The Wolf Gift (13 page)

Good God, it’s the woman from the alleyway
.

Billie’s words came as if from a blast furnace.

“Well, you took your sweet time getting in here, and Ms. Susan Larson here doesn’t want to talk to anyone else but you. Small wonder, isn’t it, with the entire city making fun of her.”

She threw the front page of the
San Francisco Chronicle
at him. “That’s the extra that hit the streets while you were getting your beauty sleep, Reuben. ‘Woman Saved by Wolf Man.’ CNN went with ‘Mysterious Beast Attacks Rapist in San Francisco Alleyway.’ This went viral right after noon. We’re getting calls from Japan!”

“Can you start at the beginning?” Reuben said. But he understood only too well.

“ ‘The beginning’?” Billie demanded. “What’s with you, Reuben? We’ve got a busload of kids missing, and a blue-eyed beast creature stalking the back alleys of North Beach, and you ask me to start from the beginning?”

“I’m not insane,” said the woman. “I saw what I saw. Just like you saw it up there in Mendocino County. I read your description of what happened to you!”

“But I didn’t see anything up there,” said Reuben. He hated this. Was he going to try to make her think she was crazy?

“It was the way you described it!” the woman said. Her voice was thin and hysterical. “The panting, the snarls, the sound of the thing. But it wasn’t an animal. I saw it. It was a beast man, all right. I know what I saw.” She moved to the edge of the chair, and stared into his eyes. “I’m not talking to anybody but you,” she said. “I’m sick of being laughed at and made fun of. ‘Woman Rescued by Yeti!’ How dare they make this into a joke.”

“Take her into the conference room and get the whole story,” said Billie. “I want your view on this from start to finish. I want the details the rest of the press has been all too happy to miss.”

“I’ve been offered money for this interview,” broke in Ms. Larson. “I turned it down to come to you.”

“Just hold it here, Billie,” said Reuben. He held Ms. Larson’s hand as warmly as he could. “I’m not the person to do this story and you know perfectly well why. It’s been two weeks since that disaster in Mendocino, and you’re expecting me to cover another animal attack—.”

“You’re damn right I am,” said Billie. “Who else? Look, everybody’s been calling you, Reuben. The networks, the cable news—the
New York Times
, for heaven’s sakes! They want your comment. Is this the beast from Mendocino? And if you don’t think the people from Mendocino have been calling, well, you have another think coming. Now you’re telling me you won’t cover this for
us
.”

“ ‘Us’ should have a little loyalty here, Billie,” Reuben shot back. “I’m not ready to—.”

“Mr. Golding, please, I’m asking you to listen to me,” said the woman. “Don’t you understand what this is like? I was nearly killed last night. This thing saved me, and now I’m an international joke for describing what I saw.”

Reuben went speechless. The blood was pounding in his face.
Where the hell are Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen?
He was saved by Billie’s phone. She listened attentively for fifteen seconds, grunted, and clicked it off. He heard the words too.

“Well, the coroner’s office has confirmed it was an animal, all right, canine or lupine, but an animal. That much is out of the way.”

“What about hair or fur?” Reuben asked.

“It wasn’t an animal,” the woman protested. She was almost screaming. “I’m telling you, it had a face, a human face, and it spoke to me. It spoke words! It tried to help me. It touched me. It was gentling me! Stop saying it was an animal.”

Billie got up and beckoned for them to follow.

The conference room was windowless, sterile, with an oval mahogany table and several scattered Chippendale chairs. The two television monitors near the ceiling were flashing CNN and Fox silently with flowing captions.

Suddenly a lurid painting of a werewolf, comic-book style, filled up one screen.

Reuben flinched.

In a flash he saw that hallway in Marchent’s house, this time illuminated by his imagination, and the beast man there, descending on those two men who’d been trying to kill him.

