The Wolfen (13 page)

“Nah. I’m burned, remember. It ain’t for me.”

“Then it’s for me.”

“So answer the fucker. One of us has gotta do it.”

She picked up the receiver. Wilson didn’t waste hellos. “Oh, Christ. OK, see you there.” She hung up. “Gotta go. Homicide in the park.”

“Since when are you assigned uptown?”

“Evans called us in. He says it looks like our friends got hungry again.”

“The big bad wolves.” He raised himself up on his elbow. “What about our picture-taking expedition, will it be on?”

“I hope. I’ll call you.”

“OK, honey.”

She was dressing as quickly as possible, but the gentleness in his voice made her stop. They looked at one another. The delirious, unexpected intensity of the night before was written in Dick’s face. She saw clearly: he was grateful. It touched her, made her think that maybe there was still something left after all.

“I—” The words seemed to die in her throat. They were so unfamiliar, so long unsaid.

Dick had come to her wordlessly, in the dark, just as she was falling asleep. He had embraced her, his body hot and trembling, and had awakened in her a painful rush of feeling. Maybe she did care—so much that she just couldn’t face it. Maybe that was the true source of the wall that was being built between them. And realizing that she had responded to his intensity with passion of her own and had enjoyed the violent insistence of his body, finally crying out with the pleasure.

“What, Becky?”

“I don’t know. Just wanted to say good-bye.” But not I love you, not that again, not yet. And she felt like a heel for holding back, a selfish heel.

“Don’t make it sound so final.” He chuckled. “The worst I’ll get is early retirement. If the shooflies are real good they might give you a five-day. Don’t let it bug you, darling. And by the way, there’s something else I want to say to you before you go.” He rolled over on his back, throwing off the covers, exposing his naked body and erect penis with delightful lack of modesty. “You still remain one of the great American lays, darling.”

And she was beside him, bending over him, kissing his smiling face. “Dick, you silly fool, look at you. You never get enough.”

“I’m a morning man.”

“And a night man and an afternoon man. I wish I didn’t have to go! I’ll call you when I get the chance.” She drew herself away from him, full of a confusion of emotions. Why couldn’t she make up her mind about this: did she still love Dick Neff or didn’t she? And what about Wilson, what did her feelings for him mean?

She rode the elevator down to the garage level and got in her car. As soon as she started driving her mind closed around the case. The night with Dick receded, as did the welter of emotions she had been feeling. Like a murky, ugly fog the case rose and recaptured her. Wilson hadn’t said much over the phone, not much. But he had sounded uncharacteristically upset. Evans had been with him at Police Headquarters. She glanced at her watch: seven
a.m. An early hour for Doctor Evans. She stepped on the accelerator, racing across Seventy-ninth Street in the snow, heading for the point of rendezvous, Central Park West and Seventy-second.

The streets were empty as she maneuvered the car around the corner at Seventy-ninth and CPW. She was now in the 20th Precinct. Ahead she could see the flashing lights, the dismal little crowd of emergency vehicles that always marked a crime scene. She pulled up behind a parked radio car. “I’m Neff,” she said to the lieutenant on the scene.

“We got a funny one,” he intoned. “Anticrime boys found this bench covered with frozen blood about an hour ago. We took it to pathology and sure enough it’s human. O-negative, to be exact. But we got no corpse,
nothin’.”

“How do you know it was a murder?”

“There’s evidence enough. First off, too much blood, whoever lost it had to die. Second, we can see where the body was pulled across the wall.” Her eyes went to the indentations in the snow that lay along the wall. More snow had fallen since the murder, but not enough to completely obliterate the signs. “By the way, Detective Neff, if I may be so blunt, why are you here?”

“Well, I’m on special assignment with my partner, Detective Wilson. We’re investigating a certain M.O. When the M. E. finds a case that seems to fit he gives us a call.”

“You take your orders from the M. E.?”

“We were instructed by the Commissioner.” She hadn’t wanted to pull rank, but she sensed that he was needling her. He smiled a little sheepishly and strolled away. “Lieutenant,” Neff called, “is this blood all you have? No body, no clothing, nothing?”

“Hold on, Becky,” a voice said behind her. It was Evans, followed closely by Wilson. The two men came up and the three of them huddled together under the curious eyes of the men of the 20th and Central Park precincts. “There’s more,” Evans said, “there’s some hair.”

“He’s examined some hairs that were stuck in the blood.”

“Right. This is my interpreter, Detective Wilson. I found hairs—”

“That match the hairs found at the DiFalco scene.”

Evans frowned. “Come on, Wilson, lay off. The hairs match the ones we’ve found at every scene.”

