Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  “I’m glad I don’t know what actually happened to her,” said Dr. Eng. “Something very bad.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “What do you think it must have been?”

  I confessed ignorance.

  “You read the police doctor’s report.”

  “I deliberately avoided it, actually. It was all too upsetting.” It was unsettling more than upsetting. It might begin to tell me how close detectives were to discovering who I was. I did not want to know. I wanted to imagine that I had weeks yet, perhaps even longer. If there was a threat to me, I did not want to know about it.

  “Wolf hairs, Dr. Byrd. In her vagina they found very coarse wolf hairs. You read in the newspaper some of the theories.”

  “No, I’ve stopped reading the paper.”

  This did not surprise her. Many therapists avoid newspapers. They hear enough bad news every day, and one’s clients keep one informed of really important disasters. “They have an interesting theory. That a psychotic used a turkey baster to insert lupine semen into her vaginal sheath.”

  I nearly laughed. “This is imaginative journalism. I’m sorry I didn’t read it.”

  “You saved yourself a useless theory. There is no question about it. This woman was attacked by a large, wolf-like animal. She will never have a normal life again.”

  The sight of the victim had confused me. She looked so wretched I could not conceive of mating with her, and I was puzzled at my emotional deadness. I lacked even the most casual, professional sympathy. I disguised this lack, however, expressing concern over her state.

  Dr. Eng looked hard at me. “It would have been better for her to be killed.”

  That night, for the first time, it did not happen to me as I slept. I was fully awake, turning off the VCR. I had just watched The Heiress, one of my favorite movies, and as I pushed the on/off switch and slipped the tape into its cover I felt a pain like a cracked tooth. Very much like a cracked tooth, except that it was within every single bone in my body.

  The tape clattered to the floor. My hands itched. Then my metacarpals seemed to burst, and crawl beneath my skin like beetles. I could see them crawling under my skin. My body burned, my skin writhed. I fell to the floor, hunching my body, my skin seeming to wither and split in a hundred places. My eyes seemed to dry in my head and trickle like salt from between my lids.

  I was on my feet again, staggering, bounding from wall to wall, crawling toward the bathroom. I was about to vomit, I thought, but I had misinterpreted the churning, rising swell from within my gut.

  The worst sensation was the pain in my teeth. Each tooth was yanked from the bone, twisting as it was pulled. Each molar exploded. But even as the pain was worst I experienced a joy so deep my heart nearly stopped. This was not pain. This was triumph.

  I slumped to the carpet. The sensation was a bright explosion in my brain, brighter than any flag, the pennon of a battle won.

  I snapped at the air, and the sound of my teeth was loud and bright. I fell to my feet—that was how it seemed, that standing was an act of falling toward the ceiling. When I was on the floor again I no longer sought the bathroom. This house had nothing for me. My breath was loud, each exhalation a growl.

  It was only when I was padding toward the back door that I fully understood what had happened. It was over. It was that simple. An easy triumph. Because for all the pain—and it had been considerable—it all had been so unexpected, and so quick, that the power I now felt was more than compensation for it.

  My clothes were rags I trailed and shook off, but I was careful to gather them and hide them in the trash in the darkened garden. So this is how I was, I thought. Careful. Always the hunter, working downwind, disguising the spoor. I had imagined my transformation to be explosive, and it was, physically. But mentally it was a shifting into greater clarity, and greater wile. I did not want to leave a scrap on the street that might identify me. I did not want to damage the house. I felt the perfection of my senses and understood for the first time what cunning was, how cutting and quiet. And how potent.

  This is how it was, like undressing, letting the human clothing of the body fall. I stepped to the back fence, breathing the lives around me, each man and woman, each child, each living creature, even the earthworm spasming through the mud like a nerve.

  I was over the fence without a moment of effort. It was an act of simple will. I was through the naked rose bushes, streaking across a lawn, and then I bounded a brick wall and was in the street.

  I folded myself briefly into the shadow of a parked car. My breath was a chuckle.

  Tonight I had a special prey.

