The Wolf Gift (23 page)

St. Francis was one of the most ornate and colorful churches in all the city, built long before the Tenderloin had become the city’s premier and most legendary slum. It was large with old heavily carved scrollwork pews, and walls covered with richly painted and gilded murals. The huge paintings embraced its altar under a trio of Roman arches, then moved behind its side altars—to St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary—and down the sides to the very back, where, on the far right side, stood the old wooden confessionals, each a little tripartite wooden house with booths for penitents to kneel on either side of a central place where the priest sat as he pulled back the wooden panel that covered the screen through which he could hear the confession.

It was not strictly necessary to be in such a booth when one confessed. You could confess on a park bench or in a room, or anywhere for that matter. Reuben knew all that. But this had to be utterly official, utterly secret, and he wanted it this way, and so he had requested it.

He followed Jim towards the first confessional, the only one of late that Jim ever really used, and he watched patiently as Jim took out his small satin stole and put it around his neck, this to assure the man behind him that he was now ready officially to offer the Sacrament of Penance.

Now silently, Reuben removed the glasses and pushed down the scarf, exposing his face.

Only casually did Jim glance back as he gestured for “the man” to open the door of the little booth. But the glance was enough.

He saw the bestial face hovering just over him and he gasped as he fell back against the confessional.

Immediately Jim’s right hand flew up to his forehead and he made the Sign of the Cross. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and confronted what he saw.

“Confession,” said Reuben and he opened the door of the booth. He was the one gesturing now with his paw for Jim to take his place inside.

It took a minute for Jim to recover.

It was so very strange to see Jim in this moment, when Jim did not know this monster he was looking at was his brother, Reuben. When do we ever see a brother or sister staring at us as if we are perfect strangers?

He knew things about his brother now that he could never know in their day-to-day contact—that his brother was even braver and more dedicated than he’d ever imagined. And that his brother could handle fear calmly.

Reuben went into the penitent’s booth and pulled the velvet curtain behind him. It was tight in here, made for small men and women. But he knelt on the padded kneeler, and faced the screen as Jim pulled back the panel. He saw Jim’s hand raised in blessing.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Reuben said. “And all I tell you now is under the absolute Seal of the Confessional.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “Are your intentions sincere?”

“Completely. I’m your brother, Reuben.”

Jim didn’t utter a word.

“I’m the one who killed the rapist in North Beach and the men in Golden Gate Park. I slew the woman on Buena Vista Hill who was torturing the old couple. I killed the kidnappers in Marin when I liberated the children. I was too late there to save them all. Two were already dead. Another little girl, a diabetic, died this morning.”

Silence.

“I am indeed your brother,” Reuben said. “This began for me with the attack in Mendocino County. I don’t know what manner of beast attacked me up there, or whether or not it meant to give me this power. But I know what manner of beast I am.”

Again, utter silence. Jim appeared to be staring forward. It seemed his elbow was resting on the arm of his chair. And that his hand was near to his mouth.

Reuben went on:

“The change is coming earlier and earlier in the evening. It came on tonight about seven. I don’t know whether or not I can learn to block it or bring it on at will. I don’t know why it leaves me around dawn. But I do know it leaves me near dead with exhaustion.

“How do I find the victims? I hear them. I hear them and I smell them—their innocence and fear. And I smell the evil of those attacking them. I smell it like a dog or a wolf smells his prey.

“You know the rest, you’ve read it in the papers, heard it on the news. I have nothing more to tell you.”

Silence.

Reuben waited.

It was stiflingly hot for him in this little box. But he waited.

Finally Jim spoke. His voice was thick and low, almost unrecognizable.

“If you are my little brother, then you must know something, something only he would know, something that you can tell me to assure me that’s who you are.”

“For Chrissake, Jimmy, it’s me,” Reuben said. “Mom doesn’t know anything about this; neither does Phil. Neither does Celeste. No one knows, Jim, except for one woman and that woman doesn’t know who I really am. She’s only known me as the Man Wolf. If she’s called the police or the FBI, or the NIH, or the CIA, there’s been no word made public on it. I’m telling you, Jim, because I need you, I need you to hear these things. I’m alone in this, Jim. I’m completely alone. And yes, I’m your brother. Aren’t I
still
your brother, Jim? Please answer me.”

