by Jeff Rovin
Talbot fell still and laughed bitterly. “If only I could give you another explanation. But if the world were only what we see, then there would be no God either. Do you believe in God, Trooper Willis?”
“I do, sir.”
“Then ask for His help. For when the sun goes down, Caroline will need it.”
Shutting his eyes, Talbot tried once again to understand the sinister and bloody things he’d seen the night before.
Why him? What had he done in his life to deserve this endless torture? Yet worse than his own suffering was the pain of the image he couldn’t see. That of Caroline transfixed and alone somewhere as she awaited the vile commands of Dracula. Curling his hands into fists, Talbot pretended that his fingers were knit together. And for the first time since Bela the Gypsy attacked him, Talbot prayed. Not for himself, not for one who was already unforgivably damned, but for one who might still be saved . . .
TWENTY-ONE
Tom Stevenson woke late in the morning after a dreamless night. As soon as he felt the pain in his body and in his mind, he wished he were back asleep. He moaned and a nurse summoned Dr. Aubert.
After being given an efficient but thorough examination, Stevenson lay on the hard bed in his private room, gazing at the white ceiling. He had no choice. Because of the tight support collar the attorney was wearing, he couldn’t move in either direction. And Aubert didn’t want to sedate him unless the pain made it necessary. The doctor told Stevenson that Willis might want questions answered for the investigation and didn’t want his only witness unconscious.
Stevenson said he understood. Then he asked about Lawrence Talbot and Caroline Cooke.
“Talbot is under observation here and I haven’t seen Dr. Cooke this morning,” Aubert answered truthfully as he left the room.
“Could you be a little more specific?” Stevenson called after him.
But the doctor was already out the door.
Stevenson looked up. So much for bedside manner, he thought.
Unfortunately, the bright ceiling was a perfect screen on which to replay the horrors Stevenson had endured the night before. Talbot’s metamorphosis. The cold, brutal murder of Willis. His own helplessness when the stranger turned on him. Stevenson was frustrated at how useless he’d been, though he took some comfort from the fact that a lack of preparedness was to blame, not a lack of courage.
When he’d worked as an attorney and activist for the nonviolent environmentalists at Greenpeace, Tom Stevenson used to get bashed around quite a bit. He was pummeled insensate by angry lumberjacks who didn’t give a hoot about spotted owls. He was clubbed by frenzied hunters who became enraged when they couldn’t club harp seals. He was bludgeoned by Japanese tuna fishermen who didn’t care whether or not they caught dolphins in their nets. Those beatings were the main reason he’d left Greenpeace to find his own peace here in sleepy LaMirada. To regroup and remind himself that not all humans were monsters.
Yet those attacks paled beside what he had suffered at the station house. The killer was fast and incredibly strong. He could still feel the man’s powerful hand around his throat; it came close to lifting his head right off his neck. The only preparation that might have helped any of them was to be somewhere else.
Stevenson wondered if this could have been one of the “monsters” Caroline had told him about. He’d always had an open mind about the supernatural. He had to; he’d seen some pretty strange phenomena during his life. While piloting the plane during one of his team’s excursions to the Arctic, he spotted what he could have sworn was a giant praying mantis frozen in ice. The insect was perfectly preserved and even from two thousand feet up it looked almost alive. Unfortunately, the icy tomb was covered by a storm and the specimen was lost. A month later, on an environmental field trip to California, he’d come upon a meteorite that actually grew when exposed to water. But until last night he’d never seen a man turn into an animal. Stevenson hadn’t told Trooper Willis about the transformation because he didn’t want to be moved from here to the psychiatric ward alongside Talbot. He’d only told Willis that he thought he saw the cloaked killer fighting a bear—which was strange enough. What he had seen was Talbot transform into some kind of monster in the jail cell. And it happened the moment the moonlight appeared over the window—exactly what Caroline Cooke had tried to warn him might happen. Stevenson and Dr. Cooke and Deputy Clyde all saw it before the killer arrived.
