The Ultimate Werewolf (25 page)

He was about to turn back when he noticed a place not far from the boulder where the game trail widened. Branching off the game trail was the faintest suggestion of another trail, little more than a few scuff

marks in the soil and a few bare patches of earth. Just the suggestion of a trail winding up the slope.

He scanned the slope above him. From a rocky outcropping, a raven squawked, staring at Jem. A robin landed on a low bush, picked up something white in its beak, and flew away to build a nest.

Jem started up the slope, following the trail and heading toward the place where the robin had landed. He found the wolfs sleeping place first. The tough grass was flattened and white hairs mingled with the green. From here, the wolf had a clear view of the valley, the cabin below.

Beyond the sleeping place, the trail dropped a little, running down the slope and growing even fainter. He followed it for a few hundred feet to a small dark opening, just large enough to admit an adult wolf. The den was half concealed by a spreading bush and looked freshly dug.

Jem peered into the opening. The wolf had dug deep into the earth; the tunnel ended in darkness. A place where the pups would be safe and protected. He turned away, feeling as if he had invaded another man's cabin in his absence. He did not belong here. This was not his business.

He returned to the valley. Nadya saw him coming and ran to meet him. Already she was slower, heavy on her feet.

"I didn't see anything worth shooting at," he told her.

"That's fine," she said. "Just fine."

▼▼▼

Sometimes, sitting by the fire at night or lying in bed under the thick buffalo robes, he told her about the tricks that trappers used to hide their deadly steel-jawed traps. He told her of pitfalls, deadfalls, and rawhide snares that the Indians used. He told her of how trappers would lace the fresh carcass of a deer with poison. And when she went out at night, when the moon was full, he lay awake and thought of other things he had to tell her.

She seemed so small to him, little more than a child herself. Her belly swelled and her breasts grew heavy. It seemed to Jem that it happened quickly, but he knew little of the ways of women. He caressed her belly when she lay beside him in the bed, wondering at the firmness of it, the smoothness of the skin.

She stopped helping with the heavy work, went hunting less often.

When the moon was full, he heard a wolf bark once, then howl. Nadya left the bed. He heard the rustle of her clothing in the darkness.

"Must you go?" he asked her.

"It's not my choice, Jem," she said softly.

"Be safe," he said. And then, shielded by the darkness, he said, "I saw the den. He'll take care of you when I can't, won't he?"

She kissed him, a fleeting warmth in the cold air. He reached up and touched her shoulder, a bare breast, but then she was gone. When she opened the door, he could see her silhouette against the moonlight, her belly rounded. She closed the door behind her.

▼▼▼

Jem plowed the land, breaking new ground and planting twice the acreage of Indian corn as the year before. Nadya stayed closer to home, planting the kitchen garden with melons and squash and pumpkins and beans.

One afternoon, Jem returned from the field to find Nadya in labor. She lay on the bed, gripping the wooden sides and panting like an animal. He filled a bucket at the spring and wiped her forehead with a cool wet cloth. He stayed at the bedside. She held his hand in a fierce grip and cried out in a rhythmic, helpless way.

The sun set and the evening came. He left the bedside to build up the fire and light the candles. In the flickering light, he saw a movement at the half-open door. The white wolf was just outside the corral fence, a ghost drifting past in the open meadow. He left the door ajar.

The first child was a girl, red and squawling with a full head of dark hair. The second was a boy, as ruddy as his sister and screaming just as loudly.

"Take them to the door," Nadya said. "Let them look outside. Let them see the moon. They need to know the moon. They'll take after me."

He carried them in his arms—they were so small, barely a weight at all. The dog wolf was in the yard, on the near side of the fence. Jem held up the babies. "Look," he said to them. "Look at the world; look at the moon."

The girl waved her tiny red hands in the air, brushing against his beard and trying feebly to grip the coarse hair. When the hair slipped from her grasp, she wailed and her brother joined in. The dog wolf barked and then lifted its head to howl with the babies.

"Sit by me," she said, and he brought the babies to her. "Beautiful babies," she said. "I'll teach them to hunt." Her eyes searched his face. "They'll take after me, Jem—I can tell already. Do you mind that?"

