A Werewolf Among Us Read online

  He was disappointed.

  "Nothing of my own, sir. It is truly baffling. There is only what the natives say about it."

  "Native Darmanians?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "What do they say, Teddy?"

  "Werewolf, sir."

  "Pardon me?"

  "I know that it sounds absurd to reasoning creatures like ourselves. The Darmanians say that a werewolf, a creature they call the du-aga-klava, inhabits the hills at the foot of the mountains. The natives are convinced that one of these du-aga-klava has bitten some member of the family, thus transmitting its lycanthropy. That member of the family, by this theory, is the murderer of Leon and Dorothea Alderban."

  "As you said, that doesn't really satisfy anyone with the ability to reason clearly."

  Teddy said nothing more.

  "I noticed," St. Cyr said, "that your tone of voice has been deliberately chosen to indicate doubt. Why is that?"

  The car seemed to accelerate slightly, though the detective could not be certain of that. And if he could be certain, what would such a reaction on Teddy's part mean?

  "It is not superstitious, Mr. St. Cyr, to believe that there are more things beyond our understanding than we would admit."

  "I suppose."

  Something here… The bio-computer part of him was disturbed. It had analyzed what the robot had told it — not merely what the robot had said, but how it had said h. It had dissected grammar and inflection, and now it was displeased.

  Something there is here… The master unit's words seem designed to conceal. They are not natural to it. It is almost as if someone had gotten to the robot and programmed it to answer this way, programmed it to emphasize the werewolf stories.

  But who, St. Cyr wondered, would Teddy be unwittingly trying to protect? Who could have programmed him to slant his story toward the supernatural?

  Something there is here…

  But, for the time being anyway, St. Cyr was willing to ignore the warning signals. The boredom had been driven out, and that was what counted the most. With his mind occupied, he would not find himself remembering odd moments of the past without really wanting to. And if he did not remember them, he would not be sad. He hated being sad. Thank God for work, for corpses with their throats torn out, for mysteries.

  They broke through the mountains and started down the foothills on the other side. For a moment, the sun shone through the break in the ubiquitous trees — then the dark branches and gray leaves enfolded the car once more.

  TWO: Rider in the Storm

  The Alderban mansion was built on the slopes of the last of the major foothills, in the shadows of the gray mountains. In five distinct steps, each fitted against the contour of the land, perfectly smooth and unseamed as if it had been carved from a single piece of blazing white stone, the house managed to appear more like a natural outcropping of the landscape than like the intruding hand of civilization.

  Teddy piloted the ground car into the irising mouth of the garage and parked it in a stall alongside five similar vehicles.

  "I'll show you to your room," he said.

  Five minutes later, by means of an elevator that moved both vertically and horizontally by turns, they reached the main hall of the topmost level of the house: deep carpet the color of untainted seawater; muted blue walls; indirect lighting, so indirect that he could not locate the source; paintings on both walls, all rather interesting at a glance, all signed by Tina Alderban; music, almost inaudible, gentle and soothing.

  Teddy palmed a wall switch, opened the door that appeared behind a sliding panel and showed the detective to his quarters: a comfortably furnished sitting room, a bedroom with a mammoth waterbed and a fireplace large enough to roast an ox, more of Tina Alderban's paintings, a private bath off the bedchamber complete with a Brobdingnagian sunken tub.

  "Will this do?" Teddy asked.

  "I'll try it for a day or so and see," St. Cyr said dryly. But his sarcasm was lost on the master unit.

  "If it doesn't suit, I am sure that something else can be arranged." Teddy floated to the door, turned and said, "Dinner will be served in two hours and twenty minutes, in the main dining room. You will find directions in the house guide in the top drawer of your nightstand."

  "Wait." St. Cyr said. "I'd like to talk to Mr. Alderban to get—"

  "That will come later," Teddy assured him. "Now, Mr. Alderban wishes that you rest from your journey."

  "I'm not tired, actually."

