by Gene Lazuta
But the girl was holding him as easily as if he were a child.
Woodie swallowed on his first attempt, roared triumphantly, and stretched his face into a wide-eyed look of madness that glared in the bathroom glass with streaks of blood crawling down his chin.
Raymond was screaming.
And Norris knew that he’d been wrong.
As the change happened, it suddenly all made sense to him, and he was flabbergasted with himself for having been so wrong about everything. He’d had all he needed to know right in front of him, but he had clung to the preposterous story that Mike Cooper had told him when he first arrived on the murder scene, and its false chronology had confused him totally.
Now, seeing events unfold, he realized that Cooper had lied to him—that Woodie had never asked for a meeting at any McDonald’s in Akron, or anywhere else. That Woodie hadn’t begged for help to get out of the Institute of Metaphysical Research. And that his brother’s diary wasn’t really a notebook thrown carelessly on the backseat of his Pinto.
This was his brother’s diary.
This eye…this stone…this moment.
His brother hadn’t died in this motel room…it had only been his brother’s humanity that had perished.
The body they had found belonged to someone else.
As Raymond rolled on the bed, Woodie stared at his own face in the bathroom mirror. Both he and his brother, who was inside his head, watched as first Woodies’ face and then the rest of his body underwent a transformation of staggering proportion. It wasn’t like Lefty Zimmer’s, which had been a transformation of the mind, but not of the body, because, at that time, Woodie and the girl had still been on their way down from Cleveland and therefore the power for a physical change hadn’t been available to him. And it wasn’t like Cheryl Lockner’s, which had been the first physical manifestation, but had been limited because the bones hadn’t yet been moved and the curse was still on the land. And it wasn’t like Ernie Cray’s, which, when it would happen the following morning, would be the closest thing to a real change yet, because the power would have come…but the moon still wouldn’t be full, so it wouldn’t be complete.
This was a full-blown alteration that moved Woodie Norris from one plane of being to another in a matter of seconds. It seemed to swell up from inside the man so that, for one terrible instant, he stood perfectly still, as if waiting, and then it hit him with all the force of a blow.
The first thing to change was his hair—it grew, on his head and everywhere. In a wink it reached to his waist and spread over his jaws and neck. His face stretched as did, simultaneously, his fingers, until his lower jaw hung low and bristling with sharp, canine teeth and his hands had become wicked, claw-like arrangements that sported mean, sharp nails at the cap of each finger. His brow pushed itself out over his staring, animal eyes—which were pocketed like a gorilla’s amid pouches of dark, wrinkled skin—and his forehead sloped back to a peaked ridge over pointed, wolfish ears. Suddenly his nose was moist and sensitive, his arms hung low, and his clothing tore away as he grew bigger and bigger, his head virtually touching the ceiling as soon as he became…
Nine feet tall.
He towered over the bed, trembled, and then, with a shudder that made him clench his huge fists, and an effort that watered his eyes, he looked directly down at where Raymond lay—awestruck on the bed in a bloody fetal position—and expressed his newfound power and rage in one long, agonizing howl that shook the walls and made the terrified man lose what little was left of his composure, and his mind.
Norris watched it all in the bathroom mirror. He didn’t miss a detail, and finally, when the change was nearing its end, he said in a voice filled with wonder, “Neanderthal.”
For that was the word he knew.
He had heard Mr. Green’s story of the first Blood Prince, heard how he had found the stone after it fell from the moon millions of years ago. And here was the proof of it, the logical extension of its events: Woodie Norris, as least according to Mr. Green, was a direct descendant of that first, primitive man who had taken the magic from the sky and made it a part of himself. He was connected, by some invisible umbilical, to a time before history had begun, and now, with the stone’s help, and apparently released by his first taste of human flesh, he had become that ancestral forebear! He was that primitive cannibal! Time had ceased exerting its control and was suddenly meaningless—at least for now. At this instant the Wild had returned, and all the changes, evolutions, developments, and discoveries that mankind had experienced over the course of countless generations were rendered insignificant. All that mattered now was all that had mattered from that first instant of life’s inception on the planet: there was life, and it needed to be fed.
Survival.
The Hunt!
It was suddenly all reduced to that because Woodie Norris and a man named Green, who was, Robert Norris suddenly understood, everything he claimed to be!
Norris?
Woodie…and Robert.
They were brothers!
If Woodie was a direct descendant of that first, banished primitive who consumed members of his own species and lived the wild life even at a time when behaving in a civilized manner was as easy as sleeping in a cave, that meant that Robert was also thus related. He shared the same genes with his brother, and in truth, he was the eldest son. Wasn’t he as much a part of the Wild as Woodie…or had he been ignored?
Norris stopped his thoughts with a conscious effort and said, “Listen to yourself! Ignored? You’re acting like you feel left out! Like you want to be a part of this! Look at that thing! Look at what your baby brother’s become!”
