Reuben looked at her lovingly now. And you are safe. He will not let anything bad happen to you. He stopped himself to reassure you. He saw how beautiful and gentle and pure you are. You are not me. I am not you. He will not go back on his word.
He ordered a big Italian meal, salad, minestrone soup, cannelloni, veal, French bread.
He was crunching through his salad, still going over the entire conversation to Laura, when Celeste texted: “SOS. About us.”
He texted back: “Tell me.”
She wrote: “Are we together or aren’t we?”
“The main thing I want,” he patiently tapped out with his thumbs, “is for us to remain friends.”
If this was brutal, he was so sorry, so very sorry, but he had to say it. It was completely unfair to her to continue as they were.
“Does this mean you don’t hate me,” she wrote, “for being with Mort?”
“I’m happy you’re with Mort.” He meant it. He knew Mort was happy; Mort had to be. Mort had always been fascinated by Celeste. If she’d finally accepted Mort in his dusty and wrinkled genius clothes with his bushy hair and forgetful expression, well, this was terrific for both of them.
“Mort’s happy too,” she shot back.
“Are you happy?”
“I’m happy but I love you and I miss you and I’m worried about you and so is everybody else.”
“Then you’re still my friend.”
“Forever.”
“What’s new on the Man Wolf?”
“Just what everybody knows.”
“Love you. Gotta go.”
He put the phone in his pocket. “That’s over,” he said to Laura. “She’s happy; she’s having an affair with my best friend.”
A little bit of gladness crept into Laura’s expression and she smiled.
He wanted to say that he loved her. But he didn’t.
He drank his soup now as slowly as he could force himself to drink it.
Laura was actually enjoying the meal too instead of picking at it. Her face now had that steady sweet radiance he hadn’t seen in her for days.
“Think about it, what it all means,” he said. “We just left a man who—.”
He shook his head. He couldn’t talk. Tears again. He’d cried more in the presence of Laura than he had ever cried in his whole life in front of his own mother. Well, not quite. “I just want him to help me with this,” he insisted. “I want him to …”
She reached across the table and took his hand.
“He’s going to do that,” she said.
He looked into her eyes.
“You’d accept the Chrism, wouldn’t you?” he whispered.
She flinched, but her eyes remained fastened on him.
“You mean risk death for it?” she answered. “I don’t know.” She had a very grave expression on her face. “I share the power because you have the power.”
That’s not enough, he thought.
29
LAURA WAS DRIVING. With his head against the window of the Porsche Reuben slept.
They’d gone by the house before leaving San Francisco. Reuben positively knew that Simon Oliver would find some way to tell Grace or Phil that he’d been in town, and of course it turned out that he was right.
Grace had been fixing dinner, with Phil already at the dining table, and Celeste was there with Mort, standing around in the kitchen, all of them enjoying a glass of wine. A doctor friend of Grace’s, a brilliant oncologist whose name Reuben could never remember, was there too, setting the table with another female doctor Reuben had never seen before. The Stan Getz–Charlie Byrd Jazz Samba had been playing in the background, and the entire group was obviously having a good time.
Reuben had felt an acute longing for them all, for the cozy house, for the convivial life he’d left behind, but other than that it had been perfect: too many people for an interrogation or an intervention. Everyone greeted Laura graciously, especially Celeste, who was plainly relieved that Reuben was already with someone else, though Mort seemed predictably and loyally miserable, at least when he glanced at Reuben, who just made a fist and punched Mort lightly on the arm. Rosy threw her arms around Reuben.
Grace wanted to corner him, yes, but she couldn’t leave the steaks on the broiler, and the broccoli she was sautéing with garlic, and she settled for being kissed tenderly by him and the confidential whisper that he loved her.
“I wish you’d stay, of all nights, I wish you’d stay.”
“Mom, we already had supper,” he whispered.
“But there is someone coming tonight.”
“Mom, I can’t.”
“Reuben, will you listen to me? I want you to meet this man, Dr. Jaska.”
