The Wolfman (25 page)

Lawrence recoiled from his father as he passed. There was something strange, something repellent about the way in which his father moved. It was not the gait of an old man, not even the sturdy step of a man whose fitness belied his years. No, this was something else. Sir John moved with an unnatural vitality that chilled Lawrence to the marrow.

“I would’ve given my life that you had not found us that night.” His eyes now fell upon Lawrence and they were hot and alien in their intensity. “You don’t believe me? You should, my boy. Some images are so terrible that we cannot forget them and as a consequence they rot the soul. I never wanted that for you.”

As Sir John paced to and fro, Lawrence backed away until his shoulder banged against the open iron door. He shot a brief calculating look through the doorway and then back to his father.

“Yes . . . not a single day passes,” continued Sir John, constantly moving between candlelight and shadows, “when I don’t wish that my little boy had stayed asleep in his bed, safe and warm. You must believe me when I tell you this, Lawrence.”

Sir John stopped his pacing and turned back to the shrine. As he did so Lawrence moved surreptitiously into the doorway.

“You do believe me, don’t you?”

Lawrence said nothing.

Sir John’s eyes were fixed on the picture of Solana. “I
loved her, that woman, I loved her with a passion like the burning of the sun. Her death finished me,” he said. “And, yes, still I prowl the house at night . . . alone . . . I wander as before.” He turned to Lawrence. “But I am dead all the same. Look into my eyes, Lawrence—you see I am quite dead.”

Lawrence looked at his father, at the alcove and the dead flowers, at the iron chair and the debris . . . and finally at the walls. There were deep lines in the walls, from floor to ceiling. He turned to the section of wall closest to him and studied the marks. Sets of parallel lines torn into the rock. And then all of the doors in Lawrence’s mind opened up and a realization struck him with such ferocity that he nearly screamed. He clamped his hand over his mouth and staggered sideways; if the doorway had not been there he would have collapsed onto the floor.

Sir John heard his muted cry and faced his son. He smiled and began walking toward Lawrence.

Lawrence stumbled backward out of the cell and finally the words were torn from him.

“My God! It’s you!” he cried. “You’re the monster.”

Sir John kept moving toward him, slowly, a step at a time.

“Mother . . . she found out,” Lawrence hissed. “She found out what you were and that’s why she killed herself!”

Sir John was at the doorway now and his eyes burned into Lawrence.

“So much pain,” he said . . . and then he moved with a blur of speed. Lawrence screamed and fell back, throwing his hands out to ward off the attack. But there was a heavy
clang!

Lawrence stared at what had happened.

The cell door was shut.

He heard a key turn in a lock.

Sir John stared at him through the bars. Lawrence’s mind could not process this. He turned and looked back down the corridor that led to the stairs and freedom. His escape was there, waiting.

Sir John leaned on the bars and spoke from inside the cell.

“I wish I could tell you, Lawrence, that the . . . tragedy that has been your lot in life was over . . .”

“Father . . . I don’t . . .”

“. . . but I’m afraid your darkest moments of hell lie before you . . .”

And then Lawrence understood. His father had not trapped himself inside the cell as a punishment. He had trapped Lawrence outside, unfettered, free. . . .

Lawrence sank to his knees as the full weight of what was happening landed on him.

“No . . . ,” he whispered. “God, no . . .” He suddenly raised his eyes to his father and reached out his hand. “I’m going to . . . No!”

The pain that flared in his hand was so sudden, so unexpected, so intense, that it shocked him to silence. It was as if every nerve in his hand had exploded with fire, and as Lawrence watched with horrified eyes the shape of his hand
changed.

“Father!” he screamed. “You’re going to let them kill me!”

Sir John chuckled. “Oh, I doubt they’ll kill you,” he said. “No. But . . . I will let them blame you.”

Agony rippled up Lawrence’s arm, exploded through muscle and sinew.

“Why?” demanded Lawrence. Bloody tears began to roll down his cheeks.

Sir John turned away for a moment as if considering his answer. And as he turned back Lawrence felt a flare of hope ignite in him that his father could somehow change the moment, that he would have an answer. But as the candlelight bathed Sir John’s face, Lawrence knew that there were no answers left.

Sir John’s eyes were no longer human. They blazed with yellow fire and his smile revealed teeth that had suddenly grown long and sharp and hungry.

“The beast will have its day,” Sir John said, but his words were mangled by a mouth that was not made for speech. “The beast will be out.”

Those were the last words from that awful mouth. The rest was a vicious snarl of hatred and mockery that drove Lawrence to his feet and chased him down the hallway and away from that accursed place.

F
or thousands of years the standing stones in the forest of Blackmoor had tracked the movements of the stars and planets and the moon. Now, as night consumed the town the rising moon spilled its light through the center of the heel stone to mark the precise moment when the full moon, in all her power, was above the horizon.

