I suppose I should address this to you, Joanne, for all that you cannot read it; I do not care if anyone else does, and you were the reason for it all. Yet I would do it again.
I was certainly thinking of you when I drove up. The mansion of Giles Scott is not a showy building, although there are a few noticeable flourishes. The first flourish one meets is the gate, which bears the silver A on a black shield that also serves as the logo of the Aegidian Corporation, of which he is chief executive officer. Passing through the gates takes you along a meandering lane over manicured grounds until you reach the front of the house itself, large but unremarkable in appearance. It is not made to impress, either by its beauty or its ugliness, and one gets the impression that even its size is mostly utilitarian. There are gardens, it is said, in the back, beautiful gardens, but I have never seen them, and know of them only by the testimony of another. I am sure that they are there, though; he would know.
It indicates my state of mind that I had left the car and made it almost to the door when I had to run back and grab the thick manila envelope I had left on the seat. When I had returned the door, I had barely knocked when a young man of haughty Iberian looks answered the door. He wore black slacks, a loose silk shirt and a bright yellow flower in a buttonhole.
"What is your business?" he asked. His voice was chillingly cool.
I worked up my courage. "I have an appointment with Giles Scott. It was made through the office of Mr. Lewis."
He looked at me impassively for a moment, then said, "Very well, then. Come inside."
The mansion was much more lovely inside than outside. The floor was marble tile and the wood on the walls was dark and expensive-looking. Along the hallways there were display cases with some breathtaking displays of endless exotic items. I would have died to have the chance to curate some of them. He brought me to an office.
"Mr. Scott should be along shortly," he said. "If he is delayed and you require anything, my name is Marcos." Then he left.
I looked around. It was a cheerful office, apparently designed precisely for receiving guests. There was a wooden desk in front of a large window, and also some chairs, and two walls were lined with books, some very old. In one corner of the room was a large standing globe, but of the moon rather than the earth. The wall that had neither books nor window was lined with cabinets and tables of matching mahogany, mostly filled with stones and curious knick-knacks from all over the world.
I bent down and looked at one of the stones on the table nearest to me. It was a pinkish stone, as big as large hen's egg. I say 'pinkish', but in fact it seemed to shift somewhat in hue depending on how exactly you looked at it. "He seems quite the collector, Giles Scott," I said to myself.
"Opal," a low, quiet voice right behind me suddenly said, causing me to jump and twist around. "'It seems to blush and turn pale as if it had a soul.'"
It was Giles Scott himself, of course. He looked surprisingly young, although in that way in which it is difficult to tell how old some people are. His face was pale in the way that you expect someone on the edge of death to be pale, giving a suggestion of gauntness to a face that was not really gaunt at all. His hair was black and slightly curly, and his dark eyes were startlingly hostile. His pallor made both his hair and his eyes seem darker than any hair and eyes should be. He wore a custom-tailored suit with an expensively red silk tie and diamond tie pin and a black vest.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't hear you come in."
He did not smile, but he seemed amused. "People rarely do. Won't you have a seat?"
As I sat down in the chair he indicated, he said, "Would you like something to drink?"
"No, thank you," I said. "I don't drink."
"I rarely drink myself," he said, sitting in the chair across the desk from me. "In general, I only drink to calm myself when I am in a state of excitement; and things excite me very rarely. Do you smoke?" He pulled a cigar case out of a drawer.
"No, sorry."
"No apology needed. I only keep them around for others, since I am not a smoker myself. No drinking, no smoking, no gambling." He did smile at this, with a smile that was marvelously ambiguous between pleasantness and sarcasm. "I am a man of very few vices."
He leaned back in his chair and regarded me for a moment with an unsettling gaze. Then he said, "You are a journalist?"
I hesitated. "In the strict sense, no. I am a historian."
"A much more respectable trade. In what do you specialize?"
"Marginal religious practices in Greater Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
"'Marginal religious practices,'" he said. "That is academic-speak for 'crazy superstitions'. In late medieval Greater German, that must be a very large field of study."
I do not know what I had expected him to say, but it was not that. "Well, yes," I replied lamely.
