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The Paranormal Hunters Society received dozens of emails on its main website every week. The crew and I made bets on what kind of claims or stories I’d sort through during the weekend or during my downtime. Dean like betting on religious nuts claiming the president was the Devil or a demon. Laurie liked predicting if we’d receive random requests to spend a night ghost hunting Location A or Location B if we could (the top contender was always Goodbye, New Mexico following our first freaky episode focused on the ghost town). More often than not though, we’d receive crazy live calls too during the live podcast.

Sometimes, it would be a regular interview, like the time I questioned a gay couple claiming to be reincarnated lovers from Victorian-era England, or a UFO researcher whose photographs of alien spacecraft disappeared the minute he uploaded them to computers. Plenty of spooky stuff. Some of it I actually believed. Other times, I’d listen to verbal accounts from those listening in to the podcast episode itself. After a while, some of them could blur together.

If I had a nickel for each time someone said, ‘at first, I thought it was the wind’.

During one recent episode, I got quite the story. Following a short commercial break, I sat back down at my booth, coffee in paw, turned on the phone’s speaker, and spoke into the microphone, “Welcome back spooks and specters to the Paranormal Hunters Society’s Paranormalist’s Podcast. This is Bram Heathcliff, and we’ve got a caller claiming to have his own supernatural encounter.” I clicked a button. “You’re live on the air now, Brian! How are you doing this fine evening?”

“Uh, hi there. Hello, Bram, love your show…” came a nervous, shaken voice. “I’m okay, I guess. Could be better, but I feel like it ain’t.”

“Bad day, huh?” I asked. “Hopefully, we at the Paranormalist’s Podcast can help cheer you up a little. Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself then, and why you’ve decided to call?”

“Well…like I said, my name is Brian. Brian Demarco. I’m thirty-three years old, three-quarters coyote and one-quarter wolf—you’d think I was full-blooded timber wolf at first glance—and I work as an accountant in Thunderbird, a damn good one too. Or at least, I used to be. Yeah, I uh…got fired due to the same reason I’m calling.”

My jackrabbit ears perked high at what he said. “I’m sorry to hear you lost your job, Brian. May I ask what happened to you? You sound like you’re shaking.”

A silent beat later, and I heard Brian give a deep sigh in his phone. “I am. Shaking, I mean. It’s been a wild few weeks for me, and I don’t know how long I’ve got left before…”

“Brian?” I set my coffee cup aside on a coaster, leaning closer to my microphone and turning up the volume on my headphones. “Brian, are you alright? Do you need to talk—”

“My family has been seeing the Grim Reaper for years.”

I blinked. “What?”

“It all started with my grandfather.” Brian Demarco’s voice trembled on the other end but stayed strong with each word spoken. “I remember he was on his death bed and told my entire family a secret we couldn’t believe. Not until our own time came. Grandpa John, he…he was a corporal in World War Two. He was actually one of the first American soldiers sent into Normandy on D-Day, and he often talked about the sheer horrors he saw. Explosions everywhere, bullets shredding men like meat, the taste of salt water and blood in his teeth. He told my folks that he didn’t make it twenty feet onto the beach when a German bullet hit him close to his heart, and he fell.

“Grandpa John told us he spent what felt like hours lying there on Omaha Beach, bleeding and dying, helplessly watching as his fellow soldiers threw themselves at the enemy. He couldn’t even look away. He expected to pass out any moment and go to Heaven when he…started to see them. At first, John thought they were wisps of smoke coming from mine craters along the beach, but they weren’t. No, they were…shadows. Tall, hooded, pale-furred figures. According to him, and I quote, ‘Just as many of these cloaks filled the beach as corpses did. They stood hunched over each dead body, the ends of their cloaks almost unnaturally waving against the wind like octopus tentacles. The all resembled different species, different ages, nationalities and genders. All that they had in common were the lack of color in their graying fur, and the blood dripping from their eyes down their faces. Nobody on the beach acknowledged their presences. What scared me the most was that a few would wail in agony each time somebody was shot and fell to the Earth.’

“According to my grandpa, he said one of them approached him from thin air, and he looked exactly like him. A full-blooded wolf with ashy fur, crimson staining his cheeks, and a cloak that seemed to envelope everything around them…He—not it, wanted him.”

The line on the other end suddenly fell silent. Rustling and inaudible muttering would interrupt the quiet, and I nearly asked if Brian was still there when the coywolf abruptly continued his tale.

