The Wolves of Midwinter

1

IT WAS THE BEGINNING of December, deeply cold and gray, with the rain pounding as always, but the oak fires had never burned brighter in the vast rooms of Nideck Point.^* The distinguished gentlemen, who had now become in Reuben’s argot the “Distinguished Gentlemen,” were already talking of Yuletide, of old and venerable traditions, of recipes for mead, and food for a banquet, and ordering fresh green garland by the mile to adorn the doorways, the mantelpieces, and the stairway railings of the old house.

It would be a Christmas like no other for Reuben, spending it here in this house with Felix Nideck, Margon, and Stuart, and all those he loved. These people were his new family. This was the secretive yet cheerful and embracing world of the Morphenkinder to which Reuben belonged now, more surely than to the world of his human family.

A charming Swiss housekeeper, Lisa by name, had joined the household only a couple of days ago. A stately woman with a slight German accent, and a very well-bred manner, she had already become the mistress of Nideck Point, seeing to countless little details that gave everyone more comfort. She actually wore a uniform of sorts, consisting of soft flowing dresses in black silk or wool that fell well below the knee, and wore her blond hair in what used to be called a French twist, and smiled effortlessly.

The others, Heddy, the English maid, and Jean Pierre, Margon’s valet, had apparently been expecting her and they deferred to her, the three of them often whispering together almost furtively in German as they went about their work.

Each afternoon, Lisa turned on the “Three O’Clock Lights,” as she called them, saying it was Herr Felix’s wish that they never be forgotten, and so the main rooms were always cheerful as the winter darkness closed in, and she saw to the fires that had become indispensable for Reuben’s peace of mind.

Back in San Francisco, the little gas fires of Reuben’s home had been pleasant, yes, a luxury certainly and often entirely neglected. But here the great blazing hearths were a part of life, and Reuben depended on them, on their warmth, on their fragrance, on their eerie and flickering brilliance, as if this were not a house at all, Nideck Point, but the heart of a great forest that was the world with its eternally encroaching darkness.

Jean Pierre and Heddy had become more confident since Lisa’s arrival in offering Reuben and Stuart every comfort imaginable, and bringing coffee or tea unbidden and slipping into rooms to make beds the instant that the groggy sleepers had left them.

This was home, taking shape ever more completely around Reuben, including its mysteries.

And Reuben really didn’t want to answer the frequent phone messages from San Francisco, from his mother and father, or from his old girlfriend, Celeste, who had in the last few days been calling him regularly.

The mere sound of her voice, calling him Sunshine Boy, set him on edge. His mother would call him Baby Boy or Little Boy once in a while. He could handle this. But Celeste now used her old title of Sunshine Boy exclusively for him whenever she talked to him. Every message was to Sunshine Boy, and she had a way of saying it that struck him as increasingly sarcastic or demeaning.

Last time they’d spoken face-to-face, right after Thanksgiving, she had laid into him as usual, for dropping his old life and moving to this remote corner of Mendocino County, where apparently he could “do nothing,” and “become nothing” and live on his looks and the “flattery of all these new friends of yours.”

“I’m not doing nothing,” he’d protested mildly, to which she’d said, “Even Sunshine Boys have to make something of themselves.”

Of course there was no way under heaven that he could ever tell Celeste what had really happened to his world, and though he told himself she had the best of intentions for her endless and carping concerns, he sometimes wondered how that was possible. Why had he ever loved Celeste, or thought that he loved her? And more significantly, perhaps, why had she ever loved him? It seemed impossible they’d been engaged for a year before his life was turned upside down, and he wished for nothing more right now than that she would leave him alone, forget him, enjoy her new relationship with his best friend Mort, and make poor Mort her “work in progress.” Mort loved Celeste, and Celeste did seem to love him. So why wasn’t all this over?

He was missing Laura painfully, Laura, with whom he’d shared everything, and since she’d left Nideck Point to go back home, to think over her crucial decision, he had had no word from her.

On impulse he drove south to seek her out at her home on the edge of Muir Woods.

All the way, he meditated on the many things that had been happening. He wanted to listen to music, to daydream, to enjoy the drive, rain or no rain, but matters closed in on him though not unhappily.

It was afternoon and the sky was leaden and gleaming and the rain never let up. But he was used to this now and had come to see it as part of the winter charm of his new existence.

