The Wolfman Read online

  “Mr. Talbot?”

  He had been so lost in reverie that he hadn’t heard her approach and he shot to his feet as nervously as a young heir at a debutante’s ball. But the actor in him rebelled at the foolishness and immediately pulled his features into a smooth smile.

  “Miss Conliffe.”

  “Thank you for coming,” she said as he ushered her to the adjoining seat. She arranged her tightly cinched brocade robe primly. Lawrence was fully aware of the maid lingering down the hall, her face as stern as a beadle’s, arms folded across her considerable bosom. Lawrence had no wish to challenge such ferocity.

  “I’m sorry we’re meeting like this.” He reached beside the chair and lifted the small satchel of Ben’s belongings.

  “These were Ben’s. He’d want you to have them.”

  But it was immediately clear that she recognized the bag. Her eyes glistened as she accepted it, and when she lay it upon her lap she caressed the worn leather. Then she opened it and removed the daguerreotype picture of herself. The memory of it, perhaps of the happy day on which it was taken, struck her hard and a sob hitched through her chest. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “If . . . if there’s anything you need,” Lawrence said, feeling suddenly large and clumsy. “Anything at all, please let me know.”

  She looked up from the picture and Lawrence could see her eyes transform from the vulnerability of tears to something harder and colder.

  “I want to know what happened to him,” she said, and there was no tremble in her voice.

  “So do I. And I’ll do everything I can.”

  Those words, that promise, broke the fragile resolve and she disintegrated into tears. He moved quickly to sit beside her, drew her into the circle of his arms, and caressed her head as she buried her face into the hollow of his throat and wept.

  The maid took a single defensive step toward them, but Lawrence caught her glance and gave a mild shake of his head. The maid paused, watching her mistress, then nodded and resumed her post.

  Lawrence held Gwen as she cried. The sobs were so deep, the grief so huge and immediate that he wondered if she had been able to let it out before now. Certainly Sir John offered no haven of a shoulder to cry on. Lawrence felt awful for not being able to help, but he was glad he could do at least this much. Her tears burned against his throat like acid and he fought to keep his own sobs from tearing free of his chest.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Lawrence knew that he would not be sleeping much tonight, if at all. Too much had happened. Too much was still happening. His brother’s funeral was tomorrow, and his brother’s fiancée was just down the hall. Lawrence’s thoughts flowed like liquid mercury from one to the other, from grief at his loss and guilt over his desires. Sleep be damned.

  He paced the length of his room over and over again, sipping too much whiskey, frowning at the shadows, imagining laughter and boyhood chatter from years ago. All of his and Ben’s possessions were still in that room. When Lawrence had gone away after their mother’s death Ben apparently moved across the hall and left every reminder of childhood behind. Shelves filled with clockwork toys and tin soldiers and tin weapons surrounded him. A clothes tree in a corner still held red cloaks from their adventures as Roman soldiers and oilskins in which they walked the decks of imaginary ships. A broken rocking horse leaned against a wall near a cricket bat and a pile of chipped building blocks. All the colors had paled like a faded photograph . . . like his own memories, which had lost so much clarity and texture as the years had burned away.

  In the distance, miles beyond the estate, there was the sound of thunder, low and mean like an old dragon clearing its throat. Lawrence almost smiled, thinking of how Ben had convinced him that thunder was the voice of dragons, but then another thought raked its claws through that image. The thunder rumbled again and Lawrence stood there, staring at the big four-poster bed, remembering thoughts he had hoped never to revisit. Never, especially not here. . . .

  THUNDER GROWLED IN the east and the shaking of the old house’s timbers jolted young Lawrence Talbot out of a dream of dragons. His heart was in his throat and he crept out of his bed and crossed the cold floor to the edge of Ben’s bed. He bent low over the sleeping form and hissed, “Ben! Wake up!”

  “Ug . . . it’s late . . . I’m asleep . . .”

  Lawrence shook him by the shoulder. “I heard something.”

