by Gemma Files
Let us say that if I wrinkle my nose just so, I can—without a doubt—
—smell it on you.
Their only mistake—the “sin” that condemned them—was that they had never learned how men, too, prey on men, poor little ones. I had spared them that knowledge, foolishly, out of some vain hope of preserving their innocence; far too well, as it turns out. And for that I will no doubt have to make amends, in time.
This glittering mess-hall, this carbuncle, squatting over a field of shallow graves. This poisoned honeycomb, a nest to trap and drown flies in. This place where off-season travellers sometimes simply disappear, leaving nothing but their few sad treasures and a table or so of full bellies behind.
But you were surprised as well, I am sure, when—after the girls saw you, for the first time, in your true shapes—they let you see them, in theirs.
* * *
My Sylvie found a thin place in the ice with her paw as they broke from the inn, and sank like a stone to its bottom. But my poor Perrinette, hampered by her fine new clothing, was easily brought to ground. And though she snapped at you with her slavering jaws and tore at you with her clever, clawed hands, you shot her all the same: put a ball in her brain, tore her limb from limb, flayed her wolf’s skin away from the man-skin still lurking below, then dragged what was left of her back inside.
For there is much meat to be had from a wolf, if one knows where to make the cuts. Almost as much, in the end, as there is on a poor girl, taken by surprise.
* * *
Yes, it is a sad story indeed. And though you do not seem eager to hear the end of it, I will tell it to you all the same.
These woods were full of wolves when we first came here, but we drove them out, hunting them almost to their extinction. For they knew the truth of our nature, just as the savages did: We are the sort who do not care to share what is ours, not even with our closest kin. So when the wolves had fled we hunted savages, and because we hunted them, the savages dressed up like us and prayed to us, prayed to us not to eat them. We became their gods for a time, until they fled as well, to find themselves others. Or—perhaps—to seek out a place with none.
But we are not gods, and never have been. We are Wolf’s-heads. Tessedaluye. We are . . .
. . . shall I really have to say the word aloud, my friends?
The primal sin of those like myself, mes amis, is that because we were once people who acted like beasts, we are forever cursed to be beasts who know they were once men. A wolf hunts in a pack, to eat, not to kill—it is a proponent of all those most wonderful, natural qualities: Liberty, loyalty, fraternity. But a were-wolf hunts to kill rather than eat, a creature whose unslaked hunger is only for blood and slaughter, defilement and degradation. It will prey even on its own family, for the bonds of kinship mean startlingly little to it; it can violate the families of others, and will, for much the same reason. The were-wolf likes to play, to torture, and takes a grim humor in its continual masquerade, the toothy animal face beneath the gentle human mask.
Perhaps this is because the oldest story behind the myth—one which those amongst us educated in the Classics may well recognize—is that of King Lykaon and his fifty sons; Lykaon, whose disgusting crimes caused the old god Zeus to flood the known world, washing it clean for future, less perverse occupants. Lykaon and his sons, who were transformed into wolves for profaning and denying the gods, for serving strangers human meat, for ravening the land they were supposed to protect like bandits rather than rulers. And since sometimes Lykaon’s name is linked with that of Tantalus, perhaps it follows that the rule he broke was the one which warns us not to share in the eating of our own children, or others’. For to force or trick others into sharing the flesh of your own line is always an evil sort of victory over them, a potential spreading of moral contagion.
Later, in Arcadia, followers of the cult of Lykaian Zeus believed that each year, one of their number would be doomed to turn into a wolf. If that person could only live for a year without tasting human flesh, he or she would return to human form; if not, he or she would remain a wolf forever. But to be a man turned wolf makes the hunger for human flesh a dreadful, and constant, temptation . . .
Ah, yes. Perhaps you have felt it too, by now: That very different sort of greed, aching in all your bones, at the root of every tooth. That itch beneath the skin, just where you can never quite reach. That song in your blood which calls out to the rising moon, dinning in your ears like some evil tide.
For we are all were-wolves here, make no mistake. Every parent who beats and rapes their own child, every man driven to eat his fellow’s flesh—like a savage, though they most-times have better reason for it—by seasonal extremity. He, she, I, you; all of us who break the social compact by treating each other as something . . . less than human.
And the cry, the cry, echoing down unchanged throughout the ages: It is not so, nor was not so, and God forbid that it should be so!
But it is so. Is it not?
And still: Calme-toi. How could I possibly hurt you, m’sieu—an old woman like myself? Look at me. Look.
Yes, just that way.
Sit. Stay. Assayez-vous, each and every one of you, before I am forced to let my—worser—nature slip.
. . . better.
Ah, and now I recall how when I was but a gay girl like my poor Perrinette, still foolish enough to risk myself for trifles, I wore nothing but scarlet velvet . . . scarlet, so the stains would not show so badly. You understand.
Yet how times change, and how they do not. How do they never.
But I do not blame you for her death, any of you—oh no, not I. How could I, and not count myself a hypocrite? For I, of all people, should know how very difficult it is to refuse fresh meat when it presents itself, especially out here in this bleak and denuded frontier landscape. Out here, where hunger rules.