Just as he did, the final few convolutions contorted Woodie’s skull and altered its shape and size so much that the glass eye he wore—the one through which Norris was witnessing this entire event—no longer fit into its socket. As Woodie jerked his head around and aimed his snarling face at the boy on the bed, his eye flew out, making Norris involuntarily scream as his perspective went tumbling through a dizzying spin within which he was trapped without so much as a hint of stability. Reflexively he tried to hold on to something…but he had no hands. Desperately he tried to look away…but outside Woodie’s head there was no dark place of memory and dream in which he could hide, and everything he saw spun and rushed at him from every direction, so that finally he felt as if he had been launched into a terrible world of immense objects and pointless motion.
The eye landed on the carpet, bounced, rolled, and settled near a chair leg, cockeyed, so that Norris found himself looking up at an odd angle, into the room. From this floor-bound perspective, Woodie’s hairy body loomed even larger than it had from above, his legs stretching as tall as an office building in a room of fun-house angles and endless depths. Bereft of its contact with Woodie’s being, the stone seemed to lose some of its life, and Norris realized that he was deaf inside it: he no longer had the use of Woodie’s ears through which to hear. All he could do was watch as Woodie reached down to the bed…so far down it seemed…and picked Raymond up…so, so far up…and…
All the violence that resulted in the carnage that Norris found when he was thrust into the room—would find when he was thrust into the room hours later, he tried to remember in a vague attempt at keeping some kind of handle on at least a piece of reality—happened in less than one minute.
Woodie’s fury was complete, and his strength, staggering. He held Raymond up, straight-armed out from his body so that the boy’s head touched the ceiling, looked at him for a moment, and then, in an explosion of brute force, simply pulled both his arms off, allowing the now screaming body to drop onto the bed.
Raymond was rolling frantically in the sheets, bleeding steaming sprays from the stumps of his shoulders and marring the walls on either side while Woodie ate his arms.
Ate them!
Norris felt nausea sweep through him in gasping waves, but without a body he had no way to express it.
When the last of Raymond’s h
and disappeared into Woodie’s mouth, he swallowed and threw his arms out on either side, bellowing exuberantly before bashing himself into the walls around him, as if suddenly realizing that he was indoors. He punched holes in the plaster, bit through wood, railed at the air, and tore gouges in the ceiling with his fingers. After a pause, he ripped Raymond to pieces with three deadly sweeps of his hands…fingers like knives…knives like mercy.
“Thank God he’s finally dead,” Norris whispered when Raymond stopped struggling.
In an instant the body’s head was off, as was most of his face. His chest was open. And what followed, the feeding, numbed Norris through.
When Woodie finished, he stood for a moment with his huge chest heaving, glanced over to the bathroom mirror, and became suddenly very interested in it. He stepped closer, stared, and then lifted his hand to touch the cheek under his empty eye socket. He studied it for a long time, his brows working until he finally turned, looked over the floor, and spotted the eye on the carpet.
Norris saw relief spread over his brother’s face as he leaned down from what looked like a thousand feet up to retrieve his eye. But strangely, with his hand no more than a few inches away, Woodie stopped, cocked his head as if someone were speaking to him, and stood back up, leaving the eye where it lay.
Then Norris saw the woman.
She was standing, beautiful, virtually glowing with radiant light, her long white robes unmarked and gloriously clean in so awful a place as the motel room had become. She was looking at Woodie without a trace of fear or concern for herself. If any word could have described her expression, it could only have been “satisfied.” She was looking at this immense, slavering beast as a mother would a child who had performed some simple task correctly for the first time. And when Woodie returned her gaze, that childish attitude became his own.
He cowered a little, pointing to the eye and moving his lips as if he were speaking…
Speaking, Norris thought. Can that ape speak?
The woman listened and then shook her head.
Woodie’s face twisted with anger, but he did not make so much as a single move forward. Instead he spoke faster and Norris strained, desperate to hear but relegated to a view of shattering silence. Woodie’s words were coming hard and fast, and all the while he continued pointing down at the eye, so that Norris saw his face balanced miles away at the end of an arm that looked as big as the space shuttle’s solid rocket booster.
But despite his impassioned argument, the woman still refused to let Woodie retrieve his eye. Finally, as if in compensation, she produced the thighbone that she had apparently retrieved from the car, and Woodie fell silent looking at it. With solemn purpose, he listened as the woman apparently described the object, holding it out for him to take and smiling benevolently when he finally did.
When the bone was in Woodie’s hairy hand, the woman tossed back her head with a laugh and threw her arms out wide. Woodie rushed into them and picked her up off the floor, reminding Norris sickly of some old movie musical when the boy finally gets the girl. But when he released her, the girl had become something that no old movie musical would ever have featured: she had her bat wings back, and she was only about three feet tall, and she had a tail…
And Woodie leapt right through the glass window, disappearing into the night.
And the girl flew through the hole he had made and up, into the darkened sky.
And Norris suddenly found himself alone, in that horrible room, to await…
“Myself,” he said, feeling his thoughts spinning at the brink of collapse. “I’m going to arrive in a few hours. I’m going to lie here, in the blood, and wait for myself to come and put me in my pocket!”
In a little while red and blue lights were spinning outside, and the door was forced open. In stumbled Sheriff Conway and Detective Michael Cooper together!
