“Yes, I see,” he said.
“Bullshit.”
The doctor brightened. Gut reactions always encouraged him.
“You don’t see at all,” Karyn told him. “You don’t believe Drago actually happened any more than my husband does. Any more than all the other people I’ve told about it.”
After his customary wait the doctor said. “Karyn, whether I believe or not isn’t important. What happened in the past or didn’t happen really doesn’t concern us. Our bag is the here and now. All that matters to us is how you feel about it.”
Karyn met the doctor’s sincere gaze. He was having a difficult time making the transition from the traditional Freudian to the trendy transactional school of analysis. Everybody’s got problems, she thought.
“What it makes me feel is scared shitless,” she said.
Pause.
“Why?”
“Because I know they aren’t all dead.”
“When you say ‘they’ you mean––”
“I mean the wolves,” Karyn supplied. “The werewolves.”
She watched closely for a reaction––the narrowing of the eyes, or the little quirk, which she had seen so often at the corner of his mouth. Dr. Goetz held his expression of friendly concern. He was good.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” he said.
“Doctor, I have told you about it.”
“Tell me again, if you think it would help.”
Hell, why not, Karyn thought. There was no pain in the telling any more, and that, at least, was an improvement. Maybe if she heard the story often enough herself it would become meaningless, the way a familiar word repeated over and over eventually becomes a nonsense sound.
She stood up again and walked back to the window. There, watching the peaceful scene down on the lake, she repeated the story of the damned village of Drago, and the six months she spent there with Roy Beatty.
She described the way it began, with the howling in the night. Then there had been the cruel killing of her little dog. She told of the strange people who had lived in the village, and the huge, unnatural wolves that had roamed the woods at night. In a quiet, controlled voice she spoke of the black-haired Marcia Lura, who had bewitched Karyn’s husband and finally taken him forever with the virulent bite of the werewolf. Finally she told of the escape from Drago as she and Chris Halloran had fled the burning village.
Dr. Goetz waited, then spoke. “You said they aren’t all dead. The wolves.”
“As we drove out of the valley with everything behind us in flames, I heard it again from off in the forest. The howling.”
Abruptly Karyn stopped talking and went back to her chair across from the doctor. “Telling the story doesn’t make it any better or any worse,” she said. “All it does is keep the memory fresh. What I want to do is put Drago out of my mind, now and forever.”
“I can understand that,” Dr. Goetz said reasonably. “And that’s what we’re working toward, isn’t it? But, Karyn, before we can finally put this idea out of your mind, we have to find out what put it in.
Karyn stared at him. She spaced out her words carefully. “What put this idea into my mind, God-dammit, is that it happened.”
“Yes, of course,” the doctor went on. “Maybe when you were a little girl there was some experience, something ugly, with wolves or large dogs.”
Karyn shook her head wearily. “No, Doctor, not when I was a little girl. My only traumatic experience with wolves came when I was a full-grown woman. Three years ago. In Drago. You’re telling me the same old thing, aren’t you, that it’s a delusion?”
“Delusion is a term we don’t use much any more. We understand now that things that happen in the mind are every bit as vivid, and often more damaging than what we call reality. I’m sure your experience in Drago is as real to you today as this room we are sitting in. The important thing, as I said––”
Karyn only half-listened as Dr. Goetz droned on in his silky, reassuring voice. He was saying the thing everyone else did. Namely, that she had imagined the whole Drago episode. Maybe in time he could convince her of that. If he could, he would be well worth whatever David was paying him. In the meantime, it did help a little to be able to talk.
There was a subtle change in the doctor’s tone, and Karyn saw his eyes flick over at the discreet little clock on his desk. Her hour was up.
3
Karyn drove slowly north over the Aurora Bridge toward Mountlake Terrace, where she and David had their home. Her thoughts, as usual when she left Dr. Goetz, were on Drago and what happened afterward.
There had been one moment of triumph at the very end when she had fired the deadly silver bullet into the head of the black she-wolf. But that small victory, like the escape with Chris Halloran, had lacked a ring of finality. Even as she and Chris had paused to look back on the valley in flames, neither of them had really believed it was over.
For six tempestuous months they had tried to pretend it was, and that they were just another ordinary couple. After sharing the horror of Drago, it had seemed a natural thing to stay together. How wrong they were.
For a time they had traveled aimlessly from place to place, living on pills and nervous energy. Before long their pent-up emotions were turned against each other. At the end of six months these two people, who had shared more in a day than many couples do in a lifetime, were living on the edge of violence. The most insignificant squabble could erupt in an ugly word battle. They were staying in a Las Vegas hotel when the final blowup came.
Karyn had spent the morning in their room. She had the air conditioner turned up full and wore a sweater buttoned to the throat as protection against the dry cold. Chris had gone down to the swimming pool early, after making only a half-hearted attempt at persuading her to come with him.
At noon Chris returned. He glanced briefly at Karyn and went into the bathroom. Not until he had showered, shaved, and dressed, did he speak to her.
“Do you want to go down and get some lunch?”
