The Wolfen

by Whitley Strieber

  And he climbed toward the smell of the human woman. She was here, closer and closer. He climbed, he longed to reach her, to feel her blood pouring down his throat, to taste the meat of her, to feel as her body died and the threat to the race ended. The pack was glad he could climb, and he was glad to climb for them!

  When he got to her balcony he moved as softly as he could. But not softly enough. One of his toenails clicked against the glass door as he tested the lock. To him the sound was bell-clear. Had the humans inside heard it? Had she heard it?

  Her scent changed from the thickness of sleep to the sharpness of fear. The accursed creature had heard him! Slowly he inched across the balcony. She knew he was out here.

  Now the sound of her breath changed. She was growing so terribly afraid that he longed to help her into death even though she was not weak enough to be prey. But this was so dangerous. If they opened that curtain, he would be seen. You cannot be seen by those who will live! To avoid that he was prepared to throw himself off the balcony. Or was he?

  Die, for that? His own heart began to pound. She made a little cry—she had seen his shadow on the ceiling. His instincts screamed at him —growl, lunge, kill—but all that came out was a tiny noise.

  A noise which she heard.

  Now it was too late! They were getting up. He glanced at the light fixture in the ceiling of the balcony. The turning of a switch inside would reveal him! Desperately he climbed up to the next floor, and not a moment too soon. He heard the sliding door scrape, a footfall on her balcony. Her male companion looked about, moving through the dense body-heat and smell of himself and, in the marvelous blindness of humans, not even noticing. These poor creatures were blind in all except the visual sense. Nose-blind, ear-blind, touch-blind. They were the best prey in the world.

  When the man went back inside and all once again fell into darkness he returned to the alley. His heart was full of sorrow. When he faced the pack—he had failed, she still lived.

  But they found a way to move against her also, and now they were ready.

  Chapter 5

  Carl Ferguson had gone back to his office. His lamp provided the last glimmer of light in the empty workrooms of the museum basement. Beyond his open door the evening shadows spread slowly across the workbenches, turning the half-finished specimens into indistinct, angular shapes.

  Under his light Ferguson held the model he had constructed of the paw.

  The paw. He turned it in his hands, looking at its supple efficiency for the hundredth time. He placed it on the desk, then picked it up again and ran its claws along his cheek. It would do its job well, this paw. The long toes with their extra joints. The broad, sensitive pads. The needle-sharp claws. Almost… what a human being might have if people had claws. It had the same functional beauty as a hand, a lethal one.

  Suddenly he frowned. Wasn’t that a noise? He jumped up and started toward his door—then saw that some moving air was ruffling a box of feathers.

  “I’m getting crazy,” he said aloud. His voice had a flat echo in the empty space beyond his office.

  Ferguson glanced at his watch. Seven p.m. It was dark, the winter sun had set. He was tired, exhausted from the harrowing meeting downtown and from his own hectic schedule. The new exhibit was going to be a great achievement, one that would be sure to get him tenure at the museum. A beautiful concept— the birds of North America. Not just static cases but a whole room of meticulous reconstructions, soaring, wonderful creatures… he looked at some of them, their great wings spread in the darkness, barely visible, in the process of being feathered quill by careful quill.

  But where did this—thing—belong among the creatures of North America? What the hell was it, dammit!

  The detectives had babbled about werewolves… superstitious fools. But they certainly had uncovered a problem. Surely the city police could capture one of the things, bring it in, let him evaluate it more thoroughly. Judging from this paw it was on the large side, maybe bigger than a wolf. Possibly a hundred and eighty pounds. Even alone such a creature could be extremely dangerous, highly so in a pack. Unlikely it was a mutant wolf, they were too radically adapted to their traditional prey. Coyotes—too much of a size variance. Whatever had a paw like this had split off from the canine mainstream a long time ago, and had reached a very, very high level of evolution.

  Which brought up the question of why there were no bones, no specimens, nothing.

  It was uncanny and chilling to think that a whole subspecies of canine carnivore existed without even a hint of it in science.

  He jumped again—this time he heard a scraping sound. Now he took it seriously.

  “Luis,” he said, hoping it was the night man coming down to check on the light, “it’s me, Carl Ferguson.” The scraping continued, insistent, patient… something trying to worry one of the basement windows open.

  He looked at the paw. Yes, it could do that.

  He turned out his lamp, closed his eyes to hasten their getting used to the dark. He stood up from his desk swaying, his skin crawling.

  The scraping stopped, was followed by a slight creak. A puff of icy air made the box of feathers in the hallway rustle again. There was a sliding sound and a thump as something came in the window, then another.

  Then there was silence. Carl Ferguson stood with his plaster paw in his hand, his throat and mouth agonizingly dry.

  “Somebody’s over there.”

  A light flashed in the scientist’s eyes.

  “Hello, Doctor,” said a gruff voice. “Sorry we startled you.”

  “What the hell—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, don’t go off half-cocked. We’re cops, this is an investigation.”

  “What in hell do you mean coming in here like this? You—you scared me! I thought—”

  “It was them?” Wilson flipped a bank of switches flooding the basement with a stark neon glow. “I don’t blame you for being afraid, Doctor. This place is spooky.”

