The Wolf Gift (12 page)

He was certain, certain, he would find nothing there but a photograph of good old Reuben Golding. Just that, and nothing more, and incontrovertible proof that Reuben Golding was going flat-out crazy.

But there it was: the man wolf, staring back at him.

His heart stopped.

The head was immense, the brown mane falling well beyond the shoulders, the long black-tipped nose more than evident, and the fangs cutting below the black-rimmed edge of the mouth of the thing.
Blue eyes, your blue eyes
.

He covered his mouth with his hand. He was shaking all over. He felt of his own, natural lips, well formed, faintly pink, as he studied himself in the mirror. And then he looked at that mouth again, rimmed in black. This could not be; and this was. This was a lupine man—a monster. He clicked through one picture after another.

Dear God …

The creature’s ears were long, pointed, cleaving to its head, half hidden by the luxuriant hair. Its forehead protruded, but did not really conceal the large eyes. Only they retained their human proportion. The beast looked like nothing he’d ever seen before—certainly not the teddy bear monster of old werewolf movies. It looked like a tall satyr.

“Man wolf,” he whispered.

And is this what almost killed me in Marchent’s house? Is this what lifted me in its mouth and almost tore open my throat as it had done to Marchent’s brothers?

He synced the images one by one to his computer.

Then, sitting down before the thirty-inch monitor, he brought them up one by one. He gasped. In one picture, he’d been holding up his paw—and it was him, wasn’t it? No point to calling it “it.” And now he studied the paw, the big hairy webbed fingers and the claws.

He went back into the bathroom and looked at the floor. Last night he’d seen hairs dropping off him as they would off a shedding dog. They weren’t there now. There was something there, something wispy—tiny tendrils, almost too thin to see that seemed to disintegrate when he tried to catch them up in his fingers.

So it dries up, it dissolves, it flies away. All the evidence is inside me or gone, burnt up.

So that’s why they’d never found any fur or hair in Mendocino County!

He remembered that spasm in his gut, and the waves of pleasure washing over him, pervading every limb the way music reverberates through the wood of a violin or the wood of a building.

On the bed, he found the same fine, vanishing hairs, dissolving at his touch, or simply scattering far and wide.

He began to laugh. “I can’t help it,” he whispered. “I can’t help it.” But this was an exhausted, desperate laughter. Sinking down on the side of the bed, his head in his hands, he gave in to it, laughing under his breath until he was too exhausted to laugh anymore.

An hour later, he was still lying there, with his head on the pillow. He was remembering things—the scent of the alleyway, garbage, urine; the scent of the woman, a tender perfume suffused with an acid smell, almost citruslike—the smell of fear? He didn’t know. The whole world had been alive with scents and sounds, but he’d been focused only on the reek of the man, the pumping smell of his fury.

The phone rang. He ignored it. It rang again. It didn’t matter.

“You killed somebody,” he said. “Are you going to think about that? Stop thinking about scents, and sensations, and leaping over rooftops, and jumping some twelve feet in the air. Stop it. You killed somebody.”

He couldn’t be sorry. No, not at all. The man was going to kill the woman. He had already done irreparable damage to her, terrifying her, strangling her, forcing his fury upon her. The man had harmed others. The man lived and breathed to hurt and harm. He knew this, knew this from what he saw, and oddly enough from that powerful reek. The man was a killer.

Dogs know the scent of fear, don’t they? Well, he knew the scent of helplessness, and the scent of rage.

No, he wasn’t sorry. The woman was alive. He saw her running down that alley, falling, rising again, running not only towards the busy street, the lights, the traffic, but towards her life, her life yet to be lived, a life of things to learn, and things to know and things to do.

He saw Marchent, in his mind’s eye, rushing out of the office with the gun in her hand. He saw the dark figures close in on her. She fell hard on the kitchen floor. She died. And there was no more life.

