The Wolfman (11 page)

Lawrence frowned.

Black rain made no sense.

He followed it with his eyes back along the cracks in the flagstone to the base of the huge stone fountain that was carved with birds and squirrels and pine cones. The black rain came from there.

The lightning flashed once more, but dimmer now, as if the storm was moving away. In its glow Lawrence saw something that made no sense to him. A man knelt before the fountain, his head bowed as if in prayer. His shoulders shook as he knelt there.

Lawrence recognized those shoulders, the clothes.

Father?

How? How could Father be here when he was supposed to be away on business? Why was he here?

And . . . was he laughing? Weeping?

Then lightning flashed once more and the moment became stranger still, for Lawrence saw that his father was not alone as he knelt by the fountain. He had his arms wrapped around another person, cradling her to his chest.

A woman.

“Mother?” Lawrence whispered.

The wail tore through the night, rising upward from the kneeling figure as Sir John raised his head and screamed to the storm. As he did so the body in his arms shifted and Lawrence saw his mother’s arm fall limply down, her hand striking the wet ground. The black rain flowed from her, from her arm, from her body, from her skin. A river of darkness that washed from her and across the flagstones toward Lawrence.

“Mother? . . .” Lawrence said again, and this time his father heard his plaintive little voice. Sir John turned, still cradling Solana to his chest. As lightning flashed Lawrence could see the lines of terrible, impossible grief carved into his father’s face. His father’s eyes were dark, a red that was filled with grief and fury and rage and an impossible loss.

Sir John opened his mouth and uttered a cry of despair that tore the night apart. Lawrence felt the blackness of the storm suddenly gather around him, closing like a fist on his throat, and then his own scream lifted into the air as the lightning and thunder exploded around him.

And then there was nothing but blackness.

L
awrence lay on his bed and stared up at the blackness of the ceiling. He felt old and used and damaged in a hundred ways. He had thought himself free of the memories of that awful night. His mother was thirty years in her grave, and Lawrence had not set foot in this house since.

But now, as if the wood and stone were a battery that had stored every minute detail of that night, it replayed over and over in his head. No matter how much whiskey he drank the images were relentless, undeterred. Every detail of that night . . . and of what followed. . . .

T
HE BLACK CARRIAGE
was not a hearse but it looked like one. Large and heavy, with shaded windows and four black horses led by a grim-faced man in a dark suit.

Young Lawrence is only remotely aware that he is being carried. His mind does not process time or movement or action with any clarity or cogency. He feels like he is floating. When he hears voices he does not know who they belong to. His father’s voice is that of a stranger. The other voice—people are calling him Dr. Hoenneger—is equally unknown to him. Lawrence is beyond the point of associating people with reality, because nothing is real.

This is all a dream. A nightmare. He knows that, because it must be a nightmare. What he saw last night in the garden. The black rain. His mother’s body. The uncontrollable grief of his father. These are not possible in the real world . . . they belong in dark dreams. Lawrence understands this. Just as he knows that the black carriage and Dr. Hoenneger likewise do not belong to the waking world. And the dark horses and this strange building—they are all parts of a nightmare, too. The storm did this. It was too loud, too strong, and it broke the world. The wind and the rain washed all sense away.

Lawrence thinks these things without knowing that he is thinking. His mind is twisted into crooked shapes and self-awareness has been washed away with black rain down a gutter.

Lawrence’s eyes see words painted on wood outside the building, but they’re nonsense words. They don’t belong to him, they don’t apply to his world. In his world there is no Lambeth Asylum, and even if there was he would not be there, and his father would not be taking him there. Nightmares are like that. Strange things that make no sense are jumbled into shapes that don’t fit in his head.

“Poor lad,” a voice says. Lawrence does not know the voice, and doesn’t care.

He stares upward with eyes that are drying from not blinking, but he doesn’t feel discomfort. Discomfort belongs to a different world. Nor does he feel the jab of a needle. It’s only pain and it doesn’t belong to him either.

All that belongs to him is the darkness. He can feel it spreading through him and closing around him, and as he sinks into it Lawrence hears his mother’s voice singing
an old Spanish lullaby. He knows that he should remember the words. But he can’t, and he can’t find a way to care.

The blackness is so soft and smooth and it covers everything. . . .