"They'll be fine hunters," he said.

Outside, the wolf barked once, then howled, a long lonely call as thin and cold as the light of the crescent moon. The babies, startled by the sound, began to wail.

▼▼▼

Jem sat in a stump in the sun, smoothing the last splinters from a cedar toy he had carved for the babies. The grass in the meadow was lush and green. The cow had borne her calf, just a week after the twins' birth. The vegetables in the garden and the Indian corn in the field were coming up thick and green.

The day was warm and Nadya sat on a blanket on the grass. The girl nursed at her breast. The boy lay on his back, waving his hands in the air. They had named the girl Neka, after Jem's mother. The boy was Alek, for Nadya's father.

"So greedy," Nadya murmured to Neka. "So fierce." She looked up at Jem. "She will be a good hunter."

A bird flew overhead. Alek reached for its passing shadow and made a sputtering sound when he did not catch it. Jem leaned over and offered him the toy, a crudely carved figure of a running wolf. Alek closed his fingers around it, then brought the wolf to his mouth, where he proceeded to suck on its head.

"They will both be good hunters," Jem said.

Kevin J. Anderson

▼▼▼

THE
second camera operator ran to fetch the clapboard. Someone else called out. "Quiet on the set! Hey everybody, shut up!" Three of the extras coughed at the same time.

"Wolfman in Casablanca,
Scene 23. Are we ready for Scene 23?" The second camera operator held the clapboard ready.

"Ahem." The director, Rino Derwell, puffed on his long cigarette in an ivory cigarette holder, just like all famous directors were supposed to have. "I'd like to start today's shooting sometime
today!
Is that too much to ask? Where the hell is Lance?"

The boom man swivelled his microphone around; the extras on the nightclub set fidgeted in their places. The cameraman slurped a cold cup of coffee, making a noise like a vacuum cleaner in a bathtub.

"Urn, Lance is still, um, getting his makeup on," the script supervisor said.

"Christ! Can somebody find me a way to shoot this picture without the star? He was supposed to be done half an hour ago. Go tell Zoltan to hurry up—this is a horror picture, not the Mona Lisa." Derwell mumbled how glad he was that the gypsy makeup man would be leaving in a day or two, and they could get someone else who didn't consider himself such a perfectionist. The director's assistant dashed away, stumbling off the soundstage and tripping on loose wires.

Around them, the set showed an exotic nightclub, with white fake-

adobe walls, potted tropical plants, and Arabic-looking squiggles on the pottery. The piano in the center of the stage, just in front of the bar, sat empty under the spotlight, waiting for the movie's star, Lance Chandler. The sound stage sweltered in the summer heat. The large standup fans had to be shut off before shooting; and the ceiling fans—nightclub props—stirred the cloud of cigarette smoke overhead into a gray whirlpool, making the extras cough even when they were supposed to keep silent.

Rino Derwell looked again at his gold wristwatch. He had bought it cheap from a man in an alley, but Derwell's pride would not allow him to admit he had been swindled even after it had promptly stopped working. Derwell didn't need it to tell him he was already well behind schedule, over budget, and out of patience.

It was going to take all day just to shoot a few seconds of finished footage. "God, I hate these transformation sequences. Why does the audience need to
see
everything? Have they no imagination?" he muttered. "Maybe I should just do romance pictures? At least nobody wants to see everything
there!"

▼▼▼

"Oh, God! Please no! Not again! Not
NOW!!!"
Lance couldn't see the look of horror he hoped would show on his face.

"You must stop fidgeting, Mr. Lance. This will go much faster." Zoltan stepped back, large makeup brush in hand, inspecting his work. His heavy eastern European accent slurred out his words.

"Well, I've got to practice my lines. This blasted makeup takes so blasted long that I forget my blasted lines by the time it comes to shoot. Was I supposed to say 'Don't let it happen
here!'
in that scene? Hand me the script."

