The Wolves of Midwinter (37 page)

If only I could tell you the smallest part of it, if only I could confide and seek your guidance. If only …

“Here, Dad, my presents,” Reuben said. And he brought in the big box of carefully wrapped little volumes and set it before Phil.

Phil was in tears when he opened the first one, seeing the little Ginn
and Company hardcover of
Hamlet
, the very textbook version he’d cherished as an undergraduate. And as he came to see that the complete plays were here, every single one of them, he was overwhelmed. This was something he hadn’t even dreamed of—the entire collection. These books had been out of print even when he first came upon them in secondhand shops in his student days.

He choked back the tears, talking softly of his time at Berkeley as the richest period of his life, when he was reading Shakespeare, acting Shakespeare, living Shakespeare every day, spending hours under the trees of the beautiful old campus, wandering the Telegraph Avenue bookstores for scholarly works on the Bard, thrilled every time some piercing critic gave him a new insight, or brought the plays to life for him in some new way. He’d thought then he would love the academic world always. He wanted nothing more than to stay in the atmosphere of books and poetry forever.

Then had come teaching, and repeating the same words year after year, and the endless committee meetings, and tiresome faculty parties, and the relentless pressure to publish critical theories or ideas that he didn’t even have in him. Then had come weariness of it all, and hatred even, and his conviction of his own utter insignificance and mediocrity. But these little volumes took him back to the sweetest part of it—when it had been new, and filled with hope, before it had become a racket for him.

About that time, Lisa appeared with a full breakfast for both of them—scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon, pancakes, syrup, butter, toast, and jam. She had it set up quickly at the little dining table, and put on fresh coffee. Jean Pierre appeared with the carafe of orange juice, and a plate of the gingerbread cookies which Phil couldn’t resist.

After they’d demolished the meal, Phil stood for a long time at the large rectangular window looking out at the sea, at the dark blue horizon lying beneath the brighter cobalt of the clear sky. Then he said how he had never dreamed he could be this happy, never dreamed he had this much life left in him.

“Why don’t people do what they really want to do, Reuben?” he asked. “Why do we so often settle for what makes us devoutly unhappy!
Why do we accept that happiness just isn’t possible? Look what’s happened. I’m ten years younger now than I was a week ago, and your mother? Your mother’s perfectly fine with it. Perfectly fine. I was always too old for your mother, Reuben. Too old in here, in my heart, and just plain too old in every other way. When I get the slightest doubt about her being happier, I call and I talk to her and I listen to the timbre of her voice, you know, the cadence of her speech. She’s so relieved to be on her own.”

“I hear you, Dad,” Reuben said. “I feel a little the same way when I think of my years with Celeste. I don’t know why I woke up every morning with the idea that I had to adjust, had to accept, had to go along with.”

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Phil said, turning from the window. He shrugged and made a resigned gesture with his hands. “Thank you, Reuben, for letting me come here.”

“Dad, I don’t ever want you to leave,” said Reuben.

The expression in Phil’s eyes was the only response he needed. Phil went over to the box of Shakespeare books and took out the copy of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. “You know, I can’t wait to read parts of this to Elthram and Mara. Mara said she’s never heard of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Elthram knew it. He can recite parts of it by heart. You know, Reuben? I’m going to give my old copy of the comedies to Elthram and Mara. It’s here somewhere. Well, I have two. I’ll give them the one without the notes, the clean one. I think that would be a good present for Elthram and Mara. And look what they gave to me.” He turned and pointed to a small bouquet of brightly colored wildflowers on his desk, with streams of ivy trailing from it. “I didn’t know there were that many wildflowers in the woods this time of year. They gave me that early this morning.”

“It’s beautiful, Dad,” said Reuben.

That afternoon, they drove to the coast and to the town of Mendocino, to have a walk around while the weather held. And it was worth it. The little downtown of beach Victorian buildings was as cheerfully decorated as the village of Nideck, and bustled with last-minute Christmas shoppers. The sea was calm as well as beautifully
blue, and the sky overhead, filled with scudding white clouds, was glorious.

But by four o’clock, as they drove home, the slate-colored sky was rolling over them, and the evening gloom was falling around them. Tiny raindrops struck the windshield. Reuben thought to himself how little it would matter when he was in full wolf coat whether a storm descended on Nideck Point, and he settled into his own quiet growing anticipation. Would they hunt tonight? They had to hunt. He was starving for the hunt and he knew that Stuart was starving for it too.

He stayed long enough in Phil’s little house to call Grace and Jim and wish them both the happiest of Christmases. Jim would say Midnight Mass tonight at St. Francis at Gubbio Church as always, and Grace, Celeste, and Mort would be there. Tomorrow they’d all serve Christmas dinner at the St. Francis dining room for the homeless and the poor of the Tenderloin.

Finally, it was time to take leave of Phil. It was Christmas Eve at last. It was full dark, and the rain had become a fine mist outside the windows. The forest beckoned.

As he came up the slope, Reuben realized all the outside lights of Nideck Point had been turned off. The cheerful three-story house so well drawn on the night with bright Christmas lights had vanished, leaving in its place a great dark apparition of glinting windows with only the faintest light within, gables invisible in the shrouding mist.

Only a few candles lighted his way up the stairs. And in his room, he found the green velvet hooded robe laid out for him, with the slippers.

Another spectacular item had been added—a very large drinking horn trimmed in gold and beautifully carved with tiny gold-filled figures and symbols. There was a band of hammered and decorated gold beneath the lip, and a gold tip on the end, and a long thin leather shoulder strap for carrying it. It was a beautiful thing, too big for a buffalo or sheep horn, obviously.

A knock on his door interrupted him as he inspected it. He heard Felix’s faintly muffled voice say: “It’s time.”

O
NLY ONE CANDLE LIGHTED
his way down the staircase, and he felt the emptiness and the vastness of the house.

From far off came the ominous beat of drums.

When he stepped out onto the back steps, he could barely see the five hooded figures in the heavy darkness. The distant drums sounded a bizarre and faintly menacing cadence. And just below the sound of the wind, he heard the faint melody of flutes. The rain was no more than a thick mist now that he could feel but not hear, though a wind gusted through the distant trees and he heard that awful moaning that can come with the wind.

An instinctive fear gripped him. Far off, he saw the lurid flickering of a fire. It was a huge fire, a fire so huge it struck a deep chord of alarm in him. But the rain-drenched forest was in no danger from the fire. He knew that.

Gradually he made out more clearly the outlines of those nearest him. There was the loud crack of a kitchen match and a little blaze flared revealing Margon with a long slender torch in his hand.

At once, the torch was ignited and the other figures emerged in the burgeoning light.

Reuben could smell the pitch or the tar of the torch, he didn’t know for sure which it was.

They began to walk through the forest with Margon, torch in hand, leading the way. It seemed the distant drums knew they were coming. There came the deep insistent throbbing of big drums, and the relentless goading sound of other smaller drums, and then the horns soaring above them. Another instrumental voice joined in that might have been the Irish pipe, high, nasal, and almost baleful.

All around them the forest rustled, snapped, and moved in the shadows. As they struggled over rocks and fallen bracken moving steadily onwards, he heard hushed and secretive laughter. He could see the dim white faces of the Forest Gentry, mere flashes on either side of the irregular path they followed, and suddenly the faintest eeriest music rose to accompany them—in time with the greater sound summoning them from afar—the roughened mournful notes of wooden pipes, the tap and jingle of tambourines, a restless humming.

He felt the chills come up on the back of his arms and his neck, but they were pleasurable chills. His nakedness beneath the robe felt erotic.

On and on they walked. Reuben began to feel the deep pringling that meant the change. But Felix’s hand gripped his wrist. “Wait,” he said gently, falling into stride beside Reuben, steadying him when he stumbled or almost fell.

The drums in the distance grew louder. The deepest drums slowed to the ominous and terrifying sound of a knell, and the deep whine of the Irish pipes was hypnotic. Overhead the high remote branches of the redwoods groaned and creaked with the Forest Gentry. Sharp sounds came from the underbrush as of vines ripped in the blackness, and of branches beating the underbrush.

