“Yes,” she cried.
Up and up he climbed until he was in the high branches, beyond the ivy and the straggling vines, up and up, higher until the lower trees were lost, and he could see the sea now above the bluffs, the endless, sparkling sea under the ghostly white of the hidden moon, and finally he found a bed of twisted branches strong enough to hold them. He sat back, his left arm firmly locked around the branch above him, his right arm cradling her.
She was laughing under her breath, delirious with the joy of it. She kissed him all over his face where he could feel it, his eyelids, the tip of his nose, against the side of his mouth.
“Hang on tight,” he cautioned her. Then he eased her just a little to the right, so that she sat on his right thigh and his right arm firmly held her. “Can you see the sea?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But only as utter blackness, and because I know it’s there and I know what it is.”
He was breathing easy against the trunk of the monstrous tree. He was listening to the chorus of the woodlands; the canopy seethed and sighed and whispered. Far to the south he could see the lights of the house winkling through the trees, as if they were so many tiny stars, snared in its many windows. Down there, way down there in the world, the house full of light, waiting for them.
She laid her head on his chest.
For the longest time, they remained that way, together, up there, and he looked out at the sea and saw nothing at all but the shimmering water and the inky sky above it and the faintest stars. The clouds gathered and broke over the moon, sustaining that illusion that the moon was again and again burning its way through the clouds. The damp salty wind whispered and blew in the tall trees around them.
Just for a moment, he sensed danger. Or was it merely the presence of some other creature near them? He wasn’t sure, but he was certain that he could not communicate this sudden alarm to Laura. She was totally dependent on him here. Quietly he listened.
Maybe it was only the inevitable rustling of the canopy, and possibly some fleet little beast he didn’t know wending its way nearby. The vesper bats were at these heights, the flying squirrels, the chickadee and the chipmunk could spend their lives in these upper branches. But why would such little things have awakened his protective spirit? Whatever it was, it was gone, and he thought to himself that it was because he had her here, her heart beating against his heart, that he had felt such a vague alarm at all.
All was well around them.
He thought of the boy. He was in agony.
Unspeakable, all this.
He begged the forest to hold him close, to protect him from the merciless sharpness of his own conscience. A long time ago in his short life, the voice of conscience had been the voice of Grace, Phil, Jim, and Celeste. But that was no longer the way it was at all. And now his own conscience sank the knife into his soul.
Heal this, if you can with all your secret boiling power! Morphenkind, what have you done to that boy? Will he survive only to become what you are?
At last, he couldn’t stand these thoughts anymore. The sublime peace of these leafy heights was paling in the heat of his misery. He had to move, and he began to climb from tree to tree, with her arms and legs once more locked to him. They moved on in a great arc through the woods, and slowly back to the edge of the redwood forest. As always, she weighed nothing; she was fragrant and sweet as if he carried bundles of flowers close to him for their luscious scent. His tongue sought out her neck, her cheek, his growls turned to low moans serenading her.
She locked her arms and legs even tighter around him again, and he descended into the warmer closer air of the lower forest.
Her hands felt icy. Even he could feel this, feel the iciness as if it was smoke coming from her hands.
He walked slowly through the great generous gray-barked oaks, carrying her, stopping here and there so they could kiss, so he could move his left paw under her sweater and feel the hot silky naked flesh there, so moist, so bare, so redolent of citrus and blossoms he couldn’t name and the stark searing scent of her living flesh. He lifted her up and suckled her breasts as she sighed.
Once inside the house, he laid her down on the great long dining room table. He held her icy hands between his paws, his warm paws, weren’t they warm? The room was dark. The house creaked and sighed against the pummeling of the ocean wind. Light fell languidly through the alcove from the great room.
For a long moment he looked at her, lying there waiting for him, her hair loose and snagged with bits of aromatic leaf or petal, her eyes large and drowsy yet fixed on him.
Then he gave the match to the oak wood that was built up in the fireplace. The kindling crackled, exploded, and the flames leapt. The eerie light danced on the coffered ceiling. It danced in the high lacquer of the tabletop.
