Innocuous in appearance, the letter engendered a feeling of excitement and boding ill in Ernot, for he recognized by a small sign following the signature that the letter was from Amphidias.
* * * *
Amphidias was not Amphidias. That is to say, no eye—no human eye—would have recognized portly, balding Edwin Van Zant as the scrawny, hirsute character Ernot knew as Amphidias. But Ernot knew him. He knew him by smell, a werewolf faculty.
“You should not have moved so soon, Ernot,” Amphidias chided him. He nodded over a desk, covered with slab-glass, in his handsome real estate office. He fingered a fine pair of pince-nez and pursed rather puffy lips. “It caused a full day of delay in delivering my letter to you.” He sighed. “However, no harm done. We still have time.”
Ernot released pent breath. He had been recalling more vividly of late stories the Others had told of the elder. Being in disfavor with Amphidias, They said, was as effective a way to end one’s werewolfing as to drink a vial of silver nitrate during the Moon.
“I come ready to serve, Amphidias,” he said humbly.
The older one smiled, rather horribly, Ernot thought. Although Amphidias could change his physical appearance, certain features remained to mark him. His teeth, for instance…
“About the Law,” Amphidias pursued. “Has it ever occurred to you to question its wisdom, Ernot?”
Ernot shook his head.
Amphidias nodded wisely, “There have been some who have. To attack the Quick is forbidden. If one should chance to escape, humanity would be warned against us. To cannot have that. The Quick-Dead—the sick, the dying, the Quick on the field of battle, victims of accident—these are our lawful prey. The Law is a wise one, but there still are some who flout the Law.”
Ernot squirmed and sweated. Cold window-light glittered on the lenses of Amphidias’ pince-nez. He frowned.
“It is enough that humans have their confounded myths, legends, and superstitions about us. If they really knew and believed in us, if they really knew their ultimate danger as a race from us, they’d wipe us out…like that.” He snapped his fingers, then smiled.
“Mankind kids itself it will mutate some day into Homo Superior. Homo-Superior is already on earth—has been here as long as Homo sapiens. We are Homo Superior!” He drew himself up proudly and Ernot nodded. Race stuff. He sneered inside.
“To all ends,” Amphidias went on, “we are immortal. We die, yes. But we can’t ordinarily be killed. Only silver in the hands of humans at the full of the moon can kill us. We are not many compared to Mankind’s billions. A few Moons of systematic hunting would finish us.”
Ernot waited in silence. He felt that he was secure. In his own forays upon the human kind, he endeavored to cause the accident that provided his victims. He recalled last Moon and the careening convertible on the turnpike. He licked his lips with an inner grin of greedy pleasure.
“You are young,” Amphidias continued. “It is time you know that we werewolves police our own organization.”
Ernot sat up straight. “Then what I have heard is true—”
Amphidias waved glittering pince-nez.
“I am not the Master Wolf, if that is what you have heard. There are Others older than I by ten thousand years or more. I am one of their agents…a policeman, if you like the term.”
He sobered and grew reminiscent. “In the Middle Ages, communications were poor. Travel was exceptionally difficult and limited, owing to the warlike attitudes of small communities of men. We lost control of some of our subjects, and…well, Mankind has its legends and superstitions about us as a result of our inability to hold a closer rein. However,” he brightened, “things are different today. Practically no one believes in us; and no one, so far as we know, has seen a werewolf lately—and lived to tell of it!”
Ernot grinned and licked his lips again.
“I am here on a policing job,” Amphidias announced.
Ernot quailed. “But I—”
“You’re all right—for now,” Amphidias soothed him. “There are Others in this city, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” whispered Ernot.
“Several,” admitted Amphidias. “You would not have run across these I have in mind—a father and daughter. Out of your class.”
Ernot pricked up his ears. A were-girl? Perhaps you couldn’t live like this for a million years and like it unless… He leaned forward with lively anticipation.
