“No!” he said, pointing at Logan. “Make him go!”
“He’s here to help, Zephraim,” Nahum said in the same soothing voice he’d used before.
“He’ll tell! He’ll be telling them others!”
“No, he won’t. You remember Harrison, here—you met him as a sprat. He’s done staked his word on this man. And that scientist fellow who came—he never told a living soul about you, now, did he? And that was, oh, eight, nine months back.”
Zephraim looked at Logan with what the enigmalogist sensed was a confused welter of emotions—suspicion, uncertainty, fear, maybe a faint stirring of hope. “How can he help?” he said finally in a despairing voice, turning away from them.
“Don’t know, exactly. Not sure he done, neither. But they want to watch your turning.”
“No!” Zephraim said, wheeling back again. “It’s not for others to see! I don’t—”
But the man stopped in mid-sentence and looked away. Logan saw he was suddenly staring at the boarded-up window. It was no longer afterglow that streamed through the cracks between the boards—now it was moonlight.
The three elders exchanged glances but said nothing more. The air in the room became strangely charged, as if with electricity. It seemed everyone there was waiting for something to happen.
Which, Logan realized, was precisely the case.
Zephraim remained motionless, staring at the boarded window, for perhaps fifteen minutes. During that time, the moonbeams grew a little stronger, gilding the rough edges of the wood with a pale, ethereal hue. Logan was reminded of the color he’d seen re-created in Feverbridge’s secret lab.
Now Zephraim abruptly stood up. He began to move restlessly around the little room: picking up the bowl of gruel, then replacing it; pacing while muttering under his breath. Then, one by one, he stopped at the five men lined up against the far wall, looking intently at them in turn. Lastly he came to Logan, stared hard into his eyes. Zephraim’s own eyes had turned red-rimmed, bloodshot. Almost unwillingly, Logan allowed his empathetic senses to reach out to the man. He still sensed suspicion and uncertainty. But the fear was now gone. And there was something else: while he sensed the strangeness, the unnaturalness, he’d felt the first time he stood outside the walled compound, he felt none of the terrible wrongness of the two murder sites he had witnessed.
Zephraim turned away and, pacing again, resumed his low muttering. It might have been a trick of the light, but the man’s skin seemed to take on a darker, rougher cast. “Close the door,” he said roughly.
Nobody moved.
“Close the door!” he almost barked.
After a moment, Esau moved toward the door. He did so with the reluctant but familiar motion of someone who had done this countless times before. When the door closed, shutting out the light from the landing, the room immediately grew dim. And yet not as dim as Logan might have expected: light from the second night of the full moon seeped strongly between the cracks of the boarded-up window.
And now a change came over Zephraim. Several hives, or weals, began breaking out over his skin—large, irregularly shaped, almost black with subcutaneous blood. A low rattle began to sound in his throat. He moved back and forth irregularly, once, twice, all the time shaking his head so that his hair flew like a dark corona around him. It must have been a trick of the light, but the man’s beard, the hair on his arms, seemed to grow thicker and more rough; the nails of his hands appeared to lengthen and spread. The three elders exchanged glances once more.
Zephraim growled. And then—with a single, animal-like bound—he leapt for the window.
“Zephraim!” cried Nahum. “No—!”
But it was too late: with several violent, powerful yanks, Zephraim pulled the wooden planks away from the window with a harsh splintering sound. The light of the full moon streamed in, unimpeded. And then, quite suddenly, Zephraim seemed to go mad: he began rushing back and forth, growling; running to the window and throwing his face outward, baying to the moonlight; then, turning away, he ran around the room, falling onto all fours before rising to his feet again, overturning the stool, picking up the clay jug of water and dashing it to the ground, where it broke in a million pieces.
Immediately, the elders turned and made for the door. With both hands, Nahum took Albright and Logan by their elbows and propelled them out onto the landing, where he turned back, closed the door, and padlocked it.
“What just happened?” Logan said, shocked by what he had just witnessed, unlike anything in his long experience.
