The Wolves of Midwinter twgc-2

by Anne Rice

  Far below to their left, tucked into the mountainside, they saw the clear outline of an electrically lighted house and near it sprawling and manicured gardens, lighted swimming pools, and paved lots. The house was a conglomeration of tile roofs and broad terraces. Reuben could hear the low strum and rumble of machines. Cars crowded the lots like exotic beetles.

  The voices rose, in a soft chorus of cries and desperate muted words. Children in this house. Boys, and girls, frightened, agitated, and without hope. And over the dismal choir of misery came the deeper voices of men, English-speaking men, mingling with one another in easy camaraderie. And the low drumbeat of women’s voices in another language, speaking of discipline and pain.

  “The best here, the very best,” came a deep masculine voice. “You will find nothing like this anywhere in the world, not even in Asia.”

  A girl child wept without words. An angry, bruising woman’s voice in a foreign tongue commanded obedience, so transparent the cajoling and bullying woven together.

  Scent of innocence and suffering, scents of evil, and other scents, strangely ambiguous and unclassifiable, odious and ugly, rose all around them.

  Margon dropped off the edge of the cliff, arms raised, falling down and down till he landed heavily on the tile roof. They all followed, landing silently on their padded feet. How could they not follow? A low rumble came from Stuart’s chest that was not a roar, not a growl. Sergei answered.

  Once more they dropped down, this time to a wide and spacious terrace. Ah, such a heavenly place, with soft, fluttering flowerbeds aglow in the gentle electric light, and the swimming pools shimmering and twinkling like rare jewels. The palm trees rattling in the caressing wind.

  The walls of a villa rose before them, with glass windows and subtle soothing lights, sheer curtains billowing out into the night and twisting in the breeze.

  Whisper of a child praying.

  With a roar, Margon passed into the room as shrieks and screams rose all around him.

  The children scrambled off the high-backed bed and ran for the corners as the woman and the half naked man fled for their lives.

  “Chupacabra!” roared the woman. Smell of malice, old habitual malice. She hurled a lamp at the approaching Morphenkinder. A string of curses poured out of her like noxious fluid.

  Margon caught the woman by the hair, and Stuart caught the man with her, the sniveling, sobbing man. Instantly, they were dead, remains dragged through the room and flung out over the terrace wall.

  Naked, a boy and girl cowered, faces and limbs dark and twisted with terror, black hair shining. Move on.

  But something was confusing to Reuben, something deviling him as they ran through the wide corridors, into room after room. There were men fleeing who gave no evil scent, only the rank smell of fear flying off them, and the reek of bowels cut loose, and urine gushing. And something else that might have been shame.

  Against a wall two men stood, white men, men of ordinary build and ordinary clothes, stark terrified, faces wet and blanched, mouths loose and watering. How many times had Reuben seen that very attitude before, that helplessness, that blank stare of a broken human being on the verge of madness? But something was missing here, something was confusing, something was not right.

  Where was the clear imperative? Where was the decisive scent? Where was the undeniable evidence of evil that had always goaded him to kill instantly in the past?

  Margon stood beside him.

  “I can’t do it,” Reuben whispered. “They’re cowards,” he whispered. “But I can’t—.”

  “Yes, the ignorant and thoughtless clientele of these slave traders,” said Margon under his breath, “the very tide of appetite that supports this foul business. They’re everywhere in this house.”

  “But what do we do?” asked Reuben.

  Stuart stood helplessly there, waiting for the command.

  Below people were running and screaming. Ah, now there was the scent, there was the old stench that galvanized Reuben and sent him flying down the staircase. Evil, hate you, kill you, full-blown evil, reeking like a carnivorous plant. How easy it was to take them down, the hard-bitten, the scum, one after another. Were these the old habitual predators, or their servants? He didn’t know. He didn’t care.

  Gunshots rang out in the plaster rooms. “Chupacabra, chupacabra.” Wild volleys of Spanish burst forth like the crack of artillery.

