Saint Peter’s Wolf (37 page)

As I was about to jump. But first I needed to be transformed, to flower into my night self. I closed my eyes, and willed myself to change—and nothing happened.

I was so shaken by the blood, so stunned at what had happened to Johanna, that I could do nothing. I was helpless. I was puny. I was nailed to my human form, and there was not a thing I could do about it.

It didn't matter. I hurled myself across the bedroom, through the shattered glass. I plunged over the sill, and at once realized how weak my human body was, how much less agile, how mortal.

I had no strength. I had only my human powers now. My human body hurtled downward. I was used to calling upon the power of my limbs, but my mere arms and legs flailed.

I was nothing but a man, falling.

Stowe looked up as I fell, appearing like a shadow in his dark suit. His gray hands gripped a black rifle. He was still, timeless as a photograph is timeless, lithe and pale.

Even my fall seemed to take place in a world without time. Johanna was nowhere. Neither wolf nor woman was anywhere in the late afternoon gold of the garden. There was only the sweating rifleman, looking up at me as I fell.

Because it was like joy, the way he watched me grow huge in his sight. His gray eyes met mine as I spread my arms, perhaps believing that I could slow my fall, like a bat.

Time began again. Pain, and the sound of two men colliding, a grunt, a gasp, and the crunch of joints and sinews. I tackled him as I came down, and we sprawled. I was stunned, aware of everything that was happening, but unable to move. Stowe was hurt, one shoulder held crooked, his other arm groping for the rifle.

He was panting, his gray eyes bright with delight, as he hefted the big gun in my direction. He was snarling, a laugh of pain and disbelief. And then the laugh changed. He could not believe his good fortune. Here I was, in his hands, helpless. It was a laugh of great glee, as though this were a tremendous game, the finest imaginable sport.

I nearly wanted to join him in this fine joke. How funny it was. I fell on him, dropped out of the sky. It was all so easy for him. Time was spurting again, and it was my body which had ceased to move. I had no breath in my body. Air, inhaling, exhaling—that was all a dim memory.

The rifle seemed alive in his one-handed grasp, and so he dragged the other hand forward to steady the lashing weapon, and fought it down toward me.

Toward my face, that black, dead hole, that zero of the gun barrel.

He squeezed the trigger.

The sound was so sharp the day seemed to flash scarlet in my eyes. But some inexplicable canniness, some essential-quickness that would never leave me, had twitched me to one side. I was up and grappling with him at once, and fighting to wrench the rifle from his grasp.

He was lean, and strong as such men can be, all tendon and bone. He grunted, and I felt him work to trip me, to throw me aside. He was skilled, well-trained—but he was hurt. I rocked him as I struggled with him.

My man-strength was almost equal to his, but we grappled, grunting, and I could not throw him down. And so I squeezed. I hugged him, squeezing the air from his lungs. I squeezed the blood from his arms, and then, when his breath was a choking rasp, I hurled him down, hard.

I brandished the weapon high over his head.

My shadow fell over him, my man-shape. I panted so hard I could not speak, but I wanted to command him to stay still, to do nothing, to lie down and let the struggle end here.

But he felt into his dark blue, grass-flecked clothing and brought forth a bright, silvery automatic, grimacing and panting all the while.

It was a gun so gleaming that I knew it could do no harm at all. Except that he held it steady, his hand trembling not at all as he aimed it up into my eyes. I saw it too clearly—the little hole, the exact shape of my death.

And so I killed him. I slammed his skull with the rifle stock as he grunted and grinned, as though the fragmenting of his skull were a joke. He coughed, someone laughing too hard to breathe.

The rifle stock splintered, and I hammered him with what was left until the automatic danced from his hand, and he fell sideways, smiling still, but making no sound. Black blood snaked from his nose.

I fell to the lawn, too numb to weep.

Perhaps I was there for a long time. Perhaps for only a few moments. All I knew was that something terrible had ended, and that something even more terrible, my life without Johanna, was about to begin.