“I warned you,” Nahum replied. “It’s the changing time. The moon-sickness—it’s strong in him.”
Beyond the door, the sound of crashing and baying continued unabated.
“How long will it last?” Albright asked.
“ ’Til moonfall.”
“And is he a danger to others until then?” Logan asked.
“No,” Nahum said. “Not to others.”
And—looking into the man’s eyes—Logan suddenly understood. The lock on the door, the unusual padding on the walls of the garret room: they were not there to protect others from Zephraim…but to protect him from himself.
32
The group made the long trip back down through the rambling house in silence. Gradually, the sounds from behind the locked door grew more remote. Exiting the building, the five returned to the fire pit and sat down once again. Here, Logan could once again hear, faintly, Zephraim’s growling and baying, through the boarded window that he had torn open.
The three elders looked at each other, then at Logan and Albright. They seemed both abashed and relieved—abashed at the display of such a strange and embarrassing phenomenon; relieved that the display was over.
“This ‘moon-sickness’ Zephraim suffers from,” Logan asked. “It runs in your family, doesn’t it?”
Nahum nodded. “From what my grandpappy told me, there’s always been one or two of the clan been touched, more or less. But none like Zephraim.”
So with Zephraim, the syndrome—or condition—has found full flower. Logan thought of what Fred the bartender had said of the Blakeneys: his reference to “tainted blood.” “What form does it usually take, then?”
Nahum thought a moment. “Folks get agitated. Skin turns dark in spots. Boils come out, like them you saw on Zephraim.”
“And you say it lasts until the moon goes down?”
Nahum nodded.
“But only during a full moon—right?”
“That’s right.”
So it was the intensity of the moonlight, the light of the full moon, that was necessary to trigger the effect. In that way, it was not unlike the experiment with the shrews that Feverbridge had demonstrated to him.
“What if it’s a cloudy or a rainy night?” Albright asked. “If the moon is obscured, say?”
“Nothing happens,” said Aaron.
Logan thought for a minute. “The effects sound uncomfortable. Zephraim certainly seemed to be suffering from them. And yet he sought out the moonlight—he ripped the boards off the window. Why?”
“Don’t rightly know,” Nahum said. “Zephraim, he don’t like to talk about it much. Best as I can make out, you’re drawn to it—drawn despite yourself. It’s a craving, like. And…I think it gives a feeling of—well, some kind of power.”
“Like a wolf,” Albright said.
Nahum nodded. His eyes had been cast downward, but now he looked up, directly at Logan, and the moonlight reflected brightly on the corneas. “But no matter how bad he gits, he never hurts anyone. He never gits violent.”
The other two nodded vigorously.
“Has anybody but us ever seen the…the changing time?” Albright asked. “Besides Dr. Feverbridge, I mean?”
“Many years back,” said the patriarch, Esau. “Uncle Levi, he used to get the moon-sickness pretty bad. One time he done scaled the wall. I think one or two folks from Pike Hollow saw him running toward the woods.”
Logan and Albright exchange
d glances. That, perhaps, explained where the rumors came from.
“Ever since,” Esau went on, “we’ve always kept kinfolk with the moon-sickness locked up on full moon nights.”
“Dr. Feverbridge,” Logan said, turning to Nahum. “Did he want anything else from Zephraim—other than the swab from his cheek, I mean?”
Nahum hesitated once again. “Yes. He wanted…” He pantomimed drawing blood from the cubital vein. “Paid us two hundred fifty dollar to do it. I done told you—Rebekah had the chest fever real bad.” He repeated this as if to explain away a lingering guilt.
