The suggestion revolted him. Such beauty as that of Clarisse was meant for man to enjoy, not destroy. What should he do?
* * * *
For a long time—many days—Hubert did nothing. Nothing, that is, except wrestle with himself.
Mademoiselle Clarisse remained her usual self. Pale, aloof, smiling. She said nothing of the damage she must have noticed had accrued to her door. Only now, when Hubert in his agony would have avoided her, she sought him, as if for the express purpose of showing him she really was no different.
“Are you angry with me, Hubert?” she asked quietly. “I would not have you angry with me!”
She looked into his eyes, and Hubert felt his senses spin. The hot curve of her lips mocked him; a throbbing pulse in her ivory throat taunted him. He fought with the urge to seize her in his arms, to kiss her, to fondle her, to bury his twitching face in the flaming oblivion of her hair.
He fought and won. He left her quickly, and sent a lackey for the Commissaire de Police.
Pierre was in an intolerant mood. The last foray of the were-wolf, he asserted, had resulted in four victims, although all four were safely indoors and had barred the doors and windows of their chaumière. Nonetheless, la bête du diable had leaped upon the roof, burrowed through the thatch, and devoured them. Not one of the terrorized cottage inhabitants had escaped.
Hubert looked across the room at Mademoiselle Clarisse, at her scarlet-tinted nails, and wondered what bruises that stain concealed.
“Leave us, my dear,” he told her. “I have some matters of state to talk over with the Commissaire.”
Clarisse smiled her soft, strangely bewitching smile and drifted out of the room.
“Hein?” queried Pierre. “What is it you would talk of?”
Hubert pawed his mustaches restlessly.
“Pierre, I have not been asleep. No, not me. I have kept awake, and I have done what you have not.”
“You accuse me of laxness in my duty?” cried Pierre. “What have you discovered of importance that I do not know?”
Hubert smiled tiredly and closed his eyes. “Mon vieux, I have discovered your loup-garou.”
Pierre sat with mouth, agape. He began to babble. “But who? Who is this bête du diable? Tell me at once, that I may—”
The governor waved his hand for silence.
“All in good time, Pierre, the creature will be delivered to you. One does not accuse a were-wolf and dispose of him by ordinary means, remember. But no. It is necessary to be wary. It is necessary to employ the proper weapons!”
“I am dreaming,” said Pierre, nervously patting the broad hulk of his stomach. “For once, the governor does not fall dead with apoplexy at mention of the were-wolf. For once, the governor also believes in the loup-garou!”
Hubert wagged his head.
“That is neither here nor there, mon vieux. It will be necessary to enlist the aid of the clergy…secure l’eau bénit…mould the bullets of silver. You know all that. Have it done. I will show you the place at the foot of my garden to set your trap for the fiend. That is all. The rest is up to you…on the night of full moon.”
Le Commissaire de Police went out, tottering. Hubert had steadfastly refused to divulge the name of the were-wolf. Was he imagining? Was he making sport of him, Pierre de Cardinois, Commissaire de Police? What a one, celui-là.
* * * *
Although summer was at hand and the weather fine, the days were dark and filled with torment for Hubert de Montreuil. He walked as usual with the beautiful maid at his side, yearned for her, and reflected upon his treason.
He thought with sorrow of the long days, the months and empty years ahead. He could not bear it! He must save her from his own perfidy.
It was sunset, and they strolled together in the garden. Clarisse looked anxiously at the darkening sky, up to the window of, her apartment, and made a motion to withdraw. Hubert seized her in his arms.
“No!” he cried. “No, no, Clarisse, my love—you shall not go! I will tell you that I know your secret—saw you from your own window. I know you for what you are, but I love you…”
Clarisse stiffened in his grasp, and as suddenly relaxed.
“I felt that you knew,” she said quietly. She sighed. “I am sorry, too. It has presented a problem, but perhaps it is best that you know.” She smiled her pale, winning smile and brushed the fiery cloud of her hair back from clear-skinned cheeks. “Hubert, I can tell you now that I come from a very fine family that thinks me dead. Better that, than that they should know the truth. It would do them great harm if my secret became known. When this…change first came upon me, I left home.” She hung her head.
Hubert squeezed her passionately. “It does not matter, my dearest. Nothing matters now.
And he pressed his first kiss upon her, felt her yield in his arms, return his caress. And so ardently did he press his passion upon her, that he did not feel the tiny thrill of pain in his lip, the piercing nip of sharp teeth in his flesh. It was only when he drew back from her, panting, that he saw the drop of blood, more scarlet yet than her scarlet mouth, and knew that it came from himself. Clarisse smiled dreamily, twined her arms about him.
“I have drawn your blood, Hubert,” she murmured huskily. “When the full moon rises tonight, you will be the same as I.”
“I—a were-wolf, too?”
She held him close, arching her body against him.
“It was the only way, Hubert, love. Otherwise, you might have denounced me, destroyed me. Now that we are the same, we’ll go on together, living forever as our kind does, unless we meet the fatal silver. But we can take care of that, can we not? Imagine, darling, an eternity with me, always like this…”
Swirling clouds of flame licked at Hubert’s brain. He forgot himself utterly in that savage moment, for the virus was quick, and its effect destroyed the mind as well as the body. Hubert gloried in his new-found estate, and hungered for the delights it promised him.
