WOLFWEIR Page 2

  **

  "Maman! Maman!"

  Bursting into his parents' bedroom at a full run, he sees his mother sprawled across the big bed in her nightdress.

  He shakes her by the shoulders. No movement.

  He holds two fingers below her nostrils. Yes. She is still breathing. But, like his father, deeply unconscious.

  He looks on her throat, below the left ear.

  Bite-marks, and drops of drying blood.

  **

  At sunrise, a horse-drawn ambulance takes away Rudolphe and Mireille. Clip-clop clip-clop. The ambulance is bound for St. George's Hospital.

  Meantime Alphonse stands with two detectives on the street, wiping away tears on the sleeves of his jacket.

  Inside the apartment, he sits on a stool with his head lowered as they question him. He answers their queries in a dull monotone.

  He tells the two sympathetic men all about the pale, elegantly dressed couple in the Bois, He gives their names: Lord and Lady Blackgore. One of the detectives scribbles it all down in a notebook. Then he claps the notebook shut.

  "We'll go to the Bois de Bologne. If we don't find them there, we'll cover the hotels. Don't worry, boy. Go to the hospital when you're ready and wait to hear from us."

  Patting his shoulders, they go.

  He listens to their footsteps clicking down the stairs.

  Going softly into the hall, he picks up his sword cane, the one with the initials A.D.S. engraved on the silver knob, from the umbrella stand by the door.

  Whipping the blade free of the cane, he studies the cutting edge before sliding it back in.

  **

  Afternoon. Nurses bustle in the white hospital corridor. Alphonse stands between two hospital beds, holding the sword cane. Rudolphe is in one, Mireille in the other. They are both breathing, yet still unconscious.

  **

  He returns home in the late afternoon, a few hours before sunset, and enters his father's study. The lamp is still burning. He doesn't turn it off.

  He opens a drawer with a small key and takes out his father's private diary.

  It is a leatherbound book, quite heavy. He flips through the pages until he finds the latest entry for an new case at the Deuville Asylum -- its heading reads "Lucia di Fermonti, Wolf-Girl?"

  He reads his father's notes on the little girl found wandering naked in the forests north of Paris.

  He reads it over several times.

  As he shuts the diary, his gaze falls on a hasty ink scrawl on a corner of his father's green desk-blotter:

  VAMP -

  **

  He stares at the scrawl for a long time. Then, he goes to his father's shelves.

  Fingering the gold-stamped bindings of the shelved medical books, he finally pulls out an old volume with the title: VAMPYRISM: FORENSICS OR FOLKLORE? A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE.

  **

  He sits to read it in the big red leather armchair. Concentrating fiercely, he glances up only when the last sunrays begin to fade from the study's windows.

  It's twilight. His eyes are red, grim with fury.

  **

  He walks down the hallway to the bathroom to splash cold water onto his face from the basin.

  He scrubs his face hard in the water.

  Raising his head to glance in the mirror, he takes two steps backward in shock. His heart is pounding.

  For, scrawled there in what appears to be dried blood, are two stark words:

  YOU'RE NEXT

  Escape

  Alphonse Didier Stein rides a city bus to the asylum on the wooded outskirts of Paris. I see him standing outside the gate. It's night and the streetlights cast a dull yellow radiance on the wet sidewalks. He is wearing a velvet jacket and short pants and he carries his sword cane. He's shivering a little.

  He pushes the gate open a crack. It squeals on rusty hinges. He slips inside and walks up the driveway to the looming ivy covered building. Looking up at the dark windows. It's late. Almost midnight.

  He sees that one window on a corner of the building is yellow with gaslight. He walks cautiously up the white graveled drive and when he reaches the massive front door he looks at it but does not bang the heavy brass lion-headed knocker, nor does he just blithely open it and go in. There will be a night staff and he does not want to explain why he is at the asylum so late, why he is carrying a silver-tipped cane.

  He walks around to the side of the big building studying the ivy and looking for some other means of ingress. Then he finds it. An open window on the ground floor. He clambers inside.

  He is in the asylum's kitchen with the gleaming copper pots. He feels the eeriness of an empty kitchen at night. But this is no time to be afraid. He makes his way through the kitchen into a hallway and then up two flights of stairs. He crawls past a glassed in office. Inside it a big man in a white smock sits reading a book. Alphonse is trembling. He reaches the door of the Wolf-Girl's cell: it's number 28, as noted in his father's diary.

  He stands on tiptoe to look into the peep hole. He sees the thin girl with the brilliant golden hair. Lucia di Fermonti. She's the girl who believes that she can turn into a wolf. She's sitting on her bed wearing a blue smock. Her face is pale and there are dark circles around her sunken eyes. She's staring dully at the barred window, rocking a little.

  Feverishly, Alphonse tries to think of how to get the key to this door. He'd glimpsed a big iron key chain hanging in the office where the man in white sits reading. A diversion. Maybe a loud noise. Maybe a fire alarm. Sure. It's the only way.

  At the end of the hallway there is a door to a stairwell -- a copy of the one at the other end. But beside this green-painted door hangs a fire axe inside a coil of fire hose and under it there is a red alarm box. Alphonse walks to it. His heart thudding.

