Read The Wolfman for Free Online Page B

butcher reached past him and pulled the sheet up until it covered everything except Ben’s face. It was a merciful act and Lawrence nodded his mute thanks. He turned away to blink tears from his eyes. Lawrence leaned on the wooden wall and breathed with great care until he was sure that he would not disintegrate into tears.
    After a few moments, the butcher cleared his throat. “We were all sorry about your brother. He were a good man.”
    “Was he?” Lawrence said distantly. He turned and looked down at Ben. For just a moment it seemed as if his brother were merely sleeping. “I missed his whole life . . .”
    The butcher shifted uncomfortably. “Sir . . . I might be overstepping meself . . .”
    Lawrence turned to him. “Speak your mind.”
    “Well, sir . . . your father instructed me to bury your brother’s effects with him.” He dug into a large pocket and removed a small leather bag. “But it seems a shame, though. Especially you being his brother an’ all.”
    He offered the bag, and Lawrence hesitated only a moment then took it from the butcher’s bloodstainedfingers. Lawrence mumbled a disjointed thanks, and the butcher nodded and vanished back into the gloom of the icehouse. Lawrence lingered for ten minutes longer, staring at Ben’s face and holding the bag of his possessions to his chest. He could feel his heart beating against the clenched fist that held the last things Ben had touched before he died.
    Then Lawrence stumbled out of the icehouse and into the light.

C HAPTER S EVEN
     
     
     
    L awrence brooded into his whiskey, thinking some of the darkest thoughts he owned. The tavern was nearly as dark as his temper. A haze of pipe smoke and burning peat hung like a cloudbank beneath the creosote-soaked wooden rafters. The voices of fifty men and a handful of women filled the air with a constant din that nearly drowned out the off-key tinkle of the piano and the tone-deaf voice of the drunk singing the wrong lyrics to the song the pianist was playing. An eight-year-old boy walked backward through the room, scattering sawdust on the floor that he scooped from an old leather ship’s bucket. Portraits on the walls showed the haughty faces of landed gentry who had sponsored the tavern at different times in its long history. A two hundred-year-old blunderbuss was hung on pegs over the bar, and the barman—an evil-faced exsailor with a knife scar that made him look like a pirate—tugged on animal-headed beer taps to fill pewter tankards with dark local beer.
    Lawrence saw all of this when he’d come in but little of it registered. He found a table in a corner and had settled down to examine Ben’s belongings and lose himself in the strong whiskey of the region. It was rough and raw and nasty and suited his mood to a tee.
    He sipped his whiskey and used one finger to push the items into an uneven line on the table. Ben’s readingglasses were bent and scratched, showing much wear, and Lawrence wondered if Ben had become a scholar. He’d always loved stories as a boy. What would he have read as a man? Lawrence did not think that Ben would tend toward the scientific—natural philosophy was their father’s passion; Ben had always seemed more of a dreamer. Novels, perhaps? Or poetry. Lawrence decided that he would find out. Gwen Conliffe would know, and might perhaps enjoy talking about the things that fascinated Ben. Singh would know, too.
    Lawrence would not ask his father.
    There had been a pocket watch among Ben’s things, and Lawrence recognized it as the one that had belonged to their maternal grandfather—someone they’d never met but whose belongings had been shared out among the boys by their mother. Lawrence had owned a silver cigar case as a boy and he’d used it to keep crickets and other bugs that he could catch. Thinking of it nearly carved a smile into the harsh frown that was etched onto his mouth, but then he thought about its loss, along with everything else he’d owned,