  There was a car starting out there in the night, and the roar of an accelerating engine.

  Through the broad open doors of a terrace, Reuben saw the giant figure of Sergei bounding after the car and easily overtaking it, springing first on the roof, and then dropping down in front of the windshield as the vehicle swerved, screeched into a circle, and came to a halt, glass exploding.

  Another one of those craven men knelt right in front of Reuben with his arms up, his bald head bowed, wire glasses glinting, prayers issuing from his lips, Catholic prayers, words tumbling out of him meaninglessly and like the mumblings of a maniac.

  “Holy Mary Mother of God, Jesus, Joseph, and all the saints, dear God, please, Mother of God, God, please, I swear, no, please, please, no …”

  And again, no clear and unequivocal stench of evil, no scent that commanded it, made it clear, made it possible.

  People were dying above.

  Those men were dying above, those men that Reuben had left alive. Over the staircase railing fell one of those bodies, landing on its face, or what was left of its face, blood streaming from it.

  “Do it!” whispered Margon.

  Reuben felt he couldn’t. Guilty, yes, guilty, soaked in shame, yes, and fear, unspeakable fear. But wholly evil, no, by no means. That was the horror. This was something else, something more rank and hideous and defeating in its own way than purposeful evil, the purposeful break from all things human, this was something boiling with helpless hunger and agonizing denial.

  “I can’t.”

  Margon killed the man. He killed others.

  Sergei appeared. Blood and blood and blood.

  Others ran through the gardens. Others were rushing out the doors. Sergei went after them and so did Margon.

  Reuben heard Stuart’s tortured voice, “What can we do with these children?”

  Sobbing, sobbing everywhere around them.

  And the clusters of women, accomplices, yes, terrified, damaged, defeated, down on their knees too. “Chupacabra!” He heard it woven into their prayerful pleading cries, “Ten piedad de nosotros.”

  Margon and Sergei returned, the blood clinging to their fur in gouts.

  Sergei paced before the terrified group on its knees, murmuring in Spanish words that Reuben could not catch.

  Women nodded their heads; the children prayed. Somewhere a telephone rang.

  “Come, let’s leave here. We’ve done what we can,” said Margon.

  “But the children!” said Stuart.

  “People will come,” said Margon. “They will come for the children. And the word will spread. And fear will do its work. Now we are going.”

  Back in the ruined villa of the Morphenkind Hugo, they lay on the mattresses, sweating, bone weary, and tormented.

  Reuben stared at the blotched and broken plaster ceiling. Oh, he had known this moment was coming. He had known it had all been too simple before, the Brotherhood of the Scent, the brotherhood that acted like the right hand of God, incapable of error.

  Margon sat cross-legged against the wall, his dark hair loose over his naked shoulders, his eyes closed, lost in his meditations or his prayers.

  Stuart climbed up off the mattress, and paced back and forth, back and forth, unable to stop.

  “There will be such times,” Margon said finally. “You will encounter them, yes, and situations even more baffling and defeating. All over the world, day after day and night after night, victims tumble down into the abyss with the guilty, and the weak and the corrupt who don’t deserve death pay with their lives one way or another for what they do and w
hat they don’t do.”

  “And we leave,” Stuart cried. “We just leave the children?”

  “It’s finished,” said Margon. “You take the lessons with you.”

  “Something was accomplished,” Sergei said, “make no mistake of it. The place is shattered. They’ll all clear out; the children will have some chance for escape. The children will remember. They will remember that someone slew the men who had come to use them. They will remember that.”

  “Or they’ll be shipped to another brothel,” said Stuart dismally. “Christ! Can we make a war on them, a consistent war?”

  Sergei laughed under his breath. “We’re hunters, little wolf, and they are the prey. This is not a war.”

  Reuben said nothing. But he had seen something he would not forget, and he marveled that it hadn’t surprised him. He had seen Margon and Sergei slay at will those who didn’t give off the fatal scent, those ugly, compromised souls driven by unholy appetites and inveterate weakness.

