The Wolfman (18 page)

The doctor withdrew his hand from Lawrence and quietly redressed the wounds. He met no one’s eyes as he did so. As soon as he was finished, he shoved his instruments into his bag and rose.

“What’s wrong,” Gwen asked. “Is there infection or—?”

Dr. Lloyd shook his head and finally met Lawrence’s eyes. “This is . . . remarkable. A week ago I would have said that you’d never use that arm again.”

“And now?” asked Gwen.

The doctor looked steadily at her. “He was missing his entire tendon and most of the muscle. It seems . . . um . . . to have healed.”

“ ‘Healed?’ ” echoed Sir John.

“It’s truly remarkable.” He turned back to Lawrence, but almost at once his eyes shifted away. “Remarkable.” He straightened his shoulders. “I’ll be back to check on you at the end of the week.”

Lawrence said, “Doctor . . . thank you. You’re a miracle worker.”

“Not I,” said Dr. Lloyd, and he still did not meet Lawrence’s gaze as he turned and left. Singh ushered him out.

O
NCE THE DOCTOR
was gone, Gwen plumped Lawrence’s pillows and Sir John came and stood by the foot of the bed.

“Miss Conliffe,” he said softly, “thank you for staying with us during this difficult time. Perhaps if there was any sense of filial obedience in this house we wouldn’t have inconvenienced you so.”

Gwen stiffened and Lawrence looked from her to his father, sensing tension and rightly guessing that this was another round in an argument that had played out over the last few weeks, and her words confirmed his guess.

“Lawrence was just trying to find out what killed Ben,” she said with frost, “as you well know. What he did was heroic, and he did it out of love.”

“ ‘Love’?” repeated Sir John, shaking his head. “No, my dear, I think there was some stronger motivation. It is seldom love that compels a hunter to enter the forest.”

Lawrence said nothing. There were many things about that night he couldn’t remember, but the burning hatred and towering rage—those things he remembered with perfect clarity. But he did not want to side with his father against Gwen.

“Call it what you will,” insisted Gwen, “but Lawrence was not being a willful child. He’s a man.” Her voice faltered for a moment. “A fine man . . . and he’s suffered terribly.”

“To no good purpose,” Sir John countered.

“No? We know that Ben’s murder wasn’t the random act of some madman passing through the region. Wasn’t that one of your theories? Well, this was no lunatic who attacked the Gypsy camp.”

“No,” he said, “but we don’t know
what
it is, do we?”

“No . . . but now we know that whatever it is—it’s still out there.”

D
r. Lloyd had left a sleeping draught for him and despite his protests Singh had all but forced it down his throat. Lawrence vanished down a black hole. He wasn’t sure if it was for hours or days. The act of waking, of confronting the reality of what had happened, of being poked and prodded by Dr. Lloyd, interrogated by his father, watched like a hawk by Singh and comforted by Gwen—all of this was too much for Lawrence, and he drifted back into an exhausted sleep. But it was sleep, not coma.

When he woke it was in the depths of night. Gwen was no longer in her chair. Lawrence had some vague memory of Sir John insisting that she take a night in the bed that had been provided for her across the hall, a bed she had barely used since the attack. Although he would have liked to speak with her here in the quiet privacy of the night, he was equally pleased to be alone.

His shoulder throbbed strangely. Not quite pain, but not a comfortable feeling. It was a strange sensation, as if things were moving beneath his skin. Lawrence had read about surgeons placing maggots on infected wounds because the little vermin ate only necrotic tissue and would not eat healthy flesh. Whereas he could understand the scientific logic of that, it nevertheless profoundly
disgusted him and he hoped to God that there were no wriggling grubs beneath his bandages.

He swung his legs out of bed and placed them on the carpet, and for a moment he distracted himself by flexing his toes in the thick nap. But the strange sensation continued. He experimented with his grip by opening and closing the hand of his injured arm. Earlier that hand had been stiff and un responsive, but now the fingers moved and the muscles worked correctly as he clenched and unclenched his fist. The action comforted him, but it made his shoulder throb and itch.

“So far so good,” he said aloud, aware that his voice was a rusty croak from disuse. He’d nearly burned his throat raw recounting the whole story of the attack earlier in the day, and had said very little since. Singh had brought him endless cups of tea and honey, and Gwen had spoon-fed him soothing broth.

Standing was a challenge and Lawrence took hold of the bedpost and used his good arm to pull himself slowly to his feet. The room did a drunken jig for several nauseating seconds, but it settled down more quickly than he thought. Even so, he stood still for a full minute before he tried a step.

His muscles felt weak, but not as weak as he expected from nearly a month in bed. He tottered slowly across the floor to the window and looked out at the night. The sky was a velvet black with a gibbous moon washing the landscape with pale silver.

There was a tall dressing mirror nearby and he walked carefully to it and examined his drawn face and peered into his own dark eyes.

