5

The Devil Is Always a Man

Douglas Morgan’s column and the tie-in front page article were, to say the least, eye-popping material in the next morning’s edition, and both helped to make that issue the only one in recent memory that contained an unqualified scoop involving a major news story over all of the area papers. Margret Talley’s account of the Mangler’s latest assaults was the kind of sensationalism that the Chronicle had once avoided, but the temptation of an exclusive story that the police were keeping the lid on (supposedly in order to protect certain critical details during the investigation and to shield the girl from adverse publicity) and the competitiveness of modern journalism forced them to give full rein to the drawing power of the headlines. A number of staff reporters were evidently burned by this by-line feat of a representative of what they saw as “soft news” coverage.

Prodded by the response to the startling articles, the L.A.P.D. called another news conference in the early afternoon and released basically the same details that Grundel’s eavesdropping had produced. But one major point that the police did reveal was the fact that a .22 caliber pistol which had been fired during the night had been discovered at the scene, though only two spent shells could be located.

Naturally, there was no way of being certain how many bullets had been fired from the gun at—presumably—the savage killer. Still, the average man on the street had to believe that at least one shell had found its mark and failed to stop the creature. All of the blood found in the Mitchell house could be attributed to the victims, according to police analysis.

Morgan’s day in the sun didn’t noticeably please him, leading Blake to believe that winning the Noble Prize for reporting on the same day that he dragged a furiously kicking Loch Ness Monster from the water would not bring so much as a Maine grin to his forbidding visage. But he did surprise Corbett with his eagerness and commitment to what Grundel called “the Search,” even going so far as to rattle the novelist out of bed on the next day, Sunday, and suggesting that they have dinner together at his home and use the afternoon to map out their immediate plans.

Even though he tended to place a tag of gullibility on Blake, the fiction writer, while picturing himself as a more rational rock of doubt, it was very clear that Morgan really believed that there was a man out there, presently walking undetected among normal humans, who would undergo a massive physical change the next time the moon reached its full phase. He accepted the reality of a werewolf.

Corbett accepted the invitation and met Joyce Morgan, Doug’s wife of twenty-five years and a darned good cook, looked at pictures of son Donald (now an artist in New York) and daughter Carol (studying archeology at an Eastern college), and waited for Nick Grundel to join them for the planned conference. The young man had quit his job at the market on Friday afternoon, the same day he had been accepted into the coalition, and he had told them that he would be moving out of his apartment with his suitcaseful of possessions on that Sunday. But as the two men sat in Morgan’s den and waited for him to make his appearance, they quickly exhausted their supply of small talk, as well as their interest in the clear blue sky outside of the picture window. Eventually, Doug phoned Nick’s apartment in order to find out what sort of emergency was keeping him from a discussion of the upcoming campaign that had certainly seemed vital to him just the day before.

Corbett listened patiently to Morgan’s side of the conversation, but the questions and unrelated answers were so confusing that he didn’t try to mesh them with an imaginary other half. He felt sure that he could have made hardly any sense of it that way, either. After a couple of minutes during which Doug’s face turned several shades redder and his tone became increasingly incredulous, he grunted a goodbye and hung up the phone.

“That is the most unpredictable human being I have ever had the misfortune to become associated with,” he said in disgust.

“He’s not coming?” Blake asked.

“Not until later in the evening. He says that something more important is occupying his time right now.”

“Such as?” Corbett envisioned family crisis, a private health problem, or perhaps research into historical lycanthropy.

“The Dodgers and the Mets.”

“What?”

“Baseball. He’s a fanatic about it. You saw how committed he was to catching the killer when he told us the Talley story on Friday? Well, that was the same tone of voice he used when ‘explaining’ why he had to see this game on television. I suppose it has some bearing on the divisional lead, or something.” Morgan shook his head; he really couldn’t believe that anyone could allow anything to interfere with an investigation that was so urgent as this one was to him.

Corbett shared his sense of disbelief, but he also couldn’t suppress some amusement at the schizophrenia displayed by a man who was humanity’s defender against supernatural demons one day and a sports freak the next. “Do we postpone matters until he gets here or start fresh tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” answered Doug. “I have to get another column ready and entered tonight. Maybe the wait will do us all good, allow us to decide if we are really ready to devote ourselves to this thing or if we’re simply out for a lark at the expense of others who are naive enough to actually believe in real lycanthropy.”

