Without this gift, without that transforming night in the woods of Mobile, I would be no more than a plain-faced, bored accountant toting up figures for the railroad, a dull speck of humanity, one of billions of colorless little men laboring like ants on the planet, who live and die without notice or regard.
Oh, how I have savored this new existence, how grateful I am for having been chosen by destiny to be unique among my fellows. Never had I felt stronger, healthier, more fulfilled.
Then she entered my life.
My employer had posted a HELP WANTED – SECRETARY sign in the office window, and she had come in to apply for the job. Edith Anne Hartley, twenty-five, single, supple-bodied and beautiful.
My parents had divorced by then and had moved to California. This was no great loss to me since we had never been close. My mother and father are cold, emotionless people. They never abused me, but lacked the capacity or desire to express their love. We exchange cards at Christmas, and that’s it. No phone calls or letters—just impersonal Christmas cards each year.
I was living alone in a cramped one-bedroom rented apartment just two blocks from my workplace. Had no friends. (Bobby Wilkes had gone away to college in Boston and we had lost contact.)
I’ve never had an emotional relationship with a woman. In fact, women found me aloof and unattractive, and I had long since reconciled myself to living alone.
Until I met Edith.
She was the first girl I’d ever yearned to be with, but I didn’t know how to approach her.
One morning, a week after she’d come to work in the GMO office, I left a limerick on her desk. Edith giggled, reading it:
I sit at my desk and ponder
about the new girl over yonder.
Would she possibly agree
to have lunch with me?
I’m sure if I asked her, I’d flounder.
The limerick worked. Edith laughingly agreed to meet me in Walgreens at noon. This initiated a cycle of daily lunches. Despite my shyness, our relationship progressed rapidly. Edith overlooked my obvious physical shortcomings. She was,in fact, charmed by my awkward manner. Many handsome men had paid court to her over the years, but she had rejected all of them. Good looks were not a concern to her. She sought depth and sincerity in a man, and she felt that I had both. She understood me in a way no one else ever had.
We made love in my apartment that same month. It was an incredible experience, my first real sexual adventure.
In a rented Ford, I would drive from town each evening after work to see Edith at her home on the outskirts of Mobile and we would sit together, holding hands, on a stone bench in the garden behind the tall, white-pillared mansion, talking quietly for hours . . . facing the woods.
Streamers of hanging moss draped the trees like white confetti, lending an incongruous carnival atmosphere to the area, but, to Edith, the woods represented blood and death.
She told me about her early life in Shreveport before her father, Thomas Hartley, bought the big plantation house in Mobile. He had been a very successful trial lawyer in Louisiana, and had now retired at fifty.
“Daddy spends most of his time these days watching football on TV,” Edith declared. “He’ll never have to work again. We have lots of money.”
“A beautiful young girl with lots of money.” I smiled. “How come you haven’t been snapped up by now?”
“Because I happen to be very particular about who does the snapping,” she replied.
“Must be nice, having all that money.”
She nodded. She’d been spoiled, Edith admitted. Daddy’s girl. Given everything she ever wanted. She was now driving a new Mercedes, a gift from Daddy for her twenty-fourth birthday. And her mother was equally indulgent.
“I don’t think you’re spoiled.”
She was sweetness itself, her voice like soft music. I was stunned when she told me, just a month after we had met, that she had fallen in love with me. By then, of course, I adored her.
I found it curious that she never asked me why I never visited her under a full moon, but we did talk about what the local Mobile papers were now calling “The Full Moon Murders.”
“It’s so horrible,” she declared. “All those murders. Old folks. Young children. Who could be doing such awful things?”
“People seem to think it isn’t a man doing the killings,” I said. “More likely a wild beast of some kind.”
She drew in a quick breath, trembling. “I used to love walking in the woods under a full moon. When I was a young girl just after we moved here from Shreveport. It was one of my favorite things to do. I never felt in any kind of danger. It was exciting — all mystery and magic. But now . . .”
