A Werewolf Among Us

ran. He did not get too far from the den before the wolf was upon him. Much larger than the boy, the wolf sank teeth into his shoulder and dragged him down. They skidded on fallen leaves, rolled, the boy screaming and the wolf snarling furiously as he worked at the hold he had secured… Since the camp was so close by, several men soon reached the boy and drove away the wolf. Though they carried guns, and though several were good marksmen who placed bullets in the wolf, it loped away, apparently unharmed. The du-aga-klava, unlike the ordinary wolf, can only be brought down with weapons that have been coated with the sap of the Dead Men… The rescuers carried the boy back to camp, where physicians stopped the bleeding and bandaged his arm. He had entered a coma, however, and he did not rise out of it for nearly two and a half weeks — except those times when his mother came upon him groveling on the floor like an animal. When she tried to touch him and put him to bed, he snapped at her, snarled like the wolf that had bit him. When these seizures took him, there was nothing to do but wait until they passed and unconsciousness again claimed him. Then he would be put to bed again. The leaves fell from the Dead Men, souls expelled from purgatory into heaven… The air grew cooler as winter approached. For long days the camp was bathed in light — the whole while that the boy lay stricken… When the new leaves had interlaced and the familiar canopy of darkness lay over them once more, the boy began to improve. He no longer howled, and did not snap at his loved ones; he had ceased to froth at the mouth. He had lost a great deal of weight, but he gained it back swiftly, his appetite ravenous. Completely out of his comatose state now, he slowly grew tolerant of bright lights, though he shied away from them when it was at all possible to do so, always choosing to sit in the most dimly lighted corner. Within another month, his sickness was all but forgotten, except when the family prayed and gave thanks for his recovery. At about this time, the first of the children was attacked and killed by a wolf. It happened at night, when some of the children were playing a form of hide-and-seek in the backlot of the trailers, while the adults were all in towards the center of the camp for a celebration. A week later another child was killed, also at night, but this time while he slept alone in his mother's tent. Though the men banded together to hunt down the rogue wolf, they found no trace of the animal. All the nearby dens had been deserted earlier as the animals moved into the low country for the winter. Soon they began to murmur among themselves, form theories based on legends. The wolf, they said, was more than an ordinary wolf. The third child to be attacked was playing with Norya's brother when the wolf jumped her. According to the boy, he frightened the beast off before it could do the girl much harm. She was hysterical, but spoke lucidly enough to point the finger at the boy. He was the wolf, she said. They had been playing, and suddenly he jumped her and he had fangs and his hands had become claws, and he had almost killed her… It was necessary, then, to execute the boy by forcing him to consume a cup of poison made from the bark of the Dead Men. And when he was gone, there were no more murders, no more—

The vision of the dead boy — face contorted by the poison, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling of the tent — faded from view, as if his flesh were nothing more than smoke.

It was, of course, even less than that.

Beyond the tent, the green-gray forest melted.

Reality intruded: heavy furniture, flickering candles, an old woman with a blanket across her knees…

'I would like to know—' St. Cyr began.

Dane said, 'She's sleeping.'

'When will she wake?'

'Perhaps not until morning. It was a hard thing for her to do, but she knew she had to warn us.'

'What now?'

'We leave. What else?'

Outside, they stood against a thick Dead Man's trunk and breathed the stale air out of their lungs. 'It meant nothing,' St. Cyr said.

'How can you say that?' Dane turned to face him, angry. 'You saw how the weapons had no effect on the wolf that bit her brother.'

'The marksmen were nervous — at least, they were in the re-creation that we saw. They could easily have missed and sworn they hit to preserve their reputations.'

'What about his sickness?'

'The same sickness that everyone got when bitten by a wolf. They carried bacteria. I have the report on them from Climicon.'

'What about the aversion to light?'

'A symptom in many diseases where the eye may be infected.'

Dane shook his head violently. 'But that's not all. What about the second child who was killed, the one sleeping in a tent? Would a wild animal enter a civilized habitat for prey?'

'It might. It's more probable than Norya's werewolf.'

'And the fact that the men searched but could find no wolf in the neighborhood?'

'They did not search well enough. Or it eluded them.'

Dane said, 'What about the child's story, the little girl who was nearly the third victim?'

'She knew she was playing with Norya's brother,' St. Cyr explained patiently. 'She was not expecting anything else. When the wolf jumped her, she became hysterical. She saw the boy driving it off, and in her hysteria, having heard the rumors about a du-aga-klava, it all became twisted in her mind until the boy was the wolf, the wolf was the boy.'

'That's a shaky explanation, don't you think?'

'No,' St. Cyr said. 'When you're a detective for long, you learn that no witness ever reports things quite the way they were; sometimes they don't get it remotely as it was. A child of the girl's age is an even more unreliable source of information.'

'You're saying they killed an innocent boy, one who wasn't possessed?'

'I'm afraid it looks that way to me.'

Dane struck one palm with the other fist. 'But, dammit, you saw him metamorphosing into a wolf. You saw him trying to tear out the girl's throat!'

'No, all that I saw was Norya's re-creation of the way she thought it was. She was not present when the little girl was attacked; she was only replaying it as she was told it had happened.'

'But she sees the future clearly — why not the past too?'

'She's precognitive, yes. But, like most precogs, she can't make use of that power at will — let alone employ it to dredge up bits of the past at which she was not ever present. She's a telepathic projectionist, Dane, one who produced some colorful fantasies for us, nothing more.'

'I think you're wrong.'

'I think I'm not. But I'm still glad that I came with you. Up until now, I had given the du-aga- klava theory more credence than it deserved — if only in the sense that I considered the possibility of a wolf-transmitted lycanthropic bacterium. Now, having seen the quality of the facts upon which these legends are built, I've rejected the werewolf notion altogether.'

A fine decision.

Dane didn't agree with the bio-computer's analysis. 'You'll see yet,' he said. 'Norya is right; I'm sure she is.'

St. Cyr said, 'I'm also glad I came along because I got to meet Salardi. Or I will meet him. Which tent or trailer is his?'

'There,' Dane said, pointing to a yellow and green tent painted in swirling, abstract patterns. 'But what do you want from him?'

'It's occurred to me that a man running from a criminal offense in the Inner Galaxy, living only a couple of hours from your house, might be a likely suspect.'

'What would Salardi have against us? We hardly know him.'

'Perhaps he has nothing against you. Let's go see if we can find out, though.' He walked off toward the gaily colored tent.

Salardi came to the flap the second time they called his name, pushed through, and stood before them, obviously determined not to invite them inside. 'What is it?' he asked.

St. Cyr introduced himself, though he saw Salardi's eyes narrow at the mention of 'detective.'

'I wonder if you'd mind answering a few questions.'

Salardi wiped at his beard, thinking it over, looked at Dane, then said, 'Go ahead. I'll tell you when I've heard enough of them.'