“I’m a dog man, Father. I’ve worked with the creatures all my life. I know dogs maybe better than I know men. Sometimes I reckon I respect ’em more. I was five years in the Yukon country, training dogs. With my own eyes I saw a case of what I’ve just told you about. The Canadians called it loup-garou.”
Father Murphy looked harassed.
“It’s—it’s unthinkable, Sergeant. It’s blasphemous!”
Stranger looked bleak. “It was an accident, anyway. The fiend didn’t intend it that way. But there may be more accidents of the same kind. Think of it then. What I’m suggesting is only a last resort, you might say. D’you think I want to do it? God knows I’ll try everything else first. Me, I know dogs. You know men. Between us, we might figger something.”
The chaplain nodded somberly. “There are ways. I have never been called upon to use than. One wouldn’t be—not in this supposedly enlightened era. I’ll have to study somewhat. We can’t afford—”
“To make a mistake,” Stranger finished for him. “But in the Yukon, about that loup-garou, we didn’t make a mistake. We finished him.”
Behind the saturnine man’s opaque eyes glimmered a vision of graphic drama witnessed in the snowy woods of the North. He saw again the group of rough miners, mackinawed, toqued, stamping on ungainly snowshoes about a thing that lay dead in the snow, an evil thing that had lived beyond life, and now its blood was frozen to ruddy cake in the brittle cold.
Stranger fumbled in his dungaree jacket, withdrew a photographic contact print and tendered it to the chaplain.
“I had my suspicions yesterday. I heard him shoot, and it was patently impossible for him to miss. And there was no blood. Not anywhere, except his sleeve was soaked with it. That was his own blood. Then Grim, my dog, bolted, and none of the other dogs could stand it when he came around. They sensed him, y’see—what he is. So I had a photographer take his picture at the dressing station. He didn’t know anything about it.”
Father Murphy frowned at the bit of glossy paper.
“It seems to be a picture of the dressing station, all right. Rather blurred and out of focus.”
Stranger grinned tightly. “You think that is the photographer’s fault? It was focused on him, y’see. All you see there is background, and naturally it’s out of focus.”
Father Murphy looked up, puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” shrugged the sergeant. “The photographer is still biting his nails over it. He wanted to throw’ the negative away. I persuaded him to make a print, anyway. It’s the only proof I’ve got—so far.”
“Proof? Man, I don’t see how this proves anything!”
Stranger retrieved the print, tucked it into his pocket.
“That photographer is an expert in his line. He wouldn’t miss a picture not six feet away. But he did miss. You can see that for yourself. Now, there’s silver in the photographic emulsion—I dunno. Anyway, you’ve got to take my word for it, Father. About what I came for—”
Father Murphy sighed with trouble. “I have what you want,” he said slowly. “Just a minute. I’ll get it from my locker.”
“You’ll be ready to go with me tonight, Father—and bring the water?”
The chaplain nodded wearily. His eyes were bright with a new comprehension, an understanding of vileness that had not been his before.
“I would never have believed,” he breathed.
Stranger went away from the chaplain’s hut, concealing something under his jacket. He picked his way past clots of wounded about the medical station, directed his steps toward a repair depot where a group of greasy Marines were working on a disabled amtrac. One set down a glowing, gasoline blow-torch and rummaged in the amtrac’s vitals. He reached back for the torch, and it was gone. He cursed without visible effect, regarded his mates with suspicion. An hour later, the blow-torch returned as mysteriously as it had disappeared.
Father Murphy went out to solace the wounded and to inquire into the situation in the hills. When he returned, he found the heavy base of a solid silver candlestick lying on his bunk. The upper half had been quite melted away. He wrapped the relic in a piece of chamois and put it soberly away in his locker.
* * * *
Lieutenant Barkis slept fitfully.
Near midnight, he awoke in the darkness of his hut, racked with a scalding thirst. He got up and fumbled for his canteen. It was dry. There was water in the village, if he could just think where. It was brought up in tank-trailers from the distillery at the beach. He lurched out the blanketed door.