“This isn’t the night, Mom,” said Reuben and he made for the stairs.
With Rosy’s help, Reuben had been able to collect the very last of his books, files, and photographs and load them into the Porsche.
Then he’d taken one last look around the pretty dining room with its many candles on the table and on the mantel, and with a kiss thrown to Grace, he’d started to head out. Phil had given him an affectionate wave.
The doorbell startled him, and he opened the door to see a tall gray-haired man there, not a very old man, really, with hard gray eyes and a square face. He had a curious but very slightly hostile expression.
At once, Grace appeared, drawing the man into the house with one hand while she held fast to Reuben with the other.
The man didn’t take his eyes off Reuben. Clearly, he hadn’t expected to come face-to-face with him just yet.
A strange stillness settled over Reuben. A scent came from the man, a very faint scent that Reuben knew only too well.
“And this is Dr. Akim Jaska, Reuben. I’ve spoken to you about Dr. Jaska,” Grace said quickly, awkwardly, uncomfortably. “Come in, Doctor. Rosy, please get the doctor his usual drink.”
“Very pleasant to meet you, Dr. Jaska,” said Reuben. “I wish I could stay but I can’t.” He glanced around anxiously for Laura. She was right behind him. She pressed his arm.
The scent was growing stronger as he looked into the man’s strangely opaque eyes, and what if the scent triggered the change?
Grace was conflicted, not herself. She seemed to be watching this little exchange intently. “Good-bye, Baby Boy,” she said suddenly.
“Right, love you, Mamma,” said Reuben.
Laura glided out of the door in front of him.
“Have a pleasant evening, Doctor. Mamma, I’ll call.”
As he walked down the steps, he felt the faintest spasm in his gut. It was like a warning, the spasm. He wasn’t changing. No, he must not change. And he knew he could hold fast against it, but the scent was still in his nostrils. He looked back at the house, and he listened. But all he could hear were pleasantries, and meaningless words. And the scent lingered. The scent even grew a little stronger.
“Let’s get on the road,” he said.
The traffic had rumbled swiftly over the Golden Gate in the heavy winter darkness, but the rain had not started.
On they traveled. And he slept.
Somehow in his thin but delicious sleep, he knew they were just nearing Santa Rosa.
And when he heard the voices, they were like an ice pick to his brain.
He sat bolt upright.
Never had he heard sharper panic, pain.
“Pull over,” he shouted.
The spasms had already begun. His skin was sizzling. The scent of cruelty suffocated him—evil at its most rank.
“Into the trees,” he said as they rolled into the nearby park. He was out of his clothes and sprinting through the darkness within seconds, plunging headlong through the prickling transformation as he moved up and into the trees.
Again and again, the cries ignited his blood. These were two young boys, terrified boys, being beaten, in fear of being cruelly mutilated, in fear of dying, and the seething hatred of the executioners poured out in a riff of filthy curses, sexual
denunciations, grinding taunts.
They weren’t in the park but in the dim long overgrown backyard just off it, behind a darkened ramshackle old house, a gang of four who’d brought the boys here for a slow ritualistic bludgeoning and bloodletting, and as Reuben closed in, he realized one of the two victims was on the edge of his last breath. Sharp scent of blood, of rage, of terror.
He couldn’t save the dying boy. He knew it. But he could save the defiant one who was still fighting for his life.
With a gnashing roar he descended on the two who were driving their fists into the belly of this victim who was still resisting them, cursing them, with his whole soul. Bullies, killers, I spit at you!
In a boiling tangle of limbs and shrieks, Reuben’s jaws champed down on the reeking head of one attacker as his right claw went for the other, snaring him by his hair. The first man, head yanked back, writhed and convulsed, as Reuben’s teeth pierced his skull, the man grabbing for the bleeding victim under him, seemingly trying to draw him up as a human shield. With his right paw dragging the other attacker underfoot, Reuben crushed his head into the packed dirt of the yard. Then he clenched with delicious force on the torso of the first attacker, feasting on the scraggling flesh. The struggling victim slipped from the dying attacker’s grip.