“I understand,” Logan said. He was still trying to process what he had just witnessed in the garret room: the bizarre transformation—no other word was sufficient—of Zephraim Blakeney. It was like the change the short-tailed shrews had exhibited: except this went beyond mere behavior; there were actual morphological changes, subtle but undeniable. Although he had no idea of what, exactly, the underlying biologic cause was, it was evident there was a genetic trait in the Blakeney clan—perhaps because of inbreeding, perhaps just due to a fluke in their particular genome—that rendered them hypersensitive to moonlight. And Zephraim was the most sensitive of all. No wonder Dr. Feverbridge had sought him out, paid handsomely for samples of blood and DNA. It seemed to dovetail with the lines of research mentioned in both articles Logan had seen on Jessup’s computer screen: the re-creation of moonlight and morphological change.
He realized Nahum was asking him a question and, with effort, pushed these speculations aside. “I’m sorry?”
“I said: can you help us?”
Logan took a deep breath. “I’m not sure. I hope so. I’ll do my best. There are a few things I need to look into—and the sooner the better.”
The group fell silent. Zephraim’s distant howlings became audible once again. The three elders shifted on the rough wooden seat, clearly agitated.
“I have one last question,” Logan said. “Ever since I entered your compound, I’ve sensed fear—fear from all of you. What, exactly, is it that you’re afraid of?”
The three looked at him in disbelief. “What you think, mister?” Nahum said. “If there’s some monster out there—something killing people, tearing ’em up—don’t you think we feared of it, too?”
“And with the moon-sickness running in our kinfolk,” Aaron said, “that critter just might try and seek us out on purpose.”
“That’s enough to frighten anybody,” said Albright. “And if that wasn’t sufficient, there’s the hatred and distrust of all the locals—not to mention the plans Krenshaw is putting together.” He stood up. “Thank you all—for letting us on your land, for trusting us…and for letting us see Zephraim. We’ll be going now.”
They walked back down the path to the massive wall of twigs. Nahum undid a spool of coiled wire, opened the carefully hidden door, then nodded solemnly to both of them in turn. They ducked out through the opening and the door was immediately closed behind them. With no light at all now save for that of the full moon, filtering down through the branches, the surrounding forest was a woven braid of almost unrelieved black. Albright reached into his pocket, pulled out a flashlight, and turned it on.
“Do you really think you’re going to be able to follow that path?” Logan asked. “Even with a flashlight? I could barely make it out in daylight.”
“Are you trying to be insulting?” Albright replied. “That’s the second time today you’ve questioned my woodcraft. Watch this.” He snapped off the light and returned it to his pocket. “I’ll take us back to the road using nothing but the moonlight. Not as impressive perhaps as what you just witnessed in there, but I think it’ll stop you from asking a third time. Put your hand on my shoulder now—wouldn’t want you getting lost. And for God’s sake, move as quietly as you can: it’s a full moon, remember, and whatever killed Jessup and the others is out there—somewhere.”
33
They walked all the way back to Albright’s pickup and drove the short distance down 3A to his house, without speaking. When Albright got out, Logan did the same, automatically following him inside.
“Well, what do you think?” Albright said, breaking the silence at last. “I’ll bet even you’ve never seen anything like that before. I know I haven’t.”
Logan just shook his head. “I guess I’ve got some work to do.”
“Well, I suggest that you hurry it up.” Albright took the rifle off the wall, grabbed a box of bullets from the mantelpiece, and loaded it. Then he leaned the rifle up against the fireplace. “Because tomorrow’s the last night of the full moon—and it sounds like our friend Krenshaw has a real hard-on to prosecute some, ah, justice.”
Logan thanked him for his time and effort, then left the house and drove back to his own cabin at Cloudwater. He had a great deal to think about—and not much time to do it in.
First, he accessed the Internet and looked into possible inherited conditions that might explain what was afflicting Zephraim. The darkening of the skin, he suspected, might be connected to melanin—perhaps a hyperpigmentation of brown eumelanin that was—bizarrely—produced by reflected moonlight instead of direct sunlight. If this was the case, then the phenomenon of photoprotection—suites of molecular mechanisms designed to protect humans from damaging sunlight—might be working in reverse, so to speak, endowing him with actual physical benefits from the moon’s beams. If a sudden and dramatic spike in melanin production was responsible, then neuromelanin—a strange and little-understood polymer that was found in the brain—might also be responsible for his marked change in behavior, especially if it could be linked to a spike in the secretion of a hormone like adrenaline.