She began to remove her clothes, but he begged her with a quiet gesture to stop. Then he took them off of her, rolling back the sweater and pulling it gently away, and pulling loose the pants and throwing them aside. She kicked off her shoes.
The sight of her naked on the bare table maddened him wondrously. He ran the soft side of his paws under her naked feet. He caressed her naked calves. “Don’t let me hurt you,” he whispered in that low voice, so familiar to him now, now so much a part of him. “Tell me if I hurt you.”
“You never hurt me,” she whispered. “You can’t hurt me.”
“Tender throat, tender belly,” he growled, licking her with his long tongue, soft under-paws lifting her breasts. Get thee behind me, tragedy. Kneeling over her, he lifted her and impaled her gently on his sex and the room went dim around him, the fire roaring and crackling in his ears, his mind filled with nothing but her, till it was no mind at all.
Afterwards, he picked her up and carried her up the stairs and down the hollow hallway—such a long walk in the secretive dark—to the warmer air of their bedroom. Perfume; candles. It was so very dim here, so very silent.
He laid her down on the bed, a shadow against the pale whiteness of the sheets, and sat beside her. Without fanfare he closed his eyes and brought the change. A little fire burst inside his chest; the air itself seemed to lift the wolf-coat, soften it, dissolve it. The orgasmic waves rocked him violently but quickly. Then the fur began to melt away, his skin drew breath, and he looked down again at his hands, his familiar hands.
“I did a terrible thing tonight,” he said.
“What was it?” She clasped his arm and pressed it gently.
“I injured that boy, that boy I was trying to save. I think I passed the Chrism.”
She said nothing. Her shadowy face was a picture of understanding and compassion, and what a marvel that was, because he expected neither from anyone. Hoping for something is not the same as expecting it.
“And what if he dies?” he asked with a sigh. “What if I’ve shed innocent blood? Or what if the best of all possible outcomes is that he becomes what I am?”
31
THE STORY EXPLODED on the morning news, not because the Man Wolf had had the temerity to go to the northern city of Santa Rosa and shred four vicious killers, but because the surviving victim was already famous.
As the juvenile victim of a near-fatal attack, his identity was protected, but by 5:00 a.m. he had called the press from his hospital bed, and given his version of the story out to several reporters.
His name was Stuart McIntyre, a sixteen-year-old high school graduate who six months before had made international headlines by insisting on taking a male date to his senior prom at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Academy in Santa Rosa. The school had not only said no to Stuart’s request, but stripped him of the title of valedictorian, thereby denying him the right to make the key speech on graduation night, and Stuart had taken his case to the media, granting interviews by phone and e-mail to anybody and everybody who was interested.
This had not been the first gay activist cause of which Stuart was a champion. But his greatest claim to fame before the prom crisis had been his success
as a high school actor, persuading Blessed Sacrament to put on a full-scale production of Cyrano de Bergerac, just so that he could ably play the lead in it, which he had, to good reviews.
As soon as Reuben saw Stuart on the news he recognized him. Stuart had a square face, a sprinkling of freckles across his broad nose and cheeks, and a huge mop of unruly blond hair that suggested a halo. His eyes were blue and his habitual smile was a bit mischievous. It was actually a grin. His was a likable and at times pretty face. The camera loved him.
Reuben had just begun reporting for the Observer when Stuart became a local celebrity, and Reuben had never paid much attention to the story, except to be amused that this plucky kid thought he could convince a Catholic high school to let him take his boyfriend to the prom.
The “boyfriend,” Antonio Lopez, had been the unfortunate kid murdered last night by the four gay bashers, who had, by the way, expressed their intent, to the boys and to others, to mutilate both victims postmortem.
