Laura began to cry desperately, almost as if she was laughing, her sobs and cries erupting uncontrollably. She knelt down beside him and he took her in his arms. He saw the blood being smeared all over her white gown, all over her hair.
But he held her close, stroking her, trying to calm her. Her cries were heartbroken. Finally, she sobbed without making a sound.
Reuben gently kissed the top of her head, and her forehead. He brought up a knuckle of his paw and touched her lips. Smeared with blood. Too much blood. Unspeakable.
“Laura,” he whispered. She held fast to him as if she was drowning, as if some invisible wave might sweep her away.
The man’s remains were hairless now, as if there had never been any hair at all. Only a coarse and barely visible dust covered him and the surrounding carpet.
For a long moment, they remained still, Laura crying ever more softly, exhausting herself in her tears, and then finally growing quiet.
“I have to bury him now,” said Reuben. “There are shovels back there in that shed.”
“Bury him! Reuben, you can’t.” Laura looked up at him as if awakened from a nightmare. She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “Reuben, you can’t simply bury him. Surely you realize how valuable, how utterly priceless, this body is—to you!”
She climbed to her feet and looked down at the man from a little ways off as if she was afraid to go closer. The head now lay on its side, the left eye half closed and yellowish. The flesh of the face and body was faintly yellowish too.
“In this body are all the cellular secrets of this power,” Laura said. “If ever you are to find out, if ever you are to know. Why, you can’t discard this thing. That’s unthinkable.”
“And who’s going to do the studying of this body, Laura?” asked Reuben. He was so exhausted that he feared the change would come, too soon. He needed his strength to dig a hole deep enough for this being’s grave. “Who’s going to biopsy the organs, remove the brain, do the autopsy? I can’t do those things. You can’t do those things. Who can?”
“But there has to be some way to preserve it, to save it so that someone eventually can.”
“What? Stow it in a freezer? Risk having somebody find it here, connect it to us? You are seriously suggesting we conceal this body on the premises of this house where we live?”
“I don’t know,” she said frantically. “But Reuben, you can’t simply take this thing, this mysterious thing, and consign it to the dirt, you can’t just bury it. My God, this is an unimaginable organism, of which the world knows nothing. It points the way to understanding—.” She broke off. She stood quiet for a moment, her hair tumbling down on either side of her face like a veil. “Could it be put somewhere … where someone else would find it? I mean miles from here.”
“Why, to what purpose?” Reuben asked.
“What if it were found, and analyzed and blamed for all the crimes that have occurred?” She looked at Reuben. “Just think about it for a minute. Don’t say no. This thing tried to kill us. Say, we left it somewhere off the highway, in plain sight, so to speak, and what if they found some strange mixture of human DNA and wolf fluids … the Chrism, as he called it—.”
“Laura, the mitochondrial component of the DNA would prove that this wasn’t the being who slaughtered the others,” Reuben said. “Even I know that much science.”
He stared at the head again. It seemed even more shriveled than before, and to be darkening slightly like a piece of fruit ripening into decay. The body too was shrinking and darkening, the trunk particularly, though the feet were shriveling to nubs. Just nubs.
“And do you realize what this creature told us?” said Reuben, patiently. “He sentenced me to death for the trouble I caused, the ‘prodigious achievements,’ as he called them, the fact that I’d attracted notice. These things want secrecy; they depend on it. And how do you think the other Morphenkinder would respond if I dumped this body unceremoniously into the public domain?”
She nodded.
“There are others, Laura! This thing managed to tell us a great deal.”
“You’re right, on all counts,” she said. She too was watching the subtle changes in the body and the head. “I could swear it’s … disappearing,” she said.
“Well, shriveling, drying up.”
“Disappearing,” she said again.
She came back to him and sat down beside him. “Look at it,” she said. “The bones inside are disintegrating. It’s flattening out. I want to touch it, but I can’t.”
Reuben didn’t answer.
The body and the head were deflating, flattening; she was right. The flesh now looked powdery and porous.
“Look!” she said. “Look at the carpet. Look where the blood—.”
“I see it,” he whispered. The blood was a tissue-thin glaze on the surface of the rug. And the glaze was silently cracking into a million tiny bits and pieces. The blood was turning into infinitesimal flakes. And the flakes were dissolving. “Look, look at your gown.”
The blood was crusting, flaking off there as well. She crumpled the flannel, brushed at it. She reached up to grasp the flaky residue that still clung to her hair. It was all crumbling.
“I see now,” Reuben said. “I understand. I understand everything.” He was in awe.
“Understand what?” she asked.
“Why they keep saying the Man Wolf is human. Don’t you see? They’re lying. They don’t have proof of this or anything else. This is what happens to us, to all particles of us, to all fluids. Look. They don’t have any samples from the Man Wolf. They took samples of what they found at the crime scenes, and probably even before they’d completed their work, the samples were no good, dissolving, dissolving like this.”
He crawled forward and leaned down over the head. The face had fallen in. The head was a small puddle on the rug. He sniffed at it. Decomposition, human scent, animal scent—a mixture, subtle, very subtle, so subtle. Was he himself scentless like this to others, or only to others of this species?
