Saint Peter’s Wolf (27 page)

The car had started obediently, as though to mock me. Of course all would be well.

Johanna, I reminded myself as the rain pattered the car, was the sole link between my present and my future. Without Johanna, I was lost.

I alternated between KCBS and KGO. A man had shot himself in the leg hurrying after a mysterious figure in Noe Valley. Palo Alto police were on full alert after a sighting of a wolflike fugitive there. The wolves at the San Francisco Zoo were guarded by members of the Tactical Squad, and the National Guard had just been mobilized to comb the Sunset District, where dogs had picked up the scent where I had fled the night before.

Johanna's secret replayed itself again and again in my mind. The word stung me, recurring time and again, ugly, cutting: werewolf.

I gripped the wheel, and stayed in the middle lane as though to avoid the fears that tangles the lanes to either side. Stay straight. Stay safe.

But I had never doubted it. As soon as she had uttered the word “werewolf” so much became clear. I remembered most vividly waking that morning at Lake Tahoe, finding her away from the bed. She had run that night, she said. She ran many nights, and often with Belinda. She had called it that, simply “running in the night.” As though for her it was not a rampage, as though for her it was an act of undiluted joy.

Despite our great danger, she had taken the time to explain to me what had happened, sharing those secrets I had long sensed. She had known there was another werewolf. The paw print had been undeniable. “There was another one in the night. Is it possible, I wondered, it senses in me a companion?” She had never guessed until recent days that her fellow werewolf was myself, and even then she had prayed that I might be spared. She had assumed that it was her fate to encounter once again this curse, and accepted it with compassion for “the one Out There, whomever he might be.”

She accepted a reality which I would have found unimaginable a few weeks before. She understood that a person's life can be haunted by something deliberate and inescapable. She had believed that it was her role in fate. The human wolf was the theme of her life, a wolfen thread woven into her years.

Poor Belinda, she said, had been the fulcrum, the way the fangs had found me, and brought us together. Both of us grieved together once more at the thought of Belinda. Perhaps, I had offered, her death would free us. As though fate would accept Belinda as a sacrifice, as though fate were a hungry god.

Johanna had discovered the fangs in her brother's belongings after his death. “I loved them at once, and when they began to work on me I could not resist them any longer than any of the other fine people who had owned them. They choose us well, you see. I tried them on, after resisting this temptation for many weeks, just to amuse myself, one freezing night. Months later, when I realized I had to be rid of them, I saw how it worked: an afflicted one can never bring himself to destroy the fangs. Nor can you bury them, or give them knowingly to someone. You have to leave them somewhere so that an innocent person will find them. Sometimes this person remains unafflicted, through some immunity on their part. The fangs may choose such a person as we might choose a bus or an airplane, as a means of transportation. I left the fangs—freed them, you might say—on a back shelf in an antique shop in Zurich, among salt cellars. It was the only way to lose them, but I see now that the teeth were not done with me and the people I loved. I want to be free of them at last. Zinser will destroy them. I would do it myself, but even now, after all I have seen—I still can't do that.”

“To get rid of the fangs, though, does not free you of the—affliction.”

“No, Benjamin. You will be a human wolf as long as you live. Unless you should accidentally discover a cure. You are foolish to blame yourself for harboring the fangs, or for the people you have killed. It was all the fangs' work, all their action on you, and through you. Your role was always innocent, as the thrashings of a man in convulsions are all without intention to do harm. Our only islet of freedom is what we choose to do now, out of love for each other.”

All that Johanna told me had stunned me. I had wanted to hold her, to keep her safe, but she urged me to hurry. She would see me, she said, at midnight.

“But you aren't like me,” I had protested. You don't—do you? Kill?”

“I'll explain it all,” she had said. “But I'll need time, and this is what we do not have. You are experiencing only the ugly side of the affliction. Very soon you will begin to see that what has happened to you is not a curse at all, but more like a miracle. We are a creature of nature, too, and as wonderful as any. Now, hurry. Leave now. We cannot waste another moment.”