  Twenty-Four

  It was an easy lope downhill toward the Marina district, the windows of houses blinking past me. I was quick, a dark flash, squeezing quietly through the space between parked cars, bounding through alleys and back gardens, leaping trash cans, careful to run on concrete or asphalt, because I was learning that earth carried an imprint, and I was wiser now.

  Again I felt that joy in my legs and the scents around me. No man had ever experienced such delicious nights. My tongue began to extend from my mouth, tasting the dark, and a blade of saliva spun from me as I tossed my head.

  I knew exactly where I was going, and what I would do when I got there. There was never even a moment of decision. I was a beast of great calm. I was a hunter.

  My calm continued as I reached the house, and easily leaped the mock adobe fence. I was delighted to note the glittering stitches of snail trails on the stepping stones. I stopped to sniff the air. People—I could smell and hear them through the walls. There was never any question in my mind. I knew where each of them were, the timber and stucco transparent to me. I trotted to the back door.

  It was locked, but I put my paw through as easily as parting a curtain. When I had ripped an opening I slipped through, the ragged wood gliding along my shoulders and flanks.

  What a wealth of scent. The stale funk of that evening’s supper. The ozone crisp of a computer up where the boy played. The pudendal tang of the woman where she sat, drinking Scotch and watching television. And the aftershave and roll-on-deodorant buzz of the man, the talking man, laughing into a telephone, agreeing to meet, hanging up, scratching a note with a pen.

  The man had the salt of fear in his scent. He had heard the rip of the back door, and while he believed that it was nothing—what, after all, is a thump and crash from the kitchen but trash tumbling, or a cat squeezing in through a window—this man was easily frightened.

  I should not have been surprised, but I was. This was a nervous man, a man who lived on the energy bred by his cowardice. He hesitated to clump down the stairs and see what was happening in the kitchen where I waited, saliva pattering on the kitchen tiles.

  I was hungry. I was very hungry, and the man hesitated, turning on lights as he came. He snapped on the stairway lights, and he snapped on the hallway lights, and he waited to listen through the bray of the television upstairs, and the electronic twirps of the computer. He took a breath, and his lips parted.

  He heard me panting, and he put out his hand to the wall. The rasp of his nails on the plasterboard was loud. His fingers fumbled, and fumbled again, working toward the light switch. If he spoke, the sound of his own voice would frighten him.

  He swallowed. His lips parted again. “Hello?” he said, his voice thin.

  His fingers found the switch, and the kitchen was light, a yellow cube of it, too bright, too garish, stainless steel and bright yellow appliances, and in the midst of it, one hand frozen on the switch, the blond, gaping, howling, wide-eyed man.

  I opened my mouth around his throat, and felt the life vibrate there in his cry. There was no hurry.

  I drank the hot blood as I closed my jaws. There was a crunch, and my teeth met so perfectly that the head thudded to the floor, rolling away from the body. Blood gushed, and I drank hard, the terrified heart machine-gunning blood into my throat long after the legs had stopped kicking.


  It had been so easy. I was entirely lucid, and saw and understood more than I had ever understood before. The neck, I knew now, is an island with no walls. It is too weak to be unthinkingly depended on, and yet a human life never considers its tenuous stem. The external jugular, that famous thread, that string of gristle, is just beneath the skin, protected by almost nothing. But if that is missed, through clumsiness or ill chance, there are other pulses.

  I had never understood so much before. In my studies I had memorized the names of the nerves and the veins, but they had meant very little to me, until now. The internal jugular is a figure eight when it is severed. It lies only slightly more than two finger widths into the muscle, the sterno-mastoid, the meat that turns the neck and badly protects the most important course, the carotid artery.

  A human is such a slight thing, really. “The great vessels of the neck” the anatomists praise are nearly nothing. Then there is the trachea, so close to the skin that a simple accident, the burst machine, the exploding window, can make it whistle air.

  So much of the body is highway, and so easily cut. The vertebrae themselves are mostly hollow, atolls that are almost entirely sea.

