The Wolfman (2 page)

With a rueful smile and a shake of his head, he turned and found his path. But ten steps deeper into the forest his lantern guttered, the light dimming for a dangerous moment before waxing again as he shook it. Ben peered at it. The oil was almost gone. He had snatched up the first lantern he found and had not stopped to check the oil first. “You bloody fool,” he said again. It was not the first time a hasty act had come around to bite him.

Ben lingered for a moment, looking back the way he had come. As silence reclaimed the shadowy landscape the night seemed bigger, darker, less familiar. Silence was like a presence, he could feel it watching him.

“Are you out there?” he called, but without wanting to he pitched his voice as a whisper.

Silence answered him, but Ben still felt as if he was being watched, as if familiar eyes were on him.

He cleared his throat and pitched his voice louder. “Come,” he yelled, “we have to talk!”

Nothing.

The flame of his lantern flickered and he realized that if he didn’t find his quarry soon the oil might not last and he’d be lost out here in the darkness.

He looked up, and even through the dense ceiling of evergreen branches he could see a paleness like frost. The touch of moonlight on the trees. Ben nodded to himself. If he lost his lantern he could find his way home by going to higher ground. That moon was bright enough to read by and it had just begun its long hunt across the sky. He would have hours of light left if it came to it, and the Hall only
felt
far away.

Even so . . . the thought of being without light, even for a few minutes, was daunting. Ben squared his shoulders and took a steadying breath.

On his first step the lantern sputtered again.

“Stay with me,” he murmured and the light seemed to steady at his words. Encouraged, Ben moved forward. And as if to mock him the light guttered low and nearly went out.

He chewed his lip. Moonlight would get him back, but it would not help him find what he was looking for. Maybe it would be better to give it up as a bad job and come back tomorrow. Ben shook the lantern again and then, as the light flared once more, he caught movement off to his left. Just a flash of moonlight on something that moved behind the trees.

“What the hell?”

He tried to track it through the woods but it was already gone.

A sound made him turn and he caught another flash of it. There and gone.

Suddenly there was a blur of dark movement that slammed into him with impossible speed. As it whipped past Ben it made a strange ripping sound.

His lantern struck the hard-packed dirt behind him and rolled away, the fickle flame flaring brighter for a moment. The impact knocked Ben halfway around and he stared numbly in the wrong direction, his eyes bulging and blinking. The world dwindled down to an envelope of darkness that seemed to wrap itself around him. He heard the delicate sound of a raindrop on the scattered leaves beneath his feet. Another drop, and another. He looked up, wondering why he felt no rain on his face. The sky beyond the roof of trees was clear.

Ben smiled crookedly at the moon, wondering how rain could fall on such a night. And then looked down at the splattering of drops on the leaves. Dark rain. Black in the moonlight. Glistening like oil, smelling of freshly sheared copper. Ben opened his mouth to comment on the strange rain that seemed to be falling from his own body but no sound came out.

He heard a soft sound, the crunch as someone stepped on the wet leaves, but when he looked at the foot it was wrong. So wrong. Shoeless, misshapen. Not a human foot at all. Not an animal either. Ben raised his head and saw the eyes of the thing that stood near him. They were not the eyes of the person he came looking for out here. They were large and as yellow as a harvest moon. The eyes glared at him and Ben felt his hammering heart suddenly go still in his chest.

Understanding struck him harder than the blow that had stalled him.

He screamed, and then he
ran
.

His stomach was a furnace that sloshed loosely and Ben clamped his hands over his abdomen as he blundered through the brush. His fingers closed over wet ropes that threatened to spill out of him. His mind
refused to accept the reality of what had been done to him—to accept it was to allow it and he could not.

He ran. Staggering, stumbling, leaving a widening trail of red behind him. Even through the sound of his own desperate breaths and the slap of his feet on the leaves he could hear the
thing
following. Not running. Stalking.

“God . . . ,” he breathed, but his voice was ragged and wet.

He risked a single backward glance. Just one.

And it was not there. Moonlight painted the corridor of trees with a ghostly light and nothing behind him moved except the tree branches he himself had disturbed.

“Please,” Ben whispered. Let there be a chance. He turned back to find his way.

And
it
was there. He slammed into it and rebounded.

With an awful realization he knew that it had circled him. Not hunting . . .
taunting
him. Playing with him.

The thing moved with hideous speed and Ben felt lines of fire ignite along his cheek. Hot blood poured from the gashes and ran into his mouth and down the side of his throat.

Ben whirled and ran straight through the dense brush.

His legs were as heavy as iron weights but he willed his feet to move and move. The brush abruptly thinned and then gave way to a small clearing that skirted the base of the cliff wall. Out of the tangles of withered grass a set of pale stone steps rose to the foot of a massive door.

Ben realized where he was. It was a mausoleum carved into the living rock of the cliff. It was ancient, with a massive lintel carved with the faces of forgotten gods and nameless kings. The ponderous bronze door
was bound with thick iron bands that ran from top to bottom and side to side. The panels between the intersecting bands were inscribed with complex prayers and spells of such antiquity that much of their meaning was lost to time.

