Loup-Garou: The Beast of Harmony Falls (The Ian McDermott, Ph.D., Paranormal Investigator Series Book 1) Read online

  Loup-Garou:

  The Beast of Harmony Falls

  David Reuben Aslin

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the publisher or author of this book except where permitted by law. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously (or, in some instances names/places are used and/or depicted consensually). Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. This book does not purport to provide accurate descriptions of any actual locations, things, or entities. This is an original work of fiction and all intellectual property rights are reserved by David Reuben, Author.

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  Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

  Cover art by Dean Samed

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  Copyright © 2014 by David Reuben Aslin

  www.authorDavidReubenAslin.com

  Dedicated to:

  My beautiful wife Denise.

  My five fabulous boys:

  Dustin, Devan, Drew, Cody, Moe …

  Without their loving support this work would not have been possible.

  Additionally, special thanks to my son’s: Cody and Moe - For their creative input.

  To Dad:

  Love eternal…

  Acknowledgements

  Very special thanks to the following people:

  Monique Lewis Happy – Monique Happy Editorial Services

  Amanda Shore – Assistant Editor at MHES

  Linda Tooch – Proofreading

  Angie McCain

  Tide Waters

  Beloved ones presently past friendships ceased all too fast

  Tide waters rush in rush out

  Loved ones whose tide waters have rescinded

  Pages torn chapters ended

  Memorials to attend not to comprehend

  Newborn children write new pages born with eyes bearing more than traces

  Tide waters rush out rush in.

  -David Reuben Aslin

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Fifteen Minutes

  Madagascar - Spring 1991

  Two men stood shaking hands. One spoke in a very thick Asian accent. They both smiled while cameras flashed. This was it … the sort of thing that pastes your face across the covers of countless magazines. This was significant enough to land both of them guest spots on all the best talk shows … They might even soon find themselves waiting in the most famous green room of them all; watching a monitor. Listening for those immortal words – Here’s Johnny!

  It was that big … but it wasn’t as if it had come easy. Both men had suffered bouts of dysentery and malaria … relatively small expectable potential sacrifices they had both accepted during months of their communications prior to the expedition. What they sought—if they could prove its existence–they both agreed would be worth nearly any sacrifice … well worth it.

  Both men had had their eyes on this particular ichthyoidal prize for years. One man to put an exclamation point to his long list of notoriety in his field. The other … this was his best chance to jump-start a severely stalled career. This was the chance of a lifetime he’d been looking for … praying for.

  It wasn’t that he was getting on in years. He was still a relatively young man. The problem was that the field of what some referred to as pseudo-science that he avidly pursued offered a very shallow window of time to prove yourself not to be a crank. To get stamped with that irrevocable label would be the proverbial coup de grace—the death blow regarding any hopes of attaining additional grants to further his studies.

  CHAPTER 1

  Sic Semper Tyrannis

  Present Day

  It was one of those fiercely windy days, like so many others this time of year, when the torrents of sheeted rain seemed to further drown his existence. The stormy weather served as just one more excuse. It wasn’t really what held him captured within the confines of his bleak existence. He’d become a prisoner of his own creation, the aftermath of a mental disposition of his own design—one much more serious than mere seasonal unrest or cabin fever. He had leaped off the wagon months ago. He’d been sinking faster and further into the deep end of clinical depression until his brain was swimming in it. He was way beyond his depth with no shoreline in sight, desperately treading to remain afloat while grasping futilely at any would-be semblance of a life raft that always remained just out of reach. It had all been like a bad dream, a nightmare from which he could not wake. The loss of both his wife and teenage daughter two years ago at the hands of a drunk driver in one ugly sweep of fate, or cosmic karma, or whatever had seemed of late to be just another horrific allowance by God. If there even is a God, he often wondered. That travesty, that sacrificial taking of the only two people he loved by the supreme, seemingly absentee landlord, had ruined his life. If God existed, he hated him.

