The Wolfman by Jonathan Maberry
A Chance in Hell . . .
“Please,” Ben whispered. Let there be a chance. He turned back to find his way.
And it was there. He slammed into it and rebounded.
With an awful realization he knew that it had circled him. Not hunting . . . taunting him. Playing with him.
The thing moved with hideous speed and Ben felt lines of fire ignite along his cheek. Hot blood poured from the gashes and ran into his mouth and down the side of his throat.
Ben whirled and ran straight through the dense brush.
His legs were as heavy as iron weights but he willed his feet to move. Out of the tangles of withered grass a set of pale stone steps rose to the foot of a massive door.
Ben realized where he was. It was a mausoleum carved into the living rock of the cliff. The ponderous bronze door was bound with thick iron bands that ran from top to bottom and side to side. The panels between the intersecting bands were inscribed with complex prayers and spells.
Hope flared like a spark in the darkness of his mind and he raced toward it. In the woods behind him he could hear the thing as it smashed through the brush in pursuit. He lifted the ten-thousand-pound weight of one foot onto the first step, but when he tried to lift the other he simply could not. With a cry of pain and defeat he collapsed.
Even so, Ben Talbot did not give up. The door stood ajar. If he could only reach it, then he could haul himself inside and slam it. That great door would hold back Hell itself.
Then he heard the click and scratch of clawed feet on the stone steps, and he knew that he would never reach that door. Ben’s numb fingers scrabbled for his knife but the thing loomed up huge and terrible over him and the knife clattered to the cold stone.
OTHER BOOKS BY JONATHAN MABERRY
Ghost Road Blues
Dead Man’s Song
Bad Moon Rising
Patient Zero
The Dragon Factory (forthcoming)
THE
WOLFMAN™
* * *
A Novelization by
Jonathan Maberry
Based on the motion picture screenplay by
Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
and the motion picture screenplay by
Curt Siodmak
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
NEW YORK
A Note to Parents: Please consult www.filmratings.com for information regarding movie ratings in making choices for children.
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE WOLFMAN
Copyright © 2010 by Universal Studios Licensing LLLP
The Wolfman is a trademark and copyright of Universal Studios. Licensed by Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. All Rights Reserved.
Edited by James Frenkel
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-6516-3
First Edition: February 2010
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sara Jo
THE
WOLFMAN™
PROLOGUE
[1]
The hunt is eternal.
Her hunger is eternal.
For four billion years she has hunted the night while the world below rolled and changed. The Goddess of the Hunt is pale and hungry, her wicked eye alert, her teeth ready to bite; her mouth aches for the taste of life flowing down her throat. The stars flee like sheep from her, and at the full flush of her power she rules the whole of the night sky.
At the new moon, when the Goddess of the Hunt sleeps, the flocks of stars return to their endless fields, each time thinking that the beast has gone. Each time unprepared for when she comes again, bright, shining and newly hungry, to hunt among them.
Eternally hungry.
Eternally hunting.
[2]
Blackmoor, England, 1891
HE STOPPED ON a ridge that ran to the top of the cliff and looked up through the twisted fingers of the leafless trees at the sky. The clouds were thin and the night winds peeled them away in layers to reveal the moon—impossibly huge and bright, a cold white face that ruled the sky. She was the only light in the sky; every star and planet had fled before the moon’s stern face.
Ben Talbot lingered on the ridge for a full minute, his lantern hanging from his fingers, his mouth open in a silent “oh.” He had seen the moon in a hundred forests, in distant fields far from cities, aboard ships lost in the vastness of the oceans—but every time he beheld her again in her fullness he was stunned to stillness. By her power . . . by her beauty.
Ben closed his eyes to force his wits to focus on the matter at hand. He wasn’t out here to gape at the sky, and as he came back to his purpose he felt a pang in his heart. With great trepidation he turned away, moving carefully past the spillway of a waterfall that roared down into a hidden pool, down the cracked rock of the ridge until he was at the foot of the cliff wall near the pool. He paused, looking first the way he’d come and then turned to pick out his path among the thick yews. The evergreens had long since won back the path, cracking paving stones with their indefatigable roots and spreading backward until they washed hard against the cliff wall. These trees were ancient, Ben knew, some of them planted by the Romans and still reaching up from the black soil to scratch at the roof of heaven. He held out his lantern, first in one direction and then another until he saw the path: a shadowy tunnel formed by the outstretched arms of the trees.
Ben nodded to himself. That had to be the right way, though it had been so long since he’d walked these woods that it seemed entirely new and alien. The way a boy sees the forest and the way a grown man remembers it are so different.