Hope flared like a spark in the darkness of his mind and he raced toward it. In the woods behind him he could hear the thing as it smashed through the brush in pursuit. He lifted the ten-thousand-pound weight of one foot onto the first step, but when he tried to lift the other he simply could not. With a cry of pain and defeat he collapsed onto the steps.

Even so Ben Talbot did not give up. He crawled, leaving behind him a red-black trail like a bloody slug. The door was near, and it stood ajar. If he could only reach it, then he could haul himself inside and slam it. That great door would hold back Hell itself.

Then he heard the click and scratch of clawed feet on the stone steps, and he knew that he would never reach that door. Ben’s numb fingers scrabbled for his knife but the thing loomed up huge and terrible over him and the knife clattered to the cold stone.

Ben heard the sound of his own death. He saw the flash of claws as they tore at him. He heard his clothing rip, heard the separate sounds of parting flesh and tendon, heard the scrape of claw on bone. He heard all of this from a great distance, detached from the pain that must be coursing through his nerves. He heard, but did not feel. The tethers that held him to the broken flesh were stretching, stretching.

The thing leaned over him and he saw those dreadful yellow eyes. He saw himself reflected there.

When it suddenly stopped tearing at him and ran away into the night, Ben watched as if he were only a
spectator watching a gruesome play. It was not real, this was not him.

A gust of the night breeze blew the branches aside and there above the cliff was the screaming face of the Goddess of the Night. The moon, in all her mad glory.

Framed against it, standing powerful on the crest of the ridge, Ben saw the thing that had hunted him. The thing that had killed him. Huge, misshapen, an impossible figure against an impossible sky.

“No . . .” Ben said as the thing on the cliff turned and vanished, fleeing this place, running free into the world. “No.”

But his protest was heard by no ears other than his own. The darkness that crept toward him from all sides was black and infinite. The last thing he heard was the long and terrible howl of the beast, a sound that rose from the forest into the night sky.

Above the world the full white moon watched it all in glorious triumph.

H
e reached down and lifted the skull from the grave. It was old and battered, its jaw missing, the eye sockets fixed in an eternal stare. The man who held it brushed dirt from the cheeks and brow and held it in one hand, considering the lines and planes of the old bones. The eyes of the skull and the eyes of the man met and for a long minute they shared the secrets of eternity, the subtle truths of the grave.

“Alas,” murmured the man in a voice that could hide no trace of the real hurt that wrenched his heart. “Poor Yorick.” He half turned to his companion. “I knew him, Horatio.”

In the shadows beyond a row of candles, thousands of invisible hands began applauding. Lawrence Talbot did not flick so much as a covert glance at the audience. His eyes remained locked with those of the skull, though his features shifted with a half dozen emotions as he turned the skull this way and that. When he regarded the brow his own brow knotted as if remembering old conversations; when turning it away from him his mouth betrayed the sadness of a boy suffering the disappointment of a beloved tutor; when he tilted the head back he smiled in remembrance of countless old jests. He shared the moment with the skull while the applause ran its course, and when it abated he spoke softly.

“. . . a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times. And now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? No one now to mock your own grinning. Quite chap-fallen?”

Lawrence did not shout or bleat. He spoke with tenderness to the skull and everyone in the theater bent forward to be included in the private discourse, hanging on his words, their senses entirely given over to the soft voice of the Prince of Denmark, for—to the watching crowd—this was not Lawrence Talbot, the American actor, this was Hamlet himself. Alive, real, his mocking words clear evidence of the tortured pain within his troubled soul.

Except for one man, a well-dressed buffoon to whom Shakespeare was a bore and Shakespeare performed, a torment. Before Hamlet and Horatio had wandered into the cemetery the man had nodded and drifted off to sleep and now his buzzing snore sought to undercut the moment.

But Lawrence was too practiced a professional to allow a fool to upstage him. He tossed the skull into the man’s lap and continued with his soliloquy as if the act had been staged to include this moment. The skull landed hard on sensitive softness and the man shot upright in his seat, flushing red as the crowd around him erupted into laughter.

“Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her,” continued Lawrence as he drew his energy and all eyes back to center stage, “let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come . . .”

Lawrence wore a suit of dark velvet and a ruffled shirt open to midchest. His wavy hair was as black as the pit and it framed a face that was rough and thoughtful and angry and handsome. “Brutally handsome” was the phrase used by
The Times
theater reviewer. He knew that everyone packed into the theater had read that review, and more than half of them were there because of it. When he stepped close to the footlights he was able to see past them to the rows of faces, each as pale as the moon, tilted up toward him, eyes fixed on him. The naked adoration in the faces of the women stoked fires within him, but the similarity of the faces—each as empty and vacuous and uncomprehending as the next—made him feel cold, empty. Gutted.

His full lips curled into a sneer. But they saw it as a smile and the applause rolled over him in waves.

The broadsheet tacked to the dressing room door read:

LAWRENCE TALBOT
The Eminent American Tragedian
Stars as the Melancholy Dane

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