The Wild

by Whitley Strieber

  And yet—the phone ringing again. Bob jerked back and forth. God, God, it could be a client. Or—he answered.

  "Tragliano. Look, we got a hot check here. We can't deposit it again, you gotta send us a new check. You understand that?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay, there's gonna be an eviction notice in your mailbox tomorrow. It's no big deal, don't get worried, just get the money to us, okay?"

  "Okay." Oh, God. The apartment, sixteen hundred and fifty dollars a month. It hadn't seemed like much a year ago but now, God.

  There was a pink envelope on the floor he hadn't seen before. Pushed under the outer door while he was on the phone. He opened it. A pink copy of his April office rent bill, a yellow copy of the May bill, a blue copy of the June bill, a white copy of the current bill.

  They had been waiting for him to come in. Eyes had watched his entrance, feet had moved. Was somebody now hanging back in the hall, waiting to buttonhole him when he came out?

  Please somebody—if there is a God—help me, help me get out of this mess.

  He would go down to the coffee shop in the basement and coffee himself and read the latest issue ofMacWorld. Maybe there'd be some useful tidbit in the computer-industry gossip columns, something he could make a few cold calls about. "Hi, Willard, I just heard a rumor that Compaq's coming out with an AT clone that's—"

  What? Who cares. His "clients" didn't need him, they subscribed to computer magazines, too. Soon he heard the coffee bell in the hall. Never mind the shop in the basement. He shouldn't risk leaving his office, anyway. What if they changed the locks on him? But they were nice people here. He was nearly half a year behind and they hadn't even given him an eviction notice. Just these bills, and the feeling that he was being watched.

  He went out and bought a cup of hot tea. When he returned to his desk, he noticed that there were tears streaming down his face. He worried that he was in imminent danger of becoming the first person to commit suicide by jumping out of a lower floor of the Empire State Building. He called Monica. She took the call personally, bless her soul.

  "Bob?"

  He had planned a big speech, but the sound of her voice washed it all out of his mind. "I need a little help." He hated the shaking tone, the whine behind it. "Monica, give me an appointment as soon as you can."

  "Where are you, Bob?"

  His throat was constricting. The dreadful memories, the sheer terror of what he had experienced in Atlanta now flooded in on him. "My office." His voice was a whisper. He jammed his teeth together to capture the sob that was about to follow the words.

  "If you can get here by ten-thirty, I'll give you half an hour. We can meet again after five."

  The even tone was like a handclasp right through the phone. As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was American Express. "Mr. Duke, we must have a fifteen-hundred-dollar payment at one of our offices by the close of business today, or we'll be forced—"

  He put the phone down, a fussy, frightened gesture. Fear made him feel so careful that he thought he must look prissy. Did pilots in crashing planes become fascinated by bug splotches on the windshield as the ground rushed up?

  He tried to swallow his tea and leave, but the tea seared his throat and he gagged, spitting it all over the pile of bills and computer magazines. Oh, so what? His lips, his tongue burning, he stalked out into the silent hallway.

  He no longer cared if the Empire State Building was watching him. Better to be outside than in here with all these miserable creditors and the spilled tea. Who knew, maybe something good would happen. He might find a dime on the sidewalk, for example, or be run over by a bus.

  As he moved through the streets of the city he experienced a radical change of mood. His spirits lifted. Hard, white sunlight was flooding the world. He went up Fifth Avenue past the corpse of Altman's and still-moving Lord and Taylor's. The people who passed him were shining with what he told himself was the light of the soul. For a moment, reveling in the secret understanding that there was something beautiful here, he loved the faded plastic sushi in the window of a Japanese restaurant, the roaring buses, the sweating Con Ed workers at the corner of Fortieth and Fifth, the new Republic National Bank building, the library with its bright lions and its grand facade.