In this manner, Nicholas Grundel began his less than pacific association with Douglas Morgan. Blake Corbett wasn’t certain yet that he hadn’t wandered into the middle of a cinematic rendition of Moon Fury, a horror novel he had written for the paperback market ten years before.

Monday, partially at least because it is universally despised and dreaded by working people, seemed to be a more fitting choice upon which to begin the organized assault on the supposed monster, anyway. The feeling of impending conflict was only reinforced by the big thunderstorm that rolled into California just after sunup to dump its heavy load over most of the southern half of the state. The rain worked its cleansing act on the smog and broke the long string of exceptionally hot days, but Morgan welcomed the rain as a physical presence at which to aim his rising nervous excitement and “psych” himself for the task which was at hand.

“Hey, man, are you still asleep or just naturally blind?” shouted Grundel as Morgan stopped very short before a red light. The storm had kept the city dark enough to leave the streetlamps burning. “Jeeze, I think I’d be safer walking around Lynnview during a full moon than riding in the same car with you. Or on the same highway, for that matter.”

Doug idly wondered whether he had the driving skills to flip his car at the next intersection and dispense with this yammering boil at his right without injuring himself. “You know, while we’re stopped at this light, you’d have an excellent opportunity to deplane and jog the rest of the way,” he said coolly.

Grundel, who felt that arising any time before the first inning of a doubleheader was symptomatic of galloping Puritanism, opened one red eye wide enough to check the sheets of rain and replied, “I can’t swim.”

The building housing the Chronicle was only two blocks away—luckily for Morgan’s ulcers and Los Angeles traffic in general—though the two still had to make a sprint from the open parking lot to the nearest entrance. They rode an elevator in mutually agreeable silence until they reached the fifth floor.

The Chronicle was a large operation with a staff sized to match, and when Morgan and Grundel left the hall and entered the large newsroom, the noise of swift typing and long distance shouting enveloped them with a vengeance that did nothing to alleviate the dark outlook they both had toward life and humanity. They had crossed most of the busy room through a fog of good morning wishes that Morgan drew before a tall, flush-faced boy no older than seventeen stopped them.

“Hello, Mr. Morgan,” he said.

“Hi, Lonny,” Doug replied. “How about a fresh pot of coffee inside?”

“Sure, Mr. Morgan, but what I want to tell you is there’s somebody waiting. In your office.”

“Who?”

Lonny shrugged and sauntered away to prepare the coffee. Nick grinned maliciously and observed, “It seems that the Men In Black finally have located you, Morgan, and doubtless you’ll vanish into the same mysterious bailiwick of the weird that you’ve been covering for the last two decades.”

“I couldn’t vanish in the Grand Canyon with you and your foghorn voice alongside me,” Doug said. He led the rest of the way to his office and entered without waiting for Nick.

The Men In Black (who usually were interested in UFO witnesses) weren’t awaiting Morgan in the office, but a young woman was. She was younger than Grundel and quite attractive, in spite of the damage done to her hair and makeup by the raging storm; her hair was reddish brown, like burnished copper, and shoulder length, and her eyes were light green, somewhat resembling those of Morgan’s daughter. This faint resemblance acted to counter the natural attraction he felt toward her as a man and induced a kind of paternal sensation within him.

“Good morning,” he said.

The woman was a bit startled by his arrival and stood as she answered, “Oh, hello, Mr. Morgan, is it?”

“That’s right, Douglas Morgan. And you are … ?”

“Margret Talley,” Grundel supplied from behind him. “It’s good to see you on your feet.”

Meg looked past Doug’s shoulder in surprise. “Excuse me, but do I know you?”

“Imagine me all in white and pushing a tray into your face.” When her eyes remained blank, Nick sighed and continued, “Nick Grundel. I was a bogus orderly in your hospital room on Friday.”

“Yes, now I remember you! You were there when the police questioned me.”

“Right, and it cost me thirty bucks, which was twenty more than I could afford at the time.”

Doug pulled off his raincoat and tossed it at a rack on the rear wall, inspiring Grundel to attempt a similar move; the younger man’s coat slipped from the hook and dropped to the floor, where he left it.

