The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Read online

  Not so the pains. They were, if anything, worse than they’d been yesterday. His sinews and ligaments ached as if they’d been exercised beyond the limits of their design; there were bruises at all his joints, where blood had broken its banks beneath the skin. But that sense of imminent rebellion had disappeared, to be replaced with a dreamy peacefulness. And at its heart, such happiness.

  When he tried to think back over recent events, to work out what had cued this transformation, his memory played tricks. He had been called to meet with Ballard’s superior; that he remembered. Whether he had gone to the meeting, he did not. The night was a blank.

  Ballard would know how things stood, he reasoned. He had liked and trusted the Englishman from the beginning, sensing that despite the many differences between them they were more alike than not. If he let his instinct lead, he would find Ballard, of that he was certain. No doubt the Englishman would be surprised to see him; even angered at first. But when he told Ballard of this new-found happiness surely his trespasses would be forgiven?

  Ballard dined late, and drank until later still in The Ring, a small transvestite bar which he had been first taken to by Odell almost two decades ago. No doubt his guide’s intention had been to prove his sophistication by showing his raw colleague the decadence of Berlin, but Ballard, though he never felt any sexual frisson in the company of The Ring’s clientele, had immediately felt at home here. His neutrality was respected; no attempts were made to solicit him. He was simply left to drink and watch the passing parade of genders.

  Coming here tonight raised the ghost of Odell, whose name would now be scrubbed from conversation because of his involvement with the Mironenko affair. Ballard had seen this process at work before. History did not forgive failure, unless it was so profound as to achieve a kind of grandeur. For the Odells of the world – ambitious men who had found themselves through little fault of their own in a cul-de-sac from which all retreat was barred – for such men there would be no fine words spoken nor medals struck. There would only be oblivion.

  It made him melancholy to think of this, and he drank heavily to keep his thoughts mellow, but when – at two in the morning – he stepped out on to the street his depression was only marginally dulled. The good burghers of Berlin were well a-bed; tomorrow was another working day. Only the sound of traffic from the Kurfürstendamm offered sign of life somewhere near. He made his way towards it, his thoughts fleecy.

  Behind him, laughter. A young man – glamorously dressed as a starlet – tottered along the pavement arm in arm with his unsmiling escort. Ballard recognized the transvestite as a regular at the bar; the client, to judge by his sober suit, was an out-of-towner slaking his thirst for boys dressed as girls behind his wife’s back. Ballard picked up his pace. The young man’s laughter, its musicality patently forced, set his teeth on edge.

  He heard somebody running nearby; caught a shadow moving out of the corner of his eye. His watch-dog, most likely. Though alcohol had blurred his instincts, he felt some anxiety surface, the root of which he couldn’t fix. He walked on. Featherlight tremors ran in his scalp.

  A few yards on, he realized that the laughter from the street behind him had ceased. He glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the boy and his customer embracing. But both had disappeared; slipped off down one of the alleyways, no doubt, to conclude their contract in darkness. Somewhere near, a dog had begun to bark wildly. Ballard turned round to look back the way he’d come, daring the deserted street to display its secrets to him. Whatever was arousing the buzz in his head and the itch on his palms, it was no commonplace anxiety. There was something wrong with the street, despite its show of innocence; it hid terrors.

  The bright lights of the Kurfürstendamm were no more than three minutes’ walk away, but he didn’t want to turn his back on this mystery and take refuge there. Instead he proceeded to walk back the way he’d come, slowly. The dog had now ceased its alarm, and settled into silence; he had only his footsteps for company.

  He reached the corner of the first alleyway and peered down it. No light burned at window or doorway. He could sense no living presence in the gloom. He crossed over the alley and walked on to the next. A luxurious stench had crept into the air, which became more lavish yet as he approached the corner. As he breathed it in the buzz in his head deepened to a threat of thunder.