“They’re pretty voracious if they only left blood,” Becky said.

“They didn’t. Don’t you see what happened? They hid the remains. They’ve learned that we’re on their tail and they’re trying to slow us down. They’re very bright.”

“That’s for certain,” Wilson said. Becky noticed how haggard he looked, his face waxen, his jaw unshaven. Had he slept at all? It didn’t look like it. He cleared his throat. “Are they searching for the corpse?” he asked the Lieutenant, who was standing nearby.

“Yeah. There’s some sign of something being dragged, but the snow covered most of the evidence up. We’re just not sure what happened.”

Becky motioned to Wilson and Evans. They followed her into her car. “It’s warmer here,” she said, “and the Loo won’t overhear us.”

Evans was the first to speak. “Obviously they were hiding behind the wall when somebody sat on the bench. Judging from the blood it happened five or six hours ago. They must have jumped over the wall, killed fast and dragged the corpse away.”

“Not in one piece,” Wilson said. “There’d be more marks. I think they tore it up and carried it.”

“Jesus. But what about the clothes?”

“That’s what we ought to be able to find. The bones, too, for that matter, there aren’t too many places they could have hidden them.”

“How about the pond?”

“You mean because it’s frozen over? I doubt if they’d think of busting the ice in the pond, that’s too smart.”

“We need to find clothes, some kind of identification.”

“Yeah. Where the hell to look, though? This friggin’ snow…”

“I have the hairs. I don’t need anything more to convince me. They came here last night and they killed this person. I’m certain of that. It was them. Their hairs are unique, as unique as a fingerprint.”

“So they kill a lot. That’s to be expected for a carnivorous animal.”

Becky corrected her partner. “Carnivorous humanoid.”

Wilson laughed. “From what I’ve seen they could hardly be described as humanoid.”

“And what have you seen?”

“Them.”

Becky and the M. E. stared at him. “You’ve seen them?” Evans finally managed to ask.

“That’s right. Last night.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Becky asked.

“I saw six of them outside of your apartment last night. I was hunting them, trying to get Ferguson his specimen.” He sighed. “They’re fast, though. I missed  
’em  by a mile. Lucky I’m still alive.”

Becky was stunned. She looked at her partner’s tired face, at his watery, aging eyes. He had been out there guarding her! The crazy, sweet old romantic jerk. At this moment she felt like she was seeing a hidden, secret Wilson, seeing him for the very first time. She could have kissed him.

Carl Ferguson was horrified and excited at the same time by what he was reading. He seemed to drift away, to a quiet and safe place. But he came back. Around him the prosaic realities of the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library reasserted themselves. Across from him a painfully pretty schoolgirl cracked her gum. Beside him an old man breathed long and slow, paging through an equally old book. All around him there was a subdued clatter, the scuttle of pen on paper, the coughs, the whispers, the drone of clerks calling numbers from the front of the room.

Because you could not enter the stacks and because you could neither enter nor leave this room with a book, its collection had not been stolen and was still among the best in the world. And it was because of the book that he had finally obtained from this superb collection that Carl Ferguson felt such an extremity of fear. What he read, what he saw before him was almost too fantastic and too horrible to believe. And yet the words were there.

“In Normandy,” Ferguson read for the third time, “tradition tells of certain fantastic beings known as lupins or lubins. They pass the night chattering together and twattling in an unknown tongue. They take their stand by the walls of country cemeteries and howl dismally at the moon. Timorous and fearful of man they will flee away scared at a footstep or distant voice. In some districts, however, they are fierce and of the werewolf race, since they are said to scratch up graves with their hands and gnaw poor dead bones.”

An ancient story, repeated by Montague Summers in his classic The Werewolf. Summers assumed that the werewolf tales were folklore, hearsay conjured up to frighten the gullible. But Summers was totally, incredibly wrong. The old legends and tales were true. Only one small element was incorrect—in the past it was assumed that their intelligence and cunning meant that werewolves were men who had assumed the shape of animals. But they weren’t. They were not that at all, but rather a completely separate species of intelligent creature. And they had been sharing planet Earth with us all these long eons and we never understood it. What
marvelous beings they must be—a virtual alien intelligence right here at home. It was a frightening discovery, but to Ferguson also one of awesome wonder.

Here were legends, stories, tales going back thousands of years, repeating again and again the mythology of the werewolf. And then suddenly, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, silence.

The legends died.

The stories were no longer told.

