The Universe of Horror Volume 2: The Dark Cry of the Moon (Neccon Classic Horror)

by Charles L. Grant

  He approved without reservation, despite the impending storm’s severity marked by its thunder.

  The rain would be a blessing. It may not last long, they may get more than they wanted, but the respite had arrived exactly when needed.

  The door opened, and he turned, the wind taking the tails of his white jacket and whipping them against his thighs. In his hand he held a narrow-brimmed grey hat. His collar was back on, his black satin tie neatly done on in a loose bow.

  “Come in, Mr. Stockton, come in,” a man’s voice welcomed, and he stepped into the foyer, blinked against the dim light and saw Lawrence Drummond already walking awkwardly into the sitting room on the left, the foot of his crutch loud on the oaken flooring. He followed, apologizing for the intrusion.

  “No need,” Lawrence said with a desultory gesture of his free hand. “No need, Mr. Stockton. We are always here to serve the capable minions of the constabulary, isn’t that right, Bart?”

  Bartholomew stood stolidly by the fireplace. He nodded, shook hands with Lucas and waited.

  Lucas noted the unnatural turn of Lawrence’s foot, found it hard to look away. “I trust you’re feeling better, Larry,” he said, hoping the hypocrisy did not show.

  “I’ll survive,” was the bitter answer. “One cannot ask more than that, can one?”

  “For God’s sake, Lawrence,” Bartholomew said in disgust. A shrug to Lucas. “Lawrence is wishing at the top of his voice he had gone with me instead of playing the hero and going to fight the war. He’d be in one piece now if he had, you see.”

  “What Lawrence wishes,” Lawrence said, “is none of your damned business.” Lucas sniffed, and studied his hat for a moment. “And your father? Did his journey abroad help him in any way? That is, is he recovering?”

  “As well as can be expected for a man his age.” Bartholomew said. “I’m afraid, however, that even the most prominent physicians he consulted were unable to help him. But thank you for asking, Lucas. And by the way, my congratulations on your promotion.”

  “Yes,” said Lawrence, “we’re so glad we can sleep soundly now and not worry about the beasts of the field coming to eat out our hearts.”

  “Lawrence!” Bartholomew barked. “Lucas is a policeman, not a trapper. He does what he can.”

  “I’ll tell George Tripper you said that.”

  “Damn you, Larry, hold your foolish tongue or go to your room!”

  Lawrence could not hold back a chuckle. “Whatever you say, Mother. Whatever you say.”

  “Gentlemen, please, please,” Lucas intervened, wishing he could take them both by the throat and shake them until they wept. “I don’t want to take too much of your valuable time. But there have been two killings out in the valley, and from the evidence I’ve every reason to believe a timber wolf has decided to visit the state early.”

  Lawrence fell into an armchair and scoffed. Bartholomew shrugged.

  “I heard it myself last night,” Lucas said. “And in view of certain matters, all I need to ask is if Jerad Pendleton has shown up for work today.”

  “Ah,” Lawrence said. The chair’s back was to the window, his face cloaked in shadow. “Ah, the lovely Miss Pendleton still hunting for her drunken uncle.”

  “Uncalled for, Lawrence!” Bartholomew snapped. “Mind your tongue.”

  “I’ll mind mine if you mind yours,” the shadow-voice said.

  Lucas ignored the byplay. As long as he’d known them, the two brothers had never gotten along. Lawrence, the younger, had always seemed content to do as little work as possible and spend the rest of his time sniping at the world; Bartholomew, on the other hand, took his job seriously, and had surprised them all when he decided a year ago to take the Tour, alone, on the heels of his father’s return.

  “I assume you’ve not seen him since Miss Pendleton called this morning?”

  “The roses are dying,” Lawrence said, then stood in a single clumsy movement and clumped to the large window, leaned heavily on the crutch to watch the air darken. “The most beautiful day since I got home.”

