“Quiet,” he hissed, “Don’t say anything.”
Marianna became aware of the heat of a swelling penis thrusting against her. “Hey, Nugent,” she purred, “what’s come over you?” She tried to turn around, to welcome him with her arms.
“Don’t move!” There was an odd, growling timbre to his voice, coupled with a note of urgency. “Stay as you are and keep quiet.”
Marianna acquiesced, content to lie prone and let Nugent make all the play. She realized that unlike herself, the man was not fully naked. He was wearing some kind of robe, for she felt coarse fur caressing her skin as he moved about her. She began to purr and melted as fingers and tongue probed roughly at her private place, making her deeply moist.
Then Nugent lifted the woman’s hips and took her savagely from behind, not making love but rutting. There was slight pain, but it was enjoyable and Marianna submitted to it. She felt only ecstasy and relief as the man’s hardness pounded into her body. She yelled and sobbed aloud as Nugent brought her to orgasm once, twice, yet again. When the man climaxed, his cry was animal in its intensity.
He collapsed upon her, holding her to the bed. Gradually she relapsed into sleep.
(Nugent opened his eyes slowly, aroused by the light which was shining in them. A full moon showed through the upper windows of the room, shedding illumination onto the dishevelled bed and onto Nugent’s face. His eyes glinted redly and he felt a primitive urge to lift his head and bay to the silver orb.
As he awakened more he became aware of Marianna’s soft body lying beneath his. The pungent smell of woman-musk arose from her and Nugent could feel himself becoming aroused once more, but it was more than a sexual desire. There were other lusts, other passions, which overwhelmed him and took precedence over the urge to mate . . .)
Finale: Soul of the Wolf
Nugent came to, exhausted and stiff. He was curled up on the floor of his trophy room, almost naked. The room was not quite dark. Subdued early dawn light filtered through the fine drapes, providing some vision. The man raised his head with difficulty, feeling as much as seeing the artificial, disapproving glares of the beasts which he had killed. There was some kind of covering over him. He took a loose end in trembling fingers and stared at it.
It was the skin of the timber wolf, the head resting atop his own, forelegs draped and tied about his neck, the body fitting snugly to his back as if it belonged, the hind legs and tail falling down behind him.
Nugent struggled to hands and knees, rested there shaking his head, trying to get his thoughts into order. He recalled going to bed, overcome with the strange lethargy which was all too common now, maybe something to do with his medication. But no, he’d stopped taking that when he stopped going to Doctor Cudlipp. Why had he stopped going? He couldn’t even remember that. So much eluded him now, so much . . .
Then there was something else, something to do with Marianna, what?
He remembered. He had gone to Marianna in the night and he had made love to her, had taken her with all the force and vigour which had once been his. But if he had slept with Marianna, then why did he end up here on the floor?
Still in a dazed state, Nugent crawled over to his desk and grasping the edge with both hands, hauled himself to his feet. There was a slight and unpleasant stickiness, either on his hands or on the edge of the desk.
Shuffling towards the door, Nugent found the switch and snapped the ceiling lights on. His hands and fingers were dyed with a partly dry, reddish mess which was also thick beneath his nails. Other stains blotched his torso and legs, while a glimpse in a polished silver wall-plate showed his face to be similarly smeared.
Darkening patches disfigured the floor at his feet. Trembling, Nugent opened the door and looked out into the hall. Mingled trails of drying drops and splashes meandered throughout the apartment.
With a feeling of sick horror in his heart, Nugent dashed up the stairway and flung open the door to Marianna’s room, his hand leaping instinctively to flick on the light. He was unable to prevent himself from screaming when he saw the carnage.
Marianna, beautiful, vibrant, cold-hearted Marianna, was transformed into a shredded symphony in scarlet, an abstract canvas composed from gore and flesh and entrails.
Nugent threw back his head to scream a second time. Instead, the steadily rising croon of a wolf burst from his lips, filling the apartment with cold and lonely lamentation . . .
