A Wildfire of the Soul
Dorothy Taylor was tired and upset, and the cold sterility of the large, darkened cafeteria was doing nothing to alleviate the condition, in spite of the fact that the room was filled with at least forty reporters from around the nation and the world. They were talking in low mutters while waiting out the hour or so that was left until they could interview that murderer whateverhisnamewas again at twelve. Dorothy realized that she was overreacting to what was almost a predictable setback, but she had allowed her spirits to fly so high following the initial meetings with the psychiatrists only to watch Walter go through one of his most difficult days, so that it was only a natural law of physics that she had to come screaming back to Earth in flames, so to speak.
Yes, they had said that he was one of the most unusual cases they had ever encountered, and they had assured her that he appeared to be susceptible to treatment. But all day Walter had been impossible: during the tests, the interviews, all of the observations, he had reacted only as the Dark Ages warrior (or was he a Viking or a Norman?) He roared in that operatic voice, affected the language of the minor-league novelists who had provided the background for his strange illness, and looked through the solid reality, that she and the other normal people took as the representation of the world as it was, to witness scenes and creatures that existed only within the shrouded recesses of his mind. He seemed edgy, as if preparing for something.
And now he was even refusing to go to bed to rest for the next battery of tests that were slated for tomorrow. Normally, he loved to slip away into his fantasy dreamland, but tonight was different; Dorothy could almost feel a strange frightening charge in the air.
“A repast fit for the kings of the seven thrones of Algrinth,” said the huge man across the table from her.
Dorothy closed her eyes in pain and fatigue. What could have induced this in a young boy who, at the age of ten, had already displayed a level of intelligence that marked him as a genius? How could ghosts from the minds of fantasy writers invade his soul and twist his life into this parody?
“Did you get enough to eat, Walter?” she asked. He had devoured more than a dozen cold cut sandwiches and glasses of milk, and she hoped that the meal would make him sleepy. Nothing else seemed to be working him in that direction.
“Enough?” he repeated in his loud bass voice. “My gut swells with sustenance, I chase the demon Hunger from the field of my flesh and ready myself for mortal combat. Aye, ’twas enow, but I must ready my spirit for the coming engagement.”
“Shhh!” Dorothy whispered, seeing several reporters’ heads turning to stare at them (someone was always staring at her brother, if not due to his actions, then because of his freakish size).
Though only sixteen years old, Walter had already reached that rare seven foot mark in height, and this meant that there were a number of purely physical considerations in addition to the mental problems in his case. But he was not one of those long-limbed, weak, and fragile giants that normally resulted from pathological growth. Actually, the rather surprised doctors had assured Dorothy that her brother was in extraordinarily good health, lacking even the calcium deficiency that was almost obligatory in cases of extreme and rapid growth. Dorothy had seen him perform feats of strength that had convinced her that he was among the strongest human beings who had ever lived, never mind what Russian hippo was currently laying claim to the title. And his body control and reflexes were incredible.
In fact, if he were sane according to society’s standards, he might well be considered the first representative of a new race of people.
“Are you tired now, Walter?” Dorothy asked hopefully. “You can lie down any time you’re ready.” What a switch! Usually, she went to great lengths to keep him awake!
He laughed, though with more reflection than mirth. “Aye, long would I remain with my people, in the bosom of their companionship, but tonight is the hour of my admission into the ranks of the immortals. I ache! My bones cry out for the fetid horror to challenge them! I am here, he is here, and yet who moves from the depths of the shadows to meet me in combat?” Walter leaped to his feet, almost upsetting the large table, and Dorothy rushed around to his side. “Bring him forth, for the might of the Bearsarm will await the confrontation!”
“Walter, Walter, please! You’re making a—Walter, sit down!” she pleaded, feeling nearly helpless with her brother for one of the few times since she had removed him from the mental home. He was nearly trembling with his strange rage; she had seen him happy, angry, and confused, but she had never seen him in any state like this one. “I’m going to have to call the doctors!” she cried.
“Of what aid would they be to me? How can I rest when the Fates dispatch this putrid evil into our midst?”
He was ready for whatever was to come. With a body in the present and a mind in the past, Walter Taylor was a bisected man.
“Holy spandrel, look at the size of that guy!” Brad Ferguson whispered, pointing across the cafeteria. “He must weigh more than I do!”
“He looks big enough to be a professional basketball player,” Corbett said.
“He looks big enough to be a professional mountain,” added Grundel.
“I think he’s some sort of patient here,” Loraine Powell commented uneasily. “And he looks violent.”
Several husky-looking men dressed in light gray uniforms entered the room and crowded around the big man in a very businesslike fashion, but the giant merely shrugged and sent them stumbling away. Brad stood and began clicking off a series of pictures, while most of the other people in the cafeteria pushed their chairs away from the tables in case they had to do some fast moving as a result of this developing situation. But all of the preparation went unused when the young woman who had been trying to calm the tall guy finally managed to soothe him enough to allow himself to be led slowly from the room. There was a general relaxation of the tension in the air.
“Phew, I wonder what his problem is?” said Meg after the group had vanished into the hall.
Nick Grundel chuckled. “Living with midgets, I’d say.”
Morgan nodded. “He’s acting strange, all right, but did you notice his face? He looked like a kid.”
“A big kid,” Loraine amended. “Oh well, how long before the big show begins?”
“Thirty-seven minutes,” replied Doug. “And then he starts to change.”
“The eternal optimist, aren’t you? If Mr. Psycho Cummings is really a member of the fang and claw set, why does he pretend to have invincibility? In the old days one could injure a werewolf with a knife, a gun, sometimes even a stick. In fact, a favorite way of deciding who was or wasn’t a lycanthrope was to lop off an arm or leg or some other member while he was in ‘animal form’ and then look for a human being with a recent and corresponding injury.” Loraine moved her empty tea glass toward the center of the table and lighted a filter-tip cigarette like a judge dismissing a jury.
“Maybe the disease organisms have mutated since the days of the historical werewolves,” Morgan answered, using Cummings’ own words, “it certainly happens enough with common microbes. Or maybe it’s because his brain controls the physical changes brought on by the disease. If you’ll recall, Lon Chaney and Lorenzo Cameron were susceptible only to silver weapons in their films and went unharmed by normal bullets on many occasions.”