He’d spent the morning in the town of Nideck with Felix, as Felix made arrangements to have the entire main street decorated for Christmas with greenery and lights. Every tree would be wrapped and twinkling, and Felix would finance the lighting and trimming of every storefront, as long as the owners went along with it, which they very cheerfully did. He wrote a check to the innkeeper for special decorations in the main room, and conferred with a number of residents eager to decorate their houses as well.

More merchants had been found for the old empty stores on the main street—a dealer in special soaps and shampoos, a vintage-clothing merchant, and a specialist in laces, both antique and modern. Felix had bought the one and only old motion-picture theater, and was having it renovated but for what he was not certain.

Reuben had to smile at all of this ultra-gentrification. But Felix had not neglected more practical aspects of Nideck. He’d been in contact with two retired contractors who wanted to open a variety hardware store and fix-it shop, and several people were interested in the idea of a café and newsstand. Nideck had some 300 people, and 142 households. It couldn’t support the businesses that were coming in, but Felix could, and would until the place became a quaint and charming and popular destination. He had already sold off four lots to people who would be building appropriately designed homes within walking distance of downtown.

The elderly mayor, Johnny Cronin, was in ecstasy. Felix had offered him some sort of financial grant to quit his “miserable job” sixty miles away in an insurance office.

It was agreed there would be a Sunday Christmas festival soon to which handicraft people of all sorts would be invited, ads would be taken in the various local papers, and Felix and the mayor were still talking over a late lunch in the main dining room of the Inn when Reuben decided he had to break away.

Even if Laura was not ready to discuss her decision one way or the other, he had to see her, had to steal whatever embrace he could from her. Hell, if she wasn’t home, he would be happy just to sit in her little living room for a while, or maybe stretch out and nap on her bed.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to her for him to do this, but maybe again it was. He loved her, loved her more than he had ever loved any girlfriend or lover before her. He couldn’t stand being without her, and maybe he ought to say so. Why shouldn’t he say so? What could he lose? He wouldn’t make or break her decision for her by what he did. And he had to stop being fearful as to what he would think or feel about whatever she chose to do.

It was just getting dark when he pulled into her drive.

Another urgent message came in on his iPhone from Celeste. He ignored it.

The little steep-roofed house in the woods was warmly lighted against the great dark gulf of the forest, and he could smell the oak fire. It struck him suddenly that he should have brought a little gift with him, flowers perhaps, or even maybe … a ring. He hadn’t thought of this before, and he was suddenly crushed.

And what if she had company, a man of whom he knew nothing? What if she didn’t come to the door?

Well, she did come to the door. She opened it for him.

And the moment he set eyes on her he wanted to make love to her, and nothing else. She was in faded jeans and an old gray sweater that made her eyes look all the more smoky and dark, and she wore no makeup, looking quietly splendid, with her hair free on her shoulders.

“Come here to me, you monster,” she said at once, in a low teasing voice, hugging him tightly, kissing him all over his face and neck. “Look at this dark hair, hmmm, and these blue eyes. I was beginning to think I dreamed every minute of you.”

He held her so tightly he must have been hurting her. He wanted a moment of nothing but holding her.

She drew him towards the back bedroom. She was rosy-cheeked and radiant, her hair beautifully mussed and fuller than he’d remembered, certainly more blond than he’d remembered, full of sunlight, it seemed to him, and her expression struck him as sly and deliciously intimate.

There was a comforting blaze in the black-iron Franklin stove. And a couple of little glass-shade lamps lighted on either side of the oak bed with its soft lumpy faded quilts and lace-trimmed pillows.

She pulled the covers down and helped him take off his shirt and jacket and pants. The air was warm and dry and sweet, as it always was in her house, her little lair.

He was weak with relief, but that lasted only a few seconds, and then he was kissing her as if they’d never been separated. Not too fast, not too fast, he kept telling himself, but it didn’t do any good. This was hotter, all this, more exuberant and divinely rough.

They lay together after, dozing, as the rain trickled down the panes. He woke with a start, and turned to see her with her eyes open looking at the ceiling. The only light came from the kitchen. And food was cooking there. He could smell it. Roast chicken and red wine. He knew that fragrance well enough and he was suddenly too hungry to think of anything else.

They had dinner together at the round oak table, Reuben in a terry-cloth robe she’d found for him, and Laura in one of those lovely white flannel gowns she so loved. This one was trimmed with a bit of blue embroidery and blue ribbon on the collar and cuffs and placket, and it had blue buttons, a flattering complement to her dazzled, confidential smile, and her glowing skin.

They said nothing as they ate the meal, Reuben devouring everything as always, and Laura to his surprise actually eating her food rather than pushing it around on her plate.

