The Wolfman (31 page)

“Be at peace, Mr. Talbot. Soon you’ll see that this is all in your mind.”

Lawrence felt stabs of pain in his hands and he looked down to see the veins on the backs of his hands begin to throb as if huge amounts of blood were suddenly being forced through them. He watched in growing
horror as his pores widened and black hairs began to sprout on his fingers and wrists.

“God . . . no,” he said, and then to Hoenneger he cried: “It’s
happening
!”

Hoenneger did not bother to look at him. He turned a knowing smile to the audience. Over his shoulder he said, “It’s your imagination, Mr. Talbot. All in your vivid imagina—”

Lawrence screamed as a wave of pain hit him that was so enormous that he felt like his body was exploding. His limbs trembled with the onset of convulsions and he threw his head back as screams were ripped from him.

“Get . . . out! . . .”

Hoenneger saw the front rank of the audience suddenly leap to its feet and he turned, still smiling . . . but the smile died on his face. As he stood there and watched, Lawrence Talbot’s eyes changed from brown to orange to a fiery yellow. Hoenneger’s brain seemed to freeze. He stood, openedmouthed, watching as the teeth in Lawrence’s screaming mouth lengthened and thickened, tearing the gums as they swelled to daggerlike points, and then the whole jaw
shifted
, expanding to allow more teeth to tear through. The flesh of Lawrence’s hands and feet rippled as the bones broke and reformed into new shapes. Blood spurted from each fingertip as black claws tore through the flesh.

Hoenneger’s mind was spinning toward darkness. For a moment a detached part of him thought that this was a forced manifestation, like the stigmata appearing on the wrists and feet of religious fanatics, but even as he thought that, the horrible truth of what he was seeing smashed that fantasy to fragments. This was happening, and it was happening right here. Inches away.

In the bleachers Inspector Aberline leaped to his feet, unable to see what was happening over the heads of the people in the rows ahead of him. He craned his neck for a better look and what he saw smashed into his mind like a bullet.

Lawrence tried to warn them all to run, but his mouth was no longer made for human speech and his mind was losing its ability to frame cohesive thought. The room was becoming brighter and his last conscious thought was the realization that he could
see
the blood glowing in the bodies of everyone in the room. And then everything that defined Lawrence Talbot as a human being was torn apart by what he was becoming.

The creature’s body began expanding as its muscles swelled and its chest grew more massive. The seams on the heavy canvas straightjacket burst apart. The strap across his chest was forced outward so sharply that the metal of the buckle twisted and snapped.

People were screaming now and the crowd was shrinking back from this impossible spectacle.

“Get the needle!” Hoenneger shouted, but the assistant doctors were rooted to the floor by shock.

With an ear-shattering scream of rage the Wolfman surged up from the chair as leather straps ruptured and wood splintered. It rose to its full height, towering over Hoenneger and his staff. One doctor grabbed a metal tray and swung it at the creature’s head, but the impact did nothing to the monster, except to anger it.

The Wolfman spun toward the doctor and struck him with a backhand that caught the man across the chin so fast and hard that his head spun more than halfway around. His neck snapped with a sound like knuckles cracking, and he fell dead to the floor.

Hoenneger grabbed a syringe and held it like a
weapon as he began backing away from the creature. The monster seemed momentarily confused, distracted by all of the people in the room. It was not afraid; rather the insatiable greed of its appetites pulled it in too many directions at once. The blood sang to him.

Inspector Aberline stood stock still on the stands, unable to process what he was seeing, unable to believe it, the pistol in his pocket forgotten in the insanity of the moment.

The Wolfman sensed movement near him and turned to see Dr. Hoenneger backing away. The creature did not possess human thoughts, could not access Lawrence Talbot’s memories, but on some primal level it understood that this man was the enemy. Not just food, but a rival predator.

The creature bent forward, head low between its massive shoulders, and snarled a challenge.

But then it saw someone else that it hated even more. Ripler was making a dash for the doors. The Wolfman saw that man, remembered his smell, and equated it with attack and pain. With a snarl it leapt from the ruins of the restraining chair and cleared twenty feet in a single jump, landing on the stones ten feet from Ripler. The man screamed and grabbed for the door handles, forgetting that he had locked them and given the keys to Hoenneger.

He spun around as the Wolfman stalked toward him. The big, muscular orderly dropped to his knees and began weeping like a baby, begging for mercy. But as he had proven so many times to the helpless inmates in his charge, there was no mercy within these walls. The Wolfman grabbed him with its massive clawed hands, raised him over its head, and then threw Ripler at the wall forty feet away. The orderly hit with an impact that
shattered bones. He collapsed to the floor, broken but alive, and the quirks of a merciless god kept him awake even as the Wolfman buried its snout in the orderly’s stomach and began to feed.

“Jesus Christ!” someone shouted, and the yell somehow jolted Aberline out of his stupor. He shook his head and then raced down the rows of bleachers toward the monster.

Hoenneger and his assistant edged toward the locked doors. Hoenneger had the keys in one hand and the syringe in the other.

“Hurry, Doctor,” hissed his assistant. “Hurry!”

Everywhere in the room there was panic as the crowd surged toward the various exit doors, all of which were locked.

