There had to be something she could do.
This was the worst development imaginable. She’d trusted Logan, let him in on their secret…and he had betrayed her. Worse, he’d betrayed her father. God knew what he would do with that knowledge. But there was one thing she was certain of: these kind of gross accusations, on top of all the scorn her father had endured already, would have the worst possible effect on him.
As she paced, her eye fell on the door to his private room—the room where he did his own research, where she was forbidden to go.
She stopped. Of course. There would be proof in there; proof that he was doing his best to undo the dreadful affliction he was suffering, that this talk of his efforts being nothing but pretense was the vilest kind of slander.
She walked toward the door, hesitating slightly; to enter it felt like a violation, but she was doing so for the best of reasons. After a moment, she stepped through the door. It was furnished with surprising spareness; there was a cot, a sink, a table, and a rack of equipment—but the equipment was simplistic, almost meager; not the kind one would work with to solve this knotty a problem. Of course, he hadn’t asked for anything particularly exotic—naturally, she’d ordered everything herself—but she’d assumed he’d taken what he needed from the main room of the secret lab and then returned it when he was done. She hadn’t kept close tabs on what equipment was on hand at any one moment….After all, he was her father, the senior scientist….
Had he done most of his work in the main lab? Was this room the equivalent, perhaps, of a monk’s cell, where he went to think, perhaps do trivial experiments—and suffer through the nights of the full moon, safely under lock and key?
Her eye fell on a lab journal, covered in green cloth, that lay on the table. The relief that flooded through her as she saw this caused her to realize just how distraught Logan’s assertions had made her. Her father’s private journal! This was exactly the proof she needed. It would contain a record of the attempts he’d made, the things he’d tried, what had been promising and what had not.
She snatched it up from the table and began paging through it quickly. But after only a minute, she stopped. A look of horror came over her face as she stared at the open page.
“No,” she whispered.
With trembling hands, she turned another page; read briefly; turned another…and then let the book drop to the floor.
And now, with no more hesitation, she left the room and ran toward the building’s front door.
39
Logan felt himself go cold at the apparition that now confronted them among the thick pines. It was, without a doubt, Chase Feverbridge—but a Feverbridge who had become an abomination of nature.
He seemed to tower over them, his six-foot-four height increased by some trick of the moonlight. His white hair was matted and caked with dirt, full of twigs and dead leaves. His skin had become a blotchy mahogany color, studded here and there with pustulant boils, and it exuded a foul, animalistic odor, sour and musky. Patchy woolen hair covered his limbs. His mouth hung open avariciously. Huge hands, with long, spadelike, chitinous nails, flexed and clenched. Powerful muscles rippled beneath the woolen shirt. Worst of all were the small red eyes that stared at them with a mixture of hatred and hunger. Logan had seen eyes like those once before: in an emergency ward, where a youth suffering a bad PCP trip was being wheeled in by the staff. The youth had been screaming and frothing at the mouth, and—though a cop had hit him in the arm with a nightstick, causing a compound fracture—he was swinging the exposed bone around like a weapon, heedless of the pain, trying to gouge the orderlies who were rushing him into the hospital.
The ghastly spectacle was like a mindless, violence-mad travesty of Zephraim Blakeney—but an order of magnitude worse. Gone was the diffident man of science; in its place stood a creature of violent needs and animal lust. The feeling of wrongness, of nature twisted and perverted, washed over Logan like a wave.
All this took place in a split second. Then Albright began to free his rifle from his shoulder. With a roar, Feverbridge leapt forward and—with a single blow of a taloned hand—rent Albright from collarbone to sternum. Albright cried out with the pain, but still struggled to free his rifle. Feverbridge reached out and grabbed Albright’s arm, gave it a vicious wrench; there was a pop like a cooked chicken leg being pulled from its carcass, and the arm dangled at a strange angle from the poet’s shoulder, dislocated. Albright screamed in pain just as Feverbridge leapt on top of him, hand raised and fingers splayed wide, readying himself for the killing blow.
