Abend didn’t need the candle anymore. The dagger glowed and lit the room with that weird red-black bright-dark light. From Abend’s right hand, the strange illumination spread in a broadening dome, over the body of Goulart where he lay on his back staring up into the high rafters, over the figure of Imogen where she strained in her bonds, over the rats and giant spiders where they seemed to pause, to hover tensely as if awaiting a command, and finally over the deepest shadows themselves, joining with the shadows until what was in the shadows was also in the light, and what was muttering in the silence was muttering louder and louder throughout the atmosphere.
“Let me go about my business,” Abend said, speaking into that terrible music, gesturing toward Imogen and starting to turn to her with the dagger raised. “Let me live and you will live. It’s so simple, my boy. All you need to do is nothing.”
Zach shot him.
The bullet tore a huge—an unnaturally huge—hole through the center of the man, a hole the size of a fist. Blood exploded backward and forward out of the wound in an enormous red blast. And even so, even so, even with the black-bright air glowing through the middle of him, Abend did not go down. His rotting features contorted with agony, but he still had the strength to keep turning toward Imogen, to keep lifting the knife and to step once in her direction, ready to plunge the glowing blade into the heart of her and drink the healing draught of her existence.
Zach began to pull the trigger again, but he was out of time: the creatures rushed him.
The circle of rats and spiders closed around him instantly, like a noose pulled tight. In a second, the things were swarming over and up him, covering every inch of his body, clawing their ways onto his face, smothering him beneath their huge, furred, wriggling forms, tearing and biting at him with tooth and fang. His arms were forced up. His finger spasmed on the trigger. Flame shot out of the gun barrel straight upward as the bullet went wild. Then the gun was torn from his hands and fell into the glowing dark, he didn’t know where. He didn’t know anything but the agony and nauseating horror of the rats and spiders crawling over him, tearing into his flesh, so many of them covering him all at once that Zach’s mind shut down under the weight of hurt and sheer repugnance. He couldn’t think, he could only try to scream—and even the scream was cut off by whatever twisting thing squirmed over his lips to get at him.
He reeled as they devoured him. The loud, dark, thrumming murmur of the Presence filled his head. The lightning flashed and, through the seething beasts, he saw the wounded Abend take another staggering step toward Imogen where she struggled and tried to scream. He saw Abend lift the blade higher, ready to bring it down into her exposed chest.
Then—in the very midst of that abomination: metamorphosis. The transformation exploded inside him and he became the wolf.
A red and wrenching blast went through him, his flesh made fire. His pain became rage and his rage became bloodlust, and all the while his muscles and sinews were bursting their bounds, his bones straining themselves into immensity, his skin pierced from within by the wildly sprouting fur. There was no pleasure in it as there had been the last time. There was almost no man-mind there to experience pleasure. All his thoughts had been consumed by the ravening, disgusting rats and spiders that covered and tore at him—and now even that horror was consumed by this.
And now too, as his jaws were ripped out of their human shape into the form of a snout, as his teeth extended brutally from their very nerve endings into pointed fangs, as his whole form grew enormous in one savage burst, the gnawing beasties flew off him in every direction.
The werewolf roared and, with a paw the size of a boulder, tore one stubborn rodent out of his midsection where it had eaten its way in deep and would not let go. The wolf’s razor claws sliced the thing to ribbons as they closed on it, and when he hurled the creature across the room it was nothing but red string knotted with gray fur. A gargantuan spider, mindlessly renewing its attack across the floor, was crushed to twitching sludge by a single lupine footstep.
With that—that quickly—the change was done. And now, howling at the heaven-high rafters, there stood the wolf, the curse’s incarnation.
For Zach, for a moment, there was nothing else. He was the creature, and that was all. The incomprehensible murmuring of the darkness was all he knew. It filled his head like the voice of his own imagination. The black light of the dagger filled his gaze till he saw nothing else. For that one second, he looked around him with rolling, yellow eyes and wanted only destruction, only meat, only blood.
But then he saw Dominic Abend—the struggling woman—the upraised dagger—and in a lesser flash—in a still, small but indestructible act of knowing—he remembered who he was.
Abend, weak and bleeding and profoundly wounded, took one final shuffling half step toward Imogen. With his left hand—crawling with rot and maggots now—he seized her black hair to hold her thrashing figure still. Crying out with effort, he jerked the blade up high for the killing stroke.
Zach the wolf leapt at him, swiping with one great claw, and tore his arm off.
The gangster’s arm flew through the air, the hand releasing the dagger so that it dropped, clunk, to the floor as the limb kept sailing. Not for another second—not until the bloody appendage itself dropped with a wet thud—not until the surviving rats and spiders swarmed over the fresh feast—not until then did the shocked Abend realize what had happened. Only then did he turn to look at his lost arm with wild-eyed comprehension. Only then did he begin to shriek in horror.
In the next instant, the wolf was on him and the scream was cut short. Zach destroyed Abend. It took mere moments. He was—Abend was—already nothing but rotten flesh, a withering sack of skin holding black blood and maggots. The werewolf’s enormous claws ripped him to pieces. What was left sank down to the floor like empty clothes, rags squirming with bugs and viscera, boiling with gore. Whatever else there had once been—the man’s substance, his firmer matter—was already long gone.
