The Wolves of Midwinter

6

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Reuben returned from Sonoma. The rain was thin but steady and the light almost as dim as twilight.

When he caught sight of the house he felt an immediate relief. Workers had finished lining every single window on the façade with tiny bright yellow Christmas lights in perfectly neat lines, and the front door was framed with thick evergreen garland wound with lights as well.

How cheerful and comforting it looked. The workmen were just finishing, and the trucks pulled off the terrace right after he pulled up. Only one truck remained for the crew that was working on the guesthouse on the lower slope, and it would soon be gone as well.

The main rooms were also extremely cheerful, with the usual fires going, and a great undecorated Christmas tree stood to the right of the conservatory doors. More thick and beautiful green garland had been added to the fireplaces and their mantelpieces. And the delicious fragrance of the evergreens everywhere was sweet.

But the house was empty, and that was odd. Reuben had not been alone in this house since the Distinguished Gentlemen had arrived. Notes on the kitchen counter told Reuben that Felix had taken Lisa down the coast for shopping; Heddy was napping; and Jean Pierre had taken Stuart and Margon to the town of Napa for dinner.

Strange as this was, Reuben didn’t mind it. He was deep in his thoughts of Marchent. He’d been thinking of Marchent on the long drive back from Sonoma, and it only now came to him, as he put on a pot of coffee, that his afternoon with Laura had been blissful—the lunch, the bed-and-breakfast lovemaking—because he had not been afraid anymore of the changes in her.

He took a quick shower, putting on his blue blazer and gray wool pants as he often did for dinner, and was on his way down the hall towards the stairs when he heard the low, faint sound of a radio coming from somewhere on the west side of the house, his side of the house.

It took him only a moment in the hallway to locate the origin of the sound. It was Marchent’s old room.

The hallway was grim and shadowy as always, as it had no windows, and only a few scattered wall sconces with parchment shades and small bulbs. And he could see a seam of light under her door.

There came that eerie throbbing terror again, only slowly. He felt the transformation coming but did all in his power to stop it as he stood there, shaken, and not certain what to do.

A dozen explanations might account for the light and the radio. Felix might have left on both after searching for something in Marchent’s closet or desk.

Reuben was unable to move. He fought the prickling in his face and hands, but he couldn’t entirely stifle it. His hands were now what somebody might call hirsute and a quick examination of his face told him it was the same. So be it. But of what use was this subtle enhancement against the possibility of a ghost?

The radio was playing an old dreamy melodic song from the nineties. He knew that song, knew that slow hypnotic beat and that deep female voice. “Take Me As I Am”—that was it. Mary Fahl with the October Project. He’d danced to that song with his high school girlfriend, Charlotte. It had been an old song by then. This was too palpable, too real.

Suddenly, he was so angry with his own panic that he knocked on the door.

The knob slowly turned and the door opened, and he saw the darkened figure of Marchent looking at him, the lamp behind her only partially illuminating the room.

He stood stock-still staring at the dark figure, and slowly her features became visible, the familiar angles of her face and her large unhappy and imploring eyes.

She wore the same bloodstained negligee and he could see the light glinting on countless tiny pearls.

He tried to speak, but the muscles of his face and jaw were petrified, as were his arms and his legs.

They weren’t two feet apart.

His heart seemed about to explode.

He felt himself backing away from the figure, and then the entire scene went dark. He was standing in the silent empty hallway, trembling, sweating, and the door to Marchent’s room was closed.

In a fury, he opened the door and walked into the darkened room. Groping for the wall button he found it and snapped on a collection of scattered small lamps.

The sweat broke out all over his chest and arms. His fingers were slippery with it. The wolf change had stopped. The wolf hair was gone now. But he still felt the pringling and the tremors in his hands and feet. And he forced himself to take several slow breaths.

No sound of a radio, no sight of a radio even, and all the room as he remembered it from the last time he’d inspected it before Felix and Margon and the others had ever come.

The windows were done in elaborate white-lace-ruffled curtains, and so was the canopy of the heavy brass four-poster bed. An old-fashioned dressing table in the far-north corner had been fitted with a skirt in the same starched white-lace ruffles. The bedspread was pink chintz and the overstuffed love seat by the fire was covered in the same fabric. There was a desk, ultra-feminine like all the rest, with Queen Anne legs, and white bookshelves half filled with a few hardcover books.

The closet door was ajar. Nothing inside but a half-dozen padded clothes hangers. Pretty. Some were covered in toile, others in pastel silk. Perfumed. Just there on the closet bar, empty hangers—a symbol for him suddenly of loss, of the horrid reality of Marchent having vanished into death.