Logan realized that he had been instinctively backing up in horror during this one-sided battle. Now he raised his handgun and fired, winging Feverbridge in the shoulder. The man roared out, but remained fixated on the fallen Albright. Logan fired again, this time hitting Feverbridge in the leg. Now the man straightened up, howling in pain. Logan fired a third and fourth time, but his hand was shaking and the shots went wide. Feverbridge tensed himself, preparing to spring, and Logan—without a moment’s additional thought—turned and ran for his life.
He tore mindlessly through the thick pine forest, heedless of the direction he was headed or obstacles in his path, aware of only one thing—the terrific crashing and snapping of branches behind him that made it horrifyingly obvious he was being pursued. He’d hit Feverbridge twice, but the shots hadn’t slowed him down—at least, not by much. The man’s plan was now all too clear. Albright had been correct about the unnaturally slow progress Feverbridge had made as he was being tracked, about how he was apparently doubling back on himself: despite his maddened state, he was aware that the two of them knew too much about him—and so he had laid a trap, waiting to ambush and kill them both.
Logan ran and ran, oblivious to the pine needles that raked his face and the branches that tugged at his limbs. Once he stumbled, but somersaulted forward back onto his feet and kept going without interruption, aware that at any moment he might feel those frightful nails tear across his back.
All of a sudden, the trees parted and a structure reared up ahead of him, spectral in the moonlight: the Phelps Fire Observation Station. The crashing sounds were still coming on, but he seemed to have put some distance between himself and Feverbridge. If he could get to the observation building at the top, he could use it as a blind and shoot Feverbridge when he came into the clearing. Immediately, he ducked between the metal struts that made up the sides of the tower and began climbing, two at a time, the exposed stairs that rose between them.
He made the first landing, started up the second switchback, then the third, before he heard a maddened roaring from below. A patch of thin clouds was now passing over the moon, but he could still make out the form of Feverbridge, crouching at the edge of the clearing below him. He half limped, half leapt for the staircase and began climbing with frenzied speed.
With something like despair, Logan realized he had made a tactical error. He still had two more switchbacks to go before reaching the top—he’d never make it in time. He pointed his gun at the climbing Feverbridge, squeezed off a shot—but the man-beast shrank away and the bullet ricocheted harmlessly off metal. He shot again, and this time Feverbridge grunted as the bullet bit through part of an ear—but it did not slow his frantic climb.
Logan looked around in desperation. There was only one chance. Without giving himself time to reconsider, he leapt from the open staircase onto the metal skeleton that made up the external structure of the station. He hit it with a bone-jarring impact; one hand slipped off the metal framing, but he quickly grasped it again. There was a bellow of anger from below and to one side. Ignoring this as best he could, Logan maneuvered his way crablike along the beam until he reached a corner strut, then began sliding his way as quickly as he dared back down to the ground.
A terrific bang overhead told him that Feverbridge had duplicated his maneuver.
He hit the ground with a dreadful thump, then raced across the narrow clearing and reentered the pine forest, hoping a
gainst hope that Feverbridge had not seen the direction in which he’d run.
Another nightmarish dash through the pine forest began. Logan’s sides were burning, and his ankles hurt from the heavy landing he’d just endured, but desperation lent new strength to his limbs. Once again, the crashing noises started up behind him, and with dismay Logan realized he had not ditched Feverbridge, after all.
He lost track of time, entering a kind of trancelike state in which all his concentration was bent on escape. He veered sharply, first left and then, a few hundred yards later, right; he was aware of tripping over another exposed root and falling flat on his face in the pine needles, losing precious time. The pain in his side became like fire, and each intake of breath was a small agony. But the frenzied bellowing from behind, the snapping noises of branches being thrust violently aside, forced him on.