  Ben propped himself up on his elbows and listened, eyes still closed. “It’s just the storm,” he said and then collapsed back onto the bed and pulled the covers up over his head. A buzzing snore came faintly from beneath the blanket.

  Lawrence made a frustrated face but he did not retreat back to his own bed. Instead he stood there, still bent over, his head cocked to listen.

  There it was again. A strange sound. More of a growl than a rumble, but muffled. Was it outside the house . . . or inside? He crept to the door of their room and turned the handle as quietly as he could, trying to make sense of what he had heard.

  Only silence greeted his straining ear.

  Summing up all of his meager courage, Lawrence pulled the door open and stepped into the hall with all the care of someone putting a foot onto thin lake ice. He gradually shifted his weight, willing the floorboards not to creak. The hallway seemed a mile long and as lightning flashed outside the twist of shadows made it seem as if the rows of deer heads had turned toward him, their glass eyes searching for this pale intruder.

  Lawrence shuffled sideways, his back to the wall, turning front and back to make sure that all of the shadows were just empty air, that nothing was hiding there waiting to reach out a taloned hand. On many wild nights he had dreamed of monsters in the dark—strange, shapeless creatures that skulked out of the black forest, sniffing for tender meat. Father and Singh always smiled at his stories, assuring him that the woods were safe and the house was a fortress, but Lawrence always feared that they were saying that just to fool him. To protect him from the truth. That maybe there were monsters out there in the dark.

  Thunder rattled the windows and in the heart of their din Lawrence thought he heard the other sound, the one that had pulled him from his sleep. That indefinable noise that he knew was made by something that should not be here. At the top of the stairs he paused, his tongue nervously licking his dry lips. Should he wake up father?

  No! Father was away on business.

  The thought terrified Lawrence. Why would Father go away when a storm was coming? Father had his guns, he had shot bears and boars and all manner of creatures. Surely Father was unafraid of anything in the woods . . . but now the truth that his hero and protector was not here chilled Lawrence to his core.

  What about Singh?

  But the Sikh’s room was on the other side of the Hall; with all these shadows it might as well be on the dark side of the moon.

  Thunder slammed a fist against the walls and the whole house shook. Lawrence looked over his shoulders and he could swear that the deer heads had turned toward him, their antlers sharp as knives, their eyes glaring at him with unnatural ferocity. He backed quickly away, moving backward down the stairs. First a few steps, then more, and when the next thunderclap struck he whirled and ran down the rest of the winding stairwell, his bare feet slapping desperately on the icy wood. Outside, the storm had brought wind with it and it howled through every crack in the walls and under every door. The wind rose and rose until it was a piercing shriek and Lawrence wanted to stop up his ears, but at the same time he felt drawn to it. It called to him and screamed at him and tore at the night.

  Lawrence ran down the last of the stairs and raced along the side passage, away from the great front door, heading toward the back door that led into his mother’s glass house garden. She would not be there this late, of course, but it was a place where she always felt safe, and where she read to Lawrence and Ben. Even with all its glass walls it felt more like a fortress to him than this pile of wood and rock; so he tore along, chased by shadows, pounded by thunder. A
nd the wind’s wail continued to build to a banshee shriek.

  Lightning flashed so brightly that the corridor was suddenly stark whites and blacks, and it outlined every curl and twist in the ornate wrought iron of the garden door. The reflection turned each pane of glass in the double doors to milky opacity, and then the lightning vanished and the doors were plunged into darkness. But not before Lawrence had found them and grasped the smooth, cold, familiar curves of the handles.

  More thunder, and the wail of the wind was a white-hot needle in his brain.

  As Lawrence thrust open the doors the wail spiked even higher and for a terrible moment he thought that the sound was a scream and not the wind at all. He stepped tentatively into the garden and winds buffeted him, and then he realized why he could hear the wind so well—the glass house doors were opened to the natural garden beyond. The exterior doors stood open, moving back and forth as waves of rain shoved at them. The glass house was soaked and frigid water washed around Lawrence’s ankles, sending chills up his flesh in waves. And the wails continued. Hypnotized by the moment, lost in the dark sorcery of wind and thunder and rain and lightning, Lawrence moved forward as if in a dream, unable to stop his frozen feet, his eyes blinking as he stepped into the spray of rain by the doors to the outside garden.

  Thunder struck again and again, and between the bursts he could hear the wail. Lawrence stopped.

  The world stopped.

  He looked down at the water flowing toward him from the edge of the patio. It was black with shadows, but even when the lightning flashed it remained black.

  Lawrence frowned.

  Black rain made no sense.

  He followed it with his eyes back along the cracks in the flagstone to the base of the huge stone fountain that was carved with birds and squirrels and pine cones. The black rain came from there.

  The lightning flashed once more, but dimmer now, as if the storm was moving away. In its glow Lawrence saw something that made no sense to him. A man knelt before the fountain, his head bowed as if in prayer. His shoulders shook as he knelt there.

  Lawrence recognized those shoulders, the clothes.

  Father?

  How? How could Father be here when he was supposed to be away on business? Why was he here?

  And . . . was he laughing? Weeping?

  Then lightning flashed once more and the moment became stranger still, for Lawrence saw that his father was not alone as he knelt by the fountain. He had his arms wrapped around another person, cradling her to his chest.

  A woman.

  “Mother?” Lawrence whispered.

  The wail tore through the night, rising upward from the kneeling figure as Sir John raised his head and screamed to the storm. As he did so the body in his arms shifted and Lawrence saw his mother’s arm fall limply down, her hand striking the wet ground. The black rain flowed from her, from her arm, from her body, from her skin. A river of darkness that washed from her and across the flagstones toward Lawrence.

  “Mother? . . .” Lawrence said again, and this time his father heard his plaintive little voice. Sir John turned, still cradling Solana to his chest. As lightning flashed Lawrence could see the lines of terrible, impossible grief carved into his father’s face. His father’s eyes were dark, a red that was filled with grief and fury and rage and an impossible loss.

  Sir John opened his mouth and uttered a cry of despair that tore the night apart. Lawrence felt the blackness of the storm suddenly gather around him, closing like a fist on his throat, and then his own scream lifted into the air as the lightning and thunder exploded around him.

  And then there was nothing but blackness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lawrence lay on his bed and stared up at the blackness of the ceiling. He felt old and used and damaged in a hundred ways. He had thought himself free of the memories of that awful night. His mother was thirty years in her grave, and Lawrence had not set foot in this house since.

  But now, as if the wood and stone were a battery that had stored every minute detail of that night, it replayed over and over in his head. No matter how much whiskey he drank the images were relentless, undeterred. Every detail of that night . . . and of what followed. . . .

  THE BLACK CARRIAGE was not a hearse but it looked like one. Large and heavy, with shaded windows and four black horses led by a grim-faced man in a dark suit.

  Young Lawrence is only remotely aware that he is being carried. His mind does not process time or movement or action with any clarity or cogency. He feels like he is floating. When he hears voices he does not know who they belong to. His father’s voice is that of a stranger. The other voice—people are calling him Dr. Hoenneger—is equally unknown to him. Lawrence is beyond the point of associating people with reality, because nothing is real.

  This is all a dream. A nightmare. He knows that, because it must be a nightmare. What he saw last night in the garden. The black rain. His mother’s body. The uncontrollable grief of his father. These are not possible in the real world . . . they belong in dark dreams. Lawrence understands this. Just as he knows that the black carriage and Dr. Hoenneger likewise do not belong to the waking world. And the dark horses and this strange building—they are all parts of a nightmare, too. The storm did this. It was too loud, too strong, and it broke the world. The wind and the rain washed all sense away.

  Lawrence thinks these things without knowing that he is thinking. His mind is twisted into crooked shapes and self-awareness has been washed away with black rain down a gutter.

  Lawrence’s eyes see words painted on wood outside the building, but they’re nonsense words. They don’t belong to him, they don’t apply to his world. In his world there is no Lambeth Asylum, and even if there was he would not be there, and his father would not be taking him there. Nightmares are like that. Strange things that make no sense are jumbled into shapes that don’t fit in his head.

  “Poor lad,” a voice says. Lawrence does not know the voice, and doesn’t care.

  He stares upward with eyes that are drying from not blinking, but he doesn’t feel discomfort. Discomfort belongs to a different world. Nor does he feel the jab of a needle. It’s only pain and it doesn’t belong to him either.

  All that belongs to him is the darkness. He can feel it spreading through him and closing around him, and as he sinks into it Lawrence hears his mother’s voice singing an old Spanish lullaby. He knows that he should remember the words. But he can’t, and he can’t find a way to care.

  The blackness is so soft and smooth and it covers everything. . . .

  THINKING BACK, REMEMBERING now with a cruel clarity those things that were fractured dreams to him as a boy, Lawrence threw his arm across his eyes in an attempt to deny, even to himself, that he wept.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They buried Benjamin Talbot the next day.

  Funerals are supposed to be dreary days with gray skies that weep cold rain, but the sun stubbornly shone and the trees were filled with idiot birds who sang as if hurt and harm had not poisoned the air of Blackmoor.

  The funeral procession began at the church, where a scowling Pastor Fisk gave a long and droning homily about the transience and fragility of life and the enduring suffering of the grave. During the church service Lawrence sat beside his father and glared hatred at the old vicar. To compound grief with religious guilt was, to his view, the greatest sin. Wasn’t it enough to suffer irretrievable loss?

  Lawrence cut covert looks to his left, where Sir John sat with wooden rigidity and allowed nothing at all to show on his face, and to his right, where Gwen Conliffe sat hunched over the knot of despair in her heart. She clung to her father and wept continuously, and Lawrence was sure that the pastor’s words were doing her actual harm. Just when Lawrence’s rage had built to the point where he was ready to jump to his feet and tell Pastor Fisk to go leap into his own dismal Hellfire, the sermon ended. The congregation stood and sang a hymn of grace that was, at least, not an actual condemnation of having lived, and
then it was over. At least the church part of it was over.

  From there the coffin was loaded into the back of a hearse pulled by four night black horses, and the procession to the cemetery began.

  It was far, far worse than the sermon. At least in the church there was someone specific at whom Lawrence could direct his frustration and anger, but now it was a slow march to the place where Ben’s body would rest forever. Rest, and rot, and probably be forgotten in little more than a generation. There were no more Talbots except for Lawrence and he had no intention of returning to the Hall to live. And Ben had never had the chance to marry Gwen. Ben had no sons to carry on his name, and Gwen was young . . . there would be an end to her grief. She would return to London with her father and in time her shattered heart would heal. She would marry some other man, and Ben would settle into being a footnote in her life. His death would drift into local legend here in Blackmoor and he would be remembered more for how he died than how he lived.

  That hurt Lawrence terribly, and as he walked behind the hearse tears ran down his face. If the sky would not weep for Benjamin, then the tears of Gwen Conliffe and Lawrence Talbot would stand as substitutes, even though those tears fell on cold ground and were absorbed by dust and trampled into obscurity by the rest of the townsfolk, who trudged along behind the procession more out of duty and obligation than sentiment.

  BESIDE THE GRAVE the pastor spoke again, but this time his remarks were brief and he recited his lines straight from the scriptures; by then Lawrence was so set against the deaf old fool that he internally mocked the performance.

  And then the words were done and the mourners had each dropped a ritual handful of dirt onto the coffin, and Gwen had scattered roses atop it, and all that was left was the reality that Ben was going into the ground. It was the end of all things for Lawrence’s brother, and as he watched the coffin being lowered into the cold earth he could feel his heart descend to a lower place in his chest. He knew that it would remain there forever, just as Ben would remain here in the soil of Blackmoor until the sun itself burned to a cinder in the sky.