Woman on the street before a reporter’s handheld mike: “It’s troubling that they are keeping these witnesses from talking directly to the press! Why are we hearing all about what these people saw but not hearing from them ourselves?”
“Well, how do you expect people to feel?” said a tall man, questioned on a busy street corner against a backdrop of the Powell Street cable car clanging noisily downhill. “Is there any one of us who doesn’t want to strike back at all the evil in this world? Look, these kidnappers murdered two kids. A third died from a ketoacidosis coma. And who’s afraid of the guy, may I ask? I’m not. Are you?”
Reuben hit the OFF button.
“I’ve had enough,” he said apologetically.
Laura nodded.
“So have I,” she said. She walked soundlessly to the fireplace and gave the logs a nudge with the brass poker, then returned to the couch, snuggling up against the white pillow she’d brought down from upstairs, and covering up with a white blanket. She had Reuben’s new collection of books on werewolf literature. She’d been reading them on and off since they arrived.
The room was comfortably lighted by the brass lamp on the desk. All the draperies were closed. Reuben had closed them throughout the house—quite a chore, but they had both wanted it.
Reuben wanted for all the world to snuggle up with her now, either here or upstairs in the regal bed of the master bedroom.
But they were both on tenterhooks. All Reuben could think about was “the transformation.” Would it come? Would it not come? And if it did not come, how bad would the restlessness get? He was already feeling it.
“If only I knew,” he said with a sigh. “Will this be something that happens to me every night for the rest of my life? If only I knew some way to predict or control it.”
Laura was quietly entirely sympathetic. She asked for one thing: to stay close to him.
Their first couple of hours at the house had been blissful. Reuben had loved revealing the place room by room to Laura, and she had fallen in love with the master bedroom, as he’d hoped.
Galton had installed a great many new plants in the conservatory, and even sought to arrange them in some decent fashion.
The orchid trees were magnificent, well over eight feet tall and filled with pinkish-purple blossoms, though some had been a little damaged in transit. They were in wooden pots. It took Reuben’s breath away to think that Marchent had ordered these right before her life came to an end. These trees flanked the fountain, and a white marble-top table with two white iron chairs now stood right in front of it.
The fountain had been reinvigorated and the water was rumbling beautifully from the small basin atop its fluted column into the broad flat basin below.
Reuben’s computer equipment and printer had arrived, along with the Blu-ray films. And all of the many television sets were fully equipped and working.
Reuben had spent some time answering e-mails, principally to head off trouble. Celeste had reported that the DNA findings for the Man Wolf case were “frustrating everybody,” but she hadn’t elaborated on what that meant.
And Grace had insisted that he needed to come home for more tests. But that if anyone asked him for another DNA sample, he was to refuse. And he should know they could not take it from him against his will without a warrant. She was looking into the matter of a private facility in Sausalito, recommended by the Russian doctor from Paris, that might be the perfect place for some confidential research.
She’d also cautioned him sternly against talking to reporters. With every new revelation concerning the Man Wolf, the reporters grew bolder in their search for a comment from Reuben, even showing up at the door of the Russian Hill house now, or calling the family’s private landline.
Billie wanted some deep reflection on the Man Wolf craze.
Maybe now was the time to offer it. He’d watched as much of the national news as he could endure, and had surveyed enough online to have a feel for the range of public responses.
It was good here, being alone with Laura. The silence, the crackle of the fire, the whispers of the forest beyond the curtains. Why not work? Who said that he couldn’t work? Who said that he could not go on working?
Finally he began.
After passing over the cases to date in some choice detail, Reuben went on to write:
Our way—the Western Way—has always been a “work in progress.” Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy—these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.
So why do we romanticize the Man Wolf who seemingly punishes wrongdoing without hesitation in ways that we ourselves cannot countenance?
Why does a noisy public cheer him on in his nocturnal frenzy when in fact his cruelty and violence should repel all of us? Can a monster who embodies the most primal and detestable urge we know as humans—the urge to kill with utter abandon—be hailed as a superhero? Certainly not. And surely if we sleep soundly in our beds during these extraordinary times, it is because we are certain that those upon whom we depend for our daily safety are in fact on the trail of this most challenging of aberrations.
The social fabric no matter how resilient cannot subsume the Man Wolf. And no sustained embrace of the creature by the popular media can alter that fact.
It is perhaps worth remembering that we are all, as a species, prey to dreams and nightmares. Our art is built upon the irrepressible stream of images rising from a secret fulcrum that can never be trusted. And though these images can delight and amaze, they can also paralyze and terrify. There are times when we are shamed by the most fleeting savage fancy.
Surely the Man Wolf seems the stuff of nightmare. But a dream he most certainly is not. And therein lies our responsibility, not only to him, but to all that he seeks to undermine in his unconscionable rampages.
Reuben e-mailed this at once to Billie, and printed out a copy for Laura. She read it in silence, then slipped her arm around him and kissed him. They were side by side then. He was staring into the fire, his elbows on his knees, his fingers running through his hair, as if he could somehow get to the thoughts in his head that way.
