Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  We were never interrupted except by these tape changes, and the occasional lapse into silence, when I was so vibrant with memory, or sorrowful over a death, that I could not speak. The life beyond the walls had vanished, and we heard nothing but the fine, dry ticks of Page’s Rolex.

  Page put his hands together. He did not want to say what he knew was true. Responsibility is painful, his posture said.

  “You still have one simple problem,” said Johanna, breaking the long silence.

  I knew what she was about to say, but I waited quietly. I had learned, as Johanna had learned long ago, to drink silence, and let it fill me.

  Page stood and paced the room, his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know that I have a problem, exactly.”

  “It’s a problem for all of us,” she said. “You don’t believe what we are telling you.”

  We were locked in a smaller room, with comfortable mock leather furniture in vivid pastel blues and pinks. A coffee table was bolted to the floor. An aluminum ash tray was so flimsy that one butt had bent the metal into something of a bowl.

  There were no cameras. There were mesh-glass windows high above, where night was on display like a distant, well-guarded treasury. This was a room for confidential confession. It was also a perfect prison.

  Page found his glasses in his pocket and twirled them, like a useless toy. “I believe that you may believe it.” He paused, awkward, hating what he was forced to say. “I never doubted your sincerity.”

  I found myself smiling ironically. Sincerity, I thought, that most useless of all virtues. “But you don’t believe,” I said, “that we are wolves.”

  He uttered the dry laugh of the wise and weary. “I believe that you, as you have put it so wonderfully, ‘ran with the wolves.’ In your minds.”

  “You believe,” I said, “that we are plain, garden variety human beings, suffering from a delusion.”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know if I would use the word ‘suffering.’ Perhaps you enjoy it.”

  “I can help you, Dr. Page,” Johanna said with a kind laugh. “It is so easy. After all these days I can’t stand to see you so troubled.”

  “I’m hardly troubled at all,” he said, a man plainly lying.

  “The truth is, you are only stalling,” she said. Her voice was so pleasant she might have been paying a compliment. “You are delaying. They told you to talk to us, and let us talk, and do anything to use up time.” She turned to me and said, “They are deciding what to do with us, and Dr. Page is going through the motions of practicing his profession.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, sweating, but showing himself to be bravely calm. “I’m proud of my accomplishments. I’ve had a good career.”

  “Are you ashamed of what you’re doing now?” she asked.

  He did not speak at once. “Why should I be ashamed?”

  “You see, Benjamin? He is pretending to help, while the hunters plan to finish us. This has happened so many times, to us, and to our kind.”

  “She’s right, Page.” My voice was gentle, and I felt sorry for him, in a way. He did not know what to do. He had nothing left but pride, and even that must have felt suddenly cheap.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said, blinking. “Have you any idea how sick both of you are? I have the evidence on tape.”

  “They’ll confiscate the tape, Doctor,” she said. “And if you tell anyone about us, they may silence you.”

  He made a hard sound, an ugly laugh. “I think you are two very dangerous people.”

  She seemed delighted. “You have been putting it off. I know you are afraid to ask, so I feel a little reluctant to show you. Don’t you think that you are probably ready by now?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Proof.”

  “‘Proof.’ Of course—you’ll turn into a wolf, right before my eyes.”

  “Would you like that?”

  “I’m not nervous,” he said, pacing, then stopping himself. “But if you would feel better …” He looked at me for help, but I simply gave him my blandest smile.

  “Psychotherapists don’t like to confront their clients with the truth,” I said, feeling, I must confess, a little devilish. “He knows that you can’t turn into anything but what you are now. You might say he doesn’t want to embarrass you.”

  “Poor Dr. Page. Is that the truth?”

  Page tugged at his nose. He gestured, but could not speak. Then he said, “Basically. Not entirely, but basically.”

  “But you are curious, of course,” Johanna reminded him. “And a scientist as well.”