  He was in essence a family man, he decided, and trudged on to the Olympic Tower, where Monica's office overlooked all of mid and lower Manhattan. The waiting room was full of teak and zebrawood furniture, rich dark paneling, and floor-to-ceiling windows. An elderly, beautifully dressed woman sat behind the reception desk and a man of perhaps thirty in one of the chairs. Far below, St. Patrick's Cathedral spread like a stone beast.

  "You can go right in, Mr. Duke," the woman at the desk said. Monica was so successful, so rich;

  Look at all this. Somehow it enabled him to regain his composure. "Look at all this," he said as he went in. "It's a long way from a psychiatric residency at Bellevue." Bob remembered her as she had been then, a laughing girl so blond she might have been an angel.

  He sat down gratefully in the heavy chair she indicated with a gesture. She came beside him and sat in a higher, stiffer chair.

  "Go ahead," she said, touching his hand.

  "I was in Atlanta at a conference. Business. I went to sleep—no, it begins before. It started on Saturday. We were at the zoo. The wolf stared at me. Later I had a strange dream, that the wolf had eaten me, and I sort of filled its body. I animated it, like. That must have been Saturday night. Sunday I went to the conference, and I had another dream. Far worse."

  "During the conference?"

  "Well, at night. I was in my room. It was like I didn't even fall asleep, when suddenly I was not a human being anymore. I was this animal again."

  "The wolf from the zoo?"

  "An animal. Whatever animal. Probably a wolf, maybe a dog. I dreamed I went out of the room and got chased by a guard and ended up, for God's sake, in the hotel restaurant. I crashed through a door and made it back to my room. I became myself again in the elevator and I had to stand there with my face to the wall because I was totally naked. I have never felt so naked." He dropped to silence. That had not been as hard as he had thought it would be. The next part, though, he wondered if he could utter.

  "Yes?" She touched his hand again. She had done that ever since he had known her. Surely she understood how provocative it was. He wished for perhaps the hundred-thousandth time that he had made her that night in the Catskills.

  "Monica, I think some part of this dream was real. The next morning I got up and everybody at the conference was talking about how this giant dog had gotten into the restaurant and broken down the glass doors, and escaped into an elevator."

  She did not do what he had thought she would, which was to cry out in amazed disbelief. "So you integrated this into your previous night's dreaming."

  "Integrated—Monica, you don't understand. It was my dream. My dream was true. I became something else, something wild. I remember how it was to be that creature. Exactly how it was."

  "Yes?"

  Could he talk about it? It was almost as if the part of him which contained those memories had not the best grasp of the English language. Or was that true? Maybe he could do as she asked, maybe he had language enough. He had planned to talk about what he did, and how it was all real, not a dream, but some baroque effect of a deteriorating mind—the emergence of the wild. But how it felt—well, how had it felt?

  "I was lying on my bed in the room. I was naked."

  "Lying how, on your back?"

  "On my back. I was aroused."

  "Meaning?"

  "I had desire. Intense desire and there was nobody there. I don't fool around on Cindy, but right then I wanted to. I was in a state of intense excitement, and I was alone."

  "Did you do anything at all about it?"

  "I rarely do that—you're referring to—"

  "Bob, try to relax. If you can't talk comfortably with me, I can certainly recommend somebody else."
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  "No, Monica, I love you—" How in the world had he come to say that? This wasn't going to come out right. "You to help me."

  "Bob, I'm a mother figure for you, as much as you may think you desire me sexually."

  "I never had much of a relationship with my mother. When I got in her lap, she used to say I was too bony and put me out. Or she'd say she didn't like to be touched when it was hot, her skin was clammy. It was always hot, and her skin was always clammy. When I say that, I feel a hideous, upsetting sexual stirring. I remember when I used to get punished, my sister would watch. It was horrible."

  "How were you punished?"

  "The old-fashioned way. I was spanked. Viciously, at times. It happened constantly, but I only remember one or two specific occasions."

  "Do you think that this is where your masochism started?"

  "Masochism?"

  "You tell me."