  Even as I pleasured in the kill, and drank deep, I was learning. Men are less than mortal. They are water. They depend for their short lives on threads and fascia, flesh and air, all suspended in the same formless wash that patters on windows. As I killed I learned to love my prey. I was hungry; I ate. But I felt my quarry die and loved him. Such proud, urgent creatures are made of spit and bone.

  This prey had been chosen carefully. I did not feed on him by chance. He deserved his death. I had marked him for the kill, and I had brought him down.

  I continued to feed, swallowing great hot hunks of him, but then I heard a sour sound. I looked up to see the woman, screaming. I was too hungry to stop eating, and could only growl for her to silence herself. My growl was so loud pans rang throughout the kitchen, and the window shivered.

  Indeed, I nearly filled the kitchen, and the heat from my body must have been the first thing she had sensed, coming down the stairs. I wanted to tell her that I would not harm her, or the boy who had joined her. I fed quickly, and then I heard the boy at the telephone in the living room, stabbing the buttons as he wept.

  I seized the head and ate the flesh from it, and let it fall. I was sated. I wanted to caress the woman, to tell her that I would never harm her, no matter what happened. She was safe with me.

  But she was a huddle against the wall, screaming, weeping, and the boy was on the telephone. I would never hurt him, either, but I did not want him calling anyone for help.

  So I bellowed. This was a sound that expanded walls—just fractionally, but it made them move. The boy dropped the phone. He was screaming as with pain, and so I closed upon him and embraced him with my forelegs.

  “It’s all right,” I tried to say. “I won’t hurt you.”

  What I uttered, however, was a ragged gush of sound. So I licked him, once, and leaped through the bay window, frames and glass bursting with me into the night.

  What a sweet night it was, for a few heartbeats. The dark was so rich I lingered, sniffing the cool wind from the bay. There were already sounds of human hunters arriving from the east, where the fragment moon was rising. And from the south, rising and falling, the artificial howls.

  I lifted my own voice. My song was purer, a high lift, and then a slow, minor-key tailing off. Tires shrieked, and flashing lights approached up the street. A pair of headlights caught me.

  It was all too fast, even for my clear-sightedness. A shotgun shell was pumped with a loud snap into firing position, a revolver was whipped from its holster, another squad car squealed to a stop, and I was frozen in a beam of light.

  Perhaps I expected the sight of me to blanch them, to stun them and freeze them where they stood. Instead, I heard as distinctly as if it were next to my very ear, the cylinder of a revolver begin to turn.

  I leaped, and a gun snapped. A bullet moaned off the curb. I ran low to the ground, spearing the dark. Another gun popped, and the shotgun ripped the night, all of it wasted on the dark and the empty asphalt.

  I was gone.

  But now I understood my enemy. He was everywhere, and I could depend only on my senses to save my life. It was exhilarating, but it also meant that I was about to die, and I felt an animal’s fear. The joy faded, the exhilaration dimmed, and all I had was a new, second heart, a heart that slammed strength into my four limbs, and sight into my eyes. There was no other organ in my body but this fear-heart.

  I ran faster than I had ever run, but in my great faith in speed and my great desire to be far from the guns and the lights, I made a mistake.

  Houses and cars were streaks as I plunged straight down a street, the double yellow line at my paws. A headlight blazed from behind me, igniting the pavement before me and around me. The street pulsed with the blinking red light. The engine was an ugly rip of noise, a crescendo.

  I zigged to one side, bounding high, and the squad car nicked me, just a tap. My hindquarters collapsed. The car itself slammed to a stop, brakes and tires scorched. I lost control of my body, and tumbled.

  I tumbled hard, crunching into a trash can, paper and rotting garbage exploding around me. I burst toward the car and caught the first policeman in my jaws as he stepped from the vehicle.

  The second policeman, his body an aura of fear stink, had both hands together, aiming over the top of the car. But I could read the doubt in the bad light, the knowledge in his soul that he could not bring me down with one shot from a gun like that.