  Thunder reached into the caverns of the house, and a maid scurried into the room, lighting the lamps silently, putting shadows on the walls.

  When she was gone, Bartholomew cleared his throat. “Do you think him dead?” .

  “I don’t think anything,” he said. “But he’s not been seen for a while, and . . .”

  “I see. A nasty business.” Drummond ran a finger along the mantelpiece. “Will you need hunters?”

  “There are some out already. We could always use another.”

  “Hunters,” Lawrence said without turning, “are never the hunters they seem to be.”

  Lucas couldn’t take anymore. He thanked them for their cooperation, and left as swiftly as propriety permitted. With his hat clapped firmly on, he strode through the gate, took several paces to his right, and glanced over his shoulder. Lawrence was still in the window, an unmoving dark spectre in the deepening greylight. A shame, he thought, that such a man should have to be crippled like that; it only added fuel to his store of self-pity.

  He started off again, halted in midstride and turned back.

  Lawrence was gone. The trees were rasping furiously at him, and the chill of the wind penetrated his shirt to raise droplets of ice on his chest, on his arms.

  A frown, and he retraced his steps until he was near the gate and staring at one of the spiked iron pickets. There, halfway down and snared by a sliver of metal, was a swatch of cloth. He leaned down to stare, took it carefully before the wind snatched it from him, and held it close to his eyes. It was dark brown, not fine material and, from the feel of it, torn off a coat.

  He looked at the house, put the cloth in his pocket and headed back for the station.

  Dark brown was the coat Johanna’s uncle was wearing.

  Chapter 7

  Despite the ordered proliferation of starkly burning candles, and the hasty lighting of the green-globed gaslamps in their walled brass sconces, the Drummond house seemed filled with the darkest of midnights, a darkness that thrummed each time the thunder roared.

  Lawrence watched Chief Stockton march up the street, then turned and made his clumsy way toward the staircase. His brother said nothing, and for the first time since he’d arrived home, he was grateful. He had nothing at all decent to say to that pompous jackass, nothing at all that would not provoke another debate.

  Each had changed drastically since their return, each had become a stranger to the other.

  And the old man didn’t help, sniveling up there in his filthy stinking room, shouting threats whenever one of them passed by his door, reminding them that he was still alive, reminding them to whom the Drummond fortune still belonged.

  One of these days, he thought, he was going to strangle the old bastard.

  He climbed the steps in silence, fighting the pain that still lurked in his shattered foot.

  He was restless. Storms always made him restless. As if they knew him, knew where he was, and were calling to him to come out. Come out, Lawrence, and play. We’re your friend, come and play, come and catch the lightning.

  And since those hellish days at Shiloh, since his return from the dead, the slightest suggestion that Nature was about to set loose her most potent and seductive forces against him made him feel as if he were trapped in a tomb. He had to get out. He had to leave before the walls closed around him, snared him, buried him as he had been buried under all those bodies for all those hours until a corpsman had stumbled over his outflung arm and he’d cried out, in fear, in agony, at relief that he’d been discovered.

  Buried there under all the men he knew.

  Buried.

  All night.

  Hours upon unholy hours of lying beneath dead men, feeling their slow-dripping blood land upon his face and chest, listening to the muffled thunder of cannon in the woods, listening to the screams of the dying horses, the screams of the dying men, the deep throated growling of hungry wolves who made forays o
f their own onto the battlefield after dark to find an easy meal.

  He was not surprised.

  He had seen them before.

  They had come by the dozens, shadows breaking from the trees after other skirmishes, most of them immediately driven away or shot. It had been worse at the war’s outset, he’d been told; now many of the scavengers were gone, leaving the dead to the buzzards and crows.

  But they weren’t gone that night. Not the night he lay there in such agony he could not feel a thing, while the blood dripped on his cheek and the wolf sniffed around his throat and hours became years until the corpsman uncovered him and the surgeon sent him home.

  He had to get out.

