Then again, he made that gesture to the monk—that motion of his chin. “Make it unbearable for him,” he said. “Make it last forever.” And to Zach he added, “Auf wiedersehen, Cowboy.” Then he moved away, muttering “Incorruptible!”
Zach heard the rapping of his boots fading away. With an effort, he managed to raise his head. He saw the monk and Satan shift around to stand in front of him. The rat-faced monk bared his rotten teeth in a rat-faced grin. He obviously relished what was coming. The long countenance of the devil beside him simply looked mournful: the expression of an aging debauchee who knew full well that the pleasures of this life could never match his fantasies.
The monk opened his coat with slow melodrama to show the hilt of the combat knife sheathed on his belt.
Zach, his bloody flesh ablaze with pain, not certain how much more of this he could stand, silently recited an Our Father in his mind and forced himself to look away from the weapon, forced himself to look instead between the two thugs’ faces to the picture window.
Nothing on the glass now but blackness, not even the sea: only blackness and the reflections of the three men there in the lighted room, the torturers’ backs and Zach’s crucified nakedness; only blackness . . . and now, at the center of the pane, a shapeless patch of illuminated cloud, a brightening silver-gray radiance at the border of sea and sky.
Moonrise.
23
THE USES OF LYCANTHROPY
The grinning monk drew his knife from its sheath. He brandished it sadistically, holding it up in front of Zach’s eyes, turning it slowly to display first its razor-wicked edge and then its vicious serrations.
As if in response, Zach gave a long groan. He straightened abruptly in his chains. He seemed to stick his chest out at his tormenter, as if in defiance.
And then, impossibly, the crossed gashes on his torso began to knit themselves together.
There was a horribly wet sucking sound. The raw meat exposed on Zach’s breasts folded in on itself, the gory scarlet of it disappearing. The parted edges of flesh met and with a sort of leathery bubbling noise—and a busy particulate scrabbling as if a mass of tiny beetles were working just beneath the skin—they began to weave into one solid and unscarred whole. The spilled blood remained, staining Zach’s abdomen and dripping from his shorts, but the body beneath the blood healed completely in the course of seconds.
The monk and Satan stood aghast. They had seen some squirrelly supernatural shit during their tenure with Abend, but not this, nothing like this. This made the monk’s grin fade and Satan’s studied Weltschmerz resolve itself into a wholly unaffected expression of gaping stupefaction. It was a definite uh-oh moment for two enterprising young henchmen in the very heyday of their careers.
As for Zach, he could only look down—stare down at himself dumbfounded—and watch his injuries vanish, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, his mind gone blank. At first, he felt his transformation as little more than a tickling itch all through him. But as the wounds healed, the deep pain and even deeper sickness that had pervaded him suddenly rose to the surface and molted off, and they were replaced by a heady sense of strength and well-being. He drew a deep, restorative breath. There followed one last moment of full awareness, one single second in which his understanding overcame his disbelief, when he realized what was about to happen.
Then the change went off inside him like a bomb. Truly, it was as if another self inside himself exploded, expanded and filled him, and obliterated who he had been in the blast. There was new pain—writhing, groaning, straining agony as his body was violently wrenched out of shape by a force like an internal tornado. His flesh erupted enormously. His bones expanded in a shattering rush. The wild stiff bristling fur stabbed out through his mutating skin. The pain—but also and at the same time an indescribably elemental upsurge of pleasure—made him twist and cry out and stiffen. The agony of it and the thrill became indistinguishable to him, a single sensation beyond either, more than both.
It was that pain, that pleasure, that larger sensation without a name, that threatened to eradicate him. He could feel his very soul nearly blown to smoke by the beast he was becoming. His consciousness was on the verge of being extinguished by the force of Great Nature that was taking him over from within. This, he understood even now, was why he hadn’t remembered what had happened that night with Margo. He had been gone. He had been consumed in the metamorphosis. He had become the wolf.
