The Wolves of Midwinter

5

THE PHONE WOKE HIM EARLY; when he saw Celeste’s name flashing on the screen, he didn’t pick up. In a half sleep he heard her leaving her message. “… and I suppose this is good news for somebody,” she was saying, her voice uncharacteristically flat, “but not for me. I talked to Grace about it, and well, I’m considering Grace’s feelings too. Anyway, I need to see you, because I can’t make a decision here without you.”

What in the world could she be talking about? He had little interest and little patience. And the strangest most unexpected feeling came over him: he could not remember why he had ever claimed to love Celeste. How had he ever become engaged to her? Why had he ever spent so much time in the company of someone who personally disliked him so much? She had made him so unhappy for so long that the mere sound of her voice now irritated him and bruised him a little, when in fact his mind ought to be on other things.

Probably Celeste needed permission to marry his best friend, Mort. That was it. That had to be it. It was only two months since he and Celeste had broken their engagement and she was feeling uneasy about the haste. Of course she’d consulted Grace because she loved Grace. Mort and Celeste were regulars in the house on Russian Hill. They’d been dining there three times a week. Mort had always loved Phil. Phil loved to talk about poetry with Mort, and Reuben wondered how that would set with Celeste these days, since she had always thought Phil such a pathetic person.

As he showered, he reflected that the two people he really wanted to see today were his father, and his brother, Jim.

Wasn’t there some way to broach the subject of ghosts with Phil without confiding in Phil about what happened?

Phil had seen spirits, yes, and Phil would have some old folklore wisdom on the matter, undoubtedly, but there was a wall now between Reuben and all those who didn’t share the truths of Nideck Point, and he could not breach that wall.

As for Jim, he feared Jim’s suspicion of ghosts and spirits would be predictable. No, Jim didn’t believe in the devil, and maybe Jim didn’t believe in God. But he was a priest and he often said the things he thought a priest had to say. Reuben realized that he hadn’t really confided in Jim since the Distinguished Gentlemen had come into his life, and he was ashamed. If he had had to it do over again, Reuben never would have confided in Jim about the Wolf Gift. It had been so unfair.

After he’d dressed and had his coffee, he called the only person in the world with whom he could share the haunting and that was Laura.

“Look, don’t drive all the way down here,” Laura immediately offered. “Let’s meet someplace away from the coast. It’s raining in the wine country but probably not as hard.”

He was all for it.

It was noon when he reached the plaza in Sonoma, and he saw Laura’s Jeep outside the café. The sun was out, though the pavements were wet, and the center of town was busy as always in spite of the damp chill in the air. He loved Sonoma, and he loved its town plaza. It seemed to him that nothing bad could ever happen in such a gentle, pleasant little California town, and he hoped for a few minutes to browse the shops after lunch.

As soon as he saw Laura waiting for him at the table, he was struck again by the changes in her. Yes, the darkening blue eyes, and the luxuriant blond hair, and something beyond that, a kind of secretive vitality that seemed to infect her expression and even her smile.

After he’d ordered the largest sandwich the place had to offer, along with soup and salad, he began to talk.

Slowly, he poured out the story of the haunting, lingering on every single detail. He wanted Laura to have the entire picture, the sense of the house in its stillness and above all, the vivid intensity of Marchent’s appearance, and the eloquence of Marchent’s gestures and troubled face.

The crowded café was noisy around them but not so that he had to talk in anything but a confidential voice. Finally he’d reported everything, including his conversation with Felix, and he fell on his soup in his usual wolfish fashion, forgetting manners entirely and drinking all of it straight out of the bowl. Sweet fresh vegetables, thick broth.

“Well, do you believe me?” he asked. “Do you believe that I actually saw this thing?” He wiped his mouth with the napkin and started in on the salad. “I’m telling you, this was no dream.”

“Yes, I think you saw her,” she said. “And obviously Felix didn’t think you imagined this either. I guess what frightens me is you might see her again.”

He nodded. “But do you believe she’s existing somewhere, I mean the real and true Marchent. Do you believe she’s in some sort of purgatorial state?”

“I don’t know,” she said frankly. “You’ve heard the word ‘earthbound,’ haven’t you? You know the theories, don’t you, that some ghosts are earthbound spirits, people who have died and simply cannot move on. I don’t know if any of it’s true. I’ve never believed in it much. But the dead person remains out of confusion or some emotional attachment when it should be moving into the light.”

He shuddered. He had heard those theories. He had heard his father talking of “the earthbound dead.” Phil spoke of the earthbound dead as suffering in a kind of purgatory created for themselves.

Vague thoughts came back to him of Hamlet’s ghost and its horrifying descriptions of the fires of torment in which it existed. There were literary critics who thought the ghost of Hamlet’s father was actually from hell. But these thoughts were absurd. Reuben didn’t believe in purgatory. He didn’t believe in hell. Actually, he had always found talk of hell highly offensive. He’d always sensed that those who did believe in hell had little or no empathy for those they assumed to be suffering there. Indeed, quite the opposite. Hellfire believers seem to delight in the idea that most of the human race would end up in just such a horrible place.

“But what does earthbound mean, exactly?” he asked. “Where is Marchent now at this very moment? What is she feeling?” To his mild amazement, Laura was actually eating her food. Quickly cutting several pieces of veal European style, she devoured them and moved on through the plate of scaloppine without stopping for breath. When the waitress set down the roast beef sandwich, naturally he snapped back to the task at hand.