Archaeologists have long debated the need for early man to gauge so precisely the rising of the moon. Hundreds of papers and books have been written to explain how the phases of the moon predict tides and harvests and other aspects of the mundane and orderly world.

They have all been wrong.

Every one of them.

The flash of moonlight across the heel stone of the circle of monoliths did not mark a change of tides. It did not signal the start of a harvest. It marked the moment when the Goddess of the Hunt—and all of her full-blooded children scattered throughout the world—began their hunt.

It marked the hour of the wolf.

The ancients knew this and they, warned by their celestial clock, fled for shelter.

In the village of Blackmoor the people were, without knowing it, re enacting a ritual as old as the standing
stones themselves. They were hiding, and arming themselves, and making peace with their gods, because in their hearts they knew that the night no longer belonged to them.

L
awrence crawled up the spiral stairs from the catacomb, grabbing the steps with fingers that were no longer his own, pulling himself up with hands that had become nightmare shapes, pushing with twisted and malformed feet.

“Mother . . . help me!” he begged, but his words came out as a twisted roar.

He collapsed inside the main chamber, falling to his knees before his mother’s crypt. The light from the candles were far too bright, their meager glow somehow transformed in his eyes to sunbursts. He could feel his eyes changing, shifting. It was the most nauseating thing he had ever felt. And then it got worse.

His senses exploded as sights and sounds and tastes flooded in impossibly fast. In the span of a single second he saw grains of pollen—each as separate and distinct as planets orbiting the sun—floating on the breeze. A swarm of insects flashed into focus, and Lawrence could smell the traces of vegetable matter and animal blood on each proboscis, could count the minute hairs on their tiny legs, could discern each delicate lacy line of their gossamer wings. Water running in a brook became a torrent in his ears. His mind staggered under the sensory assault.

Lawrence could feel every separate bit of what was
happening to him. His flesh felt hot, as if every cell in his body had become a furnace. His respiration quickened until he was panting like an animal. The landscape of his brain shifted as new glands formed and pumped chemicals in combinations no human could endure and the old human processes faded and died away. Lawrence screamed and screamed. He could feel his body changing as bones bent to horrific new shapes and muscles tore apart and merged together in unnatural ways. Somehow his mass increased—perhaps drawing substance from Hell itself. His bones thickened to support the heavier muscle and corded ligaments. His skin burned and itched as new hair follicles formed and began sending stiff black shoots through the flesh.

His feet expanded and black claws tore through the leather as if it was paper. Lacings snapped like fiddle strings and the shoes fell away as his feet changed, the heel rising, the clawed toes digging into the rock of the mausoleum floor.

White hot pain flared in his jaw as his molars shifted forward to allow the growth of strong new carnassial teeth, and the incisors and canines became sharper and more pronounced.

Lawrence screamed his mother’s name, but an animal’s roar was what shook the room. There was no trace of a human voice in that roar. The sound was so loud that dust flew from the sarcophagi and old vases shattered. Insects crawling along the floor burst apart and cracks ran along the walls. The roar was as loud as all the pain and fury and despair in the world. It funneled out through the open iron door and tore at the night sky.

It was not the cry of a man.

In that moment, in that hour, that
form
of Lawrence Talbot no longer existed.

What remained—that thing that rose up on twisted legs and tore the air with monstrous claws—was no longer human. It was a monster from the oldest of legends. It burst from the mausoleum and stood in the cold wash of moonlight, and there, under the watchful eye of the Goddess of the Hunt, the Wolfman threw back its head and howled its fury at the night.

A
mile away, on the far side of Talbot Hall, Singh sat alone in his room, his
kirpan
loosened in its scabbard and a heavy rifle resting across his thighs. He sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the door, which was closed and sealed with three heavy hasp locks. A pistol lay on the bedspread beside him and a silver-tipped hunting spear stood leaning against the bedpost.

Sweat and tears ran down his face.

The howl of the Wolfman burst from the forest and raced across the fields and invaded the house through every crack and loose board. That sound beat at Singh’s ears. And he bowed his head and prayed.

I
N THE CHURCH
Pastor Fisk was still ranting about the power of Satan when an unearthly howl shook the building to its rafters. It was far away and yet the naked threat implied within its urgency seemed to breathe against the back of the vicar’s neck. What little hair he had stood on end and gooseflesh pebbled his skin.

He left a passage from the Revelation of John unfinished and instead bent and blew out his candles.

The congregation stared at him in confusion and fear, their own candles trembling in their hands.

“Quickly!” he shouted. “No light . . . no sound!”

Everyone blew out their candles and for a long minute they sat in the darkness, safe within the church walls.

The creature howled again. Louder. Closer.

And suddenly the darkness in which they hid felt far less comforting.