The Werewolf Megapack. Александр Дюма
suitable names.”
Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being grafted on to a nice suitable child. His misgivings were not diminished by the fact that his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the house at the first incoming of the boy, and now obstinately remained shivering and yapping at the farther end of the orchard, while the canary, usually as vocally industrious as Van Cheele himself, had put itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps. More than ever he was resolved to consult Cunningham without loss of time.
As he drove off to the station his aunt was arranging that Gabriel- Ernest should help her to entertain the infant members of her Sunday-school class at tea that afternoon.
Cunningham was not at first disposed to be communicative.
“My mother died of some brain trouble,” he explained, “so you will understand why I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly fantastic nature that I may see or think that I have seen.”
“But what did you see?” persisted Van Cheele.
“What I thought I saw was something so extraordinary that no really sane man could dignify it with the credit of having actually happened. I was standing, the last evening I was with you, half- hidden in the hedgegrowth by the orchard gate, watching the dying glow of the sunset. Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold and grey. And at the same moment an astounding thing happened—the boy vanished too!”
“What! vanished away into nothing?” asked Van Cheele excitedly.
“No; that is the dreadful part of it,” answered the artist; “on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes. You may think—”
But Van Cheele did not stop for anything as futile as thought. Already he was tearing at top speed towards the station. He dismissed the idea of a telegram. “Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf” was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key. His one hope was that he might reach home before sundown. The cab which he chartered at the other end of the railway journey bore him with what seemed exasperating slowness along the country roads, which were pink and mauve with the flush of the sinking sun. His aunt was putting away some unfinished jams and cake when he arrived.
“Where is Gabriel-Ernest?” he almost screamed.
“He is taking the little Toop child home,” said his aunt. “It was getting so late, I thought it wasn’t safe to let it go back alone. What a lovely sunset, isn’t it?”
But Van Cheele, although not oblivious of the glow in the western sky, did not stay to discuss its beauties. At a speed for which he was scarcely geared he raced along the narrow lane that led to the home of the Toops. On one side ran the swift current of the mill- stream, on the other rose the stretch of bare hillside. A dwindling rim of red sun showed still on the skyline, and the next turning must bring him in view of the ill-assorted couple he was pursuing. Then the colour went suddenly out of things, and a grey light settled itself with a quick shiver over the landscape. Van Cheele heard a shrill wail of fear, and stopped running.
Nothing was ever seen again of the Toop child or Gabriel-Ernest, but the latter’s discarded garments were found lying in the road so it was assumed that the child had fallen into the water, and that the boy had stripped and jumped in, in a vain endeavour to save it. Van Cheele and some workmen who were near by at the time testified to having heard a child scream loudly just near the spot where the clothes were found. Mrs. Toop, who had eleven other children, was decently resigned to her bereavement, but Miss Van Cheele sincerely mourned her lost foundling. It was on her initiative that a memorial brass was put up in the parish church to “Gabriel-Ernest, an unknown boy, who bravely sacrificed his life for another.”
Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.
SYMPATHY FOR WOLVES, by John Gregory Betancourt
I could hear wolves scratching like dogs at my door again. It was a full moon, or close to it, and I still felt a stirring deep in my soul, a longing to join them for the hunt, just as they longed to join me. I fought it, as I always did, and those wolfish instincts subsided for a time.
As I pulled back the shade and peered out, I marveled at the crystalline perfection of a crisp Montana night. It was January, and a coating of frost had silvered the land, etching a pattern of crystals around the window panes.
I couldn’t help myself. I opened the window and leaned out, sniffing the air, letting my senses heighten and expand well beyond the human norm.
Six gray wolves stood on the ridge behind my house, noses up, smelling the air this way and that, letting loose yips and soft communicative growls. Their leader, who called himself Bear-Hunter, was an old male with a long white scar down the left side of his haunches. He’d gotten it years ago in a brief fight with a bear (he lost). Bear-Hunter glanced at me and gave a plaintive cry.
“Not tonight,” I whispered. “It’s too cold. I’m human.”
I leaned back and shut the window. Suddenly I shivered uncontrollably. It was a bitterly cold out there. I didn’t envy them their freedom. On nights like this one I knew I’d made the right choice in trying to remain a man. If I’d given in to my wolf instincts and let myself go, given in to my desires to be a wolf, I’d be suffering like them. No, I was better off holed up in my house with its oil heat and its thermal windows and its wood-burning stove, a human safe and secure and, if not entirely happy, at least warm.
The wolves began to bay, calling one to another, pack to pack, and other wolf howls answered through the still night air. There were at least thirty separate voices, probably more, and as I listened to the rich timbred sounds I began to identify one and another and another. Rabbit-Hunter, Silverpaw, Snowfoot, all the rest, coming down from the hills to see me.
They knew I had a soft heart. And finally, as they circled my house, crying, I could resist their calls no longer.
I strode to my door, threw it open, and one by one they slunk into my living room. Old Bear-Hunter came last, gazing up into my face with his piercing yellow eyes, as if searching for some trace of my lost wolfhood. I met his gaze for a second, then looked away, submissive. He could be leader; I didn’t want the responsibility.
And on that cold, cold, bitterly cold night, as I stretched out on my sofa before the crackling fire, I could hear the soft lapping of water from my toilet bowl, hear the soft rustling of paws prying open the refrigerator door and rummaging through the meat bin for coldcuts and steaks, hear the squeaking of springs as heavy feet circled three times on my bed before lying down.
And, as often happened on these cold and lonely nights, all these wolves who had once been men joined me for a brief time in my humanity, and I joined them in their wolfishness, laying my head upon my paws and pulling my tail around my nose for the night with a reluctant yet somehow happy sigh, and the pack was whole.
THE DRONE, by Abraham Merritt
Four men sat at a table of the Explorers’ Club: Hewitt, just in from two years’ botanical research in Ethiopia; Caranac, the ethnologist; MacLeod, poet first, and second the learned curator of the Asiatic Museum; and Winston, the archaeologist who, with Kosloff the Russian, had worked over the ruins of Khara-Kora, the City of the Black Stones in the northern Gobi, once capital of the Empire of Genghis Khan.
The talk had veered to werewolves, vampires, fox-women, and similar superstitions. Caranac, who had brought up the subject originally, said:
“It is a deep-rooted belief, and immeasurably ancient, that a man or woman may assume the shape of an animal, a serpent, or a bird,