Werewolf Cop (11 page)

Its substance seemed to shrink into itself. It made a strangled noise of human anguish. The sounds of tearing muscle and splintering bone repeated themselves in a weird inversion—a damp congealing noise—a clattering of reconstruction. The black fur of the beast seemed to retract into gray, aged, naked flesh—until, in the shadow and moonlight, there lay the old professor, Gretchen Dankl, her wrinkled white body settling onto its back, her old dugs sinking into the outline of her ribcage, her taut, anxious features pointed at the sky.

The wolf-creature was gone as if it had never been there at all. Zach could only stare at the professor, his mouth open, his mind in a muddy fever of denial: this was not happening. This could not be happening. Had he killed the woman?

Gretchen Dankl's lips moved weakly. She whispered up into the air—to no one—to the forest night: “
Liebestod
.”

She seemed to smile a little, then her final breath rattled out of her for what seemed an impossibly long time. Her naked old frame sank into itself so that it appeared to Zach to grow even older—and then he realized it was—it
was
growing older, aging even as it died, as if the life inside had somehow kept time at bay, and now that the life was gone, the hindered years were returning to claim their due.

The body grew old, and even older. The face caved in at the cheeks. The eyes grew large and round in their widening sockets. The dead woman shriveled to an ancient corpse, and then to something like a mummy, its flesh wrapped tightly around the bones protruding from beneath. Then even what flesh there was grew darker; grew thin—paper-thin—and turned to ashes. The ash drifted down into the skeleton so that only the skeleton remained—the skeleton, skeins of sinew and the eyes still staring out of the skull. Then the staring eyes liquefied and drained away.

In his shock and disgust and confusion, pain and fear, Zach gagged. He hung his head and coughed at the earth, thinking he would vomit up the last life inside him. But the gagging subsided. With a heavy breath or two, he recovered. Still panting, he lifted his head and looked at the old woman's bones.

The sinews dissolved and the bones began to crumble. The ribs clattered onto the spine. The skull collapsed into itself. The whole structure disintegrated, atomized. The dust pattered down upon the leaves, and was gone.

Breathing hard, Detective Zach Adams looked around him with mad, white, rolling eyes.

He was all alone in the clearing.

The gun fell from his hands, and he dropped down into the leaves to die.

8

ALL THE WAY HOME

Z
ach had little memory of what happened next: fragments and flashes of memory like pictures in a museum, each isolated in its frame, separated from the one beside it. He remembered, for instance, lying on his back with his hand on his middle, the sticky, slippery feel against his palm of the blood and gore smeared all over the core of him. White-hot agony screamed from the wounds there and in his gouged leg, and the cold knowledge seeped through him that this really was the end, that he could not lose that much of himself and still survive.

He remembered—again in flashes, in fragments—moments of trying to make sense of what had happened to him. Was it a dream? Had he gone mad? Had he just killed a woman? Had he killed a wolf? Was he even here, or was he somewhere else, sleeping? He must have passed out between questions and come to later, asking more questions. A good deal of time must have gone by. He remembered lying on the forest floor at one point in a sickness of complete unknowing, unable to imagine any plausible explanation for his being there at all.

Then—as if it had happened later, but how much later he couldn't tell—he had a very distinct recollection of suddenly becoming conscious in the night, of taking a deep, deep breath, what he thought might be his final breath, and finding instead, to his confusion and surprise, that it had actually become
easier
for him to breathe somehow, that he actually felt
less
pain than before, had
more
strength than before—less pain and more strength, bizarrely, than he'd had when he'd first fallen.

He remembered crawling on his belly through the leaves. A sense that he must be leaving his guts in a bloody trail behind him. An even stranger sense that, no, he wasn't, that he wasn't leaving anything behind at all.

There had been a cabin—hadn't there? He had an image in his mind—an image that included himself as if he were outside his own body looking at it. He was lying on dirt, in a cleared space on the forest floor. He was half-lifted on his elbows in a spill of blue moonlight. He was at the base of a set of porch stairs—yearning up at the front door of a wooden cabin as if he knew he would never find the energy to climb to it.