“Now it’s not that way anymore,” I said, taking her hand. “I want you to promise me something.”
“Yes?”
My eyes locked to hers. “I want you to promise me that you’ll never walk in these woods after dark.”
She laughed. “That’ll be an easy promise to keep. I’d be terrified to go walking there at night.”
“So you promise?”
“I do.”
“Good girl.”
The slaughter continued — a mounting series of gruesome deaths in those moss-draped Alabama woods under the pus-yellow face of a full moon. Brutal, bloody, savage deaths. Half-devoured corpses with throats ripped open. Children. Women. Old men.
The authorities were baffled. Some ravenous animal was loose in the area. But no victim survived to describe the killer. Traps were set. Armed police patrolled the woods. To no avail. They found nothing.
The slaughter continued.
Then there was an evening in late fall when I asked Edith to be my wife. She happily accepted. We were married a week later by a local justice of the peace. Her parents attended, pleased that their daughter had chosen a solid, feet-on-the-ground working man. That I lacked money of my own was of no consequence.
“Remember, Don,” Thomas Hartley had told me, “you’ll always have my money behind you. I don’t want my little girl to miss any of the good things in life. Don’t ever hesitate to ask me for extra funds. Whatever you need.”
“I’ll remember.”
No one from my side of the family attended the wedding. Mother wrote a brief note of congratulation; I got only silence from my father. When I tried to phone them, no one answered.
But I didn’t mind. Nothing mattered beyond Edith. She became my personal universe.
I was elated, overwhelmed; I felt myself to be the luckiest man in the world to have won this lovely girl as my wife. Which was when I made the vow: to never again venture into the night woods under a full moon. The beast within must not be allowed to emerge for further carnage. I owed that to Edith. My willpower was strong, and I was certain that I could keep my vow.
The decision had been difficult. I would miss that marvelous feeling of euphoria and well-being experienced on the languorous mornings after my moonlit kills. I had never suffered guilt. Why should I? The only person on the planet I cared about was Edith. I had no brothers or sisters, and if I met my mother and father in the woods under a full moon I’d have no qualms about ripping their throats out.
Death comes to claim everyone. What matter that strangers died in the woods? Death would have taken them eventually. Death was universal.
Yes, in all the world, only my sweet wife mattered. And, for her sake, I would sacrifice the joys of my moonlit adventures. She must never know the truth about that long-ago night in the woods when I was a boy . . . about what I then became under a full moon.
Edith must never know.
As a wedding present, Thomas Hartley gifted us with a handsome two-story stone-and-stucco home not far from the family plantation. I was grateful to escape my cramped apartment. The new structure had just one drawback: it faced the woods.
Our lovemaking was intense. As if a sexual dam had broken.
I never imagined that I possessed such wild passion.
Edith was shocked, but no
t displeased, at my sexual boldness, and once had ironically called out: “Oh . . . you beast!”
I had smiled.
For the first year of our marriage I somehow managed to keep my vow. It was always a struggle When the round pocked face of the Alabama moon flushed the sky with its sickly yellow radiance, I’d draw the curtains tight at each window to stifle the light, to keep it at bay.
I must never go out to it. Its terrible rays must never touch my body!
Yet, incredibly, the “Full Moon Murders” continued, as fresh victims were slaughtered in the woods of Mobile. Tourists, unaware of the danger. Locals, unwilling to bow to personal fear. Could it be that my dark side had surfaced on those nights without my conscious knowledge? Was I losing my battle with the beast?
On each night of the full moon the hunger to kill, to maim and feast, increased — building, becoming all-powerful. I could not sleep on such nights. I roamed through the house, sweating, shivering — and still Edith, the perfect wife, never questioned my bizarre behavior, leaving me alone in my agony.
Tortured and alone.
Summer in Mobile. A hot, sticky southern summer night a year and six months after the marriage of Donald Morgan and Edith Hartley.
