The Wolves of Midwinter (24 page)

Elthram looked stunned. He stood back away from the chair, blinking at Margon as if Margon were a bright light, Elthram’s hands apparently clasped behind his back.

He appeared to say something under his breath, but it wasn’t audible.

There came a soft series of sounds again, the woof of the air threatening the candles, and the fire, and then a great darkening of the gloom all around them, as a great mass of figures gradually came into view. Reuben blinked, trying to clear his vision, trying to make them more visible, but they were of their own becoming visible, as so many very long-haired women and children and men, all clothed in the same soft leather garments as Elthram, and quite literally of all sizes, and filling the entire room around them now, all along behind them and in front of them around the table and out to the corners.

Reuben was dazed, aware of shifting movements, gestures, and seeming whispers teeming almost like the drone of insects in midsummer around flowers, trying to fasten on this detail or that—long red hair, fair hair, gray hair, eyes flitting over him, dancing over the table, the wildly flickering candles, and even hands touching him, touching his shoulders, brushing his cheek, stroking his head. He felt he was going to slip out of consciousness. Everything he saw looked material, vital, yet it seemed moment by moment to be pulsing ever more rapidly, as if building to a pinnacle of some sort, while across from him Stuart looked frantically from right to left, his eyebrows knotted, his mouth open in what sounded like a moan.

Margon jumped to his feet and glared at them as if he were the least prepared for their number. Reuben couldn’t see Lisa as too many crowded in front of her, and Felix merely looked up at them, appeared to be smiling at many of them, and nodding in agreement, and the crowd grew even more dense as if others were pressing the front lines slowly forward so that faces were now in the full glare of the candles, faces of all human shapes and sizes, Nordic, Asian, African,
Mediterranean—Reuben didn’t have the labels for them, only the associations—all rustic in dress and manner, yet all benign. Not a single face was disagreeable, or even curious, or in any way intrusive so much as passive and vaguely content-seeming at most. There came faint ripples of laughter like something drawn with a fine pen stroke, and again a sense of those around him soundlessly jostling, and he saw across from him two figures bending to kiss Stuart on either cheek.

Suddenly, with a gust of wind that shook the very rafters, the entire company vanished.

The walls creaked. The fire roared in the chimney, and the windows rattled as if about to break. A deep menacing rumble moved through the structure around them; plates and glasses on the hunter’s boards tinkled and clattered, and a zinging sound came from the sparkling crystal on the table.

All of them gone, dematerialized. And like that.

The candles went out.

Lisa was plastered to the wall as if she were on a rolling ship, her eyes half closed. Stuart had gone stark white. Reuben resisted the urge to make the Sign of the Cross.

“Very impressive,” said Margon sarcastically under his breath.

Suddenly sheets of rain were flung against the windows with such force that the glass groaned and strained in its framing. The whole house was creaking, writhing, and the high-pitched whistle of wind in the chimneys came from all sides. The rain pummeled the roofs and the walls. The windows rattled and boomed as if they’d explode.

And then the world, the soft familiar world around them, went quiet.

Stuart let out a long low gasp. His hands went up to his face, blue eyes peering through his fingers at Reuben. He was obviously delighted.

Reuben could scarcely repress a smile.

Margon, who was standing with his arms folded, had an oddly satisfied look on his face, as though he’d proven his point. But what that point was precisely Reuben couldn’t figure.

“Never forget what you’re dealing with here,” Margon said to Stuart and Reuben. “It’s so easy to tempt them to a display of power. I always
marvel at it. And never forget that there may be multitudes around you at any moment, myriad homeless, restless, wandering ghosts.”

Felix sat calm and collected, merely looking at the polished wood in front of him, where Reuben could see the reflected glare of the fire.

“Listen to them, my darling Marchent,” Felix said with feeling. “Listen to them and let them dry your tears.”

W
HERE WERE THEY
? Did it matter? Reuben and Stuart were so hungry they didn’t care. They were exhausted too. The crumbling old villa was on the mountainside, and the writhing equatorial jungle was reclaiming it, the arched windows without glass, the Grecian columns peeling, the floors caked with decaying leaves and filth. A hoard of hungry creatures scurried through the fetid debris and the broken withered undergrowth that choked the passageways and stairs.

