Even the details of her features were sinking into the darkness now, but he thought he caught a glimpse of some strange tenderness in the sadness of her smile. She reached up and briefly gripped his elbow, as if with true affection. Then she turned away. Turned her back on him.
“You know the word liebestod?” She could not have seen him begin to shake his head, but she went on anyway before he said no aloud. “Love-death, it means. A song or story about lovers who must together die. Romeo and Juliet—these you know, yes? But Americans do not tell such stories. Each one is everything to himself there, so I think. And always they believe they will make for themselves the happy ending. They do not know about liebestod.”
A wind moved, the fallen leaves rustling on the ground, branches creaking overhead. Zach shivered and looked around him. The woods were now draped in such sable night that the trees beyond the conifer circle had vanished into a general black and twisted thickness. Even the nearby evergreens were becoming mere suggestions of themselves. In such full darkfall, Zach’s eyes were quick to make out the odd star-like gleam that had appeared on the far rise to his left, to the east. In the moment or two that he watched it, wondering what it might be—an airplane? the evening star?—it expanded into a brighter blast of radiance, and then took shape: a curving silver crescent, the top edge of the rising moon.
“And yet it has been like that for me and my country,” Professor Dankl went on, her voice still deep and hollow but full of feeling too, full of a world-weary fondness that struck Zach as somehow particularly European. “Liebestod. I have sacrificed even my immortal soul to defend her—to defend her from evil and from death—to chase them through the centuries of unbelief, alone in my understanding of them. Umsonst. For nothing. I have failed and she is gone. My country . . . my continent . . . my culture. . . .”
Zach stood fascinated by the moon as it rose and rose, as it became a half circle illuminating the romantic silhouetted skein of branches and forest vines beyond the clearing, and then still kept rising from behind its far hill. He felt Professor Dankl glance over her caped shoulder at him, and looked at her—but she had turned again, was facing away from him again, and he went back to watching the moonrise, only half listening to her mad ramblings.
“Now she is gone, I cannot bear what I have become for her. Why should I fear what I must now do? Why should I fear hell even? I am in hell.”
Taking another quick look her way, Zach saw her shake her head at the earth beneath her feet. From where he was, she was little more than a shadow, frail and hunched. He turned his eyes to the moon again. It had crested the rise. It was full and glorious. The forest was magical with its glow. The deep interweavings of the branches had grown mysterious and fantastical.
“My love, my love,” said Professor Gretchen Dankl. “It is for you I have become an abomination.”
Zach stood for one more second appreciating the beauty of the moon and the moonlit forest. Then he drew a deep breath, resolving that he was finished here. He had humored the loony old woman enough. Enough.
He turned to her and began to speak, but before he could, she made a sound—and it was such a sound as he had never heard before. Animal in its rumbling depth and savagery but human in its grief, it was a cross between a feral growl and a low moan of mourning.
“Professor? Are you all right?” he said.
He took a step toward her. Had an instant in which to begin to realize that she was changing—that she had changed—but it was only an instant, and he only began to realize, because the truth of it was too impossible to imagine.
Then she spun round and tore him open with unimaginable speed and violence.
He was flying backward, his torso shredded, even as his mind was forming the image of what he could not in all reason have seen: the small, hunched shadow of the woman in the dark transforming into the great, hunkering beast of a thing that pivoted toward him quicker than the eye could follow. Its massive, blackly furred arm was still expanding, still bursting from its sleeve as it whiplashed through the night at him, its dagger-long, dagger-sharp claws slicing away his jacket, shirt, and flesh in one slashing sweep. The gun and the box it had come in flew from his outflung hands. Then his back smashed into the earth with a force that would have knocked the air out of him if he had not already gasped it all away.
He felt the life-blood spilling from his core. He choked on the blood rising in his throat. It coughed up out of him and spilled over his chin, and he was full of the primal knowledge that he had been wounded in some deep, essential way, maybe unto death. He did not even have to think this; he just knew it—he had a single second in which he knew it. . . .