A full moon lighted the trodden earth of the village. Crisp shadows cut across areas of moonglow, breaking the landscape into a weird phantasmagoria of brilliance and blackness, like an infra-red photograph.
The night was breathless and still. The sounds of war were muted among the hills of Watinau. The jungle brooded under the moon, as if it had body and brain, and the moon-shadows were Circean convolutions of the latter, spawning vileness and evil in tangible thought.
Barkis did not hesitate in the open, though he seemed to have forgotten about the tank-trailers. His thirst did not call to drink. It was a sensation of his whole body, a singing flame that rippled ecstatically from nerve end to nerve end. The air held for him the promise of a new and keener quality of living. He savored it, cocked his ears to the infinitesimal sounds of the jungle. He heard the purl of running water, and the melody of it was a lure. He thrust his way into the jungle, almost running in his hurry.
A hundred feet from the edge of the village, the little creek that came down from the hills of Watinau broadened into a pool. The shadows hid riffles above and below the pool, but here the moonlight was bright and barred with the shadow of vines and creepers.
At this pool the villagers had got their water for cooking and drinking; here they had washed their lava-lavas and splashed the silvery drops upon their supple, brown hides, had dived and swum in their eternal playtime.
The surface of the pool turned sluggishly in the moonlight; in the shadows, the riffles chuckled rhythmic melody as old as the earth is old, a hymn of living and laughter unwrit in the books of eld, and always fresh to the listening ear.
The place was elemental in the sight and the sound and the smell of it. Barkis breathed the air in delighted gulps, plunged suddenly into the pool, unaware of the helmeted pair who crouched among the vines on the far bank, their drab-dappled combat suits blending with the camouflage of night.
It was something Barkis did not fully understand, this ecstasy that transformed him. Last night it had happened, while the moon was riding high. Then he had answered the call through the prompting of instinct. Tonight was the repetition of experience, and the cool waters washed the fever from his blood, sharpened his senses to supernormal keenness, and brought about…that other change.
Fierce strength throbbed in Barkis’ limbs, suddenly lean and steel-thewed. His chest labored and deepened; his flanks grew thinner. He felt the tingling growth of his ears, the fullness of feeling as the bony structure of his skull lengthened and metamorphosed into a lupine muzzle. He paddled to shore, drew his wolfish body upon the land, and squatted on his haunches. He lifted his gray-furred muzzle to the moon, the wolf that was Barkis did this, and he sobbed the anguished joy of his being to that cold luminary.
Full-throated, piercing, the call of the pack lifted and quavered, a sound of pleasure and of pain, of savage joy and sorrowing evil. In the village, men awakened and felt afraid. Some who knew of such things listened and shook their heads.
“Wolves on Watinau? What a dream!” And they went back to sleep.
The two across the pool shivered where they knelt. Father Murphy made the sign of the cross and murmured in Latin. Saturnine Sergeant Stranger clutched grimly the stock of his carbine and peered with burning eyes through a shield of vines at the thi
ng that had once been a man.
Far into the hills of Watinau knifed that throbbing call, and one there in a den of rocks pricked up his ears and listened. The hair rose upon the listener’s shaggy back. Black lips writhed hatefully away from wolfish fangs. The devil dog of Watinau padded swiftly into the jungle.
The thing that had been Barkis harkened a moment upon the vanishing echo of his own cry. The jungle held its breath and quaked silently in fear of the unknown. And the wolf licked its chops with a pink slab of tongue, skulked into an alleyway of shadow.
Sergeant stranger relaxed. “Now are you convinced, Father?”
“Irrevocably!” The chaplain repressed further shuddering. He spoke in a breathless whisper. “Poor devil!”
“He enjoys his hellish existence,” Sergeant Stranger vouchsafed. “It’s still new to him. It was only night before last that he was bitten by the werewolf. The infection must have been immediate. It is said that it is.”