Dust on the shelves above. Dust on the hardwood floor. Nothing to be found, nothing to which a vagrant spirit might have sadly attached itself—if that’s what vagrant spirits did.

“Marchent,” he whispered. He put his hand to his forehead, then took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from it. “Marchent, please,” he whispered again. He couldn’t remember from the lore he’d heard all his life whether a ghost could read your mind. “Marchent, help me,” he offered, but his whisper sounded huge in the empty room, and as unnerving to him suddenly as everything else.

The bathroom was empty and immaculate, with empty cabinets. No radio to be seen. Smell of bleach.

How pretty the wallpaper was, an old toile pattern with pastoral figures, in blue and white. This was like the pattern on the padded hangers.

He imagined her bathing in the long oval claw-foot tub, and a wave of her intimate presence caught him off guard, fragments of their moments in each other’s arms on that ghastly night, fragments of her warm face against his, and her soft soothing voice.

He turned and inspected the scene before him, and then slowly he made his way to the bed. It wasn’t a high bed at all, and he sat down on the side of it, facing the windows, and he closed his eyes.

“Marchent, help me,” he said under his breath. “Help me. What is it, Marchent?” If he’d ever known sorrow like this before, he couldn’t remember it. His soul was shaken. And suddenly he began to cry. The whole world seemed empty to him, devoid of any hope, of any possibility of dreams. “I’m so sorry about what happened,” he said thickly. “Marchent, I came as soon as I heard you scream. I swear to God, I did, but they were too much for me, the two of them, and besides, I was just too late.”

He bowed his head. “Tell me what it is you want of me, please,” he said. He was crying just like a child now. He thought of Felix downstairs in the library last night, asking himself why he had never come home during all those years, feeling such awful regret. He thought of Felix in the hallway last night saying so dejectedly, “Why should she want me to have anything … after the way I abandoned her?”

He took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose and mouth.

“I can’t answer for Felix,” he said. “I don’t know why he did what he did. Or if I do, I can’t say. But I can tell you that I love you. I would have given my life to stop them from hurting you. I would have done that without a thought.”

A kind of relief coursed through him, but he felt it was cheap and undeserved. The finality of her death deserved better. The finality of her death left him crushed. Yet he had, in a rush, said so many things that he’d been longing to say and that felt good, though perhaps it didn’t matter to her at all. He had no idea whether or not Marchent really existed in any realm where she might see him or hear him, or what the apparition at the door had been.

“But all this is true, Marchent,” he said. “And you left me the gift of this house, and I did nothing to deserve it, nothing, and I’m alive here, and I don’t know what’s happened to you, to you, Marchent—I don’t understand.”

He didn’t have any more words to speak out loud. In his heart, he said, I loved you so much.

He thought of how unhappy he’d been when he met her. He thought of how desperately he’d wanted to be free not only of his loving family but of his miserable connection with Celeste. Celeste had not loved him. She had not even liked him. And he had not liked her either. That was the truth. It had all been vanity, he thought suddenly, her wanting the “handsome boyfriend” as she called him so often to others in that high mocking tone, and him believing he ought to want such a smart and adorable woman whom his mother liked so much. The truth was Celeste had made him miserable, and as for his family, well, he’d needed to escape them for a while if he was ever to find what it was that he wanted to do.

“And now thanks to you,” he whispered, “I live in this world.”

And remembering suddenly her love for Felix, her grief for him, her weary conviction that he was dead and gone, he knew a pain that he could hardly bear. What right had he to the Felix for whom she’d mourned? The injustice of it, the horror of it, paralyzed him.

For a long moment he sat there shivering, shivering as if he were cold when he wasn’t cold, his eyes closed, wondering at all of it, and very far now from the terror and the shock he’d felt only moments ago. There were worse things in this world than fear.

A sound came from the bed, the sound of the springs and the mattress creaking, and he felt the mattress shifting just to his right.

The blood drained out of his face, and his heart began to skip.

She was sitting next to him! He knew it. He felt her hand suddenly on his hand, supple flesh this, and the pressure of her breasts against his arm.

Slowly he opened his eyes, and looked into hers.

“Oh God in heaven,” he whispered. He couldn’t stop the words from coming though they were slurred and low. “God in heaven,” he said as he forced himself to look at her, truly look at her, at her pale pink lips and the fine pen-stroke lines of her face. Her blond hair was glistening in the light. The silk of the white negligee, right against his arm, was rising and falling with her breath. He could feel her breath. She drew even closer, her cold hand covering his right hand as it tightened its grip, and her other hand closing on his left shoulder.

