The Wolves of Midwinter (8 page)

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.