He moved forward, bending his tall body nearly in half in order to enter the tunnel of branches; though within a few steps the roof of the tunnel rose in a gentle slope and Ben could straighten to his full height of six feet. He was not yet forty, fit, and every nerve and sense he possessed was attuned to the night around him. As a boy he and his brother had been out here a thousand times, but never in the dead of night. Perhaps it was the distortion of nighttime as much as the questionable integrity of memory that made this all feel unreal and unknown. With unsure steps and a fluttering heart he moved forward.
The corridor of yews paid out into a clearing and Ben stopped again to make sure he was going the right way. He began to raise his lantern for a better view—
Crash!
Something smashed through the dried bracken behind him. Ben spun and leaped to one side, his heart racing now, pounding on the walls of his chest. Something moved through the brush . . . invisible in the darkness.
What the hell was this? Ben tensed to fight or run. One hand held the lantern out—as much a talisman as a light—and the other scrabbled at his belt for his knife. It was a sailor’s blade, six inches and sharpened to a wicked edge. As his fingers closed around it he felt a fragment of confidence fall back into place, but still the thing moved through the shadows.
Ben drew the blade slowly, keeping it behind him, not wanting the polished steel to catch light from the lantern.
It was closer.
The blade cleared the sheath and Ben eased slowly down into a c
Closer still.
“Come on, you bugger,” he murmured, his fingers flexing on the handle to find the best grip. If it rushed him he’d slash. Stabbing is a fool’s move, the blade gets caught. Ben knew that quick slashes could fend off even a big hound or a boar.
Suddenly the thing burst from the bushes and drove right toward him. Ben growled in fear and fury and raised his knife. The creature flew into the spill of lantern light and Ben fell back a step, a laugh escaping his chest.
It was a pheasant. Plump and beautiful and indifferent to the big man with the wicked knife. It flapped past him down the corridor of yews.
“Bloody hell!” Ben gasped and slammed the knife back into its sheath. “Bloody bird,” he called after it, and then to himself, “Bloody fool.”
With a rueful smile and a shake of his head, he turned and found his path. But ten steps deeper into the forest his lantern guttered, the light dimming for a dangerous moment before waxing again as he shook it. Ben peered at it. The oil was almost gone. He had snatched up the first lantern he found and had not stopped to check the oil first. “You bloody fool,” he said again. It was not the first time a hasty act had come around to bite him.
Ben lingered for a moment, looking back the way he had come. As silence reclaimed the shadowy landscape the night seemed bigger, darker, less familiar. Silence was like a presence, he could feel it watching him.
“Are you out there?” he called, but without wanting to he pitched his voice as a whisper.
Silence answered him, but Ben still felt as if he was being watched, as if familiar eyes were on him.
He cleared his throat and pitched his voice louder. “Come,” he yelled, “we have to talk!”
Nothing.
The flame of his lantern flickered and he realized that if he didn’t find his quarry soon the oil might not last and he’d be lost out here in the darkness.
He looked up, and even through the dense ceiling of evergreen branches he could see a paleness like frost. The touch of moonlight on the trees. Ben nodded to himself. If he lost his lantern he could find his way home by going to higher ground. That moon was bright enough to read by and it had just begun its long hunt across the sky. He would have hours of light left if it came to it, and the Hall only felt far away.
Even so . . . the thought of being without light, even for a few minutes, was daunting. Ben squared his shoulders and took a steadying breath.
On his first step the lantern sputtered again.
“Stay with me,” he murmured and the light seemed to steady at his words. Encouraged, Ben moved forward. And as if to mock him the light guttered low and nearly went out.
He chewed his lip. Moonlight would get him back, but it would not help him find what he was looking for. Maybe it would be better to give it up as a bad job and come back tomorrow. Ben shook the lantern again and then, as the light flared once more, he caught movement off to his left. Just a flash of moonlight on something that moved behind the trees.
“What the hell?”
He tried to track it through the woods but it was already gone.
A sound made him turn and he caught another flash of it. There and gone.
Suddenly there was a blur of dark movement that slammed into him with impossible speed. As it whipped past Ben it made a strange ripping sound.
His lantern struck the hard-packed dirt behind him and rolled away, the fickle flame flaring brighter for a moment. The impact knocked Ben halfway around and he stared numbly in the wrong direction, his eyes bulging and blinking. The world dwindled down to an envelope of darkness that seemed to wrap itself around him. He heard the delicate sound of a raindrop on the scattered leaves beneath his feet. Another drop, and another. He looked up, wondering why he felt no rain on his face. The sky beyond the roof of trees was clear.
Ben smiled crookedly at the moon, wondering how rain could fall on such a night. And then looked down at the splattering of drops on the leaves. Dark rain. Black in the moonlight. Glistening like oil, smelling of freshly sheared copper. Ben opened his mouth to comment on the strange rain that seemed to be falling from his own body but no sound came out.
He heard a soft sound, the crunch as someone stepped on the wet leaves, but when he looked at the foot it was wrong. So wrong. Shoeless, misshapen. Not a human foot at all. Not an animal either. Ben raised his head and saw the eyes of the thing that stood near him. They were not the eyes of the person he came looking for out here. They were large and as yellow as a harvest moon. The eyes glared at him and Ben felt his hammering heart suddenly go still in his chest.
Understanding struck him harder than the blow that had stalled him.
He screamed, and then he ran.
His stomach was a furnace that sloshed loosely and Ben clamped his hands over his abdomen as he blundered through the brush. His fingers closed over wet ropes that threatened to spill out of him. His mind refused to accept the reality of what had been done to him—to accept it was to allow it and he could not.
He ran. Staggering, stumbling, leaving a widening trail of red behind him. Even through the sound of his own desperate breaths and the slap of his feet on the leaves he could hear the thing following. Not running. Stalking.
“God . . . ,” he breathed, but his voice was ragged and wet.
He risked a single backward glance. Just one.
And it was not there. Moonlight painted the corridor of trees with a ghostly light and nothing behind him moved except the tree branches he himself had disturbed.
“Please,” Ben whispered. Let there be a chance. He turned back to find his way.
And it was there. He slammed into it and rebounded.
With an awful realization he knew that it had circled him. Not hunting . . . taunting him. Playing with him.
The thing moved with hideous speed and Ben felt lines of fire ignite along his cheek. Hot blood poured from the gashes and ran into his mouth and down the side of his throat.
Ben whirled and ran straight through the dense brush.
His legs were as heavy as iron weights but he willed his feet to move and move. The brush abruptly thinned and then gave way to a small clearing that skirted the base of the cliff wall. Out of the tangles of withered grass a set of pale stone steps rose to the foot of a massive door.
Ben realized where he was. It was a mausoleum carved into the living rock of the cliff. It was ancient, with a massive lintel carved with the faces of forgotten gods and nameless kings. The ponderous bronze door was bound with thick iron bands that ran from top to bottom and side to side. The panels between the intersecting bands were inscribed with complex prayers and spells of such antiquity that much of their meaning was lost to time.
Hope flared like a spark in the darkness of his mind and he raced toward it. In the woods behind him he could hear the thing as it smashed through the brush in pursuit. He lifted the ten-thousand-pound weight of one foot onto the first step, but when he tried to lift the other he simply could not. With a cry of pain and defeat he collapsed onto the steps.
Even so Ben Talbot did not give up. He crawled, leaving behind him a red-black trail like a bloody slug. The door was near, and it stood ajar. If he could only reach it, then he could haul himself inside and slam it. That great door would hold back Hell itself.
Then he heard the click and scratch of clawed feet on the stone steps, and he knew that he would never reach that door. Ben’s numb fingers scrabbled for his knife but the thing loomed up huge and terrible over him and the knife clattered to the cold stone.
Ben heard the sound of his own death. He saw the flash of claws as they tore at him. He heard his clothing rip, heard the separate sounds of parting flesh and tendon, heard the scrape of claw on bone. He heard all of this from a great distance, detached from the pain that must be coursing through his nerves. He heard, but did not feel. The tethers that held him to the broken flesh were stretching, stretching.
The thing l
When it suddenly stopped tearing at him and ran away into the night, Ben watched as if he were only a spectator watching a gruesome play. It was not real, this was not him.
A gust of the night breeze blew the branches aside and there above the cliff was the screaming face of the Goddess of the Night. The moon, in all her mad glory.
Framed against it, standing powerful on the crest of the ridge, Ben saw the thing that had hunted him. The thing that had killed him. Huge, misshapen, an impossible figure against an impossible sky.
“No . . .” Ben said as the thing on the cliff turned and vanished, fleeing this place, running free into the world. “No.”
But his protest was heard by no ears other than his own. The darkness that crept toward him from all sides was black and infinite. The last thing he heard was the long and terrible howl of the beast, a sound that rose from the forest into the night sky.
Above the world the full white moon watched it all in glorious triumph.
CHAPTER ONE
London, England, 1891
He reached down and lifted the skull from the grave. It was old and battered, its jaw missing, the eye sockets fixed in an eternal stare. The man who held it brushed dirt from the cheeks and brow and held it in one hand, considering the lines and planes of the old bones. The eyes of the skull and the eyes of the man met and for a long minute they shared the secrets of eternity, the subtle truths of the grave.
“Alas,” murmured the man in a voice that could hide no trace of the real hurt that wrenched his heart. “Poor Yorick.” He half turned to his companion. “I knew him, Horatio.”