  A single light flickered in the throat of the alley, a meagre wash from an upper window. By it, he saw the body of the out-of-towner, lying sprawled on the ground. He had been so traumatically mutilated it seemed an attempt might have been made to turn him inside out. From the spilled innards, that ripe smell rose in all its complexity.

  Ballard had seen violent death before, and thought himself indifferent to the spectacle. But something here in the alley threw his calm into disarray. He felt his limbs begin to shake. And then, from beyond the throw of light, the boy spoke.

  “In God’s name . . .” he said. His voice had lost all pretension to femininity; it was a murmur of undisguised terror.

  Ballard took a step down the alley. Neither the boy, nor the reason for his whispered prayer, became visible until he had advanced ten yards. The boy was half-slumped against the wall amongst the refuse. His sequins and taffeta had been ripped from him; the body was pale and sexless. He seemed not to notice Ballard: his eyes were fixed on the deepest shadows.

  The shaking in Ballard’s limbs worsened as he followed the boy’s gaze; it was all he could do to prevent his teeth from chattering. Nevertheless he continued his advance, not for the boy’s sake (heroism had little merit, he’d always been taught) but because he was curious, more than curious, eager, to see what manner of man was capable of such casual violence. To look into the eyes of such ferocity seemed at that moment the most important thing in all the world.

  Now the boy saw him, and muttered a pitiful appeal, but Ballard scarcely heard it. He felt other eyes upon him, and their touch was like a blow. The din in his head took on a sickening rhythm, like the sound of helicopter rotors. In mere seconds it mounted to a blinding roar.

  Ballard pressed his hands to his eyes, and stumbled back against the wall, dimly aware that the killer was moving out of hiding (refuse was overturned) and making his escape. He felt something brush against him, and opened his eyes in time to glimpse the man slipping away down the passageway. He seemed somehow misshapen; his back crooked, his head too large. Ballard loosed a shout after him, but the berserker ran on, pausing only to look down at the body before racing towards the street.

  Ballard heaved himself off the wall and stood upright. The noise in his head was diminishing somewhat; the attendant giddiness was passing.

  Behind him, the boy had begun sobbing. “Did you see?” he said. “Did you see?”

  “Who was it? Somebody you knew?”

  The boy stared at Ballard like a frightened doe, his mascaraed eyes huge.

  “Somebody . . . ?” he said.

  Ballard was about to repeat the question when there came a shriek of brakes, swiftly followed by the sound of the impact. Leaving the boy to pull his tattered trousseau about him, Ballard went back into the street. Voices were raised nearby; he hurried to their source. A large car was straddling the pavement, its head-lights blazing. The driver was being helped from his seat, while his passengers – party-goers to judge by their dress and drink-flushed faces – stood and debated furiously as to how the accident had happened. One of the women was talking about an animal in the road, but another of the passengers corrected her. The body that lay in the gutter where it had been thrown was not that of an animal.

  Ballard had seen little of the killer in the alleyway but he knew instinctively that this was he. There was no sign of the malformation he thought he’d glimpsed, however; just a man dressed in a suit that had seen better days, lying face down in a patch of blood. The police had already arrived, and an officer shouted to him to stand away from the body, but Ballard ignored the instruction and went to steal a look at the dead man’s f
ace. There was nothing there of the ferocity he had hoped so much to see. But there was much he recognized nevertheless.

  The man was Odell.

  He told the officers that he had seen nothing of the accident, which was essentially true, and made his escape from the scene before events in the adjacent alley were discovered.

  It seemed every corner turned on his route back to his rooms brought a fresh question. Chief amongst them: why had he been lied to about Odell’s death?; and what psychosis had seized the man that made him capable of the slaughter Ballard had witnessed? He would not get the answers to these questions from his sometime colleagues, that he knew. The only man whom he might have beguiled an answer from was Cripps. He remembered the debate they’d had about Mironenko, and Cripps’ talk of “reasons for caution” when dealing with the Russian. The Glass Eye had known then that there was something in the wind, though surely even he had not envisaged the scale of the present disaster. Two highly valued agents murdered; Mironenko missing, presumed dead; he himself – if Suckling was to be believed – at death’s door. And all this begun with Sergei Zakharovich Mironenko, the lost man of Berlin. It seemed his tragedy was infectious.