“I’ll have to take your word, since I’m not a horror film buff, but do I understand you to say that we have here a mentally-produced monster? Sort of a psychosomatic lycanthrope?”
She had been quick enough to turn the situation into a joke again, Morgan conceded with a sigh, but he had to give her more of an answer than a sigh, so he said, “We have eyewitness testimony that he took a shotgun blast at point-blank range and recovered completely within seconds.”
“Testimony given by a terrified man who had just witnessed six grisly murders,” interjected Ferguson, who was neither baiting Loraine or contesting her stand. “I’d like to see how he reacts to a .44 Magnum going off in his ear.”
“That girl probably missed when she shot at him, anyway,” Powell theorized.
“With a shotgun?” demanded Morgan. “She could have aimed forty-five degrees to the right of him and still scored a hit!”
“After which he immediately knitted up his shredded stomach like a woman doing needlepoint, only a hundred times faster,” the reporter said smugly.
“You now, you really shouldn’t mock something until you’ve found out for sure whether it’s true or not,” Meg Talley muttered. She was not at all comfortable with the approaching exhibition, in spite of the fact that it would swiftly prove that she hadn’t been drunk or hallucinating on that night in August; she was beginning to wish that she had given in to the urgings of her parents and stayed safely home, where she could watch the proof or destruction of her story on television. Once the film was released for public consumption, of course.
Loraine was touched by her evident sincerity, at least mildly, and so she switched her argument to the specifics rather than the general possibility: “Does his fur, then, appear like magic out of the air at the start of this metamorphosis and disappear in the same manner when the sun rises?”
“Allow me,” said Grundel before Doug could reply. “Ms. Powell, would you call a chimpanzee a hairy beast?”
“Of course,” she answered. “Why?”
“Did you know that the average man has, by count, more hair on his body than a chimpanzee does? Naturally, the ape’s fur is longer and coarser, but if this is a dramatic alteration of Cummings’ entire biological system, as we pretty much have agreed, doesn’t it make sense that the growth of his natural body hair would be stimulated into an advanced state of hypertrichosis? And as for its disappearance, we encountered the spots where this loss of the extra whiskers took place several times.”
Powell held up her hands. “Enough! I surrender! Outnumbered as I am, how can I stand against you all? I’ll admit, though, you have got the story nice and tidied up.”
“Cummings will be glad to hear that you no longer disbelieve in him,” Nick said. “Maybe he’ll come out of the observation room and thank you personally.”
“Let’s hope that it never comes down to that,” Blake Corbett added. To himself, he said, Let’s hope he’s securely tied down when he either changes into a ravaging devil or goes into psychotic convulsions.
“If you can keep him calm for a moment, we will prepare and administer a sedative which will let him sleep until morning,” said the doctor, and Walter recognized the word, even though it was technical nonsense from the Outside. He knew that they wanted to drug him so that he would miss the most important night of all of his life ever to be. Almost, he was tempted to seize the offer.
Ola, Eldreda, Ulrica, Gerda, and friends such as Konrad and Lambert were calling him even now from the far side to come to his already deserved reward, a life of ease and good gaming forever, but Walter (from the Teutonic for “mighty warrior,” he knew) was not that man that they believed him to be. He could never refuse this challenge.
“I think he’s going to be okay now,” said the Girl, “but it might be best if you gave him the shot. Are you sleepy now, Walter? You can go to bed if you’d like to. There’re no more tests or anything, and it’s nearly midnight.”
The pleading in her voice touched deeply within him. “No, little one, no sleep and no drugs. You need me. The world needs the sword and the right arm of this man.”
“I’ll call for the orderlies again,” the doctor said.
“Wait, doctor, please,” the girl said. “Walter, you know what will happen if those men come back: they’ll tie you down and make you go to sleep, anyway. So why not take the shot quietly? Do it for me, will you?”
For her. It was from the breath of the goddess Irony that she spoke, not knowing how soon he would be the only defense for her life, tonight, in this pool of insanity. Somehow, he knew that she had no one else to depend upon.
But there was some truth in her words. If these fools were enough to overcome him and lash him to some object, he would naturally free himself from mere bonds, but it would require time and effort which would be more fruitfully applied to his battle. The drug? It would be a more insidious foe, working against him internally, but this … even this he could overpower, and the war would progress at greater speed if he were unbound.
“Aye, lass, I will allow it,” he said softly, rewarded by the rebirth of the light in her eyes. Within a minute, the doctor had the steel of the needle sliding into his massive forearm, and the medicinal poison was being loosed in his body.
“Now you can rest and not be bothered anymore by your problems,” she told him as he lay upon the outsized bed.
Almost, he told her, almost he revealed the terrors and the extent of the slaughter that were held by the coming hours, the evil that would overwhelm her and most of her kind if he were not there to meet the attack, but he saved her that knowing. She would see all soon enough.
“Walter, it is good of you to return to us,” said Konrad from the edges of the darkness that was enveloping Walter.
“But only for a time, my brother,” he replied, “and then I must heed the summons of the evil gods.”
So, come, vilest creature from the red craters and stinking depths of Hell, spread your foul essence! Walter Bearsarm is ready with his undefeated sword!
They played music all of the time, the Man thought, like the hallways of a modern hospital or the telephone hold-line of some large business. It was subdued and, one might say, therapeutic, perfectly suited to the stately atmosphere of this whole place. It drifted into the halls and lecture rooms—and probably even the labs, when the researchers desired it—though each chamber had wall controls to regulate the volume. He liked music.
The guards seemed very nervous and the attendants were beginning to swarm around him like white-coated elves going about Santa’s work with all of their pure little hearts. That could mean just one thing: midnight was approaching.
They would be moving him into the observation room any minute now, which, because of his reputation, would be a major tactical production reminiscent of something taking place in late World War II. They took his story seriously, all right, even if they didn’t admit to believing that he was a legitimate monster, because all of the evidence pointed to the fact that he had destroyed nearly twenty people without the aid of weapons. The truly crazy cases in life frightened even the most hardened of incarcerated men, and he certainly was thought to be among the craziest individuals to ever skulk through a dark alley.
