The Wolf Gift Read online

  Her eyes rolled in her head. She was dying.

  A great effortless roar came out of Reuben. Growling, snarling, he bore down on the man, ripping him loose from the woman, Reuben’s teeth sinking into the man’s throat, the hot blood spurting in Reuben’s face, as the man screeched in pain. A hideous scent rose from the man, if indeed it was a scent. It was as if the man’s intent was a scent, and it maddened Reuben. Reuben tore at the man’s flesh, growls coming out of his mouth as his teeth tore at the man’s shoulder. It felt so good to sink his teeth deep into the muscle and feel it split. That scent overpowered him, drove him on. Scent of evil.

  He let the man go.

  The man fell to the pavement, the arterial blood pumping out of him. Reuben chomped at his right arm, tore it almost loose from the shoulder, and then flung the helpless broken body by this arm against the far wall so that the man’s skull cracked on the bricks.

  The woman stood stark still, her arms crossed over her breasts, staring at him. Feeble, choking sounds came out of her. How utterly miserable and pitiable she was. How unspeakable that anyone would do such evil to her. She was shaking so violently that she could scarce stand, one naked shoulder visible above the torn red silk of her dress.

  She began to sob.

  “You’re safe now,” Reuben said. Was this his voice? This low and rough and confidential voice? “The man who tried to hurt you is dead.” He reached out towards her. He saw his paw like a hand reaching for her. Tenderly he stroked her arm. What did it feel like to her?

  He looked down at the dead man who lay on his side, his eyes gleaming like glass in the shadows. So incongruous, those eyes, those bits of hard-polished beauty embedded in such reeking flesh. The scent of the man and the scent of what the man was filled the space around him.

  The woman backed away from Reuben. She turned and ran, her loud shrill screams filling the alleyway. She went down on one knee, rose again, and continued, running right towards the traffic of the busy street.

  Reuben easily sprang up out of the alley, gripping the bricks as surely as a cat might grip the bark of a tree as he went straight up to the rooftop. In less than a second, he had left the entire block behind, bounding towards home.

  There was only one thought in his mind. Survive. Get away. Get back to your room. Get away from her screams and from the dead man.

  Without a conscious thought, he found his house, and came down from the roof to the open deck outside his bedroom.

  He stood there in the open door staring at the little tableau of bed, television, desk, fireplace. He licked the blood on his fangs, on his lower teeth. It had a salty taste, a taste that was ugly yet tantalizing.

  How quaint and small the bedroom seemed, how painfully artificial, as if it was fabricated from something as fragile as eggshells.

  He moved inside, into the dense unwelcome warm air, and closed the windows behind him. It seemed absurd to slide the tiny brass lock shut; what a curious little thing it was. Why, anyone could break one of the small white framed panes in the glass door and easily open it. One could easily break all of the panes, and fling the window, frame and all, out into the darkness.

  In this close place, he heard his own easy breathing.

  The light from the television was flashing white and blue over the ceiling.

  In the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, he saw himself, a great hairy figure with a long mane covering his shoulders. Man wolf.

  “So this was the manner of beast that saved me in Marchent’s house, was it?” He laughed again that low, irresistible rolling laughter. Of course. “And you bit me, you devil. And I didn’t die from the bite and now it’s happened to me.” He wanted to laugh out loud. He wanted to roar with laughter.

  But the dark little house was too close around him for that, too close for throwing open the doors and howling at the drifting stars, though he so wanted to do it.

  He drew closer to the mirror.

  A daylight scene on the television screen laid bare every detail. His eyes were the same, large and deeply blue, but his eyes. He could see himself in them, yet all the rest of his face was thick with dark brown hair, revealing a small black-tipped nose that only faintly resembled that of a wolf, and a long lipless mouth with glaring white teeth and fangs. The better to eat you with, my dear.

