The Ultimate Werewolf (14 page)

"The whiskers, Isaac, and the eyes."

"Was he wearing clothes?"

"A dirty pea coat, dark pants, shoes without socks."

"No socks? Are you sure?"

"His pants were rolled up. He didn't have shoelaces. He didn't have socks. He rushed past me. I tried to follow him and . . ."

Walter shut his eyes and never opened them again. He was the first fatality in the war against the Wolf Man.

Isaac returned to Central Park with a complement of detectives and trained dogs. The dogs devoured rabbits in the north woods. The detectives tore through every patch of ground. Isaac called off the search. He sat in his office at One Police Plaza like some melancholiac. He wouldn't take calls from Becky Karp. He set up his miniature chessboard and replayed the opening gambits of Bobby Fisher, the former world champion who was hibernating in his own north woods.

He allowed only one visitor, Harvey Montaigne, who'd walked out of his half-way house in a pair of slippers and a flannel robe. "Mr. Isaac, I'm sorry I was so glib. I want to help."

"It's too late."

"I want to help."

Harvey Montaigne wore his flannel robe in Isaac's limousine. People mistook him for a medium Isaac had hired. They forgot he was the former Wolf Man. Isaac visited the catacomb of old abandoned subway stations with Harvey Montaigne. They heard the beat of water over their heads. They discovered more and more stations until Isaac realized there was a whole New York he knew nothing about. He existed at the scratchy surface of things. The interior had never been his.

Harvey caught a cold. Isaac fed him Bufferin and brought him home to the half-way house. He had his aides look for any other reference to the Bangor Wolf. There were none. He faxed all the police chiefs of

Maine. No one could recall any previous sightings of the Bangor Wolf.

▼▼▼

The moon turned a marble color and was eaten up in the sky. Isaac slept in his office. Hairs grew on his face. He was one more hibernating man. He got a call from Central Park. The Wolf Man had been spotted. Isaac didn't even get out of his chair. Fifty patrol cars converged upon the Park. Sharpshooters were arriving from Tactical Services. The dogs were taken out of the kennels at the Police Academy. And Isaac sat.

He looked at his own hairy face and left One Police Plaza. He entered the catacombs through a door near the tracks of Becky's own subway station at City Hall. Isaac walked a half mile under the ground and arrived at the Cherry Street station of the old Kings County line. He had his pocket flashlight and a small, collapsible shovel with a very sharp blade. My man likes a direct north to south line, with only a little bit of a bias, Isaac muttered to himself. He knew Bangor would escape the sharpshooters and the dogs.

Isaac whistled to himself and waited.

He heard the trudge of feet against the tracks.

He put out the light and opened the shovel's neck. Ah, he said. Should have brought my baseball bat. But the shovel had been more convenient.

He saw the blueness of the eyes, caught the heavy breathing. He couldn't tell if the Wolf Man had been wounded or not. Isaac would have to depend on surprise. His heart was pounding.

I'll have to wait until I can feel his whiskers.

He held the shovel in that high, classic stance of Joe DiMaggio and walloped the Wolf Man over the head.

The Wolf Man dropped without a groan. Isaac shoved the light in his eyes. The Wolf Man was all whiskers. He looked shorter than Isaac. He slept like a little boy without his socks. His teeth weren't yellow. He had long fingernails, but he didn't have claws.

▼▼▼

It was Isaac who carried him out of the catacombs, who brought him to the Elizabeth Street police station, read him his rights while the Wolf Man was still groggy. And that was Isaac's last moment of peace. There were reporters all over the place. Becky Karp arrived in her chauf- feured limousine. She had a press conference on the steps of the precinct. "Ain't he the best?" she said, pointing to Isaac, who stood outside the cage where the Wolf Man sat, hair up to his eyes.

"You can't become a wolf man in the city of New York without getting zapped by Isaac Sidel."

And Isaac was feeling more and more guilty. Perhaps he shouldn't have used a shovel. But if there had been detectives around from the tactical unit, they would have shot out the Wolf Man's teeth. No one, not even a wolf man, should have been subjected to this: sitting in a cage like a circus freak, while there was a fury of faces all around him.