Then the moonlight broke into the clearing in a broad and radiant beam—and the beast rose up above him, raging in the silver glow.
On his back, bleeding and in an agony more of shock than pain, Zach gaped up at the thing as it continued its metamorphosis. With sounds like the tearing of fabric and the splintering of wood, its muscles and bones were breaking out of themselves and the last traces of its humanity were molting from it. Shreds of what had been its clothes were flying and falling away. Its limbs were lengthening, its core thickening, its face—like some nightmare flower—was blossoming into a fire-eyed, snouted, snarling mass of bared and dripping fangs.
Another instant and its transformation was complete. It was no longer the little German professor at all. It was a massive monster, rampant against the moon.
Rearing on its huge hind legs, it raised its forelegs, its talons flashing. It howled—howled!—its muzzle tilted to the sky. The sound sent such an ancient and unholy terror through Zach’s whole body that it seemed to curdle his sinews into milk. Any courage he had, any strategy, any hope, was blasted out of him by that high, primeval cry. The oldest instincts of his brain informed the rest of him that life was over. He was prey. He was food.
If the beast had fallen on him then—as he was sure it would—he would have died and been devoured like any rabbit paralyzed by a predator’s glare. But the creature hovered above him in the moonlight another long second. He couldn’t tell why. It almost seemed to be pausing, to be relishing its expectation, snarling and slavering and staring in anticipation at the feast spread before it on the ground, its guttural noises full of hunger, nothing but ravenous hunger in its fire-yellow eyes.
In that moment of the animal’s hesitation—whatever its cause—Zach’s inner man rallied. The soul of a hero cop broke through his age-old mammal-shock, and he thought: the gun.
He didn’t know where it had fallen. It had been in his right hand. It must have flown off to the right. He didn’t know if he could find it. He didn’t know if he could reach it. He didn’t know if he could move at all, with his midsection torn apart and the gore still burbling out of him. Even his cry of effort gurgled with blood—but he did cry out—and he rolled.
The monster roared. It sprang at him. Zach reached desperately across the clearing’s floor, his fingers scrabbling blindly through the leaves. The beast was on him. Its huge claws sank deep into the flesh of his lower leg, spearing his calf through and through. Zach shrieked in wild agony—and his palm touched metal. His fingers clutched the .38.
The wolf-beast dragged him across the earth. He twisted his bleeding body round. He saw its eyes—enormous, and a color like no other thing: viscous yellow depths of extinction. The beast’s mouth was wide, its fangs were bared and ready to clamp on Zach’s throat. Its other paw was already swinging down to swipe the last life out of him.
Zach brought the gun to bear. He didn’t even know he was pulling the trigger until the third shot fired and the fourth and fifth. He screamed in pain again as the beast’s claws were wrenched out of his leg, ripping away chunks of him—and the enormous creature staggered back, reared up again, and wavered in the broad, mellow swath of moonlight.
Zach steadied his gun hand with the other and fired his last bullet, aiming center mass. The monster took one more faltering step backward, then stood stil
l and swayed. It looked down at the meat-man on the earth beneath it. The great yellow eyes blinked, and Zach thought for all the world he saw some recognition in them, some bizarre ecstasy of feeling that he couldn’t begin to name.
For what seemed forever, the beast swayed there above him. He thought it might—he thought it must—pounce on him again, and him now weaponless. Finally, though, it began its slow collapse. It sank down almost gracefully, one hind leg bending under it until the knee-joint planted itself in the leaves, one forepaw bracing itself against the earth. It panted rapidly, its huge tongue hanging over its fangs.
Coughing up some last bits of something—some essential organic matter from his deep entrails—Zach pushed himself off the forest floor, propping himself on one hand, so that, for a second or two, he and the beast were in almost the same position, the man rising, the creature sinking down. Their eyes met on a level, and Zach could’ve sworn that he saw something human there, some tenderness or gratitude in their savage depths.