“What can I do for you, Miss Talley?” Morgan asked. “And I don’t want you to think that I’m not glad to see you. There are a number of things that I’d like to ask you about last Thursday night.”

She sat down again. “Everybody has questions, and then they laugh at the answers.”

“I assure you, Miss Talley, no one here will laugh at you,” Doug said.

Grundel dropped like a collapsing bridge into a chair. “Our friend here,” he waved to Morgan, “can sit through an entire Marx Brothers film festival without resembling anyone as cheerful as a man on his way to the electric chair.”

Meg began to look uncomfortable, especially since Grundel had entered the conversation. She turned her attention to Doug and his more formal approach to the matter. “I’m here to thank you for the articles you wrote about me in Saturday’s papers; you’re the only reporter who didn’t lace the story with subtle observations that would dissociate you from this crazy woman’s ravings. Also, I’m here because Mr. Corbett asked me to come.”

“Corbett?” repeated Nick. “Do you mean that behind that placid mask of total incompetence rests the mind of a detective, thrusting through all of the irrelevant data to latch onto the one solid lead that this upside-down case offers us? Of course, he may have been drawn early to said lead because she’s so good-looking.”

“Mr. Corbett called me at my parents’ home last night,” Meg said, with a careful eye on the bearded man, “after learning that I was discharged from the hospital yesterday morning. He explained about how he—and you—believed me and were going to work together to find that … thing.”

“Werewolf,” Nick corrected her. “Say it.”

She drew in a deep breath. “I want to help you.”

“Another recruit,” muttered Morgan.

“Look at it this way, Chief: if we keep getting folks on our side, pretty soon the Mangler will look conspicuous because he’ll be the only individual walking around on the streets.”

“The investigation could have continued without that ridiculous observation, Nick,” Morgan answered. “Miss Talley, I appreciate your volunteering, but—”

“I have a right to be in on this,” she pointed out. “I’ve seen him, I was almost killed by him.”

“Yeah, then with all of these rights and arcane knowledge at your command, why don’t you just sashay out there and collar the bad fellow alone and take all of the credit?” Grundel asked. He wasn’t attacking the young woman for any particular reason; it was simply a natural reaction for him, a Pavlovian response.

Meg Talley wasn’t about to fold up and creep away, however. “I’m not sure why I seem to be so much of a threat to you, Mr. Grundel—”

“Nick, call me Nick,” he interrupted her with infuriating friendliness.

“Whatever,” Meg went on. “I’ve tried going after him alone, and I can swear to you that I was seconds away from death during that night. I don’t ever want to be in that situation again. It’s just fine with me if that monster is locked in the strongest cell in a prison in the deepest cave in the world the next time he goes through that change.

“But, at the same time, I know what he can do to innocent people because I’ve seen the results firsthand. Anything that I might do to stop a repeat of that before he attacks some other poor woman or man is something like a sacred duty to me now.”

Grundel applauded briefly. “Bravo! A sincere, yet forceful and totally unselfish presentation of your motives that can be used as a foreword when you write your book about the affair.”

“Listen, Nick Whoeveryouare, I’m too close to this to take it so lightly! I’ve still got tape all over my back from where he tried to tear my spine out! If I sit still for an hour, my legs get too stiff and sore to support me when I stand up! And underneath this makeup and dress, I’m mottled with purple bruises!”

“Show me,” he whispered with an evil grin.

“Grundel, will you shut your mouth for just a few minutes?” Morgan asked angrily. “It appears to me that the lady has better qualifications by far to be a member of this team than you do. Please ignore him, Miss Talley.”

“I’ll try,” she said, “but it will be difficult. It seems to me that working together and keeping one another abreast of our efforts would allow us to make more progress than if we go scurrying around in all directions.”

“Makes sense to me,” admitted Doug. “Corbett knows about this, I suppose?”

“He suggested it.”

“He always was a sucker for a pair of green eyes,” Grundel added.

“Okay, Nick,” Morgan said, “let’s have your raving, irrational objections to including Miss Talley in our group.”

“Objections? Me?” Nick’s face presented the perfect picture of perplexed innocence. “I’ve been promoting her since we walked into the office.”

Meg’s only recourse was to offer Morgan another confused look.

“You’ll get used to him,” the reporter said.

