The League of Grey-Eyed Women

by Julius Fast

  "Someday Jack will wake up and start living," Anna had once said, "and then watch out!"

  He thought of Anna and Jack and the lazy, halfhearted way their affair had been carried out. Anna, too, meant very little to Jack. "The sort of woman who's always there," he had once said, and had added gratefully, "and who never asks for anything."

  How had Anna reacted to Jack's hallucination last night? How could she have let him run out of the apartment naked? Had she followed him? The sudden puzzling aspect of Jack's hallucination came back to plague him. Had Jack even been to Anna's?

  On a sudden impulse he fished out a dime and called Anna from the coffee-shop phone booth. When she answered, he hardly recognized her voice. There was a tight, drawn quality to it.

  "Anna? This is Clifford. Can I drop over and see you?" For some uncomfortable reason he avoided mentioning Jack.

  Her voice softened. "Clifford! How nice. Yes, come now, Clifford. Have you eaten?"

  "I've just finished."

  "Then come for coffee. I have some nice Linsertorte left over..."

  She welcomed him into the apartment with a warm hug, but there was a watchful, uncertain look at the back of her eyes. She bustled about, pouring the coffee and cutting the cake, talking a little too brightly, her hand shaking so as she poured that she had to steady it, smiling apologetically. He stared at the disordered room, his eyes moving to the window that gave on the fire escape. He walked over and moved the curtain back. Had it been repaired today? Wasn't that fresh putty on the outside?

  Anna set the cups and cake on the little table near the kitchenette. "It's always so good to see you, Clifford—and so seldom that you come. We can have a good talk now. With you, Clifford, I can let my hair down."

  He smiled ruefully, remembering something he had once told Jack. "Women always let down their hair with me—they never let down their pants."

  He sat and touching the coffee cup asked carefully, "When did you last see Jack?"

  Anna paused, the coffeepot held in midair. For a moment she didn't move, but the pot trembled. Then she lowered the pot and to Clifford's horror her eyes slowly filled with tears. They spilled over and fell unchecked down her cheeks.

  "Clifford, forgive me," she whispered. "I've been going out of my mind all day. I've been so upset."

  "But when did you see him?"

  She twisted her hands. "I haven't been well, Clifford. My arthritis has bothered me so..."

  "What about Jack," he persisted. "When was he here last?"

  "Last night he called and came to see me," she said slowly, hesitantly. "You know how it is between us?"

  Clifford nodded. There was a long pause, then he said, "Go on, Anna."

  "I'm a—how do you say it, an easy woman. I've never pretended otherwise. Jack is not the only man I know. But for Jack I have a very special place. I had a very special place, only..." Her voice trailed away.

  "What happened last night?"

  In bewilderment she said, "I don't know. He had a little to drink before he came here, but surely not too much. I have never seen Jack drunk, so drunk that he was not himself. Last night he was himself, at first. Clifford, I can't go on. I beg you."

  "And I beg you, Anna, I must know."

  She shuddered and took a large gulp of coffee. "Only how can I explain this, Clifford, without sounding mad. We were in bed and suddenly—oh, my God, my God!"

  "What happened?"

  The tears were running down her cheeks. "Either I went mad, Clifford, completely mad, or he changed into a wolf! An animal with fur and teeth and ears. I saw him change, saw his face grow long and flat—oh, Christ!"

  He felt a cold sharp chill of fear go down his back. He forced himself to ask, "Did he smash the window and run down the fire escape?"

  She stared at him. "How did you know?"

  Dully he said, "Because I found him in the park this morning, naked and terrified, wearing a coat he had stolen. He thought he had imagined it, that it was an hallucination."

  "If there was any hallucination, I had it too, Clifford. Jack changed. I will swear to that. Like a werewolf. He changed in front of my eyes, he became a wolf. Do you believe me?" Her voice rose as she talked, almost to a scream.

  He looked at her pale, pretty face with the blank terror behind the eyes and he nodded slowly, his body shivering. "Yes, yes I believe you, only—I don't know what to think, Anna. I just don't know."