“Can’t we have something sent up?”
“Why?”
“I’d rather not leave the room, that’s all.”
“For God’s sake, Karyn, you can’t just sit up here and hide from the world like a frightened child.”
His words cut into her like a dull knife. She fired back, “I can do anything I want. Who are you to tell me what I can’t do? Nobody asked you to run my life.”
Chris’s eyes had turned dark and dangerous for a moment, then he whirled and stormed out the door. Karyn fought down the angry impulse to throw something after him.
The rush of blood through the veins made a roaring in her ears. She walked over to the window, parted the draperies, and blinked at the bright white Las Vegas sunlight. Twelve stories down, she could see people in the pool and on the deck around it. Everyone seemed to be laughing and having a fine time. Was she the only one in the world, Karyn wondered, who was miserable?
She let the draperies fall back across the window, and returned to the chair where she had sat all morning. She was still there, shivering with the cold, an hour later when Chris returned.
He closed the door firmly behind him and stood looking at her. “Why the hell don’t you turn the air conditioning down?”
“I like it this way.”
She could see him start to get angry, then, with an effort, relax.
“Karyn, we have to talk.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re destroying each other.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Cut it out, damn it. I’ve had all of this I can take.”
“Poor you.”
“This continual picking at each other is tearing me apart. It isn’t doing you any good, either. Have you looked at yourself closely in the mirror lately?”
“Well, thank you very much.”
“Will you please stop playing childish games? I know what you went through at Drago, but––”
Karyn sprang out of the cha
ir and faced him angrily. “You have no idea what I went through. You were there only at the very end. I spent six months in that place. Six months in hell.”
Chris spoke in a carefully controlled voice. “I know that, Karyn. I know you suffered a lot. What I want to do now is help you.”
“Oh? And just how do you think you can help me?”
“It would be a start if we brought the whole thing out in the open and talked about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Karyn snapped. “Not to you, not to anybody.”
“I’m the only one you can talk to about Drago,” he said. “I am the only person in the world who would believe it, because I was there. I saw the wolves, and I know what they were.”
Karyn clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to think about it. Why don’t you let me forget Drago, so it will go away?”
“It will never go away,” Chris said. “It will always be locked in the back of your head. If we could just talk about it––”
“There you go with your ‘talk about it’ again. You sound like one of those fucking parlor psychologists. Tell me, where did you get your medical degree, Doctor?”
“Cut it out. I can’t take any more of this.”
“Don’t then. Don’t take a Goddamn thing you don’t want to. Nobody’s holding you.”
“That’s right,” he said in a voice that had gone suddenly cold. “Nobody is.”
In thirty minutes Chris Halloran had packed his clothes and left the hotel. That had been two and a half years ago. Karyn had not seen him since.
* * *
The weeks that followed the Las Vegas breakup with Chris were fragmented in Karyn’s memory. She knew that during that time she was very close to losing her hold on sanity. Somehow, she had made her way back to her parents’ home in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood. For two months she had a full-time nurse, and never left the upstairs bedroom that had been hers when she was a little girl. The days were blanks and the nights were filled with shadows where lurked unspeakable horrors.
Then gradually the world came back into focus. Karyn at last learned to talk about the summer in Drago. Then as now, no one really believed her, but they listened sympathetically. She learned that Chris had been right. Talking about it did help.
After six months in the quiet, comfortable house with her family, Karyn began to feel whole again. She tried to contact Chris Halloran, but learned he had taken a traveling assignment with his engineering firm and was seldom in town for long. Maybe, she decided, it was better this way. She would have liked to say she was sorry about the bad days at the end, and keep at least a part of Chris’s friendship, but seeing him might just open old wounds.
Instead, she had accepted the invitation of a college classmate and flown to Seattle for a visit. That was when she met David Richter.
David was twenty years older than Karyn, and solid as Mount Rainier. He did not have the dreamy romanticism of Roy Beatty, nor the charm and dash of Chris Halloran, but he was exactly what Karyn needed. She had been a little hesitant about meeting David’s son, but she need not have worried. She and Joey hit it off immediately.
The big test, in Karyn’s mind, came when she told David the story of Drago. He had listened patiently and seriously, without laughing or patronizing her. He did not, of course, treat it as reality, but accepted it as a minor eccentricity as he might have accepted a slight limp.
David asked her to marry him two months after they met. He offered her security and stability, and a kind of quiet love she had never known. She said yes.
All in all Karyn was content with her life as Mrs. David Richter. Now if she could just stop dreaming of the wolves, and shake the feeling that someday, somewhere, they were going to kill her.
Want to keep reading?
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GARY BRANDNER - THE HOWLING II
* * *
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GARY BRANDNER’S - THE HOWLING III
1
Sheriff Gavin Ramsay stretched out a foot and nudged the switch on the electric heater to OFF with the toe of his boot. The heater coils twanged as the red glow faded. The voters of La Reina County, all 4,012 of them, would be proud of their sheriff’s economy moves.
