The Wolf Gift (52 page)

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.”

Both men went quiet for a moment, as though lost in their reminiscence. Then Thibault, with a dreamy faraway look in his eyes, smiled. “Well, we escaped into Belgrade where Sergei had everything waiting for us. We thought we’d take care of Klopov and Jaska in a matter of days.”

“And it didn’t happen,” Laura affirmed.

“No, it didn’t,” said Thibault. “We were never able to locate them again. I suspect they used other names. But when a doctor’s credentials depend upon the birth name, well, he or she is likely to return to it, for obvious advantages.” His smile became faintly bitter. “And that is what inevitably happened. Of course the pair has found new backing, and we must eventually worry about that backing, but not just now.”

He cleared his throat and went on.

“Then came the news from America that Felix’s beloved Marchent had been murdered by her own brothers and a Morphenkind had dispatched the killers in the age-old way of the beast.”

For a long time they were silent.

“I was certain I would be united with Marchent someday,” Felix said in a small defeated voice. “I was so foolish, not to have contacted her, not to have simply come home.” He looked off, and then at the table in
front of him, as though intrigued by the satin finish of the wood. But he was not seeing that at all. “I had come here often enough when she was traveling. And once or twice spied on her from the woods. You see—.” He broke off.

“You didn’t want to tell her who had betrayed you,” suggested Laura.

“No, I didn’t,” said Felix. His voice was low, tentative. “And I didn’t want to tell her that I had paid them both—her father and mother—in kind. How would she have ever understood unless I’d revealed
everything
to her, and that I did not want to do.”

A silence fell over them all.

“When the news broke about the attacks in San Francisco …,” Felix started, then his voice just trailed away.

“You knew that Marrok had passed the Chrism,” Laura suggested. “And you suspected that the good doctors would be unable to resist.”

Felix nodded.

Another interval of silence fell. The only sounds were the rain pattering on the windowsills, and the fire spitting and crackling in the huge grate.

“Would you have come here,” Reuben asked, “if there had been no question of Klopov or Jaska?”

“Yes,” said Felix. “Most definitely yes. I would not have left you to face this alone. I wanted to come on account of Marchent. I wanted the things I’d left in the house. But I wanted to know you. I wanted to discover who you really were. I wasn’t going to abandon you to all this. We never do that. That’s why I arranged that awkward meeting at the lawyers’ offices.

“And if I’d been unreachable for any reason, Thibault would have come to seek you out. Or Vandover or Sergei. As it was, we were together when the news broke. We knew it was Marrok. We knew that the assaults in San Francisco had been carried out by you.”

“Then whenever the Chrism’s passed, you go to help that individual?” asked Reuben.

“My dear boy,” said Felix. “It does not happen all that often, really, and seldom in such a spectacular way.”

They were both looking fondly at Reuben now, and the old warmth came back into Felix’s face.

“So you were never angry,” asked Reuben, “that I put the Man Wolf in the public eye.”

Felix laughed under his breath, and so did Thibault, as they exchanged glances.

“Were we angry?” he asked Thibault with a sly smile, nudging him with his elbow. “What do you think?”

Thibault shook his head.

Reuben couldn’t figure out what this actually meant, only that it did seem the very opposite of anger, and that was more than he had a right to ask.

“Well, I was not so very delighted with it,” said Felix, “but I would not say I was ever angry, no.”

“There’s so much we can tell you,” said Thibault, affectionately. “So many things we can explain—to you, and to Stuart, and to Laura.”

And to Laura
.

Felix looked at the dark window with its glittering sheet of sliding rain. His eyes moved over the elaborate ceiling with its varnished crisscross beams and those panels of painted sky with their gold stars.

And I know what he is feeling, thought Reuben, and he loves this house, loves it as he did when he built it, for surely he did build it, and he needs it, needs to come home to it now.

“And it would take years of nights such as this,” Felix said, dreamily, “to tell you all we have to tell.”

“I think it’s enough for now, for this first night, this remarkable night,” said Thibault. “But remember, you were never in danger as we waited to play our hand.”

“I understand that completely,” said Reuben. There was more he wanted to say, especially now. So much more. But he was almost too dazzled to form words.

His many questions seemed insignificant as a vision of knowledge took form in his mind, vast, well beyond the arithmetical strictures of language, a great organic yet limitless vision that dissolved words. It was something infinitely more like music, expanding and rolling like the symphonic triumphs of Brahms. His heart was beating quietly to the mounting rhythm of his expectations, and a light was slowing breaking in on him, heated, incandescent, like the Shechinah, or the inevitable light of every dawn.

In his mind, he was back in the high forest canopy, a man wolf resting in the branches, seeing the stars again above him, and wondering once more if the great longing he felt was somehow a form of prayer.
Why was that so important to him? Was that the only species of redemption he understood?