“My-My Grandpa John pleaded for his life. He begged that thing to not let him die on the beach.” Brian sighed. “Well, I don’t know how he did it. Whether by a classic game of chess or just dumb luck, but a field nurse managed to find him, and nursed my grandpa back to health during the rest of the war. That’s how he met my Grandma Beatrice. He got better, and after getting honorably discharged, life carried on for them. They had cubs, and those cubs had me, my brothers, and cousins. We all visited Grandpa John in the hospital, where he told us about what happened to him on D-Day, and the deal he made with the Grim Reaper that nearly claimed him. He told us…that the reaper spoke to him, and said he could live, but would return to claim the souls of all his descendants. My dad, my uncles, my aunt, their cubs, grand-cubs, my brothers and me…none of us were supposed to have been ever born after Normandy, and so, we were John’s payment to the reaper, and now…Death has come to collect us.”

“We all thought he was delirious and completely out of it. We all thought it was dementia and trauma from losing his wife not too long after being hospitalized and didn’t think much of it. Not until after the funeral, when my oldest uncle suddenly learned he had lung cancer. It was so severe, like he’d been smoking a pack a day since college, but it wasn’t true! The man hated the habit, and never touched a cigarette in his life. It came out of nowhere though, and within a year, he died. Then, my other two uncles died, and so did my aunt and their cubs. Leukemia, pneumonia, freak accidents…my parents died together after having heart attacks in their sleep. One of my brothers decided to end his life. My youngest committed himself to an insane asylum. The only ones who remain are my cousin Ollie in the institute, his younger preteen sister who’s been living with a friend of the remaining family, and…and then there’s me. Over the course of ten years, my extended family’s dropped from thirty-three strong to just three. Not including my uncles’ and aunt’s widows.

“During all of this, I tried keeping a level head. I kept working, stayed healthy, avoided junk food and alcohol, but it’s gotten harder with every goddamn tragedy happening every few months. This affected my job performance especially after my folks died. My former boss understood, but he stopped having sympathy after I started…started…oh God.”

“Brian, what started?” I asked.

“I started seeing what my grandpa saw,” he replied after a few seconds, adding, “On the beaches of Normandy. At first, I chalked it up to a mirage or one of those ‘cosplayers’ who liked dressing up on every day but Halloween, but then the figure started appearing in crowds, watching me. A wolf…or coywolf, I think, like me. Ashy gray fur, a long black cloak, wearing a hood even on sunny hot days, and blood dripping down his eyes. I tried warning my former coworkers about seeing him outside the office doors, but none of them could see it! Neither did my boss! When I finally had the nerve to call the police and tell them this freaky canine in a gothic robe was stalking me outside my workplace, the cops arrived with a vengeance. No matter how hard I tried pointing them to the…thing, standing patiently outside the building, they couldn’t see. Neither could my coworkers or my boss, who fired me on the spot.

“I’ve been seeing more of the Grim Reaper, or one of them, ever since. I saw it the night my ex-girlfriend broke up with me after a huge fight, during the rides between my apartment and the unemployment office, and now…I’m seeing it each night before I fall asleep. I’ve been using the last of my savings to stay in this motel, but it still stalks me. I…”

“Brian?” I spoke up, cautiously. “Brian, are you still there?”

“…it’s here,” the coywolf’s voice was laced with defeat. Scared yet content breathing could be heard through growing static. “It’s standing right by the foyer, in the room. I guess it’s my time. I gotta go, Bram. Pray for me…good-bye.”

Beep, beep, beep, beep. The line had gone dead.

“Well then,” I said after a moment of tense silence, trying to sound calm, “let’s go to commercials. Come back to listen to me discuss this week’s latest sighting of a UFO in Southern California, and what scientists suggest it really is. Um, yeah.”

When I tried calling the number back, nobody replied. Then, I decided to send a text to Laurie and see if she could look up Brian Demarco, and possibly contact him. She too couldn’t reach the coywolf. It wouldn’t be until a couple of days later that a fan of the Paranormalist’s Podcast sent a link to our social media pages. It was an online obituary for a coyote-wolf hybrid in Thunderbird, Arizona. Aged thirty-three, a former accountant, unmarried with two living relatives. He had a brain aneurysm, according to his death certificate.

A quick search also led to us discovering everything Brian had said regarding his family’s premature deaths were true. Over the course of eleven years, members of the Demarco family, young and old, passed away from unforeseen circumstances.

The freakiest part? Another fan listening to the podcast had heard something in the silence between Brian’s story, and when he mentioned a visitor in his room before ending the call. It could be faintly heard in-between the seconds of when I asked if Brian was still there and when he said, “It’s here.”

One needed to pay close attention to the audio, but under the static, you could hear another voice. It didn’t sound like Brian or me. It was deeper, melancholic, but urgent. All the audible words that me, a curious Laurie, a skeptical Dean, and a freaked-out Samantha could make out were the following:

“…come, Brian…do not dawdle…it is time…it is time…”