“You had a nightmare,” said Mrs Smythe-Barnett, stroking his forehead.
“It’s all right. I’m all right now,” John told her, almost crossly.
“How’s your earache?” she asked him.
“Better, thanks. I saw a stork.”
“That’s nice. Actually, storks are quite common around here; but the local people think they’re bad luck. They say that if a stork perches on your roof, somebody in the house will get the very worst thing they ever feared. I think that’s why they say that storks bring babies! But I don’t believe in superstitions like that, do you?”
John shook his head. He couldn’t understand where the wolf had gone. The wolf had come running down the stairs and along the corridor and down the second flight of stairs and along the corridor and—
And here was Mrs Smythe-Barnett, stroking his forehead.
He took the bus into Bielefeld the next day, on his own this time. He suffered the cabbagey sweat and the Emte 23 cigarettes, squashed between a huge woman dressed in black and a thin youth with a long hair growing out of the mole on his chin.
He went to the cake-shop and bought an apfel-strudel with piles of squirty cream on it, which he ate as he walked along the street. When he saw his reflection in shop windows he couldn’t believe how young he was. He went into a bookshop and looked through some illustrated art books. Some of them had pictures of nudes. He found an etching by Hans Bellmer of a pregnant woman being penetrated by two men at once, her baby crowded to one side of her womb by two thrusting penises. Her head was thrown back to swallow the penis of a third man, faceless, anonymous.
He was about to leave the bookshop when he saw an etching on the wall of a wolf. On closer inspection, however, it wasn’t a wolf at all, but a man with the face of a wolf. The caption, in black Gothic lettering, read Wolfmensch. John went up and peered at it more closely. The man-wolf was standing in front of an old German town, with crowded rooftops. On one of those rooftops perched a stork.
He was still staring at the picture when the bookshop proprietor approached him – a small, balding, thin-cheeked man with yellowish skin and a worn-out grey suit, and breath that was thick with tobacco.
“You’re English?” he asked.
John nodded.
“You’re interested in wolf-men?”
“I don’t know. Not specially.”
“Well, anyway, this picture in which you show so much interest, he is our famous local wolf-man, from Bielefeld. His real name was Schmidt, Gunther Schmidt. He lived – you see the dates here – from 1887 to 1923. He was the son of a schoolmaster.”
“Did he ever kill anybody?” asked John.
“Yes, they say so,” nodded the bookshop proprietor. “They say he killed many young women, when they were out walking in the woods.”
John said nothing, but stared at the wolf-man in awe. The wolf-man looked so much like the rug in the Smythe-Barnetts’ attic – eyes and fangs and hairy ears – but then he supposed that all wolves looked much the same. Met one wolf-man, met them all.
The bookshop proprietor hooked the picture down from the wall. “Nobody knows how Gunther Schmidt became a wolf-man. Some people say that his ancestor was bitten by a wolf-man mercenary during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s a legend, you see, that when the Diet of Ratisbon called back General Wallenstein, he brought in some very strange mercenaries to help him. He was beaten by Gustavus at the battle of Lützen, but many of Gustavus’ men had terrible wounds, throats torn open, and suchlike. Well, perhaps it isn’t true. But it’s true that the battle of Lützen was fought under a full moon, and you know what they say about wolf-people. Women, as well as men.”
“Werewolves,” said John, feeling awed.
“That’s right, werewolves! Here, let me show you this book. It has pictures of all of the incidents of werewolves, during the past fifty years. It’s a very interesting book, if you like to be scared!”
From the shelf just above his desk, he took down a large album, covered with brown paper. He opened it out, and beckoned John to take a look.
“Here! This is one for the werewolf enthusiast! Lili Bauer, killed on the night of April 20, 1921, in Tecklenburg, her throat was torn open. And here is Mara Thiele, found dead in the Lippe, July 19, 1921, also throat torn open . . . und so weiter, und so weiter.”