He pondered darkly. “He hates, all things human, now. Some night, unless we interfere, he will run away into the jungle and never come back. Right now he’s held by ties of habit and discipline. These won’t dissolve easily.”
“It explains his actions when I stopped by his hut,” the chaplain mused. “Are you sure he will come back here for the change at dawn?”
“This was where I first saw him. When he changed from a wolf into a man. He went directly back to his hut then. When I talked to him that morning, I hinted pretty strong, but I didn’t tell him all I had seen.
“This pool has associations. If I’m not mistaken, he identifies this spot with the change, and we can almost count on his coming back. Any running water will do, of course. He could change any place between the beach and the hills. But maybe he doesn’t know that. The chances are he will come right here.”
Father Murphy nodded. “Your reasoning is sound. Perhaps if I keep watch, you can get a little sleep while we wait.” Stranger argued before giving in reluctantly. He recognized that there were certain things troubling the soul of the priest, and these things required contemplation for a readjustment of values. Several hours later, Stranger came awake at the chaplain’s touch on his shoulder.
“He’s here,” breathed Father Murphy.
Stranger peered through the screen of vines. The moonlight had angled sharply while he slept. Now it lighted the opposite bank in detail. It seemed deserted to the casual glance, but sharp scrutiny discerned the deeper blot among the shadows, the glint of ferocious eyes watching the pool with an intentness that matched their own. Stranger’s grip crushed upon the chaplain’s arm.
Barkis had slaked his thirst. A soldier’s blood is hot, strong, and vital. The wolf loped easily, reveling in that strength and vitality which had become his. Whether the soldier had been friend or foe had not concerned him. He had not noticed; for both were Man to the wolf-kind, and hated. He had drenched his muzzle in blood, and dawn now crept across the sea. A dim instinct warned him of the fatal sun, urged speed into the lean, gray flanks. And true to Stranger’s prediction, he was bent upon return to the place his mind associated with the change.
So the wolf came again to the village, and circling, approached the pool.
He stopped, one paw upraised. Suspicion flamed in the narrowed eyes, Barkis’ own, human eyes in the head of the wolf. He tested the gentle dawn wind with his nostrils, but it came off the village and brought him the scent only of oil, sleeping men, and gasoline. He hunkered down in the path and stared hypnotically at the pallid surface of the pool a few yards ahead. Belly-wise, he crept forward, tense and alert.
Out of the shadows lunged the devil dog of Watinau, muzzle frozen in a hideous grimace. Barkis’ own fangs bared and snapped. He rolled, sprang to his feet, tumbled with the shock of the beast’s assault. In and out of the shadows they writhed, horribly silent save for the scuffing of clawed feet, the clashing of fangs.
They were two things out of nightmare, invincible to Nature, each vulnerable only to the other, their hatreds steeped in the brew of Hell. The fires of the Pit flamed in their savage eyes; their satanic souls were curdled with the acids of evil. The black beast’s strength and cunning was matched by the litheness and man-courage of the gray one, his spirit not yet polluted in the full, revolting vileness of his condition.
They fought while the stars paled in the sky, while the moon grew dim and effaced itself, while streamers of dawn-light stole forth and laced a web to trap the eastern stars. Rigid, spellbound, the two across the pool observed the unfolding of the drama, watched the grim race of mortal combat against the deadly rising of the sun.
Then the gray wolf’s fangs found the favored spot, tore with bloody exultation. And the black wolf died, and dwindled, and changed. The hair of its body melted, the form of its bones shifted. The body became as that of a man, and the gray wolf worried it, growled, and tore it some more.
The unknown was not to be identified by age or race. Perhaps the corpse was all that remained of a hell-pacted acolyte of some obscure Shinto temple. He might even have been Polynesian, or a white man—the cursed product of some ancient shipwreck. Knowledge of the European origin of the werewolf later inclined Stranger’s opinion to this latter view. Who could tell for sure, now that he had died? Who knew how long he had suffered thus, or from whence he came? Death leveleth all things, even the accursed and the unholy.
