“Right.”
“And they’ll never know what went on in the guy’s mind. They’ll never know who he really is or was or why he does what he does.”
“Does your hand hurt?”
“No. But I wouldn’t know if it was on fire. I have so much Valium and Vicodin in me right now that—.”
“Gotcha. Been there. Okay. What else do you want to tell me?”
For half an hour, they talked about Antonio and his macho in-law cousins and how much they’d hated him because he was gay, and hated Stuart, whom they blamed for Antonio “becoming” gay; they talked about his stepfather Herman Buckler who paid the guys who’d kidnapped Antonio and Stuart, and wanted to kill and mutilate them both; they talked about Santa Rosa, about Blessed Sacrament High School, and they talked about what it means to be a really really great criminal lawyer, like Clarence Darrow, who was Stuart’s hero, and he would take the cases of the marginalized, the neglected, the despised.
Stuart started crying again. “Must be the drugs,” he said. He crumpled up again like a little child.
His mom came in with the chocolate milk shake.
“You’re going to get sick, drinking this!” she said with a vengeance, slamming it down on the bedside tray.
When the nurse appeared, she discovered that Stuart had a temperature again and said Reuben had to go. Yes, she said, they were giving him the rabies treatment, of course, and a cocktail of antibiotics that ought to take care of anything contagious from this wolf being. But Reuben had to go now.
“The ‘wolf being,’ ” said Stuart, “that really has a nice ring. Hey, will you come back, or do you pretty much have your whole story?”
“I’d like to come back tomorrow, and see how you are,” said Reuben. He gave Stuart his cards, with the Mendocino address and number written on the back. He wrote all his numbers down for Stuart in his hardcover copy of Game of Thrones.
On the way out, Reuben left his card at the nurses’ station. If there is any change, please call, he asked. If he thought about this kid actually dying, he would break down right then and there.
He caught the attending physician, Dr. Angie Cutler, right outside the elevator and urged her to contact Grace in San Francisco, since he’d been through all this with his mother handling the case. He tried to be as tactful about this as he could, but he was inwardly convinced by now that his mother’s treatment of him probably helped him to survive. Dr. Cutler was a lot more responsive than he’d expected. She was younger than Grace, knew Grace, and respected her. She was kind of sweet. Reuben gave her his card. “Call me anytime about this,” he said, murmuring something about what he himself had experienced.
“I know all about you,” said Dr. Cutler with an inviting smile. “I’m glad you came to see that boy. He’s crawling the walls in there. But he does have marvelous recuperative powers; it’s a miracle. If you had seen the bruises on him when they brought him in.”
On the way down in the elevator, he called Grace and urged her please to connect with the doctor. The kid had been bitten. It was true.
His mother was silent for a moment. Then she said in a strained voice,
“Reuben, if I were to tell this doctor the things I observed in your case, I’m not sure I’d have much cred with her at all.”
“I know that, Mom, I understand. I know,” he said. “But there just could be some really important things you could share with her, you know, about the antibiotics you used, the rabies treatment, whatever you did in my case that might help this boy.”
“Reuben, I can’t really call the boy’s doctor out of the blue. The only person who’s been the least interested in what I actually observed in your case was this Dr. Jaska, and you wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
“Yeah, Mom, I realize. But I’m talking now about the kid getting treatment for the bite, that’s all.”
A chill came over him.
He was walking out of the hospital now to the car, and the rain had started up again.
“Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t stay and talk to Dr. Jaska. I know you wanted me to. And maybe if it will make you feel better, I can talk to the man soon.”
And if I had stayed, well, then by the time I’d passed Santa Rosa, Stuart McIntyre would have been dead.
There was such a long silence that he feared he’d lost the connection, but then Grace spoke up again, and she sounded like somebody else with Grace’s voice.
“Reuben, why have you gone up to Mendocino County? What’s really the matter with you?”
How could he respond?
“Mamma, not now, please. I’ve been here all day. If you could just call the doctor, just volunteer, you know, that you handled a case like this one—.”
“Well, listen. You have to take the final rabies shot tomorrow. You know that, right?”
“I completely forgot.”
“Well, Reuben, I’ve left messages for you every day for a week. It’s twenty-eight days tomorrow and you have to have the final shot. Does this beautiful young woman, Laura, have a phone? Does she answer it? Could I perhaps be leaving messages with her?”
“I’m going to get better at all this, I swear.”
“Okay, listen to me. We were going to send the nurse up there with the shot, but if you like, I can contact this doctor in Santa Rosa and arrange for her to give it to you tomorrow morning, when you visit this boy. I could strike up a conversation with her, and if there is anything I know that would be of use to her, anything that I’m willing to share, that is, well, let’s just see what develops.”
“Mom, that would be perfect. You are my peach of a mother. But does this mean it’s actually been twenty-eight days since that night?”
It seemed a century had passed; his life had been so completely altered. And it had only been twenty-eight days.
“Yes, Reuben, that’s when my beloved son, Reuben Golding, disappeared and you took his place.”
“Mamma, I adore you. I will somehow in time answer all questions and solve all problems and bring harmony back to the world we share.”
She laughed. “Now that does sound like my Baby Boy.”