“Who’s this?” asked John. He had found a photograph of a girl in a halter-top dress, with a white blouse, and blonde hair, standing by a suburban road, one eye squinched against the sunlight.
“This one . . . Lotte Bremke, found dead in the woods close to Heepen, August 15, 1923. Again, throat ripped out. The last victim, this is what it says. After that, nobody heard from Gunther Schmidt anything more . . . although here, look. A human heart was found nailed to a tree in Waldstrasse, with the message, here is the heart of the wolf.”
John stared at the photograph of Lotte Bremke for a long time. He was sure that it was the same girl whose photograph was nailed up in the attic at the Smythe-Barnetts’ house. But could that mean that Lotte Bremke had lived there once? And if she had – where had the wolf-skin come from? Had Lotte Bremke’s father killed the wolf-man, perhaps, and nailed his heart to a tree, and kept his skin as a gruesome souvenir?
He closed the book and handed it back. The bookshop proprietor was watching him with pale, disinterested eyes, their pupils the colour of cold tea.
“Well?” said the bookshop proprietor. “Wass glaubst du?”
“I’m not really interested in werewolves,” John told him. There were far worse things than werewolves, like wetting the bed in front of Mrs Smythe-Barnett.
“But you stared at this picture,” the bookshop proprietor smiled.
“I was just interested.”
“Well . . . of course. But don’t forget that the beast is not inside us. This is important to remember when dealing with wolf-men. The beast is not inside us. We are inside the beast, versteh?”
John stared at him. He didn’t know what to say. He felt as if this man could read everything that he was thinking, like an open book lying on a shallow riverbed. All that was required to turn the pages was to get one’s fingers wet.
John took the bus back to Heepen. It was nearly half-past five and the sky was indigo. The moon hung over the Teutoburger Wald like the bright face of God. When he arrived back at the Smythe-Barnett’s house, all the lights were lit, Penny and Veronica were giggling in the kitchen, and Col. Smythe-Barnett was entertaining six or seven fellow-officers in the living-room (roars of laughter, clouds of cigarette-smoke).
Mrs Smythe-Barnett came into the kitchen and for the first time John was pleased to see her. She was wearing a glittery cocktail-dress but her face was dark with rage. “Where have you been?” she shouted, and she was so angry that it took him a moment or two to understand that she was shouting at him.
“I went to Bielefeld,” he said, weakly.
“You went to Bielefeld without telling us! We’ve been frantic! Gerald had to call the local polizei, for God’s sake, and you don’t have any idea how much he hates asking for help from the locals!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought it was all right. We went on Tuesday. I thought it was all right to go today.”
“For God’s sake, isn’t it enough that we’re wetnursing you? You’ve only been here four days and you’ve been nothing but trouble! No wonder your parents broke up!”
John sat with his head bowed and said nothing. He didn’t understand adult drunkenness. He didn’t understand that people could exaggerate things that irritated them, and not really mean it, and say sorry the next morning, and it was all forgotten. He was eleven.
Veronica set his supper in front of him. It was a cold chicken leg, with gherkins. He had asked especially not to be given warm milk, because he didn’t like it. Instead, Veronica had poured him a glass of flat Coca-Cola.
In bed that night, he crunched himself up and cried as if his heart would split into pieces.
But at two o�
��clock in the morning, he opened his eyes and he was perfectly calm. The moon was shining so brightly through his bedroom curtains that it could have been daylight. Dead daylight, the world of the dead, but daylight all the same.
He climbed out of bed and looked at himself in his little mirror. A boy with a face made of silver. He said, “Lotte Bremke”. That was all he had to say. He knew that she had lived here, when the house was first built. He knew what had happened to her. Some things are so obvious to children that they blink in disbelief when adults fail to understand. Lotte Bremke’s father had done what any father would do, and hunted down the wolf-man, and killed him, somehow, and nailed his heart (smash! quiver! smash! quiver) to the nearest plane tree.
