Anything Can Be Dangerous (22 page)

After his customary wait the doctor
said. “Karyn, whether I believe or not isn’t important. What
happened in the past or didn’t happen really doesn’t concern us.
Our bag is the here and now. All that matters to us is how you feel
about it.”

Karyn met the doctor’s sincere gaze.
He was having a difficult time making the transition from the
traditional Freudian to the trendy transactional school of
analysis. Everybody’s got problems, she thought.

“
What it makes me feel is
scared shitless,” she said.

Pause.

“
Why?”

“
Because I know they aren’t
all dead.”

“
When you say ‘they’ you
mean––”

“
I mean the wolves,” Karyn
supplied. “The werewolves.”

She watched closely for a
reaction––the narrowing of the eyes, or the little quirk, which she
had seen so often at the corner of his mouth. Dr. Goetz held his
expression of friendly concern. He was good.

“
Do you want to tell me
about it?” he said.

“
Doctor, I
have
told you about
it.”

“
Tell me again, if you
think it would help.”

Hell, why not, Karyn thought. There
was no pain in the telling any more, and that, at least, was an
improvement. Maybe if she heard the story often enough herself it
would become meaningless, the way a familiar word repeated over and
over eventually becomes a nonsense sound.

She stood up again and walked back to
the window. There, watching the peaceful scene down on the lake,
she repeated the story of the damned village of Drago, and the six
months she spent there with Roy Beatty.

She described the way it began, with
the howling in the night. Then there had been the cruel killing of
her little dog. She told of the strange people who had lived in the
village, and the huge, unnatural wolves that had roamed the woods
at night. In a quiet, controlled voice she spoke of the
black-haired Marcia Lura, who had bewitched Karyn’s husband and
finally taken him forever with the virulent bite of the werewolf.
Finally she told of the escape from Drago as she and Chris Halloran
had fled the burning village.

Dr. Goetz waited, then spoke. “You
said they aren’t all dead. The wolves.”

“
As we drove out of the
valley with everything behind us in flames, I heard it again from
off in the forest. The howling.”

Abruptly Karyn stopped talking and
went back to her chair across from the doctor. “Telling the story
doesn’t make it any better or any worse,” she said. “All it does is
keep the memory fresh. What I want to do is put Drago out of my
mind, now and forever.”

“
I can understand that,”
Dr. Goetz said reasonably. “And that’s what we’re working toward,
isn’t it? But, Karyn, before we can finally put this idea out of
your mind, we have to find out what put it in.

Karyn stared at him. She spaced out
her words carefully. “What put this
idea
into my mind, God-dammit, is that it
happened.”

“
Yes, of course,” the
doctor went on. “Maybe when you were a little girl there was some
experience, something ugly, with wolves or large dogs.”

Karyn shook her head wearily. “No,
Doctor, not when I was a little girl. My only traumatic experience
with wolves came when I was a full-grown woman. Three years ago. In
Drago. You’re telling me the same old thing, aren’t you, that it’s
a delusion?”

“
Delusion is a term we
don’t use much any more. We understand now that things that happen
in the mind are every bit as vivid, and often more damaging than
what we call reality. I’m sure your experience in Drago is as real
to you today as this room we are sitting in. The important thing,
as I said––”

Karyn only half-listened as Dr. Goetz
droned on in his silky, reassuring voice. He was saying the thing
everyone else did. Namely, that she had imagined the whole Drago
episode. Maybe in time he could convince her of that. If he could,
he would be well worth whatever David was paying him. In the
meantime, it did help a little to be able to talk.

There was a subtle change in the
doctor’s tone, and Karyn saw his eyes flick over at the discreet
little clock on his desk. Her hour was up.

3

Karyn drove slowly north over the
Aurora Bridge toward Mountlake Terrace, where she and David had
their home. Her thoughts, as usual when she left Dr. Goetz, were on
Drago and what happened afterward.

There had been one moment of triumph
at the very end when she had fired the deadly silver bullet into
the head of the black she-wolf. But that small victory, like the
escape with Chris Halloran, had lacked a ring of finality. Even as
she and Chris had paused to look back on the valley in flames,
neither of them had really believed it was over.

For six tempestuous months they had
tried to pretend it was, and that they were just another ordinary
couple. After sharing the horror of Drago, it had seemed a natural
thing to stay together. How wrong they were.

For a time they had traveled aimlessly
from place to place, living on pills and nervous energy. Before
long their pent-up emotions were turned against each other. At the
end of six months these two people, who had shared more in a day
than many couples do in a lifetime, were living on the edge of
violence. The most insignificant squabble could erupt in an ugly
word battle. They were staying in a Las Vegas hotel when the final
blowup came.

Karyn had spent the morning in their
room. She had the air conditioner turned up full and wore a sweater
buttoned to the throat as protection against the dry cold. Chris
had gone down to the swimming pool early, after making only a
half-hearted attempt at persuading her to come with him.

At noon Chris returned. He glanced
briefly at Karyn and went into the bathroom. Not until he had
showered, shaved, and dressed, did he speak to her.

“
Do you want to go down and
get some lunch?”

“
Can’t we have something
sent up?”

“
Why?”

“
I’d rather not leave the
room, that’s all.”

“
For God’s sake, Karyn, you
can’t just sit up here and hide from the world like a frightened
child.”

His words cut into her like a dull
knife. She fired back, “I can do anything I want. Who are you to
tell me what I can’t do? Nobody asked you to run my
life.”