But why? To Ferguson’s mind the answer was simple: the werewolves, tormented for generations by humanity’s vigilance and fear, had found a way to hide from man. Their cover was now perfect. They lived among us, fed off our living flesh, but were unknown to all except those who didn’t live to tell the tale. They were a race of living ghosts, unseen but very much a part of the world. They understood human society well enough to take only the abandoned, the weak, the isolated. And toward the end of the nineteenth century the human population all over the world had started to explode, poverty and filth had spread. Huge masses of people were ignored and abandoned by the societies in which they lived. And they were fodder for these werewolves, who range through the shadows devouring the beggars, the wanderers, those without name or home.

And no doubt the population of werewolves had exploded right along with the human population. Ferguson pictured hundreds, thousands of them scavenging the great cities of the earth for their human prey, rarely being glimpsed, using their sensitive ears and noses to keep well distant of all but the weak and helpless, taking advantage of man’s increasing multitudes and increasing poverty. Their faculties combined with their intelligence must make them fearsome indeed—but what an opportunity they also represented to science—to him—as another intelligence capable of study, even perhaps communication.

But there was something else about Summers’ book, something even more disquieting, and that was the continual references to men and werewolves in communication with one another. “Two gentlemen who were crossing a forest glade after dark suddenly came upon an open space where an old woodsman was standing, a man well-known to them, who was making passes in the air, weaving strange signs and signals. The two friends concealed themselves behind a tree, whence they saw thirteen wolves come trotting along. The leader was a huge grey wolf who went up to the old man fawning upon him and being caressed. Presently the forester uttered a sing-song chant and plunged into the woods followed by the wolves.”

Just a story, but tremendously interesting in the context of the information that the two detectives had brought him. Obviously the references to signs and a “sing-song” chant referred to human attempts to mimic the language of the werewolves, to communicate. Why did men once run with the werewolves?

Summers said that vampires were often connected to werewolves. Vampires—the eaters of blood. In other words, cannibals. To a less knowledgeable person such an idea might have seemed fantastic, but Ferguson knew enough about old Europe to understand the probable truth behind the legend. Men did indeed run with werewolves, and those men were called vampires because they fed off human flesh like the wolves themselves. Cannibalism must have been common in the Europe of the Dark Ages, when grinding poverty was the fate of all except a tiny minority. When men were the weakest and most numerous creatures around it must have tempted the hungry… to go out and find the werewolves, somehow build up a rapport, and then hunt with them, living like a scavenger off the pickings.

So much for the image of the vampire as a count with a castle and a silk dinner jacket. The truth was more like Summers’ description—a filthy old forester scrabbling along with a pack of werewolves to glean the leavings of their monstrous feasts.

Man the scavenger, in the same role among werewolves that dogs play among men! And the human prey, unsuspecting now, but in those days it knew. People approached the night with terror crackling in their hearts. And when darkness fell only the desperate and the mad remained out of doors.

What, then, was the role of the human scavenger, the vampire, that ran with the werewolves? Why did they tolerate him? Simple enough, to coax people out of their houses, to lure them into the shadows where they would be ripped apart. It was ugly but it also meant that there had been communication of a sort between man and werewolf in the past, and could be again. And how immeasurably richer communication between this extraordinary species and modern science might be. There could be no comparison between the promise of the future and the sordid mistakes of the distant past.

It had gotten much easier for the werewolves in recent centuries. No longer were the human vampires needed. Nowadays the werewolves could do it on their own. Just take up residence in any big city, live in abandoned buildings among the city’s million byways, and prey on the human strays.

Man and wolf. It had been an age-old animosity. The image of the wolf baying at the moon on a winter’s night still calls primitive terrors to the heart of man.

And with good reason, except that the innocent timber wolf with his loud howling and once conspicuous presence was not the enemy. Lurking back there in the shadows, perhaps along the path to the well, was the real enemy, unnoticed, patient, lethal beyond imagining. The wolf-being with its long finger-like paws, the werewolf, the other intelligent species that shared this planet.

We killed off the innocent timber wolf and never even discovered the real danger. While the timber wolf bayed to the oblivious moon the real enemy crept up the basement steps and used one of those clever paws to throw the bolt on the door.

Ferguson ran his fingers through his hair, his mind trying to accept the fearful truth he had uncovered. That damn detective—Wilson was his name —had an absolutely uncanny intuition about this whole matter. It was Detective Wilson who had first said the word werewolf, the word that had gotten Ferguson really thinking about that strange paw. And Wilson had claimed that the werewolves were hunting him and the woman down. With good reason! Once their secret was out the life of the werewolf would be made immeasurably harder, like it was in the old days in Europe when humanity bolted its doors and locked its windows, or in the Americas where the Indian used his knowledge of the forest to play a deadly game of hide and seek, a game commemorated to this day in the traditional dances of many tribes. The werewolf undoubtedly followed man to this continent across the Bering land bridge eons ago. But always and everywhere he kept himself as well hidden as he could. And it made good sense. You wouldn’t find beggars sleeping on sidewalks if the werewolf was common knowledge. A wave of terror would sweep the city and the world unlike anything known since the Middle Ages. Unspeakable things would be done in the name of human safety. Man would declare all-out war on his adversary.

