Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

The first book in the Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator series, 2007

For the first time in the history of humankind, the turn of the millennium was tracked around the globe like an incoming comet zooming over the earth from the black night sky.

People every where joined to watch the exciting evidence of this invisible moment of time arrive. Exploding nebulas of fireworks in the midnight heavens marked its passage. Space satellites and television stations tracked its progress.

From the Pacific islands and Australia to China, where fireworks and gunpowder were born, to Europe to America, rockets were bursting in air, just like in the national anthem. They illuminated the edge of oncoming midnight.

A world globe stood next to the TV screen so we kids could track the necklace of fireworks circle the earth. On TV, men and women in exotic locales Singapore, Sri Lanka, Krakow, Paris, New York City, San Francisco, Peru, Easter Island -sounded breathless and triumphant. They announced the magical millennium moment over their microphones as the thousand-year turn of the centuries overtook each of the world's time zones.

Even the littlest kids in the orphanage were allowed to stay up past midnight to watch.

The oldest at eleven, I thought that there could be no more delicious moment than standing under those glittering showers of light with a microphone like a lollipop in my hand, telling everyone all about it.

Oh, we had piles of bottled water and dry foods stocked in the basement, and all the residence's computer screens were darker than night. Primal fears underlay the outward celebrations of the millennium. Some people swore the year 2000 would bring technological chaos, or an old-fashioned End of the Word cataclysm. And I was living through it, a skinny, careful kid with no history who dreamed of making some, someday.

The nightmares hadn't started yet.

Mine. And everybody else's.

We all are so much older now, and not much wiser.

I'm twenty-four and hold that TV microphone in my hand on a windswept scrap of high plains turf called Kansas, reporting the continuing aftermath of that landmark night and its unexpected revelations.

Ironic, how all the pundits, religious and secular, had feared the wrong bogeymen when the twentieth century turned its hoary head over its shoulder to mark the end of the second thousand years after Christ with the sharp slash of a scythe. Before 2000. After 2000.

I'd been taught the religious implications, of course, and even back then had a reporter's dubious eye about ballyhooed adult events. Later, I understood it all even more.

The apocalyptic crowd had predicted Armageddon, the Antichrist abroad, raising Hell quite literally. The dark, evil dead would be drawn from their graves to battle the Lord of the Second Coming and His legions of shining angels.

World leaders had feared a terrorist cascade of bombs bursting across the globe to broadcast religious strife, anger, and hatred.

Computer geeks had predicted that Y2K, the Year 2000 in their geeky shorthand, would short-circuit computer programs the world over. The preprogrammed 0000s and 1111s would go berserk with the stress of recording the unprepared-for calendar shift to 2000, plunging us all back into the chaos of an abacus age.

They were all right in a way, and all wrong.

Instead-wonder of wonders-the lost, the legends, the outcast, the feared, the bogeymen and women of more simple-minded times, witches and ghosts, werewolves and vampires and zombies, oh my-rose from the graveyard of myth, gradually demanding recognition, revealing themselves as endlessly ongoing inhabitants of our same human planet.

It started with a few werewolf cub sightings. They were mistaken for feral children until a couple were captured in transition. Then came increased rumors of vampire bites. Air traffic controllers reported small flying bodies, relatively speaking. These turned out to be flocks of giant vampire bats migrating between South America and the other continents by night. By Halloween, witches were reported hot-rodding across the moon and scaring trick-or-treaters with candy-stealing fly-bys. These were just the show-offs. Previously normal citizens revealed weird, inexplicable powers. The Change became too general and global to deny.

Religious leaders were torn between dismissing them all as demonsor the benighted mentally ill. The divide between both conditions had always been hairline-thin.

Politicians wavered between rallying popular feeling against the new-old populationor registering them to vote.

Technogeeks veered between calling them a bunch of hallucinatory Ludditesand wanting to get them online blogs.

I found myself with mixed feelings too, not sure whether I was destined to be a casualty of this bizarre new turn in human history, or its recording angel.

And then things really got weird

"Authorities assert," I said clearly into the microphone I held, "that medical examinations will reveal this as just the scene of another rural juvenile prank, nothing more."

I held my position while the station videographer wrapped the take. No moving. You never knew when you were really on or off camera. A savvy TV reporter learned to freeze like a department store mannequin before and after filming a stand-up.

Of course I hadn't believed a word I said.

If you don't cooperate with the police in the early stages of a crime story, they'll cold-cock you later, just when everything is getting juicy. They'll cold-cock you anyway, just for the fun of it.

Speaking of juicy, the three corpses were bone soup inside their intact skins. No way does any weapon known to human do that. Yet the "authorities" were playing the incident like a frat-boy prank for the public. So this was just a semi-crime scene.

That scene was a Kansas cornfield and my mid-heeled reporter pumps were sinking arch-deep in clods of dirt or shit, depending.

" Del," the lieutenant said as soon as the day-bright camera light had turned off and we were all plunged back into a rural darkness where no crickets chirped.

Crickets always chirped in the spring country night, which was yet another sign that this was one eerie crime scene.

As the cameraman drove off in the station van to film another story, Lieutenant Werner, short, dark, and rotund, escorted me over the clods to the unpaved road, where a sleek black car stood shrouded in gravel dust. We had a working history, so I accepted his part gallant, part controlling male custody. Besides, that car was very interesting. Out of state license plate. Way more than unmarked police car class. Cool.

"Agent Edwards wants to talk to you."

Agent Edwards. Not the county agricultural agent, not state police. Fed. Hello, Fox Mulder, maybe? Just when you need a hero.

" Miss Street," the man said.

I nodded, unsold. Viewed in the headlights from his car, Agent Edwards was an East Coast yuppie, no hair below the tops of his ears or the back of his stiff white shirt collar. Cornfields were as alien to him as crop circles, but I knew a lot about both.

"You cover the 'paranormal crime' beat around here, I understand." Edwards put a sneer inside his quotation marks.

"I don't think you do understand," I answered. "Whatbureau are you with?"

"Office of Rural Security. We handle uncooperative farmers on the mad cow disease issue, fertilizer thefts, anything that involves national safety. So all suspect incidents are a federal case. Media rights bow to national security nowadays. We demand your discretion."