People were screaming now and the crowd was shrinking back from this impossible spectacle.
“Get the needle!” Hoenneger shouted, but the assistant doctors were rooted to the floor by shock.
With an ear-shattering scream of rage the Wolfman surged up from the chair as leather straps ruptured and wood splintered. It rose to its full height, towering over Hoenneger and his staff. One doctor grabbed a metal tray and swung it at the creature’s head, but the impact did nothing to the monster, except to anger it.
The Wolfman spun toward the doctor and struck him with a backhand that caught the man across the chin so fast and hard that his head spun more than halfway around. His neck snapped with a sound like knuckles cracking, and he fell dead to the floor.
Hoenneger grabbed a syringe and held it like a weapon as he began backing away from the creature. The monster seemed momentarily confused, distracted by all of the people in the room. It was not afraid; rather the insatiable greed of its appetites pulled it in too many directions at once. The blood sang to him.
Inspector Aberline stood stock still on the stands, unable to process what he was seeing, unable to believe it, the pistol in his pocket forgotten in the insanity of the moment.
The Wolfman sensed movement near him and turned to see Dr. Hoenneger backing away. The creature did not possess human thoughts, could not access Lawrence Talbot’s memories, but on some primal level it understood that this man was the enemy. Not just food, but a rival predator.
The creature bent forward, head low between its massive shoulders, and snarled a challenge.
But then it saw someone else that it hated even more. Ripler was making a dash for the doors. The Wolfman saw that man, remembered his smell, and equated it with attack and pain. With a snarl it leapt from the ruins of the restraining chair and cleared twenty feet in a single jump, landing on the stones ten feet from Ripler. The man screamed and grabbed for the door handles, forgetting that he had locked them and given the keys to Hoenneger.
He spun around as the Wolfman stalked toward him. The big, muscular orderly dropped to his knees and began weeping like a baby, begging for mercy. But as he had proven so many times to the helpless inmates in his charge, there was no mercy within these walls. The Wolfman grabbed him with its massive clawed hands, raised him over its head, and then threw Ripler at the wall forty feet away. The orderly hit with an impact that shattered bones. He collapsed to the floor, broken but alive, and the quirks of a merciless god kept him awake even as the Wolfman buried its snout in the orderly’s stomach and began to feed.
“Jesus Christ!” someone shouted, and the yell somehow jolted Aberline out of his stupor. He shook his head and then raced down the rows of bleachers toward the monster.
Hoenneger and his assistant edged toward the locked doors. Hoenneger had the keys in one hand and the syringe in the other.
“Hurry, Doctor,” hissed his assistant. “Hurry!”
Everywhere in the room there was panic as the crowd surged toward the various exit doors, all of which were locked.
“I got it,” Hoenneger said breathlessly as he jammed the key into the lock and gave it a violent turn, but in his haste he used far too much force. The slender key bent . . . and broke.
“Oh God!”
The Wolfman raised its head, smelling a new flavor of fear. He turned and again saw Hoenneger, but this time the man was screaming and pounding on the locked door.
OUTSIDE THE ROOM, Lafferty and Strunk heard the commotion and tried to work the handles, but the door was solidly locked. The door’s small circular window was opaque and they couldn’t see what was happening, but as they watched, someone began beating his fists on the glass. The glass cracked and shattered and the two bruisers stared in surprise as Dr. Hoenneger pressed his face against the jagged opening.
“Help! Let me out! Oh, Lord . . . someone please open this—”
Strunk patted his pockets. “Right, sir. I’ll just pop ’round to the works office and get the key. Won’t take a—”
“You bleeding imbecile!” screamed Hoenneger. “Open this door—”
And then something huge and dark appeared behind the doctor and yanked him backward and out of sight. A split second later the broken window was sprayed with blood. The sound of screams from inside was drowned by the roar of something immeasurably strong and unnatural.
Lafferty looked at the bloody window and then turned to Strunk.
Without a word they bolted down the hallway, running as fast as they could. Another custodian ran past them, heading toward the mad din in the examination theater. Strunk and Lafferty watched him go.
“Think we should have told Roger not to—?”
“Not our concern, lad.”
They tore down stairways and skidded around turns until they burst out of the Asylum’s front door.
“What the bleedin’ ’ell is ’appening back there?” demanded Lafferty.
“God if I know,” said Strunk. “And I don’t want to know.”
They heard a crash and looked up as the big picture window of the surgical theater six stories above exploded outward. Something red and twisted came hurtling into the night and the men lingered just a second too long in shocked surprise. As they turned to run glass rained down on them and Dr. Hoenneger’s body crashed onto the spikes of a wrought-iron fence that ran along the edge of the Lambeth grounds. The doctor had been ruined—torn and mangled—and much of him was missing, and he hung from the gate’s spikes like some grisly trophy.
They stared at the corpse and then turned once more to look up.
The Wolfman, falling silently, was plummeting through the shadows toward them. It had a six-story fall to gather speed and the impact smashed both men into the cobblestones with so much force that their internal organs were pulped and blood exploded through their pores.
