Saint Peter’s Wolf Read online

  Men were awake late this night. This was not the usual tempo of these neighborhoods. The news bleated into every home. Lock the doors, the news said. Men have died tonight, said the news. I showed my fangs to the glittering lights.

  I traveled hard.

  My hindquarters ached, but the pain was unimportant, a vague hum. It was this single-mindedness that forced a shot dog to run for hours, that let a fox gnaw through his trapped forepaw. It was the lack of choice, the ugly command to live. Many animals, when they are shot, will die falling in the direction of their burrows. It was this drive, deeper than an instinct, that stole me through the gardens and alleys. Several times I had to melt into the shelter of a garage or a tangle of trees. Many times a dog, made nervous by his master’s fear, would yammer as I whispered by him. Many times a police car, his circling light punishing the street, would lurch around a corner as I lanced the dark.

  I did not decide what to do. It was done for me, by the knowledge in my blood. When a policeman opened a car door, or a Doberman shrieked, I wended down another street, so fast weeds whipped my flanks.

  The dogs were what I feared more than anything. They were close enough to being my kind that they knew something about me, if only my scent. And the police were gathering new dogs. I could hear it in the damp. Smarter dogs, as capable as guns. German shepherds, more patient on the leash, more silent on the hunt. Even when my night self was done, I sensed that these smarter creatures would still be able to trail me. My night scent would be alloyed with the scent of a man, but a keen dog would not be tricked.

  I ran well, but I knew that wherever I turned, I ran to my death.

  Twenty-Seven

  The last hours of my flight were a trance, a running stupor. I dodged headlights, started at slammed doors and distant whispers. I was still quick, but the messages bypassed my consciousness. I knew what I was doing only after I had done it.

  The dark was fading. Night was dying. The sun, I believed, was the enemy. Must hide, I told myself. A star dissolved as I watched. A bird opened its cry, joined by another, a sound like machinery glazed with rust.

  No time, I thought. I was running out of time.

  I was surprised, then, when I flung myself over a fence, and tumbled into my own garden. Or, what had been my garden when I had been a human being, with a human’s hopes. Home. The refuge, the place of my own scent.

  For a moment, my night self and my human frontier were one. Sanctuary. Safety. I panted on the wet grass. Then I struggled to the back steps, and lurched into the house.

  I was not safe. I was safe nowhere.

  I fell to the carpet, feeling the foreign rasp of this woolen textile, the confinement of the walls. I can’t stay here, I thought. The dogs will find me here.

  Because I heard them. Dog chains tinkled. The scent of large, deliberate dogs reached me even here. They were nearby, encouraged by their handlers. These dogs would not bay. They would not choke at the leash. They were calm masters of their powers, these German shepherds. They would not find me immediately. It might take hours, or, as the scent faded, days. But they were hunting, even now.

  But that was my fear warping the truth. There was only silence outside the house. For the moment, I was safe enough.

  Each bone was split by a pain so bright it was nearly pleasure. My teeth were jammed upward and downward, forcing my mandible open, my voice rasping, a whispered cry. My skin shrank, tightening around me. It squeezed the air out of my body.

  I could not breathe. I felt my strength dissolve, eaten away as by an acid. I melted into a human shape as I sprawled there, like ice in great heat, until I had shrunken into my merest configuration.

  I was human once again.

  Human. Weak. Ungifted. A mere man.

  Now if the dogs found me I would be a naked, powerless creature. I crept to the bathtub, and let hot water play over my numb, human feet. The hot water rose around me. The warmth soaked away some of the ache.

  Don’t think, I told myself. To think is to fear. Rest now.

  It was past time to rest, and to hide. The hot water had soaked away some of the ache, but not all. My skeleton throbbed. I found my way, like someone in a stranger’s house, to the bed.

  I woke suddenly. I was up, clutching a blanket, panting.

  It was the telephone. The answering machine cut in after the third ring. Only the telephone. Not the doorbell, not the voice of someone in the room.