He covered his eyes, and Billie grabbed at his wrist, “Wake up, Reuben,” she said. She turned to the young woman. “Sit down here and tell Reuben everything you remember.” She was hollering at her assistant, Althea, to bring some coffee.

The woman put her face in her hands and cried.

Reuben felt a rising panic. He moved in closer to the woman and put his arm around her. One of the monitors was running a clip from the Lon Chaney Jr.
Wolf Man
. And there suddenly was the first panoramic shot of Nideck Point that he’d ever seen on the television screen—his house with its peaked gables and diamond-pane windows.

“No, no,” said the woman, “not like that. Can you make them turn that thing off? He didn’t look like Lon Chaney and he didn’t look like Michael J. Fox!”

“Althea,” Billie shouted. “Turn that damn TV off.”

Reuben had the urge to just walk out now. But that was out of the question.

“What about the kidnapping?” Reuben murmured.

“What about it? You’re off it. You’re on the wolf man full-time. Althea, get Reuben’s tape recorder.”

“Don’t need it, Billie,” said Reuben, “got my iPhone.” He set the iPhone to record.

She slammed the door as she went out.

For the next half hour, he listened to the woman, his thumbs busy as he wrote his notes, his eyes returning again and again to the woman’s face.

But again and again, he faded out on her words. He couldn’t stop trying to picture “the beast” that had almost killed him.

Again and again, he nodded, he squeezed her hand, and at one point he took her in his arms. But he was not there.

Finally her husband showed up and insisted she leave, though the woman herself wanted very much to go on talking, and Reuben ended up walking them to the elevator doors.

Back at his desk, he stared at all the little paper phone messages taped to his computer monitor. Althea told him Celeste was on line 2.

“What did you do with your cell phone?” Celeste demanded. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Tell me something. Is the moon full?”

“No. Not at all. I think we’re in the quarter moon. Hold on.” He heard the keys of her computer clacking. “Yeah, quarter moon, so you can forget about that. But why are you asking? They just got a ransom demand from the kidnappers, for heaven’s sakes. And you’re talking about the wolf man thing?”

“They put me on the wolf man story. There’s nothing I can do. How much is the ransom demand?”

“That’s the most insulting and demeaning thing I ever heard,” Celeste stormed. “Reuben, stand up for yourself. Why, because of what happened to you up north? What is Billie thinking? The kidnappers have just demanded five million dollars or they will start killing the kids one by one. You should be on the way to Marin. The ransom’s to be transferred to an account in the Bahamas, but you can be sure it will pass through that account like lightning and vanish into the cyber-banking twilight zone. It might never even reach that bank. They’re saying these kidnappers are tech geniuses.”

Billie was suddenly standing over his desk.

“What did you get?”

He hung up the phone. “A lot,” he said. “Her perspective. Now I need some time to catch up on the coverage out there.”

“You haven’t got time. I want your exclusive on the front page. You realize the
Chronicle
’s going to offer you a job, don’t you? And you know what? Channel Six is making noises about wanting you. They have been since you were attacked in Mendocino.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s your looks. That’s all broadcast news cares about, your looks. But I didn’t offer you this job for your looks. I’m telling you, Reuben, the worst thing that could possibly happen to you is to go into broadcast news at your age. Give me the Reuben take on all this in your own voice, your distinctive voice. And don’t disappear on me again the way you did this morning.”

She was gone.

He sat there staring in front of him.

All right, the moon’s not full. It meant that what had happened to
him had nothing to do with the moon, and that it could happen again anytime. It might happen again tonight. So much for the old legends, and why was he trapped here when he should be investigating every shred of fact or fancy that had to do with “beast men”?

A memory came back to him, of gliding over the rooftops, his legs throbbing with their new strength. He’d looked up and seen the quarter moon behind the clouds that surely veiled it from human eyes.

And will this happen again as soon as it’s dark?

How beautiful it had looked, that quarter moon hanging amid so many vibrant stars. He felt himself again flying with arms out as he cleared the street before him, landing effortlessly on the sloped roof. He felt a powerful exhilaration. And then the horrifying thought came:
Will this happen every night?

