“This gives me time and space,” said Reuben.
“I know. It takes the heat off you and that kid. I understand that. I don’t want anyone to hurt you, Reuben. I can’t bear the thought of them catching you, hurting you. I just don’t know what to do for you, myself.”
A few of the law enforcement people were still taking photographs and the sheriff reminded them: “No publishing of private photos on Facebook and I mean it!”
It seemed an eternity as they took their leave, Dr. Cutler the absolute last, who wanted so to check on Stuart, but realized that the boy shouldn’t be awakened after what he’d been through.
Stuart’s mother would be in the hospital for another few days. Yes, he would help Stuart to get to see his mother. He would handle it. Not to worry.
Phil gave him a rough hug. “One of these days I’m going to appear on your doorstep,” he said, “with a suitcase under my arm.”
“That would be wonderful, Dad,” he said. “Dad, there’s a little house over there, down over the rise, with a view of the sea. It needs a lot of repair, but somehow I see you in there, hammering away on your old typewriter.”
“Son, don’t push it. I might show up here and never leave.” He shook his head, one of his favorite little gestures. He shook his head negatively at least fifteen times a day. “Be the best thing that ever happened to your mother, if I did,” he said. “You just whistle when you’re ready for me to come.”
Reuben kissed him on his rough unshaven face and helped him into the van.
At last they were gone, all of them, and he wandered back through the drizzling rain into the house and bolted the door.
36
THEY WERE in the dining room. There were candles burning on the hunters’ boards, and on the table, in heavy engraved candlesticks. Thibault was feeding the fire again.
And across the table, Felix sat with his arms around Laura who was crying softly, her lips pressed to the back of her left hand. Her hair was loosened now and down around her face in that ethereal white veil that Reuben loved, full of flickering and reflected light.
Reuben bristled in his heart at the sight of this powerful and enthralling man holding her, and as if Felix sensed this, Felix drew back now, stood up, and gestured for him to take the chair at Laura’s side.
He went round to face Reuben across the table, seating himself beside Thibault, and they were quiet for a moment in the vast dreamy and warm room.
The candle flames played softly on their faces. The smell of beeswax was sweet.
Laura had stopped crying. Her left arm locked around Reuben and she laid her head against his chest. He enfolded her with his right arm, kissing the top of her head and cradling her face with his left hand.
“I am so sorry, so sorry for all of it,” he whispered.
“Oh, not for you to say,” she said. “Not your doing, any of it. I’m here because I want to be here. I’m sorry for such tears.”
What had brought on these particular words, Reuben wondered. They seemed related to a long conversation that he had missed.
He forced himself to look up at Felix, ashamed suddenly of his jealousy, heart breaking that he was now alone with Felix, that Felix and Thibault were under this roof with him and with Laura and that they were at last alone. How many times had he dreamt of such a moment? How many times had he prayed for it? And now it had come, and there was no impediment. The night’s horrors were behind them. The night’s horrors had been climactic, and were done.
Immediately Felix’s cheerful and affectionate expression melted his soul. Thibault, with his large heavy-lidded eyes, looked thoughtful and kind, gray hair tousled, the soft folds of his face framing an expression that was gentle, wise.
“We couldn’t tell you what we were doing,” he said. “We had to draw them out, Klopov and Jaska. With Jaska it was simple. He was dogging your mother, dogging Stuart. But Klopov only surfaced at the very close.”
“I thought as much,” said Reuben. “It was clear Jaska deferred to her. I could sense it. So she was behind it all.”
“Oh, she was the last of the governing committee that took us prisoner twenty years ago,” said Felix. “The very last, and Jaska her eager apprentice. It took a little provocation bringing her into it, but never mind that now. We couldn’t warn you, we couldn’t reassure you. And you do realize that not the slightest suspicion will ever attach to you or Stuart now for the Man Wolf’s attacks.”
“Yes, that was brilliant,” said Reuben.
