The Wolf's Hour

by Robert R. McCammon

  Mikhail ate whatever was given to him. His tongue began to crave the blood and fluids, and he could tell what he was eating—rabbit, deer, wild boar, or squirrel, sometimes even the fleshy musk of a rat—and if it was a fresh kill or dead for hours. His mind ceased to revolt from the thought of consuming blood-drenched meat; he ate because he was hungry, and because there was nothing else. Sometimes he was fed only berries or some kind of coarse grass, but it all went down without complaint.

  His vision blurred, everything going gray around the edges. His eyeballs pounded with pain, and even the low firelight tortured them. Then, and he wasn’t sure exactly when it was because time was twisted, the darkness closed in and he was blind.

  The pain never left him; it increased to a new level, and his muscles stiffened and cracked like the boards of a house about to burst apart from inner pressure. He couldn’t get his mouth open enough to eat flesh, and soon he was aware of fingers pushing into his mouth meat that had already been chewed. A freezing-cold hand touched his forehead, and even the light pressure on his skin made him gasp. “I want you to live.” It was Renati’s voice, whispering in his ear. “I want you to fight death, do you hear me? I want you to fight to hold on. If you live through this, little one, you’ll know wonders.”

  “How is he?” Franco’s voice, and in it a measure of true concern. “He’s gotten thinner.”

  “He’s not a skeleton yet,” she replied testily, and then Mikhail heard her voice soften. “He’s going to live. I know he is. He’s a fighter, Franco; look how he grits his teeth. Yes. He’s going to live.”

  “He has a long path to travel,” Franco said. “The worst is ahead.”

  “I know.” She was silent for a long while, and Mikhail felt her fingers gently combing his sweat-damp hair. “How many have there been who didn’t live as long as him? I’d need ten hands to count them all. But look at him, Franco! Look how he strains and fights!”

  “That’s not fighting,” Franco observed. “I think he’s about to shit.”

  “Well, his insides are still working! That’s a good sign! It’s when they stop and they swell up that you know they’re going to die! No, this one’s got iron in his soul, Franco. I can tell these things.”

  “I hope you can,” he said. “And I hope you’re right about him.” He took a few steps, then spoke again. “If he dies… it’s not on your hands. It’s just… nature’s way. You understand that?”

  Renati made a muffled sound of agreement. Then, sometime later, as Renati stroked his hair and ran her fingers over his forehead, Mikhail heard her sing a whispered song: a Russian lullaby, about the bluebird searching for a home and finding rest when the springtime sun melted winter’s ice. She sang the tune in a sweet, lilting voice, a whisper meant only for him. He remembered someone else singing such a song to him, but it seemed so long ago. His mother. Yes. His mother, who lay sleeping in a meadow. Renati sang on, and for a few moments Mikhail listened and felt no pain.

  A skip of time, a darkness of days. Agony. Agony. Mikhail had never known such agony, and if ever in his young life he might have thought he’d know such torment, he would have crushed himself into a corner and screamed for God’s hand to grasp him. He thought he felt his teeth move in his jaws, grinding together in raw, bleeding sockets. He felt broken at the joints, a living rag doll pierced with needles. His pulse was a drumbeat for the damned, and Mikhail tried to open his mouth to scream but his jaw muscles tensed and scraped like barbed wire. Agony building, ebbing, building again to a new crescendo. He was one moment a furnace and the next a house of ice. He was aware of his body jerking, contorting, bending itself into a new shape. His bones arched and twisted, as if they were the consistency of sugar sticks. He had no control over these contortions; his body had become a strange machine, seemingly intent on self-destruction. Blind, unable to speak or scream, hardly able to draw a breath for the anguish in his lungs and his pounding heart, Mikhail felt his spine begin to warp. His muscles went mad; they shot his torso upright, threw his arms backward, twisted his neck, and squeezed his face as if caught between iron clamps. He slammed down on his back as his muscles relaxed, then was lifted upright again as they drew tight as sun-dried leather. At the center of the maelstrom of pain, the core of Mikhail Gallatinov fought against losing the will to live. As his body thrashed and his muscles stretched he thought of the Rubber Man, and that when this was over he might join the circus and be the greatest Rubber Man who’d ever been. And then the pain bit into him again, seized him by the guts, and shook him. Mikhail felt his backbone swell and lengthen with a shriek of shocked nerves. Voices floated to him from the land of ghosts: “Hold him! Hold him! He’ll break his neck!”