  Tomorrow, Ballard decided, he would find Suckling and squeeze some answers from him. In the meantime, his head and his hands ached, and he wanted sleep. Fatigue compromised sound judgement, and if ever he needed that faculty it was now. But despite his exhaustion sleep eluded him for an hour or more, and when it came it was no comfort. He dreamt whispers; and hard upon them, rising as if to drown them out, the roar of the helicopters. Twice he surfaced from sleep with his head pounding; twice a hunger to understand what the whispers were telling him drove him to the pillow again. When he woke for the third time, the noise between his temples had become crippling; a thought-cancelling assault which made him fear for his sanity. Barely able to see the room through the pain, he crawled from his bed.

  “Please . . .” he murmured, as if there were somebody to help him from his misery.

  A cool voice answered him out of the darkness:

  “What do you want?”

  He didn’t question the questioner; merely said:

  “Take the pain away.”

  “You can do that for yourself,” the voice told him.

  He leaned against the wall, nursing his splitting head, tears of agony coming and coming. “I don’t know how,” he said.

  “Your dreams give you pain” the voice replied, “so you must forget them. Do you understand? Forget them, and the pain will go.”

  He understood the instruction, but not how to realize it. He had no powers of government in sleep. He was the object of these whispers; not they his. But the voice insisted.

  “The dream means you harm, Ballard. You must bury it. Bury it deep.”

  “Bury it?”

  “Make an image of it, Ballard. Picture it in detail.”

  He did as he was told. He imagined a burial party, and a box; and in the box, this dream. He made them dig deep, as the voice instructed him, so that he would never be able to disinter this hurtful thing again. But even as he imagined the box lowered into the pit he heard its boards creak. The dream would not lie down. It beat against confinement. The boards began to break.

  “Quickly!” the voice said.

  The din of the rotors had risen to a terrifying pitch. Blood had begun to pour from his nostrils; he tasted salt at the back of his throat.

  “Finish it!” the voice yelled above the tumult. “Cover it up!”

  Ballard looked into the grave. The box was thrashing from side to side.

  “Cover it, damn you!”

  He tried to make the burial party obey; tried to will them to pick up their shovels and bury the offending thing alive, but they would not. Instead they gazed into the grave as he did and watched as the contents of the box fought for light.

  “No!” the voice demanded, its fury mounting. “You must not look!”

  The box danced in the hole. The lid splintered. Briefly, Ballard glimpsed something shining up between the boards.

  “It will kill you!” the voice said, and as if to prove its point the volume of the sound rose beyond the point of endurance, washing out burial party, box and all in a blaze of pain. Suddenly it seemed that what the voice said was true; that he was near to death. But it wasn’t the dream that was conspiring to kill him, but the sentinel they had posted between him and it: this skull-splintering cacophony.

  Only now did he realize that he’d fallen on the floor, prostrate beneath this assault. Reaching out blindly he found the wall, and hauled himself towards it, the machines still thundering behind his eyes, the blood hot on his face.

  He stood up as best he could and began to move towards the bathroom. Behind him the voice, its tantrum controlled, began its exhortation afresh. It sounded so intimate that he looked round, fully expecting to see the speaker, and he was not disappointed. For a few flickering moments he seemed to be standing in a small, windowless room, its walls painted a uniform white. The light here was bright and dead, and in the centre of the room stood the face behind the voice, smiling.

  “Your dreams give you pain,” he said. This was the first Commandment again. “Bury them Ballard, and the pain will pass.”

