The Howling II (2 page)

She described the way it began, with the howling in the night. Then there had been the cruel killing of her little dog. She told of the strange people who had lived in the village, and the huge, unnatural wolves that had roamed the woods at night. In a quiet, controlled voice she spoke of the black-haired Marcia Lura, who had bewitched Karyn’s husband and finally taken him forever with the virulent bite of the werewolf. Finally she told of the escape from Drago as she and Chris Halloran had fled the burning village.

Dr. Goetz waited, then spoke. “You said they aren’t all dead. The wolves.”

“As we drove out of the valley with everything behind us in flames, I heard it again from off in the forest. The howling.”

Abruptly Karyn stopped talking and went back to her chair across from the doctor. “Telling the story doesn’t make it any better or any worse,” she said. “All it does is keep the memory fresh. What I want to do is put Drago out of my mind. Now and forever.”

“I can understand that,” Dr. Goetz said reasonably. “And that’s what we’re working toward, isn’t it? But, Karyn, before we can finally put this idea out of your mind, we have to find out what put it in.”

Karyn stared at him. She spaced out her words carefully. “What put this idea into my mind, Goddamnit, is that it happened.”

“Yes, of course,” the doctor went on. “Maybe when you were a little girl there was some experience, something ugly, with wolves or large dogs.”

Karyn shook her head wearily. “No, Doctor, not when I was a little girl. My only traumatic experience with wolves came when I was a full-grown woman. Three years ago. In Drago. You’re telling me the same old thing, aren’t you, that it’s a delusion?”

“Delusion is a term we don’t use much any more. We understand now that things that happen in the mind are every bit as vivid, and often more damaging than what we call reality. I’m sure your experience in Drago is as real to you today as this room we are sitting in. The important thing, as I said - “

Karyn only half-listened as Dr. Goetz droned on in his silky, reassuring voice. He was saying the same thing everyone else did. Namely, that she had imagined the whole Drago episode. Maybe in time he could convince her of that. If he could, he would be well worth whatever David was paying him. In the meantime, it did help a little to be able to talk.

There was a subtle change in the doctor’s tone, and Karyn saw his eyes flick over at the discreet little clock on his desk. Her hour was up.

KARYN DROVE SLOWLY north over the Aurora Bridge toward Mountlake Terrace, where she and David had their home. Her thoughts, as usual when she left Dr. Goetz, were on Drago and what happened afterward.

There had been one moment of triumph at the very end when she had fired the deadly silver bullet into the head of the black she-wolf. But that small victory, like the escape with Chris Halloran, had lacked a ring of finality. Even as she and Chris had paused to look back on the valley in flames, neither of them had really believed it was over.

For six tempestuous months they had tried to pretend it was, and that they were just another ordinary couple. After sharing the horror of Drago, it had seemed a natural thing to stay together. How wrong they were.

For a time they had traveled aimlessly from place to place, living on pills and nervous energy. Before long their pent-up emotions were turned against each other. At the end of six months these two people, who had shared more in a day than many couples do in a lifetime, were living on the edge of violence. The most insignificant squabble could erupt in an ugly word battle. They were staying in a Las Vegas hotel when the final blowup came.

Karyn had spent the morning in their room. She had the air conditioner turned up full and wore a sweater buttoned to the throat as protection against the dry cold. Chris had gone down to the swimming pool early, after making only a half-hearted attempt at persuading her to come with him.

At noon Chris returned. He glanced briefly at Karyn and went into the bathroom. Not until he had showered, shaved, and dressed did he speak to her.

“Do you want to go down and get some lunch?”

“Can’t we have something sent up?”

“Why?”

“I’d rather not leave the room, that’s all.”

“For God’s sake, Karyn, you can’t just sit up here and hide from the world like a frightened child.”

His words cut into her like a dull knife. She flared back. “I can do anything I want. Who are you to tell me what I can’t do? Nobody asked you to run my life.”

