People on the other side were screaming, men and women alike.
The door burst inward, falling off its screeching hinges, and was slammed violently to his left.
Reuben’s heart was in his throat.
It was a man wolf, emerging from the swirling rain as if from nothingness, a great seven-foot monster in full dark brown wolf-coat with blazing gray eyes, shining white fangs, and a deep gargling roar breaking from its throat.
The spasms made a fist inside of Reuben. He felt the blood drain from his face. At the same time he felt a wave of nausea and his knees went weak.
The man wolf’s great paws reached out for Dr. Klopov and caught her by her arms, lifting her off her feet.
“You will not, you will not!” she bellowed, squirming, feet thrashing, struggling to make her own groping fingers into claws, as the beast raised her up into the full glare of the outside lights.
Everyone in the room was in motion, Reuben himself stumbling backwards, and Dr. Cutler shrieking over and over again as if she couldn’t stop herself, and Jim scrambling to his mother’s side.
The men and women outside were in total panic, yelling, fighting with one another. Shots rang out and then came the inevitable, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
“Rush it, take it alive!” roared Dr. Jaska, grabbing at the petrified sheriff. “Capture it, you fool!”
Reuben watched utterly astonished as the man wolf sank its gobbling fangs into the doctor’s throat, the blood spurting and pouring down over her rumpled clothes. Her arms went dead like broken branches. Dr. Jaska gave the loudest and most terrible wail. “Kill it, kill it!” he was now screaming, and the sheriff was struggling to get his gun out of the holster.
Shots came again from the screaming crowd on the outside.
Undeterred the beast closed its powerful jaws on the woman’s flopping head and tore it loose from her neck, snapping ribbons of rubbery bloody skin. Then swinging the head back and forth wildly, the beast sent the head flying out into the night.
The mangled bloody body of the doctor, it dropped to the steps—lunging into the room and knocking the sheriff flat on his back, as it caught the fleeing Dr. Jaska in the doors of the conservatory.
Crashing into the potted trees and flowers, the two figures merged as the doctor let loose a desperate boiling tirade in Russian before the man wolf ripped his head off as he had done to the woman doctor and threw the head back into the great room where it rolled across the floor before the open door.
The sheriff was struggling to get up and almost fell on the head, and then got his gun out and couldn’t get control of his right arm to aim.
The towering man wolf strode past him, pale eyes staring forward, dragging the headless broken body of Jaska by one hook of a claw.
Reuben stared aghast at its powerful hairy legs, the way it moved on the balls of its feet, heels high, knees flexed. He had felt all this, but never beheld it.
The monster dropped the body. With one great leap it vaulted through the assembly, pounding past Grace and Jim as it raced across the great room and into the library where it burst through the drapery and glass of the eastern window and vanished into the night. The shattered glass clattered down with the brass drapery rod and the crumpling fabric and the glittering rain swept in.
Reuben stood stock-still.
The spasms were running rampant inside him. But his skin was like an icy armor containing him.
He saw around him utter pandemonium—Dr. Cutler in hysterics being held by the desperate stammering Stuart, his mother climbing up from her knees and staring after the monster, and Jim down on his knees with his hands over his face, praying with his eyes shut.
Phil rushed to the aid of his wife. And Laura, who appeared now in the open door, and standing well to one side of the doctor’s dead body, stared at Reuben and Reuben stared at her. He reached out to welcome her into his arms.
Simon Oliver had fallen into a chair, and clutching at his chest, his face flushed and wet, was struggling to get back to his feet.
Only the three men—Felix, Margon, and Thibault—had not moved. Now Thibault collected himself and went to assist the sheriff. The sheriff took his arm gratefully and rushed past Laura and Reuben, shouting commands to his men.
The sirens of the patrol cars were now slicing up the night with their shrill pulsing wails.