  There was still an abiding chill, deep inside me. I tugged on a thick, wool bathrobe. I peeked out the window. It was full morning outside. I was limping, and the pain in my leg was enough to make me pause before lurching down the stairs. I took three Excedrin, and drank four glasses of water.

  Then I worked my way to the answering machine. I was stiff, and allowed myself some time before I reached it.

  Don’t touch it, I warned myself. You don’t want to hear from anyone.

  But perhaps—it’s not impossible—Johanna has tried to reach me. It was this hope that made me sit down beside the telephone.

  “Ben, I need to talk to you,” said the answering machine. “I really need to talk to you right away. Please call me as soon as you can.” It was Stan Houseman, his voice sounding shaken.

  I stalled. There was a trace of paw print beside the daphne. I erased it with my bare, human foot. There was another mud trace on a sidewalk. I swept it until it was gone. This was a waste of time, of course, if they brought dogs here. A dog would know me at once. A human being, however, would see no trace.

  Run. Run away now.

  Don’t call him. Pack a suitcase and leave immediately, telling no one anything. The only one to talk to is Johanna. Tell Johanna. Only she can help you. But my curiosity was too great, and perhaps I was too weary, in the midst of my anxiety, to think straight. I punched Stan’s home phone, and he answered on the second ring.

  “Did you hear about Orr?” he said.

  “No,” I said, truthfully. I had, in fact, not heard. “What happened?”

  Was there, even in the way I formed the words, a betrayal of the truth? Did my tone communicate the awareness that Orr was so much cold meat?

  He almost could not say it. “He’s been killed.” His voice was trembling. Murder does that to people, especially kind people like Stan.

  Stan sketched a violent story. The same kind of vicious animal as before. Huge, evidently surprised while feeding on kitchen scraps. Cherry and Carliss both hospitalized, “under sedation,” but unhurt.

  “Jesus!” It was horror that made me feel so cold, shock at the truth. Hearing it from Stan made it cut deep.

  “I know how awful it is, Ben.” He offered the threadbare condolences we share at such times.

  I managed some numb conversation, all the while thinking: I had killed Orr, my former business partner, my rival. A man I had known well. Cherry was safe, and Carliss. But the blow was hard. I had acted out of personal spite, not out of animal hunger. I had killed as I hated.

  We fumbled on to other topics, as shaken people will. Chicago had been fine, Stan said. The kids were fine, everything—the word cloyed—was fine. Then he said, “Ben—I’m afraid. I know I’m crazy, but it’s true. And you know something else?”

  “I don’t know anything. I can hardly think.”

  “My first thought when I heard that Orr was dead was that you had done it.”

  Again, fear sounded close to ugly surprise. “How could you think that?”

  Stan sounded near tears. “I’m crazy. Forgive me, Ben. I just—when I heard about it. I just knew it was you. I knew it, in my bones.”

  “What a terrible thing to think, Stan.” It was the stunned detachment of real shock, and Stan accepted it, while misunderstanding it.

  “I don’t think that any more. I was crazy—I told you that. But I knew Cherry left you, and that she was living with Orr, and I thought the worst. Please forgive me, Ben. I was relieved when the whole story came out.”

  What, I managed to ask, was the whole story?r />
  “It turns out that a big animal did it, some sort of wolf. The news of Orr’s murder was on before eleven, but the news about the animal was on a couple of hours later. It’s been on television all night. They thought they had shot it over near Twin Peaks, but it turned out to be just another dog. There were guns going off all over the city. People are really frightened. I had a talk radio program on after midnight, and that’s all anyone wanted to talk about. They still think this animal, whatever it is, is at large somewhere.”

  “You’ve been up all night?”

  “A lot of people have. I know you aren’t the news addict I am or you would have heard about it. Everyone in North America must know about it, except for you and a few Trappist monks somewhere.”

  “I slept so well last night—”

  “And I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m afraid.”

  He was about to ask about the fangs. I could feel it in my bones. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he still had the fear that I had done it. He was struggling to suppress it, and would hate to admit it. Some intuition, some queasy suspicion, was his guide.

