The Ultimate Werewolf (8 page)

One of the most interesting articles speculated that the genes for lycanthropy were recessive. Thus, a werewolf could be born only to parents each of whom had the recessive genes. But the son or daughter had to be bitten by a werewolf before the heritage was manifested. Or the offspring had to obtain a skin taken from a dead werewolf. Hence, the extreme scarcity of lycanthropes.

Having gobbled down all the solid food, his belly packed and yet still feeling hungry, Varglik spooned out the honey from the jar into his mouth while he read the Personals column.

WM, single, 39, handsome, vivacious, affluent coll. grad, loves Mozart, old movies, long walks in the evening, seeks young, lovely, coll. grad, polymorphous-perverse WF. Children no problem, won't eat them. Photo exch. req. Write c/o WAW.

Jane, come home. I love you. All's forgiven. You may use the cat's litterbox. Ernst.

The magazine articles were serious scientific papers. But, surely, the WAW staff was making up most of the Personals column. Maybe to relieve the grimness of their lives. After all, being a lycanthrope was no fun. He should know.

Having read the magazine, he put it through the shredder. It hurt his bibliophile soul to do that, but the publisher's urgings to her subscribers to destroy their copies after reading them made good sense. On the other hand, the publisher might be keeping a small inventory of every issue hidden away, knowing that they could become quite valuable collector's items. His doubts about her intentions were probably unfounded. But being a lycanthrope, like being a dweller in the Big Apple, made one downright paranoiac. He had double reason to know that it was better to be suspicious than to be sorry.

It was also best to always play it safe. But the lycanthrope ejaculated all caution when the full moon was up. That had been yesterday. It did not matter. Two nights on either side of the full moon exerted almost as strong an influence. He was as helpless against the tug possessing him— soon to be a flashflood—as the moon was against the grip of its orbit.

Unable to fight the forces of change, not even knowing how to do it, he had once tried to cage himself during the metamorphosis. When its time was near, he had locked himself in a windowless room of his Westchester house with a side of beef as fuel for the re-transformation back into Man. Then he had pushed the key through the lock so that it fell on a paper in the hall just outside the door. As soon as he had felt the change beginning, a shudder running through him even more sweet and powerful than sexual arousal, he had smashed the furniture and bitten off the doorknob and howled so mightily that he would have awakened the entire neighborhood if his house had not been so isolated.

He had no memory of his agonies during his frenzied attempts to escape to freedom. But the wrecked room and the wounds in his arms, legs, and buttocks where he had bitten himself were just as good evidence as if he had taped the drama. When he regained consciousness as a man, he was so crippled and weak from loss of blood that he had almost not been able to pull back under the door the paper holding the key.

Somehow, he had gotten up, unlocked the door, put on his clothes, cut and torn them over the wounds, and phoned a physician friend to come to his house to attend the wounds. The doctor had obviously not believed his story about being attacked by a large dog while walking in the woods, but he had not said so.

Since the police could not find the dog, Varglik had had to take a series of painful rabies shots.

That was his -first and last attempt to cage himself.

A diligent and experienced detective, the sheriff would have found out about the supposed attack. A few phone calls or letters to New York would be enough. He would also have learned about the dogs and horses slain in the area, though the scenes of the killings were twenty miles from Varglik's house. Yeager would have learned about the mutilation-murders of two hikers and two lovers in the woods. The police suspected that the killer was a man who had butchered the four so that they would appear to have been killed and partly eaten by wild dogs. Yeager would tend to believe that the killer was neither man nor dog.

"It must drive him nuts to have to believe that," Varglik muttered. "Welcome to the funny farm, Sheriff."

Whatever Yeager did or did not believe or intend to do, Varglik could do nothing about what was going to happen to his persona. He could control where he would be when the inevitable happened.

At six p.m., he left his office. The wolf skin, rolled up, was in the attache case he carried. He waited in his house, eating a huge supper and afterwards munching on potato chips, until 10:30 p.m. Then he drove his car through town, watching behind him, going in an indirect route, stopping now and then to check for possible shadowers. Within thirty minutes he was on a gravel country road deep within the county just north of Reynolds County. After ten minutes, he pulled into a sideroad and stopped the car in the darkness of an oak grove. The only sounds except for his accelerating breathing were the shrillness of locusts and the booming of frogs in a nearby marsh. Then, the whine of mosquitoes zeroing in on him.

