Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  Garrigue rubbed the back of his neck and folded his arms. “So what you saying, same thing, except with the cabin? Man, I wouldn’t fall for that, and you know I’m a fool.”

  “Yeah, but see, see, we know we fools—we used to it, we live with it like everybody, do the best we can. But Duplessis….” He smiled, although it felt as though he were lifting a great cold weight with his mouth. “Duplessis scary. Duplessis got knowledge you and me couldn’t even spell, never mind understand. He just as smart as he think he is, and we just about what we were back when we never seen a city man before, we so proud to be running with a city man.” He rubbed the bad knee, remembering Sophie’s warnings, not at all comforted by the thought that no one else in the clan had seen through the laughter, the effortless charm, the newness of the young loup-garou who came so persistently courting her. He said, “There’s things Duplessis never going to understand.”

  He missed Garrigue’s question, because it was mumbled in so low a tone. He said, “Say what?”

  Garrigue asked, “It going to be like that time?” Arceneaux did not answer. Garrigue said, “Cause I don’t think I can do that again, Ti-Jean. I don’t think I can watch, even.” His face and voice were embarrassed, but there was no mistaking the set of his eyes, not after seventy years.

  “I don’t know, me.” Arceneaux himself had never once been pursued by dreams of what they had done to Alexandre Duplessis in Sophie’s name; but in forty years he had gently shaken Garrigue out of them more than once, and held him afterward. “We get him there—just you, me and him, like before—I know then. All I can tell you now, Rene.”

  Garrigue made no reply, and they separated shortly afterward. Arceneaux went home, iced his knee, turned on his radio (he had a television set, but rarely watched it), and learned of the discovery of a second homeless woman, eviscerated and partly devoured, her head almost severed from her body by the violence of the attack. The corpse had been found under the Viaduct, barely two blocks from Arceneaux’s apartment, and the police announced that they were taking seriously the disappearance of the woman Arceneaux had buried. Arceneaux sat staring at the radio long after it had switched to broadcasting a college football game.

  He called Garrigue, got a busy signal, and waited until his friend called him back a moment later. When he picked up the phone, he said simply, “I know.”

  Garrigue was fighting hysteria; Arceneaux could feel it before he spoke the first word. “Can’t be, Ti-Jean. Not full moon. Can’t be.”

  “Well,” Arceneaux said. “Gone have to ask old Duplessis what else he sold that Fontenot.” He had not expected Garrigue to laugh, and was not surprised. He said, “Don’t be panicking, you hear me, Rene? Not now. Ain’t the time.”

  “Don’t know what else to do.” But Garrigue’s voice was slightly steadier. “If he really be changing any damn time he like—”

  “Got to be rules. Le Bon Dieu, he wouldn’t let there not be rules—”

  “Then we got to tell them, you hear me? They got to know what out there, what we dealing with—what coming after them—”

  “And what we are? What they come from, what they part of? You think your little Manette, my Patrice, you think they ready for that?”

  “Not the grandbabies, when I ever said the grandbabies? I’m talking the chirren—yours, mine, they husbands, wives, all them. They old enough, they got a right to know.” There was a pause on the other end, and then Garrigue said flatly, “You don’t tell them, I will. I swear.”

  It was Arceneaux’s turn to be silent, listening to Garrigue’s anxious breathing on the phone. He said finally, “Noelle. Noelle got a head on her. We tell her, no one else.”

  “She got a husband, too. What about him?”

  “Noelle,” Arceneaux said firmly. “Antoine ain’t got no werewolf for a daddy.”

  “Okay.” Garrigue drew the two syllables out with obvious dubiousness. “Noelle.” The voice quavered again, sounding old for the first time in Arceneaux’s memory. “Ti-Jean, he could be anywhere right now, we wouldn’t know. Could be at them, be tearing them apart, like that woman—”

  Arceneaux stopped him like a traffic cop, literally—and absurdly—with a hand held up. “No, he couldn’t. Think about it, Rene. Back in Louzianne—back then—what we do after that big a kill? What anybody do?”

  “Go off…. go off somewhere, go to sleep.” Garrigue said it grudgingly, but he said it.