He looked right into her soft moist eyes. He made himself do it. But his right hand moved away from hers in a sudden jerking motion that he couldn’t control, and with it he made the Sign of the Cross. It had been like a spasm and he was suddenly red with shame.

A little sigh came from her. Her eyebrows puckered and the sigh became a moan.

“I’m so sorry!” he said. “Tell me.…” He was stammering, clenching his teeth in his panic. “Tell me … what can I do?”

The expression on her face was one of unutterable torment. Slowly she lowered her gaze and looked away, her bobbed hair falling down over her cheek. He wanted to touch her hair, touch her skin, touch all of her. Then her eyes veered back to him, full to the brim with misery, and it seemed she was about to speak; she was struggling desperately to speak.

At once the vision brightened as if it were filling with light and then it dissolved.

It was gone as if it had never been. And he was alone on the bed, alone in her room, alone in the house. The minutes ticked as he sat there, unable to move.

She wasn’t coming back, he knew it. Whatever in God’s name she was now—ghost, spirit, earthbound—she’d taxed herself to the limit of her powers, and she wasn’t coming back. And he was sweating again, his heart thudding in his ears. The palms of his hands and the soles of his feet burned. He could feel the wolf hair under his skin like myriad needles. It was torture to hold it back.

Without resolving to do it, he got up and hurried down the stairs and out the back door.

The cold darkness was descending, the molten clouds lowering, and the woods turning into shadow all around. The invisible rain sighed like a living thing in the trees.

He got in his Porsche and he drove. He didn’t know where he was headed, only that he had to be away from Nideck Point, away from fear, from helplessness, from grief. Grief is like a fist against your throat, he thought. Grief strangles you. Grief was more awful than anything he’d ever known.

He kept to the back roads, vaguely aware that he was moving inland and the forest was on either side of him wherever he went. He wasn’t thinking, so much as feeling, stifling the powerful transformation, again and again feeling the tiny needlelike growth of the hair all over him as he forced it back. He was listening for the voices, voices from the Garden of Pain, listening, listening for the inevitable sound of someone crying out frantically, someone who could speak, someone who was yet alive, someone who was crying for him though he or she couldn’t know it, someone he could reach.

Pain somewhere, like a scent on the wind. A little child threatening, kicking, sobbing.

He pulled off the road and into a grove of trees and, folding his arms defensively over his chest, he listened as the voices came clear. Again the wolf hair pushed at him like needles. His skin was alive with it. His scalp was tingling and his hands were shuddering as he struggled to hold it back.

“And where would you be without me?” the man snarled. “You think they wouldn’t put you in jail? Sure, they’d put you in jail.”

“I hate you,” sobbed the child. “You’re hurting me. You always hurt me. I wanna go home.”

And the man’s voice rolled over her voice, in guttural curses and threats—ah, the grim, predictable sound of evil, the greed of utter selfishness! Give me the scent!

He felt himself breaking through his clothes, every inch of his scalp and face burning as the hair broke out, his claws extended, his thick hairy feet pushing out of the shoes. He tore off his jacket, shredding the shirt and pants with his claws. The mane came down to his shoulders. Who I truly am, what I truly am. How quickly the fur covered all of him, and how powerful he felt to be alone with it, alone and hunting as he had hunted on those first thrilling nights before the elder Morphenkinder had come, when he’d been on the very edge of all that he could comprehend, imagine, define—reaching for this luscious power.

He took to the forest in full wolf coat, running on all fours towards the child, his muscles singing, his eyes finding the jagged and broken ways through the forest without a single mishap. And I belong to this, I am this.

They were in an old decrepit trailer home half concealed by a thicket of broken oaks and giant firs. Small ghostly windows flashing with bluish television light gleamed before him in a cramped wet yard of butane tanks, trash cans, and old tires, with a rusted and dented truck parked to one side.

He hovered, uncertain, determined not to blunder as he’d done in the past. But he was ravenously hungry for the evil man only inches away from his grasp. Television voices chattered inside. The child was choking now and the man was beating her. He heard the thwack of the leather belt. The scent of the child rose sweet and penetrating. And there came the rank foul smell of the man, in wave after wave, the stench mingling with the man’s voice and the reek of the dried sweat in his filthy clothing.

The rage rose in his throat as he let out a long, low growl.

The door came off too easily when he yanked it, and he threw it aside. A rush of hot fetid air assaulted his nostrils. Into the small narrow space, he forced himself like a giant, head bowed under the low ceiling, the whole trailer rocking under his weight, the jabbering television crashing to the floor as he caught the scrawny screaming red-faced bully by his flannel shirt and drew him back and out into the clattering cans and breaking bottles of the yard.

