Read The Wild Online

Authors: Whitley Strieber

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction, #General, #New York (N.Y.), #Wolves

The Wild (9 page)

BOOK: The Wild
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"Why would anybody do that?"

"I am not in the profession of analyzing love. I'd be a fool to try."

"Implying that you cannot imagine why she loves me. Well, neither can I. I'm a lot of trouble and not much good."

"You've made her happy." There was an edge in Monica's voice.

"Am I leaving my marriage behind? Is that what this is all about?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know! That's why I asked. You're the expensive psychiatrist. You tell me."

"I'm not a Miss Lonelyhearts. My profession is to guide you toward insight."

He remembered the wolf sucking at his hand. He could feel the tongue, the teeth, could see those glaring, empty eyes. They looked like glass because the soul behind them had been burned away. That wolf was already dead. It wasn't responsible for what was happening, it was just a mechanism.

There was an impression of somebody so huge that they contained the whole earth. He thought of the Catholic image of the Blessed Virgin Mary standing astride the world, and was for a moment deeply comforted. "Officer Mary."

"Excuse me?"

"Did I say something?"

"Something. I couldn't hear you. What were you thinking about?"

There was no way to say it, because the image was so strange and private. His mother must have held him newborn thus, a magical being cradling an infant who trailed in his soul the whole world.

"We underestimate ourselves, Monica. Human beings don't know what they are."

"I've often thought that." A smile almost captured her face, but it got away.

There was something startling here—this woman was not at all wise. She wasn't even a good questioner. Her mind wandered about. She occasionally repeated something you said, agreed, tried to make you expand. But she was not concentrating. For all her well-groomed beauty, the perfect blue of her eyeshadow, the colorful humidity of her lips, her heartbreaking almond eyes, her radiant blond hair—for all of that—she was just not here.

Bob was here, totally. Maybe that was his problem. He had come awake to a life which is normally meant for a sort of sleep. A soul might be like this in heaven, but when it was born, it would forget everything it had learned in the airy libraries of the angels.

"What are you really, truly thinking about right now, Monica?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Monica, please. Forget the session. Forget the questions.
What are you thinking about?"

"What should I be thinking about?"

He noticed that there was nothing near the patient that could be thrown, no ashtrays, no fat little statuettes of Buddha like in the rest of the office.

"I could get a computer that would ask me these parroting questions."

"Would that satisfy you?"

A tingling iron was thrust directly into his groin by an unseen hand. His penis sprang up. Sweat flowed from his every pore. Her skin was alight, pale and smooth, her fingers tapering, her breast a milky stillness. The fire in him almost cracked him open. He thought for a moment that he would split in two and his organs would fall out, a stoke of blazing coals.

She laughed a little, leaning forward, her chin on one of those long, soft hands he wished to God would touch him. "Bob?"

"I'm remembering the Catskills." It wasn't true, it was more than that. He wasn't remembering anything and it wasn't her in particular. His desire went flying right out the window, and in an instant included everybody in the world, good, big, little, bad, old, new, every sweat and softness, hair in the sun, sweet skin in the dark.

Singing came from the reception room. Monica turned her head sharply. "Katie, are you still there?"

"I'm leaving now, Monica. Is that okay?"

"Sure, Kate." She got up, a glory of whispering movement. In a low voice she spoke to her assistant. "You don't need to stay for this one. He's a little overwrought, but he's harmless. I've known him for years."

The kiss they traded, made to look casual, seemed to Bob like two molten cymbals crashing, a thing of fury hidden behind a thousand curtains, and on each curtain was another deceiving word. It was not casual. It meant that their hidden souls were in deep and abiding love. They should share their bodies, their very blood. That they did not know this, or ignored it, made them sinners.

She closed the door firmly and came around her big desk. She stood before Bob, her arms folded. "That night haunts you, doesn't it?"

"I want you."

"We could put all that to rest, you know. I'm speaking as a friend. You don't want me, you want your image of me. If I satisfied your curiosity, maybe we could get on with the analysis."

Her words shuddered, and Bob saw that she was shaking. Behind the folded arms, her hands were clenched fists. He felt sorry for her, because he had discovered her secret. She had tried so hard to hide her failure. The reality was before him, though. She had no idea what she was doing: her profession was exactly what it seemed—a superficial fraud clinging to a deeper truth.

There came to him an insight. His path had diverted from common reality and entered uncommon reality. He might be off in this fog, lost here at least for a time, but it was a grand fog.

Within it there were fearsome discoveries to be made, but also he was closer to the old immortalities. Saints and the innocent of God had been here, the geniuses of the surreal like Francis of Assisi and friend Kafka.

He had to break the tension between himself and Monica. His passion would not be satisfied by some hurried roll on her rug, indeed not by any physical thing. It was too deeply of the body to be appeased by the decorative rituals that have grown up around the act of procreation. Maybe giving her a child would wet his fires a little, but he did not want his fires wetted. He had to see this through.