  His frame was bigger, taller, taller by perhaps four inches than it had been, and his hands or paws were enormous, sprouting thin deadly white claws. His feet were huge as well, and his calves and thighs so powerfully muscled, he could see this beneath the hair. He touched his private parts, then drew back from the slight hardness he discovered there.

  But it was hidden, all that, by a soft underfur, as well as the coarser hair that covered most of his body. Indeed this soft underfur was everywhere, he realized. It was just thicker in some places than others—around his private parts, and on his inner thighs, and on his lower belly. If he parted the fur, or the coarser outer hair, gently with his claw, he felt a rippling, dazzling sensation.

  It made him want to go out again, to travel over the rooftops, to seek out the voices of those in need. He was salivating.

  “And you are thinking, feeling, watching this,” he said. Once again, the low timbre of his voice startled him. “Stop it!”

  He looked at his palms, which had thickened into hairless pads for the paws his hands had become. There was a thin webbing between what had been his fingers. But he had thumbs, still, did he not?

  Slowly, he made his way to the bedside table. The room felt much too warm. He was thirsty. He picked up the small iPhone, and it was difficult to grasp it with these huge paws, but he managed.

  He went into the bathroom, turned on the full electric light, and stared at himself in the mirrored wall opposite the shower.

  Now, in this intense illumination, the shock was almost too much for him. He wanted to turn, cower, shut off the light. But he forced himself to study the image in the mirror.

  Yes, a black-tipped nose, and a nose that could smell a multitude of things such as an animal could smell, and powerful jaws, though they did not protrude, and such fangs, ah!

  He wanted to cover his face with his hands. But he didn’t have hands. Instead, he held up the iPhone and clicked a picture of himself. And again and again.

  He rested back against the marble tile beside the shower.

  He pushed his tongue through his fangs. He tasted the dead man’s blood again.

  The desire rose in him again. There were more like the reeking rapist, and the sobbing woman. The voices were still all around him. If he wanted, he could reach into that slow rolling ocean of sound and hook another voice, and bring himself to it.

  But he didn’t. He was paralyzed, finished.

  The impulse to cry came to him, but there was no real physical pressure to it. It was just an idea: cry, pray to God, beg to understand; confess your fear.

  No. He had no intention of doing it.

  He turned on the tap and let the basin fill with water. Then he drank it in fierce laps until he was satisfied. It seemed he’d never tasted water before, never known how purely delicious it was, how sweet and cleansing it was, how invigorating.

  He was struggling to hold a glass and fill it with water when the change began.

  He felt it as he had the first time, in the millions of hair follicles covering his body. And there was a sharp contraction in his stomach, not painful, just a spasm that was almost pleasure.

  He made himself look up. And he made himself remain standing, though it became harder and harder to do so. The hair was retracting, disappearing, though some of it fell to the tile floor. The black tip of his nose was paling, dissolving. His nose was shrinking, becoming shorter. The fangs were shrinking. His mouth tingled. His hands and feet tingled. Every part of him was electrified with sensation.

  Finally, the acute physical pleasure overwhelmed him. He couldn’t watch, couldn’t be attentive. He was near to fainting.

  He staggered into the bedroom an
d fell across the bed. Deep orgasmic spasms ran through the muscles of his thighs and calves, through his back, his arms. The bed felt wondrously soft, and the voices outside had become a low vibrant hum.

  The darkness came, as it had during those despairing moments in Marchent’s house, when he’d thought he was dying. But he didn’t fight it now as he had then.

  He was asleep before the transformation was finished.

  It was broad daylight when the ringing of his phone awakened him. Where was it coming from?

  It stopped.

  He turned and got up. He was cold and naked, and the raw light of the overcast sky hurt his eyes. A sharp pain in his head scared him, but then it left as suddenly as it had come.

  He looked around for the iPhone. He found it on the bathroom floor and at once clicked back to the pictures.

  He was certain, certain, he would find nothing there but a photograph of good old Reuben Golding. Just that, and nothing more, and incontrovertible proof that Reuben Golding was going flat-out crazy.