  He had been on the downward slope of a rollercoaster ride from hell like so many other deeply bereaved that he’d seen plenty of times over the years on talk shows. But he knew with empirical certainty that unless a person had experienced something similar, all those sad stories heard almost daily leave people mostly unaffected. That is unless a loved one or ones should find themselves one day zigging when they should have zagged, either metaphorically or actually. Whereby random bad luck or perhaps even crueler, some predestined cosmic fate should strike with a finality that up to that moment he never could have comprehended. That fateful day, all of the hope in his heart was instantaneously extinguished, leaving him feeling soulless. In many ways, no longer feeling at all. He’d become a vacuum, void of all the light of the world. Nothing looked the same. His world had transformed from Technicolor to black and white. Nothing smelled fragr
ant or tasted sweet. He’d become hollow. Everything around him seemed to be spinning out of control. His mind was caught in a continuous loop of an aging, worn-out video that played incessantly magic and tragic memories that lingered but were becoming out of focus like swirling, smoky, fading specters of what once was. He felt that nobody could ever comprehend the depth of his affliction, which in common vernacular was a condition generally referred to as a broken heart. He hated people who used that phrase. Like those two ladies from his wife’s old church that came to visit him a few months after the accident. He made the mistake of inviting them to come into his house and to have a seat. It seemed to him an eternity of them looking at him with their phony, sympathetic eyes as they thumped their thumbs upon their Bibles that they held firmly upon their laps. So that’s where they got the phrase Bible thumpers, he’d mused at the time. To him, they were nothing more than cackling, blue-haired old birds who liked to poke their beaks up other people’s business. The only thing they had to say that he could even remember was a lot of crap about faith and that old cliché, “Time heals all wounds.” Whoever coined that phrase should have been shot on sight, he often thought. He’d been told by some doctor that his extreme mental pain and anguish was called post-traumatic stress and anxiety disorder. He’d become convinced with certainty that to gain release, there was but one solution. The trouble was his method to date to achieve a solution was taking way too long. Suicide by drinking himself to oblivion was depressingly slow and expensive, and he was rapidly running out of what little money he had left.

  That day, his depression was rapidly approaching a crescendo as it held him tight within its vice-grip, twisting and wrenching his gut. Tighter and tighter it squeezed, and it wasn’t going to let go. He was feeling lower than a snake’s belly. And no amount of time, church do-gooders with their kindly offerings of support and pep-talks, or any amount of prescription anti-depressants or even his medication of choice—lots and lots of booze—had or would make one lick of difference.

  He just sat in his dilapidated twenty-seven-foot Airstream Argosy travel trailer, circa 1986, in The Dunes RV Park and stared blurry-eyed out at the torrential rain and gusting wind. The weather in Winchester Bay, Southern Oregon Coast had been much like a metaphor regarding how his life had been for the last two years: dismally bleak and catatonically depressing.

  Each long day was just another useless waste of time, which to him merely underscored the futility of any thoughts he might fleetingly consider—rare thoughts regarding any possibility of effecting positive change intended to gather momentum towards some semblance of beginning to live again.

  He had moved out to the Pacific Northwest after the accident in a feeble attempt to dive back into his work. That too had been failing, and he was nearly as broke as his completely broken heart that, by some cruel joke, just kept on beating.

  It hadn’t always been so. He’d once been, for the most part, a happy guy. He had generally been considered to be a respectable academician, though his shiny credentials often lost their luster among his peers due to his notorious deviations from scientific pathways more commonly tread into the unhallowed halls of cryptozoology.

  Shortly after the accident, he’d sold their house in Sacramento and most of his and Janet’s things. He moved away mostly as an attempt to leave the house and area that around every corner brought memories that tore at his soul until there wasn’t anything left to tear at. He’d been living, or rather surviving, all around the forests of northern California and the Pacific Northwest for the last year, semi-occupying some of his time by chasing any hint of a credible lead geared towards the ever-elusive Big Foot.

  Dr. Ian McDermott, Ph.D. sat slumped in his very broken-down swivel rocker-recliner in an alcohol-induced haze, reading the Help Wanted ads in the local newspaper. He had just turned fifty-three not two weeks previously. He celebrated his birthday alone, as usual. Alone, that is, unless you counted his house guests for the evening: Jack Daniels and a loaded .32 Beretta that he affectionately called “Ole Caretaker.” He’d named his gun after one of his favorite characters from The Longest Yard. The original, not the remake. Generally speaking, he hated remakes. Some things are sacred cows and should be left alone, he thought.

  The night of his birthday, he’d become reacquainted with “Ole Caretaker.” In the shank of that fateful evening amidst his rock-bottom despair, his trusty Cyclops-barrel-eyed .32 had stared him unsteadily between his eyes for one eternal minute.

  Ian turned from the window, and for the next several moments just sat staring at a framed picture of himself and the renowned oceanographic scientist Dr. Mitsuru Matsimoto, Ph.D. from the University of Nagasaki. The two were posing for a photo, shaking hands in celebration of their co-discovery of a previously thought to be extinct variety of prehistoric fish. The photo of them showed the fish lying at their feet on the deck of the boat. This particular variety of black-finned blue coelacanth showed signs of evolutionary traits that would later prove to pre-date on the evolutionary scale the previously discovered all-blue coelacanth found in Indonesian waters not six months earlier. Both varieties of coelacanth had been thought to have been extinct for over eighty million years.