  He ducked into the car and slammed the door, and the radio was in his hand. I sprang to the hood, my weight buckling the metal, the flashing red light making me shield my eyes with one paw. With the other I smashed through the glass, and slammed the man hard against the seat.

  Another animal emotion lifted me. As I had felt animal fear, now I felt animal certainty. This man would not hurt me. He was not a threat. He was stunned, swimming in shattered glass, an avalanche of white pebbles. Only a man, I realized, or a hungry beast, would continue to try to hurt an enemy so momentarily helpless.

  The alley was darker than the street. There was a trickle of water in a gutter, and I drank, lapping the flavor of concrete and car oil and leaves. I smelled trees, pines, and earth. I sought the cover I knew would save me, brush and leaves, culverts, the places men did not understand.

  But I could not run as I had before. My strength was leaking. I gasped as I ran, and when I came to a fence I shouldered through it. My body was smarter than I was, and knew what to do.

  Trees, it told me—find the trees.

  It told me something else, and I should have been surprised at the insistence of this command. There it was, like a neon warning: find Johanna. Find Johanna now.

  I did not question this command, as I loped past back stairs and the occasional flash of a fleeing cat. Only later would I marvel at the assurance I felt that Johanna would be able to save me.

  I was fleeing toward the fragrance of the Presidio pines, the dense stands of trees like a small forest. I would hide there. It was far away from Johanna, in the opposite direction, but I needed to go to ground soon. I could not run like this much longer.

  The car had done what bullets had failed to do.

  I was hurt.

  Twenty-Five

  One of my hind legs was nearly dragging. I had seen dogs with three legs running in the past, and while I had always marveled, I had never imagined that I would be forced to try such a pace myself.

  I collided with another fence, and burst through. This was foolish. I was leaving a swath, a trail so easy even a man would be able to follow it. I saw how men seem to a beast: dangerous, thoughtless, weak and untrustworthy.

  I tried running on three legs, and collapsed. I did not move for a few breaths. And then I looked up, staring hard ahead of me. I was not alone.

  The white plume of a skunk paused ahead of me. I panted, waiting
for the skunk to pass, and it would not take a single step. It crouched on a bag of chicken bones and would not yield.

  Skunks care for nothing. I had never realized this before. As long as they can be seen they will be avoided. I hobbled past it, and at last began to run again. Until finally I felt that I had reached a refuge, not simply a safe place, but a place without fiction: home. Human beings were plans, memories, images of themselves and of the universe. Here there were no lies. My paws crushed the pine needles and the fragrance of the overreaching pines was everywhere.

  I threw myself down and rolled onto my back. Johanna, came, the thought, insistent, a drip that turns out to be a knock, which in turn turns out to be a messenger with news that can save a life.

  Must talk to Johanna. She will be able to help me.

  But now I wanted to rest. Now I was safe. My hip was numb where the squad car had tagged it. It was not painful, but that very lack of feeling disturbed me.

  I rolled over in the pine spice, letting the oil and earth coat my fur. I lolled on my back, grateful to the scent of pine. The air was healing here.

  Then I trotted, stiffly, to a drainpipe, water gleaming among weeds. A creature was there ahead of me; it sniffed the air and went still. I snouted the water, and lapped a taste of it, and for the first time actually saw myself reflected.

  I was neither afraid nor surprised at what I saw, but I did stare for several heartbeats. There was nothing even remotely human about me. And I was huge. My ears were larger than human hands, and tufted, and wooly within with fur. My shoulders were square, and I seemed more bear than wolf.

  I looked up to see two uneasy eyes recognizing me as though we had met in another life.

  This was a small animal, but it had broad shoulders, and hands similar to my paw-hands. He was wary, and wanted to call to his mate, but did not want to expose himself to any quick response on my part. What delighted me was that in no way did he mistake me for a man. He drew into himself, eyeing me.

  It was understood that I would not attack. He was muscular—too muscular to be a quick victim, and yet he did not want to test me. We both depended on our judgment. He was gambling, but he had gambled before.