“It’s Margon who will counsel you,” said Thibault. “It’s always best that Margon do the counseling. He is the very oldest of us all.”

It sent a thrill through Reuben. And Margon, “the very oldest,” was with the Boy Wolf right now. How different all this would be for Stuart who was so energetic and inquisitive by nature, how remarkably different from what it had been for Reuben stumbling from one discovery to another on his unlighted path.

“I’m tired now,” said Felix, “and the sight of so much blood earlier has played upon my inveterate hunger.”

“Oh, give it a rest!” said Thibault in a mock-scolding voice.

“You were born old,” said Felix, gently nudging Thibault with his elbow again.

“Perhaps I was,” said Thibault. “And it’s not a bad thing. I’ll take the offer of any bed in this house.”

“I need the forest,” said Felix. He looked at Laura. “My darling,” he said, “would you allow me to take your young man away for just a little while, should he want to come?”

“Of course, go,” she said earnestly. She clasped Reuben’s hand. “And what about Stuart?”

“They’re close,” said Thibault. “I think Margon is deliberately exhausting him for his own good.”

“There are reporters out there,” said Reuben. “I can hear them. I’m sure you can too.”

“And so can Margon,” said Felix gently. “They’ll come through the tunnel or over the roof into the sanctum. You need not worry. You know that. You need not ever worry. We will never be seen.”

Laura was on her feet and in Reuben’s arms. He felt the intense heat of her breasts against his shirtfront, his chest. He pressed his face against her tender neck.

Reuben didn’t have to tell her what this meant to him, to go out there into the divine leafy darkness with Felix, to go deep into the very heart of the night at Felix’s side.

“You come back to me soon,” she whispered.

Thibault had come round to take her arm, to escort her, as it were, as if this had been a formal dinner in an earlier time, and they left the
room together, Laura vaguely enchanted and Thibault doting as they disappeared into the hall.

Reuben looked at Felix.

Felix was again smiling at him, his face serene and full of compassion and a simple, effortless, and shining goodwill.

T
HEY WENT DOWN
through the cellar. All one had to do was swing back the heavy door to which the furnace was affixed above a concrete base that was in fact a hollow plastered box, and they were walking through a nest of cluttered dimly lighted rooms, beneath dusty electric bulbs and past heaps of trunks and old garments, and hulking pieces of furniture, and past other doors.

Down the stairs they went, and at last entered the broad earthen tunnel beamed and supported like a coal mine, a faint silvery light sparkling on the rich veins of clay in the damp walls.

Round one turn and another they walked until far ahead of them, there broke the metallic light of the wet sky.

The tunnel went straight to the roaring sea.

Felix, fully clothed, began to run. He ran faster and faster and then leapt forward with his arms out, his clothes breaking from him, his shoes flying away as in midair his arms turned to great wolfen forelegs and his hands to great furred claws. On and on he galloped, gliding through the narrow opening out of sight.

Reuben gasped in astonishment. Then, trusting himself utterly to the example, he too began to run. Faster and faster he ran, the spasms rolling inside him, seemingly lifting him as he too leapt forward, his clothes ripping and releasing him, his limbs elongating, the wolf-coat erupting from the top of his head to his toes.

When he hit the ground again, he was Morphenkind, pounding towards the roar of the surf, the roar of the wind, the welcoming light of the night sky.

He cleared the opening effortlessly, rushing through the icy frothing waves.

Above on the perilous and jagged rocks, the man wolf who was Felix waited for him and then they scaled the impossible cliff together, digging
into earth and vine and root, and romping into the dank fragrant refuge of the trees.

Where Felix led, he followed, running as he had run south to Santa Rosa to find Stuart, with that rippling power, as they went north beyond the woods of Nideck Point, farther and farther into cathedral groves of redwoods that dwarfed them in the journey, like the lost monoliths of another world.

Boar, wildcat, bear—he caught the scents, and the hunger rose in him, the imperative to kill, to feast. The wind carried the scent of fields, of flower, of earth baked by sun and soaked with rain. On and on they ran, until there came on the wind the scent he’d never truly relished before: the bull elk.

The bull elk knew it was being pursued. Its heart thundered inside it. It ran with majestic speed and grace, dashing ever faster ahead of them until they both caught it, descending on its broad back, closing their jaws on either side of its mighty arched neck.

Down went the immense animal, its thin graceful legs twitching, its mighty heart pumping, its great gentle dark eye staring unquestioningly at the broken fragments of starry sky above.

Woe to you, all living things that appeal to such a heaven for help.

Reuben pulled loose the long dripping strips of meat as if he’d never known restraint in all his life. He crunched the gristle and bones, snapping the bones, grinding them, sucking at the marrow, swallowing all.

They nuzzled into the soft underdown of the belly—oh, this was always the sweetest with either man or beast—and tore at the richly flavorful rubbery guts, lapping with quick pink tongues at the thickening blood.