  If we can do that, he thought, then we can fight amongst each other. The scent of evil does not make us what we are, and once we are beasts we can kill like beasts, and we have only the human part of us, the fallible human part, to guide us.

  But these ideas were abstract and remote. Only the recollections were immediate—boys and girls racing in terror, and the women, the women screaming for mercy.

  Somewhere off in this filthy villa, Margon was talking to the mysterious Hugo.

  Had a plan been made to destroy the seaside brothel?

  No doubt it was deserted by now. Who in his right mind would have remained?

  He fell asleep, hating the dirt and grit of this mattress, waiting for the car that would come before daylight to take them to the luxury hotel where they would bathe and dine before the flight home.

  17

  IT WAS SATURDAY EVENING about 9:00 p.m. when they returned, and never had the property looked more warm, more welcoming, more beautiful. Through the rainy mist as they came up the road, they could make out the lighted gables along the front and the neat squares and rectangles of three stories of windows.

  Felix came out of the front door to greet them all in the driveway with a warm embrace and to show them the preparations for tomorrow’s banquet. His exuberance was positively contagious.

  The entire terrace was now one great lighted and decorated pavilion, with the giant tented rooms flowing into one another on either side of a great covered corridor that led to the immense Christmas stable.

  It stood with its back to the sea surrounded by a forest of dense and beautiful Douglas fir trees, all splendidly lighted like everything else. The white-marble figures of the crèche were artfully illuminated and perfectly arranged amid a bed of green pine branches, and a more splendid Christmas grouping Reuben had never seen. Even Stuart got wistful and almost sad looking at it. It excited Reuben terribly that all his family would see this. And he could have stood alone by the crèche for a long time, just looking at the white-marble faces of Mary and Joseph and the beaming Christ Child. On the pediment of the stable a great white-marble angel had been fixed with brackets and bolts, who, bathed in golden light, looked down on the Holy Family.

  The forest of tall potted Douglas firs extended to the right and the left of the stable, against a newly constructed wooden wall, and this functioned as an excellent windbreak. Nobody after dark could have seen the ocean anyway.

  To the left of the stable in the vast tented space was a massive grouping of little gold-painted music chairs, ready and waiting, with black-wire music stands, for the orchestra, while on the far right side were the chairs for the adult choir and for the boys’ choir, which would alternate and at times sing together.

  There were other choirs, too, Felix quickly added, and they’d be singing in the house and in the oaks. He’d conferred with everyone today, and seen to everything.

  The rest of the pavilion was beautifully furnished with hundreds of small white draped tables and white dressed chairs, all trimmed in gold ribbon. Each table had its trio of candles in a glass shade, surrounded with holly.

  Every few yards it seemed there were station tables or bars already stocked with silver coffee urns, china, and cases of glassware as well as cases of soft drinks and tubs for the ice that would be delivered tomorrow. Mountains of linen napkins lay in waiting, along with piles of sterling spoons and dessert forks.

  The metal framing beneath the high white roofs of the tents was all concealed in fresh pine garland, bound here and there with red velvet ribbon; a lot of holly had been worked into this as well. And the flagstones of the entire terrace had been cleaned and polished to a high luster.

  Tall treelike oil heaters were in place all over, and some were already lighted to keep the air not only warm but dry. Tiny multicolored lights were strung everywhere. But soft white floodlights provided the real illumination.

  The pavilion opened in two places along the east side to accommodate incoming guests from the driveway and those wandering out into the oak forest, and the door of the house itself opened into the pavilion.

  In sum, it had become a huge sprawling extension of the house, and Reuben confessed he’d never seen anything on this scale before, not even at the largest weddings.

  The rain was falling only lightly now and Felix had high hopes that it would die off for a little while tomorrow. “But still, it will be entirely possible to walk in the forest,” he said, “as the branches are so thick. Well, let’s hope, and if not, well, it’s splendid to look at.”

  Yes, indeed it was.