(Nugent unlocked a weapons display case and selected the open razor, testing its keenness with the ball of his thumb. A bright pearl of blood oozed up.
“That’ll do,” he muttered.
He hurried into the bathroom and stood before the massive mirror. Regarding his reflection with sick loathing, he placed the edge of the razor beneath his left ear.
After a tentative jab or two, he pressed the blade home firmly and drew it swiftly to the right.)
Manly Wade Wellman
THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE
Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) wrote more than seventy-five books and over two hundred short stories, many of which were published in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and ‘40s. He twice won the World Fantasy Award and some of the writer’s best short fiction is collected in Who Fears the Devil? (filmed in 1972), Worse Things Waiting, Lonely Vigils and The Valley So Low.
The classic werewolf novella which follows was originally published over three issues of Weird Tales in January, February and March 1938 under the pseudonym “Gans T. Field”. One of the Virgil Finlay illustrations for the serial depicted Wellman (as Finlay imagined him) throwing a punch at the werewolf. The author didn’t think it was a very good likeness, but then he and the artist had never met. Finlay gave the drawing to Wellman who, years later, passed it on to his friend Karl Edward Wagner.
“The Hairy Ones Shall Dance” once again follows the exploits of occult investigator Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, whose adventures have previously appeared in both The Mammoth Book of Terror and The Mammoth Book of Vampires . . .
Foreword
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Few words are best, as Sir Philip Sidney once wrote in challenging an enemy. The present account will be accepted as a challenge by the vast army of skeptics of which I once made one. Therefore I write it brief and bald. If my story seems unsteady in spots, that is because the hand that writes it still quivers from my recent ordeal.
Shifting the metaphor from duello to military engagement, this is but the first gun of the bombardment. Even now sworn statements are being prepared by all others who survived the strange and, in some degree, unthinkable adventure I am recounting. After that, every great psychic investigator in the country, as well as some from Europe, will begin researches. I wish that my friends and brother-magicians, Houdini and Thurston, had lived to bear a hand in them.
I must apologize for the strong admixture of the personal element in my narrative. Some may feel that I err against good taste. My humble argument is that I was not merely an observer, but an actor, albeit a clumsy one, throughout the drama.
As to the setting forth of matters which many will call impossible, let me smile in advance. Things happen and have always happened, that defy the narrow science of test-tube and formula. I can only say again that I am writing the truth, and that my statement will be supported by my companions in the adventure.
Talbot Wills
November 15, 1937
I “Why must the burden of proof rest with the spirits?”
“You don’t believe in psychic phenomena,” said Doctor Otto Zoberg yet again, “because you won’t.”
This with studied kindness, sitting in the most comfortable chair of my hotel room. I, at thirty-four, silently hoped I would have his health and charm at fifty-four – he was so rugged for all his lean length, so well groomed for all his tweeds and beard and joined eyebrows, so articulate for all his accent. Doctor Zoberg quite apparently liked and admired me, and I felt guilty once more that I did not entirely return the compliment.
“I know that y
ou are a stage magician—” he began afresh.
“I was once,” I amended, a little sulkily. My early career had brought me considerable money and notice, but after the novelty of show business was worn off I had never rejoiced in it. Talboto the Mysterious – it had been impressive, but tawdry. Better to be Talbot Wills, lecturer and investigator in the field of exposing fraudulent mediums.
For six years I had known Doctor Otto Zoberg, the champion of spiritism and mediumism, as rival and companion. We had first met in debate under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research in London. I, young enough for enthusiasm but also for carelessness, had been badly out-thought and out-talked. But afterward, Doctor Zoberg had praised my arguments and my delivery, and had graciously taken me out to a late supper. The following day, there arrived from him a present of helpful books and magazines. Our next platform duel found me in a position to get a little of my own back; and he, afterward, laughingly congratulated me on turning to account the material he had sent me. After that, we were public foemen and personal inseparables. Just now we were touring the United States, debating, giving exhibitions, visiting mediums. The night’s program, before a Washington audience liberally laced with high officials, had ended in what we agreed was a draw; and here we were, squabbling good-naturedly afterward.
