Jordan’s face was stony. He put his arm around her.
“What did he say, honey?”
Her lip curled. “Said our kind wasn’t wanted in these parts. Said we better ‘git’.”
Jordan pulled thoughtfully at his chin. “They’re gathering against us,” he muttered. “That priest—!”
He shook his head somberly and took Mulvaney’s arm.
“I suppose you’ll want to move into your old home, lad. It’s just like your daddy and mother left it. I’ll take you there.”
Before driving from the square, Mulvaney cast a glance about in search of Joan. But she had slipped away with the dispersing crowd and he did not see her.
Mulvaney was not surprised to learn that the house his parents had occupied was vacant and waiting for him. He was not even surprised to discover that it was clean and well-kept in spite of the twenty years or more it had been separated from its owners. The people of the valley look after their own, he thought to himself.
“We figured they’d come back sooner or later,” Jordan told him. “We kept it ready.”
No, Mulvaney was not surprised. There was something about the atmosphere of this strange valley, its town and its people that precluded the possibility of such feeling.
Long shadows had begun to steal across the valley bottom when Jordan left him in the large, frame dwelling that was his by birthright. He stood in the middle of the worn carpet in the living room. Outside the window, the leaves of a dusty cottonwood fluttered in the evening breeze.
Mulvaney brought his glance inside with an effort. He looked lingeringly over the old-fashioned furnishings. A sofa, a platform rocker, a couple of straight-back chairs, what-not shelves in the corners, loaded with bric-a-brac. It was here—in this very room, amid these same surroundings—he had played when he was a baby.
He was home. He took time out to think of that. Home. He had lived from his sixth to his eighteenth year in an orphanage: The following seven years he had spent wandering from job to job. Never long in one place, never one to make friends, he had always been restless, unquiet. Was this what he had hunted all those years—without knowing it? He was home now.
He sat suddenly on the sofa, and it creaked under his weight. He rubbed his hand over his eyes. He had driven quite a distance today. He was tired. He wasn’t hungry at all.
Twilight came to the valley. Gloom rushed in to fill the corners of every room in the old house.
Mulvaney stood erect at last and groped his way to the lamp he had observed earlier on the dining table. He struck a light and held it to the oily wick.
Odd people—an odd place. He resented Bock Martin—the way he had looked at Joan. He saw the girl’s lovely young face in his imagination. A pleasant tingle passed through his flesh.
He held the lamp high to light his passage up the creaking stairs. The whole place was wrong somehow. He felt it even more strongly now. He couldn’t place the wrongness. Gave him an eerie feeling, though.
In a bedroom upstairs, he placed the lamp on a dresser. The wick flared, casting grotesque flickers throughout the room. He leaned forward and scanned himself in the glass. He was Kenneth Mulvaney, just as he always had been. He would not have been surprised to find himself different, too.
He recalled Joan telling the crowd to look at his eyes. He squinted, frowning. There was a difference there, somehow. They seemed to lack their normal luster. The look of them reminded him of—the valley people! It was the look that characterized their eyes!
He could not understand the significance of this fact, but it troubled him. He turned around to survey his surroundings and reeled with his discovery. Sweat gathered on his forehead as he recognized now the wrongness that had haunted him. It had been the same with Joan. Jordan—with the valley people—and now—himself. His body, as hard, physical, opaque as ever, did not cast a shadow in the shine of the lamp!
One takes a shadow for granted. To be without one is—is—Mulvaney did not know the portent of it. He was shaken with the discovery. He blew out the lamp quickly and got into bed in the dark.
No shadow! The argent moonlight splashing through the window fascinated him. A full moon was rising above the ridge along the eastern rim of the valley. Its orb lighted the land with a weird, eldritch illumination. It lay in a puddle on his floor and rose in a silver tide along the opposite wall.
The moonglow soothed his senses. He believed his imagination was overwrought. Maybe a touch of the sun. He drifted hazily in the shadowy borderland of consciousness.