“This father and daughter combination,” said Amphidias sternly, “has broken the Law—consistently! They must be liquidated, because of the manifest danger to the rest of our kind.”
Ernot drew back. “What am I to do?”
“They not only attack the Quick,” Amphidias explained, as if ignoring Ernot’s question, “they take exorbitant chances at it. They invite their victims to social affairs in their own home. There have been numerous disappearances, and so far they have got away with it. We cannot risk their action any longer.”
Ernot said, “Shall we use…silver?”
Amphidias shook his head. “No. We shall use a little known natural law with which we of the Law Enforcement Agency are familiar. So far as ordinary damage is concerned, our kind is practically indestructible. However, a werewolf is susceptible to the damage that can be inflicted upon him by another werewolf, so long as both are in the same form—man to man, or wolf to wolf. I am not surprised that you did not know this, Ernot. For instance,” he smiled, “I could hang you quite neatly and with dispatch at this very instant and you would be dead—quite dead!”
Ernot swallowed.
“Which reminds me,” reminisced Amphidias, “of the time—it was back in the Middle Ages and we were having that trouble I was telling you about. One of our people unfortunately revealed himself to the human population. He was caught, tried by the people of the village, and sentenced to be hanged on the night of the full moon. Well, to make certain that he was hanged, our organization loaned one of its members to be the hangman. Just as the hangman fitted the noose to the wretch’s cervical column, a rainstorm came up, wetting everybody, and condemned, hangman, and three of the judges instantly changed into werewolves and went racing away into the night.”
Amphidias chuckled without humor and cocked an eye at Ernot.
“Let that be a lesson to you and keep dry when the moon is full. A good rainstorm will change you as fast as a dip in the creek.”
Ernot nodded dumbly. He had had experience with the unexpected and unpleasant change a werewolf endures when caught in a rainstorm during the Moon. Under certain circumstances it could prove embarrassing and even fatal.
“How about this—er—father and daughter?” he pressed.
“Enough for now,” Amphidias told him. “Wait until the Moon. I will pick you up at your hotel.”
* * * *
Ernot suffered a fever of impatience until the Moon arrived. For a fortnight his mind had dwelt on nothing save the thought of meeting the were-girl. He had never seen one in his life, and human women disgusted him. There was something of sparkling excitement in the thought of actually meeting a female of his own kind. He wondered what she looked like.
Amphidias drove carefully, at what seemed to Ernot a snail’s pace. They had left the city, and the road wound among fields and quaint hills, wooded and somnolent in the late afternoon sun.
Before leaving Ernot’s hotel, the two had anointed themselves with a decoction provided by Amphidias.
“It will,” he said, “disguise our werewolf odor and confuse the condemned. They will think we are human.”
A thousand questions twisted like gray worms through Ernot’s mind. He frowned against the light of the westering sun. Who were these Others they were about to meet? How were they to handle the situation? Was it not possible to spare the were-girl’s life?
/> “They are a banker who calls himself Jerome Sanderson,” Amphidias said, “and his daughter Sandra. Her mother died in the neighborhood of ninety or a hundred years ago, I think, in child-birth, Sandra’s father had in a human physician, and as I recall, the surgeon used a knife, the metal of which was alloyed with silver. Phphphttt! Anyway, the girl must be about your age, Ernot.”
Ernot wondered. “Is she pretty?”
“I’ve never seen her,” shrugged Amphidias. “I suppose she is. Most were-women are considered astoundingly beautiful. Being Homo Superior, of course, they would be. Practically any extremely beautiful woman is almost sure to be a werewolf.”
Amphidias peered at the road. “It doesn’t matter whether she is beautiful or not. It has no bearing on the case. She, with her father, has broken the Law. Getting back to our problem—they think I am a real estate promoter. I have told them you are my assistant. I have here,” he patted a bulging briefcase, “the money and papers necessary to transfer the title of a certain estate from the name of Jerome Sanderson to my own. That is the ostensible reason for our visit, which I have maneuvered to fall on the night of the Moon.