He could not let that happen again. He could not lose control of himself so utterly. He had to fight it. Unbelievably powerful as the force of transformation was, he had to remain who he was in the midst of its whirlwind. Somehow, he had to keep his mind alive inside the burgeoning monster.
Impossible to say in words how difficult this was, what an act of will it required to fight the force of the event. He was becoming so powerful so quickly, so large in such a little instant, that the very experience of it was enough to destroy his saner self. His substance was morphing into incarnate power, his chest blossoming, doubling, tripling, quadrupling its size and strength. The spikes of fur impaled him from within and burst out into the open with a power of their own. His arms and legs grew so massive in so short a time that the manacles on his wrists and ankles broke at hinge and lock and flew away in pieces. He was free—and the blazing sirocco of wild animal passion blew up out of him in an uncontrollable roar that became an uncontrollable and raging howl. And through all this, he had to fight to retain some portion of that Zach who had looked in the mirror that morning and tied his tie. He was becoming a monster, but battling with all the force of his conscience to hold on to the inner man.
So he changed, but he was still there. He saw what was happening as if peering out from within a creature wholly beyond himself, wholly out of his control.
The monk and Satan, meanwhile, staggered back in open-mouthed shock. Satan screamed. The monk let the combat knife slip from his slack fingers. It spun down through the air and bounced on the wooden floor and lay there still. The two killers ran. Satan, his eyes like suns, shot away as if fired from a pistol. But the monk in his incredulity staggered back another step and stumbled when he tried to turn. He had to claw the air to get his balance back. He let out a girlish shriek of pure terror as he fought to get his feet under him. Then he motored from a slow, clumsy start into a full escape.
All this occurred while Zach was still transforming, while the beast was still bursting through his human boundaries as he writhed and screamed and howled.
Then the transformation was complete and Zach went after his tormenters.
He was a cop and had felt the thrill of the chase before, had forgotten himself and every danger and even all common sense in the excitement of running down some alleyway after a hightailing punk. But that was nothing compared to this. When he saw these two hapless schmucks scrambling for the doors, he felt as if some potion concocted of energy, hunger, and joy had come bubbling and snapping and sparking out of his heart to flood through him and commandeer his being. Suddenly, he was chase; he was capture; he was devour: these were all his life and purpose, and they compelled him. His small remnant of Zach-self could only look out helplessly through the wolf’s immense yellow eyes as he gave a roar of the purest bloodlust and took off after the running thugs.
All his senses sharpened. He felt a complete instinctual command of distance and terrain. He was at the door of the room with a single leap. The scent of his prey infused him with fresh desire and drew him to its source as would a female in heat. There was the front door down the hallway and the smell of asphalt, sea, and sand beyond and, just darting out of sight around the edge of the jamb was oh, oh, oh, the hot, red blood-being of the running monk.
Zach—or the beast that carried him inside it—the wolf he had become—raced after the monk with a wholeness of intent so complete that its very completeness made him let out another roar. Exuberant purpose so pure that no merely human endeavor could have inspired it seemed to propel his enormous for
m out of the house and into the open.
He skidded over a patch of gravel, then got his huge claws dug into the verge of grass. He steadied and, in one glance of electrified intensity, saw the whole scene.
Across the little hill of lawn, Satan had reached the driveway and tumbled into his car, a sleek, silver-blue Camaro. He must have started it by remote control because its engine was already running, its headlights already on, and he, behind the wheel and hysterical with panic, was trying to shift it into gear with one hand and pull the door shut at the same time with the other.
The monk, meanwhile, was scrambling and stumbling toward the car across the grass, shrieking “Wait-wait-wait!” in a voice so high-pitched it no longer sounded even like a little girl’s but was more like crow-call or the irritating creak of some unoiled machine.
Zach was appalled by his own sense of hilarity at this. The wolf’s hunter-joy filled him, transformed him. He relished what he was about to do even as the feeling made him disgusted with himself.
After that, whatever he felt didn’t really matter anymore, not even to him. There was only the pure motion-thrill of racing over the grass, the heat of blood in his nostrils, and the welling desire for running meat that made him slaver so that the drool flew out over his bared fangs.
