Wolf Flow

by K. W. Jeter

  She grabbed him again, both arms, tugging him around to face her.

  "It's that stuff, that water you showed me." Her face was still red, from running to find him. She looked straight into his eyes. "There's something wrong… it does something…"

  He shoved her away, hard enough to stagger her back a couple of steps. "I thought you were the one who didn't believe in all that." He climbed onto the bike and started the engine.

  "Doot-wait…"

  She ran after him, but he was already beyond her reach. She stood watching as the bike scattered gravel, crossing the dirt strip onto the road.

  TWENTY-THREE

  He lifted his head from his dark sleep and dreaming. Sitting on the floor of the tiled room; the smell, the taste of the water heavy in his throat and lungs; arms wrapped around his knees, sheltering the steady hammer of his pulse.

  The girl again-he'd seen her, the laughing mouth red and wet as blood. The skin of her bare throat and breasts a perfect transparent ivory that yielded to his touch but moved with no breath beneath. And it had been night in the dreaming, great rolling fields of it outside the examining room windows, the mountains shapes that ate the stars. The animals of the red eyes had paced and watched, their gaze lifted intently to the building they circled around.

  Here, she'd said, pulling back from him, teasing. She'd slid away from the examining table and his embrace. The smell of his own fevered sweat had choked him as he'd watched her pull something-not one of the blue glass bottles, or a chrome sharp-edged tool-from one of the cabinets on the wall. A book, with lined pages and flowing script in black India ink. See? She'd held the book low against her breasts, the small bleeding wounds of her nipples just above the paper white as her flesh. He raised himself up on one elbow. Look-her smile had shown the points of her teeth. See for yourself.

  Dreaming. He had woken, with her smile and the book still there inside his head. But not the words written in it. That was the secret.

  Mike touched his chest with the flat of his hand. The shirt, the one he'd taken from Aitch's closet, was still wet from when he'd drunk and spilled the water from his palms. A white shirt, the front discolored with a dark, smeared blossom.

  Kneeling, he rubbed his hand across the bottom of the stone basin, then licked the moistness from his fingers. The taste uncoiled on his tongue, then slid down his throat.

  He turned his head, looking up at the ceiling. And through it, to the floor above. He could already see it, waiting for him there. He stood up, wiping his hands against his hips.

  ***

  She'd heard the crashing sounds from upstairs. They'd pulled Lindy from sleep, a chemical haze jerked away from her by a sudden rush of fright. Her eyes opened wide as she lay on her back, hearing something else smash into the floor above.

  "Mike-what is it-"

  At a flying run, she'd taken the stairs, the sounds growing louder with each step. Now she stood in the doorway of the old clinic's examining room, watching Mike rip through everything there.

  He didn't turn to look at her. He toppled the examining table onto its side and ran his hands over the rust-specked chrome beneath. With a manic fury, he crossed to one of the wall cabinets and swept the glass bottles off the shelves. They exploded on the floor, the shards grinding beneath his feet.

  "It's here…" His voice came through his clenched teeth. "I know it is…"

  "Mike-"

  He shot her a look of seething anger. With one step, he was across the room; he slapped her hard enough to knock her back against the doorframe. She felt herself sliding down it, hands clutching the wall behind. In the thin curved mirror of one of the examining table's legs, she saw her face with the red imprint of his hand.

  Mike had already returned to his search. The antique X-ray machine tilted, then crashed to the floor as he shoved it aside. It was followed by one of the pharmaceutical cabinets, wrenched free from the wall and thrown behind him.

  He stopped for a moment, panting for breath. Dizzied from the blow of his hand, Lindy watched him, her back against the bottom of the door.

  A niche was sunk into the wall, in the center of the space where the cabinet had been mounted. Edges of rough plaster were framed on either side by the building's timbers. Mike stepped closer to the hole, his stomach pressing against the countertop beneath. He reached into it and pulled something out that he held with both hands as he looked down at it.