Chris’s eyes had turned dark and dangerous for a moment, then he whirled and stormed out the door. Karyn fought down the angry impulse to throw something after him.

The rush of blood through the veins made a roaring in her ears. She walked over to the window, parted the draperies, and blinked at the bright white Las Vegas sunlight. Twelve stories down, she could see people in the pool and on the deck around it. Everyone seemed to be laughing and having a fine time. Was she the only one in the world, Karyn wondered, who was miserable?

She let the draperies fall back across the window, and returned to the chair where she had sat all morning. She was still there, shivering with the cold, an hour later when Chris returned.

He closed the door firmly behind him and stood looking at her. “Why the hell don’t you turn the air conditioning down?”

“I like it this way.”

She could see him start to get angry, then, with an effort, relax.

“Karyn, we have to talk.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re destroying each other.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Cut it out, damn it. I’ve had all of this I can take.”

“Poor you.”

“This continual picking at each other is tearing me apart. It isn’t doing you any good, either. Have you looked at yourself closely in the mirror lately?”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“Will you please stop playing childish games? I know what you went through at Drago, but - “

Karyn sprang out of the chair and faced him angrily. “You have no idea what I went through. You were there only at the very end. I spent six months in that place. Six months in hell.”

Chris spoke in a carefully controlled voice. “I know that, Karyn. I know you suffered a lot. What I want to do now is help you.”

“Oh? And just how do you think you can help me?”

“It would be a start if we brought the whole thing out in the open and talked about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Karyn snapped. “Not to you, not to anybody.”

“I’m the only one you can talk to about Drago,” he said. “I am the only person in the world who would believe it, because I was there. I saw the wolves, and I know what they were.”

Karyn clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to think about it. Why don’t you let me forget Drago, so it will go away?”

“It will never go away,” Chris said. “It will always be locked in the back of your head. If we could just talk about it - “

“There you go with your ‘talk about it’ again. You sound like one of those fucking parlor psychologists. Tell me, where did you get your medical degree, Doctor?”

“Cut it out. I can’t take any more of this.”

“Don’t then. Don’t take a Goddamn thing you don’t want to, Nobody’s holding you.”

“That’s right,” he said in a voice that had gone suddenly cold. “Nobody is.”

In thirty minutes Chris Halloran had packed his clothes and left the hotel. That had been two and a half years ago. Karyn had not seen him since.

*****

The weeks that followed the Las Vegas breakup with Chris were fragmented in Karyn’s memory. She knew that during that time she was very close to losing her hold on sanity. Somehow, she had made her way back to her parents’ home in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood. For two months she had a full-time nurse, and never left the upstairs bedroom that had been hers when she was a little girl. The days were blanks and the nights were filled with shadows where lurked unspeakable horrors.

Then gradually the world came back into focus. Karyn at last learned to talk about the summer in Drago. Then as now, no one really believed her, but they listened sympathetically. She learned that Chris had been right. Talking about it did help.

After six months in the quiet, comfortable house with her family, Karyn began to feel whole again. She tried to contact Chris Halloran, but learned he had taken a traveling assignment with his engineering firm, and was seldom in town for long. Maybe, she decided, it was better this way. She would have liked to say she was sorry about the bad days at the end, and keep at least a part of Chris’s friendship, but seeing him might just open old wounds.

Instead, she had accepted the invitation of a college classmate and flown to Seattle for a visit. That was when she met David Richter.

David was twenty years older than Karyn, and solid as Mount Rainier. He did not have the dreamy romanticism of Roy Beatty, nor the charm and dash of Chris Halloran, but he was exactly what Karyn needed. She had been a little hesitant about meeting David’s son, but she need not have worried. She and Joey hit it off immediately.

The big test, in Karyn’s mind, came when she told David the story of Drago. He had listened patiently and seriously, without laughing or patronizing her. He did not, of course, treat it as reality, but accepted it as a minor eccentricity as he might have accepted a slight limp.

David asked her to marry him two months after they met. He offered her security and stability, and a kind of quiet love she had never known. She said yes.

