Authors: Franklin Gregory
They started down a path through the woods, Summers’ flashlight picking out the way. It was downhill—down toward the Neshaminy.
The night previous they had hidden out near the confluence of the Neshaminy and the Bowling, where the body of Leroy Tilson was found. And the night before that they had camped even farther down the Neshaminy. But tonight:
“I’ll show you where we went wrong,” Crane said. “We were right in our first idea. This damned wolf or whatever it is keeps pretty close to the creek. The Tilson case proved that. So does the dead goat and the case up at Melton Crossing. But this after-noon I found. . . .”
He took the flashlight from Summers and led the way down a steep gravel incline. “Here’s the creek now.”
Reporter and photographer emerged into a small canyon.
“Hell!” spat Summers. “I know this place. It’s where Derhammer and Messner took a shot at it.”
“Over that way,” Crane amended, motioning upstream. “Well, do you see?”
“Hell, no.”
“Look, Tom. If this thing wanders up and downstream and if it keeps close to the creek, it’s got to come through this canyon. And if—”
“Check.”
For the next few minutes, Crane busied himself with his case. He opened his camera and adjusted the lens. He inserted a bulb and checked the plate. He found a rocky ledge between two bushes several feet above the creek, affording a view both up and downstream. Then the two men made themselves comfortable and sat down to wait.
Fifteen minutes dragged by. Then, more slowly, thirty. Summers drew out a bottle, unscrewed the top and silently handed it to Crane. Crane drank. And Summers drank. And Summers put the bottle away and started to light a cigarette.
“Douse it,” Crane whispered. ‘‘Animals can smell a mile off.”
“He'll smell us, anyway,” Summers said.
“That’s so. Where’s the wind?”
They checked the direction of the breeze, found it from the north.
“That’s okay,” Crane decided. “Can’t smell us up or downstream.”
They waited. It was an hour now. An hour and a half. The canyon was dark, forbidding. Scrub pine on the shoulders of the canyon cast shadows on the creek and screened the starlit sky. The water below them gurgled quietly.
“This where you saw those fresh prints?” Summers whispered.
“Yell.”
They waited. An owl somewhere above screeched with startled suddenness. A rabbit scrambled through the dry leaves somewhere below.
Two hours.
Downstream, at Fountain Head, Dr. Justin Hard: was preparing to leave. Shortly, Manning Trent would return home, his mind troubled. And Pierre would sit in front of his log fire and stare.
Two hours and fifteen minutes. Upstream two miles was the Lamberton Farm.
Two hours and a half had passed when Summers clutched Crane’s arm. They listened breathlessly.
There. . . . There it was again:
Plump, plump, plump
—the faint padding of footsteps on moist earth.
Crane crouched, camera in hand, eyes on the creek below and the narrow path on the other side, meagerly illuminated between the splotches of black shadows by starlight. A dry twig cracked under Crane’s feet, sounding to his tense ears like a blast of dynamite.
“Easy, Red.”
The sound neared; stopped (and both men visualized the quarry pausing to sniff suspiciously); then the sound grew more distinct.
Pad, pad, pa
d
. . . .
At the canyon mouth now, Summers figured; where Heinrich and Messner had seen them.
There was rhythm in the sound;
pad-plump, pad-plump, pad-plump
. . . .
And then—
With their own eyes, and simultaneously, they saw the long, low, moving shadows. Summers thought:
“Two! Derhammer’s right.”
He nudged Crane.
One appeared larger and whiter, Summers thought. And that would check. Crane steeled himself. He crouched, sighted. A. hundred thoughts sped dizzily: would the bulb have enough penetration; little far, there; black, too black; speed right? Damn it! Need the telescopic. Gosh! If I pull this off. . . .
Summers, behind Crane, saw the slow leisurely approach. The beasts trotted as it tired.
Pad-plump
. They were more distinct now. They resolved into form. But they were still shadows. Why didn’t Crane shoot?
Now they were directly in front of them. In a belt of starlight.
Flash!
Summers received a split-second impression of a huge, sleek white beast etched against the far rocks; of a red stain about the nose; of a darker animal drawing up the rear.
“Got it!” Crane shouted.
In the black oblivion that followed they heard a crashing from below; sounds receding, racing away.
THE next day Manning Trent did not go into the city. He breakfasted late—too late, purposely, to face David over the table. His eyes wore the telltale look of a sleepless night.
Julia, too, was up before Trent came down. From the open bay window in the cheerfully curtained breakfast room, Manning saw her long, low limousine—Roger at the wheel—roll out of the grounds and creep along the State Highway. Julia, a lady settled in her ways, never permitted Roger to drive more than twenty-five miles an hour.
“You are driving too rapidly, Roger,” she would announce with asperity into the microphone which linked her glass-encased ton- neau to Roger’s seat. Or again:
“Somewhat more slowly, Roger.”
She had installed, in the rear, a separate speedometer. And the result was that Julia Trent crept wherever she went—and traffic crept behind her.
As the spotless black limousine disappeared at its discreet pace behind a hill, Trent was relieved. He just couldn’t, today, stand up to her prying inquiries.
“You did not sleep well last night, Manning?”
“Do you feel, Manning, that the—ah—alcohol may have occasioned your restlessness?”
The tightness in the throat, the slight giddiness, the aching of neck and shoulder muscles so well known to the insomniac gripped Trent. Nor did he more than look at his food.
Have to work this out, he thought. No sleep. Can’t think straight. But—have to work this out.
He sat, and his coffee grew cold. He stared out across the lawn, still green even in December. He stared beyond the lawn to his fields and woods, to tree-studded Mt. Neshaminy. Above the crowns of the trees and somewhat to the east of that tall hill, the copper work on a chimney pot glistened in the sun. Fountain Head. Unreasoning bitterness grew within him.
