The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

Of course 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 ra**st 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 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.