As they moved him carefully from his bed to a contraption of foam and steel, the Man shut out the buzz of jittery conversation to tune in a beautiful woman’s voice coming from the speaker high on the wall. Linda Ronstadt. 1970’s soft, sad hit, “Long, Long Time”. He smiled to himself.
Love songs to die by.
Each member of the group began to display obvious symptoms of nervousness as they made their way from the cafeteria to the observation room. Nick Grundel attempted to appear worldly, bored, and above all of the fuss; instead, he came off resembling a bearded high school student preparing to engage in his initial class debate. Meg Talley was much more open with her tension, somewhat like a dental patient awaiting her turn in the chair. The questions that were directed to her invariably had to be repeated, and her large eyes stared forward in a locked vision of what she had experienced four months before. Her presence here, tonight, was rapidly becoming an idea beyond her comprehension. She knew, and still she had come …
Douglas Morgan was tense, also, but his attitude was one of eagerness to be on with the display—an attitude touched at the edges by a dread of the possible letdown—and it was perfectly delineated by his habit of glancing at his watch every few seconds and frowning because he had been sure that at least five minutes had passed since the last look.
Blake Corbett was extrapolating, as he did practically continually and without conscious effort even in the day to day situations of his life. He extrapolated at breakfast and at interviewing werewolves. “What if … ?” his mind asked reflexively under the slightest provocation, and yet another potential novel crept from the shadows. (Corbett was more than facetiously convinced that his final words on his deathbed would be, “What if this isn’t the end of things?”) At that particular moment, however, he was preoccupied with the possibilities that would be unleashed if Cummings turned out to be just what he claimed: how many other subjects from his (originally) vicariously thrill-providing novels would prove to have been accidentally based on gut-wrenching reality?
The young guide from earlier in the evening, Audrey Tucker, was conducting the four and a number of others to the observation room, and she kept up her polished, promotional spiel as they walked. She pointed out labs where historic medical discoveries had recently been made, and she catalogued the many ways in which the Institute was repaying the taxpayers. Despite her bright personality and the ease with which she dealt with the press representatives (who could become the Institute’s most influential supporters or its greatest opponents, according to whim and the impressions garnered from her speech), Blake felt a sort of mild pity for her. Here she was, calmly, charmingly, desperately asking for the acceptance and support of the fickle public for a facility which already had justified its existence for decades with the medical advances which had flowered within its confines. The scene reminded Corbett of NASA officials pleading for a comparatively piddling amount of funds with which to carry on mankind’s greatest mission of exploration.
Brad Ferguson was cracking obscene jokes beneath his breath, and Loraine Powell was maintaining an air of weary superiority, but each was actually intent on disguising the excitement that was gripping their hearts and stomachs just as fiercely as it had clutched the souls of their fellow journalists.
Morgan had drunk five or six cups of coffee in the cafeteria in a completely needless exercise designed to sharpen his mind for the upcoming event. He told himself that it was the excess of caffeine was causing the minute trembling in his hands now, but he knew that the nervousness had nothing to do with any external stimulant.
“This is where the members of the press will stay during the examination of the patient,” Audrey said as she led them into a large, semi-circular room next to the hospital-like observation chamber where Cummings would be kept during his midnight ordeal.
The observation room sloped gradually from the entrance to a window-topped wall that separated it from the next room. It could easily seat three hundred people in its tiers of deeply-cushioned, high-backed couches. The line of sight was clear into the observation room from any point, and, while entering, the witnesses could see a large number of white-coated men and women who were already present there, apparently making preparations for the arrival of their celebrated patient.
“Please be seated,” Audrey told them. “All of the conversation taking place in the next room will be clearly audible throughout the procedure due to the highly sensitive receivers mounted within the observation room and connected to the speakers here in the gallery. If you will look across the room beyond to its far wall, you will be able to see the readout panel which will keep a running record of Mr. Cummings’ vital functions, including heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure, and temperature throughout the evening. The readings will be given in digital units. The pulse rate for a male of Mr. Cummings’ size and age normally should fall into the area of sixty-five to seventy beats per minute and his respiration would be about eighteen per minute; both will be displayed at the appropriate points on the panel.
“You ladies and gentlemen with cameras may set up on the floor, if you wish, so long as you don’t obstruct the view of the others. I must remind you about our policy in this matter: all film or tape taken of the subject within this compound tonight will be surrendered to the proper authorities at the end of the session and will be returned to the respective groups following the resolution of the legal matters involving Mr. Cummings.”
“The psycho is giving us his full cooperation, so why aren’t you people?” demanded Max Coslo.
Audrey’s polished smile didn’t waver. “In spite of what Mr. Cummings has voluntarily surrendered in the way of his constitutional rights, we must be extremely meticulous in our dealings with him, and each of you understood the restrictions which had to be implemented when you arrived. Your material will be quite carefully handled.”
“I don’t know if I can afford another sample of your gentle care,” Ferguson mumbled, thinking of a ruined roll of film.
“I will be in the rear of the room should you need anything further,” the guide said. And then she walked toward the two exits at the rear of the room, where more excited reporters were flowing inside.
Meg drew in a large breath, held it for a moment, and then released it with a sigh that her friends to either side of her could hear.
“Nerves are getting stretched out pretty tight, aren’t they?” Nick observed.
She nodded. “My stomach feels like this entire building just went over the falls in a barrel.”
“I get that feeling every time I sit down to watch a World Series game.”
“Yeah, or a heavyweight title fight,” Blake added, thankful for the opportunity to attribute his galloping jitters to something other than congenital cowardice. “Even if I’m only watching it on television, I’m sure I get more nervous than the two boxers.”
“Believe me, this hasn’t got anything to do with sports,” Meg assured them. “I only hope that they’ve got him securely strapped down inside a heavy cage when midnight comes.”
“You shouldn’t worry about that,” said Brad. “You saw how he was chained in his ‘normal’ phase at the interview. Don’t you think that that much steel will hold him?”
“No,” she replied simply.
