Creep. R.M. Greenaway
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a patch of woods somewhat off the beaten trail. Gently sloped and fairly open, it had been built into a playground for bike gymnastics. Happy young voices echoed through the trees, and there were their witnesses, two mud-spattered teens taking turns tackling one archaic-looking wooden ramp.
Dion watched one of them land, skew, nearly lose it. He called out for them both to take five and come over and talk.
The boys laid down their bikes and approached. Introductions were made. The skinny white kid said he was Ronnie Graham. The heavier Asian kid said, “Wong … James Wong.”
“You guys must be the only human beings on the planet without cellphones,” Randall told them.
“Even if we had phones,” Graham said, “there’s no signal up here.”
“And no phone is the new cool,” Wong said.
“First I’ve heard of it.” Randall’s breath puffed out white in the chill. “You’re not in trouble, but mind coming with us? Grapevine says you might have seen something up here that might be of interest to the police.”
“We did,” Graham said, and he would have said more, but Wong stopped him with an arm shot out sideways.
“There’s a reward, right? If you catch it?”
“It?”
“It,” Wong said.
“It,” Randall said to Dion, and her eyes sparkled. “This is going to be interesting.”
* * *
Dion decided he was not needed and stayed in the car when the GIS members arrived. The black sedan pulled in alongside. Leith and JD Temple, along with the corporal whose name Dion had forgotten, left the car and joined Randall and the boys in the gloom. Randall would promptly hand the kids over now, then join him, and they would return to their duties keeping North Vancouver safe from graffiti artists, jaywalkers, and shoplifters —at least that was how he saw it unfolding.
When things didn’t unfold as he expected, he stepped out of the car and leaned against it. Introductions were made — Wong … James Wong — and then some bonding talk about the sport, the park, the weather. Everybody was being chatty, including Randall. Dion signalled at her that they had to get back to work, but she ignored him. He stopped listening to the group and watched the sky, which was gathering itself into another great blue-black bank of rain clouds.
Yeti, he heard Ronnie Graham say.
“Wasn’t a yeti,” Wong said. “Don’t listen to him. Yetis are a creamy white or a pale grey. This was black. It was a werewolf. Up on the bike path near the Rock. Near enough that we could see it.”
A bogeyman was the hot tip, then. Dion waited for someone in the group to smarten up the tipsters with a warning and call the whole thing off, but nobody did. David Leith was doing the talking now, and Dion moved in closer to hear, as the air was heavy and voices were muted, even over short distances.
“Let’s forget what it’s called,” Leith said. “What did this thing look like?”
“It was big and black and running along on all fours,” Wong said.
“We looked for tracks,” Graham added.
“Later, when we were sure it was gone.”
“Didn’t find any.”
“Could it have been a dog?” Leith asked. He sounded tired.
“Way too big,” Wong said. “It was like a really big man.”
“Bigger,” Graham said.
Leith asked for the circumstances: When was the sighting? What were the kids up to at the time? Wong said, “Two months ago, August. Last week of summer holidays. We were up on the trails. It was at night, like, ten o’clock or something. Dark, but we had headlights. Then we heard something, like this blood-curdling howl.”
Graham failed to chime in to back up his friend’s story of the howl, as he had backed up everything else, and Dion expected Leith would pick up on the boy’s silence, challenge him on it. But Leith didn’t catch it, and neither did the corporal who had introduced himself as Montgomery. They were focusing all their attention on Wong, the loudmouth, the squeaky wheel.
Wong said, “It was like this,” and pitched his face upward so it caught the blue-black wash of coming storm, squeezed his eyes shut, and let loose a howl. He didn’t do a bad job of it. Graham didn’t contribute to the howling, and Wong went on with the story. “So we heard this howl, and couldn’t tell where it was coming from really, up or down, so we kept going up, and then we saw it, this big dark shape, kind of crouched on the path, right? I think we scared it, ’cause soon as we showed up it took off.”
“Running on all fours?” Corporal Montgomery asked.
“Yes. Not like a dog so much, but not like a man, like something in between.”
“Like a yeti,” Graham said.
“It was summer, you genius of the undead!” Wong bawled at his friend. “No snow, no Himalayas, no yeti. Altogether the wrong country. Okay?”
“Then a sasquatch. Same thing.”
“Sasquatches are huge,” Wong said. He looked up pleadingly at JD, Leith, and Corporal Montgomery. “If this was a sasquatch, it was a midget sasquatch. No, this isn’t a joke. We saw a werewolf, and I’ll swear my life on it.” His palm went over his heart.
“Whatever it was,” Leith asked, “was it running level, uphill, or downhill?”
“Up,” Wong said.
Up. If it was a steep enough up, Dion thought, a man doubled over for balance could be seen as running on all fours.
JD must have been thinking along the same lines. “How steep uphill?” she demanded, dark brows angled dangerously.
The boys watched her blankly and didn’t answer.
“You guys are making this up, hey?” she said. She began to describe what kind of serious trouble they could get into, telling stories to the police, but Wong interrupted, his teeth a flare of white in the dusk. “It’s not stories. And what about that dead guy who came out of the woods and fell down with his hair white as snow? That’s not stories.”
Dion sighed.
“What dead guy?” Leith said.
“Heart attack fatality last week,” Randall told him. “Name of Rosetti. He was found up on the Lynn Peak trail. Cal and I attended to assist. His hair was not white as snow.”
For the first time, Corporal Montgomery spoke up, to scold the boys, “See here, this is how rumours get started. An acorn falls on your head, and next thing you know the sky is falling. How far up the path are we talking here, where you saw whatever you saw?”
“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes,” Wong said. “By bike.”
“If Dave and I brought our bikes around tomorrow, would you show us where you saw this werewolf?”
“Well, hang on,” Leith said.
“What kind of compensation are we talking about?” Wong asked.
“Compensation?”
“I don’t have a bike,” Leith said. “And even if I had one, I only do paved roads. Count me out.”
“And if you were thinking of counting me in, don’t,” JD added.
Dion looked at Jackie Randall, waiting for her to jump in and volunteer.
She did, but not how he expected. “Cal here knows the trails like the back of his hand, and he’s an ace mountain biker.”
Dion spoke up loud and clear, telling Montgomery, “I’m not on duty tomorrow, I don’t have a