  “How long for? How long you ever sleep, you and that full belly?”

  “A day, anyway. Slept out two whole days, one time. And old Albert Vaugine….” Garrigue was chuckling a bit, in spite of himself. He said, “Okay, so we maybe got a couple of days—maybe. What then?”

  “Then we get ourselves on up to the cabin. You and me and him.” Arceneaux hung up.

  It had long been the centerpiece of Arceneaux’s private understanding of the world that nothing was ever as good as you expected it to be, or as bad. His confession of her ancestry to Noelle fell into the latter category. He had expected her reaction to be one of horrified revulsion, followed by absolute denial and tearful outrage. Instead, after withdrawing into silent thought for a time, and then saying slow, mysterious things like, “So that’s why I can never do anything with my hair,” she told him, “You do know there’s no way in the world you’re going without me?”

  His response never got much beyond, “The hell you preach, girl!” Noelle set her right forefinger somewhere between his Adam’s apple and his collarbones, and said, “Dadda, this is my fight too. As long as that man’s running around loose”—the irony of her using the words that Alexandre Duplessis had used to justify his murder of the conjure man Fontenot was not lost on Arceneaux—“my children aren’t safe. You know the way I get about the children.”

  “This won’t be no PTA meeting. You don’t know.”

  “I know you and Uncle Rene, you may both be werewolves, but you’re old werewolves, and you’re not exactly in the best shape. Oh, you’re going to need me, cause right now the both of you couldn’t tackle Patrice, never mind Zelime.” He was in no state to tackle her, either; he made do with a mental reservation: Look away for even five minutes and we’re out of here, me and Rene. You got to know how to handle daughters, that’s all. Specially the pushy ones.

  But on the second day, it didn’t matter, because it was Noelle who was gone. And Patrice with her. And her car.

  After Antoine had called the police, and the house had begun to fill with terrified family, but before the reporters had arrived, and before Zelime had stopped crying for her mother and little brother, Arceneaux borrowed his son Celestin’s car. It was quite a bit like renting it, not because Celestin charged him anything, but because answering all his questions about why the loan was necessary almost amounted to filling out a form. Arceneaux finally roared at him, in a voice Celestin had not heard since his childhood, “Cause I’m your father, me, and I just about to snatch you balder than you already are, you don’t hand me them keys.” He was on the road five minutes later.

  He did not stop to pick up Garrigue. His explanation to himself was that there wasn’t time, that every minute was too precious to be taken up with a detour; but even as he made it, he knew better. The truth lay in his pity for Garrigue’s endless nightmares, for his lonesome question, “It gone be like that time?” and for his own sense that this was finally between him and the man whom he had carved to obscene fragments alive. I let him do it all back to me, he lets them two go. Please, Damballa, you hear? Please.

  But he was never certain—and less now than ever before—whether Damballa heard prayers addressed to him in English. So for the entire length of the drive, which seemed to take the rest of his life, he chanted, over and over, a prayer-song that little Ti-Jean Arceneaux, who spoke another language, had learned young, never forgotten, and, until this moment, never needed.

  “Baba yehge, amiwa saba yehge,

  De Damballa e a miwa,

  Danou sewa yehge o, djevo de.


  De Damballa Wedo, Bade miwa….”

  Rather than bursting into the cabin like the avenging angel he had planned to be, he hardly had the strength or the energy to open the car door, once he arrived. The afternoon was cold, and he could smell snow an hour or two away; he noticed a few flakes on the roof of Noelle’s car. There was flickering light in the cabin, and smoke curling from the chimney, which he and Garrigue mistrusted enough that they almost never lighted a fire. He moved closer, noticing two sets of footprints leading to the door, Yeah, she’d have been carrying Patrice, boy’d have been too scared to walk. The vision of his terrified four-year-old grandson made him grind his teeth, and Duplessis promptly called from within, “No need to bite the door down, Jean-Marc. Half a minute, I’ll be right there.”