Hastily, he opened the car trunk, removed the skin, doffed his clothes, and put them through the open window into the front seat. His breath sawed through his nose. He panted. His body seemed to be getting warm, and it was. The fever of metamorphosis was nearing its peak.

The wolf skin was draped over his shoulders when he stepped out from under the shade to stand in the full shower of moonlight. Though he was not holding the skin, it clung like a living thing to his back.

The moonlight beams, pale catalytic arrows, pierced him. His blood thumpthumped. The great artery of his neck jumped like a fox caught in a bag. He reeled, and he fell through a cloud of shining silvery smokepuffs. His head and neck hairs rose; the curly pubic hair straightened out. An exquisitely pleasureful sensation rippled through him. He swelled like the throat sac of a marsh bullfrog. His nose ran; the fluid oozed over his lips, which were puffing outward.

Without his will, his arms lifted and straightened. His legs expanded as if blood had poured through the skin. His bowels contracted and expelled his feces with the sound of an angry cat spitting. He emptied his blade in a mighty arc. Then his penis became enormous and lifted toward the moon until it had almost touched his belly and seemed to his darkening senses to howl shrilly.

Howling deeply with his mouth, he fell hard backwards on the ground. The wolf skin was still fastened to him as if it were a giant bloodsucking bat. He felt forces shooting through the ground and then through him like saw-topped oscillograph waves, chaotic at first then organizing themselves into parallel but curving lines. They shook his body until he had to claw deep into the dirt with his outstretched hands to keep from falling off the planet.

He shot out his spermatic fluid, again and again, as if he were mating with Mother Earth Herself. His human spermatozoa were gone, and his glands were already pouring Wolf fluid into his ducts.

After that, he knew nothing as Man.

Only the moon saw his hair and skin melt until he looked like a mass of jelly that had been formed into the figure of a man. After a minute or so, the jelly quivered, and it kept on quivering for some time. It shone as pale and semisolid as lemon jello. Or as some primeval slug that had crawled out of the earth and was dying.

But it lived. The furious metabolic fires in that jelly had already devoured some of the fat that Varglik had accumulated so swiftly. The fires would eat up all of it and then attack some of the normal fat before the process was completed. In the dawn of Varglik's awareness of what he was heir to, he had tried to diet. He reasoned that if he lacked the fat, he would lack the energy needed to carry out the metamorphosis. But the sleeping Wolf in him had defeated him. Varglik could no more stop eating great quantities of food than he could stop sweating.

The jelly darkened as it changed shape. The arms and legs shrank. The head became long and narrow, and newly formed teeth shone like steel spears. The buttocks dwindled, and from the incipient spine, now a dark line in the mass, a tentacle extruded. This would become the tail, smooth at first, then hairy. Other darknesses appeared in his head, trunk, legs, and arms. These were at first swirling, the cells shifting as they were reformed by the magnetic lines generated by the Wolf in him.

The wolf did not become conscious until the change was completed. The wolf skin had become a living part of the living jelly and then of the metamorphosis. That completed, what had fallen as two-legs rose as four-legs. He shook himself as if he had just emerged from swimming.

He sat down on his lurry haunches and howled. Then he prowled around, sniffing at the feces and the fluids. He investigated the car despite its repulsive and overpowering stench of gasoline and oil.

A moment later, he was running through the woods. He ran and ran. He loped through a world that had no time. He saw the bushes and trees and rocks he passed as living beings which moved. He saw the moon as an orb that had not existed until then. He had no concept of a changeless moon rising from above the Earth in its orbit. It was a new thing. It had been born with him.

But the wolf knew what it wanted. Flesh and blood. And, being a werewolf, it desired human flesh above all flesh. Yet, like all creatures two-legged or four-legged, it ate what it could. Thus, he bounded over a fence and gripped the throat of a barking watch-dog and carried it over the fence into the woods where he slew and ate it. That was not enough. He needed more prey to kill to thrill his nerves with ecstasy and to fill his belly for fuel for the change back into Man. He ran on until he came to a pasture on which horses grazed or slept. He killed a mare and disemboweled her and began tearing at the flesh until the aroused farmers came at him with flashlights and guns.