Blake Corbett arrived shedding water like a large, brown duck and holding a collection of books and magazines beneath the protection of his raincoat. The pot of coffee had just arrived via Lonny’s lethargic delivery system, and he was welcomed with a steaming cup.

“Hmm, ah, that’s hot,” he commented as he dropped the books on Morgan’s desk and wrestled himself free of his coat with the service of just one hand. “I trust you two have met Miss Talley.”

“Intimately,” replied Grundel. “Oversleep?”

The weather may have literally dampened the spirits of nine-tenths of the local population, but the writer seemed charged by it, or perhaps by his mission. “No, sir, I’ve been hard at work in the largest branch of the county library since long before you emerged from your cocoon of blissful slumber. Look at this.” He began randomly selecting books from the stack and tossing them at unready hands. “I’ve been assembling this collection since late Friday; some of them are from libraries, and the rest belong to me.”

Morgan held up the first volume and read, “‘The Werewolf, by Montague Summers.’”

“‘Human Animals’,” Meg added quickly, eager to make herself a part of the proceedings, “‘Frank Hamel’.”

“My turn,” said Nick, “and I seem to have ‘Werwolves’, only one ‘e’ in the first syllable, and it appears to be by a certain ‘Mr. Elliot O’Donnell’”. He scanned a second book. “‘Strange Disappearances, Brad Steiger’? This will prepare us to face the legendary man-beast?”

“Chapter Six,” Corbett replied happily. “It’s called, ‘Monsters and Marksmen from Other Worlds,’ and it contains a couple of accounts of sightings of a wolfman that took place in 1971.”

Meg started a little; she had the memories, still very fresh memories. “Oh god, do you think it might be the same one as ours?”

“Could be. This one was seen in Texas, but, actually, I doubt that it was the same, since it doesn’t seem as if the phase of the moon had any effect on it and it didn’t attempt to harm anyone, though it had plenty of opportunities. One fellow did suffer a heart attack when he saw it.”

“I can understand that,” Meg stated under her breath.

“‘Man Into Wolf’, ‘The Book of Werewolves’, ‘True Mystery Magazine’, the article underline: ‘I Fought the Wolfman’,” Doug read quickly. “Seems like you’ve armed us with all of the knowledge that we need to handle an army of the creatures. You didn’t think to bring along a stake and a mallet, did you?”

“You don’t stake a werewolf, you shoot him with a silver bullet,” Meg pointed out. She smiled to let everyone know that the remark was meant to be taken lightly, but her eyes told them that there was a real belief in the words.

“Oh, I’m not so sure that a strong shaft of wood through his heart wouldn’t stop our doggie,” said Grundel. “After all, somebody has to retain a trace of healthy skepticism in this bunch, and the rest of you believe in it all more than I do.”

“I figured we would need a sort of jumping off spot to get us into the current,” Blake explained. “We can sift through all of this written material and pick out similarities which might help us in some way.”

Morgan was not very impressed with the gathered literature. “I’ve read a good part of this already, Blake; I’ve been interested in the occult for over thirty years, since I was eight or nine. I hate to say it, but there are a lot more blatant contradictions in these stories than similarities. If there is any truth to actual, physical lycanthropy—not just the mental condition—then we’ll probably have to catalogue the facts about it as we uncover them.”

Corbett’s enthusiasm didn’t fade. “Okay, let’s talk to our resident expert, then. Meg?”

She looked up from a garishly illustrated magazine article. “Um, I don’t claim to be an expert.” The young woman sighed. “What do you want to know exactly, besides what I told the police?”

“The physical appearance,” Blake said.

“Like did he resemble the flea-bitten police dogs that substituted for werewolves in the low budget B movies of the Forties,” Nick added.

Meg smiled slightly at the reference. It seemed that she had fallen in with another horror film buff. “When I first saw him, as he leaped from the brush at the roadside through the beams of my headlights and onto the roof, I got impressions of size and speed … and brownness. He was completely covered with brownish-colored hair, at least he appeared to be in that brief flash. And it was about two to three inches long.”

“Face?” asked Doug.

She shook her head. “I didn’t have a chance to see it.”

“Sounds like a man in an ape suit to me,” Nick stated, tossing out the questions and comments that they all knew would have to be weathered if they were to convince anyone of the strange tale’s truth.