“I got it,” Hoenneger said breathlessly as he jammed the key into the lock and gave it a violent turn, but in his haste he used far too much force. The slender key bent . . . and broke.

“Oh God!”

The Wolfman raised its head, smelling a new flavor of fear. He turned and again saw Hoenneger, but this time the man was screaming and pounding on the locked door.

O
UTSIDE THE ROOM
, Lafferty and Strunk heard the commotion and tried to work the handles, but the door was solidly locked. The door’s small circular window was opaque and they couldn’t see what was happening, but as they watched, someone began beating his fists on the glass. The glass cracked and shattered and the two bruisers stared in surprise as Dr. Hoenneger pressed his face against the jagged opening.

“
Help
! Let me out! Oh, Lord . . . someone please open this—”

Strunk patted his pockets. “Right, sir. I’ll just pop ’round to the works office and get the key. Won’t take a—”

“You bleeding imbecile!” screamed Hoenneger. “Open this door—”

And then something huge and dark appeared behind the doctor and yanked him backward and out of sight. A split second later the broken window was sprayed with blood. The sound of screams from inside was drowned by the roar of something immeasurably strong and unnatural.

Lafferty looked at the bloody window and then turned to Strunk.

Without a word they bolted down the hallway, running as fast as they could. Another custodian ran past them, heading toward the mad din in the examination theater. Strunk and Lafferty watched him go.

“Think we should have told Roger not to—?”

“Not our concern, lad.”

They tore down stairways and skidded around turns until they burst out of the Asylum’s front door.

“What the bleedin’ ’ell is ’appening back there?” demanded Lafferty.

“God if I know,” said Strunk. “And I don’t want to know.”

They heard a crash and looked up as the big picture window of the surgical theater six stories above exploded outward. Something red and twisted came hurtling into the night and the men lingered just a second too long in shocked surprise. As they turned to run glass rained down on them and Dr. Hoenneger’s body crashed onto the spikes of a wrought-iron fence that ran along
the edge of the Lambeth grounds. The doctor had been ruined—torn and mangled—and much of him was missing, and he hung from the gate’s spikes like some grisly trophy.

They stared at the corpse and then turned once more to look up.

The Wolfman, falling silently, was plummeting through the shadows toward them. It had a six-story fall to gather speed and the impact smashed both men into the cobblestones with so much force that their internal organs were pulped and blood exploded through their pores.

The fall jarred the Wolfman but it pitched forward onto the grass beside the cobbled walkway and crouched there, waiting as broken bones reformed and torn muscle tissue was made whole within seconds. It threw back its head and howled for the sheer joy of the fresh meat in its belly and the power of its life force.

There was a sharp
crack
and sparks leapt from a guardrail a yard away. The Wolfman craned its neck upward to see a man leaning out of the window. There was another crack and fire leapt from the man’s hand. A bullet tore through the Wolfman’s shoulder, passing through flesh and nicking bone before burying itself in the dirt. But before the man could fire his third shot the wound was gone as if it had never existed.

The Wolfman roared at the figure in the high window and then turned and dropped forward, running on all fours faster than any wolf ever did . . . faster than any animal that the natural world ever produced ever could. It leapt over railings and hedges, springing high into the air without effort, reveling in the power that coursed through its muscles. People—men and women—screamed and fled before it. Horses reared
and kicked and shied away; mongrel dogs whined and rolled onto their backs as it passed.

The creature jumped onto a low wall that led to a shed rooftop, then climbed a drainpipe more nimbly than an ape. At the top of a tall building it stopped and paused to look around. It feared nothing. It hungered for everything. There was a line of statues perched on the edge of the roof and the Wolfman climbed onto the largest, a massive stone griffin. There it lingered, staring down at the city, at its playground, at its hunting fields. He could smell the sweat and fear and blood. He knew that everything down there that was aware of him feared him.

And he, in turn, hungered for all of them.

I
nspector Aberline burst from the Asylum’s lower doors and skidded to a halt by the gate. The moon was on the other side of the building and the courtyard was in shadows, but Aberline could smell blood. He fumbled in his pockets for an electric torch and shined its light across the ground and then gasped at what the light revealed. Dr. Hoenneger’s torn body hung limp and ragged from the spikes and the two orderlies lay in pools of blood on the walkway.

“Dear God in heaven . . .”

His mind felt disconnected from reality. He could
not
have seen the things he had seen. It was impossible, insane.

And yet . . .

He drew a steadying breath and squatted down to play the torchlight over the ground. A line of clawed footprints were dug into the soil of the verge. The trail ran for only a few steps and then a pair of deeper marks showed where the creature had leapt toward the row of hedges.

Aberline dug into his pocket for his whistle and he blew a high, shrill note, the note as shrill as the scream that might otherwise have burst from his chest. Once, twice . . . and then it was answered almost immediately
by another whistle down the lane. And another far to his left.

With trembling fingers, Aberline reloaded his pistol. He was still trying to accept the facts as he knew them . . . and what they meant to his understanding of the world. His heart was beating like the hooves of a galloping horse and sweat ran down inside his clothes.

“Steady on,” he muttered to himself as he pressed the shells into the chambers of the cylinder. He thought about the blacksmith in the village and the silver bullets. “Steady on . . .”

In the distance he heard the running feet of a squadron of constables.