The Werewolf and the Death of Billy Martin
It was 1968, and there was a boy named Billy Martin who lived down the lane. Billy had freckles, that much I remember, but I am embarrassed to say that I cannot remember much more. He was about my size, which made sense since he was about my age. We didn’t see Billy that often because his mother believed that we would lead him astray. Billy’s mother thought that a boy should always be clean, a near impossibility when so much of a boy’s day is spent outside in dirt and mud.
And so, Billy would show up and spend a couple days playing baseball or exploring the area around our neighborhood with us. Eventually, however, his mother would become upset with us or with him, I was never sure which. Maybe it was both. In any event, he would then be imprisoned in his home until his mother decided he could come back outside. It was a predictable pattern.
The last time I saw Billy, he was with Danny, my brother, and me. We made our way to the creek that ran through our neighborhood and started to explore. After a couple of hours, we came upon a snake in the small stream.
For us, a snake was a rare find. We knew very little about snakes, but we knew we were going to capture this snake, and so we went after the snake with gusto. We soon figured out that it was probably a water snake because it moved through the water nearly as fast as we could run in the stream. As we chased after it, it would shoot through the ripples and into the deeper pools, and then, once the water was muddy — from us chasing the snake — it would somehow flip around and head in the opposite direction.
Several times, the snake almost escaped, but each time, we would cut the snake off, and it would turn and swim in the opposite direction. We were at a stalemate. I was about to give up when I saw Billy reach down and grab the snake by the tail. The snake turned and struck as quick as lightning sinking its teeth into Billy’s wrist.
Billy, however, did not let that snake bite bother him. No, he held fast to the snake and threw it onto the shore. Danny quickly caught the snake in the proper way, and we were soon marching back to my grandmother’s house. Technically speaking, she “watched” us on those long summer days while my mother worked, but her supervision was probably not what it should have been.
As we made our way down the street, we gathered a crowd as we went. Boys came to see the snake Danny was carrying — it seemed huge and menacing. And they came to see Billy’s snakebite. There were no fang marks because the snake was not poisonous, but its teeth were sharp, and it had lacerated Billy’s wrist. Blood trickled down his hand and onto his index finger. It wasn’t enough to say that he was bleeding, but it was sufficient to prove that he had faced down the creature and had been injured as a consequence. In the currency of boyish manhood in the 1960s, a snakebite was pretty valuable.
Except that when we got to my grandmother’s house, adult panic set in. When my grandmother saw the snake, she misidentified it as a copperhead, a poisonous snake not found in our region of the state. She then called Mrs. Martin, told her Billy had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Since she then realized that Mrs. Martin was too far away and hung up the phone. The next thing I knew, she was throwing Billy into her car and speeding off. No one knew where my grandmother took Billy. Later, we found out that she took him to a hospital.
In retrospect, the whole incident was kind of funny. The snake was not a copperhead, Billy faced no ill-effects from the bite, and everyone had a good story to tell. Unfortunately, Mrs. Martin did not appreciate the humor in the afternoon’s events. The next day, after Billy was back home, Danny and our friends Mikey, Rusty, and Tom, decided to go see how he was and if he wanted to explore with us. Mrs. Martin called us a bunch of “hooligans” and told us never to talk to Billy again. I tried to tell her that Mikey, Rusty, and Tom had nothing to do with the capture of the snake, but it seemed to only make her angrier.
I never saw Billy again. The thought of him walking down the street, holding his injured hand and showing it to everyone, a big smile across his face, is indelibly etched in my mind even half a century later.
Billy disappeared a few weeks after the capture of the snake. We first became aware that there was something wrong when we noticed several police cars at Billy’s house. Police officers walked up and down the street asking if any of us had seen Billy. He was missing. Two more weeks passed before we heard that Billy had been found. He was dead. Even worse, he had been murdered.
I was not accustomed to death — I suppose no child is. We were shielded from it by our parents and grandparents. I had not known anyone who had died before, and the reality and finality of it fell on me like a ton of bricks. I thought about Billy, buried in the ground, in a cold, dark grave. I woke up in the middle of the night, night after night, imagining him trapped in his coffin in utter blackness, alone forever, the blackness of my room only hinting at what he must be going through.
