The Wolves of Midwinter (11 page)

When Felix came up beside him, Felix said, “She’s not here, is she? You don’t sense any presence of her here.”

“No,” said Reuben. She is not here. Her suffering face is imprinted on my soul forever. But she is not in this place, and cannot be comforted here.

But where is she? Where is she herself now?

They headed for home, trolling the main street of Nideck, where the official town Christmas trimmings were going up with amazing speed. What a transformation, to see the three-story Nideck Inn already decked with tiny red lights to the rooftop, and to see the green wreaths on the shop doors, and the green garland wound around the quaint old lampposts. There were workmen busy on more than one site. They wore yellow rain slickers and boots. People stopped and waved. Galton and his wife, Bess, were just going into the Inn, probably for lunch, and they both stopped and waved.

All this cheered Felix, obviously. “Reuben,” he said, “I think this little Winterfest is truly going to work!”

Only after they hit the narrow country road again did Felix say in a low, very gentle voice, his most protective voice,

“Reuben, do you want to tell me where you went last night?”

Reuben swallowed. He wanted to answer, but he couldn’t think what to say.

“Look, I understand,” said Felix. “You saw Marchent again. This was profoundly unsettling, of course. And you went out after that, but I so wish you had not.”

Silence. Reuben felt like a bad schoolboy, but he didn’t know the reason himself why he’d gone. Yes, he’d seen Marchent, and obviously it did have to do with that. But why had this triggered the need to hunt? All he could think of was the bloody triumph of the kill and that plunge through the forest afterwards, after he’d left little Susie Blakely and it seemed he’d been flying like Goodman Brown through the world’s darkest wilderness. He knew he was blushing now, blushing with shame.

The car was following the narrow Nideck Road uphill through phalanxes of towering trees.

“Reuben, you know perfectly well what we’re trying to do,” Felix said, his patience as reliable as ever. “We’re trying to take you and
Stuart to places where you can hunt unknown and unnoticed. But if you go out on your own, if you venture into the surrounding towns, the press will be on top of us all again. Reporters will be swarming all over the house, asking for some statement from you on the Man Wolf. You’re the go-to guy when it comes to the Man Wolf, the one who’s been bitten by the Man Wolf, the one who’s seen the Man Wolf, not once but twice, the reporter who writes about the Man Wolf. Look, dear boy, it’s a matter of surviving at Nideck Point, for all of us.”

“I know, Felix, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I haven’t even checked the news.”

“Well, I haven’t either, but the fact is you left your torn and bloody clothes, and a bloodstained blanket, of all things, in the furnace room, Reuben, and any Morphenkind can smell human blood. You’ve had a meal of somebody for certain, and this won’t go unnoticed.”

Reuben felt his face grow hot. Too many images of the hunt were crowding in on him. He thought of little Susie’s tiny candle-flame face against his chest. He was disoriented, as if this normal body of his now was some sort of illusion. He longed for the other body, the other muscles, the other eyes.

“What stops us, Felix, from living in the forest always, encased in fur, living like the beasts that we are?”

“You know what stops us,” said Felix. “We’re human beings, Reuben. Human beings. And you will soon have a son.”

“I felt like I had to go,” Reuben said under his breath. “I just did. I don’t know. I had to push back and I know it was foolish. And I wanted to go, that’s the God’s truth. I wanted to go alone.” He blurted out in fits and starts the little story of the child in the trailer. He told how he’d buried the remains of the corpse. “Felix, I’m caught between two worlds, and I had to blunder into that other world, I had to.”

Felix was quiet for a while, and then ventured, “I know it’s all very seductive, Reuben, these people treating us like God’s anointed.”

“Felix, how many people are out there, suffering like that? That little girl wasn’t fifty miles from here. They’re all around us, aren’t they?”

“This is part of the burden, Reuben. It’s part of the Chrism. We cannot save all of them. And any attempt to do so will end in failure
and in our own ruin. We can’t make our territory into our kingdom. The time is long past for that. And I don’t want to lose Nideck Point again so soon, dear boy. I don’t want you to leave, or Laura, or any of us! Reuben, don’t burn up your mortal life just yet, don’t extinguish all ties with it. Look, this is all my fault and Margon’s fault. We haven’t let you boys hunt enough. We’re not remembering what the early years were like. This will change, Reuben, I promise you.”