And at last he would have a fair fight on his hands. With all our technology, we have never faced an alien intelligence before, have never faced a species with its own built-in technology far superior to our own. Ferguson could not imagine what the mind behind the nose and ears of the werewolf must be like. The sheer quantity of information pouring in must literally be millions of times greater than that reaching a man through his eyes. The mind that gave meaning to all that information must be a miracle indeed. Maybe even greater than the mind of man. And man must, this time, react responsibly. If there was intelligence there it could be reasoned with, and eventually the two enemy species could learn to live together in peace. If Carl Ferguson had any part in this at all it was as the missionary of reason and understanding. Man could either declare war on this species or try to come to an understanding. Carl Ferguson raised his head, closed his eyes and hoped with every fiber of his being that reason would for once prevail.

He was surprised to notice somebody was standing beside him.

“You’ve got to take this call slip to the rare books department. We don’t have this book in the reading room. All of our stuff is post-1825 and this book was written in 1597.” The call clerk dropped the card on the table in front of Ferguson and went away. Ferguson got up and headed for the rare books collection, card clutched in his hand.

He moved through the empty, echoing halls of the great library, finally arriving at the rare books collection. A middle-aged woman sat at a desk working on a catalogue under a green-shaded lamp. The only sound in the room was the faint clatter of the steam pipes and the snow-muted mutter of the city beyond the windows.

“I’m Carl Ferguson of the Museum of Natural History. I’d like to take a look at this book.” He handed her the card. “Do we have this?”

“It’s catalogued.” She got up and disappeared behind a wire-covered
doorway. Ferguson waited standing expectantly for a few moments, then found a
chair. There was no sound from the direction the woman had gone. He was alone in
the room. The place smelled of books. And he was impatient for her to return. It
was urgent that she produce the book he needed. It was by Beauvoys de Chauvincourt, a man considered an authority on werewolves in his day, and more interestingly, a familiar of them. The manner of his death was what had excited Ferguson—it indicated that the man may indeed have known the creatures firsthand. Beauvoys de Chauvincourt had gone out one night in search of his friends the werewolves and had simply disappeared. The dark suspicions of the time notwithstanding, Ferguson felt that he almost certainly had met his end observing the ancestors of the very creatures whose work the two cops had uncovered. “Do you know books, Mr. Ferguson?”

“It’s Doctor. Y-yes, I do. I can handle antique books.”

“That’s exactly what shouldn’t be done with them.” She eyed him. “I’ll turn for you,” she said firmly. “Let’s go over there.” She placed the book before him at a table and turned on one of the green-shaded lights.

“Discours de la Lycanthropie, ou de la transformation des hommes en loups,” read the title page.

“Turn.”

She opened the book, turning the stiff pages to the frontispiece. And Ferguson felt sweat trickling down his temples. What he was seeing was so extraordinary that it was almost too much to bear without crying out. For there on the frontispiece of the ancient book was engraved a most amazing picture. In this ancient engraving a sparse plain was shown lit by a full moon. And walking through the plain was a man surrounded by things that looked somewhat like wolves but were not wolves. The man appeared at ease, strolling along playing a bagpipe that was slung over his shoulder. And the werewolves walked with him. The artist had rendered his subjects faithfully, Ferguson guessed. The heads with their high, wide brain cases and large eyes, the delicate and sinister paws, the voracious, knowing faces—it all fit the image Ferguson had created in his own mind of what the creatures must look like. And the man with them—incredible. In those days there must certainly have been communication between humans —some humans—and werewolves. De Chauvincourt himself must have… known them. And in the end they destroyed him.

“Turn.”

Ferguson cursed his French. Here were lists of names—no, they were invocations of demons. Nothing to be learned here. “Turn.”

More invocations.

“Keep turning.”

The pages rolled past until something caught Ferguson’s eye. “The Language They Assume.”

Here followed a description of a complex language composed of tail movements, ear movements, growls, changes in facial expression, movements of the tongue and even clicks of the nails. It was as if human language had consisted not only of words but also of myriad gestures to augment those words.

And Ferguson knew something he hadn’t known before. The creatures had vocal cords inadequate to the needs of true verbal language. How fast their brain must have evolved! Perhaps it took only fifty or a hundred thousand years and there they were, strange intelligent beings roaming the world in pursuit of man, engaged in the age-long hunt that occupied them to this day.