Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  “Yes,” said Page, nearly regretfully. This had not been the confession he had hoped to hear. “Furthermore, divorce is always distressing. It can turn people inside-out. You know this as well as I do.”

  “I know—it can be terrible.”

  “Byrd, this won’t do. Forgive me.”

  I waited.

  He opened his mouth, and then he shut it. “I have a failure of nerve. I keep trying to work up to the subject of wolves, and I can’t do it. It won’t do. It’s all too silly. You have to get on with your life.”

  “I am trying very hard to get on with my life, but no one will believe me.”

  “I’m going to be blunt.” He said this with pride, as though it were an unusual accomplishment. “People will have trouble believing you because they are sane, rational, sensible people. You are uttering delusions so fantastic that you cannot even pretend to believe them. Look at you—completely calm, quite focused. Insisting on the most absurd fantasy.”

  I said nothing.

  “Five men have confessed to the Night Beast murders. Five men, all absolutely sincere. All totally innocent. Murders like these bring out bizarre confessions. We all expect the worst of ourselves. I thought you would have the insight to see that you are not immune to these confession-compulsions.”

  “It’s not a matter of insight.”

  “Your pride is so great that you cannot admit to yourself that you have a mental problem, just like millions of other people. It’s all right, Byrd. I respect your courage for seeking help. We’ll play tennis together in a few weeks, and this will all be over. I admit—it’s ghastly about Orr. But the point is, they found the beast that did it.”

  I sighed. “In the warehouse. Burned to so much carbon. All they had was few bone crisps. What kind of an identification is that?”

  “Enough to satisfy the police.” He shook his head. “I’m not usually directive like this, but I think you’re playing games. The murders have stopped. You didn’t do them.”

  “The police want to be satisfied. They want to close the case and lock it, because no one wants to admit that maybe, just maybe, this case wasn’t a matter of a mean dog going around biting people. Maybe the world is a strange place after all. Maybe we are all wrong about what’s real, and what’s possible. No one wants to think that. Cops least of all.”

  “It’s too ridiculous.”

  Most people have that ability to forget misfortune, which is the secret of optimism, and which allows people to have cheerful, simple—and ignorant—views of life. We pretend the world is a simpler place than it is. I understood Page’s hesitation. “I understand how you feel,” I said.

  He gave me the vulpine smile psychotherapists reserve for foolish colleagues. He knew that I was the one in need of understanding.

  “You know I wouldn’t sit here and invent such a fantasy.”

  Dr. Page had that shrewd, steady gaze, and like many therapists he seemed to read one’s eyes. I could certainly read his: he had just remembered something. “I have the feeling that you genuinely believe that what you are saying is true. And there is one incident, one little detail, that makes me consider your story as more than a length of airy nothing.”

  He turned and tugged a newspaper from his briefcase. He shook the paper out, and turned a page. “I’m almost sorry I remembered seeing this. It certainly clouds the waters for me. It’s the early edition Examiner. “‘Mystery chopper crash in Tahoe. Several fatalities.’”

  His smile was rueful. “It doesn’t say very much about wolves, or wolfmen. It says, in fact, nothing about such things.”

  “But it makes you wonder.”

  “It makes me feel tired. It makes me sorry I sat here listening to you.”

  We were silent for a moment. Then he said, “The rape victim is doing so well, Dr. Eng says it’s as though it had never happened.”

  “I’ve heard. That’s wonderful.” My relief was so great, and so unfeigned, that he studied me for a moment. “Look how healthy you are, Ben. Enjoy your life. Forget all this.”

  “I killed people. I can’t forget that.”

  Dr. Page let the newspaper fall, and folded his arms. He played what he plainly felt was his ace. “If you have this strange ability to turn into a wolf, Ben, do it now. Show me how it works.”

