“Yes,” I agreed, “Things like that often place a nomination under a shadow.” I gave a tiny giggle and then took control of myself. “The Cold War is over, doctor, and the world is swamped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that no longer have any purpose. I have a couple of ideas for what to do with them. The value of the ideas should outweigh any reservations concerning the state of my mental health. Besides, I’ve done a few favors that have placed some good people on my side.”
The doctor’s eyes say that he thinks I’m chasing a fantasy. I shake hands with the doctor one last time, the security guard smiles through the grill, unlocks the door, and I step into the chill of a winter afternoon.
Somewhere, somewhen, in a distant dimension, the essence of Iyef Nu Reyitim was released from its restraint field and was returned to its body to resume normal life. The investigator, recently placed in charge of the case, said many, many apologies to Iyef, for no one could remember why Iyef had ever been placed in restraint. There were empty files and blank data cores at the mental support facility, as well as several counselors who had literally lost their minds. Strangest of all were the curious blanks that appeared in news and history cores all over the world. Nonetheless, Iyef accepted the apology, ate most of the investigator, and streaked away from the facility directly toward the closest major population center.
Iyef Nu Reyitim and his shadow were free.
L.A. in L.A.
Lyle Bennet tried to hide his facial expression from Dr. Raeder by looking down at his notes. He needed a moment to think. Lyle had always envisioned himself as a future psychological explorer blazing new paths in the treatment of mental disorders. He had found himself, however, contemplating a master’s thesis comparing the performances of two breeds of lab rats running a slight modification of the Hauser Maze. After hearing a description of the project, his thesis advisor had suggested he look for something else. That’s what Lyle had thought even before the suggestion had been made, and that was what he was doing that morning in Dr. Raeder’s office. But Raeder had to be kidding.
Lyle looked up from his notes, stifled a giggle, and leveled his gaze at his thesis advisor. “Let me get this straight, Dr. Raeder. You’re telling me wolf men are real? Silver bullets, full moons, bad hair days, and all that?”
Janos Raeder returned the gaze and didn’t change expression as he tapped the tip of a freshly sharpened pencil against his desk blotter. Abruptly he tossed down the pencil, leaned forward in his chair, and clasped his hands in front of him, his wrists on the edge of his desk. “No, that is not what I said. What I said was that you should check out a meeting of that new twelve step program.” He glanced at a sheet of paper on the desk. “Let’s see. This is the thirty-first, right? Friday?”
“That’s right.”
Dr. Raeder moved a finger down the list. “Here it is. There’s an L.A. meeting tonight on Alameda. I think you should at least go and check it out.”
Lyle’s eyebrows went up. “L.A.? Lycanthropics Anonymous? Werewolves, right?”
“Look, Lyle, you were the one who came to me for suggestions regarding a new thesis topic.”
“Yeah, but werewolves? Give me a break.”
Dr. Raeder slowly shook his head. “I don’t know, Lyle. Perhaps I made a mistake. This is the kind of subject that, properly handled, could make your career take off from a standing start. Your mind seems a little too shut down, though, to take on a subject as radical and controversial as this.”
Lyle held up his hands. “Okay, look, I’m coming at this cold, Dr. Raeder. This is all new to me, as long as you ignore a bunch of bad Lon Chaney, Jr. movies that rotted out my mind years ago.” He lowered his hands to his lap and tried to hold his face expressionless. “Why not let me hear the whole thing and then I’ll decide.”
His advisor took a pained breath then continued. “First, Lyle, forget all about Lon Chaney, Jr., silver bullets, full moon freakouts, and Hollywood horrors. Lycanthropy is a very real, quite painful, condition. I’m not only referring to the well-known psychotic belief in being an animal. The variation of lycanthropy to which I refer also manifests itself in physical symptoms, such as measurable increases in body and facial hair, dentition, bone mass, musculature, and alterations in saliva and blood chemistry. Are you familiar with Kuchilan’s recent paper on hysteria?”
Lyle nodded. “Yes. Fanatics tapping into forces on the quantum level, miracle cures, religious freaks who go into a frenzy and begin squirting blood from their palms. But this—”
“This is the same sort of thing, Lyle,” interrupted his advisor. Dr. Raeder held up a finger, nodded, and said, “Hold on. There’s something I want you to see.”
He got up from his desk, went to an old wooden filing cabinet in the corner of his cluttered office, and opened the middle drawer. “It’s in here somewhere … here.” He pulled out a thick accordion file that had obviously seen a lot of wear. Almost reverently the doctor placed the file on his desk, opened it, and began thumbing through the contents. “Yes,” He pulled out a dog-eared eight by ten glossy print and handed it across the desk to Lyle. “Look at that.”
Lyle took the print and frowned as he examined it. It was a print of six different stages in the transformation of a man in his early twenties into something very much resembling a latter day Hollywood wolf man. In all six stages the man was clad in sixtyish hippie garb: headband, peasant shirt, patched flares, and sandals. In each stage there was a definite increase in body and facial hair, an elongation of the upper and lower mandibles into a shape resembling a muzzle, an incredible enlargement of the canine teeth, and a tongue that would be the envy of any Doberman. The increase in upper body mass had been sufficient to split open the baggy shirt’s seams. On the final frame the enlarged hairy toes sticking out of the sandals each carried what looked to be a two inch long claw. Similar armaments graced the fingertips. Time and date signatures appeared on each of the frames. The date on all of the frames was 4 May 1967. The elapsed time indicated that the subject had made the transformation from young adult to drooling beast in just under three minutes. Lyle raised an eyebrow and handed back the print. “Jack Nicholson did it better in Wolf .”
Ignoring the comment, Raeder took the glossy and tapped it with his finger. “The subject’s name was Roger Westlake. He was a psych student at Pepperdine working on his master’s. This series of shots was taken under faculty supervised laboratory conditions just before he was committed to Pescadero.”
“Was Roger Westlake?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You used the past tense, doctor.”
“Oh.” Dr. Raeder nodded, his expression quite wooden. “He was reported dead in October of ‘Sixty-nine. The story was that he attacked some other patients and in the process of subduing him, he was accidentally killed.” Raeder held out a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. The headline read: “Three killed, eleven mauled at Pescadero.”
Janos Raeder dropped the clipping back into the file. “Westlake’s body was cremated before anyone could get a look at it. The two patients and the guard who were killed, however, looked as through they had been savaged by timber wolves.” He looked up at nothing in particular. “They were all cremated, as well.” He faced Lyle. “It might be very interesting to find out what happened to all of the patients who survived. The belief among most lycanthropics is that a virus in the saliva is what transmits the disease.” Dr. Raeder tapped the glossy and said, “In any event, this is one of the most well documented modern cases of lycanthropic hysteria that exists.”