The Wolf Gift (49 page)

Felix motioned for Margon to draw back, and the two moved closer to the dining room, signaling to Reuben to go ahead.

He snapped on the switch for the outside lights, turned off the burglar alarm, and opened the door.

It was a sea of wet angry people in glistening raincoats with glistening umbrellas, and a good many more enforcement personnel than he had realized. At once the female Russian doctor—middle-aged, thick-bodied, with a short tight cap of gray hair—advanced, beckoning for Jaska and her squadron of supporters to follow, but Grace barred her way.

Phil came up the steps and slipped into the house, with Jim right behind him.

“If you would all please listen,” said Reuben. He raised his hands for patience and quiet. “I understand how cold it is out here, and I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting.”

Grace was backing up the steps with Simon Oliver and trying to keep the Russian doctors at bay. The scent of malice rose decisively from the
two Russians, and Jaska’s cold eyes fixed Reuben harshly, as if they were beams that could somehow paralyze a victim as he pushed relentlessly closer.

The female doctor was powerfully excited by the sight of Reuben, eyeing him arrogantly with small milky-blue eyes.

“Doctors, please,” said Reuben. Grace was now at his elbow. “Do come in, and you too, Dr. Cutler—.” (He hoped and prayed Felix and Margon knew what they were doing, that they were the beings he believed them to be, but suddenly it seemed a slender and fantastical faith!) “We need to talk inside, you and I.” He went on. “And Galton, I’m so sorry to have brought you out in this weather. Galton, maybe you could rustle up some coffee for all these people. You know the kitchen here as well as anybody else. I think we have enough cups for the whole party—.”

Beside him, Laura motioned to Galton and said she’d meet him at the back door.

Galton was amazed, but immediately nodded and started taking orders for sugar and cream.

Grace pushed into the room behind Reuben.

But the two Russian doctors remained on the steps, in spite of the pelting rain. Then the woman said something under her breath and in Russian to Jaska, and Jaska turned and told the men and women peace officers to please be ready, to draw close to the house.

The men were none too sure about following his orders, obviously. And a great many hung back, though a few in uniforms Reuben didn’t recognize came forward and even tried to follow Jaska inside.

“You may come in, Doctor,” said Reuben. “But the men must remain outside.”

Suddenly the sheriff came forward, very much objecting, and Reuben, saying nothing, allowed him into the great room as well.

He shut the door, and faced them—the sheriff, the family, Simon Oliver, the girlish and pretty Dr. Cutler, and the two formidable Russians who appraised him with eyes of stone.

Dr. Cutler suddenly let out a cry. She’d picked Stuart out of the shadows by the fireplace and rushed to him with her arms out.

“I’m all right, Doctor—,” Stuart said. He put his big ungainly arms around her immediately. “I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry. I don’t know what happened to me last night, I just somehow had to get out of there, and I broke the window—.”

His words were drowned out as the female Russian doctor and Grace began to shout at each other, the Russian woman insisting, “This does not have to be difficult, if your son and this boy will simply come!”

There was something grindingly presumptuous and vicious in her tone. Reek of malice.

Simon, looking very wet and very worn out in his usual gray suit, but more than anything outraged and militant, grabbed Reuben’s arm and said, “The fifty-one-fifties are bogus. They had these papers signed by paramedics who aren’t even here! How can we verify these signatures, or that these people even know you two boys?”

Reuben only vaguely knew what a “fifty-one-fifty” was, but he could tell it was a legal paper of commitment.

“Now you can see perfectly well that there is nothing wrong or violent about this young man, both of you,” Simon continued in a quaking voice, “and I warn you, if you dare to attempt to take him or that boy there out of this house by force—.”

With a steely firmness, the Russian doctor turned and introduced herself to Reuben. “Dr. Darya Klopov,” she said in a thick accent, with a slight raise of her white eyebrows, her eyes narrowing as she extended her small naked hand. Her smile was a grimace baring perfect porcelain teeth. The scent of deep resentment came from her, absolute insolence. “I ask only that you trust me, young man, that you trust my knowledge of these extraordinary experiences that you’ve had to endure.”