Felix stood quite still, looking to his right at the severed head of Dr. Jaska that lay on its side, as heads apparently tend to do, staring blankly at nothing. And Margon went to put his arms round Dr. Cutler and assure her in the most tender voice that “the creature” had apparently fled. Dr. Cutler was plainly nauseated and about to be really sick.
The patrolmen were fanning out into the woods. More sirens were cutting up the night. Those hideous strobing lights were flashing across the great room, in one garish turn after another, and the crumpled body of Dr. Klopov lay on the top step, a sack of bloody clothes in the falling rain.
Men stumbled over it as they came into the house, guns raised.
Stuart’s face was utterly expressionless and white.
Poor Stuart. Reuben stood there, holding Laura in his arms. He was trembling. Stuart had seen what this monster could do twice, had he not? Reuben had never even seen it once. Never once seen the great hairy beast pick up a human being as if it were a weightless mannequin and decapitate it as though pulling a fat chunk of overripe fruit off a crackling stem. The sheriff burst back into the room, face wet and shining, with a highway patrolman beside him. “Nobody leaves this place, nobody leaves, nobody leaves!” he yelled. “Until we get a statement from everybody.”
Grace, white-faced, shaking, her eyes grotesquely wide and glassy with tears, was being stroked and comforted by Phil, who spoke to her in a soft confidential voice. Felix also stood beside her, and Thibault drew close to Reuben and Laura.
Grace looked at her son.
Reuben looked at her.
He looked at Stuart. Stuart stood helpless by the fireplace merely looking at Reuben, his face now remarkably calm and with a dreamy remote perplexity.
Reuben watched Margon and Felix conferring with the sheriff, but he didn’t hear the words they spoke.
Then Grace did something Reuben had never seen before, or ever thought he would see. She passed out cold, slipping like a greased sack out of Phil’s arms, and hit the floor with a thud.
35
IT WAS THE STRANGEST PARTY that Reuben had ever seen in all his life. And it was a party.
The forensics teams were long gone, including men from San Francisco, Mendocino County, and the FBI.
So were most of the paramedics as they were needed elsewhere and had been questioned first.
Simon Oliver had been taken to the local emergency room, after suffering all the symptoms of heart failure which might have been only a panic attack.
The house was filled with the scent of the rain and the aroma of coffee, lemon tea, and red wine.
All the comfort cookies had been taken out of the pantry and piled upon trays. Dried salamis had been sliced and set out with crackers and mustard. The wife of one of the local sheriff’s deputies had come with platters of fresh sliced pumpkin bread.
At the breakfast table and in the kitchen, and in the dining room, people were gathered in little knots mulling over what had happened, giving their statements to the sheriff, the highway patrol, and the men from the attorney general’s office who’d been sent from Fort Bragg.
Galton and his cousins had done their best to board up the library window at least halfway, draping it with heavy plastic; and after an hour of hard work had managed to rehang the front door on serviceable hinges with a new dead-bolt lock.
Now they sipped coffee, chatted, milled around with everyone else.
Fires blazed in the big fireplaces. All the lamps had been lighted, from ornate wall sconces to old electric lights on corner tables or chests which Reuben had never even noticed before.
And the young armed patrol
men and paramedics moved through the rooms like singles at any party, eyeing one another and the “more important” guests who clung together in small cliques.
Dr. Cutler hunkered down deep in the big old couch by the great room fireplace, a blanket around her shoulders, shivering not from the cold but from the experience, explaining to the investigators, “Well, surely it was some species for which we have no present scientific label or definition; either that or a truly monstrous mutation, a victim of a combination of rampant bone development and hair growth. Why, the floorboards were shaking under the thing. It must have weighed three hundred pounds.”
Grace, Phil, and Jim were gathered at the great dining table in the oddly cheerful light of the medieval fireplace, talking to Felix who explained amicably that Jaska and Klopov had been connected for years with unorthodox experiments and clandestine research, funded for decades by the Soviet government, and later by questionable private patrons for dubious ends.
