Return of the Wolf Man Read Online Free PDF

laboratory.
    The insurance investigator picked up the scientist’s wrist. It was cold. She felt for a pulse then held a finger under Dr. Mornay’s nose. There was no sign of life.
    Joan looked up at the castle. The scientist must have been pushed or thrown from the laboratory window. She looked back down at the white and broken figure.
    “You poor, misguided soul,” Joan said. There had been a tragic majesty in the demise of the Frankenstein Monster, its arms outstretched as it strode through the fire—almost as though it were finally welcoming destruction. But there was nothing heroic in the death of this poor woman.
    Joan rose. As she did, she noticed ugly bruises on the back of Dr. Mornay’s bloody right leg. She’d been gripped by something powerful. Since Count Dracula had been fighting the Wolf Man, she assumed that this was the work of the Frankenstein Monster. It was ironic, thought Joan. The creature she had helped to revive had ended up destroying her.
    Joan looked back toward the front of the castle. Whether or not Stevens had found the journal of Dr. Frankenstein, she was going to have to telephone the mainland and ask the sheriff to come out. Concealing knowledge of a homicide would only serve to cast suspicion on them.
    As she started toward the door, a bestial howl ripped through the castle and poured through the windows. The cry echoed across the island even after Professor Stevens’s squeals of terror and pain had begun.
    “Professor!” Joan cried.
    Silence.
    “Professor! What is it?”
    The young woman turned and ran to the castle, losing her shoes as she ran. She was tired but alert as she pulled open the massive door and stepped into the candlelit entranceway. A wind followed her through the open door and puffed out the candles. She stopped and listened. The professor screamed again, just once, and she followed the cry to the brightly lit laboratory.
    Though the castle was dark and chilly and the stones were cold on her bare feet, perspiration ran down Joan’s throat and trickled between her breasts. She was hot and frightened yet she didn’t consider running away. Professor Stevens was in trouble. Besides, the sensual appeal of mystery and danger were qualities that had compelled her to become an insurance investigator in the first place. No relationship, no other job, had ever made her feel so alive.
    She swung through the open laboratory door and froze there.
    During her seven years of specializing in missing persons and lost goods for Shippers Insurance, the twenty-nine-year-old had witnessed many horrors. In addition to the routine shootings and bludgeonings and knifings, there was the body of the union organizer who had been thrown in front of a speeding train in Poughkeepsie and the corpse of the New Orleans shipping magnate, which had been stuffed inside a fish barrel where it lay undiscovered for twelve days. Then there was the publisher who’d been mangled to death in his own printing press. She could actually read passages from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle on his forehead. But Joan had never seen anything like the sight that waited for her in the laboratory.
    The werewolf hadn’t perished, as they’d thought. The creature was perched on one knee. The other knee was upright and the body of Professor Stevens was lying across it. Stevens’s head was twisted unnaturally to one side, his eyes shut, his dead mouth hanging open. A great jagged gash ran from behind his left ear to his larynx. Blood pumped in ugly jets from around frayed muscle. Some of the blood spilled behind the cervical vertebrae; some of it gushed onto the professor’s white shirt. Some of it had been lapped up by the Wolf Man; his thin, leathery lips and hairy chin were matted with blood and gore.
    The werewolf looked up when she arrived. He stared at her and snarled, his eyes glowing with fierce contentment.
    Joan fought down her nausea as she stood absolutely still. She didn’t even breathe. The creature had