Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  But I told myself that I was bringing suspicion upon her. I would have to leave, and never see her again. Never. The thought was nearly poisonous.

  She had vanished. Strangely enough, I had so much faith in her that I never really worried. She was visiting one of her friends. She had left the city, the state. She had that gift I had long since recognized of being, quite suddenly, somewhere else. It was only right that she worked as a translator. She easily slipped from one place to another, from thought to thought.

  Never.

  Maybe some day I would call her. Only—what sort of future did I have, if I really considered it? She would have the life of a beautiful gifted woman. It would be better for her if she never thought of me again.

  The carbon steel door was cold to my touch, and the dial would not turn easily. The low hiss it usually made when spun was now a stubborn series of clicks. I could not even remember the combination for a moment.

  At last, the safe was open. I closed my hand around the box, and as before I was amazed at its weight, and its presence, the sensation of a cube containing a gyroscope. It even seemed to hum in my hand.

  This box. This secret that had ended my human life.

  I sat with them, holding the unopened box, and everything that had happened seemed to fold around me, all the joy and all the anguish.

  I called Solano again, and this time he answered. His voice brightened when he recognized my voice.

  “Yes, it’s a mess around here.”

  “I got a visit from Karl Gneiss,” I began. I wanted to find out whether or not the police considered me a suspect, or if only Gneiss and his shadows were after me so far.

  “Yeah, I have a meeting with him in five minutes. He’s supposed to have a big break in the case. What did he say to you?”

  “He seems to think I know something.”

  “About what?”

  “About the—what are we calling it?”

  “The Night Beast? Hey, Dr. Byrd, I hope you do, because we need all the help we can get.”

  “I don’t, really—”

  “Look, Gneiss is just doing his job, okay. And you want to cooperate with him because you have to. But between you and me we don’t have time for any of that science fiction right now. We have a body count.”

  By which he meant that he didn’t have time for me right now, either, and so I thanked him.

  But I was eager to be off the phone, because I heard something. There was a sound in a distant part of the house. A creak, a distant pat of foot on floor.

  I held my breath. There could be no mistake.

  There was someone in the house. My new self could not be wrong.

  It must be Stowe, I thought. It was Stowe searching once again, perhaps here to put a tap oh my phone. I found myself baring my teeth.

  Certainly it was someone very light on his feet, someone quiet, even furtive. My keen hearing brought the soft footsteps to me. A normal human would have probably heard nothing. What I did not understand was why the footsteps seemed to be approaching.

  I tucked the box under my desk. I wanted my hands to be free. Someone was approaching me, up the hall, hesitating just outside the door. My previous self would have been afraid, but I crouched and waited.

  Let them come to me.

  There was a touch at the door, and the door swung slowly open.

  And at first I could not see who it was. The figure, shrinking back, seemed like a flicker of light, something that wasn’t there at all.

  Then she spoke. “Benjamin, I’m so thankful you are here!”

  I could not move. Despite my keen hearing, I had never imagined that she had arrived, and was in my very house.

  I held her. So I was able to see her once again, once more before I fled. It was a feeling like joy, but sharp, painful.

  She was ashen, her eyes wild. She could not say any more, but simply held me. When I tried to speak she put her fingers to my lips. Then she pulled me into the back garden.

  “It’s something terrible, Benjamin. Something very sad.”

  I knew that I did not want to see what the morning sun illuminated, but I stood there on the wet grass and gazed down upon it.

  I fell to my knees. She fell beside me, and took my hand. When she could speak, she said, “She is so still.”

  “But how. How could this—”

  “You know what happened last night.”

  I could not respond.

  “It was on television, interrupting all the shows.”

  Television. Alerting everyone, keeping the city awake all night.

  “A large animal,” she continued. “They said it was like a wolf.” She waited as though she expected me to clarify the nature of the animal. “And Belinda was frantic, because she seemed to know. She seemed to want to help the animal, wherever he was.”

  I clutched my hair in my hands. She had wanted to help me!

  “She broke out,” said Johanna. “Through a window.”

  Belinda’s eyes were half open. Her feet still. She lay, looking exhausted to the point of coma, but the single black-red wound in her side made her not a dog any longer.

  “The same man who shot the other dog,” Johanna was saying. “He saw Belinda, and fired several times.” She trembled. “I heard the shots.”

  The thought was stone: this was my fault.

  When she could speak again, she said, “I think she was always destined for an early death. Always running off. Life was sport to her. So innocent. That’s what hurts. She was so innocent, Ben. It’s so wrong for her to die like this.”

  Belinda’s death was the grief that fully woke me. I could not continue. I had already decided to tell Johanna everything, but now I knew that I had no choice. I had reached the edge, and I must jump. My own life meant nothing to me now. I should, I thought clearly and without self-pity, be killed. It didn’t matter. I deserved whatever happened.

  The remorse I felt was so thorough, so complete, that it flattened every memory and every hope to rubble. I was done. Benjamin Byrd was finished. It was almost a relief to realize how evil I had become.

