Keller, who,d always been sort of in love with her, and Phil and Grace were talking about that very development right now, and they weren,t really saying a whole lot. Grace had gotten a call from a specialist in Paris who was very interested in the wolf killings, but she hadn,t had much time to talk with the man. Easy to shut them out.
Reuben brought up the pictures he,d taken of himself last night, which he had buried in an encrypted file that was password protected. Staring at them was horrifying and tantalizing.
He wanted it to happen again.
He had to face that. He was looking forward to it as he had never looked forward to anything in his entire life, not even his first night in bed with a woman, or Christmas morning when he was eight years old. He was waiting for it to happen.
Meantime he reminded himself that it hadn,t happened until midnight the night before. And he went back to surfing classics on lycanthropy and mythology. Actually the lore of wolves in all cultures was fascinating him as much as werewolf stories proper, and old medieval traditions pertaining to a village Brotherhood of the Green Wolf charmed him with their descriptions of country people dancing wildly around bonfires into which the "wolf" was now and then symbolically tossed.
He was about to call it a night when he remembered that collection, The Man-Wolf and Other Tales, by those two nineteenth-century French writers. Why not try it? It was easy to find. On Amazon.com, he punched in an order for one of several reprints, and then decided to try to find the title story online.
No problem. On horrormasters.com, he found a free download. He probably wouldn,t read all of it, just have a look in the vain hope that some nugget of truth might be mixed in with the fiction.
About Christmas time in the year 18 - , as I was lying fast asleep at the Cygne at Fribourg, my old friend Gideon Sperver broke abruptly into my room crying -
"Fritz, I have good news for you; I am going to take you to Nideck....
Nideck!
The next sentence read, "You know Nideck, the finest baronial castle in the country, a grand monument of the glory of our forefathers."
He could not quite believe his eyes. There was Marchent,s last name in a story called "The Man-Wolf."
He broke off and Googled "Nideck." Yes, it was an actual place, a real Chateau de Nideck, a famous ruin, on the road from Oberhaslach to Wangenbourg. But that really wasn,t the point. The point was the last name had been used over a hundred years ago in a short story about a werewolf. And the story had come into English in 1876, right before the Nideck family moved to Mendocino County and built their immense house overlooking the ocean. This family that came out of nowhere, apparently, if Simon Oliver was right, was named Nideck.
He was stunned. This had to be a coincidence, and certainly it was a coincidence that no one had noticed and which no one might ever notice.
But there was something else in those first few lines. He brought up the story again. Sperver. He,d seen that name before too, somewhere, and it had something to do with Marchent and Nideck Point. But what? He couldn,t remember. Sperver. He could almost see the name written in ink, but where? Then it hit him. It was the last name of Felix Nideck,s very dear friend and mentor, Margon, the man Felix had called Margon the Godless. Hadn,t his name been written on the mat inside the framing of the big photograph over the fireplace? Oh, why hadn,t he written down those names? But he was certain of it. He remembered Marchent saying the name Margon Sperver.
No, this simply could not be a coincidence. One name, yes, but two names? No. Impossible. But what in the world could this possibly mean?
He experienced a deep frisson.
Nideck.
What had Simon Oliver, his lawyer, told him? He,d talked on and on about this in phone call after phone call, as if reassuring himself of this rather than Reuben.
"The family,s hardly what you would call ancient. It comes out of nowhere in the 1880s. There was an exhaustive search for relatives after Felix disappeared, for anyone who might have information on the man. They found nothing. Of course the nineteenth century is filled with new men, self-made men. A timber baron who comes out of nowhere and builds