The Wolves of Midwinter Read online

  “I know, Felix, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I haven’t even checked the news.”

  “Well, I haven’t either, but the fact is you left your torn and bloody clothes, and a bloodstained blanket, of all things, in the furnace room, Reuben, and any Morphenkind can smell human blood. You’ve had a meal of somebody for certain, and this won’t go unnoticed.”

  Reuben felt his face grow hot. Too many images of the hunt were crowding in on him. He thought of little Susie’s tiny candle-flame face against his chest. He was disoriented, as if this normal body of his now was some sort of illusion. He longed for the other body, the other muscles, the other eyes.

  “What stops us, Felix, from living in the forest always, encased in fur, living like the beasts that we are?”

  “You know what stops us,” said Felix. “We’re human beings, Reuben. Human beings. And you will soon have a son.”

  “I felt like I had to go,” Reuben said under his breath. “I just did. I don’t know. I had to push back and I know it was foolish. And I wanted to go, that’s the God’s truth. I wanted to go alone.” He blurted out in fits and starts the little story of the child in the trailer. He told how he’d buried the remains of the corpse. “Felix, I’m caught between two worlds, and I had to blunder into that other world, I had to.”

  Felix was quiet for a while, and then ventured, “I know it’s all very seductive, Reuben, these people treating us like God’s anointed.”

  “Felix, how many people are out there, suffering like that? That little girl wasn’t fifty miles from here. They’re all around us, aren’t they?”

  “This is part of the burden, Reuben. It’s part of the Chrism. We cannot save all of them. And any attempt to do so will end in failure and in our own ruin. We can’t make our territory into our kingdom. The time is long past for that. And I don’t want to lose Nideck Point again so soon, dear boy. I don’t want you to leave, or Laura, or any of us! Reuben, don’t burn up your mortal life just yet, don’t extinguish all ties with it. Look, this is all my fault and Margon’s fault. We haven’t let you boys hunt enough. We’re not remembering what the early years were like. This will change, Reuben, I promise you.”

  “I’m sorry, Felix. But you know, those first days, those first heady days, when I didn’t know what I was, or what would happen next—or whether I was the only man beast in the whole world—there was such a hedonistic freedom there. And I have to get over that, that I can’t slip out at will and become the Man Wolf. I’m working on it, Felix.”

  “I know you are,” said Felix with a sad little laugh. “Of course you are. Reuben, Nideck Point is worth the sacrifice. Whatever we become, wherever we go, we need a haven, a refuge, a sanctuary. I need this. We all need this.”

  “I know,” said Reuben.

  “I wonder if you do,” said Felix. “How does a man who does not age, who does not grow old—how does such a man keep a family manse, a piece of land that is his? You cannot imagine what it means to leave all you hold sacred because you have to. You have to hide that you don’t change, you have to annihilate the person you are to all those you love. You have to abandon your home and your family and return decades later in some alien guise to strangers, pretending to be the long-lost uncle, the bastard son.…”

  Reuben nodded.

  He had never heard Felix’s voice so full of pain before, not even when he spoke of Marchent.

  “I was born in the most beautiful land imaginable,” said Felix, “near the River Rhine above a heavenly Alpine valley. I told you this before, didn’t I? I lost it a long time ago. I lost it forever. The fact is I do own the property again now—that very land, those ancient buildings. I bought it all back—lock, stock, and barrel. But it’s not my home, or my sanctuary. That can’t be reclaimed ever. It’s a new place for me now, with all the promise of a new home perhaps in a new time, and that’s the best that it can be. But my true home? That’s gone beyond reprieve.”

  “I understand,” said Reuben. “I really do. I understand as far as I can understand. I don’t know how but I do.”

  “But time hasn’t swallowed Nideck Point for me,” said Felix with that same low emotional heat. “No. Not yet. We still have time with Nideck Point before we have to slip away. And you have time, lots of time, with Nideck Point. You and Laura, and now your son, too, can grow up at Nideck Point. We have time to live a rich chapter here.”

