The Wolfen

“How about the pond?”

“You mean because it’s frozen over? I doubt if they’d think of busting the ice in the pond, that’s too smart.”

“We need to find clothes, some kind of identification.”

“Yeah. Where the hell to look, though? This friggin’ snow…”

“I have the hairs. I don’t need anything more to convince me. They came here last night and they killed this person. I’m certain of that. It was them. Their hairs are unique, as unique as a fingerprint.”

“So they kill a lot. That’s to be expected for a carnivorous animal.”

Becky corrected her partner. “Carnivorous humanoid.”

Wilson laughed. “From what I’ve seen they could hardly be described as humanoid.”

“And what have you seen?”

“Them.”

Becky and the M. E. stared at him. “You’ve seen them?” Evans finally managed to ask.

“That’s right. Last night.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Becky asked.

“I saw six of them outside of your apartment last night. I was hunting them, trying to get Ferguson his specimen.” He sighed. “They’re fast, though. I missed   ’em  by a mile. Lucky I’m still alive.”

Becky was stunned. She looked at her partner’s tired face, at his watery, aging eyes. He had been out there guarding her! The crazy, sweet old romantic jerk. At this moment she felt like she was seeing a hidden, secret Wilson, seeing him for the very first time. She could have kissed him.

Chapter 7

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Carl Ferguson was horrified and excited at the same time by what he was reading. He seemed to drift away, to a quiet and safe place. But he came back. Around him the prosaic realities of the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library reasserted themselves. Across from him a painfully pretty schoolgirl cracked her gum. Beside him an old man breathed long and slow, paging through an equally old book. All around him there was a subdued clatter, the scuttle of pen on paper, the coughs, the whispers, the drone of clerks calling numbers from the front of the room.

Because you could not enter the stacks and because you could neither enter nor leave this room with a book, its collection had not been stolen and was still among the best in the world. And it was because of the book that he had finally obtained from this superb collection that Carl Ferguson felt such an extremity of fear. What he read, what he saw before him was almost too fantastic and too horrible to believe. And yet the words were there.

“In Normandy,” Ferguson read for the third time, “tradition tells of certain fantastic beings known as lupins or lubins. They pass the night chattering together and twattling in an unknown tongue. They take their stand by the walls of country cemeteries and howl dismally at the moon. Timorous and fearful of man they will flee away scared at a footstep or distant voice. In some districts, however, they are fierce and of the werewolf race, since they are said to scratch up graves with their hands and gnaw poor dead bones.”

An ancient story, repeated by Montague Summers in his classic The Werewolf. Summers assumed that the werewolf tales were folklore, hearsay conjured up to frighten the gullible. But Summers was totally, incredibly wrong. The old legends and tales were true. Only one small element was incorrect—in the past it was assumed that their intelligence and cunning meant that werewolves were men who had assumed the shape of animals. But they weren’t. They were not that at all, but rather a completely separate species of intelligent creature. And they had been sharing planet Earth with us all these long eons and we never understood it. What marvelous beings they must be—a virtual alien intelligence right here at home. It was a frightening discovery, but to Ferguson also one of awesome wonder.

Here were legends, stories, tales going back thousands of years, repeating again and again the mythology of the werewolf. And then suddenly, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, silence.

The legends died.

The stories were no longer told.

But why? To Ferguson’s mind the answer was simple: the werewolves, tormented for generations by humanity’s vigilance and fear, had found a way to hide from man. Their cover was now perfect. They lived among us, fed off our living flesh, but were unknown to all except those who didn’t live to tell the tale. They were a race of living ghosts, unseen but very much a part of the world. They understood human society well enough to take only the abandoned, the weak, the isolated. And toward the end of the nineteenth century the human population all over the world had started to explode, poverty and filth had spread. Huge masses of people were ignored and abandoned by the societies in which they lived. And they were fodder for these werewolves, who range through the shadows devouring the beggars, the wanderers, those without name or home.

And no doubt the population of werewolves had exploded right along with the human population. Ferguson pictured hundreds, thousands of them scavenging the great cities of the earth for their human prey, rarely being glimpsed, using their sensitive ears and noses to keep well distant of all but the weak and helpless, taking advantage of man’s increasing multitudes and increasing poverty. Their faculties combined with their intelligence must make them fearsome indeed—but what an opportunity they also represented to science—to him—as another intelligence capable of study, even perhaps communication.

But there was something else about Summers’ book, something even more disquieting, and that was the continual references to men and werewolves in communication with one another. “Two gentlemen who were crossing a forest glade after dark suddenly came upon an open space where an old woodsman was standing, a man well-known to them, who was making passes in the air, weaving strange signs and signals. The two friends concealed themselves behind a tree, whence they saw thirteen wolves come trotting along. The leader was a huge grey wolf who went up to the old man fawning upon him and being caressed. Presently the forester uttered a sing- song chant and plunged into the woods followed by the wolves.”

Just a story, but tremendously interesting in the context of the information that the two detectives had brought him. Obviously the references to signs and a “sing-song” chant referred to human attempts to mimic the language of the werewolves, to communicate. Why did men once run with the werewolves?