“I’m sorry, Felix. But you know, those first days, those first heady days, when I didn’t know what I was, or what would happen next—or whether I was the only man beast in the whole world—there was such a hedonistic freedom there. And I have to get over that, that I can’t slip out at will and become the Man Wolf. I’m working on it, Felix.”

“I know you are,” said Felix with a sad little laugh. “Of course you are. Reuben, Nideck Point is worth the sacrifice. Whatever we become, wherever we go, we need a haven, a refuge, a sanctuary. I need this. We all need this.”

“I know,” said Reuben.

“I wonder if you do,” said Felix. “How does a man who does not age, who does not grow old—how does such a man keep a family manse, a piece of land that is his? You cannot imagine what it means to leave all you hold sacred because you have to. You have to hide that you don’t change, you have to annihilate the person you are to all those you love. You have to abandon your home and your family and return decades later in some alien guise to strangers, pretending to be the long-lost uncle, the bastard son.…”

Reuben nodded.

He had never heard Felix’s voice so full of pain before, not even when he spoke of Marchent.

“I was born in the most beautiful land imaginable,” said Felix, “near the River Rhine above a heavenly Alpine valley. I told you this before, didn’t I? I lost it a long time ago. I lost it forever. The fact is I do own the property again now—that very land, those ancient buildings. I bought it all back—lock, stock, and barrel. But it’s not my home, or my sanctuary. That can’t be reclaimed ever. It’s a new place for me now, with all the promise of a new home perhaps in a new time, and
that’s the best that it can be. But my true home? That’s gone beyond reprieve.”

“I understand,” said Reuben. “I really do. I understand as far as I can understand. I don’t know how but I do.”

“But time hasn’t swallowed Nideck Point for me,” said Felix with that same low emotional heat. “No. Not yet. We still have time with Nideck Point before we have to slip away. And you have time, lots of time, with Nideck Point. You and Laura, and now your son, too, can grow up at Nideck Point. We have time to live a rich chapter here.”

Felix broke off as though deliberately reining himself in.

Reuben waited, desperate for a way to express what he felt. “I will behave, Felix,” he said. “I swear it. I won’t ruin it.”

“You don’t want to ruin it for yourself, Reuben,” Felix said. “Forget about me. Forget Margon or Frank or Sergei. Forget Thibault. You don’t want to ruin it for yourself and for Laura. Reuben, you will lose everything here soon enough; don’t throw away what you have now.”

“I don’t want to ruin it for you either,” said Reuben. “I know what it means to you, Nideck Point.”

Felix didn’t answer.

A strange thought occurred to Reuben.

It took form as they drove up the sloping road from the gates to the terrace.

“What if she needs Nideck Point?” he asked in a soft voice. “What if it’s Marchent’s sanctuary? What if she’s looked beyond, Felix, and she doesn’t want to go beyond? What if she wants to remain here too?”

“Then she wouldn’t be suffering, would she, when she comes to you?” Felix responded.

Reuben sighed. “Yes. Why would she be suffering?”

“The world might be full of ghosts for all we know. They might have found their sanctuaries all around us. But they don’t show us their pain, do they? They don’t haunt as she’s haunting you.”

Reuben shook his head. “She’s here, and she can’t break through. She’s wandering, alone, desperate for me to see her and hear her.” He thought about his dream again, the dream in which he’d seen Marchent in rooms filled with people who took no notice of her, the dream in
which he’d seen her running through the darkness alone. He thought of those curious shadowy figures he’d seen vaguely in the dim forest of the dream. Had they been reaching out to her?

In a low voice, he described the dream to Felix. “But there was more to it,” he confessed, “and now I’ve forgotten.”

“That’s always the way with dreams,” Felix said.

They sat parked before the house. The end of the terrace along the cliff was scarcely visible in the mist. Yet they could hear the sounds of hammers and saws from the workmen down the hill at the guesthouse. Rain or shine, the men worked on the guesthouse.

Felix shivered. He drew in his breath, and then after a long pause, he placed his hand on Reuben’s shoulder. As always it had a calming effect on Reuben.