How calm Reuben was as he picked the man up—Bless us, O Lord, for these are Thy gifts!—how very natural he felt. The man kicked at him and pounded at him, face savage with terror, like the terror Reuben had felt when Marchent embraced him, and then slowly and deliberately Reuben bit into the man’s throat. Feed the beast in me!

Oh, too rich, this, too rich in salt and rupturing blood and relentless heartbeat, too sweet the very viscid life of the evil one, too beyond what memory could ever record. It had been too long since he’d hunted alone, feasting on his chosen victim, his chosen prey, his chosen enemies.

He swallowed great mouthfuls of the man’s flesh, his tongue sweeping the man’s throat and the side of his face.

He liked the bones of the jaw, liked biting into them, liked feeling his teeth hook onto the jawbone as he bit down on what was left of the man’s face.

There was no sound in the whole world now except the sound of his chewing and swallowing this warm, bloody flesh.

Only the leftover rain sang in the gleaming forest around him as if it were now bereft of all the small eyes that had seen this unholy Eucharist and fled. He abandoned himself to the meal, devouring the man’s entire head, his shoulders, and his arms. Now the rib cage was his, and he went on delighting in the crackling sound of thin hollow bones, until suddenly he could eat no more.

He licked his paws, licked the pads of his palms, wiped at his face, and licked his paw again as he cleaned himself with it as a cat might have done. What was left of the man, a pelvis and two legs? He hurled the remains deep into the forest, hearing a soft shuffling collection of sounds as they fell to the earth.

Then he thought the better of this. He moved swiftly through the trees until he’d recovered the body, or what was left of it, and he carried it with him farther away from the trailer until he came to a small muddy clearing by a little stream. There he dug quickly down into the damp earth, and buried the corpse there, covering it as best he could. Here the world might never find it.

Then he started to wash his paws in the stream, splashing the icy water over his hairy face, but he heard the child calling him. Her voice was a shrill piping sound: “Man Wolf, Man Wolf.” She called it over and over again.

“Man Wolf!” he whispered.

He hurried back to find her, near hysterical, in the door of the trailer.

Painfully thin, a child of seven or eight at most, with tangled blond hair, she begged him not to leave her. She wore jeans and a filthy T-shirt. She was turning blue from the cold. Her little face was streaked with tears and dirt.

“I prayed for you to come!” she sobbed. “I prayed for you to save me and you did.”

“Yes, darling dear,” he said, in his low gruff wolfish voice. “I came.”

“He stole me from my mommy,” she sobbed. She held out her wrists, scarred from the ropes with which he’d tied her. “He said my mommy was dead. I know she’s not.”

“He’s gone now, precious darling,” he said. “He’ll never hurt you again. Now stay here until I find a blanket in there to cover you. And I’ll take you to where you’ll be safe.” He stroked her little head as gently as he could. How impossibly frail she seemed, yet so unaccountably strong.

There was an army blanket on the stale bed inside the trailer.

He wrapped her in this tightly, as if she were a newborn, her large eyes settling on him with total trust. Then he took her up with his left arm, and plunged fast through the trees.

How long they traveled, he didn’t know. It was thrilling to him to have her safe in his arms. She was silent, folded against him, a treasure.

On he moved until he saw the lights of a town.

“They’ll shoot you!” she cried out when she saw the lights. “Man Wolf,” she pleaded. “They will!”

“Would I let anyone harm you?” he asked. “Be quiet, little darling.”

She snuggled against him.

On the edges of the town, he crept slowly, safe in the underbrush and the scattered trees, until he saw a brick church with its back to the forest. There were lights in a small rectory-style building beside it, and an old metal swing set in a paved yard. The big rectangular wood-framed sign on the road said in giant black movable letters: GOOD SHEPHERD CHURCH. PASTOR CORRIE GEORGE. SERVICE: SUNDAY AT NOON. There was a phone number in squarish numerals.

He cradled the child in both arms as he approached the window, comforting her because she was afraid again. “Man Wolf, don’t let them see you,” she cried.

Inside the rectory, he could see a heavyset woman, alone, at a brown kitchen table, in dark blue pants and a simple blouse, with a paperback book propped up to read as she ate her lonely meal. Her wavy gray hair was cropped short, and she had a simple no-nonsense face. For a long moment, he watched her as the scent of her came to him, clean and good. He had no doubt of it.

He set the child down, carefully removing the bloodstained blanket, and gestured to the kitchen door. “Do you know your name, darling?” he asked.

“Susie,” she said. “Susie Blakely. And I live in Eureka. I know my phone number too.”

He nodded. “You go to that lady, Susie, and you bring her to me. Go on.”