I drove, glancing repeatedly into the rearview for the highway patrol. I had no plan beyond midnight. It was plain that the police were overwhelmed by false reports, and it was also clear that they were methodically following the procedures that would eventually discover who I was and where I had gone. Perhaps Gneiss had not done a good job in persuading the police. The authorities were not leaking the news of any suspects to the media.

I did not have time to waste. It was already midafternoon, and the winter days were short. I could easily imagine what would happen if the transformation took place while I was powering down the freeway at well over the speed limit. I would be a scrap of meat in a wad of metal.

As I drove I glanced at the dashboard clock, upward at the sky, listening to the various reporters, the national news, the local politicians, the press spokesmen for the police, all with their own views of what was described as a “developing story.”

The bare pasture land and ricefields east of Fairfield rolled by, then the off-ramps and distant trees of Davis. The long, straight viaduct crossed the mud-gray water of the river's overflow. And then the Sacramento itself, a red and black ship, and a storage silo. Traffic slowed, brake lights flashing, turn signals stitching the growing dark. It was too dark, too fast. The sky soaked up the dim sunlight, and I switched on my headlights.

Traffic, terrible, sluggish traffic. And more news: they had found a paw print in Pacific Heights. The bright voice of the radio reporter broke into a falsetto at one point. Yes, he should be excited, I thought. “Judging from the width and depth of this track, some sources are upping their estimate of the Night Beast's weight.”

Johanna was more than a lover to me, but a mate in every sense. I trusted her as I had never entirely trusted another human being. And I needed her. I depended entirely upon her.

It was this great belief in Johanna that was nearly to destroy me.

As darkness began to thicken, my pulse galloped. No time. I was running out of time. The slow, steady gradient began, the climb into the Sierras. Rocklin, with its boulders and gaunt oaks. Auburn, a blur of parked cars and traffic lights. Climbing, the rust-red dirt and the beet-dark boulders streaking past. I was driving too fast, and changing lanes, passing first a lumbering Winnebago, next a Chevron tanker truck.

And always the rain, until, well east of Colfax, the rain began to drift, pirouette upward, and swirl from one side to another. I'll have to stop and have them put on chains, I thought. Taillights glittered off the wet pavement. The snow fell wet, slushy and ill-defined, and as the Sierra closed in around me, and the mountain dark, I stayed in the fast lane and passed every car.

The news took a break from the Night Beast for a weather report—seventy percent chance of rain, with snow in the Sierra—and some international news, a strike, a conference, a speech by a head of state. Always, the focus returned to this rampage, these brutal killings, and how close they were to finding the Beast itself.

The radio began to whistle and spit. Whole eyewitness reports of shootings and mysterious footprints were chopped into pieces by static.

I was far into the mountains, perhaps an hour from Tahoe. I had to turn up the radio several times, and fine tune it. The pace of the bulletins was faster. “We have more and more reports of possible unconfirmed—” Then nothing but white noise, until voices faded in again.

The car spun out near Tahoe City.

I was driving fast, the report coming in of yet another Night Beast sighting in Park Merced, when the car swung free of the road. It was a sensation like rapture—the car hissed over the road, spinning, scabby tree bark and bright snow drift flashing by in the headlights.

The car crunched something hard in the cumulus of snow. I cared nothing for the car. I pumped the accelerator, and a mailbox wobbled in the red glow of the tail-lights.

I drove more carefully now, but still pushed hard. If the transformation began now, I thought that I would be able to aim the car toward a snowdrift, and escape.

The radio station was sputtering. Static cut into nearly every word. I could not even tell if they were speaking English. The pace of the news was faster. Something important must have happened, I thought, but when I turned the radio with one hand I could make out nothing.

At last I switched off the radio and drove with the rush of wheels and the hum of the engine seeming close to silence. Silence was what I wanted. Silence, and Johanna.

The road was impossibly long. I was almost there. Almost there, and then I only had to wait until midnight for Johanna to join me. It was going to work. It was actually going to work.

