“The fact is, there may not be an England when I get back. There may not be one now, for all I know—I’m not sure how one tells when a country is gone, how many of its institutions can be transformed before it’s no longer the place it was. It’s not like it all collapses outright or anything, is it? Nothing of it that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change and all that. Myself, I think that England—that all of Europe—died in World War II, the spirit of it anyway. It’s just the corpse rotting now, the maggots devouring the flesh. Rather overwhelming to think about, when I can think about it. A whole civilization—Western civilization—Shakespeare, Newton, Mozart, Michelangelo. . . .”
Fatboy Mooch, Zach couldn’t help thinking.
Imogen flicked her fingers off her thumb to indicate a puff of smoke. “Gone like that.”
“You’ve lost me now, Miss Storm. What’s this got to do with Gretchen Dankl?”
“She approached us. Or, that is, she approached Bernard, Bernard Albright, my fiancé, our then-editor-in-chief. This was more than a year ago, before all the troubles started, but it was already pretty clear which way the wind was blowing. She told him there was a gangster named Dominic Abend who was behind it all somehow—the currency collapses, the strikes, the corruption, even the Islamist terrorist attacks. She said he—Abend—was an immortal warlock in league with the devil in some way. Bernard didn’t tell me all that much about it. It was just the sort of usual thing we cover.”
“Immortal warlocks in league with the devil.”
“Oh, yes, we must get two or three calls about them a month.”
Zach finally lowered his hand from his mouth to reveal his faint smile. “So . . . just so we’re clear. You’re telling me this in your—unemotional, objective way, but I’m supposed to catch the cutting-edge tone of irony, is that right? What you’re trying to say is that Gretchen Dankl was insane.”
One corner of Imogen’s mouth lifted. It was an attractive mouth, Zach noticed, the glossed lips thin but inviting in their prim, self-certain English way. “I forgot. Americans don’t have a sense of irony, do they?”
“It’s a national handicap, no question.”
“Can’t be helped. Mustn’t grumble,” she said briskly—and Zach began to like her now. He sensed real intelligence in her; he sensed she was trustworthy. “How if I simply give you the facts and you can decide for yourself, all right?”
“Fair enough,” he said.
“Gretchen Dankl rang up my fiancé Bernard with her story about Abend, and he was intrigued enough to agree to a mysterious evening meeting with her in the New Forest—about two hours outside of London. He never came back from that meeting. They found his body the next afternoon. His throat, as I say, had been ripped open.”
“I’m sorry.”
She didn’t acknowledge his condolence at all. She merely continued: “The police were noncommittal, but the tabloids chalked it up to a panther attack, of all things. Bizarre! covers quite a lot of those: panther sightings. The Beast of Bodmin Moor and all that. We even get an occasional fuzzy picture of one, like the sort you see of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I don’t believe there’s ever been a proven case, though. We cover a lot of sightings of ghosts as well.”
“So y’all don’t believe it, in other words.”
“When I went through Bernard’s computer afterward, I found some notes he’d taken during his phone conversation with Dankl. I gather she told him a rather convoluted tale about a line of werewolves who had allowed themselves to become beasts in order to fight off the evil threatening Christendom or suchlike. The idea seemed to be, you know, that evil can only be thwarted where people are willing to sacrifice themselves to fight it—to sacrifice not only their lives but their very souls.”
“By becoming wolves.”
“There you are.”
“And you think . . . ?” Zach began—but then said, “Well, what do you think?”
“Bernard was an older man—older than I am, at least,” said Imogen. “But he was in absolutely top condition and an accomplished martial artist to boot. I doubt a woman the size of Gretchen Dankl could have done much damage to him.”
“Except in wolf mode.”