T
HINKING BACK, REMEMBERING
now with a cruel clarity those things that were fractured dreams to him as a boy, Lawrence threw his arm across his eyes in an attempt to deny, even to himself, that he wept.

T
hey buried Benjamin Talbot the next day.

Funerals are supposed to be dreary days with gray skies that weep cold rain, but the sun stubbornly shone and the trees were filled with idiot birds who sang as if hurt and harm had not poisoned the air of Blackmoor.

The funeral procession began at the church, where a scowling Pastor Fisk gave a long and droning homily about the transience and fragility of life and the enduring suffering of the grave. During the church service Lawrence sat beside his father and glared hatred at the old vicar. To compound grief with religious guilt was, to his view, the greatest sin. Wasn’t it enough to suffer irretrievable loss?

Lawrence cut covert looks to his left, where Sir John sat with wooden rigidity and allowed nothing at all to show on his face, and to his right, where Gwen Conliffe sat hunched over the knot of despair in her heart. She clung to her father and wept continuously, and Lawrence was sure that the pastor’s words were doing her actual harm. Just when Lawrence’s rage had built to the point where he was ready to jump to his feet and tell Pastor Fisk to go leap into his own dismal Hellfire, the sermon ended. The congregation stood and sang a hymn of grace that was, at least, not an actual condemnation of
having lived, and then it was over. At least the church part of it was over.

From there the coffin was loaded into the back of a hearse pulled by four night black horses, and the procession to the cemetery began.

It was far, far worse than the sermon. At least in the church there was someone specific at whom Lawrence could direct his frustration and anger, but now it was a slow march to the place where Ben’s body would rest forever. Rest, and rot, and probably be forgotten in little more than a generation. There were no more Talbots except for Lawrence and he had no intention of returning to the Hall to live. And Ben had never had the chance to marry Gwen. Ben had no sons to carry on his name, and Gwen was young . . . there would be an end to her grief. She would return to London with her father and in time her shattered heart would heal. She would marry some other man, and Ben would settle into being a footnote in her life. His death would drift into local legend here in Blackmoor and he would be remembered more for how he died than how he lived.

That hurt Lawrence terribly, and as he walked behind the hearse tears ran down his face. If the sky would not weep for Benjamin, then the tears of Gwen Conliffe and Lawrence Talbot would stand as substitutes, even though those tears fell on cold ground and were absorbed by dust and trampled into obscurity by the rest of the townsfolk, who trudged along behind the procession more out of duty and obligation than sentiment.

B
ESIDE THE GRAVE
the pastor spoke again, but this time his remarks were brief and he recited his lines straight from the scriptures; by then Lawrence was so
set against the deaf old fool that he internally mocked the performance.

And then the words were done and the mourners had each dropped a ritual handful of dirt onto the coffin, and Gwen had scattered roses atop it, and all that was left was the reality that Ben was going into the ground. It was the end of all things for Lawrence’s brother, and as he watched the coffin being lowered into the cold earth he could feel his heart descend to a lower place in his chest. He knew that it would remain there forever, just as Ben would remain here in the soil of Blackmoor until the sun itself burned to a cinder in the sky.

Lawrence wanted to scream. He did not.

Instead he stood there and wept. For his brother. For his mother. For opportunities lost forever. For himself.

The funeral party began to disperse. Gwen was one of the very last to leave, and she stood on the opposite side of the grave from Lawrence. They had not said a word all morning beyond a kiss on the cheek before setting off to the church. Her eyes were as red-rimmed as his own as she raised them from the grave and looked at Lawrence.

There were no words that could possibly define what he felt about all that had happened. Lawrence nodded to her and she nodded back, and though he was aware of some transfer of communication it was not on any level where his conscious mind could read it. But he felt it nonetheless.

Gwen’s father took her arm and led her away from the grave, but once, for a fleeting moment, she turned and looked back. Not at the grave, but at Lawrence.

Lawrence stood there for a long, long time, watching her go.

He wiped his face with his hands as if to cleanse it of
more than tears, and as he turned he saw his father standing at the foot of the grave. Sir John was looking up the hill to where Gwen’s father was helping her into a carriage, but then he turned and met Lawrence’s gaze. Behind the lenses of his dark spectacles Sir John’s eyes glittered with an understanding of the moment that was, perhaps, sharper and more accurate than Lawrence’s own. Without a word or change of expression Sir John turned away and began walking among the headstones toward the road.