Then the great wolf fell, toppling onto its shoulder with a thud that Zach felt in the ground underneath him. The creature made a high, weak, and sorrowful noise like the yip of a wounded dog. And as Zach watched—too badly wounded, too badly shocked, too thoroughly amazed to think much of anything—the thing began to change again.
Its substance seemed to shrink into itself. It made a strangled noise of human anguish. The sounds of tearing muscle and splintering bone repeated themselves in a weird inversion—a damp congealing noise—a clattering of reconstruction. The black fur of the beast seemed to retract into gray, aged, naked flesh—until, in the shadow and moonlight, there lay the old professor, Gretchen Dankl, her wrinkled white body settling onto its back, her old dugs sinking into the outline of her ribcage, her taut, anxious features pointed at the sky.
The wolf-creature was gone as if it had never been there at all. Zach could only stare at the professor, his mouth open, his mind in a muddy fever of denial: this was not happening. This could not be happening. Had he killed the woman?
Gretchen Dankl’s lips moved weakly. She whispered up into the air—to no one—to the forest night: “Liebestod.”
She seemed to smile a little, then her final breath rattled out of her for what seemed an impossibly long time. Her naked old frame sank into itself so that it appeared to Zach to grow even older—and then he realized it was—it was growing older, aging even as it died, as if the life inside had somehow kept time at bay, and now that the life was gone, the hindered years were returning to claim their due.
The body grew old, and even older. The face caved in at the cheeks. The eyes grew large and round in their widening sockets. The dead woman shriveled to an ancient corpse, and then to something like a mummy, its flesh wrapped tightly around the bones protruding from beneath. Then even what flesh there was grew darker; grew thin—paper-thin—and turned to ashes. The ash drifted down into the skeleton so that only the skeleton remained—the skeleton, skeins of sinew and the eyes still staring out of the skull. Then the staring eyes liquefied and drained away.
In his shock and disgust and confusion, pain and fear, Zach gagged. He hung his head and coughed at the earth, thinking he would vomit up the last life inside him. But the gagging subsided. With a heavy breath or two, he recovered. Still panting, he lifted his head and looked at the old woman’s bones.
The sinews dissolved and the bones began to crumble. The ribs clattered onto the spine. The skull collapsed into itself. The whole structure disintegrated, atomized. The dust pattered down upon the leaves, and was gone.
Breathing hard, Detective Zach Adams looked around him with mad, white, rolling eyes.
He was all alone in the clearing.
The gun fell from his hands, and he dropped down into the leaves to die.
8
ALL THE WAY HOME
Zach had little memory of what happened next: fragments and flashes of memory like pictures in a museum, each isolated in its frame, separated from the one beside it. He remembered, for instance, lying on his back with his hand on his middle, the sticky, slippery feel against his palm of the blood and gore smeared all over the core of him. White-hot agony screamed from the wounds there and in his gouged leg, and the cold knowledge seeped through him that this really was the end, that he could not lose that much of himself and still survive.
He remembered—again in flashes, in fragments—moments of trying to make sense of what had happened to him. Was it a dream? Had he gone mad? Had he just killed a woman? Had he killed a wolf? Was he even here, or was he somewhere else, sleeping? He must have passed out between questions and come to later, asking more questions. A good deal of time must have gone by. He remembered lying on the forest floor at one point in a sickness of complete unknowing, unable to imagine any plausible explanation for his being there at all.
Then—as if it had happened later, but how much later he couldn’t tell—he had a very distinct recollection of suddenly becoming conscious in the night, of taking a deep, deep breath, what he thought might be his final breath, and finding instead, to his confusion and surprise, that it had actually become easier for him to breathe somehow, that he actually felt less pain than before, had more strength than before—less pain and more strength, bizarrely, than he’d had when he’d first fallen.
He remembered crawling on his belly through the leaves. A sense that he must be leaving his guts in a bloody trail behind him. An even stranger sense that, no, he wasn’t, that he wasn’t leaving anything behind at all.
