by Anne Rice
Frank Vandover, tall, black-haired, with very fair skin and his handsome Cupid’s-bow mouth, had returned with the Nordic giant Sergei Gorlagon—filling the house with quasi-humorous tales as to how they had baited police and witnesses alike in their journey south. Frank was certainly the most contemporary of the distinguished gentlemen, a wisecracking American with a Hollywood sheen, and a penchant for teasing Reuben mercilessly about his early exploits and tousling Stuart’s hair. He called them the Wonder Puppies, and would have baited them into a race in the forest if Margon had not laid down the law.
Sergei was a brilliant scholar, with white hair, bushy white eyebrows, and clever, amused blue eyes. He had a voice somewhat like Thibault’s, deep and resonant, and even a bit crackling. And he went into a delightful tirade about the brilliant and prophetic Teilhard de Chardin with Laura and Reuben, having a love of abstract theology and philosophy that surpassed theirs.
It was impossible to guess the age of any of these men, really, Reuben felt; and it was clearly not polite to ask. “How long have you been roaming the planet?” just did not seem an acceptable question, especially from what Frank persisted in calling a pup or a cub.
Any number of times, over lunch or dinner, or whilst gathered just for talking at the breakfast room table, two or more of these men would lapse into another tongue, apparently forgetting themselves, and it was always exciting to Reuben to hear those rapid confidential riffs that Reuben couldn’t relate to any language he’d ever heard.
Margon and Felix frequently spoke a different tongue when they were alone. He’d overheard them without meaning to. And he had been tempted to ask if they all shared a common language, but that seemed—like asking their ages, or places of birth, or asking about the secret writing in Felix’s diaries and letters—to be intrusive, something that was not done.
Stuart and Reuben both wanted to know who had introduced the term “Morphenkinder,” or “Morphengift,” and what other terms there had been, or might be now. But they figured this information and a great deal more would come in time.
People broke into sometime pairs. Reuben spent most of his time either with Laura or with Felix. And Laura loved Felix as well. Stuart adored Margon and never wanted to be separated from him. In fact, Stuart seemed to have fallen in love with Margon. Frank often went off with Sergei. And only Thibault seemed a genuine loner, or a man equally at home with any of the group. There developed a sympathy between Thibault and Laura. They all adored Laura, but Thibault enjoyed her company especially, and went walking in the woods with her, or on errands, or sometimes watched a film with her in the afternoons.
Reuben’s entire family, as well as Celeste and Mort Keller, and Dr. Cutler, came north for Thanksgiving, joining Reuben, Laura, Stuart, and the distinguished gentlemen, and it was the greatest party the house had seen so far, and the most inescapable proof of the truth of Margon’s maxim, that one must live in both worlds—the world of the human and the world of the beast—if one was to survive.
Frank surprised Reuben and his family by playing the piano with spectacular skill after dinner, making a run at the Satie compositions that Reuben so loved and moving on into Chopin and other romantic compositions of his own.
Even Jim, who had been morose and withdrawn all evening, was drawn into conversation with Frank. And finally Jim played a composition he had written long ago, before the seminary, to accompany a poem by Rilke.
This was a painful moment for Reuben, sitting there in the music room on the small gilded music chair, listening to Jim lose himself in that brief, dark, melancholy melody, so like Satie, meditative, slow, and eloquent of pain.
Only Reuben knew what Jim knew. And Jim alone of all the guests and the family knew who the distinguished gentlemen were and what had happened to Stuart, and what had become of Reuben.
They did not talk, Reuben and Jim, all during that Thanksgiving Day or evening. There was just that moment in the candle-lighted music room when Jim had played that mournful music. And Reuben felt the shame of having done a terrible cruelty to Jim with his secrets and did not know what to do. There would come a time in the future when he would again meet with Jim to discuss all that had happened. But this was something he couldn’t face right now. It was something he did not want right now.
Grace was relaxed with the company, but something was not the same between Reuben and his mother. She no longer struggled to understand what was happening to him, no, and seemed to have found a place in her own orderly mind for the phenomenon she’d been obsessed with for so long. But there was a shadow between her and Reuben. With all his might, he sought to pierce that thin darkness, to draw her close again as she’d been before; and perhaps to all the world, this effort appeared successful. But it was not. His mother sensed something, if only a decisive change in her son, and there lived in her bright, sparkling world now a nameless dread she couldn’t confide to anyone.
Celeste and Mort Keller had a marvelous time, Celeste lecturing Reuben unendingly on the inadvisability of anyone his age “recollecting in tranquillity,” and Mort and Reuben wandered in the oak forest talking of books and poets they both loved so much. Mort left the latest draft of his dissertation for Reuben to read.
After the holiday, the piano was moved into the great room, where there was an excellent spot for it near the doors to the conservatory, and the music room became a screening room, soon furnished with comfortable white leather couches and chairs so that the entire company could enjoy films and television together when they chose.
Reuben began to write a book. But it was not an autobiography, or a novel. It was something quite pure and had to do with his own observations, his own deep suspicions that the highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world.