It was full dark, now, and I was tense at the wheel, wondering if every itch was the beginning of the transformation. But at last I rolled down the driveway, turning off the ignition as I rolled, and turning off the headlights, too, letting the car coast on its own momentum toward the cabin.

I yanked the parking brake. There was a truck ahead of me, its reflectors glinting. A pickup truck. At this last moment, when I was sure that the transformation was about to take place, and was breathless with relief at having arrived here at last, a familiar grin welcomed me from the glow of the porchlight.

“What did I tell you about my sixth sense?” said Mr. Laurel. “I just got here, just this very minute. I had this feeling, just this peculiar feeling that you might show up.”

It was snowing the occasional soggy spit of ice. The pine silence was around me, a hush that stilled me. The air was clean and cold, and the only mar in the perfect quiet was Laurel's voice. I spat some snow from my lips.

“Let's go in,” said Laurel. “You'll freeze your butt.”

Inside smelled of pine sap and old fireplace smoke.

“I got to thinking about poisoning the little bastards, and decided it might be a hard way to die. So I switched back to mouse traps. Look here.”

He held up a wooden table. A small, gray body dangled from it. “I don't know if they're more humane, and I don't know at all if they're more efficient. And I don't know at all why I care, either. Look here—here's another. I was hoping I could get the casualties out of here before you showed up.”

Get this man out of here now, I commanded myself.

But my voice sounded ridiculously civilized. “Johanna changed your mind. You were telling her about how they kill rogue bears, and she didn't' like hearing about it.”

Laurel didn't quite like learning that his philosophy might have been altered by a woman. “Maybe so,” he admitted. “She was a real charmer. Here's another little bugger. This place is mouse lodge when you aren't here.”

He dangled another small gray body at me. I wanted to throttle him. Each heartbeat was pulling me closer to my night self, and he was fumbling, searching a closet for more traps.

“I'm a little tired, actually.…” I said.

“I just came by to clean up the battlefield. Speaking of which, they caught that beast.”

I was sure that I had not heard him correctly.

“The Night Beast,” he said.

I could barely whisper. “What?”

He might have eyed me for a moment, before he added, “In San Francisco. They had a bulletin on the television just as I was leaving to come over. They had it trapped in a warehouse and shot it.”

My lips, my face, my entire body was numb. “No!” I whispered.

Laurel tried on a grin, found it inappropriate, and said, trying to understand why it mattered so much, “They were bound to hunt it down sooner or later. It's just some poor dumb animal or other.”

So this was how it ended.

I knew what had happened. I knew it exactly. It was like opening a book to a chapter, a storybook I remembered from childhood, and seeing it all again, the terrible story, but seeing it clearly, now, with a man's eyes.

I had been a fool to hope. “I am a little tired,” I croaked, and Laurel said that he certainly understood that.

He carried the dead mice in a paper bag, a small bag, the sort he might use for his lunch. The pickup engine started, and swung wide to get around the car.

When I was alone I was reluctant to touch the television. I hated the sight of that blank, blue-gray screen, and the buttons crafted for the human touch. I did not want to see.

Don't look, I told myself. Believe that she is coming. Keep on believing, even though you know you will never see her again. But I knelt before the television. I had to know.

The cable from Reno carried every known channel, a banquet of laugh tracks and gesticulating actors. But, inexplicably, none of the stations carried news. At last I stumbled onto a news program, and the voice blared: “… a hail of gunfire in this South of Market warehouse. Police estimate at least one thousand rounds were fired, but because of the ensuing fire they are not able to reach the apparently fatally wounded beast to make an actual determination as to its condition. Furthermore, at least one officer described the beast as not nearly as large as it had been rumored to be, putting a question mark beside speculation that some sort of hybrid giant wolf or even bear—”

There was a moment when I saw nothing, heard nothing.

Then I howled, a human cry that tore my throat. I seized the television, lifted it high over my head, and hurled it through the sliding glass door.