None of us were church-goers, but Billy’s family organized a memorial service for Billy. It wasn’t part of the viewing or the funeral the adults attended, and Billy’s body was not present, thank God. But it was an opportunity for us to go to his church, view some pictures of him, and say our goodbyes. I remember his mother giving me a big hug as we both wept.
There was a speech by the youth minister, Kyle Miller, a young guy not long out of college. Afterwards, Kyle took some time to speak with us kids. He was a bit preachy, but you had to expect that from a preacher. He said he wanted to get to know us, and, after talking to us for about twenty minutes, he invited us over to the place the church provided for him. It was a small ranch house, but downstairs, there was an exposed basement someone had converted into a family room. The family room had a fuzzball table, a sofa and a television. As time passed, I found him to be a good person to talk to.
Most adults had very little time for children. “Better seen and not heard” was a saying my grandparents use to use. When he came home from his factory job, he was always tired and angry. After a couple of drinks, he would become angrier. If I bothered him, it normally meant the switch (a thin branch cut from a sapling) or the belt. Both were painful. I learned to avoid adults, especially men.
Kyle was different. And so it was to Kyle that I first confided about my theory as to what had happened to Billy. In my mind, there was only one person who could have murdered Billy — Mr. Stevic.
Mr. Stevic was old, older than our grandparents. It was said that he came from some country in Eastern Europe that the Russians now ruled, but I don’t know if that is true or not. He had a thick accent and was hard to understand, although he mostly mumbled to himself. When he spoke to us, it was in a low growl with gestures, telling us to get off of his property or out of his trees.
He was a large man — very large, with broad shoulders and thick arms. He wore the same clothes every day, a blue long-sleeved shirt which he did not button and matching blue trousers. The remnants of a dirty white T-shirt hung down over his protruding belly. His clothing was filthy and was mostly black from grease and grime. His teeth had rotted from his mouth, and we used to say his breath would kill flowers. Mr. Stevic’s hair was gray, but not a soft white gray. It was more like a blue, metallic gray. His thin beard did not hide the scars on his face.
He lived in a bungalow, which was surrounded by old, broken furniture and rusted appliances. The windows were filthy, and it was impossible to see inside. At night, when we would walk by the bungalow, it looked like there was only a single light inside. There were those who said that night, Mr. Stevic would leave his bungalow and disappear into the night. No one knew where he went or what he did. At least, that was the rumor.
“Kyle,” I said one night when I was alone with Kyle at his house, “I think I know who killed Billy. I think it was Mr. Stevic.”
He seemed to consider that thought for a moment, and then he said, “I think you might be right”.
He told me that he had witnessed some very odd behavior involving Mr. Stevic. According to Kyle, the old man would leave his house after dark through his back door, which faced Kyle’s house. He would be gone for hours, always arriving back at his house before daylight.
“I don’t know what he does exactly, but I’m keeping a log of everything I see,” Kyle said. He then reached into an end table beside the couch where we were sitting and pulled out a spiral-ring notebook. It was yellow. On the front of the notebook, it said only “Stevic”.
“I’ve been keeping this for several weeks now. If anything ever happens to me, take this notebook to the police. It might be helpful to them,” Kyle said. He put it back into the drawer and pushed the drawer shut.
Most afternoons, I would stop by Kyle’s place, and he would always have time to talk to me. Sometimes we would talk about girls or school or the future. Most days, however, the topic would at some point turn to Billy and to Mr. Stevic. One afternoon, Kyle drove me up into the mountains where he said Billy’s body was located. He told me that Billy had been molested before he was killed. Then he told me what “molested” meant. We looked around for clues but came up with nothing.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought that Mr. Stevic must be a child molester. I can’t honestly say that I knew what a child molester looked like back then — I really don’t know now — but Mr. Stevic was strange. Everyone else in the neighborhood seemed so normal. Mr. Stevic did not. Kyle agreed with me.
“There is just something off about that guy,” Kyle would say.
Instead of hanging out with the guys, I started to find myself going over to Kyle’s. He understood me better than anyone else. Eventually, Kyle told me I could spend the night at this house. If I wanted to stay over, however, he told me that I would have to make up a story as to where I was going to be.