As always, there was no time to savor this repast. He ripped out the man’s throat and was done with it, as the other two members of the gang came on.
With raised knives, they flung themselves at Reuben, trying to rip the hairy “costume” from him, one boy stabbing Reuben twice, three times, with his long knife, as the other sought to cut the “mask” from Reuben’s head.
The blood poured out of Reuben. It poured out of his chest, and down into his eyes from the slashes to his head. He was maddened. He clawed the face off one of the men, slashing the carotid artery, and caught the other as he turned and made for the chain-link fence. In a second, the man was dead and Reuben stood still, feasting on the soft meat of his thigh before dropping him and staggering backwards, drunk with the struggle, drunk with the blood. The scent of evil was lifting, evaporating, giving way to the scents of humans swarming in the nearby dark, and the scent of death just behind him.
Lights had gone on in the surrounding houses. There was a jambling of voices—screams in the night. Lights went on in the house above the yard.
Reuben’s wounds were a hot palpitating mass of pain, but he could feel them healing, feel the intense tingling above his right eye as the gash healed. In the dimness, he saw the bleeding victim crawling across the filthy trash-strewn yard towards the other—the poor boy who was already dead. The victim knelt beside his friend, shaking him, trying to revive him, and then let out the most anguished howl.
He turned to Reuben, eyes glinting in the darkness, sobbing over and over, “He’s dead, they killed him, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.”
Reuben stood there silently looking down at the limp half-naked body. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen, either of these boys. The grieving boy climbed to his feet. His face and clothes were covered in blood; he reached out for Reuben, actually reached out for him. Then he fell forward in a dead faint.
Only now as he lay there at Reuben’s feet did Reuben see the tiny wounds oozing blood on the back of the boy’s outstretched left hand. Puncture wounds! Puncture wounds in the hand, the wrist, and the lower arm. Bite marks.
Reuben was petrified.
The surrounding yards were alive with whispering, gasping spectators. The back door of the house had opened.
Sirens were approaching—again, those unfurling ribbons of sound, sharp as steel.
Reuben stepped backwards.
Flashing lights strobed the heavy damp clouds and broke around the borders of the house, luridly illuminating its hulking sagging shape against the sky, and the filth and ruin of the yard.
Reuben turned and leapt over the fence, and moved swiftly, silently, through the darkness, dropping to all fours as he cleared a mile of the woods and then another mile, spotting ahead of him the Porsche as he’d left it, under the trees. His arms flashing out before him felt like forelegs, and his speed astonished him.
Yet he had to call for the transformation.
Leave me now, you know what I need, give me back my former shape.
He crouched down beside the car, gasping for breath, working with the spasms, as the thick wolf-coat dropped away. His chest wounds burned, pulsed, and the hair stayed thick there, full of blood. Same over his right eye, a hank of thick wolf-hair. His claws were retracting, vanishing. With long gnarled fingers he reached for the wounds and tugged at the thick hair there which remained. His bare legs felt weak, his bare feet unsure, his hands clutching for the door of the car as he lost his balance and fell down on one knee.
Laura was beside him, steadying him, helping him into the passenger seat. The patches of hair on his chest and forehead seemed infinitely more monstrous than the full transformation, but the blood had already coagulated into a thick flaking varnish. The skin positively burned over the wounds. Ripples of dizzying pleasure encircled his head as if two hands were massaging him.
As Laura drove for the freeway, he pulled his shirt on again, and his pants. And with his left hand over the throbbing chest wounds, he felt the wolf-hair shrinking, finally falling loose. Only the soft underfur remained. Both wolf-hair and fur were gone from his forehead.
There came the rolling darkness to drown him, take him away. He fought it, his head thumping against the window, a low moan coming from his lips.