“We shall give them the benefit of a trial. But if they act true to form tonight, we shall find them alone at home, waiting for us. They will have dismissed their servants for the night.
“Doubtless, they will make some pretext to lure us near water, then change and attack us. Thus we shall try them and they will acknowledge their guilt. The benefit of surprise will be on our side. I will liquidate the father and you the daughter. Change when she does, waste no lime, and show no mercy!”
Ernot said nothing. He considered himself very shrewd, and was already reviewing the possibilities of betraying Amphidias. After all, would he not be better off as the husband of a rich banker’s beautiful daughter than as the tool of a doubtful accomplice who, now that his original thousand was spent, was shamefully tight with money? Already they clamored for their rent at the hotel.
The car finally turned into a lonely drive that wound among thickly grown trees toward a large house but dimly seen, buried in thickets at the crest of a hill. The last rays of the setting sun laid golden scimitars across the underbrush that grew rankly among the trees. The air was silent with the hushed expectancy of sunset.
Amphidias’ car ground up the slope. The house came out of its concealment. It was a massive structure of some antiquity, yet in excellent repair. Jacobean in its architecture, straightforwardly built along simple lines, the house featured stern gables and severe elements to its rambling wings.
There was a great portico of rather grim appearance, with a series of broad, stone steps rising to the tessellated porch. The door was tall, wide, painted a dead white, and ornamented with an enormous brass knocker.
There was no sight or sound of occupancy, and for a moment the two stared around them after getting out of the car and admiring the grim pile of the house. A well-kept lawn undulated from house and garden to the verge of the encroaching wood.
Amphidias led the way to the dead-white door and hammered lustily with the brazen knocker.
Jerome Sanderson was tall and spare. Revealed in the semi-darkness of the hall, he gave the appearance of what the average person might think a werewolf looks like at home—except that the average person does not believe in werewolves and thinks of them scarcely or not at all.
“Mr. Van Zant!” Sanderson exclaimed. His voice was dry as a sandstorm in Hell. “Do come in!”
He bent a questioning glance to Ernot.
“My assistant, Mr. Les Os,” Amphidias spoke up.
“Mr. Lay-zoh,” Sanderson pronounced carefully. “So glad.”
He shook hands like a fistful of dry twigs. The impression was disheartening to Ernot. He began to have doubts about the desirability of a daughter of such a creature.
But he did not doubt for long. Sandra Sanderson was the first animate object to take Ernot’s eye the moment the trio entered the spacious, softly lit and luxuriously furnished drawing room that opened off the hall. Had a crowd besides been present, Ernot would have noted not one of them. Sandra bore out fully Amphidias’ contention in respect to the charms of werewolf women.
“You must excuse our lack of servants,” Jerome apologized reedily. “This is our cook’s night off. Our butler has to attend his ailing mother, and our maid was married last week. We have not found another since.”
Amphidias politely deprecated the lack and cast a discreet, knowing look at Ernot. He placed his briefcase upon the polished table.
“The better for business,” he said smartly. “Now here—”
“Sandra,” Sanderson’s voice rustled like a breeze playing in the papyrus leaves of the Book of the Dead. “Liqueurs, please. Your preference, gentlemen?”
Ernot named his with alacrity, Amphidias followed with a little more hesitation.
“Perhaps,” Sanderson said later, over empty glasses, “Mr. Lay-zoh would like to look around while we conclude our business, Mr. Van Zant. Sandra, will you please show the gentleman our garden? It is striking by moonlight.”
Ernot looked at Amphidias. The old one’s features expressed smug satisfaction. Ernot went willingly with the girl.
It was like a dream, where you follow a beautiful spectre flitting from great vaulted room to great vaulted room, breathless, never quite catching up. Ernot had a garbled impression of costly furnishings, of barred twilight entering great, wall-sized windows. Finally, they retraced their way along a whispering hall, down the broad curving stairs.