  Becky Neff pulled the window closed. “The truth is, Doctor, we were looking for you.

  We figured we’d find you here, that’s why we came.”

  “Why didn’t you come in the damn front door? My heart’s still pounding, for God’s sake! I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared.”

  “Think how we feel, Doctor. We feel that way all the time. At least I do. I don’t know about Detective Wilson.”

  Wilson pulled his chin into his chest and said nothing.

  “Well, you could have come in the right way. I don’t think that’s asking too much.” He was angry and aggrieved. They had no right to do this to him! Typical cops, completely indifferent to the law. They didn’t even have a right to be here! “I think you should leave.”

  “No, Doctor. We came here to talk to you.” She said it sweetly, but the way she and Wilson advanced toward him made him take an involuntary step back. When he did Wilson sighed, long, ragged and sad— and Ferguson saw for an instant how tired the man was, how tired and afraid.

  “Come into my office, then. But I fail to see what you’re expecting to get out of me.”

  They pulled up chairs in the tiny office. Ferguson noticed that Wilson lingered at the door, Neff sat so that she was looking out. Together they had most of the workroom in view. “Those are easy windows,” Wilson murmured, “very easy windows.”

  “The museum has guards.”

  “Yeah, we figured that out.”

  “All right, what is it you want—but don’t think I’m going to let this matter drop. I want you to know I’m calling the Police Complaint Department in the morning.”

  “The Police Department doesn’t have a complaint department.”

  “Well, I’m calling somebody. Cops don’t run around breaking and entering without citizen complaint. You people get away with enough as it is.”

  Wilson remained silent. Becky took over. “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t desperate,” she said softly. “And we realize that you’ve told us all the facts
you know, that’s not what we want. We want your theories, Doctor, your speculations.”

  “Anything might help us stay alive, Doctor,” Wilson added. “We are going to have a hard time doing that as things stand now.”

  “Why?”

  Becky closed her eyes, ignored the question. “Imagine, Doctor,” she said, “what these creatures might want, what they might need—if they are as we say they are.”

  “You mean intelligent, predatory, all that.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s barely a hypothesis.”

  “Try it.”

  “Detective Neff, I cannot try it. It’s worse than a hypothesis, it’s rank speculation.”

  “Please, Doctor.”

  “But what if I’m wrong—what if I confuse you more than you’ve already confused yourselves? Can’t you see the risk that’s involved? I can’t work on unfounded imagination, I’m a scientist! The truth is I want to help you. I really do! But I can’t. I know that this damn paw is something special but I don’t know how to apply that knowledge! Can’t you understand?”

  Becky watched him, her eyes filled with the desperation that she felt. Wilson covered their backs, listening to every word but watching the long row of black windows at the far end of the workroom. From the sound of Ferguson’s voice, she knew that he was telling the truth. No longer was he holding back to protect his reputation. Now, in the dead of night when the three of them were alone and the customary bustle of his little kingdom around him was missing, he had forgotten worries of reputation and was forced to face the real truth—that the two cops needed help that he could not give.

  Or could he? Often the trouble with scientists is that they do not realize how little others really know. “Anything you can say might be of help to us, Doctor,” Becky said with what she hoped was gentle calmness. “Why not tell us about something you do understand.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like the sense of smell. How effective is it and what can we do to cover our trails?”

  “It varies greatly. A bloodhound might be seven or eight times more effective than a terrier—”

  “Assume the bloodhound,” Wilson said from the doorway. “Assume the best, the most sensitive.”

  “It’s a very extraordinary organ, a bloodhound’s nose. What it is, basically, is a concentration of nerve endings that fill the whole muzzle, not just the tip, although the tip is the most sensitive. For a bloodhound, you’ve got about a hundred million separate cells in the olfactory mucosa. For a terrier, twenty-five million.” He looked to Becky as if to ask if this sort of thing was any help.

  “If we understood their capabilities we might be able to throw them off our tracks,”

  Becky said. She wished that the man would explain how the hell the sense of smell worked—if she understood it she would think of something, or Wilson would.

  Wilson. His instinct had told them that they would find Ferguson sitting in here worrying about his plaster paw. Wilson had very good instincts. Now added to them was the overriding feeling of desperation, the certain knowledge that something was following them now. From the way he was beginning to twist the edge of the blotter on his desk Ferguson was having the same thought. If so, he didn’t acknowledge it directly. “You want me to tell you how to throw the… animals off your tracks?”

  Becky nodded. “Give me a cigarette,” Wilson growled. “I don’t think I’m gonna like what the doctor’s gonna say.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you won’t. A lot of people have tried to figure out how to shake a tracking hound. Not much will do it except rain and a lot of wind.”

  “How about snow? It’s snowing now.”

  “A bloodhound in Switzerland once followed a track that had been under snow for forty-seven days. Heavy snow. A massive blizzard, in fact. Snow isn’t going to stop a bloodhound.”

  “Doctor,” Becky said, “maybe we ought to approach this from another angle. Why can’t anything stop a hound from tracking?”