But I had no time to grieve.

She was there, as simply and quietly as though she were, in truth, a delusion. I climbed to my knees, and then to my feet. I put my hand out to touch her. She was human, and her hair and skin the same gold as the evening around her.

Just then I had that insight which had been kept from me, there beside the shattered body of the man I had just killed. We are wondrous, not just the human beings—all of us, even to the least ant on the thorn.

Wondrous, and everything we know is tinged with ignorance. We know nothing.

“Rest, now,” she said.

I was panting too hard to speak.

“You still don't know, do you?” she said. “You still have no idea how powerful we really are.”

The sirens had been descending upon us, and now they were on the street outside, beyond the garden walls.

Forty-One

When I was a boy my father would take me to the Academy of Sciences where I would gaze upward at the great, dark skeleton of an allosaurus. At the sight of the dinosaur's bones I'd be silenced by a mixture of boyish disappointment and awe.

The disappointment arose from the dinosaur's size—he was only a little over three meters high. Not a giant at all, I used to think. The awe was at the color of the bones, a burnished blue-black, and the artful way in which they were held together by man-made bolts and wires. The creature poised above us, looking off to its right, mouth agape, ready to lunge for its meat.

It was a creature made almost entirely of space, with black bones like the girders of an unfinished building, and capacious sockets gazing out at the world it could not abandon with eyes made of nothing.

In my adolescence such a sight illuminated my own cynicism. This is reality, I would smirk to myself. Short giants, monsters made of bone, reality reduced to its ebony lie.

But I was wrong. This was not a lie at all; it was a kind of truth. The structure of the dinosaur was both elegant and magnificent, and yet what was most magnificent was what I could only imagine—what was gone. A skeleton is not the essence of a creature, any more than death is the essence of life. Something else is, something fleeting, and ungraspable. Something made of light and water.

I had come to see that the giants of life are as big as they have to be, and as deadly. My life with Johanna had become a skeleton that was fleshing even as I watched, growing muscles and blood red eyes. I had that sense I sometimes have when confronted with disaster, that all of my everyday concerns and passions are the whimsies of an adult child.

What is not shared is gone. Unless I used my new compassion I would continue to be incomplete. I would remain that self-satisfied boy, refusing to be impressed by something wonderful.

I would share my life with Johanna. She could have whatever she wanted of me. Everything else was the foolishness of a child, an ugly ignorance that dismissed monsters that were all too real.

I think this must have been what Johanna had known all along, the insight that had made her seem a creature of magic. She had been capable of love, and I, despite what I thought, had not been.

Until now.

The sirens stopped, and then there was the squawk and sputter of radios, and the sound of running feet, heavy feet, running as men run when they carry guns. Doors thudded shut, and the sound of a gathering force of armed men surrounded us, beyond the walls of the garden.

There were muttered commands and the rasp and click of weapons being loaded and cocked. The armed men around us were in no hurry. Speed was dangerous. They took their time, preparing their assault.

Destroyed. The thought was like a blow to the head: you will be destroyed like animals.

The thought made me urge her to run, but even as I spoke I knew that we had to face what was about to happen together. She put a finger on my lips to silence me.

Shot dead, here on the lawn. Like anyone, I had wondered when I would die, and how. This lawn was the place. Was there, I wondered, a better place?

But I wrestled with this fear in myself. Surely there was some hope, even now. Surely there would be some way to survive, if not escape.

And so we crouched on the lawn, feeling as animals must feel, except that we knew exactly how easily we could be killed, while animals can only guess.

“Every place turns into a trap for me,” said Johanna. Her voice was steady, her eyes clear. “I wanted to free you of the burden of my life. They know I am dangerous. But they don't know about you yet. But I heard the last shot. And then, Benjamin, how could I stay away?”

Then she said the only thing in the world that mattered to me: “Please, let's stay together forever, Benjamin.”

We stood together, and I held her.

They'll kill you, said the voice in me.