“No?” repeated Loraine, who had been listening in. “My dear, even accepting your premise that he is transformed in some way by his ‘disease,’ you are still dealing with a human being. Just how strong can any man be?”
“I was in a car that he flipped over like so much balsa wood,” Meg answered.
“So we are told—”
Before Powell could continue, however, a ripple of excited conversation dashed throughout the assembly and all eyes were drawn to the clear, thick, and allegedly unbreakable window which formed the upper portion of the wall before them. A door within that sterile-looking room slipped open, and an entourage of blue and white uniforms marched through it with their bodies totally enclosing a large, wheeled contraption; it was no mystery as to who was strapped to that odd vehicle.
“A bed!” Meg exclaimed with unintentional volume. “They’ve got him on a bed!”
Grundel stood up, ignoring the indignant suggestions from those behind him, and peered as well as he could over the heads of the men as they neared the center of the observation room. “It’s a hell of a bed, hon,” he said. And when the policemen and orderlies spread out a bit, the other spectators could see what he meant.
It was a bed, in that it had a deep mattress supported by the wheeled legs, but its frame was constructed of a thick, glossy metal and reinforced with diagonal bars across the legs; anchored securely to the bed’s sides were a number of heavy, black leather straps. These straps were wrapped around the arms and legs and across the chest and forehead of Gerald Cummings. It didn’t appear that any man, even a maniacally powerful one, would be able to work himself free of that mobile prison.
“It won’t hold him,” Meg whispered tightly. “Oh god, they should have put him in a cage.”
If anyone heard her, no heed was paid, because the collective attention of the one hundred and sixty-three people in the room was focused on the supine man lying on the bed and the doctors and nurses surrounding him. No one, not even the four young guides near the rear of the room, noticed a casually dressed young man named William Pembroke as he slipped out into the corridor through the still open doorway; he thought that he had more important dealings in other places in the building.
“Almost zero hour, isn’t it?” Audrey Tucker’s promise proved to be well-founded, as everyone in the gallery heard Gerald Cummings’ words as he spoke to an attendant standing at his side in the next room.
“So long, it’s been good to know you,” Brad swiftly whispered while moving from his seat into the aisle to his right. For a moment, Meg thought that the big man had been affected by the fear emanating from her, but when she saw him nimbly darting down the aisle toward the window, she quickly realized that he was merely succumbing to the demands of his vocation and adjusting himself for better camera shots of the scene a few feet before them.
Morgan was surprised to find that his tension seemed to fade as the drama developed before him. He hardened into a coldly detached observer. He was the investigator now and no longer a mere human participant in this strange demonstration. What’s happening in that mind now? the reporter wondered. Just minutes from the target hour, what will trigger the animal fury that has already destroyed eighteen people? Is it the world’s rarest infection, or just the explosive horrors of madness?
In the observation room, Cummings’ head was freed of the restraining strap and lifted carefully by one of the attendants while he drank a cup of water. A doctor used quick and sure fingers to sift through the man’s brown hair and locate four strategic points on his skull where monitoring equipment would be attached to him via thin, insulated wires. Doug was surprised that Cummings’ hair hadn’t been shaved for that procedure; he figured that even accused mass murderers were spared avoidable indignities, at least until a verdict of guilty was passed.
“What time is it, Dr. Gurren?” Cummings asked the man who had applied the wires to his head.
“Seven minutes until twelve,” the other calmly replied.
“Seven more minutes, seven minutes,” the captive said, and Corbett could detect a nervousness in that formerly controlled instructor’s voice. Cummings glanced laboriously at the bed on which he lay. “Aren’t you going to put me in something? A cage of some kind? I’ve killed too many … I wouldn’t want any more accidents to occur.”
“Young man, that contraption into which you have been laced is designed and built to withstand an uninhibited attack by a dozen grown men,” Gurren assured him. “I don’t believe that you have any reason to worry about inadvertently injuring anyone.”
“Okay, okay,” said Cummings between rapid breaths. The forehead strap had not been refixed after the monitoring wires were fitted to him, and he was able to crane his neck around and peer through the long window at the assembled reporters and photographers who were recording the proceedings. “I see that the gallery’s ready for the big show.” At this, Corbett was suddenly and uncomfortably startled: he had thought that the glass would be one-way, shielding him from the attention of the subject of all of this. “Not as many scientists out there as I would have expected,” Cummings added.
“The majority of these people belong to the press,” Gurren confirmed, “but that’s as you requested.”
“Don’t worry. My constitutional rights aren’t at issue here. Besides, after tonight I seriously doubt that any sort of trial will be required.” The former college teacher leaned forward as far as the straps would permit and winked to the watchers. “I hope they get some good pictures.”
“I will,” Brad Ferguson said to himself.
Cummings lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He couldn’t seem to force himself to remain still. “What’s the time now?”
“Five ’til.”
He nodded. “That can be a twinkling or an eternity. You know, not too long after all of this started, I thought that possibly, if I shut myself away from any direct visual contact with the moon for all night during the times when it was full, I might hoodwink my own body and miss a seizure, but it was a futile hope. Somehow, I always know when midnight arrives, even if the moon has already set.”
The idle conversation continued for a few minutes while a number of other monitoring devices were attached to specific points about Cummings’ body. He was dressed only in a loose, white hospital gown, which made placement of the equipment swift and simple. The reporters kept running totals of the readouts of his vital signs, and it was somewhat surprising to note the degree of self-control displayed by the man as the moment approached. The indications of his increasing uneasiness rose at a steady, but not spectacular rate.
When Cummings asked the time once more, Meg glanced at her own watch out of habit and saw that it was still two minutes until midnight. She was quite surprised by Gurren’s response, however.
“Three minutes past twelve.”
Cummings’ eyes widened with rage and his lips drew back from his strangely formed teeth. “Don’t lie to me, doctor! Don’t try these little psychological games, because I’ll know when it’s time whether or not I have a clock at hand! We will all know! In the car, in Montana, I was practically driving in my sleep, but when it started … damn, I knew when it started without a watch!”
“So cracks the sophisticated veneer of the mass killer,” Nick whispered to Meg. She stayed silent, and her lips were thin and white in the pale field of her face.
“I want something!” Cummings screamed abruptly.
