The Wolfman (22 page)

“And yet you haven’t gone hunting for the thing that killed Ben.”

Singh shook his head. “Under no circumstance is a Sikh allowed to use force in aggression. This is part of our faith, and sometimes I struggle with that limitation for I, like all men, am a weak human tempted to sin. Vengeance would be too dangerous a path.”

Lawrence sipped his tea. The large tapestry behind Singh depicted complex scenes from the Upanishads. It looked to be from the same weavers who made the one that hung between the double staircases.

“Do you believe in curses?” Lawrence asked.

Singh smiled sadly. “This house has had its fair share of sorrow. Your mother. Your brother . . . Yes, Lawrence. I believe in curses.”

“How could you stand it here all these years? You didn’t have to stay.”

The Sikh refilled his cup. “Sir John isn’t an easy man. But he is righteous. He is not what people think he is.”

That provoked a grunt from Lawrence. “I don’t know what anyone is anymore.”

“This house, this place . . . mysteries are built into the brick and mortar.”

Lawrence said nothing for a time, working things through. Finally he said, “Singh . . . I know what I saw that night.”

“Yes.”

“What I saw was not a man. And it wasn’t an animal. Not an ‘animal’ in the way a sane man would use that word. Do you understand?”

Instead of answering Singh reached inside his shirt and drew out a key on a leather thong. He held it in his fingers for Lawrence to see.

“This will tell you what I understand.”

With that he rose and crossed the room to an ornate
traveling chest and unlocked the bottom drawer. He pulled the drawer out and carried it back to the table. There, fitted into cushioned slots, were dozens of bullets of different calibers and sizes. The metal was brighter and paler than lead.

Lawrence felt as if the room was becoming unhinged from the world.

“Silver bullets? I didn’t know you and father hunted monsters.” He reached out and closed the lid.

“We didn’t,” said Singh. “But it is a sad truth that sometimes the monsters hunt you.”

Lawrence walked away from him and stopped by the ornate mirror that covered one wall. His reflection looked worn and wild and not at all like the man who had stepped onto the London stage a few weeks ago. The deep sadness he saw in his own eyes nearly broke him.

He said, “I’m cursed, aren’t I?”

When Singh took too long to answer, Lawrence turned and walked to the door and out into the cold shadows of the hall.

T
he mirror in his room was no kinder than the one in Singh’s quarters, but Lawrence stood before it, shirtless, barefoot, hair wild, fists clenched at his sides. He looked into his reflected eyes, rarely blinking, and it seemed to him that he could see through those eyes, that they were windows instead of mirrored reflections. Beyond those windows was the barren landscape of some alien world. Nothing there was natural, nothing was suited to the needs or desires of the human experience. It was foreign territory across which dark shapes hunted and howled.

“God,” Lawrence said softly, his voice weak and desperate.

With slow, trembling fingers he undid the knots on the bandages, unwound them turn upon turn. The white cotton coiled around his ankles like pale snakes.

As the last of the gauze fell silently to the floor, Lawrence stared at his shoulder, at the evidence of the savage attack.

And saw nothing.

No scabbing, no faint lines of healed scars, no pucker of missing muscle. There was no mark of any kind to show that he had ever been attacked.

Lawrence stared with naked accusation into his own eyes. Or were they still his eyes? Had the color changed?
Paled? Were there now hints of yellow there? Splinters of red?

“No!” he snarled and suddenly smashed his fist into the mirror, which exploded into a thousand shards.

“God save my soul . . .” he breathed.

But he feared that his plea to a forgotten deity and the renewal of his own discarded faith had come far too late. He stared down at the mirror fragments scattered around him on the floor. Each one seemed to reflect its own perverse distortion of him. One image was Lawrence the boy, lying in his mother’s arms. Another was the boy in bondage in the asylum, his mouth opened to scream at the night—just as he had every night for years. Another fragment was the boy aboard ship to America, discarded, sent away by a father who could no longer bear to look at him. Another was the predator man he had become, striding the world’s stages, sliding in and out of beds, descending into opium dreams in a vain attempt to replace nightmares with drugged hallucinations.

And one fragment, a sliver no wider than a knife blade and equally as sharp, lay on the floor between his bare feet and when Lawrence looked down at his reflection he did not see a man, or a boy. He saw the snarling face of a monster.

Lawrence closed his eyes and beat the sides of his temples with his fists. “Please,” he begged. “Please . . .”

But all that answered him was the dark.

In the sky above the Hall the Goddess of the Hunt was rising in all her wicked white splendor.

L
awrence pounded furiously on the door to Ben’s old room. When there was no immediate response he knocked again and again until Gwen opened it a handsbreadth, her hair disheveled, eyes puffy from sleep, her nightclothes pulled around her. She held a brass candleholder and a match still smoked in the tray.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Lawrence pushed the door wider and stepped halfway into the room.

“Gwen, listen to me,” he said in a voice that was breathless with urgency. “You have to leave. Now. Right away. Grab only what you must take with you and return to London.”

