Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance

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  To Max

  and a lifetime of wandering this world together

  prologue

  HOLBROOK, MICHIGAN

  1968

  DR. DANIEL FOUST, OB/GYN

  I have delivered over a thousand babies in my career, but one in particular stands out in my mind. Weylyn was by all outward appearances a healthy baby boy: eight pounds, two ounces, all the necessary parts accounted for, and a wail that could shatter good china. He fit perfectly in the crook of his mother’s arm and watched her with one eye, carefully, as she was still a stranger to him. I would have forgotten all about this seemingly ordinary child if it hadn’t been for the storm.

  The moment Weylyn took his first bewildered gulp of fresh air, it began to snow. Not just a few flurries, but buckets of the stuff, tumbling through the sky and belly flopping on the ground outside the hospital room window. By the time the nurses had him cleaned and swaddled, there was a good six inches on the ground.

  It was June 29.

  The child turned one eye on me, then opened the other like a backward wink. His irises were molten pools of solder that had not yet set, and for a moment I thought I could see a fire behind them, keeping them liquid.

  “He’s a healthy baby boy,” I told the mother, trying my best not to sound unnerved.

  Weylyn’s eyes closed peacefully, and the snow melted almost as quickly as it had fallen, leaving shimmering gray puddles on the sidewalk below.

  first interlude

  WILDWOOD FOREST, OREGON

  2017

  ROARKE

  “A betting man can lose a dollar. It’s the man he bets on that can lose an eye.” My mother would say this with a confidence that suggested there were no other possible outcomes, that there were thousands of one-eyed boys out there apologizing to their mothers for not taking their advice.

  I, remarkably, still had both my eyes despite my impulse to hurl myself off things that were often a generous distance from the ground. Some of my other hobbies included running with sharp objects, lighting fires, and lighting sharp objects on fire and launching them into the sky with my slingshot. So, naturally, when it was my turn in Truth or Dare, my friends never had to ask.

  “Dare!” I hollered and head-butted a tree.

  The other kids laughed. That was my favorite part.

  “I dare you to…” Mike looked around the forest for something I hadn’t yet climbed, eaten, or peed on. One time, he puked after I made him eat a worm, so I ate ten worms and a beetle just to make him look like a baby in front of pretty Ruby S.

  “This’d better be good,” Ruby said as she perched herself on a tree stump like it was box seats at the opera, pointing her candy heart nose at the ceiling as she admired the crown molding.

  Mike thought for a moment longer, then flashed me a wily grin. “Did you hear about the thing that ate Gretchen’s dog?”

  “Again?” I scoffed. Mike’s cousin Gretchen was always making up stories. Her most recent string of lies featuring beloved family pets meeting strange and untimely demises. She was pretty weird.

  “This one’s real!” Mike insisted. “Charlie got off his leash and started sniffing around this old cabin by the creek. She tried to call him back, but he wouldn’t come. Then like a minute later, she saw this half-man, half-spider thing looking back at her through the window, and she bolted.”

  Ruby gasped and leaned forward on her stump. “She just left Charlie there?”

  Mike nodded and continued, “She showed me the place. It’s creepy. Covered in cobwebs and stuff. I wanted to look inside, but Gretchen started crying ’cause she didn’t want me leaving her there by herself. She’s scared of spiders.”

  “I think you’re the one who’s afraid of spiders,” I said, wiggling my fingers like they were eight hairy legs.

  Mike didn’t take the bait. He leveled his gaze on me and said, “I dare you to touch it.”

  “What? The cabin?”

  Mike nodded, searching my face for signs of fear. “What d’ya say? Truth or—”

  “Dare.”

  * * *

  “That’s it.” Mike pointed to a ramshackle cabin made of splintered, gray wood. The windows were dark and shrouded by cobwebs. It appeared no one was home.

  This was going to be easy. “So, I just have to walk up and touch it?” I asked.

  Mike hesitated, clearly thrown off by how unfazed I was. “Yeah … but you have to keep your hand on it for at least twenty seconds.”

  I almost laughed. This was weak, even for Mike.

  “Guys, look,” Ruby said, pointing to a small flock of sparrows that had settled on the roof of the cabin.

  “What is it?” I asked, failing to see what was so interesting about a bunch of birds.

  “Just watch,” she said.

  One by one, the birds beat their wings, but none of them lifted off. It was as if something was anchoring them by their tiny wishbone feet. They furiously flapped and chirped for help as their heads jump-cut from one angle to the next, searching the sky for hawks or eagles.

  “Poor birds!” Ruby cared enough to exclaim, but not enough to do something about it. She turned to me. “You have to save them.”

  “Yeah, Roarke. Save them.” Mike nudged me forward.

  For the first time in my life, I hesitated. I didn’t hesitate when I drove my uncle’s truck when he left it running in the driveway, or when I caught that snake and wore it like a necktie. But something about this was different. My heart fluttered; my pulse raced. I was …

  “What’s wrong? Scared Old Man Spider’s gonna eat you?”