Meantime the old dilapidated two-story cottage on the lower cliff beneath the point—the guesthouse Reuben had seen with Marchent on their walk together—was being completely restored for Phil. Felix wrote the check for this and told Galton to spare no expense. Galton was in total awe of Felix because of the extent to which he resembled his late father, and Galton seemed fired with a new zeal to please the masters of Nideck Point.
Felix also introduced himself in the town of Nideck as the son of the late Felix Nideck, and invested in the Inn so that it did not have to be sold. He bought up the shops for the asking prices, planning to offer bargain rents to new merchants. It was important, he explained to Reuben, that the family exert some beneficent influence over the town. There was land around the town that could be subdivided and developed. Felix had thoughts on all of this.
Reuben was eager, dazzled. Felix surprised and delighted him by pointing out that his grandfather Spangler (Grace’s father) had been famous during the last century for planned communities of amazing vision and scope, and they visited the websites together to study them. Who owned the land around Nideck? Felix owned the land under another name. Not to worry.
Reuben went to dinner with Felix at the house of the mayor of Nideck. On the Internet they soon found a quilt merchant eager to open up shop on the main street, together with a used book dealer, and a woman who sold antique dolls and toys out of her home.
“Hardly the beginnings of a metropolis,” Felix confessed. “But it’s an excellent start. The town needs some sort of small library, doesn’t it? And a theater. How far from here must we go to see a new film?”
Meanwhile, as the Man Wolf receded rapidly into myth, the sale of Man Wolf T-shirts, mugs, and paraphernalia increased exponentially. There were Man Wolf tours operating in San Francisco, and Man Wolf costumes for sale. Of course a local tour company wanted to bring busloads to Nideck Point, but Reuben flatly refused and for the first time the south boundary of the property was being fenced.
Reuben wrote two long pieces for Billie on the lore of the werewolf throughout history, and on the iconic engravings of werewolves that he most liked, and some of the free circulating Man Wolf art that was easy to find and difficult to avoid.
Every night Reuben hunted the forests with Felix. They went farther and farther north into Humboldt County, hunting the fierce wild boar with its razor tusks, and on another occasion chasing down a powerful cat, bigger than the female Reuben had so handily killed on his own. Reuben did not like to hunt the herd animals, or the free-roaming deer and elk—because they weren’t killers—though Felix reminded him that they often died by terribly violent and painful means.
Margon and Stuart went with them twice. Stuart was a lusty, blustering hunter, ravenous for any experience, and wanted to hunt the surf off the cliffs if only Margon would allow, but Margon would not. Margon seemed infatuated with Stuart, and gradually their conversations involved more questions from Margon about the world of today than Stuart had ever asked about the past or anything else.
Margon moved his room from the back of the house to the front, obviously to be closer to Stuart, and the two could be heard talking and arguing late into the night. They had periodic squabbles over clothing, Stuart taking Margon to purchase jeans and polo shirts, and Margon insisting that Stuart buy a three-piece suit and several dress shirts with French cuffs. But most of the time they were plainly and exuberantly happy.
Servants arrived from Europe, including a solemn quiet French-speaking man who had been Margon’s valet, and a cheerful and uncomplaining old woman from England who cooked, cleaned, and baked bread. Thibault hinted that more would be coming.
Even before Thanksgiving, Reuben was hearing casual talk of a private airport above Fort Bragg that the others were using for short flights to distant hunting grounds. He was blazing with curiosity and so was Stuart. Stuart spent his days deep in study of werewolf lore, world history, evolution, civil and criminal law, human anatomy and endocrinology, archaeology, and foreign film.
Frequently the distinguished gentlemen disappeared into the Inner Sanctum, as they called it, to work with the ancient tablets which they were putting in some kind of order, and which they were not eager, for obvious reasons, to move again.
Felix spent much time trying to put his own galleries and libraries in reasonable order. And could often be found in the gabled attic over the master bedroom, reading in the very place where Reuben had found the little book of theology by Teilhard de Chardin.
Thanksgiving night, after the family left, Laura went south to spend a few days alone in her little house on the edge of Muir Woods. Reuben begged to go with her but she insisted that this was a trip she had to make alone. She wanted to visit the cemetery where her father and mother, her sister, and her daughter were buried. And when she came back, she said, she’d know what the future held for her. And so would Reuben.
He found this damned near unbearable. He was tempted more than once to drive south just to spy on Laura. But he knew that Laura needed this time. He did not so much as call her.
Finally, the distinguished gentlemen gathered up the cubs, and took them by plane for a hunt in the Mexican city of Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
This was to be a hybrid hunt, according to Margon, and that meant clothing had to be worn—the predictable hooded sweatshirts and loose raincoats, baggy pants and loafers that would accommodate their transformed bodies.
Stuart and Reuben were both powerfully excited.
It was thrilling beyond their sharpest dreams—the hollow stripped-down cargo plane landing at the secret airstrip, the black SUVs tunneling through the jet-black night, and then the trip over the rooftops when the company spread out like cats in the dark, lured by the scent of the suffering girls and women held captive in a brothel-slave barracks from which they’d soon be smuggled into the United States under threat of torture and death.