She rang off.
He was standing beside the car.
A strange feeling came over him, unpleasant but not terrible. He imagined a future, in a flash, in which he was sitting with his mother in front of the fire in the great room at Nideck Point and he was telling her everything. He imagined their speaking to one another in intimate tones, and that he shared this thing with her, and she welcomed it, and enfolded him with her expertise, her knowledge, her unique intuition.
There was no Dr. Akim Jaska in this little world, or anybody else. Just him and Grace. Grace knew, Grace understood, Grace would help him grasp what was happening to him, Grace would be there.
But that was impossible, rather like imagining angels over his bed in the dark at night, guarding him, with wings that arched to the rafters.
And when he imagined his mother in this tête-à-tête, she took on a sinister coloration that terrified him. There was a malevolent gleam in her eye in his mind, and her face was half in shadow.
He shuddered.
That could never be.
This was a secret thing, and could be shared perhaps with Felix Nideck, and always, and forever, as long as that might be, with Laura. But not with anyone else … except perhaps that chipper, bright-eyed boy with the freckles and the grin who was upstairs now healing miraculously. Time to go home, home to Laura, home to Nideck Point. Never had it seemed so like a refuge.
He found Laura in the kitchen making a large salad. She said one of the things she did when she was worried was make a large salad.
She’d rinsed and dried the romaine lettuce with paper towels. She had a large square wooden bowl rubbed with oil and with freshly cut garlic. The smell of the garlic was tantalizing.
Now she broke the lettuce into crisp bite-sized pieces, and she tossed the pieces in olive oil till they were glistening. There was quite a pile of thes
e bits of lettuce, glistening.
She gave the wooden spoons to Reuben and asked him to toss the lettuce slowly. Then she put the finely chopped green onions in and the herbs, taking out pinches of each herb—oregano, thyme, basil—and rubbing each pinch between her hands as she sprinkled it over the salad. The herbs clung perfectly to the glistening leaves. Then she added the wine vinegar and Reuben tossed more and then she served up this salad with sliced avocados and thin sliced tomatoes, and soft warm French bread from the oven, and they ate it together.
The sparkling water in the crystal glasses looked like champagne.
“Feel better?” he asked. He’d eaten the largest plate of salad he’d ever been served in his life.
She said yes. She was eating daintily, looking now and then at her freshly polished silver fork. She said she’d never seen silver like this old silver, so heavily and deeply carved.
He stared out the window at the oaks.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What isn’t?” he asked. “Want to know something terrible? I’ve lost track completely of how many people I’ve killed. I have to get a pen and paper and make a count. I don’t know how many nights it’s been either, I mean how many nights I’ve been changing. I have to make a count of that. And I have to write, write in a secret diary, all the little things I’ve been noticing.”
Strange thoughts were running through his mind. He knew he couldn’t continue this way. It was virtually impossible. He wondered what it would be like to be in a foreign land, a lawless land where there was evil to hunt in hills and valleys, where no one kept track of the number you killed or how many nights you did it. He thought of vast cities like Cairo and Bangkok and Bogotà, and of vast countries with endless tracts of land and forest.
After a while, he said:
“That boy. Stuart. I think he’s going to make it. I mean he’s not going to die. Whatever else will happen I don’t know. I can’t know. If only I could talk to Felix. I’m putting too much hope on talking to Felix.”
“He’ll come back,” she said.
“I want to remain here tonight. I want to stay indoors. I don’t want the change to come. Or if it does, I want to be alone with it in the forest, the way I was in Muir Woods that night when I met you.”
“I understand,” she said. “And you’re afraid, afraid that you can’t control it. I mean that you won’t stay here alone with it.”
“I never even tried,” he said. “That’s shameful. I have to try. And I have to go back down to Santa Rosa in the morning.”
It was already getting dark. The last rays of the western sun had vanished from the forest and the deep dark blue shadows were broadening and thickening. The rain came, light, shimmering beyond the panes.
After a while, he went into the library and called the Santa Rosa hospital. The nurse said Stuart was running a high fever, but was otherwise “holding his own.”
He had a text from Grace. The final rabies shot had been set up with Dr. Angie Cutler, Stuart’s doctor, for tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.
The night had closed in around the house.
He stared at the large photograph of the gentlemen on the wall—at Felix, at Margon Sperver, at all of them, gathered there against the tropical forest. Were they all beasts like him? Did they all gather to hunt together, to exchange secrets? Or was Felix actually the only one?
I suspect Felix Nideck was betrayed.
What could that have meant? That Abel Nideck had somehow plotted his uncle’s demise, even somehow collected money for it, and kept this knowledge from his devoted daughter Marchent?
Vainly, Reuben searched the Internet for the living Felix Nideck, but could find nothing. But what if, in returning to Paris, Felix had reentered another identity, at which Reuben couldn’t even guess?
The evening news said that Stuart’s stepfather had been released on bail. Taciturn police admitted to reporters that he was “a person of interest,” not a suspect in the case. Stuart’s mother was protesting that her husband was innocent.
