The Wolf Gift (15 page)

How could he know?

He couldn’t dismiss it, that was certain.

He thought of that big photograph over Marchent’s library fireplace, of those men deep in the tropical forest—Felix Nideck and his mentor, Margon Sperver. Marchent had mentioned others’ names, but he couldn’t clearly remember them—except that they didn’t appear in the story.

Ah, he had to make an exhaustive search of all werewolf literature. And at once he set about ordering books specifically on werewolf fiction, legends, and poetry, including anthologies and studies, to be delivered overnight.

But he felt he was grasping at straws. He was imagining things.

Felix was long dead. Margon was probably dead. Marchent had searched and searched. What absurd nonsense. And the beast thing came into that house from the forest, certainly, through the shattered dining room windows. It heard the screams just as you hear screams; he smelled the evil as you smell evil.

Romantic nonsense.

A sadness came over him suddenly that Felix was dead and gone. But still: names from a man wolf story. And what if there is, what, some degenerate beast cousin roaming the forest … keeping guard over the house?

He felt tired.

Suddenly a warm feeling came over him. He heard the low roar of the gas fire; he heard the rain singing in the gutters. He felt warm all over, and light. The voices of the city throbbed and rumbled, and gave him the oddest feeling that he was connected to the whole world. Hmmm. It was just the opposite of the alienation he’d felt earlier when talking to real identifiable people at the
Observer
.

“You belong to them now, maybe,” he whispered. The voices were too homogenized. Words, cries, pleas, hovered just below the surface.

God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?

He looked at his watch.

It was just past ten o’clock. What if he took off now in the Porsche for Nideck Point? Why, the drive would be nothing. Just several hours in pouring rain. Very likely he could get in the house. He’d break a little windowpane if he had to. Why would there be a problem? The house would be legally his within a few weeks. He’d already signed all the documents the title company required of him. He’d already taken over the utility bills, hadn’t he? Well, hell, why not go there?

And the beast man out there, in the forest. Would he know that Reuben was there? Would he pick up the scent of the one he’d bitten and left alive?

He was burning to go up there.

Something startled him. It wasn’t a sound exactly, no, but something … a vibration—as if a car with a pounding sound system was passing in the street.

He saw a dark woods, but it wasn’t the woods of Mendocino. No, another woods, a misty tangled woods that he knew. Alarm.

He got up and opened the doors to the deck.

The air was gusty and bitter cold. The rain struck his face and his hands. It was divinely bracing.

The city shimmered beneath its veil of rain, thicket upon thicket of lighted towers crowding in on him so beautifully. He heard a voice whispering as if in his ear: “Burn him, burn them.” This was an ugly, acid voice.

His heart was thudding, and his body tensed. All over his skin came the ecstatic rippling sensation. A fount inside him let loose with a gushing power that straightened his back.

It was happening, all right, the wolf-hair was covering his body, the mane descending to his shoulders, and the waves of ecstatic pleasure were coursing over him, obliterating all caution. The wolf-hair grew from his face as though invisible fingers coaxed it, and the keening pleasure made him gasp.

His hands were already claws; as before, he tore off his clothes, and kicked off his shoes. He ran his claws over his thick hairy arms and chest.

All the sounds of the night were sharpened, the chorus rising around him, mingled with bells, fleeting streaks of music, and desperate prayers.
He felt the urge to escape the confines of the room, to spring off into the darkness, utterly indifferent to where he might land.

Wait; photograph it. Get to the mirror and witness it, he thought. But there was no time for that. He heard the voices again: “We’ll burn you alive, old man!”

He leapt up to the rooftop. The rain scarcely touched him. It was no more than a mist.

Towards the voice he bounded, clearing one alley and street after another, scaling the taller apartment houses and flying free over the lower buildings, springing over the broader avenues effortlessly, and heading towards the ocean, buoyed by the wind.

The voice grew louder, mingled with yet another voice, and then came the cries of the victim. “I won’t tell you. I won’t tell you. I’ll die but I won’t tell you.”

