The Wolves of Midwinter

8

THEY HEADED FOR the Nideck Cemetery under a leaden sky, the rain reduced to a drizzle in the surrounding forest. Felix was at the wheel of his heavy Mercedes sedan.

Arthur Hammermill had seen to Marchent’s interment in the family mausoleum, Felix explained, according to clear instructions in Marchent’s will. Hammermill himself attended a small ceremony for which a few residents of Nideck had gathered, including the Galtons and their cousins, though there had been no public announcement at all. As for the murderous brothers, they had been cremated, based on their own instructions to “friends.”

“I’m ashamed that I never thought to visit her grave,” said Reuben. “I’m ashamed. There can’t be the slightest doubt that whatever is causing her to haunt, she’s unhappy.”

Felix never once took his eyes off the road.

“I didn’t visit the grave myself,” said Felix in a tormented voice. “I had some convenient notion that she’d been buried in South America. But that is no excuse.” His voice went dry as if he were on the verge of breaking down. “And she was the very last of my own blood descendants.”

Reuben looked at him, wanting so badly to ask how this had played out.

“The very last of those related to me by blood in this world, as far as I know. Since every other scion of my family has long ago withered or vanished. And I didn’t visit her grave, no, I did not. And that is why we are doing it now, isn’t it? Both of us are visiting her grave.”

The cemetery was behind the town, and occupied about two city blocks, flanked by scattered houses on all four sides. The road here was patchy, badly in need of repair, but the homes were all vintage Victorian, small, simple, but well-built frame houses with peak roofs much like the Victorians Reuben had always loved in countless other old California towns. That several here and there were brightly painted with fresh pastel colors and white trim struck him as good for the town of Nideck. There were multicolored Christmas lights twinkling in windows here and there. And the cemetery itself, bound by an iron picket fence with more than one open gate, was rather a picturesque spot with well-kept grass and a great sprinkling of old monuments.

The rain had let up, and they didn’t need the umbrellas they’d brought with them, though Reuben wound his scarf around his neck against the eternal chill. The sky was dark and featureless, and a white mist enveloped the top of the forest.

Small rounded tombstones made up most of the graves. Many had rich scrollwork and deep lettering, and here and there Reuben glimpsed a poetic epitaph. There was one small mausoleum, a house of stone blocks with a flat roof and an iron door, and this bore the name NIDECK in ornate letters, while several other Nideck tombstones were scattered to its left and right.

Felix had a key for the iron door.

It made Reuben very uneasy to hear the key grind in the old lock, but they were soon standing in a very dusty little passage illuminated by a single leaded-glass window in the back of the little building, with evidence of what must have been coffin-length crypts on either side.

Marchent had been laid to rest to the right, and a rectangular stone had been fitted in place near the head or the foot of the coffin, Reuben could not guess which. It gave her name, Marchent Sophia Nideck, the dates of her life, and a line of poetry, which surprised Reuben. It read: WE MUST LOVE ONE ANOTHER OR DIE. The poet was W. H. Auden, and his name was inscribed in small letters beneath the quote.

Reuben felt light-headed. He felt trapped and sick, and almost on the edge of collapsing in this little space.

Quickly, he hurried outside, back into the damp air, and left Felix alone inside the little building. He was trembling, and he stood still, fighting the nausea.

It seemed more than ever ghastly to him, perfectly ghastly, that Marchent was dead. He saw Celeste’s face, he saw some sweetly illuminated image of the child he was now dreaming of, he saw all the faces of those he loved, including Laura, beautiful Laura, and he felt the grief for Marchent like a sickness that would turn him inside out.

So this is one of the big secrets of life, is it?—you cope with loss sooner or later, and then one loss after another most likely, and it probably never gets any easier than this, and each time you’re looking at what is going to happen to you, only this won’t happen to me. It won’t. And I can’t quite make that real.

He stared dully ahead of him and was only vaguely aware that a man was coming across the graveyard from a truck parked on the road, and that he was carrying a large bouquet of white roses, arranged in green ferns, that was fitted into what appeared to be a stone vase.

He thought of the roses he’d sent to Celeste. He felt like crying. He saw Marchent’s tormented face again right near him, so near. He felt he was going to go crazy here.

He moved away as the man approached the little mausoleum but he could still hear Felix thanking the man and telling him that the flowers should be placed outside. He heard the rasp of the key in the lock. Then the man was gone, and Reuben was staring at a long row of yew trees, grown far too tall to be picturesque anymore, that divided the graveyard from the quaint and pretty houses across the way. Such pretty bay windows, outlined with red and green lights. Such pretty gingerbread trim. A mass of dark pines rose behind the houses. Indeed the dark woods encroached on all sides, and the houses in all directions looked small and bold against the giant fir trees. The trees were so horribly out of scale with the little streetscape and the community of small graves that slumbered here amid the velvet green grass.

He wanted to turn back, find Felix, say something comforting, but he was so deeply immersed now in the vision of last night, in seeing Marchent’s face, feeling her cold hand on his hand, that he couldn’t move or speak.