But somehow he must have done it. Because he had another memory: he was inside the cabin. He was in a bare room. There was a metal bowl of water. Chains—this part couldn't be right, but he did remember it—there were chains in the wall—chains and manacles like in some old dungeon. Crazy, but that's what came back to him.

More clearly, he remembered the taste of the water as he guzzled it thirstily. He remembered the cool, cool sensation of it as he splashed it over his wounds . . . over what he'd thought were his wounds . . . what had to have been his wounds . . . but he also remembered, or thought he remembered, how he'd sat propped against one rough, untreated wood-plank wall, his chin on his chest as he looked down at himself in stupid amazement, as he pawed through the bloody shreds of his shirt and jacket to see his torso, to find that his stomach was not wounded at all, but whole! His chest was whole! His leg—though his pants too were gory and torn—his calf was whole, completely unharmed!

Everything after that was fever and dream. An image of himself staggering through the woods. An image of himself in the Sebring again, on the road. A sense that he had driven on nearly empty highways in the dead of night, fighting to keep his eyes from sinking shut, his head from pitching forward onto the wheel. He did not remember returning to his hotel, but he must have because he had obviously retrieved his overnight bag. He had brought his bag back on the planes with him—his bag, but not the clothes that he remembered wearing, the clothes that had been ripped to blood-soaked rags. Those, he must have left behind somewhere.

The misery of the trip home came back to him in blurred flickering snatches. Jostling crowds at the airport. Grim faces, frightened eyes all around him. People pounding on countertops. Someone shouting in English in a German accent, “Zis iz madness! Zis iz madness!” over and over again. It was: madness. TV screens showed pictures of fire. Pictures of chaos, shaky-cam anarchy on city streets. Weak but grimly determined, he fought his way onto the plane. Sat on the plane covered in sweat, hot with fever. His head rested against the window. Sleep fell heavy on him, smothering sleep like a woolen shroud.

The last thing he could recall was waking up after the landing at Newark. Feeling slightly refreshed. Cooler. Thinking:
Thank God.
Thinking: if he could just get home, just take a couple of aspirin and crawl into bed. . . .

He never made it. He had no memory of this at all, but, according to witnesses, he had come out of the plane walking steadily, carrying his bag. He had looked pale—very pale, nearly gray and damp with sweat—but had seemed alert and strong. He had continued quickly through customs to the airport exit. Stepped out into the gray autumn weather. He had then stood as if considering which way to go. He had taken a deep, appreciative breath of the cool air.

Then, as if checking the weather, he had lifted his face to the sky. His mouth had fallen open and his eyes had rolled up into his head until only the whites were showing. The bag had dropped from his slack hand and—“as if he'd suddenly turned into a piece of string,” one witness said—his body sank in a wavering line to the sidewalk, and he spilled across the pavement, unconscious.

The doctors said he must have been traveling on pure willpower, sick as he was.

PART II

A DREAM OF GOOD AND EVIL

9

THE GRETCHENFRAGE

A
sickly yellow fog lay over the headstones. It twined like a cat around the bases of the monuments. A statue of a cowled mourner gazed into its depths. A marble child, staring with blank eyes, appeared and disappeared as the mist blew and shifted over her. Inscriptions spoke and fell silent as the fog revealed or covered them. Here lies . . . Beloved mother of . . . What I once was. . . .

The mist felt cold on the back of Zach's hands as he moved among the markers. With a low frisson of fear, he realized: he
knew
this place, this cemetery. The dead here—the dead were not dead. Some were walking near him—very near him—hidden in the fog. Some were even closer than that, running through his bloodstream, racing through his brain, as near as his own thoughts.

He paused beside the statue of the cowled mourner. He felt it staring down at him. He raised his eyes to it.

Good God, it wasn't a statue at all! It was a woman. He knew her from someplace. . . .

He looked around him. Ah, now he understood! This was a dream! He was in a dream. Yes, look. There, up ahead. A shadow in the mist: the shape of a scaffold—a platform framed by rising beams. . . .

