Return of the Wolf Man (3 page)

Sensing that she was a threat to his plan to revitalize the giant Monster of Frankenstein, Count Dracula had put her into a deep trance and taken her back to the castle. When Stevens followed, he found her locked in Dr. Mornay’s bedroom, her heart rate dangerously slow. But she had shown incredible resilience and courage. Not only did she recover when Count Dracula plunged into the sea and vanished, but she insisted that they stay and destroy the Frankenstein Monster on the dock. If it had been up to Stevens, he would have taken her away in the powerboat and come back in the morning to finish the job.

Brave girl,
Stevens had thought at the time. By then his infatuation was turning to love.

Now, as the embers of the burnt pilings flickered behind them, and the smoke from the fire dissipated, Stevens told Joan that before they left the island he had to get something important from the castle. In spite of her recent experiences there, she agreed to accompany him.
Damned
brave girl.

The sound of crickets was close around them and moonlight was spilling from around the edges of a long, sharp-edged cloud. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted, its voice swallowed by the crashing waves. If this were anywhere else in the world, Stevens felt, it would be a desperately romantic moment. But despite the disappearance of Count Dracula and the death of the Frankenstein Monster, there was still a powerful sense of evil on the tiny island. It shrouded the castle and rose from the very earth beneath them. He felt its presence as cold, sudden gusts in the humid air—chill ribbons that brushed the face and twined around the hands and arms as though they were things alive. He had experienced these same sensations, though not as powerfully, when patients had died during his internship. Stevens wondered if Joan felt it too but decided not to ask. She’d been through enough without having to focus on the cold presence that enveloped them.

After walking in silence for a short while, Stevens decided to ask the young investigator why she had been following Young and Grey. She told him that her company, Shippers Insurance, had sent her from the home office in New York to look into the disappearance of two exhibits bound for McDougal’s House of Horrors: the remains of the legendary vampire Count Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster. At first, she’d assumed that railroad baggage clerks Young and Grey had stolen the bodies to sell to a third party like the Lampini family, who had been angry runners-up in the bidding. Or else, she suspected, the clerks may have hidden the bodies at the behest of James Karl McDougal so he could collect the insurance.

“I never imagined the creatures were alive and had left the shipping crates on their own,” she said softly, shaking her head. “My God. Even now I find it difficult to believe. And I don’t think my boss, Mr. Foley, will believe it either.”

“It is incredible,” Stevens agreed. “But we saw what we saw.”

“Would you mind telling that to Mr. Foley?” she said with a laugh.

It was a nervous laugh, the residue of a night of horror. Stevens wanted to hold her.

“Of course I’ll tell him,” Stevens said.

“Thanks, but I was kidding,” Joan said. “It won’t help. He’ll tell me to take a long vacation and write one or two of the mystery stories I’ve been threatening to write and then come back rested. Meanwhile, he’ll turn it over to one of the men on the staff. As if somebody’s physical appointments determine how well a job gets done.”

“It’s an unfair world,” Stevens admitted. “But you know—it doesn’t matter what Mr. Foley says. That vampire was real. So was the lycanthrope who fell into the ocean with him—”

“The who?”

“Lycanthrope,” Stevens replied. “That’s the scientific term for a werewolf. It’s from the Greek
lykanthrōpos,
or ‘wolf-man.’ ”

“Sweet lord,” she said. “I can’t believe there’s actually a term for it.”

“Oh, there’s a term for just about every strange life-form, aberration, sickness, or phobia. Creatures like that wolf-man have been reported since the dawn of civilization. As for the Frankenstein Monster, we have proof that he existed. The notebook of Dr. Frankenstein.”

“Is that what we’re going back for?” Joan asked.

Stevens nodded. “The sheriff will want to investigate all of this. I want to get the notebook before he confiscates it.”

Joan shuddered. “I saw the journal earlier this evening, while I was up in Dr. Mornay’s bedroom powdering my nose. It was chilling—all about stealing bodies and charging them with lightning.”

“Chilling but fascinating,” Stevens said. “The journal proves that Dr. Frankenstein succeeded in restoring life to dead tissue, and that he used his discoveries to create the Monster.”

“Do you think he did that intentionally? Created a monster?”

“No,” said Stevens. “I believe there was something wrong with the brain Dr. Frankenstein gave him. I also believe that Count Dracula and Dr. Mornay were planning to fix that mistake. To give the Monster a new brain to make him more obedient.” Stevens suddenly stopped and pressed a palm to the back of his head. He rubbed gently along his short black hair.