Their host, Hugo, was the only other Morphenkind they’d ever seen, except for the Distinguished Gentlemen, a great hulking giant of a man, with long snarled and matted brown hair, and maniacal black eyes, dressed in rags that might have once been a shirt and khaki shorts. Barefoot, covered in dirt.

And after he’d directed them to the filthy rooms in which they might sleep on soiled and rotting mattresses, Sergei said under his breath, “This is what happens when a Morphenkind lives as a beast all the time.”

The villa had the smell of an urban zoo in the middle of summer. And indeed the heat was simmering and soothing after the relentless cold of Northern California. Yet it was like a toxin, wearying and weakening Reuben with every step.

In a small voice, Stuart asked, “Must we stay here? Like what about an American motel? A little B&B? Or a nice lodging with some old native in a hut somewhere?”

“We haven’t come for the amenities of the house,” said Margon. “Now listen to me, both of you. We don’t spend all our lupine hours hunting humankind and there’s never been a law that says we have to. We’ve come here to prowl the ancient ruins in these jungles—temples,
tombs, the ruins of a city—the way men and women can’t possibly do it—as Morphenkind—and we’ll feed off the jungle rodents as we do it. We’ll see things that no eye has seen in centuries.”

“This is a dream,” said Reuben. “Why didn’t I think of such things?” A thousand possibilities were opening before him.

“Fill your bellies first,” said Margon. “Nothing can hurt you here—not the beasts, not the serpents, not the insects, and not the natives if any dare to approach. Drop your clothes where you stand. Breathe and live as Morphenkinder.”

At once, they obeyed him, stripping away shirts and trousers that were already soaked with sweat.

The wolf coat rose all over Reuben’s body, sealing out the heat as it always did the cold. The enervating weakness in his limbs evaporated in a surge of power. At once the zinging, sighing, rippling voices of the jungle assailed him. Over the hills and valleys around them, the jungle seethed like one great undulating fungoid being.

They dropped down effortlessly from the cliff and into the rattling web of sharp-edged leaf and prickling vine, the night sky pink and luminescent above them, allowing themselves to slide fearlessly down the mountainside.

The noxious squirming brown-coated rodents slithered away from them everywhere. The hunting was easy, the prey large and pungent, gasping impotently with razor teeth, as the Morphenkinder ripped through fur and sinew to spouting blood.

They feasted together, thrashing and rolling noisily in the undergrowth, the jungle around them erupting with the alarms of the living things who feared them, large and small. The night monkeys screamed in the treetops. Rotted crumbling branches and old tree trunks shattered beneath them, the tough fibrous vines whipped and torn by their simplest movements, snakes thrashing wildly through the foliage as the insects swarmed, seeking to blind them or stop them to no avail.

Again and again, Reuben brought down the fat succulent rats, big as raccoons, ripping back the twitching silky coat to bite into the meat. Always the meat. The same salty blood-soaked meat. The world devours the world to make the world.

At last all were satisfied and lay about in a bower of broken palm leaves and clawing branches, lazy and half dozing. How embracing was the hot motionless air, the deep rumble of malignant life all around them.

“Come,” said Margon. He was the smallest of the Man Wolf pack, moving with a feline grace and swiftness that often dazzled Reuben.

They followed him on and on as he broke a tunnel through the dense growth, moving on all fours, springing upwards from time to time to chart a swift passage through the jungle high above the earth.

They came to a deep valley, slumbering beneath its writhing blanket of green.

Far off they could smell the sea, and for a moment Reuben thought he heard it, the rise and fall of the waves, equatorial waves, windless, and lapping again and again on an imagined beach.

There was no scent of humans here any more than there had been around the villa. The deceptive yet soothing quiet of the natural world reigned, with the simmering boiling sound of death, death in the treetops, death on the jungle floor—unbroken by a human voice.

It chilled Reuben suddenly to think of how long the world in its entirety had been like this place, devoid of human eyes or human ears or human language. Was Margon thinking of these same things? Margon, who’d been born in a time when the world had had no savage pedigree of biological evolution.

