“Go on.”
“Gorlagon—he’s a werewolf in a medieval story by Marie de France.”
“Of course. I read that story years ago!”
“Baron Thibault—it’s a combination of names from Dumas’s famous story ‘The Wolf-Leader.’ That’s 1857—first published in France.”
“So it’s true!” he whispered. He stood up and looked at the men gathered in the jungle. She stood by his side.
Baron was the only man who was obviously gray-haired, older, with a heavily lined but very agreeable face. His eyes were uncommonly large, pale, kindly. Reynolds Wagner might have been red-haired. Hard to tell. But he was about the same age as Felix and Margon, with narrow elegant features, and small hands. Frank Vandover appeared to be a bit younger than the others, with curly black hair and dark eyes and very pale skin. He had a well-defined Cupid’s-bow mouth.
There was something in their expressions that reminded him of a famous painting, but he couldn’t quite think what it was.
“Oh, and Tom Marrok?” Laura said. “Well, that is a reference to Sir Marrok, a werewolf in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, written in the 1400s, and you’ve probably read that too.”
“I have,” he said. His eyes were fastened on the faces of the men.
“The plots don’t matter,” she said. “Neither do the dates. What matters is that the names all refer to characters in werewolf literature. So it’s either a clever device for members of a club. Or the names are deliberate signals to others who share the same very special gift.”
“Signals,” he said. “One doesn’t change one’s legal name just for the fun of it, to be a member of a select club.”
“How many times do you think they’ve been forced to change their names?” she asked. “That is, how many times have they been reborn with new names? And now this man appears, Felix Nideck, who claims to be the illegitimate son of the Felix Nideck in this picture; and we know that a Felix Nideck built this house in 1880 or thereabouts.”
He paced the floor slowly and then made his way back to the fire. She had settled again near the fender, with the journal still in her hand.
“You realize what this may mean,” she suggested.
“That they’re all part of it, of course. I’m trembling. I’m almost unable to … I don’t know what to say. I suspected it! I suspected it almost from the beginning but it seemed so far-fetched.”
“What it could mean,” she said gravely, “is that these creatures don’t age, that you won’t age. That they’re immortal, and that you may be immortal.”
“We don’t know that. We can’t know that. But if this is really Felix, well, he may not be aging like other men.”
He thought about the bullet that didn’t wound him, about the glass he’d broken which didn’t cut him. He wished he had the courage to test this right now with a self-inflicted wound, but he did not.
He was dazed by the possibility that this Felix Nideck knew all the answers he was seeking.
“But why, why does he want me to come to a meeting with lawyers?” he said. “Could he want to lure me out of this house simply so he could rob it?”
“I don’t believe that,” she answered. “I think he wants to meet you face-to-face.”
“So why doesn’t he come through the front door?”
“He wants to see who you are without revealing who or what he is,” she replied. “That’s what I think. And he does want the tablets, the diaries, and the things that are still here. He wants them and he’s being honest about it, well, honest to a point.”
“Yes.”
“But he may not know what’s actually happened here. He may not know that Marrok is dead.”
“But it’s my chance, isn’t it?” he asked. “To appeal to him, to somehow convey who I am and why I had to kill Marrok.”
“We both killed him,” she said. “We had no choice.”
“I will take the full blame for having killed him,” he said. “You leave that to me. But will it matter to him, why I or we did it? Will Marchent’s wishes mean anything to him? Or will he see me as an abomination too?”
“I don’t know, but as you said, it’s your chance.”
They settled down again before the fire.
They sat quietly for a long time. One of the things he devoutly loved about her was that they could sit quiet like this for the longest time. She seemed lost in her thoughts, her knees drawn up, her arms locked around them, her eyes on the fire.
He felt utterly comfortable with her, and when he thought of something happening to her, his mind went blank white with rage.
“I wish you could be at that meeting,” he said. “Does that involve a risk, do you think?”
“I think you need to meet him alone,” she said. “I don’t know why I think that, really, but I do. I’ll go with you, but I won’t be in the meeting. I’ll wait in a separate room.”
“Oh, you have to do that. I can’t leave you here alone.”
After a long while, he said, “It’s not coming.” He was speaking of the change, of course.
“Are you certain?”
“I know it’s not,” he said.
He didn’t feel the restlessness. He didn’t feel the desire.
They didn’t talk about it anymore.
Finally, Laura went up to bed early.
Reuben opened the letter again and looked over the impenetrable writing. He collected the gold watch from the mantel. Marrok.
At 1:00 a.m., Reuben woke Laura. He was standing by the bed in his robe, with the fire ax.
“Reuben, what in the name of God!” she whispered.
“Keep this beside you,” he said. “I’m going up on the roof.”
“But you can’t do that.”
“I’m going to try to bring the change, and if I can bring it, I’m going up. If you need me, call to me. I’ll hear you. I promise you, I’m not going off into the forest. I won’t leave you here.”
He went outside into the oaks. The rain was quiet, irregular, and barely penetrated the canopy here. The light from the kitchen window was dim through the interlocking branches.
He put his hands up, and ran his fingers back through his hair. “Come now,” he whispered. “Come.”