Sergeant Stranger stood erect across the pool. A full canteen, unstoppered, hurtled from his hand, splashed into the water. The sound was shockingly loud in the dawn-quiet. The gray wolf whirled, snarling.
“Barkis!” shouted the sergeant. “I have just thrown holy water into the pool! The water is spoiled for you.” He lifted his carbine and aimed. “Don’t move from where you are. There’s a silver bullet in this gun. It will split your head wide open if you so much as stir! Do you understand?” He hurled exhortation to the priest. “Now, Father!”
He could not take his eyes from the wolf to see what the chaplain was doing, but he heard the cadenced murmur of Latin invocation. Stranger’s brain was in turmoil—would the exorcism prevail? Time was pitifully short. The day brightened from moment to moment. At the first touch of the sun, the wolf would die horribly. More horrible still, a virtuous soul would be hurled to eternal damnation. Dared he act, if the exorcism failed?
The gray wolf rumbled a dirge of hatred and fear. Its tongue lolled. Sweat came out on Stranger’s forehead. The palm of his hand was slippery on the carbine stock. Father Murphy faltered in his droning ritual.
“Useless!” he whispered. “And there is the sun.”
Indeed, the east had flushed, and a roseate glow tipped the tallest trees of the jungle. The gray wolf whimpered, shifted its glance from the dawn-hued tree-tops to the pool that had become as a bath of acid for him.
Across the pool, Sergeant Stranger saw the human eyes of the beast, saw the pain and the suffering and the tears in them. He squeezed gently upon the trigger. The world of the gray wolf obliterated itself in sound and flame.
* * * *
“I didn’t want to do it,” Stranger repeated numbly, as they stood over the bodies. “God knows I didn’t want to do it!” Mingled expressions of shock and horror struggled across his saturnine features. He and the priest looked down upon the prostrate dead, the one grimacing still with hideous hate, the other calmly reposed, smiling almost, with a small, blue hole in the middle of his forehead. Barkis had scarcely bled where the silver bullet entered his brain.
Father Murphy dropped to one knee, performed his offices. The dead man was at rest.
“Silver once doomed a Life,” the priest said, rising. “Thirty pieces of silver. In compensation of this taint, it was given the power in this wise to save from damnation. He knows now what he escaped.”
Stranger’s glance was bleak. “I had to do it, didn’t I, Father? I gave him back the soul that h
ad been stolen from him, didn’t I? Do you think they will take that into consideration?”
Father Murphy’s face was transfigured by understanding and compassion.
“It was not murder, lad, and they need never know.” He drew the sergeant’s heavy jungle knife, like thousands more issued to jungle fighters, from its sheath on Stranger’s hip and dipped its blade in the blood of the unknown. He pressed the cold fingers of Lieutenant Barkis around the leathern haft and came erect. For the first time since Sergeant Stranger had sought his aid, the chaplain’s eyes were calm and untroubled.
Father Murphy spoke gently. “Perhaps a Japanese patrol sneaked through our lines. Who can say this dead fellow is not a Jap, that his rags are not the remains of a uniform? Barkis died a hero when he attacked single-handed, with only a knife. Unfortunately, his killer escaped.”
The slope went out of Stranger’s thin shoulders. He lifted his stubbled jaw and met the chaplain’s unfaltering glance.
The tableau was set. Already he heard the sound of men approaching cautiously from the village to investigate. The shot had been loud in the morning stillness. Naturally, there would be questions. And answers, too, just as naturally. Adequate answers. Little suspicion attends violent death, where there is a war going on.
ROOM WITHOUT WINDOWS
Originally published in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, September 1954.
I had never really liked Lavorine De Valgis. I didn’t like his name or the sly, lecherous attitude he could assume when telling an off-color story. I didn’t like his insisting upon a friendship I didn’t want, and I didn’t like loaning him money—though he always paid back with great punctuality. I didn’t like him around the house, either, but he would drop in now and again to spend an evening with Ethel and me. He accepted our civil politeness as entertainment and never failed to return.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 11
