The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men

by Stephen Jones

  He added, “Now, as to the wolf, how would you like me to deal with him?”

  Nugent stood, hand stroking chin, considering the question. “I wondered . . . Do you think perhaps mounted standing, threatening maybe, with a snarl?”

  Wallace Plumtree shook his head a little. “So very passé, don’t you think, Mr Nugent? And dare I say, a modicum vulgar? All very well for a school child visiting a museum but not for a person of taste. Why, it would be an insult to the nature of this lovely beast. If I may suggest . . .”

  Nugent motioned the other man to continue.

  “Well, sir, I recommend flaying, save for the head which would be treated and remain intact. Then the fur prepared so that the body, with legs and tail, are supple and soft, able to spread out. The whole would then make a beautiful rug or wall display.”

  “I don’t want the fur damaged in any way,” warned Nugent.

  “Of course not, Mr Nugent. As you know, I use the very latest techniques, including laser technology. I guarantee that despite the opening out, no harm will come to the fur itself.”

  (The night janitor was young and a nineteen-sixties freak. That night he was stoned, as he so often was, flying high, away in his own previous century world. He cleaned Wallace Plumtree’s outer office but when he tried the inner door to the workshop he found it to be locked. This wasn’t unusual, it generally meant the old dude had something special in there. Hey man, imagine stuffing dead animals for a living. Guess it paid well, though, that Plumtree cat didn’t look like he’d worried about his next meal for decades. And the rents in this block didn’t come cheap.

  Just as the janitor was about to turn away from the door, he thought that he heard something. It was low and distant and sounded a bit like an animal of some kind, dog maybe, alternately whimpering and howling. Might even have heard the sound of scrabbling, like clawed feet trying to gain purchase on a polished stone floor. Not possible, all those creatures in there, they were dead, man. The janitor pulled out the remains of the toke he’d been smoking earlier and studied it. Hey, powerful shit, man . . .)

  Interlude: Dreamplace

  Nugent was back at that place of death in the mountains. He sprawled there with the ground hard beneath him and the Remington, aimed steadily at the timber wolf, weighty in his arms. The sun must have been setting, for the sky behind the animal was the bright scarlet of freshly-spilled arterial blood.

  Nugent was aware that two Indians stood behind him, although neither one came into his line of sight. He could hear, or perhaps feel, a throbbing as of drums, or of rushing life filling veins and arteries. He thought that he could smell wood-smoke and tobacco, and beneath that something else, something narcotic.

  Nugent knew that Two-Trees was trying to tell him something, but he could never quite catch the Indian’s words. He understood the gist to be something concerning the wolf’s soul, but he knew too that such a concept was ridiculous.

  He closed his mind to those unheard entreaties and concentrated on making his shot good. He took first pressure. The telescopic sight was better, clearer than he had ever known it. It focused in upon the wolf’s head and each hair in the coarse fur stood out sharp and plain. He took the second pressure.

  And as he released death, as it became too late for him to stay his action, the wolf’s noble head turned and through the ‘scope Nugent found himself staring into human eyes, dark blue eyes like his own, which pleaded with him.

  Nugent jerked up in his bed screaming . . .

  (In her penthouse room, the best in the apartment from which she had a wonderful panoramic view of city and sky, Marianna shifted uneasily in bed. She awoke briefly, confused, thinking that she had heard an animal howling. How could she have done? This was the city. Muttering sleepily, she turned over and drifted off once more . . .)

  Item: Display

  Wallace Plumtree looked around him with interest. ‘It looks a little different from when I was last here,” he said.

  “You’ve got sharp eyes,” acknowledged Nugent, “I like change, I get bored easily. I’ve arranged things now so that the trophy can be displayed to better advantage. I thought here.” He indicated an area of highly-polished wooden floor in front of the huge fireplace with its heap of artificial logs.

  “Perfect.” Plumtree motioned to his chauffeur to lay down the bulky parcel. When the man had left the room, his employer removed the lid from the box and tenderly lifted out the contents. “There, Mr Nugent, I’m as proud of that as of anything I’ve ever done.”