  "Then you may watch the thunderstorm, Mr. St. Cyr. Climicon has scheduled one for approximately six o'clock. It should already have begun to form."

  This time, when the robot assumed its air of dismissal, it was utterly inarguable. The door closed behind it; beyond the door, the concealing panel slid down the wall.

  St. Cyr, unable to imagine what else he should do to pass the time, afraid of growing bored again, went to the glass patio doors and discovered that they opened on vocal command. He stepped onto the slate-floored balcony, which was shielded from the elements by the slanted, spout-flanked, red-shingled roof. Below, a lush valley opened like the center of a flower, cut through by a blue stream of water, spotted with stands of pines and, now and again, a copse of gray-leafed trees.

  Above the valley was the storm.

  A towering bank of thunderheads had moved stolidly out of the east, black as a carboned anvil. A dozen quick, silvery Eyes of Climicon darted in and out of the dense clouds, drawing them forward with clever atmospheric chemistry.

  The thunderheads moved as fast as a freight train, across rails of air on wheels of vapor.

  St. Cyr pulled a chair to the railing and sat down, intrigued.

  Over the roof of the house, moving in from the mountains behind, a second storm front tagged after and sometimes swept across the spherical Eyes, bearing down on the deep evil of the thunderheads. This massive cloud formation was a softer color, more gray than black, more blue than purple.

  At ground level the wind had subsided, though it was clearly still a power at higher altitudes as it jammed the two centers of atmospheric disturbance into the area above the valley.

  St. Cyr realized that, in an incredibly small area, the wind appeared to be blowing from two entirely different directions, evidenced by the opposite line of drive behind each front. He supposed this was a relatively minor feat for Climicon on a planet where costs were no object. After all, in recent years they had graduated from weather control to complete terraforming of worlds once unsuitable for human settlements.

  Lightning forked between the behemoths overhead.

  A moment later, thunder cracked down the valley, a thermal whip that brought an auditory punishment.

  Across the valley, in the foothills at the ankles of the next spine of gray mountains, sheets of rain obscured the trees, sliced quick gulleys in the exposed earth, and gushed forward toward the stream below.

  And out of those fluttering curtains of rain rode a man on horseback, bent low over his mount's neck, slapping its shoulders with his free hand. He dug his knees into the beast's sides, as if he were riding without benefit of a saddle, but he seemed in no danger of falling off.

  St, Cyr stood, now oblivious of the storm except as it was a backdrop to the rider. The approaching figure carried with it an air, a mood, that somehow made him uneasy — something he had noticed with the aid of the bio-computer but which he was as yet unable to pin down and define.

  The rain lashed at the rider's back, pushed by the winds, which had once again kissed the earth. Yet he managed to remain ahead of the worst of it, still slapping his mount's neck and shoulders, still bent low so as to be almost a part of the four-legged creature under him.

  As the rider drew nearer, taking the slopes of the valley toward the lowest step of the Alderban house, St. Cyr saw that he carried a rifle strapped across his broad back, Slung across the shoulders of the horse were two objects: a saddlebag made of dark leather — and a pair of bloody boar's heads, which dripped crimson and glared o
ut at the passing world with bared fangs and rigor-mortised snarls.

  The man took the last hundred yards toward the swiftly irising doors of the stables, and as he drew close to St. Cyr's position, the cyberdetective saw tangled black hair, a broad and Slavic face, fierce dark eyes. The hand that slapped the horse, urging it on, was as large as a dinner plate and looked, consequently, too large to eat with. Beneath the tight-fitting black shirt, muscles bulged and twisted as if they were sentient creatures in their own right.

  The hunter was laughing, heedless of the blood that spattered over his trousers from the dangling boars' heads, unconcerned about the lightning that chattered down to the earth all across the valley. The only thing in the world, at that moment for that large dark man, was the race. And he was laughing at the elements because he knew that he had won it.

  He disappeared through the stable door.

  The door winked shut.

  And the storm broke over the house with the force of a small hurricane, almost taking St. Cyr off his feet as he staggered back into the safety of his quarters.

  Inside, he listened to the rain and the pea-sized hailstones as the deluge battered the roof and snapped against the patio doors. Curiously, its fury seemed pale now. He had watched the hunter defeat it; the hunter was now more charged, more fiercely powerful than any storm.

  Only a man, the bio-computer said, without speaking.

  But who had he been? The laughing giant, bringing home two bloody pig heads as trophies, did not fit any of the descriptions of members of the Alderban family that he had obtained from his own reliable sources before setting out for Darma, and certainly not with anything that Teddy had told him. It was evident to St. Cyr that the hunter had never undergone psychiatric hypno-keying to stimulate his creativity. He was elemental. He was blood, the fight, the stalk, rain and fire. He was positively no historical novelist like Dane, no sculptor like Jubal.

  St. Cyr walked to the communications board in the wall by his bed and called the house computer.

  "May I be of service?" a voice asked overhead.

  "I wish to speak to Teddy," he said.

  A moment later the master unit was on the line. "Yes, Mr. St. Cyr?"

  "I asked you who all was in the family, and you did not tell me everything."

  "Whom did I miss?" Teddy asked, concerned. He would be running a check of his own systems even as he spoke, searching for a faulty memory cell.

  "The big man with black hair and eyes. He was out hunting just now."

  "You mean Hirschel," Teddy said, as relieved as a robot could be.

  "Who is he?"

  "Hirschel is Jubal Alderban's uncle on his father's side of the family."

  "He lives here?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Why didn't you mention him before?"

  The master unit said, "I suppose because of the way you asked the question. You wanted to know who was in the family. To that, I am programmed to reply as I did. If you had asked who was in the household, I would have told you about Hirschel."

  It was possible, St. Cyr thought, that the master unit had been given a narrow definition of the word "family" and that the restricted use he was permitted for that term had made it impossible for him to mention Hirschel. He really did not know enough about Reiss Master Units to be certain. His bio-computer assured him that, while most robotic servants should be equipped for cross-reference and broad spectrum recall, such a likelihood as this was not that improbable. Yet, emotionally, he could not escape the notion that Teddy had been trying to hide Hirschel's presence as long as he could.

  To what end?

  "Anything else, Mr. St. Cyr?"

  "No, Teddy," he said at last He broke the connection.

  St. Cyr showered, still wearing the turtle-shell machine, and lay down for a while before getting dressed for supper. He worked at the pieces of hay, cleared away a section of the stack but still could not find any needle. Reminding himself that the nap would have to be short and relying on the bio-computer to wake him, he fell asleep.

  The dream was about a man wearing a boar's head mask. The man was leading him along a road where the pavement was broken, jutting up in great slabs much higher than a man. Around them, the tottering buildings, filmed in gray smoke, leaned over the street, skewed out of square and ready to topple. When he woke from it an hour later, he was drenched in perspiration and felt as if the greasy smoke that layered the dead buildings now wrapped him in a dark, buttery sheath. The sheets were twisted around his legs. The pillowcase was sodden.

  While he showered and dressed, the bio-computer explained a few things about his dream.

  The man in the boar's head mask: THE UNKNOWN.

  The damaged road: THE PAST.

  The tottering buildings: MEMORIES BEST LEFT BURIED.

  The reason you woke without letting it continue further: FEAR OF WHERE THE ROAD WOULD END.

  St. Cyr hated these dream analyses, but he could not do anything to dissuade the bio-computer, which contributed what it deemed important whether he wished to hear from it or not. He refused to consider what it said. He was a detective. A detective did not have to investigate himself.

  In the top drawer of the nightstand he found the house guide — fifty pages of closely-packed information and ten pages of detailed maps. He located the main dining room, traced a path backwards to his own quarters, which were marked in red. Satisfied that he knew the way, a bit amazed that even the wealthiest families would require a house this size, he went downstairs to meet the suspects.

  THREE: Suspects

  Seven limited-response mechanicals rolled out of the wide kitchen doorway, two abreast except for their gleaming leader, Jubal's personal waiter, who preceded them by ten feet. They split into two columns at the head of the table, precisely as they had done at the start of each of the many courses of the dinner, and, in a moment, stationed themselves beside and to the left of their respective masters. The long table was alabaster. The dishes were black. The silverware was silver. Simultaneously reaching into their seven identical body-trunk storage compartments, the robots placed clear, crystal dishes, filled with bright crimson fruit, on the small black plates before the diners. White, black, red, and the gleam of silver… As if satisfied by the simplicity of the setting and the color scheme, the mindless mechanicals turned as a single unit and retraced their path back to the kitchen, the door hissing shut behind the last of them.

  "This is a native fruit," Jubal said, using a long-handled, tiny-bowled silver spoon to scoop up a chunk of it. "It grows on trees in a shell, much like a coconut, but it tastes like a combination of watermelon and blackberries."

  It was quite good, juicy and sweet.

  They finished dessert in silence and retired to the main drawing room for after-dinner liqueurs, while the mechanicals cleaned up the dirty dishes behind them. At first, through the soup and the meat courses, everyone had been talkative, though no one had touched on the subject that was foremost in all their minds. Later in the meal, the conversational mood passed as fewer and fewer topics remained that avoided reference to the murders. St. Cyr had found it umprofitable to attempt to steer the talk into a rewarding channel, had accepted that such things must wait until after the meal, but was by now considerably tense. Wearing the bio-computer, he seemed to have less patience with the rituals of daily existence and the rigid rules of protocol and manners than when he was not in his symbiotic role.

  He accepted an amber liqueur from Jubal Alderban, who was doing the honor of personally pouring for the family.

  "At times," Jubal said, "one longs for a respite from all this mechanical, loving care."

  St. Cyr tasted the drink. It smelled like burnt plums and tasted like minted cherries.

  He sat down in one of the many form-fitting black chairs spaced in a cozy ring by the fireplace, felt it shift and writhe under him as it explored his structural peculiarities and adjusted to an optimum mold. The others, except for Jubal, who was still serving, were already seated
, watching him with only thinly disguised anxiety.

  In a moment, when they all had drinks and were comfortably fitted by their chairs, St. Cyr broached the subject. "Business," he said.

  Alicia, Jubal's wife, sighed. She was a pretty woman, petite and dark, possessed of that noticeable glow of health that indicated the use of rejuvenation drugs of some sort. "I suppose you'll want the whole thing, step by step." Her tone was practiced weariness on the surface, something much more personal and sad beneath.

  "Step by step," St. Cyr affirmed.

  Alicia paled, blinked at him stupidly for a moment, licked her lips and attempted to regain her composure. She had clearly expected him to say that, but she had been hoping against the necessity of a retelling.

  "I'm sorry," St. Cyr told her. "But all that I've heard thus far is what Mr. Alderban posted in the light-telegram, and what Teddy told me."

  "You questioned Teddy?" Dane asked incredulously. He was a tall, lean boy with a dark complexion, black eyes, and thin, pale lips. When he spoke he kept his head tilted downwards, looking up over the shelf of his brow at the detective.

  "Of course I questioned him. He's unemotional, scientifically logical, a good source for first impressions."

  "No, a bad source," Dane said, sure of himself. He laced his long, bony fingers around the tiny glass of liqueur. "This is an emotional subject, after all, not a dry one. The du-aga-klava is real."

  "You think so?" St. Cyr asked.

  He wished that Dane would raise his head. As long as he sat in that position, on the edge of the couch, his shoulders hunched forward, it was difficult to tell anything of what he was thinking by examining his face and eyes.

  "It's real enough," Dane said.

  "Bullshit," Tina Alderban said, ignoring the angry look her brother directed at her.