  “I’m a father,” he continued, “and it skews my thinking. I want to protect my kids. Sometimes it’s all I think about. My wife, my kids.”

  I had tried to forget: I had bitten off his face.

  “It all sounds so ghastly.” I uttered the lines I thought a normal man would say. “I can’t believe all this. I really can’t. I’m stunned.” The words sounded, in my ears, so terribly false.

  I summoned all my powers, and delivered a perfect lie. “This news is so awful, I’ve decided to do something drastic.”

  I did not give him time to ask. “I’m giving the fangs back to Zinser. All this bad news has me feeling so terrible. I just can’t stand having them around. I’m getting rid of them.”

  In truth, I had to do something with the fangs, but I did not know, yet, what I might do.

  Stan sounded altogether too happy to hear this. “I’ve hated them ever since I first saw them.”

  But I knew what he was thinking. If I were willing to part with the fangs, then that irrational fear he had regarding me could be banished from his mind.

  The fangs, I reassured him, were on their way out of my life.

  I set down the receiver very carefully, as though afraid it might break. I should, I thought, turn myself in. Give myself up to the police immediately. I had killed.

  Even so, my remorse was not a man’s remorse. There was horror at what I had done, but it was muted. My night self, the beast, had absorbed most of my thoughts and feelings, so that above all I had the simplest compulsion.

  It was as though the command were stitched into me with a needle: see Johanna.

  Before you do anything, I thought, see her. And when you see her, tell her everything.

  I wanted to take the fangs to her and get her advice. If I fled and left the fangs here, I would be abandoning them. They were mine. I had to do what was right.

  Even now, in the daylight, my night self was a part of me, coming back to me with each heartbeat. I felt the canniness fill me again. My hearing sharpened.

  So I was not afraid or surprised when there was a step at my front door, and a hand tried the latch.

  Tried the latch as though the visitor had a right to enter. An impatient hand, a large hand, giving up on the doorbell, and knocking.

  Karl Gneiss did not look tired after his long night, but he did look like a man who had been working hard. One knee had a grass stain, and there was a wrinkle on his right shoulder, or perhaps I imagined it, left by the recoil of his rifle.

  He was accompanied by Stowe, his shadow. This time Stowe looked drawn and pensive, and did not even try to smile. He wore dark glasses and resembled a Secret Service agent.

  The two men declined tea, and even water. Stowe said, barely above a whisper, “No thank you,” perhaps the first words I had ever heard him utter. They sat in my study, on the edges of their chairs.

  But Gneiss relaxed almost immediately. He sat back in his chair, and exclaimed on the difficulty of finding parking in San Francisco.

  I agreed. Tough town for parking.

  I struck first. I told them I knew about Orr. I told them with a tremor in my voice, and felt honest anguish as I explained our long working relationship together.

  Gneiss listened, both compassionate and bored, as though he knew all there was to know about sorrow. Then he leaned forward and pointed a finger at me. “You have got a wonderful opportunity.”

  I blinked at him.

  He smiled in an avuncular way, cocking his head. “You’ve got a big chance to do something right. You’re going to be a big help to us.”

  The dark glasses stared back at me. I found my teeth grinding together. I watched Stowe, his hands, the position of his black shoes on the carpet, as though any move he might make would kill me.

  And yet, with the poise my night self provided me, I managed to seem what they would expect to see: a shaken, harmless human being. “How can I help you?”

  “You can tell me anything you know about Johanna Fisher.” His mouth was clumsy with her name, giving it a hard J.

  “I know almost nothing.”

  “You’ve been seeing her.” He said the word “seeing” as though it were the rankest obscenity.

  I agreed.

  “Tell me what you know.” Not “us.” Me. Stowe was forgotten, an apparition.

  He wants you to betray her.

  Kill him now—kill both of them. I felt my body stiffen, lean forward, my fingers digging into my thighs. Stowe watched me from behind his dark glasses. I could nearly smell the cold steel of the gun he carried under his jacket.