“If he had an excellent tailor—or whatever you’d call a man who makes ape suits—and that was all of the evidence, I’d have to agree with you. But—the way he jumped across the hood of the car means that he had to be an acrobat of some kind. When he tore off the door on the passenger side, I couldn’t see him as anything other than a dark smudge in the night, but I would almost swear that he wasn’t larger than a normal man … um, maybe your height, Mr. Morgan.”

“I’m six feet,” Morgan noted for the record.

“Braggart,” mumbled Nick. “He stood on his back legs, right?” With none of the fanfare that might have been expected, he had taken a pencil and notepad from his pocket and was listing the specifics.

“That’s right. He stood upright, like a man. And as to his strength … wow, I never saw an animal as strong as he was. He flipped the car over as easily as—as one of you would tip over a canoe in shallow water.”

Morgan leaned far back in his desk chair, and Corbett thoughtfully massaged the lower portion of his face. Here it was again, the package of transparently ludicrous facts flaunting itself before their faces and daring to be accepted or refuted. Part of each man wanted to believe this evidence of a hitherto invisible world, but another, more pragmatic part was in active conflict with this acceptance in an effort to provide protection against the laughter when it all fell before the winds of logic sooner or later.

“You’re sure he was the only active force in turning over the car?” Morgan asked cautiously.

Meg’s face flashed with a swift expression of anger and hurt, but she quickly realized that Doug was only being prudently skeptical in spite of his need to believe her story. “He was alone, Mr. Morgan, I didn’t wreck the car, and no other driver hit me and then left the scene. He was really there, and he did it.”

“You shot him, I believe,” Nick said calmly.

“Yes. Four times.” Her reply was quietly devastating.

“You didn’t miss?” asked Blake.

“Well, the first bullet hit inside the car, because I fired before I aimed, but the next four went point blank out of the side of the car and into … whatever was standing there. He screamed.”

“This was before he flipped the car?”

“Just before. I think that the pain of the shots drove him to do it.”

Grundel noisily tapped the eraser of his pencil against his front teeth. “If the door was gone, why didn’t he come inside after you? You were responsible for the pain.”

“You make the assumption that we’re dealing with a rational creature, Nicholas,” Corbett answered for her.

“And he definitely wasn’t rational,” sighed Meg. “His anger was total, almost as if it were giving him the strength to do what he did. I could feel it, radiating like heat from him. He was insane with rage.”

“That paints a comforting scenario,” muttered Grundel. “Well, with the police department reluctantly admitting that the creature seemed to have caught more bullets inside the Mitchell home, plus the fact that his punctured corpse was not found anywhere about the premises, I’d have to say that the subject we’re dealing in, my friends, clearly falls under the heading of supernatural.”

“No,” Morgan disagreed at once. “When we catch this guy and the medical geniuses find out what has inspired these terrible transformations, it’ll turn out to be some exotic disease or syndrome, and the smug scientific minds will point and say, ‘We predicted all along that it was nothing supernatural.’”

“In other words, the supernatural inevitably becomes the natural upon being identified,” said Blake.

“Semantics,” stated Grundel, as if it obviously was an area that he couldn’t bother to become involved with.

Corbett began rummaging through the remaining materials that he had brought into the office. “Mentioning disease, there was an article in one of these college journals … here it is, an article that deals specifically with that possibility. It’s by a Professor Gerald Cummings, who was an instructor of, among other subjects, cinema arts at Blythe Springs Junior College near San Diego. The title is, ‘The Hyde Effect,’ subtitled, ‘An Investigation Into The Mythos of the Inner Savage as Freed in Physical Form.’ A short way into it, he presents an entirely reasonable explanation for the supposedly fantastic changes that the werewolf experiences:

“‘Aside from Mr. Sanderson’s entirely logical and documented ‘werewolves’ in sunless upper Norway, another intelligent explanation of changeling creatures involves the possibility of disease, usually rabies, and on the face of it, this proves to be an acceptable hypothesis. After all, in many cases of rabid infection the incubational period is approximately one month, and thus if the subject were to be bitten by a diseased animal—especially a wolf or dog, which were documented carriers in early Europe—and began to act irrationally during the time of the next full moon, including biting those with whom he came in contact, the legend of the werewolf is born practically in its complete bloom. With the disease being transmitted regularly through the actions of its victims, the tales would have to grow and reinforce themselves in the minds of the simple people who were ravaged by the pestilence.’”