  Later that night, armed with a bundle of Jack's clothes and his wallet, Clifford took a cab uptown to Jack's apartment. There was no answer when he rang and finally, his apprehension growing, he prevailed upon Andy, the superintendent, to let him in. Inside he hung up the clothes and then sat down to wait for Jack.

  He must have dozed off in the armchair. When he woke with a sudden start out of troubled, dream-ridden sleep, the early grey morning light made the yellow lamp pale and sickly.

  He stood up and stretched, looking unhappily down at his crumpled suit and then at his watch. Where the hell was Jack? It was after six in the morning. Where had he spent the night?

  But then, what business was it of his? Did he have any right to pry and probe into another man's life like this? He shook his head. It wasn't prying. Jack had been in trouble, perhaps he still was. In the name of friendship...

  Friendship? How far did that go? If a man wanted to stay out all night ... He ran his tongue over his teeth and frowned at the taste. His mouth felt dry and furry, as if he had been out drinking half the night. His suit and shirt were rumpled and he felt unwashed and uncomfortable. Usually an immaculate man, he hated leaving the apartment in this condition, but he had to get home. Pushkin was waiting and he had his work to finish. Besides, if he didn't clean himself up soon...

  He left a note for Jack, begging him to call as soon as he got in. Then he took a cab to his own apartment. He showered and shaved, dressed in clean clothes and had a light breakfast, then plunged into his work in the studio, resolutely putting aside all thought of Jack and his problem.

  But later that afternoon he pushed his work aside in disgust. At first he told himself he had to get out of the studio and away from the odor of fixative and rubber cement, but he knew it was no good. He had to follow up Jack's problem somehow. Jack had called and asked him for help. He still needed help, maybe more than ever. What if last night had been a repetition of the night before, and somewhere, naked and terrified, Jack was trying to reach him?

  He called the apartment again, but there was still no answer. Then, with a sudden crystallizing of impulse he called Stanton Foundation in Montreal and asked to speak to Dr. Douthright. He was put through to the laboratory and a secretary informed him that Dr. Douthright was no longer with the laboratory.

  "It's most important that I get in touch with her," he said, and then, as the secretary hesitated, added, "if you could give me her home number. I'm calling from New York."

  "Well, actually she's left the city," the secretary said slowly. "We have no forwarding address yet, but why don't you try Albert Einstein in the Bronx. Unofficially, I can tell you she's gone there. Try the department of microbiology at the university."

  He could almost see her looking over her shoulder for Dr. Stiener, and he remembered Jack's description of the argument that had led to Steve's resignation.

  A call to Albert Einstein led to a number of transfers from department to department, and finally a businesslike, matter-of-fact voice. "This is Dr. Douthright."

  "Dr. Steve Douthright of Canada?"

  "Dr. Stephanie Douthright." A touch of controlled impatience. "Who is this? How can I help you?"

  "I want to speak to you, Dr. Douthright. I'm a very close friend of Jack Freeman, possibly his closest friend."

  "Oh." There was a long pause, and then she said, slowly, "We're not settled yet. If I could meet you somewhere. The school might be awkward. What did you say your name is?"

  "Clifford McNally. Will you have dinner with me tonight, you and Rhoda? Jack has told me about both of you."
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  "Will he be there? How is he?"

  "I don't think he'll join us, and frankly I don't know how he is or where he is. That's what I want to talk to you about. I want to be here, near my phone, in case he calls. He did that once before when he was in a great deal of trouble."

  "I don't understand," she said sharply. "What kind of trouble?"

  "Look, I can't explain by phone. Won't you come up here? I'll send out for dinner."

  She took his address and he hung up, feeling that he had done as much as he could. Now he'd stick to the phone and wait.

  Chapter Eight

  Where New York Harbor opens to meet the ocean, the fresh water of the Hudson has faded away, and even when the tide runs out, the water is ocean water, rich and salted.

  The shark that had been a bird, and before that a man, met the full pure salt water gratefully, his gill slits opening wide to welcome it into his gills, and his lean, streamlined body awakened eagerly to the cold, the saline, the multitude of shark scents carried by the running tide, to the phosphorescent flashes of life below and the dark shadows above.