Doctors and nurses scrambled about in the observation room, and the digital readings leapt or dipped in response to the man’s outpouring of fear and anger. Only Gurren appeared to retain his placid resolve in the midst of them. “What do you wish?” he asked.
“A sedative, something to knock me out!” replied Cummings in the same urgent tone. “I know it won’t—listen, maybe—maybe if you dope me, with massive amounts of some drug … I don’t want to go through it again, please!”
“Lon Chaney to Maria Ouspenskaya, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, 1943,” Grundel muttered.
“No sedation, I think,” Gurren calmly told the frantic man.
“Doctor, please, you don’t understand! I have to have something to get me through it again! It’ll drive me completely insane if you don’t give me some help!”
“No, Gerald. We have to monitor your reactions in order to construct an apposite theory as to your—”
Cummings snapped his face away from the man at his side. “Then shut up! Shut up, goddamn you, and leave me alone!”
“Now we come to the fun,” Loraine said smugly into Doug’s ear. “The predicted reversion. Watch your ‘werewolf’ become a spitting, screaming, howling, and probably foaming, hysterical human being.”
Morgan said nothing, for now only time was his enemy, and it was swiftly dying.
With the seconds running out and drawing to a point in existence which had called to them with a mocking voice since the night of the first murder, Cummings twisted from side to side within the prison of his steel and plastic bed and started to moan hoarsely, like a child gripped by a nightmare too terrible for screams. Then he stiffened, almost spasmodically, and slowly succumbed to a spreading series of uncoordinated jerks throughout his body.
“Wow, I’ll bet I don’t get to use ten per cent of this on KXLR whenever it clears these censors,” Ferguson prophesied. He was shooting television tape along with a string of selected stills.
“Shh!” cautioned another photographer. “You’re bleeding onto everyone’s tapes!”
“Edit, edit,” advised the big man, grinning savagely.
“Get me out of here!” Cummings shrieked. The jerks were becoming more violent and graduating into the beginnings of a convulsion. His face was flushed scarlet and his eyes were rolling madly. “Get everybody away from me, you fools!”
Blake Corbett looked quickly to either side of him and saw that not one of the faces of his associates in the room had maintained that sneering dubiousness with which they had entered into the evening. Meg was biting her lips and staring as if hypnotized at the wild display beyond the glass.
Cummings was writhing like a snake by then. Gurren had at last prepared a hypodermic of some sort of liquid sedative to inject into him if he showed signs of self-injury as he twisted against the heavy straps. The captive man shouted, “No time … no … more … time! God, help me, God, if you’re there! I don’t want to do it! Let me go! Let me go, let me go!”
Midnight, Morgan thought. Now!
“Good lord, look at the board!” someone yelled, pointing to the digital readings across the room. The dials were whirling crazily.
“What a performance!” Loraine Powell gasped over the noise.
Now, damn it, now!
And Cummings began to scream. At first, it was high, breaking, and drawn out, the cry of a tortured human. But as Morgan watched the wildly fluctuating digits on the board, the tone of the scream altered drastically. It became deeper and rougher, with a heavy, vibrant current rushing beneath the open vocal, a sound from out of a jungle. Startled—even though he knew that he shouldn’t have been—Doug looked at the bed and saw every petrifying fantasy of his life materializing before his eyes; his mind became one with those of Blake, Meg, and Nick as they drank in the awful vision.
A paralysis struck both rooms. No one spoke and no one moved. Everyone watched Gerald Cummings as he ceased his struggles and lay back into the bed with staring eyes and an open, twisted mouth. His lips now rolled back from the protruding teeth and their four gaps, and his breath seemed to rush as loudly as the wind. But it was the skin of his face that drew the focus of the onlookers in the way that it appeared to darken and move down the sides of his head. For an instant, it actually looked as if his flesh were aging at some incredibly accelerated rate and sliding from his skull onto the bed, but a further look showed the observers that the darkening was his facial hair, which was visibly growing in an even spread from his forehead to his neck. Long, brown hair.
“Christ,” whispered a man in the examination room.
The silence returned, and Cummings continued to change. The blank look that had come into his eyes vanished to be replaced by a darting rage. His mouth started to work in wordless fury, an action which revealed, through a thin film of his own blood, four newly-grown fangs as long and sharp as those of a carnivorous mammal of his size. They looked like daggers.
With a deep breath, the creature roared in a feral call of exaltation; there was no note of human frailty or compassion in the cry. He was again complete and hungering for his only sustenance.
“Oh my god!” cried Meg Talley, the last word rising into the range of hysteria.
A maelstrom erupted around the four who had believed in this moment months earlier, though never really accepting it: reporters and lab technicians began screaming in a mixture of terror, shock, and exhilaration; others could only stare without words or breath; and Ferguson actually crashed noisily against the heavy glass of the window as he scrambled forward to get closer, better pictures of this inconceivable occurrence that he was witnessing.
While this purely human reaction to the madness roiled in both rooms, Cummings began to struggle so savagely against the leather which held him that the heavily-constructed bed—which weighed at least three hundred pounds—slipped and bucked, actually bouncing from the floor like a painfully spurred horse. With their shock and inertia burned away by this sudden activity, an army of shouting doctors, scientists, and policemen surrounded the violent prisoner, all trying to calm, drug, or physically subdue him. They hadn’t yet fully comprehended what they were witnessing.
“Move away from him, you damned jackasses!” Ferguson roared frantically. “I can’t get him, move back!”
Douglas Morgan had held his last breath for almost a full minute until Loraine began to pound his shoulder in blind excitement and shouted, “You were right, Doug, he is a monster! I never in all of my life would have believed it!” Abruptly, she stopped her beating and clutched a handful of his right arm with her painfully sharp nails. “Unless it’s a trick—”
“What the hell kind of trick?” he demanded. “Mirrors? Makeup? Loraine, the man has changed—his teeth, his hair, my god, not even you can deny it now!”
Words burst forth from the startled group and splashed against the walls in waves of white noise, and while a few were calling for quiet in a futile attempt to pick up what the doctors were screaming in the other room, most were still lost in the horrified wonder of the fantastic moment. Blake suddenly found himself leaving his seat to fight for a position among the photographers at the window, and Nick and Doug were at his sides.
