“Yes. Of course. Yes. South Ninth Street.” “She was visiting a house there. So David said. He followed her one day. He was pretty worried. I haven’t the slightest doubt that it was there she sold her soul.”
Trent shook himself. Reason was tiding back to replace his mental paralysis.
“Damned impossible business!” he exclaimed- Pierre said:
“Very well—but you saw.”
“Hallucination,” Trent said gruffly.
“And would we all three of us see it at the same time?” Pierre asked.
“Why not? There’s mass delusion, isn’t there? How about that. Doctor?”
“It's been known,” said Hardt slowly. Trent, reassured, nodded. He said:
“We might have been able to see anything after you gave us your rigamarole. Power of suggestion.”
“I did not.” Pierre replied evenly, “so much as suggest the absence of a shadow. All I said was to examine her closely.”
Hardt nodded judiciously.
Trent was unconvinced.
“Matter of thought transference, then,” he said sullenly.
Pierre's smile was grim. His hold on himself was tightening now and the effects of the liquor-potent for a man who hadn’t had a drink in two years—were wearing thin.
“You wouldn’t,” he inquired smoothly, “argue against the occult by contending I used an occult power to show you something that wasn't?”
“There’s nothing occult about telepathy at all.” Trent maintained doggedly. “It’s a scientific fact.”
But Dr. Hardt shook his head.
“Scarcely, sir.” he said. “There have been experiments. But nothing proved.”
Then, again, there fell an island of tormenting silence. Trent arose and prowled nervously about the room. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks.
“My God!” he exclaimed. “She’s out there now!”
Pierre said, gently, “And David’s with her.” Trent turned on him.
“You can’t mean . . . .”
Pierre shook his head, gesturing with a shaking hand.
“I don’t know. But Heinrich said there were two. You can telephone your house.” Trent reached for the telephone. He called his own number. His hand was steady. And his voice. He said:
“Oh—Julia? Is David in?” . . . His voice faltered then. “What time?” . . .
He replaced the instrument in its cradle. And now his hand shook. And his figure was limp as he crossed the room to his chair. It was not necessary for the others to question him.
“It was curious,” mused Dr. Hardt, “about those two wolves. I read about them in last night’s paper. The one, white—” He turned toward Pierre. “As was the case in your family, sir. The other, a smaller gray.”
Trent's eyes were narrow.
“What’s curious?” he demanded. “All it proves is that she—and, damn itl I won't believe it’s she—picked up with some vagabond. Likely as not a renegade police dog.”
Pierre's voice was subdued. “Heinrich said the gray was a wolf. And Messner said it was a wolf. And Nathan knows wolves. Fifty years ago he saw what were called the last Pennsylvania timber wolves and he says this —the gray—was identical.”
Trent said angrily, “You’re damned sure of yourself, Pierre.”
Pierre said mildly, “Do you think I wanted to believe? I’ve been fighting this thing out with myself for the past twenty-four hours. I haven’t slept. I know how you feel. With me. it was Sara. With you, so long as it was Sara, you could look at it halfway objectively. But with David. . . .”
“You don’t know it’s David!”
DR. HARDT, contrary to his usual bombastic manner, waited patiently for this side argument to end. Now that there was a pause, he continued:
“What was curious was your Heinrich's contention that he shot pointblank at close range and—didn't hit.”
He hesitated, then added, “I say it is curious because the old accounts often mention the immunity of were-animals to bullets.” He laughed heavily, with abrupt embarrassment. “I think you remember, I wrote a brochure on witchcraft once. If it proved anything, it showed I did a good bit of research on the subject. It was,” he smiled grimly, “entirely derivative.”
“And if I recall,” Pierre said, “the reviewers thought your treatment hardly sympathetic.” Hardt appeared not to hear him.
“There are some odd tales,” he resumed. He added hastily, “Don’t take me wrong. I myself, sir, have not the slightest faith.” Pierre thought the tone a bit too defensive. “In general it is said there are two types of werewolves. The one, selling his soul to the devil, receives as the highest reward for faithful service as a warlock the ability to shift his shape at will. And some of the stories tell how no ordinary attack upon the beast will prove effective.”
Trent said with a quick sneer, “Ah. And yet you tell us, Pierre, this crazy yam about Sara coming home with smashed fingers the night of that thing at Melton Crossing!”
Pierre replied with a voice now beginning to chill, “I only told you—because it was true.”
Dr. Hardt bowed his head thoughtfully. “Smashed? Swollen, I believe he said. No blood was there?”
“I didn’t see any,” Pierre said.
“It is said,” Hardt explained, “that sometimes they are bloodless. It might check. Of course, in the other type, there are many reports of werewolves revealed for what they—I say, allegedly—were by the loss of a leg or an arm in conflict with a huntsman.