  He jerks the lever from Up to Down. The alarm screams and clangs.

  He runs. His shoes squeaking.

  He sees the office door rattle -- the knob turns.

  He throws himself onto the waxed floor and slides squeaking past the door just as it opens.

  The big man in white is out and running toward the fire hose. Alphonse jumps to his feet and dashes into the office. Snatches the iron key ring and clamps it to his chest to stop the keys from jangling.

  He puts his head out the door to look. The big man is turning his head. Sniffing the air for smoke. His face has a comically quizzical look. Alphonse ducks back inside.

  He hears the staircase door open and shut. Footsteps going down fast.

  Do it now, he thinks. Do it now.

  He makes his rush for 28. Each key is etched with a number. He sticks 28 into the lock and turns it hard and the bolt retracts with a clunk and then Alphonse is standing in the open doorway. His hair wild. Gesturing with his arms for the blue-smocked Lucia di Fermonti to follow him while mouthing over the shattering noise of the fire alarm FOLLOW ME.

  She stands. Bare-legged. Looking right into Alphonse's soul through his eyes. His heart gives another pained leap. He does not know if he can bear this level of excitement. Then the alarm halts. Silence. His eardrums throbbing. Hearing heavy footsteps on the staircase Alphonse grabs Lucia's skinny arm and drags her with him out into the hallway and pushes her ahead of him toward the opposite door. He hears the staircase door by the fire alarm box bang open and a man's shout. He and the girl are running like demons. The keys jangling on the ring in his right hand.

  Then Alphonse has one of his brainstorms. Pushing Lucia harder -- shouting Go Go Go -- he stops at door 240 and opens it with the matching key. Feverish in his haste, he fumbles and almost drops the ring. The big man is shouting Stop. Alphonse throws the door wide and tosses the key ring into the cell with a clank and runs after Lucia so fast that the soles of his shoes do not even seem to be touching the floor. He shoves her through the doorway and drags her down the stairs with him. He guides her through the dark kitchen by the gleam of hanging copper pots. Pushes her at the open window. She climbs out and drops onto the damp grass
. Then he leaps out after her.

  She seizes Alphonse, clings to him. Panting. Her breath wild and sweet.

  He pushes her again. Together they run for the gate. Somehow he is still holding the swordcane under his arm. They exit through the tall iron gate, Alphonse clanging it behind them, and they are on a street in the sick yellow pallor of gas lamps. Everything feels empty as a stage set and a fog is rising. He takes the girl's skinny cool arm -- the touch giving him goosebumps -- and leads her down the dark wet street toward the bus stop.

  He does not know when the city bus will come. They wait huddled close together, looking back at the dark shape of the asylum building, and Alphonse wonders if the big man in white thinks they are still hiding somewhere on the grounds or if he will give chase or maybe even call the gendarmes.

  Lucia is shivering now. That smock is thin and she is naked under it. Alphonse whips off his velvet jacket and drapes it on her shoulders. It's then that it strikes him like a thunderbolt -- how beautiful she is.

  He feels he's never looked at a girl before. He begins to stutter an apology for nothing upon realizing this. Lucia -- smiles. His knees go watery.

  She speaks to him in Italian. But Alphonse knows almost no Italian. He can hold his part in a simple conversation in Spanish but Italian, no. His ears burn as he listens to Lucia's musical voice speaking to him rapidly in that beautiful clear language.

  Why didn't he bother to learn Italian in school! He merely nods, smiling distantly, at Lucia's bell-like voice.

  **

  But now Alphonse hears something faintly in the fog. It can only be described as a spidery skittering. Turning, he beholds them: an army of small wooden puppets. Puppets without strings clattering in step down the dark wet street. In his and Lucia's direction. No bus. Streetlamps shedding a gaseous yellow light into the fog. Bare trees. And now these hideous puppets clattering along like something seen in a nightmare.

  His heart freezes. He opens his mouth but makes no sound. Lucia glances to the side, sees the puppets too, and her eyes go stark and wide.

  The Blue Orb

  Alphonse steps in front of Lucia and draws the sword. He stands boldly exposed to these gaudy, clattering puppets holding the naked sword in one hand and the cane in the other.

  Then he feels her fingers gripping his upper arm. The grip is hard, intense. He turns his head.

  He sees a tall, shabbily dressed man standing nearby them. How could this evil-looking vagrant have snuck up so close, without Alphonse ever hearing a sound? The man is grinning, showing a mouthful of ugly brown teeth.

  His expression is fierce and blazes with evil and mockery. He holds in his hands a glowing blue orb that seems to be made of glass -- glass with fire inside.

  With a shock, Alphonse feels the strength empty out of his body. Despite all the effort of his raging will, he lowers the sword and the cane. He hears the blade drop, clank, onto the street.

  Lucia is now clinging to him, shaking him by the elbows, but he can't move, not a toe or an eyelid or a fingertip. He cannot take his eyes from the eyes of brutal looking man.

  "Vesuvio!" Lucia shrieks in her bad French. "No! The boy has done nothing! Rien!"