“That does make sense,” Meg said.

Corbett held up one hand, indicating that more followed. “‘On closer look, however, several strong arguments against the rabies theory are to be found,’” he continued. “‘In the first place, the ever-present details concerning physical metamorphosis—most often resulting in total species diversification—are incriminatingly absent in actual medical cases involving rabies. In fact, while any number of diseases are capable of producing physically evident changes in the victim (some quite startling in advanced stages), accepted records list not one that is capable of inciting advanced hypertrichosis, skeletal deformity, and psychological dysfunction all within the space of, at most, a few hours and then reversing the conditions in a like amount of time. Secondly, as so many of my students say, the most completely documented incidences of actual lycanthropy involve the same killer over a period of months and, in some cases, years. The stage of mental derangement that is necessary to approximate the behavior of the werewolf is reached by the victim of rabies only in the final development of the disease, when death is imminent and, in nearly all of the instances, inevitable. This fact alone would disqualify the rabies explanation in a number of werewolf stories devoted to killings over a lengthy period of time.’”

“So, we know that the maniac isn’t rabid,” Nick commented.

“But he offers another theory; bear with me,” Blake said. “If we don’t like that, he goes on, ‘What of diseases that are not included in our incomplete modern records? Isn’t it just possible that among the innumerable strains of greatly adaptable bacterial life there is one type which lives symbiotically within the human system and at regular intervals creates such a tremendous shift in hormonal and related physiological balances that the classic characteristics of the anthropomorphized wolf are acquired? Perhaps this disease is even in some unfathomable affinity with the man’s—or woman’s—mind and has mutated along the lines dictated by the beliefs of that mind, id est, the earlier werewolves, who were susceptible to injuries dealt them by their braver victims, gave way to the practically invulnerable monsters of the last and previous centuries.’”

“You know, that’s a point that I haven’t considered,” Talley admitted. “The thing—man, animal, werewolf, whatever—that I shot was hurt and angered by the bullets, but it wasn’t actually injured, just the way Lon Chaney Jr. and Lorenzo Cameron walked through ordinary gunfire in their films. Only silver bullets killed them.”

Her mention of the name of actor Lorenzo Cameron, somewhat famous for his horror and science fiction film roles in the Forties and Fifties, rang a deeply recessed bell within Blake Corbett’s mind, and he filed it away for future reference.

“An evolving disease, changing as it is passed down through the ages from victim to victim,” whispered Morgan.

“Or maybe evolving as it crosses the ages within the system of a single carrier,” Blake proposed. The rest looked at him quizzically. “I read on: ‘And what of the beneficial’—the word ‘beneficial’ is italicized—’aspects of the affliction? Changing, growing in intellectual rapport with its host into the largely cinematic imagery concocted for it by creative human minds, it gives the supposed victim a practical invulnerability, a total resistance to the ‘ordinary’ diseases to which normal people are subject, and perhaps it even maintains the host statically in terms of age. If one is lucky enough to catch this infection while youthful, is it not conceivable that he might never be faced with old age, remaining always the same, living shielded from less fortunate brothers and sisters so as not to inspire suspicion or, more perilous to himself, envy, moving from place to place about the world when the circumstances dictate? Isn’t it possible that this extraordinary disease might be, aside from regular bursts of incredible violence, the blessing that our race has craved since its first glimmerings of intelligence: immortality?’”

“Now, that,” stated Nick, “is clearly worthy of creation by you or any of your more talented compatriots in the deepest fit of inspiration.”

“Invulnerability and immortality, Jesus,” added Doug. “A man, a monster who could live forever, savaging innocents and their distant descendants with the same undiminished ferocity.”

“Or a woman,” interjected Meg. “I don’t know you all well enough to know how you feel about women,” this was sharply hurled in Grundel’s direction, “but we are human and subject to the same diseases, talents, and shortcomings as you are. The thing I saw on Thursday night could have been a tall, mutated woman.”