  “No!” I sounded more defensive than I’d have liked. I could see the other kids doubting me, Ruby doubting me.

  I head-butted the nearest tree, took one last look at Ruby’s candy heart nose, and ran to my almost certain doom.

  I slowed to a stop within spitting distance of the cabin—twenty-three feet, my personal best. I made sure the coast was clear before I pulled myself onto the branch of a sagging elm and shimmied over to the eaves of Old Man Spider’s roof. Then I realized what was keeping the birds from leaving. Most of the cottage’s roof was missing, and in its place was what looked like a tarp made of spider’s silk. I carefully placed my weight on one of the several rotten two-by-fours that remained of the original roof and went to work freeing the birds with my Swiss Army knife, cutting the threads that bound their tiny feet while being careful not to step on the sticky stuff myself.

  I could see Ruby from where I was, so I decided to make a show of it. I leaped from board to board, bird to bird, cutting them loose and throwing my arms in the air as if I had performed some kind of magic trick. Ruby’s lips were moving, probably saying something like, “Oh! Did you see that? Roarke is so brave.” When all the birds were free, I took a bow and wondered if I’d get a kiss later. Then came time for my final trick: the Disa
ppearing Act. Like a trapdoor, the board beneath my feet gave way, and I fell.

  I braced myself for the landing I had nailed a hundred times before from the tops of trees, roofs, and bridges, but it never came. I found myself cradled in a hammock of spider silk not three feet from the ground. I had fallen into Old Man Spider’s trap.

  I struggled to break free but only succeeded in making myself more tangled. Where was my knife? Not in my pocket. I eventually spotted it suspended several feet above me from a single thread of silk. I could see the webbing had caught the blade, not the handle, so all I could do was wait as gravity cut through the thread and hope it didn’t land on any part of me that contained a vital organ.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dark, my surroundings revealed themselves. The room itself was spartan—the only pieces of furniture were a kitchen table and a sofa bed with springs sticking out of the mattress. It was what was above eye level that was cluttered. Spoons, toothbrushes, socks, tweezers, tennis rackets, and other household miscellany hung suspended in long, sticky tendrils that dangled from large sheets of cobweb on the ceiling. It was as if all those items had gotten stuck at some point and whoever lived here just hadn’t bothered to cut them down.

  I heard a shuffling noise behind me. My heart raced as I imagined a giant half-man, half-spider pinning me down with its hairy arms as it prepared to devour me headfirst. Luckily, the thing that found me was no mutant human-spider hybrid, but entirely man: two legs, two arms, two eyes, hair mostly concentrated on his scalp. He also had two pant legs and two sleeves—both of which were soiled and frayed—and a long, salt-and-pepper beard that he most likely used as a napkin from the amount of food particles that were nestled in it. I guess he wasn’t so much old as he was dirty, although I could see how it might be hard to tell from a distance.

  “What’s this?” His look of surprise suggested he had never seen a child before.

  “Get away from me!” I shouted and struggled against the webbing that bound me.

  “You’ll pardon my asking, but this is my house. Why do you ask that I remove myself from it when you are the one dropping in unannounced?”

  “I’m not scared of you!”

  The man once again looked surprised. “And why should you be?”

  “Because! You … you’re a villain!”

  “A villain?”

  “You trap animals in your web and eat them!” I said bluntly.

  “I think you have me confused with someone else. Have you tried Myra Oswald on South Street? She’s an odd one.”

  “What about … kids?”

  “Of course not! Eating children is a ghastly business.”

  My muscles relaxed a little. “Then why do you live in this creepy place?”

  “Because I needed a place to stay and it was available. The roof needed some patching-up, so my eight-legged friends offered to fix it for me. Would you like something to eat? Cheese? Watermelon?”

  I liked both cheese and watermelon, and Old Man Spider didn’t seem so bad, but I wanted out of that web. “No, thanks. Could you help cut me out? My knife got stuck.”

  He gazed up at the hole in his ceiling. “What were you doing up there, anyway?”

  I told him about the birds, the bet, and Mike.

  “I tell them not to land on the roof, but they keep doing it. You could say they’re a little flighty.” He paused like actors do in sitcoms after they’ve told a joke, only I had no idea what the joke was. “Never mind,” he added flatly.

  “Can you get me outta here or not?”

  “Of course, of course!” Old Man Spider went to work untangling my mess. “This might take a while. As you can see, when things get caught, I usually just leave them where they are.”

  I glanced at a cheese grater hanging not ten inches from my face and wondered if he just stood in the middle of the living room to grate his cheese.

  “What is your name, young man?”

  “Roarke.”

  “Roarke, Roarke…” The man ran off and rummaged through a kitchen drawer. He pulled out a leather-bound book and flipped through it. “Rachel, Randy, Reginald, Ronald. No Roarke. You’re the first!” He excitedly scribbled something in the book. “I try not to repeat names. You don’t know how many Johns I’ve told to skedaddle! My goal is to know one person of every name. I haven’t met another Weylyn, yet. That’s my name—Weylyn Grey,” he said, shaking my hand. His name suited him. He had gray eyes that shone like fish scales in the light.