  “… burning up with fever…”

  “Never last through it… too weak…”

  “Open his mouth! He’ll bite through his tongue!”

  The voices moved away in a whirl of noise. Mikhail felt but was powerless to stop his body’s contortions, his knees rising toward his chest as he lay on his side. His spine was the center of the agony, his skull a boiling kettle. His knees touched his chin and jammed tight. His teeth gritted together, and in his brain he heard a wailing like the rising of a storm wind, tearing at the foundations of all that had been before. The storm wind rose to a roar, a sound that blanked out all but itself, and its force doubled and tripled. Mikhail saw himself, in his mind’s eye, running across the field of yellow flowers as black banners of clouds hurtled toward the Gallatinov house. Mikhail stopped, turned, shouted, “Mother! Father! Alizia!” but there was no answer from the house, and the clouds were hungry. Mikhail turned and ran on, his heart hammering; he heard a crash, looked back, and saw the house flying into fragments before the wind. And then the clouds were coming after him, about to engulf him. He ran, but he couldn’t run fast enough. Faster. Faster. The storm roaring on his heels. Faster. His heart, pounding. A banshee scream in his ears. Faster…

  And a change exploded out of him. Dark hairs burst from his hands and arms. He felt his spine contort, bowing his shoulders. His hands—no longer hands—touched the earth. He ran faster, his body whipsawing, and he began to rip from his clothes. The storm clouds took them, and spewed them to heaven. Mikhail kicked his shoes away, his toes spiraling earth and flowers behind him. The storm reached for him, but he was running on all fours now, racing from the past into the future. Rain swept over him: cold, cleansing rain, and he lifted his face toward the sky and—awakened.

  Dark upon dark. His eyelids, sealed by tears. He worked them open, and a faint glimmer of crimson sneaked in. The little fire was still burning, and the chamber smelled strongly of pine ashes. Mikhail got to his haunches, every movement an exercise in pain. His muscles still throbbed, as if they’d been stretched taut and re-formed. His brain, his back, his tailbone all ached. He tried to stand, but his spine shrieked. He craved fresh air, the scent of the wind through the forest; it was a physical hunger in him, and it drove him on. He crawled, naked, across the rough stones, away from the fire.

  Several times he tried to stand up, but his bones weren’t ready for it. He crawled on hands and knees to the stairway and ascended them like an animal. At the top he crawled along a moss-draped corridor, and gave a pile of deer skeletons only a passing glance. Soon he saw light ahead: a ruddy light, the light of either dawn or dusk. It came through the glassless windows and painted the walls and ceiling, and where it touched, the moss had not leeched. Mikhail smelled fresh air, but the scent made something in his brain click and whir like the wheels of a pocket watch. It was no longer the pungent, flowery aroma of late spring. It carried a different smell, a dry aroma with a chill center: fire at war with frost. It was the smell of dying summer.

  Time had passed. That much was clear to him. He sat, stunned by his senses, and his hand drifted to his left shoulder. The fingers found ridges of pink flesh, and a few flakes of scabs drifted from the skin and settled to the floor. His knees were hurting him now, and it seemed important to him that he stand up bef
ore he went any farther. He tried. If bones had nerves, they were aflame. He could almost hear his muscles bending, like the squeaking hinges of old doors long unopened. Sweat was on his face, chest, and shoulders, but he didn’t give up, nor did he cry out. His skeleton felt unfamiliar. Whose bones were these, lodged like broken splinters in his flesh? Stand up, he told himself. Stand up and walk… like a man.

  He stood.