Morgan was holding his portable recorder near his mouth to overcome the flood of voices about him and practically shrieking narration into the speaker to capture the reality of the instant. These shoving, cursing men and women were experienced professional investigators who possessed more than enough acumen to recognize any form of fakery, but their impassioned faces told Corbett that not one doubted that he was viewing an occurrence far beyond anything contained in the precepts of modern science.
The pitch of the voices in the observation room itself had been at a sustained level of amazement at the transformation since it began, but as Corbett, Morgan, and Grundel elbowed themselves places at the window, there came an abrupt shift in tone in the shouts from the second room. The noise rose even higher in the register to a point of more alarm than excitement. The regular pounding sounds of the big bed as it leaped from the floor and slammed back into it now contained a note of shrilly protesting metal, and the cluster of thirty or more people about the captive turned away from him toward the two exits from the room. The source of their panic was revealed in all of its savage magnificence just as soon as the center of the chamber was clear of them.
The bed, once proclaimed to be strong enough to hold a dozen insanely strong men, lay on its side in the floor, twisted like a toy in an inferno, and Gerald Cummings was held at bay only by a single unbroken strap about his left ankle. This lasted but a second longer.
“He’s loose!” someone cried, and the shout began a rout as the formerly analytically impassive residents of the Institute tore at one another in hysteria in their efforts to flee through the doors to escape the demonic creature. The rout came seconds too late to save all of them, however.
Looking more ape-like than wolfish due to his upright posture and the jutting forward of his lips over the huge fangs, Cummings ripped the white gown from his body with a simple flick of his clawed right hand, and this revealed his tall, slender body to be covered with a coating of the pelt-like hair. Then he leaped with no more than a casual tensing of his legs onto the fleeing crowd of people and caught a short and thin man by the back of the neck.
Lifting the struggling man over his head as if the body weighed no more than that of a child, the beast held him aloft for a moment, roared with the most unbridled hatred that any of the witnesses had ever heard, and threw the suddenly limp man against an equipment-filled wall more than ten feet away. The man struck the panels and switches with such force that the entire circuitry of that section of machines shorted in small bursts of light and an angry sizzling of burning wires.
Meg was screaming mindlessly by that time. It seemed as if her throat would rupture from the strain, but she remained frozen to her seat and her unblinking eyes could not turn away from the terrible craziness evolving in the next room.
An answering roar of pure horror swept through the crowd.
“… with the strength of some huge animal! Cummings has thrown the man almost carelessly aside!” Morgan heard his voice hurling the words into his tape recorder; they tumbled out of him as if at the command of some invisible ventriloquist, since he was certain that he was too deeply plunged into the depths of shock to even mumble. But he still spoke and edged ever closer to the window for a better view. “Now he advances upon the screaming morass of humanity trapped by their very numbers, his head moving, catlike, side to side, as if searching for the next victim of his …”
The opposing doorways of the observation room were providing escape for some, but the panicked crush of those behind the lucky few was insuring that the majority would be caught in the enclosure with the creature for several moments longer. Cummings stood for an instant on the balls of his shoeless feet and then chose to go to his left. His hands dug into the terrified cluster and dragged away a pair of doctors.
One victim, a wild-eyed man, was flipped across the floor with an incidental force which sent him tumbling like an acrobat. The second, a thrashing woman, was thrown to the tiled floor on her back and pinned there by one of his hands. Cummings snarled with an inarticulate, yet unmistakable threat in his voice and drove his open mouth onto her neck. Blood and flesh ran down his own throat when he rose, and this was almost instantly feasted upon by the exotic bacteria that inhabited his body and converted to even more energy to drive his reconstructed form.
“We’ve got to get out of here and get help!” Les Tominsky shouted with sudden realization.
“Wait, wait! The police are in there!” Max Coslo answered.
As if in answer to the statement, four uniformed state policemen pushed themselves free of the panicked crowd and took up positions on every side of the raging monster. Blake recognized them as the men who had guarded Cummings at the interview: Darrow, Malory, Nestor, and Nozaka. With guns drawn, they quickly hustled the remaining scientists and doctors away from the beast.
“Cummings!” screamed Darrow. “Stop where you are or we’ll open fire!”
The creature advanced on the nearest officer with the same ferociousness he had displayed while attacking the lab workers. Rivulets of blood from the woman’s mutilated neck rolled down his chin, and his frenzy seemed unabated as he reached out toward the man’s face. The officer fought his own panic and waited until the final possible moment before squeezing the trigger of his gun.
An exceptionally loud report exploded above the screams, causing Morgan to wince. Cummings was suddenly falling backwards while emitting a mad howl of pain and surprise. Instinctively, Doug, who had seen the effects of bullets on bodies before, thought, He’s dead, it’s over. But this mixed relief and loss was premature.
Rolling on the floor and jabbing his feet into the air in agony, the metamorphosed man jerked to his right shoulder, flipped sharply, and was abruptly standing again. He crouched and roared defiantly and displayed no sign of injury other than a splash of red in the fur of his back where the bullet had exited.
“For the love of god, he’s healed!” a doctor in the gallery stated in awed recognition.
The policeman fired again and was joined by his three fellow officers in the assault, so that the air was quickly filled with the flare and thunder of their guns. Corbett joined the rest of the room in diving to the floor as three slugs missed their targets and smashed through the viewing window.
Ferguson held his position with inhuman concentration through the assault and filmed the grotesque scene as Cummings was knocked across the room and almost torn apart by the fusillade. But his numbed mind refused to accept the evidence that was being recorded by his camera. Nothing the size of a man could survive being sprayed with shells that way … but Cummings was surviving.
Even as the police emptied their guns into him, his body was accepting the bullets, in a fashion absorbing them, and expelling the metal through its own momentum while repairing whatever damage had been caused by the passage faster than the officers could pull their triggers. Even the most vicious wounds were knitting in seconds, and the incredible symbiotic activities of a human mind and the world’s most extraordinary disease gave irrefutable proof that invincibility in man had been approached.
