The Howling Trilogy

by Gary Brandner

  “Don’ wan’ any more shots.” Malcolm had trouble getting the words out past the tongue that did not belong to him. “Wan’ see Holly.”

  “Will you please hurry?” Pastory snapped at the nurse, who was still fumbling at the tray.

  “No more shots,” Malcolm said feebly.

  The orange-haired nurse turned toward him, making no attempt this time to conceal the hypodermic needle. She reached down with one hand and flipped Malcolm onto his side. His body would not respond to the messages sent by his brain.

  He barely felt the second needle prick. The nurse eased him over on his back and he watched as she and Dr. Pastory floated side by side in some murky void. The room grew warm, then hot. Malcolm could feel the sweat rolling off him, but he could not move a hand up to clear his eyes. His power of speech was gone. All he could manage were soft grunting noises. The light grew dim. And dimmer.

  “That s done it.” Dr. Pastory’s voice floated to him through a long tunnel, distorted and barely audible. “I won’t be needing you anymore, Nurse.”

  The shadow shape that was the nurse floated back away from him and disappeared. Dr. Pastory went away, too, but just for a moment. Then he was back with somebody else. Another man. The features were only a blur to Malcolm, but he sensed that the newcomer was not a doctor or a hospital employee. He smelled wrong. There was none of the astringent tang of surgical soap, medicine, and alcohol that clung to the hospital people. This one smelled of tobacco, stale sweat, and urine.

  Malcolm felt himself lifted roughly from the bed and placed on another flat, yielding surface. He sensed the door to his room being opened, and he was floating out through it into the corridor. No, not floating, rolling on soft rubber wheels. Rolling, rolling. The fluorescent lights passed overhead in dim, wavery images, as though seen from underwater.

  Suddenly the air was cool on his face. There was a breeze with the scent of pine in it. He was outside. A dim recollection of a voice that called him from out here fought for a space in his consciousness, but the drug was too strong.

  Malcolm was lifted again, placed inside some sort of metallic box. A van. Dr. Pastory got in beside him. He gave an order. An engine fired and Malcolm sensed movement. Then the fever returned and consciousness slipped away.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock Dr. Dennis Qualen strolled in through the entrance of La Reina County Hospital. He was, as always, impeccably turned out. Today he had chosen a dark blue worsted with muted pinstripe and a tie of pale yellow. He acknowledged the greetings of staff and employees with a nod and half smile. Dr. Qualen did not believe in becoming too familiar with the people under him. Particularly since he did not intend to spend one day longer than necessary at La Reina. He had feelers out to bigger institutions in San Francisco, Houston, and Miami. Once he had straightened out the budgetary problems here, and had the figures to show it, he would surely be hearing from them.

  He rode the elevator to the second floor, passing an encouraging word to a small boy in a wheelchair. The boy stared at him dully. He watched as the nurse wheeled the boy toward the orthopedic ward, then he turned and walked briskly toward the glass doors to Administration. Once beyond them he felt a tangible relief. Those doors represented a barrier to Dr. Qualen that kept the sordidness of disease and death separate from the nice clean business of running a hospital.

  He barely noticed a neatly dressed young man with sandy hair who sat in one of the chairs across from the reception desk. A salesman, the doctor surmised. Some new wonder drug, or a piece of expensive equipment that no modern hospital should be without. La Reina was not in a buying cycle at present, but Qualen tolerated salesmen for the gossip they carried of the outside medical community.

  The doctor smiled coolly at Mrs. Thayer as he went by. For his own taste he would have preferred a receptionist with a bit more style, and better tits. However, he knew that the matronly Mrs. Thayer gave his office a solid, businesslike appearance. And she was excellent at guarding his door from patients and other unwanted visitors.

  As soon as he settled himself in the burgundy leather chair behind the mahogany desk, the intercom buzzed. With a sigh he reached over and flipped the switch.

  “Yes, Mrs. Thayer.”

  “A gentleman out here to see you, Doctor.”

  “Who is he with?”

  “Apparently he is not representing any firm.”

  “Then what does he want with me?”

  “He says it’s about the boy they brought in from the woods. The boy in one-oh-eight.”

  Qualen frowned. He glanced over at the transfer papers for Malcolm, riffled through them, and saw that Dr. Pastory’s name had been correctly entered, making him the responsible party.

  He said, “Did you tell him I am not concerned with patients’ affairs?”

  “The gentleman was quite adamant about wanting to see the man in charge. He’s been here since I came in, at eight o’clock.”

  Damn. Qualen hated to start the day with some petty annoyance. “Does he have a name?”

  “Yes, Doctor. Mr. Derak.”

  It meant nothing to Dr. Qualen. Had an unpleasant foreign sound. He sighed. Might as well get it over with.

  “Ask Mr. Derak to come in.”

  The doctor assumed a businesslike pose and watched as his visitor entered. He was not as young as he had appeared at first glance. It was difficult to guess his age. Something about the eyes, an odd shade of green, seemed very, very old. Nevertheless, he was presentable enough. His sandy hair was cut short and neatly brushed. The jacket and slacks were not top quality, but good. He had a nice smile. Strong.