They know all about you, and they'll blow you up. Look at you, holding her with blood all over your clothes.

“You were right,” I whispered. “You should run.” The front door rattled. A heavy hand hurled it open. Heavy feet crunched through the house.

Die die you're about to die.

“You want them to catch you,” she said, sadly. “You want to confess. You think that will free you. You want to give yourself up to them. You want to write books, and go to conferences, and tell the entire world the whole truth. Benjamin, you don't understand anything yet. You still don't. You think they'll believe you.”

Her words were true. That was exactly what I wanted, and her words dazzled me as much as anything that had happened. There had been too much blood. Too much flight. I couldn't think any longer.

“They have to believe me,” I said.

She smiled. “I'll stay with you,” she said. “While you learn the truth.”

The leather, the guns, the uniforms all had a smell, a dark, life-stilling aura. Radios spat. We were circled by armed men. Strangely, they did not put cuffs on us. They seemed to want to avoid our touch.

Whatever they believed, they knew that we were trouble. “Stand back,” they told each other. “Not too close.”

Johanna smiled at them. These were the men who always came for creatures like us, out-of-breath hunters, afraid, confused. They kept their shotguns leveled at us, and left us standing, not even ordering us to put our hands to our heads. It was my first sample of their uncertainty. They did not want us dead, they did not want us alive.

A shotgun is a cold, heavy thing to have leveled at one's head. Something deep within me, something both beast and human, turned to ice. I hated the guns more than anything I had ever hated in my life.

Later, we sat in my living room. I was a man foreign to his own house, his own life, except for the woman he loved. I had asked for a change of clothes; I could not endure sitting here with drying blood on my shirt. But the cops, men in dark green jumpsuits labeled “Police,” did not answer me.

It all began to make sense when Solano arrived, in sweat pants, chewing gum furiously.

“Don't even take any pictures,” he commanded his men. “Whatever you've started doing, stop. This isn't our problem.”

He looked at me with his hard, dark eyes. “This is a Washington problem.” He spent fifteen minutes on my kitchen telephone, and then stepped into my living room. He stood in front of us and said, in a low voice, “I don't want to hear about whatever happened here. Don't tell me anything.”

“I killed him,” I said.

“Shut your mouth, Doctor. You didn't do anything like that, and if you did I don't know anything about it.”

“Are we under arrest?” I meant: are you going to shoot us now, or later?

“I mean it, Doctor. Don't tell me a single thing. I don't want to know any of it, and don't tell any of my men anything. Just sit there. Don't move and don't talk.”

“Ever?” I asked.

He pointed at me, a warning more definite than any speech could have been: Shut up.

Page arrived, and was allowed in only after insisting that he was my personal physician, and even then he had to raise his voice and insist that he had important information. It was this last statement, I was to later realize, that forced them to let him in.

“This is your doctor?” asked Solano.

I nodded.

Solano took him into the wrecked study, and they talked for several minutes. Page was shaken when he emerged, and speechless when he gazed at the splattered blood on my clothes. Yet he rallied, as perhaps as an intern he had rallied at the sight of a dying patient.

He sat slowly, and leaned forward, having trouble choosing his words. “You didn't show up,” he said. “For our appointment. I got worried.”

He has come to watch them take our lives, I thought.

How would they do it? Would they empty our cranial vaults with a blast each from one of those shotguns, or would they deliver a cleaner death of some sort?

Perhaps a death Page himself was equipped to deliver. He was, after all, a medical doctor.

He read the fear in my eyes.

“The police have the most unusual attitude,” he began. “They would be delighted if I admitted both of you for observation.”

“Into a hospital.”

“Yes,” said Page, but he looked away, and then looked back again. “They don't want anything to do with you. It's as if—”

“As if they believe the story I told you. The story of the mountains, and the lake, and the helicopter. The story you didn't want to hear.”

He nodded. “As if they have heard some of it. And don't like it, but—” He was hoping I would conclude his thought for him, but when I remained silent he added, “They don't want anything to do with you.”