"No, Mr. Lance. That line comes much later—it follows 'Oh no! I'm transforming!' " Zoltan smeared shadow under Lance's eyes. This would be just the first step in the transformation, but he still had to increase the highlights. Veins stood out on Zoltan's gnarled hands, but his fingers were rock steady with the fine detail.

"How do you know my lines?"

"You may call it gypsy intuition, Mr. Lance—or it may be because you have been saying them every morning before makeup for a week now. They have burned into my brain like a gypsy curse."

Lance glared at the wizened old man in his pale blue shirt and color- spattered smock. Zoltan's leathery fingers had a real instinct for

makeup, for changing the appearance of any actor. But his craft took hours.

Lance Chandler had enough confidence in his own screen presence to carry any picture, regardless of how silly the makeup made him look. His square jaw, fine physique, and clean-cut appearance made him the perfect model of the ail-American hero. Now, during the War against Germany and Japan, the U.S. needed its strong heroes to keep up morale. Besides, making propaganda pictures fulfilled his patriotic duties without requiring him to go somewhere and risk getting shot. Red- corn-syrup blood and bullet blanks were about all the real violence he wanted to experience.

Lance took special pride in his performance in
Tarzan Versus the
Third Reich.
Though he had few lines in the film, the animal rage on his face and his oiled and straining body had been enough to topple an entire regiment of Hitler's finest, including one of Rommel's desert vehicles. (Exactly why one of Rommel's desert vehicles had shown up in the middle of Africa's deepest jungles was a question only the scriptwriter could have answered.)

Craig Corwyn, U-Boat Smasher
, to be released next month as the start of a new series, might make Lance a household name. Those stories centered on brave Craig Corwyn, who had a penchant for leaping off the deck of his Allied destroyer and swimming down to sink Nazi submarines with his bare hands, usually by opening the underwater hatches or just plucking out the rivets in the hull.

But none of those movies would compare to
Wolfman in Casablanca.
Bogart would be forgotten in a week. The timing for this picture was just perfect; it had an emotional content Lance had not been able to bring into his earlier efforts. The country was just waiting for a new hero, strong and manly, with a dash of animal unpredictability and a heart of gold (not to mention unwavering in Allied sympathies).

The story concerned a troubled but patriotic werewolf—him, Lance Chandler—who in his wanderings has found himself in German-occupied Casablanca. There he causes what havoc he can for the enemy, and he also meets Brigitte, a beautiful French resistance fighter vacationing in Morocco. Brigitte turns out to be a werewolf herself, Lance's true love. Even in the script, the final scene as the two of them howl on the rooftops above a conflagration of Nazi tanks and ruined artillery sent shivers down Lance's spine. If he could pull off this performance, Hitler himself would tremble in his sheets.

Zoltan added spirit gum to Lance's cheeks and forehead, humming as

he worked. "You will please stop perspiring, Mr. Lance. I require a dry surface for this fine hair."

Lance slumped in the chair. Zoltan reminded him of the wicked old gypsy man in the movie, the one who had cursed his character to become a werewolf in the first place. "This blasted transformation sequence is going to take all day again, isn't it? And I don't even get to
act
after the first second or so! Lie still, add more hair, shoot a few frames, lie still, add more hair, shoot a few more frames. And it's so hot in the soundstage. The spirit gum burns and ruins my complexion. The fumes sting my eyes. The fake hair itches."

He winced his face into the practiced look of horror again. "Oh, God! Please no! Not again!
Um ...
oh yeah—don't let it happen here!" Lance paused, then scowled. "Blast, that wasn't right. Would you hurry up, Zoltan! I'm already losing my lines. And I'm really tired of you dragging your feet—get moving!"

Zoltan tossed the makeup brush with a loud clink into its glass jar of solvent. He put his gnarled hands on his hips and glared at Lance. The smoldering gypsy fury in his dark eyes looked worse than anything Lance had seen on a movie villain's face.

"I lose my patience with you, Mr. Lance! It is gone! Poof! Now I must take a short cut. A special trick that only I know. It will take a minute, and it will make you a star forevermore! I guarantee that. You will no longer suffer my efforts—and I need not suffer you! The people at the new Frankenstein picture over on Lot 17 would appreciate my work, no doubt."