After all, I, too, have been known to prey on the unwary, in my time. I, too, have followed close behind travelling families and used their love for one another to harry them to their doom. I, too, keep a cellar full of bones.
Yet I will give you this one thing for gift, mesdames et messieurs of The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise: This much, I will tell you for free. That there is more than one reason, traditionally, why a wolf who speaks—a wolf with human hands—should always be burnt rather than eaten.
You killed one of my children, and ate the other. But I do not begrudge you—since, in doing so, you have allowed yourselves to be eaten from inside-out by this same raging hunger that has always driven us, I and my kind, down all the long years before we came to this country, and after. In a way, you have become my children, my kin; Tessdaluye by nature, if not by name. And how could I harm my own kind, after all?
Well . . . easily enough, as I have explained already.
Nevertheless, I catch myself feeling generous, for now. For as a fellow hunter, I do so admire your arrangement here—this inn, sprung perpetually open like a trap disguised as providence; this fine, new trick of letting the little pigs come to be served and watching them serve themselves up, in turn. A steady stream of travellers lodging once, then moving on, and never being seen again: Only tracks in the snow, covered over before the moon next rises, and (here and there, in the underbrush) the rustle of soft paws following. With nothing left behind but the hard, dark scat of some unseen thing, so concentrated it must surely eat nothing but meat.
Oh yes indeed, ca marche, absolutement. Ca ira.
But never forget whose sufferance you live by from this moment on, curs. As last of my line, I am first in the blood here—alpha and omega, the aleph and the zed. And so you will come to my call, heel at my command, because I am—
—ah, ca phrase?
“Top dog.”
You may even call me grandmother, if you wish.
A Single Shadow Make
They dance together then ‘til dawn
—J.R.R. Tolkien
1.
The first thing I saw was your face. I recall it now, as I always will.
* * *
“Tu es tres beau, comme un ange d’argent,” my cousin—Count Ivan—murmured to me, in his execrable Russian aristocrat’s French, and his choice of form alone told me what would follow. But it was 1818, I was twenty-five already, and sorely needed money if I was ever to reach my stated goal—the re-Creation of new life from death.
And: “Ah, mon ange blanc, mon ange tombe,” Ivan moaned, much later that same night. And at last, altering my Irish mother’s suitably Heavenly—yet a touch too . . . plebeian—choice of name (Michael) for something more to his own taste, as he finally reached his climax: “Oh, Mikela, Mikela.”
All of which I took with a not inconsiderable grain of salt, bemused to find myself the object of such passion—having always personally judged my attributes more freakish than anything else, seeing the “moon-bleached” hair Ivan extolled more as bordering on albino, the “silver” eyes mere light grey, and as defiantly crossed as any Siamese’s. Quite unworthy of Ivan’s intent, melancholy lust, all told.
But as I’ve said, he was rich, and I not. So, to bed—and after, to the bank.
* * *
A blank slate, empty of all but the most brute sensation, I lay there unprotesting on the slab in my first dazed shock of life. Then came feeling—your hands running up and down my limbs, checking reflexes, testing for damage. A tickle at my brow as your scalpel’s blade traced my face’s outline through the gauze. And when the veil was drawn away I blinked, eyes watering, as the light flooded in. I looked up—
—into your face.
You bent over me, tensed for certain failure. I gaped. And triumph leapt in your slant, rain-filled eyes, so vivid under those pale brows—in that pale, pale face. Ivory hair fell about you, released from its loosened bow. I saw you clearly.
You were the first thing I had ever seen, and the only thing I have ever seen since.
* * *
From earliest days on, my greatest fear has been that of death.
I was born and raised in Ireland, son of a Russian trader lost at sea and the frail, white-gilt Catholic woman whom I came to worship. One day, when I was perhaps ten, we went out riding past an ancient, beehive-shaped structure of crumbling grey stone and mortar—the proper term for which, she told me, was “a tomb.”
“Where we go when we are dead?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Mother, what is ‘dead’?”
“Sleeping, my darling. One day we must all go to sleep, never to wake again.”
I frowned. “I couldn’t sleep that long.”
I didn’t understand why she laughed at that.
Once inside, I picked up a stray skull and hefted it in curiosity, testing its weight. My mother cried out to me to replace it, for it had been laid there to rest until the Day of Judgement. It could not be separated from its owner except at the cost of his immortal soul. And all at once, I realized what she had meant: That this object was what lay inside my own head, under my face, housing my brain. Some day I would “go to sleep,” and then the skin which covered me would creep away. My bones would collapse in a heap and be left here, grinning under a blue sky, covered in birds’ droppings.
I let the skull fall with a crunch, and was violently ill.
Not long after that, a fever took hold. My life was feared for, and I too believed—wholeheartedly—that I would die. As I tossed in my soaking sheets, I prayed to everyone and anyone I could remember for another chance.
“Twenty more years, Lord. Ten, even. And I will make sure there is no more dying ever, no more of the long sleep. Then dreams will come true, and the world will be full of light.”
