The Wolf Age Read Online Free PDF Page B

Presently a man-formed werewolf came by to collect them in a basket.
    This werewolf was not a guard, clearly. He had no armor and very little clothing, only a sort of loincloth. His skin, hair, and eyes were all the same mottled pale color, and he was beardless (like the guards, but unlike Morlock himself; it was long since he'd shaved). Morlock guessed he was a prisoner, too: a trustee of some kind. The guards spoke to him, their voices friendly and contemptuous. The trustee said a few things to Morlock, but Morlock made no move to respond. Eventually the trustee went away, his basket of bowls clanking as he wrestled it down the corridor.
    Time passed. Morlock spent a good deal of it staring at the walls. They looked new: this prison was not more than a few years old. Had it replaced an older one, or had the werewolves found some new need for a prison? For that matter, it seemed in retrospect that the dens he had walked past on his way here were also new; there was a rawness about their edges, a lack of plant growth on or near the doorways. He wondered about all this but came to no conclusions. It was hard to think with the glass spike in his skull: he was deaf to his own insight, could proceed only on reason alone, that feeble reed.
    Morlock began to hope that he would be kept in solitary confinement, but that evening, when the window was still reddish gray with sunset, a dozen guards herded a new prisoner up the hallway. The two on station unlocked the door while the others forced the new prisoner into the cell that had been Morlock's sole domain.
    The new prisoner was in human form ... approximately. His face was long, but his eyes were set far back, almost by his ears. His brutal jaw came out almost as far as his flat porcine nose; when he bared his teeth, as he often did, they looked like the long gleaming teeth of a carnivore. His legs had a twist in them, like a dog's hind legs. His massive naked body was shaggy with hair, white streaked with red. (His bare skin, where it could be seen, showed the same mottling.) He looked like a werewolf who had changed incompletely back to human-who, perhaps, could not change fully out of beast form.
    The new prisoner, as soon as he was released, threw himself at the cell door, but the wary guards had already slammed it shut and locked it fast. The new prisoner pressed his snarling face through the bars and snapped and howled. The guards stood back and passed amused remarks among themselves.
    The pale trustee appeared again. This time he had two baskets and a handful of some kind of marker. He passed like a vendor through the crowd of guards (more guards, and more trustees, were filling up the hallway). Morlock couldn't tell exactly what was going one, but he thought the pale mottled trustee was selling bets.
    The new prisoner tired of struggling against the unyielding bars. He drew his head back and stood snuffling angrily for a while. Then he stood as straight as his arched spine allowed and turned to look at Morlock, seeming to notice him for the first time.
    He howled like a dog, and the crowd outside the cell roared and hooted like the audience at a race. They were an audience, Morlock realized: they had come to see him broken, perhaps killed by the beastlike prisoner.
    A square of moonlight was already shining on the cell floor. The new prisoner stepped into it, and his unlovely flesh began to ripple like the surface of boiling water. The prisoner knelt down, raising his arms and screaming in ecstasy or fury as they transformed to wolf legs in the silvery light.
    In a moment he had transformed: there was no trace of humanity about him anymore. Even his shadow seemed bestial and hulking as he turned toward Morlock with the light of death in his dark eyes.
    Morlock stood, his hands open and empty. He was acutely aware that he had nothing to help him in this fight, not even a seer's intuition. He had no tools, no weapons, no escape, and he faced an enemy he could not kill.
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