Deputy Clyde—
Before yesterday, Stevenson had also never seen a man killed. Of the three ghastly milestones he’d experienced last night, that was the worst. Stevenson remembered being dropped on his head when the killer went to the cell to fight that bear or ape or oversized dog or whatever it was Talbot had become. He remembered lying there and watching blood run in thin sheets from the cleaved flesh beneath David Clyde’s chin. He remembered the surprised, helpless expression on Deputy Clyde’s face as he tried in vain to hold the flaps of the wound shut, as he tried to breathe. He remembered trying to get to Clyde and passing out.
Stevenson had had enough with being conscious. They could wake him up if Willis needed him. He was about to use the call button to summon the nurse when Trooper Willis walked in.
“The doctor said you were awake,” Willis said. “I was just in talking to Talbot and thought I’d stop by. How are you?”
“I’m not too bad, all things considered,” Stevenson informed him. “How is Mr. Talbot? And Dr. Cooke? I assume that since Aubert hasn’t seen her she’s okay.”
“Don’t you worry about the two of them,” Willis said. “You just worry about getting better.”
“Matt,” Stevenson told him, “I am going to worry about those two. They’re my clients.”
“Not anymore, Tom,” Willis said.
“Excuse me?”
“Tom, you almost had your head torn off. You need to take a long rest—”
“My head’s going to be fine and Mr. Talbot and Dr. Cooke are still my clients,” Stevenson replied.
His throat was raw and his voice raspy from the abrasions he’d suffered during the attack. He reached for the water glass on the nightstand. Willis stepped over and handed it to him, helped him drink.
“Thanks,” Stevenson said.
Willis pointed to a bottle on the nightstand. “You want some of the painkillers?”
“Not right now,” he said. “It’s not my neck that’s bothering me as much as this damn collar.”
“Wait until the painkillers wear off,” Willis said. “It’ll be your neck.”
“Jeez, I thought Aubert’s bedside manner was lousy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been a shitty night,” Willis said. “Listen, I’ll come back later. We can talk then—”
“We’ll talk now,” Stevenson said.
“Tom, you’ve got to rest.”
“How can I, when you’re threatening to turn my clients over to that fee chaser D’Arcy Corrigan?”
“I’m not ‘threatening,’ Tom. And D’Arcy’s a good attorney—”
“For contesting wills and suing for whiplash and filing nuisance suits for big settlements and padding his hours,” Stevenson said. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to put Dr. Cooke and Talbot in his hands for what could be murder and abetting. Now talk to me. Tell me how my clients are.”
Willis frowned. He took the glass from Stevenson, filled it from a pitcher on the nightstand, and then set it down again. “Tom, I’m afraid your clients are not doing very well.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Dr. Cooke is missing,” Willis said.
Stevenson was actually relieved to hear that. When Aubert hadn’t answered him, he’d begun to wonder if she might have been killed in the attack.
“Did she go with anyone?” Stevenson asked.
“We don’t know,” Willis replied. “She disappeared about eight o’clock last night, right after the attack at the station house. I’ve got a team of troopers from Naples looking for her. So far, nothing. Not even a legitimat
e clue.”
“Legitimate?”
“Something other than what Talbot has to say,” Willis said. “As far as I’m concerned, that man is delusional and dangerous.”
“Matt, in both law and psychiatry delusions are beliefs a patient holds strongly in the face of invalidating evidence. But in them, there’s often a kernel of truth. What did Talbot have to say about last night?”
“Not one thing that makes any sense,” Willis said. “The man is nuts, plain and simple. Even Dr. Benson thinks so.”
“That’s not good enough and you know it.”
“No?” said Willis. He flipped open his notebook. “Fine. Let’s run some of these statements up the sanity flagpole.” The trooper looked down at his notes. “Talbot says that what you saw in the station house last night was a wolf and that the wolf was him. He says that David Clyde’s killer is a vampire named Dracula and that this Dracula took Caroline away on a boat. Talbot further insists that Dracula had as his companions an eighty-year-old vampire mistress who’s been dead for fifty of those years, and a hundred-odd-year-old monster made up of parts from dead bodies and powered by electricity.” He flipped the notebook shut. “If he’s not crazy, Tom, then I am. But what really pinches is that the law says I’ve got to look into his claims because he was a witness, crazy or not. So I’m off to do that now. I’m going to check with the Coast Guard and I’ll see what the coroner found out about our old dead ladyfriend.”
“What about the patient who was onboard the LifeSaver?” Stevenson asked. “The one from the Tombs.”
“We’re still poking through the wreckage but that fire was pretty hot. There isn’t much left in the way of flesh and bone, especially in the back near the fuel tanks, where he was. The patient was probably burned to death.”
“Just to keep the legal issues nice and neat, I assume you’re going to have Dr. Werdegast see Talbot?”
“I’m on my way to call her,” Willis said. “Now how about you taking it easy, Tom. At least for the rest of the morning. Nap. Watch some game shows. Listen to some of that New Age music crap you like.”
“Sure,” Stevenson said. “That’ll definitely take my mind off what happened last night.”
“Tom,” said Willis, “nothing will ever make you forget what you saw. Thirty-odd years ago I saw my best friend step on a land mine in Vietnam. I still see it when I look into my cup of coffee every morning. Pictures like that don’t go away.” He patted Stevenson on the arm. “I’ll be back in a couple hours. You want the bed raised or anything before I go?”
“No thanks,” Stevenson said. “I’m fine. And I’ll be finer if you promise you won’t call D’Arcy Corrigan in on this?”
Willis hesitated then nodded reluctantly.
The attorney smiled as the state trooper left. As soon as the door was shut, he put his hands behind his neck. Slowly and painfully Stevenson lifted his head from the pillow. He sat up.
Stevenson had seen enough the night before to suspect that Talbot wasn’t insane or delusional. Nor did he believe that Talbot was dangerous—except, as Caroline had said, when the moon was full.
But the sun was out and now that Stevenson was upright his neck didn’t feel all that bad. And he desperately wanted—no, he needed to know more about what he’d witnessed last night. Rising from the bed, he pulled off the collar and carefully rolled his head around to make sure that he could hold it erect. It hurt when he bent too far in any direction, but he’d survive as long as he was careful.
Slipping his jeans, green shirt, and jacket on over his hospital gown, and shoving the bottle of painkillers in his pocket, Stevenson went to the door. He peeked out; when the corridor was empty he headed toward the stairwell and another section of the clinic.
TWENTY-TWO
When he was thirty-one years old, Lawrence Talbot had listened from the shadows of a church crypt as Maleva said a prayer for her son Bela. To this day, he could remember the smells and sounds of the place. The moldy musk of the rotted leaves that had blown through the door in autumns past. The drops of pooled rainwater leaking between the stones of the roof and falling to the stone floor. The woman’s frail breath and the sun-baked skin stretched thin over her bony cheeks and fingers.
The old Gypsy woman had spilled no tears that day. She’d spoken softly, almost with relief, as she mourned the werewolf whom Talbot had slain the night before with his silver-topped cane.
The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own, Maleva had said. But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears surround your predestined end.
And with that, the long and difficult journey of Bela Blasko had ended. It had always seemed unjust to Talbot that the man who was the source of his own infection had died so quickly, so permanently, while he himself never could. Yet that wasn’t the only irony in his miserable life. For as long as he could remember, Talbot had desperately wanted to have a father—a father’s love. Yet within a day of returning to Llanwelly Village and to his natural father, Sir John, Talbot had taken a new father: the Devil himself. Perhaps that was Lawrence Talbot’s punishment for not having honored his own father enough, however formal and aloof Sir John had been. For not having visited more or been there when his father buried his firstborn son and heir. Never mind that Talbot’s own brother hadn’t wanted him there. The younger Talbot should have fought that. He should have fought for the love and attention of their father.
Satan, Talbot thought. Ah, Satan was not so impersonal and remote. He was the master of indulgence, of vengeance, of sin. And though Talbot never saw him he knew the Devil was present every night, taking an active hand in the Wolf Man’s fiendish labors. That was another part of Talbot’s torment. From his very first lover, Hollywood High School choir soprano Joan Mallory, to Gwen Conliffe in Llanwelly Village, Talbot had wooed and used women to satisfy his animal desires. Knowing that Gwen was affianced to Frank Andrews, he nonetheless took her out to the Gypsy camp with the intention of seducing her in the fog-shrouded darkness.
Now Talbot was cursed to seek out women to satisfy his deadlier animal needs. When women weren’t afoot he would kill men—elderly men, usually. Someone else’s father. Maybe he would tell all of this to Dr. Werdegast. Perhaps Caroline was right; perhaps his problem was mostly psychological. Possibly other people could benefit from what they learned about him.
It would be good to give something back to society. He had failed in his one good ambition, other than to die. He had failed to rid the world of Count Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster. He wondered if that were another part of his curse, being unable to use his strength to stop a greater evil.
He asked himself again, in agonized silence, the same question he had asked himself so many times: what had he done to deserve this?
He had lacked the proper respect for his father and for young women.
Guilty.
He had been jealous of his older brother.
Guilty.
But he had loved and cared for his mother and he had been generous to his fellow workers at Browning Optics in Los Angeles. When he killed Bela in Wanderers’ Woods, Talbot had been risking his own life in an effort to save Jenny Williams.
Were the crimes he had committed greater than those of the men who had started the World Wars? Did he really deserve this special place in hell? Or was he God’s new Job, an upright man whose poverty, sorrow, and physical infirmity were designed to test his faith?
If it weren’t for Caroline, Talbot would be content to stand trial and let these people kill him with their advanced medicine and science. But Caroline was in danger. Why should she pay for his sins? If there were a God and He cared for His children, he would let Talbot go to her.
As Talbot lay there, sinking deeper into bitter reflection, he heard the door groan open. He looked over with disinterest, expecting to see Trooper Willis or the psychiatrist or maybe even that newspaperman who’d come to the castle during the fire. It took a moment before Talbot recognized the long-haired yo
ung man dressed in jeans and approaching furtively.
Talbot’s features brightened. It was Tom Stevenson.
“You’re all right!” Talbot said.
“I’m ambulatory and conscious, if that’s what you mean,” Stevenson replied. “I’ve got the world’s sorest neck and a headache to match.”
“I’m sorry,” said Talbot. “I hope I wasn’t responsible for that.”
“You weren’t,” Stevenson said. “Neither was your shaggy alter ego, whatever that was.”
“Then—you saw?”
“Oh yes. I saw.” Stevenson looked at him curiously. “You don’t remember any of what happened?”
Talbot shook his head. “Once the malignancy comes over me, I don’t remember much of what happens. Sometimes memories come to me later, in pieces. But I try not to think about them.”
“I understand,” Stevenson said. Careful not to make any sudden moves that might strain his neck, Stevenson lowered himself onto the edge of the bed. He frowned when he noticed the straps. “Has Willis charged you with anything?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Talbot replied.
“Then I hope they had a good reason for using those.”
Talbot looked down at his wrists. He turned his forearms slowly, the leather straps twisting with them. “I was angry,” he admitted. “Trooper Willis refused to listen to anything I had to say.”
“Matt Willis is a good man,” Stevenson said, “though no one would ever accuse him of having a lot of imagination—or patience. But I want to listen, Mr. Talbot. Last night at the station house I saw you turn into something. Something astonishing. I don’t know what it was but I know I didn’t imagine it.”
“What you saw, Mr. Stevenson, was a man become a Wolf Man. There’s no other way to describe it.”
Stevenson looked into Talbot’s sad eyes. “I saw it happen,” the attorney said, “so I’m not about to tell you it didn’t and that you’re crazy. That’s not why I came to see you. You became this creature, this werewolf—and you also saved my life.”