The Wolf Gift Page 11

  “It had a face, I tell you. It spoke to me. It moved like a man. A man wolf. [She’d used that very term, his term, “man wolf.”] I heard its voice. Dear God, I wish I hadn’t run from it. It saved my life, and I ran from it as if it was a monster.”

  He made the story personal, yes, but only in tone. Following her own vivid descriptions, a review of the forensic evidence and the inevitable questions, he wrote in conclusion:

  Was it some sort of “Man Wolf” that saved the victim from her assailant? Was it a beast of intelligence that so recently spared the life of this reporter in the darkened hallway of a Mendocino house?

  We have no answers now to these questions. But there can be no doubt as to the intentions of the North Beach rapist—already connected to a string of unsolved rapes—or the drug-crazed killers who took the life of Marchent Nideck on the Mendocino coast.

  If science cannot yet explain the forensic evidence found at both sites, or the emotional testimony of the survivors, there is no reason to believe that it won’t in time be able to explain all. For now, we must, as so often happens, live with unanswered questions. If a Man Wolf—the Man Wolf—is stalking the alleyways of San Francisco, to whom exactly is this beast a threat?

  Last, he added the title:

  San Francisco’s Man Wolf: Moral Certainty in the Middle of a Mystery

  Before he filed the story, he Googled the words “man wolf.” Just as he suspected, the name had been used—for a minor character in the Spider-Man comics, and for another minor character in the manga-anime series Dragon Ball. But he also noted a book called The Man-Wolf and Other Tales by Émile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian, first translated into English in 1876. Good enough. It was in the public domain as far as he was concerned.

  He hit the SEND button to file the story with Billie, and walked out.

  7

  THE RAIN STARTED before Reuben ever got home, and by the time he locked himself in his room, it was coming down hard in that dreary windless way it so often did in Northern California, slowly, relentlessly drenching everything, and quenching the light of the dying sun, the moon, and the stars completely. He was sorry to see it. This rain meant that “the rainy season” had begun and there might not be another clear day until next April.

  Reuben hated the rain, and immediately lighted his fireplace, turning down the lamps so the flickering of the fire could provide some tangible comfort.

  But it tantalized him to think about how it might not matter one whit to him once he was transformed, if indeed the transformation was coming.

  What is hating rain to me now, he thought. He thought of Nideck Point and wondered how the redwood forest would be in the rain. Somewhere on his desk was a map of the property sent to him by Simon Oliver. On that map for the first time he’d seen the actual layout of the land. The point of land where the house stood was just south of a huge bluff and jutting cliffs that obviously protected the redwood forest to the east and behind the east side of the house. The beach itself was small, with access uncertain, but whoever had built the house had certainly chosen a blessed location, as it overlooked both sea and forest.

  Well, there was time to think about all that. Now he had to barricade himself in and go to work.

  He’d bought a hot sandwich and soda on the way home, and he devoured these impatiently, Googling “werewolves,” “werewolf legends,” “werewolf movies,” and a host of other such subjects with his right hand.

  Unfortunately he was fully capable of hearing the entire discussion going on downstairs at the dining table.

  Celeste was still personally outraged that the Observer had taken Reuben off the Goldenwood kidnap for this crazy wolf man story, and Grace was positively disgusted, or so she said, that her son could never stand up for himself. This monstrous attack in Mendocino was the last thing her baby needed. Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of “redeeming everything that ever happens to them.”

  Reuben perked up at that thought, and even jotted it down on the pad next to his keyboard. Good old Dad.

  But the Committee on Reuben and Reuben’s Life now included new members.

  Rosy, the darling and deeply beloved housekeeper who’d returned this morning from her yearly trip to Mexico, was weighing in that she could never forgive herself for being “gone” when Reuben most needed her. She said flat out it was the “loup garoo” who had gotten him.

  Reuben’s best friend, Mort Keller, was also there, apparently having been drafted for the meeting before anybody realized that Reuben was going to lock himself in his room and refuse to talk to anyone. This made Reuben furious. Mort Keller was finishing his Ph.D. at Berkeley and didn’t have time for nonsense like this. He’d come to the hospital twice, and that had been heroic, as far as Reuben was concerned, considering Mort was getting maybe four hours of sleep a night, and having a hell of a time with preparing for his oral examination.

  Now Mort had to listen—and so did Reuben—to the “whole story” of how Reuben had changed since the tragic night in Mendocino, and Grace’s theory that he’d caught something from that rabid animal that bit him.

  Caught something! Understatement. And what was up there in the Mendocino forest? Did he talk? Did it walk? Or was it—? He stopped.

  Of course it talked. “Murder, murder.” He’d always known he didn’t make that 911 call. It was the beast thing that had picked up his phone.

  A great relief coursed through him. Okay, so it wasn’t so degenerate and transformed that it had become a mindless monster. No, it was inhabited by some civilized force just like the back-alley beast of San Francisco. And if that was the case, perhaps it knew—it knew—what was happening to the man it had nearly killed in Marchent’s hallway.

  Was that good? Or was that bad?

  The voices from downstairs were driving him crazy.