…And then the trees fell away behind and he found himself on the top of a rocky outcropping, boulder-strewn flanks stretching away to the left and right. Nearby a stream bubbled up out of the rocks, falling away over the edge of the cliff and forming a waterfall that crashed onto the stones far below. Logan looked around as he gasped for breath. Although the clouds were still thickening, the light of the full moon was unimpeded, and it lit up the landscape below and beyond with a spectral illumination. Logan knew this spot: he was standing atop Madder’s Gorge, where Feverbridge had first killed the lone backpacker, half a year before.
A snapping of twigs behind him and Feverbridge emerged from the shadow of the trees. With a low snarl of triumph, he leapt forward. Logan raised the gun but Feverbridge swatted it away with the back of his hand and it went tumbling over the cliff. Logan stepped backward as Feverbridge advanced. He was bleeding from the gunshot wounds; two had merely grazed him, but the third had clearly been a direct hit to his left thigh. Despite the extremity of his own situation, Logan couldn’t help but marvel at the man’s ability to cover ground so quickly, given a wound like that.
A half smile formed on Feverbridge’s distorted mouth, and the little red eyes glowed with victorious malice. The hand that had swatted away the gun clenched into a fist; it came smashing down on Logan’s shoulder with unbelievable strength and Logan immediately crumpled to the ground. Now the fist opened, fingers flexing as before, nails gleaming in the moonlight. With a howl of bloodlust, Feverbridge raised his arm, preparing to tear out Logan’s throat.
Even as he did so, out of the night came a sudden, shouted word of command:
“Stop!”
40
Logan glanced over. It was Laura Feverbridge, advancing on them, moonlight glinting off the shotgun in her hands. In his preoccupation, struggling with the thing that had been Laura’s father, Logan had not noticed her approach.
Feverbridge, too, turned toward her with a snarl. He advanced a step, snarling again. But then it seemed that recognition burned its way through the madness that had overtaken him, because he raised a hand over his face—perhaps to shield himself from Laura’s terrible expression, perhaps to prevent her from fully seeing the change that had come over him. He retreated, one step, then another, and then his foot slipped on the edge of the cliff. He reared forward away from the edge as a group of thicker clouds began to scud across the bloated moon.
“You lied to me,” she told her father in a voice choked with anger, betrayal, and grief. “After all the effort, all the deception, all I’ve done for you—you’ve been lying the whole time.” She brushed away a tear with an angry gesture. “I found the journal in your private lab. I read your notes. Jeremy was right. Instead of trying to find an antidote, you’ve been secretly working to concentrate the serum—and you’ve been reinjecting yourself with it. Whenever we found a promising new avenue of research, you’ve paid lip service to the advance, pretending to be excited—and then you’ve subtly managed to undermine it. Every time. When I think of the hours, days, months I spent, worrying about you, trying to help you—all wasted, totally wasted!”
Logan tried to rise, realized from the sharp pain in his shoulder that it had been broken by the single, brutal blow from Feverbridge, and sank back. Feverbridge himself had gone still, staring at Laura. Exactly how much he could understand in his current state, Logan could not be sure—but he sensed the man-thing comprehended most, if not all, of what she said.
“And Jeremy was right about the other thing, wasn’t he? You don’t see what’s happened to you as an affliction—you’ve started to enjoy it. All those full moons you said you spent locked in your private room so I wouldn’t be burdened with the sight of your transformation—that violent impulse you said we managed to nullify after you murdered an innocent man in this very spot—those were lies, too. Weren’t they? Weren’t they?” Her whole body trembled with emotion; the shotgun shook in her hands. “And what’s even worse, the killings have been accelerating. They aren’t months apart anymore—they’re days. You killed those two hikers. You killed our very own lab assistant. You killed the ranger, Jessup, who’d begun to have suspicions of his own. Each murder more brutal than the last. And now you’re trying to kill Jeremy, as well—Jeremy, who only wanted to help!”
Suddenly, she raised the shotgun and pointed it directly at her father, openly weeping. “You’ve murdered five people. And that’s all you want to do now—kill again. Oh, my dear God, what kind of position have you put me in? What choice have you given me? No choice at all!”