“What’s wrong?” Joan asked.

“Got a shooting pain down my neck.” Stevens grimaced. “A memento of my one big act of defiance. When I confronted Count Dracula about his plans to revive the Monster, Dr. Mornay snuck up behind me. Gave me a good whack on the parietal bone—the right side of the skull.”

Joan frowned at him. “I know where that is. I may not have worked with lycanthropes, but I have worked with forensics.”

“Sorry,” Stevens said. “I’m used to my first-year students at Johns Hopkins.”

“Do you want to stop and sit for a while?”

Stevens looked around. More than ever, out there in the blackness, he felt the presence of something malevolent. “I don’t think so,” he said. He stopped feeling his head. “It seems okay.”

They continued walking.

“So you teach medicine?” Joan said.

“I do. And I’m going to have a heck of a story to tell those kids when I get back.”

“I’m curious,” Joan said. “How does a college professor become involved with someone like Dr. Mornay?”

“Strange fortune,” he admitted. “Sandra and I were students together at New York University before the war. We rarely agreed on ethical matters, but she was a fascinating woman. Her grandfather, Sandor Mornay, built the castle from stones quarried in his native Hungary. He was an infamous surgeon.”

“Infamous in what way?” Joan asked.

“I understand he performed experimental surgery and vivisections.”

“Goodness. How awful!”

Stevens nodded. “Apparently, H. G. Wells was once a houseguest at his estate in Europe. Reportedly, he fictionalized Sandor Mornay as his notorious villain Dr. Moreau. Sandor’s son Miklos, Sandra’s father, wasn’t much better. Inspired by Henry Frankenstein’s work, he used electricity not to revive the dead but to try to give additional strength and stamina to the bodies of the living. I believe he succeeded only in immolating dozens of people.”

“That’s quite a heritage,” Joan remarked. “No wonder Dr. Mornay turned out the way she did.”

“I tried to empathize with her in college,” Stevens said. “Lord, how I tried. But she was a real Mornay. Her mother ran off when Sandra was fifteen and she chose to remain with her father. Her own fascination was for organ transplants. In fact, she was forced to leave the university after putting the brain of a dead child into the body of a chimpanzee.”

“Was the operation a success?” Joan asked.

Stevens looked at her. “It was, albeit briefly.”

Joan shuddered.

“Dr. Mornay was brilliant,” Stevens said, “though she was much too ruthless, too driven.”

“I don’t understand,” Joan said. “If you have such contempt for her, why did you come to LaMirada?”

“Fair question,” Stevens admitted, “and you’ll probably think I deserve that conk on the head for being such a dunce. Several months ago, she wrote and asked me to come down during midsemester break to help with her experiments in electrical cellular regeneration of the cerebral cortex. I had very mixed feelings about her request. The work was intriguing, obviously, but her reputation for unorthodoxy could not be ignored. I finally agreed to assist for three weeks because she promised to donate the equipment to the university when she was finished.”

“So your interest was mostly mercenary?”

Stevens smiled. “Let’s say it was
partly
mercenary. She was going to do the work whether I assisted or not. The gift was to override my moral reservations. But I’d also heard that Dr. Mornay spent the war working in a laboratory in the Tyrolean Alps. I was curious to see what she’d come up with. Obviously, she’d come up with Dr. Frankenstein’s notebook . . . and his Monster.”

“And Count Dracula?”

“I don’t know where he fits in,” Stevens said. “Until tonight, I only knew him as Dr. Lejos, his nom de guerre. I think he helped Dr. Mornay get out of Europe and also paid for the equipment. But how they met, I don’t know. Perhaps he was hiding with the Monster somewhere. Maybe the creatures were coffinmates.”

“That isn’t funny,” Joan said.

“Sorry,” Stevens replied.

Joan stopped when they reached the heavy door with its oversized ring knocker. She looked back toward the cove and pulled her shawl tightly around her shoulders.

“Cold?” Stevens asked.

She nodded. “There’s something strange in the air. The proverbial icy fingers.”

“I know,” he said. “I feel them too.”

“Do you think the Monster is really dead?”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that poor, cold thing was ever really alive,” Stevens said. “He was merely animate. As to whether we’ve destroyed him, I don’t know.”

“He was caught in the middle of the fire,” Joan said. “How
could
he have survived?”

