“Not really. The most they would do was lay the killings at the doorstep of the Blakeneys. The bar owner, Fred, said more than anybody.” Logan pulled out his notebook, consulted it for a moment. “He said they had lived in the woods too long. He said doing that changes a person. He claimed they stole babies for unknown rituals. And he said they had unnatural dealings with the animals of the deep forest — that they had, in his words, tainted blood.”
“Tainted blood,” Jessup murmured. “Jeremy, let me explain something to you. That’s about as far as you’d expect a citizen of Pike Hollow to open up to an outsider like yourself. But what they talk of among themselves is something else again. I know, because I’ve heard some of it.”
“Such as?”
“Well, Fred Bridger was right. A few babies have gone missing over the last several decades. There have been several unexplained deaths in the park over the last forty years, and a disproportionate number of them happened in the Five Ponds vicinity. For a long time now — even though they wouldn’t say it to your face — the inhabitants around those parts think they know exactly what the Blakeneys are… and what kind of changes they’ve experienced.”
Jessup took another sip of coffee. The droning of insects increased.
“Well?” Logan spoke into the silence. “What do the inhabitants think the Blakeneys are?”
“Lycanthropes.” Jessup spoke the word carefully, as if tasting it.
“Lycanthropes?” Logan repeated. “People believe the Blakeney clan to be werewolves? That’s—”
“What? Ridiculous? Coming from an enigmalogist like you?”
“But there’s no clinical evidence to support such a phenomenon. A human being, transforming into a wolf?”
“From what I’ve read, you’ve investigated stranger things than that. And don’t forget, these are people who know the Blakeneys best — who have lived, practically on their doorstep, for generations. They’ve seen things that you and I haven’t.”
Logan glanced at the ranger with fresh surprise. Was it possible Jessup might actually lend credence to such a story?
Jessup, looking over, guessed what Logan was thinking. He smiled again the thoughtful, wistful smile Logan remembered so well.
“Now you know why I asked you to go out to Pike Hollow today — and why you were the only person I could ask. I mean, let’s face it — it’s your job.”
This was true, Logan admitted to himself; as an enigmalogist, he couldn’t discount any possibility. And Jessup knew these woods and these people much better than he did.
“I’m not saying I believe it,” Jessup went on. “I’m not saying that at all. But as a ranger, I can’t just ignore it, either. Rumors don’t just start themselves. And a lot of strange things are hidden away in these six million acres of forest.”
Logan didn’t reply.
“Just give it some thought,” Jessup said after a long silence. “And read those case files.” And with that he drained his coffee cup, set it down again, and gazed out over the moonlit pond.
9
For the next two days, Logan remained cloistered in his cabin at Cloudwater. The days were Indian-summer warm and the nights brisk and clear. He found himself quickly slipping into a routine. He skipped breakfast, instead making himself a pot of coffee that he nursed over the course of the day. Lunch, always excellent, was brought to his cabin around one p.m. He left the cabin only to have dinner in the main lodge, where he became acquainted with the people staying in the cabins closest to his — a conceptual artist and a pianist-composer — and where talk lingered on the subjects of the weather and their individual projects.
Logan had feared it would take him some time to get reimmersed in his monograph, but Cloudwater seemed to exert an almost magical influence: the enforced isolation, and the faintly competitive awareness of all the work being done by others in the cabins around him, sharpened his concentration. By the end of the first day, he had acquainted himself once again with the source material and reread what he’d accomplished so far; by the end of the second, he was actively writing. It was this sense of real progress that, after dinner that second night, allowed him to relax his guard and finally take a look at Jessup’s case files.
The clinical details in the files did not add much to what he already knew about the murders — except for their sheer ferocity, which was obvious from the evidence photos even given the advanced states of decomposition. While the bodies had not been eaten, they had been torn apart with remarkable fury. The corpses were too far gone for the wounds themselves to be analyzed with any accuracy, and it was primarily the brute strength necessary to rend a human body in such a way that caused the ME to presume bear attacks.
The other commonalities he already knew: both victims were backpackers, both had been killed in the vicinity of Desolation Mountain, and both had been killed during full moons.
Pushing the case files away, Logan accessed the Internet and spent ninety minutes researching werewolves. The situation he found himself in was, he realized, a little unusual. While over the course of his career he had looked into all sorts of so-called monsters — mummies, revenants, and the rest of the Hollywood horror-movie parade — he had never dealt with werewolves. Zombies could be explained away by the absorption of tetrodotoxin-laced coupe poudre into the bloodstream; belief in vampirism was said by some to be based on victims of porphyria, or mass hysteria of the sort found following the death of the so-called Serbian vampire Petar Blagojevich. And yet werewolves had always seemed — from a scientific aspect — the least explainable to him. And he found nothing on the web to change his mind. He was aware, of course, of clinical lycanthropy — the delusional, even schizophrenic, belief that a person could transform himself into an animal. He also knew something of hypertrichosis, or “werewolf syndrome,” in which victims are afflicted with excessive and abnormal hair growth, sometimes covering the entire body. Yet neither of these fit the true definition of a werewolf: a human with the ability to shape-shift into a vicious, wolflike creature.
Still, there was no denying that the werewolf legend was both remarkably old and remarkably tenacious, having its roots in ancient Greece and coming to full flower in Central Europe during the Middle Ages. And there it continued to persist in the years that followed: in such books as Claude Prieur’s 1596 Dialogue de la lycanthropie, or 1621’s Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Robert Burton devoted an entire subchapter to lycanthropia, or “wolf-madness”—supposedly caused by an excess of melancholic humor — in which the sufferer believed himself to be a wolf. Even John Webster allowed Duke Ferdinand, a villain in his infamously blood-drenched play The Duchess of Malfi, to succumb to the malady:
In the Elizabethan-era firsthand accounts Logan managed to unearth, werewolves or wolf-men were usually the result of dabblings in witchcraft, or at times the direct intervention of Satan himself. One such tract, “A true Discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, a most wicked Sorcerer, who in the likenes of a woolfe, committed many murders,” described an evil man who — thanks to the practice of sorcery — could turn into a wolf almost at will, and whose favorite practice included accosting pregnant women, “tearing the Children out of their wombes, in most bloody and savedge sorte, and after eate their hartes panting hotte and rawe.”