  Waiting, Arceneaux moved to the side of the house and ripped down the single power line. The electric light went out inside, and he heard Duplessis laugh. Standing on the doorstep as Arceneaux walked back, he said, “I thought you might do that, so I built a handsome fire for us all—even lit a few candles. But if you imagine that’s going to preclude the use of power tools, I feel I should remind you that they all run on batteries these days. Nice big batteries. Come in, Jean-Marc, I bid you welcome.”

  It was not the shock of seeing Noelle tied in a chair that almost caused Arceneaux to lose what control he had and charge the smiling man standing beside her. It was the sight of Patrice, unbound on her lap, lighting up at the sight of him to call “Gam’pair!” He had been crying, but his face made it clear that everything would be all right now. Duplessis said pleasantly, “I wouldn’t give it a second thought, old friend. I’m sure you know why.”

  “Fontenot,” Arceneaux said. “Never knowed the old man had that much power.”

  “Oh, it cost me an arm and a leg…. so to speak.” Duplessis laughed softly. “Another reason he had to go. I mean, suppose everyone could change whenever he chose, things might become a bit…. chaotic, don’t you agree? But it certainly does come in handy, those nights when you’re suddenly peckish, just like that, and everything’s closed.”

  Noelle’s eyes were terrified, but her voice was surprisingly steady. She said, “He broke in in the night, I don’t know how. I couldn’t fight him, because he had Patrice, and he said if I screamed….”

  “Yeah, honey,” Arceneaux said. “Yeah, baby.”

  “He made me drive him up here. Poor Patrice was so frightened.”

  Patrice nodded proudly. “I was scared, Gam ’pair.”

  “He tried to rape me,” Noelle said evenly. “He couldn’t.”

  Duplessis looked only mildly abashed. “Everything costs. And it did seem appropriate—you and little Rene working so hard to entice me up here. I thought I’d just take you up on it a bit early.”

  Arceneaux took a step, then another; not toward Duplessis, but toward Noelle in the chair. Duplessis said, “I really wouldn’t, Jean-Marc.”

  Noelle said, “Dadda, get out of here! It’s you he wants!”

  Arceneaux said, “He got me. He ain’t getting you.”

  Duplessis nodded. “I’ll let them go, you have my word. But they have to watch first. That’s fair. Her and the little one, watching and remembering…. you know, that might even make up for what you did to me.” His smile brightened even more. “Then we’ll be quits at last, just think, after all the years. I might even leave some of the others alive—lagniappe, don’t you know, our greatest Louzianne tradition. As your folks say down in the swamp, lagniappe c’est bitin qui bon—lagniappe is lawful treasure.”

  Arceneaux ignored him. To Patrice he said, “Boy, you get off your mama’s lap now, I got to get those ropes off her. Then we all go get some ice cream, you like that?”

  Patrice scrambled down eagerly. Noelle said, “Dadda, no. Take Patrice and get out—” just as Duplessis’s voice sharpened and tightened, good cheer gone. “Jean-Marc, I’m warning you—”

  The ropes were tight for stiff old fingers, and Noelle’s struggling against them didn’t help. Behind him, Arceneaux heard Patrice scream in terror. A moment later, looking past him, Noelle went absolutely rigid, her mouth open but no smallest sound emerging. He turned himself then, knowing better than they what he would see.

  Petrifying as the sight of a werewolf obviously is, it is the transformation itself that is the smothering fabric of nightmare. On the average, it lasts no more than ten or fifteen seconds: but to the observing eyes and mind the process is endless, going on and on and on in everlasting slow-motion, as the grinning mouth twists and lengthens into a fanged snarl, while the body convulses, falls forward, catches itself on long gray legs that were arms a lifetime ago, and the eyes lengthen, literally reseat themselves in the head at a new angle, and take on the beautiful insane glow that particularly distinguishes the loup-garou. Alexandre Duplessis—cotton-white, except for the dark-shaded neck-ruff and the jagged black slash across the chest—uttered a shattering half-human roar and sprang straight at Arceneaux.