  "I want to tell you about my experience. What brought me in here. I have to, it's terribly important. I think that I may be the victim of a rare psychophysical effect. My mind and my body are working together in some mysterious manner— oh, God, Monica, I've got to get this through to you: I was that animal. I turned into something that everybody else in the hotel, the maid who first saw me, the security guards, the people in the restaurant, they all thought it was a big dog or a wolf. And Monica, I felt like a wolf. I did not feel like a human being."

  "Did you want to eat them?"

  "No no no, that's totally off the point. You're not understanding me. My whole frame of reference changed. Sense of smell, hearing. For God's sake, I could hear people breathing at the far end of a long hall. I could smell all the components of their sweat, their perfume as seven or eight different odors, even the difference between the smell of their hands and the smell of their faces. And I saw it all in vague, muted colors. The point is, what I did in the dream is what people in the hotel saw this big animal do. And I dreamed I was that animal."

  "Bob, I want you to listen to me for a moment. Our half hour is up and I'm going to run late with all my patients until lunchtime. I'm going to write you a prescription for something that will calm you down. You'll feel much better. I want you to take it and have a good lunch and then do something you enjoy. Go to a movie. Afterward come back here. I'm finished at five-thirty and I can spend a couple of hours with you. Does that sound like a good plan?"

  He nodded and she wrote something on a prescription form. He didn't read it and didn't intend to. He was so grateful that she had instructions for him to follow that he would have followed them into a fire, had that been demanded of him. On the way out of the office he had quite a surprise.

  "Mr. Duke, that's a hundred and fifty dollars," the receptionist said with a smile.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Your bill. We prefer payment by visit. The fee is three hundred dollars an hour. The doctor said you should pay for this visit now, and be sure and bring another check tonight."

  For a moment Bob felt anger, then disappointment. Then it occurred to him that she was doing the professionally correct thing. The relationship was being established for what it was, being separated by the check from the friendship. As he wrote he felt a little sick, thinking of the astounding dwindling of the money. Another hot check. How would she take it, when she discovered that he was a deadbeat?

  It hit him that he could spend the next few hours productively by writing an ad for the Consultants Market of the Tuesday Science Section of the Times. That made sense. He could run it for a month and maybe something would happen that would spare him the hopelessness of letters and the indignity of calls. Or he could go over to the library and look through the Standard Rate and Data Catalog of Mailing Lists. A new SRDC was out; maybe this month's edition would show some relevant mailing lists he hadn't tried. Or better, he could get some lists of people in computer-intensive industries like accounting, and send them letters. Lists of known computer users weren't worth a damn. Consultants had a bad rep with those people. Too many fast-buck operators in the business who turned out to know less than their clients.

  After all, it wasn't entirely hopeless. He did have a few miserable assets. Last week he had found some useful changes to the WordPerfect word processing program in an obscure freeware database. Those were worth money. They sped up the program and removed many of its minor annoyances. He could look like a hero to companies that used WordPerfect as their word processor. Surely he could find someone, somewhere willing and able to pay him a few thousand dollars for increasing the efficiency of their secretarial pool by twenty percent. Surely he could. For the love of God, Monica got three hundred dollars an hour. He was more poorly paid than a private detective in a Raymond Chandler novel. He was lucky if he was paid at all.

  As he walked he read the prescription. Elavin. What would it do? He had no idea, but it was an immense relief to consider using it. He would place himself in Monica's capable hands. Let her make the decisions. Let her reorder his life. Give up every dignity to her: take the pills she prescribed, let her alter his brain.

  He went down to the Duane Reade Drugstore on Madison and Forty-first and filled the prescription. Like a skulking thief he continued on the avenue, half expecting to find his office rekeyed when he came back.

  And what about the apartment? Would they start eviction? How long did it take? Could they keep their furniture, and would there be anyplace to go?

  Back in his office he took the dose, two pills, with a cup of water from the men's room. His water cooler had run out last month and they had not showed up to replenish it, not with their bill unpaid for six months. It was autumn. His last good month had been April.