“Petronius tells how a soldier, turned werewolf, was wounded in the neck by a pike. When he resumed human form, he had a bad gash in the exact spot.”
Trent interposed suspiciously, “What do you mean, other type?”
“The type,” explained Hardt, “that does not sell its soul to the devil.”
Trent began, “Then how can a person become—”
Then, guessing such a terrible answer as he did not wish to hear, he stopped abruptly. But Hardt said brutally, “Contagion.” “Personal contact?” inquired Pierre.
“That, sir, is the supposition. Frazier quotes the Toradja belief that a man is either born a werewolf or becomes one by mere contact. A bite would suffice; the human would be doomed.”
“Forever?”
“In cases of contagion, I believe, the curse is supposed to last seven years, unless the spell is broken.”
Pierre, who had been listening intently, asked, “But for the former type, Doctor?”
“Life.”
And once more there was an uncomfortably long pause.
Trent pierced a cigar and lit it. He lit it with the elaborate automatic lighter which Pierre kept on his smoking stand—the butt end of an old flintlock pistol. He snapped the trigger, and the steel hammer struck flint and gave flame. Trent held it a moment, examining it with an obvious attempt at selfcommand. He said wearily:
“At least, we don’t know that David. . . .”
Pierre (and Dr. Hardt could see how the man was terrorized at the thought of being the only victim; how he clutched at each straw to draw someone, anyone, into his own horrible web) said:
“We don’t know. But we surmise. I’ve good grounds to surmise. Sara told me how much she wanted David. And now—they’re together.”
If ever Trent felt like murder, he did now. He gripped the arms of his chair with his fists until his knuckles were drawn of blood. He glared at Pierre. And Dr. Hardt, whose lifelong study was the human mind, could see—even as he had deciphered Pierre— how eager Trent was to transfer his fear of the unknown to a hatred of something that was definitely flesh and blood. In mental turmoil he sought a scapegoat.
What Hardt did not know was that Manning Trent suddenly remembered David’s return on a recent night from a nocturnal tramp. Ever solicitous for his son’s welfare, he had observed that David’s lower lip was split; it was stained with blood. His hands relaxed from the chair arms. And he held up his left, fingers outspread, and with the forefinger of his right began to count—back.
That was it! That was the night of Melton Crossing!
Had they met, then? He remembered kisses of his own youth.
Trent’s head lowered and his hand stroked his hot forehead. After a time, from what seemed a long distance, he heard Hardt’s voice:
“Those prints. Didn’t I read where they led away from the Tilson child’s body and disappeared at the creek edge?”
“You did,” said Pierre.
“The reason I asked,” said Hardt, “was that, so the stories go, the werewolf often changes his shape by rolling in water. A baptism, in reverse, if you like. Is it true that your—ah, beast has been seen near the water each time?”
Pierre said, “Near by, usually. Seems to hug the watercourses.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Hardt, “for a quick change in order to avoid detection?”
The doctor spoke with a tolerant air. Pierre replied seriously:
“Perhaps.”
“And were there not,” pursued Hardt, “the prints of a human being across the stream from where the animal’s tracks disappeared?”
“There were,” Pierre said. “And now that you’ve brought that up. . . .”
He rose heavily from his chair and turned once more to the study. The eyes of both men followed him—Trent’s, bitterly; Dr. Hardt’s, with curiosity. When he reappeared, Pierre held a shoe box. He placed it on the coffee stand.
“I went over there this morning,” he said. “It’s on the Waterman place, just across the highway. Those prints were still there, most of them in pretty bad shape because of the wet weather. But there was one—frozen. . . .”
He held up a small plaster cast.
“I don’t pretend,” he said, “to be a detective. Still, heel and toe, here it is. And here—’’ he held up a woman’s oxford—”is the shoe that matches. I took it—from Sara’s closet.”
Chapter Five
RETURNING home that night, Dr. Justin Hardt found himself in a strangely contradictory position. For the first time in his life he could not believe what his own eyes showed him.
Man of science, he had trained himself to believe nothing that was not proved by one or a combination of his five senses. Now, facing a critical test of this lifelong tenet, he had refused to accept his own criterion for truth.
The result was a gradual realization that the foundations upon which he had built his life were shaken. He was logical enough to admit that from the type of forceful personality that had regarded his own word as the final law, he might—possibly—be relegated to the class of an intellectually lazy agnostic who could only mouth:
“I do not know.”
There was, moreover, another element in Dr. Hardt’s personal problem. This was that some years before, purely out of curiosity, he had begun a study of witchcraft. He had penetrated the subject to some depth. He had accumulated a considerable library on magic, demonology and related matter.
