The Wolves of Midwinter

16

WHERE WERE THEY? Did it matter? Reuben and Stuart were so hungry they didn’t care. They were exhausted too. The crumbling old villa was on the mountainside, and the writhing equatorial jungle was reclaiming it, the arched windows without glass, the Grecian columns peeling, the floors caked with decaying leaves and filth. A hoard of hungry creatures scurried through the fetid debris and the broken withered undergrowth that choked the passageways and stairs.

Their host, Hugo, was the only other Morphenkind they’d ever seen, except for the Distinguished Gentlemen, a great hulking giant of a man, with long snarled and matted brown hair, and maniacal black eyes, dressed in rags that might have once been a shirt and khaki shorts. Barefoot, covered in dirt.

And after he’d directed them to the filthy rooms in which they might sleep on soiled and rotting mattresses, Sergei said under his breath, “This is what happens when a Morphenkind lives as a beast all the time.”

The villa had the smell of an urban zoo in the middle of summer. And indeed the heat was simmering and soothing after the relentless cold of Northern California. Yet it was like a toxin, wearying and weakening Reuben with every step.

In a small voice, Stuart asked, “Must we stay here? Like what about an American motel? A little B&B? Or a nice lodging with some old native in a hut somewhere?”

“We haven’t come for the amenities of the house,” said Margon. “Now listen to me, both of you. We don’t spend all our lupine hours hunting humankind and there’s never been a law that says we have to. We’ve come here to prowl the ancient ruins in these jungles—temples, tombs, the ruins of a city—the way men and women can’t possibly do it—as Morphenkind—and we’ll feed off the jungle rodents as we do it. We’ll see things that no eye has seen in centuries.”

“This is a dream,” said Reuben. “Why didn’t I think of such things?” A thousand possibilities were opening before him.

“Fill your bellies first,” said Margon. “Nothing can hurt you here—not the beasts, not the serpents, not the insects, and not the natives if any dare to approach. Drop your clothes where you stand. Breathe and live as Morphenkinder.”

At once, they obeyed him, stripping away shirts and trousers that were already soaked with sweat.

The wolf coat rose all over Reuben’s body, sealing out the heat as it always did the cold. The enervating weakness in his limbs evaporated in a surge of power. At once the zinging, sighing, rippling voices of the jungle assailed him. Over the hills and valleys around them, the jungle seethed like one great undulating fungoid being.

They dropped down effortlessly from the cliff and into the rattling web of sharp-edged leaf and prickling vine, the night sky pink and luminescent above them, allowing themselves to slide fearlessly down the mountainside.

The noxious squirming brown-coated rodents slithered away from them everywhere. The hunting was easy, the prey large and pungent, gasping impotently with razor teeth, as the Morphenkinder ripped through fur and sinew to spouting blood.

They feasted together, thrashing and rolling noisily in the undergrowth, the jungle around them erupting with the alarms of the living things who feared them, large and small. The night monkeys screamed in the treetops. Rotted crumbling branches and old tree trunks shattered beneath them, the tough fibrous vines whipped and torn by their simplest movements, snakes thrashing wildly through the foliage as the insects swarmed, seeking to blind them or stop them to no avail.

Again and again, Reuben brought down the fat succulent rats, big as raccoons, ripping back the twitching silky coat to bite into the meat. Always the meat. The same salty blood-soaked meat. The world devours the world to make the world.

At last all were satisfied and lay about in a bower of broken palm leaves and clawing branches, lazy and half dozing. How embracing was the hot motionless air, the deep rumble of malignant life all around them.

“Come,” said Margon. He was the smallest of the Man Wolf pack, moving with a feline grace and swiftness that often dazzled Reuben.

They followed him on and on as he broke a tunnel through the dense growth, moving on all fours, springing upwards from time to time to chart a swift passage through the jungle high above the earth.

They came to a deep valley, slumbering beneath its writhing blanket of green.

Far off they could smell the sea, and for a moment Reuben thought he heard it, the rise and fall of the waves, equatorial waves, windless, and lapping again and again on an imagined beach.

There was no scent of humans here any more than there had been around the villa. The deceptive yet soothing quiet of the natural world reigned, with the simmering boiling sound of death, death in the treetops, death on the jungle floor—unbroken by a human voice.

It chilled Reuben suddenly to think of how long the world in its entirety had been like this place, devoid of human eyes or human ears or human language. Was Margon thinking of these same things? Margon, who’d been born in a time when the world had had no savage pedigree of biological evolution.

A terrible loneliness and sense of fatality came over Reuben. And yet this was a priceless perception, a priceless moment. And he felt wondrously alert, marveling at the universe of varying shapes and movements that he could pick from the airy darkness. He knew he was man and Morphenkind in one. Sergei rose on hind legs and threw his head back, his mouth gaping, fangs gleaming as if he were swallowing the breeze. Even the big shadowy brown wolf figure of Stuart, almost as big as Sergei, seemed content for the moment, crouched but not to spring, merely looking out with gleaming blue eyes at the valley beneath them and the distant slopes beyond.

Was Margon dreaming? He swayed slightly from one foot to the other, great hairy arms slack at his sides, as if the breeze were washing him clean.

“This way,” Margon signaled finally. And they plunged with him now into what for human beings would have been an impassable tangle of knotted vines and sharp, prickling, and menacing leaves. Breaking loudly through pocket after pocket of fetid and wet underwood, they moved on, inexorably, birds screeching heavenward, lizards wriggling out of their path.

Ahead Reuben saw the great hulk of a pyramid. On all fours they traveled along its huge base, and then mounted its high steps, tearing loose like so much wrapping paper the living thatch that covered it.

How clear under the rosy sky were these curious twisted Mayan figures, so exquisitely carved, limbs seeming to writhe like the snakes and vines of the jungle around them, solemn faces in profile with half-closed eyes and noses like the beaks of great birds. Heads were wreathed in feathers. Bodies were embedded in mysterious configurations and patterns, as if imprisoned in the very fabric of the tropical world.

On and on they went, running their paws over these stone images as they yanked back the veil of foliage.

How private, how intimate, these moments seemed. Far back in the workaday world such relics were enshrined in museums, untouchable, and out of context, unconnected to such a night as this.

Yet here, against this monument, Reuben pressed the pads of his paws, and his forehead, relishing the rough surface and even the deep smell of the breathing, disintegrating stone.

He broke away from the others and bounded up the slope of the pyramid, clawed feet gaining easy traction as he moved—until he was under the infinitely faint and twinkling stars.

The blowing mist, filled with the light of the moon, was seeking to swallow the lamps of the heavens. Or so a poet might imagine, when in fact the whole odoriferous and quivering world around him, of earth and flora and helpless fauna, of gaseous cloud and humid air—all this sighed and sang at a million cross-purposes, and ultimately with no avowed purpose—an accidental chaos blindly serving up the unaccountable beauty he now saw.

What are we that this is beautiful to us? What are we that we are now powerful as lions and fear nothing, yet see this with the eyes and hearts of thinking beings—makers of music, makers of history, makers of art? Makers of the serpentine carvings that cover this old and blood-drenched structure? What are we that we feel such things as I am feeling now?

He saw the others running, stopping, and moving on. He went down again to join them.

For hours they prowled, over broken walls, low flattop buildings, and the pyramids themselves, searching out again and again the faces, forms, geometrical designs, until finally Reuben grew weary and wanted only to sit again under the sky, drinking in with all his senses the unmistakable ambience of this secret and neglected place.

But the little pack kept moving, towards the scent of the sea. He too wanted to see the shoreline. He dreamed suddenly of running on endless deserted sand.

Margon was in the lead with Sergei moving fast behind him. Reuben caught up with Stuart and on they traveled at the easy pace until Margon stopped suddenly. He rose to full height.

Reuben knew why. He too had caught it.

Voices in the night where there should have been none.

Up a small bluff they climbed.

The great warm ocean stretched beyond, sparkling wondrously under the bright incandescent clouds. So different from the cold northern Pacific, this inviting tropical sea.

Far below they saw a winding road leading on with a broken jagged beach beyond it. The sand appeared white, and the waves black with white foam as they crashed on the rocks.

The voices came from the south. Margon moved south. Why? What did he hear?

Then they all heard it as they followed him. Reuben saw the change in Stuart as he himself felt the delicious hardening of his body, the seeming expansion of his chest.

Voices crying in the night, the voices of children.

Margon began to run and they all tried frantically to keep up with him.

Further south they moved and further up onto a belt of cliffs where the vegetation died away, leaving only a rocky promontory.

The warm wind came strong and fresh, flooding over them as they found themselves standing there together.

Far below to their left, tucked into the mountainside, they saw the clear outline of an electrically lighted house and near it sprawling and manicured gardens, lighted swimming pools, and paved lots. The house was a conglomeration of tile roofs and broad terraces. Reuben could hear the low strum and rumble of machines. Cars crowded the lots like exotic beetles.

The voices rose, in a soft chorus of cries and desperate muted words. Children in this house. Boys, and girls, frightened, agitated, and without hope. And over the dismal choir of misery came the deeper voices of men, English-speaking men, mingling with one another in easy camaraderie. And the low drumbeat of women’s voices in another language, speaking of discipline and pain.

“The best here, the very best,” came a deep masculine voice. “You will find nothing like this anywhere in the world, not even in Asia.”

A girl child wept without words. An angry, bruising woman’s voice in a foreign tongue commanded obedience, so transparent the cajoling and bullying woven together.

Scent of innocence and suffering, scents of evil, and other scents, strangely ambiguous and unclassifiable, odious and ugly, rose all around them.

Margon dropped off the edge of the cliff, arms raised, falling down and down till he landed heavily on the tile roof. They all followed, landing silently on their padded feet. How could they not follow? A low rumble came from Stuart’s chest that was not a roar, not a growl. Sergei answered.

Once more they dropped down, this time to a wide and spacious terrace. Ah, such a heavenly place, with soft, fluttering flowerbeds aglow in the gentle electric light, and the swimming pools shimmering and twinkling like rare jewels. The palm trees rattling in the caressing wind.

The walls of a villa rose before them, with glass windows and subtle soothing lights, sheer curtains billowing out into the night and twisting in the breeze.

Whisper of a child praying.

With a roar, Margon passed into the room as shrieks and screams rose all around him.

The children scrambled off the high-backed bed and ran for the corners as the woman and the half naked man fled for their lives.

“Chupacabra!” roared the woman. Smell of malice, old habitual malice. She hurled a lamp at the approaching Morphenkinder. A string of curses poured out of her like noxious fluid.

Margon caught the woman by the hair, and Stuart caught the man with her, the sniveling, sobbing man. Instantly, they were dead, remains dragged through the room and flung out over the terrace wall.

Naked, a boy and girl cowered, faces and limbs dark and twisted with terror, black hair shining. Move on.

But something was confusing to Reuben, something deviling him as they ran through the wide corridors, into room after room. There were men fleeing who gave no evil scent, only the rank smell of fear flying off them, and the reek of bowels cut loose, and urine gushing. And something else that might have been shame.

Against a wall two men stood, white men, men of ordinary build and ordinary clothes, stark terrified, faces wet and blanched, mouths loose and watering. How many times had Reuben seen that very attitude before, that helplessness, that blank stare of a broken human being on the verge of madness? But something was missing here, something was confusing, something was not right.

Where was the clear imperative? Where was the decisive scent? Where was the undeniable evidence of evil that had always goaded him to kill instantly in the past?

Margon stood beside him.

“I can’t do it,” Reuben whispered. “They’re cowards,” he whispered. “But I can’t—.”

“Yes, the ignorant and thoughtless clientele of these slave traders,” said Margon under his breath, “the very tide of appetite that supports this foul business. They’re everywhere in this house.”

“But what do we do?” asked Reuben.

Stuart stood helplessly there, waiting for the command.

Below people were running and screaming. Ah, now there was the scent, there was the old stench that galvanized Reuben and sent him flying down the staircase. Evil, hate you, kill you, full-blown evil, reeking like a carnivorous plant. How easy it was to take them down, the hard-bitten, the scum, one after another. Were these the old habitual predators, or their servants? He didn’t know. He didn’t care.

Gunshots rang out in the plaster rooms. “Chupacabra, chupacabra.” Wild volleys of Spanish burst forth like the crack of artillery.

There was a car starting out there in the night, and the roar of an accelerating engine.

Through the broad open doors of a terrace, Reuben saw the giant figure of Sergei bounding after the car and easily overtaking it, springing first on the roof, and then dropping down in front of the windshield as the vehicle swerved, screeched into a circle, and came to a halt, glass exploding.

Another one of those craven men knelt right in front of Reuben with his arms up, his bald head bowed, wire glasses glinting, prayers issuing from his lips, Catholic prayers, words tumbling out of him meaninglessly and like the mumblings of a maniac.

“Holy Mary Mother of God, Jesus, Joseph, and all the saints, dear God, please, Mother of God, God, please, I swear, no, please, please, no …”

And again, no clear and unequivocal stench of evil, no scent that commanded it, made it clear, made it possible.

People were dying above.

Those men were dying above, those men that Reuben had left alive. Over the staircase railing fell one of those bodies, landing on its face, or what was left of its face, blood streaming from it.

“Do it!” whispered Margon.

Reuben felt he couldn’t. Guilty, yes, guilty, soaked in shame, yes, and fear, unspeakable fear. But wholly evil, no, by no means. That was the horror. This was something else, something more rank and hideous and defeating in its own way than purposeful evil, the purposeful break from all things human, this was something boiling with helpless hunger and agonizing denial.

“I can’t.”

Margon killed the man. He killed others.

Sergei appeared. Blood and blood and blood.

Others ran through the gardens. Others were rushing out the doors. Sergei went after them and so did Margon.

Reuben heard Stuart’s tortured voice, “What can we do with these children?”

Sobbing, sobbing everywhere around them.

And the clusters of women, accomplices, yes, terrified, damaged, defeated, down on their knees too. “Chupacabra!” He heard it woven into their prayerful pleading cries, “Ten piedad de nosotros.”

Margon and Sergei returned, the blood clinging to their fur in gouts.

Sergei paced before the terrified group on its knees, murmuring in Spanish words that Reuben could not catch.

Women nodded their heads; the children prayed. Somewhere a telephone rang.

“Come, let’s leave here. We’ve done what we can,” said Margon.

“But the children!” said Stuart.

“People will come,” said Margon. “They will come for the children. And the word will spread. And fear will do its work. Now we are going.”

Back in the ruined villa of the Morphenkind Hugo, they lay on the mattresses, sweating, bone weary, and tormented.

Reuben stared at the blotched and broken plaster ceiling. Oh, he had known this moment was coming. He had known it had all been too simple before, the Brotherhood of the Scent, the brotherhood that acted like the right hand of God, incapable of error.

Margon sat cross-legged against the wall, his dark hair loose over his naked shoulders, his eyes closed, lost in his meditations or his prayers.

Stuart climbed up off the mattress, and paced back and forth, back and forth, unable to stop.

“There will be such times,” Margon said finally. “You will encounter them, yes, and situations even more baffling and defeating. All over the world, day after day and night after night, victims tumble down into the abyss with the guilty, and the weak and the corrupt who don’t deserve death pay with their lives one way or another for what they do and what they don’t do.”

“And we leave,” Stuart cried. “We just leave the children?”

“It’s finished,” said Margon. “You take the lessons with you.”

“Something was accomplished,” Sergei said, “make no mistake of it. The place is shattered. They’ll all clear out; the children will have some chance for escape. The children will remember. They will remember that someone slew the men who had come to use them. They will remember that.”

“Or they’ll be shipped to another brothel,” said Stuart dismally. “Christ! Can we make a war on them, a consistent war?”

Sergei laughed under his breath. “We’re hunters, little wolf, and they are the prey. This is not a war.”

Reuben said nothing. But he had seen something he would not forget, and he marveled that it hadn’t surprised him. He had seen Margon and Sergei slay at will those who didn’t give off the fatal scent, those ugly, compromised souls driven by unholy appetites and inveterate weakness.

If we can do that, he thought, then we can fight amongst each other. The scent of evil does not make us what we are, and once we are beasts we can kill like beasts, and we have only the human part of us, the fallible human part, to guide us.

But these ideas were abstract and remote. Only the recollections were immediate—boys and girls racing in terror, and the women, the women screaming for mercy.

Somewhere off in this filthy villa, Margon was talking to the mysterious Hugo.

Had a plan been made to destroy the seaside brothel?

No doubt it was deserted by now. Who in his right mind would have remained?

He fell asleep, hating the dirt and grit of this mattress, waiting for the car that would come before daylight to take them to the luxury hotel where they would bathe and dine before the flight home.