The Wolf Gift

by Anne Rice

  The study and adjoining bedroom that had belonged to Felix, which completed the western row of rooms at the northwestern end of the hall, remained a sanctum.

  Laura and Reuben cooked all meals together, and did the errands together. Galton handled almost all the real time-consuming problems of the property.

  Laura had done a lot of thinking, true, she admitted, about how she could easily accept the brutality of the Man Wolf’s attacks. She did not know the answer. She was deeply in love with Reuben, she said. She’d never leave him. That wasn’t even conceivable to her.

  But yes, she thought about it, thought about it night and day, the drive we have for revenge against those who are cruel to us, and the cruelty of revenge and what it does to those who give themselves over to it.

  True, she wished he could hunt the forest forever, that he would never again go to the mysterious voices that called him. But she could not explain away the fact that the voices did call, and every day the press elaborated in more detail the spectacular “fallout” of the Man Wolf’s “intervention.”

  The beneficiaries of his savagery captured the imagination of the press as much as the criminal victims. The old woman of Buena Vista Hill, having suffered excruciating torture before the Man Wolf burst into her window, was now mentally recovered from her ordeal and granting interviews. She said boldly on camera that the Man Wolf should be caught alive, not shot down like a beast, and that she would devote her fortune to supporting him and protecting him if he were captured. Susan Larson, the Man Wolf’s first “contact” in North Beach, also lobbied hard for his “safe” capture. To Larson, he was “The Gentling Wolf,” because of the way that he had touched her and comforted her. Meanwhile Man Wolf fan clubs formed online and on YouTube, and at least one famous rock star had written “A Ballad of the Man Wolf,” and other songs would shortly follow. There was a Man Wolf Facebook page, and a Man Wolf poetry contest on YouTube. And a whole variety of Man Wolf T-shirts had appeared.

  Near the end of the week, Simon Oliver called to say that the title company had all documents on Nideck Point ready for signature. Reuben agreed, but secretly he had misgivings.

  What about Felix? This was Felix, the real Felix. Didn’t this house belong to him?

  “Nothing can be done about this question now,” said Laura. “I think you should go to the title company, sign the papers, and let them file the title. Remember, there is no legal way for Felix to acquire this house. He won’t and can’t take a DNA test to prove anything, either affinity to Marchent, or that he is the man himself. He’d have to buy the house from you. For now, this place is yours.”

  The visit to the title company was brief. It was unusual to clear title in this amount of time, they told Reuben, but this house had been owned by only one family down through the years, which had made it easy. Reuben signed where they told him to sign.

  Nideck Point was now legally his. Property taxes were paid in advance through the end of the following year. Insurance was in place.

  He drove Laura south to get her Jeep and the bulk of her possessions, which amounted to so few boxes that he was kind of amazed. Half of them were filled with flannel nightgowns.

  Finally Grace called with the news that Stuart might be visited the following Tuesday. He’d not had a temperature for two days, and the rash and the nausea were gone. So were all signs of injury. And the boy’s height and weight had increased.

  “Like I told you, it’s all happened so much faster,” she said. “He’s not so manic now. But the moodiness has begun.”

  Frankly, she wanted Reuben to see him. She wanted Reuben to talk to him. The boy wanted to go home, and that meant San Francisco. His mother wouldn’t have him in the Santa Rosa house, she was afraid of the stepfather, and Grace didn’t trust him on his own.

  “Yes, it’s a hell of a lot easier for me to look after him down here,” said Grace, “in San Francisco. But this kid is acting too weird, just too weird. Of course he’s clever as they come. He knows better than to say anything more about hearing voices. Reuben, it’s playing out like it did with you, exactly. The lab results. Well, we make a little progress and then the specimens disintegrate! We haven’t solved that problem. And he’s not the same boy he was when I first talked to him. I want you to see him.”

  He sensed that they were able to talk about all this much more easily now that it involved Stuart. They were speaking as if there was no silence between them, no secret, no mystery, as if all the mystery had to do with Stuart.

  That was all right.

  Reuben said he would see Stuart anytime that he could. He’d be there early Tuesday morning.

  Finally Grace asked: would he and Laura be willing if she, and Jim, and Phil came to dinner?

  Reuben was overjoyed. He could control the Wolf Gift now. He had no fear of it. This was what he so wanted!

  He and Laura spent all day Monday preparing for a feast in the august dining room.

  They dug out linen for the table, great cloths trimmed in old lace, dinner-sized napkins embossed with the initial N, and heaps of old graven silver. They ordered flowers for the main rooms, and specialty desserts from the nearest bakery.

  Grace and Phil were completely taken with the house, but it was Phil who fell in love with it, just as Reuben had anticipated. Phil stopped responding to questions or remarks and roamed off by himself, humming under his breath, running his hands over paneling and doorjambs, and the varnish of the piano, and the crinkled leaves of the weeping ficus, and the leather-bound books of the library. He put on his thick glasses to examine the carved figures of the hunters’ boards and the medieval fireplace. Phil looked like he belonged to the place in his disheveled tweed with his long unkempt gray hair.