  Ballard wept like a child; this scrutiny shamed him. He looked away from his tutor to bury his tears.

  “Trust us,” another voice said, close by. “We’re your friends.”

  He didn’t trust their fine words. The very pain they claimed to want to save him from was of their making; it was a stick to beat him with if the dreams came calling.

  “We want to help you.” one or other of them said.

  “No . . .” he murmured, “No damn you . . . I don’t . . . I don’t believe . . .”

  The room flickered out, and he was in the bedroom again, clinging to the wall like a climber to a cliff-face. Before they could come for him with more words, more pain, he edged his way to the bathroom door, and stumbled blindly towards the shower. There was a moment of panic while he located the taps, and then the water came on at a rush. It was bitterly cold, but he put his head beneath it, while the onslaught of rotor-blades tried to shake the plates of his skull apart. Icy water trekked down his back, but he let the rain come down on him in a torrent, and by degrees, the helicopters took their leave. He didn’t move, though his body juddered with cold, until the last of them had gone; then he sat on the edge of the bath, mopping water from his neck and face and body, and eventually, when his legs felt courageous enough, made his way back into the bedroom.

  He lay down on the same crumpled sheets in much the same position as he’d lain in before; yet nothing was the same. He didn’t know what had changed in him, or how. But he lay there without sleep disturbing his serenity through the remaining hours of the night, trying to puzzle it out, and a little before dawn he remembered the words he had muttered in the face of the delusion. Simple words; but oh, their power.

  “I don’t believe . . .” he said; and the Commandments trembled. It was half an hour before noon when he arrived at the small book exporting firm which served Suckling for cover. He felt quickwitted, despite the disturbance of the night, and rapidly charmed his way past the receptionist and entered Suckling’s office unannounced. When Suckling’s eyes settled on his visitor he started from his desk as if fired upon.

  “Good morning,” said Ballard. “I thought it was time we talked.”

  Suckling’s eyes fled to the office-door, which Ballard had left ajar.

  “Sorry; is there a draught?” Ballard closed the door gently. “I want to see Cripps,” he said.

  Suckling waded through the sea of books and manuscripts that threatened to engulf his desk. “Are you out of your mind, coming back here?”

  “Tell them I’m a friend of the family,” Ballard offered.

  “I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.”

  “Just point me to Cripps, and I’ll be away.”

  Suckling ignored him in favour of his
tirade. “It’s taken two years to establish my credentials here.”

  Ballard laughed.

  “I’m going to report this, damn you!”

  “I think you should,” said Ballard, turning up the volume. “In the meanwhile: where’s Cripps?“

  Suckling, apparently convinced that he was faced with a lunatic, controlled his apoplexy. “All right,” he said. “I’ll have somebody call on you; take you to him.”

  “Not good enough,” Ballard replied. He crossed to Suckling in two short strides and took hold of him by his lapel. He’d spent at most three hours with Suckling in ten years, but he’d scarcely passed a moment in his presence without itching to do what he was doing now. Knocking the man’s hands away, he pushed Suckling against the book-lined wall. A stack of volumes, caught by Suckling’s heel, toppled.

  “Once more,” Ballard said. “The old man.”

  “Take your fucking hands off me,” Suckling said, his fury redoubled at being touched.

  “Again,” said Ballard. “Cripps.”

  “I’ll have you carpeted for this. I’ll have you out!”

  Ballard leaned towards the reddening face, and smiled.

  “I’m out anyway. People have died, remember? London needs a sacrificial lamb, and I think I’m it.” Suckling’s face dropped. “So I’ve got nothing to lose, have I?” There was no reply. Ballard pressed closer to Suckling, tightening his grip on the man. “Have I?”

  Suckling’s courage failed him. “Cripps is dead,” he said.

  Ballard didn’t release his hold. “You said the same about Odell—” he remarked. At the name, Suckling’s eyes widened. “— And I saw him only last night,” Ballard said, “out on the town.”