  “You should see the town,” Felix said. “Everything’s ready for the fair. The Inn’s full, and people have been renting out spare bedrooms in their homes to the merchants. We have a marvelous range of crafts. Just wait. And think what we can do for next year when we really have time to do things properly.”

  He brought the company into the main room, and stood with arms folded as they acknowledged the perfection of everything.

  It had all been “done,” or so they had thought when they left, but it seemed a multitude of refinements had been added. “Those are pure bayberry candles on all the mantels,” Felix said, “and the holly. Do note the holly.” It was everywhere, with sharp dark glistening leaves and bright red berries, nestled into the garland around the fireplaces, the doorways, and the windows.

  To the giant tree, already a masterpiece before they left, countless little gold ornaments had been added, most representing nuts or dates, and also a whole sprinkling of gold angels.

  And to the right of the front door stood a giant dark heavily carved German grandfather clock, “to chime on New Year’s Eve,” said Felix.

  In the dining room, the great table was covered in Battenberg lace, and laid out, like the hunter’s boards, with sterling chafing dishes and heavy serving pieces. In the corner a long bar was set up with a dazzling array of name-brand liquors and wines, and there were round tables here and there with potbellied silver coffee urns and piles of sparkling china cups and saucers.

  China plates in ten or more patterns at least were piled at the ends of the long table along with stacks of heavy sterling dinner forks. Chefs would carve the turkey and the ham for a “fork meal,” said Felix, as some people would have to balance a plate on their knees, and he wanted them to be entirely comfortable.

  Reuben was completely in the spirit. Only the absence of Laura hurt him, and also the worry about Marchent. But judging from Felix’s excitement, perhaps there was no cause now to worry about Marchent. Nevertheless the thought of Marchent here or Marchent gone struck equal terror in Reuben’s heart. But he didn’t want to say so.

  They had their supper in the kitchen, crowding around the rectangular table by the window, Lisa ladling up a pungent beef stew into their bowls, while the men served themselves their drinks, and Jean Pierre served a crisp green salad. Stuart devoured half a loaf of French bread before even touching the stew.

  “Don’t worry about this kitchen,” Felix said. “It w
ill be turned out like everything else. And don’t be shocked at all the garland upstairs. We can take it all down off the doors after the party.”

  “I’m kind of loving it,” Stuart said. And he did appear dazed as he looked around at the trimmings on the kitchen window which hadn’t been there before, and the masses of candles on the sideboard. “It’s a shame it can’t be Christmas all year.”

  “Oh, but the spring will bring its festivals,” said Felix. “Now we must get our rest. We have to be down in the village by ten a.m. tomorrow for the fair. Of course we can take breaks. We don’t have to be there all day; well, I have to be there all day, and, Reuben, it would be good if you were with me.”

  Reuben agreed immediately. He was smiling at the sheer scope of all this, and wondered who would be first in his family to ask how much it had cost and who was paying for it. Maybe Celeste would ask that question, but then maybe again she wouldn’t dare.

  It was Stuart now who asked this very question.

  Felix clearly didn’t want to answer, and Sergei said, “A banquet like this is a gift to everyone who comes, you wait and see; it’s that way. You can’t measure it in dollars and cents. It’s an experience. And people will be talking about it for years. You give them something priceless with all this.”

  “Yes, but they give us something priceless too,” said Felix, “in that they come, they are part of it, and what would it be without every one of them?”

  “True,” said Sergei, and then looking at Stuart he said gravely in his crackling baritone, “In my time, of course, we ate the captives of other tribes at Midwinter, but before cooking them, we put them to death painlessly.”

  Felix laughed out loud before he could stop himself.

  And Stuart shot back, “Oh, yeah, right!—You’re a farm boy from West Virginia and you know it. Probably worked in a coal mine for a little while. Hey, I’m not knocking it. Just sayin’.”

  Sergei laughed and shook his head.

  Margon and Felix exchanged a secretive look, but said nothing.