All in all, Karyn was content with her life as Mrs. David Richter. Now if she could just stop dreaming of the wolves, and shake the feeling that someday, somewhere, they were going to kill her.

IN THE SAN JOAQUIN Valley of California a band of gypsies made their camp in a clearing at the edge of a forest. Their camp was not much like the romantic fiction of operettas and the movies. Instead of colorful horse-drawn wagons, their vehicles were vans, pickup trucks, travel trailers and campers. The music in the camp came from transistor radios and tape decks, not from the fabled wild violins and tambourines.

Some things, however, remained little changed over the centuries. Although many of them worked for daily wages in the neighboring fields, the gypsies remained wanderers. An entire camp might pack up and vanish one night, to appear next morning in another place miles away. And the gypsies still had their own methods of communication, which carried news between distant camps more swiftly than the mails.

In yet another way these modern gypsies resembled their forebears. They had a deep respect for the old beliefs. They still held that a man’s future could be seen in the lines of his hand. The turn of a card could chill the blood like the whisper of Death. And the gypsies knew there were those who existed outside the laws of nature, creatures to be feared and never, never betrayed.

For this reason the gypsies stayed well away from a battered old trailer that rested on blocks at the periphery of the camp. By their heritage they were bound to protect those who dwelt there, but the wisdom of their ancestors kept them wary.

*****

Inside the trailer was shadowed, the sun filtered by green cloth curtains across the two small windows. There was a tiny alcove for cooking, with a butane stove and refrigerator. There were a table and benches, which folded up out of the way when they were not being used. At the far end of the trailer, across its entire width, was a bed, covered with a profusion of pillows, silken scarves, soft blankets over a billowy mattress.

Amidst the pillows and scarves on the bed were the wet, naked bodies of a man and a woman. The man was blond, and broad through the chest and shoulders. The woman was dark and long-bodied, with compelling green eyes and hair of midnight black shot through with a streak of silver.

The body of the man strained over the woman. Her long, strong legs locked him between her knees. With a last powerful thrust the man buried himself deep inside the woman. With a sharp intake of breath, she clasped him tight against her. He groaned deep in his chest. Her teeth sank in and marked his shoulder. They cried out together, and it was finished.

Roy Beatty rolled over on his side. The woman rolled with him, still holding him tightly in the circle of her arms. Roy’s breath came in ragged gasps. As always with Marcia, their climax had been a devastating experience, leaving him spent and drained as no other woman ever had. Since the first time he saw her in the hamlet of Drago - had it been only three years? - Roy Beatty had belonged to this woman. He had been hers even before she had claimed him in the ancient way. Now they shared the power and the curse, and he was hers forever.

“Are you at ease now, my Roy?” Marcia Lura let her fingers wander through the damp golden hair across his chest. “Did I please you?”

Roy pulled a breath deep into his lungs and exhaled slowly. “You please me like nothing else on earth.”

“And you will never leave me?”

He pulled back his head to look at her. “Leave you, Marcia? Impossible.”

“That is good.” Her fingers massaged the corded muscles where his neck joined his shoulders. “We will leave this place soon.”

Roy pulled away from her and sat up. He ran his hand over the smooth length of her body. “Are you sure you’re well enough to travel?”

“I am as well now as I will ever be. I know these have been difficult months for you, my Roy, nursing a sick woman, but now it is over.”

“All that matters is having you near me,” he said.

“I will always be near you,” she said. “I will be all the woman you will ever want. But now, you know what we have to do.”

Roy’s eyes shifted away. He reached down for his clothes where they had fallen beside the bed. “You mean - Karyn.”

“Yes!” Green fire flashed in her eyes. “That woman.”

He turned back to face her, feeling the impact of her hatred. “Do we have to go through with this?” he said. “So much time has passed.”

Marcia ran her eyes over him slowly. When she spoke there was a chill in her voice. “You can’t be saying you still have tender feelings for her. Can you?”