“Tell me the truth, if you will,” he had said. “Are you disappointed that I am not the Man of the Wild you imagined? I think you saw me as something pure, unburdened by moral constraint. Or maybe, maybe having to live up to an entirely different code because I was something not human.”
“Disappointed …” She pondered. “No, I’m in no way disappointed. I’m deeply in love.” Her voice was quiet, steady. “Let me put it to you like this. Maybe you’ll understand. You’re a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery.”
He turned and looked at her.
He wanted desperately to kiss her, to make love to her, right here in the library, or anywhere for that matter, anywhere that she would permit. But it was firmly lodged in his mind that she didn’t want him the way he was now. How could she? She wanted the other. They were waiting for the other, for him to become her lover, not simply “one of the handsomest men” she’d ever seen.
Time can tick when there is no clock.
He started kissing her. The heat was immediate and she slipped her arms around him. He found her naked breasts beneath the white flannel and laid claim with his left hand. He was ready, oh, too ready after waiting so long.
They moved down to the carpet together, and he heard her pulse quicken just as the scent of desire rose from her, something secretive and smoky and delicate. Her face was flushed under him, oh, so warm.
They removed their clothes, hurriedly, silently, and came together again, in a tangle of kisses that were almost tormenting for him.
Suddenly he felt the violent spasm in his belly and in his chest; the ecstasy moved over the sur
face of his entire body; the prickling pleasure paralyzed him. He fell to one side, and sat up, doubled over.
He heard her gasp.
His eyes were closed. Had it always happened that way before? Yes, at the very moment when he felt the hairs erupting from every pore, when the pleasure was one volcanic wave after another, he couldn’t actually see.
When he did open his eyes, he was standing, the mane thick and heavy over his shoulders, his hands transformed into claws. The fur was thickening into a ruff around his neck and between his legs. His muscles were singing with the power, his arms expanding, his legs pulled upwards as if by unseen hands.
He looked down at her from his new height.
She was on her knees staring up at him in obvious shock.
Shakily, she rose. She murmured some half-strangled prayer under her breath, and reached out cautiously and then quickly to touch him, to slide her fingers as she had done before into the thick outer coat that was growing denser and longer all over him.
“Like velvet!” she whispered, running her hands over his face. “So silken smooth.”
He could scarcely hold back from lifting her off her feet so that he could put his lips on hers. He had all of her, naked and small and beating with passion, in his arms.
“Laura,” he said in the new voice, the real voice. A divine relief coursed through him. She opened her mouth to his. That deep throbbing sound was coming from him, as if his body were a drum.
The forest crept to the windows. The rain was hissing and splashing in the gutters and in the downspouts, and rushing over the flags. The ocean wind drove at the rain and pushed against the walls.
He could hear a low vibration of the wind in the rafters, and in the softly groaning branches of the trees.
All the scents of the night had broken through the solid shell of the house, rising like steam from a thousand tiny whispering chinks and crannies. But central to all scents was the scent of her, and it went right into his brain.
20
HE STOOD in the front door, the rain pelting him, and the wind whistling under the eaves.
Out there, south of here, in the redwoods that ran to the east and upwards, he heard the snorting, snuffling animal he wanted. Mountain lion slumbering. Oh, you are a worthy prey.
Laura hovered close to him, the loose collar of her nightgown held tight at her throat against the cold.
“You can’t go,” she said. “You can’t risk it. You can’t bring them up here.”
“No. It’s not the voices,” he said. He knew he was staring glaze-eyed at the forest. He could hear the low almost guttural sound of his words. “No one will mourn this victim. She and I are creatures of the wild.”
He wanted that animal, that huge hulking animal that had killed Galton’s dog, that powerful beast that was secreted deep in the brush so very close by with three of her grown cubs, big cats themselves, breathing deep in sleep, but ready to break from their mother into the savage world. The scents mingled in his nostrils.
He had to go. He could not refuse this. The hunger and restlessness would be unendurable.
He turned and bent to kiss Laura again, fearing to hurt her as he held her face gently, very gently, with his paws.
“Wait for me by the fire. Stay warm, and I promise you, I won’t be long.”
He began to run as soon as he left the orbit of light surrounding the house. Swiftly, he entered the living whispering forest, running on all fours at such speed he scarce saw anything around him, the scent of the cats pulling him like a vibrant cord.
The coast winds died in the deep redwoods, and the rain was a mist against his eyes.
As he drew near the sleeping cat, he moved upwards into the lower branches of the trees, easily traveling as fast as he had on all fours, gaining on the lair of the cat, as the cat, catching his scent perhaps, woke and rattled the undergrowth around it, alerting the cubs whose low growls and hisses he could hear.
He knew instinctively what the cat would do. It was crouching low, fully expecting him to pass near to it, when it would spring with the full power of its hind legs and seek to overtake him from behind. It would sink its teeth into his spine if it could, disabling him immediately, and then tear out his throat. He saw this, saw it as if the scent carried the modus operandi.