  He was smiling when his gaze came up and fastened on Lindy's face, as if seeing her there for the first time. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead and neck.

  "Look." He squatted down in front of her, holding out the thing he'd found. His voice trembled with excitement.

  She tasted salt in her mouth and knew it was blood. Her tongue had cut against her teeth when he slapped her. She looked down and saw that it was a book he held.

  The leather cover was cracked and fire-scorched, with the single word Registry in faded gilt lettering.

  Mike opened the book, leafing through the pages, stiff and yellowed with age, the edges blackened by ash. She could see, upside-down, the old-style handwriting, full of swooping flourishes. People's names, then other words, and dates-the years were all in the 1890's.

  His finger traced one of the lines. "You see," he murmured, voice softened by his fascination. "They'd put down what they came here for." He touched another word. "Their ailments. What they were hoping to be cured of. Vapors and fits…" He looked up with his smile. "Female troubles…"

  She kept still, trying not even to breathe, as he paged further through the book. Her face still ached, but the dizziness had ebbed away.

  A piece of paper that had been creased and stuck in the registry-he took it out and unfolded it, the browned surfaces rustling in his hands.

  He nodded, eyes closed in satisfaction. "This is it. She told me…"

  Lindy didn't know what he was talking about. The way he was acting… She wondered if she could slide out of his reach, without his seeing her, and out into the hallway and away from him. Her hand reached to the side of the doorway, pulling her a couple of inches closer to it.

  Mike's eyes opened. He held the unfolded piece of paper out to her. "See for yourself."

  The paper looked like some kind of poster, an advertisement. For the clinic-the word THERMALENE, in big ornate lettering, filled the top space. Underneath were gray-toned, old prints, framed in ovals like the pictures she remembered seeing in her grandmother's photo albums. A big one of the clinic building itself and smaller ones of the room with the stone basins and the lobby, with potted palms stationed by deep sofas and armchairs.

  "There." Mike's finger touched the paper. "See it?"

  At the bottom, another oval, with a man's face. Wearing a doctor's white coat-the shoulders of it were just visible. The man had dark hair, parted in the middle, so he looked younger; but he looked just like the old man who was the caretaker here. The same skull face, the flesh tight against the bone. And without the dark glasses, small gold rims instead-the ancient portrait gazed out directly at her.

  Mike's finger traced the words underneath the man's face. " 'Doctor Wilhelm Nelder,' " he read aloud. " 'Founder and chief physician.' "

  She didn't understand. All she knew was that a wild, frightening joy had bloomed inside Mike.

  He took back the paper, folding it and putting it in his shirt pocket. He nodded, lost in thought, as though she no longer existed for him. "Now," he murmured. "Now I know…"

  He stood up and left the examining room, leaving her crouched upon the floor.

  ***

  The old man was sitting on the rock outside his shack-where Mike had seen him before, when he'd gone up into the hills.

  Nelder looked up at the sound of pebbles and dust shifting down the slope. Sun glinted off the dark lenses over his eyes. He made no move as the visitor made his way down to him.

  He looked up at Mike, standing before him. And the piece of paper, browned with age, that Mike held out. Nelder glanced at the paper
, but didn't touch it.

  "There's more than what you told me." Mike tossed the paper onto the ground. "About the water. A lot more."

  Nelder shrugged, his gaunt face expressionless. "There's more to a lot of things."

  Mike prodded the paper with his foot. The oval-framed picture, of a young, thin-faced man, gazed up.

  "You've lived an awful long time… Doctor Nelder. When you add it all up-what does it come to? A couple hundred years? Something like that. That's a long time. A long time to keep yourself alive. And a long time to be sitting on something like this. Keeping it to yourself."

  The old man stood up and faced Mike.

  "You'll have to leave now." A fine tremor, the skin growing even paler, touched the skeletal face. "Immediately. The water…" Nelder's voice trembled and broke. "It heals, but then it changes. I know; I have been here a long time. I know what it wants." Fervor pitched the words higher. "It wants bad things, dark things like itself. It made me do terrible… things…"

  Mike gazed at the old man, a smile of contempt turning on his own face.