A stillness fell over them when they’d finished. The fire was snapping and rustling in the living room fireplace. And the whole little house seemed safe and strong against the rain that hammered on the roof and the panes. What had it been like to grow up under this roof? He couldn’t imagine. Morphenkind or not, he realized, the great woods still represented for him a wilderness.

This was something he loved, that they did not make small talk, that they could go hours without talking, that they talked without talking, but what were they saying to one another, without words, just now?

She sat motionless in the oak chair with only her left hand on the table, her right hand in her lap. It seemed she’d been watching him as he cleaned the plate, and he sensed it now and sensed something particularly enticing about her, about the fullness of her lips and the mass of her hair that framed her face.

Then it came over him, came over him like a chill stealing over his face and neck. Why in the world hadn’t he realized immediately.

“You’ve done it,” he whispered. “You’ve taken the Chrism.”

She didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all.

Her eyes were darker, yes, and her hair was fuller, much fuller, and even her grayish-blond eyebrows had darkened, so that she looked like a sister of herself, almost identical yet wholly different, with even a darker glow to her cheeks.

Dear God, he whispered without words. And then his heart began tripping and he felt he was going to be sick. This is how he’d looked to others in those days before the transformation had come on him, when those around him knew something had “happened” to him and he’d felt so completely remote, and without fear.

Was she that remote from him now, as he’d been from all his family? No, that couldn’t be. This was Laura, Laura who’d just welcomed him, Laura who’d just taken him into her bed. He blushed. Why had he not known?

Nothing changed in her expression, nothing at all. That’s how it had been with him. He’d stared like that, knowing others wanted something from him, but unable to give it. But then, in his arms, she’d been soft and melting as always, giving, trusting, close.

“Felix didn’t tell you?” she asked. Even her voice seemed different, now that he knew. Just a richer timbre to it, and he could have sworn that the bones of her face were slightly larger, but that might have been his fear.

He couldn’t get the words out. He didn’t know what the words were. A flash of the heat of their lovemaking came back to him, and he felt an immediate arousal. He wanted her again, and yet he felt, what, sick? Was he sick with fear? He hated himself.

“How do you feel?” he managed. “Are you feeling bad at all, I mean are there any bad side effects?”

“I was a little sick in the beginning,” she said.

“And you were alone and no one—?”

“Thibault’s been here every night,” she said. “Sometimes Sergei. Sometimes Felix.”

“Those devils,” he whispered.

“Reuben, don’t,” she said in the most simple and sincere way. “You mustn’t for a moment think that anything bad has happened. You mustn’t.”

“I know,” he murmured. He felt a throbbing in his face and in his hands. Of all places, his hands. The blood was rushing in his veins. “But were you ever in any kind of danger?”

“No, none,” she said. “That simply doesn’t happen. They explained all that. Not when the Chrism’s passed and there are no real injuries to the person. Those who die, die when their injuries can’t be overtaken by the Chrism.”

“I figured as much,” he said. “But we don’t have a rule book to consult when we begin to worry, do we?”

She didn’t answer.

“When did you decide?”

“I decided almost immediately,” she said. “I couldn’t resist it. It was pointless to tell myself I was pondering it, giving it the consideration it deserved.” Her voice grew warmer and so did her expression. This was Laura, his Laura. “I wanted it, and I told Felix and I told Thibault.”

He studied her, ignoring the impulse to take her to the bed again. Her skin looked moist, youthful, and though she’d never looked old, she’d been powerfully enhanced, there was no doubt of it. He could hardly bear to look at her lips and not kiss them.

“I went to the cemetery,” she said. “I talked to my father.” She looked off, obviously not finding this easy. “Well, talked as if I could talk to my father,” she said. “They’re all buried there, you know, my sister, my mother, my father. I talked to them. Talked to them about all of it. But I’d made the decision before I ever left Nideck Point. I knew I was going to do it.”

“All this time, I was figuring you’d refuse, you’d say no.”

“Why?” she asked gently. “Why would you think such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Because you had lost so much and you might want so much more. Because you’d lost children, and you might want a child again, not a Morphenkind child, whatever that would be, but a child. Or because you believed in life, and thought life itself is worth what we give up for it.”

“It is worth dying for?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

“You speak like you have regrets,” she said. “But I guess that’s bound to happen.”

“I don’t have regrets,” he said. “I don’t know what I feel, but I could imagine your saying no. I could imagine your wanting another chance at a family, a husband, a lover, and children.”