A new experience had claimed him.

She, though, still assumed him to be part of the old reality. Her eyes were wet, her lips parted. Her fingers took his cheeks and guided his mouth to her mouth. He turned away and her kiss came to his cheek.

"Bob?"

"Monica, this is not—"

"Hush. Don't say it." She dropped her eyes, her head, knelt, then crouched before him like an Egyptian at the feet of Pharaoh. He heard constricted sobs. But the constriction began failing, the sobs growing louder. She had come to her own darkness, here in this lovely room, with the late sun bathing the cathedral below the windows. She was seeing full how close she was to the mysteries that her ancient sisters in magic had celebrated with potions and flying ointment and broomsticks. So close, and yet denied. Her science, in seeking to penetrate the heart, locked the heart.

He felt sure that she had just at this moment discovered her own fraud. As softly, as gently as he could, Bob rose. He stepped over Monica's crouching form. He left this soul to the privacy of its discovery.

There was no point in trying any longer to escape. Not Monica, not her pills, nothing could help him. If there was a guide, he would find it in the black letters of the past, the
Mabinogion,
the
Little Flowers of St. Francis,
the
Metamorphosis.

Bob Duke had come to the center of the forest. There was no sound, not even wind. The path was not marked by moon or stars or prior passage. All around him the eyes, the fangs, the claws of another world—the wild and true world— gathered themselves.

As evening settled over New York St. Patrick's Cathedral raised its bells. He started off through their glassine clamor and at the same time through this silent forest in his soul. Now he was alone.

Chapter Six

T
HE ENCOUNTER LEFT
B
OB DESPERATE FOR
T
YLENOL
, and he was glad when he was finally riding the old elevator up to his own apartment. Lupe drove it, one-eyed, silent Lupe who had been here since this building was called "The Montague House" and dressed its doormen and elevator operators in tan uniforms with gold braid. Now there was only Lupe, and he rarely wore his shaggy formals. They were reserved for Christmas, or if there was a wedding party in the building, or a wake.

Lupe never talked. He had stopped talking, the old-timers said, back when the Dodgers had left Brooklyn. Mrs. Trask in 14C remembered Lupe's last words: "Too sad."

Lupe's last words, Mrs. Trask . . . the life and history of the building. Mrs. Trask also remembered when your maid piled your dirty sheets on the dumbwaiter and sent them down to the laundry, which was staffed by six Chinese. "At Christmas we gave twenty-eight tip envelopes, a dollar each. Our rent was forty-one dollars a month. Let me tell you, young man, this place was class with a capital K."

Lupe pulled back the rattling brass cage. "Thanks, Lupe." Bob heard, and disliked, the superior drone in his own voice. "I need about twelve Tylenols," he said as he went through the door into his dark, silent apartment. "Hello?"

There was a scrabbling sound from the bedroom.

He went down the hall. "Cindy?"

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in the dark, smoking. He was stunned. To his knowledge, she had never smoked. "What's the matter?"

"We have thirty days to go in this apartment. Jennie called from the bank, we're eight hundred dollars overdrawn. I spent all afternoon at the welfare office trying to get food stamps, and we can't get them because we've already made too much money this year. So I bought a pack of Salems and I've been sitting here ever since smoking them and get me some money or leave me alone!"

He stepped back as if a snake had lashed its head in his direction. Her breath hissed between her teeth.

She was hurting, and he loved her, but he could not comfort her. The source could not melt the pain. Still, there must be something to say.

"We—"

"No, Bob."

He held out his arms. She looked at him, and for a moment she seemed to be gazing at him through the bars of a cage. Gazing in. Her beauty flowed in the dark.

"Don't come any closer, Bob, unless you've got money."

"I went to Monica. She made me take pills—"

"We need money more than we need you sane! Why didn't you rob a bank and then go to Monica?"

"They rape you in prison."

"Forty-year-old men with Jell-0 around the middle? I hardly think so."

"I've forgotten how to make money. Why don't you work?"

"Doing what? Taking in wash? Pumping gas? Scrubbing floors for our friends? I'm equipped for nothing. A drone. A victim of the culture." She laughed silently, mirthlessly, her cigarette bobbing like a little red lantern. "I've been paying for being a woman all my life, and now I'm really going to pay, I guess." The bobbing stopped. "That's what being a woman's all about. You're born, therefore you pay."

What did she mean? Was she referring to pregnancy? They had used the Lamaze Method for Kevin, working as a team, two shouting, screaming people in the University Hospital birthing ward, and afterward she said it hadn't been so bad.