The fire was a great red glare in the mist ahead, flashing in a vast mesh of tangled vine and branches.

This way and that they turned as they walked. He had no idea now in which direction he was going except that they were drawing closer and closer, always, to that glare.

In front of him, the hooded figures looked anonymous in the distant light of the lone flickering torch, and it seemed suddenly only Felix was real to him, Felix who was beside him, and his heart went out to Stuart. Was Stuart afraid? Was he himself afraid?

No. Even as the drums grew louder, and as the spectral musicians around him answered and wove their low, harsh threads of melody around the drumbeat, he was not afraid. Again, the prickling began and he could feel the hairs of his scalp wanting to be released, feel the wolf hair in him raging against the skin of the man. Did the wolf in him respond to the drums? Did the drums hold a secret power
over the beast of which he’d been unaware? Bravely yet deliciously he struggled against it, knowing it would burst forth soon enough.

The distant fire grew brighter, and seemed to swallow the feeble light of Margon’s torch. There was something so horrific about the quivering, throbbing glare of the fire that he did feel again a deep and terrible alarm. But the fire was calling them, and he was eager for it, reaching out suddenly and taking firm hold of Felix’s arm.

Suddenly the anticipation he felt was intoxicating and it seemed to him that he’d been moving through this dark forest forever, and it was the greatest of experiences, this, to be with the others, heading towards the distant blaze that flared and flickered so high above them as if from the throat of a volcano or some dark chimney invisible beneath its light.

Pungent scents caught his nostrils, the deep rich and living scent of the wild boar he’d hunted all too seldom, and the sweet and seductive fragrance of simmering wine. Cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, the sweet smell of honey, all this he caught with the smell of smoke, the smell of pine, the smell of the wet mist. It was flooding his senses.

Out of the night, he thought he heard the deep-throated cry of the wild boar, a guttural scream, and again his skin was on fire. Hunger knotted his insides, hunger for living meat, yes.

A vast wordless song rose from the invisible beings all round them as ahead they drew up to a veritable wall of blackness above which the sparks flew heavenward from the raging fire they could no longer clearly see.

Suddenly the small torch in Margon’s hand was moving upwards, and dimly Reuben saw the outlines of the gray boulders that he’d once glimpsed by daylight, and all at once he was climbing a steep and rocky incline and entering at Felix’s bidding a narrow, jagged passage through which he could barely move. The drums beat loud against his ears, and the pipes soared again, throbbing, urging, calling to him to move quickly.

Ahead the world exploded with lurid dancing orange flames.

The last of the dark figures in front of him had stepped aside and
into the clearing, and he stumbled down now and found his footing on the packed earth, the fire for a moment blinding him.

It was a vast space.

Some thirty yards away the great exploding bonfire raged and crackled, its dark heavy scaffolding of logs plainly visible within the furnace of its yellow and orange flames.

It appeared to define the very center of a vast arena. To the right and left of him he saw the boulders spreading out into the inevitable shadows, how far he couldn’t guess.

Right by the mouth of the passage through which they’d just come stood the company of musicians—all recognizable in their green velvet hooded finery. It was Lisa pounding the kettledrums whose deep rolling booms shook Reuben’s very bones, and around her were gathered Henrietta and Peter playing the wooden flutes, and Heddy with a long narrow drum, and Jean Pierre playing the huge Scottish bagpipes. From high above came the wordless singing of the Forest Gentry and the unmistakable sound of violins and metal flutes, and the twanging notes of dulcimers.

All contrived to make a song of expectation and reverence, of unquestioned solemnity.

Between the boulders and the fire ahead stood a giant golden cauldron over a low-simmering fire that glowed as if made up of coals, and Reuben realized that this cauldron defined the center of the circle which the Morphenkinder were now forming around it.

He stepped forward, taking his place, the fumes of the spiced mixture in the cauldron rising in his nostrils enticingly.

The music slowed now and softened all around him. The air seemed to hold its breath, with the drum rolling as softly as thunder.