He tensed the muscles of his abdomen and immediately the deep spasm came, sending shock waves through his chest and his limbs. He let the robe drop in the leaves. He stepped out of the slippers. “Quickly,” he whispered, and the sensations rolled upwards and outwards, the power radiating from his stomach into his chest and into his loins.
He tugged at the hair as it came bursting out, smoothing it back, tossing his head, loving the weight of it, the thick protective hood of it, as it curled down to his shoulders. He felt himself rising, his limbs swelling, as the sensations themselves seemed to support him, massaging him, holding him weightless in the brightening light.
Now the night was translucent, the shadows were thinning, and the rain felt like nothing, swirling before his eyes. The forest sang, tiny creatures surrounding him, as if welcoming him.
In the kitchen window he saw Laura watching him, the light very yellow behind her, her face in shadow. But he could clearly see the glistening orbs of her eyes.
He ran towards the house, directly below where two of the gables met, and springing on the wall effortlessly, he climbed up the protruding blocks of stone, higher and higher until he reached the roof. Through the narrow little valley of slates between the gables, he made his way to the great square glass roof.
He saw now that it was set below the gable rooms, and roofed only the secret space of the second floor.
The gables showed it only blank walls as they surrounded it, as if guarding it from the world.
Dead leaves filled the deep gutters that ran along each side of it, and it gleamed like a great black pool of water beneath the light of the mist-shrouded moon.
He went on his knees to move across it. It was slippery with rainwater, and he could feel how thick the glass was,
and see the iron ribs that supported it, crisscrossing beneath him, but he could not see into the room or rooms below. The glass was darkly tinted, laminated perhaps, surely tempered. In the southwest corner, he found the square hatch or trapdoor that he had only glimpsed from the satellite map. It was surprisingly large, framed in iron, fitted flush into the iron, like a large pane of the roof. And he could find no handle, or way to open it, no visible hinges, no edge to grasp. It was sealed tight.
Surely there was a way to open it, unless he’d been wrong all the time. But no. He was sure that it opened. He explored the deep gutter, digging like a dog through the leaves, but he found no handle, or lever or button to push.
What if it opened inward? What if it required weight and strength? He tested it with his paws. He figured it was about three feet square.
He climbed to his feet and stood on it, approaching the south side first and then, flexing his legs with all his strength, he jumped.
The thing flapped open, the hinges behind him, and down he went into the darkness, catching hold of the edge above him with both paws. The scents of wood and dust, of books, of mold, flooded his nostrils.
Still gripping the rim, his feet dangling, he looked around and saw the dim outlines of a giant room. He feared to be trapped in it however, but his curiosity was a lot stronger than his fear. If he could get in, he could get out. He dropped to the floor, on carpet, and the trapdoor creaked as it closed again, slowly, sealing out the sky.
This was the deepest darkness he’d ever known. The tint of the glass made the faint shine of the moon a mere blur.
He could feel a plaster wall before him, and a door, a paneled door. He felt the knob of the door, and turned it, hearing it and feeling it turn though he could scarcely see it, and he pulled it open to his right.
Creeping slowly through the door, he almost toppled and fell down a narrow steep stairs. Oh, so they had been wrong all the time that this sanctuary was accessed through the second floor. He climbed down now quickly, easily, to the first floor of the house, feeling the wall on both sides with his paws.
The door at the bottom opened inwards and he found himself in a small room he immediately recognized by its scent: linen, silver polish, candles. It was one of the pantries between the dining room and the great room. He opened the door and stepped into the wide-arched alcove that divided the two enormous rooms.
Laura came towards him out of the kitchen, through the long butler’s pantry and across the darkened dining room.
“So this is the way,” she said in astonishment.
“We’ll need a flashlight,” he said. “Even I will need a flashlight. It’s quite dark.”
She went into the pantry from which he’d come.
“But look, there’s a light switch,” she said, reaching into the stairwell. She snapped it on. At once a small bulb was illuminated at the very top of the narrow stairs.
“I see,” he said. He was marveling. Could this interior sanctum be heated and wired? And how long ago had someone been here—to see to the lightbulb?
He led the way up, back to the small landing beneath the skylight.
By the weak light of the landing, they peered through an open doorway into a vast room. Books there were aplenty on shelves everywhere, covered in dust and cobwebs, but this was no simple library, not by any means.
Tables crowded the center of the room, most of them filled with scientific equipment—beakers, Bunsen burners, banks of test tubes, small boxes, stacks of glass slides, bottles, jars. One long table was entirely draped with a grayish threadbare cloth. All was encrusted with dust.
Another light switch immediately turned on the overhead bulbs, strung on iron rafters beneath the wired glass of the roof along the western side of the room.
There had once been lights everywhere but most of the sockets hung empty now.
Laura began to cough from the dust. It was a gray film on the beakers and burners, on every object they could see, even on the loose papers that lay here and there among the equipment, on pencils and pens.
“Microscopes,” said Reuben. “Primitive, all of them, antiques.” He walked through the wilderness of tables. “It’s old, all of it very old. Things like this haven’t been used in a laboratory in decades.”