Her Honor entered the precinct. She was still angry at Isaac, because he'd stopped sleeping with her. Isaac was in love with Margaret Tolstoy, an undercover girl for the FBI
and
the KGB.

"Is that him?" Becky said, growling into the cage. The Wolf Man blinked.

"Becky," Isaac said, "leave the guy alone."

"Guy? That's a fucking monster, not a guy."

"Yeah, but if you tamper with him, some judge will put him back in the street."

"Over my dead body . . . Isaac, have dinner with me."

"Can't," Isaac said.

"Ah, it's that Roumanian slut, Madame Tolstoya. She's been jerking you off, Isaac. She has a hundred boyfriends."

"Becky, do you have to discuss my personal life in public?"

"You have no personal life. You're my police commissioner."

And she disappeared from Elizabeth Street.

Isaac took the Wolf Man out of the cage and brought him into the interrogation room. It was the last chance Isaac would have to talk with the Wolf Man, who had no Social Security card or driver's license in his pockets, no identity papers. The blue eyes seemed to converge somewhere beyond Isaac's narrow ken. "I can help you," Isaac said.

The Wolf Man would belong to the courts once he was arraigned. "I can help you."

The Wolf Man wouldn't take cigarettes or a sandwich from Isaac. "If the D.A. starts getting rough, call me . . . day or night," Isaac said, shoving his card into the Wolf Man's shirt pocket.

▼▼▼

The Wolf Man did become a child of the courts. He sat in his own ward at Bellevue. No one could discover his name. He didn't seem to have a past outside his little history of chewing on people. Then a woman came forth and identified the Wolf Man as her son, Monroe Tapler, who'd grown up as an incorrigible in Jersey City and had moved to Manhattan at the age of twenty-two and lived in the streets. Papers began to appear in psychological journals on the subject of Monroe Tapler as sociopath "in our mean, modern season."

Isaac wrote to the editor of one such journal.

Dear Sir,

In regard to the article, "Pathology of the Lycanthrope," in your November number, I would like to say that your author is skating on very thin ice. Monroe Tapler    may have bitten people at nine or ten, but that would not necessarily make him a wolf man. I'm afraid your author should have moved from psychology to myth. The Wolf Man is closer to our collective unconscious than he is to any sociopathic chart.

Sincerely, Isaac Sidel

The letter started a controversy. But Isaac was sick of the whole thing. His whiskers grew longer and longer. He began to look like the Wolf Man. And one night, while he was in his tiny apartment on the Lower East Side, he had a visit from Margaret Tolstoy, she who slept with Mafia chieftains all across America while she busted up gangs for the FBI. She was over fifty, Isaac's age. But he couldn't take his eyes off her. She was wearing a blond wig in her latest avatar. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes looked like huge green marbles. She removed a pair of scissors from her handbag without saying a word and chopped off Isaac's beard.

"Now you're human," she said.

Isaac stared into the mirror. He had white stubble all over his face.

"Come to bed," she told him. He lay down next to Margaret Tolstoy. She rubbed the fur on his chest.

"My little Wolf Man," she said, and she made love to him until most of his melancholy was gone.

Craig Shaw Gardner

▼▼▼

THE
animals knew.

In the city, he didn't have to worry about that. Cats, birds, rodents: all stayed out of his way. Dogs would go wild sometimes when he was near, especially as it grew close to the full moon. But other dogs, small nervous things that yipped at the heels of anything that moved, were so domesticated that they were almost as blind as their human masters.

In the city, he could be one of those famous faceless millions. No one needed to know his name, or his business. And if there was a little extra violence on the streets, no one came looking for him. It was easier, these days, for his sort to survive.

But the violence became so bad that even city people had to pay attention. There were too many dying in the wrong ways, too many bodies found with claw and teeth marks. Even those bored by drug turf wars and drive-by shootings took notice. And, once they noticed, they started to ask questions.

He had known he would have to leave the city eventually. No place was safe forever. But he had lived within the tall buildings for too long.

He had forgotten about the animals.

▼▼▼

He was going by the name Sam now. Not that anybody had asked his name.

There was a gun pointed straight at him. The gun barrel glinted in the early morning sunlight. The moon, still visible above the horizon, was perfectly round, perfectly full. The first of three nights, he thought. Two more nights to go. If only it could be night again, and everything would change.