“Yes, yes,” said Dr. Jaska. Another grotesque smile that was not a smile, and another thick accent. “And absolutely no one has to be harmed in this situation, where, you see, we have so many armed men.” His lips drew back menacingly from his teeth as he said the words “armed men.” He turned anxiously to the door as he gestured, seemingly on the verge of opening it and inviting the “armed men” in.

Grace flew at the doctor with a volley of legal threats.

Jim, in his full black suit and Roman collar, had taken up a position directly beside Reuben, and now Phil came round and stood with him as well. Phil, looking professorial with his disheveled gray hair and rumpled shirt and crooked tie, was shaking his head, murmuring, “No, no, this is not going to happen. Absolutely not.”

Reuben could hear Stuart pouring out his heart to Dr. Cutler. “Let me just stay here with Reuben. Reuben’s my friend. If I can just stay here, Dr. Cutler, please, please, please.”

What do I do now?

“You see,” said Dr. Klopov unctuously, “this is a signed order entrusting you to our care.”

“And have you ever even laid eyes on the paramedic who signed this order?” demanded Grace. “They bought these two pieces of paper. They do not understand. They will not get away with this.”

“I can’t come with you,” Reuben said to the doctor.

Jaska turned and opened the door on the icy wind. He called out to the men.

The sheriff at once protested. “I’ll take care of that, Doctor. You just leave those men outside.” He immediately stepped up to the door. “You stay where you are!” he called out. A mild-mannered gray-haired man in his late sixties, he was plainly out of sorts with the whole predicament. He turned to Reuben now and appeared to rather theatrically take a good look at him. “If somebody could just explain to me in plain English why either of these two boys should be committed against their will, I would welcome that explanation because I don’t see the problem here, I really just don’t—.”

“Of course you don’t see it!” fired back Dr. Klopov, pacing in her thick black high heels, as though she needed the sound of them thonking on the oak parquet. “You have no sense of the volatile nature of the illness we’re dealing with, or our knowledge of these dangerous cases—.”

Simon Oliver raised his voice. “Sheriff, you should take those men and go home.”

The door was still open. The voices outside were getting louder. The scent of coffee wafted on the wind. Galton’s voice was mingled with the others, and from what Reuben could see, Laura was out there too in the rain serving the coffee in mugs from a large tray.

And where the hell are Felix and Margon? And what the hell do they expect me to do?

“All right!” declared Reuben. Again, he held up his hands. “I’m not going anywhere.” He closed the front door. “Sheriff, the last time I saw a paramedic was over a month ago. I don’t know who signed this paper. I picked up Stuart last night because the kid was lost and frightened. That’s Stuart’s doctor right there, Dr. Cutler. Granted, I should have called somebody, notified somebody last night, but Stuart’s fine.”

With ugly patronizing facial expressions the doctors were shaking their heads, and pursing their lips, as though this was out of the question.
“No, no, no,” said Dr. Jaska. “You are most certainly coming, young man. We have gone to great trouble and expense to see to your care, and you will come. Will you come peacefully or must we—.”

He stopped dead, his face going blank.

Beside him, Dr. Klopov turned pale with shock.

Reuben turned around.

Margon and Felix had come back into the room. They stood to the right side of the great fireplace, and beside them stood yet another of the distinguished gentlemen from the photograph, the gray-haired older-appearing Baron Thibault, the man with the very large eyes and deeply wrinkled face.

The men moved naturally and almost casually closer, as Grace stepped back and out of the way.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Doctors,” said Baron Thibault in a deep well-assured baritone. “What has it been, exactly, would you say? Almost ten years?”

Dr. Klopov was inching backwards towards the door, and Jaska, who stood beside it, reached out, groping, for the knob.

“Oh, surely you’re not leaving,” Margon said. The voice was pleasant, polite. “But you’ve only just arrived, and as you said, Dr. Jaska, you’ve gone to so much trouble and expense.”

“You know these men?” Grace asked Margon. She gestured to the doctors. “You know what this is about?”

“Stay out of it, Grace,” said Phil.

Margon acknowledged both of them with small nods and an agreeable enough smile.

The doctors were petrified, and in a silent rage. The reek of evil was so seductive. The spasms were churning again in Reuben.

