own the house? Marchent didn’t know Felix was alive when she gave me the house.”
“I doubt it has anything to do with that,” said Laura. “Felix is rich. If he wanted Nideck Point, he’d offer to buy it from you. He isn’t living there as your guest because he lacks the means.” She went on eating as she spoke, easily cleaning her plate. “Felix owns all the property bordering on Nideck Point. I heard him talking about it to Galton and the other handymen. It’s no secret. He was discussing it casually with them, hiring them to do other work. The Hamilton place to the north has belonged to him for the last five years. And the Drexel place to the east was bought by him long before that. Galton’s men are working on those houses now. Felix owns the land south of Nideck Point, all the way from the coast inland to the town of Nideck. There are old homes throughout these areas, homes like Galton’s home, but Felix stands ready to buy each and every one of them whenever the owners want to sell.”
“Then he did plan to come back,” said Reuben. “He planned to come back all the time. And he does want the house. He has to want it.”
“No, Reuben, you’ve got it wrong,” she said. “Yes, he planned someday to return. But not while Marchent was connected to the property. After she’d moved to South America, his agents made repeated offers under various names to purchase the house, but Marchent always refused. Felix told me this himself, just in conversation. Nothing secretive about it. He was waiting her out. Then events caught him completely unawares.”
“The point is he wants it now,” said Reuben. “Of course he wants it. He built it himself.”
“But he’s not in any hurry,” she said.
“I’ll give it to him. It never cost me one silver dime.”
“But do you think this ghost knows all these things?” Laura asked. “Does this ghost care?”
“No,” he said. He shook his head. He thought of Marchent’s contorted face, thought of her hand extended, as if to reach through the glass. “Maybe I’m on the wrong track. Maybe it’s the Christmas plans that are disturbing her spirit—plans for a party so soon after her death. But maybe that’s not it at all.”
Again, he had a strong sense of Marchent, as if the apparition had involved a new and eerie intimacy, and the misery he’d felt seemed infinitely more deeply rooted in the Marchent he knew.
“No, the party plans wouldn’t offend her. That wouldn’t be enough to bring her back from wherever she is, make her visit you in this way.”
Reuben’s mind drifted. He fell silent. He realized nothing more could be known until this spirit appeared to him again.
“Ghosts often come at Midwinter, don’t they?” Laura asked. “I mean, think of all the Christmas ghost stories in the English language. That’s always been a matter of tradition, that ghosts walk at this time of the year; they’re strong at this time, as though the veil between the living and dead becomes fragile.”
“Yes, Phil always said the same thing,” Reuben said. “That’s why Dickens’s
“Come back to me,” said Laura taking his hand. “Don’t think about this any more now.” She motioned for the check. “There’s a little bed-and-breakfast near here.” She smiled at him, the most incandescent and gently knowing smile. “It’s always fun, isn’t it, a different bed, different rafters overhead.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
Two blocks away in a charming Craftsman cottage nestled in a garden, they made love in an old brass bed below a close sloping ceiling. Yellow flowers in the wallpaper. Candle on the old cast-iron mantel. Rose petals on the sheet.
Laura was rough, urgent, inflaming him with her hunger.
Suddenly she stopped and drew back.
“Can you bring it on now?” she whispered. “Please, do it. Be the Man Wolf for me.”
The room was shadowy, quiet, white shutters closed against the fading afternoon light.
Before he could reply, the metamorphosis had begun.
He found himself standing by the bed, his body yielding up the wolfen coat, the claws, the rippling, elongating tendons of his arms and legs. It was as if he could hear his mane growing, hear the silken hair covering his face. He looked about him with new eyes at the quaint, fragile furnishings of the room.
“And this is what you want, madam?” he asked in the usual low, baritone voice of the Man Wolf, so much darker, richer than his own normal voice. “We are risking discovery, are we, for this?”
She smiled.
She was studying him as never before. She ran her hands over the fur on his forehead, her fingers gripping the long rougher hair of his head.
He drew her towards him and then down on the bare boards. She pushed and pulled as if she wanted to provoke him, beating against his chest with her fists even as she kissed him, pressing her tongue to his fang teeth.
6
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Reuben returned from Sonoma. The rain was thin but steady and the light almost as dim as twilight.
When he caught sight of the house he felt an immediate relief. Workers had finished lining every single window on the facade with tiny bright yellow Christmas lights in perfectly neat lines, and the front door was framed with thick evergreen garland wound with lights as well.
How cheerful and comforting it looked. The workmen were just finishing, and the trucks pulled off the terrace right after he pulled up. Only one truck remained for the crew that was working on the guesthouse on the lower slope, and it would soon be gone as well.
The main rooms were also extremely cheerful, with the usual fires going, and a great undecorated Christmas tree stood to the right of the conservatory doors. More thick and beautiful green garland had been added to the fireplaces and their mantelpieces. And the delicious fragrance of the evergreens everywhere was sweet.
But the house was empty, and that was odd. Reuben had not been alone in this house since the Distinguished Gentlemen had arrived. Notes on the kitchen counter told Reuben that Felix had taken Lisa down the coast for shopping; Heddy was napping; and Jean Pierre had taken Stuart and Margon to the town of Napa for dinner.
Strange as this was, Reuben didn’t mind it. He was deep in his thoughts of Marchent. He’d been thinking of Marchent on the long drive back from Sonoma, and it only now came to him, as he put on a pot of coffee, that his afternoon with Laura had been blissful—the lunch, the bed-and-breakfast lovemaking—because he had not been afraid anymore of the changes in her.
He took a quick shower, putting on his blue blazer and gray wool pants as he often did for dinner, and was on his way down the hall towards the stairs when he heard the low, faint sound of a radio coming from somewhere on the west side of the house, his side of the house.
It took him only a moment in the hallway to locate the origin of the sound. It was Marchent’s old room.
The hallway was grim and shadowy as always, as it had no windows, and only a few scattered wall sconces with parchment shades and small bulbs. And he could see a seam of light under her door.
There came that eerie throbbing terror again, only slowly. He felt the transformation coming but did all in his power to stop it as he stood there, shaken, and not certain what to do.
A dozen explanations might account for the light and the radio. Felix might have left on both after searching for something in Marchent’s closet or desk.
Reuben was unable to move. He fought the prickling in his face and hands, but he couldn’t entirely stifle it. His hands were now what somebody might call hirsute and a quick examination of his face told him it was the same. So be it. But of what use was this subtle enhancement against the possibility of a ghost?
The radio was playing an old dreamy melodic song from the nineties. He knew that song, knew that slow hypnotic beat and that deep female voice. “Take Me As I Am”—that was it. Mary Fahl with the October Project.