“No, Man Wolf, go, please!” she said. “She’ll call the police and they’ll kill you.”

But when he wouldn’t go, she turned and did as she was told.

When the woman came out, Reuben stood there gazing at her, wondering what it was she really saw in the dim light of the window—this tall hairy monster that he was, more beast than man, but with a man’s bestial face. The rain was just a mist now. He scarcely felt it. The woman was fearless.

“Well, it is you!” she said. An agreeable voice. And the little child beside her, clinging to her, pointed and nodded.

“Help her,” Reuben said to the woman, conscious of how deep and rough his voice sounded. “The man’s gone who was hurting her. They’ll never find him. Not hair nor hide of him. Help her. She’s been through terrible things, but she knows her name and where she belongs.”

“I know who she is,” the woman said under her breath. She came a little closer to him, looking up at him with small, pale eyes. “She’s the Blakely kid. She’s been missing since summer.”

“You’ll see to it then—.”

“You have to get out of here,” she said with a wagging finger as though talking to a giant child. “They’ll kill you if they see you. These woods were crawling with every harebrained backwoods gun-toting crazy in the country after you last appeared. People came from out of state to hunt you. Get the hell out of here.”

He started to laugh, ruefully aware of how very strange that must have seemed to both of them, this hulking dark-haired beast chuckling under his breath like a man.

“Please go, Man Wolf,” said the little girl, her pale cheeks coloring. “I won’t tell anybody I saw you. I’ll tell them I ran away. Go, please, run.”

“You tell them what you have to tell them,” he said. “You tell what sets you free.”

He turned to go.

“You saved my life, Man Wolf!” she cried.

He turned back to her. For a long moment he gazed at her, her strong upturned face, the quiet steady fire in her eyes. “You’re going to be all right, Susie,” he said. “I love you, darling dear.”

And then he was gone.

Racing into the rich, fragrant thickness of the forest, the bloody blanket thrown over his shoulder, tunneling at incalculable speed through the brambles and the broken branches, and the crackling wet leaves, his soul soaring as he put the miles between himself and the little church.

An hour and a half later, he fell down exhausted on his bed. He was sure that he’d slipped in without anyone being aware. He felt guilty, guilty for going out without the permission of Felix or Margon and doing the very thing that the Distinguished Gentlemen didn’t want for him and Stuart to do. But he felt exultant, and he felt exhausted. And guilty or not, for the moment, he didn’t care. And he was almost asleep when he heard a mournful howling somewhere outside in the night.

Perhaps he was already dreaming but then he heard the howling again.

To all the world, it might have been the howling of a wolf, but he knew otherwise. He could hear the Morphenkind in the howling, and it had a deep plaintive note to it that no animal could make.

He sat up. He couldn’t conceivably figure which of the Morphenkinder was making such a sound or why.

It came again, a long, low howl that made the hair come again to the backs of his hands and his arms.

Wolves in the wild howl to signal one another, do they not? But we are not really wolves, are we? We are something neither human nor animal. And who among us would make such a strange, sad sound?

He lay back on the pillow, forcing the hair all over his body to recede, and leave him alone.

It came again, almost sorrowful, this howling—full of pain and pleading, it seemed.

He was more than half asleep, and tumbling into dreams, when he heard it for the last time.

A dream came to him. It was confused even in the dreaming. Marchent was there, in a house in the forest, an old house full of people and lighted rooms, and figures coming and going. Marchent cried and cried as she talked to the people around her. She cried and cried and he couldn’t bear the agonized sound of her voice, the sight of her upturned face as she gestured and argued with these people. The people did not appear to hear her, to heed her, or to answer. He couldn’t clearly see the people. He couldn’t clearly see anything. At one point Marchent rose and ran out of the house and, in her bare feet and torn clothes, she ran through the cold wet forest. The bristling saplings scraped her bare legs. There were indistinct figures in the darkness around her, shadowy figures that appeared to reach out for her as she ran. He couldn’t stand the sight of it. He was terrified as he ran after her. The scene shifted. She sat on the side of Felix’s bed, the bed they’d shared, and she was crying again and he said things to her, but what they were, he didn’t know—it was all happening so swiftly, so confusedly—and she said, “I know, I know, but I don’t know how!” And he felt he couldn’t stand the pain of it.

He woke in the icy-gray morning light. The dream fell apart as if it were made of melting frost on the panes. The image of the little girl came back to him, little Susie Blakely, and with it the miserable realization that he was going to have to answer to the Distinguished Gentlemen for doing what he had done. Was it on the news already? “Man Wolf Strikes Again.” He roused himself uneasily and was thinking about Marchent as he stepped into the shower.