Life died around her. The great redwood forest outside her house died, and all the rooms of her house died. The shadows of the kitchen shrank; the boards beneath her shrank. Until there was nothing, and the nothing closed her in and shut her up. And that was the end of it for Marchent.

If there was a great blossoming on the other side, if her soul had expanded in the light of an infinite and embracing love, well, how are we to know it, until we go there too? He tried for a moment to imagine God, a God as immense as the universe with all its millions of stars and
planets, its unchartable distances, its inevitable sounds and its silence. Such a God could know all things,
all things
, the minds and attitudes and fears and regrets of every single living thing, from the scampering rat to every person. This God could gather a soul, whole and complete and magnificent, from a dying woman on a kitchen floor. He could catch it up in His powerful hands, and carry it heavenward beyond this world to be forever united with Him.

But how could Reuben really know that? How could he know what lay on the other side of the silence in the hallway when he’d been struggling there to breathe and live, and those two dead bodies had been tangled with his body?

He saw the forest die again, and the rooms shrink and vanish; every visible thing collapsed—and all life winked out for Marchent.

He saw the rapist’s victim again, running, running towards her life. He saw the entire city take shape around her with myriad scents and sounds and exploding lights; he saw it expand in all directions from her running figure. He saw it tumbling and boiling towards the dark waters of the bay, the distant invisible ocean, the faraway mountains, the rolling clouds. The woman was screaming and reaching for life.

No, he didn’t regret it. Not one bit. Ah, the hubris, the greed of that man as he’d clutched at her throat, as he’d sought to take her life. Ah, the gluttonous arrogance of those two crazed brothers as they sank the knife over and over again into that magnificent living being that had been their sister.

“No, not at all,” he whispered.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he was aware that he had never thought of such things before. But observing himself just now was not the point. He was observing them, the others. And he had no regrets at all, only a marvelous calm.

Finally, he got up. He went to wash his face and comb his hair.

Only absently did he glance at his own reflection. But it shocked him. He was Reuben, of course, not the man wolf, but he wasn’t the Reuben he used to be. His hair was fuller, and longer. And he was slightly bigger all over. Whatever he’d become, a factory of alchemical changes, he was different now externally. He housed a crucible that required a more durable body, didn’t he?

Grace had talked about hormones, his body being flooded with hormones. Well, hormones make you grow, don’t they? They lengthen your
vocal cords, add inches to your legs, increase the growth of your hair. This involved hormones, all right, but secret hormones, hormones infinitely more complex than the hospital tests had been able to measure. Something had happened to his entire body that was very much like what happens to the erectile tissue of his organ when a man is sexually aroused. It increases marvelously in size, no matter what the man wants to happen. It goes from something flaccid and secret to becoming a kind of weapon.

That’s what had happened to him; he’d increased all over, and all the processes that govern any hormonal change in a man had been greatly accelerated.

Well, Reuben never really understood science. And maybe now he was trying to understand magic. But he sensed the science behind the apparent magic. And this capacity to change, how had he acquired it? Through the saliva of the beast that had bitten him, the creature who might have given him the fatal virus, rabies. The beast had given him this. And was the beast a man wolf such as Reuben had become?

Had the beast heard Marchent’s screams just as Reuben had heard the screams of the rape victim in the alley? Had the beast smelled the evil of Marchent’s brothers?

Of course, it had to be. And he understood for the first time why the beast had released him. The beast had known suddenly that Reuben was no part of the evil that had ended Marchent’s life. The beast knew the scent of innocence as well as evil.

But had the beast meant to pass on its obvious power?

Something in the beast’s saliva had traveled into Reuben’s bloodstream, just as a virus might travel, sought a pathway to his brain, perhaps, to the mysterious pineal gland, perhaps, or the pituitary gland, that little pea-sized thing we all have in our brain that controls what? Hormones?

Hell.

He didn’t really know. These were guesses. If ever in his life he wanted to talk to Grace about “science,” it was now, but not a chance. Not a chance!

Grace was not to know about this! Grace must never know. And no one like her must ever know.