  The first step was like a baby’s: halting, uncertain. The second wasn’t much better. But the third and fourth told him he still knew how to walk, and he went through the corridor into a high-ceilinged room where sunlight turned the rafters orange and pigeons softly cooed overhead.

  Something moved, over in the shadows on the floor to Mikhail’s right. He heard the noise of leaves crunching. Two bodies lay there, entwined and slowly heaving. Where one began and the other stopped was difficult to tell. Mikhail blinked the last of sleep’s mist from his eyes. One of the figures on the floor moaned—a female’s moan—and Mikhail saw human skin banded with animal hair that rose and rippled, then disappeared again into the damp flesh.

  A pair of ice-blue eyes stared fixedly at him from the gloom. Alekza grasped a shoulder on which pale brown hairs rose and fell like river tides. Franco’s head turned, and he saw the boy standing there at the crossing of sun and shadow.

  “My God!” Franco whispered, in a shocked voice. “He’s made it through!” Franco pulled away from Alekza, with a moist parting sound, and sprang to his feet. “Wiktor!” he shouted. “Renati!” His shouts echoed through the corridors and chambers of the white palace.”Someone! Come quick!”

  Mikhail stared at Alekza’s nude body. She made no movement to cover herself. A light sheen of moisture glowed on her flesh. “Wiktor! Renati!” Franco kept shouting. “He’s alive! He’s alive!”

  3

  “Follow me,” Wiktor said, on a morning in late September, and Mikhail walked in his shadow. They left the chambers of sunlight behind, and went down into a place in the white palace where the air was chill. Mikhail wore the deerskin robe that Renati had made for him, and he drew it tighter around his shoulders as he and Wiktor continued into the depths. Mikhail had realized over the past few weeks that his eyes quickly grew accustomed to darkness, and in the daylight he seemed to be able to see with razor clarity, even able to count the red leaves in an oak tree at a distance of a hundred yards. Still, Wiktor had something he wanted the boy to see, down here in the dark, and he paused to light a torch of boar fat and rags in the embers of a small fire he’d previously arranged. The torch flickered, and the smell of the burning fat made Mikhail’s mouth water.

  They descended into an area where the murals of robed and hooded monks on the walls still held their colors. A harrow passageway led through an arch, past open iron gates and into a huge chamber. Mikhail looked up, but couldn’t see the ceiling. Wiktor said, “This is it. Stand where you are.” Mikhail did, and Wiktor began to walk around the room. The torchlight revealed stone shelves packed with thick, leatherbound books: hundreds of them. No, more than hundreds, Mikhail thought. The books filled every available space and were piled up in stacks on the floor.

  “This,” Wiktor said quietly, “is what the monks who lived here a hundred years ago labored on: copying and storing manuscripts. There are three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine volumes in here.” He said it with pride, as if discussing favored children. “Theology, history, architecture, engineering, mathematics, languages, philosophy… all here.” He made a sweeping gesture with his torch. He smiled slightly. “The monks, as you can see, didn’t have much of a social life. Show me your hands.”

  “My… hands?”

  “Yes. You know. Those two things on the ends of your arms. Show them to me.”

  Mikhail lifted his hands toward the torchlight.

  Wiktor studied them. He grunted and nodded. “You have the hands of a scholar,” he said. “You’ve lived a privileged life, haven’t you?”

  Mikhail shrugged, not understanding.

  “You’ve been well taken care of,” Wiktor went on. “Born into an aristocratic family.” He’d already seen the clothes Mikhail’s mother, father, and sister had worn; they were of high quality. Good torch rags, now. He held up one of his own slender-fingered hands and turned it in the light. “I was a professor at the University of Kiev, a long time ago,” he said. There was no wistfulness in his voice, only memory. “I taught languages: German, English, and French.” A hard glint passed over his eyes. “I learned in three different tongues how to beg for money to feed my wife and son. Russia does not put a premium on the human mind.”