Dimly, Reuben saw Jim put his hands up over his nose and Jim made a short sound, like a cough.

“Okay.” He sighed, sitting back. “Reuben. Just give me a minute. You know the old story. You can’t shock a priest in Confession. Well, I think that applies to people who haven’t been changed into some sort of …”

“Animal,” said Reuben. “I’m a werewolf, Jim. But I’d rather call myself a man wolf. I do actually retain my full consciousness in this state, as ought to be plain enough to you. But it’s not that simple. There are hormones flooding me in this state and they work on my emotions. I am Reuben, yes, but I’m Reuben under a new series of influences. And no one really knows to what extent hormones and emotions influence free will and conscience and inhibition and moral habit.”

“Yes, that’s so true, and nobody would word that quite like you just did except my little brother, Reuben.”

“Phil Golding didn’t bring up any sons who couldn’t obsess over cosmic questions.”

Jim laughed. “And where is Phil now when I need him?”

“Don’t go there,” said Reuben. “What we say here is sealed.”

“Amen, that’s without question.”

Reuben waited.

Then he said:

“It’s easy to kill, easy to kill people reeking of guilt. No, that’s not it. They don’t reek of guilt. They reek of intent to do evil.”

“And other people, innocent people?”

“Other people smell just like people. They smell innocent; they smell healthy; they smell good. That must be why the beast in Mendocino let me go. He caught me in the midst of his attack on two killers. And he let me go, perhaps knowing what he’d done to me, what he’d passed on to me.”

“But you don’t know who or what he is.”

“No. Not yet. But I’m going to find out, that is, if there is any way that I can. And there’s more to it all than meets the eye, I mean, more connecting what happened to that house and the family. But it’s too soon to try to make sense of it yet.”

“Tonight. Have you killed tonight?”

“No, I have not. But it’s early, Jim.”

“The whole city’s looking for you. They’ve got more traffic-light cameras put up. They have people watching the rooftops. Reuben, they have satellite capabilities now to watch the rooftops. They know that’s how you travel. Reuben, they’re going to catch you. They’re going to shoot you down! They’re going to kill you.”

“It won’t be that easy, Jim. Let me worry about that.”

“Listen, I want you to turn yourself over to the authorities. I will go home with you. We will call Simon Oliver and get the litigator in the firm, what’s-his-name, Gary Paget, and—.”

“Stop it, Jim. Not going to happen.”

“Little Boy, you can’t handle this on your own. You’re tearing human beings limb from limb—.”

“Jimmy, stop.”

“You expect me to give you absolution for—.”

“I didn’t come for absolution. You know that. I came for this to be
secret! You can’t share this with anyone, Jim. You’ve made that promise to God, not just to me.”

“That’s true, but you must do as I tell you. You must go to Mom and explain all this. Look, let Mom run tests, let her figure out what the physical components of this thing are, how or why it’s happening. Mom’s been contacted by some specialist from Paris, some Russian doctor, really bizarre name, Jaska, I think, but this doctor claims to have seen other cases, cases in which strange things have happened. Reuben, this is not the first time—.”

“Not on your life.”

“We don’t live in the Dark Ages, Reuben. We’re not roaming around nineteenth-century London! Mom is the perfect person to shed real light on—.”

“Are you serious? You think Mom is going to set up a Frankenstein-style lab with this Jaska guy and research this little project on her own? Will they get a humpbacked helper named Igor to run the MRIs and mix the chemicals? You think she’s going to strap me to an iron chair when the sun sets so I can froth and roar in a little prison cell? You’re dreaming. One word to Mom and I’m finished, Jim. She’ll have to call in the finest scientific minds of her generation, the Paris specialist be damned. That’s the way she’s made. That’s what the world would expect of her, that she’ll get on the phone to the NIH. And in the meantime, she’d seek with all her power to confine me so I couldn’t ‘harm’ anyone else and that would be the end, Jim. The end. Or the beginning of Reuben’s life as an experimental animal under lock and key and government supervision. How long do you think it would be before I disappeared completely into some government facility? She couldn’t stop that from happening.