“I don’t know,” said Laura. “These souls, assuming they exist at all, are trapped, clinging to what they can see and hear of us and our world.”

“That makes perfect sense,” he whispered. Again, he shuddered. He couldn’t help it.

“This is what I would do, if I were you,” she said suddenly, blotting her lips, and swallowing half the iced cola in her glass. “I’d be open, willing, eager to discover what the ghost wants. I mean, if this is the personality of Marchent Nideck, if there is something coherent and real and feeling there, well, be open to it. Now I know this is easy for me to say in a cheerful little crowded café in broad daylight, and of course, I haven’t seen this, but that is what I’d try to do.”

He nodded. “I’m not afraid of her,” he said. “I’m afraid that she’s miserable, that she, Marchent, does exist somewhere and it’s not a good place. I want to comfort her, do what I can to give her whatever she wants.”

“Of course.”

“Do you think it’s conceivable that she’s troubled about the house, about the fact that Felix is back now, yet I own the house? Marchent didn’t know Felix was alive when she gave me the house.”

“I doubt it has anything to do with that,” said Laura. “Felix is rich. If he wanted Nideck Point, he’d offer to buy it from you. He isn’t living there as your guest because he lacks the means.” She went on eating as she spoke, easily cleaning her plate. “Felix owns all the property bordering on Nideck Point. I heard him talking about it to Galton and the other handymen. It’s no secret. He was discussing it casually with them, hiring them to do other work. The Hamilton place to the north has belonged to him for the last five years. And the Drexel place to the east was bought by him long before that. Galton’s men are working on those houses now. Felix owns the land south of Nideck Point, all the way from the coast inland to the town of Nideck. There are old homes throughout these areas, homes like Galton’s home, but Felix stands ready to buy each and every one of them whenever the owners want to sell.”

“Then he did plan to come back,” said Reuben. “He planned to come back all the time. And he does want the house. He has to want it.”

“No, Reuben, you’ve got it wrong,” she said. “Yes, he planned someday to return. But not while Marchent was connected to the property. After she’d moved to South America, his agents made repeated offers under various names to purchase the house, but Marchent always refused. Felix told me this himself, just in conversation. Nothing secretive about it. He was waiting her out. Then events caught him completely unawares.”

“The point is he wants it now,” said Reuben. “Of course he wants it. He built it himself.”

“But he’s not in any hurry,” she said.

“I’ll give it to him. It never cost me one silver dime.”

“But do you think this ghost knows all these things?” Laura asked. “Does this ghost care?”

“No,” he said. He shook his head. He thought of Marchent’s contorted face, thought of her hand extended, as if to reach through the glass. “Maybe I’m on the wrong track. Maybe it’s the Christmas plans that are disturbing her spirit—plans for a party so soon after her death. But maybe that’s not it at all.”

Again, he had a strong sense of Marchent, as if the apparition had involved a new and eerie intimacy, and the misery he’d felt seemed infinitely more deeply rooted in the Marchent he knew.

“No, the party plans wouldn’t offend her. That wouldn’t be enough to bring her back from wherever she is, make her visit you in this way.”

Reuben’s mind drifted. He fell silent. He realized nothing more could be known until this spirit appeared to him again.

“Ghosts often come at Midwinter, don’t they?” Laura asked. “I mean, think of all the Christmas ghost stories in the English language. That’s always been a matter of tradition, that ghosts walk at this time of the year; they’re strong at this time, as though the veil between the living and dead becomes fragile.”

“Yes, Phil always said the same thing,” Reuben said. “That’s why Dickens’s Christmas Carol has such a strong hold on us. It’s all that old lore about spirits coming through at this time of year.”

“Come back to me,” said Laura taking his hand. “Don’t think about this any more now.” She motioned for the check. “There’s a little bed-and-breakfast near here.” She smiled at him, the most incandescent and gently knowing smile. “It’s always fun, isn’t it, a different bed, different rafters overhead.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

Two blocks away in a charming Craftsman cottage nestled in a garden, they made love in an old brass bed below a close sloping ceiling. Yellow flowers in the wallpaper. Candle on the old cast-iron mantel. Rose petals on the sheet.

Laura was rough, urgent, inflaming him with her hunger.

Suddenly she stopped and drew back.

“Can you bring it on now?” she whispered. “Please, do it. Be the Man Wolf for me.”

The room was shadowy, quiet, white shutters closed against the fading afternoon light.

Before he could reply, the metamorphosis had begun.

He found himself standing by the bed, his body yielding up the wolfen coat, the claws, the rippling, elongating tendons of his arms and legs. It was as if he could hear his mane growing, hear the silken hair covering his face. He looked about him with new eyes at the quaint, fragile furnishings of the room.

“And this is what you want, madam?” he asked in the usual low, baritone voice of the Man Wolf, so much darker, richer than his own normal voice. “We are risking discovery, are we, for this?”

She smiled.

She was studying him as never before. She ran her hands over the fur on his forehead, her fingers gripping the long rougher hair of his head.

He drew her towards him and then down on the bare boards. She pushed and pulled as if she wanted to provoke him, beating against his chest with her fists even as she kissed him, pressing her tongue to his fang teeth.