* * * *
Five miles over the ridges and tangled ravines from Kenneth Mulvaney and his troubled thoughts, big Sam Carver shook his grizzled white head and gestured with mahogany hands.
“If you ain’t right,” he rumbled at the small, dark-skinned man, “we’ll be in a mess. Ever been a laughing-stock before?” The small man was dressed in black, white collar turned back to fore. He was a priest and his name was Father d’Arcy.
“It is my duty to stamp out evil where I find it.”
His appearance and accent marked him as French-Canadian.
“How long have you had this trouble?” he went on.
Carver shrugged. “Maybe two, three years. We’ve always had trouble in winters—when the snow drove the wolves out of the mountains. Before, we drove our critters to summer pasture up in the mountains. Don’t figger we lost many then. But the ground’s barren up there any more. We pasture ’em in the valleys all summer long—an’ that’s how our trouble comes. Never knew wolves to come down to the foothills in summertime.”
“Yet you think I may be wrong; the wolves attack only when the moon is full?”
“Seems like it’s always happened that way,” the rancher responded wearily. “Full moon last month—and the month before—and before that. There’s a monstrous pack o’ them—they ruin a terrific lot o’ good beef.”
“I know. Financially, the wolves are hitting you hard. But how about tonight?”
“Don’t worry. Every rancher in these parts is ready. I’m ridin’ out to join them pretty soon.”
“The water?”
“Yeah. Crazy idea, though.”
The priest shrugged.
“You have supplied yourself with a mirror? And the silver—you did with it as I ordered?”
“Yes—my God! Didn’t I tell you we’ll be the laughing stock if you ain’t right about this?”
The priest made a steeple of his fingers and regarded the structure with calm meditation.
“The loup-garou cannot withstand these things,” he said.
The rancher snorted weakly.
“If I ain’t crazy now, I’m goin’ to be when this is over! I’d as soon think those folks in the other valley were siccin’ their dogs on our cattle. Though I’ve no doubt they’ve a hand in it somewheres.”
“Very likely,” agreed the priest. “Course, Yancey had no right shootin’ that girl’s horse out from under her today an’ leavin’ her afoot in the desert. I gave him the bloody devil. The sooner those people leave these parts, the better off we’ll be. But I don’t truck with shootin’ horses out from under women.”
“Getting back to the wolves, Mr. Carver. You don’t really suspect those are dogs attacking your cattle?”
“No. Slim says they ain’t dog-tracks. Slim used to trap wolves for the bounty. When he says wolf, I have to believe him.”
“You have set traps for these wolves?”
“Of course.”
“And the wolves avoid them—I know. They have the cunning of man. Have any of your riders ever seen these…wolves?”
“Sure. Shot at ’em, too. Missed.”
“Perhaps,” reflected the priest. “Perhaps not. You don’t miss with silver. These loups-garous—”
“You better
be right,” the big rancher murmured. He stood up and combed his fingers through his shock of white hair, “Hateful damned business! You staying here, padre? I’m ridin’ out to meet the boys. See you when I get back.”
“I will still be here,” the priest said, smiling confidently.
* * * *
Kenneth Mulvaney opened his eyes in the dark. Moonlight no longer flooded the wall. There was only a faint reflection from the argent puddle that spilled across the foot of his bed.
The voice of Joan Jordan sounded in the room.
“You’re awake now.”
He swiveled his head, blinking in consternation. The moonlight glowed on the naked body of the girl sitting at his feet. He started to sit up, then drew back, ashamed for her. Her eyes gleamed feverishly bright. White breasts throbbed with the rapidity of her breathing. She murmured in ecstasy.
“Isn’t it a lovely moon!”
Words strangled in Mulvaney’s throat. “After all,” he broke out hoarsely. “Isn’t this a bit—?”
