The Wolf Gift Page 15

  Reuben opened the book now. The paper was aged and brittle. Copyright 1969.

  I believe that the universe is an evolution.

  I believe that evolution proceeds toward spirit.

  I believe that spirit is fully realized in a form of personality.

  I believe that the supremely personal is the Universal Christ.

  Well, bully for Teilhard, he thought bitterly. He felt a deep sadness suddenly, a bit of anger and then something akin to despair. Despair wasn’t in his nature really. But he knew it in moments like this. He was about to put the book back when he saw there was something scribbled in ink on this page:

  Beloved Felix,

  For You!

  We have survived this;

  we can survive anything.

  In Celebration,

  Margon

  Rome ’04

  Well, this was his now.

  He shoved the small relic into his coat pocket.

  Far to the back of the room, he saw the discarded iron stairs, all of a circular piece lying on its side in the dust. There were boxes there, boxes he wouldn’t try to search just now.

  For the next hour, he roamed, finding two other isolated gable attic rooms like this first one, and another that was empty. All were reached by closeted staircases from the front hall below.

  Then he went back down to Felix’s old room that he would occupy tonight, and he felt a little panic that he’d been here so far away from the television news that had sustained him since he’d been old enough to turn it on at the age of four. But then he had his computer, of course. And maybe it was all just as well.

  It was the night that the power went out in Berkeley that he’d finished Joyce’s Finnegans Wake by the light of a candle. Sometimes you need to be forced to study what’s right in front of you.

  He surveyed Felix’s shelves. These items in his bedroom must have been the most important to him. Where would he begin? What would he examine first?

  Something was missing.

  At first he thought, No, I’ve just made a mistake. I’ve misremembered. But as he quickly scanned every shelf in the room, he realized he was right.

  The tablets, the tiny Mesopotamian tablets, the priceless tablets covered in cuneiform, were gone. Every single one of them, every single fragment of them, was missing.

  He went down the hall and examined two other storerooms. Same result. No tablets.

  He went back up to the attics.

  Same thing. Treasures galore but no tablets.

  And now in the dust he could see where things had been that were no longer there.

  Everywhere he searched he found evidence that small items—the tablets—had been carefully collected and removed, leaving shiny blank places in the dust.

  He went back to the room he knew best and double-checked. The tablets were indeed gone, and the dustless places were clearly visible and he could see here and there fingerprints.

  He panicked.

  Someone had come into this house and stolen the most valuable parts of Felix’s collection. Someone had taken the most significant finds he’d brought back with him from years of traveling in the Middle East. Someone had raided the treasure that Marchent had wanted so to protect and to bequeath. Someone had …

  But that was ridiculous.

  Who could have done that? Who could have done that and left so very much here utterly undisturbed—statues that were surely worth a fortune, even old scrolls that must have been priceless to scholars and curators? Who would have left the little boxes of ancient coins and, look there, a medieval codex in plain sight, and he’d seen others upstairs, books that libraries would have paid a fortune for.

  He couldn’t figure this out! What sort of person would have known what the tablets were, when in fact some of them had looked like pieces of dirt, or plaster or even dried cookie or biscuit?

  And imagine the care of this august thief, ferreting out these precious fragments from amid so much valuable clutter and slipping away leaving all else undisturbed.

  Who would have had the knowledge, the patience, the skill, to do this?

  Didn’t make sense, but the tablets were gone. There was not a fragment left in the house with the precious cuneiform writing.

  And just maybe a lot of other things were gone and Reuben simply wasn’t aware of it.

  He began to rummage through items on the bedroom shelves. Here were books from the seventeenth century, pages soft and disintegrating, but still turnable, readable. Yes, and this statuette was genuine, he could see and feel that as he set it back down.

  Oh, there was so much here that was worth a fortune.

  Why, on one shelf he found an exquisite necklace of soft, pliable gold worked into engraved leaves that was surely ancient.

  He was very careful to put it back exactly as he had found it.

  Reuben went down to the library and rang Simon Oliver on his home phone.

  “I need some information,” Reuben said. “I need to know if the police photographed every single thing in this house when they investigated, I mean did they photograph all the rooms they didn’t disturb. Can you get me those photographs?”

  Simon protested that that wouldn’t be easy, but the Nideck law firm had photographed everything right after Marchent’s death.

  “Marchent took photographs of all of it, she told me,” said Reuben. “Can you get those photographs?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I’ll see what I can do. You’ll get the law firm’s inventory, of that I’m quite sure.”

  “The sooner the better,” said Reuben. “Tomorrow, e-mail me whatever photographs of the place you can.”

  He rang off and called Galton.

  The man assured him: no one but him and his family had been in the house. He and his wife had been in and out for days, and yes, his cousin and his stepson, along with Nina, the little girl from the town who had often helped Felice, okay, yeah, she’d been in there too. Nina liked to hike the woods back there. Nina wouldn’t touch a thing.

  “Remember the alarm,” said Galton. “I set that alarm as soon as the investigators left.” That alarm never failed. If Miss Nideck had had that alarm set the night she was attacked, why it would have gone off the minute those windows had been smashed.