“They were heavy into the occult, as I understood it,” said Felix, “always insinuating that the Soviets knew secrets about the world of lore and legend that others had foolishly dismissed.”
Grace studied Felix sympathetically as he went on.
“You mean they were interested in this thing, this man wolf, for private medicinal research?” asked Phil.
Jim’s face was solemn, remote, his eyes moving over Felix gently and unobtrusively as Felix spoke.
“Does it surprise you?” asked Felix. “There are scientists out there treating billionaire clients with unorthodox youth serums, human growth hormone, stem cells, sheep glands, cloned skin and bone, and cosmetic transplants of which the rest of us only dream. Who knows what they know, or where their research has led them? Of course they wanted to get their hands on the Man Wolf. Perhaps there are sub rosa laboratories under American auspices with the same aims.”
Grace murmured wearily that there would always be scientists and doctors who dreamed of being morally free to do exactly as they pleased.
“Yes,” said Felix, “and when I heard from Arthur Hammermill that Jaska had been pestering Reuben’s family, well, I thought to myself perhaps we can be of some assistance.”
“And you’d met them in Paris—,” said Phil.
“I knew them,” said Felix. “I suspected their methods. I suspected the lengths to which they might go to achieve their ends. I suspect the police will discover their Sausalito Rehabilitation Center was a front, that they had a plane waiting to take Stuart and Reuben out of the country.”
“And all this to determine why the boys were exhibiting these symptoms, whatever they are, these strange changes—,” said Phil.
“Because they’d been bitten by this thing,” said Grace. She sat back, shaking her head. “To see whether the saliva of the Man Wolf had imparted some element that could be isolated from the victims’ blood.”
“Precisely,” said Felix.
“Well, they would have been extremely disappointed,” said Grace. “Because we ourselves have researched the matter from every conceivable angle.”
“Oh, but you don’t know what scientists like that have at their disposal,” said Phil. “You’ve never really been a research scientist. You’re a surgeon. Those two were Frankensteinian fanatics.”
Jim looked past the others at Reuben, his eyes tired, grieved, faintly afraid.
Jim had gone with Simon Oliver to the emergency room, and had returned only an hour ago, reporting that Simon was all right and on his way back to the city by special ambulance. He would be fine.
“Well, there is one thing we all know, isn’t there?” asked Grace. “Whether we are surgeons, priests, or poets, right Phil? We’ve seen this monster with our own eyes.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Phil. “It’s like a ghost. You see it yourself, you believe it. But nobody else will believe it. You’ll see. They’ll sneer at us just like they’re sneering at everybody else who’s seen it. The witnesses could fill Candlestick Park and it wouldn’t make any difference at all.”
“That’s true,” said Jim softly, speaking to no one in particular.
“And what did you learn from this,” asked Felix, looking intently at Grace, “that you didn’t know before?”
“That it is real,” said Grace with a shrug. “That it’s no criminal in a costume, or matter of a collective hallucination. It’s a freak of nature, to use the old phrase, a human being who’s suffered a monstrous deformity. It will all eventually be explained.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Felix.
“But what if it’s an unknown species?” asked Phil. “Something that simply has not been discovered yet?”
“Nonsense,” said Grace. “That’s impossible in today’s world. Oh, I mean maybe it could happen in New Guinea but not here. It’s a one-off. It’s suffered some hideous calamity or it’s a freak since birth.”
“Hmmm, I don’t know,” said Phil. “Exactly what accident or illness or congenital deformity could account for that thing? Nothing I ever heard of, but you’re the doctor, Grace.”