In the light of what he knew, he could not drop the matter of Sara's lack of shadow by shrugging his huge round shoulders and observing that it was something beyond his knowledge.
Nor did the problem rest there. He might have felt much greater mental ease, despite what his eyes had shown him, had he been able to diagnose Sara’s trouble. He hadn’t. And he was honest about that.
Hardt was, in fact, so greatly troubled that when he finally reached his expensive rooms at the Racquet Club he removed from their shelves several books on the general subject of witchcraft. Then, robed and slippered and settled in his easy chair with the reading lamp adjusted at the exact angle, he began to thumb through them.
First troubling question to present itself was the fact of Sara’s womanhood. He could not recall having heard of a female werewolf. Yet, when he had opened his copy of de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, he discovered just such a case:
The year was 1588; the scene, the mountains of Auvergne. A friend of the husband of a woman who had shot off the right forepaw of a wolf and had kept the paw in a bag as a trophy. But when he opened the bag to exhibit his prize to the husband, to his horror he drew out a human hand. And on one finger was a ring which the husband recognized as his wife’s.
There was that—and Hardt could not but remember Sara’s swollen fingers and the story of Mary Heath.
On the surface, Dr. Hardt knew, there was a bond of sympathy between the so-called authenticated cases of werewolfery and insanity. In either instance, there was a dissatisfaction with self. Madness for the insane was release. So, with the warlock. There must be desires that can be satisfied in no other manner.
This, Dr. Hardt conceded, was reasonable. But he was still too skeptical to admit the possibility of winning the ability to satisfy a lust for blood by sale of one’s soul to so improbable a character as Satan.
And here was another problem:
Was it not generally conceded that there could be no belief in metamorphosis into any particular animal in a locality where that animal had ceased to exist? Without the belief, what became of the alleged fact? And how long had it been since wolves were seen in this region?
The answer in this case, Dr. Hardt finally decided, would be the old curse on the family which—curses being taken at their face value —would not be expected to trouble itself too much about geography.
And then Dr. Hardt sat up!
“But, of course! There is the answer. Lycanthropy. Wolf madness.”
He got up and walked back to his shelves and switched on a lamp.
“How long since I’ve heard of a case like that?”
It would be the reason, he knew—or, rather, theorized—that he hadn’t recognized Sara's symptoms.
A natural form of insanity . . . rare nowadays . . . the patient became obsessed with the idea he was a wolf . . . went barking about . . . attacking people . . . .
‘‘Yes. Here’s that case. At Pavia, 1541”
It was the case of a lycanthrope who, when captured in human form, maintained he was a wolf none the less; with a single difference, that his fur grew within him. Curious, some of his captors opened wounds in the body to find out.
And still, when Dr. Hardt had poured for an hour over the symptoms which physicians long before his time had recorded, he was not satisfied. Not that the symptoms for what was known as lycanthropy did not, at some points, fit Sara. What struck him time after time was the fact of those animal prints beside the dead body of the Tilson child; the fact that men had seen a wolf. . . .
He put down his books finally, strode into his dressing room.
“One thing certain. The girl must be placed in an institution. I will recommend commitment tomorrow. . . .”
The words bounced back.
He’d recommend!
And what would he recommend?
Good Lord! he could see the headlines:
FAMED PSYCHIATRIST OFFERS CASE OF LYCANTHROPY!
The thing would ruin him.
Well, then, he could say it was something else. Make out she was a manic-depressive. That would come about as close to it as anything.
But no. There would be the other doctors. They would know differently.
He considered the angles. And the more he mulled over each phase, the uglier under professional scrutiny his predicament became.
If there was an ounce of truth in the case, what an opportunity was presented to hinland his hands were tied!
PIERRE, after his guests departed, sat for a long time staring moodily into the dying fire. His mind clearing, he was inclined to disapprove of himself for overindulgence. Yet, drinking had given him a cushion for shock; and now that he had gained perspective, he would not need it any more.
He had particularly avoided meeting Sara immediately after his discovery the day previous. Indeed, he had been in no condition to dine. He had not seen her that day, save for the moment that evening when Trent and Hardt were present. He dreaded meeting her alone.
He dreaded it.
And yet he did not feel fear of her. Rather, he felt overwhelmin
g pity. And that pity, he knew, was the substance of his love. He knew that now there was only one pressing question, and that everything else—his business, his zest for life, his companions—must give way before it. The question was: How was he to save Sara from herself?
Ah, but it wasn't possible she was beyond salvation. Was she woman or devil or some creature halfway between and still capable of being pulled in one direction or the other? If only a person knew!
THE WHITE WOLF Page 11