  They had to pull him down from the second-story rooms finally because everyone was starving. But Phil was whispering to the house, communing with it, and paid absolutely no attention to Grace when she began to talk about the obvious expense of it.

  Reuben was thrilled by this. He kept hugging Phil. Phil was in a dream world with the house. He murmured under his breath, “I’d live here in a second.” And now and then he beamed proudly, lovingly, at Reuben.

  “Son, this is your destiny,” he said.

  Grace said such houses were obsolete, ought to be converted into institutions, museums, or hospitals. She looked especially beautiful to Reuben, with her red hair natural around her face, her lips only slightly rouged, and her sharp intense features expressive as always. Her black silk pantsuit looked new; she had put on her pearls for the occasion. But she was tired, worn, and watching him intently no matter who was doing the talking.

  Jim came to the defense of the place, pointing out Reuben had never been a terribly expensive kid. He’d traveled on a shoestring, used to tiny hotel rooms and coach fares, and attended a state university and not an Ivy League college. The most extravagant thing he’d ever done was ask for a Porsche when he graduated and he was still driving the same car two years later. He’d never gone into the principal of any of his trusts until now, and had lived for years on half his income. Yes, the house was expensive, but they didn’t heat the whole thing every day, did they?

  And how long was Reuben expected to live with his parents anyhow? Yes, the house cost. But what would it cost to buy a new condo or refurbished Victorian in San Francisco? And what would Grandfather Spangler have thought of all this, the gift of a property of this value? He would have approved the maintenance in the blink of an eye! He’d been a real estate developer, hadn’t he? Someday this whole place would sell for a fortune, so would everybody please leave Reuben alone!

  Grace accepted all this with a casual nod. What Jim didn’t say was that he, Jim, had turned his trust funds back over to the family when he’d joined the priesthood, and so shouldn’t his opinion count for something?

  Jim had dropped out of medical school to be a priest, and his education in Rome had cost little in comparison. The family had made a hefty donation to the Church when he was ordained,
but the bulk of his inheritance was now at the disposal of Reuben.

  Reuben didn’t care what the hell any of them said. He kept his counsel about Felix, and Felix’s possible moral claim to the house naturally. His heart broke when he thought of losing the house, but it was the least of his worries. What would Felix think when he found out about Stuart?

  What would Stuart think when he found out about Stuart?

  But maybe nothing would happen. Hadn’t Marrok indicated that sometimes nothing happened? Oh, faint hope.

  What Reuben loved was that they were here, his family, that their voices were filling the big shadowy dining room, that his father was happy and not bored, and it felt good, oh, so good, to be near them.

  The meal was a great success—roast filet, fresh vegetables, pasta, and one of Laura’s enormous simple and herb-laden salads.

  Laura got into a discussion with Jim about Teilhard de Chardin, and Reuben understood less than half of what they were saying. What he saw however was how much they enjoyed the conversation. Phil was smiling at Laura in a particularly delighted way. When Phil talked about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Laura listened with rapt focus. Grace started another conversation, of course, but Reuben had long ago grown used to listening to their two separate conversations simultaneously. The fact was Laura liked his father. And his mother.

  Grace asked what good theology ever did anybody, or poetry for that matter.

  Laura remarked that science was dependent upon poetry, that all scientific description was metaphoric.

  Only when the conversation turned to Dr. Akim Jaska did things turn unpleasant. Grace didn’t want to discuss the man, but Phil went into a fury.

  “That doctor wanted to have you legally committed,” he said to Reuben.

  “Well, that was the end of the matter, wasn’t it?” said Grace. “Because nobody, I mean nobody, was going to even remotely consider such a thing.”

  “Legally committed?” Laura asked.

  “Yes, to this phony-baloney rehab center of his in Sausalito,” said Phil. “I knew the guy was a fraud from the moment I met him. I practically threw him down the front steps. Coming at us with those papers.”

  “Papers?” Reuben asked.

  “He is most certainly not a fraud,” said Grace, and it suddenly became a screaming match between Phil and Grace, until Jim intervened to declare that yes, the doctor was obviously brilliant and extremely knowledgeable in his field, but something wasn’t on the level there, not with this attempt at commitment.

  “Well, you can forget him,” said Grace. “That was the end of it, Reuben. We just weren’t on the same page, Dr. Jaska and I. Not at all unfortunately.” But she insisted in a rolling murmur that he’d been one of the most brilliant doctors she’d ever met. Too bad he was a bit of a lunatic himself on the subject of werewolves.

  Phil was snorting, throwing down his napkin, picking it up, and throwing it down again, and saying the guy was a Rasputin.

  “He had some theory,” said Jim, “about mutational changes and mutational beings. But the man’s credentials just aren’t what they should be, and Mother realized this soon enough.”

  “Not soon enough for me,” said Phil. “He tried to cover his record with some cock-and-bull story about the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of all his most valuable research. Nonsense!”

  Reuben got up, put on some soothing piano music by Erik Satie, and when he sat down again, Laura was talking softly about the forest and how they must all come when the rains finally stopped and spend a weekend hiking the trails behind the house.

  Jim managed to get Reuben alone, for a brisk walk after dark in the woods.

  “Is it true,” he demanded, “this kid was bitten?”

