He flashed the inevitable warm smile. But he felt nothing, not even that he knew her, or had ever been connected with her, or that they even shared the same world.
That was it; they didn,t share the same world. Nobody shared the world in which he lived right now. Nobody could.
Except maybe that thing that had attacked him in Mendocino. He closed his eyes. He felt those fangs biting into his scalp, into his face, that deep horrific pain in the side of his face when those teeth sank in.
And if he hadn,t killed that man in the North Beach alley, would that man have gone on to become a beast thing, too, just like Reuben! He shuddered. Thank God, he,d killed the guy. Oh, now, wait a minute. What kind of a prayer was that!
He went blank.
The coffee in his cup looked like gasoline. The cookies looked like plaster.
And it wasn,t reversible, was it? It was no matter of choice; in fact he had not the slightest control at all.
The voice of the coroner,s assistant snapped him back to life. "Oh, it was an animal all right. We can tell by the lysozyme in the saliva. Well, humans don,t have this amount of lysozyme in their saliva. Humans have a lot of amylase, which starts to break down the carbohydrates that we eat. But an animal doesn,t have amylase, and it does have a powerful amount of lysozyme, which kills the bacteria it ingests, which is why a dog can eat from a garbage dump or a rotted carcass and we can,t. But I,ll tell you something strange about this beast, whatever it is. It had more lysozyme than any dog would ever have. And there were other enzymes in the saliva that we can,t properly analyze here. Tests on this are going to take months."
No, no hair, no fur, nothing like that. They,d collected some fibers, or thought they had, but then they came up with nothing.
His heart was pounding when he put down the phone. So he,d become something other than human, without a doubt. It all got back to the hormones, didn,t it? But that was as far as he could understand.
What he did understand was that he had to be locked in his room before it got dark.
And it was fall now, almost winter, and this was one of those damp gray days with no real sky at all, just a wet roof over San Francisco.
By five o,clock, he was finished with his story.
He,d checked in covertly with Celeste, who verified the Chronicle account of the woman,s bruises and torn clothes. He,d checked in with San Francisco General but no one would say anything and Grace was in surgery.
He,d also checked out all the main versions of the mystery animal attack online. The story was galloping around the globe, all right, and almost all accounts mentioned the "mysterious" attack on him in Mendocino. Only now as he tracked the news of Marchent,s murder did he realize this had traveled the globe as well. "Mystery Beast Strikes Again?" "Bigfoot Intervenes to Save Lives."
He,d also checked out the YouTubes of reporters in North Beach describing the "back-alley beast."
Then he hit the computer keyboard with the woman,s words.
"It had a face, I tell you. It spoke to me. It moved like a man. A man wolf. [She,d used that very term, his term, "man wolf."] I heard its voice. Dear God, I wish I hadn,t run from it. It saved my life, and I ran from it as if it was a monster."
He made the story personal, yes, but only in tone. Following her own vivid descriptions, a review of the forensic evidence and the inevitable questions, he wrote in conclusion:
Was it some sort of "Man Wolf" that saved the victim from her assailant? Was it a beast of intelligence that so recently spared the life of this reporter in the darkened hallway of a Mendocino house?
We have no answers now to these questions. But there can be no doubt as to the intentions of the North Beach rapist - already connected to a string of unsolved rapes - or the drug-crazed killers who took the life of Marchent Nideck on the Mendocino coast.
If science cannot yet explain the forensic evidence found at both sites, or the emotional testimony of the survivors, there is no reason to believe that it won,t in time be able to explain all. For now, we must, as so often happens, live with