He flew through the air, free as free, and pounced on the monk in the middle of yet another corvine cry. The monk’s “Wait-wait-wait!” was truncated to “Wait-wait-wuh . . .” as the weight of the monster-Zach landed on him and bore him heavily to the earth. The monk began another syllable of some sort, but Zach’s great jaws clamped shut on his throat and savaged it into a guttering glut of blood. So very good. The monk’s body jacked and shivered as if he were being electrocuted, but this was nothing in the wolf’s powerful grasp. Zach savored the monk’s blood and ripped a hunk of delicious meat out of him and disemboweled him with his claws as well—and all before the poor son of a bitch could rightly die.
The monk was such a pleasure in his gullet that Zach would’ve gladly stayed where he was and eaten every succulent morsel of him. But even as he settled in—with his prey’s last spasms radiating through his own flesh and intensifying his pleasure—he heard the sleek growl of Satan’s sporty ride and looked up, dripping gore, to see the silver-blue Camaro reverse down the beach house driveway.
At this point, the cop and the wolf became bizarrely one. The beast, having hunted, would probably have stayed and eaten; but at the sight of the bright racing object with more red flesh-and-blood inside, he felt torn between hunger and the atavistic desire to give chase. And Zach, the man, the federal agent who wanted to bring down the escaping felon, felt the wolf’s uprising urge to hunt and thought into his beast-self, Yes! Go! and that decided the matter.
He was off again. Springing across the grass, with monk-stuff still dripping from his jaws. His enormous paws hit the asphalt just as the Camaro backed to the end of the driveway. The goateed killer behind the wheel looked up to see the monster in his headlights—and Zach caught a glimpse of Satan’s face in that moment of his wildest terror. Once again, he was appalled at the uproarious vitality that filled him at the thought of running the evil idiot down and ripping him to pieces.
The Camaro’s tires screeched as it swung around onto the narrow road. It stopped hard as Satan braked to throw it from reverse into drive. Instinct flaming, the werewolf left the asphalt and raced slantwise across the lawn, not at where the sports car was, but at where it was headed: down the road.
There was a windbreak hedge along the border of the beach-house property. The Camaro shot forward and disappeared behind it, only the glow of its headlights visible through the shrubs. Zach was bounding on all enormous fours across the lawn at the hedgerow, his angle meant to intersect the Camaro’s path. He reached the windbreak and leapt, flying right over it.
Even from inside the car, even over the noise of the motor, Zach heard Satan scream as he landed on the Camaro’s roof. The weight of the massive supernatural creature threw the car into a zigzagging skid. It spun sideways hard, throwing Zach off it. The great wolf body tumbled through the air, hit the soft shoulder of the road, and rolled. He rose up, howling and brandishing what were still as much human arms as forelegs, the deadly claws extended.
The Camaro was turned across the pavement, frozen there for a moment, its headlights shining into Zach’s hyper-sensitive eyes. A second later, the car started to straighten. At the same instant, Zach sprang toward it and ripped the driver’s door open.
Even he was surprised at the power coursing through him. His wolf-self had acted on impulse, swiping a massive paw at the silver object as it tried to escape. But Zach the man had known to go for the edge of the door frame. He snagged it with his claws and tore with all his might. How easy it was! There was a loud crunch and scream of rending metal, and not only did the door’s latch burst asunder but the door came flying open so hard that the force of it bent the hinge so that when the door bounced back it could not properly close.
This, not surprisingly, made Satan scream again—nothing intelligible, just a babbling yell of fear as he hit the gas. But even as the car was lurching forward, Zach was on it, hurling the broken door open with one paw and reaching in for the driver with the other.
Smothered in muscle and fur and pierced by dagger-like claws, Satan was yanked from behind the wheel and hurled through the darkness, his head and feet changing places as he flew. The Camaro shot forward a yard or so without him, then settled quickly to a slow, dawdling, aimless roll until it reached the edge of the road, dropped onto the shoulder, and came to a halt.