“It will all be explained,” she said. She wasn’t adamant or arguing, really. She was merely convinced. “They’ll catch the thing. They have to. There’s no safe corner of the modern world for such a thing. They’ll get to the bottom of what he is and how he became what he is, and that will be the end of it. In the meantime, the world can run rampant with the idea of the Man Wolf as if he were a template for a new form of hero, when, sadly, he’s no more than an aberration. Eventually, they’ll autopsy him, eviscerate him, stuff him, and mount him. He’ll end up in the Smithsonian in a glass case. And we’ll tell our grandchildren that we once glimpsed him with our own eyes, during his brief and brilliant glory days, and he’ll be sentimentalized as a tragic figure—rather like the Elephant Man, in the end.”
Jim said not a word.
Reuben wandered out to the kitchen where the sheriff stood with his thirteenth cup of coffee, talking to Galton about the werewolf legends around “these parts” that hadn’t been heard in many a year.
“Now, there was an old lady up here, a crazy lady, years ago, in this house. I remember my grandmother talking about it. She sent word down to the mayor in Nideck, that there were werewolves in these woods—.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Galton. “I’m older than you and I never heard any such thing—.”
“—claimed the Nideck family were werewolves. I meant she went screaming crazy up here, insisting—.”
“Oh, your grandmother made that up.”
And so forth and so on.
Stuart had disappeared with Margon Sperver. And Baron Thibault was assisting Laura as she arranged the last of the Fig Newtons and coconut macaroons on a pretty flowered china plate. The kitchen smelled strongly now of fresh-cut apples and cinnamon tea. Laura looked emotionally threadbare but she obviously liked Thibault enormously and they’d been conversing all evening in low voices as the party rolled on. Thibault was saying to her, “But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I’m not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.”
“Then how exactly do we define immutable truths?” Laura asked. “I do see exactly what you’re saying but I lack the skills to define how we construct moral decisions when context is continually shifting—.”
“By recognizing,” said Thibault, “the conditions under which every moral decision is made.”
Some people were leaving.
The official interviews were winding down.
The sheriff reported that the search for the Man Wolf around Nideck had been abandoned. And he was just getting word that Jaska and Klopov had both been wanted by Interpol for questioning in a number of open cases in Germany and France.
Someone had gotten a clear and unmistakable series of shots of the Man Wolf south of San Jose. “Looks like the real thing to me,” said the sheriff checking his iPhone. “That’s the same devil all right. Take a look. And how c
ould the critter have gotten that far that quick?”
The forensics teams had called to say that the crime scenes could be released.
Finally, the party began to break up.
The family had a plane waiting for them at the nearby airport. Reuben walked with his mother to the door.
“These friends of the Nidecks’, they’ve been invaluable,” she conceded. “I like that Felix very much. I thought Arthur Hammermill was in love or something when he went on and on about the man, but I understand now. I do.”
She kissed Reuben tenderly on both cheeks.
“You’ll bring Stuart in to see Dr. Cutler for his shots.”
“Absolutely, Mom. Stuart’s my little brother from now on.”
His mother looked at him for a long moment.
“Try not to think about all the unanswered questions, Mom,” said Reuben. “You taught me once that we have to live with unanswered questions all our lives.”
She was surprised. “You think I’m worried, Reuben?” she asked. “You don’t know what this night has done for me. Oh, it’s been ghastly, yes. It was the Day from Hell and the Night from Hell. But someday I’ll have to tell you all about my worries, what they actually were.” She shook her head sadly. “You know, medicine can confound the most rational of human beings. We doctors witness the inexplicable and the miraculous every day. You wouldn’t believe how relieved I am now about a lot of things.” She hesitated, but then said only, “A surgeon can be as superstitious as anybody else.”
They walked in silence to the waiting van.
He embraced Jim warmly, and promised to call soon. “I know the burden you’re carrying,” Reuben whispered to him. “I know what I’ve put you through.”
“And now you have a houseful of these creatures?” Jim asked in a hushed confidential voice. “What are you doing, Reuben? Where are you going? Is there any turning back? Well, they’ve snookered everybody, haven’t they? And what now?” Immediately he was sorry, terribly sorry. He hugged Reuben again.