Growling with confusion and disappointment, the wolf-man stared down at what it had thought to devour. The muck that had been Abend bubbled on the floor and turned to sulfurous steam and then dissipated completely, vanished.
That was not good enough, not half good enough. The wolf needed meat. The wolf needed blood. The wolf raised his enormous head, baring its fangs, and gazed with hungry, yellow eyes at Imogen.
Imogen was now nearly mad with fear, nearly strangling on her gag as she cowered in the shadow of the towering monster that dwarfed her.
To Zach, in his beast state, in his all-compelling hunger, her terror was arousing, a piquant seasoning to his lust for dealing death. The susurration of the shadowy presence that had come into the room through the dagger pounded in him like his own pulse, driving him to attack her, to have her. The dagger itself, the black glow of it, seemed to light his mind with murder.
The beast roared. It moved in for the kill. Lightning flashed. The room went white. Imogen’s tear-stained face went white, the shadow of the wolf falling hugely on the wall beside her. The thunder hammered down from heaven, nearly drowning out the mutter of destruction.
Jarred by the flash and clatter, the wolf stopped in his tracks and saw his victim as she was. Zach’s heart remembered pity, and what was left of his man-mind cried out to him: No!
With that, the mysterious force of human will—like a tiny rudder steering a great ship—turned the hungry werewolf from its prey. Hulking, growling, still drawn back toward the scent and savor of flesh and blood, the beast forced its terrible head to swing round. He looked down at the dagger.
The dagger. Through the noise and desire, it came back to him. The dagger and the curse. They had to be brought together again, the doorway closed, the rift in reality sealed. The room shuddered as the great creature stepped toward the fallen weapon. The sky crackled at the windows, and the shadows muttered their weird incantation and the woman wept, and Zach bent down from his unnatural wolf-height and wrapped his claw aro
und the handle of the baselard.
He lifted the iron dagger clumsily. The black glow of the blade hurt his eyes. The mutter of the Presence that inhabited and ruled the darkness made his head ache. He let out an animal roar of pain and frustration, and as he craned his neck with the effort of making that fearful noise, his eyes swept the dark room—and he saw the phantoms.
They were all there, all around him. Dankl and the executioner and the man in blue and several others whose names and fortunes he had never known. They were standing at the circumference of the shadows, made of the shadows, watching him with their mournful eyes, pleading with him silently not to do this thing, not to destroy them.
How much they wanted to live—even in their ghost-life, how much. And he wanted to live, wanted to go on, even this way, full of blood and violence, wanted so much to continue, a desire beyond telling. His wolf-mind just then was unable to form a clear thought of Grace or Tom or Ann, but he did think of them, did summon the deep sensation of the wife and son and daughter whom he loved above all else. He gazed sadly down into the fathomless dark-light of the dagger blade, and he knew instinctively that this meant separation from them forever. How could he choose that willingly?
But the dagger . . . the curse. . . . It had to be ended.
Lightning flashed once more at the big rain-streaked windows, and the werewolf raised his muzzle to the sky and howled. The mutter of the shadow presence all around him rose in desperate insistence as if it understood that it had lost its power over him. Even the storm seemed to sense what was happening: the thunder that followed was a low, sorrowful moan. Even the woman in her chains seemed to understand: the tone of her sobs changed from one of fear to one of grieving.
Zach’s hulking wolf-form straightened, enormous. He wrapped his clawed hand tightly around the handle of the dagger. He lifted the ancient weapon high into the air—hesitated only a second more—then brought the glowing blade down swiftly, and plunged it into his heart.
32
THE DEATH OF THE WEREWOLF
Christ, how terrible death was! Not the pain of that final moment or even his shriveling collapse into human form, or his tumbling fall into the spreading puddle of his own blood, or his last gasping, rattling breath. All that was ugly enough, but it was over quickly.
But the other death, the great loveless nothing that followed, the endless torment of blackness—that was terrible beyond imagining. It was, he saw at once, a cancer in the heart of life. It made life idiotic, meaningless, and mad. And there was no escape from it.
There was nothing at all here, in fact. There were no words. There couldn’t be: there was nothing to describe. There were no ideas, no thoughts, not even darkness. There was no pain. There was no elsewhere. There were no others. There was no time that could end or stretch forever.
There was only this: the inner man in utter isolation, in utter silence, never changing, undifferentiated from his surroundings except by the visceral knowledge that there was such a thing as love that this was not. Love was infinite, but it was not present. This was infinity’s end, its defining border. This was solitude—solitude without change. Alone, alone, alone, alone—while love was elsewhere.
Zach’s heart stopped. His brain stopped. He ceased to have even himself for company. His body became nothing more than meat. And yet there was still this—this wordless, timeless, loveless brutality of solitude—and it did not even go on forever, because there was no forever—it simply remained, constant: there would never be anything else because there was nothing else to be. There was not even false hope.
Christ, oh Christ, it was terrible. This was what the wolves had feared. This was why they had let the curse continue. They had chosen to go on even in the half-life of phantoms rather than face this, this death, the prison of death, that closed around him and held him fast and never ended and would always be the same.