  “Aside from rain and wind? Well, it’s because of their sensitivity and the long-lasting nature of odors.”

  “How sensitive are they?”

  “Let me see if I can quantify it for you. The nose of a bloodhound is perhaps one hundred million times more sensitive than that of a man.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “I’m not surprised, Lieutenant Wilson. It’s a very difficult number to grasp. Look at it this way.” He went outside and returned with a tiny pinch of oily-looking powder between his fingers. “This is about one milligram of brown paint pigment. Now visualize a hundred million cubic centimeters of air—about as much air as covers Manhattan. A good bloodhound could detect this amount of pigment in that amount of air.”

  Becky felt as if she had been hit. They were that sensitive! She had never realized just what an animal’s sense of smell meant before now. She fought to stay calm, her eyes darting toward the windows that revealed only the reflection of the workroom itself.

  Wilson got his cigarette lit and drew on it, exhaling with a long sigh. “What if you neutralized the odor, if you covered it with ammonia, say?”

  “Makes absolutely no difference. The dog won’t like it but it will still be able to distinguish the odor. People have tried everything to break track, but very little works.

  One thing—floating down a river, completely submerged, with the wind going in the same direction as the water. If you can make it half a mile without putting your head out of water you might break track. I say might because a single breath coming up through the water could be enough for a dog if the wind wasn’t too strong.”

  “Breath?”

  “We don’t know the exact mechanism of a dog’s scent, but we believe that they track by body oils and exhaled breath. They may also go by the odor of clothing.”

  “There’s nothing you can do to yourself to nullify your odor?”

  “Sure. Take a bath. You’ll be safe for a while as long as you don’t put on your clothes.”

  Wilson raised his eyebrows. “How long?”

  “A good three or four minutes. Until your skin oils start replacing themselves.”

  “Wonderful! That’s very helpful.” There was a ragged edge in Wilson’s voice that Becky didn’t like.

  “There must be something, something you haven’t mentioned that would help us. If we can’t get rid of our odor, what about neutralizing their sense of smell?”

  “Good question. You can cause osmoanaesthesia with something like cocaine, although I’ve never heard of a dog that would inhale it willingly. Also, you could use a phenamine.

  You’d get a temporary paralysis of the olfactory sense with that, too, and administration would be a little easier. That stuff you could disguise in meat. It doesn’t have to be inhaled, just eaten.”

  “Here doggie, have a little snacker!”

  “Shut up, George. We might learn something if you’d just keep your trap shut!”

  “Oh, Little Miss Muffet becomes Dragon Lady. So solly, missy!” He bowed, his hands folded across his belly, his eyes in a mocking squint. Then he froze. His hand dropped to the Colt he was carrying under his jacket

  “What?” Becky was on her feet, her own pistol in her hand.

  “Good heavens, put those things—”

  “Shut up, Sonny! I saw something at that window, Becky.” The mocking tone was gone, the voice was grave and a little sad. “Something pressing against it, gray fur. Like something had banged against the glass and gone off into the night.”

  “We would have heard it.”

  “Maybe. How thick is the glass in those windows?”

  “I have no idea. It’s just glass.”

  Becky remembered back to their entry. “It’s thick,” she said, “about a quarter inch.”

  Wilson suddenly holstered his gun. “Saw it again. It’s a bush blowing against the glass.

  Sorry for the false alarm.”

  “Keep your shirt on, Detective,” Becky said �
��I can’t handle many more of those.”

  “Sorry. Lucky I was wrong.”

  Left unsaid was the fact that they had now been here a long time, longer than must be safe. The plan was to keep to the car, keep moving. That way at least they’d be harder to follow. In fact now that she thought of it, Becky didn’t know how they could be tracked at all if they were in a car. She asked the question.

  “The tires. Each set of tires has a distinctive odor. Tracking dogs can follow bicycles, cars, even carriages with iron wheels. In fact it’s easier in some cases than following people on foot There’s more odor laid down.”

  “But in the city—hundreds of thousands of cars I—It seems almost impossible.”

  Ferguson shook his head. “It’s difficult but not out of the question. And if you two are right about being followed all the way from the Bronx our specimens are quite capable of doing it.”

  “So let’s sum up. We can’t get rid of our odors. We can’t neutralize their noses without getting a hell of a lot closer than we want to be. Is there any other bad news?”

  “Is he always this acerbic, Miss Neff?”

  “It’s Mrs. And the answer is ‘yes.’ ”

  Ferguson held his eyes on her a moment, as if to ask something more. She stared right back at him. In an instant he looked away, faintly confused by the challenge. Becky did not like men to strip her with their eyes, and when they did she stripped right back. Some it turned on, some it frightened, some it angered. She really didn’t care how they reacted, although from the way Ferguson both crossed his legs and brushed his hand along his cheek it looked as if he had been turned on and frightened at the same time. He was scared of a lot of things, this scientist. His face was powerful, only the eyes giving away the inner man. Yet there was also something else about him—a sort of buried competence that Becky felt was a positive factor in his makeup. He must be very professional and very smart. Too bad, it probably meant he was giving them the best information they were going to get