  Felix broke off as though deliberately reining himself in.

  Reuben waited, desperate for a way to express what he felt. “I will behave, Felix,” he said. “I swear it. I won’t ruin it.”

  “You don’t want to ruin it for yourself, Reuben,” Felix said. “Forget about me. Forget Margon or Frank or Sergei. Forget Thibault. You don’t want to ruin it for yourself and for Laura. Reuben, you will lose everything here soon enough; don’t throw away what you have now.”

  “I don’t want to ruin it for you either,” said Reuben. “I know what it means to you, Nideck Point.”

  Felix didn’t answer.

  A strange thought occurred to Reuben.

  It took form as they drove up the sloping road from the gates to the terrace.

  “What if she needs Nideck Point?” he asked in a soft voice. “What if it’s Marchent’s sanctuary? What if she’s looked beyond, Felix, and she doesn’t want to go beyond? What if she wants to remain here too?”

  “Then she wouldn’t be suffering, would she, when she comes to you?” Felix responded.

  Reuben sighed. “Yes. Why would she be suffering?”

  “The world might be full of ghosts for all we know. They might have found their sanctuaries all around us. But they don’t show us their pain, do they? They don’t haunt as she’s haunting you.”

  Reuben shook his head. “She’s here, and she can’t break through. She’s wandering, alone, desperate for me to see her and hear her.” He thought about his dream again, the dream in which he’d seen Marchent in rooms filled with people who took no notice of her, the dream in which he’d seen her running through the darkness alone. He thought of those curious shadowy figures he’d seen vaguely in the dim forest of the dream. Had they been reaching out to her?

  In a low voice, he described the dream to Felix. “But there was more to it,” he confessed, “and now I’ve forgotten.”

  “That’s always the way with dreams,” Felix said.

  They sat parked before the house. The end of the terrace along the cliff was scarcely visible in the mist. Yet they could hear the sounds of hammers and saws from the workmen down the hill at the guesthouse. Rain or shine, the men worked on the guesthouse.

  Felix shivered. He drew in his breath, and then after a long pause, he placed his hand on Reuben’s shoulder. As always it had a calming effect on Reuben.

  “You’re a brave boy,” he said.

  “You think so?”

  “Oh yes, very,” said Felix. “That’s why she’s come to you.”

  Reuben was bewildered, lost suddenly in too many shifting mind pictures and half-remembered sensations, unable to reason. Of all things, he heard that dreamy haunting song again that the ghost radio had played inside the ghost room, and that spellbinding beat paralyzed him.

  “Felix, this house should be yours,” he said. “We don’t know what Marchent wants, why she haunts. But if I’m a brave boy, then I have to say it. This is your house, Felix. Not mine.”

  “No,” Felix said. He smiled faintly, sadly.

  “Felix, I know you own all the land around this property, all the land to the town and back and north and east. You should have the house back.”

  “No,” said Felix gently but resolutely.

  “If I deed it over to you, well, there’s no way you can stop me from doing it—.”

  “No,” Felix said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you did that,” Felix said, his eyes glazing with tears, “it wouldn’t be your home anymore. And then you and Laura might leave. And you and Laura are the warmth shining in the heart
of Nideck Point. And I can’t bear the thought of your going away. I can’t make Nideck Point my home again without you. Leave things as they are. My niece gave you this house to get rid of it, rid of her grief, and rid of her pain. Leave it as she willed it. And you brought me back to it. In a sense, you’ve given it to me already. Owning a great cluster of empty rooms might have meant little or nothing—without you.”

  Felix opened the door. “Now come,” he said, “let’s take a quick look at the progress on the guesthouse. We want it to be ready whenever your father comes to visit.”

  Yes, the guesthouse, and the promise of Phil coming to spend long leisurely visits with him. Phil had indeed promised. And Reuben wanted that so very much.

  9

  AS IT TURNED OUT, there was nothing on the news about the Man Wolf appearing again in Northern California. Reuben searched the web, and every local news source he knew. The papers, the television, all were silent on that score. But there was a big story, getting quite a bit of play in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Susie Blakely, an eight-year-old girl, missing since June from her home in Eureka, California, had at last been found—wandering near the town of Mountainville in northern Mendocino County. Authorities had confirmed that a carpenter, long suspected of the crime, had in fact abducted her, and kept her prisoner, often beating her and starving her until her escape from his trailer last night.

  The carpenter was believed dead as the result of an animal attack, which the child, too traumatized by her ordeal, had witnessed but could not describe.

  There was a picture of Susie, taken at the time she went missing. And there was that tiny radiant candle flame of a face.

  Reuben Googled the old stories. Her parents, obviously, were extremely good people who had made numerous appeals to the media. As for the older lady, Pastor Corrie George, who had taken the child from Reuben, there was no mention of her on the news at all.

  Had both the minister and the little girl agreed not to talk of the Man Wolf? Reuben was amazed. But he worried. How would the secret weigh upon both these innocent people? More than ever he was ashamed, yet had he not gone into the forest, would that precious little life have been snuffed out in that filthy trailer?

  Over a late lunch, with only the housekeeper, Lisa, in attendance, Reuben assured the Distinguished Gentlemen that he would never again risk their security with this kind of careless behavior. Stuart made a few sulky remarks to the effect that Reuben should have taken him with him, but Margon cut him off with a quick and imperious gesture, and went on to toast Celeste’s “marvelous news.”

  This didn’t stop Sergei from lecturing Reuben at length on the risks of what he had done, and Thibault joined in as well. It was agreed that Saturday they would fly out for a couple of days, this time to the “jungles” of South America, and there hunt together before returning home. Stuart was ecstatic at the prospect. And Reuben felt a low arousal very much akin to sexual desire. He could already see and feel the jungles around him, a great swooshing fabric of moist greenery, fragrant, tropical, delicious, so very different from the bleak cold of Nideck Point, and the thought of prowling there in such a dense and lawless universe, in search of “the most dangerous game” caused him to fall quiet.

  By suppertime, Reuben had conferred with Laura, who was genuinely overjoyed about the developments, and he and Lisa were removing all Laura’s belongings to a new office on the east side of the house. This would suit Laura wonderfully, as the room was flooded with morning light, and a good deal warmer than anything on the ocean side of Nideck Point as well.

  Reuben walked around the now-vacant bedroom for some half an hour, imagining the nursery, and then went to investigate all the necessary accoutrements online. Lisa chatted happily about the necessity of a good German nanny who would sleep in the room while the little boy was an infant, and all the marvelous Swiss shops from which the finest layette imaginable could be ordered, and the necessity of surrounding a sensitive little one with fine furnishings, soothing colors, the music of Mozart and Bach, and appealing paintings from the very start of his life.

  “Now, you must leave the nanny to me,” said Lisa forcefully as she straightened the white curtains in the new office. “And I will find the most marvelous of women to do this job for you. I have someone in mind. A beloved friend, yes, very beloved. You ask Master Felix. And you leave it to me.”

  Reuben was fine with it, yet something about her suddenly struck him as strange. There was a moment when Lisa turned and smiled at him that he had an uneasy feeling about her, that something was not quite right about her and what she was saying, but he shrugged it off.

  He stood watching her as she dusted Laura’s desk. Her mode of dress was prim, old-fashioned, even out-of-date. But she was spry in her movements and rather economical. It nudged at him, her whole demeanor, but he couldn’t quite figure out why.

  She was slender to the point of being wiry but unusually strong. He’d seen that when she forced the window which had been stuck fast with fresh paint. And there were other strange things about her.

  Like now, when she seated herself before Laura’s computer, turned it on, and quickly ascertained that it was in fact going “online” as it should.

  Reuben Golding, you are a sexist, he said to himself silently. Why do you find it surprising that a forty-five-year-old woman from Switzerland would know all about checking that a computer was online? He’d seen Lisa often enough on the household computer in Marchent’s old office. And she hadn’t been merely pecking away.