  The wolf’s head lived. Plumtree had prepared it to seem that the beast was at rest, lazily satisfied, with a glint of knowing wisdom in the glass eyes. The pelt shone from the loving attention which had been paid to it, silver highlights glistening in the matt greyness.

  Going to his knees, the taxidermist arranged the wolf-skin then looked to Nugent for approval.

  The hunter nodded. “Thank you, Mr Plumtree. I am very pleased.” He grinned. “Our finest work, I think.”

  (In the strange lambency of another dimension, something stirred, a patch of darkness which stretched itself into a long and slender lupine shape. Created of vengeance from nothingness, its sole need was to destroy.

  With a silent snarl, the ethereal creature set out to find its prey . . .)

  Item: Shame

  With only the most perfunctory of knocks, Marianna strode into the trophy room, a swirl of white-blonde hair and lithe body and silken robe. Nugent was sitting, whisky in hand, contemplating the remains of the great wolf with satisfaction.

  “What do you want?” asked the man without looking up. “More money, I suppose?”

  “I want to go shopping,” his mistress told him. “It’s better than sitting around here on my butt while you spend all your time among these . . . these masculine souvenirs of yours.”

  Nugent glared but said nothing. Although a violent man, he prided himself on never having raised a hand to a woman. Marianna pushed him, though, Jesus Christ did she push him. He pressed buttons on his desk computer, tore off the credit cheque it printed and thrust it towards her.

  The woman took the check without a word of thanks. Instead, she stepped over to the wolf-skin and looked down at it with something like contempt.

  She said, “Since this goddam thing came here, you’ve spent most of your time just gazing at it. What goes through your mind when you’re doing that, Nugent? Wondering what it would be like to lay me on it? Fat chance of that, seeing that you can’t get it up any more. Hell, I might as well be a nun for all the action I’m getting.”

  She wandered to one of the weapons cases and tapped her fingers on the glass lid. “Guess that’s why you collect all these guns and things,” she added. “And why you enjoy killing. It’s all about penis substitutes and feeling macho, isn’t it?”

  Nugent drained his glass and poured himself another Glenlivet. “Why do you stay here, Marianna? There’s nothing left between us and you can’t stand me any more.”

  “Remember our cohabitation agreement, honey?” she mocked. “If I go voluntarily, I get nothing. And I’ve had enough of nothing in my life. You want rid, you send me away – and pay for it. God knows you can afford it. Or are you afraid I’ll tell the world that the mighty hunter is impotent? It’d take a lot of killing to rid yourself of that particular shame, wouldn’t it, Nugent? Well, must go, thanks for the cheque. Hey, maybe I’ll buy you a present. How about a set of ivory splints for your dick?”

  As Nugent watched the woman leave the room, his fist tightened slowly until the whisky glass crushed, driving long splinters into his fingers and palm. Blood spurted, but Nugent paid no heed. He noticed neither the pain of the cuts, nor the sting of the spirit as it seeped into his wounds.

  (Somewhere on another plane, the ebon, prowling wolf-shape stopped and raised its head, nostrils flaring. It had caught the whiff of something to lead it to its eagerly sought goal, the mingled odours of scorn and shame and hatred and blood . . .)

  Interlude: Dreampl
ace

  Nugent stood on top of the rock, filling his lungs with the clean air of a mountain evening. Scents undreamed of called to him, told him tales of the forest, told him where the prey was, where the pack was, where his beloved mate, the alpha female, romped with their cubs. His greatly altered colour perception turned the landscape, the mountains and sky, the very rock on which he stood, into a bizarre and fascinating composition in monochrome.

  He stretched, tensing and relaxing his powerful muscles, spread his great fanged jaws wide in a yawn. Never in his life had he felt so alive, so at one with the environment.

  Without knowing why, he felt other presences in this place of peace. He turned his great head and saw the three man-creatures. Two of them were of the ancient race and he could feel the emanations of their admiration and awed respect. Then he realized what the third man-thing was about.

  It looked at him over the barrel of a killing-stick, staring at him intently with its yellow wolf-eyes. Recognition of imminent death came to Nugent much too late, for the death dart struck him even as he was crying out, reaching out, to his brother . . .