He did not want to draw closer to it, but it was a dream so he couldn't help himself. He stepped toward the structure. The thick fog parted like a curtain. The figures standing on the platform emerged, tendrils of mist hanging off them like rags. An executioner in a frilled collar stood holding a sword—a strange sort of sword with sharp edges but a rounded end. Another man knelt in front of him, his back straight, his shirt pulled down over his shoulders to expose his neck to the executioner's blow. His arms were tied together in front of him, and Zach could see that one of his hands was missing, cut away, the ragged stump of his wrist obscenely naked and putrefied.

The kneeling man looked up. He called out to him—to Zach. “Do you believe?”

“
Ja,
” said the executioner heavily. “
Ja, das ist die Gretchenfrage.
”

Zach heard a soft footstep behind him. He turned and saw another figure approaching him through the fog. The cowled mourner from the grave! She was pushing the cowl back off her head as she moved between the stones to expose her face . . . the face of a corpse . . . rotting flesh on a grinning skull with strands of gray hair hanging around it . . . Gretchen Dankl!

The thing reached out for him. Her damp fingers closed around his wrist. “It is for you that I have become an abomination,” she said.

And Zach realized:
This isn't a dream! This isn't a dream at all!

He woke up with a gasp of fear, his heart pounding hard. He was lying on his back, staring up at a white ceiling. He turned his head and saw Agent Martin “Broadway Joe” Goulart slouched in the wooden armchair beside his bed. His partner was wearing one of his fine, fancy suits—a pinstriped gray—and a tie just the perfect robin's-egg blue. He was playing with his phone, tapping and swiping the screen with his thumb. He barely glanced at Zach, but he said “The Cowboy awakes!” Zach was about to ask him
Where am I? Why am I here?
but before he could, Goulart added “In the hospital. You had septicemia.”

Zach turned a muzzy-headed gaze down toward his wrist. There was a needle stuck in the vein there, a tube running out of it. Near the entry point, the wet imprint of a woman's fingers was just now evaporating. . . .

It wasn't a dream.

“Wanna know how I knew what you were gonna ask?” said Goulart, still tapping away at the phone. “It's because this is the third time you've woken up and asked me. The third time today. You did it twice on Tuesday too. Same questions. A week, by the way. That's your next question: ‘How long have I been here?' A week.”

“What's a
Gretchenfrage
?” Zach asked.

“That's a new one! What's a
what
?”

“A
Gretchenfrage
.”

“A French girl with a German name? Gretchen Frog? Just guessing.” He gave one of his silent laughs as he went on playing whatever game he was playing on the phone.

“I've been here a week?” murmured Zach faintly.

“Now we're back to the script. You collapsed outside Newark airport right after you got back from Deutschland. Doctors say you would have died if you weren't such a tough guy. Your whole body was infected.”

Zach shut his eyes hard, trying to clear his mind. But the graveyard came back to him. The fog. The scaffold. The headsman.
Das ist die Gretchenfrage
. How could someone use a word in your dream if you'd never heard the word before? And then that creature approaching him . . . the dead professor. . . .

He opened his eyes again quickly before he could picture her face. “Why?” he said softly to Goulart. “How? How did I get so sick?” He had already remembered the answer—no one knew—but he asked anyway, to distract himself from the memory of the dream . . . or whatever it was. . . . That graveyard. He shuddered. Where the dead were not dead.

Goulart shrugged. “They don't know. Said it could've been some small infection, like a urinary thing or something, that just suddenly flared up. Or maybe something you picked up overseas. None too surprising with all the hairy scumbags running riot over there, burning things down and whatnot. You know the government of France resigned yesterday? The whole government! I didn't even know you could do that. They're saying the new president wants that Islamic Sharia shit added to the legal system. What could possibly go wrong with that, right?”

Zach groaned. Brought his right hand to his forehead—which was no easy task; there were needles and tubes in his right arm too. “You're giving me a headache, Goulart.”