Werewolf Cop (28 page)

“That's right,” said Zach. And as his mind began to grind back into action, he realized: this man was smart—really smart—dangerously smart. And how much did he know? About Dankl. About Margo. About him, and the old curse. . . .

Abend paced away from in front of him. Zach was too weak and foggy to watch him go. He lifted his chin from his chest and saw the window across from him. The storm must have been coming fast. The clouds had grown nearly black now. The surf was high, a vexed beast that rose up roaring toward the sky and hurled itself in seeming rage upon the dull sand.

Zach's head rolled. There was the monk beside him, greasy and unshaven, grinning with his red eyes bright and vicious and submissive. And there, on the other side of him, was the lean, grinning, goateed Satan whose expression was duller and more inward, as if no outward brutality could give him as much hellish pleasure as what he saw in his own mind.

Abend paced back in front of Zach again. The bulging eyes and slowly mummifying features tilted as he studied the blood-soaked investigator with that same musing disinterest.

“Did she follow you here—Dankl? Is she in the United States?”

Zach shook his head. “I don't know.”

In what seemed a sort of arbitrary experiment, Abend lifted the sword again, jammed the point into the gash in Zach's chest and twisted it back and forth.

Zach thrashed in his rattling chains, shrieking mindlessly: “I don't know!” After a moment, Abend lowered the sword. Zach slumped in his manacles, bleeding.

“Skin for skin,” said Abend softly. “Do you know this saying?” When Zach slumped there silently, too weak to answer, Abend put the sword point under his chin and pushed so that Zach had to raise his head. “Hm?” he said. “Skin for skin? You know this?”

Zach began to shake his head no, but then remembered. “It's in the Bible somewhere. In the book of Job.”

“Very good. Very good.” Abend took the sword away and Zach's head fell forward. “Do you know what it means? It means a man will give anything to save himself, his own skin. He will give anything to make pain stop, anything.”

Abend studied the blade of his sword. Zach's blood ran along the shiny steel and dripped off it, falling to the floor. Abend seemed mildly amused by the sight, a break from his general boredom.

Zach couldn't look at it. It sickened him. He looked past Abend instead, to the window again. It was even darker out there now—much darker, in fact. The far waters were sinking into the obscurity of the cloud-covered horizon, gray blending with gray and the whole scene beginning to turn a thick blue-black. Zach licked his lips. Some small, fine something—wonder or maybe hope—ignited in him: a tiny particle of light in the blackness of his tortured spirit.
Wait,
he thought,
that's not a storm coming, is it? That's nightfall!
Could that be right? Could it be nightfall? Already? Had so much time gone by while he was drugged?

“I would rather corrupt you than kill you, you know,” Abend said thoughtfully. “You don't have any information I need. There is nothing to torture out of you. Dead, you are only a headline. Which means publicity from the media—until my media can distract them. Pressure on officials—until my officials can form a committee or call for a study. Policemen manfully swearing to catch me—until my lawyers baffle them into impotence. All not very helpful—or very interesting, really—commonplace, in fact. Just a great waste of time for everyone. But if you were to work with me, become one of my people, I could find uses for you, I'm sure. Skin for skin, yes? Then I do not have to hurt you anymore or kill you—as long as you remain loyal. To the public, you will be the hero who escaped my clutches. You will sleep at home tonight with your wife and children instead of dying here in bloody bits and pieces. You would like that, wouldn't you? To sleep at home with your wife in your arms.”

Zach's head had fallen forward again, nausea and pain and weakness overcoming him. But he knew he had to answer Abend or suffer more, so he lifted his head. He saw the decay creeping under the gangster's skin like maggots. He met the gangster's bulging eyes.