  But now small hands are grasping at Alphonse, pulling at him. He is pinned by many small wooden hands and lifted in the air, and with wonder he feels himself being borne along by the jerking and clattering puppets -- a true and filthy nightmare if there ever was one.

  Lucia's scream is cut off by a ringing night silence. Alphonse's mouth is wide open but he's frozen. Frozen. He couldn't even scream if he wanted to. He doesn't want to scream, he wants to fight. But he can't move.

  He feels the wooden hands crawl on his face. They're pulling at his cheeks, his lips. He is being sailed along at great speed by these clattering puppets. He can't see anything but the night sky, foggy, with searchlights beaming in it, punching out holes in the thin fog. Then he sees dark overhanging branches. They are in a park or maybe back on the grounds of the asylum and it is very cold without his jacket. He would shiver if he could move.

  Despairingly he thinks of his parents, stretched comatose in twin hospital beds. He tries to scream out their names, like a charm against this vivid new horror. But the voice is stopped somewhere deep within his chest. Suffocated.

  His head spins. And then the whole world goes black.

  Puppets

  After an eternity of darkness, as the pulp novels always say, Alphonse opens his eyes with a double click, like the sound of a pistol being cocked.

  His chin is on his chest. He's looking straight down at a wooden body and a pair of dangling wooden legs clad in sabots.

  He's seated on a high, dusty shelf in a dim, barrel-like room, his spindly wooden legs hanging in space.

  He turns his head, creaking, and sees: a long row of puppet boys.

  As he stares, several of the puppet heads turn, with that same ominous creaking he just heard from his own neck, and the painted eyeballs roll into place, clicking like billiard balls.

  He tries a scream. Silence.

  When he reaches into his gaping mouth to find out why not, his wooden fingers can find nothing in the cavity.

  No tongue!

  His wooden teeth begin clattering like castanets. He clamps his mouth shut to stop them.

  **

  He's inside a dim and grimy storeroom, or maybe judging by the oblong shape an unmoving circus wagon. There's an iron grilled window high on the opposite wall.

  No way to get to it -- even if he stood on what appears to be a wine cask he couldn't see anything out there but clouds drifting in a blue sky. A bucolic, serene sight.

  So it's daytime.

  He hears birdsong. Guessing by the sheer volume and variety of twitters this circus wagon is parked in the woods someplace.

  He glances around for a chalk and slate. No such luck. He tries some crude mimicry and sign language on the other puppets.

  They merely stare at him with open mouths and wide, blank billiard ball-like eyes.

  They're all boys in linen shirts, short pants, and wooden sabots, some with jaunty wool caps pulled low on their heads.

  Alphonse feels his head. He's wearing a cap, too.

  It's dusty here, the dust motes floating in and out of light beams.

  Alphonse tries to maneuver himself to the edge of the shelf. He's high up. Will falling hurt?

  In any case, the clamor might arouse some life. He edges himself, scraping, off the shelf, pushing with his wooden palms --

  **

  SPLANG. BANG. CRASH.

  He's on the floor, a spindly heap, one leg wrapped about his scrawny puppet neck.

  The other boy puppets lean forward, gaping down at him like fools.

  Alphonse feels he'll weep from mingled despair and helplessness and rage. His wooden eyes actually begin to ooze something sticky -- he touches it and looks at the stuff on his fingers.

  Pine sap!

  He's made of sticks. A nut brown boy, painted a gaudy green and red, dressed in a doll's raiment.

  Senseless. No heart beating in his chest.

  Without a tongue he can't taste, and his nose doesn't smell. So how can his eyes see, his ears hear sounds? It must be some kind of Black Magic.

  He suddenly recalls the golden-locked Lucia di Fermonti shouting "No! Vesuvio!"

  And that cursed blue glowing orb, and the fat hirsute face with bloodshot eyes leering above it.

  Definitely, he thinks, the fiery blue orb is the source of the gypsy's power. He remembers staring into it, overwhelmed, just before he got all dizzy and collapsed, and the clattering puppets bore him paralyzed off into the night.

  His real body. A.D.S.'s flesh and blood and beating heart --where could it be right now?

  Maybe it's entombed someplace. And with that terrifying thought, a shiver runs through puppet-Alphonse, making his wooden legs dance, his fingers click together like bones.

  Vesuvio

  He explores the wagon. A clutter of objects heaped
in one dark corner turns out to be a circus junk pile. Paper mache lion and clown masks. Broken drums. A shining copper pennywhistle -- he slips it into his shirt pocket. Dust, filth and rot, torn posters (VESUVIO PUPPET CIRCUS, GYPSY MAGIC ALL THE WAY FROM BEAUTIFUL MOORISH CITY OF PALERMO). Wrack and refuse mixed with rat droppings. A spider perched on her dusty web. Hello, Madame Spider. Hello, Puppet Boy.

  **

  With a clank, a rattle, and a bang, the double doors at the rear of the wagon opened -- a gust of moist forest wind entered, lifting Alphonse's cap. He grabbed it and shoved it back down on his pine head.