He sat back again on his heels. He looked at his own paws, at the soft pads that had replaced his palms, and the shining white claws which he could so easy retract or extend.
“All of it,” he said, “the transformed tissue, it dissolves. That is, it dehydrates and breaks into particles too fine to be seen, and finally too fine to be measured, even in whatever laboratory chemicals or preservatives that they have. Oh, it explains everything—the ridiculous contradictions from the Mendocino officials, and from the San Francisco laboratories. I see now what’s happened.”
“I don’t follow.”
He explained to her about the failure of the tests on him at San Francisco General. They’d gotten some results, then gone back only to find that all the original material was useless, or contaminated or lost.
“In the beginning, with my tissues, perhaps the process of dissolution was slower. I was still evolving. What did the man say about the cells … you remember …”
“I do. He referred to pluripotent progenitor cells, cells we all have in our bodies. We’re a tiny mass of pluripotent progenitor cells when we are embryos. Then those cells get signals, chemical signals to express themselves in different ways—to become skin tissue cells, or eye cells, or bone cells—.”
“Right, of course,” he said. “Stem cells are pluripotent progenitor cells.”
“They are,” she said.
“So we all still have such cells inside us.”
“Yes.”
“And the wolf fluid, the Chrism, it caused those cells to express themselves to make me into a Morphenkind, into this.”
“Chrism,” she said, “it has to be in the saliva, a metaphysical word for a toxin or a serum in the bodily fluids of the Morphenkind that triggers a whole string of glandular and hormonal responses for a new kind of growth.”
He nodded.
“And you’re saying that even right after you were bitten, while you were still evolving, the tests they took still
went bad.”
“More slowly, but yes, the specimens definitely went bad. They lasted long enough to get results about hormones, and extraordinary amounts of calcium in my system, but my mother said that eventually all the lab results failed.”
He sat quiet for a long while, thinking about it.
“My mother knows more than she’s letting on,” he said. “She must have realized after the second battery of tests that something in my blood itself was causing the specimens to destruct. She couldn’t tell me this. She might have been trying to protect me from it. God knows what she feared was happening. Oh, Mamma. But she knew. And when the authorities came back to her, asking for another DNA sample from me, she said no.”
He felt a heavy sadness that he couldn’t talk to Grace, couldn’t present her with all of this, and have her loving counsel, but what right had he to dream of such a thing?
All her life Grace had saved lives. She couldn’t live without saving lives. And he would not ask her sympathy and complicity now for what he was. It was bad enough that he had brought Laura into this. Bad enough that he’d given Jim troubled sleep for the rest of his days.
“You do realize what this means,” said Laura. “All that talk on the television about human DNA and manipulating the evidence.”
“Oh, yes, I certainly do realize it. It’s just talk.” He nodded. “That’s what I was saying. It’s talk. Laura, they have no evidence of any kind against me at all.”
They looked at one another.
Reuben reached up, felt the fur at his neck where the monster had bitten him in his most effective and dangerous strike. No blood there. The blood was gone.
They both stared at the head and the body. They were now heaps of what looked like ash. A wind could have swept them into invisibility. But even the ash was growing lighter, fainter.
There were only gray streaks, like streaks of dust on Laura’s white gown.
For a quarter of an hour they continued to watch. Nothing now remained of the monster but a few dark streaks on the woven fabric of the carpet, streaks dissolving into the rosy flowers and the twining green leaves.
Even the blade of the ax was clean as if it had never struck a blow.
Reuben gathered up the creature’s shredded clothes. There was nothing personal, no identification, nothing in the jacket pockets or the pants pockets.
The shoes were soft expensive heelless moccasins—and small. The jacket and pants had Florentine labels. None of this was cheap. But none of it identified the man or gave a hint of where he had come from. He’d obviously come here prepared to lose these clothes, which might mean that he had a lodging and a vehicle close by. But there was one thing—the gold wristwatch. Where was it? It had become almost invisible against the flowered pattern of the rug.
He picked it up, examining its large face of Roman numerals; then he looked at the back. The name MARROK was inscribed there in Latin block letters.
“Marrok,” he whispered.
“Don’t keep it.”
“Why not?” he said. “All the evidence is gone. That includes the evidence that might have been on this watch … prints, fluids, DNA.”
He put it on the mantel. He didn’t want to argue, but he couldn’t destroy it. It was really all he had that gave him any clue as to the identity of the beast.
They put the rags on the fire, and watched them burn.
He was now painfully tired.
But he had to try to fix the front door and its broken locks before he reverted back to Reuben Golding who could barely turn a screwdriver or drive in a nail.
And he and Laura attended to that now.
It took much longer than either of them expected, but Laura knew all about how to stuff little splinters into the gouged-out screw holes, which filled them up and allowed the screws to catch and secure the lock mechanisms, and so it got done. Galton could take care of the rest.
He needed sleep.
He needed for the transformation to come, but he had the sense that he himself was holding it off. And he was a little afraid of its coming, of being weakened and unable to defend himself if another one of these creatures appeared.
He couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t analyze, couldn’t absorb. Chrism, Morphenkinder. Did these poetic terms help?
The horror was this: the others. How would the others respond when they knew this Morphenkind had been destroyed?
There could be a tribe of them, couldn’t there? There could be an entire race.
And Felix Nideck had to have been one of them, and maybe he was alive now, a Morphenkind still. His Marchent. Felix was the primary other. He had come here and taken the tablets, hadn’t he? Or was it that thing that had done it?
He pondered. He had caught no scent from the man wolf who had come to kill them! No scent at all, no scent of animal or man, no scent of evil.
All through the battle with the creature there had been no scent of evil to intoxicate him, and drive him forward.
And perhaps that meant that the dead Morphenkind had not detected any scent of evil from Reuben as well, no scent of malice, no scent of the will to destroy.
Was this why they had struggled so clumsily, so hopelessly with one another?
And if I can’t detect a scent from them, I will not know if they come here and are close by.
He wouldn’t tell this to Laura.
He got up slowly and made a round of the house.
Neither he nor Laura could figure how the creature had gotten in. They’d locked all the doors. He’d checked the locks all over the first floor when he’d arrived.
Yet Laura explained that the beast had come upon her as she was sleeping in the library and awakened her with a steady stream of low explanations as to why her life had to be forfeit much as he disliked to shed innocent blood. He’d said that he loathed killing women, he’d wanted her to know that, that he wasn’t “insensible” to her beauty. He’d compared her to a flower that had to be crushed underfoot.
The cruelty of it made Reuben wince.
Perhaps he had come in through an upper window. Such was conceivable.
Reuben went through all the rooms, even the smaller northern bedrooms that faced the forest behind the house. He could find no window that was not securely latched.
For the first time, he searched all the linen closets, and extra coat closets and bathrooms off the inside walls of the four hallways, and found no openings or secret staircases to the roof.
He went through the gable attic rooms on all four sides of the house and could find only locked windows there as well. None contained a rear stairway. In fact he could not quite figure how anyone could get to the roof of this house.
Tomorrow, he vowed, he’d walk the property and search for some vehicle that the creature had driven to the house, or some hiding place in the forest where he might have left a backpack or duffel bag hidden in the trees.
It was growing light.
The change had still not come.
Laura was in the master bedroom when he found her. She’d bathed and dressed in a fresh nightgown and brushed her long hair. She was pale with exhaustion but looked as fresh and tender to him as she always had.
For fifteen minutes or more he argued with her furiously, that she should leave here, take his car, go south back to her home in the Marin woods. If Felix Nideck was coming, if he was the primary other, who knew what strength and cunning he possessed? It was all in vain. Laura wasn’t leaving him. She never raised her voice; she never became agitated. But she never budged.
“My only chance with Felix is to appeal to him, to talk to him, to somehow—.” He gave off, too tired to go on.
“You don’t know that it is Felix.”
“Oh, it has to be one of the Nidecks,” he said. “It has to be. This creature knew Marchent, had protective feelings for Marchent, was told to guard this house. How could it not be a Nideck?”
But there were so many unanswered questions.
He went into the master shower and let
the water stream over him for a long time. It washed the blood of the mountain lion in pale reddish rivulets down the copper drain. But he barely felt this water. His hairy body craved the icy water of a forest stream.
The morning was brightening. The view from the window wall of the shower was marvelously clear. He could see the sea to the far left, pale and colorless and glittering under the white sky.
Just opposite and to his right, the cliffs rose, blotting out the view of the ocean and its winds, as they extended further north.
Something could be up there on the cliffs, Felix Nideck, up there watching, waiting to avenge the dead Marrok.
But no. If Felix was near at hand, why would Marrok have come? Marrok had clearly indicated that he feared the eventual meeting with the one who’d appointed him as guardian, that he meant to annihilate his “mistake” before that meeting came to pass.
And if Felix Nideck was living, why did he allow his death to be made official, and his property passed on?
Too many possibilities.
Think about the good news. You’ve left nothing at the site of any kill. Absolutely nothing. Your fears on that score are over; there is no threat now from “the world” to you or Laura. Well, almost. There was the matter of Marchent’s autopsy, wasn’t there?—and their intimate contact before his DNA had begun to change. But what did that matter if they had nothing, absolutely nothing, from the kills? He wasn’t thinking clearly anymore at all.
Reuben folded his arms around himself and willed the change to come. He willed it with all his strength, feeling the heat teem in his temples, and feeling his heart beat faster in his ears. Change now, leave me, dissolve into me and outside me.
It was happening, as if his body had obeyed him, as if the power had acknowledged him. He was almost weeping at this small progress. The pleasure crawled over him, subduing him, making him groggy, the hair dropping off of him, the convulsions stretching him and making him shudder divinely even as he reverted to his regular form.
Laura was waiting for him when he came out. She’d been reading a book. It was the little book by Teilhard de Chardin that had belonged to Felix—given him by Margon. Reuben had found it in his jacket pocket when he’d moved his clothes in here from Felix’s old room.