John glided to the bedroom door, and opened it. He walked along the corridor with feet like glass. He walked up the stairs, and along the second corridor, with feet like glass. He opened the cream-painted door that led to the attic, and opened it.
He climbed the stairs.
Sure enough, the wolf-rug was waiting for him, with gleaming yellow eyes and bristly fur. John crawled across the rough hessian carpet on hands and knees and stroked it, and whispered, “Wolfman, that’s what you were. Don’t deny it. You were on the outside, weren’t you? You were the skin. That was the difference; that was what nobody understood. Werewolves are wolves turned into men, not men turned into wolves! And you ran round their houses, didn’t you, and ran through their woods, and caught them, and bit them, and tore their throats out, and killed them!”
“But they caught you, didn’t they, wolf, and they took out the man who was hiding inside you. They took out all of your insides, and left you with nothing but your skin.
“Still, you shouldn’t worry. I can be your man now. I can put you on. You can be a rug one minute, and a real wolf the next.”
He stood up, and lifted the rug up from the floor. It had felt heavy when he had been wrestling with it this afternoon, but now it felt even heavier, almost as heavy as a live wolf. It took him all of his strength to lift it around his shoulders, and to drape the empty legs around him. He perched the head on top of his own head.
He trailed around the attic, around and around. “I am the wolf, and the wolf is me,” he breathed to himself. “I am the wolf, and the wolf is me.”
He closed his eyes. He flared his nostrils. I’m a wolf now, he thought to himself. Fierce and fast and dangerous. He could imagine himself running through the woods of Heepen, in between the trees, his paws padding soft and deadly over the thick carpet of pine-needles.
He opened his eyes. Now was the time to get his revenge. The wolf’s revenge! He climbed down the stairs with his tail beating thump, thump, thump on the treads behind him. He pushed open the attic door and began to lope along the corridor, toward the slightly-open door of the Smythe-Barnetts’ bedroom.
He growled deep down in his throat, and saliva began to drip from the sides of his mouth. He made hardly any sound at all as he approached the Smythe-Barnetts’ door.
I am the wolf, and the wolf is me.
He was only three or four feet away from the door when it suddenly and silently opened, and the corridor was filled with moonlight.
John hesitated for a moment, and growled again.
Then something stepped out of the Smythe-Barnetts’ bedroom that made the real hair rise on the back of his neck, and turned his soul to water.
It was Mrs Smythe-Barnett, and yet it wasn’t. She was naked, tall and naked – but she was more than naked, she was raw. Her body glistened with white bone and tightly-stretched membranes, and John could even see her arteries pulsing, and the fanlike tracery of her veins.
Inside her long, narrow ribcage, her lungs rose and fell in a quick, obscene panting.
Her face was horrifying. It seemed to have stretched out into a long bony snout, and her lips were drawn tightly back over her teeth. Her eyes glittered yellow. Wolf-yellow.
“Where’s my skin?” she demanded, in a voice that was halfway between a hiss and a growl. “What are you doing with my skin?”
John let the wolf-rug drop from his shoulders and slide down onto the floor. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even breathe. He watched in helpless dread as Mrs Smythe-Barnett dropped down onto her hands and knees, and seemed to slither into the wolf-rug like a naked hand slithering into a furry glove.
“I didn’t mean to—” he managed to choke out, but then the claws burst into his windpipe, knocking him backward against the wall. He swallowed, so that he could scream, but all that he swallowed was a half-pint of warm blood.
The wolf-rug came after him and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
John’s father arrived at the house shortly after eight-thirty the following morning, as he did every morning, so that he could see John for five or ten minutes before he went to work. His German driver kept the engine of the khaki Volkswagen running, because it was so cold this morning, well below five degrees.
He went up the steps, his swagger-stick tucked under his arm. To his surprise, the front door was wide open. He pressed the doorbell, and then stepped inside the house.
“David? Helen? Anyone at home?”
He heard a strange mewing noise coming from the kitchen.
“Helen? Is everything all right?”
