The Wolfman (35 page)

A
BERLINE GRABBED A
burly sergeant. “Take ten men and block the alley. I’ll take the rest and circle behind. We’ll catch the bastard in a crossfire.”

The sergeant gave him a curt nod and was calling out names as he headed into the alley. Aberline took the rest and raced to the corner as fast as he could.

I
N THE ALLEY
the Wolfman ran with incredible speed, occasionally dropping to all fours before springing over heaped garbage or tethered horses. The bobbies ran as fast as they could, all of them fit and tough, but the monster outpaced them with ease.

The sergeant, a fleet-footed Scot with a dark red mustache and the cold eye of an ex-soldier, aimed his pistol as he ran. He’d been in running fights before and he knew how to time breath and stride with the pull of the trigger so that he was a deadly marksman even at a full run. His pistol bucked in his hand and the bullet caught up with the fleeing monster. Blood pocked the back of the tattered white shirt. The sergeant grinned as he ran and put a second bullet into its back a hands-breadth from the other.

The creature slowed and stopped, and the sergeant shared a quick look with the bobby running next to him. They had the thing!

They raced toward it, still firing, wanting to tear the thing to pieces.

But the Wolfman had not stopped because of the sergeant’s bullets. Or, not because of any injury they were intended to have made. It stopped because the bullets were not doing any harm at all. The predatory instincts understood this now, and the creature had not turned because it was at bay. It turned to attack.

With a howl of bloody delight it leaped at the policemen, and before they could realize that the trap had turned on them the Wolfman was among them.

W
HEN INSPECTOR ABERLINE
and his men flooded into the alley from the far side of the block they found nothing alive.

The creature had done its butchery and escaped.

Aberline stood amid the wreckage of sanity and order. His own clothes were as red-splashed as those of the dead officers who lay around him, his face as bloodless.

He looked down at the pistol he carried. It had been useless. Less than useless, like a toy gun against a tiger. All of the fight that was left in him drained away, leaving him empty. Spent.

Aberline was not a religious man. He had never held much stock in faith. But he whispered, “God help us.”

And he meant it.

“God help us all.”

T
he Wolfman squatted for a long time in the inky shadows of the bridge. He tore a bite from a severed arm, chewed slowly, took another bite. When the flesh was gone he snapped the forearm and sucked out the marrow.

When there was no more to eat, he dropped the bones and gristle into the water and settled back against the moss-covered bricks. They were cool and soothing. The sound of whistles and people yelling had faded off to the north and soon died altogether.

The monster sniffed the air. There was no one near. A few rats, but nothing that he wanted to hunt, and nothing that was hunting him. In the east a pale rim of light was slowly defining the outlines of buildings.

The creature’s eyes felt heavy. This spot felt safe. The hunt was over for now. It was time to rest.

L
awrence did not want to open his eyes. He feared the light. He feared being awake. He feared everything.

He gradually became aware that he was awake, but his body felt somehow missing, as if he was only consciousness with no form. Lawrence hoped that he was dead,
prayed
that he was dead.

Then, bit by bit, his physical awareness returned. The first thing he felt was pain. It was vague, an amorphous mass of pain in which his consciousness seemed to float, but it gradually became specific. He felt his back, one aching vertebra at a time, as if someone ran a finger along and poked each throbbing edge of bone. His arms sent messages of inert agony, and then his legs. Lawrence had no idea how long the process took. An hour, a year.

When he finally mustered the courage to open his eyes he had to blink them clear. He stared straight up to see a blue sky framed by grimy brick walls. The walls were gouged with claw marks and splattered with blood. It did not surprise him, but it sickened him. He wished the walls would crumble and fall in to crush the life from him.

Smell returned next and the stink was horrendous. Spoiled meat, rotten fruit, foul water, sweat and human
waste. Lawrence realized that he was lying in a heap of garbage under a bridge. He gagged, and the stench more than anything else made him move.

Lawrence sat up slowly. Nausea was a sick wash in his stomach and his eyes watered from the smell. He looked at his hands and what he saw made the sickness a thousand times worse. They were caked with dried blood.

His whole body and his clothes were nothing more than tattered streamers smeared with gore and filth. The cry of gulls was a chorus of accusations that flayed him.

“God, no . . .” he prayed.