“Please, Doctor,” I begged, offering him a cigarette, “save your charges of stubbornness for the theater.”
He waved my case aside and bit the end from a villainous black cheroot. “I wouldn’t say it, here or in public, if it weren’t true, Talbot. Yet you sneer even at telepathy, and only half believe in mental suggestion. Ach, you are worse than Houdini.”
“Houdini was absolutely sincere,” I almost blazed, for I had known and worshipped that brilliant and kindly prince of conjurers and fraud-finders.
“Ach, to be sure, to be sure,” nodded Zoberg over his blazing match. “I did not say he was not. Yet, he refused proof – the proof that he himself embodied. Houdini was a great mystic, a medium. His power for miracles he did not know himself.”
I had heard that before, from Conan Doyle as well as Zoberg, but I made no comment. Zoberg continued:
“Perhaps Houdini was afraid – if anything could frighten so brave and wise a man it would assuredly come from within. And so he would not even listen to argument.” He turned suddenly somber. “Perhaps he knew best, ja. But he was stubborn, and so are you.”
“I don’t think you can say that of me,” I objected once more. The cheroot was alight now, and I kindled a cigarette to combat in some degree the gun-powdery fumes.
Teeth gleamed amiably through the beard, and Zoberg nodded again, in frank delight this time. “Oh, we have hopes of you, Wills, where we gave up Houdini.”
He had never said that before, not so plainly at any rate. I smiled back. “I’ve always been willing to be shown. Give me a fool-proof, fake-proof, supernormal phenomenon, Doctor; let me convince myself; then I’ll come gladly into the spiritist camp.”
“Ach, so you always say!” he exploded, but without genuine wrath. “Why must the burden of proof rest with the spirits? How can you prove that they do not live and move and act? Study what Eddington has to say about that.”
“For five years,” I reminded him, “I have offered a prize of five thousand dollars to any medium whose spirit miracles I could not duplicate by honest sleight-of-hand.”
He gestured with slim fingers, as though to push the words back into me. “That proves absolutely nothing, Wills. For all your skill, do you think that sleight-of-hand can be the only way? Is it even the best way?”
“I’ve unmasked famous mediums for years, at the rate of one a month,” I flung back. “Unmasked them as the clumsiest of fakes.”
“Because some are dishonest, are all dishonest?” he appealed. “What specific thing would convince you, my friend?”
I thought for a moment, gazing at him through the billows of smoke. Not a gray hair to him – and I, twenty years his junior, had six or eight at either temple. I went on to admire and even to envy that pointed trowel of beard, the sort of thing that I, a magician, might have cultivated once. Then I made my answer.
“I’d ask for a materialization, Doctor. An ectoplasmic apparition, visible and solid to touch – in an empty room with no curtains or closets, all entrances sealed by myself, the medium and witnesses shackled.” He started to open his mouth, but I hurried to prevent him. “I know what you’ll say – that I’ve seen a number of impressive ectoplasms. So I have, perhaps, but not one was scientifically and dispassionately controlled. No, Doctor, if I’m to be convinced, I must make the conditions and set the stage myself.”
“And if the materialization was a complete success?”
“Then it would prove the claim to me – to the world. Materializations are the most important question in the whole field.”
He looked long at me, narrowing his shrewd eyes beneath the dark single bar of his brows. “Wills,” he said at length, “I hoped you would ask something like this.”
“You did?”
“Ja. Because – first, can you spare a day or so?”
I replied guardedly, “I can, I believe. We have two weeks or more before the New Orleans date.” I computed rapidly. “Yes, that’s December 8. What have you got up your sleeve, Doctor?”