The fall jarred the Wolfman but it pitched forward onto the grass beside the cobbled walkway and crouched there, waiting as broken bones reformed and torn muscle tissue was made whole within seconds. It threw back its head and howled for the sheer joy of the fresh meat in its belly and the power of its life force.
There was a sharp crack and sparks leapt from a guardrail a yard away. The Wolfman craned its neck upward to see a man leaning out of the window. There was another crack and fire leapt from the man’s hand. A bullet tore through the Wolfman’s shoulder, passing through flesh and nicking bone before burying itself in the dirt. But before the man could fire his third shot the wound was gone as if it had never existed.
The Wolfman roared at the figure in the high window and then turned and dropped forward, running on all fours faster than any wolf ever did . . . faster than any animal that the natural world ever produced ever could. It leapt over railings and hedges, springing high into the air without effort, reveling in the power that coursed through its muscles. People—men and women—screamed and fled before it. Horses reared and kicked and shied away; mongrel dogs whined and rolled onto their backs as it passed.
The creature jumped onto a low wall that led to a shed rooftop, then climbed a drainpipe more nimbly than an ape. At the top of a tall building it stopped and paused to look around. It feared nothing. It hungered for everything. There was a line of statues perched on the edge of the roof and the Wolfman climbed onto the largest, a massive stone griffin. There it lingered, staring down at the city, at its playground, at its hunting fields. He could smell the sweat and fear and blood. He knew that everything down there that was aware of him feared him.
And he, in turn, hungered for all of them.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Inspector Aberline burst from the Asylum’s lower doors and skidded to a halt by the gate. The moon was on the other side of the building and the courtyard was in shadows, but Aberline could smell blood. He fumbled in his pockets for an electric torch and shined its light across the ground and then gasped at what the light revealed. Dr. Hoenneger’s torn body hung limp and ragged from the spikes and the two orderlies lay in pools
of blood on the walkway.
“Dear God in heaven . . .”
His mind felt disconnected from reality. He could not have seen the things he had seen. It was impossible, insane.
And yet . . .
He drew a steadying breath and squatted down to play the torchlight over the ground. A line of clawed footprints were dug into the soil of the verge. The trail ran for only a few steps and then a pair of deeper marks showed where the creature had leapt toward the row of hedges.
Aberline dug into his pocket for his whistle and he blew a high, shrill note, the note as shrill as the scream that might otherwise have burst from his chest. Once, twice . . . and then it was answered almost immediately by another whistle down the lane. And another far to his left.
With trembling fingers, Aberline reloaded his pistol. He was still trying to accept the facts as he knew them . . . and what they meant to his understanding of the world. His heart was beating like the hooves of a galloping horse and sweat ran down inside his clothes.
“Steady on,” he muttered to himself as he pressed the shells into the chambers of the cylinder. He thought about the blacksmith in the village and the silver bullets. “Steady on . . .”
In the distance he heard the running feet of a squadron of constables.
But before they could arrive he heard a sound and turned to look up at the roof of the building on the far side of the hedges, and there, framed against a rounded curve of the moon, was the monster.
Every instinct told Aberline to run. He saw his death up there. He saw hell itself crouching atop a stone griffin, the Devil himself in true form. He wanted to run.
And he did run.
Toward the building.
THE WOLFMAN’S HUNGER was a furnace that could not be fed. It screamed within him, demanding meat, demanding blood.
It leaped from the back of the griffin and began running along the edges of the building, jumping from one rooftop to another with ease, sometimes dropping to all fours to spring faster than a racehorse, sometimes climbing, always moving, a blur of darkness against the smiling face of the Goddess of the Hunt.
Aberline ran as fast as he could, trying to keep pace with the monster. He saw it leap from a building and land badly, scrambling for purchase at the edge of the building across the way.
“Got you!” Aberline hissed. He stopped and stood with his legs braced, raised his pistol in both hands, closed one eye and fired.
The first bullet tore a chunk of brick and dust from the wall a foot from the monster’s shoulder. Aberline drew a breath, corrected and fired again. And again. He could see the back of the creature’s shirt puff with each impact. He fired and fired until the hammer clicked on an empty cylinder.
The Wolfman did not fall. It did not falter. It threw a growl over its shoulder and then hauled itself over the edge of the building and vanished.
Aberline cursed and kept running.
He had no idea what he would do, or could do. He had just used the last of his cartridges.
TWO BOBBIES ON horseback heard the bleat of whistles and then six spaced gunshots. They turned and tracked the echoes to the far side of the park.
“That’s the Asylum,” growled Pettit. “Jailers have let another madman slip out.”
“Bloody loonies ought to be put down,” answered Frost as he kicked his mount into a jump to clear a row of hedges. They angled toward the center of the park, the quickest route to the Asylum, but both horses suddenly cried out and reared as a wave of screaming people broke from under the shadows of the trees and surged toward them in a mass.
“What the bloody ’ell?” demanded Pettit.
“All the loonies have broken out,” warned Frost as he drew his baton. But the crowd that surged toward them and past them were not inmates in straightjackets or prison pajamas. They were businessmen and clerks, ladies and street musicians, wealthy children and shabby beggars. The only thing that unified them was the absolute terror written onto each face.