"But I take it that it is not in your role as a historian that you are here today?"
I hesitated again, trembling inside. "Well, yes and no."
His gaze became even more unsettling and hostile, if possible. "I was told that you had information of material concern to me about the recent murder out in the park."
"I do."
He waited patiently. At least, I suppose it was patience; his eyes seemed to bore into me.
"Perhaps I had better begin at the beginning," I felt myself blurt out.
"That is often the best way to begin," Giles agreed, with a slow nod of the head that managed again to achieve that remarkable borderline between affability and sarcasm.
"I first met Joanne in college; she was a journalism student and I, of course, was a history student. We became fast friends, and throughout our undergraduate years we were largely inseparable. After college, however, we went separate ways. We did keep in touch, with occasional correspondence, and we saw each other once every other year or so, but that's about it.
"A few years back, however, Joanne came to me saying that she had uncovered something extraordinary, but that it needed to be investigated carefully before she did anything with it. She couldn't trust it with anyone else, she said, so she had come to me. Also, it had some relationship to my field of study. She had discovered, she said, a secret Wolf-cult with roots going back to medieval Germany. The members of this cult thought of themselves as werewolves." I paused here and waited for him to respond, but he said nothing, simply looking at me with the same patient but disconcerting look.
"How she came across it originally, I do not know. I also didn't make much of it at the time. But what she had was interesting from a historian's perspective: symbols, old names, fragments of stories. I promised to look into them and get back to her. And I did. Some of them I couldn't trace, some of them I could. But it was always very sketchy. I sent what I could find to her, and largely set all thought of it aside, except that part of me kept a look-out for anything in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Germany that might indicate an interest in wolves. Whenever I did, I would mark it in case she would happen to need it, and when I had a fair stack of such things, I sent them to her. It didn't happen often. Sometimes she would send a special request to me, although usually about other places and times; I saw no pattern in the requests until much later.
"Then a little over a year ago she came to me in great agitation, saying she had stumbled on something even larger than she had thought. She brought me copies of everything she had gathered, which by this point was a quite considerable stack. She also had video footage that was somewhat startling: people vanishing suddenly into shadows, and the like. I didn't know what to make of it, but she said she did: there was indeed a cult of the Wolf, and its members did not merely think they were werewolves, but actually were."
I stopped. "If it had been anyone else," I said, "I would have laughed at it. But Joanne was no flighty individual, nor was she gullible. She had sense. She had always had sense. I didn't know what to make of it, but I promised at least that I would look over what she had brought me and do some research on my own. She said that she had some leads that needed to be followed, and that she would be incommunicado for some time. I got two small packages from her after that, with additional materials; they had no return address, and the postmark was different in each case. That was all until I read the news report about her death, mauled by an animal 'while camping alone in the park'. In the meantime, though, I kept my promise. I went through everything she had gathered and did further research on my own. And I became convinced that she was right, at least in general. There were werewolves among them. And chief among them was one known as the Invincible Wolf, sometimes called Lykaios, sometimes called Aegidius, sometimes Gide, sometimes Egidio, sometimes Gilles, sometimes Giles, called the Scot. You are he. But more than this, the day after she died I received a last package from her, with a full letter. I know about Eric, I know it all."
His smile quirked into something that might have been pity if the eyes had not been so fierce and cold. "Not all."
"You admit it?"
"I am a great reader of people, my friend," he replied. "If I denied it, you would simply continue nosing around; and you clearly know enough it would be useless to pretend otherwise, in any case. But still I would pretend, and still I would deny, were it not for one thing: you knew quite well that coming here would be the death of you. You cannot hide the slight shaking in your body or the slight tremor in your voice; the scent of an animal afraid to die is pouring off of you. You are expecting to die today, and yet you came here, anyway. Why was that?"
"I came here to ask a favor from you."
He smiled. It was cold, having nothing of the affability of his previous smile, but it still was sarcastic. "The prey asking the predator for a promise? And what would this be?"
"That you not kill me before you give Joanne the justice she deserves. That Eric, or whoever it was that killed her, die in turn. I just want to know that justice is done before I die."
His eyes locked mine, and he rose suddenly. He still was somewhat boyish in appearance, and still sickly-pale, but somehow he was also seemed tall, majestic, terrible, as if the room warped around him. Slight shadows in the room became deep and black. I had a sense of vertigo. It seemed as if I saw spread before me an extraordinarily vast panorama of centuries of night, filled with wars and destruction; with plagues and famines; with great Gothic churches, and monks in choir, and friars preaching crusade; with uprisings and revolts and revolutions; with great sailing ships and conquistador armies; with the rising and falling of civilizations. It all seemed too real, too sharp, too clear; for it was lit with the light of a vast and unwaning moon. He stepped around the desk and looked down at me as I, unable to break the gaze, began to tremble, knowing that this was an angel of death come for me.
But after holding me gaze for so long it seemed unbearable, he looked away, gazing as if at something very far off. "Non potest," he said softly to someone or something that was not me. "Non potest ab homine tolli quod sit rationalis, non totaliter; etiam in damnatis manet conscientia. Etiam in damnatis."
He looked down at me again; but his gaze, while as unsettling and cold as ever, was no longer terrible. "You do not know," he said. "You do not know what it is to bear this quasi-morbus animorum, this second languor of nature. The moment you stepped into this room was, as you thought, the beginning of your death. The moon-wolf in me recognizes you as a threat, and his strength is mingled with the madness of the moon. I cannot outlast him, and no matter how much I tried to prevent it, there would one day come a day in which my strength would give out, and you would die. But I promise you this: you will not die before I have killed the Wolf who killed Joanne." He looked away again. "Go now, before I waver in the decision."
I fled, running into a startled black man in an expensive suit and tie who was entering as I was leaving. He was like a wall, and I fell to the ground and had to scramble to get back up and keep running. Looking back at it, it was embarrassingly undignified. But all that I could think at the time was that I needed to get out.
As I left, although I did not hear it at the time, Giles Scott said, "Come on in, Seneca" and walked over to the globe of the moon, looking down at it reflectively.
The man I had run into walked into the office. "That seemed dramatic," he said.
"I was expecting you for the interview, Sen," Giles said abstractedly, reaching out his hand to set the globe spinning.
"I apologize," said Seneca. "But it is Elsbietka. She has some significant news. She is in your study."
"I will meet her there.
It was about ten minutes later when Giles entered his study to find Seneca sitting beside an agitated Elsbietka. She was holding an already opened envelope.
"Well," said Giles, "What is it?"
She said nothing, merely handing him the envelope. He pulled out a piece of paper and looked at it briefly. "This is written in blood," he said.
"Yes," Elsbietka said.
He studied it more closely. "And it is touched by the Moon. One of yours?"
She nodded. "An acquaintance in Krasnoyarsk."
"The acquaintance in Krasnoyarsk?"
She nodded again. He turned back to the letter.
"'As one Scion of Lykaios to another, I felt obliged to inform you that something of yours was unfortunately destroyed. Ivan.' Apparently you no longer have the acquaintance in Krasnoyarsk."
"You do know what this means?" said Seneca. "If he can convince others that he is a Scion of Lykaios -- well, you know what the legends say about the Scions of Lykaios."
Giles cast a sarcastic glance at him. "Yes, I know what the legends say; I invented half of them."
"Could it be true?"
"That he is a Scion of Lykaios?" Giles looked thoughtful. "It is impossible to rule out. Vsesalevich and I hunted down all the ones that were known, but Lykaios was ancient. How remarkable it would be to find out after all this time that I am still not the only one! But it is unlikely."
"Regardless, if he can get enough people to believe him -- and who in the age of Aegidius would dare claim it if he did not think he could get people to believe it?--it will be a problem."
"In fact," said Giles, handing the paper and envelope back to Elsbietka, "it changes nothing essential. But it does give some questions to ask." He looked at them both a moment, then said, "Bitka, please do me the honor of staying the night here" -- despite the 'please', it was not a request -- "and we will talk more over breakfast tomorrow. In the meantime, I think I will take a walk alone in the garden."