He walked through to the back of the house. In the kitchen he found the German maid sitting at the table, still dressed in her hat and coat, her handbag in front of her, shaking and shivering with shock.
“What’s wrong?” John’s father demanded. “Where is everybody?”
“Etwas shrecklich.” the maid quivered. “All family dead.”
“What? What do you mean, ‘all family dead’?”
“Upstairs,” said the maid. “All family dead.”
“Call my driver. Tell him to come inside. Then telephone the police. Polizei, got it?”
Filled with terrible apprehension, John’s father climbed the stairs. On the first-floor landing, he found the bedroom doors ajar, and spattered with blood. The smiling photographs of Penny and Veronica lay smashed on the carpet, the red gymkhana rosettes trampled and torn.
He went close to the girls’ bedroom doors and looked inside. Penny lay sprawled on her back, her neck so furiously ripped open that her head was almost separated from her body. Veronica lay face-down, her white nightgown stained dark red.
Grim-faced, John’s father went to the bedroom where John was sleeping. He opened the door, but inside the bed was empty, and there was no sign of John. He swallowed dryly, and said a prayer to himself. Please God, let him still be alive.
He climbed further. The second-story corridor was sprayed with squiggles and question-marks of blood. In the Smythe-Barnetts’ bedroom, Col. Smythe-Barnett lay on his back staring at the ceiling, his larynx torn out. He looked as if he were wearing a bib of blood. No sign of Helen Smythe-Barnett anywhere.
The door that led to the staircase was decorated all over with bloody handmarks. John’s father opened it, took a deep breath, and slowly climbed up to the attic.
The room was filled with sunlight. As he entered, he found himself confronted by a rug made of wolfskin, with the wolf’s head still attached. The wolf’s jaws were dark with congealing blood, and its fur was matted.
There was something concealed by the rug that raised it in a slight hump. John’s father hesitated for a very long time, and then took hold of the edge of the rug and lifted it up.
Underneath it were the half-digested remains of a young boy.
Hugh B. Cave
THE WHISPERERS
Hugh Barnett Cave (1910–2004) was born in Chester, England, but emigrated to America with his family when he was five. He sold his first fiction in 1929, and went on to publish around 800 stories (often under various bylines) to such pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the so-called “shudder” or “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales.
Cave left the fiel
d for almost three decades, moving to Haiti and later Jamaica, where he established a coffee plantation and wrote two highly-praised travel books, Haiti: Highroad to Adventure and Four Paths to Paradise: A Book About Jamaica. He also continued to write for the “slick” magazines, such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and many other titles. In 1977, Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa imprint published a volume of Cave’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, and he returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels: Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns and The Restless Dead.
The story that follows is a revised version of one which originally saw print in 1942 in Spicy Mystery Stories under the author’s jokey pseudonym “Justin Case”.
It was a very old, very forlorn house. To reach it we had to climb over a broken gate on which hung a FOR SALE sign, and then wade through a sea of grass that had grown rampant.
“Darling,” Anne said, “This is it! Let’s buy it!”
I stared at her. We had been married a week, but I still could not even glance at her without wanting to take her in my arms. We could fix the house up and come here weekends, at least, she insisted. I was thinking we might actually live here full time because, being a writer, I could live anywhere.
An hour later we were in the village, talking to Jedney Prentiss, whose name and address were on the sign.
The price he quoted was reasonable enough, I thought. “And it’s still a mighty fine house, even though it’s been empty for six years,” he said. We drove to Harkness, then, to arrange the transfer.
That afternoon we lit a fire in the big fireplace and burned the road-maps. Then we picked out the room we wanted for our bedroom and went to work, determined to have at least that much done by nightfall. Anne had bought bedding and some furniture in Harkness, and the store people had promised to deliver them at once.
It was great fun. To save her dress, Anne peeled down to shorts and a halter, and there she was, running around in the almost-nude with mops and brooms, dusters, and buckets of water. I watched her out of one eye and realized what a lucky man I was.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 21