  But there it was: the man wolf, staring back at him.

  His heart stopped.

  The head was immense, the brown mane falling well beyond the shoulders, the long black-tipped nose more than evident, and the fangs cutting below the black-rimmed edge of the mouth of the thing. Blue eyes, your blue eyes.

  He covered his mouth with his hand. He was shaking all over. He felt of his own, natural lips, well formed, faintly pink, as he studied himself in the mirror. And then he looked at that mouth again, rimmed in black. This could not be; and this was. This was a lupine man—a monster. He clicked through one picture after another.

  Dear God …

  The creature’s ears were long, pointed, cleaving to its head, half hidden by the luxuriant hair. Its forehead protruded, but did not really conceal the large eyes. Only they retained their human proportion. The beast looked like nothing he’d ever seen before—certainly not the teddy bear monster of old werewolf movies. It looked like a tall satyr.

  “Man wolf,” he whispered.

  And is this what almost killed me in Marchent’s house? Is this what lifted me in its mouth and almost tore open my throat as it had done to Marchent’s brothers?

  He synced the images one by one to his computer.

  Then, sitting down before the thirty-inch monitor, he brought them up one by one. He gasped. In one picture, he’d been holding up his paw—and it was him, wasn’t it? No point to calling it “it.” And now he studied the paw, the big hairy webbed fingers and the claws.

  He went back into the bathroom and looked at the floor. Last night he’d seen hairs dropping off him as they would off a shedding dog. They weren’t there now. There was something there, something wispy—tiny tendrils, almost too thin to see that seemed to disintegrate when he tried to catch them up in his fingers.

  So it dries up, it dissolves, it flies away. All the evidence is inside me or gone, burnt up.

  So that’s why they’d never found any fur or hair in Mendocino County!

  He remembered that spasm in his gut, and the waves of pleasure washing over him, pervading every limb the way music reverberates through the wood of a violin or the wood of a building.

  On the bed, he found the same fine, vanishing hairs, dissolving at his touch, or simply scattering far and wide.

  He began to laugh. “I can’t help it,” he whispered. “I can’t help it.” But this was an exhausted, desperate laughter. Sinking down on the side of the bed, his head in his hands, he gave in to it, laughing under his breath until he was too exhausted to laugh anymore.

  An hour later, he was still lying there, with his head on the pillow. He was remembering things—the scent of the alleyway, garbage, urine; the scent of the woman, a tender perfume suffused with an acid smell, almost citruslike—the smell of fear? He didn’t know. The whole world had been alive with scents and sounds, but he’d been focused only on the reek of the man, the pumping smell of his fury.

  The phone rang. He ignored it. It rang again. It didn’t matter.

  “You killed somebody,” he said. “Are you going to think about that? Stop thinking about scents, and sensations, and leaping over rooftops, and jumping some twelve feet in the air. Stop it. You killed somebody.”

  He couldn’t be sorry. No, not at all. The man was going to kill the woman. He had already done irreparable damage to her, terrifying her, strangling her, forcing his fury upon her. The man had harmed others. The man lived and breathed to hurt and harm. He knew this, knew this from what he saw, and oddly enough from that powerful reek. The man was a killer.

  Dogs know the scent of fear, don’t they? Well, he knew the scent of helplessness, and the scent of rage.

  No, he wasn’t sorry. The woman was alive. He saw her running down that alley, falling, rising again, running not only towards the busy street, the lights, the traffic, but towards her life, her life yet to be lived, a life of things to learn, and things to know and things to do.

  He saw Marchent, in his mind’s eye, rushing out of the office with the gun in her hand. He saw the dark figures close in on her. She fell hard on the kitchen floor. She died. And there was no more life.

  Life died around her. The great redwood forest outside her house died, and all the rooms of her house died. The shadows of the kitchen shrank; the boards beneath her shrank. Until there was nothing, and the nothing closed her in and shut her up. And that was the end of it for Marchent.