  I was tempted to. I felt the power in me like the wash of a cold, dark tide. That would certainly blow out Page’s candle, I thought. The man of science would not be able to deny the evidence of his eyes. “I could,” I mused. “But I think you might find it—”

  “Startling?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe you can’t do it any more. Maybe it’s like being able to yodel, or do handstands. You have to practice.”

  I did not answer.

  He gave me a crooked smile. “Maybe during the full moon.…”

  “I can’t believe how ignorant you are.”

  He was professional enough to take this seriously. “I’m sorry, Ben. I thought a little humor would help. Tell me, though. How would you feel if you did lose this wonderful ability?”

  “I’d miss running in the night. But I think I’d always retain some of the compassion I learned.” I gazed at my shoes, and the gray woolen carpet.

  Page gave me a bit of wisdom. “If you feel that you have wronged people—even to the extent of killing them—you carry an unpleasant burden.”

  “I do.”

  “You’ll have to dedicate your life to healing people. Do good, where before you did—you have convinced yourself that you did—harm.”

  I held my head in my hands.

  There was real compassion in Page’s voice. “I don’t know what hell you’ve been through, Ben. I can’t know what takes place in your soul. But you are in a profession ideal for someone who wants to help people.”

  I looked up at him. Page was earnest. I could see it in his eyes. “You’re telling me ‘Go, and sin no more.’”

  Page looked at me hard, and for the first time I think he nearly believed my story. “No, those are your words. And they’re good ones.”

  We both sat silently, and then Page said, “I think you might as well face it. You’ll need hospitalization. You are stable, but hardly well. You were right to come to me. Perhaps a few weeks, no longer. I suspect.…” He fumbled his diagnosis. “Anxiety related delusions.”

  “Naturally.”

  He sighed. “Damn it, even if I believed for a moment what you are saying—and you are persuasive—I still might refuse to buy it.”

  I considered what he was saying.

  He added, “There are some things I would rather not believe.”

  “I’ll bring Johanna.”

  By offering to do this I startled him. He touched his mustache, and I saw that he had assumed that Johanna was a delusion, and nothing more. “I would love to see her.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I was hoping to book you into UC Medical Center tonight.”

  “I’ll bring her tomorrow.”

  “The thought occurs that, without really being certain—”

  “I may be dangerous.”

  He looked down and said, “You see my position. I really do want to play tennis with you someday, Byrd. I don’t want you jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, howling at the moon all the way down.”

  “You have to take a risk.”

  He made a pained expression, and I could see again that despite his flat, professional-to-a-fault manner he was a man of genuine feeling. I had been right to admire him. He was a good physician. “I could have stayed in research,” he said. “I should have, I suppose. I could have spent my days with slides of the corpus collusa.” Once again, he indulged in something like humor. “That’s my favorite part of the brain, you know. When I was a kid it wasn’t football cards. It was favorite cerebral loci. I’m still working on my ‘Modular Components of Cognitive Process.’ I haven’t added a word to it in over a year. I shouldn’t have made the career choice that got me into this face-to-face
with the imponderable.”

  “Tomorrow, first thing in the morning?” I asked.

  He looked at me for a long time: “I think of this as an emergency. There is something wrong either with you or with—”

  “Reality,” I finished his thought.

  He pulled back his cuff and consulted his watch. “Tonight. In this office, an hour from now.”

  I was ecstatic as I bounded up the steps to my house. With Page on our side, there was a future for us.

  The world of the intellect, the world of books and computers, would help us after all. It was my good mood that made me unobservant, and my renewed faith in humanity. I believed in people once more, and I did not notice the peculiar smell in the air, like the smell of something burning. I did not notice the clutter that spilled out of the study into the hall, until I stood over it.

  And then I froze.

  There were scraps of furniture and a white chalk I recognized, after a moment, as plaster. And there was the vivid sense of strange bodies in the house, somewhere unseen.

  Wrong wrong something wrong.

  Plaster, I found myself thinking, stupid, leaden, and growing heavier as I began to guess what was happening. Why, came the slow question, was there plaster on the floor?