He grinned once more, with a great display of gleaming white teeth, and flung out his long arms. “My sleeves, you will observe, are empty!” he cried. “No trickery. But within five hours of where we sit – five hours by fast automobile – is a little town. And in that town there is a little medium. No, Wills, you have never seen or heard of her. It is only myself who found her by chance, who studied her long and prayerfully. Come with me, Wills – she will teach you how little you know and how much you can learn!”
II “You can almost hear the ghosts.”
I have sat down with the purpose of writing out, plainly and even flatly, all that happened to me and to Doctor Otto Zoberg in our impromptu adventure at psychic investigation; yet, almost at the start, I find it necessary to be vague about the tiny town where that adventure ran its course. Zoberg began by refusing to tell me its name, and now my friends of various psychical research committees have asked me to hold my peace until they have finished certain examinations without benefit of yellow journals or prying politicians.
It is located, as Zoberg told me, within five hours by fast automobile of Washington. On the following morning, after a quick and early breakfast, we departed at seven o’clock in my sturdy coupé. I drove and Zoberg guided. In the turtle-back we had stowed bags, for the November sky had begun to boil up with dark, heavy clouds, and a storm might delay us.
On the way Zoberg talked a great deal, with his usual charm and animation. He scoffed at my skepticism and prophesied my conversion before another midnight.
“A hundred years ago, realists like yourself were ridiculing hypnotism,” he chuckled. “They thought that it was a fantastic fake, like one of Edgar Poe’s amusing tales, ja? And now it is a great science, for healing and comforting the world. A few years ago, the world scorned mental telepathy—”
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “I’m none too convinced of it now.”
“I said just that, last night. However, you think that there is some grain of truth to it. You would be a fool to laugh at the many experiments in clairvoyance carried on at Duke University.”
“Yes, they are impressive,” I admitted.
“They are tremendous, and by no means unique,” he insisted. “Think of a number between one and ten,” he said suddenly.
I gazed at my hands on the wheel, thought of a joking reply, then fell in with his mood.
“All right,” I replied. “I’m thinking of a number. What is it?”
“It is seven,” he cried out at once, then laughed heartily at the blank look on my face.
“Look here, that’s a logical number for an average man to think of,” I protested. “You relied on human nature, not telepathy.�
�
He grinned and tweaked the end of his beard between manicured fingers. “Very good, Wills, try again. A color this time.”
I paused a moment before replying, “All right, guess what it is.”
He, too, hesitated, staring at me sidewise. “I think it is blue,” he offered at length.
“Go to the head of the class,” I grumbled. “I rather expected you to guess red – that’s most obvious.”
“But I was not guessing,” he assured me. “A flash of blue came before my mind’s eye. Come, let us try another time.”
We continued the experiment for a while. Zoberg was not always correct, but he was surprisingly close in nearly every case. The most interesting results were with the names of persons, and Zoberg achieved some rather mystifying approximations. Thus, when I was thinking of the actor Boris Karloff, he gave me the name of the actor Bela Lugosi. Upon my thinking of Gilbert K. Chesterton, he named Chesterton’s close friend Hilaire Belloc, and my concentration on George Bernard Shaw brought forth a shout of “Santa Claus.” When I reiterated my charge of psychological trickery and besought him to teach me his method, he grew actually angry and did not speak for more than half an hour. Then he began to discuss our destination.
“A most amazing community,” he pronounced. “It is old – one of the oldest inland towns of all America. Wait until you see the houses, my friend. You can almost hear the ghosts within them, in broad daylight. And their Devil’s Croft, that is worth seeing, too.”
“Their what?”
He shook his head, as though in despair. “And you set yourself up as an authority on occultism!” he sniffed. “Next you will admit that you have never heard of the Druids. A Devil’s Croft, my dull young friend, used to be part of every English or Scots village. The good people would set aside a field for Satan, so that he would not take their own lands.”
“And this settlement has such a place?”
“Ja wohl, a grove of the thickest timber ever seen in this over-civilized country, and hedged in to boot. I do not say that they believe, but it is civic property and protected by special order from trespassers.”
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 32