“Mm.” Even as she spoke of her fiancé’s murder—perhaps because she was speaking of her fiancé’s murder—Imogen had become distracted again. Her elfin face had grown wistful again, and she was gazing past Zach’s shoulder at the busy scene outside. Zach glanced at the window too. He could see there was something cheerful and comforting about the sight of the people hurrying home through the cool weather. Even the sight of the jammed traffic had a festive and vital air about it. He’d read somewhere that it was bad in London now. People hiding in their houses, afraid to go out. . . .
The young woman shook herself as if waking from a trance. “You’ve heard the term lycanthropy, I suppose.”
“Uh-huh. It means being a werewolf.”
“Or being convinced you’re one. It’s been recognized as a mental disorder at least since the 16th century. Some even say it was the form of insanity that afflicted King Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel, when he went off to live with the wild animals. That was back in the 6th century before Christ. But the 16th century, that does seem to’ve been the . . . lycanthropical high-water mark, if you will. Between 1520 and 1630, there were as many as thirty thousand people condemned for being werewolves in France alone. Those sorts of numbers indicate something beyond mere superstition—or they do to me, at least. In fact, there’s a professor at the University of Maryland who claims that a fungus, ergot, infected the bread eaten by French peasants, causing them to have hallucinations and delusions, the effects similar to those of LSD. In any case, there have been documented cases of lycanthropy from then on, right up to the present: people who believe they can change into wolves or other animals. Shape-shifters, in other words. Nowadays, many psychiatrists think it’s a form of schizophrenia.”
“And you think Gretchen Dankl was suffering from lycanthropy. The mental disorder.”
“Well, if she was suffering from it, she may be still. She’s vanished, as I say, but I have no particular reason to think that she’s deceased.”
And now, with a feeling in his mind as if a three-dimensional puzzle piece had been dropped into place, Zach remembered where he had seen Imogen before—which, in turn, answered the other question that had been nagging at him: how had she made the connection between Gretchen Dankl and himself?
“You followed her,” he said. “After your fiancé was killed, you started trailing her. I remember now. I saw you on the campus in Freiberg, walking under the trees.”
“You must be a very good detective,” said Imogen Storm without, apparently, any irony at all—though, as an American, he couldn’t be sure. “Yes. I did follow her. After reading Bernard’s notes, I theorized that she suffered from the delusion that she was a werewolf. And I thought it quite possible that she had killed Bernard in one of her fits, her madness giving her extraordinary strength as madness sometimes does. The police were not convinced, not even interested. My profession made me suspect, for one thing: a kook working for a kooky website and all that. On the record, they claimed to be certain that Bernard had been killed by an animal. A dog or boar, if not some sort of wildcat. Off the record, one of the detectives indicated that they were afraid there was terrorism involved. They didn’t want to stir up headlines and trouble. They told me what hotel Dankl had been staying at, but that was as far as they would go. She was long gone by the time I got there, of course. But I was able to pick up her trail and, over the next year, I chased her across four countries. No mean feat, if I say so myself, especially as I had to keep the website going all the while in order to pay my way. It was only last month that I caught up with her in Germany, in Freiberg. She was selling cigarettes out of a kiosk there.”
“A kiosk,” said Zach, slowly shaking his head. This confirmed what he already assumed: that his meeting with Dankl at the university—her office there and so o
n—was all a setup, all a sham. “And you were trailing her the day I met with her.”
“I was. Your arrival was the first thing that had happened that was out of the ordinary. I was excited. I wanted to find out who you were. I knew where Dankl was staying, so unfortunately I made the mistake of following you back to your hotel. Thinking, you know, I’d be able to pick Dankl up at her flat when I was done. Well, I got your name and address from the hotel clerk, all right, but Dankl never returned to her flat after that, and the long and short of it is: I lost track of you both. You didn’t meet with her again, did you?”
“No,” Zach lied at once—like her or not, he was not willing to tell her about the half-remembered meeting in the Black Forest.
“Well, after that, as I say, she vanished,” Imogen went on. “I’ve been trying to pick up her trail ever since, but I’ve had no joy of it at all.”