“I don’t want people to know you’re able to stay over and no one else is. It would make the other kids jealous. You understand, right?” he said.
I understood that I was special — that was for sure. So about once a week, I would tell my mother that I had been invited over to a friend’s house for a sleepover. She would ask a couple of questions to make sure she knew where I was going. She was too busy with her own life to pay too close attention to mine, and she always allowed me go. Afterwards, if she asked, I would make up a story about what we did, but, most of the time, I was never asked.
Those nights were some of the best in my childhood, although in retrospect, I should have realized something was wrong. Sometimes he would make popcorn and we would watch an old horror movie. Usually, I would fall asleep on his couch sometime after midnight. In the morning, I would head home.
I was preoccupied that Summer was finding out what happened to Billy. I mean, I knew what happened, but I wanted to find out who killed him. To me, the identity of the murderer was obvious. Mr. Stevic was old and mean and different from the rest of the people in the community. He had to be the killer, but as far as I could tell, the police had no interest in him.
Whenever I tried to talk to my friends about Mr. Stevic, they looked at me like I was crazy. In fact, Rusty and Tom told me I was crazy. The agreed that Mr. Stevic was odd but thought that it should be the police who solved Billy’s murder. Besides, they told me, if Mr. Stevic was the murderer, they argued that we should stay as far from him as possible.
Even my brother Danny abandoned me. I tried to enlist him in my plan to surveil Mr. Stevic, but he refused. He seemed to think that if Mr. Stevic was the murderer, we should stay far away from him or else we might be his next victims. I tried to explain that none of us would be safe unless Mr. Stevic was arrested. No matter what I said, however, he remained obstinate. I was on my own.
The stream where Billy caught the snake flowed through a grove of trees in the neighborhood. Mr. Stevic’s house was located next to those trees. It was actually more of a thicket than a grove. The trees in that particular thicket were small and sparse. Thorn bushes grew thick under the trees, and it was difficult for even rabbits to get through.
We had built a fort in that thicket. We had cut some of the thorn bushes away, making a path into the thicket. The path was only about four feet long, and in ended in a small circular area we had cleared out — that was the fort. We had to be careful when we were climbing into or out of our fort because of the thorns, but when we were in the fort, no one could see us through the thick Summer foliage.
The fort also offered a concealed vantage point from where one could spy on Mr. Stevic. My plan was simple. I would tell my mother I would be at another sleepover, only this time, I would conceal myself in the fort and keep a close watch on Mr. Stevic’s house. When he left his house, I would slip from my hiding place and follow him from a safe distance. I would find out where he went and what he did.
At least that was my plan.
One Thursday evening, I slipped into the fort to keep a watch on Mr. Stevic. At first, nothing happened, but then around 10:00, Mr. Stevic left through his back door and walked straight toward my hiding spot. I tried to shrink into the thorn bushes, but he kept coming. I didn’t know if he could see me or not, but it seemed like he was looking right at me.
It was not a full moon that night, but there was enough moonlight that I could see him pretty well. As Mr. Stevic approached the entrance to the fort, he stopped and turned sideways to me. Then, much to my surprise, he took off his shirt and draped it over the thorn bushes that concealed me. He then took off his trousers and did the same thing.
I can’t explain what happened next, and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed it.
As I watched, Mr. Stevic began to grow — I mean literally grow. He was already a large man, but he grew two or three feet taller. His arms grew longer, and his muscles became much thicker. As I watched, his faced became deformed, and a snout resembling a German Shepard’s snout began to protrude from his face. Claws grew from his think, long fingers as I watched. A thick layer of fur grew to covered his body. Even his legs were no longer human legs. They looked like those of an animal. His thighs grew to several times their natural size. His chest was massive, and all of his muscles looked as tight as cords.
The transformation had not taken long. The creature — for it was no longer human — looked directly at me with its small black eyes. Then it tilted its head back and let out a long, deep howl. He then turned away from me, and in one or two bounds, he was gone. There was no way I was going to follow him.
I lay there on the ground, too scared to even tremble in fear. I noticed that my pants were warm and wet. I had urinated myself, and I hadn’t even realized it. Nevertheless, my fear paralyzed me.