He looked around and saw that he was in an alley that was heaped with rubbish. And he was not alone. A corpse—an old beggar in castoff clothes—lay three feet away. The man’s face was a ruin, an arm was missing.

Lawrence buried his face in his bloody hands and wept.

L
ATER, DRESSED IN
the dead man’s clothes and smelling of garbage and death, Lawrence Talbot shambled along the streets of London. He walked like a zombie, head bowed, eyes staring blankly at the ground, feet barely lifting from the concrete. Passersby saw him and walked around him, shaking their heads in disgust. Women pulled their children to the opposite sides of the street. Even stray dogs growled warnings at him.

As he walked he mumbled the words, “Please, God . . . please, God . . .” over and over again, and the unspoken end of that plea echoed in his head.

Please God . . . let me die.

But he did not die and Lawrence cursed God for His bloody indifference.

When he reached Essington Lane he stopped and realized that he knew where he was going. The thought jolted him. Lawrence stared at the street sign, set into the plaster of the side of the near building, and he turned and looked across the street. He could not understand how he had managed to make his way here without knowing that he was heading anywhere, and to a place whose address he had only heard but had never visited.

Yet there it was, right across the street, its reality proclaimed on a painted sign: conliffe apothecary.

Lawrence licked his lips.

What would the Conliffes do? Would they bar the door against him? They should, even though tonight’s moon would not be full. Would they call for the police? Half of him wished they would—and maybe he could contrive to get the police to shoot him down right there on the doorstep. Or would they shoot him down like the animal he had become? That would be justice . . . and perhaps a mercy. Throughout the morning, as Lawrence had staggered along the side streets and back alleys he heard the newsboys yelling the headlines. Mad killer on the loose, they all said.

Mad?

No . . . something far worse than mad.

He stared at the Conliffe’s shop. It looked closed, but there were lights on in the rooms above. Gwen had said that she and her father lived above their store on Essington Lane, between a milliners and a flower shop.

He chewed his lip. If they chased him off would he go?
Could
he go? Or did the survival instinct of the wolf still rule his deepest mind?

With these doubts gnawing at the walls of his soul, Lawrence risked everything and stepped into the street, threaded his way through the traffic, and crept up to the
door of the shop. It took more strength than he thought he possessed to raise his hand and ring the bell.

Silence was the only answer. The windows were dark and he cupped his hands to peer inside. The establishment looked empty and his heart sank, but then he saw someone move in the shadows at the back of the shop. A moment later the lock clicked and the door opened.

Gwen Conliffe looked at him and opened her mouth to dismiss the beggar at her door.

“Gwen . . .” said Lawrence, in a voice that was filled with all of the heartbreak and need in the world.

Her eyes widened as she saw past the grime and dried blood and agony.

“Oh my God! Lawrence!”

“I—” he began, but Gwen seized him by the arms and pulled him urgently into the shop. She closed the door and pulled the shade and then hurried over to draw the curtains across the picture window so that only a sliver of the cold morning light sliced through the brown shadows of the shop. Then she turned to him, her hand touching her throat.

“Lawrence? What are you doing here? How did you—?”

“Is your father here?”

“No. He’s away on a buying trip in Paris. Oh God, please tell me what’s going on.”

Lawrence sagged back against the foyer wall and ran trembling fingers through the greasy tangle of his hair. “What’s going on?” he mused and almost smiled. The attempt was ghastly. “Horrible things . . . and it’s all true. All of it. Gwen . . . I am what they say I am.”

“No . . .”

“And it’s worse still than that.”

She still stood by the curtained window, ten feet
away, and she did not move. “What do you mean? The things I’ve heard . . . what could be worse?”

Lawrence slid down the wall until he sat on the floor of the foyer, his head in his hands. “My father is . . . he’s the same as me. And—God, how can I even make myself say this—I’m certain that Benjamin knew about it and tried to stop him. I think that’s why he was in the forest that night.” Lawrence wiped tears from his eyes. “And I’m just as certain that’s how he was killed.”

Gwen stood there, her face defined by the sliver of cold, hard light of day. Lawrence could see how his words tore into her, how the implications lacerated her heart and soul. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and dropped like silver rain down her cheeks. He expected her to scream. He expected her to throw him out into the street.