“You’re a brave boy,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Oh yes, very,” said Felix. “That’s why she’s come to you.”

Reuben was bewildered, lost suddenly in too many shifting mind pictures and half-remembered sensations, unable to reason. Of all things, he heard that dreamy haunting song again that the ghost radio had played inside the ghost room, and that spellbinding beat paralyzed him.

“Felix, this house should be yours,” he said. “We don’t know what Marchent wants, why she haunts. But if I’m a brave boy, then I have to say it. This is your house, Felix. Not mine.”

“No,” Felix said. He smiled faintly, sadly.

“Felix, I know you own all the land around this property, all the land to the town and back and north and east. You should have the house back.”

“No,” said Felix gently but resolutely.

“If I deed it over to you, well, there’s no way you can stop me from doing it—.”

“No,” Felix said.

“Why not?”

“Because if you did that,” Felix said, his eyes glazing with tears, “it wouldn’t be your home anymore. And then you and Laura might leave.
And you and Laura are the warmth shining in the heart of Nideck Point. And I can’t bear the thought of your going away. I can’t make Nideck Point my home again without you. Leave things as they are. My niece gave you this house to get rid of it, rid of her grief, and rid of her pain. Leave it as she willed it. And you brought me back to it. In a sense, you’ve given it to me already. Owning a great cluster of empty rooms might have meant little or nothing—without you.”

Felix opened the door. “Now come,” he said, “let’s take a quick look at the progress on the guesthouse. We want it to be ready whenever your father comes to visit.”

Yes, the guesthouse, and the promise of Phil coming to spend long leisurely visits with him. Phil had indeed promised. And Reuben wanted that so very much.

A
S IT TURNED OUT
, there was nothing on the news about the Man Wolf appearing again in Northern California. Reuben searched the web, and every local news source he knew. The papers, the television, all were silent on that score. But there was a big story, getting quite a bit of play in the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

Susie Blakely, an eight-year-old girl, missing since June from her home in Eureka, California, had at last been found—wandering near the town of Mountainville in northern Mendocino County. Authorities had confirmed that a carpenter, long suspected of the crime, had in fact abducted her, and kept her prisoner, often beating her and starving her until her escape from his trailer last night.

The carpenter was believed dead as the result of an animal attack, which the child, too traumatized by her ordeal, had witnessed but could not describe.

There was a picture of Susie, taken at the time she went missing. And there was that tiny radiant candle flame of a face.

Reuben Googled the old stories. Her parents, obviously, were extremely good people who had made numerous appeals to the media. As for the older lady, Pastor Corrie George, who had taken the child from Reuben, there was no mention of her on the news at all.

Had both the minister and the little girl agreed not to talk of the Man Wolf? Reuben was amazed. But he worried. How would the secret weigh upon both these innocent people? More than ever he was ashamed, yet had he not gone into the forest, would that precious little life have been snuffed out in that filthy trailer?

Over a late lunch, with only the housekeeper, Lisa, in attendance, Reuben assured the Distinguished Gentlemen that he would never
again risk their security with this kind of careless behavior. Stuart made a few sulky remarks to the effect that Reuben should have taken him with him, but Margon cut him off with a quick and imperious gesture, and went on to toast Celeste’s “marvelous news.”

This didn’t stop Sergei from lecturing Reuben at length on the risks of what he had done, and Thibault joined in as well. It was agreed that Saturday they would fly out for a couple of days, this time to the “jungles” of South America, and there hunt together before returning home. Stuart was ecstatic at the prospect. And Reuben felt a low arousal very much akin to sexual desire. He could already see and feel the jungles around him, a great swooshing fabric of moist greenery, fragrant, tropical, delicious, so very different from the bleak cold of Nideck Point, and the thought of prowling there in such a dense and lawless universe, in search of “the most dangerous game” caused him to fall quiet.

By suppertime, Reuben had conferred with Laura, who was genuinely overjoyed about the developments, and he and Lisa were removing all Laura’s belongings to a new office on the east side of the house. This would suit Laura wonderfully, as the room was flooded with morning light, and a good deal warmer than anything on the ocean side of Nideck Point as well.