I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and I was up at first light and ran home to mother. I was already showered and changed when my mother got up. When she finally came down the steps from her bedroom, I told her that I had seen Mr. Stevic turn into a werewolf. Despite the fear and trepidation in my voice, she laughed.
I don’t know why, but her laughter caused me to break into tears.
“Oh Eddie,” she said, “I am sure you saw something, but it wasn’t a werewolf. There is no such thing as a werewolf”.
I wanted to believe that there was no such thing as a werewolf. I really did, but I had to believe what I had seen with my own eyes. I wanted to be a little boy again, someone who knew nothing. I wanted my mother to take me in her arms and tell me it was okay. But she had to be at work that day, and there was no time for her to comfort an obviously confused kid.
“We’ll talk about it tonight,” she said as she headed out the door.
If there was one thing I could say about my grandmother, it was that she was very superstitious. So as soon as I could, Danny and I went to see her. She lived with my grandfather in the house next to mine.
“Grandma,” I said, “I was watching Mr. Stevic last night”.
She immediately interrupted, “why would you do that. You should let that poor old man alone”.
“But that’s the point, Grandma,” I continued, “he’ not a man. Last night, when I was watching him, he turned into a wolf.”
My grandmother looked at me like one of us must have been drinking. “You mean like with four legs and a tail?”
“No Grandma. I mean like a werewolf who walked on two legs and was covered with hair”.
My grandmother just stared at me in disbelief. I continued, “I heard you and your sisters talk before about witches and demons — this is the same type of thing”.
“Eddie,” my grandmother said, “there is no such thing as a werewolf. It’s just something made up for motion pictures. I know they look real on in the movies, but they’re not real. When I was a little girl, I thought there werewolves too, but it was all make-believe.”
“Now as far as witches and demons are concerned, they exist,” she continued, “I’ve seen them with my own eyes. And the Bible talks about witches and demons, so they must exist. There is no such thing as a werewolf”.
I tried to tell her about what I had seen, but she was completely convinced that I hadn’t seen anything. I asked her to call the police, but she said that if she did, they might put me in some sort of insane asylum because what I was saying was crazy. I pleaded with her, but nothing I said made any difference.
There was no one I could turn to who would believe me. The one person who might believe me was Kyle, but I didn’t want him to think I was crazy like everyone else. I decided to do some more research.
I went to the local library, a place where I had never been before, to see what I could learn. I read through magazines and books, and aside from a few novels about werewolves, I could find nothing. It seemed that werewolves had been relegated to fiction, but I knew they were real.
Everything I found about werewolves was classified as “fiction”, but I wondered if there might be some element of truth even in fiction — I mean, how could anyone write a book about a werewolf unless he had actually had some experience with a werewolf? Why would anyone make up such a creature unless there was some basis for it? And so, I read a novel since that was all there was. There was an old copy of The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, and I spent hours reading it and memorizing every detail.
After doing as much research as I could, I decided to go see Kyle — there was no one else I could trust. I told him about The Werewolf of Paris, and he bought a copy to read himself. As he read it, we would discuss each passage and how it related to Mr. Stevic. I cannot tell you how much I appreciated Kyle’s support and friendship, and how the friendship continued to deepen.
Then Kyle told me that he too knew that Mr. Stevic was a werewolf. He had seen the transformation himself, and as someone who knew the Bible, he was familiar with demons and other supernatural beings. He told me that Stevic was probably possessed by a demon that caused him to change into a werewolf. Kyle told me that he had kept all details of his research and everything he has seen in the yellow notebook he had showed me earlier.
Kyle speculated that Stevic killed people that had committed crimes or were homeless, people that no one care about. He said that in his notebook, he had document a number of people who could be the werewolf’s victims. He said that we couldn’t go to the police, however, because they would never believe us.
“But Billy wasn’t a bad person,” I said.
“No, but probably not everyone Stevic has killed is bad,” he answered.
“Have they found any of the people he killed?” I asked.
“No, Stevic had been very careful about how he disposes of the bodies of the people he kills.” Kyle responded.
“But they did find Billy’s body,” I noted.
“You’re right,” Kyle responded, “I suppose he made a mistake with that”.