The policemen found this no easier to believe than did Ferguson, but when the creature stood once more, whole and as bursting with fury as before, they were forced to accept the fact that they couldn’t stop him with their now-empty weapons. But they continued to press the attack, whether from training or sheer desperation.
It was a magnificent, courageous action, but it was also in vain. Cummings became a slashing dervish and pitted his claws and teeth against their ordinary flesh and muscle. One man leaped onto the monster’s back and attempted to ride him to the floor by weight alone, but a hand caught in his clothing, ripped him from his purchase, and whipped him into a wall with such power that the back of his head crashed against it and broke open. A smeared red trail followed as he slid to the floor.
Malory kept his gun in his right hand as he darted in, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter. He used its butt to club the awful face with every ounce of strength that he could summon from his body. Cummings actually reeled for an instant before the pounding, but it was far from enough of an assault to stop his rampage. He caught Malory’s face in one hand, squeezed, and tore away the man’s features.
A third officer had seen enough to convince him that anything other than flight was suicidal, so he joined the others who were streaming from the room. But his decision had come too late to save his life. Nick was just peering over the lower portion of the wall through the window when he saw the cop collapse beneath the leaping werewolf.
Only Darrow was left to face the terrible thing which had destroyed his men. He didn’t run or charge, as had the others; instead, thinking with surprising clarity in the situation, he backed carefully away from Cummings, who was still occupied with the third dead policeman, while reloading his service revolver. When the creature turned its attention to the last few civilians running through the exits Darrow directed his arm at the spots which would have been most vulnerable on any man: the head and spine. Three shots rang out in quick succession. Cummings was knocked from his feet again by the impact of the shells, and his ringing cries echoed the fiery anguish that the bullets had drilled into him. Again, however, there was no permanence to the injuries, hardly even a momentary effect, so that by the time Darrow had again emptied his gun, the awesome creature was advancing on him like Death personified.
“Get out of there!” Grundel found himself screaming. “Run, you dumb sucker!” And just inches from his right ear, Corbett was yelling, “Look out, Darrow!”
The policeman was frantically loading his gun when Cummings reached him and threw him completely across the room. Then the beast leaped through the doorway after his vanishing quarry with the lower portion of Sergeant Darrow’s left arm in his hand.
“Hey, folks, I think we’d better get our collective tails in gear,” Grundel whispered urgently, alarmed over his personal well-being for the first time.
The ice-like atmosphere that had frozen the watchers into disbelief and immobility shattered with that whisper and the realization that Cummings, having found no live game in the hallway immediately outside the observation room, had returned and was glaring at them through the glass. The reporters and scientists spilled into the aisles that led up the sloping floor to the two doorways, but in their sudden response to the instinctive flight, they almost repeated the scene of the disastrous stampede which had taken place in the next room. Men and women fell over one another in the charge up the carpeted ramp, and a number of them tried to avoid the confusion by leaping over the long couches. One portion of the reporters even chose to attack the clogged escape routes with the hindrance of their bulky cameras and the irreplaceable film that each carried.
The observation room had emptied of those able to run by that time, and this left, in addition to the orgiastic Cummings, eight injured or dead bodies on a tile floor which was staining red with the blood he had spilled. Lust and rage surged through the channels of his body. The werewolf looked around the almost silent room but found no enemy to slash open and no other struggling vessels of hot juices to partake of. His sharply moving eyes swept over his possible targets and were caught by the vision of the panicked crowd in the gallery.
The brain residing in Gerald Cummings’ body was not that of a displaced animal; it belonged to an educated and intelligent human being who was being subjected to the tremendous pressures and freedoms of his unique condition. So when he saw the window, he knew the glass for what it was, though there was no analytical consideration concerning its substance or purpose. If he failed to reason out the principles of the glass, he still realized that the nearly invisible barrier separated him from even more of the objects of his insatiable cravings.
A large man in a white coat lay at his feet. The man was injured, but not yet dead, and he realized what was happening when the amazingly strong hands of the creature closed about his shoulder and thigh.
“No, leave me alone, please leave me alone …” His voice was weak with shock and fear, but it became louder as he rose from the floor toward the werewolf’s head. “Put me down! Help me, somebody! For god’s sake, stop him!”
Cummings lifted the heavy body up and behind his head, all the while watching the reporters in the gallery disappearing through yet another door. Already he hated doors with a passion as hot as Hell itself. The joy and craving that were driving him seemed wounded when even one person escaped him, so, roaring his fury and contempt, he pitched the heavy man into the window.
Corbett and Grundel had worked in wordless harmony by climbing over the wide couches in the gallery before them and grasping Meg, who was still paralyzed by the rebirth of her deepest fear, to pull her into the tide that was racing towards the doors, so they were more than a dozen yards away from the window when it shattered. But Morgan had been shoved to his knees by a muscular network newsman just after the flight began, and he could only slowly regain his feet due to the scramble of legs all around him. The glass exploded just behind him and rained shards across his back. The man who had become a living missile sailed over his head into the pack of men and women ahead of him, bowling over a number of them. Ignoring their screams, Morgan turned to see Cummings poised in the jagged hole in the window like a painted demon from the wall of some ancient temple.
He heard a scream—it could have been his—and the werewolf leaped at the assembly. Doug was lucky in that there were so many people present to fill the monster’s needs that little individual attention could be paid him. In a rush of steaming rage, one long arm slashed by Doug in a wide arc to smoothly slice the skin of his chest as if his shirt and coat were no more than thin netting. Blood welled instantly from the gashes and felt ice cold, rather than warm.
The creature fell past Doug onto the back of a woman. Doug tried to rush the thing off her with a body block that he threw amid old football memories, but as he hit the hairy shoulder-blades, Cummings swung halfway around and knocked him to his hands and knees. The forearm that struck the reporter across the face felt as hard as a ballbat, and the blow drove him to the floor with his consciousness spinning wildly behind his eyelids.
Morgan staggered to his feet and was hit by something—either another blow from Cummings or the body of a victim flying past him—that knocked him over the back of the couch nearest him and into the seat of the one behind it.