He knew where he was now, traveling at his greatest conceivable speed over the buildings of the Haight. Ahead he saw the great dark rectangle of Golden Gate Park. Those woods, yes, that dense fairy forest with its secret hollows. Of course!

He plunged into it now, moving along the wet grassy ground and then up into the fragrant trees.

Suddenly he saw the ragged old man running away from his pursuers, through a tunnel in the bracken, surrounded by a sylvan camouflage in which other witnesses cowered under shining tarps and broken boards as the rain came pouring down.

One of the attackers caught the man by the shoulder and dragged him out into a grassy clearing. The rain soaked their clothes. The other attacker had stopped, and was setting afire a torch of curled newspapers, but the rain was putting out the fire.

“The kerosene!” shouted the man who held the victim. The victim was punching, and kicking. “I’ll never tell you,” he wailed.

“Then you’ll burn with your secret, old man.”

The scent of the kerosene mingled with the scent of evil, the stench of evil, as the torchbearer splashed the fluid on his torch and it burst into flame.

With a deep rolling roar, Reuben caught the torchbearer, his claws digging into the man’s throat and all but splitting his head from his shoulders. The man’s neck snapped.

Then he turned on the other assailant who had dropped the shuddering
victim and was loping across the clearing in the downpour towards the shelter of the far trees.

Effortlessly Reuben overtook him. His jaws opened instinctively. He wanted so with all his being to dig out the man’s heart. His jaws were hungry for it, aching for it. But no, not the teeth, not the teeth that could give the Wolf Gift, no, he could not risk that. His snarls coming like curses, he tore at the helpless man. “You would have burned him alive, would you?”—clawing the flesh off his face, and the skin from his chest. His claw raked through the carotid artery and the blood spurted. The man sank down on his knees and fell over, as the blood soaked his old denim coat.

Reuben turned back. The kerosene had spilled in the grass and was burning, spitting and smoking in the rain, giving the ghastly scene a hellish light.

The old man who had been the victim knelt huddled, his arms tightly wrapped around his body, staring at Reuben with large unquestioning eyes. Reuben could see the old man flinching in the rain, flinching as the cold rain beat down on him, but Reuben couldn’t feel the rain.

He approached the man and reached out to help him to his feet. How powerful and calm he felt, the blaze flickering near him, the warmth barely touching him.

The dark undergrowth surrounding them was swarming with movement and whispers, with desperate accolades and ejaculations of fear.

“Where do you want to go?” Reuben asked.

The man pointed to the darkness beyond the low-hanging oaks. Reuben lifted him and carried him under the low boughs. The earth was dry and fragrant here. The matted vines formed veils. A shack of broken boards and tarpaper hung amid the swallowing ivy and giant shuddering ferns. Reuben put the man down on his nest of rags and woolen blankets. He shrank back amid the bundles that surrounded him, pulling the covers up to his neck.

The scent of dusty cloth and whiskey filled the little enclosure. The scent of raw earth surrounded them, of wet and glistening green things, of tiny animals burrowing in the dark. Reuben pulled away as if the little man-made space were a form of trap.

He moved off, quickly, taking to the sturdy treetops, arms reaching for one limb after another, as the forest grew thicker, moving back towards the dim yellow lights of Stanyan Street with its steady traffic
hissing on the asphalt along the eastern border of the world of Golden Gate Park.

He seemed to fly across the breadth of the street, into the soaring eucalyptus trees of the Panhandle, the narrow arm of the park that went east.

He traveled as high as he could in the giant weedlike eucalyptus, breathing the strange bittersweet scent of their long thin pale leaves. He followed the ribbon of park, almost singing aloud as he moved from giant tree to giant tree with fluid movements, and then he made for the roofs of the Victorians that climbed the Masonic Street hill.

Who could see him in the darkness? No one. The rain was his friend. He went up over the slippery roof tiles with no hesitation and found himself traveling to the blackness of yet another small woodland—Buena Vista Park.