  Nelder looked away from him. The years weighed upon his shoulders, bowing his spine.

  "But it made me want to know things, the things it knows…" A whisper now. "There was blood all over, and they looked at me, and they would scream… The water kept them alive, but they kept on screaming and screaming… I had to stop. I had to stop everything."

  Nelder turned and grabbed Mike's arm, the long, large-knuckled fingers squeezing into the flesh. "That's why I set fire to the clinic. To end it; to end everything. And then when it was over, when everything was gone… the bad things, the screaming… I had to stay. To guard it. To keep anyone from finding it again." The voice screeched up into Mike's face. "I had to stay, and go on drinking it, and bathing in it, letting it inside me, letting it go on living and wanting…"

  Mike could see his own sneering face reflected in the dark glasses.

  "Bullshit." The stupid old fuck; the stupid scared old fuck-Mike felt disgust growing in his gut. "You're afraid. It's kept you alive, but you got old, and now you're afraid." He shook his head. "But I'm not."

  He tried to pull away from Nelder's grasp, but the old man's hands clung even tighter to his arm.

  "No-you have to leave! Immediately!"

  The anger surged up inside him, and he struck the old man across the face, backhanded. Nelder hung on to him, the bony hands clenching stronger than he could have imagined. His vision reddened, as he felt the blood come weeping from his eyes, a red sweat seeping from the pores of his face. With the anger came his own strength, the muscles swelling under his dampening skin. Another blow sent Nelder's dark glasses flying onto the ground. The lenses crackled as they broke against the rocks.

  He could barely see through the red haze, but it was enough. Nelder had no eyes; where they should have been, nothing but two deep sockets, red darkening to black, going back into his skull. Something wet moved at the base of the two holes, with a gaze that burned into Mike's head, to that same thing at the center of his brain.

  His teeth clamped together as he struggled to peel Nelder's hands from him. Suddenly, the old man's strength ebbed; he seemed to crumple and shrink as Mike gripped the hard knobs of his shoulders.

  Then the old man came apart in his hands.

  Nelder's shirt split, exposing the white, ridged chest. The drum-tight skin tore open, peeling away from the bones and tendons beneath. The ribs cracked, spilling out the lungs and heart, soft trembling masses suspended in yellow sinew.

  Skin hung in tattered strips from Nelder's bowels, the looped intestines dangling lower.

  Mike felt his fingers sink into the thin layers of skin. The weeping flesh fell away from him, the tapered masses of the arm muscles pulling away from the shoulder and elbow joints. The knife edge of Nelder's skull broke through the face, drawing out the taut, striated ribbons around the mouth and eye sockets.

  He let go of the thing, casting it away from him. For a few seconds, it writhed upon the ground, more red segments detaching from the carcass. The legs snapped at the hips and knees, the tattered ankles lengthening from the blood-soaked trousers. Then it lay still, the blind red face pressed into the dust.

  He stood above it, gazing down and drawing one deep breath after another, the anger retreating once more to his spine. With the arm of his shirt, he wiped the blood from his face.

  There was water in the stone basin by the shack's door. He knelt down and splashed it up with his hands, opening his mouth to let the sulfur taste run down his throat. He scooped up more with his cupped palms and drank it, tilting his head back, the sun full in his eyes. Inside him, beneath his heart, the water spread, filtering into his arms and legs, restoring him.

  He went back to Nelder's corpse and regarded it for a moment. Then he reached down and grabbed its wrists, where the bones and tendons lay exposed. The arms stretched as he dragged the corpse over the ground, but they didn't tear loose; the connective tissue tightened, a web across the collarbone and upper ribs.

  Carefully-he didn't want to lose any part of it-he dragged the red, bedraggled thing up into the path through the hills, the way he had come.