By noon, the story was huge, again, not only because the seeming “invincible” Man Wolf had intervened, saving Stuart’s life, but because the person behind the gay bashing was rumored to be Stuart’s stepfather, a golf instructor named Herman Buckler. Two of the killers had been brothers-in-law of the dead boy, Antonio, and other members of their family spilled the story fingering the stepfather as the man who had masterminded the attack to get rid of his stepson. Stuart also told police that his stepfather had set up the attack, and that the young men who had tried to kill him had told him as much.
There was more. Stuart’s mother, a bottle-blond named Buffy Longstreet, had been a teen actress in a short-lived sitcom for a few years, and Stuart’s father had been a computer tech genius who made a killing in Silicon Valley before the dot-com crash, leaving Stuart well off and the mother moderately comfortable when he died of an infection in Salvador da Bahia while on a dream trip to the Amazon. The stepfather’s crime had been for the money all right and because he devoutly hated Stuart. He was denying everything, and threatened to sue Stuart.
Stuart was now a student at the University of San Francisco, living alone in his own Haight-Ashbury apartment three blocks from the school, and had been back in Santa Rosa for a visit with his boyfriend, Antonio, at the time of the gay bashing. Stuart’s whole goal in life, or so he repeatedly told the press, was to become a lawyer and work for human rights. He was a frequent guest on radio talk shows by call-in, and he was the first survivor of a Man Wolf encounter willing to talk to the press directly since Susan Larson had spoken to Reuben at the offices of the San Francisco Observer.
Reuben was processing all this as rapidly as he could when he was interrupted by two officers from the Mendocino sheriff’s department who wanted again to talk to him about the Man Wolf, and whether or not he had remembered anything more about that terrible night when Marchent had died. Did he know the Man Wolf had struck in Santa Rosa?
The interview was brief because Reuben actually didn’t remember “anything more” about that terrible night. And both officers really wanted to express their fury that people were not getting to the bottom of this Man Wolf thing by catching this maniac before he took a chunk out of an innocent person.
Five minutes after they had left, Reuben was interrupted again by a phone call on his cell from Stuart.
“You know who I am,” came the energetic voice through the phone. “Well, listen, I just got off the phone with your editor, Billie Kale, and I read the piece you did on that woman, the first person to ever really see the Man Wolf. I wanna talk to you. I really do. If you’re the least bit interested, please come to Santa Rosa. They won’t let me out of here right now. And look, if you’re not into this, okay, but I need to know now because I want to call someone else if you’re not, all right? So yes or no, what do you think? Otherwise I’m calling your editor back, she said this was a long shot—.”
“Stop. Tell me exactly where you are. I am coming.”
“Oh, my God, I thought I was talking to your machine. It’s you? Cool. I’m at St. Mark’s Hospital in Santa Rosa. And hurry because they’re threatening to shut me down.”
By the time Reuben got there, Stuart had started to run a fever and Reuben wasn’t permitted to see him. Reuben decided to wait, no matter whether it was a couple of hours or a couple of days, and finally, about two o’clock, he did get in to see the boy. By that time, Reuben had texted Grace twice urging her to get in touch with the Santa Rosa doctors and “share” whatever protocol she’d used with Reuben, just in case the kid had been scratched or bitten, who knew?
Grace was reluctant to take that initiative. She texted back: “Nobody said anything about the kid being bitten.”
But the kid had been bitten.
When Reuben walked in, Stuart was propped up on a mound of pillows and had two different packages of IV fluids pumping into his veins. There were bandages on his face and on his left hand and arm, and probably more bandages under his hospital gown, but he was making a “miraculous” recovery. He was drinking a chocolate milk shake, and grinning. The freckles and the big laughing eyes made Reuben think of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
“I got bitten!” Stuart said, holding up his bandaged left hand, with the tubes dangling from it. “I’m going to turn into a werewolf.” He broke into seemingly uncontrollable laughter.
Pain meds, Reuben thought.
Stuart’s mother, Buffy Longstreet, a fatally cute blond who had the same plump freckled cheeks as her son and a tiny upturned plastic surgery nose, was sitting in the corner with her arms folded staring at her son with a combination of fascination and horror.
