“There he is,” Jaeckel screamed. “The wolf-man!”
He raised his rifle before I could stop him. The explosion fell like a heavy wound on my heart. A large body lurched from the thicket and rolled almost to our feet. I ran forward in horror. Andrew sprawled on the ground, darkness running from his mouth, soaking the snow.
I lifted his head, hardly knowing what I was doing. His bandaged hand fell forward over his chest. There was a gasp from the search party behind us.
Andrew opened his eyes.
“I cut my hand chopping wood, father,” he said very deliberately in English. “That is the truth.”
Then he died.
“I believe you, my boy,” I said.
The group around us made way for Dr Lemaire. Powerful electric torches illuminated the scene.
Jaeckel, the frontier guard, was stammering in my ears. “Pardon, monsieur, a terrible tragedy, but I was right. Le loup-garou! The bandage on his hand.”
I hardly heard him. There was a strange look of triumph in Jaeckel’s eyes and I understood many things.
As he turned away I saw he too had a bandage on his right hand.
Graham Masterton
RUG
Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was a newspaper reporter and editor of Mayfair and Penthouse before becoming a full-time novelist with his 1976 book The Manitou (filmed two years later).
Since then he has written numerous horror novels and short stories, as well as historical sagas, thrillers and best-selling how-to sex books. His many titles include The Djinn, Charnel House, The Sphinx, The Devil’s of D-Day, The Wells of Hell, Revenge of the Manitou, Tengu, The Pariah, Sacrifice, Death Trance, Night Warriors, Nightspawn, Mirror, Death Dream, Walkers, Night Plague, Prey, The House That Jack Built, Rook, The Devil in Gray, Manitou Blood, Ghost Music and Death Mask. His short fiction has been collected in Fortnight of Fear, Flights of Fear, Faces of Fear, the British Fantasy Award-winning Manitou Man: The Worlds of Graham Masterton, Feelings of Fear and Charnel House and Other Stories. In 1989 he edited Scare Care, an anthology of horror stories to benefit abused and needy children.
Masterton is the son of an Army officer, and the setting of “Rug” will be familiar to all those one-time children of BAOR who were schooled in England and visited their parents in Germany in the holidays. As the author reveals: “The real wolfskin rug hung in a shop filled with antique bric-a-brac in Munster, Westphalia. The house and the horse are real. Only the family have been changed to protect those who are frightened by claws scratching at the window . . .”
Two days later, and nearly 75 kilometres away, a tall woman entered an antique shop close to the thirteenth-century Buddensturm, in the cathedral town of Münster. The doorbell jangled on a spring; the morning sunlight illuminated antlers and stags’ heads and display cases of stuffed foxes.
The shopowner appeared from behind a curtain, smoking a cigarette. The woman was standing against the light, so that it was difficult for him to see her face.
“Ich möchte eine Relsedecke,” she said.
“Eine Relsedecke, gnädige Frau?”
“Ja. Ich möchte ein Wolfshaut.”
“Ein Wolfshaut? Das ist rar. Very difficult to find, you understand?”
“Yes, I understand. But you can find me one, yes?”
“Ich weiss nicht. I can try.”
The woman took out a small black purse, unfastened the clasp, and gave the shopowner 1,000DM, neatly folded. “Deposit,” she said. “Depositum. If you can find me a wolfskin rug, I will pay you more. Much more.”
She wrote a telephone number on the back of one of his cards, blew it dry and gave it to him.
“Don’t fail me,” she said.
But when she had left the shop (the doorbell still ringing) the shopowner stood still for a very long time. Then he opened one of the drawers underneath his counter and took out a dark, tarnished nail. A steel nail, heavily plated with silver.
They didn’t come looking for wolfskins very often, but when they did they were usually desperate, which made them even more vulnerable than ever. Still, he needed the practice. He needed to tease her along. He needed to build up her hopes. He needed to make her believe that here, at last, was a man that she could trust.
Then it would be tree time. The hammer and the heart.
The woman didn’t look back at the shop as she left it. Even if she had done, she may not have understood the significance of its name. After all, one beast simply passed on his ferocity to the next; not caring about names or heritage or marital vows. The only thing that was important was the skin, the Wolfshaut, the hairy covering that gave everything meaning.
But the name of the shop was “Bremke: Jagerkunst,” and its business was not only the art and artefacts of hunting, but the relentless pursuit of the hunters themselves.
John found the wolf on the third day, when everybody else had gone to Paderborn for the horse trials. He had pleaded an earache (earaches were always best because nobody could prove whether you really had one or not, and you were still allowed to read and listen to the radio.) The truth was, though, that he was already homesick, and he didn’t feel like doing anything but sitting by himself and thinking miserably about mummy.
The Smythe-Barnetts were very kind to him. Mrs Smythe-Barnett always kissed him goodnight, and their two daughters Penny and Veronica tried their best to involve him in everything they did. But the truth was that he was too sad to be much fun, and he shunned affection because it made a terrible prickly lump rise up in his throat, like a sea-urchin, and his eyes fill with tears.
He stood in the bay window in the front of the house watching the Smythe-Barnetts drive away with their smartly-varnished horse-box in tow. The exhaust from Col. Smythe-Barnett’s Land Rover drifted away between the scabby plane trees, and the street fell silent again. It was one of those colourless autumn mornings when he could easily believe that he would never see blue sky again, ever. From Aachen to the Teutoburger Wald, the north German plains were suffocating under a comforter of greyish-white cloud.
In the kitchen, John could hear the German maid singing as she mopped the beige-tiled floor “Wooden Heart” in German. Everybody was singing it because Elvis had just released GI Blues.
He knew that everything would be better next week. His father had ten days’ leave, and they were going to take a Rhine steamer to Koblenz, and then they were going to spend a week at the Forces recreation centre at Winterberg, among the pine forests of the Sauerland. But that still couldn’t ease the homesickness of staying with a strange family in a strange country, with his parents so recently divorced. His grandmother had said something about “all those long separations . . . a man’s only human, you know.” John wasn’t at all sure what she meant by “only human”. It sounded to him like only just human – as if beneath those pond green cardigans and those tattersall-check shirts there throbbed the heart of a creature far more primitive.
He had even heard mummy saying about his father “he can be a beast at times”, and he thought of his father arching back his head and baring his teeth, his eyes filled up with scarlet and his hands crooked like claws.
He went into the kitchen, but the floor was still wet and the maid shooed him away. She was a big-faced woman in black, and she smelled of cabbagey sweat. It seemed to John that all Germans smelled of cabbagey sweat. Penny had taken him on the bus to Bielefeld yesterday afternoon, and the smell of cabbagey sweat had been overwhelming.
He went out into the garden. The lawns were studded with fallen apples. He kicked one of them so that it hit the side of the stable. John had already been told off for trying to feed the Smythe-Barnetts’ horse with apples. “They give him gripes, you stupid boy,” Veronica had snapped at him. How was he supposed to know? The only horse he had ever seen at close-quarters was the milkman’s horse from United Dairies, and that wore a permanent nosebag.
He sat on the swing and creaked backward and forward for a while. The garden was almost un
bearably silent. Still, this was better than being introduced to all of the Smythe-Barnett’s haw-hawing friends in Paderborn. He had seen them packing their picnic lunch and it was salami and fatty beef sandwiches.
He looked up at the huge suburban house. It was typical of large family residences built in Germany between the wars, with an orange-tiled roof and fawn concrete-rendered walls. There must have been another similar house next door, but Bielefeld had been badly bombed, and now there was nothing left but a wild orchard and brick foundations.
John heard a harsh croaking noise. He looked up and saw a stork perched on the chimney – a real-live stork. It was the first one he had ever seen, and he could hardly believe it was real. It was like an omen, a warning of things to come. It stayed on the chimney for only a few moments, turning its beak imperiously from right to left, its feathers ruffled. Then it flew away, with an audible flap, flap, flap of its wings.
While he was looking up, John noticed for the first time that there was a dormer window in the roof: only a small one. There must be an attic or another bedroom right at the top of the house. If there was an attic, there might be something interesting in it, like relics from the war, or an unexploded bomb, or books about sex. He had found a book about sex in the attic at home, Everything Newlyweds Should Know. He had traced Fig. 6 – The Female Vulva and coloured it pink.
He went back inside the house. The maid was in the living-room now, polishing the furniture and filling the air with the aroma of lavender and cabbagey sweat. John climbed the stairs to the first landing, where the walls were hung with photographs of Penny and Veronica on Jupiter, each photograph decorated with a red rosette. He was glad he hadn’t gone with them to Paderborn. Why should he care if their stupid horse managed to jump over a whole lot of poles?
He climbed the second flight of stairs. He hadn’t been up here before. This was where Col. and Mrs Smythe-Barnett had their “sweet.” John didn’t know why they felt it necessary to eat their pudding in their bedroom. He supposed it was just another of those things that snobby people like the Smythe-Barnetts always did, like having silver napkin-rings and serving tomato ketchup in a dish.
The floorboards creaked. Through the half-open doors, John could see the corner of the Smythe-Barnetts’ bed, and Mrs Smythe-Barnett’s dressing-table, with its array of silverbacked brushes. He listened for a moment. Downstairs, the maid had started to vacuum-clean the living-room carpet. Her cleaner made a roaring drone like a German bomber. She wouldn’t be able to hear him at all.
Cautiously, he crept into the Smythe-Barnetts’ bedroom, and across to the dressing-table. In the mirror, he could see a solemn, white-faced boy of 11 with a short prickly haircut and sticky-outy ears. This of course was not him but simply his external disguise, the physical manifestation he adopted in order to put up his hand during school register and say “Present, miss!”
On the dressing-table lay a half-finished letter on blue deckle-edged notepaper, with a fountainpen lying across it. It read “very disturbed and withdrawn, but I suppose that’s only natural under the circumstances. He cries himself to sleep every night, and suffers nightmares. He also seems to find it very difficult to get along with other children. It will obviously take a great deal of time and”
He stared at his pasty face in the mirror. He looked like a photograph of his father when his father was very young. Very disturbed and withdrawn. How could Mrs Smythe-Barnett have written that about him? He wasn’t disturbed and withdrawn. It was just that what was inside him, he wanted to keep inside. Why should he let Mrs Smythe-Barnett know how unhappy he was? What did it have to do with her?
He tiptoed out of the Smythe-Barnetts’ bedroom and quietly closed the door. The German maid was still leading a full-scale raid over London Docks. He walked along to the end of the corridor, and it was there that he discovered a small cream-painted door which obviously led up to the attic. He opened it. Inside, there was a steep flight of hessian-carpeted stairs. It was very gloomy up there, although a little of the grey, muted daylight managed to penetrate. John could smell mustiness, and dust, and an odd odour like onion-flowers.
He climbed the stairs. As he did so, he came face to face with the wolf.
It was lying flat on the floor, facing him. Its eyes were yellow and its teeth were bared, and its dry, purplish tongue was hanging out. Its hairy ears were slightly motheaten, and there was a baldish patch on the side of its snout, but that did nothing to detract from its ferocity. Even if its body was utterly empty, and it was now being used as a rug, it was still a wolf, and a huge wolf at that – the biggest wolf that John had ever seen.
He looked around the attic. Apart from a partitioned-off area at the far end, to house the water-tanks, it had been converted into a spare bedroom which ran the whole length and breadth of the house. Behind the wolf there was a solid brass bed, with a sagging mattress on it. Three ill-assorted armchairs were arranged by the window, and an old varnished chest-of-drawers stood beneath the lowest part of the eaves.
There was a framed photograph hanging by the side of the dormer window. The top of the frame was decorated with dried flowers, long ago leached of any colour. The photograph showed a fair-haired girl standing by the side of a suburban road somewhere, one eye closed against the sunlight. She was wearing an embroidered halter-top dress and a white blouse.
John knelt down beside the wolf-rug and examined it closely. He reached out and touched the tips of its curving teeth. It was incredible to think this had once been a real animal, running through the woods, chasing after hares and deer, maybe even people.
He stroked its fur. It was still wiry and thick, mostly black, with some grey streaks around the throat. He wondered who had shot it, and why. If he had a wolf, he wouldn’t shoot it. He would train it to hunt people down, and tear their throats out. Particularly his maths teacher, Mrs Bennett. She would look good with her throat turn out. Blood creeping across the pages of School Mathematics Part One by H.E. Parr.
He buried his nose in the wolf-rug’s flanks and breathed in, to find out if it still smelled at all like animal. All he could detect, however, was dust, and a very faintly leathery odour. Whatever wolf-scent this beast had ever possessed, it had been dried up with age.
For an hour or two, until it was lunchtime, he played hunters. Then he played Tarzan, and wrestled with the wolf-rug all over the bedroom. He clamped its jaws around his wrist, and grunted and heaved in an effort to prevent it from biting off his hand. Finally he managed to get it onto its back, and he stabbed it again and again with his huge imaginary jungle-knife, ripping out its guts, and twisting the blade deep into its heart.
A few minutes after twelve, he heard the maid calling him. He straightened the rug, and hurried quickly and quietly downstairs. The maid was ready to leave, in hat and coat and gloves, all black. On the kitchen table there was a plateful of cold salami and gherkins and buttered bread, and a large glass of warm milk, on the surface of which the yellow cream had already begun to form into blobby clusters.
That night, after the Smythe-Barnetts returned, all tired and noisy and smelling of horses and sherry, John lay in his small bed staring at the ceiling and thinking of the wolf. It was so proud, so fierce, and yet so dead, lying gutted on the attic floor with its eyes staring at nothing at all. It had been a beast at times, just like his father; and perhaps one day it could be a beast again. There was no telling with creatures like that, as his grandmother had once said, with her hand cupped over the telephone receiver, as if he wouldn’t be able to hear.
The wind was getting up and clearing away the cloud; but at the same time it was making the plane tree branches dip and thrash, so that strange spiky shadows shuddered and danced across the ceiling of John’s bedroom, shadows like praying-mantises, and spider-legs, and wolf-claws.
In the eye of the coming gale he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But the spider-legs danced even more frantically on the ceiling, and the praying-mantises dipped and shivered, and every quarter-hour the
Smythe-Barnetts’ hall clock struck the Westminster chimes, as if to remind themselves all through the night how correct they were, both in timing and in taste.
And then at quarter past two in the morning he heard a scratching sound coming down the attic stairs. He was sure of it. The wolf! The wolf was climbing down the attic stairs with arched back and bristled tail, its eyes gleaming amber as garnets in the darkness, its breath panting hah-hah-HAH-hah! hah-hah-HAH-hah! ripe with wolfishness and bloodlust.
He heard it running along the corridor, past the Smythe-Barnetts’ sweet, hungry, hungry, hungry. He heard it sniffing at doorlocks, growling in its throat. He heard it pause at the head of the second-floor staircase, and then plunge downwards, coming his way.
It began to run really fast now, its tail beating against the walls of the corridor. Its eyes opened wide and yellow, and its ears stiffened up. It was coming after him, coming to take its revenge. He shouldn’t have fought it, shouldn’t have wrestled it, and for all that his jungle-knife was imaginary, he had still intended to cut its heart out, he had still wanted to do it, even if he hadn’t.
He heard the wolf thudding toward his bedroom-door, louder and louder, and then the door burst open and John shot up in bed and screamed and screamed, his eyes tight shut, his fists clenched, wetting his pyjamas in sheer terror.
Mrs Smythe-Barnett came into the room and took him in her arms. She switched on his bedside lamp and cuddled him and shushed him. He put up with her cuddling for two or three minutes and then he had to pull away. His wet pyjama trousers were rapidly chilling, and he felt so embarrassed that he could have happily died at that moment. Yet he had no alternative but to stand shivering in a dressing-gown while she patiently changed the bed for him, and brought him clean pyjamas, and tucked him up. A tall big-nosed woman in a tall nightdress, wearing a scarf to cover the rollers in her hair. Saintly, in a way, but a Bernini saint; marble-perfect, always able to cope. He so much missed his mummy, who couldn’t cope with anything, or not very well.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 20