Then, in his wide circuit through the woods, he crossed a moonlight- filled meadow because sheep scent drifted across it to him. As he got close to the edge of the woods, he smelled, along with sheep, that flesh he most lusted for. A man stepped out from the darkness of the trees, the moon shining on the rifle barrel. He lifted it as Wolf leaped snarling at him.

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Sheriff Yeager had not joined the hunting party just north of Benger's farm. Instead, outtricking his prey's every trick to detect a shadower, he had followed Varglik to the oak grove. He had sat in his car down the road until the wolf-howl had told him that what he had expected to happen had happened. After ten minutes, he had gotten out of the car and cautiously approached the grove. He was just in time to see the bushy tail disappearing into the dark woods.

Using his flashlight, he followed the pawprints in the wet earth. After a while, he heard distant shots. Guessing from which direction they came, he cut at an angle through the woods. Just before he got to the meadow, he saw the enormous wolf loping across it. He waited until the beast was almost ready to plunge into the forest, and he stepped out. His rifle cartridges contained no silver bullets. That was bullshit. A

high-velocity .30-caliber lead bullet would kill any animal, man included, weighing only one hundred and eighty pounds. The werewolf might seem to be of supernatural origin. But it was subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as any other animal.

The bullet entered the gaping mouth, bounced off the roof of the mouth, tore down the throat, and angled into the liver. The wolf was dead and so was Varglik. Nor was there a change into the human body such as shown in so many movies. The cells were dead, and the transformation principle could not act on the cells. The wolf remained Wolf.

Yeager did not want questions or publicity. He skinned the carcass and dug a grave and buried the wolf. In the process of re-metamorphosis, the skin would have fallen off, he supposed, separating from the body and other parts of the skin. But it remained whole now, the process of change having been erased with the end of life.

▼▼▼

Now, the pelt was stretched out against the stone of the fireplace in the sheriff's house. Every night, its light seemed to Yeager to be getting brighter. He considered destroying it. He knew or thought he knew what he would do soon if the skin stayed within his sight or within the reach of his hand. He had to burn it.

The hungry wolf will try to get at the meat even if it sees the trap. An iron filing does not will not to fly to the magnet. The moth does not extinguish the flame so that it will not be incinerated.

Kathe Koja

▼▼▼

HE thought he might be an angel. Angels had transformations, he was reasonably certain of that: from man to spirit and back again, it was in the Bible.
Fear not,
they said when they changed.

On his back, not quite staring up at the ceiling, arms at his long sides like a patient on a table. His hair was short and blond and dirty. He was dirty all over, no wash since winter; there was no more water upstairs in the pipes and he had no idea how to turn it back on. Memory of the change, creep and stutter, rolling up his body like the movement of some relentlessly disfiguring disease. Leprosy. Did people still get leprosy, or was it one of those things of which the world was permanently rid, old scourge conveniently crisped to nothing by the microwave heat of medical science?

One of the two windows was broken, small rectangle kicked to chips and sullen cracks. He had tried to seal the pieces retrieved with duct tape, dull silver like the surface of a nickel. The wind still found purchase, there was no way to keep it completely out. Still he didn't mind the cold. There were worse things than weather.

Exploratory scratch at his chin; he had not shaved since the angelic change, but his beard had not grown at all. The hair on his arms, his chest, his legs and groin, all seemed the same, but then it was hard to tell, it wasn't the kind of thing you would notice. Maybe it was a little coarser, but then again that could be imagination. At first he had tried to tell himself it was all imagination, some manifestation of his inner illness, some new unbearable loss. First the poems, then the words, and now humanity entire, forced transcendence on a specimen already so weakened that mere living was a challenge unhealthy in its force. He remembered waking, frightened, naked on the cement floor, compulsively counting his toes and fingers as if he might have dropped one changing back.

But wolves had ten toes, too; he knew that from the book he had gotten from the library. Had stolen, really; ashamed but it was so, he had no library card and no money to buy a book like that; and he had to have it. He had to find out what he was like when swept by angelic change, and there was no one to tell him, no way to ask. So with clumsy dread he struck the book down his shirtfront, where it lay thumping arrhythmic counterpoint against the beat of his heart as he bicycled home. Snow chivvied him, made it hard to ride, to keep the bike straight, but could not increase his hurry. Snow on his bed from the broken window, drifting small and dusty across the slick gray paint of the concrete floor. He had to put the book aside to tape the window shut again, but as soon as that was done he sat down to read; no bathroom, he did not even eat; he had a greater hunger.