“Seriously, let me tell you right now,” declared Stuart, “if this guy is wearing a costume, which nobody sane has the slightest doubt of, it’s a primo number. I mean this is the costume to end all costumes, and the guy has got to be on PCP, because there’s no other drug that can give a guy that kind of strength. I mean this guy rushes in where angels fear to tread. You wouldn’t believe this guy in action.
“Myself, I am not ruling out that this is some unknown species of animal. But I’ll tell you my pet theory, no pun intended.”
“Which is what?” asked Reuben, but in truth this was the type of interview where the reporter does not have to ask any questions.
“Okay,” said Stuart, jabbing a thumb in the direction of his own chest, “this is what I personally think is happening with this guy. I think he’s a normal human being to whom something horrible happened. I mean, forget the werewolf crap, it’s getting old, it’s going nowhere, and we’ve seen the mugs and the T-shirts. What I mean is, this guy got some kind of infection or disease—like acromegalyia-something-or-other—and it changed him into this monster. Now, my father went to the Amazon which was his big dream, I mean, all-time huge dream to go to the Amazon, go down the river, walk in the jungle, whatever, and he got an infection that within one week destroyed his pancreas and his kidneys. He died in a Brazilian hospital.”
“That’s horrible,” murmured Reuben.
“Oh, yeah, right, it was. But this, this creature has had something like that happen to him. The hair, the bone growths—.”
“What bone growths?” asked Reuben.
“He’s got huge bony hands, bony feet, bony forehead, you know. There are diseases that produce this kind of growth, and in his case he’s covered with shaggy hair on top of it. He’s isolated like the Phantom of the Opera, like the Elephant Man, like a freak in a carnival, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, and he’s out of his mind. And this guy has feelings! I mean intense feelings. You should have seen him standing there looking at Antonio. I mean he was just staring and staring at Antonio. And he put his own hands up, like this, oops, almost pulled out the IV, shit—.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t.”
“He put his hands up to his head like this, like the sight of Antonio lying there dead—.”
“Stuart, stop!” screamed his mother. Her tiny little body squirmed in the chair. “You’re ju
st going on and on and on!”
“No, no, no, Mom, I am talking to a reporter. This is an interview. If this guy did not want to hear about Antonio and what happened, he wouldn’t be here. Mom, can you get me another milk shake? Please, please?”
“Gaaaarrrrr!” said his mother and rushed out of the room on her spike heels. Beautiful body, without question.
“Now,” said Stuart, “we can really talk, can’t we? I mean she’s driving me crazy. My stepfather beats the hell out of her and she blames it on me. Me. I’m the one to blame for his slashing her entire closet full of clothes with a box cutter, me!”
“What else do you remember about the attack?” Reuben asked. It was inconceivable that this ruddy, bright-eyed boy could die from the Chrism or from anything.
“Strong, unbelievably strong,” Stuart replied. “And these guys stabbed him too. I saw that! Saw that! I mean they really stabbed him. He didn’t even flinch, man. He just tore them apart. I mean tore them apart. I mean we are talking gross, man. I mean we’re talking cannibalism here. They’re not letting witnesses talk to the press, but they can’t stop me. I know my rights under the Constitution. I cannot be stopped from talking to the press.”
“Right. What else?” asked Reuben.
Stuart shook his head. Suddenly his eyes watered and he turned into a six-year-old right before Reuben’s eyes and started sobbing.
“I’m so sorry they killed your friend,” said Reuben.
But the boy was inconsolable.
Reuben stood by the bed with his arm around him for fifteen minutes.
“You know what I’m really afraid of?” the boy asked.
“What?”
“They’re going to get this guy, the Man Wolf, and really hurt him. They’ll shoot him up with a machine gun, they’ll club him like a baby seal. I don’t know. They’ll really hurt him. He’s not a human being to them. He’s an animal. They’ll pump him full of lead the way they did Bonnie and Clyde. I mean they were human beings, yes, but they pumped them full of bullets like they were animals.”