“Reuben, what you have never grasped … what you seem absolutely unable to grasp … is that this means we don’t die.” She said it without drama, but it was cutting to him and he knew it was true. “All my family have died,” she said, her voice low and a little scolding. “All my family! My father, my mother, yes, in due course; but my sister, murdered in a liquor store robbery, and my children gone, dead, taken in the most cruel ways. Oh, I’ve never spoken of these things to you before, really; I shouldn’t now. I hate when people tout their suffering and their losses.” Her face hardened suddenly. Then a faraway look took hold of her as if she’d been drawn back into the worst pain.

“I know what you’re saying,” he said. “I don’t know about death. Not anything. Until the night Marchent was killed, I only knew one person ever that had died, Celeste’s brother. Oh, my grandparents, yes, they’re dead, but they were so old. And then Marchent. I knew Marchent for less than twenty-four hours, and it was such a shock. I was numb. It wasn’t death, it was catastrophe.”

“Don’t be in a hurry to know all about it,” she said, a little defeated.

“Shouldn’t I?” He thought of the people whose lives he’d taken, the bad guys the Man Wolf had ripped right out of life, thoughtlessly. And it came down on him hard that very soon Laura too would have that brute power, to kill as he’d killed, while she herself would be invulnerable.

There were no words now for him.

Images were crowding his mind, filling him with an ominous sadness, and a near despair. He pictured her in a country cemetery talking with the dead. He thought of those pictures of her children that he’d glimpsed. He thought of his family, always there, and then he thought of his own power, of that limitless strength he enjoyed as he mounted the rooftops, as the voices summoned him out of humanity and into the single-minded Man Wolf who would kill without regret or compassion.

“But you haven’t fully changed yet, have you? Not yet?”

“No, not yet,” she said. “Only the small changes so far,” she said. She looked off without moving her head. “I can hear the forest,” she said with a faint smile. “I can hear the rain in ways I never heard it before. I know things. I knew when you were approaching. I look at the flowers, and I swear I can see them grow, see them blossoming, see them dying.”

He didn’t speak. It was beautiful what she was saying and yet it was frightening him. Even the soft secretive look on her face frightened him. She was staring off. “There’s a Norse god, isn’t there, Reuben, who can hear the grass grow?”

“Heimdall,” he said. “The keeper of the gate. He can hear the grass grow and see for a hundred leagues in the day or in the night.”

She laughed. “Yes. I see the stars themselves through the fog, through the cloud cover; I see the sky no one else can see from this magical forest.”

He should have said, Just wait, just wait until the full change comes on you, but his voice had died in him.

“I hear the deer in the forest,” she said. “I can hear them now. I can almost … pick up the scent. It’s faint. I don’t want to imagine things.”

“They’re there. Two, out there, just beyond the clearing,” he said.

She was watching him again, watching him in that impassive fashion, and he couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. He thought about the deer, such tender, exquisite creatures, but if he didn’t stop thinking about them, he would want to kill both of them and devour them. How would she feel when that happened to her, when all she could think of was sinking her fangs into the neck of the deer and tearing out its heart while the heart was still beating?

He was aware that she was moving, coming around the table towards him. The soft clean scent of her skin caught him by surprise as the forest in his mind receded, dimmed. She settled in the empty chair to his right and then she reached out and put her hand on the side of his face.

Slowly he looked into her eyes.

“You’re afraid,” she said.

He nodded. “I am.”

“You’re being truthful about it.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“I love you so much,” she said. “So much. It’s better that than saying all the correct things, that you realize now we’ll be together in this, that you will never lose me now as you might have, that I’ll soon be invulnerable to the same things that can’t hurt you.”

“That’s what I should say, what I should think.”

“Perhaps. But you don’t tell lies, Reuben, except when you have to, and you don’t like secrets, and they cause you pain.”

“They do. And we are both a secret now, Laura, a very big secret. We are a dangerous secret.”

“Look at me.”

“I’m trying to do that.”

“Just tell me all of it, let it flow.”

“You know what it’s about,” he said. “When I came here, that first night, when I was wandering out there in the grass, the Man Wolf, and I saw you, you were like some tender, innocent being, something purely human and feminine and marvelously vulnerable, standing there on the porch and you were so …”

“Unafraid.”

“Yes, but fragile, intensely fragile, and even as I fell in love with you, I was so afraid for you, that you’d open your door like that, to something like me. You didn’t know what I was, not really. You had no idea. You thought I was a simple Man of the Wild, you know you did, something out of the heart of the forest that didn’t belong in the cities of men, remember that? You made a myth of me. I wanted to enfold you, protect you, save you from yourself, save you from myself!—from your recklessness, I mean your inviting me in as you did.”