Ah, poor brave and senseless animal that it would become the prey of a man beast who could outwit it and outfight it; his hunger, his rage for it, only grew.
As he neared the lair now the cubs, great sixty- to seventy-pound cats themselves, bolted from the wet foliage; the mother cat crouched, ready to spring. It was powerful, this tawny creature, perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds, and it sensed it was in danger. Did it know by his scent what he was?
If you do, you know more than I may ever know, he thought.
He let out a huge roar to give it fair warning, and then leapt from one tree to another before it, enticing it to pounce.
It took the bait, and as fast as it sprang for him, he whipped around and descended on it, his arm going around it as he sank his fangs into the tough layer of muscle covering its neck.
Never had he felt a creature this powerful, this big, this filled with the brute drive to survive. In a frenzy of snarling sounds, they went down together, his face pressed to its thick, odiferous fur, scrambling and struggling in the thorny vines and crashing wet leaves. Again and again, Reuben sank his fangs, wounding, maddening the animal, and then shredding the thick resistant layer of living meat with all the strength he had in his jaws.
The cat would not give up. Its long powerful body convulsed, its hind legs kicking. It gave a deep whining and furious cry. Only as he came round on top of it, forcing its head back with his left claw, was he able to kill it, piercing the softer underside of its neck, fangs closing deep on its spine.
The flesh and the blood were his now. But the cubs had come. They had surrounded him and they moved in. Firmly holding the carcass of the mother in his teeth, he sprang up the thick bark of an old redwood, easily climbing higher than the cats could climb. It felt good to his aching jaws to carry the kill ever upwards, the cat’s heavy body bouncing against his chest.
He settled high above against a thick lattice of branches and rough splintery leaves. Creatures of the heights fled from him. The upper reaches rustled and sang with the swift retreat of winged things.
He feasted on the salty meat of the cat slowly, devouring great pieces of dripping flesh.
For a long moment, after he was satisfied, he watched the angry, menacing cubs below, their yellow eyes flashing and glinting in the dark. He heard their low growls.
He shifted the thick body of the mother against his left arm so that he could feast on her belly, and rip into the soft juicy tissue inside.
He was in a kind of delirium again, because he was able to eat until his hunger was gone. Simply gone. He lay back against the crunching branches and half shut his eyes. The rain was a soft sweet veil of silver around him. As he glanced upwards the heavens opened as if for a laser beam, and he saw the moon, the full moon, the meaningless and irrelevant full moon in all its blessed glory, floating in a wreath of clouds, against the distant stars.
A deep love of all he saw settled over him—love for the splendor of the moon and the sparkling fragments of light that drifted beyond it—for the enfolding forest that sheltered him so completely, for the rain that carried the dazzling light of the skies to this shimmering bower in which he lay.
A flame burned in him, a faith that a comprehending Power existed, animating all this that it had created, and sustaining it with a love beyond anything that he, Reuben, could imagine. He prayed for this to be so. He wondered if, somehow, the whole forest was not praying for this, and it seemed to him then that all the biological world was alive with prayer, with reaching, with hope. What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?
He felt no pity for the cats circling restively below in the darkness. He had thought of pity, yes, but he did not feel it; he
seemed deeply part of a world where such an emotion made little or no sense. After all, what would the cats have thought of pity? The cats would have torn him apart if they could. The mother would have feasted on him at any opportunity. The mother had brought the long happy life of Galton’s cherished dog to a violent close. How easy a prey to her Reuben must have seemed.
The horror was that he was worse than anything known in the realm of the cat, wasn’t he? Even the bear could not have outfought him, he figured. But then he would have to see about that, wouldn’t he, and the thrill of the possibility made him laugh.
How wrong people were about the werewolf, imagining him to devolve into a mindless frenzy. The werewolf was not a wolf, no, nor a man, but an obscene combination of the two, exponentially more powerful than either one.
But right now, it did not matter. The language of thought was … just the language of thought. Who could trust language? Words like “monster,” “horror,” “obscene.” The words he’d written so recently to Billie, what were these words but weightless tissuelike membranes too weak to support the essence of any fragrant or pulsing thing.
Big cat, dead cat, cat who killed the warm and loving thing that was Galton’s dog. Dead. I loved every second of it!
He was half dreaming. He lapped at the great gash in the cat’s stomach, and sucked up the blood as if it were syrup. “Good-bye, sister cat,” he whispered, nuzzling its grinning mouth, running his tongue along its dead teeth. “Good-bye, sister cat; you fought well.”
And then he let go of her, his trophy, and she went down, down, down through the net of branches and fell to the soft hungry earth amongst her brood.
His mind wandered. If only he could bring Laura with him up into this shining realm, enfolding her safely in his arms. He dreamed that she was with him, safe against him, dozing as he dozed—as the wet breeze stirred the wilderness around them, and a universe of tiny creatures lisped and fluttered, lulling him to half sleep.