Childish, yes. But it held the seed.
* * *
It was as I stared at you, entranced, that the top of the keep burst into flames. I regarded this with amazement, but no thought of danger. You, however, saw and reacted—pulling me to the floor with one quick yank. I screamed, learning pain, and fought to dislodge you, not understanding your intent. Burning beams had begun to rain from the roof. One grazed me.
From that moment on, I have feared fire. Fire can strip me of everything you gave me in an instant.
Whimpering, I allowed you to lead me away.
Behind us, the roof collapsed with a sigh of heat, flames engulfing the laboratory. You shut the door against these sights. You barred it.
And then you led me away to your cousin’s room, where you put me to sleep in his bed.
* * *
From my tenth year on—until the day they struck my name from the medical register—I fought to keep my childhood vow. My aim, and the unashamed way I spoke of it (as well as my need for an ever-steady supply of dead flesh) conspired to keep me an outcast. In England I treated with those grim men known as Resurrectionists to meet my experiments’ demands, which so outraged my peers that they revoked my license.
I was alone then, my mother having died some years before in a carriage accident, miscarrying my stepfather’s child. So I took what money of hers was deemed mine, and went to Russia, the ancient lands of my father’s blood.
And it was here . . . with Ivan’s kind assistance . . . that I finally delivered upon my promise.
* * *
Later, I regained my new-found senses and went in search of you, groping unsteadily along the walls. Luckily, I did not have at all far to go—only across the hall to the adjoining chamber, a room so dark that I stumbled over the threshold before I even knew it was there. Only a chance grab at some handy draperies preventing me from falling. But since my motions thus disclosed you—sprawled half-clothed beneath your bed’s curtains—I soon had more than enough light to see by.
My eyes swept you up and down, each pass adding new detail. Your sharp profile, blurred in a moony cloud of hair. The bleak enamel of your nails. One cyanose nipple, half-revealed under your shirt-sleeve’s shadow. Those long, pale lines—from ankle to hip to out-flung arm and clenching fist, the whole of you sheened with a fine ivory fur—drew me in, hypnotized, like a languorous undertow. By the slow pulse at your throat, the line of fleece shadowing your stomach brought a silent groan to my lips. Before I could quite reason my actions through, I found myself reaching—as gently as possible—to trail a single finger down from throat to nipple, to navel, and beyond.
You turned in your sleep beneath my touch, sighing. And as I traced the curve of your jaw, I felt us both come to full attention.
* * *
On occasion, I felt my apparent lack of every other passion but for an overwhelming need to conquer death severely. It seemed as though my quest to reorder Nature had determined I be punished for daring to flout its rules—to wit, that each time another touched me (my pretty cousin, for example), I would be forever doomed to remain at best acquiescent—at worst, annoyed.
But I was still human. As that sweet flush settling over me like a prickly veil—seeping, with exquisite lack of haste, down through the pressing fathoms of fantasy—testified.
Uneasy at this unexpected sensation’s power, I pried my eyes open and reached for the bedside candle.
Dulled with sleep, it took a second for me to realize that the figure looming over me was, in fact—
—my creation.
No beauty, no. But then, that quality had never been my main object, and while I’d still been piecing him together the difference between our sizes had seemed, similarly, no consideration. Upright, however, he seemed huge and oddly alien, as though the arcane commingling of science and necromancy I had practiced to bring him to life had conjured up a demon: Skin dark and dry, hands lightly clawed, jaws pushing forward like a muzzle into a grim jawful of shark’s teeth. His eyes were mismatched, too, I noticed only now—one grey, one
blue.
But what matter? They worked.
HE worked.
The sight of the candle-flame made him recoil, varicolored gaze gone wide and wounded. But like the child he truly was, his attention span was too short yet to hold such fear for long.
Abruptly oblivious to me, he stepped back, eyes casting around the room for whatever caught his fancy. I followed him at a wary distance, observing how he studied each item in turn.
“Plate,” I said, as he stroked a gilded slice of Ivan’s best china.
He turned too quickly, toppling, and the weight of him almost broke my hand.
Then, still clutching the thing in question, he offered it to me.
“Plate,” I repeated.
“Paaaht.”
Soon we were pointing at all sorts of things.
Finally, he put a finger to my own chest. After a moment’s hesitation, some imp of the perverse made me answer:
“Mikela.”
“Mi-ke-la,” he replied, clearly.
We smiled at each other.
* * *
Which is all that I remember of my first night alive.
2.
My liaison with Ivan yielded the keep (one of his hereditary holdings) and enough money to live on while I completed my experiments. Unfortunately, it also—for a time—yielded HIM, playing understandable havoc with my powers of concentration. Barely a fortnight had passed, however, before he came storming into the laboratory with a letter in one hand, a drink in the other.
“Most intolerable! My father has arranged . . . ” His voice shook at the horror of it: “ . . . a marriage.”
“I feel your loss already,” I replied, making another notation.
He left swearing eternal fidelity, a claim so patently foolish it gave me no honest way of even acknowledging it, let alone matching it.