At once he found that most of these words were as well beyond him, too long and hard, like roads made up entirely of stone, and in his anger he pounded at his forehead: stupid, stupid, he should have stolen a children's book, something easy. But at least there were pictures. For an hour or more he studied them, the yellowish cool of the short-lashed eyes, the firm muscled landscape of their pelts. Despite himself he felt a shameful pleasure in their strength; if he was really so, then he was something to be proud of. He fell asleep with the book on his chest, tucked back inside the wilting flannel of his shirt as if it were a living thing whose heat he must protect to the limits of his own.

▼▼▼

The room was ten by ten, a basement storage area for the abandoned building above, the origin of which he could not guess. It was not precisely a house, but if it had once been a business then it was a small business indeed. When he first came, he had cleaned it out, piled the scatter of boxes and containers neat as a puzzle in the far corner. None of the boxes held anything he could use—plastic squares of various colors, some tiny metal pieces that looked like the atom genesis of machines—but he would not discard them, in case the owners one day came looking.

The bed was a twin-sized mattress, mildew-bleached and only a little rank, balanced carefull) atop its plywood boxspring and four blue plastic milk crates which he had weighted with rocks selected for their potential immobility as well as their size. He had three other milk crates which were chairs and table, or sometimes pantry when he had food enough to warrant storage: stale chewy saltines, cereal which he ate by hand, or his favorite, raisins, they would keep forever. He also had a boombox with one speaker and no batteries; he had to save the batteries for the camping-out light, although sometimes he would filch their power to listen for a precious hour to the Top 40 station; he loved the bright thump and screech he found there, he could repeat word for word the DJs' promos. He had three shirts, two summer and one winter, and two pairs of socks which he wore together; when he was not wearing the shirts he kept them rolled into neat balls; he liked their shapes, like little animals curled and burrowed against the cold. Sometimes it got so cold in his room that he could not bend his hands.

When he was changed, though, no weather could touch him, nothing disturb that heedless fierce insouciance. Dirty winds, thrown bottles, broken glass scattered on the pavement, the bravado snarl of lesser dogs: less than nothing. It was hard to remember, at first, how things felt, but he was getting better at it, the angel-time memories bright with sparkling dread. Each time it happened, and it had happened three times so far since the first gibbous wax of autumn, he found the memories both easier and more fantastical, as if waking drowsy and bemused from a dream of kings and terrors to find in one hand a scepter and in the other a bloody ax. He knew that all of it should have frightened him more, been more horror than horrible pleasure—another brick in the highrise tower of self-loathing—but knew also that this terror's edge was born blunted from other, blacker troubles. Once the worst has happened, perspective changes to reflect the new reality, and evil, like pain, is more relative than ever.

▼▼▼

Sitting on a parking block in the co-op lot, carefully peeling the secret sweet layer of foil from a candy bar found like a jewel on the sidewalk outside the store. The smell released from paper was nearly overpowering, rich as gas in his nose. Since becoming an angel he had found his sense of smell raised to a disturbing level of precocity, his appetite provoked now by ant-crawling dog-chewed hamburger rinds as well as more pedestrian treats, like candy bars. Yesterday he had had an almost unbearable impulse to eat a dead bird.

Chewing slowly at the candy, letting it melt unto dissolution between his sore teeth, he was aware of the people around him, passing on the sidewalk, parking their cars, loitering outside the store. A complex threnody of scents: the sour explanations of old men, dusty fart of a starting car's exhaust, cigarette smoke, flat stink of grease, unexpected flower of menstruating women, tumbled skein of food odors as the store door opened again. Young woman, red shoes, an odor like unease beneath the false mask of perfume that never covered entire. She paused to step past him; he was sitting on the parking block next to her car.

