As the sun set, he drove into Mill Valley in a thin noiseless rain, and up Panoramic Highway till he found Laura’s house—a small gray-shingled cottage way back from the road, scarcely visible for the trees that surrounded it.
He drove past it and found a small gulley in which to hide the Porsche, and there inside the car, he fell into a fitful uneasy sleep. The change woke him much sooner than he expected.
15
THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY when he entered it, the door unlocked and open to the back porch.
He’d come down through the trees. There was no one anywhere near; no stakeout, certainly; no police voices in the vicinity—in fact, there were no voices at all.
The back bedroom was the sweet picture that he remembered. All the same sweet scents were there.
The high-backed oak bed was draped with a soft beautifully crafted patchwork quilt. A small brass lamp burned on the night table, giving a warm light through its parchment shade. And nestled among the pillows in the oak rocking chair was a faded handmade rag doll with a carefully stitched face of almond-shaped button eyes, rose-red lips, and long yellow yarn hair. A small bookshelf held row after row of books by Harper Dennys and Jacob Dennys. And even a book by L. J. Dennys on the wildflowers of Mount Tamalpais and the surrounding area.
The bedroom opened onto the kitchen, divinely rustic with its big black stove and blue-and-white china cups on hooks beneath the open white shelves.
Potato vines grew from glasses on the windowsill above the sink. Bright white and gold daisies filled a blue vase in the center of the small white table. And a bright impressionistic landscape of a walled rose garden hung on the wall. The signature was “Collette D.”
Beyond was a spacious bathroom with its own small iron fireplace, a huge shower, and a claw-foot tub. Opposite, a narrow stairs went up to a second floor.
Then came the large dining room with its vintage round oak table and heavy press-back chairs, a hutch filled with more antique blue-and-white china, and a living room of comfortable old chairs, draped with artful quilts and blankets, gathered as if for a tête-à-tête before the fieldstone hearth. A small fire was burning deep in the fireplace, well protected by a screen. A corner floor lamp, old-fashioned brass, gave a soft, agreeable light.
There were large bright garden paintings by Collette D. throughout the house, rather tame and predictable, perhaps, but brilliantly colorful and comforting and sweet. And lots of photographs everywhere—many including the cheerful weathered face of Jacob Dennys, white-haired even as a young man.
There was a flat-screen television in the living room, and even a small one in the kitchen, on the counter. There were recent newspapers by the living room hearth. “Man Wolf Frees Kidnapped Children” screamed the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Mill Valley paper had opted for: “Children Found Safe in Mill Valley; Two Dead.” Both papers had very similar drawings of the Man Wolf—an anthropoid figure with lupine ears and a ghastly fanged snout.
It was a house full of windows, and everywhere they sparkled with the soft, whispering rain. Walls were carefully painted in deep earth tones, and the woodwork was natural, and gleaming with wax.
He was in the living room by the fire when she came in the back door. He slipped into the hallway. He could see her in the kitchen, setting down a brown paper sack of groceries and what looked like a folded newspaper.
Her hair was tied back by a black ribbon at the nape of her neck. She slipped off her heavy corduroy jacket and threw it aside. She wore a soft gray high-neck sweater and a long dark skirt. There was a weariness, a dissatisfaction, in her gesture. Her sweet scent slowly filled the house. He knew now he’d know this scent anywhere—its unmistakable blend of personal warmth and that subtle citrus perfume.
He was rapt looking at her, at her tapering hands and her smooth forehead, at the soft white hair that framed her face, at her ice-blue eyes sweeping absently over the room.
He drew closer to the kitchen door.
She was anxious, uncertain. She moved dejectedly to the white table and was about to sit down when she saw him standing in the hall.
“Beautiful Laura,” he whispered. What do you see? The Man Wolf, the monster, the beast that rips his victims limb from limb?
In shock, she clapped her hands to her face, staring at him through her long fingers. And her eyes filled with tears. Suddenly she began to cry aloud in deep heartrending sobs.
She opened her arms as she ran to him. He stepped forward to embrace her, and he pressed her warmly to his chest.
“Beautiful Laura,” he whispered again, and picked her up as he had before, and carried her into the rear bedroom and set her on the bed.
He tore the ribbon from her hair. It came down in waves around her—white, streaked with yellow in the light of the nearby lamp.
He could scarcely keep from stripping off her clothes. It seemed an eternity that she struggled with buttons and clips as she peeled them away. Finally she was naked and pink against him, her nipples like petals, and the dark hair between her legs the color of smoke. He covered her mouth with kisses, and heard that deep growl come out of his chest, that animalian growl that a man could never make. He couldn’t stop himself from kissing her all over, on her throat and her breasts and her belly and on the insides of her silky thighs.
He cradled her head in his hands as she ran her fingers over his face, digging deep into the undercoat of soft wolf-fur beneath the long coarser hair.
She was still crying, but in his ears it was like the rain on the windows—like a song.
16
WHILE SHE SLEPT, he built up the living room fire. He wasn’t cold, no, not at all, but he wanted the spectacle of it, the flicker against the ceiling and the walls. He wanted the bright blaze itself.