Lance blinked, amazed at the old gypsy's anger but ready to jump at any chance that would get him out of the makeup trailer sooner. He heard only the words ". . . it will make you a
star. ...
I guarantee that."

"Well, do it then, Zoltan! I've got work to do. The great Lon Chaney never had to put up with all these delays. He did all his own makeup. My audiences are waiting to see the new meaning I can bring to the portrayal of the werewolf."

"You will never disappoint them, Mr. Lance."

Without further reply, Zoltan yanked at the fine hair he had already applied. "You no longer need this." Lance yowled as the patches came free of his skin. "That is a very good sound you make, Mr. Lance. Very much like a werewolf."

Lance growled at him.

Zoltan rustled in a cardboard box in the corner of his cramped trailer, pulled out a dirty Mason jar, and unscrewed its rusty lid. Inside, a brown oily liquid swirled all by itself, spinning green llecks in internal currents. The old man stuck his fingers into the goop and brought them out dripping.

"What is—whoa, that smells like—" Lance tried to shrink away, but Zoltan slapped the goop onto his cheek and smeared it around.

"You cannot possibly know what this smells like, Mr. Lance, because you have no idea what I used to make it. You probably do not wish to know—then you would be even more upset at having it rubbed all over your face."

Zoltan reached into the jar again and brought out another handful, which he wiped across Lance's forehead. "Ugh! Did you get that from the lot cafeteria?" Lance felt his skin tingle, as if the liquid had begun to eat its way inside. "Ow! My complexion!"

"If it gives you pimples, you can always call them character marks, Mr. Lance. Every good actor has them."

Zoltan pulled his hand away. Lance saw that the old man's fingers were clean. "Finished. It has all absorbed right in." He screwed the cover of the jar back on and replaced it in the cardboard box.

Lance grabbed a small mirror, expecting to find his (soon-to-be) well- known expression covered with ugly brown, but he could see no sign of the makeup at all. "What happened to it? It still stinks."

"It is special makeup. It will work when it needs to."

The door flew open, and the red-faced director's assistant stood panting. "Lance, Mr. Derwell wants you on the set right now! Pronto! We've got to start shooting."

Zoltan nudged his shoulder. "I am finished with you, Mr. Lance."

Lance stood up, trying not to look perplexed so that Zoltan could have a laugh at his expense. "But I don't see any—"

The old gypsy wore a wicked grin on his lips. "You need not worry about it. I believe your expression is, 'Knock 'em dead.' "

▼▼▼

Lance sat down at the nightclub piano and cracked his knuckles. The extras and other stars took their positions. Above the soundstage, he could hear men on the catwalks, positioning cool blue gels over the lights to simulate the full moon.

"Now
are you ready, Lance?" the director said, fitting another cigarette into his ivory holder. "Or do you think maybe we should just take a coffee break for an hour or so?"

"That's not necessary, Mr. Derwell. I'm readyj Just give the word, see?" He growled for good measure.

"Places, everyone!"

Lance ran his fingers over the piano keyboard, "tickling the old ivories," as real piano players called it. No sound came out. Lance couldn't play a note, of course, so the prop men had cut all the piano wires, holding the instrument in merciful silence no matter how enthusiastically Lance might bang on it. They would add the beautiful piano melody to the soundtrack during postproduction.

"Wolfman in Casablanca,
Scene 23, Take One." The clapboard cracked.

"Action!" Derwell called.

The klieg lights came on, pouring hot white illumination on the set. Lance stiffened at the piano, then began to hum and pretend to plink on the keys.

In this scene, the werewolf has taken a job as a piano player in a nightclub, where he has met Brigitte, the vacationing French resistance fighter. While playing "As Time Goes By," Lance's character looks up to see the full moon shining down through the nightclub's skylight. To keep from having to interrupt filming, Derwell had planned to shoot Lance from the back only as he played the piano, not showing his face until after he had supposedly started to transform. But now Lance didn't appear to wear any makeup at all—he wondered what would happen when Derwell noticed, but he plunged into the performance nevertheless. That would be Zoltan's problem, not his.