  The disturbing thought occurred to him that the Elavin might trigger the reaction. He looked down at his hands, took them to his face, and inhaled the familiar smell of his own skin. There hadn't been any sensation when the change took place in Atlanta. He had been assuming that it was instantaneous. Was that true? Maybe he had been lying there for some time, oozing and twisting. There really wasn't any way to tell.

  Therefore he would have no warning if it was going to happen again. They said that a strange disquiet often preceded a stroke. And there was a moment of melancholy, he had heard, prior to a grand mal seizure. There was nothing now, just the silence of an office, the faint hissing of the air-conditioning, a man sitting at a desk waiting. It was possible to believe that he was alone in this office and in the world. He could look down six stories to the street and see the cars, the passing people, the rich human activity of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. He could enjoy the faint art deco quality of his office, and dream of sunny days long ago, the late forties perhaps, some magic time when New York was right.

  Then again, he had the habit of walking up to the Strand Bookstore and looking through the collections of Weegee's searing photographs of tragedies of city life, most of them taken in the forties. Maybe New York was never right.

  Something deep within, a sort of turning of his gut, made him sit up rigid. His heart started pounding. "I won't run, I'll just stay in here until it passes." Footsteps came and went beyond the door; female laughter went by. Something tickled his cheek, a tear. He brushed it away. Should he call Monica? Was that allowed? Maybe Cindy, but Cindy couldn't handle this, she had said as much. He sucked a breath through his teeth. The chum-ing in his guts grew more intense. He imagined some great hand within him, remixing his body.

  "No." He took a deep, slow breath, shut his eyes. At once he realized that he wasn't really alone here. There was a presence staring at him much as the wolf at the zoo had stared, glaring into his heart. It was formless, you couldn't make out a face or even eyes, and it was full of furtive eagerness, like a thief. "Who are you?"

  Outside, the bell tinkled for afternoon coffee. Doors opened and shut, voices filled the hall. What of them, the people in the other offices? They never seemed to have such moments as this;

  they were not like him. But they were. In his heart he knew that he was a more o
r less ordinary man, living the common desperation.

  His breath left him with a whoosh, and when he gasped back his air, it was through a nose able to tell the difference between the smell of his own sharp and frightened sweat and the succulent damp of the secretaries in the hall.

  He had to feel his face. He had to know. His hands were trembling so much that he could barely control them. It was a struggle to raise them. They were clutching human hands, not paws, the fingers a blur of jitters, like the legs of a scorpion running in a ring of fire.

  They touched a human face. He heard a loud sound, identified it as a sob. His own sob. He sat there shaking, weeping. An almost overwhelming sense of tragedy possessed him. He wanted to feel his boy's arms around him, to hear Cindy's comforting, familiar voice.

  He remembered his mother when he was very little, her powdered mask of a face looming down into his world of toy cars and tunnels in the sandpile, the way she smelled, the way she looked, the dark eyes in the pallor, the bright, unlikely smile and those fingers on his cheek, too freezing cold to be real.

  Then he would be alone, as he was now alone. Monica's advice returned to mind: see a movie.

  He went out into the bright, rushing afternoon, haggard, his eyes full of memories, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his suit. Nobody noticed him, nobody cared, for nobody in the world but he himself knew the truth, that a wolf was awakening in his belly.

  Chapter Five

  BOB HAD TROUBLE KEEPING HIS FEET ON THE SIDEWALK. He was slipping and sliding along, the victim of frustrating air currents. It was as if he was coming unmade in himself, his body not changing shape but losing all shape. His mind was fine, but his body was falling off some kind of edge. "Monica, it really is physical, that's what you just would not believe." The pills were making it worse. They provided the lubrication: if he didn't walk like a man of glass, his hands might drop off, his knees go rolling up under the shishkebab stand on the comer, his head topple into the goo of wet cigarette butts that floated in the gutter.