And instantly Abend saw into him, into the heart of him. He saw what he was. And he chuckled. “Never mind. I understand. You are incorruptible. Yes?” But as his chuckling faded, a small hint of intense feeling—a brief contraction of the lips—momentarily darkened his expression. In a musing tone, he said, “Why, though? Hm? Why are you incorruptible? Do you know what I will do? I will let
them
torture you, these two.” With apparent nonchalance, he waggled his free hand at Satan and the monk. “I don't need anything from you and haven't the time or interest to do it myself, but they. . . . They are madmen and will do it for the pure pleasure. And so you will know it is useless—your incorruptibility—useless and troublesome—and then you will be dead. And do you know why I will do that to you? Hm? I will do it because it offends me. For you to think there is a reason to resist me. For you to think that you are better than I am in some way. This offends me. It does.”

For a moment, Abend seemed ready to leave it at that and walk away. He lifted his chin to the monk as if instructing him to begin Zach's slow annihilation. His body leaned toward the exit. But he hesitated.

“Do you know what I have seen?” he said—more forcefully than before, with more emotion. Somehow Zach seemed to have reached him, angered him, without even meaning to. Zach glanced from him to the window. He was sure now. That was no storm out there. That was night, full night, past dusk already, full darkness. Let Abend keep talking, then. . . .

“Hm?” Abend said. “Do you know what I have seen? I have seen the doctors of the Third Reich dissect children—living children—little children mild as Christ. And do you know what else I saw? When it was over, what I saw? They died. Both. The doctor and the child. They both died, and there was no difference—only one died sooner than the other and in more pain. No difference between what happened to one and what happened to the other in the end—none. And so why? Hm? Why are you incorruptible? You will suffer and then die when you could have gone on living—and so: why?”

Zach stared at his tormenter, his body slack in his chains, his mouth hanging open, his spilled blood soaking his jockey shorts and dripping
pat pat pat
upon the wooden floor.

“ANSWER ME!” Abend shouted suddenly, his rotting face twisting in its rage. He raised his sword across himself and slashed it downward slantwise so that the new gash on Zach's chest tore across the first. And as Zach howled out his agony, Abend shouted in his face, “ANSWER ME WHY!”

His chains rattling, Zach fell forward, hanging limply from the bars. Through misted vision, he saw his blood spattering the floor between his bare feet and Abend's black boots.

“Because . . .” he tried his best to appease the German with an answer, but his throat was too dry.

“Hm? What? What?” said Abend.

“Because,” Zach croaked. “I can't believe that. That there's no difference.”

“Hm? No . . . ? Oh. . . .”

“Between what happens to the Nazi and what happens to the child.”

“Oh-ho.” Abend laughed, and a piece of gray flesh fell from the corner of one eye socket. “Can't. Can't believe.” He straightened his shoulders beneath his dark overcoat, smiling thinly. “Well. You should, you know.” He laughed again. “Oh yes. You should. You will, by the time these two are through with you.” Again, he made as if to leave. Again, he stayed. “You are afraid of hell, then? That's what you are saying.”

Zach shook his hanging head.

“Hm?”

“No,” said Zach. “It's not that.”

“Well, I will show you hell.” Abend checked his watch. He seemed annoyed by something. The lateness of the hour? The fact he couldn't stay? “I will show you hell,” he repeated.

Then again, he made that gesture to the monk—that motion of his chin. “Make it unbearable for him,” he said. “Make it last forever.” And to Zach he added, “
Auf wiedersehen
, Cowboy.” Then he moved away, muttering “Incorruptible!”

Zach heard the rapping of his boots fading away. With an effort, he managed to raise his head. He saw the monk and Satan shift around to stand in front of him. The rat-faced monk bared his rotten teeth in a rat-faced grin. He obviously relished what was coming. The long countenance of the devil beside him simply looked mournful: the expression of an aging debauchee who knew full well that the pleasures of this life could never match his fantasies.

The monk opened his coat with slow melodrama to show the hilt of the combat knife sheathed on his belt.

Zach, his bloody flesh ablaze with pain, not certain how much more of this he could stand, silently recited an Our Father in his mind and forced himself to look away from the weapon, forced himself to look instead between the two thugs' faces to the picture window.