She seemed to be weighing something. She started to speak but didn’t.

“I wanted to just take away all your pain,” he said. “And the more I learned of your pain the more I wanted to annihilate it. But of course I couldn’t do that. I could only compromise you, bring you halfway into this secret with me.”

“I wanted to come,” she said. “I wanted you. I wanted the secret, didn’t I?”

“But I was no primal beast of the woods,” he said, “I was no innocent hairy man of myth, I was Reuben Golding, the hunter, the killer, the Man Wolf.”

“I know,” she said. “And I loved you every step of the way to the knowledge of what you are, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “So what am I afraid of?”

“That you won’t love the Morphenkind that I become,” she said simply. “So you won’t love me when I’m as powerful as you are.”

He couldn’t reply.

He sucked in his breath. “And Felix, and Thibault, do they know how to control when the full change happens?”

“No. They said it would be soon.” She waited, and when he said nothing, she went on. “You’re scared you won’t love me anymore, that I won’t be that tender, vulnerable pink thing that you found in this house.”

He hated himself for not answering.

“You can’t be happy for me, you can’t be happy that I will share this with you, can you?”

“I’m trying,” he said. “I really am, I’m trying.”

“From the very first moment you loved me you were miserable that you couldn’t share it with me, you know you were,” she said. “We talked about it, and it was there when we didn’t talk about it—the fact that I could die, and you couldn’t give this gift to me for fear of killing me, the fact that I might never share it with you. We talked of that. We did.”

“I know that, Laura. You’ve every right to be furious with me. To be disappointed. God knows, I disappoint people.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Don’t say those things. If you’re talking about your mother and that dreadful Celeste, well, good, you disappoint them for being far more sensitive than they can guess, for not buying into their ruthless world with its greedy ambition and nauseating self-sacrifice. So what! Disappoint them.”

“Hmmm,” he whispered. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”

“Well, I’m not Little Red Riding Hood anymore, now, am I?” She laughed. “Seriously. They don’t know who you are. But I do and your father does, and so does Felix, and you’re not disappointing me. You love me. You love who I was and you’re afraid of losing that person. That’s not disappointing.”

“I think it should be.”

“It was all theoretical to you,” she said. “That you might share the gift with me, that I might die if you didn’t. It was theoretical to you that you had it. It all happened too quickly for you.”

“That’s the truth,” he said.

“Look, I don’t expect anything of you that you can’t give,” she said. “Only allow me this. Allow me to be part of all of you, even if you and I can’t be lovers anymore. Allow that, that I’ll be part of you and Felix and Thibault and …”

“Of course, yes. Do you think they would ever allow me to drive you away? Do you think for a minute I’d do that? Laura!”

“Reuben, there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t feel possessive of the woman he loves, who doesn’t want to control his access to her and her access to him and his world.”

“Laura, I know all that—.”

“Reuben, you have to be feeling something about the fact that they gave me the Chrism, whether you wanted them to do it or not, that they made their decision about me and with me essentially without seeing me as part of you. And I made my decision the same way.”

“As it should be, for the love of—.”

He stopped.

“I don’t like what I’m finding out about myself,” he said. “But this is life and death, and it’s your choice. And do you think I could endure it if they’d left it up to me, if they’d treated you as if you were my possession?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “But we can’t always reason with our feelings.”

“Well, I love you,” he said. “And I will accept this. I will. I will love you as much after as I love you now. My feelings might not listen to reason. But I’m giving them a direct order.”

She laughed. And he did in spite of himself.

“Now, tell me. Why are you here alone now, when the change might come at any time?”

“I’m not alone,” she said. “Thibault’s here. He’s been here since before dark. He’s out there, waiting for you to leave. He’ll be with me every night until it’s resolved.”

“Well, then why don’t you come home now?” he demanded.

She didn’t answer. She was looking off again as if listening to the sounds of the forest. “Come back with me now. Let’s pack up and get out of here.”

“You’re being very brave,” she said quietly. “But I want to see this through here. And you know that’s better for both of us.”

He couldn’t deny it. He couldn’t deny that he was terrified that the transformation might come on right now as they sat there. The mere thought of it was more than he could bear.

“You’re in safe hands with Thibault,” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

“If it was that Frank, I’d kill him with my bare claws.”

She smiled, but didn’t protest.