  ***

  The dark water was hidden by the layer of charred timbers and other rubble floating on its surface. Mike squatted down by the swimming pool's edge. He reached down and cleared an open space, pushing the debris away from the tiled side.

  He eased Nelder's corpse into the water, the skull with its blind eyesockets going under first, then the torso with its dangling viscera. The limbs, torn and elongated by the rocks of the hills, drifted for a moment, then sank into the blackness and disappeared.

  Mike stood up, watching the rubble cover the water's surface again. A trail of blood led to the edge; that was the only sign of what he'd just done.

  It had made sense; he didn't even have to think about it. He knew it was what the water wanted. The old man had belonged to it for so long-he should return to it.

  He smiled. He was happy… when it was happy.

  He looked over his shoulder. At the clinic building. There were more things in there. Promised to him: things to find out, to know. That no one else knew.

  Bending down, he scooped up a handful of the water from the pool's edge and drank it. Then he walked toward the building.

  ***

  In the dark, the soft, torn thing drifted. The water filled its mouth and crept into its lungs. It lost buoyancy, and fell, its arms wavering above its head like strands of seaweed. Its blood mingled with the water, a cloud seeping from around its heart. The eyeless skull turned upward, toward the thin, diminished rays of sunlight that penetrated the surface.

  That was the other world up there, where things-things such as it had been-moved around, their blood neatly bound into themselves.

  This was its world now.

  It drifted, the water caressing its groin and spine. Easeful peace. It drifted, and waited.

  ***

  She was on her hands and knees, scrabbling across the lobby floor. Looking for the stuff that had been thrown across the space, and shoving the vials and orange plastic containers into the suitcase when she found them.

  That was stupid of her-Mike stood with his arms folded across his chest, watching her. She should've just split, if that was what she wanted to do. Now it was too late.

  Lindy suddenly looked up and saw him standing in the doorway. Her mouth fell open, eyes widening with fear.

  He sauntered toward her. "Going somewhere?"

  Still kneeling on the floor, she scooted back away from him.

  Mike bent down and picked something up from the floor, something she'd missed. He raised it up to show her.

  "You know"-the point of the hypodermic glittered in one of the room's shafts of light-"I think you've gotten a little overexcited…"

  Lindy scrambled to her feet. She turned to run away, but he was right on her. He grabbed her by one arm, jerking her around to face him.

  "Mike
…" She struggled, trying to pull her wrist out of his grasp. "Don't…"

  He threw her down to the floor. She sprawled there, facedown, while he stepped over to the suitcase. He quickly pawed through it and found what he was looking for. He turned back toward Lindy as he plunged the needle through the seal on one of the glass vials.

  "I think maybe you need a little something to calm you down."

  She cowered away from him as he approached with the hypodermic.

  "Hey…" He smiled as he grabbed her arm and pulled him up toward her. "You can trust me. I'm a doctor."

  He sank the point into the vein at the crook of her elbow.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He found the spot easily enough. He recognized the outcroppings of rock several yards back from the road.

  Aitch pulled the big Caddy over to the side, the tires crunching over gravel. He left the tape deck and the air-conditioning on as he got out of the car. The late afternoon heat squatted down on him, the highway's vanishing point shimmering beneath a silver mirage.

  Sunglasses dangling in his hand, he looked around the area. Just as bleak as when he'd come out before, with Charlie. This time, he was the only human presence.

  He kicked the dust at the roadside. A set of tire tracks, only partially sifted in, and another, wider set of marks, probably from some kind of truck. Part of the ground was discolored, stiffened into a thin crust. That was Mike's blood, he figured, from when they'd dumped him off.

  That was the only sign left of him. No picked bones inside rags, no pieces of skin dried to leather. Aitch put his sunglasses back on and headed for the car.

  In the cooled space, with the tape's volume turned up, he reached over and opened the glove compartment. The Diamondback lay on its side there, all chambers loaded. Just the sight of it satisfied him, for now.