Laura pointed. At the farthest end of the room from them, and from the light, stood several giant rectangular cages, rusted, seemingly ancient, like the cages for primates at a zoo. In fact, cages large and small lined the eastern wall.
Reuben felt a reflexive horror take hold of him looking at these cages. Cages for Morphenkinder? Cages for beasts? He moved slowly towards them. He opened one immense door that groaned and creaked on its hinges. Old locks, dangling from chains, were rusted too. Well, this cage might hold another Morphenkind, but it could not have held him. Or could it?
“All this,” he said, “all this must be a hundred years old.”
“That’s perhaps the only good thing about it,” Laura said. “Whatever happened here, it took place a long time ago.”
“But why was it abandoned?” Reuben asked. “What caused them to give up all of this?”
His eyes moved over the bookshelves lining the northern wall.
He moved closer. “Medical journals,” he said, “but they’re all from the nineteenth century. Well, here’s some from the early 1900s—1910, 1915, then they stop.”
“Yet someone has been here,” said Laura. “There’s more than one set of tracks from the door. The tracks go everywhere.”
“All the same person, I think. Small tracks. A small soft shoe without a heel, a moccasin. It was Marrok. He’s come and gone here, but no one else.”
“How can you know?”
“Just a hunch. I think he came down through the trapdoor as I did, entered the room, and moved over there to the desk.” He pointed to the northwest corner. “Look at the chair. It’s been dusted, and there are a few books there, too.”
“The only new things in this room.”
Reuben examined them. Detective novels, classics—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain.
“He camped here from time to time,” said Reuben.
On the floor to the right of the chair in the shadows stood a half-full bottle of wine with a screw top. Common California vintage, but not a bad one, just one that came with a screw top.
Behind the desk was a row of leather-bound ledgers on a high shelf, with yearly dates inscribed on the spines in faded gold. Reuben slowly removed the ledger for 1912, and opened it. Sturdy, made-to-endure, parchmentlike paper still intact.
There was the enigmatic writing in ink, Felix’s secret writing, waves and waves of it across page after page.
“Could this be what he wants above all?”
“It’s all so old,” Laura said. “What secrets could it contain? Perhaps he wants it only because it belongs to him? Or to whoever shares this language.”
Laura pointed to the long table that was draped with cloth. Reuben could see the tracks in the dust leading back and forth from it to the door. There was a mess of tracks around it.
He knew what he would find. Carefully, he peeled back the cloth.
“The tablets,” he whispered. “All the ancient Mesopotamian tablets. Marrok collected them and brought them here.” He rolled the cloth back gingerly, unveiling rows and rows of fragments. “All preserved,” Reuben said, “probably just as Felix wanted.” And there were the man’s diaries, a good dozen notebooks like the one that Reuben had first seen on Felix’s desk, in neat stacks of four each. “Look how carefully he put these things here.”
What if the secrets of this transformation went all the way back to the ancient cities of Uruk and Mari? And why should they not? The Chrism—that’s what we’ve called it for ages. The gift, the power—there are a hundred ancient words for it—what does it matter?
Laura was moving along the northern and eastern walls, studying the books on those shelves. She’d come to a plain darkly stained door.
She wai
ted for Reuben to open it. Same old brass doorknob as the others. It opened easily to reveal a door opposite with a latch. This door, too, opened with a creak.
They found themselves in one of the inside bathrooms of the north hall. The door was faced entirely with a long rectangular mirror framed in gold.
“I should have realized,” Reuben said.
But there had to be some other way into the second floor at the southwest corner, he was certain. Where the first Felix Nideck had slept right after the house was built.
He found it, a door into a linen pantry, faced in bare wood and blocked by a row of shelves. It was a simple thing to remove the shelves, and they soon found themselves at the southwest end of the south hallway, right before the master bedroom door.
They made other small discoveries. A loop of heavy iron-threaded rope hung from the trapdoor, enabling one to pull it down from the inside. Old lamps throughout the big room were empty. Some of the tables were fitted with small sinks, fully plumbed with faucets and drains. There were gas pipes running beneath the tables and gas burners. The entire laboratory had been well equipped for its time.
They soon discovered that there was a door in each corner of the room, one leading into a bathroom behind a mirror quite similar to the one they’d already found, and the last one on the southeast side leading into a closet.
“I think I understand what might have happened,” said Reuben. “Someone began experiments here, experiments to determine the nature of the change, the Chrism, whatever these creatures call this. If these creatures have longevity, truly great longevity, think what modern science must have meant to them after thousands of years of alchemy. They must have expected to discover great things.”
“But why did they stop the experiments?”
“Could be a thousand reasons. Perhaps they relocated the laboratory somewhere else. There’s only so much one can do scientifically in a house like this, isn’t there? And they wanted secrecy, obviously. Or maybe they discovered that they couldn’t discover anything at all.”
“Why do you say that?” Laura asked. “They must have discovered something, in fact, many things.”
“You think so? I think the specimens they took from themselves or others simply disintegrated before they could learn much of anything at all. Maybe that’s why they turned away from the whole endeavor.”