A full moon.
Edith gone from the house. I was alone. Sweating. Shivering.
Deny not the beast!
I walked to the front door, opened it — and entered the woods. Each tree and bush was alive with sulfurous light. Reflecting the moon’s eerie glow, fingers of hanging moss, white and stark, laced the looming trees.
I stood in the middle of a wide clearing, my head tipped upward toward the sky, hands fisted, drawing in the transforming rays of the round yellow giant above me.
Awaiting the change.
I felt the beast-power rising within my body. My bones and muscles stretched and altered; my skin prickled with a spreading mat of dark fur. Soon I would be stalking, killing, feasting.
Then, from the inked tree shadows, a dark shape surged toward me. I twisted about to face a roaring, swift-running beast. Fangs bared. Eyes blazing red. My God! Werewolf!
I felt the stunning weight of the creature as it smashed me to the ground. Its blade-sharp paws were buried in my chest. Blood spurted from ravaged veins. I screamed.
Razored teeth flashed in the moonlight.
There was one fact that I’d not encountered in my research: that the bite of a werewolf was not the only way to activate the human-to-wolf transformation, that sexual intercourse with a werewolf was equally infectious.
This was the case with sweet Edith as she lowered her beast’s head to rip my throat open.
How can I be telling you this story if Edith killed me? Well, of course, she didn’t. I survived her attack. Perhaps she allowed me to live, to function as her night companion, to share the joys of severed flesh.
We are closer than ever as we prowl the woods together under a full moon.
Beast-woman and beast-man.
A perfect union.
There was no cover art for #39, the last issue of Talebones. As a thank you, I listed the names, on the front and back covers, in order of appearance, of every writer, poet, artist and columnist who contributed creatively to the magazine. I shamelessly borrowed this idea from the Hendees, who did something similar for the final issue of Figment. (I asked if it was okay, though, and they said they’d borrowed the idea from someone else.) The issue included up-and-coming writer Aliette de Bodard, whose novel Servant of the Underworld, from Angry Robot Books, is set in the same world as “Safe, Child, Safe.”
SAFE, CHILD, SAFE
ALIETTE DE BODARD
I knew something was wrong with the child as soon as his father brought him to me.
He was perhaps four, five years old, and everything about him was high-born Mexica: his tunic of cotton embroidered with leaping deer; his skin the colour of cacao bean; his hair as dark as congealed blood. He lay on the reed mat in my temple, shivering; his feverish eyes turned to me and yet did not see me.
That was not what made the hairs on my nape rise.
No, what made me pause was what I saw clinging to his hands and feet: a green, pulsing aura that brought with it the smell of rotting leaves and mouldy earth. The aura of Mictlan, the underworld.
Living things did not have the aura. Dead things, yes, but then they should have been in the underworld, not here among mortals. And with dead things the aura wrapped the whole body, not just the extremities.
I looked up at the father, who for the whole duration of my examination had stood in a corner, dwarfed by the frescoes of Tezcatlipoca, God of War and Fate. His face was pale. Yaotl of the Atempan calpulli clan, he had said his name was, when he marched into my temple with the arrogance of successful warriors. Now he looked more hesitant — perhaps he saw the very real worry in my face.
“We thought it . . . it might be a spell,” Yaotl said. “That you’d help.”
“I’m a priest for the Dead,” I told him gently, smoothing the hair on the boy’s forehead. “The only magic I have is to usher the souls of the dead into the underworld.” And other things, too, most notably making sure that nothing of the underworld came back among us. “Why bring him here, rather than to the Great Temple?”
Yaotl shook his head. “The priests at the Great Temple are too obsessed with their sacrifices. They don’t care about human lives.”
Human lives, as I knew all too well from numerous funeral wakes, were worth nothing. Death was cheap, and caught us all, often giving little warning as to its coming. But this — the purplish, clenched lips, the pale face, the shaking fingers — this wasn’t a death I’d have wished on anyone, much less a child. “How long has he been like this?” I asked.