Suddenly her hand was heavy upon his shoulder.
“Twilight is here. The moon will soon rise—”
Leaping fire twisted in Hubert’s veins. He was only half aware while he stripped away his garments, trod eagerly at-the side of the naked Clarisse. Nor was the shock of water upon his body of consequence as he dipped with her in the fountain, and he writhed in the ecstasy of change wrought by the running water upon his bones, muscles, and sinews…
The moon lifted its golden rim above the hills. The powdered stars drew back from its saffron glow. The night wind breathed softly in the trees. The air was redolent with the scent of blossoms. To Hubert, there had never been such sensual delight, such dreadful depth of feeling. He shook the water from his heavy coat in a shower of sparkling drops, and trotted along the path, belly down, behind the slim, graceful, gray-wolf shape of Clarisse.
Hubert thought her more beautiful thus, than she had been as woman, and his heart filled and seemed to burst with yearning.
Confidently, she went ahead, and where the path divided, she took the way that led among the shrubs at the foot of the garden.
Hubert paused at the fork; a strange feeling knifed at his brain…a thought, a memory. And then, in a rush, his mind was alive with dreadful significance. He remembered the ambush he had planned.
He tried to cry out—call to his mate. But there was no voice in his wolf-throat. He could not speak with the lungs and the jaws of a wolf, and already Clarisse had disappeared ahead, among the clustering shadows at the lower end of the garden.
Hubert stood rigid, wolf-paws planted, and he heard it—heard the crackling volley of firearms, and the high, shrill scream. Then he heard the triumphant shouting of men, and his man-brain understood the words they said, and fathomed deeper, sounded the empty depths of his own bitter future.
The gray wolf
-shape dropped its head, sank belly-wise to the ground, and whimpering, crawled away into the dark, into the loneliness, into the ever-burgeoning fear of an unknown existence…
* * * *
We were silent when the stranger had finished the story of Hubert de Montreuil.
“It was a good story, was it not?” he asked, rising.
A Club member snorted. “Very entertaining, but scarcely true!”
The stranger smiled with a lupine expression and glanced at his pocket watch.
“I should be delighted to discuss it further with you, gentlemen, but I fear I have used up all my time.” His teeth flashed. “As I reminded you, there is a full moon tonight. It rises in something less than four minutes. You might enjoy hunting were-wolves on the back streets tonight!”
Somebody grunted, and the stranger left us, smiling strangely. Discussion broke out abruptly, expressed in a series of violent negatives.
“An entertaining chap,” remarked a Club member, “with a flair for unusual fiction. I doubt he meant us to believe him.”
“No,” said I, with my eye on the washroom door, through which the lean stranger had disappeared, “No, he was just an entertaining stranger…”
The washroom door was swinging open. It swung shut again, and nobody that I could see had come out, but a leather lounge chair obscured the lower part of the door from my view.
I turned my attention to a remark directed at me, and when I looked back, my glance drawn by a semblance of shadow that had seemed to flit across the space to the open street door, I stiffened. A large dog stood there, a large, gray dog. My glance briefly engaged that of the animal, and the creature smiled, grinned at me, so it seemed, then turned and vanished among the gray shadows that crowded the street.
A dog, I thought…it might as easily be a wolf!
SONG IN THE THICKET
Originally published in Weird Tales, May 1954.
John Drake drove off the highway upon the dusty approach of Beauregard Avenue. All the streets are avenues in Burton County; although, new development style, they deserved rather to be called ruts. Beauregard Ruts, Drake thought with a high degree of dissatisfaction. Whyever he and Bev had chosen to settle in Burton County was something that presently evaded his more cognizant faculties.
Twelve thousand bucks…twenty years to pay it in…be dead by then. Drake tooled the sedan through a choking cloud of dust. Twelve thousand bucks down the drain—if you could call a cesspool a proper drain. There were no sewers in Burton County yet…they’d come later. Sewers would bite an extra twenty-five dollars a month out of his already inadequate income. He kicked himself for not having foreseen the sewer problem. Add that expense to house payments, car payments, insurance, lights, water, gas, food, clothing, and the sizable sum he had invested in a perverted lawn that refused to become grass.…
He braked to a crawl and steered carefully around a big mud puddle in the middle of the road. A dollar and a quarter he’d spent this very day for a wash job, and damned if he was going to throw that away with a wild dive through that obscene patch of liquidity.
No wonder there was a puddle in the road, Drake mused viciously. The whole benighted country was clay from the surface to the center of the earth…and probably a few thousand miles beyond. No drainage through clay…clay! No wonder his lawn wouldn’t grow! Gezwich told him that yesterday…no, it was this morning. You got to haul in topsoil, Gezwich had said, or put in sod. Need topsoil in any case…the builders buried the original topsoil under the junk they dug out to make the basement.