  “Nobody’s been in that house, Reuben,” he insisted. Galton said he lived just off the road ten minutes below the point. He would have seen or heard any traffic headed up that way. Yes, there had been reporters and photographers, but that had only been in those first few days and, even then, he’d been up there most of the time keeping an eye on them, and they couldn’t have gotten past the alarm.

  “You have to realize, Reuben,” said Galton, “that place is hard to get to. Not many people want to drive up this road, you know. Except for the nature lovers, you know, the hikers, well, nobody goes around there at all.”

  Right. Reuben thanked him for everything.

  “If you’re getting uneasy up there, son, I’ll be glad to come back up and sleep in the back.”

  “No, that’s fine, Galton, thanks.” Reuben rang off.

  He sat at the desk for a long time, looking across the room at the big photograph of Felix and Company over the fireplace.

  The draperies had not been drawn, and he was surrounded with dark mirrorlike glass. The fireplace was laid with oak logs and kindling but he didn’t want to light the fire.

  He was a little cold, but not too cold, and he sat there pondering.

  There was a distinct possibility here. One of these men, one of Felix’s old friends, that is, had read of Marchent’s murder in this house, read it somewhere far away, maybe on the other side of the globe, where such news would never have penetrated in pre-Internet days—and that person had taken time to research the whole story. And having researched the whole story, that person had come here, entered surreptitiously, and collected those priceless tablets and tablet fragments.

  The story of Marchent’s murder had gone viral all right, no question of that.
He’d checked that last night.

  Now if this was so, it could mean a lot of things.

  It could mean that Felix’s precious tablets were in good hands, collected and saved by a concerned fellow archaeologist who might soon return them to Reuben when he learned of Reuben’s honorable intentions, or who might take better care of the tablets than Reuben could.

  It gave him a little peace to think of this.

  And furthermore: this person, this person might very well have some information about what had happened to Felix. At least it would be a connection, wouldn’t it, to somebody that knew Felix.

  Of course that was about the most optimistic and reassuring spin that could be put on this little mystery, and if Reuben had still been in the habit of hearing Celeste’s critical voice in his head, which he wasn’t, he would have heard her say, You’re dreaming!

  But that’s just it, Reuben thought, I’m not hearing her voice every minute, am I? And she’s not texting me or calling me. She’s at the movies with Mort Keller. And I’m not hearing my mother’s voice either, and what the hell do either of them know about it? And Phil wasn’t listening when I told him about the tablets, he was reading Leaves of Grass, and I didn’t tell Mort, did I? I’d been too groggy with painkillers and antibiotics to tell Mort anything when he came to the hospital.

  Reuben went upstairs, unpacked his laptop computer and brought it down to the library.

  There was an old typewriter stand to the left of the desk, and he set up the computer there, verified the wireless connection, and went online.

  Yes, before the Man Wolf of San Francisco had ever attacked, Marchent’s story had made headlines as far away as Japan and Russia. That was clear enough. And he knew enough of French, Spanish, Italian, et al., to see that the mysterious beast who’d slain the killers had been given substantial play everywhere. The house was described, even the forest behind the house, and the mystery of the beast of course had been part and parcel of the appeal.

  Yes, a friend of Felix could have seen the entire configuration: the house, the coast, and the mysterious name: Nideck.

  He left off tracking the story. He checked on the Goldenwood kidnapping. Nothing had changed except parents were breaking faith with the sheriff’s office and the FBI and blaming them for the little girl’s death. Susan Kirkland. That was her name. Little Susan Kirkland. Eight years old. Her smiling face was now available in full color—a sweet-eyed little being with blond hair and pink plastic barrettes.

  He checked his watch.

  It was already eight o’clock.

  His heart started to pound, but that’s all that happened. Closing his eyes, he heard the inevitable sounds of the forest, and the incessant song of the rain. Animals out there, yes, things rustling in the dark. Birds in the night. He had a strange, disoriented feeling that he was falling into the sounds. He shook himself awake.

  Apprehensive, uncertain, he got up and closed all the velvet draperies. A bit of dust was stirred, but it soon settled. He turned on a few more lamps—beside the leather couch and the Morris chair. And then he started the fire. Why the hell not have the fire?

  He went into the great room, and built up that fire too, with a couple more short logs. He banked it well. And made sure the screen in front of it—which had not been there that first night—was secure.

  Then he went into the kitchen. The coffeepot had long ago gone off. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how to make another pot.

  And within a few minutes, he was drinking a tolerable brew from one of Marchent’s pretty china cups, and pacing the floor, soothed by the crackling noises from the fireplace, and the steady song of the rainwater flowing in the gutters, and down drainpipes, and over roof tiles, and down windows.

  Funny how he heard it now so distinctly for the first time.

  Trouble is, you’re not paying enough attention to all these little details. You are not being scientific.

  He set the coffee down on the library desk and started pounding away on the matter in a password-protected document that nobody could have made head or tail of anyway.