He choked then, and his face and neck burned. The girl laughed, matching the silver of her voice against that of the moonglow. The sound of it was naive, ingenuous. This was a different Joan Jordan than the girl he had met that afternoon.
He wondered apprehensively if she still possessed her reason.
Without knowing or understanding, he realized the effect the change had wrought in her. She did not know she was naked—not in the sense she would have that afternoon. She was as innocently naked as Eve in the Garden before the Fall.
His feeling of shame for her went away.
It was best to humor her. He smiled in the dark. She smiled in return. The moonlight glinted from tiny, sharp teeth, astrally brilliant against the blood-red of her lips. In spite of their sparkle, the blue eyes remained curiously blank.
Mulvaney found that he was no longer surprised at her being there, even though he did not know the motive of her presence. And he did not think it strange that her gleaming body cast no shadow in the moonlight. It was only a point he noticed in passing.
“You have no shadow,” he remarked.
“Of course not. The moon is full.”
“I had no shadow tonight in the lamplight,” he continued.
“No. You wouldn’t have. The moon is full and you are one of us.”
The repetition irritated him.
“I always had a shadow before!”
“Things are different…in the Valley.” Mulvaney was beginning to believe that they were.
“I don’t understand you at all,” he said petulantly.
She threw back her golden head, and her slim, white body arched in the moonlight. Red lips parted breathlessly.
“Hurry! The full moon calls!”
He thought of his clothes on the chair across the room.
“My clothes—” he began.
The change in her—he could not define it. But he knew she would not understand about clothes.
“Come like this?” he asked feebly.
She sprang gracefully to her feet, eyes sparkling. She nodded eagerly, held out her hand to him.
Mulvaney would not have been astonished had she stepped out the window and floated lightly to the ground. He would have followed heroically after. She did nothing of the kind, however. She took his hand and led him down the stairs to the front door.
Then they were treading barefoot through soft grass, and he felt the caress of the nightwind on his body.
“Pinch me,” Mulvaney said. “I want to know if I’m dreaming!”
Joan Jordan—the new Joan Jordan—laughed up into his questioning face. She sobered quickly.
“Tell me, Kenneth—how did your parents—die?”
He frowned and remained stubbornly silent.
“I’m so tired of the Valley, Kenneth. I plan to leave it soon. It may some day save my life to know.”
She was mad. He could no longer doubt it. What had he let himself in for? Suppose the fierce inhabitants of the town should find them naked together like this? He thought of horsewhips and rails and feathers and tarpots.
Nonetheless, some of the girl’s ecstatic exuberance flowed into him. Abandonment began to throb in his veins. The accident suffered by his parents so long ago seemed somehow less personal than it had.
“I was only six when it happened. They went swimming—and drowned.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Is that all?”
“No. We lived on a farm. A neighbor lost some of his stock. Wolves, he said. He’d seen them crossing the irrigation ditch between our two places. My folks always enjoyed swimming in the ditch on moonlight nights—” He halted and looked at her suspiciously.
“Go on,” she breathed.
“They went out one night to swim. They didn’t come back. Our neighbor found them next morning—drowned in the ditch.”
“But how? Not both. It couldn’t just happen.”
“No. Our neighbor had secretly set traps under the water for the wolves he claimed to have seen crossing there.”
“Oh!” Horror throbbed in the cry. Then, “The wolves—did they ever come to his farm again?”
“I don’t know. I was sent away to an orphanage.”
Her white forehead wrinkled.
“Sometimes the ranchers around here set wolf-traps. But never under water. That’s—too cruel!”
Perhaps Mulvaney was beginning to guess the truth. Perhaps he preferred to believe that both of them were delightfully mad. Thought of the truth was so devastating. And worse than madness. For the moment, he was content to reject the thoughts that pounded at his brain. There was a primal joy to trotting across the soft pasture in the moonlight, the thrillingly naked girl at his side.
