The Wolf Gift Read online

The city shimmered beneath its veil of rain, thicket upon thicket of lighted towers crowding in on him so beautifully. He heard a voice whispering as if in his ear: “Burn him, burn them.” This was an ugly, acid voice.

  His heart was thudding, and his body tensed. All over his skin came the ecstatic rippling sensation. A fount inside him let loose with a gushing power that straightened his back.

  It was happening, all right, the wolf-hair was covering his body, the mane descending to his shoulders, and the waves of ecstatic pleasure were coursing over him, obliterating all caution. The wolf-hair grew from his face as though invisible fingers coaxed it, and the keening pleasure made him gasp.

  His hands were already claws; as before, he tore off his clothes, and kicked off his shoes. He ran his claws over his thick hairy arms and chest.

  All the sounds of the night were sharpened, the chorus rising around him, mingled with bells, fleeting streaks of music, and desperate prayers. He felt the urge to escape the confines of the room, to spring off into the darkness, utterly indifferent to where he might land.

  Wait; photograph it. Get to the mirror and witness it, he thought. But there was no time for that. He heard the voices again: “We’ll burn you alive, old man!”

  He leapt up to the rooftop. The rain scarcely touched him. It was no more than a mist.

  Towards the voice he bounded, clearing one alley and street after another, scaling the taller apartment houses and flying free over the lower buildings, springing over the broader avenues effortlessly, and heading towards the ocean, buoyed by the wind.

  The voice grew louder, mingled with yet another voice, and then came the cries of the victim. “I won’t tell you. I won’t tell you. I’ll die but I won’t tell you.”

  He knew where he was now, traveling at his greatest conceivable speed over the buildings of the Haight. Ahead he saw the great dark rectangle of Golden Gate Park. Those woods, yes, that dense fairy forest with its secret hollows. Of course!

  He plunged into it now, moving along the wet grassy ground and then up into the fragrant trees.

  Suddenly he saw the ragged old man running away from his pursuers, through a tunnel in the bracken, surrounded by a sylvan camouflage in which other witnesses cowered under shining tarps and broken boards as the rain came pouring down.

  One of the attackers caught the man by the shoulder and dragged him out into a grassy clearing. The rain soaked their clothes. The other attacker had stopped, and was setting afire a torch of curled newspapers, but the rain was putting out the fire.

  “The kerosene!” shouted the man who held the victim. The victim was punching, and kicking. “I’ll never tell you,” he wailed.

  “Then you’ll burn with your secret, old man.”

  The scent of the kerosene mingled with the scent of evil, the stench of evil, as the torchbearer splashed the fluid on his torch and it burst into flame.

  With a deep rolling roar, Reuben caught the torchbearer, his claws digging into the man’s throat and all but splitting his head from his shoulders. The man’s neck snapped.

  Then he turned on the other assailant who had dropped the shuddering victim and was loping across the clearing in the downpour towards the shelter of the far trees.

  Effortlessly Reuben overtook him. His jaws opened instinctively. He wanted so with all his being to dig out the man’s heart. His jaws were hungry for it, aching for it. But no, not the teeth, not the teeth that could give the Wolf Gift, no, he could not risk that. His snarls coming like curses, he tore at the helpless man. “You would have burned him alive, would you?”—clawing the flesh off his face, and the skin from his chest. His claw raked through the carotid artery and the blood spurted. The man sank down on his knees and fell over, as the blood soaked his old denim coat.

  Reuben turned back. The kerosene had spilled in the grass and was burning, spitting and smoking in the rain, giving the ghastly scene a hellish light.

  The old man who had been the victim knelt huddled, his arms tightly wrapped around his body, staring at Reuben with large unquestioning eyes. Reuben could see the old man flinching in the rain, flinching as the cold rain beat down on him, but Reuben couldn’t feel the rain.

  He approached the man and reached out to help him to his feet. How powerful and calm he felt, the blaze flickering near him, the warmth barely touching him.

  The dark undergrowth surrounding them was swarming with movement and whispers, with desperate accolades and ejaculations of fear.

  “Where do you want to go?” Reuben asked.

  The man pointed to the darkness beyond the low-hanging oaks. Reuben lifted him and carried him under the low boughs. The earth was dry and fragrant here. The matted vines formed veils. A shack of broken boards and tarpaper hung amid the swallowing ivy and giant shuddering ferns. Reuben put the man down on his nest of rags and woolen blankets. He shrank back amid the bundles that surrounded him, pulling the covers up to his neck.

  The scent of dusty cloth and whiskey filled the little enclosure. The scent of raw earth surrounded them, of wet and glistening green things, of tiny animals burrowing in the dark. Reuben pulled away as if the little man-made space were a form of trap.

  He moved off, quickly, taking to the sturdy treetops, arms reaching for one limb after another, as the forest grew thicker, moving back towards the dim yellow lights of Stanyan Street with its steady traffic hissing on the asphalt along the eastern border of the world of Golden Gate Park.

  He seemed to fly across the breadth of the street, into the soaring eucalyptus trees of the Panhandle, the narrow arm of the park that went east.

  He traveled as high as he could in the giant weedlike eucalyptus, breathing the strange bittersweet scent of their long thin pale leaves. He followed the ribbon of park, almost singing aloud as he moved from giant tree to giant tree with fluid movements, and then he made for the roofs of the Victorians that climbed the Masonic Street hill.

  Who could see him in the darkness? No one. The rain was his friend. He went up over the slippery roof tiles with no hesitation and found himself traveling to the blackness of yet another small woodland—Buena Vista Park.

  Out of the low simmering melee that was the voices, he picked out another despairing plea. “To die, I want to die. Kill me. I want to die.”

  Only it wasn’t spoken aloud; it was the drumbeat behind the moans and cries he heard that were beneath or beyond language.

  He landed on the roof above the victim, high atop a grand four-story mansion that bordered the steep hill leading up to the little park. Down the front of the house, he made his way, clutching the pipes and ledges, until he saw through the window the ugly spectacle of an old woman, skin and bones and bleeding sores, tied to a brass bed. Her pink scalp shone beneath her thin hanks of gray hair in the light of one small lamp.

  Before her on the tray was a plate with a steaming pile of human feces, and the hunched figure of a young woman across from her held out a spoon of the loathsome mess, pressing it to the old woman’s lips. The old woman shuddered and was near to fainting. Stench of filth, stench of evil, stench of cruelty. The young woman sang her bitter taunts.

  “You never fed me anything but slop in all your life, you think you will not pay for it now?”

  Reuben shattered the mullions and the panes as he broke into the room.

  The young woman screamed and backed away from the bed. Her face was full of rage.

  He bore down on her as she scrambled to pull a gun from a drawer.

  The shot rang out, deafening him for one split second, and he felt the pain in his shoulder, sharp, ugly, disabling, but at once, he moved beyond it, a deep growl rising out of him as he snatched her up, the gun falling, and slammed her into the plaster wall. Her head broke the plaster; he felt the life go out of her, the curses dying in her throat.

  In a snarling frenzy, he hurled her through the broken window. He heard the body strike the paving of the street.

  For a long second he stood there, waiting for the pain to return, bu
t the pain didn’t return. There was nothing there but pulsing warmth.

  He moved towards the wraithlike figure that was tied with tape and bandages to the brass headboard. Carefully he ripped loose her fetters.

  She had her thin face turned to one side. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” she prayed in a dry, whistling whisper, “the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

  He bent down, removing the last of the bonds from her waist.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he said under his breath as he looked into her eyes. “Pray for us sinners—us sinners!—now and at the hour of our death.”

  The old woman moaned. She was too weak to move.

  He left her, padding softly down the carpeted hallway of the house, and into another spacious room where he found a phone. It was so difficult to punch in the numbers. He was laughing to himself, thinking of the beast of Mendocino, tapping them out on the screen of an iPhone. When he heard the voice of the operator a wild exultant urge went through him, to say Murder, murder, but he did not. That would have been sheer madness. And he hated himself suddenly for thinking it so very funny. Besides, it wasn’t true. “Ambulance. Break-in. Old woman top floor. Held prisoner.”

  The operator was questioning him, and rattling off the address for verification.

  “Hurry,” he said. He left the phone off the hook.

  He listened.

  The house was empty except for the old woman—and one other silent person who slept.

  It took him only a few moments to move down to the second floor and find that helpless invalid, an old man, bound as the woman had been bound, bruised and frail, and deep asleep.

  Reuben explored, finding the light switch, and flooded the scene with light.

  What more could he do to bring help to this creature and the other, to make certain no colossal blunder was made?

  In the hallway, he saw the dim outline of himself in a high gold-framed mirror. He smashed it, the giant shards clattering to the floor.

  He picked up the old-fashioned glass-shaded lamp from the hall table and heaved it over the railing so that it was smashed on the floor of the lower front hall.

  The sirens were coming, winding together, just like those unraveling sounds he heard in Mendocino. Ribbons in the night.

  He could go now.

  He made his escape.

  For a long time, he remained in the high dark cypress woods of Buena Vista Park. The hilltop trees were slender, but he had easily found one strong enough to support him, and he watched through a mesh of branches the ambulances and the police cars collected below on the hillside outside the mansion. He saw the old woman and the old man taken away. He saw the corpse of the vengeful tormentor collected from the pavement. He saw the sleepy disheveled spectators finally wander away.

  A great exhaustion came over him. The pain in his shoulder was gone. In fact, he’d forgotten about it entirely. These paws of his could not feel like hands, he realized. They could not read the texture of the sticky fluid matted in his hair.

  He was becoming ever more tired, positively weak.

  Yet it was a simple matter to make the secretive and rapid journey home.

  Back in his room, he again confronted himself in the mirror.

  “Anything new to tell me?” he asked. “What a deep voice you have.”

  The transformation had begun.

  He gripped the soft fur between his legs even as it was shrinking, vanishing, and then he felt his fingers emerging again to touch the wound in his shoulder.

  There was no wound.

  No wound at all.

  He was so tired now he could scarcely remain standing, but he had to make sure of this. He moved towards the mirror. No wound. But was there a bullet locked inside him, a bullet that could infect him and kill him? How could he know?

  He almost laughed out loud thinking of what Grace would say if he said, Mom, I think I got shot last night. Can you run an X-ray to see if there’s a bullet lodged in my shoulder? Don’t worry, I don’t feel a thing.

  But no, that wasn’t going to happen.

  He fell into his bed, loving the soft clean smell of the pillow, and as the pewter light of morning filled the room, he went fast asleep.

  8

  REUBEN AWOKE at ten, showered, shaved, and went immediately to Simon Oliver’s office to pick up the keys to Nideck Point. No, Marchent’s lawyers didn’t care if he visited the place; indeed the handyman needed to see him, and the sooner he could take over having some repairs made the better. And would he make his own inventory, please? They were worried about “all that stuff up there.”

  He was on the road before noon, speeding across the Golden Gate towards Mendocino, the rain a steady drizzle, the car filled with clothes, an extra computer, a couple of old Bose DVD players, and other things he would leave in his new refuge.

  He needed this time alone desperately. He needed to be alone tonight with these powers—to study, to observe, to seek to control. Maybe he could stop the transformation at will or modulate it. Maybe he could bring it on.

  Whatever the case, he had to get away from everything, including the voices that had drawn him into the slaughtering of four people. He had no choice but to head north.

  And … and, there was always the remote possibility that something lived up there in those northern woods that knew all about what he was and might just share with him the secrets of what he’d become. He didn’t really hope for that, but it was possible. He wanted to be visible to that thing. He wanted that thing to see him roaming the rooms of Nideck Point.