"Excuse me," she said, rote courtesy, but responded to his smile. Looked at him, as people rarely did; the mad, or even mad-appearing, are anonymous by virtue of false perception, fear of potential danger; don't make eye contact, he might do something. Still their mutual smile held until something, some thought, fluttered under her skin to break the pleasant tension into wariness and he began, slowly, to wrap the uneaten candy back in its wrinkled jacket of foil, prefatory to flight.

She was not smiling at all, now.

"You're Ethan Parrish," she said, and he bowed his head.

▼▼▼

Ethan?

What.

Ethan, it's important we do this.

Scowl, the pick and flutter of his fingertips against the grainy wale of his oversize corduroys, and the waistline cinched with a woman's chain belt, cheap goldtone and flashy buckle filigree. She could smell the unfresh odor of his clothing from where she sat, carefully not across the desk from him, too distancing, too formal, too authoritarian. Instead she sat in the chair not quite next to him, legs calm together at her ankles, expensive shoes. The micro recorder open on the table did not disturb him; he liked to pick it up and watch, hypnotic smile as if the tiny whorling of the wheels mimicked in some more orderly way the grind and whirl of his own thoughts.

We were talking, her voice soothing, prompting, her gaze on his dirty hair, the sagging socks, about what you used to do, before. You were a writer, weren't you.

So uncomfortable he could barely speak. Her office was so hot, and all this
red:
carpet and chairs, the pictures on the wall, all as red as a chambered heart. The styrofoam cup of coffee sat untouched and lightly steaming on the desktop before him. The first half hour had been all smiles, coffee and bustle, over and over her pleasure at finding him, really uncanny, it was not a part of town she visited often (he could believe that) but a meeting with a hospital administrator had run late, she had stopped at the first grocery she saw, and. And.

She was looking at him to answer; for a moment the question stayed beyond him, then returned with its shiver of shame.

I was a poet.

I know. I've read your work, it's brilliant. You're an extraordinarily brilliant man. But you stopped writing a lo…

Her pause elongated in the larger silence, as if she had offended, done something bawdy or cruel. You were hospitalized for awhile, she said finally. At Bridgemoor.

I didn't like it there. All I did was lose things.

What do you mean?

I mean I
lost
things, I couldn't find them any more. I lost all the words and all I had were the, the pictures, the
images,
you see? That's all I had so I had to hang onto them.

Is that why you left the hospital?

Yes. Frowning; was it there that the angel-change had begun, come to him in the night like another kind of nurse? He used to remember; it seemed like. But she was waiting, again, for another answer. Yes. They were trying to medicate me too much. They do it to keep you quiet but I was quiet already. So I left. It wasn't really that hard, they don't watch you as much as they think they do. Plus they think because you're crazy, you're dumb.

You're not crazy, Ethan.

His pale shrug. What difference does it make now?

Firmly, A
lot
of difference. To a lot of people. I'm not going to give up on you, Ethan. No matter what it takes. Taking out her card, making a business of placing it in an envelope and the envelope within his reach. I'm keeping my eye on you! And her vigorous nod, smile, more answer to her own inner torment than his: sweet, beautiful and sick, those eyes, that tender bruise of a smile as he gathered up his dirt- scabbed hat, his book, a ninth-grade biology workbook, the hard words laboriously underlined with the fading green of a cracked felt-tip pen, his poetry was taught in graduate courses at the university from which she had received her degree and he could no longer understand a simple word like predator.

▼▼▼

Claws on the sidewalk, hard against his hard pads. Shiver of hair about his ears, pointed to the moon, cacophony of smells inside his wise nostrils. He had just ripped a small mongrel cat to rags, for no reason, all reasons. Nothing spoken, in this world, and everything understood.

Except the human smell, sometimes, caught inside—inside!—his own aroma:
that
was disquieting, but in the way of his kind he did not mull or worry it, worried instead the cat's carcass, dropped both to bend, lick silver from a puddle of ice. Noises in the alley, and with the long empty grin of his kind he padded off, heavy nails too short to click warning against the pavement, short with use, and use, and use.

▼▼▼

At the co-op grocery the woman behind the counter stopped him as he picked up his irregularly-donated rations—broken boxes of Hi-Ho crackers, a crushed can of cocktail peanuts, hothouse tomatoes lounging on the voluptuous edge of rot. He could not recall her name past the S that began it but her smell had the unhappy power to drive him out of the store at vulnerable moments.