The tide of shrieking, panicked people washed past them, spilling out into the streets, running away from the row of buildings near the Asylum.
The two bobbies stood up in the stirrups and looked beyond the trees at the buildings and at the thing that ran from rooftop to rooftop.
“Oh my God . . . ,” they said in perfect chorus.
ABERLINE BROKE FROM the park and ran toward a knot of constables hurrying his way on foot.
“Are you armed?” he demanded.
Two of them produced pistols and one man in the back had a shotgun.
“Give me your gun,” he demanded and the nearest officer handed over a heavy pistol. “And all your bullets. Come on, hurry, damn you.”
The wave of panicking people were sweeping toward him, but Aberline crashed into them, shoving people roughly out of his way. The bobbies fanned out behind him in a muscular phalanx off of which the mob rebounded.
“There!” called one of the officers, and Aberline saw that the creature had changed direction, heading now toward the center of town. They pelted after him, racing down streets, cutting through alleys. When they ran down a shadowy street that proved to be a dead-ended mews, Aberline stopped, cursing in frustration.
Music floated through an open window to their left, and immediately Aberline ran that way. He didn’t even pause at the door but crashed into it with two burly sergeants on either side. The door was ripped from its hinges and the officers pounded over it, crashing into the middle of a gathering of richly dressed toffs seated on sofas and ornate chairs as a string quartet played some pastoral confection. The music screeched to a sour halt and the gathered gentry cried out in shock and protest, but Aberline had no time for détente. He led his men through the house, kicked open the back door, and ran into the yard. He raised his pistol, expecting the monster to be leaping from that rooftop to the next, but there was no movement.
The monster had changed direction. They’d lost him.
BEYOND THE WALL were bright lights and the smell of meat. The Wolfman narrowed its yellow eyes and watched as people—scores of them—moved through the streets. Hot spittle dripped from its teeth as its muzzle wrinkled back in a hunting snarl.
It crept forward, selecting the perfect prey. . . .
ABERLINE RAN DOWN the alley and burst out into the street in time to see two of his best detectives, Carter and Adams, jumping down from an armored wagon.
“Carter! You got a pistol?”
“Yes, sir. We’re both—”
“Good,” Aberline snapped. “Follow me. The rest of you men, find a way to get to the rooftops. Spread out and find this thing.” But he paused and jabbed a finger into Adams’ chest. “Telegraph the yard. Issue weapons to everyone. Now!”
Aberline slapped Carter on the shoulder and the two of them ran.
Between puffing breaths, Aberline asked, “Carter . . . does the Yard have any silver bullets?”
Carter ran ten steps before he replied. “Silver?”
THE WOLFMAN WAS blocks away, running along the rooftops, tracking the movement of the herds of prey below. The greed of its own appetite made it indecisive. Each new one he saw looked more enticing than the last. Drool flew from his mouth and spattered the slashed remains of Lawrence Talbot’s white shirt.
AS ABERLINE AND Carter burst from the maze of alleys they saw a large group of bobbies running in a pack toward the commotion. When the officers saw Aberline they ran to meet him.
“Carter, take half of these men . . . gather whomever else you can and protect the streets. Who knows where this beast will strike. The rest of you come with me.”
EIGHT BLOCKS AWAY a constable sat astride a bored horse in the center of Leicester Square trying impatiently to manage the flow of traffic. He had not yet gotten word of the escaped killer and the rush and bustle was irritating him. There was only an hour left of his shift and he liked things calm and quiet.
An old woman struggled across the square, moving with painful slowness on arthritic legs and blocking the fl
ow of carriage traffic.
“Come on, come on,” he barked. “Move along smartly!”
The lady looked up at him, startled at his rudeness, and then her eyes flared wider and wider and her mouth opened into a silent “O.”
“What is it, you old—”
The bobby never saw the mass of muscle and claws that hurtled down at him from the rooftop of the nearby clock tower. He felt a sudden jolt and then the world seemed to be tumbling and spinning around him.
THE WOMAN WHO ran the flower cart heard a scream and the sound of an impact and turned just as a vast something smashed into her cart and something smaller and heavy hit her in the chest. She fell backward with the object resting on her skirts between her outstretched legs. She stared, unable to comprehend the severed head of the traffic constable. Her eyes met those of the bobby and there was still life there. Dazed, she turned and watched as the bobby’s body, still sitting astride his horse, went galloping wildly down the street. Then she looked down at the head in her lap. Impossibly, the bobby opened his mouth and tried to scream. He could not.
So she screamed for both of them as a bloody thing rose from the wreckage of her cart and turned a drooling face toward her.
ABERLINE SAW THE lights of the local police station and cut across the street toward it. He blew his whistle as he ran and a cluster of officers scrambled down the stairs. A sergeant strode toward him, one hand up to stop him.
“What’s all this then?” he demanded, but Aberline skidded to a halt and flashed his inspector’s badge.
“Sergeant, telegraph the Yard. Issue weapons.”