  Reuben went silent and then broke down, confessing everything. He was sure now that Stuart wasn’t going to die from the Chrism, but that Stuart was going to become exactly what he was. This sent Jim into a paroxysm.

  He actually knelt down on the ground, bowed his head, and prayed. Reuben talked on and on about his meeting with Felix and how he felt that Felix knew the answers.

  “What are you hoping for?” demanded Jim. “That this man can make these brutal attacks entirely morally acceptable to you!”

  “I’m hoping what all sentient beings hope … that somehow I’m part of something larger than myself, in which I play a role, an actual role that is somehow intended and meaningful.” He tugged at Jim’s arm. “Will you please get up off the ground, Father Golding, before somebody sees you?”

  They walked a little deeper into the woods, but close enough to the house to see the bright lights of the windows. Reuben stopped. He listened. He was hearing things, all manner of things. He tried to explain it to Jim. In the dimness, he could not make out the expression on Jim’s face.

  “But is a human being meant to hear those things?” Jim asked.

  “If he isn’t, then why am I hearing them?”

  “Things happen,” Jim said. “There are mutations, developments that the world includes but never embraces, things that have to be repudiated and rejected.”

  Reuben sighed.

  He glanced upwards, longing for the fuller clarity of night vision that came with the wolf-coat. He wanted to see stars above, to be reminded that this earth was no more than an ember in the blaze of never-ending galaxies, a thought that always, somehow, comforted him. Strange that it did not do this for others. The vastness of the universe brought him closer to faith in a God.

  The wind moved through the branches over him. Something jarred him, a series of sounds that seemed out of cadence with the night. Was he seeing something up there in the dark, something moving? The darkness was too thick. But at once the chills rose all over him. He felt the hair standing on end on his arms. Someone out there, up there.

  The inevitable convulsion came. But he suppressed it. He forced it back. He shivered deliberately banishing the chills. No. He could not see anything there. Yet his imagination filled in the nightscape. Beings up there in the dark, more than one, more than two.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” asked Jim.

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  Then the wind came hard through the trees, gusting, doubling its fist, and the woods sang as if with one voice.

  “Just nothing.”

  At nine o’clock, the family took off with the prospect of not reaching San Francisco before one in the morning. Grace was coming back to Santa Rosa tomorrow afternoon to argue further in person that Stuart stay in the hospital. Grace was afraid of something.

  “Do you know any more now about this whole syndrome?” Reuben asked.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing else at all.”

  “Would you be absolutely straight with me on something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Dr. Jaska—.”

  “Reuben, I sent the guy packing. He’ll never come near me again.”

  “What about Stuart?”

  “He has absolutely no way to get to Stuart. I’ve warned Dr. Cutler in no uncertain terms. Now this is strictly confidential, but I’m going to tell you. Dr. Cutler’s trying to get custody of Stuart, or at least some kind of power of attorney with regard to his medical decisions. He can’t go home and he shouldn’t be alone in San Francisco in his Haight-Ashbury apartment either. Look, forget I told you this.”

  “Right, Mamma.”

  She looked at him almost despairingly.

  They’d done a lot of talking about Stuart, but not about him.

  When had his mother ever given up on anything? Surgeons never give up. Surgeons always believe that something can be done. That’s their nature.

  This is what all of these things have done to my mother, Reuben thought. His mother stood on the front step staring up at the house, at the dark trees gathered to the east of it, her eyes haunted, unhappy. She looked back to Reuben, and there came that warm affectionate smile on which so much of his well-being depended, but only for an instant.

  “Mom, I’m
so glad you came up here this evening,” he said. He put his arms around her. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Yeah, I’m glad we came too,” she said. She held him close, looking into his eyes. “You are all right, aren’t you, Baby Boy?”

  “Yes, Mom, I’m just worried about Stuart.”

  Reuben promised to call her in the morning as soon as he’d been to the hospital.

  33

  A WILD BOAR HAD COME into his woods—a lone male. He heard the boar about two in the morning. He was reading, fighting the change. Then came the scent and the sound of the male, hunting on its own, the family left behind somewhere in a makeshift den of broken branches and leaves.

  How his senses told him these things he could not quite grasp. He stripped, heart pounding, spasms rolling, and entered the forest in full wolf-coat—taking to the heights and then plummeting to the forest floor to track the thing on foot as it was on foot, gaining on it, and at last bringing it down, powerful hairy brute, fangs chomping deep into its back, and finally into its throat.

  This was a feast, all right, a feast he’d been hungering for. He took his time, feasting on the boar’s belly, and other soft innards, and devouring the dripping heart. The great white tusks gleamed in the dimness. What a fierce thing it had been. He glutted himself with the juicy and fragrant flesh.

  A sleepiness came over him as he devoured more and more, chewing the meat now more slowly, draining the blood juice out of it, and feeling an immense satisfying warmth throughout his chest and stomach and even his limbs.

  This was heaven, the soundless rain all around him, the scents of the fallen leaves rising, the boar’s scent intoxicating him, the flesh more than he could possibly consume.

  A scream shocked him. It was Laura, screaming for him in the darkness.

  He raced towards the sound of her voice.