The moon was now fully covered by clouds; Madder’s Gorge was reduced to a blue-black outline, illuminated by the palest ivory haze. As Logan watched, the madness in Feverbridge’s eyes seemed to waver and lessen. The mahogany hue of his skin began to shrink, grow paler. Maybe now I can get through to him, he thought. Maybe now he will listen. Laura had the shotgun trained on her father, but she seemed unable—or unwilling—to pull the trigger.
“Dr. Feverbridge!” Logan shouted.
After a minute, Feverbridge turned from Laura to him.
“We know the truth now—all of it. This can’t go on. Will you let us help you? Can you stop yourself, work to undo what you’ve become? Or are you going to keep on killing innocent people to satisfy an ever-growing bloodlust? Or…are you going to force your own daughter to kill you?”
As Logan spoke, Feverbridge stood motionless, like a statue. The red light died away in his eyes. The sense of wrongness, of nature perverted, that Logan had sensed emanating from him eased. He seemed to be wrestling with a deep inner conflict. He opened his mouth, but it was a low whine, not words, that came forth. He turned back toward Laura, her shotgun still pointed, tears streaming down her face, and his expression softened. He lifted one hand, reaching for her almost tenderly. At the same time, he took one quick step backward, then another—and then disappeared over the face of the cliff.
41
“Father!” Laura cried. The shotgun dropped from her hands, clattering forgotten onto the stones, and she turned and began scrambling down the path along the edge of the cliff. Even in the dim light, Logan could see that she was dashing along the trail at an almost suicidal pace, taking desperate chances as she leapt over rocks and fissures in an attempt to get to the bottom of the waterfall as quickly as possible. He rose to his feet and—doing his best to ignore the sharp pain in his shoulder—followed. By the time he reached her, she was at the edge of a little pool at the base of the cliff, water cascading all around, cradling the battered body of her father in her arms. She bent her head over him, weeping more loudly now.
With the absence of moonlight, Chase Feverbridge had reverted to his normal self. Gone was the thick hair from his limbs; gone were the hoary, oversized nails. The battered form was once again the bemused, charismatic scientist he had first met in the secret lab, mere weeks before.
Looking on, he understood what had just happened. Feverbridge had seen the unmistakable pain in his daughter’s eyes. He must have realized he was a lost soul. What he was doing was unpardonable—but it was something he could not stop, a murderous obsession that was only gro
wing worse. Whether his daughter would have managed to shoot him, nobody could now say—but rather than force her to live with doing so, and knowing he could no longer change, he’d saved her from the terrible choice by taking his own life, falling from the top of the cliff—ironically, dying in exactly the way Laura said he had half a year earlier.
Logan pulled out his cell phone, dialed 911—it took three tries before he managed to keep the call from dropping—and gave them the location, as best he could, of where Albright could be found. Then he knelt beside her. She was rocking her father’s head in her arms now, the weeping reduced to racking sobs.
“How did you know to come here?” he asked her gently.
It took her some time to answer. “I couldn’t think where else to go.”
He waited, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, for the sobbing to stop. There was nothing more to say. Finally, he put a hand on her shoulder. “Come on. I’ll take you back to the camp. Then we’d better call Krenshaw, turn ourselves in before he makes his move on the Blakeneys.”
At this she looked at him for the first time since he’d come up beside her. “Turn ourselves in? You’ve done nothing wrong. If anything, you were the one who came here tonight and showed me the truth. If it wasn’t for you, he’d have killed again. And again, and again. I’m the one—the only one—at fault. I wanted to believe him. I thought I did believe him. But deep down, I guess I always wondered—was he really there, locked in that room of his, on the nights of the full moon? Why was it that our research kept running into blind alleys? I should have asked myself those questions directly. Despite his pleas for privacy, to respect his affliction, I should have looked in on him those nights when the moon was full. I realize now the reason I never did was because I didn’t…didn’t want to know the truth.” She sniffed. “I thought I could cure him. But all I did was prolong his murderous obsession. And now, because of me—directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter—four more people have died.”