  “Good morning, Mr. Derak,” said Qualen with just the right mixture of cordiality and restraint. “What can I do for you?”

  “You have a boy here. I understand he was found wandering in the forest and was brought in by deputy sheriffs.”

  “Ah, yes,” Qualen said after a pause to indicate he was trying to remember the case.

  “I’d like to see him.”

  “Mr. Derak, visits with patients are handled through the desk in the main lobby. You must have passed it when you came in.”

  “I talked to the woman there, and I talked to her supervisor. I could not get satisfactory answers from them. They suggested I see you.” A rather unpleasant note crept into Derak’s voice.

  Qualen resolved to have a talk with that woman and her supervisor at the first opportunity. He said. “You are a relative of…” He made a show of looking through the papers on his desk. “…Malcolm.”

  “In a way.”

  The doctor looked up, expecting a further explanation. Derak offered none. His green-eyed gaze was uncomfortably direct.

  “As it happens,” Qualen said, “that patient has been transferred.”

  “Transferred?” Derak took a step closer to the desk. “He was here last night.”

  “That’s true. The transfer happened early this morning.”

  The sandy-haired man became agitated. One hand pulled loose the knot of his necktie. “Where was he taken?” His voice sounded different. Coarser.

  “I’m really not at liberty to say. If you will leave your name and address with my––”

  “You will tell me now,” said Derak. The voice had roughened into a growl.

  Dr. Qualen stared at the man in astonishment. He had thrown off his jacket and was actually tearing at his shirt. And his face, my God, it was twisting into something quite inhuman.

  The doctor reached for the intercom box. Derak’s hand clamped onto his wrist with a grip that crackled the bones.

  Qualen stared at the hand. Before his bulging eyes it changed. Grew into a terrible mutant paw. Thick, wiry hair sprouted from the back. The nails thickened and pushed out into claws. Qualen looked up at the face.

  Even as he began to scream, the doctor knew the acoustic walls would let no more than a murmur escape to Mrs. Thayer outside.

  With a strength born of terror, Qualen wrenched his wrist free of the terrible grip.
He ran around his desk and tried to make it to the door. Derak, or whatever this thing was that Derak had become, was faster. He threw himself past the doctor and used that misshapen, hairy paw to roll the dead bolt home, locking them in.

  The only other way out was the window of reinforced glass, and that gave on a sheer drop of twenty feet to the concrete parking lot. Qualen backed away, watching in horrified fascination the transformation taking place before him.

  The man’s body twisted and swelled and grew to a height that towered over the six-foot doctor. There was a terrible cracking as the skeleton reshaped itself inside the creature. The face… the face was all muzzle and teeth and burning eyes of green hellfire.

  In a movement too swift for him to follow, Qualen felt himself seized under the arms and lifted clear off the floor. His shrieks echoed dully off the soundproofed walls. He felt the hot breath of the creature as the great jaws opened; he smelled the stench of it. There was a moment of searing agony as the teeth sank into his throat. A hot gush of his life’s blood. A last roar in his ears. Then blackness and oblivion.

  * * *

  It was the faint but unmistakable crash of glass from inside Dr. Qualen’s office that roused Mrs. Thayer. The only thing in there that could make a crash like that was the window. She buzzed the intercom, got no answer. With mounting unease, Mrs. Thayer rose from her chair, walked to the door of Dr. Qualen’s office, tried the knob. Locked. She rapped lightly, then again, louder. There was no response. Something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong.

  Mrs. Thayer snatched the telephone from her desk and punched out the internal emergency code. In less than a minute two burly orderlies came running in from the corridor outside.

  “There’s trouble in Dr. Qualen’s office,” she tried. “The door’s locked and he won’t answer me.”

  The orderlies hesitated only a moment, then attacked the door while Mrs. Thayer stood back out of the way. The door soon splintered under their combined assault. The men rushed inside, stopping as though they had hit a wall when they saw the bloody thing sprawled over the desk of the administrative chief. Behind them Mrs. Thayer started into the room, then gave a little cry and backed away, her hand covering her mouth.

  At the same moment the men turned toward the broken window. They crossed the room together and looked out, scanning the parking lot below. Nothing.

  One of them pointed up at the hillside. “Look!”

  The other followed his pointing finger. “What is it? I don’t see anything.”

  “I thought… for a minute it looked like something up there. Running.”

  “A man? What?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see it now. It was more like a big dog. Or… Christ, I don’t know. Let’s get help.”

  Later, of all the ghastly events of that morning the two men would remember the sound they heard from somewhere up on the wooded hill. They would remember the howling.

  11

  The people at the hospital provided Ramsay with a small unused office at the rear of the first floor, next to the kitchen, to use for his interviews with the staff and employees. It had only a desk, two chairs, a file cabinet that would not open, and a hastily installed telephone. There was also a pervasive smell of bland hospital cooking coming in through the single window.

  One of the chairs was occupied by a stenographer on loan from Ventura County. She took rapid, silent notes as Mrs. Audrey Thayer, secretary and receptionist for the late Dr. Qualen, answered the sheriff’s questions.