“But you were never in the slightest danger,” said Thibault. “And if I may say so, you behaved superbly, rather like you did with Marrok. We never dreamed that Marrok would approach you. We didn’t account for that at all.”
“But how long have you been watching exactly?” asked Reuben.
“Well, in a way, since the beginning,” said Felix. “Since I picked up the Herald Examiner in Paris and saw Marchent’s death splashed across the front page. As soon as the ‘San Francisco Man Wolf’ made his debut, I was on a plane.”
“Then you never left the country after our meeting at the law offices,” said Reuben.
“No. We’ve been close to you ever since. Thibault arrived within hours; then Margon had to cross the Atlantic, and then Vandover and Gorlagon, too. But I’ve been in this house unbeknownst to you. You were quite clever in finding the Inner Sanctum, as we used to call it. But you did not discover the entrance in the cellar. The old obsolete furnace is a hollow aluminum dummy. I’ll show you later. Grasp the right side of the lower portion of it, bring it towards you, and you will open a door to which it is attached. There is a sanctuary of rooms there, all electrically lighted and heated, and then a stairs down to a narrow tunnel which runs to the west, opening just above the huge rocks at the base of the cliff at the end of the beach.”
“I know the place,” said Laura. “At least I think I do.” She picked up one of the old lace-trimmed linen napkins that lay in a little fan-shaped display near her, near to a plate of fruit and candies, and she dabbed at her eyes with this, and then clenched it tightly in her hand. “I found it on my walks. I couldn’t quite get over those slippery rocks. But I bet I saw the place.”
“Very likely you did,” said Felix, “and it is very dangerous there, and the tide often pours into the tunnel, flooding it for a hundred yards or more. Best for Morphenkinder and their like, who can swim and climb like dragons.”
“And you’ve been down there in the cement rooms behind the cellar,” said Reuben.
“Yes, most of the time, or in the nearby woods. Of course we followed you into Santa Rosa to see Stuart. We knew at once what had happened. We followed you when you went in search of him. If you hadn’t rescued him, we would have intervened. But you were handling things beautifully, as we suspected you would.”
“The man wolf,” said Laura, “who broke into the house tonight, this is one of the men in the library picture?”
“It was Sergei,” said Thibault with a smile in his deep flowing baritone voice. “We vied for the privilege, but Sergei was adamant. And Frank Vandover is with Sergei now, of course. Dr. Klopov held us prisoner for ten years. Klopov murdered one of us. This night provided considerable satisfaction for us all.”
“They’ll be back tomorrow,” said Felix. “What they are doing right now is establishing a path south for the Man Wolf. They’ll arrange an unimpeachable sighting in Mexico before morning. When they return, I’m hoping you’ll receive them, that we can all, with your permission, sleep under this roof.”
“This is your house,” said Reuben. “Think of me as a custodian.”
“No, dear boy,” said Felix, saying it exactly the way Marchent had so often said it, “it’s your house. Most definitely it is your house. But we will accept your invitation.”
“Absolutely,” said Reuben, “for now and forever and whenever and wherever you like.”
“I’ll take my old rooms, if you don’t mind,” said Felix, “and Margon has always been comfortable in one
of the smaller rooms along the north side facing the woods. We will put Thibault in one of the southern rooms, just next to Stuart, if this is agreeable to you, and Frank and Sergei will sleep on the northeast end in those corner rooms above the oaks.”
“I’ll go see to things,” said Laura, who started to get up.
“My darling, you mustn’t,” said Felix. “Please, do sit down. I know for a fact that everything is as comfortable as it ever was. Older, perhaps a little musty, but entirely comfortable. And I want you here, close to us. Surely you want to know what happened, too.”
Reuben nodded and murmured his assent to that, holding Laura close again.
“I must say, Reuben,” said Felix, “with a house of this size you must have a trusted servant or two, or this young woman completely out of her own generosity will become a drudge.”
“Absolutely,” said Reuben. He blushed. He didn’t want to think he’d been exploiting Laura, forcing her into any domestic role. He wanted to protest, but now was not the time for it.