Felix merely watched, his face impassive and faintly sad.

Suddenly a riff of cries broke out beyond the door.

Jaska jumped back. And Klopov too was startled but recovered herself, firing a fierce malevolent look at Margon.

Something immense and heavy thundered against the door. Reuben saw it actually shuddering as the doctors scrambled to get clear of it, and the sheriff let out a shout.

People on the other side were screaming, men and women alike.

The door burst inward, falling off its screeching hinges, and was slammed violently to his left.

Reuben’s heart was in his throat.

It was a man wolf, emerging from the swirling rain as if from nothingness, a great seven-foot monster in full dark brown wolf-coat with blazing gray eyes, shining white fangs, and a deep gargling roar breaking from its throat.

The spasms made a fist inside of Reuben. He felt the blood drain from his face. At the same time he felt a wave of nausea and his knees went weak.

The man wolf’s great paws reached out for Dr. Klopov and caught her by her arms, lifting her off her feet.

“You will not, you will not!” she bellowed, squirming, feet thrashing, struggling to make her own groping fingers into claws, as the beast raised her up into the full glare of the outside lights.

Everyone in the room was in motion, Reuben himself stumbling backwards, and Dr. Cutler shrieking over and over again as if she couldn’t stop herself, and Jim scrambling to his mother’s side.

The men and women outside were in total panic, yelling, fighting with one another. Shots rang out and then came the inevitable, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”

“Rush it, take it alive!” roared Dr. Jaska, grabbing at the petrified sheriff. “Capture it, you fool!”

Reuben watched utterly astonished as the man wolf sank its gobbling fangs into the doctor’s throat, the blood spurting and pouring down over her rumpled clothes. Her arms went dead like broken branches. Dr. Jaska gave the loudest and most terrible wail. “Kill it, kill it!” he was now screaming, and the sheriff was struggling to get his gun out of the holster.

Shots came again from the screaming crowd on the outside.

Undeterred the beast closed its powerful jaws on the woman’s flopping head and tore it loose from her neck, snapping ribbons of rubbery bloody skin. Then swinging the head back and forth wildly, the beast sent the head flying out into the night.

The mangled bloody body of the doctor, it dropped to the steps—lunging into the room and knocking the sheriff flat on his back, as it caught the fleeing Dr. Jaska in the doors of the conservatory.

Crashing into the potted trees and flowers, the two figures merged as the doctor let loose a desperate boiling tirade in Russian before the man wolf ripped his head off as he had done to the woman doctor and threw
the head back into the great room where it rolled across the floor before the open door.

The sheriff was struggling to get up and almost fell on the head, and then got his gun out and couldn’t get control of his right arm to aim.

The towering man wolf strode past him, pale eyes staring forward, dragging the headless broken body of Jaska by one hook of a claw.

Reuben stared aghast at its powerful hairy legs, the way it moved on the balls of its feet, heels high, knees flexed. He had felt all this, but never beheld it.

The monster dropped the body. With one great leap it vaulted through the assembly, pounding past Grace and Jim as it raced across the great room and into the library where it burst through the drapery and glass of the eastern window and vanished into the night. The shattered glass clattered down with the brass drapery rod and the crumpling fabric and the glittering rain swept in.

Reuben stood stock-still.

The spasms were running rampant inside him. But his skin was like an icy armor containing him.

He saw around him utter pandemonium—Dr. Cutler in hysterics being held by the desperate stammering Stuart, his mother climbing up from her knees and staring after the monster, and Jim down on his knees with his hands over his face, praying with his eyes shut.

Phil rushed to the aid of his wife. And Laura, who appeared now in the open door, and standing well to one side of the doctor’s dead body, stared at Reuben and Reuben stared at her. He reached out to welcome her into his arms.

Simon Oliver had fallen into a chair, and clutching at his chest, his face flushed and wet, was struggling to get back to his feet.

Only the three men—Felix, Margon, and Thibault—had not moved. Now Thibault collected himself and went to assist the sheriff. The sheriff took his arm gratefully and rushed past Laura and Reuben, shouting commands to his men.

The sirens of the patrol cars were now slicing up the night with their shrill pulsing wails.