  Wiktor walked on, shining the torch at the books. “Unless, of course, you can devise a more economical method of killing,” he added. “But I imagine all governments are more or less the same: all greedy, all shortsighted. It’s the curse of man to have a mind and not have the sense to use it.” He paused to gently remove a volume from a shelf. The back cover was gone, and the sheepskin pages hung from the spine. “Plato’s Republic,” Wiktor said. “In Russian, thank God. I don’t know Greek.” He sniffed at the binding as if inhaling a luxuriant perfume, then returned the book to its place. The chronicles of Julius Caesar, the theories of Copernicus, Dante’s Inferno, the travels of Marco Polo… all around us, the doors to three thousand worlds.” He moved the torch in a delicate circle and lifted a finger to his lips. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “Be very quiet, and you can hear the sounds of keys turning, down here in the dark.”

  Mikhail listened. He heard a tentative scratching noise—not a key in a lock, but a rat somewhere in the huge chamber.

  “Ah, well.” Wiktor shrugged and continued his inspection of the books. “They belong to me now.” Again, that hint of a smile. “I can honestly say I have the largest library of any lycanthrope in the world.”

  “Your wife and son,” Mikhail said. “Where are they?”

  “Dead. And dead.” Wiktor stopped to break cobwebs away from a few volumes. “Both of them starved to death, after I lost my position. It was a political situation, you see. My ideas made someone angry. We were wanderers for a while. Beggars, too.” He stared at the torchlight, and Mikhail saw his amber eyes glint with fire. “I was not a very good beggar,” he said quietly. “After they died, I struck out on my own. I decided to get out of Russia, perhaps go to England. They have educated men in England. I took a road that led me through these woods… and a wolf bit me. His name was Gustav; he was my teacher.” He moved the torch so its light fell on Mikhail. “My son had dark hair, like yours. He was older, though. Eleven years old. He was a very fine boy.” The torch shifted, and Wiktor followed it around the chamber. “You’ve come a long way, Mikhail. But you have a long way yet to go. You’ve heard tales of wolfmen, yes? Every child is scared to bed at least once by such stories.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mikhail answered. His father had told him and Alizia tales of cursed men who became wolves and tore lambs to pieces.

  “They’re lies,” Wiktor said. “The full moon has nothing to do with it. Nor does night. We can go through the change whenever we please… but learning to control it takes time and patience. You have the first; you’ll learn the second. Some of us change selectively. Do you know what that means?”

  “No, sir.”

  “We can control which part changes first. The hands into claws, for instance. Or the facial bones and the teeth. The task is mastery of the mind and body, Mikhail. It is abhorrent for a wolf—or a man—to lose control over himself. As I say, this is something you’ll have to learn. And it’s not a simple task, by any means; it’ll take years before you master it, if ever.”

  Mikhail felt split; he was listening with one half of his mind to what Wiktor was saying, but the other half listened to the rat scratching in the darkness.

  “Have you ever read anything on anatomy?” Wiktor took a thick book from a shelf. Mikhail looked blankly at him. “Anatomy: the study of the human body,” Wiktor translated. “This one is written in German, and it gi
ves illustrations of the brain. I’ve thought a lot about the virus in our bodies, and why we can go through the change while ordinary men cannot. I think the virus affects something deep in the brain. Something long buried, and meant to be forgotten.” His voice was getting excited, as if he were on a university podium again. “This book here”—he returned the anatomy volume and removed another book near it—“is a philosophy of the mind, from a medieval manuscript. It proposes that man’s brain is multilayered. At the center of the brain is the animal instinct; the beast’s nature, if you will—”

  Mikhail was distracted. The rat: scratch, scratch. A peal of hunger rang in his stomach like a hollow bell.

  “—and that portion of the brain is what the virus liberates. How little we know about the magnificent engine in our skulls, Mikhail! Do you see what I mean?”

  Mikhail didn’t, really. All this talk of beasts and brains made no impression on him. He looked around, his senses questing: scratch, scratch.

  “You can have three thousand worlds, if you want them,” Wiktor said. “I’ll be your key, if you choose to learn.”