The terror continued in spite of Morgan’s dazed condition. At least a dozen people had been unable to escape the room before the attack, and the beast became a totally mindless, gale-like force among them, lashing in every direction and tearing away flesh wherever the razor-sharp claws touched. The cries of the victims burst as loudly as they had while watching the slaughter in the observation room, but now the heart of the screaming was anguished despair, not the vicarious horror of before.
Morgan’s head slowed its rush about the cosmos and cleared enough for him to view the butchery before him from the safety (he hoped) of the high-backed couch. He found himself incapable of closing his eyes against the heart-stopping spectacle, even though his revulsion had him on the verge of passing out in order to rescue his own sanity.
He watched the death of another woman as Cummings ripped her throat open, and next there was a man who had his head pounded into featureless gore as he begged for mercy from his attacker. Someone Doug vaguely recognized as the ABC commentator assigned to the story tried to save the pair by using a metal folding chair to club at the monster’s back, but he was disemboweled before he could turn to flee. Morgan tried to move, either to attack Cummings or run or something, only to discover that his body remained limp, like a dead cell encasing his frantically racing heart.
Finally, the carnage ended. The creature dropped the last of his victims and surveyed the hot, reddening room. Now that there was no one else to try to save, Doug lay still, hoping to pass for dead if those terrible eyes happened to fall upon him. He even held his shaky breath within his lungs to eliminate the possibility of being heard. But though the only sounds escaping from the savaged people were only weak moanings, another whispering hum came from somewhere behind Morgan and drew the. angry investigation of the eyes before it died abruptly.
The reporter’s heart had turned to stone inside his chest when the werewolf turned in his direction to locate the source of the noise, and it remained so even after the beast had shifted his attention away from the rear of the room. The low growling emitted from the long throat was nothing more than an unconscious threat while Cummings sniffed at the air in the still area. After a quick glance at what he had done, he stepped over the bodies of his victims and disappeared into the corridor. Morgan closed his eyes and sighed deeply to release the breath that had been trapped for so long in his lungs.
“Help me,” a bloodied form on the floor before Doug cried in a voice so weak as to be no more than a whisper.
A stronger, much more excited voice rode over the plea with a nearly ecstatic, “I got it, Morgan! Morgan, you alive? I got it all on film!”
Doug painfully twisted his head and asked dryly, “Ferguson?”
The big man was suddenly at his side, dragging him into a sitting position. “Glad you made it, man! This has got to be the greatest film footage since the time of Sir Humphry Davy, damn, it’s incredible! A photographic record of the transformation and attack of an honest-to-god werewolf, it’s absolutely sensa—”
“Ferguson!” Doug exploded. “Are you crazy? We’ve got to get out of here before he comes back!”
Brad actually looked startled at the suggestion. Blood was flowing from a gash on his right cheek and his shirt had been torn to rags by a momentary contact with Cummings’ claws, but he seemed to be oblivious to any pain or danger. “Sure, Doug, but these pictures!. I’ve got it from the instant of transformation to the point where he came through the window and walked over us! When he knocked me down is going to come out—”
Morgan dragged himself to his feet and grasped Ferguson’s arm, now certain that he was dealing with some weird manifestation of shock that was insulating Brad from the desperate nature of their situation, inside this windowless, fortress-like building with that terrible engine of destruction. “Will you shut up about your damned photos? You and I—and these other people, if any are left alive—have to get outside and find some way of stopping him!”
“Okay, Doug, just calm down,” Ferguson replied. “You’re experiencing some shock, that’s all.”
“I’m in shock?” Morgan repeated incredulously.
“Take it easy, man; we’ll get help right now.”
With this concession from the photographer, Morgan suddenly realized that he was planning to leave the room for the quiet corridor where that monster now stalked in search of more sating of the irresistible compulsions that coursed through him. Abruptly, he wasn’t certain if he could go through with what definitely had to be done.
Brad still remained outwardly cool. “I heard somebody asking for help a second ago,” he stated with apparent detachment.
“There,” Morgan answered, pointing to an unmoving body.
Ferguson stooped and checked for signs of life. “Too late now. No wonder, though; would you look at that—”
“Let’s get out of here,” Doug said quickly. His fears were dividing him brutally: on the one hand, he certainly did not wish to go out there into those corridors where he knew that Cummings was prowling and looking for fresh blood; but on the other, staying here in this room reeking with dead and dying offered him no greater protection than did the hallway. Criminals return to the scene of the crimes, they say, so why not expect a monster to return to the site of a massacre? Doug stepped over several still forms and into the exit.
His heart almost stopped for good when a large hand fell on his right shoulder. “Hold it, Doug,” Ferguson said.
“Jesus Christ, Brad!” he hissed. “Don’t do that!”
Somehow, Ferguson found the nerve to wink playfully at him. “We don’t want to charge out directly into the maw of that thing, now, do we?”
“And what in the hell do you suggest we do instead?” Morgan demanded, louder than he had intended.
“Why don’t we try shutting our mouths for a few seconds?”
Confused and still deeply terrified, Douglas complied. He and Ferguson stood in the doorway with their heads thrust slightly into the corridor beyond, and they listened. At first, they heard nothing. As their pulse rates slowed enough to reduce the hammering in their ears, however, they began to pick up on the normal, almost subliminal sounds of the building: to their right they heard the faint crackling of a fluorescent light bulb that needed replacing and the steady hum of a soft drink machine, both of these devices carrying on their ordinary duties in a world that had become anything but ordinary; to their left, they picked up on a very weak, practically whispered sobbing that seemed to come from a woman several hundred feet up the hall and out of sight of them. One of Cummings’ victims?
“This way,” Brad said, pulling Morgan to the right.
“We should check …” Doug began, but Brad ignored this and dragged him along like a battleship towing a yacht.
The corridor was cold, freezing, in fact. The very air was hard and sharp, so that it was difficult for Morgan to move through it even with Ferguson creating a channel ahead of him. Terror, he thought sardonically, the old man who has seen everything is so damned frightened that he’s about to shit in his drawers, if he hasn’t already.
Ferguson seemed to have read his mind. “It’s different, isn’t it? Now that’s it’s real,” he noted perceptively.
“You’re damned right about that,” Morgan answered tightly. “Before, I wanted to be here so that I could write about it later; now, I just hope that there is a later.”