Sirens; they were like banshees wailing, shrill, hideous. But the Porsche was moving north again, gaining the freeway, joining the thumping shuddering flow of winking, gleaming red taillights ahead, gliding from one lane to another, and finally moving at top speed.
He lay back staring at Laura. In the flashing lights, she appeared utterly calm, eyes fastened on the road.
“Reuben?” she said, not daring to take her eyes off the traffic. “Reuben, talk to me. Reuben, please.”
“I’m all right, Laura,” he said. He sighed. One shiver after another passed through him. His teeth were chattering. The fur was gone now from the chest wounds, and the wounds were gone too. The skin sang. The pleasure washed through him, exhausting him. The scent of death was still clinging to him, the death of the boy crumpled in the yard, scent of innocent death.
“I’ve done something terrible, unspeakable!” he whispered. He tried to say more but all he could hear from his own lips was another moan.
“What are you saying?” she asked. The traffic ripped and rattled ahead and behind them. They were already leaving the city of Santa Rosa.
He closed his eyes again. No pain now. Only a low fever pulsing in his face and in the palms of his hands, and in the smooth flesh where the pain had been.
“A terrible thing, Laura,” he whispered, but she couldn’t hear him. He saw the boy again staggering towards him, a tall broad-chested child with a pale beseeching face, a torn and bleeding face, with a mop of blond hair around it, eyes wide with horror, lips moving, saying nothing. The darkness came. And he welcomed it, the leather bucket seat cradling him, the car rocking him as they drove on.
30
THE LIGHTS of the big room dazzled him. The central heat pouring from the vents was too warm, the fragrances of the house dusty, close, intoxicating, even suffocating.
At once, he went into the library and made a call to the Clift Hotel in San Francisco. He had to speak to Felix. He was choked with shame. Only Felix could help him with what he had done, and ashamed as he was, as mortified and miserable, he could not rest until he had confessed this horror to Felix, that he’d bungled, that he’d passed the Chrism.
Felix was no longer there, said the clerk at the desk. Felix had checked out that afternoon. “May I ask who is calling?” He was about to hang up in despair, but identified himself in the faint hope there would be some message. There was.
“Yes, he said to tell you that he was calle
d away. Urgent business he couldn’t ignore. But that he would return as soon as he could.”
No number, no address.
He sank down in the chair with his head on the desk, forehead against the green blotter. After a moment, he picked up the phone and called Simon Oliver, leaving the desperate plea on voice mail that Oliver get in touch with Arthur Hammermill and find out if he had an emergency number for Felix Nideck. It was urgent, urgent, urgent. Simon could not imagine how urgent.
Nothing to be done; nothing to alleviate this unspeakable panic. Will this boy die? Will the Chrism kill him? Was that despicable Marrok telling the truth when he said the Chrism could kill?
He had to find Felix!
Again, he saw the boy collapsed in the dirt of that yard, his outstretched hand, and the wound.
Lord, God!
He stared at the smiling figure of Felix in the photograph. Dear God, please help me. Don’t let that poor kid die. Please. And don’t let—.
He couldn’t endure this panic.
Laura was there, watching him, waiting, sensing something was dreadfully wrong.
He grabbed Laura in his arms, and ran his hands over the thick gray sweater she wore, clutching at the high neck under her chin, then ran his hands down her long pants; warm enough.
I want to change, now, go back into the night. Now.
Holding tight to her, he felt the wolf-coat erupt again. He let go of her only long enough to take off his clothes. The fur was insulating him from the heat of the room, his nostrils as always picking up the heady scent of the forest that pressed against the windows. Ecstasy this, these jarring volcanic waves that almost swept him off his feet.
He lifted her and went out the back door of the house into the night, the transformation now complete, and with her secure against his left shoulder he sped through the forest, bent forward, springing on his powerful thighs, until he’d left the oak wood behind and was now among the giant redwoods.
“Wrap yourself around me,” he breathed into her ear, guiding her arms around his neck, and her legs around his torso. “We’re going up, are you game for it?”