When Felix came up beside him, Felix said, “She’s not here, is she? You don’t sense any presence of her here.”

“No,” said Reuben. She is not here. Her suffering face is imprinted on my soul forever. But she is not in this place, and cannot be comforted here.

But where is she? Where is she herself now?

They headed for home, trolling the main street of Nideck, where the official town Christmas trimmings were going up with amazing speed. What a transformation, to see the three-story Nideck Inn already decked with tiny red lights to the rooftop, and to see the green wreaths on the shop doors, and the green garland wound around the quaint old lampposts. There were workmen busy on more than one site. They wore yellow rain slickers and boots. People stopped and waved. Galton and his wife, Bess, were just going into the Inn, probably for lunch, and they both stopped and waved.

All this cheered Felix, obviously. “Reuben,” he said, “I think this little Winterfest is truly going to work!”

Only after they hit the narrow country road again did Felix say in a low, very gentle voice, his most protective voice,

“Reuben, do you want to tell me where you went last night?”

Reuben swallowed. He wanted to answer, but he couldn’t think what to say.

“Look, I understand,” said Felix. “You saw Marchent again. This was profoundly unsettling, of course. And you went out after that, but I so wish you had not.”

Silence. Reuben felt like a bad schoolboy, but he didn’t know the reason himself why he’d gone. Yes, he’d seen Marchent, and obviously it did have to do with that. But why had this triggered the need to hunt? All he could think of was the bloody triumph of the kill and that plunge through the forest afterwards, after he’d left little Susie Blakely and it seemed he’d been flying like Goodman Brown through the world’s darkest wilderness. He knew he was blushing now, blushing with shame.

The car was following the narrow Nideck Road uphill through phalanxes of towering trees.

“Reuben, you know perfectly well what we’re trying to do,” Felix said, his patience as reliable as ever. “We’re trying to take you and Stuart to places where you can hunt unknown and unnoticed. But if you go out on your own, if you venture into the surrounding towns, the press will be on top of us all again. Reporters will be swarming all over the house, asking for some statement from you on the Man Wolf. You’re the go-to guy when it comes to the Man Wolf, the one who’s been bitten by the Man Wolf, the one who’s seen the Man Wolf, not once but twice, the reporter who writes about the Man Wolf. Look, dear boy, it’s a matter of surviving at Nideck Point, for all of us.”

“I know, Felix, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I haven’t even checked the news.”

“Well, I haven’t either, but the fact is you left your torn and bloody clothes, and a bloodstained blanket, of all things, in the furnace room, Reuben, and any Morphenkind can smell human blood. You’ve had a meal of somebody for certain, and this won’t go unnoticed.”

Reuben felt his face grow hot. Too many images of the hunt were crowding in on him. He thought of little Susie’s tiny candle-flame face against his chest. He was disoriented, as if this normal body of his now was some sort of illusion. He longed for the other body, the other muscles, the other eyes.

“What stops us, Felix, from living in the forest always, encased in fur, living like the beasts that we are?”

“You know what stops us,” said Felix. “We’re human beings, Reuben. Human beings. And you will soon have a son.”

“I felt like I had to go,” Reuben said under his breath. “I just did. I don’t know. I had to push back and I know it was foolish. And I wanted to go, that’s the God’s truth. I wanted to go alone.” He blurted out in fits and starts the little story of the child in the trailer. He told how he’d buried the remains of the corpse. “Felix, I’m caught between two worlds, and I had to blunder into that other world, I had to.”

Felix was quiet for a while, and then ventured, “I know it’s all very seductive, Reuben, these people treating us like God’s anointed.”

“Felix, how many people are out there, suffering like that? That little girl wasn’t fifty miles from here. They’re all around us, aren’t they?”

“This is part of the burden, Reuben. It’s part of the Chrism. We cannot save all of them. And any attempt to do so will end in failure and in our own ruin. We can’t make our territory into our kingdom. The time is long past for that. And I don’t want to lose Nideck Point again so soon, dear boy. I don’t want you to leave, or Laura, or any of us! Reuben, don’t burn up your mortal life just yet, don’t extinguish all ties with it. Look, this is all my fault and Margon’s fault. We haven’t let you boys hunt enough. We’re not remembering what the early years were like. This will change, Reuben, I promise you.”

“I’m sorry, Felix. But you know, those first days, those first heady days, when I didn’t know what I was, or what would happen next—or whether I was the only man beast in the whole world—there was such a hedonistic freedom there. And I have to get over that, that I can’t slip out at will and become the Man Wolf. I’m working on it, Felix.”

“I know you are,” said Felix with a sad little laugh. “Of course you are. Reuben, Nideck Point is worth the sacrifice. Whatever we become, wherever we go, we need a haven, a refuge, a sanctuary. I need this. We all need this.”

“I know,” said Reuben.