  The web was starting to make my skin itch. “I really gotta go home.”

  “Of course. My apologies.” Weylyn got back to work.

  I hoped my mom had bought more chocolate milk. Maybe she’d let me have some after she made me try on that eye patch again and asked me how I’d like to have one of my own.

  “So, what’s a smart boy like you doing climbing on people’s roofs? You could’ve hurt yourself.”

  “I’ve done much crazier stuff than that.”

  I told him some of my best stories: the one about the sewer and the train tracks and the neighbor’s dogs. Weylyn seemed unimpressed.

  “What? You got something better?”

  Weylyn smiled. “I was young once, too.”

  book 1

  THE WOLF BOY

  TIMBER HILLS, MICHIGAN

  1979

  1

  MARY PENLORE

  It was the morning of my eleventh birthday, and as usual, my dad had failed to notice. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; he had just never been one for party planning or affection in general. That had been my mom’s job. Still, a card would have been nice.

  Instead, he gave me my order for the day. It was 5:00 A.M., and he handed me a postcard. “It’s all one order. The directions are kind of confusing, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” Without another word, he walked back into the freezer and shut the door behind him.

  On the front of the postcard was a picture of a dormant volcano with steam rising from its peak. In bright orange text, it read, Aloha! I flipped it over and found directions on the back. They were confusing, mostly because there wasn’t really an address. It read:

  W.

  The Howling Cave

  Twelve Pines Forest

  Timber Hills, MI

  United States

  Enter from the southwest corner of the forest. Follow the path for a half a mile, then follow your nose.

  I hitched my icebox trailer to my bike and set out just as the sun began to outline the jagged tree line.

  * * *

  Five minutes deep into the forest, all I could smell were pine needles and the first of the season’s bee balm. I love the smell of bee balm. My mother used to tie a bundle to the clothesline upwind of the laundry as it dried, so my sheets would come out smelling like fresh air and mint. She had an elevated sense of smell like a bloodhound, so half her day was spent sniffing out odors and concocting perfumes from things she found in the woods behind our house: pine and juniper for bathroom odors; lemon and sage for smelly drains; a cocktail of water, dandelion, and crushed peach pits worked great on upholstery; and a towel tumble-dried with cinnamon sticks was a surefire cure for a wet dog.

  Breakfast was her favorite time of day. Every morning, I would find her in the kitchen in a state of euphoria as her nostrils gulped the scents of bacon, eggs, and syrup. I even caught her drooling on her apron a few times.

  Watching her eat was even more fun. Every bite she took was followed by a series of mmmms and I’ve outdone myselfs, even when all she had made was buttered toast. Her food was usually underseasoned for my tongue, so I’d sneak a dash of salt when she closed her eyes, something she did when she swallowed so she could concentrate on the blooming of every taste bud. I once joked she should wear earplugs, too, and was then asked if I could pick some up for her next time I was at the store.

  Her condition wasn’t all syrup, bacon, and eggs, however. I once forgot to take the trash out, and one whiff of it caused my mother to pass out on the kitchen floor. I
quickly got rid of it and revived her with an orange peel. When she had her stroke last year, I tried basil, lavender, ginger, garlic, anything I could find until the doctor told me to stop.

  For her funeral, her friends brought bouquets of not only flowers but also dried herbs, soaps, fruits, sandalwood, and other sweet-smelling things. When I looked at her in her casket, I pretended she had just closed her eyes for a moment so she could take them all in at once. I hid a piece of orange peel behind her right ear.

  I stopped my bike and smelled the air. It would have helped if I knew what I was supposed to smell or whom I was meeting or what.

  Then it hit me like the punch line of a bad joke, every foul-smelling particle of it. I opened my mouth to cough, and my tongue absorbed it like a sponge. I stuffed my mouth with mints fluffy with pocket lint and looked for the source of the smell. It didn’t take long to find the carcass of a dead raccoon half-hidden in the bushes beside my feet.

  Is this some kind of prank? I thought. Had I been dragged out into the woods at 5:00 A.M. just to smell a dead raccoon and go home? If I had, that would have been the time for the comedian to jump out from behind a bush and shout, “Gotcha!” so I could run him over with my bike.

  “This is dumb,” I muttered to no one and steered my bike back the way I came. My pedals had only completed one full rotation before I stopped again. Another smell overtook me: smoke. Someone somewhere had a campfire going. It was the only thing I had to go on, so I left my bike on the path, unhitched the trailer, and followed my nose through the brush.

  * * *

  I was surprised when I found the campsite. Not that I thought it didn’t exist but that my sense of smell led me right to it. My mother would be proud.

  At the mouth of a narrow cave, there was a clearing. In the center of the clearing was a crackling fire, but—as far as I could tell—no one to tend to it. In fact, there was very little that suggested anyone had ever been there, aside from a cast-iron pan and a single sock half-buried in the dirt.