  The thunder was driving him crazy.

  “I’m going out,” Newstone declared to the room, slapping the latest complaint sheet onto an untidy pile and stuffing them into the desk drawer. He rose and stretched, rolled his head on his neck and groaned at the stiffness lodged in his shoulders. The two constables who were with him only looked at each other and shrugged. What Newstone did, direct orders or not, was his own business; Chief Stockton’s wrath was something they would rather not have to face.

  One day in the position, they thought in admiration, and Lucas was already in charge.

  “Want to check on the Northland Avenue gripes,” Newstone said, buttoning his tunic and slapping on his soft black cap, patting the crown and tugging at the peaked brim. “Seems to be more of them there than anywhere else.”

  No one answered. Only the thunder.

  “If the Chief comes in,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  If the Chief comes in, they thought, you’d best not be back at all.

  Newstone felt their hostility, and didn’t give a damn. He’d been on this force for ten long years, got nowhere fast, and knew by all the gods that he should have been the one to be voted the top position, not Lucas Stockton. On the other hand, as long as Stockton was out chasing ghosts and dogs, he was free to do what he wanted. Those who worked his tour had no guts to deny him.

  He grinned, clapped and rubbed his palms together.

  The thunder cracked; lightning bounced white lances off the cobblestones.

  Hang on, Charlotte, he thought, old Farley’s coming.

  Bartholomew said nothing as his brother limped from the room. If he had his way at all, he would say nothing to that coward for the rest of their lives.

  Instead, he remained unmoving on the hearth and watched the leaves dart like insects past the window, watched a carriage ride past as if Satan were on its heels, watched his left hand begin to shake and slop over his wrist port he had drawn for himself at the first sign of the storm.

  For several minutes he smoothed the soft white leather over the backs of his hands, wincing now and then, turning them over to examine the palms, the fingers, the cut of the leather that reached up over his wrists.

  A sigh.

  The storm muttered, and he grimaced in an effort to keep himself from yelping.

  He did not like storms.

  He did not like thunder.

  He did not like a single reminder of the trip he had taken. London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris — sinfully false cities in a sinfully false world, filled with people who shouldn’t be living, people with no better purpose than to propagate themselves. Dirty people and profane people and people whose god had the voice of gold falling into a purse. Not like those he had met later on, those who lived where they wanted, those who let the wind guide them and teach them and protect them in the womb of the mountains. They had fascinated him. They had terrified him. They had, finally, permitted him to travel along with them. A lark. A bit of fluff for his exceedingly dull life . . . until the storm in the mountain pass.

  He had been walking, enjoying himself, wishing he had tried harder to talk Johanna into coming with him, wishing he were a king so he could order the peasants to their deaths and the rich to his dungeons and leave only those he thought worthy of breathing.

  Walking, up there in the pass, where the headlong charge of thunder utterly deafened him and the lightning blinded him and the stones loosened by the pelting cold rain slammed into his back, rolled him down the hillside and trapped him under a fallen log crawling with dead things he dared not examine, not even when he felt them working their way under his clothes.

  Trapped beneath the log swarming with things.

  Trapped.

  All night.

  Thinking he would surely die, wishing he would die when it was evident he would not, when it was clear he would remain there under that log, exposed to the things, that wriggled under his clothes, over his flesh; exposed to the things that came out of the trees to see what meals they could find.

  Pinned.

  Helpless.

  Alone in the dark while the bears prowled, and the storm howled, and the wolves sniffed close around his bleeding ankles, his one free hand, his torn and naked throat because his head was pulled away by a branch pressed against his forehead. The wolves whose fetid. breath made him gag, whose fur brushed over his face and made him scream so silently he thought his head would burst.

  All night.

  All during the storm.

  Found the next day, he allowed himself to be rescued, and said nothing when the people asked him fearfully to leave.

  The change in his hands was noticed when he returned to Paris, the change in himself when he took ship for home in Southampton.