  Whether it was caused by the adrenaline of terror or of rage he couldn’t guess, but suddenly the ropes fell loose from the chair and his fingers, and Noelle, in one motion, swept up the wailing Patrice and was through the door before the wolf that had been Duplessis even reached her father. The bad knee predictably locked up, and Arceneaux went down, with the wolf Duplessis on him, worrying at his throat. He warded the wide-stretched jaws off with his forearm, bringing the good knee up into the loup-garou’s belly, the huge white-and-black body that had become all his sky and all his night. Duplessis threw back his head and bayed in triumph.

  Arceneaux made a last desperate attempt to heave Duplessis away and get to his feet. But he was near to suffocation from the weight on his chest—Saba yehge, amiwa saba yehge, de Damballa e a miwa—and then the werewolf’s jaws were past his guard, the great fangs sank into his shoulder, and he heard himself scream in pain—Danou sewa yehge o, djevo de, Damballa come to us, they are hurting us, Damballa come quickly….

  ….and heard the scream become a howl of fury in the same moment, as he lunged upward, his changing jaws closing on Duplessis’s head, taking out an eye with the first snap. Wolf to wolf—the greatest sin of all—they rose on their hind legs, locked together, fangs clashing, each streaked and blotched with the other’s blood. Arceneaux had lost not only who he was, but what—he had no grandchildren now, no children either, no lifelong down-home friend, no memories of affection…. there had never been anything else but this murderous twin, and no joy but in hurting it, killing it, tearing it back once again to shreds, where it belonged. He had never been so happy in his life.

  In the wolf form, loups-garoux do not mate; lovemaking is a gift for ordinary animals, ordinary humans. Yet this terrible, transcendent meshing was like nothing Arceneaux had ever known, even as he was aware that his left front leg was broken and one side of his throat laid open. Duplessis was down now…. or was that some other wolf bleeding and panting under him, breath ragged, weakened claws finding no purchase in his fur? It made no difference. There was nothing but battle now, nothing but hunger for someone’s blood.

  Most of the lighted candles had been knocked over—some by Noelle’s flight to the door, some during the battle. The rag rugs that he and Garrigue had devastated and not yet replaced were catching fire, and spreading the flames to dry furniture and loose paper and kindling. Arceneaux watched the fire with a curious detachment, as intense, in its way, as the ecstasy with which he had he had closed his wolf jaws on Duplessis’s wolf flesh. He was aware, with the same disinterest, that he was bleeding badly from a dozen wounds; still, he was on his feet, and Duplessis was sprawled before him, alive but barely breathing, lacking the strength and will to regain the human shape. Arceneaux was in the same condition, which was a pity, for he would have liked to give his thanks to Damballa in words. He considered the helpless Duplessis for a moment longer, as the fire began to find its own tongue, and then he pushed the door open with his head and limped outside.

  Noelle cried ou
t at first as he stumbled toward her; but then she knew him, as she would always have known him, and knelt down before him, hugging his torn neck—Duplessis had come very near the throat—and getting blood all over the pajamas in which she had been kidnapped. She had no words either, except for Dadda, but she got plenty of mileage out of that one, even so.

  The cabin was just reaching full blaze, and Patrice had worked up the courage to let the strange big dog lick his face, when the police car came barreling up the overgrown little path, very nearly losing an axle to the pothole Garrigue had been warning them about for the last couple of miles. Antoine was with them too, and Garrigue’s son Claude, and a police paramedic as well. There was a good deal of embracing among one group, and an equal amount of headscratching, chinrubbing and cell-phone calling by the other.

  And Jean-Marc Arceneaux—“Ti-Jean” to a very few old friends—nuzzled his grandson one last time, and then turned and walked back into the blazing cabin and threw himself over the body of the wolf Alexandre Duplessis. Noelle’s cry of grief was still echoing when the roof came down.

  When Garrigue could talk—when anyone could talk, after the fire engine came—he told Noelle, “The ashes. He done it because of the ashes.”

  Noelle shook her head weakly. “I don’t understand.”

  Garrigue said, “Duplessis come back once, maybe do it again, even from ashes. But not all mixed up together with old Ti-Jean, no, not with their jaws locked on each other in the other world and the loa watching. Not even a really good conjure man out of Sabine, Vernon Parish, pull off that trick. You follow me?”