Ramsay hoisted his foot back to the top of the desk and resumed his contemplation of the view from his office window. Out in front ran S31, a two-lane blacktop with a flaking yellow center stripe badly in need of repainting. S31 was also the main street of Pinyon, California, seat of La Reina County, Pop. 2,109, Elev. 3550.
Across the road from the sheriff’s office was Art Moore’s Exxon station, a Pioneer Chicken franchise, and Hackett’s Pharmacy. On his own side of the road, out of Ramsay’s line of sight, was Yates Hardware & Plumbing, the Safeway, the boarded-up Rialto Theater, and the Pinyon Inn. That was about it for Pinyon, except for the library and La Reina County Hospital, which were built off the road on the high ground between S31 and the mountains.
The storm that had hammered the town for two days had moved on in the early-morning hours, leaving everything wet and bedraggled. The landscape would need a couple of days of sunshine to dry out.
Gavin Ramsay was more than ready for some dry weather. The rain depressed him. Elise used to get poetic about the rain. Literally. She would go to her typewriter and turn out pages of tortured free verse whenever a few raindrops fell. Then she would show it to Gavin and ask what he thought of it. In the first year of their marriage he used to lie and say it was good, really good. After that first year he started telling her the truth. By that time it didn’t matter anymore.
Today was the last day of March, and with luck there would not be another big storm until fall. Summer would bring its own problems––motorcycle gangs, irritable tourists, lost hikers, and campers with poison oak. Nothing that couldn’t be handled as long as it was not raining.
Probably there would be fewer problems with hikers and campers this year. Thoughtful people were not eager to go into the woods since the Drago business. You couldn’t blame them. It was peaceful now, but sometimes on a quiet night you could still hear it. The howling.
In truth, there wasn’t a whole lot for a sheriff and two deputies to do in La Reina County. Well, one deputy and a trainee assigned here by the state, to be accurate. Right now the prospect of a quiet summer suited Gavin Ramsay just fine. After the double trauma of Drago and his divorce from Elise he could use the time to reassemble his life.
The people of La Reina County were happy to see things calm down again. Drago was enough excitement for several lifetimes. It was kind of fun for a while. Now the folks would just as soon not talk about it.
They still got a fair number of sightseers who detoured off Interstate 5 hoping to see something of the infamous village. They might as well have stayed home. There was nothing left to see.
The asphalt road connecting Pinyon to Drago had buckled and cracked with the heat of the fire, and there were wooden barriers put up by Caltrans to block it off. Still, determined curiosity seekers could get through in a tough truck. Those driving something less rugged turned back to Pinyon, where they searched in vain for souvenir shops. Some of the locals used to joke down at the Pinyon Inn about printing up a bunch of Drago T-shirts with bite marks and red splotches, but those jokes got old in a hurry.
Gavin Ramsay had functioned with his usual quiet efficiency during the Drago business. In a way it was a relief for him to get away from home at the time. Now, like the rest of the people in town, he didn’t want to talk about it. Not about Drago or Elise. That did not mean he had forgotten. Nobody who lived through Drago would ever forget. Elise, either, for that matter. You just didn’t want to talk about it.
He picked up a paperback novel from the other desk in the pine-paneled office, the one shared by his two deputies. Ed McBain. 87th Precinct. It must belong to Milo Fernandez. The trainee. Roy Nevins’s taste ran more to Hustler.
Milo was an eager kid,
still excited by the idea of police work. Roy Nevins wasn’t excited by much of anything these days, except finishing up his twenty years of public service and living the rest of his life comfortably off the taxpayers of California.
They should be returning soon. It was after four and getting dark. Ramsay felt a little guilty about sending them out on what he figured to be a wild goose chase, but he could see Milo getting restless with nothing to do, and Roy had been on the verge of falling asleep. They were not likely to find Abe Craddock and Curly Vane in the woods. Those fearless hunters were more likely holed up in some saloon down in Saugus, where everybody had a tattoo and a pickup truck. Still, Abe’s wife had called to say she was worried about him, and it had been three days, so Ramsay was more or less obligated to look into it. Anyway, Milo would probably enjoy getting out of the office, and Roy could sure as hell use the exercise.
The gravel crunched outside and Orry Yates’s panel truck pulled onto the parking area. YATES PLUMING was painted on the side in no-nonsense black letters. Orry claimed the misspelling was done deliberately to attract attention. Ramsay had his doubts.
Orry got out of the driver’s side of the truck, and two teenagers, a boy and a girl wearing backpacks, climbed out of the other. Orry led the way toward the office.
Ramsay swung his feet down to the floor and waited for them to come in. A tightening in his gut warned that this was going to be trouble.
Orry held the door open for the young backpackers, then herded them over to Ramsay’s desk. “Got a little problem, Gavin,” he said.
“Oh?”
“These kids think they found a dead man in the woods.”
“They think?”
“You know how sometimes the light plays tricks coming through the trees. A tree stump or a mossy log can look like something else.”
The boy shot Orry a dark look. “If that’s a log laying out there, I’m Beaver Cleaver.”
The Dead Parade Page 28