They cut the power to the barracks before they invaded it, and quickly locked the women away for their own safety.
Reuben had never dreamed of such carnage, such abandon, such a massacre in the low concrete building, its escape routes latched from the outside, and its vicious male inmates scrambling like rats in the wet slippery corridors and dead-end rooms—to escape the remorseless sharp-toothed enemy that descended on them.
The building shook with the roars of the Morphenkinder, the shrieks and bellowing of dying men, and the screams of terrified women huddled in their filthy dormitory.
At last the stench of evil had died out; in remote corners of the compound, Morphenkinder still feasted, chomping on the remains. Stuart, the great shaggy Boy Wolf, in his long open coat, stood dazed staring at the bodies scattered around him. And the women had ceased their wailing.
Now it was time for them all to slip away—for the women to be freed in the blackness to stumble towards the light never knowing the identity of the hulking hooded giants who had avenged them. And the sure-footed hunters were gone, vaulting over the rooftops once more, their paws and garments stained with blood, their mouths smeared with it, their stomachs full.
They dozed like a litter, piled on one another in the hold of the plane. Somewhere over the Pacific they dropped their bloody garments into the sea, and emerged into the chill windy night of Mendocino County in the fresh rags they’d taken for their return—still bleary-eyed, glutted, and at peace, or so it seemed, silent on the short ride to Nideck Point as the rain, the familiar, relentless California rain, beat upon the windshield.
“Now that was hunting!” said Stuart, staggering in a half sleep towards the back door. And throwing back his head he let out a wolfen howl that echoed off the stone walls of the house, the others dissolving into soft laughter.
“Soon,” said Margon, “we hunt the jungles of Colombia.”
Reuben dreamed, as he dragged his exhausted limbs up the stairs, that Laura would be there waiting for him, but she was not. Only her fragrance was there in the soft down comforter and pillows. He took one of her flannel nightgowns from the closet, and held it in his arms, resolving to dream of her.
Hours later, he awoke to the miracle of the blue sky over the Pacific and the miracle of the dark blue water glittering and dancing under the sun.
Showering and dressing quickly, he went out to walk in the bright and glorious light, marveling at the common spectacle of snow-white clouds moving beyond the gables of the house which rose above him as severe and strong as battlements.
One had to live on this bleak and chilly coast to understand the full miracle of a clear day when the marine mists were simply gone as if their wintry reign had finally ended.
It seemed a lifetime ago that he had come to this very terrace with Marchent Nideck, and he had looked up at this house and asked of it that it give him the darkness, the depth, he so needed. Be the minor-key music in my life, he had said to it, and he had felt certain the house answered him, promising revelations of which he could not dream.
He walked across the windswept flags, straight into the brisk and fresh ocean wind, until he stood at the old broken balustrade that separated the terrace from the edge of the cliff, and that narrow perilous path that led down to the ribbon of beach below with its forlorn rocks and bleached driftwood.
The sound of the surf swallowed him whole. He felt weightless, and as if the wind would support him if he let himself go, with arms out towards the sky.
To the right of him rose the dark green tree-shrouded bluffs that sheltered the redwood forest. And to the south the twisted Monterey cypress and scrub oak that the wind had turned into tortured sculpture.
A tragic happiness took hold of him, a deep recognition that he loved what he was, loved it, loved the mad hunt in the filthy corridors of the brothel in Juárez, loved the mad sprinting through the clean forest north, loved the feel of the victim in his teeth, or the beast struggling so desperately and vainly to get away from him.
But there was a deep awareness in him that this was only the beginning. He felt young, powerful, and safe from a reckoning. He felt he had time to discover how and why he was wrong, and why he must change or give up the Wolf Gift that had extinguished so many other passions in him.
Heaven and hell wait for the
young. Heaven and hell hover beyond the ocean before us and the sky spreading above us.
So the sun shines in the Garden of Pain. In the Garden of Discovery.
He saw the face of his brother on Thanksgiving night, saw Jim’s sad weary eyes, and his heart broke, as if his brother were more important than God himself, or God himself was speaking through Jim as he might speak through anyone put in our inevitable or accidental path, anyone who threatened to call us back to ourselves, who looked at us with eyes that reflected a heart as broken as our own, as fragile, as disappointed.
The wind was icing him now all over. His ears were cold and the fingers with which he covered his face were so cold he could scarce move them. And yet it felt so good, so lovely, lovely as it felt to feel nothing like this at all when the wolf garb protected him.
He turned and looked back again at the house, at the high ivy-covered walls, and the smoke from the chimneys winding skyward—to be snatched by the wind, to be dissolved into invisibility.
Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost—a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.
He did lean into the wind; he did let it hold him there, and keep him from falling into space, keep him from tumbling down over the balustrade and cliff, down and down and down towards the rocky surf.
He took a deep breath, and the tears came into his eyes, and he felt them blasted off his cheeks by this same wind that was supporting him.
“Lord, forgive me my blasphemous soul,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “But I thank You with all my heart for the gift of life, for all the blessings You have rained down upon me, for the miracle of life in all its forms—and Lord, I thank You for the Wolf Gift!”
The End
August 2011
Palm Desert, California