The Wolf Gift (44 page)

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.

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 played 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.

S
EVEN 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
.

Feverish, at times incoherent, Stuart was not only surviving but thriving, Grace said, exhibiting all the same symptoms Reuben had exhibited, bruises vanishing, ribs completely healed, skin glistening with health, and the boy’s body experiencing the baffling growth spurt, as Dr. Cutler had described.

“It’s all happening faster with him,” Grace said. “Much faster. But then he’s so damned young. Just a few years makes such a remarkable difference.”

Stuart had broken out in a terrible rash from the antibiotics and then
the rash had simply vanished. Not to worry, Grace said. The fever and delirium were frightening but there was no infection and the boy came out of it for hours every day, long enough to demand to see people, to threaten to break out of the window if he didn’t get his cell phone and computer, and to fight with his mother who wanted him to exonerate his stepfather completely. He claimed to be hearing voices, to know things about what was going on in buildings surrounding the hospital, to be agitated, eager to get out of bed, uncooperative. He was afraid of his stepfather, afraid of him hurting his mother. Invariably the staff sedated him.

“She’s an awful woman, this mother,” Grace confided. “She’s jealous of her son. She blames him for the stepfather’s rages. She treats him like a pesky little brother who’s ruining her life with her new boyfriend. And the boy doesn’t get how childish she really is, and it makes me sick.”

“I remember her,” Reuben murmured.

But Grace was as adamant as everyone else that Reuben couldn’t see Stuart. No visitors were allowed just now. It was all they could do to hold off the sheriff and the police, and the attorney general’s office. So how could she make an exception for Reuben?

“They upset him with their questions,” she said.

Reuben understood.

They came to Nideck Point four times during the week, pressing for information, as Reuben sat patiently on the couch by the big fireplace explaining again and again that he had seen nothing of “the beast” that attacked him. Over and over again, he led them to the hallway where the attack had taken place. He showed them the windows that had been bashed out. They seemed satisfied. Then they came back twenty-four hours later.

He hated it, struggling to sound sincere, helpless in the face of their curiosity, eager to please, when inwardly he was trembling. They were honest enough, but they were a nuisance.

The press was camped on the Santa Rosa hospital door. A fan club had sprung up among Stuart’s old high school friends, and they picketed daily demanding that the murderer be brought to justice. Two radical nuns joined the group. They told the world that the San Francisco Man Wolf cared more about cruelty to gay youth than the people of California.

In the early evenings, Reuben, in his hoodie and glasses, faithfully
wandered the pavements outside the hospital, circling the block, listening, pondering, brooding. He could have sworn once that he saw Stuart at the window. Could Stuart hear him? He whispered that he was there, that he wasn’t leaving Stuart alone, that he was waiting.

“This kid is in no danger of death,” Grace averred. “You can forget that. But I have to get to the root of these symptoms. I have to figure out what this syndrome signifies. And this is becoming a consuming passion.”

Yeah, and a dangerous one too, thought Reuben, but he cared more than anything else that Stuart live, and he trusted Grace to care more about that than anything else.

Meantime there had been a falling-out between Grace and the mysterious Dr. Jaska, though Grace obviously didn’t want to tell Reuben why. Suffice it to say the doctor was making suggestions Grace didn’t like.

“Reuben, the guy believes in things, unusual things,” Grace said. “It’s a veritable obsession. There are other red flags. If he contacts you, cut him off.”

“Will do,” said Reuben.

But Jaska was buzzing around Stuart and engaging his mother in long conversations as to the boy’s mysterious encounter with the Man Wolf, and Grace was leery of it. He was suggesting that mysterious hospital in Sausalito that had no documentation and was licensed only as a private rehabilitation center.

“He’s not getting anywhere for one good reason,” said Grace. “That woman doesn’t give a damn.”

Reuben was frantic with worry. He drove south and sought out Stuart’s mother at her sprawling modern redwood-and-glass palace east of Santa Rosa on Plum Ranch Road.

Yes, she remembered him from the hospital, he was the handsome one. Come on in. No, she wasn’t worried about Stuart. Seems like he had more doctors than she knew what to do with. Some weirdo from Russia, a Dr. Jaska, wanted to see him but Dr. Golding and Dr. Cutler said no. This Dr. Jaska thought he should go into some kind of sanitarium, but she couldn’t figure why.

Sometime during the interview, which wasn’t much of an interview, the stepfather, Herman Buckler, sauntered in. He was a short, wiry man with exaggerated features and dark eyes. He had crew-cut platinum hair and a dark tan. He didn’t want his wife talking to reporters. In fact, he
was furious. Reuben eyed him coldly. He was picking up the scent of malice clearly, much more clearly than he’d picked it up from Dr. Jaska, and he remained in the man’s presence as long as he could, though he was being ordered ever more violently to leave, just so he could study the guy.

The guy was poisoned with resentment and rage. He’d had enough of Stuart turning his life upside down. His wife was terrified of him, doing everything she could to placate him, apologizing for what had happened, and asking Reuben to go ahead and go.

The spasms were churning in Reuben. And it was daylight, the first time they’d ever come to him in daylight except for a very mild visitation when he’d seen Dr. Jaska. He kept his eyes on the man even as he walked out of the big glass and redwood house.

For a long time, he sat in the Porsche, looking at the surrounding forest and hills, just letting the spasms wane. The sky was blue overhead. This had the beauty of the wine country here, this lovely sunny weather. What a great place for Stuart to have grown up.

The change hadn’t really threatened. Could Reuben bring it about in daylight? He wasn’t sure. Not at all. But he was sure that Herman Buckler was capable of trying to kill his stepson, Stuart. And the wife knew it but she didn’t know it. In the midst of all this she was involved in a choice between her husband and her son.