Full Wolf Moon

36

As they approached the lab, hidden deep in the woods, the sun was close to setting behind the horizon. A few stray clouds hung in the sky.

The building was dark, apparently deserted. Laura stepped up to the door, hesitated. Logan took hold of her shoulder, gave it a brief squeeze. After a moment, she turned the knob and opened the door.

No lights were on inside, and Laura snapped on the bank of switches. The lab was as Logan remembered it, with its microscopes and DNA sequencer, a host of other equipment and instrumentation, the animal cages — and the door in the far wall, which was currently closed.

Moving slowly, hesitatingly, Laura approached that door. “Father?” she said after a moment in a voice both anxious and hopeful.

There was no response from the far side.

“Father, please answer.”

Now Logan heard a stirring beyond the door. “Laura, we had an agreement. You must leave me alone on the nights of the full moon. You know I can’t bear for you to see me like this.”

“I have Jeremy Logan with me,” she said.

Feverbridge did not respond.

“Father — he knows everything.”

Another moment of silence. And then the door slowly opened and a dark figure appeared in the doorway. As it emerged into the light, Logan made out Chase Feverbridge. He was dressed, not in a lab coat, but in torn old trousers and a loose-fitting shirt of rough wool. He seemed even taller than Logan remembered, and as he looked from Logan to his own daughter, a strange light shone in his eyes. Over his shoulder, Logan could see the cot in the small back room. This time he could also make out the tar-paper-covered window, a large sink, and a bank of instrumentation, but precisely what its purpose was he could not discern in the dimness.

“What does he know, exactly?” the naturalist asked.

“He’s been to the Blakeney compound. He’s seen Zephraim’s transformation — and he knows about the DNA and plasma samples you took from him.”

“You told him?” Feverbridge said, turning sharply toward her.

“No, no, of course not. He’d already figured most of it out. I just filled in the last details.”

“Such as my killing that old man, I assume.”

“That was an accident! That wasn’t you. And I’ve explained how we’ve suppressed the violent tendencies that presented the first time you experienced the transformation.”

Feverbridge continued to look from one to the other. He seemed to be experiencing a strange mix of emotions: surprise, alarm, hostility, and — what Logan sensed most strongly — anticipation.

“Father, there’s a chance he can help.”

“How can he help?” And Feverbridge took a seat on one of the lab stools. “We’ve been working to reverse this for half a year now — without success.” He glanced out the open front door of the lab. “You have to leave now — both of you. I… I can’t bear to be seen during these times. Go, please.”

Instead, Logan casually sat down on a lab seat across from the older scientist. “Laura has told me you’ve managed to at least mitigate the effects,” he said. “Locking yourself in, keeping moonlight to a minimum. But I’m curious: what does it feel like? When the change comes over you, I mean.”

Feverbridge was silent a moment. “Discomfort. The pain is almost unbearable at first. Your skin, it… I don’t know how to describe it. But one also feels a certain… energy. But it isn’t a human strength — not exactly. It’s a physical sensation merely, id without intellect.”

“And the violence? Where does that emotion, that need, come from?”

“Laura told you,” Feverbridge said brusquely. “That has been ameliorated. I prefer not to think about that — time.”

“When you showed me that demonstration with the shrews — why were you unaffected?”

“I stood behind the light source — remember? It was trained directly on the animals: nowhere else.”

“But if you were to train it on yourself, you’d undergo the transformation?”

“I suppose so, yes, if the light was of sufficient intensity. But as we’ve told you, I’ve done everything I can to shield myself from the full moon.” He shifted impatiently on his seat. “I fail to see how this is in any way helpful to me.”

“It’s helpful to me, Dr. Feverbridge — in understanding exactly what’s been going on. I have just a few more questions. Tell me: why do you think you have made so little progress in reversing your condition? After all, six months is a long time to work on the problem.”

“If I knew that, perhaps we’d be making more progress than we have. There was something wrong with my initial hypothesis of how the imaginal discs would respond, such as those present in the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. I synthesized them to operate on a human scale and coded them to denaturate and reverse the transformation process. Instead, they seem to have bonded to my DNA, modified it. Trying to undo that modification is a process of trial and error — and dangerous if not done very carefully.”

“Every time we seem to make a breakthrough,” Laura said, “it turns out to be just another dead end.”

“Are you willing to let others — other scientists, I mean — help you?” Logan asked. “Work with you?”

Feverbridge laughed bitterly. “If they didn’t lock me up for killing that old man, they’d put me in a cage, point at me, experiment on me. And the scientific community that laughed at me all these years — think of what they’d say! Instead of seeing what I’ve accomplished, they’d see only failure: an inability to restore what I’ve changed.”

“So you insist on staying here, working on this alone,” Logan said.

Feverbridge gave a vigorous nod. “There’s no other way. Laura’s the only help I need.”

That was it, then. Logan paused a moment, collecting his thoughts. “Watching what happened to Zephraim Blakeney last night — well, it was a revelation, something that I will never forget, either professionally or personally. But there’s something else that sticks with me — something that his brother Nahum said. You see, I asked him why — if the effect of the moon-sickness was so painful — did Zephraim pry the wooden planks from his window, deliberately exposing himself directly to the rays of the full moon? Nahum told me, as best he could understand, that — despite everything — Zephraim was drawn to the moon. He called it a craving. He said that it gave Zephraim a feeling of power, animalistic power. You alluded to something similar just now, although you used the euphemism of ‘energy.’ ”

“Get to the point,” Feverbridge said. He had slid down off his chair and was now pacing the lab, the very picture of impatience.

“It’s just this: according to Laura, you reproduced the effects Zephraim experiences in yourself — except, thanks to the other accomplishments of your prior research, the result of your resequencing meant that you experienced the transformation on a far greater scale than Zephraim did.”

Feverbridge did not answer; he simply continued pacing.

“So doesn’t it stand to reason that you are drawn to the full moon all that much more — that you crave its light, crave the power it confers on you?”

“That’s not so!” Laura protested.

“This ‘energy’ you mention — I imagine it’s more like a well, something that you can tap almost at will. I can only imagine what that feels like.”

“This is crazy!” Laura said. “My father is humiliated, sick at heart by what’s happened, he—”

“That power, that craving — why would anybody want to have it taken away from them?” Logan asked Feverbridge. “I’d think just the opposite: they’d want to hold on to it any way they could. That’s why you dazzled me by demonstrating your earlier research — the research on moon dust — knowing I would not turn you in, but rather, in my ignorance, let you proceed with what now truly interested you — the end you’d always hoped for, but had never been able to achieve… until the Blakeneys came along.” He paused. “All these breakthroughs Laura mentions, the ones that turn out to be dead ends — did you engineer things so they would turn out that way? Is it possible the phenomena affecting you are becoming stronger, rather than weaker? That you are, in fact, addicted to the transformation — and this addiction maintains you through your calmer moments, preventing you from truly finding some way to undo what you’ve caused?”

“No!” Feverbridge cried in a hoarse voice.

“What is it you really do here by yourself, Dr. Feverbridge?” Logan pressed. “When you lock yourself in on the nights of the full moon, refusing to be seen even by your daughter. Are you really cowering in that back room, in the dark, with the tar paper covering the window?”

“Jeremy,” Laura said, her tone changing abruptly. “What are you saying?”

“And that initial violent aspect of the transformation, the one you so conveniently managed to cancel out — even though you’ve made no other progress on your condition — is it really gone? Or is that what you’ve just led your daughter to believe? Because in my job as enigmalogist, I have to suspend my disbelief again and again, take a lot of things for granted — but one thing I never take for granted is coincidence. And the coincidence of your injecting yourself with that resequenced DNA, and the murders starting to take place shortly thereafter, is just a little too strong for me to accept.”

As they had been speaking, darkness had gathered around the laboratory. At that moment, a stripe of moonlight suddenly drifted through the open door — and fell directly on Feverbridge.

“You son of a bitch!” he roared in a strangled voice. “You tricked me!”

Even as he spoke, Logan saw a strange pigmentation begin to spread across the skin of his exposed throat, blossoming like brown food coloring dropped into a basin of water. Feverbridge clutched at his neck, making gargling sounds, and blood-filled weals began to appear on his fingers and the backs of his wrists. He twisted, first this way, then that — and then he dashed out the door and into the darkness beyond.

“Father!” Laura cried out in shock and pain. She rounded on Logan. “My God, what have you done to him—”

“Stay here!” he cried. Then, running out of the lab and slamming the door behind him, he hurried up the path to the main complex. He was just in time to see the shadow of Feverbridge dart past the headlights of the red pickup truck that was now pulling into the fire station.

“Looks like I got here just in time,” Albright said, getting out of his truck. “In the call you made earlier, you did say to arrive at moonrise.” He reached into the front seat, pulled out his rifle. “I knew when you saw me loading this up that I’d hear from you, sooner or later. When you asked me to meet you at the Feverbridge lab, I assumed we were talking about the dogs. But that was no dog that ran in front of my headlights just now.”

Logan did not reply. Instead, he ran to his Jeep, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out his own 9mm Sig Sauer. Then he rushed back to Albright.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing in the direction Feverbridge had gone. “We don’t have a moment to lose.”