Summers said that vampires were often connected to werewolves. Vampires—the eaters of blood. In other words, cannibals. To a less knowledgeable person such an idea might have seemed fantastic, but Ferguson knew enough about old Europe to understand the probable truth behind the legend. Men did indeed run with werewolves, and those men were called vampires because they fed off human flesh like the wolves themselves. Cannibalism must have been common in the Europe of the Dark Ages, when grinding poverty was the fate of all except a tiny minority. When men were the weakest and most numerous creatures around it must have tempted the hungry… to go out and find the werewolves, somehow build up a rapport, and then hunt with them, living like a scavenger off the pickings.
So much for the image of the vampire as a count with a castle and a silk dinner jacket. The truth was more like Summers’ description—a filthy old forester scrabbling along with a pack of werewolves to glean the leavings of their monstrous feasts.
Man the scavenger, in the same role among werewolves that dogs play among men! And the human prey, unsuspecting now, but in those days it knew. People approached the night with terror crackling in their hearts. And when darkness fell only the desperate and the mad remained out of doors.
What, then, was the role of the human scavenger, the vampire, that ran with the werewolves? Why did they tolerate him? Simple enough, to coax people out of their houses, to lure them into the shadows where they would be ripped apart. It was ugly but it also meant that there had been communication of a sort between man and werewolf in the past, and could be again. And how immeasurably richer communication between this extraordinary species and modern science might be. There could be no comparison between the promise of the future and the sordid mistakes of the distant past.
It had gotten much easier for the werewolves in recent centuries. No longer were the human vampires needed. Nowadays the werewolves could do it on their own. Just take up residence in any big city, live in abandoned buildings among the city’s million byways, and prey on the human strays.
Man and wolf. It had been an age-old animosity. The image of the wolf baying at the moon on a winter’s night still calls primitive terrors to the heart of man.
And with good reason, except that the innocent timber wolf with his loud howling and once conspicuous presence was not the enemy. Lurking back there in the shadows, perhaps along the path to the well, was the real enemy, unnoticed, patient, lethal beyond imagining. The wolf-being with its long finger-like paws, the werewolf, the other intelligent species that shared this planet.
We killed off the innocent timber wolf and never even discovered the real danger. While the timber wolf bayed to the oblivious moon the real enemy crept up the basement steps and used one of those clever paws to throw the bolt on the door.
Ferguson ran his fingers through his hair, his mind trying to accept the fearful truth he had uncovered. That damn detective—Wilson was his name —had an absolutely uncanny intuition about this whole matter. It was Detective Wilson who had first said the word werewolf, the word that had gotten Ferguson really thinking about that strange paw. And Wilson had claimed that the werewolves were hunting him and the woman down. With good reason! Once their secret was out the life of the werewolf would be made immeasurably harder, like it was in the old days in Europe when humanity bolted its doors and locked its windows, or in the Americas where the Indian used his knowledge of the forest to play a deadly game of hide and seek, a game commemorated to this day in the traditional dances of many tribes. The werewolf undoubtedly followed man to this continent across the Bering land bridge eons ago. But always and everywhere he kept himself as well hidden as he could. And it made good sense. You wouldn’t find beggars sleeping on sidewalks if the werewolf was common knowledge. A wave of terror would sweep the city and the world unlike anything known since the Middle Ages. Unspeakable things would be done in the name of human safety. Man would declare all-out war on his adversary.
And at last he would have a fair fight on his hands. With all our technology, we have never faced an alien intelligence before, have never faced a species with its own built-in technology far superior to our own. Ferguson could not imagine what the mind behind the nose and ears of the werewolf must be like. The sheer quantity of information pouring in must literally be millions of times greater than that reaching a man through his eyes. The mind that gave meaning to all that information must be a miracle indeed. Maybe even greater than the mind of man. And man must, this time, react responsibly. If there was intelligence there it could be reasoned with, and eventually the two enemy species could learn to live together in peace. If Carl Ferguson had any part in this at all it was as the missionary of reason and understanding. Man could either declare war on this species or try to come to an understanding. Carl Ferguson raised his head, closed his eyes and hoped with every fiber of his being that reason would for once prevail.
He was surprised to notice somebody was standing beside him.
“You’ve got to take this call slip to the rare books department. We don’t have this book in the reading room. All of our stuff is post-1825 and this book was written in 1597.” The call clerk dropped the card on the table in front of Ferguson and went away. Ferguson got up and headed for the rare books collection, card clutched in his hand.
He moved through the empty, echoing halls of the great library, finally arriving at the rare books collection. A middle-aged woman sat at a desk working on a catalogue under a green-shaded lamp. The only sound in the room was the faint clatter of the steam pipes and the snow-muted mutter of the city beyond the windows.
“I’m Carl Ferguson of the Museum of Natural History. I’d like to take a look at this book.” He handed her the card. “Do we have this?”
“It’s catalogued.” She got up and disappeared behind a wire-covered doorway. Ferguson waited standing expectantly for a few moments, then found a chair. There was no sound from the direction the woman had gone. He was alone in the room. The place smelled of books. And he was impatient for her to return. It was urgent that she produce the book he needed. It was by Beauvoys de Chauvincourt, a man considered an authority on werewolves in his day, and more interestingly, a familiar of them. The manner of his death was what had excited Ferguson—it indicated that the man may indeed have known the creatures firsthand. Beauvoys de Chauvincourt had gone out one night in search of his friends the werewolves and had simply disappeared. The dark suspicions of the time notwithstanding, Ferguson felt that he almost certainly had met his end observing the ancestors of the very creatures whose work the two cops had uncovered. “Do you know books, Mr. Ferguson?”
“It’s Doctor. Y-yes, I do. I can handle antique books.”
“That’s exactly what shouldn’t be done with them.” She eyed him. “I’ll turn for you,” she said firmly. “Let’s go over there.” She placed the book before him at a table and turned on one of the green-shaded lights.
“
“Turn.”
She opened the book, turning the stiff pages to the frontispiece. And Ferguson felt sweat trickling down his temples. What he was seeing was so extraordinary that it was almost too much to bear without crying out. For
