She always speaks of “we” and “us,” Andrew thought. It’s always impersonal. But who, exactly, is “us”? Whose spokesman is she? To whom is she responsible?
“How can you say that there’s no firm evidence?” he complained. “You’ve read the accounts of those dreams she’s having—indeed, you seem to have read them with great avidity. How can you ignore the signs of disturbance they display?”
“They’re only dreams,” the woman said, although there was a curious glint in her eye that somehow suggested that she didn’t mean what she said.
“Dreams are meaningful,” Andrew countered. “They offer us an invaluable window into the depths of the unconscious, if only we can take the trouble to unravel their symbolism. When a person continually dreams of meeting a horrible death it tells me that my patient is far from well, Miss Reed, and getting worse. I’d be a fool—we’d be fools—to ignore these ominous signs.”
“What else do Miss Lane’s dreams tell you, Dr. Huxley?” she asked, in a manner that suggested that she wasn’t going to believe his answer.
“They tell me that the fear of death that has already blighted Margaret’s capacity for rational thought and action is on the point of obliterating her sanity altogether,” he told her, with what he hoped was dis-armingly brutal frankness. ‘The war for continental Europe may seem to have been a mere matter of moving colored pins around on a map to you, Miss Reed, but to her it was something real. It was something going on all around her, year after year, eating away at her inner being until there was nothing left except some little beleaguered island of self—and the injections of psilocin I’ve been giving her at your request have been the equivalent of Ludendorff’s accursed zeppelins, clawing away at that little island’s defenses. If I don’t stop—if we don’t stop—she’ll be lost forever.”
“Forever’s a long time, Dr. Huxley,” Joanna Reed informed him, with a gravity whose blatant insincerity was insulting. “As a matter of interest, though, I wonder what you make of the settings of Miss Lane’s dreams, and the manner in which she populates those settings.”
“The settings are always pastoral,” Andrew replied, wondering whether the best chance of getting what he wanted might be to play along with her, at least for a while. “They always contain elements borrowed from mythology—sometimes quite abstruse elements, although Margaret never had any kind of Classical education. They always include a male figure whose dalliance with a female of some subtly different species distresses her. They obviously refer to some unfortunate incident in her past, but she’s resisted all my attempts to identify it. It must have been something that happened in Flanders—at a guess, I’d say that she became romantically involved with some young soldier, then suffered a violent reaction when she saw him with someone else—a whore, maybe. I don’t want to put ideas into her head by asking leading questions, but I’ve tried to find out whether something of that kind happened by subtler means and I’ve got nowhere. What I do know, for certain, is that it’s doing her no good to relive that moment over and over again, constantly linking it up to images of her own violent death.”
“We need more data,” the woman insisted, placidly. “We have to keep on collecting it. There may be much more at stake here than you realize.”
“No,” Andrew said, trying as hard as he could to sound equally definite and equally stubborn, “you’re wrong about that. I know that it’s not just a matter of one mentally ill girl. I know that there’s been a war on for seventeen years, and that its recent phases have produced cases of traumatic response by the trainload. I know what’s at stake. It’s people like you—people who have become so inured to the idea of mass slaughter that the war’s become a mere matter of statistics and strategies—who don’t realize that what’s really at stake and always has been at stake and always will be at stake are people’s lives and people’s minds. I can’t stop you thinking of all those young boys you send out with guns and tanks and bombs and airplanes as mere cannon-fodder to be sacrificed wholesale in your great cause, but I can make a stand for my patients and I will. I won’t feed that poor girl any more of your mind-bending rubbish, and I won’t let you do it either.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Joanna Reed, “but you really don’t have any choice. We need the data, and we intend to have it. It really is important.”
Overhead, a lone Avro was returning from its expedition over the blue-grey waters of the channel. The drone of its engine sounded unreasonably waspish as it overflew the sanitarium.
“Sometimes,” Andrew said, softly, “I think my patients are the only sane people left in the world. They’re the only ones who see things as they really are, in all their unspeakable and unbearable horror. We’re the mad ones, because we’re the ones who screen that horror out and concentrate our minds on keeping the war going, on killing more and more people more and more quickly. Perhaps you and I are the sick people, Miss Reed. Perhaps Margaret Lane is the one who can see clearly, in her traumatized imagination.”
He had thought that Joanna Reed didn’t have the capacity to surprise him, but she surprised him then. She was already turning to walk away, and her reply seemed not to be addressed to him at all, but she did reply.
What she said was: “That’s exactly why we have to carry on.”
Recently returned to human form, she kneels by the stream and scoops up water with which to wash her face. There is always a period of disorientation while her thinking mind regains its forsaken empire; sometimes, just for a few minutes, she retains some memory of what it is like to go on all fours and to live without sentience. It is those precious minutes that inform her of the secret and sacred truth that it is better by far to live as a wolf than as a human being. Wolves are conscious, but not of themselves; they possess—and are possessed by—emotions, but they have no thoughts to spoil the ecstasy of their existence.
She looks up when she hears laughter coming from behind a dense clump of bulrushes that grows where the stream widens into a pool. She moves toward the rushes, crawling on all fours as though she were still a wolf. She peeps discreetly through the curtain of vegetation.
What she sees is betrayal. A male wolf is there, sporting with a female—but the female is a wolf through and through, and the male is not. The male is of the vargr-folk. He does not know what he is doing, of course—but that is no excuse.
Why, the watcher wonders, is it always thus? Why do werewolves prefer such creatures to their own kind? It makes no sense; it is a jarring note in the great litany of Harmony.
She wants to rise to her feet, but she is afraid that if she does so, the wolves will see her as prey, and might attack.
A noise behind her causes her to look around.
The thing that is coming toward her is a travesty of a man, but there is hardly any flesh about it and its face is utterly evil—not hungry, like the face of a wolf, but something much worse.
For a single fleeting second, the watcher thinks: It is justice, after all. Do they not deserve it? But she sees that the creature’s inhuman eyes are fixed on her.
From its hand of polished steel the monster launches a spinning cylinder, which turns over and over in the air, catching the sunlight, before it falls into the water beside her and begins hissing madly. The gas released from within turns the placid stream to turbulent foam.