  He got up, found a CD of Mozart, a piano concerto that he loved, shoved it into the Bose player by his bed, and turned it up to full volume.

  Now that worked. He couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear anybody—not even that low rolling hum of the voices of the city around him. He hit the REPEAT DISK button on the machine, and relaxed.

  With the fire flickering away, and the rain tapping at the windows, and the lovely rippling Mozart filling the room, he felt almost normal.

  Well, for a moment.

  He was soon skimming one scholarly source after another. Little of what he found proved a surprise. He’d always known lycanthropy was perceived by many historically as a mental illness in which you imagined you were a wolf and behaved like one; or some kind of demonic shape-shifting in which you did indeed become a wolf until someone shot you with a silver bullet and your lupine body changed back to human form as you died, maybe with a placid expression on your face, and an old gypsy woman pronounced that you would now have rest.

  As for the movies, well, he’d seen a good many of them—an embarrassing number, in fact. It was easy to find seminal scenes on YouTube, and as he tracked back through Ginger Snaps and then Jack Nicholson’s Wolf, something pretty ghastly came to him.

  This was fiction, of course, but it presented the phase he was in as transformative and not final. Only in the early stages were some werewolves anthropoid. By the end of Wolf, Jack Nicholson had been a full-blown four-footed animal of the forest. By the end of Ginger Snaps, the unfortunate girl wolf had become a great hideous and repulsive porcine demon.

  But then it spoke, he thought, flashing on Mendocino. It used a phone, for the love of hell. It punched in 911 and brought help for the victim. How old was it? How long had it been around? And what the hell was it doing in the redwood forest up there?

  Celeste had said something, what was it? That there had always been wolves up there in Mendocino County? Well, the local population certainly didn’t agree. He’d seen enough of them reporting on television that wolves were extinct in their part of the world forest.

  Okay. Forget about the movies answeri
ng any questions. What do the movies know? Though there was one little thing worth salvaging: in several movies, the power to become a werewolf was referred to as a “gift.” He liked that. A gift. That was more in keeping with what was happening to him certainly.

  But in most of the movies, the gift didn’t have much of a purpose. In fact, it was unclear exactly why cinema werewolves went after their victims. All they did was rip random people to pieces. They didn’t even drink the blood or eat the meat. They didn’t behave like wolves at all. They behaved as if … they had rabies. True, in The Howling, they had fun making out, but other than that, what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn’t remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.

  And forget silver bullets too. If there was science behind that, well, he wasn’t Reuben the Man Wolf.

  Reuben the Man Wolf. That was the term he liked most of all himself. And it had been ratified by Susan Larson. Pray Billie left his headline intact.

  Is that so wrong, to want to think of myself as Man Wolf? Again, he tried to muster some compassion for the rapist he’d killed. But he could not.

  At about eight o’clock, he took a break. He shut off the Mozart and worked at shutting out the voices on his own.

  Wasn’t as hard as he’d thought. Celeste was no longer in the house. In fact, she’d gone off to a café with Mort Keller, who’d always been sort of in love with her, and Phil and Grace were talking about that very development right now, and they weren’t really saying a whole lot. Grace had gotten a call from a specialist in Paris who was very interested in the wolf killings, but she hadn’t had much time to talk with the man. Easy to shut them out.

  Reuben brought up the pictures he’d taken of himself last night, which he had buried in an encrypted file that was password protected. Staring at them was horrifying and tantalizing.

  He wanted it to happen again.

  He had to face that. He was looking forward to it as he had never looked forward to anything in his entire life, not even his first night in bed with a woman, or Christmas morning when he was eight years old. He was waiting for it to happen.

  Meantime he reminded himself that it hadn’t happened until midnight the night before. And he went back to surfing classics on lycanthropy and mythology. Actually the lore of wolves in all cultures was fascinating him as much as werewolf stories proper, and old medieval traditions pertaining to a village Brotherhood of the Green Wolf charmed him with their descriptions of country people dancing wildly around bonfires into which the “wolf” was now and then symbolically tossed.

  He was about to call it a night when he remembered that collection, The Man-Wolf and Other Tales, by those two nineteenth-century French writers. Why not try it? It was easy to find. On Amazon.com, he punched in an order for one of several reprints, and then decided to try to find the title story online.

  No problem. On horrormasters.com, he found a free download. He probably wouldn’t read all of it, just have a look in the vain hope that some nugget of truth might be mixed in with the fiction.

  About Christmas time in the year 18—, as I was lying fast asleep at the Cygne at Fribourg, my old friend Gideon Sperver broke abruptly into my room crying—

  “Fritz, I have good news for you; I am going to take you to Nideck.…

  Nideck!

  The next sentence read, “You know Nideck, the finest baronial castle in the country, a grand monument of the glory of our forefathers.”

  He could not quite believe his eyes. There was Marchent’s last name in a story called “The Man-Wolf.”

  He broke off and Googled “Nideck.” Yes, it was an actual place, a real Château de Nideck, a famous ruin, on the road from Oberhaslach to Wangenbourg. But that really wasn’t the point. The point was the last name had been used over a hundred years ago in a short story about a werewolf. And the story had come into English in 1876, right before the Nideck family moved to Mendocino County and built their immense house overlooking the ocean. This family that came out of nowhere, apparently, if Simon Oliver was right, was named Nideck.