She stubbed her cigarette out on the bottom of her sandal and aimed the butt at the trash can. "Bob, I've loved you so much. More than I ever thought I'd love anybody. You have a decency about you, honey, that's just so sweet. You're the only thoroughly good person I've ever met. You wouldn't hurt anything. I don't think you've ever even killed a fly." She sobbed. "Is that why you're such a failure? Why we're always broke?"

"Actually, I think I might have something with the Macintosh Office concept. I'm planning on hitting my old client list, making some cold calls—"

"Shh! Honey, don't belabor the absurd. Just leave it alone. We have no money. This is who we are. We are the We Have No Moneys. 'Hello, this is Mrs. We Have No Money. I'd like to get a credit line, please.'"

"We have MasterCard. Gold American Express—"

"Used up, used up."

"Maybe the bank—"

"They don't have time to assist the indigent."

"Something will turn up." He smiled at her, giving it his biggest, his brightest. Maybe somebody would take the apartment, maybe they wouldn't even be able to get food, but this love they had was bigger than a roof over your head or a meal.

Or, actually, maybe that was taking it a little too far. The love was big. But food and shelter were also big.

"I was poor as a kid and poor when we first married. The rest of the time I've worked the float. Just for one month, for one week, I'd like to have enough money. Get it. Get it now!" She grappled with another cigarette, lit it, and smoked with amateur fury. White streams roared out her nose.

He took all he had out of his wallet and laid the three one-dollar bills on the bed before her,

"Wonderful. Kevin and I can go out and share a Coke and a burger at the Greek's."

The numbers on that didn't quite work, but Bob thought it better not to mention it. They could get a grilled cheese sandwich in lieu of the hamburger and still have enough change for dessert from the Muscular Dystrophy gum machine beside the cashier's counter.

Bob's body seemed to churn and boil, as if he was turning under his skin to the consistency of a milkshake.

He was changing right here in the bedroom! He had to get out of here. "Isn't that music?" he asked, desperate to conceal his inner turmoil.

She sighed. It must be obvious to her that his voice was not right, and she probably knew why. "Kevin's got a friend over."

"I think I'll go say hello." He took a long step back. He quivered, goo in a sack of skin.

"Bob?"

"Yes?"

"Is that a dance you're doing or what?"

"The music—"

"You don't do the frug to the 'Blue Danube.'" Backing away from Cindy was an evasion, of course. He should go to her, and let her spend her rage on him and then ask her for the blessings of the night, but he had not the courage. Over the years of their marriage she had remade herself in an image he preferred, but now that he couldn't pay her way anymore she was back to her old self, the real Cindy—a stranger he had from time to time glimpsed in moments of rage or passion. There were jets of rebellion flaring.

And yet—and this was the most awful part— the strangeness of her anger was what was making her attractive. Her rage was a fierce aphrodisiac.

All the rules were changed; reality had come unstuck, danger and the unexpected now reigned.

His bones shifted, scuttling beneath his skin. Step-by-step he backed down the hall. Cindy snorted, a derisive, cutting noise. The light streaming from under Kevin's door was yellow and rich.

He had to hide, to get away, to save his family from this absurd horror—

His bones were oozing in his skin, his muscles bubbling as if they were carbonated glue.

He stumbled, fell against Kevin's door, lurched into the room.

The whole place was done up in blue construction paper. From Kevin's record player there blared the "Blue Danube." He was waltzing around and around with a girl in his arms.

"Dad!" They stopped waltzing.

The girl held out a soft, child-fat hand, smiled around a bucking reef of teeth. "Pleased to meetcha."

To take the hand Bob had to concentrate all of his attention on his own arm, force it forward, scream in his head for his fingers to open. Then he had to draw his hand back, which was like pulling against a cold river. The arm wanted to go straight out before him, the hand to crunch and twist itself into a new form.

This must not be allowed to happen, not here, not now. But he
wanted to,
his body
wanted to,
it had wanted to all day, to just burst its old skin and become the new, magic self that belonged to the wild.

Both children looked at him, the little girl's face flickering fear, Kevin's a mix of amusement and concern,

"Dad, have you got a sore throat?"

"Rrr—no!"

"Then why do you keep growling?"

"Your dad is really weird."

He finally managed to lurch out, caught himself leaning forward toward all fours, scuttled into the living room, and hit the phone. He fluttered through Cindy's directory, a pretty cream-colored book with roses pressed in the Lucite cover that Kevin had made last summer at camp. Here was Monica's home number. Thank God, what a convenience when your wife and your psychiatrist are such good friends, no need to gabble to some gum cracker at an answering service.
Ring.
Please.
Ring.
Oh, please.
Ring.
"Monica, thank God you're home."

"Who is this?"

"Bob; I need help."

"Are you hurt?"

"No, Monica, I'm changing. I swear."

"You sound like you've got a mouthful of Brillo or something."

"I swear, my whole body—Monica, it isn't a psychological problem, it's real. I've got to have help."