A terrible loneliness and sense of fatality came over Reuben. And yet this was a priceless perception, a priceless moment. And he felt wondrously alert, marveling at the universe of varying shapes and movements that he could pick from the airy darkness. He knew he was man and Morphenkind in one. Sergei rose on hind legs and threw his head back, his mouth gaping, fangs gleaming as if he were swallowing the breeze. Even the big shadowy brown wolf figure of Stuart, almost as big as Sergei, seemed content for the moment, crouched but not to spring, merely looking out with gleaming blue eyes at the valley beneath them and the distant slopes beyond.

Was Margon dreaming? He swayed slightly from one foot to the
other, great hairy arms slack at his sides, as if the breeze were washing him clean.

“This way,” Margon signaled finally. And they plunged with him now into what for human beings would have been an impassable tangle of knotted vines and sharp, prickling, and menacing leaves. Breaking loudly through pocket after pocket of fetid and wet underwood, they moved on, inexorably, birds screeching heavenward, lizards wriggling out of their path.

Ahead Reuben saw the great hulk of a pyramid. On all fours they traveled along its huge base, and then mounted its high steps, tearing loose like so much wrapping paper the living thatch that covered it.

How clear under the rosy sky were these curious twisted Mayan figures, so exquisitely carved, limbs seeming to writhe like the snakes and vines of the jungle around them, solemn faces in profile with half-closed eyes and noses like the beaks of great birds. Heads were wreathed in feathers. Bodies were embedded in mysterious configurations and patterns, as if imprisoned in the very fabric of the tropical world.

On and on they went, running their paws over these stone images as they yanked back the veil of foliage.

How private, how intimate, these moments seemed. Far back in the workaday world such relics were enshrined in museums, untouchable, and out of context, unconnected to such a night as this.

Yet here, against this monument, Reuben pressed the pads of his paws, and his forehead, relishing the rough surface and even the deep smell of the breathing, disintegrating stone.

He broke away from the others and bounded up the slope of the pyramid, clawed feet gaining easy traction as he moved—until he was under the infinitely faint and twinkling stars.

The blowing mist, filled with the light of the moon, was seeking to swallow the lamps of the heavens. Or so a poet might imagine, when in fact the whole odoriferous and quivering world around him, of earth and flora and helpless fauna, of gaseous cloud and humid air—all this sighed and sang at a million cross-purposes, and ultimately with no
avowed purpose—an accidental chaos blindly serving up the unaccountable beauty he now saw.

What are we that this is beautiful to us? What are we that we are now powerful as lions and fear nothing, yet see this with the eyes and hearts of thinking beings—makers of music, makers of history, makers of art? Makers of the serpentine carvings that cover this old and blood-drenched structure?
What are we that we feel such things as I am feeling now?

He saw the others running, stopping, and moving on. He went down again to join them.

For hours they prowled, over broken walls, low flattop buildings, and the pyramids themselves, searching out again and again the faces, forms, geometrical designs, until finally Reuben grew weary and wanted only to sit again under the sky, drinking in with all his senses the unmistakable ambience of this secret and neglected place.

But the little pack kept moving, towards the scent of the sea. He too wanted to see the shoreline. He dreamed suddenly of running on endless deserted sand.

Margon was in the lead with Sergei moving fast behind him. Reuben caught up with Stuart and on they traveled at the easy pace until Margon stopped suddenly. He rose to full height.

Reuben knew why. He too had caught it.

Voices in the night where there should have been none.

Up a small bluff they climbed.

The great warm ocean stretched beyond, sparkling wondrously under the bright incandescent clouds. So different from the cold northern Pacific, this inviting tropical sea.

Far below they saw a winding road leading on with a broken jagged beach beyond it. The sand appeared white, and the waves black with white foam as they crashed on the rocks.

The voices came from the south. Margon moved south. Why? What did he hear?

Then they all heard it as they followed him. Reuben saw the change in Stuart as he himself felt the delicious hardening of his body, the seeming expansion of his chest.