Sweat poured down his face. He was breathing so heavily from his exertion that his mouth was open. He could taste the salty drops of sweat on his tongue. They had him cornered, against the back wall of a neighbor's garden. There were maybe a dozen of them, spread out in a half-circle. He had nowhere else to run. He thought the revolver was a forty-four.

"Wait a moment," said one of the well-dressed men. His hunting jacket alone must have cost hundreds of dollars. "You can't shoot him."

The man holding the gun started to shake. "What do you mean, I can't shoot him? Jenny's dead!"

"You can't kill him," said the first man, his voice still calm. "Not with that."

But the man with the gun got more upset with every passing word. "She had her throat ripped out! She was only twelve, goddamn it. That thing over there only looks human." He glanced down then at the revolver in his hand, almost as if he couldn't believe it was there himself. For a moment his voice became quieter, almost resigned. "It has to die."

"I'm not arguing with you, John," the first man said. "That thing has to die. But if that's what we think it is, regular bullets won't kill it."

Someone laughed nervously in the crowd. And the way John looked at Sam, he knew the gunman wasn't buying the argument.

"To hell with your silver bullets!" John screamed, his voice shifting to the falsetto as it again filled with emotion. His gun hand shook with his rage. "I'm going to shoot his fucking face off!"

He cried out as he pulled the trigger, as if the bullet came not from the gun but from somewhere deep inside him.

Sam flinched as the first bullet flew into the trees over his head.

▼▼▼

If he was careful, he didn't have to hurt anyone.

That was the first of the lies.

He had tried so hard to believe that, after what he had become. He had wanted so desperately, despite everything he saw in front of him, despite all the blood and all the death, to have some sort of control.

But no matter how hard he tried, other people came, and were touched by him. And other people died. So many now, that there was no way to count them all.

The only thing that made it worse was the second lie. Like the first, it was a lie he had told only to himself:

He could stop himself at any time.

The two times he had gotten up the nerve to kill himself, he'd learned a single lesson. It didn't matter if he had slits in his wrists or a hole in his skull. He could bleed for hours or writhe for days in semi-conscious agony. But this thing that lived inside him would always make him whole again.

Not that it made him well. He could never be well again, after what had happened. But, as much as he could hurt inside, he could not die.

So he lived, and tried to keep to the edges of society, where nobody looked you straight in the eye, and he hoped and prayed no one would ever come close enough for him to jeopardize again.

But that was the first lie all over again.

▼▼▼

There was a long silence after the gunshot, the kind of quiet you never hear in the city. It was as if the explosion had frozen everyone in shock. Sam had been through this before. He could guess what went through all those normal minds. Before that gunshot, every person in that mob probably had thought of himself as a good soul, a good neighbor. What were they doing here? What were they doing to another human being?

A woman's voice broke the silence. "Arnie? Joe? Carl? Mr. Rein- beck? What's going on here? What's the matter?"

Parts of the mob shifted. Some men turned their heads to watch the woman run toward them across the lawn. Others looked away.

"Debbie," a man in the crowd called, "I thought I told you to stay at home."

"You can tell me a lot of things, Arnie," Debbie answered defiantly. "But when people start shooting guns, I want to see what's going on in my neighborhood."

"Your neighborhood!" Arnie exploded. "Since when does freeload- ing in my spare bedroom make this your neighborhood?" His eyes jerked back to Sam, his expression half anger, and maybe half shock that the anger could make him forget what he was here for.

"Arnie, it doesn't matter about the neighborhood," another man interrupted. "She's right." It was the same man who'd asked John to give up the gun. "We have no business doing this ourselves. Let's get the sheriff."

"The sheriff?" John demanded. "He'll never believe what happened!" He waved the gun at his target again. "He killed my Jenny! He ate part of her, for god's sake. How many more are you going to let him ' murder?"

The gun went off again. Sam felt a shot of fire, then clear, cold pain, as the bullet entered the soft flesh of his upper arm.

The woman screamed and ran to his side. He realized he had lost his balance when he saw she was using her weight to help keep him on his feet.

"Debbie!" Arnie screamed, his face almost as deep a red as the fluid pouring from Sam's arm. "If you get in the way one more time, I swear—"

"What are you going to do, Arnie?" She called out to the crowd: "What are all of you going to do? You're all animals!"