"Can you come to my office?"

"Please, I don't think I can get out of the apartment."

"Is Cindy there?"

"They're both here. And a little friend of Kevin's."

"Give me ten minutes, Bob." She hung up. He slumped over the phone, breathing deeply, trying for control, clutching his chest, huddling in on himself. Evening light gathered to waltz time from Kevin's room. Bob crept into the darkest corner he could find, the coat closet.

His body gave itself to its rebirth. He wrenched and quivered, saw waves passing through his muscles, felt the grinding reorganization of his bones. His organs seemed to have become detached from their moorings. They swooped on cold comet tracks down new paths inside him, freezing and burning at the same time, while he gasped and gargled, trying not to scream.

"Tales from the Vienna Woods" gave way to the "Acceleration Waltz," and the
pop of a
bottle of fizzy apple juice. Bob stared at the faint light coming under the door of the coat closet. He darted his ears toward the rustling sound of movement—Cindy was coming down the hall. Now she was in the living room. "Bob?"

He pressed back against the wall. The smell of overcoats filled his nose: his own coat smelled of moldy money. Perhaps that ten dollars he had lost had worked its way down into the lining. There was a faint aroma of Paco Rabanne coming from Cindy's coat. Either she had taken to using it or had walked arm in arm with a man who did.

Didn't Monica's husband use it? That, or Aramis. Bob did not care for fragrances on his own body. His ears followed Cindy as she came to the center of the room. The light increased. She had turned on the lamp over by the TV. "Bob?"

The downstairs buzzer sounded, blasting the silence in the closet, making Bob chortle out an involuntary growl of surprise. Cindy came across the room, lifted the receiver of the intercom. "Yes?"

"Cyn, it's me."

"Oh, Monica, come in."

A few moments later they embraced with swishes and a ripple of ginger kissing. "Why did you come?"

"He phoned. Where is he?"

"I think he went out."

Light burst into his eyes. There stood Cindy holding Monica's airy mink. She dropped the coat. "Bob, my God."

Monica appeared, a dark mask before the light. She squatted down, reached in and took his face in warm, firm hands. She drew him out into the blinking light. The waltz music had stopped. Briefly his eyes met his son's, the boy standing at the far end of the room. "Is this for real?" his playmate asked.

"Kafka," Kevin said, "the
Metamorphosis."

"Look at his teeth." Cindy's voice was analytical, the tone of someone so fascinated that for a moment they have forgotten to be upset. Then she fully realized what she was seeing, signified by the fact that her skin went corpse gray.

He tried to raise his arm, to touch what he sensed as a numb disfigurement of his lower face. His right arm shot out before him. It was short, the sleeve of his shirt drooping around it. The fist at the end of it was so tight it felt like it had been strapped to itself with cord. His palm was hot, his finger joints oozing red pain.

"It's a hysterical reaction," Monica said crisply. "Get him down on the floor. Get his clothes off. We've got to massage those limbs before he loses his circulation."

"What do you mean, a hysterical reaction? Look at him, he's—oh, Bob, oh, my baby!"

"The body can do wonders. You wouldn't believe what some patients look like. Especially from the East. Indians. You'd swear they'd half turned into monkeys, the way they contort themselves. It's nothing that modem psychiatry can't handle, of that much I can assure you. A few months on a Thorazine drip, a course of electroshock, and he'll seem fine."

"Months! Monica, we have no money. He can't go into the hospital, he has to work."

"I'm sorry. This is a classic case of avoidance. He can't handle his problems, can't face his responsibilities. It's a fortress mentality."

"Mother, his teeth are actually growing."

He heard all of this with absolute clarity as Monica and Cynthia undressed him. Through eyes that had gone to vague colors and shades of gray he watched his son and the little girl standing hand in hand at his feet. "Don't cry, Kevin, I'm gonna—"

Kevin clapped his hands over his ears. "He sounds like a dog!"

"Rub, Cindy." Their fingers raced along his arms and legs, raced and kneaded. Within his limbs there was a continuous churning, and it was getting worse. He delivered himself to their efforts but it was no good, not really. He was slipping, sliding through their fingers. His wife's hands were soft and cool and dry, Monica's damp and warm. Their manipulations were beautiful agony.

It faded like rain fades, and the rubbing of skin against skin was replaced by the whisper of fingers in fur.

"Oh, God, Monica, what's the matter with him!"

Monica lifted her hands as if she was being burned. A rictus twisted her face, her teeth gleaming behind tight lips, her eyes beaded to amber chips. Then a great force seemed to descend upon her and she controlled her face. Her lips were a line of wire. Young Kevin had moved away. His girlfriend was huddling in a ball beside the TV. Kevin's tape had recycled and the "Blue Danube" now filled the room.

BOOK: The Wild
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