"Barry Longyear - Dark Corners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Longyear Barry)

“Yeah, but werewolves? Give me a break.”

Dr. Raeder slowly shook his head. “I don’t know, Lyle. Perhaps I made a mistake. This is the kind of
subject that, properly handled, could make your career take off from a standing start. Your mind seems a
little too shut down, though, to take on a subject as radical and controversial as this.”
Lyle held up his hands. “Okay, look, I’m coming at this cold, Dr. Raeder. This is all new to me, as long
as you ignore a bunch of bad Lon Chaney, Jr. movies that rotted out my mind years ago.” He lowered
his hands to his lap and tried to hold his face expressionless. “Why not let me hear the whole thing and
then I’ll decide.”

His advisor took a pained breath then continued. “First, Lyle, forget all about Lon Chaney, Jr., silver
bullets, full moon freakouts, and Hollywood horrors. Lycanthropy is a very real, quite painful, condition.
I’m not only referring to the well-known psychotic belief in being an animal. The variation of lycanthropy
to which I refer also manifests itself in physical symptoms, such as measurable increases in body and
facial hair, dentition, bone mass, musculature, and alterations in saliva and blood chemistry. Are you
familiar with Kuchilan’s recent paper on hysteria?”

Lyle nodded. “Yes. Fanatics tapping into forces on the quantum level, miracle cures, religious freaks who
go into a frenzy and begin squirting blood from their palms. But this—”

“This is the same sort of thing, Lyle,” interrupted his advisor. Dr. Raeder held up a finger, nodded, and
said, “Hold on. There’s something I want you to see.”

He got up from his desk, went to an old wooden filing cabinet in the corner of his cluttered office, and
opened the middle drawer. “It’s in here somewhere … here.” He pulled out a thick accordion file that
had obviously seen a lot of wear. Almost reverently the doctor placed the file on his desk, opened it, and
began thumbing through the contents. “Yes,” He pulled out a dog-eared eight by ten glossy print and
handed it across the desk to Lyle. “Look at that.”

Lyle took the print and frowned as he examined it. It was a print of six different stages in the
transformation of a man in his early twenties into something very much resembling a latter day Hollywood
wolf man. In all six stages the man was clad in sixtyish hippie garb: headband, peasant shirt, patched
flares, and sandals. In each stage there was a definite increase in body and facial hair, an elongation of the
upper and lower mandibles into a shape resembling a muzzle, an incredible enlargement of the canine
teeth, and a tongue that would be the envy of any Doberman. The increase in upper body mass had been
sufficient to split open the baggy shirt’s seams. On the final frame the enlarged hairy toes sticking out of
the sandals each carried what looked to be a two inch long claw. Similar armaments graced the
fingertips. Time and date signatures appeared on each of the frames. The date on all of the frames was 4
May 1967. The elapsed time indicated that the subject had made the transformation from young adult to
drooling beast in just under three minutes. Lyle raised an eyebrow and handed back the print. “Jack
Nicholson did it better inWolf .”

Ignoring the comment, Raeder took the glossy and tapped it with his finger. “The subject’s name was
Roger Westlake. He was a psych student at Pepperdine working on his master’s. This series of shots
was taken under faculty supervised laboratory conditions just before he was committed to Pescadero.”

“WasRoger Westlake?”

“I beg your pardon?”