Heart and Mind 1

Chapter 4
Howard was angry, but at least he was thinking clearer than the captain. The latter was standing, hunched over in front of the pier, just looking at the water for a few minutes. Maybe it gave him comfort, maybe he felt sick. Howard didn’t want to ask his old friend questions — instead, he calmly put his bag on one of the many empty benches rusted by the sea wind and began to busily remove tools from it. Some of them were disassembled, so Howard had to twist the wires for a few seconds, put small aluminum loops on the bolts protruding from under the cover of the device, and moisten the small antennas with his saliva. Four light bulbs —apparently removed from the Christmas twinkle lights — began to flash quickly. A second later, all of them went out, except for one — the far left one.

‘She’s not here,’ Howard said quietly. Oliver just spit into the water and, straightening up, slowly walked over to his friend. The captain thrust his hands into his pockets and stared at the professor for a couple of seconds.

‘I know,’ Oliver said finally through set teeth. ‘Dammit, I can see that she’s not here.’

Howard chuckled. He was in no mood to argue with the gloomy and tired captain. No matter how angry the professor was, he didn’t have the slightest desire to take out his emotions on his friend. Howard knew how to control himself. He just began to circle in place warily and did so until one of the light bulbs started blinking. Then he stopped, took a couple of steps, shook his head, came back and again tried to figure out something that only he could understand in the signal of his device.

The captain sat down on a bench, took a pipe out of his pocket, and began to fill it with tobacco from a pouch. When he finished, he took a box of long matches out of his breast pocket and lit the pipe. He closed his eyes, probably trying to calm himself, and began to draw in the smoke. Meanwhile, Howard kept wandering around the pier, now and then holding his hands with the device out, as if trying to catch some signal, or, the opposite, pressing his elbows to his chest. Finally, he stopped and said quietly:

‘I think I got it.’

‘Did you find her?’ Oliver replied immediately, pulling the pipe out of his mouth. The captain’s eyes were wide open now, this quite an elder man was ready to jump up and rush to wherever the Howard’s device was pointing.

‘Not her,’ the professor shook his head. ‘I don’t have the ability to tune my devices to people, Oliver. There are a lot of people, you know.’

‘Okay, okay,’ the captain got to his feet and walked up to his friend at a brisk pace. ‘But you did find something, didn’t you?’

‘Clusters,’ nodded Howard. ‘Clusters of monsters. No end of type B creatures now in the sleeper neighborhood up north. Werewolves, most likely. Another group, but a smaller one, in the railway station area. But that one is group A — something bodiless. Fairies or ghosts’.

‘Bodiless fairies?’ Oliver sounded astonished. His companion only grinned, most likely trying to avoid wasting precious time on meaningless discussions of the monster typology. Moreover, this typology was completely invented — or developed, as he himself liked to correct — by Howard, and it never occurred to anyone to challenge it or put forward their own.

‘It’s quite convenient,’ Howard said instead, ‘that there are two of us.’

The captain nodded. The men walked quickly towards the car parked at the far end of the pier. It was Maybach w3 that was too expensive to think that these two middle-aged men could be its owners. However, Howard masterfully opened the door, climbed into the driver’s seat and, putting the device on his lap, opened the door for Oliver. The captain, not without difficulty, squeezed himself in. However, as soon as the professor touched the gear shifter, the ground under the car seemed to sag. In a moment, the roof sagged too, and the men heard monstrous roar over their heads.

‘Go, go,’ the captain shouted, snatching up a small flare gun as if out of nowhere. Howard, however, didn’t need those instructions — instead of going in reverse to leave the pier and drive onto the streets of Coastal Hill, he drove the Maybach straight to the pier. The car jolted, and Howard rushed straight towards the steel railing at the very edge of the pier. Something on the roof was roaring, long claws sank into the windshield — but it only cracked, not shattered. Maybach began to turn, maybe ten feet from the railing, abruptly and unexpectedly, but all three — the driver, the passenger, and the guest on the roof — remained where they were. For the third time, the men heard a deafening roar, and a powerful paw covered with thick hair began to squeeze the glass and the upper part of the windshield frame. Broken glass flew in the faces of the professor and the captain, but the former only increased the speed and drove the car forward along the pier. Oliver finally made up his mind. He abruptly opened his door and, holding on to the back of the chair, leaned out.

Just in front of him was a foot — or a hind paw? — of a huge werewolf. The creature itself faced the car hood and did not see the captain. Oliver tried to aim, so that the flare would hit at least the monster in the back, if not in the face, but the car was going too fast. A few more seconds, and the pier that was not the longest in the world would just end. Oliver leaned out a little further, tightening his grip on the back of the passenger seat — if Howard decided to do that trick again, he’d try to sharply turn the car through ...

‘Damn it!’ Howard growled from the passenger compartment. The werewolf tore out the entire windshield frame with a roar and tossed it aside. It was the perfect moment — the monster held onto the roof with its hind legs only, although those legs were strong and had the same sharp claws as the forelegs. Howard turned the car around as quickly as it only could be turned. At that very moment Oliver fired the gun. The flare flew past the creature’s face and disappeared into the night sky.

‘Oh no,’ the captain managed to whisper as the werewolf turned to him. Baring its terrible teeth, the monster growled but then it fell off the roof of the car. Oliver got inside the car and closed the door. With shaking fingers, he began to load the gun with another flare. Howard kept driving forward, hoping to get off the pier before the werewolf regained consciousness.