  Somewhere, the man part of his brain still maintained a small area of dark consciousness, a stubborn identity that waited helplessly in the cartilaginous skull of the shark for some chance to assert itself. Somewhere, in the elasmobranch horror of shark brain, the man-self struggled towards total consciousness again and again before it gave up in despair to wait, but waiting, to still sense and know.

  East, along the shores of Long Island, the shark glided through the coastal shallows, adapting his body to the water with an instinct that floated up out of a dim, abysmal, racial past. Somewhere, in the unused part of his man brain, there had lain dormant every possible instinct encountered during the infinitely distant evolutionary past, the past that stretched behind him in a multitude of life forms, back to some pre-Cambrian tidal pool where a self-replicating molecule first came into existence.

  Pausing for a moment where the green turbulence of water fell back from the crashing surf, the man-shark caught a faint odor in the water that triggered a still untried reflex in his shark brain. It spelled blood, and blood spelled food, though so keen were his senses that the source of the odor was still half a mile away.

  He cut through the shallows soundlessly, hugging the bottom with another new-old instinct, and he came up on a school of mackerel from below. One had been bitten, but not killed, by a larger fish, and it twisted helplessly, its spine cracked, its blood feathering out as it ebbed away in the water.

  The shark swept up from the bottom, its toothed jaws, the only real bone in its body, agape. It snapped one mackerel in half, but left it dying to tear at another before the whole school vanished in a flurry of alarm. Then, together with the bleeding halves offish, it sank down to the bottom, feeding and tearing at the pulsating bodies while the man-self gagged in disgust even as it tasted the fresh, sweet delight of the meat through the shark's taste buds.

  Some instinct, again newly created or awakened, guided it to the shadowed, mottled, seaweed-covered rocks where its brown, upper body would be camouflaged and it could feed contentedly on the torn mackerel.

  Afterwards it lay quiescent, digesting the meal, staring out at the flickering light and darkness, while thought processes that bore no relation to reasoned thinking drifted sluggishly through its mind.

  The hidden man part of its brain, now that the shark mind lay dormant, roused itself and tried, feebly, to take possession. Once before, as a wolf, it had managed to return to manhood during sleep, but the shark's sleep was never complete. Its eyes open, it still saw the water, and it still sensed pressure changes through the delicate nerve cells along its side, it still sifted out the millions of saline odors, the ocean scents, with its amazingly acute sense of smell.

  It was sleep of a kind, but not a complete sleep; it was sleep at the surface of consciousness. It woke to full awareness when the tide changed and the coastal surf waters, heavy with oxygen from their furious beating against the beach, washed back out to sea. The oxygen-rich water passed through his gills, and instantly he was alert; one twist of his body sent him away on a search for food.

  He swam east and then northward, edging away from the coastal shallows, out towards the wide deep ocean as buried instincts from the dawn of the world rose within him, one by one. The man part of his brain fought to pull him back, knowing that its only chance of survival as a man lay in the coastal shallows where he could reach land if he ever changed back, but the shark part followed a newfound instinct deeper and more powerful than the buried man.

  The mackeral had whetted the shark's hunger, but he knew he was after something different, something larger and tastier.

  Now he picked up speed and moved in earnest, ploughing through 120 miles of ocean in a few hours, heading up towards the fogbound Labrador coast.

  The sun, at midday, burned down through the water, sending him deep into the icy currents that ran below the surface. Towards evening, the sun's rays, hitting the water at a slant, turned it to a glowing red near the surface, a red that faded to ruby and maroon shadows in the depths.

  He saw colors in different values, different intensities, and though his man brain tried to interpret them in terms of its experience, his shark brain saw them differently, not as color at all, but still vividly, sensually.

  But clearer than the world of night was the world of smell filtering through the water and interpreted by the delicate organs of the shark brain. After dark the odors still reached him, his sense of smell more sensitive now that his sight was subdued.

  Far off he became aware of the warm, mammalian scent of sea lions, and he headed towards it questingly. Then, overriding that, more powerful and pungent, he caught the dimly unpleasant odor of fuel oil and at the same time his pressure receptors registered the rhythmic throb of a boat's engine.

