Horror fans were shocked by the discovery and publication of a portion of the memoirs of Larry Talbot, The Wolfman. And now, another fragment of those memoirs has surfaced...the memoirs known as...
By Geoffrey Miller
PART TWO
(At the end of House Of Dracula, Larry Talbot, at the behest of Dr. Franz Edelmann, shoots and kills this good but tragically marked man. "This evil thing must be destroyed," Edelmann, whose blood had been fused with that of Dracula, had earlier told Larry. "But if I am unable, you must do it for me." So Larry is forced to kill the only person who ever actually tried to help him. Not only tried, but succeeded. For Edelmann had perfected a revolutionary technique to enlarge the cranial cavity and relieved Larry of his lycanthropy. But like a character in a film noir Larry cannot get out from under his bad star. Edelmann, under the influence of Dracula’s blood, reanimates the Frankenstein monster and strangles his adoring assistant, Nina. All this happens just as Inspector Holz, the police chief of Visaria, and two of his constables arrive to warn Edelmann that a mob is descending on his house. They are demanding justice for the murder of Siegfried Steinmuhl, Edelmann’s grounds keeper, who had been killed earlier by Edelmann, leaving behind as evidence his cum laude pin from medical school. The reanimated monster injures Holz and one of his deputies. Larry shoots Edelmann. The Monster goes berserk, trying to kill Larry, and sets the house on fire. The mob arrives and storms the place. Larry yells at them, "Get out! The Frankenstein Monster!" Panic ensues and everyone flees. Larry and Edelmann’s other assistant, Miliza Morrell, who has fallen in love with him, escape with the others as the house and the Monster are consumed by flames.)
I looked up at the clock behind Gwen. Two hours had passed. Two hours from the time the grave robbers opened my tomb until I shot Dr. Edelmann.
Gwen was looking at me curiously. "What happened to the girl? Miliza."
I must’ve looked sad.
"I’m sorry, Larry. I--"
I held up a hand, glanced at the clock again and started talking.
* * *
Inspector Holz . . . his
scalp was bleeding and the back of his uniform was burned where
the Monster hurled him against one of Dr. Edelmann’s high
voltage machines. He crawled out of 
the
back of the burning house. Everyone, including Miliza and I, were
watching the fire. More police arrived. When Holz made his way to
the front he saw a lot of people in the mob pointing at me,
yelling that I’d killed Dr. Edelmann. Holz ordered me taken
into custody. Miliza protested, all the way to the police station
where I was locked up. She pleaded with me to tell them what had
actually happened. But I was stricken with guilt and another
emotion I had never expected. I couldn’t bring himself to
tell Holz that it was Edelmann who killed Siegfried. Or what had
happened to Edelmann that caused him to become a murderer. So I
just sat quietly on the bed in the corner of my cell.
In the middle of the night Holz, with his head bandaged, unlocked the door to my cell, came in and sat down next to me on the cot. "Fraulein Morrell tells me that Dr. Edelmann cured you of your ... problem. Is that true?"
I nodded.
"Then why should you kill him?" Holz showed me Edelmann’s Cum Laude pin. "They found this clutched in Siegfried’s hand. Dr. Edelmann killed Siegfried, didn’t he? Didn’t he? But why? And why did he kill Nina?"
I just sat silently with my arms folded.
"Talbot, listen to me. Fraulein Morrell told me about you. You have the chance now, after six years, to lead something like a normal life again. Isn’t that what you wanted? It’s certainly what Dr. Edelmann wanted for you. You have it backwards. Your silence betrays him; it doesn’t protect his memory. Anyway, he wasn’t the type of man who would have cared what anyone thought of him once he was gone. There was no conceit in him."
"It wasn’t his fault!," I blurted out.
"So I thought," Holz said, patting my shoulder. " Tell me what happened."
I went silent again.
"Talbot, don’t be fool--"
"You don’t understand. It’s not that I’m afraid to tell you. It’s what you said before. I have a chance now to lead a normal life. Don’t you realize how much that scares me? For six years I only wanted to die. For six years I’ve been something no person could possibly imagine. If I were as eloquent as Shakespeare no words could describe the horror of what I was. Now, all of a sudden, I’m ‘normal’. And I can’t face it. I never expected this. Someone once said, ‘Don’t wish too hard for what you want. You might get it’." I rubbed my forehead as if I had a headache, then looked at Holz. "I’d rather go to prison. I can cope with prison."
"Damned if you are," Holz said softly. "And damned if you aren’t. Is that it?"
"I never expected this," I said again. " So what do I do now?"
"You come with me."
Holz and I looked up. Miliza was standing in the cell doorway.
"Larry," she
said. "You’re like a diver who’s been hundreds of
feet under water for too long. 
You have to come to the surface
slowly, an inch at a time. I have a home in Schonheim. Come back
with me. I’ll help you start again."
"You don’t understand," I said.
" Why do you keep saying that? I do understand. The two people who meant the most to me, Dr. Edelmann and Nina, are dead. Everything I worked for is gone. I’ve got nothing. I can help you. And you can help me."
Holz said, " Talbot, if you don’t do this you’re worse than a fool. You’re selfish ... and a coward." He stood and stared down at me. "In any case, I’m not going to charge you with Dr. Edelmann’s death. So you’re free to go."