“Who are you, you old beggar?” he said, barely recognizing the face. His shoulder throbbed again and
Lawrence drew a breath as he made a very hard decision. He knew that at some point he was going to have to confront the truth about how badly damaged he was. No matter what nonsense the doctor had said about his tendons regrowing, Lawrence knew that he was likely to be at least a partial cripple. He was already wondering how the limitation of his mangled arm would impact his performance on stage. Shakespeare was a demonstrative playwright and, though subtlety of voice was important, gestures and physical performance were crucial.

“There’s always Richard the Third,” he told his skeptical reflection.

Steeling himself, he unbelted his robe and let it fall to the floor, and then with great care and caution he began to remove the bandages. The doctor had used what seemed like miles of gauze, and Lawrence unwound many turns of it, letting the cloth fall to the floor. But a perverse part of his mind noted that the lengths of gauze piled at his feet looked more like ghostly entrails. He cursed his own imagination for conjuring that image. The itching sensation was nearly maddening and he wanted to tear off the rest of the bandages and scratch like a madman, but that would be foolish. Dr. Lloyd had said that between what the Gypsies had done for him and his own work, there were hundreds of sutures holding his flesh together. God. Hundreds.

He removed several layers and now he was down to it. One large section of thick padding lay between him and the reality of what he would have to live with for the rest of his life. What horrors would he encounter? And, more importantly, would he be able to face the truth? He thought he would, but now at the moment of commission his certainty was faltering.

“Come on, you coward,” he scolded himself.

He lifted the padding away, and the sight indeed turned a knife in his bowels. His skin was a mad patchwork of crusted scabs that ran from shoulder blade to nipple and from sternum to armpit. The blood was crusted and hard and it itched worse than ever.

“Son of a bitch,” he swore as he poked experimentally at one of the scabs. The pressure didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would and when he pulled his finger back some of the scab stuck to his fingertip and pulled clear of the wound.

Only there wasn’t a wound beneath. He bit his lip, hoping that maybe the wounds were less widespread than they looked. Maybe a lot of the scabbing was just smeared blood that had dried on his skin.

He scratched lightly at the edge of one of the scabs. It resisted for a moment and then flaked away. Lawrence frowned. His shoulder itched terribly and he used his nails to crack more and more of the scabbing, scratching as much to satisfy the itch as to reveal the extent of his injuries. The scabs fell away, and stuck into them were bits of catgut and medical sutures. He kept at it, the action quickly becoming obsessive as more and more of his wound was revealed.

Only it wasn’t his wound.

As the scabs fell away all that he could find were thin white lines to show where the long and terrible slashes had healed. There were no open wounds. No lines of stitches, no patchwork of ruined flesh. All he found was a network of pale scars that barely marked the places where teeth and claws and tried to tear the life out of him.

“God . . .” he breathed, shocked at what he saw, though he suspected, deep in his heart, that God had little to do with this.

L
ater that day—and against the insistent warnings of Gwen Conliffe—Lawrence Talbot went downstairs. He called it “rejoining the world.”

“But your shoulder!” she stressed.

“It hardly hurts,” he soothed; that was a lie. His shoulder did not hurt at all, but he had not shared this with anyone. He had not yet sorted out what he thought about the miracle, if “miracle” was a word that could be applied to this. “But . . . if you’d let me lean on you I’m sure I’ll manage not to trip down the stairs.”

He said it with a smile, the kind of harmless flirtation a convalescent can get away with, but Gwen blushed all the same. Even so, she offered her arm and Lawrence made it down to the sitting room, and he was glad he had her there. The arm may have healed but he was still far from steady on his feet.

When they paused on the landing, Lawrence took a few seconds to catch his breath. “When did father have those extra five hundred steps installed?”

“I told you this was too soon.”

“Don’t scold me, Gwen,” he said, not yet letting go of her arm. “I couldn’t take being confined in that room another minute. I’ve been restless all morning. . . .”

She gave his arm a small squeeze and was about to
say something when Sir John stepped into the hall. He saw their interlaced arms and said, “Well, well.”

Gwen blushed a deeper shade of red and disentangled her arm from Lawrence. “He needed help on the stairs,” she said defensively.

“I daresay.”

Lawrence did not like the cold accusation in his father’s tone, but he understood it. Gwen had been engaged to Ben. Any show of affection that he might show to Gwen might be construed as bad form, and too soon. To rescue the moment he said, “Well, you kept me from doing a series of pratfalls that would have done nothing for my reputation . . . but I think I can manage from here.” He turned to the Ming urn set between the staircases and spotted the silver walking stick the old Frenchman had given him. The wolf’s head seemed to snarl at him and as he reached for it he felt a wave of revulsion, but he snatched it up regardless and leaned on it. “This will do fine.”

Sir John grunted and indicated the drawing room with a sideways tic of his chin. “If you’re up to it, we have company.”

“I—”

“An inspector down from London.” Sir John stepped closer. “He wants to ask questions, Lawrence.”

“No!” protested Gwen. “Lawrence isn’t nearly up to an interrogation.”

“No he isn’t,” agreed Sir John. “So let’s make sure that’s not what it becomes.”

Lawrence said, “It’ll be fine, Gwen. I’ll do anything to help.”

Sir John studied his face. “Very well then.”