  He was stunned. This had to be a coincidence, and certainly it was a coincidence that no one had noticed and which no one might ever notice.

  But there was something else in those first few lines. He brought up the story again. Sperver. He’d seen that name before too, somewhere, and it had something to do with Marchent and Nideck Point. But what? He couldn’t remember. Sperver. He could almost see the name written in ink, but where? Then it hit him. It was the last name of Felix Nideck’s very dear friend and mentor, Margon, the man Felix had called Margon the Godless. Hadn’t his name been written on the mat inside the framing of the big photograph over the fireplace? Oh, why hadn’t he written down those names? But he was certain of it. He remembered Marchent saying the name Margon Sperver.

  No, this simply could not be a coincidence. One name, yes, but two names? No. Impossible. But what in the world could this possibly mean?

  He experienced a deep frisson.

  Nideck.

  What had Simon Oliver, his lawyer, told him? He’d talked on and on about this in phone call after phone call, as if reassuring himself of this rather than Reuben.

  “The family’s hardly what you would call ancient. It comes out of nowhere in the 1880s. There was an exhaustive search for relatives after Felix disappeared, for anyone who might have information on the man. They found nothing. Of course the nineteenth century is filled with new men, self-made men. A timber baron who comes out of nowhere and builds a huge house. Par for the course. The point is, you aren’t likely to be challenged on all this by any long-lost heirs. They don’t exist anywhere.”

  He sat staring at the computer screen.

  Could that family name have been contrived for a reason? No. That’s absurd. What would have been the reason? What, these people read an obscure werewolf story and they took the name Nideck from it? And then over a century later—. No, this was nonsense. Sperver or no Sperver. It just couldn’t be. Marchent never knew of any such family secret.

  He saw Marchent’s radiant face, her smile, heard her laughter. So wholesome, so possessed of an inner … an inner what? An inner happiness?

  But what if that dark house contained the proverbial dark secret?

  He spent the next quarter hour skimming the short story “The Man-Wolf.”

  It was predictably entertaining, and typically nineteenth century. Hugh Lupus was the werewolf, of Nideck Castle, under a family curse, and the story involved tantalizing but for Reuben’s purposes meaningless elements like a dwarf who answered the gates of the castle and a powerful witch called the Black Plague. Sperver was the huntsman of the Black Forest.

  What could all this have to do with the reality of what Reuben had endured? Surely he didn’t believe the obvious cliché that a werewolf curse hung over Nideck Point.

  How could he know?

  He couldn’t dismiss it, that was certain.

  He thought of that big photograph over Marchent’s library fireplace, of those men deep in the tropical forest—Felix Nideck and his mentor, Margon Sperver. Marchent had mentioned others’ names, but he couldn’t clearly remember them—except that they didn’t appear in the story.

  Ah, he had to make an exhaustive search of all werewolf literature. And at once he set about ordering books specifically on werewolf fiction, legends, and poetry, including anthologies and studies, to be delivered overnight.

  But he felt he was grasping at straws. He was imagining things.

  Felix was long dead. Margon was probably dead. Marchent had searched and searched. What absurd nonsense. And the beast thing came into that house from the forest, certainly, through the shattered dining room windows. It heard the screams just as you hear screams; he smelled the evil as you smell evil.

  Romantic nonsense.

  A sadness came over him suddenly that Felix was dead and gone. But still: names from a man wolf story. And what if there is, what, some degenerate beast cousin
roaming the forest … keeping guard over the house?

  He felt tired.

  Suddenly a warm feeling came over him. He heard the low roar of the gas fire; he heard the rain singing in the gutters. He felt warm all over, and light. The voices of the city throbbed and rumbled, and gave him the oddest feeling that he was connected to the whole world. Hmmm. It was just the opposite of the alienation he’d felt earlier when talking to real identifiable people at the Observer.

  “You belong to them now, maybe,” he whispered. The voices were too homogenized. Words, cries, pleas, hovered just below the surface.

  God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?

  He looked at his watch.

  It was just past ten o’clock. What if he took off now in the Porsche for Nideck Point? Why, the drive would be nothing. Just several hours in pouring rain. Very likely he could get in the house. He’d break a little windowpane if he had to. Why would there be a problem? The house would be legally his within a few weeks. He’d already signed all the documents the title company required of him. He’d already taken over the utility bills, hadn’t he? Well, hell, why not go there?

  And the beast man out there, in the forest. Would he know that Reuben was there? Would he pick up the scent of the one he’d bitten and left alive?

  He was burning to go up there.

  Something startled him. It wasn’t a sound exactly, no, but something … a vibration—as if a car with a pounding sound system was passing in the street.

  He saw a dark woods, but it wasn’t the woods of Mendocino. No, another woods, a misty tangled woods that he knew. Alarm.

  He got up and opened the doors to the deck.

  The air was gusty and bitter cold. The rain struck his face and his hands. It was divinely bracing.