He was standing with one foot on the low hearth when she came into the room.
She’d put on a white flannel nightgown, like the one he’d torn up so greedily the first night. It had thick antique lace at the wrists and around the collar. Little pearl buttons glinted in the dark.
Her hair was brushed and lustrous.
She sat down in the old chair to the left of the fire, and pointed tentatively to the bigger chair, the battered and worn chair to the right, which was large enough for him.
He sat down and gestured for her to come.
She quickly moved to his lap, and he held her shoulders in his right arm and she rested her head on his chest.
“They’re searching for you,” she said. “You know that.”
“Of course.” He still was not used to the depth of this voice or its huskiness. Maybe he was lucky that he had a voice at all.
“You’re not afraid here, alone, in this house?” he asked. “I see that you aren’t. I’m asking why.”
“What is there to fear?” she answered. She was speaking confidentially, naturally, her hand playing with the long hair on his shoulder. Gradually her fingers found the nipple amid the hair of his chest. She pinched it.
“Wicked girl!” he whispered. He winced. He gave that low hungry growl again and heard her muted laughter.
“Truly,” he said. “I’m afraid for you; I’m afraid for you alone in this house.”
“I grew up in this house,” she said simply, without drama. “Nothing has ever hurt me in this house.” She paused, then said: “You’ve come to me here in this house.”
He didn’t answer. He was stroking her hair.
“You’re the one I fear for,” she said. “I’ve been sick with fear for you since you left. Even now, I’m afraid that they’ve followed you here, or someone’s seen you.…”
“They haven’t followed me,” he said. “I would hear them if they were out there. I would pick up their scent.”
They were quiet for a while. He was watching the fire.
“I know who you are,” he said. “I read your story.”
She didn’t answer.
“Everyone today has a story; the world’s an archive. I read about the things
that have happened to you.”
“Then you have the advantage, as they say,” she replied. “Because I do not have the slightest idea who you really are. Or why you came here.”
“I don’t know myself at the moment,” he said.
“Then you weren’t always what you are now?” she asked.
“No.” He laughed under his breath. “Most certainly not.” His tongue pressed against his fangs, ran against the silky black liplike tissue around his mouth. He shifted comfortably in the chair, and her weight was like nothing to him.
“You can’t stay here, I mean in the city, I mean here. They’ll find you. The world’s too small now, too controlled. If they catch the slightest hint that you’re in the forest, they’ll swarm over it. It only looks like a wilderness. It’s not.”
“I know that,” he said. “I know that very well.”
“But you take risks, terrible risks.”
“I hear voices,” he said. “I hear voices and I go to them. It’s as if I can’t help but go to them. Someone will suffer and die if I don’t.”
Slowly, he described it to her, pretty much the way he’d described it to Jim—the scents, the mystery of the scents. He talked about the various attacks, how the victims had been crying out in the darkness, how it had been so clear to him who was evil and who was good. He told her about the man who shot his wife.
“Yes, he would have killed the children,” she said. “I heard the story on the way home tonight in the car.”
“I didn’t get there in time to save the woman,” he said. “I am not infallible. I am something that can make terrible mistakes.”
“But you’re careful, so very careful,” she insisted. “You were careful with that boy up north.”
“The boy up north?”
“The reporter,” she said, “the handsome one, in the house in Mendocino—up north.”
He hesitated. Current of pain. Pain in the heart.
He didn’t answer.
“They surprised that woman, didn’t they?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“If they hadn’t, you would have—.” She stopped.
“Yes,” he said. “They surprised her. And they surprised me.”
He went quiet.
After a long time, she asked softly, tentatively, “What brought you down this far?”
He didn’t understand.
“Was it the voices, that there are so many more here?”
He didn’t answer. But he thought he understood. She was thinking he’d come down from the forests to the cities of the Bay Area. It made a kind of sense.
He was burning to pour it all out for her, burning. But he couldn’t. Not yet. And he couldn’t forsake holding her like this, the power of it, the protective and loving power. He couldn’t tell her that he wasn’t always like this, that he was in fact “that boy up north.” If he confessed that to her and she turned from him in scorn or indifference it would cut him to his soul.
That boy up north. He tried to picture himself as just Reuben, Celeste’s Sunshine Boy, Grace’s baby, Jim’s little brother, Phil’s son. Why would that vapid “boy” interest her? It seemed absurd to think that he would. After all, Marchent Nideck hadn’t really been interested in him. She’d thought him sweet and gentle and a poet, and a rich boy with the means to take Nideck Point off her hands. But that was not interest, really; and that was hardly love.
What he felt for Laura was love.
His closed his eyes and listened to the slow rhythm of her breathing. She’d fallen asleep.
The forest whispered beyond the windows. Scent of bobcat. It maddened him. He wanted to stalk it, kill it, feast on it. He could taste it. His mouth was watering. Sound of the creeks running deep in the redwoods; sound of the owls in the high branches, of things unnamable slithering in the brush.