  A little while later he stood at the back door, looking out into the darkness. He had killed the big lights, and he could see the trees now very distinctly and beautifully, and the high slate roof of the servants’ wing, covered in tangled ivy and flowering vine.

  He closed his eyes and tried to bring on the transformation. He pictured it, evoking those dizzying sensations, letting his mind go blank except for the metamorphosis.

  But he couldn’t bring it on.

  Again, there came that sense of aloneness—that he was in a truly deserted place.

  “What are you hoping for? What are you dreaming?”

  That somehow it’s all related, the creature that changed you, the name Nideck, even the theft of the tablets because maybe, somehow, the ancient tablets contained some secret that has to do with this, with all this?

  Nonsense. What had Phil said about evil? “It’s blunders, people making blunders, whether it’s raiding a village and killing all the inhabitants, or killing a child in a fit of rage. Mistakes. Everything is simply a matter of mistakes.”

  Maybe somehow this was a matter of blunders, too. And he’d been lucky, damned lucky, that the people he’d so thoughtlessly slaughtered had been “guilty” in the eyes of the world.

  What if a brute beast was responsible for the bite that had changed him—not some wise man wolf, but simply an animal—like this famous mountain lion? What then? But he didn’t believe that at all. How many human beings since the dawn of time have been attacked by beasts? They don’t turn into monsters.

  At nine o’clock, he woke up in the big leather chair behind the desk. His shoulders and neck were stiff and his head aching.

  He had an e-mail from Grace. She’d spoken again to “that specialist in Paris.” Would Reuben please call?

  Specialist in Paris? What specialist in Paris? He didn’t call. Quickly, he typed out an e-mail. “Mom, I don’t need to see a specialist in anything. I am well. Love, R.”

  I am after all sitting here in my new house waiting patiently to turn into a werewolf. Love, your son.

  He felt restless, hungry, but not hungry for food. It was something much worse. He looked around him at the big dark room with its crowded bookcases. The fire had gone out. He felt anxious, as though he had to move, had to get out, had to be somewhere.

  He could hear the soft murmuring sounds of the forest, the lisping of the rain falling through the dense branches. He could not hear a large animal. If there was a mountain lion out there, perhaps she was fast asleep with her cubs. Whatever the case she was a wild thing, and he was a human being waiting, waiting in a house with glass walls.

  He e-mailed Galton a list of things to buy for the house, though probably most of the stuff was there. He wanted a lot of new plants for the conservatory—orange trees, ferns, and bougainvillea—could Galton handle that? What else? There had to be something else. The restlessness was driving him crazy.

  He went online and ordered a laser printer for this library, and a desktop Mac to be delivered as soon as possible, and a number of Bose CD players, and a whole slew of Blu-ray. Bose CD players were the only obsolete technology he loved.

  He unpacked the Bose players he’d brought—both of which were also radios—and put one in the kitchen and the other in the library on the desk.

  He was not hearing any voices. The night was empty around him.

  And the change was not happening to him.

  For a while he drifted about the house, pondering, talking aloud to himself, thinking. He had to keep moving. He put signs where the televisions should be installed. He’d sit down, get up, pace, climb the stairs, roam the attics, come down.

  He went outside into the rain, roaming the back part of the house. Under the overhang he looked into the various lower bedrooms of the servants’ quarters, each of which had a door and a window on the stone walkway. All seemed in order, with simple somewhat rustic fur
nishings.

  At the end of the wing he found the shed, stacked with a huge amount of firewood. A worktable ran along one side, with axes and saws hung on hooks on the wall. There were other tools, anything a man might need for repairs large and small.

  Reuben had never held an ax in his hands. He took down the largest of the axes—it had a three-foot wooden handle—and felt the edge of the blade. The blade itself must have weighed about five pounds and was a good five inches long. And sharp. Very sharp. All his life he’d seen men in movies and television programs splitting logs with an ax like this. He wondered how he might like doing that out here himself. The handle itself didn’t weigh much at all; and surely the weight of the blade gave the ax its force. If it hadn’t been raining, he would have looked for the place where the wood had been split.

  But something else occurred to him—that this was the only weapon he had.

  He carried the ax back into the house with him and set it down beside the fireplace in the big room. It looked simple enough there—the paint had long ago peeled from the wooden handle—between the pile of firewood and the fire, almost out of sight.

  He felt he could get to that quickly enough if he ever had a need. Of course—before some two weeks ago, it had never occurred to him that he could defend himself with any weapon, but he had not the slightest qualm now.

  The restlessness was almost unsupportable.

  Was he resisting the change? Or was it just too damned early? It had never come on him this early. He had to wait.

  But he couldn’t wait.

  His hands and feet were tingling. The rain was acutely loud now, and he thought he could hear the surf again, but he wasn’t sure.

  He couldn’t bear it here any longer. He made a decision. He had no choice.

  He took off his clothes, hung them up neatly in the closet, and put on the big loose clothing he’d bought in Santa Rosa.

  He was swallowed by the giant hooded sweatshirt and oversized pants, but it didn’t matter. The brown trench coat was simply too big to wear, but he’d take it with him.