  If there was a great blossoming on the other side, if her soul had expanded in the light of an infinite and embracing love, well, how are we to know it, until we go there too? He tried for a moment to imagine God, a God as immense as the universe with all its millions of stars and planets, its unchartable distances, its inevitable sounds and its silence. Such a God could know all things, all things, the minds and attitudes and fears and regrets of every single living thing, from the scampering rat to every person. This God could gather a soul, whole and complete and magnificent, from a dying woman on a kitchen floor. He could catch it up in His powerful hands, and carry it heavenward beyond this world to be forever united with Him.

  But how could Reuben really know that? How could he know what lay on the other side of the silence in the hallway when he’d been struggling there to breathe and live, and those two dead bodies had been tangled with his body?

  He saw the forest die again, and the rooms shrink and vanish; every visible thing collapsed—and all life winked out for Marchent.

  He saw the rapist’s victim again, running, running towards her life. He saw the entire city take shape around her with myriad scents and sounds and exploding lights; he saw it expand in all directions from her running figure. He saw it tumbling and boiling towards the dark waters of the bay, the distant invisible ocean, the faraway mountains, the rolling clouds. The woman was screaming and reaching for life.

  No, he didn’t regret it. Not one bit. Ah, the hubris, the greed of that man as he’d clutched at her throat, as he’d sought to take her life. Ah, the gluttonous arrogance of those two crazed brothers as they sank the knife over and over again into that magnificent living being that had been their sister.

  “No, not at all,” he whispered.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind he was aware that he had never thought of such things before. But observing himself just now was not the point. He was observing them, the others. And he had no regrets at all, only a marvelous calm.

  Finally, he got up. He went to wash his face and comb his hair.

  Only absently did he glance at his own reflection. But it shocked him. He was Reuben, of course, not the man wolf, but he wasn’t the Reuben he used to be. His hair was fuller, and longer. And he was slightly bigger all over. Whatever he’d become, a factory of alchemical changes, he was different now externally. He housed a crucible that required a more durable body, didn’t he?

  Grace had talked about hormones, his body being flooded with hormones. Well, hormones make you grow, don’t they? They lengthen your vocal cords, ad
d inches to your legs, increase the growth of your hair. This involved hormones, all right, but secret hormones, hormones infinitely more complex than the hospital tests had been able to measure. Something had happened to his entire body that was very much like what happens to the erectile tissue of his organ when a man is sexually aroused. It increases marvelously in size, no matter what the man wants to happen. It goes from something flaccid and secret to becoming a kind of weapon.

  That’s what had happened to him; he’d increased all over, and all the processes that govern any hormonal change in a man had been greatly accelerated.

  Well, Reuben never really understood science. And maybe now he was trying to understand magic. But he sensed the science behind the apparent magic. And this capacity to change, how had he acquired it? Through the saliva of the beast that had bitten him, the creature who might have given him the fatal virus, rabies. The beast had given him this. And was the beast a man wolf such as Reuben had become?

  Had the beast heard Marchent’s screams just as Reuben had heard the screams of the rape victim in the alley? Had the beast smelled the evil of Marchent’s brothers?

  Of course, it had to be. And he understood for the first time why the beast had released him. The beast had known suddenly that Reuben was no part of the evil that had ended Marchent’s life. The beast knew the scent of innocence as well as evil.

  But had the beast meant to pass on its obvious power?

  Something in the beast’s saliva had traveled into Reuben’s bloodstream, just as a virus might travel, sought a pathway to his brain, perhaps, to the mysterious pineal gland, perhaps, or the pituitary gland, that little pea-sized thing we all have in our brain that controls what? Hormones?

  Hell.

  He didn’t really know. These were guesses. If ever in his life he wanted to talk to Grace about “science,” it was now, but not a chance. Not a chance!

  Grace was not to know about this! Grace must never know. And no one like her must ever know.