  She seemed to catch him studying her, and she gave him a surprisingly cold smile. Then giving his arm a squeeze as she passed, she moved out of the room.

  For all her attractiveness, which he did like very much, there was something mannish about her, and as he heard her steps echoing down the hall they sounded like those of a man. More shameless sexism, he thought. She did have the prettiest gray eyes, and her skin had a powdery soft look to it, and what was he thinking?

  He’d never paid much attention to Heddy or Jean Pierre, he realized. In fact, he was a little shy around them, not being used to “servants,” as Felix so easily called them. But there was something a little strange about them too, about their whispering, their almost stealthy movements, and the way that they never looked him in the eye.

  None of these people showed the slightest interest in anything ever said in their presence, and that was odd, when he thought about it, because the Distinguished Gentlemen talked so openly in front of them, at meals, about their various activities that you would have thought there would be a raised eyebrow, but there never was. Indeed no one ever dropped his voice when talking about anything just because the servants might hear.

  Well, Felix and Margon knew them well, these servants, so who was he to be questioning them, and they couldn’t have been more agreeable to everyone. So he ought to let it go. But the child was coming, and now that the child was coming, he was going to care about a lot of little things, perhaps, that he hadn’t cared about in the past.

  By evening, Celeste had changed the terms of her agreement slightly.

  Mort, after some agonizing reflection, saw absolutely no reason why he should be the husband of record here, and neither did she. It was agreed that Reuben would drive down to San Francisco on Friday and marry Celeste in a simple legal ceremony at City Hall. No blood test or waiting period was required by California law, thank heaven, and a small “prenup” was being drafted by Simon Oliver that would guarantee a simple no-fault divorce settlement as soon as the child was born. Grace was taking care of the money involved.

  Celeste and Mort had already moved into the guest bedroom at the Russian Hill house. They’d live with Grace and Phil until the baby came into the world and went to live with its father. But Mort didn’t want to be around for the wedding.

  Yes, Grace admitted, Celeste was angry, angry at the whole world. Prepare for some ranting. She was angry she was pregnant, and somehow Reuben had become an archvillain, but “
We have to think of the baby.” Reuben agreed.

  A little dazed and angry himself, Reuben called Laura. She was fine with the marriage. Reuben’s son would be his legal offspring. Why not?

  “Would you consider going with me?” asked Reuben.

  “Of course, I’ll go with you,” she said.

  10

  HE WAS AWAKENED in the middle of the night by the howling—the same lone Morphenkind voice he’d heard the night before.

  It was about two a.m. He didn’t know how long it had been going on, only that it had finally penetrated his thin chaotic dreams and nudged him towards consciousness. He sat up in the darkened bedroom and listened.

  It went on for a long time, but gradually became fainter as if the Morphenkind was moving slowly and steadily away from Nideck Point. It had a tragic, plaintive quality as before. It was positively baleful. And then he couldn’t hear it anymore.

  An hour later when he couldn’t get back to sleep, Reuben put on his robe and took a walk through the corridors of the second floor. He felt uneasy. He knew what he was doing. He was looking for Marchent. He found it an agony to wait for her to find him.

  In fact, waiting for her was like waiting for the wolf transformation in those early days after he’d first changed, and it filled him with dread. But it soothed his nerves to make a circuit of the upstairs hallways. They were illuminated only by the occasional sconce, little better than night-lights, but he could see the beautiful polish on the boards.

  The smell of floor wax was almost sweet.

  He liked the spaciousness, the firm wood that barely creaked under his slippers, and the glimpse of the open rooms where he could just make out the pale squares of the undraped windows revealing the faint sheen of a wet gray nighttime sky.

  He moved along the back hallway, and then turned into one of the smaller rooms, never occupied by anyone since he’d come, and tried to see out of the window into the forest behind the house.

  He listened for that howling again, but he didn’t hear it. He could make out a very dim light in the second floor of the service building to his left. He thought that was Heddy’s room, but he wasn’t sure.