“He was
made
to survive,” Stevens said. “That was one of Dr. Frankenstein’s goals. To transcend death. Back in medical school old Dr. Jeffrey Garth, a professor of psychiatry and an expert in the occult, told stories we all
thought
were legends. About how the Frankenstein Monster had been burned in a windmill, blown up in a laboratory, knocked into a sulphur pit, washed away in a dam explosion, swallowed by quicksand, and incinerated in a chemical fire. Apparently, he survived them all.”

“So a fiery pool of gasoline may not have done the job,” Joan said. “And if my company decides to dredge up the body rather than pay McDougal—”

“It may run amok again,” Stevens said. He looked back across the sea where the last of the smoke was rising in thin, snaking plumes. “The once-human brain in the Monster’s skull was reconditioned by Dr. Frankenstein to act like a sort of storage battery. The Monster was powered by electricity that it absorbed, I believe, through the terminal electrodes in his neck.” Stevens nodded toward the cove. “He’s lying in salt water, which is an excellent conductor. It may be possible for him to soak up enough ambient energy to survive.”

“How can we prevent that from happening?”

Stevens looked at her. The color had returned to her high-boned cheeks and her hazel eyes were steady. The scientist never thought of himself as a particularly brave man. But for this woman he knew he’d fight a house of Frankensteins.

“We
try
to prevent it by going inside and getting Dr. Frankenstein’s notebook,” he said. “That’s the reason I want it. The journal may contain information about how to reverse the process, how to drain the Monster’s energies away.”

“Is the notebook still upstairs?”

Stevens shook his head. It hurt. He had to remember not to do that. “The last I saw it was in the laboratory,” he said, “along with the notebooks of Miklos Mornay. But knowing Dr. Mornay she may have hidden it. She may have hidden them all and then fled. We have to find out.” He turned toward the massive door, pushed on it with both hands, then looked back. “Are you coming?”

“Maybe in a few minutes,” Joan said. “I’d like to get a little more fresh air. But you go.”

Stevens looked around. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to be out here alone.”

Joan grinned. “Count Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and your lycanthrope are all underwater,” she said. “I can handle a few crickets and a lonely owl.”

“I’m thinking about Dr. Mornay,” Stevens said. “I haven’t seen her. There’s always a chance that she hasn’t run off.”

“If she’s here,” Joan said, “she’ll probably be inside, looking for the journal. In which case I’ll be safe out here.”

Stevens smiled and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “All right, Joan,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.” He pushed again on the massive oak door. It groaned on ancient hinges and he stepped inside.

As the unnaturally chilly air swirled around them, neither Professor Stevens nor Joan Raymond noticed the crickets and the owl suddenly go quiet or saw the shadowy figure who watched from behind hanging garlands of Spanish moss.

III

Years ago and a world away, in Llanwelly Village in Wales, a small, elderly Gypsy woman named Maleva had shown compassion to a young man named Lawrence Talbot.

Llanwelly Village was a rustic place hidden in a beautiful green valley, a quaint Eden in a pestilent world. It was founded in 1350 by families who, following a priest, Father de Brulier, fled the Black Death, which was devastating the cities and towns of England. The plague passed over Llanwelly Village, earning the town a reputation as being favored by God. In order to keep the land clean and the bloodline pure, the Llanwellians did not permit many outsiders to settle there and churchgoing was mandatory. Wanderers who passed through the village were never permitted to stay in the town proper, but were forced to camp in the surrounding woods. Dotted with marshes and perpetually carpeted with mist, Wanderers’ Woods became the seat of tales about demons and unnatural predators, warlocks and witches, ghosts and the living dead. The Talbots—who were mostly physicians and men of science—worked mightily to dispel many of these local legends.

As it happened, the devil was waiting for Lawrence Talbot in Wanderers’ Woods. The devil in the form of a man-wolf. Talbot became a werewolf after being bitten by Maleva’s son Bela, who was himself a werewolf. When Talbot managed to kill Bela with a silver-topped cane, Maleva did not hold that against him. To the contrary. She was relieved that her son’s suffering had ended. After the attack, Maleva brought Talbot home. The next night, when he transformed and was caught in a wolf trap, she was there to free him. And when Talbot’s own father, Sir John, police captain Paul Montford, Dr. Lloyd, and others called Talbot mad for insisting that he had become a bloodthirsty werewolf, the gracious old Gypsy woman helped to preserve his sanity by believing him. She even gave Talbot a charm that would have protected him from the curse had he not given it to his love, Gwen Conliffe. Years later, Maleva accompanied Talbot to the Bohemian town of Vasaria in a doomed effort to find Dr. Frankenstein . . . and a cure.