He did lie, Norris thought, feeling excited on the one hand that he was in fact beginning to put things into perspective, and vaguely apathetic about anything these silly creatures were doing. He no more followed the police radio here than I did. He and Conway have been in on this all along.
The two men looked over the room and went away, leaving Norris alone for a while.
Then the door opened again and a bunch of guys with cameras and such came in.
Then the door opened a third time, and Norris fell silent as he watched himself come into the room, stagger, and fall, looking like the biggest asshole to ever ride a horse. He couldn’t believe himself. He was suddenly appalled and embarrassed. He was so puny when compared to his brother. He was so weak, and frail, and slow, and senseless when compared to Woodie, with his broad shoulders and powerful hands.
He was so…ugly.
The revelation hit him while he was watching himself slide off the bed and onto the floor. He realized in that instant—the one just before the deputies lifted him off the floor and threw him outside to vomit—that he was doing the exact thing that Mr. Green had warned Woodie not to do: he was looking through the stone and seeing what was there as the stone would see it. He was seeing things from a perspective that was alien to his own human viewpoint. He was becoming part of something…big!
“I’m…” he began to say, starting off a very important thought. “I’m…a part of…”
And then his own hand—the hand of the Robert Norris who was human and normal and who would never have dreamed of anything like what he had just seen—came down on the eye and grabbed it in his fist…
And the whole world went dark.
But the thought was still there…the idea had come.
Norris was left spinning through that darkness with nothing but a growing sense of his own place, position, and purpose. He was left tumbling through a nightmare space that seemed to rush from darkness, toward a light that emanated from an eye…an eye that had been watching him from his dreams since he was a child…his dreams…the eye…they were together…he was there…they were there…the dreams had a man with an eye…two eyes…and a beard…
And he was a child.
And his dad was drunk.
And it was nighttime.
And there was a man with a beard…
And terrible eyes…
Mr. Green.
And Norris was only five…
And his father was drunk…
And Mr. Green was there…
And Mr. Green said, “Now sleep, until the wolf in thine heart it born.”
And the next thing he knew…
“Now, sleep…”
And the next thing he knew…
He remembered it all.
IV
BLOOD PRINCE
SIX
30.
“I’m going to tell you about it, boy,” Norris heard an echoing voice say from the shadows of his own past. “I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to keep it hidden until again we meet, many years from now.”
The old man’s face was thrust up close to his own, and the hand was holding his chin so that he could not look away or remember anything else. The words climbed up like living things from the vault of his mind and tore his life into two separate parts: those five brief years before Dr. Green had “examined” him, and everything that had happened since. He hadn’t known it, but for twenty-five years he had simply been marking time, waiting for the moment when that hidden door in his head would fly open, and these words would pour forth like poisoned darts into his awareness.
And pour they did, verbatim, as if he weren’t remembering at all, but hearing them again, as he had heard them before, so long ago…
“You won’t speak of it, or think of it, or remember it until the day I summon you unto myself,” Dr. Green said with quiet confidence. “On that day, you’ll remember…and you’ll come. No resisting will prevent it. You’ll come. And together, we’ll change the world. Now, listen:
“The man who brought you here tonight isn’t your father, and the place you live isn’t your home. You are of the trees and the
valleys. Your nature is green, and your essence earthen. In your heart there’s no concrete or steel, but forests and open skies. In your soul resides the flame of freedom, lost to all but a precious, dwindling few.
“For you are Wild.
“There are others of the Wild, but you…oh, you will be their prince, because you have been born a Sender! Your dreams will be the key to the future of your kin. Your gift will open their gate. And as the Breed’s emancipator, you will be revered!”
Oh God, Norris thought, his fists clenching before his face as his head dropped and his eyes squeezed shut. What is this? Oh, Jesus! What is it?
His posture was agonized, his body trembling. As he struggled to keep his knees from buckling he felt tears running down his face and saw a faint glimmer of some glowing spark, hovering close to the front of his mind.
The light of reason, he thought, watching that spark fade precariously before the darkness of his memories.
He wanted to reach out and draw back its comforting glow, but instead, he watched helplessly as a curtain of even darker images rushed in and extinguished that light for good…
And then something snapped.
Without reason’s light to blind his mind’s eye, he saw things afresh. He heard the word Sender and thought about his dreams. He remembered that feeling of terror he had become so accustomed to over the years: the sensation of huge, pressing dread that descended on him every time he went to sleep, the overpowering horror that had driven him kicking and clawing his way out of bed as if the sheets were ablaze each and every night, and he realized that, somewhere in the back of his mind, he had always suspected that there was more to his dreams than just nightmare chills. He had always sensed…
No!
“Sensed” was too weak a word.
He had always known he was special in some way. He had never verbalized it, of course, but he had KNOWN it, as surely as he had known that the little house with the sagging roof and cockeyed shutters hadn’t been nestled back in the trees off the old dairy road before that night that his father had scooped him out of bed and said, “We’re gonna get to the bottom of this ‘fore you do any more harm!”