  Through the window Ramsay could see search parties laboring up the thickly wooded hillside, where the suspect might or might not have been seen running by one of the orderlies who found the body. Overhead was the persistent thrum of helicopters. There was one from the Ventura County Sheriff’s office and several from television news departments.

  The media had appeared miraculously less than two hours after Ramsay had received the report of Dr. Qualen’s murder. So far he had been able to avoid them with the help of deputies Nevins and Fernandez, who stood out in the hallway looking as mean as they could manage.

  Sooner or later he would have to talk to them, but Ramsay was determined to get as much as he could of his real work done first. Like most lawmen, he had a healthy distrust of reporters, a distrust he knew was mutual.

  “Is there anything more you can tell me about this Mr. Derak?” Ramsay asked the woman across from him. “Any little thing, no matter how unimportant it seemed at the time, might be helpful.”

  Mrs. Thayer frowned thoughtfully and shook her head. Her hands were busy twisting a flowered hankie into a snake. “I’m sorry, Sheriff, but there really isn’t anything more than what I’ve already told you. He was just an ordinary looking man. Rather pleasant, he seemed at the time. Very insistent, though, about seeing Dr. Qualen.”

  At the mention of her late employer, Mrs. Thayer’s ample chest convulsed in a sob. She unwound the hankie and dabbed at her eyes. Ramsay waited for the spasm to pass before he went on.

  “And he said nothing to you about what business he had with the doctor?”

  “Only that he was sent up there by Eleanor Chung. She supervises the admission desk in the lobby.”

  Ramsay nodded. He had already talked to Miss Chung and the woman who was on duty when Derak came in. They said he insisted on seeing the patient known as Malcolm in room 108. Since he could show no evidence that he was related, they explained he would have to wait until regular visiting hours, then clear it with the doctor assigned to Malcolm’s case. They declined to give him any more information, and when the man refused to leave, referred him to Dr. Qualen.

  “How long was he in the office with Dr. Qualen before you heard the crash of the window breaking?”

  “Not long. Not more than fifteen minutes. I don’t see how he could have… could have…”

  Ramsay spoke up quickly to head off another outburst of sobs. “And you heard nothing before that because of the soundproof construction of the walls. Is that correct?”

  “Nothing. Once, very faint, I thought I heard a voice, but I couldn’t be sure.”

  Milo Fernandez entered, glanced at Mrs. Thayer, and spoke to Ramsay. “Dr. Underwood is outside with his report.”

  “Good. Thank you very much, Mrs. Thayer. That’ll be all for now.”

  “You’ll catch the… the terrible person who did this, won’t you, Sheriff?”

  “Yes, we will,” Ramsay said with a lot more conviction than he felt. “He won’t get away.”

  Reassured, Mrs. Thayer gave him a teary smile and left the office. Ramsay told the stenographer to take a break, and sat back to wait for the pathologist.

  Neal Underwood was a man happy in his work. He was plump and pleasant and had thinning blond hair that still had a curl to it. His biggest satisfaction in recent years had been the cancellation of Quincy, the farfetched television show that had a choleric pathologist rushing around shouting at everyone, solving crimes, making fools out of doctors and police alike. Dr. Underwood did his job in a quiet and efficient manner and had far more friends than enemies. He could make small jokes about how his patients never complained, and he did not even mind being referred to around the hospital as Dr. Underground.

  He took the chair across from Ramsay and laid a folder on the desk between them.

  “As savage a killing as I’ve seen in some time,” the pathologist said pleasantly.

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “My preliminary findings show it to be loss of blood from a severed jugular. The lower face, throat, and upper chest were severely lacerated. Many of the wounds, I’m relieved to say, probably occurred after the victim was already dead. He died very quickly.”

  “Any guess as to the weapon?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Teeth.”

  Ramsay let several seconds go by while he held the pathologist’s mild gaze. “Teeth?”

  “I told you that you wouldn’t like it.”
>
  “Human teeth?”

  “Not likely. The human jaw is not constructed for attack. To kill with its teeth, an animal needs a protruding muzzle. That allows the jaws to open like this.” Underwood demonstrated with his two hands, touching at the heel, making teeth of his fingers.

  “What kind of an animal might that be?”

  “Oh, lots of them. Shark, alligator, tiger, hyena…”

  Ramsay saw him hesitate. “And?”

  “And a wolf.”

  “Uh-huh. Would you say it’s possible to construct a weapon that would make wounds like that, resembling teeth?”

  “I suppose it would be possible, but it would make a damned inefficient weapon. It would be an awkward thing to carry around, too. Impossible to conceal.”

  Ramsay pinched the bridge of his nose. He felt a headache coming on, but the next question had to be asked. “Have you seen a killing like this before, Doctor?”

  Underwood nodded slowly. He was no more eager to answer than Ramsay was to ask. “Similar. Several of them.”

  “Like to tell me where and when?”

  “Right here. Last year. During the business at Drago.”

  Ramsay groaned inwardly. The damned dead village of Drago was destined to haunt him. “What do you think killed those people?”