it talked. "Murder, murder." He,d always known he didn,t make that 911 call. It was the beast thing that had picked up his phone.
A great relief coursed through him. Okay, so it wasn,t so degenerate and transformed that it had become a mindless monster. No, it was inhabited by some civilized force just like the back-alley beast of San Francisco. And if that was the case, perhaps it knew - it knew - what was happening to the man it had nearly killed in Marchent,s hallway.
Was that good? Or was that bad?
The voices from downstairs were driving him crazy.
He got up, found a CD of Mozart, a piano concerto that he loved, shoved it into the Bose player by his bed, and turned it up to full volume.
Now that worked. He couldn,t hear them. He couldn,t hear anybody - not even that low rolling hum of the voices of the city around him. He hit the REPEAT DISK button on the machine, and relaxed.
With the fire flickering away, and the rain tapping at the windows, and the lovely rippling Mozart filling the room, he felt almost normal.
Well, for a moment.
He was soon skimming one scholarly source after another. Little of what he found proved a surprise. He,d always known lycanthropy was perceived by many historically as a mental illness in which you imagined you were a wolf and behaved like one; or some kind of demonic shape-shifting in which you did indeed become a wolf until someone shot you with a silver bullet and your lupine body changed back to human form as you died, maybe with a placid expression on your face, and an old gypsy woman pronounced that you would now have rest.
As for the movies, well, he,d seen a good many of them - an embarrassing number, in fact. It was easy to find seminal scenes on YouTube, and as he tracked back through Ginger Snaps and then Jack Nicholson,s Wolf, something pretty ghastly came to him.
This was fiction, of course, but it presented the phase he was in as transformative and not final. Only in the early stages were some werewolves anthropoid. By the end of Wolf, Jack Nicholson had been a full-blown four-footed animal of the forest. By the end of Ginger Snaps, the unfortunate girl wolf had become a great hideous and repulsive porcine demon.
But then it spoke, he thought, flashing on Mendocino. It used a phone, for the love of hell. It punched in 911 and brought help for the victim. How old was it? How long had it been around? And what the hell was it doing in the redwood forest up there?
Celeste had said something, what was it? That there had always been wolves up there in Mendocino County? Well, the local population certainly didn,t agree. He,d seen enough of them reporting on television that wolves were extinct in their part of the world forest.
Okay. Forget about the movies answering any questions. What do the movies know? Though there was one little thing worth salvaging: in several movies, the power to become a werewolf was referred to as a "gift." He liked that. A gift. That was more in keeping with what was happening to him certainly.
But in most of the movies, the gift didn,t have much of a purpose. In fact, it was unclear exactly why cinema werewolves went after their victims. All they did was rip random people to pieces. They didn,t even drink the blood or eat the meat. They didn,t behave like wolves at all. They behaved as if ... they had rabies. True, in The Howling, they had fun making out, but other than that, what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn,t remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.
And forget silver bullets too. If there was science behind that, well, he wasn,t Reuben the Man Wolf.
Reuben the Man Wolf. That was the term he liked most of all himself. And it had been ratified by Susan Larson. Pray Billie left his headline intact.
Is that so wrong, to want to think of myself as Man Wolf? Again, he tried to muster some compassion for the rapist he,d killed. But he could not.
At about eight o,clock, he took a break. He shut off the Mozart and worked at shutting out the voices on his own.
Wasn,t as hard as he,d thought. Celeste was no longer in the house. In fact, she,d gone off to a cafe with Mort