Out of the low simmering melee that was the voices, he picked out another despairing plea. “To die, I want to die. Kill me. I want to die.”

Only it wasn’t spoken aloud; it was the drumbeat behind the moans and cries he heard that were beneath or beyond language.

He landed on the roof above the victim, high atop a grand four-story mansion that bordered the steep hill leading up to the little park. Down the front of the house, he made his way, clutching the pipes and ledges, until he saw through the window the ugly spectacle of an old woman, skin and bones and bleeding sores, tied to a brass bed. Her pink scalp shone beneath her thin hanks of gray hair in the light of one small lamp.

Before her on the tray was a plate with a steaming pile of human feces, and the hunched figure of a young woman across from her held out a spoon of the loathsome mess, pressing it to the old woman’s lips. The old woman shuddered and was near to fainting. Stench of filth, stench of evil, stench of cruelty. The young woman sang her bitter taunts.

“You never fed me anything but slop in all your life, you think you will not pay for it now?”

Reuben shattered the mullions and the panes as he broke into the room.

The young woman screamed and backed away from the bed. Her face was full of rage.

He bore down on her as she scrambled to pull a gun from a drawer.

The shot rang out, deafening him for one split second, and he felt the pain in his shoulder, sharp, ugly, disabling, but at once, he moved
beyond it, a deep growl rising out of him as he snatched her up, the gun falling, and slammed her into the plaster wall. Her head broke the plaster; he felt the life go out of her, the curses dying in her throat.

In a snarling frenzy, he hurled her through the broken window. He heard the body strike the paving of the street.

For a long second he stood there, waiting for the pain to return, but the pain didn’t return. There was nothing there but pulsing warmth.

He moved towards the wraithlike figure that was tied with tape and bandages to the brass headboard. Carefully he ripped loose her fetters.

She had her thin face turned to one side. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” she prayed in a dry, whistling whisper, “the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

He bent down, removing the last of the bonds from her waist.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he said under his breath as he looked into her eyes. “Pray for us sinners—us sinners!—now and at the hour of our death.”

The old woman moaned. She was too weak to move.

He left her, padding softly down the carpeted hallway of the house, and into another spacious room where he found a phone. It was so difficult to punch in the numbers. He was laughing to himself, thinking of the beast of Mendocino, tapping them out on the screen of an iPhone. When he heard the voice of the operator a wild exultant urge went through him, to say
Murder, murder
, but he did not. That would have been sheer madness. And he hated himself suddenly for thinking it so very funny. Besides, it wasn’t true. “Ambulance. Break-in. Old woman top floor. Held prisoner.”

The operator was questioning him, and rattling off the address for verification.

“Hurry,” he said. He left the phone off the hook.

He listened.

The house was empty except for the old woman—and one other silent person who slept.

It took him only a few moments to move down to the second floor and find that helpless invalid, an old man, bound as the woman had been bound, bruised and frail, and deep asleep.

Reuben explored, finding the light switch, and flooded the scene with light.

What more could he do to bring help to this creature and the other, to make certain no colossal blunder was made?

In the hallway, he saw the dim outline of himself in a high gold-framed mirror. He smashed it, the giant shards clattering to the floor.

He picked up the old-fashioned glass-shaded lamp from the hall table and heaved it over the railing so that it was smashed on the floor of the lower front hall.

The sirens were coming, winding together, just like those unraveling sounds he heard in Mendocino. Ribbons in the night.

He could go now.

He made his escape.

For a long time, he remained in the high dark cypress woods of Buena Vista Park. The hilltop trees were slender, but he had easily found one strong enough to support him, and he watched through a mesh of branches the ambulances and the police cars collected below on the hillside outside the mansion. He saw the old woman and the old man taken away. He saw the corpse of the vengeful tormentor collected from the pavement. He saw the sleepy disheveled spectators finally wander away.

A great exhaustion came over him. The pain in his shoulder was gone. In fact, he’d forgotten about it entirely. These paws of his could not feel like hands, he realized. They could not read the texture of the sticky fluid matted in his hair.