  These thoughts made it very difficult for me to speak. I coughed politely. “She works as a translator,” I offered. I knew it was a harmless, and useless, bit of information. “Why are you after her?”

  “We need to talk to Miss Fisher.”

  “So—go talk to her.”

  He smiled. “These latest outbreaks of violence.” He spoke the phrase as though putting quotation marks around it. “These acts of brutal slaughter.” He let this phrase sink in. “These acts culminate what I believe to have been the presence here in San Francisco of what I would have to call something uncanny. A presence which has been here for months.”

  I made myself appear to be patiently listening. I was watching the pulse in his neck.

  “Until very recently there have been only random sightings here in this fine city. A footprint. A figure in headlights. It took my sitting at a computer scanning police logs from all over the country to detect what was taking place.”

  Perhaps he expected me to ask questions. I said nothing.

  For the first time he looked tired. “The police here have no use for us whatsoever.” He chuckled. “Even Washington barely tolerates me in the best of circumstances.”

  He stopped smiling. “You will know how to cooperate with us.”

  I smiled as he had smiled, my eyes hard.

  He was abrupt. “Johanna Fisher has vanished.”

  He stood, and his shadow stood with him. Gneiss gazed down at me. “I want you to understand us. We will never be the sort of people who get warrants.”

  I was no longer the sort of man who would be cowed by any sort of bluster. And yet I warned myself to stay calm. Johanna was missing. I had to help her.

  He nodded and Stowe vanished into the hall. A light step whispered on the stair. This automaton with his secret eyes, this gunslinging android, was searching my house.

  Karl Gneiss listened to the house around him, the nearly silent passing of his shadow from room to room. “We offer understanding, not harm,” he said. “We offer loving arms.”

  Then I knew that he did not suspect me, not yet. He had no idea that he had nearly gunned me down, just a few hours before. I could see, as well, that his investigation was faltering. The local police had evidently followed his instructions as far as readying hounds and guard dogs, but t
hey would continue to believe their quarry to be a large, quite natural beast of some sort. They would have no patience with airy theories when they had real blood on kitchen floors. And in that would lie even further impatience with Gneiss. A nightlong search had resulted in nothing. A killer, of whatever sort, was at large.

  There were plainly phenomena that Gneiss was straining to explain, if only to himself. A woman had been raped, lovers half eaten. After months of vague reports, there were bloody deaths.

  But I, too, was seeing how little I had guessed. Or, if I had touched on it, had cringed back from it. It was beginning to all make sense now. I could not deny it any longer.

  Stowe returned. He touched the rim of his dark glasses, to make sure he revealed no expression. For a moment I could imagine that he had no eyes, no nervous system. He was the dead force of law. He shrugged, as though to say: nothing so far.

  “We’ll go now,” Gneiss announced to Stowe, to me, and even to the house, as he gazed upward at the ceiling. “We’ll be watching, Dr. Byrd,” he said with a smile.

  “We’ll be watching. You can’t hide her.”

  Twenty-Eight

  I was about to run, and the fangs were going with me.

  I had no plan, only a beast’s faith in the power of flight. A peek out the living room window showed a shadow ostentatiously lounging in an unmarked car. They wanted to watch me, and they wanted to be seen watching.

  I wondered if my phone was tapped. Johanna’s phone rang unanswered. Perhaps Gneiss had, uncharacteristically, told the truth. Perhaps she really was gone.

  I tried to reach Lieutenant Solano, but he was away from his desk. There was a hubbub in the room around Solano’s abandoned desk. It was not an easy day to be a cop.

  It was wrong for me to even attempt to find Johanna. I would only bring trouble her way. I would have to escape alone, and I was taking the only precious object that still mattered to me.

  I wanted to ask her what to do with them. I could not carry them with me forever. And I wanted to see her once more to say farewell. I had to put it that way. Farewell. The thought of never seeing her again was a wound. She was life to me.