Drake had always thought dirt was dirt, and dirt was what grass grew in. Thirty bucks worth of seed and fertilizer—hours of back-breaking effort—and the yard was still a semi-sea of yellowish mud whenever it rained. When it didn’t rain, the soil baked so hard you couldn’t sink a pick-in it. Oh, of course, he had a few sprigs of grass here and there…crabgrass grows anywhere.
Drake steered carefully around another puddle. There were not many finished houses on Beauregard Avenue. Drake had the last one, at the end of the street. There were several more about midway down, but all the other lots were still a-building. Lean skeleton houses lined the dusty road.
Another puddle. Drake peered at it with a frown of disfavor. Something about those puddles had set his subconscious mind to working. He could almost hear the whirring and clicking of mental cogs. The puddle was as ordinary as any, damp around the edges and wet in the middle. Otherwise, the roadway was covered with a thick, soft layer of dust. There wasn’t much traffic on the back streets of Burton County, and Drake was sure those puddles had not been there when he left for work this morning. If it had rained in Burton County today, the roadway would at least be damp, wouldn’t it…?
Drake coped no further with the problem of the puddles. He carefully negotiated the perimeters of several more and drove onto his own drive.
A flurry of pink and white in a yellow starched housedress of economical cotton fluttered at the kitchen door, hurtled out to the car. Drake opened the door. “H’lo, hon. How’s m’baby?” Beverly Drake planted a luscious, soul-satisfying kiss on her homecoming husband’s lean chops. They still had a couple of million kisses to go—and a couple of babies, too—before Bev would content herself with a mere look out the window as John came driving in. For the present, they were very much married, and very much in love.
“I’m so glad you’re home, lover boy!”
Beverly was blonde, sparkling blue-eyed, warm and cuddlesome. Drake grabbed her to him and returned the luscious, soul-satisfying kiss she had so generously given him.
“’Smatter? Trouble?”
He knew there was no trouble. Bev said it every night. She was just glad he was home and wanted him to know it. He knew it and was glad of it, too. Bev was all he wanted out of life—the rest of it could go hang.
He expressed the depth of his feelings with “What’s for supper, baby?”
She ignored his outburst of connubial passion.
“John there’s something I want you to do for me before it gets dark…”
“Eh? Sure…anything at all, baby!”
He kissed her again, even more satisfying than before.
“Well!” she balked, pulling free. “Nothing like killing a dragon or anything! I just want you to drain a puddle out of the front yard.”
He went up the kitchen steps into the house.
“Let it dry up, baby.”
“But John…!”
He turned, chucked her under the chin, grinning.
“Anything for you, baby…after supper!”
He progressed into the living room, dumped his hat on a chair. He sprawled on the davenport. “Where’s m’paper?”
“Pork chops for supper…to answer your questions in the order of their appearance,” Beverly said, running one hand through his hair. She balanced herself delicately on the arm of the davenport.
“As for your paper—it’s out in the middle of that nasty puddle I was telling you about!”
“The hell it is!” Drake swung himself to a sitting posture. “What kind of an idiot have we got for a paper boy? Get on the phone and have another sent over.”
Beverly went dutifully to the phone, called the local distributor.
“He’ll be by with it in about a half hour,” she said, hanging up. “John, I want to discuss that puddle with you…”
Drake lay back on the davenport and reached for a magazine.
“Hmmmm. Hope you told that guy what I think of his delivery…”
“John, the puddle…”
“Lots of puddles,” John observed, whetting his glance on a four-color representation of pulchritude in the magazine ad. “There are puddles all over the road,” he said. “What do you expect when it rains?”
“Did it rain downtown today?”
“Don’t think it did…just out here.”
“Not out here, it didn’t. I’ve been home all day, so I know.”
“Maybe a street cleaning wagon went by.”
“Be sensible!”
“Okay. Maybe there’s a water main bust.”
“John—this puddle in front of our door.…”
Drake’s face went a trifle gray. “Good God! Do you suppose our water main could be broken? And on our side of the meter?… Oy! At the rate we’re paying for water!”
He got up quickly and opened the front door.
“It isn’t a broken water main,” Beverly said matter-of-factly, “because the water doesn’t flow. It just puddles. There seems to be a sag in the walk there, right at the foot of the steps.”
Indeed it did appear that the water filled a sag in the concrete walkway. It lapped out several feet on either side into the gruesome mockery of a lawn. John knew there couldn’t be a sag there. The grade sloped from the house to the street…the walk itself was slightly crowned.
The evening paper lay, as Beverly had said, in the middle of the puddle, just beyond reach of a questing broom handle.
“Could you drain it?” Beverly suggested, referring to the puddle. “Dig a little ditch or something?”
“It’ll dry up by morning,” Drake protested dubiously.
“Are we to ask the Harrians to wade through it tonight? Remember…we’re having them over for canasta. Or do you?”
Drake hadn’t remembered, but he did now.
“Get me a broom,” he said tersely, “and go on with supper. I’ll sweep it away.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Uh-uh what? Must I get my own broom?”
“Nuh. No sweep.”
“Nonsense. Get me a broom.”
“It won’t work, I say.”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 15