He had a dream in his heart that these men would never leave.
He did not know how to bring them back to the subject of Dr. Klopov. But Laura did it for him.
“Was it in the Soviet Union that Klopov held you captive?” she asked.
“It began that way,” said Felix. “We were betrayed into her hands in Paris. It was quite a maneuver. Of course she had help from a very dear member of my own family and his wife.”
“Marchent’s parents,” said Reuben.
“Correct,” said Felix. His voice was even, without rancor or judgment. “It’s a long story. Suffice it to say we were sold to Klopov and her cohorts by my nephew, Abel, for a fantastic sum. We were lured to Paris, with a promise of archaeological secrets discovered by a Dr. Philippe Durrell who was supposed to be working on a dig in the Middle East on behalf of the Louvre.” He sighed, then went on:
“This Durrell, he was a genius of a conversationalist, and dazzled us over the phone. We converged on Paris, accepting his invitation for accommodations in a small hotel on the Left Bank.”
“The trap had to be sprung in a very crowded city, you see,” said Thibault, clearing his throat, his voice deep as always, and his words coming with a little more emotional resonance. “We had to be where our senses would be overwhelmed with sounds and scents so that we wouldn’t detect the people who were closing in. We were narcotized individually except for Sergei, who managed to escape, and never after gave up the search for us.” He glanced at Felix who gestured for him to go on.
“Almost immediately Durrell and Klopov’s team lost their government funding. We were smuggled out of Russia to a grim and ill-equipped concrete prison-laboratory near Belgrade, where the battle of wits and endurance began.” He shook his head as he remembered. “Philippe Durrell was brilliant without doubt.”
“They were all brilliant,” said Felix. “Klopov, Jaska, all of them. They believed in us completely. They knew things about our history that astonished us, and they had immense scientific knowledge in areas where more conventional scientists refuse to speculate.”
“Yes, my mother was confused by that brilliance,” said Reuben. “But she became suspicious of Jaska early on.”
“Your mother’s a remarkable woman,” said Felix. “She seems utterly unconscious of her own physical beauty—oblivious as if she were a disembodied mind.”
Reuben laughed. “She wants to be taken seriously,” he said in a small voice.
“Well, yes,” said Thibault, interrupting gently. “She would have found Philippe Durrell even more seductive. Philippe had immense respect for us, and for what we might willingly or unwillingly reveal. When we refused to manifest in the wolf state, he resolved to wait. When we confided nothing, he engaged us in long conversations and bided his time.”
“He was intrigued as to what we knew,” Felix offered gently. “By what we’d seen of this world.”
Reuben was fascinated as to what this might mean.
Thibault continued:
“He treated us as delicate specimens to be pampered as well as studied. Klopov was impatient and condescending and finally brutal—the kind of monster who pulls apart a butterfly the better to know how its wings work.” He paused as though he did not like to remember the details now. “She was hell-bent on provoking the change in us, and when occasionally we did change, in the beginning, we learned quickly enough that we could not escape, that the bars were too strong and the numbers too overwhelming, and we then refused to manifest at all.” He stopped.
Felix waited, then picked up the thread.
“Now the Chrism cannot be extracted from us by force,” he explained, glancing from Laura to Reuben and back again to Laura. “It cannot be withdrawn with a hypodermic or a sponge biopsy from the tissue in our mouths. The crucial cells become inert and then disintegrate within seconds. I discovered this long ago in my own stumbling fashion in the early centuries of science, and only confirmed it in the secret laboratory in this house. The ancients knew this from trial and error. We were not the first Morphenkinder ever imprisoned by those who wanted the Chrism.”
Reuben shuddered inwardly. Weeks ago, though it seemed like years, when he’d first gone to Confession to Jim, all of these possibilities—imprisonment, coercion—had come full blown into his mind.
“But to return to the moment,” said Felix, “one cannot inject the serum into another. That simply will not work.” He became a little more passionate as he continued.