“I wonder if you do,” said Felix. “How does a man who does not age, who does not grow old—how does such a man keep a family manse, a piece of land that is his? You cannot imagine what it means to leave all you hold sacred because you have to. You have to hide that you don’t change, you have to annihilate the person you are to all those you love. You have to abandon your home and your family and return decades later in some alien guise to strangers, pretending to be the long-lost uncle, the bastard son.…”

Reuben nodded.

He had never heard Felix’s voice so full of pain before, not even when he spoke of Marchent.

“I was born in the most beautiful land imaginable,” said Felix, “near the River Rhine above a heavenly Alpine valley. I told you this before, didn’t I? I lost it a long time ago. I lost it forever. The fact is I do own the property again now—that very land, those ancient buildings. I bought it all back—lock, stock, and barrel. But it’s not my home, or my sanctuary. That can’t be reclaimed ever. It’s a new place for me now, with all the promise of a new home perhaps in a new time, and that’s the best that it can be. But my true home? That’s gone beyond reprieve.”

“I understand,” said Reuben. “I really do. I understand as far as I can understand. I don’t know how but I do.”

“But time hasn’t swallowed Nideck Point for me,” said Felix with that same low emotional heat. “No. Not yet. We still have time with Nideck Point before we have to slip away. And you have time, lots of time, with Nideck Point. You and Laura, and now your son, too, can grow up at Nideck Point. We have time to live a rich chapter here.”

Felix broke off as though deliberately reining himself in.

Reuben waited, desperate for a way to express what he felt. “I will behave, Felix,” he said. “I swear it. I won’t ruin it.”

“You don’t want to ruin it for yourself, Reuben,” Felix said. “Forget about me. Forget Margon or Frank or Sergei. Forget Thibault. You don’t want to ruin it for yourself and for Laura. Reuben, you will lose everything here soon enough; don’t throw away what you have now.”

“I don’t want to ruin it for you either,” said Reuben. “I know what it means to you, Nideck Point.”

Felix didn’t answer.

A strange thought occurred to Reuben.

It took form as they drove up the sloping road from the gates to the terrace.

“What if she needs Nideck Point?” he asked in a soft voice. “What if it’s Marchent’s sanctuary? What if she’s looked beyond, Felix, and she doesn’t want to go beyond? What if she wants to remain here too?”

“Then she wouldn’t be suffering, would she, when she comes to you?” Felix responded.

Reuben sighed. “Yes. Why would she be suffering?”

“The world might be full of ghosts for all we know. They might have found their sanctuaries all around us. But they don’t show us their pain, do they? They don’t haunt as she’s haunting you.”

Reuben shook his head. “She’s here, and she can’t break through. She’s wandering, alone, desperate for me to see her and hear her.” He thought about his dream again, the dream in which he’d seen Marchent in rooms filled with people who took no notice of her, the dream in which he’d seen her running through the darkness alone. He thought of those curious shadowy figures he’d seen vaguely in the dim forest of the dream. Had they been reaching out to her?

In a low voice, he described the dream to Felix. “But there was more to it,” he confessed, “and now I’ve forgotten.”

“That’s always the way with dreams,” Felix said.

They sat parked before the house. The end of the terrace along the cliff was scarcely visible in the mist. Yet they could hear the sounds of hammers and saws from the workmen down the hill at the guesthouse. Rain or shine, the men worked on the guesthouse.

Felix shivered. He drew in his breath, and then after a long pause, he placed his hand on Reuben’s shoulder. As always it had a calming effect on Reuben.

“You’re a brave boy,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Oh yes, very,” said Felix. “That’s why she’s come to you.”

Reuben was bewildered, lost suddenly in too many shifting mind pictures and half-remembered sensations, unable to reason. Of all things, he heard that dreamy haunting song again that the ghost radio had played inside the ghost room, and that spellbinding beat paralyzed him.

“Felix, this house should be yours,” he said. “We don’t know what Marchent wants, why she haunts. But if I’m a brave boy, then I have to say it. This is your house, Felix. Not mine.”

“No,” Felix said. He smiled faintly, sadly.

“Felix, I know you own all the land around this property, all the land to the town and back and north and east. You should have the house back.”

“No,” said Felix gently but resolutely.

“If I deed it over to you, well, there’s no way you can stop me from doing it—.”

“No,” Felix said.

“Why not?”

“Because if you did that,” Felix said, his eyes glazing with tears, “it wouldn’t be your home anymore. And then you and Laura might leave. And you and Laura are the warmth shining in the heart of Nideck Point. And I can’t bear the thought of your going away. I can’t make Nideck Point my home again without you. Leave things as they are. My niece gave you this house to get rid of it, rid of her grief, and rid of her pain. Leave it as she willed it. And you brought me back to it. In a sense, you’ve given it to me already. Owning a great cluster of empty rooms might have meant little or nothing—without you.”

Felix opened the door. “Now come,” he said, “let’s take a quick look at the progress on the guesthouse. We want it to be ready whenever your father comes to visit.”

Yes, the guesthouse, and the promise of Phil coming to spend long leisurely visits with him. Phil had indeed promised. And Reuben wanted that so very much.