Nothing on the glass now but blackness, not even the sea: only blackness and the reflections of the three men there in the lighted room, the torturers' backs and Zach's crucified nakedness; only blackness . . . and now, at the center of the pane, a shapeless patch of illuminated cloud, a brightening silver-gray radiance at the border of sea and sky.

Moonrise.

23

THE USES OF LYCANTHROPY

T
he grinning monk drew his knife from its sheath. He brandished it sadistically, holding it up in front of Zach's eyes, turning it slowly to display first its razor-wicked edge and then its vicious serrations.

As if in response, Zach gave a long groan. He straightened abruptly in his chains. He seemed to stick his chest out at his tormenter, as if in defiance.

And then, impossibly, the crossed gashes on his torso began to knit themselves together.

There was a horribly wet sucking sound. The raw meat exposed on Zach's breasts folded in on itself, the gory scarlet of it disappearing. The parted edges of flesh met and with a sort of leathery bubbling noise—and a busy particulate scrabbling as if a mass of tiny beetles were working just beneath the skin—they began to weave into one solid and unscarred whole. The spilled blood remained, staining Zach's abdomen and dripping from his shorts, but the body beneath the blood healed completely in the course of seconds.

The monk and Satan stood aghast. They had seen some squirrelly supernatural shit during their tenure with Abend, but not this, nothing like this. This made the monk's grin fade and Satan's studied
Weltschmerz
resolve itself into a wholly unaffected expression of gaping stupefaction. It was a definite
uh-oh
moment for two enterprising young henchmen in the very heyday of their careers.

As for Zach, he could only look down—stare down at himself dumbfounded—and watch his injuries vanish, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, his mind gone blank. At first, he felt his transformation as little more than a tickling itch all through him. But as the wounds healed, the deep pain and even deeper sickness that had pervaded him suddenly rose to the surface and molted off, and they were replaced by a heady sense of strength and well-being. He drew a deep, restorative breath. There followed one last moment of full awareness, one single second in which his understanding overcame his disbelief, when he realized what was about to happen.

Then the change went off inside him like a bomb. Truly, it was as if another self inside himself exploded, expanded and filled him, and obliterated who he had been in the blast. There was new pain—writhing, groaning, straining agony as his body was violently wrenched out of shape by a force like an internal tornado. His flesh erupted enormously. His bones expanded in a shattering rush. The wild stiff bristling fur stabbed out through his mutating skin. The pain—but also and at the same time an indescribably elemental upsurge of pleasure—made him twist and cry out and stiffen. The agony of it and the thrill became indistinguishable to him, a single sensation beyond either, more than both.

It was that pain, that pleasure, that larger sensation without a name, that threatened to eradicate him. He could feel his very soul nearly blown to smoke by the beast he was becoming. His consciousness was on the verge of being extinguished by the force of Great Nature that was taking him over from within. This, he understood even now, was why he hadn't remembered what had happened that night with Margo. He had been gone. He had been consumed in the metamorphosis. He had become the wolf.

He could not let that happen again. He could not lose control of himself so utterly. He had to fight it. Unbelievably powerful as the force of transformation was, he had to remain who he was in the midst of its whirlwind. Somehow, he had to keep his mind alive inside the burgeoning monster.

Impossible to say in words how difficult this was, what an act of will it required to fight the force of the event. He was becoming so powerful so quickly, so large in such a little instant, that the very experience of it was enough to destroy his saner self. His substance was morphing into incarnate power, his chest blossoming, doubling, tripling, quadrupling its size and strength. The spikes of fur impaled him from within and burst out into the open with a power of their own. His arms and legs grew so massive in so short a time that the manacles on his wrists and ankles broke at hinge and lock and flew away in pieces. He was free—and the blazing sirocco of wild animal passion blew up out of him in an uncontrollable roar that became an uncontrollable and raging howl. And through all this, he had to fight to retain some portion of that Zach who had looked in the mirror that morning and tied his tie. He was becoming a monster, but battling with all the force of his conscience to hold on to the inner man.

So he changed, but he was still there. He saw what was happening as if peering out from within a creature wholly beyond himself, wholly out of his control.