“A critical combination of elements must be present to deliver an effective dose of the Chrism, which is why the bite of Morphenkinder more often than not produces no effect on victims at all. Now we understood full well what those elements were, and that we cannot be forced to give the Chrism, even if the change is induced, and the hand or arm of a victim is thrust into our very mouths.”
“But that in itself is rather difficult to accomplish,” Thibault interjected with a little laugh. “Shall we say that with any such attempt, casualties are high. If one is manipulated into changing, it is quite easy to rip the arm off any proffered laboratory specimen, or decapitate a man before he can get out of range. End of experiment right there.”
“I understand,” said Reuben, “of course. I can imagine it. In fact, I’ve thought it over. Oh, I mean, I can’t imagine what you suffered, what you endured. But I can well imagine how this might play out.”
“Imagine years of being isolated,” said Felix, “subjected to freezing holding cells and days and nights of pitch darkness, of being starved and bullied and threatened, of being systematically tormented by insinuations that your companions are dead. Oh, some night I’ll tell you the whole story if you want to hear it. But let’s cut to the point. We refused to manifest, or to cooperate in any way. Drugs couldn’t make us manifest. Neither could physical torture. We had long ago schooled ourselves to sink deep into an altered state of consciousness to defeat such efforts. Klopov became royally sick of it, and sick of Philippe’s long discourses on the mystery of the Morphenkinder and the great philosophical truths that we undoubtedly knew.”
He glanced at Thibault and waited for him to take up the tale.
Thibault nodded, with a faint resigned gesture of his right hand. “Klopov had Reynolds Wagner, our beloved companion and fellow prisoner, bound to an operating table and she and her team started to dissect him alive.”
“My God!” Reuben whispered.
“We were forced to witness, via video cameras from our cells, what took place,” said Thibault. “We could recount the story to you blow by blow. It is enough to say Reynolds couldn’t endure the agony. He changed because he could not prevent it, becoming a ravening wolf, blind with rage. He managed to kill three of the doctors and almost killed Dr. Klopov before she and others disabled him with bullets to the brain. Even then he would not stop attacking. He was blind, on his knees. But he brought down one of the laboratory assistants. Klopov quite literally decapitated Reynolds with bullets, firing again and again
at his throat until there was no more throat—or neck. She severed his spinal cord. Then Reynolds fell over dead.” He paused, his eyes closing and his eyebrows coming together in a small frown.
“She’d been threatening us with death daily,” said Felix. “Gloating as to the wealth of forensic discoveries she’d reap from our autopsies, if only Durrell had allowed her to proceed.”
“I can imagine what happened.”
“Oh yes,” said Felix. “You’ve seen it.” He sat back, his eyebrows raised, staring at the table. “As you know from your experience with Marrok, Wagner’s remains disintegrated before her very eyes.”
“She and her team made frantic efforts to stop the disintegration,” said Thibault. “But they could do nothing. That’s when they found out that dead we were worth nothing. And around that time Vandover tried to take his own life, or so it seemed to them, and they resolved to wear us down through Durrell’s methods again. Durrell ever after hated Klopov, but he could not do without her, or have her removed. She and Jaska together were too much for him. With the other doctors lost, Jaska became even more important. We survived as best we could.”
“For ten years this went on,” said Reuben in amazement. It was all too real to him, this horror. He could vividly imagine being enclosed in a sterile cell.
“Yes,” said Felix. “We did everything we could to trick them into allowing us access to one another, but they were far too clever for that.
“Finally a crisis in Belgrade forced them to move. Sergei had discovered us. He put pressure. And then in their haste they made their fatal mistake. They brought us together, without heavily narcotizing us, for transport in one van.”
“They thought we were quite thoroughly demoralized by that time,” said Thibault, “that we were far weaker than we were.”
“We worked the change simultaneously with one another,” said Felix, “which is relatively simple for us to do. We broke the bonds and slaughtered the entire crew, including Durrell and all the other doctors, except, that is, for Klopov and her assistant Jaska who managed to escape. We burned the laboratory to the ground.”