  Page rallied. “You put me in a difficult position. You are asking me to be more unkind than I really think is necessary. I do like you, both of you, and I would like to help you. But you force me. So—show me. Prove it to me. Go ahead—I’m waiting.” He put on his glasses, and put his hands on his hips in a schoolboy posture of challenge.

  She stood up from her chair, and Page took an involuntary step back.

  Nothing happened. Johanna stood casually, like a woman being measured for a new gown. She closed her eyes, with a pleasant expression, fully peaceful.

  Page stared, then gave the smallest nod, not to me, but to himself, smiling regretfully. You see, he seemed to say. You see what all this leads to—nothing. He looked away for a moment, and coughed. He glanced back.

  And caught his breath.

  He not only went pale, he went gray, and put out a wavering hand. The hand found the wall, and I hurried to his side.

  In Johanna’s place was a shaggy, golden wolf.

  He fell, slipping down the wall. He was unconscious, stunned, mouth agape. I loosened his tie, struggling with the knot. He mouthed a word: no.

  He shivered and stirred, breathing heavily, groaning. Then he sat up, huddling back into the chair like a man climbing from a cataract. “No!” he said, and pressed his face into the chair like someone fighting to escape his own body. It escaped him, as though blows were falling on him. “No!”

  The wolf made a tune. “Poor man,” the tune said, and the great beast padded to Page’s side.

  Page covered his face with his hands, and still did not look, did nothing at all but fight to deny what was happening. “No!” he cried again, and shuddered, about to weep.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when he could manage sentences. “Please forgive me.” His voice was ragged. “I can’t help you. The strain is too great. I’m beginning to—” Syntax fled him. Words scattered. “I am having some sort of hallucination.”

  “Did they tell you to stall?” I asked.

  He did not take his hands from his face. “It’s been a difficult time for me.”

  “The police, people in Washington—did they tell you to buy time?”

  “I could have helped you, Ben. I could have worked with you to help you with this terrible delusion.”

  Johanna made a single snort, and Page cringed. He did not look up, but tied himself even more tightly into a knot. “I am losing my mind.”

  “You lied to yourself,” I said, my words slow, each syllable iron. “They used you.”

  His voice came out in little jerks. “I thought I could help them, and help you at the same time.”

  The golden wolf turned to me, and I understood her. She did not make a sound, but I heard her clearly, her voice within my own mind, a sensation that weakened my knees, and nearly made me drop to the floor.

  “It’s time for us to leave,” she said. It was a sound my own nervous system made, an utterance of such pleasure that I could think nothing for a moment but the sound of her voice, and her words.

  Her voice spoke in me again. “Follow me!”

  She did not crouch, and did nothing to prepare her spring. One moment she stood on the cold tile, surrounded by the tatters of her clothing. The next instant she lanced upward, crashing through the wire-glass, and she was gone.

  Glass spun to the floor in bits. Her escape had been an explosion, and Page huddled, covering the back of his ne
ck with his arms.

  There was no sound but his whisper: no.

  Was it my imagination? Were there steps in the hall outside? Was there a voice, and other voices, men arriving to finish what they had started?

  But I couldn’t escape. I could not transform myself. My night self was a word I had forgotten, a language that had died within me.

  Leap! I ordered myself. What are you waiting for?

  I can’t do it. Look at me—I’m just a puny, strengthless human being and there is no way I’ll ever be able to do it again. Something had changed when I saw the blood and plaster in my house, and when I killed Stowe. Something had gone out of me.

  There was a click at the door. A definite, metallic click, and the door began to swing open. The hinges, well oiled, supporting the weight of the reinforced door, made an airy sound like a yawn.

  Her voice called to me. I could not tell if the sound was outside me, in the night, or within me. It was a sound like a wolf’s cry, but like a human song, too, soprano and lucid.

  “Come, Ben!”

  I leaped, clawing at the slick green-painted walls, upward toward the wire-mesh windows, but this was not the flash Johanna had made, springing skyward. This was a man, his arms stretching upward, leaping, and falling hard.