  That photo had been taken just off the coast of Madagascar. Ian’s participation in that scientifically significant discovery had served as his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame.

  The rain had increased to nearly a thundering sound as it hammered relentlessly on the metal roof of the trailer. Ian gave up on the idea of watching any television due to the noise. He decided rather to just sit back in his recliner and let time tick away. He reached for the Jack Daniels that he had been saving for later in the evening, as he decided it must be cocktail hour somewhere. With practiced precision, without looking at what he held, he twisted the lid off and with a small flick of his wrist tossed it to the ground, allowing the sweet, malted whiskey fragrance to perfume the air about him. Ian loved the smell of Jack Daniels in the morning, afternoon, or evening. It smells not like victory. More like surrender, he mused.

  At the very moment he’d seized his chalice of choice, inflated his lungs, and puckered his lips in preparation to blow any dust out that may have settled to the bottom of his favorite whiskey glass, his cell phone began sounding off, playing its too-familiar, irritating jingle, which startled him to the point of nearly dropping his glass and bottle.

  Ian cried out loudly in a silly voice that he’d do once in a while but never in the presence of anyone. It was an attempt at a surreal Southern gentlemen’s drawl, in a manner he figured Jack Daniels himself would have responded with if faced with the same disturbance that nearly caused alcohol abuse in the form of spillage … or, heaven forbid, total breakage of old Number Seven.

  “Why, disturbing a man from enjoying his libation. Tyranny, I say. Bill-collecting scoundrel, no doubt. Why, whoever is behind this outrage should be summarily drawn and quartered. Sic Semper Tyrannis! Thus to tyrants, I say …” Ian was oblivious that his outcry, its vernacular, inflection, and intonation, was the recreation of a subconscious imprint left on him from his childhood. He had been doing a pretty decent vocal impersonation of the Loony Tunes cartoon character, Yosemite Sam, who portrayed a Southern Civil War officer.

  After almost enjoying his proclamation of protest, Ian, contrary to his better judgment, decided to pick up his cell phone. The caller ID said restricted. Whoever was calling and disturbing his peace was anyone’s guess, but for just a second he thought maybe, just maybe, it might be that gal. What was her name? Rosaline? That gal wears too much makeup in a poor attempt to hide her middle-age. But she does have two redeeming qualities in the form of very large, almost picturesque breasts.

  Ian had kidded himself into nearly believing that he’d been inadvertently flirting with her the day before at the liquor store counter. With half-hearted belief that it would ever amount to anything, he’d gone as far as to tell her where he was staying. When she had turned her head away from him, he stealthily placed h
is business card on the counter, then slipped out the door without looking back. He thought she did look to be worth spending at least twenty minutes with.

  “Hello? Yeah, this is Doctor Ian McDermott. Who wants to know? Okay, Sheriff Bud O’Brien. What does the Sheriff of Harmony County, Washington want with me? Yeah, that’s what I study. Yes, I have been chasing, doing this sort of thing for a long time. My field, it’s called crypto … I’m a zoologist. Yes … Untypical species or sometimes thought to be extinct. Yes, that’s what I specialize in. Yes, that was me in those old articles. Yes, I was … I am known to be an expert in my field. You still haven’t said what this is all about.”

  On the other end of the phone, Sheriff Bud O’Brien sat in his office, leaning back with his legs crossed atop his desk. He held the phone to his ear with one hand, and in the other he held an old copy of the magazine Explorer. As he talked and listened, he gazed at the second magazine that sat on top of his desk, National Geographic. Both magazines had Ian’s face splashed across the covers.

  “All right, Sheriff. Understand that I get two hundred fifty a day plus expenses to investigate with no guarantees—I mean no refunds—if I can’t help turn anything up. That is agreeable? Okay then. I’ll come on out to your neck of the woods and poke around a bit just as long as you understand that regardless of what I turn up or whatever, well, usually these things have perfectly logical explanations. Okay, okay, I’ll see ya tomorrow. Yeah, that’s right, I’m currently residing on the Oregon Coast, so I’m just a few hours from you. Right, right. I look forward to meeting with you. Thanks for contacting me. Bye!”

  Ian hung up the phone, reached down to pick up the screw cap that he’d tossed aside earlier, and re-screwed it back onto his bottle. He then took a deep breath, slapped his knees with both palms, and suddenly found himself momentarily smiling genuinely.