The moon was reflected in silver spangles from the dark, massed leaves of the cottonwoods along the creek. They paused in the shadows, where the bank dipped down to the cool dark waters.
The girl put both hands on his chest, forcing him to sit. Her vibrant young body was trembling with eagerness.
“Don’t move,” she whispered. “Watch me!”
A stray shaft of moonlight flashed upon her marble skin. She dipped into the creek, rolled over in the shallow water, flanks gleaming. He could see the water foam, and the girl’s body struggling; then she pawed toward shore. Emerging, it was not Joan Jordan, but a huge dog-like beast, white-furred from slim muzzle to graceful haunches. A wolf!
Mulvaney started to get up, a cry rising in his throat. The white wolf whipped around and plunged into the creek. Joan Jordan emerged, naked and dripping.
The breath whistled out of Mulvaney’s lungs. Bad night. Seeing things. The girl touched his bare shoulder with a cool, wet hand.
“You see? Now you do it!”
She pulled him to his feet, pushed him to the water’s edge. Mulvaney’s senses swam. It was out of all reason. He wanted to back away and run. Then he saw Joan naked in the stream, dark water gurgling about white thighs. He plunged forward.
The white wolf galloped out on the bank. Kenneth Mulvaney pawed after her. He found footing in the mud, lunged toward shore.
A thousand scents he had never known before swarmed upon his consciousness. The night was bright with a new acuteness of vision. He threw back his head to laugh aloud in sheer joy of living. Sleek, gray muzzle lifted to the moon, and Kenneth Mulvaney howled as a wolf howls, fiercely, savagely, with the eternal sorrow and loneliness of the wolf-kind.
Then he romped with the white she-wolf. The sky was a field of blazing gems, the earth a garden of Paradise. But she quickly ended their play.
“We don’t run alone here. The others are waiting. Bock will be angry.”
Mulvaney trotted obediently at her flank. He wanted to stay and romp, but Bock Martin said t
he pack must run together.
“It was different before Bock came,” the she-wolf told him. “We hunted deer in the mountains. Bock came from the Outside. He made himself our leader. He insists we attack cattle—and men!”
“Men have guns,” he said, bringing the thought into his wolf-brain with a vicious tug.
“We don’t fear guns, Kenneth. Only silver. Silver kills our kind, Men know that. When they realize what we are, they can arm against us. That is our danger from men. Another is the day. Never let dawn find you in wolf-form.”
The she-wolf quickened her pace. On the other side of a low mound, they found the wolf-pack waiting. Mulvaney stood atop the knoll, strong wolf-legs braced, gray-furred ears cocked forward, and received their voiceless greeting.
A great black wolf rose crouching from the midst of the pack and slunk forward, belly hugging the ground. Despite the change in form, Mulvaney knew that this black beast was Bock Martin. The hackles lifted on his sturdy shoulders, and he growled ominously.
“Don’t!” the she-wolf whispered. “It’s Bock!”
The slinking black wolf glided nearer. Mulvaney crouched, heaving loins pressed against the cool earth. The gray-furred muzzle wrinkled hatefully. Deadly fangs glinted in the moonlight.
Bock Martin was evil, Mulvaney sensed that now as he never had before. Had he been older and wiser in the ways of the wolf-men, Bock Martin would not have mattered. But Kenneth Mulvaney had never committed an evil in his life. It was through no fault of his he was one of the were-people. The training of his years in the orphanage was strong within him.
With hate-filled eyes and the promise of death in his snarling jaws, he awaited the sneaking advance of the sable hound of Hell.
Mulvaney had the advantage of height. When he saw the beast crouching and trembling for the leap, he launched his body forward. The wolf-people stood by in silent fear as the flashing, gray-furred shape streaked upon its enemy.
Mulvaney’s mind was the mind of a wolf. He was not afraid. The hot blood pounded fiercely in his veins. He was a new wolf—a young wolf. He had strength and advantage. Cunning did not matter.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 4