  He rubbed the tips of his fingers together, then headed for the coat rack by the front door, fetched down his cloak and walked into the back library where the rifles were kept in a glass-fronted cabinet affixed to the wall.

  He would hunt tonight, and show Lucas Stockton what an expert could do.

  Maria Andropayous cleared away the supper dishes, hustled Ned off to his room where she made sure his school books were out for his studying, then returned downstairs and looked in the study. Lucas was sitting by the window, staring out at the backyard but, she knew by the crease on his brow, not seeing a thing. As far as he was concerned, the approaching storm did not exist, nor any of the village. A hand scratched lightly at his knee, the other massaged his temple.

  Her ancient head shook side to side, once, and she slipped back into the kitchen to stand at the door.

  Though the sun would not set for an hour yet, night had already fallen over the Station. The wind had died, but the thunder had not, and now, at last, there were faint sparks of’ lightning that would arrive, she guessed, about the same time as the rain. The rain she could smell on the air, damp and heavy and filled with unseen shadows that made her decide.

  There had been, for a while, the welcome and desperate temptation to believe Lucas when he told her she was being nothing more than an old woman afraid of her shadow; for a while, his soothing voice had lulled her, convinced her he was right and she was wrong.

  The respite, however, lasted only until he’d returned from the stationhouse, ate his meal in silence, said not a word to his son. She saw then his worry, and the curious way he looked at her-sideways, uncertain, as if lacking the courage to ask her again what she really meant when she told him the wolf had two legs.

  And when the interlude was over, the peace she had almost talked into her soul, they returned — all the fearful nightmares of her childhood. She knew then she was not mistaken no matter how incredible it may seem, and she knew there was only one way to know for sure.

  A green woolen shawl dropped lightly around her shoulders, and she left the house, keeping away from the study window as she hurried as fast as her bent legs could take her to the sprawling garden in back. Once there she sidestepped the herbs common and exotic, the vegetables she sold in the market for extra money, until she reached a single plant she had nurtured all the way over the Atlantic, all the way to this village and her employ with the Stocktons.

  It was dark.

  She could barely see.

  Then a jagged crack of lightning rent the sky above her,
and in the deafening blast of thunder that followed she could see; her hands went to her mouth, but not in time to smother the moan.

  The plant was wolfsbane.

  The white blossom was open.

  Chapter 8

  “By damn, Lucas!” John Webber exclaimed. “By damn and damnation, what d’ya think I am, a miracle worker? Good Lord in heaven, preserve me from the idiots populating this world.” He shook his head wearily and stomped into the living room, dropped into a worn, straight-backed chair and stretched out his spindly legs. Lucas followed him more slowly after a second’s hesitation, hat deferentially in hand, eyes avoiding the other’s glare. He did not sit when the doctor offered him a chair. He was unaccountably nervous.

  “Nice suit,” Webber said with a disdainful gesture toward the chief’s white clothes. “You. practicing to be an angel?” Then he clawed in his black waistcoat pocket and pulled out the swatch the chief had given him. His half-glasses slid down to the end of his nose, and he peered, sniffed, crossed his feet at the ankles and looked up. “Brown.”

  “I know that, John.”

  “Wool, I’d say. Bad weave, very sloppy, probably local. Suspect he got it at Carpenter’s place, that hole around the corner from the bank, on Steuben. Man might as well be one for all the style he’s got. His clothes suit his name, if y’know what I mean.” He snorted — his version of a laugh — and shook his head again.

  Lucas ran the hat brim through his hands impatiently, and sighed when the diminutive physician held out the cloth for him to take.

  “Best I can do, Lucas,” Doc said. “No sign of blood. It was ripped off by that fence.”

  Lucas nodded. He’d come to the identical conclusions, had tried the old man in on the off-chance something had slipped past him. Nothing had. A man’s coat, and Jerad had one like it, and so did half the damned village.