And so that was the end of him—and later, he could not have said what had saved him from it. Even at the time, it was more than mysterious. It was inconceivable. Here, where there was nothing that could happen, no time for it to happen in, something happened. Somehow something made itself known to him—to him who was even himself no longer there.
That other reality—that unremembered infinity of love—became present to him. He felt a sudden anguish of unquenched desire, an excruciating gesture of the heart toward the impossible. With a bolt of unimaginable being, the endlessness ended.
Zach drew a sharp breath. He coughed. He whispered his wife’s name.
He opened his eyes and found that he was a man—a man lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor of a ruined mansion.
He shifted his head. His brow throbbed as if he had been clubbed. He groaned. He rolled over onto one shoulder. He was looking out a window with no glass. He remembered the storm, but the storm was over. How long had he been gone? A long time, it felt like. The clouds were sailing past the moon. The moon was full, and it was still rising.
Still rising, he realized. Still rising, and yet he was a man!
He understood: he had done it. He had done what needed to be done. The curse was over.
In another moment, he became aware that a woman was weeping. Imogen—yes, he remembered her too.
The pain flashed through his head again, and he groaned again as he shifted on the floor until he could see her. She was hanging slack in her chains, exhausted, only barely sobbing. When she saw him move, she gasped into her gag, and her eyes widened—those bright intelligent brown eyes, light brown, almost golden.
“All right,” he said, flinching because it hurt to talk. “It’s all right.”
He sat up slowly. He brought his hand to his brow and rubbed it and shut his eyes tight. When he opened them, he was looking down at himself and he saw that he was naked, his body unscarred, the dagger gone. Still dazed, he searched the room for something he could use to cover himself. He saw the remnants of his plastic Extraordinary Crimes raincoat lying on the floor, not far way. He reached out and pulled it toward him. There was just enough of it left to tie around his waist, a makeshift loincloth.
The wind came through the window and chilled him. He shivered and came wider awake. He climbed painfully to his feet. He searched the floor, somehow knowing he would find Abend’s keys—and there they were. He bent down and scooped them up, another shock of pain passing beneath his brow, but a lesser one this time.
He moved to Imogen. She gazed up at him with a sort of helpless wonder, as if she weren’t sure whether he had descended to her from heaven, or was about to transform into a murderous beast again.
He tried to smile at her. “It’s all right now,” he repeated.
He used Abend’s key to unlock her wrists and he caught her as she fell into his arms. He supported her with one hand, and with the other he removed her gag. Sneering at the filthy thing, he hurled it to the floor. It fell beside Goulart’s body.
Imogen rested her head against him, strangely silent; all cried out. He kissed her black hair to comfort her. But he was looking over her, down at his dead partner. The sight of his friend lying there like that, staring up into the rafters blindly like that—it sent a fresh wave of fear through him. He remembered death. He remembered the unimaginable solitude beyond the edges of infinity. He would never forget it. As he held Imogen against him, he prayed for Broadway Joe Goulart wordlessly. He had always liked the man. He prayed that he wasn’t even now in that awful place of death.
When he was done with his prayer, he forced his eyes away. He gazed out the window at the moon.
“Come on,” he said hoarsely. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Imogen shifted against him, raised her face to look at him. She looked carefully, a long time, exploring his features. Then, slowly, she nodded.
“Yes. Let’s.”
EPILOGUE
Half-naked and bedraggled, they made their way hand in hand down through the dripping forest in the moonlight, looking like—feeling like—the first man and woman
or the last, as if they’d been expelled from Eden or survived the apocalypse, one or the other. They had recovered Zach’s things—his phone, his car keys, and so on—and when they reached the Crown Vic, parked in its little tree-shaded turnout, Imogen waited in the passenger seat while he went around back and opened the trunk. As before, he had packed his overnight bag with some clothes: jeans and a Houston PD sweatshirt. He dressed back there while Imogen sat up front, clutching her torn sweater closed over her breasts, staring through the windshield and shivering. When he was done, he brought her a spare Extraordinary Crimes raincoat he’d found wedged in the trunk’s corner. He handed it to her through the window, then walked back around the car slowly to give her time to put it on over her nakedness.
The moment he sat down behind the wheel, she turned to him, her pixie face streaked with grime and mascara and dried tears.
“Thank you,” she said.
He shook his head. Turned the ignition on. Put the car in gear. She reached out and touched his arm so that he had to look at her.
“No, I mean it. I don’t know how you could have. . . . When you were that thing. . . . It must have required. . . . I can’t even imagine.”
He managed to smile at her. Then he faced front and pulled the car out onto the road and started driving back toward the highway. He called 911 as they went. The dispatcher’s voice came in over the speakerphone. He gave her a quick description of Goulart’s death.
“I’m taking the vic to get medical care. I’ll let you know where to find me,” he said. Then he asked her to call Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. Then he hung up.
“I don’t want medical care, thank you,” said Imogen crisply. “I’m not injured.”
“You’re probably in shock,” he told her.
Werewolf Cop Page 30