There had been a cabin—hadn’t there? He had an image in his mind—an image that included himself as if he were outside his own body looking at it. He was lying on dirt, in a cleared space on the forest floor. He was half-lifted on his elbows in a spill of blue moonlight. He was at the base of a set of porch stairs—yearning up at the front door of a wooden cabin as if he knew he would never find the energy to climb to it.
But somehow he must have done it. Because he had another memory: he was inside the cabin. He was in a bare room. There was a metal bowl of water. Chains—this part couldn’t be right, but he did remember it—there were chains in the wall—chains and manacles like in some old dungeon. Crazy, but that’s what came back to him.
More clearly, he remembered the taste of the water as he guzzled it thirstily. He remembered the cool, cool sensation of it as he splashed it over his wounds . . . over what he’d thought were his wounds . . . what had to have been his wounds . . . but he also remembered, or thought he remembered, how he’d sat propped against one rough, untreated wood-plank wall, his chin on his chest as he looked down at himself in stupid amazement, as he pawed through the bloody shreds of his shirt and jacket to see his torso, to find that his stomach was not wounded at all, but whole! His chest was whole! His leg—though his pants too were gory and torn—his calf was whole, completely unharmed!
Everything after that was fever and dream. An image of himself staggering through the woods. An image of himself in the Sebring again, on the road. A sense that he had driven on nearly empty highways in the dead of night, fighting to keep his eyes from sinking shut, his head from pitching forward onto the wheel. He did not remember returning to his hotel, but he must have because he had obviously retrieved his overnight bag. He had brought his bag back on the planes with him—his bag, but not the clothes that he remembered wearing, the clothes that had been ripped to blood-soaked rags. Those, he must have left behind somewhere.
The misery of the trip home came back to him in blurred flickering snatches. Jostling crowds at the airport. Grim faces, frightened eyes all around him. People pounding on countertops. Someone shouting in English in a German accent, “Zis iz madness! Zis iz madness!” over and over again. It was: madness. TV screens showed pictures of fire. Pictures of chaos, shaky-cam anarchy on city streets. Weak but grimly determined, he fought his way onto the plane. Sat on the plane covered in sweat, hot with fever. His head rested against the window. Sleep fell heavy on him, smothering sleep like a woolen shroud.
The last thing he could recall was waking up after the landing at Newark. Feeling slightly refreshed. Cooler. Thinking: Thank God. Thinking: if he could just get home, just take a couple of aspirin and crawl into bed. . . .
He never made it. He had no memory of this at all, but, according to witnesses, he had come out of the plane walking steadily, carrying his bag. He had looked pale—very pale, nearly gray and damp with sweat—but had seemed alert and strong. He had continued quickly through customs to the airport exit. Stepped out into the gray autumn weather. He had then stood as if considering which way to go. He had taken a deep, appreciative breath of the cool air.
Then, as if checking the weather, he had lifted his face to the sky. His mouth had fallen open and his eyes had rolled up into his head until only the whites were showing. The bag had dropped from his slack hand and—“as if he’d suddenly turned into a piece of string,” one witness said—his body sank in a wavering line to the sidewalk, and he spilled across the pavement, unconscious.
The doctors said he must have been traveling on pure willpower, sick as he was.
PART II
A DREAM OF GOOD AND EVIL
9
THE GRETCHENFRAGE
A sickly yellow fog lay over the headstones. It twined like a cat around the bases of the monuments. A statue of a cowled mourner gazed into its depths. A marble child, staring with blank eyes, appeared and disappeared as the mist blew and shifted over her. Inscriptions spoke and fell silent as the fog revealed or covered them. Here lies . . . Beloved mother of . . . What I once was. . . .
The mist felt cold on the back of Zach’s hands as he moved among the markers. With a low frisson of fear, he realized: he knew this place, this cemetery. The dead here—the dead were not dead. Some were walking near him—very near him—hidden in the fog. Some were even closer than that, running through his bloodstream, racing through his brain, as near as his own thoughts.