Amphidias and Sanderson still had their heads bent over papers spread across the luxurious mahogany of the dining room table. The girl touched Ernot’s arm softly.
“They are still busy. Let us see the garden now. The moon is full, and it will be beautiful.”
A coal-hole on a moonless night would be beautiful with her in it, thought Ernot. He took her hand and thrilled to the answering pressure of tiny fingers. They went out into the garden.
Deep dusk had fallen. The air was redolent with a thousand blooms, and so still. Far away, a cricket chirped. Ernot’s quick ear caught the tinkling murmur of falling water. He turned.
“Our fountain,” Sandra whispered warmly. “It is so beautiful in the moonlight…and the moon will be high enough in just a few minutes.”
High enough for…what? Ernot wondered.
Hand in hand, they trod the sounding gravel of a garden path. The fountain centered a tiny, flagged area. It was circular, perhaps a dozen feet across by several deep. From its center, a feathering spray shot into the air and showered tinkling into the basin.
They sat upon the stone curb and held hands in the near-dark, quiet, nerveless, waiting. The sky was deep purple. Here and there, faint stars struggled to peer out, like eyes piercing a royal shroud.
“Sandra!” whispered Ernot.
She put a finger to his lips. He could feel her waiting, luring, seductive. He could not live a million years with the thought of her upon his conscience! Ernot panted a little.
Footsteps crunched in the gravel. Sanderson spoke dryly, “Sandra, dear. We are going to look at the swimming pool. We will be back shortly.”
The sound of footsteps receded slowly as the banker and Amphidias took their way through unknown shadows toward the pool.
“The Moon!” whispered the girl, and clutched Ernot’s hand.
Above the girdling trees, the great golden orb swam into view. Pale light dappled the earth with shadow and moonglow, danced upon the feathering plume of the fountain. She stood-up.
“Now!” she cried exultantly, and quickly squirmed from her clothes.
Before Ernot could spring to clutch her, Sandra slipped over the rim of the fountain-pool, and whispering ripples closed over her. Ernot moved with haste. Bless the zippers he had had installed! Unzip here�
�unzip there…he followed her into the cool, intoxicating waters and felt ripples of delight pervade his being as the Change was effected.
They came up together, wolf and wolf, and the she-wolf uttered a yap of fright. There was no need now of speech. Mind to mind they grappled, and Ernot forced his thoughts upon her with feverish anxiety. The explanation of their deception went home, and the she-wolf answered with a hateful snarl.
“I love you, Sandra!” Ernot told her passionately. “I cannot do as Amphidias bids. Life has been so lonely for me, but with you at my side…promise to marry me, and I will kill Amphidias!”
Slowly the she-wolf crawled over the rim of the basin, stood dripping on the flags. She appeared to be in deep thought, Ernot followed and nuzzled her shoulder imploringly.
“Very well,” she thought at last, “I have never known another werewolf than my father, and no doubt I shall find you interesting!”
“Then we shall feast tonight,” Ernot promised warmly, “on the carcass of Amphidias! And you and I—”
He broke off, turned furry, pointed ears in the direction of a sound. “Back,” he told the she-wolf, “Hide, it is Amphidias.”
She glided away into the shadow of the fountain. Soft pads stirred among the gravel. Toenails rattled on the flagstones.
“Are you there, Ernot?”
“I am here, Amphidias.”
“Good, I have finished Sanderson. Where is the girl’s body?”
Ernot spied the gleam of the wolf’s eyes, and sprang.
“Ernot! What…”
The thought broke into a snarl. Savagely, from the breasts of both beasts, betrayer and betrayed, the fury of combat boiled. Ernot felt a lightning slash of razor-sharp teeth in his shoulder. He yelped with pain, twisted, flailed with fore and hind feet at once. Lean jaws clamped hard on the laboring throat of Amphidias.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 23