  “How did she get here?” I managed to ask.

  “I brought her.”

  The strangeness, the terrible magic of what had happened struck me. “Gneiss is looking for you.”

  “I know.”

  “You drove with Belinda—”

  “I’ve been here for a long while.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “When the men were here, I was waiting.”

  “They didn’t see you.”

  “I was hiding. And I had to go back, a few yards down, to collect poor Belinda. She was under someone’s rowboat, behind a garage.”

  “I’m not sure I quite understand how you managed—”

  “You’re hurt,” she said, noticing my limp.

  I tried to invent a lie for her. A slip down the stairs, or an unexplained cramp. But, I told myself, this was the day for truth. So I nodded. Yes, I was hurt.

  “We’ll bury her,” I said, determined to stick to simple, matter-of-fact plans.

  “No,” she said. “No, wait.”

  She paused, as though waiting for me to confess.

  When I did not speak, she said, “Benjamin, I know you’re in trouble.”

  “I want to bury her.”

  “Please tell me what has happened.”

  But she knew. She watched me spread a tarp over Belinda, and then we went inside, to the study. I retrieved the box from under the desk.

  At the sight of the box, Johanna looked away. Her nostrils dilated, and she closed her eyes for a moment.

  “There is something you don’t know about me.” My voice broke, and I found myself shivering. “It’s something terrible, Johanna. I don’t know if I can tell you. But I have to.” I blotted my eyes on my sleeve.

  Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it broke into my thoughts like a tossed pebble. “The police will be after you,” she said.

  I stared at her, like a m
an turned to marble.

  She closed her eyes. She knows, I thought. She already knows.

  She took my hand, and squeezed it so it hurt. “This is the worst thing that could have happened. But I can tell you without a doubt, Benjamin. We will survive.”

  “I have so much to tell you.”

  She put a finger to my lips. “I must tell you, Benjamin. I have known for a while. Or, almost knew. But it is something a person must confess. The afflicted must seek a union before one can exist.” She gave a sad laugh. Her eyes were glittering with tears, but she seemed more than sad. She seemed to have awakened at last to a powerful understanding, and not only of me.

  And not about herself. About the nature of the world, someone experiencing both enlightenment and bereavement at once.

  My fingers worked at the box, struggling to open it.

  She laid her hand over mine. “You don’t have to,” she said.

  “I want you to see them.”

  “I don’t have to see them. I know exactly what they are.”

  Twenty-Nine

  My hands acted on their own, and the box sprang open.

  Neither of us could speak for a moment. “Still so beautiful!” she breathed at last.

  They glowed, and seemed to give off warmth to my hand. A wrinkle of light reflected upward onto my palm, like a bloodless cut.

  She said exactly what I was thinking. “They looked for you, and they found you.”

  They had hunted me over the rise and fall of years, now sighting me clearly, now searching me out by hunger alone. They had always wanted me.

  My dream as a child, of being tracked by a beast of the night, had not been simply another childish nightmare. Childhood is always a time of bad dreams, but this dream had been special. This had not, in a fundamental sense, been a dream at all. Perhaps in another life, centuries ago, I had been one of the creatures Out There. Or perhaps the fangs had known me from my birth, and sought me, as a careful predator, claiming me as their own. They had done their work well.

  “You have seen these fangs before,” I suggested. “Earlier in your life. In Zurich.”

  She looked away from me, but not in denial. Other times filled her, and people she had loved were with her for a moment. “I did not tell you the entire truth,” she said.

  My hands closed the box. With the fangs out of sight the room seemed suddenly smaller, too quiet. I gazed at the dark cube, the object that had transformed my world.

  “But I did not lie,” she continued. “My brother and my parents were afflicted, as you are afflicted. They were as you are. Not merely mad. Not merely victims of a wolf obsession. They became beasts, and ran at night, sometimes with the wolves, sometimes on the hunt alone. And they killed, as you have done.”

  “And,” I said, although it mattered little to me now, “they were all destroyed.”

  I had, unwittingly, used the harsh word for the killing of an animal who suffers incurably. Johanna took my hand. “We don’t have much time.”

  The fangs, I knew, were not the true center of my world. The true center, now, was this woman. I wanted to hold Johanna, and then I wanted whatever would happen to me.

  “You must do,” she said, “exactly what I tell you to do.”

  She spoke as though she had a plan. I marveled at her spirit, but could only gaze at her.

  She kissed me, once, full on the lips. What she said next did not in my ignorance make any sense to me. “Benjamin, don’t you see? Now they will not be able to separate us.”

  My life was over, and yet here she was, talking as though we had a future. A bad thought stung me: double suicide.

  She is thinking about suicide.

  “Benjamin,” she said. “I love you.”

  Her voice, the way she spoke my name, made me believe there was a new life for both of us. But this was impossible. I saw from the way she looked into my eyes that she intended nothing like suicide. That had been my own, twisted thought.

  “What you have done is grievous,” she said, “and that you did not tell me all of this before was foolish. But it was inevitable. It was always written that when we came to this chapter of our lives this would happen. We had no choice.”

  Fate again. It made no sense, and worse, it was offensive. If we had been fated to love each other, then we were like frames in a film, stored in a can for years until, for a few seconds, light poured through us. “I’ve always believed that the world—”

  She completed my thought. “Was random. Subject to accident, more than any other force.”

  “That’s what I’ve always believed.”

  A thought jolted me. Gneiss was talking to Solano right now. The police would give that large, powerful man one more chance. They would all be here soon.

  And yet what Johanna was saying was essential. We were, to my amazement, speaking as though we had a future.

  “Perhaps other people,” she continued, “can fly from one branch to another, as they please, with a small semblance of self-determination. But we do not have such lives, Benjamin.” Her voice became urgent. “Benjamin—please do as I say. I have seen all of this coming, and I have a way to escape.”

  No time, I thought. There is no time. The police would be here soon.

  “Let this day be my gift to you,” she said. “We have something better than freedom.”

  I did not mean to hesitate, but I must have seemed to, gazing at her, dazed, trying to understand that my entire view of life was utterly wrong.

  “Hold me, Benjamin.” She smiled up at me, into me, beyond me. “Please, Benjamin. You will need to have faith in me.”

  I had faith in her. It was life, time, my own body, that I could not trust.

  “Have faith, Benjamin. And please do as I say. You must leave at once. This very minute. Be quick, so that you’ll reach Lake Tahoe by sunset.”

  She tugged a key from her clothing. It was a car key, warm from her body. I gazed at it.

  “I’ll follow you,” she said. “I should be there by midnight.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here—”

  “Have I ever pleaded with you before?”

  I could not think of a time. Her eyes were sad when she heard me say, “You make it sound as though this has all happened before.”

  I knew what she would say. “It has.”

  “If the police are so close to catching me, then I should turn myself in.”

  I thought she would slap me. “You are being a fool, Benjamin. Why do you want to die? They will kill you. This is not my judgment. It is the truth. I know it. My father, my mother, my brother. All good, fine people, people who made me love life. All dead. I have seen it happen already. I have planned our escape, Benjamin. I have planned ever since I first came to San Francisco, knowing I would have to flee some day. Karl Gneiss has hounded me from other cities, he and his slow, hateful search.”

  “You planned an escape,” I said. I knew I sounded dazed to the point of stupidity, but the world was closing on me too fast.

  “Remember that all of this is fated. Every moment of it. And there is only one way to escape. Please, Benjamin—don’t stand there like that. You don’t have much time.”

  “They can track me down wherever I go.”

  “Won’t you please just do as I say? You’ll see what will happen—it will be amazing, and we will have freedom, and we will have each other.”

  Still I did not want to leave. Something kept me here. Something drew me even further into this room.

  Then I realized what it was. The fangs. I did not want to part from the fangs.

  She clung to my shoulders, and shook me, her eyes bright. “I can’t tell you any more than I have because you have trouble believing the simple things I have told you already.”

  “What will happen to the fangs?”

  “They have done their work. We don’t need them any more. Leave them with me. I will take them to Mr. Zinser.”

  “He’ll destroy them.”

  “They will be hi
s to destroy. Mr. Zinser is one of those people who can own them without suffering harm. He is like a rock the stream swirls around but cannot move.”

  “We can destroy them now,” I said, my voice broken. I knew that was impossible. Neither of us would be able to bear the sight of the silver glowing, expanding, bubbling into a pool.

  I wanted to see the fangs one more time, but Johanna stopped my hand with her own. “You’ll have to leave them here. You have no choice.”

  I tried to deny the fixation. Surely I could live without the contents of this box. But I was sweating. “He’ll smash them up, and melt them down.”

  “Probably.”

  “It’s a sin!”

  “The fangs want you to believe that.”

  I paced, my fists bunched. Then I whirled. “Let me take them to Zinser!”

  “You don’t have time. You need to reach Tahoe by sunset.”

  “They’ll find me there—”

  “Not tonight. They won’t be able to think that quickly. The police will be slow to believe what has happened.”

  I thought that she was exaggerating the power of these fangs. Tonight I’ll probably be fine, I told myself. I’ll be a human being, nothing more.

  Could she read my thoughts? “From now on, for a long time, you will run every night.”

  “It would be wrong to leave them with you for a second.” I snatched at the fangs, but she held them, as quickly as though there had been a jump-cut in a film.

  Her sudden quickness did more than surprise me. It confused me so that I sat. She had performed an act of magic, and I could not trust my eyes.

  I blinked, and said hoarsely, “Give me the box.”

  “I love you, Benjamin. I want you to live.”

  “What makes you think that you can carry that box for so much as a minute without having the power of those fangs eat into you?”

  “You need not worry.”

  “I want them back.” I rose.

  She took a step away, but it was not fear I saw in her eyes. She was determined, and calm, and gazed at me with eyes that saw centuries.

  I stopped myself. I ached to see them just one more time, and writhed in my soul, but my love for Johanna was stronger than any other emotion.