  Only then did I see the blood.

  Forty

  The study was splattered with it, not a pool of it so much as an explosion, frozen in scarlet on the wall, on the spines of books—everywhere. And the shelves were shattered, books destroyed, leaves of eighteenth-century laid paper at my feet, soaking up a spatter of red.

  I was still heavy with shock, stupid with fear.

  The Babylonian vial lay undamaged on the desk, a talisman designed to protect nothing but itself. What had caused this splintering of wainscoting, this eruption of rips in the plaster, a row of craters across the wall? There was still a haze, a blue festoon across the air, a festive phantom. It was as though a great celebration had just finished here, one that had ended in a joyous riot. The blue in the air was like the aftermath of a chain of firecrackers.

  Except for the blood.

  And they are still in the house. And a second thought, just as fast: they don’t know you are here.

  I finally began to move my feet, and touched one of the holes in the thick plaster walls, one of the eruptions that even now flavored the air with the tang of plaster, mingling with the smoke. Perhaps I had been hoping that my eyes lied.

  Think, I told myself. Think—and whatever happens, make no mistakes.

  There was a glaze of plaster over everything. It had all happened moments before. It was, I could no longer deny, the work of a heavy weapon, an automatic weapon. I let myself think the melodramatic word: machine gun.

  Johanna. I took a breath to call her name, sensing as I stood shrieking inside that it was too late. All there was now was revenge.

  So I kept silent. I was in the hall before I knew what I was doing, leaping the stairs four at a time, calling out her name, knowing this was worse than foolish. They knew that I was here, now, and I would not surprise them.

  The wall beside the stairs fell upon me, in fragments. There was a sound that blanked hearing and thought like a blow to my skull. Half my head went numb with the blast, and I was blinded by the eruption of burst plaster.

  A figure I could barely see fumbled at his weapon, then tried to club me with it. I threw him against the wall at the top of the stairs. I registered dimly that this was not Gneiss, but one of his FBI subphyla. I had the man by the neck, slamming his head into the wall so hard he left holes.

  This was one of the men who killed Johanna. That thought ignited me. I seized his head in my hands and drove it so far into the plaster, so many times, that the plaster went red and I could feel something in the skull give. The body slumped at my feet, and I had a moment of horror of what I had done not as my night self but as a man, with my bare, human hands.

  These hands.

  Johanna.

  Must find Johanna.

  I knelt to hook the gun with my fingers. It was a weapon I recognized from television news, an Israeli or Russian submachine gun, with a banana clip. The firearm was so floured with plaster dust, where it was not blood-spattered, that it slipped from my grasp, and bounded down the stairs.

  I crouched to make myself a smaller target, and took a deep breath and held it. Now was the time to go back one more time to my night self. Couldn’t I do it one more time? I asked myself. Surely it was possible. Surely I had not lost it forever.

  Nothing was happening. I crouched, panting heavily, trying not to cough, feeling a cough building in me, and thinking: dead.

  Johanna is dead. Look.

  Because what I saw in the doorway of what had been Carliss’s room was blood, and not just a splatter or two. This was a lake, and it was still spreading, still creeping outward.

  I fell into the room, splashing the hot scarlet. The room was empty, bare except for the pond of blood that quaked around me.

  What I saw was enough to send me reeling backward. The source of the blood in the study and this great well of blood was not Johanna, but a man guttering before me, his eyes blue in a mask of red.

  The great wound in his throat, the internal jugular exposed, was a companion to the crater in his chest—bullet wounds. Someone had fired through the body of his companion, trying to kill Johanna. I studied this with an exaggerated lucidity, every detail harsh and precise in my sight. There was a rip in the man’s sleeve, and I could see the waning pulse of an artery where the golden wolf had gashed him, the cause of the spatters of blood in the studio.

  My heart stopped. There was a rifle shot, a single, world-splitting crack. As I spun, feeling my slow, puny human muscles responding to the sound, there was another. The sounds were not simple percussive reports. Each explosion was a steel whip-crack, a blow to my soul.

  Time slowed. It slowed entirely, and stopped.

  Nothing would ever happen in the world. Time was finished. There would be only this eternal present, this blood-slick Now. I had time to consider the day, to turn it one way, and then another. If I had left Page’s office one minute sooner, everything would have been different. If I had driven just a little faster. My entire past was nothing more than a twisted path to this moment.

  They had surprised her perhaps one minute before. There had been three or four of them, in an all-out assault on the house. They had hoped to catch both of us. Instead she had been where I had left her, reading in the study.

  Alone. Faithful, waiting, and one of the murderous shadows had surprised her and tried to cut her in two with his machine gun. How she had fought I could well imagine. Her transformation must have been instantaneous, and she must have counterattacked there in the study.

  All of this understanding flamed in me in an instant, in that notime after the rifle shots. She must have dragged him, perhaps flinging him over her shoulder as a shield. They had fired, using a high velocity rifle, and she had abandoned him in Carliss’s room. She should have leaped from that bedroom window, but instead, gambling that she would have a better chance of escape if she dived into the back garden, she had changed her mind. She streaked across the landing, across what had been my bedroom, and leaped from the window.

  As I was about to jump. But first I needed to be transformed, to flower into my night self. I closed my eyes, and willed myself to change—and nothing happened.

  I was so shaken by the blood, so stunned at what had happened to Johanna, that I could do nothing. I was helpless. I was puny. I was nailed to my human form, and there was not a thing I could do about it.

  It didn’t matter. I hurled myself across the bedroom, through the shattered glass. I plunged over the sill, and at once realized how weak my human body was, how much less agile, how mortal.

  I had no strength. I had only my human powers now. My human body hurtled downward. I was used to calling upon the power of my limbs, but my mere arms and legs flailed.

  I was nothing but a man, falling
.

  Stowe looked up as I fell, appearing like a shadow in his dark suit. His gray hands gripped a black rifle. He was still, timeless as a photograph is timeless, lithe and pale.

  Even my fall seemed to take place in a world without time. Johanna was nowhere. Neither wolf nor woman was anywhere in the late afternoon gold of the garden. There was only the sweating rifleman, looking up at me as I fell.

  Because it was like joy, the way he watched me grow huge in his sight. His gray eyes met mine as I spread my arms, perhaps believing that I could slow my fall, like a bat.

  Time began again. Pain, and the sound of two men colliding, a grunt, a gasp, and the crunch of joints and sinews. I tackled him as I came down, and we sprawled. I was stunned, aware of everything that was happening, but unable to move. Stowe was hurt, one shoulder held crooked, his other arm groping for the rifle.

  He was panting, his gray eyes bright with delight, as he hefted the big gun in my direction. He was snarling, a laugh of pain and disbelief. And then the laugh changed. He could not believe his good fortune. Here I was, in his hands, helpless. It was a laugh of great glee, as though this were a tremendous game, the finest imaginable sport.

  I nearly wanted to join him in this fine joke. How funny it was. I fell on him, dropped out of the sky. It was all so easy for him. Time was spurting again, and it was my body which had ceased to move. I had no breath in my body. Air, inhaling, exhaling—that was all a dim memory.

  The rifle seemed alive in his one-handed grasp, and so he dragged the other hand forward to steady the lashing weapon, and fought it down toward me.

  Toward my face, that black, dead hole, that zero of the gun barrel.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  The sound was so sharp the day seemed to flash scarlet in my eyes. But some inexplicable canniness, some essential-quickness that would never leave me, had twitched me to one side. I was up and grappling with him at once, and fighting to wrench the rifle from his grasp.

  He was lean, and strong as such men can be, all tendon and bone. He grunted, and I felt him work to trip me, to throw me aside. He was skilled, well-trained—but he was hurt. I rocked him as I struggled with him.