  He nosed away uncertainly until, mixed with the faintly repellent odor of the fuel, he scented blood, fresh and rich. He shot forward, knifing through the water, suddenly careless as the blood scent triggered an automatic reflex in his shark mind.

  He came up on the boat from behind and he saw the trailing chunk of meat imbedded on the silver hook trawling behind the boat. His shark mind spurred him forward while his man brain recognized the trap and cried out in silent, ineffectual protest.

  He struck at the hook and half the meat came away in his jaws, then he struck again, but this time the hook caught, biting into the tender skin above the boney jaws.

  Pain sent him tearing back, and then the line tightened and he was pulled forward. He struggled and twisted and then, as the hook bit painfully into his lip, he raced forward, easing the tension, straight towards the throbbing screw of the boat.

  At the last moment he dived, spiraling downward into the black, icy water, and the sudden change of angle tore the hook loose from his mouth, sending his own blood clouding outward in a maddening scent.

  He raced away from it, away from the fuel oil smell and the throbbing motor, heading down and out, into the cold, soothing depths of the ocean. He swam frantically, trying to outrun the burning pain in his lip, and then, even his shark muscles exhausted, he sank down to lie quietly along the bottom, nursing his wound while the blood feathered out into the water.

  Lying there motionless, with only his sides pulsating to the swell of the ocean, he was aware of a stealthy movement below him in an upthrust of rock. A vast conger eel, scenting his blood, was flowing towards him cautiously and slowly, but hungrily.

  Finally, seeing no movement on the part of the wounded shark, made avaricious by the taste of blood, it slid too near, and with a quick slash the man-shark moved. His jaws cut into the eel's body, slashing down through the tough, slippery skin and tearing loose a long strip of sweet white meat.

  He gulped the meat as the eel streaked away, and he darted after him, but too slowly. The long snake shape of the eel vanished into a cleft in the rock.

  The edge of his appetite was blunted, and he rest
ed again, letting the quick, prevertebrate healing process work on his torn lip, scenting out, even as he rested, the vast reaches of the ocean.

  He moved out again as the morning sun began to warm the water, and he cruised lazily during the day. In the late afternoon he caught another scent, a scent that aroused and excited him strangely.

  He thrust forward eagerly, tracing it to its source, and as night fell he caught up with a pack of sharks moving eastward. He fell in with them unquestioningly, and they accepted him, though he was by far the smallest. There was no question of where he should swim. He fitted naturally into place at the rear of the pack, and he felt an easing away of the troubling feeling that had been haunting him and which he now realized was solitude.

  They swam aimlessly through the night, and then, towards morning, a wave of excitement swept through the pack. Far in the distance they had scented a herd of whales basking on the Atlantic's surface, lazily taking the sun on their black blubber-wrapped bodies, spouting and sounding idly as the whim moved them.

  The pack of sharks swept up on them swiftly, and before the herd could alert themselves, the pack had singled out a young calf and surrounded it. In sudden terror the calf sounded, and the sharks, in a V formation, accompanied it down, through fathom after fathom of emerald-green water, and at the end of its dive they moved in, each shark in the pack launching itself at the whale, each tearing away a mouthful of warm, bleeding flesh.

  The calf whale struggled upwards, the emerald water funneling behind it in a bloody froth and the sharks came after it. At the surface the whale rolled frantically, searching for the others, but the herd had taken off at the first sign of the sharks.

  Once again, stung by the biting of the sharks, the whale sounded, but this time weakly, sensing that it was lost, that its lifeblood was ebbing away.

  Inflamed by the scent and taste of warm-blooded mammalian flesh, the sharks closed in, the man-shark among them, tearing and stripping the meat from the still-struggling bones of the calf.

  They only stopped when there were shreds of skin and bones and entrails left, and then the pack, gorged and somnolent, but content, rode the surging bosom of the ocean. In the shark that had once been human the last traces of man drew in upon itself in horrified defense and surrendered to total unconsciousness.