He wondered what Laura would think if she saw him as he was in the forest, crushing that thrashing hissing bobcat and gorging on his hot flesh. That was the thing about these feasts: the flesh was so fresh. The blood was still pumping in it, the heart still quivering. What would she think if she really saw what it was like?
She had no idea, really, what it meant to see a man’s arm ripped out by the root, to see a head torn off a neck. She had no idea. We human beings live perpetually insulated from the horrors that happen all around us. No matter what she’d suffered, she had not witnessed the viscous ugliness of that kind of death. No, it had to be unreal to her, even Laura who had endured so much.
Only those who work day in and day out with the killers of the world know what they really are. It hadn’t taken him long as a reporter to realize that—why the cops he’d interviewed were so very different from other people, why Celeste was becoming so different as she worked on more and more cases for the district attorney, or why Grace was different because she saw the bodies rolled into the emergency room with the knives in their bellies and the bullet wounds in their heads.
But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren’t there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn’t smell the scent of evil; they didn’t hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.
A frightening sadness had come over him. He wanted her so much. But what right did he have to tell her these things? What right had he to seduce her with “stories” that made it all sound so meaningful when it was perhaps not meaningful—when it was violent and primitive and dark?
Just let me have these moments with her, he mused. Let me just hold her here by this fire, in this small house of simple things, and let this be all right for now.
He drifted off, feeling her heart next to his heart.
An hour must have passed, perhaps more time than that.
He opened his eyes. The forest was at peace, from one border to another.
But something was wrong out there. Something was very wrong. A voice pushed at the layers and layers of muffled sound that surrounded him. A voice rose thin and reedy and desperate.
It was a man screaming for help. Far beyond the forest. He knew the direction. He knew the scent would come.
He carried her to the back of the house and laid her gently in the bed. She woke with a start, rising up on her elbows.
“You’re going.”
“I have to go, it’s calling me,” he said.
“They’ll catch you. They’re everywhere!” she pleaded. She started to cry. “Listen to me!” she pleaded. “You’ve got to go back up north, to the forests, away from here.”
He bent quickly to kiss her.
“You’ll see me again very soon.”
She rushed after him but he was halfway across the clearing in a second and he leapt high up into the redwoods and began his swift journey towards the coast road.
Hours later, he stood in a small grove of trees looking out at the great cold Pacific under a lowering silver sky. The moon hung behind those rain clouds. The moon shone through to the tilting, shifting surface of the sea. Oh, if the moon only had a secret, if the moon only held a truth. But the moon was just the moon.
He’d tracked the car in which the man had been imprisoned, descended from the trees onto the roof of it, and when it slowed for a dangerous curve on Highway 1, he had torn the doors open, and dragged the ugly, hardened thieves out into the dark. They’d shot the man’s companion—but kept him alive, bound, gagged, suffocating in the trunk of the car. They’d meant to force him to an automatic teller window, for the few hundred dollars they could get from him, then kill him as they had the other man.
He’d feasted on both of the thieves before he freed the prisoner and left him on the cliff above the sea with the promise that help would soon come. After that, he had roamed the cliffs in the salt wind, letting the gusting rain wash away the blood from his paws, from his mouth, from his chest.
Now it was approaching dawn and he was exhausted and lonely as if he’d never held Laura in his arms.
We all need love, don’t we
, even the worst killers, the worst animals! We all need love.
He traveled back fast to where he’d left his Porsche off the Panoramic Highway, and waited there in the glade until the change came on. Again, it surprised him, seemed more amenable to his will. He flexed and forced it to greater and greater speed.
He drove the car into Mill Valley and put up at the charming and beautiful little hotel called the Mill Valley Inn. Best place to hide right on Throckmorton Street in the very center of town. Because now they really would be looking for the Man Wolf in Marin County and he had to see Laura before he went north, perhaps for a long time.
17
AROUND NOON, he had just parked downhill from Laura’s house when she suddenly came out, got into an olive-green four-door Jeep, and drove down into the center of town, from which he’d only just come.
She went into a cheerful little café, and he saw her take her place at a table inside the front window alone.
He parked, and went inside.
She appeared wrapped in solitude as she sat there, snug in her corduroy coat, her face fresh and lovely as it had been last night. Her hair was tied back again with a black ribbon, and the symmetry of her face was flawless. It was the first time he’d seen her in the light of day.
He sat down opposite her without a word. He was dressed now more like his old self in a halfway-decent khaki jacket and a clean shirt and a tie—clothes he’d bought yesterday—and he’d scrubbed himself in the shower for an hour before checking out of the hotel. His hair was too thick and too long, but it was thoroughly combed.
“Who are you!” she demanded. She set the menu down and glanced angrily towards the back of the restaurant for the waiter.
Reuben didn’t answer. There was no waiter visible in the back of the restaurant just now. Only a couple of other tables were occupied.
“Look, I’m dining here alone,” she said politely but firmly. “Now, please go.”
Then her face changed. It went from anger and annoyance to thinly concealed alarm. At once her eyes hardened and so did her voice: