The Wolves of Midwinter

23

FOR DAYS, ELTHRAM SAT in the cottage by Phil’s bed. Phil slept. A powerful drink was given to Phil over and over again to make him sleep, this drink concocted by Elthram and Lisa, and Phil dozed sometimes moaning or singing under his breath, his wounds visibly healing, his fever rising and ebbing and finally dying away.

Slowly, the subtle changes began to appear—the thickening of his white hair with its reddish blond streaks, the restlessness in his legs and arms as his muscles grew stronger. And his eyes, of course, his pale hazel eyes were now a deeper shade of green when from time to time he opened them.

All this time Reuben slept either on the floor near Phil’s bed, or in a chair by the fire, or from time to time in the spacious attic above, on a simple mattress bed Lisa made up for him.

Laura brought down Reuben’s laptop computer for him, and spent the nights on the attic mattress by his side or alone as he remained below, in the leather recliner by the fire, listening in a half sleep to the rhythm of Phil’s breathing. But Laura was often gone. She could not yet control the transformation, and she and Thibault slipped off again and again together in the forest.

Felix and the others looked in on Phil often. A terrible gloom gripped Felix, but he showed no desire to talk with anyone about it. It was as if a dark and tortured soul had taken up residence in Felix’s body, claiming Felix’s face and voice for his own, though it could not be Felix.

Reuben went out to him and they stood in silence in the rain, merely embracing one another in shared and wordless grief for the terrible twists and turns of Modranicht. Then Felix wandered off alone, and Reuben returned to his vigil.

Margon whispered that they must all leave Felix alone, in the wake of Hockan’s scathing excoriations. Sergei snorted with contempt. “Hockan, the judge,” he said. “He is the high priest of words and words and words. His words couple with his words and breed more words. His words run rampant.”

Stuart appeared from time to time, as tormented as the others. “And so there can be war amongst us,” he said to Reuben in anxious whispers. “There can be terrible strife. I knew it.” Stuart needed to talk to Reuben and Reuben knew this, but he couldn’t leave Phil just now. He couldn’t take his mind off Phil. He couldn’t answer Stuart’s many questions. Besides, who better to answer those questions than Margon, if only Margon would.

Lisa told Reuben that the first thing Felix had done on Wednesday morning was to commence plans for a sprinkler system to protect the house, hooked to the county water supply, but also to a huge reserve tank that would be installed in the parking area behind the servants’ wing.

“Nobody will ever burn down Nideck Point,” said Felix. “Not while I have breath in my body.” Other than those few words, nothing more on the horrors of Modranicht came from Felix.

“He is in Marchent’s old room,” said Lisa. “He sleeps there on top of her bed. He won’t disturb anything. This is not good, this must stop.” She shook her head.

But what of Margon, Reuben asked Lisa in furtive whispers—Margon, who was so opposed to the Forest Gentry on general principles? Was he not alarmed that the Forest Gentry had marshaled such physical power on Modranicht? How many times had Reuben been told that the Forest Gentry never harmed anyone?

Lisa waved all this away with the soft answer, “Margon loves your father. He knows why they did what they did.”

From time to time, Margon checked on Phil with the careful scrutiny and precision of a doctor, with Stuart always nearby. Margon was easy with Elthram there. They nodded to one another, as if nothing unusual had occurred in the history of the Forest Gentry, as if they had not massed together to kill two Morphenkinder before everyone’s eyes.

Finally Phil was out of all danger.

Yet now and then Phil cried out in his sleep, and Lisa knelt beside him whispering. “In the beginning he was with the living and the dead,” she told Reuben. “Now he is only with the living.”

Elthram spoke to no one. If he could sleep in his material form, he gave no evidence of it. Each morning, people of the Gentry came to bring fresh flowers, which Elthram arranged in vases and glasses around on the windowsills and the tables.

Lisa was as easy with Elthram’s presence as she’d ever been. And Sergei and Thibault spoke to him casually now and then when they came to visit the guesthouse, though Elthram only nodded, rarely taking his eyes off Phil.

But surely the massive show of physical power by the Forest Gentry had meant something to the others. It had to have shocked them all. This was much on Reuben’s mind. The Forest Gentry could indeed do harm to others when they chose. Who could deny it now?

Yet he felt comfortable with Elthram, indeed, more comfortable perhaps than he’d ever been. Elthram’s presence had a soothing affect on him. If Phil took a turn for the worse, Elthram would be the first to see it, and call attention to it. Of that Reuben was sure.

One early morning while Laura slept, Reuben wrote out all that he could remember of Hockan’s condemnations. He did not attempt a reconstruction of the speech so much as an accurate record of it. And when he was finished, he lay restless in the warm dry quiet of the attic, the window a patch of white light, feeling a deep dull misery.

On the morning of the fourth day—December 28—Reuben went up while it was still dark to shower and shave, and get fresh clothing. He and Laura made love in their bedroom, and Reuben fell helplessly to sleep afterwards in Laura’s arms. It wasn’t good, however. It had not been enough. Reuben wanted her in the beast shape; he wanted both of them coupling in the forest, savage as they’d been by the Yule fire. But that would have to wait.

It was ten a.m. when he awakened, alone, filled with guilt and worry for Phil. How could he have left Phil like this? Hastily he pulled on his jeans and his polo shirt, and searched for his shoes and jacket.

It seemed to take him forever to reach the cottage. He came in to find Phil at his desk, writing in his diary. Lisa was assembling his breakfast in the kitchen. Setting down the tray and carafe of coffee, with cups and plates for father and son, she slipped out of the cottage. Elthram was gone.

On and on Phil wrote, and then finally, he shut the diary and rose to his feet. He wore a fresh black sweatshirt and black sweatpants. His dark green eyes regarded Reuben calmly, but abstractly, as though he were struggling to bring himself out of his deepest and most crucial thoughts.

“My boy,” he said. He gestured to the breakfast on the table before the window.

“You know what’s happened to you?” asked Reuben. He sat down at the table with the window to his left. The sea was a steel blue beneath a bright white sky, and the inevitable rain fell hard in silent sheets of sparkling silver.

Phil nodded.

“What do you remember, Dad?”

“Just about all of it,” Phil said. “If I’ve forgotten anything, well, I don’t know what that would be.” Hungrily he sliced through the fried eggs, making a mixture of them with the bacon and grits. “Come on, aren’t you hungry? A man your age is always hungry.”

Reuben stared at the food. “Dad, what do you remember?”

“All of it, son, I told you,” said Phil. “Except being carried through the woods, that I don’t remember. It was the cold that brought me around, and it took a few minutes. That and the light of the fire. But I remember everything after that. I never lost consciousness. I thought I would. But I never went completely under.”

“Dad, did you want us to do what we did?” asked Reuben. “I mean, what we did to save your life. You know now what’s happened to you, don’t you?”

Phil smiled. “There’s always plenty of time to die, isn’t there, Reuben?” he answered. “And plenty of opportunity. Yes, I know what you did, and I’m glad that you did it.” He looked youthful, vigorous in spite of the familiar creases in his forehead and the slight jowls he’d had for years. His white hair was shot through with thick locks of reddish blond.

“Dad, have you no questions about what you saw?” asked Reuben. “Don’t you want an explanation for what you saw? Or what you heard?”

Phil swallowed a couple more forkfuls of food, scooping up plenty of the thick grits with the eggs. Then he sat back and ate the last of the bacon with his fingers.

“Well, you know, son, it wasn’t a shock, though to see it that way was a shock all right. But I can’t say I was entirely surprised. I knew you’d gone out there to celebrate Modranicht with your friends, and I pretty much figured how that might go for you, the old Yuletide customs being what they are.”

“But Dad, you mean you knew?” Reuben asked. “You knew all along what we were, all of us?”

“Let me tell you a story,” said Phil. His voice was the same as ever, but his sharp green eyes kept startling Reuben. “Your mother doesn’t drink much, you know that. I don’t know that you’ve ever seen your mother drunk, have you?”

“One time, tipsy, maybe.”

“Well, she stays off the sauce because she tends to go crazy on it, and always did, and then she blacks out and she can’t remember what happened. It’s bad for her, bad for her because she becomes emotional and carries on and cries and then she can’t own what happened.”

“I remember her saying all that.”

“And of course, she’s a surgeon, and when that phone rings she wants to be ready to go into the operating room.”

“Yes, Dad. I know.”

“Well, right after Thanksgiving, Reuben, I think it was the following Saturday night, your mother gets completely drunk all by herself and comes into my room crying. Of course she’d been telling the newspapers and the televisions twenty-four/seven that she’d seen the Man Wolf with her own eyes, seen him here at Nideck Point when he broke in the front door and killed those two Russian scientists. Yes, she’d been telling everybody who asked that it was no myth, the California Man Wolf, and that it was some kind of physical mutant, you know, an anomaly, a one-off as she kept saying—a biological reality for which we’d all soon have an explanation. Well, anyway, she comes into my room and she sits down on the side of my bed, just sobbing, and she tells me that she knows, just knows in her heart, that you and all your friends up here are the very same species—‘They’re all Man Wolves,’ she sobs, ‘and Reuben’s one of them.’ And on and on she goes explaining that she knows this to be true, just knows, and knows that your brother Jim knows, because Jim can’t talk about it, which can mean only one thing—that Jim can’t reveal what was told him in Confession. ‘They’re all in it together. Did you see that big picture of them all over the library fire? They’re monsters, and our son is one of them.’

“Well, of course, I helped her back to bed, and I lay down with her until she stopped crying and went to sleep. And then in the morning, Reuben, she didn’t remember a thing except that she’d gotten drunk and she’d cried over something. She was humiliated, terribly humiliated like she always is over any excess emotion, any loss of control, and she swallows half a bottle of aspirin, and goes to work like nothing happened. Well, what do you think I did?”

“You went to see Jim,” said Reuben.

“That’s exactly right,” said Phil with a smile. “Jim was saying the six a.m. Mass as usual when I got there. There was, what, fifty people in the church? Probably half that many. And the street people were all lined up outside waiting to get in to go to sleep in the pews.”

“Right,” said Reuben.

“And I caught Jim right after Mass, right after he’d said farewell to the people at the front door, and he was heading back up the aisle towards the sacristy. And I told him what she’d said. ‘Now you tell me,’ I said to Jim, ‘is this conceivable? That this Man Wolf creature is not some simple freak of nature, but that there’s a tribe of them, and that your brother is in fact part of that tribe? That this is some secret species that’s always existed, and when Reuben was bitten up there in that house in the dark, he became one of them?’ ”

Phil stopped and took a deep swallow of the hot coffee.

“And what did Jim say?” asked Reuben.

“That was just it, son. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me for a long time, and the expression on his face, well, I don’t have words to describe it. And then he looked up at the high altar. And I saw he was looking at the statue of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. And then he said, in the most sad, discouraged voice, ‘Dad, I don’t have any light to shed on this.’

“And I said, ‘Okay, son, we’ll let it go, and your mother can’t remember any of this anyway.’ And I just went on out, but I knew. I knew it was all true. I knew it was true, really, when your mother was laying it out, I felt it was true, felt it, felt it in here. But I knew it was true then when I watched Jim walking on back to the sacristy behind the altar—because there were a million things he might have said if it had been nonsense, and he didn’t say any of them.”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin, and refilled his mug with coffee. “You do know that Lisa makes the best coffee in the world, don’t you?”

Reuben didn’t answer. He was feeling so sorry for Jim, so sorry that he’d ever burdened Jim, yet what would he do without Jim? Well, there was time to deal with Jim, to made amends, to give thanks, to thank him for taking over with Susie Blakely.

“But, Dad, if Mom knew,” Reuben asked, “why ever did she let you come up here to live with us?”

“Son, she blacked out that night, I told you. What she’d revealed had come from someplace deep down inside that’s closed off to her when she isn’t drinking. And the next day she didn’t know. And she doesn’t know now.”

“Ah, but she does,” said Reuben. “She does. What the liquor did was let her speak of it, confess it, face it. And she also knows she can’t do anything about it, that she can never mention it out loud to me, she can never become an accessory to it. The only way she can live with it is to pretend she doesn’t have an inkling.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “But to get back to your question, what did I think when I saw all of you out there in the forest on Christmas Eve? Well, I was shocked. I’ll grant you that. It was as shocking a spectacle as anything I’ve ever seen in my life. But I wasn’t surprised, and I knew what was happening. And I knew that wily Helena, I knew her by her Polish accent when she picked me up out of my bed with her great hairy arms, when she said, ‘Are you willing to die for your son, to teach him and his friends a lesson?’ ”

“She said that to you?”

He nodded. “Oh yes. That was her scheme, apparently, and I knew the voice of Fiona, who was with her. Ah, such monsters! And right here in this room. ‘Foolish man,’ she said, that Fiona. ‘That you ever came here. Most humans have better instincts.’ ”

He sipped the coffee, then put his elbows on the table and ran his hands back through his hair. He seemed a man some twenty years younger now, whatever the stamp of age on his face. His shoulders were remarkably straight and his chest was broader. And even his hands were larger and stronger than they had been.

“I blacked out after they appeared here,” he said. “But when I came to in the forest, I understood their evil plan, those two, to use me as the living proof that Felix’s way with Nideck Point, of living in the very midst of human beings, of carrying on as if he were a living man, a normal man, a generous man—that this was all, as Fiona called it, folly. I saw and heard all that when the spectacle unraveled.”

“Then you know what happened to Fiona and Helena,” said Reuben.

“Not at first I didn’t,” said Phil. “That is the one part that wasn’t clear, that was puzzling me. But as I was lying there in that bed, I was having nightmares some of the time, nightmares that they’d burn down Nideck Point, and burn down the village.”

“She spoke about those very things,” said Reuben.

“Right, I’d heard that part,” said Phil. “But what wasn’t clear to me was that she and Helena were gone. I hadn’t seen what happened to them. The nightmares were terrible. I grabbed hold of Lisa and tried to get her to understand that Nideck Point was in danger from those two. And that’s when Lisa told me, told me how Elthram and the Gentry had driven them into the fire. She explained to me who the Gentry were, or at least she tried to. She said something about them being the ‘woodland spirits’ and not people like us.” He laughed softly under his breath, shaking his head. “I should have known. Well, Lisa said no one had ever seen the Forest Gentry do such a thing. But the Forest Gentry would never have done it without ‘grave cause.’ And then Elthram was there, I mean by my bed, right beside Lisa. I saw him looking down at me. And he placed one of his warm hands on me. And Elthram said, ‘You are all safe.’ ”

“That’s what happened,” said Reuben.

“And then I knew they weren’t coming to harm anybody, and I better understood all the rest of what I’d heard—what I’d heard Hockan saying out there, with his voice like Giazotto’s notorious Adagio in G Minor.”

Reuben gave a little bitter laugh. “Yes, it’s exactly like that, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, that Hockan has quite a voice. But then they all do. Felix has a voice like a Mozart piano concerto, always full of light; and Sergei, well, Sergei sounds like Beethoven.”

“Not Wagner?”

“No,” said Phil, smiling. “I like Beethoven better. But about Hockan, I sensed a sadness in him at the banquet, a kind of deep broken melancholy, I guess I’d call it, and how he seemed to love that Helena even though she frightened him. I could see that. Her questions to me frightened him.” He shook his head. “Yeah, Hockan, he’s the violin in the Adagio in G Minor all right.”

“And it is all right with you what’s happened,” asked Reuben. “That they used the Chrism to save your life, and that you’re now one of us.”

“Didn’t I just say that it was?” asked Phil.

“Can I be blamed for asking a question like that twice?” asked Reuben.

“No, of course not,” said Phil gently. He sat back and looked at Reuben with the saddest smile. “You are so young, and so naïve and so truly good of heart,” he said.

“Am I? I always wanted you with us!” Reuben whispered.

“I knew what I was doing when I came here,” said Phil.

“How could you have really known?”

“It wasn’t the mystery that drew me,” Phil explained. “It wasn’t mad speculation as to whether these friends of yours really had the secret of living forever. Oh, I knew there was a possibility of that, yes. I’d been putting it together for some time, just as your mother had. It wasn’t only the picture in the library, or the unusual personalities of the men who were living with you. It wasn’t just their curious anachronistic speech, or the odd points of view they hold. Hell, you’ve always had a way of speaking that made us joke about your being a little changeling.” He shook his head. “So it wasn’t all that surprising that you’d cultivate some group of otherworldly friends who sounded as strange as you sometimes sound. No, it’s overwhelming and irresistible, surely, immortality. It is. But I don’t know that I quite believed that part of it all. I don’t know that I believe it now. It’s easier to believe that a human being can turn into a beast than it is to believe he’ll live forever.”

“I understand that perfectly,” said Reuben. “I feel exactly that way, myself.”

“No, it was something more mundane than that yet infinitely more profound and meaningful that brought me here. I was coming to live with you in this anointed place, because I had to do it! I just had to. I had to seek this refuge against the world to which I’d given my long and dreary and inconsequential life.”

“Dad—.”

“No, son. Don’t argue with me. I know who I am. And I knew I had to come. I had to be here. I had to spend my remaining days somewhere that I truly wanted to be, doing the things that mattered to me, no matter how trivial. Walking the woods, reading my books, writing my poems, looking out at that ocean, that endless ocean. I had to. I couldn’t keep moving towards the grave step by step—choked with regret, choked with bitterness and disappointment!” He sucked in his breath as though he were in pain. His eyes were fixed on the barely visible line of the horizon.

“I understand, Dad,” said Reuben quietly. “In my own way, my young and naïve way, I felt the same thing the first day I came here. I can’t say I was on a dreary path to the grave. I just knew I’d never lived, that I’d been avoiding living—like I’d learned early to decide against life rather than for it.”

“Ah, that’s beautiful,” Phil said. His smile brightened again as he looked at Reuben.

“Dad, do you understand the things that Hockan said? Did you follow the thread?”

“Most of it,” said Phil. “It was a bit like a dream. I was lying right on the earth and the earth was cold, but I was warm under those coverings. And I was listening to him. I knew he was aiming his powerful arrows at Felix and at you and Stuart. I heard him. I put it all together. And in the nights since I’ve been going over and over it, with Lisa’s little whispers here and there, patching it together.”

Reuben screwed up his courage, and then he asked, “Do you think there was truth in what Hockan said? Do you think he was right?”

“What do you think, Reuben?” asked Phil.

“I don’t know,” said Reuben, but the words were lame. “Each time I talk about it with myself, each time I see Felix or Margon or Sergei—I come to realize a little more that I have to make up my mind, my own mind, as to what I feel about the things Hockan said to us.”

“I understand that. I respect that.”

Reuben reached inside his jacket and withdrew a folded piece of paper, and then he handed that to Phil.

“That’s everything he said to us, written down there,” Reuben explained. “That’s every word. Exactly as I recall it.”

“My son, the honor student,” said Phil. He unfolded the page, and read the words slowly, thoughtfully, and then closed up the page again.

He looked expectantly at Reuben.

“It’s had a devastating effect on Felix,” said Reuben. “He’s deeply discouraged.”

“That’s understandable,” said Phil. He had more to say, but Reuben continued.

“Margon does not seem moved, one way or the other,” he said, “and Sergei and Stuart seem absolutely to have forgotten all of it, to have swept it aside like it never happened. They certainly aren’t afraid of Elthram and the Forest Gentry. They seem as comfortable with them as they ever were.”

“And Laura?”

“Laura has asked the obvious question: ‘Who is Hockan? Is Hockan an oracle? Or is Hockan a fallible creature like the rest of us?’ ”

“So the ones who’ve been really hurt by this are you and Felix?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I can’t get his words out of my head! I’ve never been able to get the negative voices of my life out of my head. I’ve struggled all my life to find my own truth and I find myself smothered by other people’s words. It’s as though they’re always shouting at me, bullying me, shaking their fists, and half the time I can’t find what I think.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, son,” said Phil. “I think you do know what you think.”