He was being ridiculous, wasn’t he? After all, hadn’t Thibault—whenever he’d received the gift—been invigorated by it? What was the practical difference between the two men? One looked like an elderly scholar and the other like a Don Juan. But they were both full-blooded Morphenkinder, weren’t they? Yet Thibault conveyed the grace of age, and Frank was forever in his prime. And it struck him suddenly with full force that she would look as beautiful as she was now forever; and he himself, he himself, would never grow older, or look older or seem older—never become the wise and venerable man that his father was, never ever age beyond this moment. He might as well have been the youth on Keats’s Grecian urn.

How could he have failed to realize these things, and what they must mean to her, and should mean to him? How had he not been transformed by that awareness, that secret knowledge? It was theoretical to him, she was right.

She knew. She’d always known what the full import of it all was. She’d tried to get him to realize it, and when he did let it penetrate now, he felt even more ashamed than ever of fearing the change in her.

He stood up and walked to the back bedroom. He felt dazed, almost sleepy. The rain was heavy now, pounding the old roof above. He felt an eagerness to get on the road, to be plowing north through the darkness.

“If Thibault weren’t here, I wouldn’t think of leaving,” he said. He pulled on his clothes, hastily buttoning his shirt, and slipping on his coat.

Then he turned to her and the tears rose in his eyes.

“You will come home just as soon as you can,” he said.

She put her arms around him and he held her as tightly as he dared, rubbing his face in her hair, kissing her over and over again on her soft cheek. “I love you, Laura,” he said. “I love you with all my heart, Laura. I love you with all my soul. I’m young and foolish and I don’t understand all of it, but I love you, and I want you to come home. I don’t know what I have to offer you that the others can’t offer, and they’re stronger, finer, infinitely more experienced—.”

“Stop.” She put her fingers against his lips. “You are my love,” she whispered. “My only love.”

He went out the back door and down the steps in the rain. The forest was an invisible wall of darkness; only the wet grass showed in the lights from the house. And the rain stung him and he hated it.

“Reuben,” she called out. She stood on the porch as she had that first night. The Old West–style kerosene lantern was there on the bench but it was not lighted, and he could not make out the features of her face.

“What is it?”

She came down the steps, into the rain.

He couldn’t resist taking her in his arms again.

“Reuben, that night. You have to understand. I didn’t care what happened to me. I didn’t care at all.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t care whether I lived or died. Not at all.” The rain was flooding down on her hair, on her upturned face.

“I know.”

“I don’t know that you can know,” she said. “Reuben, nothing paranormal, psychic, supernatural has ever happened to me. Nothing. Never have I had a presentiment, or a foreboding dream. Never has the spirit of my father or my sister, or my husband or my children come to me, Reuben. Never has there been a comforting moment when I felt their presence. Never did I have an inkling that they were alive somewhere. Never has there been the slightest breach of the rules of the natural world. That’s where I lived until you came, in the natural world.”

“I do understand,” he said.

“You were some kind of miracle, something monstrous yet fabulous, and the radio and the TV and the newspapers had been chattering about you, this Man Wolf thing, this incredible being, this hallucination, this spectacular chimera, I don’t know how to describe it—and there you were—there you were—and you were absolutely real, and I saw you and I touched you. And I didn’t care! I wasn’t going to turn away. I didn’t care.”

“I understand. I know. I knew it at the time.”

“Reuben, I want to live now. I want to be alive. I want to be alive with every fiber of my being, don’t you see, and for you and me, this is being alive.”

He was about to pick her up, to carry her back into the house, but she stepped away and put her hands up. Her nightgown was soaked and cleaving to her breasts, and her hair was dark around her face. He was chilled to the bone and it didn’t matter.

“No,” she said, stepping back, yet holding firmly to his lapels. “Listen to what I’m saying. I don’t believe in anything, Reuben. I don’t believe I’ll ever see my father again, or my kids, or my sister. I think they are just gone. But I want to be alive. And this thing means we don’t die.”

“I do understand,” he said.

“I care now, don’t you see?”

“Yes,” he answered. “And I want to understand more, Laura. And I will understand more. I promise you. I will.”

“Go now, please,” she said. “And I’ll be home soon.”

He passed Thibault on the way to his car. Thibault, portly and dignified, in a shining black raincoat standing under the great Douglas fir, with an umbrella, a big black umbrella, and maybe Thibault gave him a nod, he didn’t know. He just got in his car and headed north.

* The name Nideck is pronounced with a long i to sound like “Nigh-deck” or “Neideck.”