“Let me tell you what happened to me when I entered that Buena Vista house two nights ago. The woman shot me. Jim, the wound had vanished by morning. There’s nothing wrong with my shoulder where the bullet passed through. Nothing.

“Jim, they’d be drawing my blood day in and day out for the rest of my life, trying to isolate what gave me that kind of recuperative power. They’d biopsy every organ I’ve got. They’d biopsy my brain, if nobody stopped them. They’d be studying me with every instrument known to man to figure out how and why I change into this thing, and what
hormones or chemicals govern my increase in size, the descent of the fangs and the claws, the rapid production of wolf-hair, the increase in muscular strength and aggression. They’ll seek to trigger the change and control it. They’ll catch on soon enough that what’s happening to me has implications not only for longevity but for national defense—that if they can breed a corps of elite wolf soldiers they’ll have a powerful tool for guerrilla warfare in places around the globe where conventional weapons are useless.”

“All right. Stop. You’ve thought this through.”

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Reuben said. “I’ve been lying in a motel room all day, listening to the news, and thinking about nothing else. I’ve been thinking about the hostages in the jungles of Colombia, and how easy it might be for me to get to them. I’ve been thinking about—everything. But not as clearly as I’m thinking it through now.” He hesitated. His voice broke. “You don’t know what it means to talk about it with you, Jim. But let’s really talk about it; I mean let’s really face what’s happening to me.”

“There’s got to be somebody, somebody you can trust,” said Jim. “Someone who can study this without jeopardizing you.”

“Jimmy, there just isn’t. That’s why the werewolf movies end the way they do, with a silver bullet.”

“Is that realistic? Can a silver bullet kill you?”

Reuben laughed under his breath.

“I have no idea,” he said. “Probably not. I do know a knife or an ordinary bullet doesn’t work. I know that much. You know, there could be something very simple that could kill me. Some toxin. Who knows?”

“All right. I understand. I understand why you can’t trust Mom. I get it. Frankly, I think Mom could be persuaded to keep this secret because she loves you, Little Boy, and she’s your mom. But I could be wrong, very wrong. It would … it would drive Mom right over the edge, that much is certain, no matter what she decided to do.”

“That’s another thing, isn’t it?” Reuben said. “Protecting those I love from this secret because of what it will do to their minds and their lives.”

That’s why I want to get out of here and find Laura in that Marin forest again. That’s why I want so much to be in her arms because for whatever reason, she just wasn’t afraid, wasn’t repelled. In fact, she held me, she let me hold her
.…

Some thoughts for the confessional.

“There’s this woman,” he said. “I don’t really even know who she is. I did some Internet searching. I think I know who she is, but the point is, I came on her unexpectedly and I lay with her.”

“ ‘Lay with her,’ you sound like the Bible. You mean you had sex with her?”

“Yeah, only I like to think of it as ‘lay’ because it was, as they say, you know, the old cliché, beautiful.”

“Oh, this is great. Look, you can’t handle this on your own. You can’t handle the power, and from what you’re telling me you can’t handle the loneliness.”

“And who is going to handle it with me?”

“I’m trying,” Jim said.

“I know.”

“You have to get someplace safe for the night, now. They’re out everywhere searching for you. They think you’re a madman dressed like a wolf, that’s what they think.”

“They don’t know anything.”

“Oh, yeah, they do. They expedited the DNA evidence from the saliva left on your victims. What if they find out it’s human DNA and that it’s mutated? What if they find unusual sequences in the DNA?”

“I don’t understand those things,” said Reuben.

“They’re having problems with the tests, problems they don’t want the public to know about. But that could mean they’re making more sophisticated tests. Celeste says they think the evidence is being manipulated in some way.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Man Wolf’s playing tricks with them, planting bizarre evidence at the scenes of the crimes.”

“That’s ridiculous. They should have been there!”

“And they are connecting these attacks with Mendocino. Mom’s connecting it to Mendocino. Mom’s pushing for more tests on those dead junkies. They’re going over everything.”