When the horror came, Arthur's being suddenly and violently split into two entities. He felt more purely the convulsive torment of his body as he was dragged across the ground. Yet he also observed the agony with detachment, as if his mind were intent on recording it all. The soul as scientist observing the experiment of death. This witnessing self both forced him deeper into the ordeal and allowed him to endure it.
Now, on some level, Arthur was mourning his blood as it snaked down his scalp and pulsed from his throat, soaking his white collar to burgundy. As he sat squatting on the ground, facing his death squarely, he felt the cold night air jabbing at his back and buttocks, torn and ragged. He felt scraps of shirt and trousers, wet and warm as bath water, sticking to him. He felt the razor burn of three sharp stones imbedded in the exposed muscles of his upper back.
The cold was in his hands and feet as well. Fatigue was softening the edges of horror. Shock was seeping in. Arthur smiled. This hound of Hell had better act quickly, or he was going to die on his own.
Strange how it stood before him, its gaze so steady Arthur almost expected it to speak. What was it waiting for? Dear Lord, those eyes. They were human. They were human!
"It was you," Arthur said, his voice hardly more than a croak in his burning throat. "You've been doing all this, haven't you?"
The creature lunged, just enough, rupturing Arthur's right ear as he pitched away from the attack. Arthur laughed with irony and realization, his shock making him giddy. All the forces of the United States Government were beating the bushes for one puny human or a cluster of puny humans. What was standing before Arthur, silver fur gleaming, black lips glistening with drool, red-tinged with his blood, was more than them all and born of them all. How he knew this, he couldn't say. But know it, he did.
It is ours, it is our own devise.
Just as Arthur was graced with the understanding, he was graced with another. Too weak to stand, he pulled himself back into a squat and leaned forward unsteadily, accepting the inward shrieking of his splayed back and buttocks as he did.
"You think I'm mourning Doris, don't you?" he said. "But, once I'm dead, I'll be with her more completely than before." He sighed. "I'm dying fast. You better take me now. The only terror you're going to get this time is from the body. "
He was struck hard and quick. Crushed anew against the rocky earth, his skinned muscles poured their overload of pain into arms, chest and legs. His body convulsed as the beast pinned him under one heavy paw that nearly spanned his chest. Interesting, to smell his own blood on the creature's breath as its jaws clamped over his face.
It's the eyes it wants this time, Arthur thought within that peculiar detachment.
And with one final, searing agony, detachment was complete.
Chapter 25
Lakeside Assembly Center
Pre-Dawn. Second Night. Full Moon.
Max woke sobbing and horrified. Horrified of something, but what was it? Not something he'd witnessed, not something he'd seen. Something he'd done.
God, God, what had he done?
Yet when he pushed his glasses over his eyes, he could see that he was safely in bed. Once his eyes adjusted, he could make out the familiar confines in the inky pre-dawn morning between moonset and sunrise.
Okay. Nightmare. He'd had a nightmare, that was all. That had to be it, he'd had a whopper of a nightmare. It was time again for them, anyway. This one was just particularly intense, almost like a memory, almost like the real thing...
The image that burst into his vision made him shriek suddenly, and even his head colliding against the backboard couldn't knock it from him. A faceless lump of flesh, a gaping hole where eyes should be, where nose and mouth should be. The jawbone was still there, sagging without the support of muscle and skin, a useless protuberance against the collapsed gore of brain matter seeping from the cavity.
Max barely made it into the bathroom. He vomited into the toilet bowl, tears seeping through the seams of his eyelids. Emptied of substance and spirit, he sagged against the porcelain for a moment, eyes still closed, until the smell of rusty iron filtered through the tang of bile. He opened his eyes. The toilet was full of blood.
Gagging, his glasses speckled with red, he clambered backward as though the blood was reaching for him. He made it to his feet only after he had tumbled out the bathroom door, and stood there trembling, staring back into the lavatory. He only made it as far as the threshold of his bedroom before he had to brace against the door jam, his forehead pressed into his arm.
Someone knocked on his front door, the noise jolting him so, he stumbled backward.
Damned if he'd answer it! Screw whoever it was! Screw whatever emergency it might be! He needed time to sort this out. Jesus, the blood! Where had it come from?
Again that jagged, gore-filled image and Max pulled away from the door jam as if he could leave the horror there. No. There was no relation between the blood in his belly and the faceless hole in his mind, no! He trod heavily into the kitchen, but the blood and the vision followed him.
The knocking came again. Max stood in the middle of the cabin's kitchen, the cracked linoleum cold against his feet. He felt caged, unable to move forward or backward. The knocking was more insistent. Max was startled by the sound of his own voice, deeper than it should be, threatening as it boomed out, "Get the hell away from here!"
Abruptly, the knocking stopped. Max stood panting in the cold kitchen. Then, suddenly, he was weeping, his head so full of agony and despair he thought it might burst. He knew he had to sit before he crumpled to the linoleum. He let his folded arms cradle his head against the kitchen table as he sank into a chair.
What's happening to me, what's happening?
Doomed. He was overwhelmed with the gut wrenching knowledge that he was doomed. But, why? What had he done? He couldn't think of a soul on earth, in Heaven or in Hell that could answer that question or would give him some glimmer of redemption.
The knocking came again, this time behind Max, at the door that led from the kitchen to the barren area behind the cabin. With it was a muffled voice Max couldn't recognize until the intruder named himself.
"Captain, let me in. I know what you're going through and I can help. Captain, it's David Alma Curar. You must try to trust me."
When Max shouted back, he was ashamed of the sob in his voice, but at least it was his own voice again. "Get the hell away from me!"
"Captain. Please. The memories are getting worse, aren't they? You're seeing the bodies now. Tonight, the seizures will be more violent than ever. Someone should sit with you. Captain..."
"Goddamn it, I don't know what you're talking about! Get out of here!"
"If you don't let me help, there'll be more deaths, there'll be more torture. Have you begun vomiting the blood, yet?"
Max's voice became throaty again. "Get your ass away from my door or I swear to God I'll kill you!"
A swath of terror coursed through him. He'd meant it. If Alma Curar wasn't careful, Max might crash straight through that door and kill him.
God. Oh, dear God in Heaven. Help me!
"Captain! I'm not leaving until I at least see your face!"
Max sprang to his feet, flung the door open. He bore his ashen complexion, the swollen eyes bulbous beneath blood spattered glasses, the stained throat of his tee shirt, to Alma Curar.
"Here's my face," he said, seething. "Here's my face."
The air was gray behind the healer as dawn softened the night. Alma Curar stood in stunned silence looking up at Max in the raised doorway. Finally he said, "Let me come in."
"What for?"
"I can help you stop the pain."
"No one can help me. I'm dying."
"You don't have to, Captain..."
"Take your medicine show someplace else. The best surgeons in three states weren't able to help me."
"You're not sick, Captain, you're entangled."
"Get the hell out of here. I'm warning you."
"If you can't do this for yourself, Captain, do it for the victims."
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about!"
"Last month I would have said you're telling me the truth. Now all you're doing is lying to yourself."
Max stepped back and shoved the door in one, fluid motion, but Alma Curar was stunningly fleet, leaping upward and colliding with the door before it slammed shut.
Max couldn't stop what happened next. Something rose up in him like bile and blood, rose up and clutched Alma Curar's shirtfront. In spite of the threat of silver and turquoise at the healer's throat, Max dragged Alma Curar the rest of the way into the cabin.
Chapter 26
Tulenar Internment Camp
Afternoon. Second Night. Full Moon.
Doris was screaming inside, somewhere deep inside, a place in her that plunged into the core of the earth. She was distantly aware of the commotion all around her, the hysteria that no amount of damage control would cap. Eisenhower was screeching through the telephone wire. The F.B.I. had taken up residence in the M.P.'s compound. Newspaper and radio reporters were bursting through the weaker seams of security. The camp itself was stricken dumb in its terror, like a bleeding animal curled into a far corner, helpless and trapped.