“Leave?” She half-smiled, as if expecting this to be some kind of prank, but that smile faded at once. “It’s the middle of the night, Lawrence.”

“I’ve sent for a coach. It will take you straight to the train station and the driver will wait until the train arrives.”

“What is this?”

“It’s not safe here. Please!”

She raised the candle and the expression cut into his features made her gasp. “Lawrence . . . what has happened? Have the villagers returned to—”

He shook his head and dug into his pocket for
something that flashed silver in the candlelight. He pressed it into her hand.

Gwen stared at it, her mouth open to form a perfect “O” of surprise.

“Ben’s medal. . . .”

“You must wear it,” Lawrence insisted. “You must wear it
now
. Around your neck.”

“But, Lawrence, how did you get this?”

“You must wear it at all times. Promise me!”

She took the medal but did not put it on. Instead she reached out her hand and touched his chest, the medal swinging from between her fingers to brush his shirt right above his heart. Her blue eyes, even in the weak light of the single candle, were as bright as hope and promise, and as beautiful as all of the spring mornings in the world. Lawrence looked into those eyes and he could feel his self-control fracture like a diamond that a jeweler had struck the wrong way. Her fingers were warm where she touched him, and in the cold autumn of Lawrence’s heart the weeds were withering as something fresh and wonderful struggled to bloom.

He closed his eyes and prayed to God that this moment, this feeling, could be real, could be true, and that it could chase away all of the shadows in his soul. His heart hurt worse than if he had been stabbed.

“Lawrence,” she said very softly, “if there is something you need to say . . .”

“Is there something you need to say to me?”

In the darkness inside his mind he felt something stir. Something that was not love, not passion. Something ancient and dreadful and hungry. The thing in his mind whispered to him.

Take her! Smell her flesh . . . smell her blood! Take her now.

“No!” he said and staggered back from their point of contact, forcing his hands to close into fists. Not as weapons, but to keep his fingers from reaching for her. He took a step toward her and she involuntarily stepped back. She hadn’t meant to do it, but the reflex was too fast for her to control. If she had slapped him it could not have hurt more deeply. Yet it was very correct, very safe, and in a strange way it steadied him.

“Gwen . . . if anything ever happened to you,” he began, his voice thick with emotion. “I’d never forgive myself. Never.”

Those words should have made her take another defensive step away, but Gwen looked up into his eyes, her brows knitting with concern. “Lawrence . . . what are you afraid of?”

He backed away one pace, then another.

“Please get dressed,” he said. “You must return to London tonight.”

He dared not say anything else, dared not
do
anything more. He whirled and stalked down the hallway toward the stairs.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER
she came downstairs with her bag. Lawrence fairly snatched it from her and caught her wrist with the other hand and pulled her out the door and down the steps to where a coach was waiting. Several times Gwen tried to make eye contact with Lawrence. She could feel the heat of whatever passion drove him to such actions, but he would not meet her gaze.

The driver hopped down, placed her bag inside, and stood by the open carriage door.

Gwen wheeled around and forced Lawrence to look at her. His eyes were fever bright.

“I don’t want to go, Lawrence.”

She said it softly, without challenge. A plea . . . and the tone drained some of the madness out of Lawrence’s eyes, leaving only sadness.

“You
must
go,” he said softly. “Please . . . you must go now, Gwen.”

“I—”

He turned away, his head low between hunched shoulders. “Pray for us.”

Gwen reached out a hand, almost touching him.

“Everything will be alright, Lawrence,” she said.

Lawrence whirled on her and Gwen gasped. He seemed larger, broader, a towering figure against the white façade of Talbot Hall. The wind whipped his dark hair and the open folds of his half-buttoned shirt. His eyes smoldered with hungers that touched secret places in her body and soul. She
felt
him as if he was somehow inside her every nerve, as if his breath whispered secrets against her secret flesh.

“Go!” he snarled, and he shoved her into the coach, his hands too strong to resist. He slammed the door and then leaned toward the driver so fiercely that the man backed away until his back thumbed into the corner of the carriage. Lawrence dug a heavy coin out of his pocket and slapped it into the driver’s hand.

“Take this. Don’t let her out of your sight until the train disappears. Do you
hear
me?”

“Yes!” the driver quailed.

Gwen leaned out of the window and called Lawrence’s name, but Lawrence turned his back on her.

D
arkness had come to the village of Blackmoor long before the setting of the sun. For a month now the people had lived and worked and moved in a state somewhere between grief and dread. Everyone felt it; no one escaped the gloom and the anxiety.

Inspector Aberline, though a stranger to this region, was sharp enough to see that the current mood was not the usual atmosphere of the town, but something new. It had begun on the night that Ben Talbot and two other men had been murdered, and since the massacre at the gypsy camp the town was as dismal and sick as if the Black Plague had returned. No one smiled. Children did not play in the streets. No one walked unaccompanied, and every man above the age of ten carried a weapon of some kind, be it an axe, pitchfork or firearm.