  Leaping again, and then slipping back. Slipping all the way back, into more than the cell. Into my life, my past, all the ignorance that had confined me in my daylight self as a man in a suit with a calendar crammed with appointments.

  I was falling all the way back into my blind, colorless life.

  Then, it was different. I was not slipping. I was bounding upward, slamming into glass that was also a net, snapping my jaws, and finding the window too tight. It squeezed me, and I felt the entire building trying to keep me where I was.

  My head was through, and I kicked my hind legs, still not fully aware of what had happened, only that I had strength now, and life.

  Johanna called to me again, a voice like the surge of my own pulse. Part of the wall burst with me, and I fell.

  Part Six

  Forty-Three

  There was an instant of fear. I was breathless. But the fear was not simply for myself. I was only an afterthought. Too high, I saw. Far too high. The fall must have killed her.

  Our prison had been so effective that I had not realized how high we were. There had been an elevator that whisked us upward, and sent my stomach toward my toes, but I had been distracted, and only now did I see that we had been far from the ground, in the tallest building at the medical center.

  The fall, I reasoned, like someone with the leisure to mull a problem, would kill me as it had killed her. And then I had to laugh, a sound like timbers snapping. I understood what my instincts were telling me.

  My body knew.

  I have had dreams of falling, and thought them nightmares. This fall was a mastery of my body, and the darkness. I was not afraid. It was that quick—the fear flickered and died.

  I spread my limbs and wanted to stay like that, unmoving. It was the keenest pleasure. I wanted this fall to last for hours, as I luxuriated in the wind.

  The earth met me. Asphalt gritted under my paws, and the force of my leap made me roll and tumble, and when I was on my feet again I was running. For a breath or two there was not enough air, but then I had the purest power in my lungs.

  This air was so delicious, with its damp and its flora of scents, that I was nourished by it as I ran. Oleander gave forth one fragrance, and a tangle of milkweed another, and even a mailbox offered smells, the gray, solid scent of paper and ink surrounded by rust and paint. Each leaf was a voice, each puddle a soup of oil and algae.

  I bounded as I ran, with a laugh I could not recognize as my own, neither man nor beast, but unmistakably a joyful sound. How alive everything was. I wanted to race in circles.

  There were dead, human smells. Aluminum, mildewed lumber, grease. Tremendous pockets of petroleum smells, exhaust, drippings, cold engines. Cooking smells were vivid, even hours after suppertime. Sage and seared flesh, ripe cheeses and sour coffee grounds. Human bodies were behind walls in all directions, coughing, sighing, and whispering. Sex was hidden, but it was there.

  And there were animals. Rabbit, I sniffed. Scared rabbit, by the dash of urine suddenly in the air. There was the warm, yeasty scent of opossum. Even the concrete was alive. Tiny mites bred in the very grit of stones. And what were stones, as I sniffed the air, but clay waiting to live?

  Headlights whisked past on the streets, and I followed the flag of Johanna’s tail. I had been fast before, but now I was less than a whisper. A shingled roof snapped by under my paws, followed by a broad, graveled roof, the crownlike domes of the air vents slowly spinning. Trees were streaks, and the bright windows were smears of light.

  We raced. Johanna stayed just ahead, but I gradually overtook her. I leaped about her, silent in my joy, one way and then another, in circles. She laughed. Then we bounded garden walls, whisking upward through a trellis of bougainvillea, leaping a pond of torpid carp.

  We raced until we found ourselves on the breakwater at Fort Point, and then the bay chaffed before us and the air was metallic with the flavor of that cold, other world.

  We paused, panting easily. I told myself I could run all night, and all day—forever. Traffic muttered high above us on the Golden Gate Bridge. The headlands across the bay were dark, blank presences, like a secret foreign country. Surf churned into the granite boulders at our feet, and the spray glowed in the dark.

  Johanna’s laugh broke within me. As before, I heard her voice as the clearest sound, unmistakable, and also as the finest pleasure, as though sexual arousal could take place as a voice in one’s cerebellum.