  Grace had been at the hospital when he’d slipped out, and Phil had been nowhere around. He’d talked to Celeste briefly, listening numbly as she recounted the horrors of last night to him in boiling detail.

  “And this THING just threw the woman out of the window, Reuben! And she landed smack-dab on the pavement! I mean the city is going crazy! It ripped apart two bums in Golden Gate Park, gutting one of them like a fish. And everybody loved your story, Reuben. The Man Wolf—that’s what they’re calling him. You could get a cut from the mugs and the T-shirts, you know. Maybe you should trademark ‘Man Wolf.’ But who’s going to believe what that crazy woman in North Beach said? I mean, what is the thing going to do next: scrawl a poetic message on a wall in the victim’s blood?”

  “That’s a thought, Celeste,” Reuben had murmured.

  When traffic stalled on the Waldo Grade, he called Billie.

  “You scored again, Boy Wonder,” said Billie. “I don’t know how you do it. It’s been picked up by the wire services and websites around the world. People are linking to it on Facebook and Twitter. You gave this monster, the Man Wolf, some metaphysical depth!”

  Had he? How had that happened—with his attention to Susan Larson’s descriptions, and her account of the creature’s voice? He couldn’t even remember what he’d written now. But they were calling him the Man Wolf and that was a small score.

  Billie was raving about what had just happened. She wanted him to talk to the Golden Gate Park witnesses and the neighbors on Buena Vista Hill.

  Well, he had to go up north, he had no choice, he told her. He had to see the scene of the crime where he was almost killed.

  “Well, of course, you’re looking for evidence of the Man Wolf up there, right? Get some pix of that hallway! You realize we never had any pix inside that house? Have you got your Nikon with you?”

  “What’s happening with the kidnap?” he demanded.

  “These kidnappers aren’t giving any assurance that the kids will be returned alive. It’s a standoff, with the FBI saying don’t transfer the money till the kidnappers come up with a plan. They aren’t telling us everything, but my contacts in the sheriff’s office say they’re dealing with real professionals here. And it doesn’t look good. If this damned San Francisco Man Wolf is so hot to bring superhero justice and vengeance to the world, why the hell doesn’t he go find those missing children?”


  Reuben swallowed. “That’s a good question,” he said.

  And just maybe the Man Wolf hasn’t gotten his act together yet, and is gaining confidence night by night, ever think of that, Billie? But he didn’t say it.

  A wave of sickness came over him. He thought of the bodies of those dead men in Golden Gate Park. He thought of the corpse of that woman on the pavement. Maybe Billie should visit the morgue, and take a look at the human wreckage “the superhero” was leaving behind. This was no series of capers.

  His sickness was short-lived, however. He was keenly aware that he had no pity for any of those creatures. And just as keenly aware that he’d had no right to kill any of them. So what?

  The traffic was moving. And the rain had picked up. He had to go. The noise of the traffic was muting the voices around himself somewhat, but he could still hear them, like a bubbling brew.

  He started surfing the radio for news and talk, turning it up loud to seal every other sound out.

  It was either the Goldenwood kidnapping or the Man Wolf, with all the predictable jokes and ridicule of the beast and his dubious witnesses. The name “Man Wolf” was a favorite, all right. But there was still plenty of talk of a Yeti, Bigfoot, or even a Gorilla Man. One caramel-voiced commentator on National Public Radio compared the rampages and their ambiguous physical evidence to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and speculated that this could be a beast manipulated by a human handler; or a powerful man dressed in furred costume.

  In fact, the more Reuben listened, the more it came clear that the idea of a costumed perpetrator was gaining favor. People weren’t accepting evidence or testimony to the contrary. And certainly nobody thought or guessed that this creature had any special power to search out injustice; it was assumed he’d stumbled on the situations in which he’d intervened. And nobody suggested that he could or ought to catch the Goldenwood kidnappers. Billie had been way ahead on that one. And so was Reuben himself.

  Why not try to find those children? Why not cancel this trip north and start driving the back roads of Marin County scanning for those children and those three adults?