Obviously, Mr. Stevic was a very dangerous person, and after the night in the fort, I tried as hard as I could to avoid, but now I started seeing him everywhere. Whenever I would walk down the street, I would look across the street and see him. Whenever I went to grocery store for my grandmother, I would see him in the store. I stayed away from Mr. Stevic’s house, and I never went to the stream. I was afraid I would run into him and he would kill me. Aside from my house and my grandmother’s house, only place I could go where I felt safe was Kyle’s.
But Kyle started to change too. It started with a hand on my shoulder, a momentary touch. Then his hand would linger. After that, he would reach over and grab my knee while we sat on his sofa. When I became uncomfortable, he would withdraw his hand. There was nothing wrong with one guy putting his hand on another guy’s shoulder. There was nothing wrong with one guy putting his hand on another guy’s knee. It felt strange, but on the other hand, it could have just been me feeling weird. Kyle was my best friend, and he was the only person I could trust. I did not want to jeopardize that friendship.
On a Friday night in late August, about two weeks before school started, I was walking from my house to Kyle’s house when I ran into Mr. Stevic. Dusk had just settled over the neighborhood, and I wasn’t paying close attention to what I was doing. Suddenly, I looked up, and there he was. He looked like a mountain.
“Little boy,” he said, in his thick Slavic accent, “you are in danger. You must be very careful!”
I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just looked at him.
“You would be safer if you went back to your home,” Mr. Stevic said.
“Yes Sir,” was all I could say.
I turned as though I was going home and then, when I was closer to my home, I circled around to a back alley and then ran to Kyle’s house. I was shaking when he opened the door and ushered me in.
He gave me a hug, which felt reassuring, and then invited me to his family room, in the exposed basement. He gave me some soda and handed me a big bowl of popcorn as we started watching a movie. Soon I was more relaxed. I was starting to enjoy myself.
As I sat there, Kyle placed a hand on my shoulder and pulled me toward him. “You are such a special guy,” he whispered to me. Then he started leaning in to kiss me.
I turned away suddenly and pulled away from his grip.
Kyle became angry. I had never seen Kyle angry before. It was terrifying.
“You’re no different than Billy,” he said. “You lead a guy on only to act all innocent like you didn’t know what was happening”.
I got up to leave, but Kyle was faster. He grabbed me before I could make it to the door. After he grabbed me and started trying to force his hand into my pants. I tried to fight, but I was losing. Kyle was so much stronger than I was.
I yelled for Kyle to stop, but he wouldn’t. I yelled louder. I started to cry.
Just as I thought it was over and there was nothing I could do, the door to the outside exploded from its hinges. The door actually hit Kyle knocking him to the floor.
There, in the doorway stood the werewolf. He was massive, hunched over because of the low ceiling. His fur was gray in the incandescent light. His arms were thicker than a normal man’s waist. He smelled like death itself. Saliva dripped from his fangs as he admitted a low roar.
Kyle scrambled across the floor trying to make it to the stairs to head to the first floor. He never made it. The werewolf seized Kyle by the thigh in his powerful hand. His long claws dug into Kyle’s leg, and he screamed. He kept screaming as the werewolf pulled him through the doorway and started to carry him away. As Kyle dangled from his arm, the creature turned and looked at me.
Strangely, I felt no malice from Mr. Stevic. He turned and walked away, Kyle’s screams turning into pleas and then into silence.
No one ever heard from Kyle Miller again. After he had been gone for a few days, his parents arrived in town, and soon there was a police investigation. They even questioned me, but I told them I didn’t know what happened to Kyle. They searched his house, but they never found the yellow, spiral-ring notebook labelled “Stevic”. After the werewolf left that night, I took the notebook from the desk drawer, and then the next day, I burned it. Kyle’s disappearance became one of the great unsolved mysteries of the region.
After that night, I would see Mr. Stevic from time to time, but I no longer felt any fear when I saw him. We never had another conversation, but I would wave when I saw him. He would nod back.
When I was in tenth grade, Mr. Stevic also disappeared too. No one knew precisely when he left or where he went. One day, someone noticed the house was empty. A few months later, the house was condemned, and the property was sold by the County. The house was eventually bulldozed, and everyone forgot about Mr. Stevic.
Everyone but me.