  “You look so happy, Benjamin,” she thought.

  I frisked about on the rocks, bounding this way and that. My animal power allowed me to gallop across the empty parking lot, wheel and bark, and then dash back while Johanna looked on, laughing within me like a song.

  Then her voice broke within me, over me. “Are you ready?”

  I barked a laugh. Of course I was ready—for anything.

  “Tonight will not be like any other night you have ever seen.”

  Her voice was still joyful, but there was something else in her tone. I stood quite still, and my tail fell. Was she trying to warn me?

  “Tonight you will find out what we really are,” her voice said, each syllable enunciated by my own nerves, each thought taking place in my marrow. “Benjamin—tonight you will know everything.”

  I did not understand that tone. It was happy, but it was serene, too, in a way that surprised me. I was in no mood for wisdom. I barked, a sound so loud and abrupt pigeons which had settled for the night scattered across the face of the old brick fort. “Everything!” my bark said. I wasn’t afraid.

  Then we both froze. My paw half-lifted, her snout in the air. It was hard to separate which of the scents meant death. There was the endless grind of car exhaust, and the black, fecal crust of chassis and engine. There was the bleat and murmur of human speech. There was the floating spark of a cigarette far across the water, on a cutter making its way under the bridge.

  I had forgotten. Our freedom was something borrowed, something stolen, and there were powers in the world that would never love us. They wanted us back again, where we belonged, as though they had made us what we were and now, after long consideration, had decided against our lives.

  How could I forget them—the hunters, the ones with crossbow and helicopter? Governments, tax collectors and taxpayers, the habits of a humanity which did not know, could not know. The vision of people who either did not believe in creatures like us, or knew the truth and feared us. Or even worse—did not experience enough emotion even to fear, but simply wanted us filed in the right folder, the folder of things which had once been alive.

  The hunters, generations, centuries of passionless repression, were tireless. The unthinking faith government had in itself was a dead weight on our lives. Nev
er forget the men and women sitting behind desks, I warned myself. They won’t forget you.

  A skunk worked the far end of the parking lot, and a mouse scurried, jerked to a stop, and slipped away as, far away, a night bird, probably an owl, stretched its wings, the bark of a tree rasping under its talons. The pleasure had shifted, now. Somewhere there were men with guns. They were not far. I could scent the carbon steel and the sulphur.

  There was a nervousness in the city. The warning was not general. Our lives, our nature, our escape, would be a secret. But there were guns, and skilled hands. I scented their indifference to our joy, their boredom. These were hunters who held no malice, who simply had a job to do. They were closer than I had guessed. A car spilled its headlights over the parking lot, and we fell to our bellies.

  The hunters are here.

  But that was impossible. They couldn’t have tracked us. The panic was missing, the outcry. There were no hounds, and this wasn’t even a police car. This was a plain, ordinary car, a car of people wanting to caress each other near the surf. That’s all it was. Surely that, and nothing more.

  A light burst from the car, a flashlight so bright it made a hiss in my ears, its spear slicing the air. It ignited a puddle, scalded a boulder, a light so bright the quarry scars were exposed in the face of the granite.

  “Now,” she whispered within me.

  When she was gone, so quickly, I did not understand. She had been there, the warmth of her like a second body between us, and then I was alone, and the air was cold.

  I thought to her: Johanna?

  I thought again: Where are you?

  “Be quick.”

  I did not have time to register what had happened. She had fled, and she expected me to follow. But as I slipped down the jagged stones, it struck me that Johanna and I were more and more alike in power, more and more equal, but that I wanted to stand my ground and fight.

  I did not have to see it. The beam of light made something like a sound. I sensed the light bleaching the empty boulders where I had held my breath just seconds before. I felt the light groping toward me, trying to bend down, as though the beam embodied the will of the hunters. There was an ugly clunk—a car door was open, and a foot crisped the fine sand on the surface of the parking lot. A shod foot, I thought, heavily shod, a boot of some kind, with a sole thick enough to keep the flesh from sensing earth.