“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.
Preview of:
GARY BRANDNER’S ~ THE HOWLING III
1
Sheriff Gavin Ramsay stretched out a foot and nudged the switch on the electric heater to OFF with the toe of his boot. The heater coils twanged as the red glow faded. The voters of La Reina County, all 4,012 of them, would be proud of their sheriff’s economy moves.
Ramsay hoisted his foot back to the top of the desk and resumed his contemplation of the view from his office window. Out in front ran S31, a two-lane blacktop with a flaking yellow center stripe badly in need of repainting. S31 was also the main street of Pinyon, California, seat of La Reina County, Pop. 2,109, Elev. 3550.
Across the road from the sheriff’s office was Art Moore’s Exxon station, a Pioneer Chicken franchise, and Hackett’s Pharmacy. On his own side of the road, out of Ramsay’s line of sight, was Yates Hardware & Plumbing, the Safeway, the boarded-up Rialto Theater, and the Pinyon Inn. That was about it for Pinyon, except for the library and La Reina County Hospital, which were built off the road on the high ground between S31 and the mountains.
The storm that had hammered the town for two days had moved on in the early-morning hours, leaving everything wet and bedraggled. The landscape would need a couple of days of sunshine to dry out.
Gavin Ramsay was more than ready for some dry weather. The rain depressed him. Elise used to get poetic about the rain. Literally. She would go to her typewriter and turn out pages of tortured free verse whenever a few raindrops fell. Then she would show it to Gavin and ask what he thought of it. In the first year of their marriage he used to lie and say it was good, really good. After that first year he started telling her the truth. By that time it didn’t matter anymore.
Today was the last day of March, and with luck there would not be another big storm until fall. Summer would bring its own problems—motorcycle gangs, irritable tourists, lost hikers, and campers with poison oak. Nothing that couldn’t be handled as long as it was not raining.
Probably there would be fewer problems with hikers and campers this year. Thoughtful people were not eager to go into the woods since the Drago business. You couldn’t blame them. It was peaceful now, but sometimes on a quiet night you could still hear it. The howling.
In truth, there wasn’t a whole lot for a sheriff and two deputies to do in La Reina County. Well, one deputy and a trainee assigned here by the state, to be accurate. Right now the prospect of a quiet summer suited Gavin Ramsay just fine. After the double trauma of Drago and his divorce from Elise he could use the time to reassemble his life.
The people of La Reina County were happy to see things calm down again. Drago was enough excitement for several lifetimes. It was kind of fun for a while. Now the folks would just as soon not talk about it.
They still got a fair number of sightseers who detoured off Interstate 5 hoping to see something of the infamous village. They might as well have stayed home. There was nothing left to see.
The asphalt road connecting Pinyon to Drago had buckled and cracked with the heat of the fire, and there were wooden barriers put up by Caltrans to block it off. Still, determined curiosity seekers could get through in a tough truck. Those driving something less rugged turned back to Pinyon, where they searched in vain for souvenir shops. Some of the locals used to joke down at the Pinyon Inn about printing up a bunch of Drago T-shirts with bite marks and red splotches, but those jokes got old in a hurry.