He couldn't help himself. He started to laugh.

It was always the animals.

▼▼▼

So he moved on before they came for him. It didn't matter that they never ever knew exactly what they were looking for. There was always the chance that they'd stumble upon him anyway. He always moved on when he felt that shift coming, like an animal who senses a change in the weather. In all the years since this had begun, he had changed. Most of all, he had learned how to survive.

And he'd learned, after a time, to savor this new life. He had managed to make certain investments over the years—some monetary, some personal, some legal, some not so legal—but all of them kept him comfortable. After a while, he had grown to appreciate his solitary , existence as he watched the world go by, so close to all the others, yet so different from every one of them. He had started to collect things, some relating to his childhood, so long ago, others that commented on his curse. And he had started to make little changes in the world around him.

He was careful, for a time, to only go after those who he felt deserved his touch: pushers and pimps and the like. Once, when he was feeling foolhardy, he had taken a particularly obnoxious small-time politician.

He might live forever—he hadn't aged since it happened, close to fifty years ago—but he held death in his hands.

Then the world changed again, and even the city became dangerous. So dangerous that people started to take back the streets in order to survive, and the police started to count the corpses. But where could he go next?

He had tired quickly in his early years of living out in the wilds, far beyond civilization. And now even the jumped-up pace of the inner city seemed to pale. He'd grown restless with both extremes. It was time for something in the middle, someplace that had never seen the likes of him. Not a mountain resort, nor farm country; they'd expect wild animals in places like that, and there would be people who knew how to handle the unexpected.

But where else was there? Perhaps his years of survival had made him reckless, but he knew where he wanted to go.

So, before the next full moon, he grabbed his Big Bad Wolf Big Little Book—a cornerstone to both his collections—a suitcase full of clothes and bank books, and headed for one of the bedroom communities outside of town.

No one expected his sort of thing in the suburbs.

▼▼▼

The woman's presence changed the chemistry in the yard, but it didn't stop the violence. He had yelled out at the pain. Some might have mistaken the sound for a growl.

The others rushed forward. He felt a dozen hands on him. Some lashed out, connected with Sam's stomach, his chin, his groin. Some tried to pull their neighbors away. Debbie shouted at them to leave him alone.

He no longer had the anger to strike back at them, or the energy to tell them to stop what they were doing. He had used up everything he had in trying to escape them. Now he was nothing but tired, and all he could do was wait for this latest drama to end.

"Look, there's one way to prove this thing!" one of the men said in a louder voice. "The moon is still full tonight. If what John says is true, we'll know then, right?"

"Yeah, right," other voices agreed one after another. "Lock him up. Reinbeck's tool shed. We'll see tonight."

John had stayed behind the rest of the crowd. "Maybe you're right," he said now as he walked forward. "I'm not a murderer. But I'm staying outside the shed until we know." He grabbed Sam's chin, and lifted his head so that he looked straight into John's eyes. "And I'm holding on to my gun."

They pushed Sam into the dark shed as the summer sun rose over the subdivision, and slammed the door behind him. He heard something heavy clank and bang against the other side; probably a padlock. He decided to sleep. There was nothing he could do that would change tonight.

▼▼▼

He woke to a sound of a key in the padlock outside.

The door swung open, and Debbie stepped inside. The door slammed shut behind her, propelled by other hands.

"I thought you'd like something to eat," she said, waving a picnic basket at the prone Sam. A picnic basket? Just like Little Red Riding Hood. He wondered if she saw the humor in that. He'd laugh all over again if he wasn't feeling so lousy. "Besides, somebody should look at your arm." In her other hand she held a damp sponge and a first-aid kit.

This Debbie, then, actually cared what happened to a stranger. He looked up at her. She was dressed simply, in worn jeans and a blouse with a faded floral print. Her clothes didn't speak of money like the wardrobes of the other women he'd seen in the neighborhood.

She smiled reassuringly. She didn't know what was going to happen.

She didn't deserve to be here like the others. But then, who was he, even now, to know what people deserved?

He had fallen in love with a woman once, soon after the change had come over him. It had shown him the true extent of his transformation, and it had been the biggest mistake he ever made.