Grace had done too many damned tests already.

No one was to know about this.

He had a vivid memory of being strapped to that gurney in Mendocino County as he shouted at those doctors, “Tell me what happened!” No. No one must know because not a single person in this world could be trusted not to incarcerate the thing he’d become, and he had to know infinitely more about what had happened and whether it would happen again and when and how. This was his journey! His darkness.

And up there, somewhere in that redwood forest, was another creature like himself, surely, a beast man who was responsible for what was happening to him. But what if it wasn’t a beast man? What if it was more nearly a beast, and Reuben himself was some hybrid creature?

This was maddening.

He pictured that creature now moving through the darkness of Marchent’s hallway, ravaging those evil brothers with its fangs and claws. And then lifting Reuben in its jaws, ready to do away with him in the same fashion. Then something had stopped it. Reuben wasn’t guilty. No, and the beast had let him go.

But had the beast known what would happen to Reuben?

Again, his own reflection in the mirror startled him, brought him back to the moment.

His skin had this unmistakable luster. Yeah, that was it, it was a luster, as if he’d been rubbed with a tiny bit of oil all over, and the hands that had anointed him with it had polished his cheekbones and jawline and his forehead.

No wonder they’d all been staring at him.

And they didn’t even begin to guess what was happening. How could they? It hit him that all he was doing was guessing himself, that he didn’t know a particle of it, truly. There was so much to find out, so much—.

There was a loud knocking at the door. Someone tried the knob. He heard Phil calling him.

He put on his robe, and went to answer.

“Reuben, son, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The
Observer
’s been calling you for hours.”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll go in. Just got to take a shower.”

The
Observer
. That was the last place he wanted to go, damn it. He locked himself in the bathroom, and turned on the hot water.

There was so much else he wanted to do, so much thinking, pondering, and delving.

But he knew it was extremely important to go to work, to get out of this room and out of himself and at least show up for Billie Kale, and for his mother and his father.

But never had he wanted so much to be alone, to be studying, thinking, searching for answers to the mystery that was engulfing him.

R
EUBEN DROVE THE
P
ORSCHE
too fast on the way to work. The car was always a chained lion in the city. With all his heart, he wanted to be on the road to the Mendocino forest behind Marchent’s house, but he knew it was way too soon for that. There was much more he had to know before he went searching for the monster who had done this to him.

Meanwhile the radio news was filling him in on the Goldenwood school bus kidnapping. No ransom call had been received, and there were still no leads as to who had taken the busload of children or where.

He made a quick call to Celeste. “Sunshine Boy,” she said, “where the hell have you been? The town’s forgotten about the children. It’s Werewolf Fever. If one more person asks me, ‘What does your boyfriend have to say about this?’ I’m going to cut out of here and barricade myself in my apartment.” She went on and on about the “crackpot” woman from North Beach who thought she’d been saved by a combination of Lon Chaney Jr. and the Abominable Snowman.

Billie was texting him, “Get in here.”

He could hear the mingled voices of the city room before he got out of the elevator. He made straight for Billie’s office.

He recognized the woman sitting in front of Billie’s desk. But for a moment he couldn’t place her. At the same time there was a scent in the room that was distinctly familiar and connected to something out of the ordinary, but what? It was a good scent. The scent of the woman, of course. And he could detect Billie’s scent, too. Quite distinctive. In fact, he was picking up all kinds of scents. He could smell coffee and popcorn the way he’d never smelled them before. He was even picking up the scents from the nearby bathrooms, and they weren’t particularly unpleasant!

So it’s going to be like this, he figured. I’m going to pick up scents like a wolf, and sounds, too, no doubt.

The woman was petite, brunette, and crying. She was dressed in a light wool suit, with her neck covered by a tightly wound silk scarf. One eye was swollen shut.

“Thank God you’re here,” she said the minute she saw Reuben. He smiled as he always did.

She immediately grabbed for his left hand, and almost pulled him down in the chair next to her. Her eyes welled with tears.