Chris’s eyes had turned dark and
dangerous for a moment, then he whirled and stormed out the door.
Karyn fought down the angry impulse to throw something after
him.

The rush of blood through the veins
made a roaring in her ears. She walked over to the window, parted
the draperies, and blinked at the bright white Las Vegas sunlight.
Twelve stories down, she could see people in the pool and on the
deck around it. Everyone seemed to be laughing and having a fine
time. Was she the only one in the world, Karyn wondered, who was
miserable?

She let the draperies fall back across
the window, and returned to the chair where she had sat all
morning. She was still there, shivering with the cold, an hour
later when Chris returned.

He closed the door firmly behind him
and stood looking at her. “Why the hell don’t you turn the air
conditioning down?”

“
I like it this
way.”

She could see him start to get angry,
then, with an effort, relax.

“
Karyn, we have to
talk.”

“
Why?”

“
Because we’re destroying
each other.”

“
Is that a
fact?”

“
Cut it out, damn it. I’ve
had all of this I can take.”

“
Poor you.”

“
This continual picking at
each other is tearing me apart. It isn’t doing you any good,
either. Have you looked at yourself closely in the mirror
lately?”

“
Well, thank you very
much.”

“
Will you please stop
playing childish games? I know what you went through at Drago,
but––”

Karyn sprang out of the chair and
faced him angrily. “You have no idea what I went through. You were
there only at the very end. I spent six months in that place. Six
months in hell.”

Chris spoke in a carefully controlled
voice. “I know that, Karyn. I know you suffered a lot. What I want
to do now is help you.”

“
Oh? And just how do you
think you can help me?”

“
It would be a start if we
brought the whole thing out in the open and talked about
it.”

“
I don’t want to talk about
it,” Karyn snapped. “Not to you, not to anybody.”

“
I’m the only one
you
can
talk to about Drago,”
he said. “I am the only person in the world who would believe it,
because I was there. I saw the wolves, and I know what they
were.”

Karyn clapped her hands over her ears.
“I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to think about it. Why don’t
you let me forget Drago, so it will go away?”

“
It will never go away,”
Chris said. “It will always be locked in the back of your head. If
we could just talk about it––”

“
There you go with
your ‘talk about it’ again. You sound like one of those fucking
parlor psychologists. Tell me, where did you get your medical
degree,
Doctor?”

“
Cut it out. I can’t take
any more of this.”

“
Don’t then. Don’t take a
Goddamn thing you don’t want to. Nobody’s holding you.”

“
That’s right,” he said in
a voice that had gone suddenly cold. “Nobody is.”

In thirty minutes Chris Halloran had
packed his clothes and left the hotel. That had been two and a half
years ago. Karyn had not seen him since.

* * *

The weeks that followed the Las Vegas
breakup with Chris were fragmented in Karyn’s memory. She knew that
during that time she was very close to losing her hold on sanity.
Somehow, she had made her way back to her parents’ home in the Los
Angeles suburb of Brentwood. For two months she had a full-time
nurse, and never left the upstairs bedroom that had been hers when
she was a little girl. The days were blanks and the nights were
filled with shadows where lurked unspeakable horrors.

Then gradually the world came back
into focus. Karyn at last learned to talk about the summer in
Drago. Then as now, no one really believed her, but they listened
sympathetically. She learned that Chris had been right. Talking
about it
did
help.

After six months in the quiet,
comfortable house with her family, Karyn began to feel whole again.
She tried to contact Chris Halloran, but learned he had taken a
traveling assignment with his engineering firm and was seldom in
town for long. Maybe, she decided, it was better this way. She
would have liked to say she was sorry about the bad days at the
end, and keep at least a part of Chris’s friendship, but seeing him
might just open old wounds.

Instead, she had accepted the
invitation of a college classmate and flown to Seattle for a visit.
That was when she met David Richter.

David was twenty years older than
Karyn, and solid as Mount Rainier. He did not have the dreamy
romanticism of Roy Beatty, nor the charm and dash of Chris
Halloran, but he was exactly what Karyn needed. She had been a
little hesitant about meeting David’s son, but she need not have
worried. She and Joey hit it off immediately.

The big test, in Karyn’s mind, came
when she told David the story of Drago. He had listened patiently
and seriously, without laughing or patronizing her. He did not, of
course, treat it as reality, but accepted it as a minor
eccentricity as he might have accepted a slight limp.

David asked her to marry him two
months after they met. He offered her security and stability, and a
kind of quiet love she had never known. She said yes.

All in all Karyn was content with her
life as Mrs. David Richter. Now if she could just stop dreaming of
the wolves, and shake the feeling that someday, somewhere, they
were going to kill her.

Want to keep reading?

Check out the rest of the story
here:

GARY
BRANDNER - THE HOWLING II

* * *

Preview of:

GARY BRANDNER’S - THE HOWLING III

1

Sheriff Gavin Ramsay stretched out a
foot and nudged the switch on the electric heater to OFF with the
toe of his boot. The heater coils twanged as the red glow faded.
The voters of La Reina County, all 4,012 of them, would be proud of
their sheriff’s economy moves.

Ramsay hoisted his foot back to the
top of the desk and resumed his contemplation of the view from his
office window. Out in front ran S31, a two-lane blacktop with a
flaking yellow center stripe badly in need of repainting. S31 was
also the main street of Pinyon, California, seat of La Reina
County, Pop. 2,109, Elev. 3550.