Zach was about to say something, about to ask something; but before he could, she held up a finger, and said, “Just . . . ,” staving him off so she could finish.
“I did want to mention too that when I was looking for her in Poland at the beginning of last summer, I came upon another suspicious death attributed to animals: a Switzerland-based financier found torn to pieces in the Notecka Forest—in an old abandoned cemetery there that’s believed to be haunted. The Polish media kept it quiet. Protecting tourism, I suppose. It got quite a lot of traffic on Bizarre! when I wrote about it, but the news never traveled much beyond our sort of audience. The Polish authorities claimed it was a wolf attack. And there still are some wolves in that area. . . .”
“But you think that was Dankl too?”
Imogen’s eyebrows arched, her hands parted as if she were opening a hymn book. “She was in the area at approximately the same time. And also. . . .”
Zach waited for her to continue.
“This is rather tenuous,” she said, “but the Frenchman, the one who was killed, was a man named Reynard. He worked for an international firm called One World Investments, dedicated, according to their prospectus, to ‘progressive strategies for the ethical investor.’ Reynard was only a minor player there, apparently, but the company itself was said to have had a hand in several of the currency and market crashes of the last few years. So if you were defending Europe from evil, in other words, Reynard might have made a suitable target.”
Zach didn’t bother to try his coffee again. He figured it must’ve gone cold by now. He sat instead with his chair turned aslant so he could lean his elbow on the table, lean his cheek against his fist. He had been listening to the woman all this while and thinking . . . well, he wasn’t sure what he was thinking. He wasn’t sure what to make of this story at all, or what to make of this Imogen. He did like her. He felt there was something solid and serious and no-nonsense about her. On the other hand, it did seem strange to him—counter-instinctual—that a person of such obvious intelligence should choose the career she’d chosen: reporting on bizarre legends, sort of making fun of them and sort of not. A kook working for a kooky website, as she herself put it. He supposed there was a story behind it. There always was. Still, it gave him doubts, even though his gut impulse was to trust her.
He straightened in his seat now. “So—let me make sure I have this straight, being an American and having no irony and all. You think Gretchen Dankl is some kind of serial killer, basically. A crazy woman who kills people under the delusion that she’s a wolf.”
“That seems to me a reasonable hypothesis.”
“Doesn’t all rightly fit together, though, does it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if she’s supposed to be defending Western civilization or whatever, you could see why she might take down this Reynard fellow in Poland. But why your fiancé? Seems to’ve been harmless enough. Why me, for that matter, assuming she was also after me?”
Imogen studied him a long moment. “You’re really quite bright, aren’t you?”
“For an American? Or a policeman?”
She nearly smiled. “That did sound condescending, didn’t it?”
“A mite.”
“Well, to answer your question: I don’t know whether it ‘rightly fits together’ or not. I suppose mad people aren’t very logical, when it comes down to it.”
“Oh, madness has a logic of its own. Pretty much everything has a logic of its own, if you can find it.”
“May I ask you something?”
Zach tilted a hand toward her, as if to say Go ahead.
“Why do you believe me? Bright as you are. I’ve talked to countless law officers now in countless countries. You’re the first to let me get past the word werewolf without casting me into the outer darkness. Most of them stopped listening after I told them the name of my website. But you. . . . You’ve not only listened, you seem to be taking me seriously.”
“Cop instinct, I guess,” he said. “I can see the sort of person you are.”
That was another lie, of course. There was much more to it than that. And Imogen picked up on it. She said, “I’m flattered. But is that all? I don’t think it is. I think you know something—something that makes what I’m saying plausible to you.”
She’s good, Zach thought. A good reporter. But all he said out loud was “Why’d you come here? Why’d you come to me?”