“One week,” Yaotl said. “Chimalli woke up one morning and refused to get up. He said that he was cold. We thought he’d caught a sickness at first. The doctor at the marketplace prescribed sweat baths, but they didn’t help. He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t leave his sleeping mat. He just . . . dwindled away.”
The boy Chimalli’s head came up, the eyes suddenly trained on me with a disturbing intensity. “Leave me alone,” he whispered, and his voice echoed as though in a great room.
I shivered. Beside me, Yaotl had gone pale, his face showing a sickly fear unbecoming a warrior, but I didn’t blame him. Even during my long career banishing underworld monsters I had seldom seen a gaze so . . . wrong. Living, and yet stripped of human feelings.
Chimalli’s eyes had closed again. I moved cautiously away from him, not eager to repeat the experience. “I’ll tell you what I see,” I said to Yaotl. “He has the aura of the underworld, though he’s still alive.”
“Dying, then,” Yaotl said curtly. Not a muscle in his face moved. A true warrior to the end.
“No,” I said. “The dying don’t have this aura. I think he’s somehow cursed.” I was about to say that I could do nothing to help, when my gaze rested on Chimalli. Four years old. He had outgrown most of the diseases that took their toll on babies and toddlers. His life should have been ahead of him, and yet . . . “Can you take me to where he sleeps?”
Yaotl nodded. His face still bore no expression, but there was something else, a glimmer in his eyes. I thought it might be hope.
Unsure of what I would find, I armed myself before I left: two obsidian knives went into my belt. I also took a jade and turquoise pectoral of Quetzatcoatl, the Feathered Serpent god, He who had once descended into the underworld to save mankind. It was poor protection against a curse, but without living blood I would not be able to do more.
Yaotl did not speak as we left my temple and headed towards his house. He held Chimalli’s hand: the boy followed where he was pulled, but appeared to have no will of his own, like a sacrificial victim drunk on peyotl and led towards the bloody altar.
This, if anything, was creepier than the rest — a wrongness that gave pause even to the passersby.
At this early hour in the afternoon, the streets of Coyoacan were
full of people, from peasants in loincloths to priests in tunics and rich cloaks, their hair matted with dried blood.
As we walked, I tried to think on what or whom might have cursed Chimalli. He was young and vulnerable: a target for many monsters, whether supernatural or human.
Beasts of shadows, fierce hunters from the eighth level of the underworld, feasted on human hearts, and would have found Chimalli’s lifeforce a rare delicacy. Ciuapipiltin, the Haunting Mothers, preyed on the children they could no longer have — for they were the spirits of mothers dead in childbirth, transformed after death into something darker.
But neither of them fitted. Anything from the underworld would have killed Chimalli outright, not bothering with this slow attrition.
Which left the living. Sorcerers, those who made magic, not with the living blood, but with corpses: the skin of drowned men, the hands of warriors fallen in battle, the finger-nails of strangled captives. Chimalli was too young to have incurred anyone’s hatred. However, sorcerers had no scruples, and the child was the perfect vehicle to strike back at Yaotl.
“Do you have any enemies?” I asked Yaotl.
He had been walking in silence; now he turned to me, startled. I guess he had not thought of the possibility, but he did not look wholly surprised. “I’m a warrior, and honoured for my skill on the battlefield. But my father was a peasant, and so was his father before him. Some have no taste for this.”
“I see,” I said and waited for something more. But Yaotl’s eyes had moved back to his son, and he did not speak again.
Sorcerers needed to be close to their victims to cast their spells. Perhaps there would be some traces near Chimalli’s sleeping mat, something to help me track the curse to its source.
I hoped so. For otherwise it was likely that we would never find the culprit. And then Chimalli would die, slowly leeched of life until every part of him belonged to the underworld.
The Best of Talebones Page 31