He felt angry with Pierre, with Sara, with Dr. Hardt, with everything and anything connected with Fountain Head. The entire landscape in that direction repelled him. Hadn’t there been enough trouble at Trent Farms without borrowing from the neighbors? Wasn’t the change in Julia’s character through the years sufficient damnation? And David’s long, long invalidism?
He speculated. Had David’s illness left some weakness which paved the way to greater susceptibility to this—this horror?
Midway in his thought he shook himself— physically and abruptly. Good God! He was going on as if he believed this nonsense! In the plain light of the new day, he knew for certain that the events of the preceding night were only a passing madness.
Violently, he pushed back his chair to leave the table. The sound brought Wallace, the butler, into evidence. As he turned to leave. Wallace said with his usual stiff politeness:
“It was too bad, sir, about the Lamberton girl.”
Trent stopped, turned. Wallace was already bending rigidly over the table to remove the dishes. Trent asked gruffly:
“What do you mean?”
Wallace, straightening, faced his employer.
“I am sorry, sir. I thought you knew. It was Elsie. She is the youngest, I am told; six years, I believe they said. She was found this morning in the woods back of their place. She was quite badly mangled, sir.”
Dully, Trent stared at Wallace—Wallace, whose poker face would greet Doomsday without a wrinkle of emotion. Finally Trent asked:
“Dead?”
“Oh, quite, sir.”
Trent's shoulders slumped. He knew the child's mother, Jennie Lamberton; prettiest girl in the township when he was a youngster. A misty recollection of a dance clouded thought for an instant; a summer romance; and then her marriage to Howard Lamberton, and her inheritance of her father's great farm on Pumpernickle Road. Trent began hesitantly:
“Was it—”
“The wolf? That is what they say, sir. But they say there were two of them, sir.”
There was just enough trace of the histrionic in Wallace’s pauses between sentences, just enough emphasis upon the numeral to give Trent thought. He looked narrowly in Wallace's face; he wondered if the man were not regarding him with a little too much interest.
“Somewhat,” continued Wallace, “like the Heath case at Melton Crossing, sir. Elsie was asleep on the first floor and the window was up a little. Rather warm for December, you know, sir. But you would think, sir, that with this going on, people would close their windows. I understand the State Police have warned—”
Trent, still thinking of Wallace’s sharp glance, interrupted impatiently, “What are
they saying?”
“The police, sir?”
“People.”
“Why, sir, I would not put any trust in gossip. You know how the talk goes on back stairs.”
“Am I expected to?” Trent inquired dryly. “I am sorry, sir. I did not mean to imply—”
“What are they saying?” Trent repeated.
“Really, sir, it is rather difficult to piece together. But since the experience of Heinrich Derhammer and Nathan Messner—perhaps I should say, sir, their alleged experience—people say that the things are—well, inhuman, sir.”
“So are dogs.”
Wallace bowed slightly.
“Of course, sir. But if you will pardon me, I intended to convey the reverse of what I said. They give the beasts human attributes.”
“Bosh!”
“Exactly, sir.”
And Wallace turned to the clearing of the table.
TOM SUMMERS, at Trent’s order, drove from the village to Trent Farms. He had cleaned up most of the news angles of Elsie Lamberton’s death. What with the night before, he was dead tired. He leaned back in a huge chair in Trent’s library and faced his employer.
“Two sets of tracks?” asked Trent.
“That’s right, but what you ought to know—” He was about to describe the ad- ture of himself and Crane. But Trent broke in:
“I don’t want details. What’s the talk?” Summers lit a cigarette.
“The talk? Around the village?” He laughed shortly. “It’s a throwback to the Middle Ages. They’re talking werewolves, Mr. Trent.”
Trent simulated surprise.
“Rot!” he said.
“You can’t tell the villagers that,” Summers said. “And they think they've a couple of pretty good reasons. Derhammer’s story is one.”
“I don’t trust Heinrich.”
“But that isn’t the whole thing, Mr. Trent. These neighbors of yours are pretty shrewd. They aren't forgetting that after the Tilson boy was killed, the troopers traced the animal to one creek bank—and found on the other side the prints of a woman’s shoes.”
Trent wrinkled his nose.
“There’s a natural enough explanation somewhere, Mr. Trent. I’ve good reason to believe they are wolves. But you can’t tell these people that. They keep saying there haven’t been any wolves in Pennsylvania for fifty years. And the troopers checked with that fellow, McFanahan, up in the Poconos. And he claims he hasn’t lost a single pup.”
“So people say, ‘No wolves.’ And they say, ‘If there aren’t any wolves about, but if we’ve got something that looks like
wolves
, why—there you are!’”
Summers leaned forward.
“I don’t mean they actually say it. They talk in and around it. But you get a blazing clear idea of what they mean—and it’s pretty ugly, too. Good God, Mr. Trent! The way their temper's up. I’d hate to be in the shoes of anyone they suspect!”
Trent glanced up sharply. Summers thought he paled. And such was the chill of this suggestion that, at first, Trent was deaf to the importance of Summers’ next words. Something about “another beat by Red Crane.” About a picture. Only the professional excitement in Summers’ tone stirred Trent from his horrendous contemplation.
“I was with him, Mr. Trent,” Summers was saying eagerly. “Right out back of your place. We’d waited in different places three nights. They came along last night. And there were two. I saw them.”
Trent leaned forward.
“Wolves?” he asked incredulously.
“They looked like wolves to me.”
Trent's hand went to his forehead.
“Crane got the picture?”
“Yes, sir.’’
Relief, sudden and welcome, enveloped Trent. Why—that would solve everything. “Thank the Lord!” he exclaimed fervently. Tom Summers was puzzled.
“Best beat Crane’s had,” he said.