Imogen Storm’s eyes, Zach noticed, were a very attractive shade of brown, a very pale brown that was almost gold. What drew his attention to them now was the emotion that had come into them for the first time since they’d sat down together. Something had broken through her English reserve, and her eyes were suddenly bright with her sorrow and pain. Zach guessed it was the fact that he believed her, or respected her anyway, that he hadn’t cast her into the outer darkness, as she’d put it. She was moved to openness, he thought, because after all this time, all this trouble, she had finally found an ally, or at least a willing ear.
“Bernard was a good man,” she told him, her voice still cool and bell-like and steady—defiantly matter-of-fact despite the look in her eyes. “A remarkable man, really, given the challenges he’d faced in life. I loved him very much and I’m not over him. He didn’t deserve to die as he did, to be murdered as he was and have it shrugged off, ignored. I find it difficult to let that go. Perhaps I simply can’t let him go. In any case, you’re the last lead I have.”
“But do you think Gretchen Dankl is here? Do you think she’s come to America?”
“That’s my working theory, yes. I don’t know why she chose her victims as she did, but I do think she chose them; and if she chose you, and if you somehow managed to escape her. . . .”
She ended with a gesture, and Zach completed her thought: “. . . she might come hunting for me.”
“And there’s one more thing.”
“All right.”
“The moon. The full moon. They say there’s always an uptick in crime at that time of the month—”
“Most policemen think so,” said Zach. “The scientists say it’s a superstition—like being able to tell when someone’s watching you.”
“Well, people with lycanthropy tend to believe in it. Their fits are often associated with full moons—or, to be more precise, those three days a month when the moon is effectively full. Bernard was killed on one of those full-moon nights. So was Reynard. Today is Friday. Sunday will be the first of the three full-moon nights this month. Do you understand what I’m saying, Detective?”
“I do,” said Zach.
“I think you should be careful,” said Imogen Storm. “I think you should be very careful indeed.”
16
LAZARUS
Sunday in church, Zach had a revelation. It was during the sermon and his mind had wandered. In fact, his mind had been wandering all weekend long.
After talking to Imogen Storm, he had had this feeling that everything was somehow better, that every strange and secret thing had been explained away. It was a feeling of relief and release. He thought, ah, these last few weeks with
all their weirdness—they had not really been so weird after all. Gretchen Dankl was insane. That was it. She had fits. She thought she was a werewolf. And when Zach had gone to meet her, he had been coming down with this septicemia thing, this fever that caused hallucinations. Her insanity and his delirium had come crashing together in a disastrous confluence, a perfect storm. She had, in fact, attacked him in the woods in a seizure of madness. That part, it turned out, wasn’t a dream. She had attacked him and he, in his illness, had seen her transformed, seen her as she believed herself to be. That accounted for all the crazy stuff he half-remembered. And as for the rest? What had happened between them after that? Well, he could only guess. It couldn’t have been the way he’d thought it was. He couldn’t have killed her. They would have found her body by now, for sure. And she couldn’t have wounded him as he’d thought. He would never have healed so quickly. Probably they had struggled and he had escaped and come home—and then collapsed. And that was the story.
And what about his dreams, his visions, the “ghosts,” the giant waterbugs? They were all the results of little relapses, little recurrences of his fever. He would have to go see the doctor next week and talk it over with him. But the effect was sure to pass as he continued to heal. The important thing was: he wasn’t going nuts and neither was the world. Everything had a reasonable explanation.
That was how he felt after talking to Imogen. That was how he felt through much of Saturday.
But the problem with reasonable explanations of mysterious things is that they almost never hold up over the long run. New doubts creep in. New questions arise—and then the same old questions return as it starts to become clear that nothing has really been explained at all, but only explained away. Mystery is mystery, that’s the whole nature of it. The old questions never really die.
If he hadn’t killed Gretchen Dankl, then where was she? If the roaches were an illusion, what had bitten his leg? If the ghost of Dankl was a hallucination, why had Grace smelled smoke? And if she really was a ghost, then she really was dead, wasn’t she? And so wasn’t it possible he had killed her, after all . . . ?