  (Marianna jerked from slumber with a muffled cry. Some dreadful noise had awoken her, just like several nights ago. And there it was again, the howling of an animal, a dog perhaps. But dogs weren’t common in this part of the city, in fact the weird and frightening noise seemed to have come from somewhere inside the building, even inside the apartment. But that was impossible . . . wasn’t it?

  Marianna slipped from her bed, tiptoed quietly to her door and listened. She wasn’t sure, but she had the impression that something was creeping around out there. She even thought that she heard a low snuffling, as if the skulking thing was trying to sniff her out. Despite the room’s warmth, she shivered violently and felt her bare body crawl with goose-flesh. She pressed her thumb against the security reader and it locked the door in response.

  Marianne ran back to the bed and hid her head beneath the topsheet. She slept badly for the remainder of the night . . .)

  Item: Nighthunt

  Two cops stood in a doorway in a mean part of the city, smoking an illicit cigarette each. Their conversation was mainly precinct scuttlebutt, interspersed with derogatory comments about their captain, a dipshit with his nose stuck firmly up the Commissioner’s ass.

  One of them leaned out of the doorway to dispose of his cigarette butt and jerked back, cannoning into his partner. “Hell, what was that?”

  “What was what?” said the other policeman, stepping out onto the sidewalk, “I don’t see nothing.”

  The first cop joined him. “I’m not sure, I thought I saw something dash between those two alleys over there. Just a glimpse out the corner of my eye. I don’t know . . . it could have been a big dog, it could have been a man crouched down . . .”

  His partner was just saying, “Okay, so let’s take a look,” when the night was made hideous by several high, thin shrieks.

  “Christ Almighty!” Pulling their machine-pistols, both cops rushed towards the source of the terrible noise. Covered by his partner, the first cop dived into the alley, flicked on his flashlight. There was nothing there save the remains of what could have been a cat, mangled and torn. Blood and guts everywhere, as they told the guys back at the station-house later.

  It had got so bad that Old Weasel could smell himself, but he didn’t give a shit. He’d found him a good, solid cardboard box, big enough to sit upright and lie down, plenty of newspapers for blankets and a fine spot over a warm air vent. A piece of sacking covering the front of the box, and his world was his castle. Okay, so he got a little gamey when warm, so what, any bastard didn’t like it could stand downwind.

  He itemized the gleanings from tonight’s search among the garbage cans. A quarter loaf, a bit stale but at least it didn’t have blue whiskers. Some chicken and burger scraps, a selection of throwout vegetables and fruit disposed of by a Chinese restaurant, in fact a feast. Why, he’d even found a paper bag with some stale donuts. And to wash it all down, a bottle of Weasel’s special skullbuster, a litre jug of cheap Muscatel with a dash of Sterno to give it a lift, vintage this very evening.

  Hey, whassat? There was somebody nosing around outside, probably after a hand-out. “Get lost, you bum! Go find your own booze!” yelled Weasel just as the curtain of sacking was wrenched aside.

  Most people couldn’t stand Weasel’s stink. The thing that hauled him from his cardboard cave to rend him didn’t seem to be all that fussy.

  Slick Gerber took his latest girl into the park to make out. Slick fancied himself a hardcase, the thought of muggers and worse didn’t worry him. He was well armed. As well as the essential packet of rubbers – hell, he didn’t know who she’d pushed out to before, did he – he packed a switchblade and an old Iver Johnson .32, both of which he enjoyed using. He may have been well prepared for muggers but not for what found him and Rhonda in the bushes.

  There were others . . . Mr Peters was an insomniac who liked to walk at night; Lucy Delgado thought her neighbourhood was safe to go jogging; Bill Brechner was sneaking home after an illicit liaison with a woman who was not his wife.

  When the reports from various precincts were collated the next day, consensus was that some asshole had dumped a number of ageing, redundant and somewhat hungry fighting-mastiffs into the community.

  And that was just the first night . . .

  (Nugent awoke, his head limbs and eyeballs aching as if he’d been on the greatest bender of his life. Worse, his abdomen felt dreadfully distended, as if he had been force fed during the night. He practically fell from his bed and stumbled his way into the bathroom.

  He pulled the lightcord and winced as he caught sight of his image in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. God, what had he been doing? And where the hell had that dirt all over his naked body come from?