Corbett started to speak up about the evidence of the hair, but Nick took the opportunity before him and related the information in lovingly patronizing tones. “You see,” he concluded, “we’re almost certain that the broken-off fur—that’s really what it was—came from our werewolf and was left in the forest floor when he underwent his reversion to his natural form. At dawn, probably.”

“I didn’t know about that,” said Meg. “But in the end, it doesn’t really matter, does it? A monster is a monster.”

Predictably, Grundel shook his head. “Oh, it matters, if only because it proves the eternal mythological rule; religions and other legends have their earth goddesses, their heavenly mothers, and their primal wombs, but on the other side of the coin, the devil is always a man.”

Meg smiled. “I guess you’re right, and, believe me, that’s one distinction that none of the ladies begrudge you, Nickie.”

“Call me Nick,” he said quickly.

She smiled even brighter. “No, I think not. You’re just too cute to be a Nick.”

Grundel’s face began to shine with a sudden redness, which surprised both Corbett and Morgan, who hadn’t thought that the young man could be embarrassed by anything. The reporter laughed aloud, as did the novelist, but Blake was a little more successful in smothering his. When Grundel didn’t show any signs of joining in the general mirth at his own expense, he decided to swing the conversation back to the matter at hand. “One more quoted point, and then I promise I’ll put away my facts and figures.”

“No writer can resist quoting, whether it’s his own work or another’s,” Nick muttered, feeling more comfortable on the offensive once more.

Having accomplished his goal, Blake let that crack slide by. “‘The skeptical, and, naturally, there are uncountable millions of them, ask with perfectly good reason why, if this exotic disease bestows upon its hosts invulnerability and immortality, the world is not literally awash with savage, murdering fiends who will ultimately decimate the normal human population to the point where they are forced to prey upon their own number? While not in the least manner insinuating that I believe any of the speculation which forms the body of this admittedly strange article, I find that I have an answer for this apparently solid roadblock of an inquiry, though for the indicated answer, I must return to the familiar forests and moors of my own specialty, the cinema.

“‘Any devoted fan of supernatural horror can recite the fashions in which werewolves and vampires recruit new members into their ranks. In the former and latter cases infection is identical: by biting (and, if further extrapolated, via the diseased saliva). With the vampire, the victim must be quite actually bled to death, because vampirism is a condition of the living dead, not vice versa, which means that if vampires actually exist, our quiet cemeteries should be crawling with the bloodsuckers come nightfall.

“‘With the werewolf, however, the situation is almost a perfect opposite: the victim of the creature’s assault must live to become a soldier in the legion. Since werewolves tend to prey upon individuals in rural, often isolated locations, and since they are such perfect killing machines, the odds of surviving such an attack are clearly very slender. The lycanthrope doesn’t spread his curse because corpses make poor hosts for incubating bacteria.’”

“He’s covered the subject pretty well, I’d say,” commented Meg.

“Yeah, but he doesn’t believe it,” added Morgan.

“Well, he claims not to, but that’s to be expected of a man in his position, a teacher and all,” said Corbett. “He admits to having done a considerable amount of independent research in the field, and that theory is really elaborate to have been the result of private mind games. Another point that makes him a fine subject for discussion among this scruffy group is that just after publishing this article, the author, Cummings took a field trip to some unnamed destination and vanished without a trace. Nothing’s been seen or heard of him since last March.”

“Ooooooooooo,” Grundel hummed in imitation of eerie organ music.

“Wow,” Meg agreed. “If I didn’t already believe …. I’ll bet that that man has watched nearly as many chiller thrillers as I have.”

Nick’s attention was snagged like a fish on a line. “You’re a devotee of the fine art of the creature feature?” he asked warily.

“Since I was old enough to switch on the television alone.”

“An expert, I suppose; a perambulating encyclopedia of the lore and listings.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself—”

“Who played reporter Steve Martin in the tacked-on American scenes in the first Godzilla film?” he snapped abruptly.

“Raymond Burr,” she answered with equal speed. “And in Japan, the movie was originally called Gojira. In what film did Kerwin Matthews co-star with Bing Crosby’s last wife?”

“The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad!”

Like a revamped version of “College Bowl” the contest began, with questions and replies fired like missiles at one another. Blake looked at Doug with a resigned half-smile, and the reporter merely shrugged.

“At least,” Corbett observed, “they’re not taking swings at one another.”