She had nothing to protect her from her grief. No one knew she had loved Arthur Satsugai. No one knew. So the details coming from the F.B.I were brutal and blunt. Found him, dead. Close to the Ataki site, but not buried. Looked like somebody took a posthole digger to his face. Stink, good god, it was amazing how quick a corpse begins to stink.
She knew she didn't seem normal to anyone. Even Harriet approached her cautiously. But the staff's careful words and behavior told her they assumed her vacant gaze and chalky pallor was because of the deepening crisis, to the disintegration of her future.
Arthur. Arthur. No one knew.
This camp was no longer hers. Lip service was given by Eisenhower's representative and the F.B.I.'s special agents, but it was really they who were in control. "Sign this, please," and "what's Madame Administrator's opinion on that?" Any choices they gave her had been telegraphed from Washington D.C.
She didn't care. Her mind was elsewhere, her vision riveted on memory, where she saw over and over again something she would never have believed possible.
There was her little house last night, shot through by moonlight. There she was at the kitchen sink, which she had walked straight toward, not even bothering to turn on a ligh. Bending toward the running water, cupping her hands, intent on splashing away the heat in her face. It was burning from Arthur's lips on her mouth, on her cheeks, on her eyes, on her mouth again.
There was that quick, odd motion disappearing over the small rise behind her house, so quick it was almost gone before she could wipe the water from her eyes. Almost. A quick, wild motion, like legs kicking helplessly upward.
She had been sure she was imagining it, sure her fatigue was teasing her with illusions. The vision of those kicking legs...so fleeting. By the time she had come around the house, by the time she stood atop the little mound, her thoughts were rational again. No one could have dragged a person so quickly and noiselessly out of sight.
By eleven o'clock that night, Arthur was reported missing. By first light, Arthur's death was a reality. When the first call came, Doris rose numbly from the kitchen table and walked to the side of the house. In the morning light, the drag marks in the dust were easy to see. So was the one animal print that Arthur's struggling body had not erased. Large. Immense. Doris could fit both hands into it.
She pointed it out to the M.P.'s. She pointed it out to the special agents. She pointed it out to anyone that could make use of the information. They were all very polite, and they all thought she was absurd. So fatigued and stressed that she was no longer thinking logically.
Yes, of course, Mrs. Tebbe, we see it, yes, it is huge. No, Mrs. Tebbe, we don't think it's canine, it's too big. Probably a cougar, an uncommonly large male. Odd, but not unheard of. An expert opinion, what for? Let's get back to the investigation, shall we?
A monster had swallowed their mother's head and dragged her through the fence.
They saw what appeared to be a wolf, a massive wolf.
The group of old backwoodsmen I wound up hunting with were convinced Alderquest had a werewolf.
Pierce. Where was Pierce today? It only occurred to her to wonder now. Only now was her soul emerging from grief enough to wonder about anything. Where was Pierce?
Harriet brought Doris's mail. She perfunctorily rummaged through it until one large, brown envelope emerged, special delivery, its return address from Bellingham, Washington. Doris stared at it, waiting for Harriet to leave before tearing it open.
Al's tight script was on a slip of paper attached to the coroner's report: "What the hell's going on?" There was even a mimeograph of Captain Maxwell Pierce's statement on the death of his wife, Anne Patricia Wellington Pierce.
The captain's statement and what he had told Doris during their dinner weeks ago were similar. Doris set it aside and scanned the coroner's report, touching on pre-mortem and post-mortem. Most of the trauma was post-mortem. But the important one wasn't. Jesus. Jesus.
Yes, the body was found at the bottom of a snowy ravine. Yes, Annie had died of severe blood loss. But her throat had not been torn open by a jagged rock. An animal had done it. Seemingly canine. Both carotid arteries severed, the larynx gone. Her head was nearly avulsed from her body.
The snow had been too deep to offer clear tracks, but the indications were also strongly canine. Most likely wolf, of an unprecedented size.