Althea put down a fresh cup of coffee for him. She smiled and waved as she moved away.

He stared at all the people around him, coming and going from their white cubicles, some glancing his way, a few nodding, others passing in inevitable silence, locked in their thoughts. He stared at the row of television monitors that ran the length of the far wall. Images of the empty school bus, the Goldenwood Academy. A woman crying. Lon Chaney Jr. again looking like a giant teddy bear rushing through the misty English forest, his lupine ears standing up.

He turned away in his swivel chair, picked up the phone, and punched in the number of the coroner’s office and agreed to hold.

I don’t want to do any of this, he was thinking. I can’t do any of it. It’s all slipping away from me in the blaze of what’s happened. I can’t. Sure, I’m sorry for Miss Larson and what she suffered, and that nobody believes her, but hell, I saved her life! I don’t belong here doing this. I’m the last person who should be doing it. None of this matters, that’s the problem. At least not to me.

A kind of cold settled over Reuben. One of his colleagues, a very friendly woman named Peggy Flynn, appeared with a plate of cookies for him. He flashed the inevitable warm smile. But he felt nothing, not even that he knew her, or had ever been connected with her, or that they even shared the same world.

That was it; they didn’t share the same world. Nobody shared the world in which he lived right now. Nobody could.

Except maybe that thing that had attacked him in Mendocino. He closed his eyes. He felt those fangs biting into his scalp, into his face, that deep horrific pain in the side of his face when those teeth sank in.

And if he hadn’t killed that man in the North Beach alley, would that man have gone on to become a beast thing, too, just like Reuben! He shuddered. Thank God, he’d killed the guy. Oh, now, wait a minute. What kind of a prayer was that!

He went blank.

The coffee in his cup looked like gasoline. The cookies looked like plaster.

And it wasn’t reversible, was it? It was no matter of choice; in fact he had not the slightest control at all.

The voice of the coroner’s assistant snapped him back to life. “Oh, it was an animal all right. We can tell by the lysozyme in the saliva. Well, humans don’t have this amount of lysozyme in their saliva. Humans have a lot of amylase, which starts to break down the carbohydrates that we eat. But an animal doesn’t have amylase, and it does have a powerful amount of lysozyme, which kills the bacteria it ingests, which is why a dog can eat from a garbage dump or a rotted carcass and we can’t. But I’ll tell you something strange about this beast, whatever it is. It had more lysozyme than any dog would ever have. And there were other enzymes in the saliva that we can’t properly analyze here. Tests on this are going to take months.”

No, no hair, no fur, nothing like that. They’d collected some fibers, or thought they had, but then they came up with nothing.

His heart was pounding when he put down the phone. So he’d become something other than human, without a doubt. It all got back to the hormones, didn’t it? But that was as far as he could understand.

What he did understand was that he had to be locked in his room before it got dark.

And it was fall now, almost winter, and this was one of those damp gray days with no real sky at all, just a wet roof over San Francisco.

By five o’clock, he was finished with his story.

He’d checked in covertly with Celeste, who verified the
Chronicle
account of the woman’s bruises and torn clothes. He’d checked in with San Francisco General but no one would say anything and Grace was in surgery.

He’d also checked out all the main versions of the mystery animal
attack online. The story was galloping around the globe, all right, and almost all accounts mentioned the “mysterious” attack on him in Mendocino. Only now as he tracked the news of Marchent’s murder did he realize this had traveled the globe as well. “Mystery Beast Strikes Again?” “Bigfoot Intervenes to Save Lives.”

He’d also checked out the YouTubes of reporters in North Beach describing the “back-alley beast.”

Then he hit the computer keyboard with the woman’s words.

He made the story personal, yes, but only in tone. Following her own vivid descriptions, a review of the forensic evidence and the inevitable questions, he wrote in conclusion: