Gary Brandner - The Howling III

Qualen resolved to have a talk with that woman and her supervisor at the first opportunity. He said, "You are a relative of… " making a show of looking through the papers on his desk'… Malcolm."

"In a way."

The doctor looked up, expecting a further explanation. Derak offered none. His green-eyed gaze was uncomfortably direct.

"As it happens," Qualen said, "that patient has been transferred."

"Transferred?" Derak took a step closer to the desk. "He was here last night."

"That's true. The transfer was effected early this morning."

The sandy-haired man became agitated. One hand pulled loose the knot of his necktie. "Where was he taken?" His voice sounded different. Coarser.

"I'm really not at liberty to say. If you will leave your name and address with my — "

"You will tell me now," said Derak. The voice had roughened into a growl.

Dr Qualen stared at the man in astonishment. He had thrown off his jacket and was actually tearing at his shirt. And his face, my God, it was twisting itself into something quite inhuman.

The doctor reached for the intercom box. Derak's hand clamped on to his wrist with a grip that crackled the bones. Qualen stared at the hand. Before his bulging eyes it changed. Grew into a terrible mutant paw. Thick wiry hair sprouted from the back. The nails thickened and pushed out into claws. Qualen looked up at the face.

Even as he began to scream, the doctor knew the acoustic walls would let no more than a murmur escape to Mrs Thayer outside.

With a strength born of terror, Qualen wrenched his wrist free of the terrible grip. He ran around his desk and tried to make it to the door. Derak, or whatever this thing was that Derak had become, was faster. He threw himself past the doctor and used that misshapen hairy paw to roll the dead bolt home, locking them in.

The only other way out was the window of reinforced glass, and that gave on a sheer drop of twenty feet to the concrete parking lot. Qualen backed away, watching in horrified fascination the transformation taking place before him.

The man's body twisted and swelled and grew to a height that towered over the six-foot doctor. There was a terrible cracking as the skeleton reshaped itself inside the creature. The face… the face was all muzzle and teeth and burning eyes of green hellfire.

In a movement too swift for him to follow, Qualen felt himself seized under the arms and lifted clear of the floor. His shrieks echoed dully off the soundproofed walls. He felt the hot breath of the creature as the great jaws opened, smelled the stench of it. There was a moment of searing agony as the teeth sank into his throat. A hot gush of his life's blood. A last roar in his ears. Then blackness and oblivion.

It was the faint but unmistakeable crash of glass from inside Dr Qualen's office that roused Mrs Thayer. The only thing in there that could make a crash like that was the window. She buzzed the intercom, but got no answer. With mounting unease, Mrs Thayer rose from her chair, walked to the door of Dr Qualen's office, and tried the knob. Locked. She rapped lightly; then again, louder. There was no response. Something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong.

Mrs Thayer snatched the telephone from her desk and punched out the internal emergency code. In less than a minute two burly orderlies came running in from the corridor outside.

"There's trouble in Dr Qualen's office," she cried. "The door's locked and he won't answer me."

The orderlies hesitated only a moment, then attacked the door while Mrs Thayer stood back out of the way. The door soon splintered under their combined assault. The men rushed inside, stopping as though they had hit a wall when they saw the bloody thing sprawled over the desk of the administrative chief. Behind them Mrs Thayer started into the room, then gave a little cry and backed away, her hand covering her mouth.

At the same moment the men turned toward the broken window. They crossed the room together and looked out, scanning the parking lot below. Nothing.

One of them pointed up at the hillside. "Look!"

The other followed his pointing finger. "What is it? I don't see anything."

"I thought… for a minute it looked like something up there. Running."

"A man? What?"

"I don't know. I can't see it now. It was more like a big dog. Or… Christ, I don't know. Let's get help."

Later, of all the ghastly events of that morning, the two men would remember the sound they heard from somewhere up on the wooded hill. They would remember the howling.

The people at the hospital provided Ramsay with a small unused office at the rear of the first floor, next to the kitchen, to use for his interviews with the staff and employees. It had only a desk, two chairs, a file cabinet that would not open, and a hastily installed telephone. There was also a pervasive smell of bland hospital cooking coming in through the single window.

One of the chairs was occupied by a stenographer on loan from Ventura County. She took rapid, silent notes as Mrs Audrey Thayer, secretary and receptionist for the late Dr Qualen, answered the sheriffs questions.

Through the window Ramsay could see search parties labouring up the thickly wooded hillside, where the suspect may or may not have been seen running by one of the orderlies who found the body. Overhead was the persistent thrum of helicopters. There was one from the Ventura County sheriffs office, and several from television news departments.

The media had appeared miraculously less than two hours after Ramsay had received the report of Dr Qualen's murder. So far he had been able to avoid them with the help of Deputies Nevins and Fernandez, who stood out in the hallway looking as mean as they could manage.

Sooner or later he would have to talk to them, but Ramsay was determined to get as much as he could of his real work done first. Like most lawmen, he had a healthy distrust of reporters, a distrust he knew was mutual.

"Is there anything more you can tell me about this Mr Derak?" Ramsay asked the woman across from him. "Any little thing, no matter how unimportant it seemed at the time, might be helpful."

Mrs Thayer frowned thoughtfully and shook her head. Her hands were busy twisting a flowered hankie into a snake. "I'm sorry, Sheriff, but there really isn't anything more than what I've already told you. He was just an ordinary-looking man. Rather pleasant, he seemed at the time. Very insistent, though, about seeing Dr Qualen."

At the mention of her late employer, Mrs Thayer's ample chest convulsed in a sob. She unwound the hankie and dabbed at her eyes. Ramsay waited for the spasm to pass before he went on.

"And he said nothing to you about what business he had with the doctor?"

"Only that he was sent up there by Eleanor Chung. She supervises the admission desk in the lobby."

Ramsay nodded. He had already talked to Miss Chung and the woman who was on duty when Derak came in. They said he insisted on seeing the patient known as Malcolm in Room 108. Since he could show no evidence that he was related, they explained he would have to wait until regular visiting hours, then clear it with the doctor assigned to Malcolm's case. They declined to give him any more information, and when the man refused to leave, referred him to Dr Qualen.

"How long was he in the office with Dr Qualen before you heard the crash of the window breaking?"

"Not long. Not more that fifteen minutes. I don't see how he could have… could have…"

Ramsay spoke up quickly to head off another outburst of sobs. "And you heard nothing before that because of the soundproof construction of the walls, is that correct?"

"Nothing. Once, very faint, I thought I heard a voice, but I couldn't be sure."