A Canadian Werewolf in New York

Chapter Twenty-Three

As I was racing back to the door, I could hear Kern shuffling around in the hallway, muttering curses under his breath and the slight squeak of a door hinge.

I opened the door and went inside again.  As I could tell from heartbeat and breathing, both Driver Dude and Bricky were still unconscious.

Ironically, Kern's powerful scent wasn't easy to track.  Most people left what I can only describe as a thin vapour trail of a scent in an area and perhaps some cloying splotches of their scent on objects they have touched.

Kern's odiferous stench didn't just linger in the air -- it suffused the air, drenched the entire area.  I suppose that the best way I can describe it is the difference between perhaps being able to smell the pleasant scent of a woman's recently washed hair as she passes, and if you're walking directly behind her, staying in the path of that scent even when a dozen or so steps behind.  That's the kind of scent that a normal person leaves behind as they move.

Then there's the scent that Kern left behind.  Rather than that straight line of scent hung directly behind the path, it was like someone had opened a container of Chlorine or rubbing alcohol in a small room.  The scent immediately spread to the far reaches of the room, infusing the room with its scent.

I had a friend back in college who was a chemistry major attempt to explain how scent molecules work.  He was highly intelligent but a somewhat cheeky sort of fellow and always liked to use low brow and "common man" sorts of analogies for explaining scientific concepts.

As he'd been explaining to me how the molecules of an airborne substance diffuse into a room, he began talking about molecular bonding on objects around.  Of course, none of this made sense to me -- I had been an Arts major and hadn't taken any science related classes since the 11th grade.  It was only after acquiring my unique wolf traits such as my super enhanced sniffer that I could fully appreciate what he had been saying because my nose could in a way "see" those scents he had been talking about.

Of course, I think that the only reason this particular scientific lecture stuck with me all these years was the low brow way in which he summed it up in a way for my non-scientific mind to grasp it.

"You fart," he had said.  "And it sticks to me."

Simple enough concept.  But frightening, too.  Particularly given Kern's uniquely raunchy smell.  The touch of the molecules of Kern's scent sticky to me in any way immediately turned my stomach.  But like my pal from college said, different scents diffuse and bond in distinctly different patterns.  And Kern's was that all consuming, all powerful scent that virtually "took over" a room.

In a nutshell, it made it hard to at first determine exactly where he'd moved -- particularly in such a small hallway.  And particularly since his struggle with me seemed to have made him sweat even more profusely than he always did.

So it hadn't been by scent that I knew Kern had moved through the doorway on the right hand side -- but rather, because I could hear his heartbeat and his heavy breathing immediately on the other side of the door.

I listened for the sound of other movement, of someone else, and could tell it was only Kern.  He was waiting on the other side of the door, perhaps to ambush me.

I then thought about the weapons the other two carried and wondered if Kern had retrieved one of them before moving on.  But I couldn't detect the movement of gun oil through the air.

Of course, like I'd said, Kern's scent kind of overpowered the hallway, so it was a bit difficult to pick out anything one hundred percent.  But I was pretty sure in my deduction that he hadn't taken a gun.