The Man Wolf had been spotted in Walnut Creek and Sacramento. People reported seeing him in Los Angeles. And a woman in Fresno claimed to have taken his picture. A couple in San Diego claimed to have been rescued by the Man Wolf from an attempted assault, though they did not get a clear look at anyone involved. Police were investigating a number of sightings in the vicinity of Lake Tahoe.
The California attorney general had convened a special task force to deal with the Man Wolf, and a commission of scientists had been formed to study all forensic evidence.
Crime had not slacked off due to the Man Wolf. No, the authorities were not willing to say that at all; but the police said that it had. The streets of Northern California were relatively quiet just now.
“He could be anywhere,” said a cop in Mill Valley.
Reuben went to the computer and tapped out his story on Stuart McIntyre for the Observer, again leaning heavily on Stuart’s own rich descriptions of what had happened in the attack. He included Stuart’s theories as to the mysterious illness of the monster; and as in the past he closed with heavy editorial emphasis on the impossible moral problem posed by the Man Wolf—that he was judge, jury, and executioner of those he massacred and that society could not embrace him as a superhero.
We cannot admire his brute intervention, or his savage cruelty. He is the enemy of all we hold sacred, and therefore he is our personal enemy, not our friend. That he has again rescued an innocent victim from almost certain annihilation is, tragically, incidental. He cannot be thanked for this any more than an erupting volcano or an earthquake can be thanked for whatever good may follow in its wake. Speculation as to his personality, his ambitions, or even his motives must remain just that, speculation, and nothing more. We celebrate what we can—that Stuart McIntyre is alive and safe.
It was not an original piece or an inspired piece, but it was solid. And what drove it was the personality of Stuart, the seemingly invincible freckle-faced teen star of Cyrano de Bergerac who had survived a near-fatal gay bashing to talk to reporters personally from his hospital bed. Reuben only noted the “bite” in passing, because Stuart had only noted it in passing. No one was attaching significance to the fact that Reuben himself had been bitten. The drama of the bite was not playing out in the public eye.
Reuben and Laura went upstairs, got into the high-backed bed, and cuddled together watching a beautiful French film, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, and Reuben’s eyes grew heavy with sleep. It disturbed him actually to see the Beast talking so eloquently in French to Beauty. The Beast wore velvet clothes and fine lace shirts, and had glistening eyes. Beauty was fair and gentle like Laura.
He began to dream, and in his dream he was running in full wolf-coat through an endless field of blowing grass, his forelegs bounding effortlessly before him. And beyond lay the forest, the great dark never-ending forest. There were cities mixed up in the forest, glass towers rising as high as the Douglas fir and the giant sequoia, buildings festooned with ivy and trailing vines, and the great oaks swarming over many-storied houses with peaked roofs and smoking chimneys. All the world had become the forest of trees and towers. Ah, this is paradise, he sang as he climbed higher and higher.
He wanted to wake and tell Laura about the dream, but he’d lose the dream if he woke, if he stirred at all, because the dream was as fragile as mist and yet utterly real to him. Night came, and the towers were covered in glowing lights, sparkling and winking amid the dark trunks of the trees and the immense branches.
“Paradise,” he whispered.
He opened his eyes. She was leaning on her elbow looking down at him. The ghostly light from the television illuminated her face, her moist lips. Why would she want him the way he was now, just a young man, a very young man, with hands as delicate as his mother’s?
But she did. She began to kiss him roughly, her fingers closing on his left nipple, shocking him with immediate desire. She was playing with his skin as he’d playe
d with hers. Her oval-tipped fingernails scratched playfully at his face, fingers finding his teeth, pinching a little at his lips. Her weight felt good to him, the tickle of her hair falling down. It felt good, naked flesh against naked flesh, and this soft moist slippery flesh, yes, against his flesh, yes. I love you, Laura.
He awoke just as the sun was rising.
This was the tenth night since the transformation had first happened, and this was the first night that he had not experienced the change. He was relieved, but he felt curiously unsettled, that he had missed something of vital importance, that he had been expected somewhere and he had failed to appear, that he was not being true to something inside him that felt like, but was not, conscience.
32
SEVEN NIGHTS PASSED before Reuben got in to see Stuart again.
Reuben was able to get his own final rabies shot from Dr. Cutler as agreed, but Dr. Cutler just couldn’t let anyone near Stuart until the fever was under control, among other things. She was in contact with Grace, and very grateful to Reuben for that connection.
If Grace had not been attending the boy from then on, even coming up to Santa Rosa to see him personally and confer with Reuben personally, Reuben would have gone mad from the suspense. Dr. Cutler took his calls, and was more than friendly, but she wasn’t going to chat freely. She did let slip that Stuart was experiencing a remarkable growth spurt and she couldn’t quite figure it out. Of course the boy was only sixteen. The epiphyseal plates hadn’t closed yet, but still, she’d never seen anyone physically grow the way this boy was growing. And the growth spurt was affecting his hair too.
Reuben was frantic to see him, but absolutely nothing he said could change Dr. Cutler’s mind.
Grace was infinitely more forthcoming as long as not a single word of what she confided saw print. Reuben swore absolute confidentiality. I just want him to be all right, to live, to survive, to be as if none of this happened to him.