“Dad, know this,” said Reuben. “I love that house, this place, this part of the world’s great forest. I want to bring my son here. I want to be here with you. I love them all, my new family. I love them more than I can say. Laura, Felix, Margon, Stuart, Thibault, Sergei, all of them. I love Lisa, whoever and whatever she is. I love the Forest Gentry.”

“I hear you, son,” said Phil, smiling. “I’m extremely fond of Lisa, too.” He gave a short secretive laugh. “ ‘Whoever and whatever’ she might be.”

“The thought of leaving Nideck Point behind, of breaking off all contact with my mom, of giving my son over to Mom to bring up, of never seeing Jim again—these are things I can hardly bear to think about. My heart’s breaking.”

Phil only nodded.

“I feel larger and stronger here than I’ve ever felt anywhere,” said Reuben. “That day at the village fair and the banquet here, I sensed a creative energy all around me. I felt a creative spirit that was infectious. I don’t know any other words to describe it. I felt it was good, all that Felix had done, all that Felix had brought into being. It was like magic, Dad. Over and over he made something out of nothing. A bleak winter, a dying town, a great empty house, a day that might have been like a thousand other days. He transformed all this. And it was good. I swear it was. Yet here comes Hockan’s judgment, Hockan’s dark reading of the script to make some other story out of it.”

“Yes, Reuben, that’s just what Hockan did,” said Phil.

“Hockan calls this great house a snare, an abomination.”

“Yes, son, I heard him.”

“What is Felix’s sin, Dad? That he wants to live in fellowship with all living creatures—with spirits, ghosts, Morphenkinder, with Ageless Ones like Lisa, with human beings? Is that really evil? Is that the Original Sin here that killed Marchent?”

“What do you think, Reuben? Is it?”

“Dad, I have no idea what immortality is. I’ve admitted that before. I just don’t know. But I do know I’m struggling here for the finer feeling, for the finer understanding. Whatever I am, I have a soul. I’ve known that always. And I can’t believe that Marchent’s out there lost and suffering because of the dreadful secret of what we are, because of the sins of Felix in loving her and her parents and keeping our secrets from them. Felix would never have left Marchent if those evil men hadn’t taken him prisoner.”

“I know, son. I know the story. Hockan provided all the missing pieces of the puzzle to me as I was lying there in that clearing.”

“And I can’t lay the blame on Felix that the Forest Gentry astonished everyone. They did something that no one knew they could do. That’s obvious. But was that Felix’s doing because he called them and invited them here?”

“No. I don’t think it was,” said Phil. “The Forest Gentry have always had their own reservoir of power.”

“If only I could talk to Marchent!” said Reuben. “If only I could hear her voice. I’ve seen her, seen her tears, seen her misery. Hell. I’ve even made love to her, Dad, held her in my arms. But no voice comes from her. No truth comes from her.”

“And what could she tell you, Reuben?” Phil asked. “She’s a ghost, not a deity or an angel. She’s a lost soul. Beware of what she might say, just as you should beware of Hockan.”

Reuben sighed. “I know that. I know that. I keep wanting to ask Elthram. Surely he knows why she haunts. He must know.”

“Elthram knows what Elthram knows,” said Phil. “Not what Marchent knows, if she knows anything.”

They were quiet. Phil drank another mug of coffee. And outside the rain picked up, shimmering and singing on the windows. Such an intimate sound, the rain gusting on the panes. The colorless sky unaccountably brightened in spite of the rain, and far out to sea a ship moved on the distant horizon. It was barely visible in the gray dazzle of the sea.

“You won’t tell me what to do, will you?” asked Reuben.

“You don’t want me to tell you what to do,” said Phil. “You need to discover that for yourself. But I will tell you this. You’ve taken my mind off my rapidly fading aches and pains; you’ve done me wonders. And whatever happens, whatever you decide, whatever Felix decides, nobody will separate you from me or me from you and Laura.”

“That’s true. That is absolutely true.” He looked at his father. “You’re happy, aren’t you, Dad?”

“Yes,” Phil answered.