By then, Satan had hit the dirt, an impact hard enough to daze him. Still, powered by fear, he scrambled mindlessly to his feet. The wolf’s triumphant howl seemed to come from everywhere so that he turned in confusion—until he saw the thing charging after him.
He didn’t run. There was no point. Bounding toward him, Zach saw the goateed gunman throw his hands up in front of his face uselessly, babbling and shrieking—also uselessly.
Another moment and the prey’s legs gave out under him and he sank to his knees.
As the werewolf flew at him through the air, Satan wept.
24
A LOVERS’ CAMPFIRE ON THE BEACH
The werewolf ran. Full of blood and flesh and moonlight, he felt the life of ages in him and the ancient joy of life. These powered him over field and forest in a mindless ecstasy of muscle and motion. The man within was overwhelmed by the force of it. He could only ride along, a more or less helpless point of view.
Over a fence, and through high grasses. Out to the beach and the wonderfully open sand. The sky was wide here and the earth was far and the moon had broken through the clouds and shone on him and made him mighty. The sound of the surf was the echo of his heartbeat. His breath was one with the boundless salt-scent of the sea. Nothing in God’s great heaven for men could match this. Running, he was the will of animal life which never dies.
The meals he had made of his torturers were with him, in him, not as a memory exactly, but as a general sense of well-fed well-being. The moment when he took them down and the moment when their heat-of-life became his heat were with him too, not as cherished mind-pictures but as fulfilled sensations still present in his moving body. If man-Zach retained any sense of disgust at these savage doings, it was less than a still-small voice in the beast. It was merely an observational glitch as good as silence. He didn’t care anymore, in other words. He simply ran.
After a while, he didn’t know how long, the postprandial exuberance went out of him and he slowed to a walk, his head hanging. He stopped and looked around him. The moon was nestled in the arc of the sky-dome now, the clouds drifting over its face like veils in a dance. Its light made the white dunes gleam. Zach looked up over them and saw high grass and sensed fresh water. He trudged up the sand and found a number of shimmering puddle-pools and drank gratefully.
He edged on, deeper into the grass. He found a dry spot and settled down to rest h
imself. He lay his head on his fur-soft arms and slept—or napped, at least, always with a sense of what was around him. His snoozing mind took stock of potential dangers in the same way his skin registered the flies that landed in his fur.
So, a little later, he became aware of presences nearby. Voices. People. Down by the beach.
He opened his eyes. Sleep had interknit the man and beast more completely. He could think, but his thoughts were a wolf’s thoughts. What is happening here? he wondered. Is it threatening to me? Or is it food? He lifted his head and listened and breathed. He heard a sound he knew was laughter. He smelled a smell he recognized as blood. People near, but not so near as to be a hazard. Zach licked his chops, considering whether he was hungry again—and he was, in fact, not for food so much, but simply for the hunt-and-kill and the pleasure of it.
He stood up slowly and stretched his back. He prowled cunningly through the grass so that it barely rustled. He reached the edge of the plant-cover atop the dunes above the beach. He looked down and saw the humans and the flame.
There were two of them, one male, one female, young and healthy but small, small enough to take easily. The boy first, he thought—in his jeans and sweatshirt, his hood pulled up against the night cold. Scrawny, but he would be the stronger and faster one. Then the girl, yellow-haired and slender in her jeans and sweater and wool cap. Slower and weaker, she would have no chance to get away. She was deliciously fertile-smelling too, Zach noticed: to bite into her would be to devour generations. He would feed on them both at leisure, then lope off to find a place to rest until morning.
He watched them from within the grass. The bloodlust rose like Saturday passion in him, a warm, slow, comfortable rise. The clouds had scattered. There were wind-blown shreds at the horizon, and lofty residual patches up high, but the moon was bright and silver-clear near the meridian. The whitecaps flashed in its light as the waves lifted to it, and when they slapped face-down upon the sand, their froth was fairly glowing.