  Well, he had gotten stuck into the Scotch the previous evening but so he had on many other occasions. He’d always remembered what he’d done before. Feeling more sick than ever, Nugent relieved himself and vowed never again.)

  Item: Bloodlet

  It’s always the cops who have to pick up the pieces, sometimes literally.

  The bizarre and savage killings in the city had continued intermittently for several weeks. The official line was still that a pack of fighting dogs was on the loose, but in the privacy of the precinct bullpens, some detectives were beginning to wonder if there was a real nut somewhere out there, a nut who was just that bit worse than the run-of-mill nut. The tabloid press was beginning to speculate along the same lines.

  The clincher for this unpublicized line of thought came with the late night slaughter of the Krazies. The rookie cop who found what was left of the street gang upchucked violently then lapsed into shock. His partner, older and generally more phlegmatic, slumped down on his butt in the gutter amid the mud and grime and garbage and worse. He drank the best part of the flask of good Irish whiskey he carried before calling in.

  Soon, the place was crawling with uniformed men and detectives and paramedics. The reckoning was that there were at least four bodies, although it might take a series of autopsies to be sure.

  Then back of a local store, somebody found a junior gang member intact but almost insane with terror. At the time, all they could get out of him was that he was called Zip. He was scrawny and underfed, his nose ran constantly and all around his mouth was the telltale rash of a solvent abuser.

  Zip remained under heavy sedation for a couple of days before he could speak to the investigating officers.

  STATEMENT OF CHARLES “ZIP” BELLINGER, MEMBER OF YOUTH GANG KNOWN AS “THE KRAZIES”

  Me and some of the guys was hangin’ out. There was Jocko, One-eye, Tattoo Nick and Rammer as well as me. We was a little high, done some sniffin’, figured that a bit of blood-lettin’ would give us a buzz. We wandered the turf, hopin’ that maybe we’d find us some guy from one of the spic gangs, carve him up good.

  Didn’t have no luck. Then Rammer spotted this creep
, looked like some kinda loony. You believe it, he was naked? In this weather? Well, maybe not quite naked. He was wearin’ some kinda coat and cap, made outa something furry. Thought we’d have some fun with him.

  Didn’t think there was nothin’ to worry about, we was all carryin’, you know? Knives, clubs, like that. We go over, get all around him. One-eye says somethin’ like, “Hey man, you a crazy? We Krazies too.” Like, One-eye, he enjoyed playin’ with words.

  Then Rammer, he says, “Only room on this turf for us Krazies, man, don’t want no other crazies here. Guess we gonna have to teach you a lesson man, punish you real good.”

  Then, you know what happens? Don’t mind tellin’ ya, scared the shit outa me, man. This crazy guy, he looks around at us, then he smiles, real slow, like he’s the one about to have fun and not us. Well, Rammer, he gets real pissed with this guy’s grin and says, “First swing to me, fellers.” Then he goes in with his club.

  Man, that guy gutted Rammer. He moved so fast, I mean fast. One minute Rammer’s there with his club so’s the nails’ll go right into the guy’s skull, next the guy’s ripped him from cock to throat, insides fallin’ out, blood everywhere. You know what was worst? I think I saw the bastard pull somethin’ out of Rammer and stuff it in his mouth.

  One-eye goes in with his switchknife, this asshole tears his arm straight from the socket, starts to use it as a weapon. I saw him rip Jocko’s head off, too.

  That was when I chickened out, man. I ran, got to the alley, looked back. My buddies, they was all down. Bastard didn’t pay me no heed, ‘cos he was startin’ to take them apart. And I don’t think they was all dead, ‘cos at least one of ‘em was screamin’, screamin’ real loud. Jesus, he was usin’ his bare hands and teeth to take them apart.

  (A gigantic mirror graced one wall in the bathroom and Nugent looked in horror at his reflection. Where in the name of sweet God had all that dried blood come from, because he certainly didn’t have any wounds. Suddenly his gut heaved and he staggered to the lavatory bowl, just making it before he spewed. He stared aghast at the reddish-brown mess his stomach had rejected, then he threw up again. His mouth and nostrils filled with the foul taste and odour of stale blood as spasm after spasm tore through him.