32

THE DEATH OF THE WEREWOLF

Christ, how terrible death was! Not the pain of that final moment or even his shriveling collapse into human form, or his tumbling fall into the spreading puddle of his own blood, or his last gasping, rattling breath. All that was ugly enough, but it was over quickly.

But the other death, the great loveless nothing that followed, the endless torment of blackness—that was terrible beyond imagining. It was, he saw at once, a cancer in the heart of life. It made life idiotic, meaningless, and mad. And there was no escape from it.

There was nothing at all here, in fact. There were no words. There couldn’t be: there was nothing to describe. There were no ideas, no thoughts, not even darkness. There was no pain. There was no elsewhere. There were no others. There was no time that could end or stretch forever.

There was only this: the inner man in utter isolation, in utter silence, never changing, undifferentiated from his surroundings except by the visceral knowledge that there was such a thing as love that this was not. Love was infinite, but it was not present. This was infinity’s end, its defining border. This was solitude—solitude without change. Alone, alone, alone, alone—while love was elsewhere.

Zach’s heart stopped. His brain stopped. He ceased to have even himself for company. His body became nothing more than meat. And yet there was still this—this wordless, timeless, loveless brutality of solitude—and it did not even go on forever, because there was no forever—it simply remained, constant: there would never be anything else because there was nothing else to be. There was not even false hope.

Christ, oh Christ, it was terrible. This was what the wolves had feared. This was why they had let the curse continue. They had chosen to go on even in the half-life of phantoms rather than face this, this death, the prison of death, that closed around him and held him fast and never ended and would always be the same.

And so that was the end of him—and later, he could not have said what had saved him from it. Even at the time, it was more than mysterious. It was inconceivable. Here, where there was nothing that could happen, no time for it to happen in, something happened. Somehow something made itself known to him—to him who was even himself no longer there.

That other reality—that unremembered infinity of love—became present to him. He felt a sudden anguish of unquenched desire, an excruciating gesture of the heart toward the impossible. With a bolt of unimaginable being, the endlessness ended.

Zach drew a sharp breath. He coughed. He whispered his wife’s name.

He opened his eyes and found that he was a man—a man lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor of a ruined mansion.

He shifted his head. His brow throbbed as if he had been clubbed. He groaned. He rolled over onto one shoulder. He was looking out a window with no glass. He remembered the storm, but the storm was over. How long had he been gone? A long time, it felt like. The clouds were sailing past the moon. The moon was full, and it was still rising.

Still rising, he realized. Still rising, and yet he was a man!

He understood: he had done it. He had done what needed to be done. The curse was over.

In another moment, he became aware that a woman was weeping. Imogen—yes, he remembered her too.

The pain flashed through his head again, and he groaned again as he shifted on the floor until he could see her. She was hanging slack in her chains, exhausted, only barely sobbing. When she saw him move, she gasped into her gag, and her eyes widened—those bright intelligent brown eyes, light brown, almost golden.

“All right,” he said, flinching because it hurt to talk. “It’s all right.”

He sat up slowly. He brought his hand to his brow and rubbed it and shut his eyes tight. When he opened them, he was looking down at himself and he saw that he was naked, his body unscarred, the dagger gone. Still dazed, he searched the room for something he could use to cover himself. He saw the remnants of his plastic Extraordinary Crimes raincoat lying on the floor, not far way. He reached out and pulled it toward him. There was just enough of it left to tie around his waist, a makeshift loincloth.

The wind came through the window and chilled him. He shivered and came wider awake. He climbed painfully to his feet. He searched the floor, somehow knowing he would find Abend’s keys—and there they were. He bent down and scooped them up, another shock of pain passing beneath his brow, but a lesser one this time.

He moved to Imogen. She gazed up at him with a sort of helpless wonder, as if she weren’t sure whether he had descended to her from heaven, or was about to transform into a murderous beast again.

He tried to smile at her. “It’s all right now,” he repeated.

He used Abend’s key to unlock her wrists and he caught her as she fell into his arms. He supported her with one hand, and with the other he removed her gag. Sneering at the filthy thing, he hurled it to the floor. It fell beside Goulart’s body.

Imogen rested her head against him, strangely silent; all cried out. He kissed her black hair to comfort her. But he was looking over her, down at his dead partner. The sight of his friend lying there like that, staring up into the rafters blindly like that—it sent a fresh wave of fear through him. He remembered death. He remembered the unimaginable solitude beyond the edges of infinity. He would never forget it. As he held Imogen against him, he prayed for Broadway Joe Goulart wordlessly. He had always liked the man. He prayed that he wasn’t even now in that awful place of death.

When he was done with his prayer, he forced his eyes away. He gazed out the window at the moon.

“Come on,” he said hoarsely. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Imogen shifted against him, raised her face to look at him. She looked carefully, a long time, exploring his features. Then, slowly, she nodded.

“Yes. Let’s.”