Along the same lines, the distended nails that Logan had thought he’d seen emerge from the ends of Zephraim’s fingers could be attributed to hyperkeratosis—which, since it was also known to produce skin irritations such as acne and keratosis pilaris, could account for the weals he’d seen appear on Zephraim’s skin.
And then of course there was Ambras syndrome, or hypertrichosis—the “werewolf syndrome”—that caused abnormal hair growth over the entire body. The bearded ladies of the freak shows of elder days were frequently sufferers of this affliction.
Hyperpigmentation, hyperkeratosis, hypertrichosis—all these could potentially be behind, scientifically, what he had seen in the garret room of the Blakeney residence. But they could not explain the rapid onset with which all three manifested themselves—nor could they explain how, presumably, they all disappeared with the same alacrity once the moon went down. And, of course, there was no record in the online medical and scientific journals that Logan consulted of any of these conditions being brought on by moonlight.
Was it possible that what Zephraim—and certain others in his clan, to a lesser degree—was suffering from was some genetic abnormality, or perhaps some syndrome, as yet unknown to science? Sudden hair growth, increased physical ability, long nails, darkened skin (which only made the additional hair appear that much more dramatic)—these all sounded like the historical werewolf sightings, recounted over the centuries, that he’d read by the dozens, although—as usual with hysterical observations—exaggerated by fear and ignorance. There was one difference, however—in Zephraim’s case, while there might be certain physical changes…there was no bloodlust, no furious spasms of violence.
At least, so the Blakeneys had told him. And the fear they’d exhibited; the way they had locked Zephraim up for his own protection—and, most of all, the feelings he had sensed from Zephraim after the change—convinced Logan they were telling the truth.
Then there was something else—something Logan found himself almost unwilling to confront. And that was Chase Feverbridge. Feverbridge had learned about Zephraim, and about the unique “moon-sickness” that the Blakeney clan suffered from. He’d taken DNA and blood samples. But none of this had come up in his demonstration to Logan, that night in the secret lab behind the fire station. That demonstration had focused on how moonlight?
??pure moonlight, filtered through the dust of the moon’s atmosphere but unhindered by the pollution that now surrounded the earth—could cause behavioral modifications. Feverbridge’s words came back to him: Was it possible this unusual quality of light, when viewed by diurnal creatures on earth, could affect the brain sufficiently to cause changes in behavior? And could the full moon alone be enough to achieve that? That was the beginnings of a working hypothesis: that the effect of this special, polarized moonlight, entering the brain, could cause an unusual response: fear, excitability, aggression.
Feverbridge had demonstrated—and Logan had seen—the results for himself. But those results, though dramatic, had all been behavioral—as posited in the first article he’d read on Jessup’s computer. What he’d just witnessed happen to Zephraim had been not only behavioral, but morphological. Albeit temporarily, albeit only to a relatively small degree, Zephraim had physically changed.
Yet this had not made up any part of the experiment Logan had seen in the secret lab, although it had perhaps been hinted at in the second, final article he’d read on Jessup’s computer, published eight or nine months earlier. There were any number of possible reasons for this omission. Perhaps Feverbridge had been unable to make any viable use of Zephraim’s DNA. He had hoped to—hence the optimistic article—but ultimately it had proven impossible. It was quite possible the Blakeneys manifested a genetic trait that was simply too unusual or exotic to be manipulated in a laboratory…and so Feverbridge had fallen back to his original research.
Another possibility was that he had not mentioned the Blakeneys to Logan because he’d promised to keep their secret. After all, Logan had made the same sort of promise—the old scientist would not be likely to betray a confidence like that.
And yet, there was one other scenario running through the back of Logan’s mind—one that he did not wish to pursue. And it had to do with the dog run he’d seen while visiting Laura Feverbridge.