"It was self-defense," Miliza said. "Dr. Edelmann went mad . . . because of an experiment that . . . that got out of his control." She looked intently at Holz. "Can’t you just leave it at that?"
"I don’t know. But I’ll worry about it later. Right now there’s a carriage out back. I suggest you both get in it and leave...now."
Miliza held out her hand. "Larry?"
I looked up at her slowly and nodded. "All right."
Holz said to her, "Fraulein, would you be so kind as to ready the carriage. I want to talk to Mr. Talbot for just a moment. Please."
Miliza looked suspicious. "Very well", she said and left.
Holz stood close to me. "Apparently you don’t remember me. Or you’re pretending not to. You came here to Visaria several years ago with an old gypsy woman. You called yourself Taylor, I believe.
"I was the Burgermeister then. You were looking for Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein... for the same reason, I suppose, that you sought out Dr. E delmann. Frankenstein was dead, so you tried to buy the ruins of the estate from his daughter--"
I held up a hand to silence him. "I didn’t forget you. But I’d certainly hoped you’d forgotten me."
"The old gypsy woman
. . . what was her name?"
"Maleva?"
"Yes."
"I suppose they never found her body after the damburst swept away the ruins."
"She didn’t drown. Neither did the Baroness, or that English doctor, Mannering."
I was thunderstruck. "Maleva? But what happened to her?"
"She left. They all left. Where I don’t know and frankly I didn’t care."
I shook my head in confusion. "But why...why are you telling me--"
"Leave Visaria and don’t come back--ever. This town has suffered several lifetimes of misery. It has the reputation in Central Europe as a place that seems destined to be victimized by unscrupulous scientists and medical adventurers. I want this town to lead a dull, normal life. And I will do everything in my power to see to it that people like Frankenstein and Mannering and, God rest his soul, Edelmann never plague us again. I’m not placing any blame on you but you’re part of all that. You understand."
"Don’t worry", I said. "In ten minutes I’ll be nothing more than an unpleasant memory for you. You’ll never see me again." I smiled at him. "But I would like to shake your hand."
Holz smiled warmly in return and we shook hands. "Good luck to you, Mr. Talbot."
"Thanks...for everything." As I walked out of the jail I felt a rush of optimism. Maleva was alive. At least she hadn’t drowned. All of a sudden I felt good; I was going to find a way back.
Miliza was sitting in the small carriage waiting at the back of the building. I stopped in front of the brown horse whose reins led from the side of its mouth to Miliza’s hands. Normally, the animal would have snorted and reared at me. Now it just stood calmly as I stroked its muzzle. I got on and looked at the moon setting beneath the horizon. I took the reins from Miliza’s hands. "What is today?"
"The thirty-first of October", she said. "Why?"
"I was born on August ninth...1908. But from now on this is the day I’ll celebrate as my birthday." I snapped the reins. "All right, horse, take us home."
* * *
Three hundred and sixty-five days later I had lived through twelve cycles of the full moon. Like the l diver Miliza had talked about, I had come back to life inch by inch. Today I was celebrating my thirty-second birthday. It was a clear, chilly autumn day and the sun spread an orange glow into the sky as it went beneath the horizon. The trees were bare and a lively breeze swept dead leaves along King Gustav Strasse in the town of Schonheim. I walked toward the bakery to pick up my cake. It gets dark so early this time of year, I thought as I rounded the corner.
A dog tethered to a post in front of the bakery started barking at me. He leapt at me but the leash snapped him back as if he’d bounced off a wall. The dog jumped immediately to its feet, strained the full length of the leash again and kept on barking. Inch by inch I had become accustomed to animals again. I had come to fear and even hate them because I knew that they feared and hated me. I would have ignored this except for the frenzy of the dog’s behavior. He was barking with every ounce of energy he had. Spittle flew from his mouth and the short hairs along his spine stood on end. I started to feel hot and flushed, as if I were having an allergic reaction to something. Then I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack. The pain quickly contracted to a small, burning point in the center of my sternum.
I turned, walked quickly back around the corner and ducked down an alley where no one could see me. I undid the top three buttons of my shirt. The burning point in the center of my sternum that felt as if I had been hit by the tip of a hot poker was an inch square, a black and red scar shaped like a five- pointed star. There was no panic as I rolled up my sleeves and saw the first coarse, dark brown hairs pushing through the skin. The moon hasn’t even started to rise, I thought. Periodically over the last year, without ever saying anything to Miliza, I’d told myself this might happen again. I needed to be prepared. Dr. Edelmann had never said it would last forever. And now it had happened. I had settled on a course of action many months before. I was just going to disappear. I knew that she knew. If one day I simply disappeared... well, I knew that she had also thought long and hard about it. We had simply never been able to discuss it together. Rather like maintaining silence about the death of a child.
Don’t just stand here, I told himself. Let’s go. Now.
I started walking quickly. It was almost dark. As I passed beyond the edge of town I walked even faster. I saw the first trees of the forest. My eyes welled up and hot tears ran down my cheeks. When I reached the tree line I started running. I heard a woman say, "Do they call you Larry?" And my own voice answered, "They used to."
And again, the fragment ends. But the story of Larry Talbot doesn't. Stay tuned as more of "The Pentagram Papers" surface.
Article copyright (c) Geoffrey Miller. Talbot JPG courtesy of The Monster Bash Page and "E-Gor" Chastain.
