Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  Ben asked, “What if it doesn’t?” They were having lunch in the Automat again. “What’ll you do if it just goes on?”

  “It’s not that easy.” Farrell looked away from his friend and began to explore the mysterious, swampy innards of his beef pie. He said, “The trouble is that I know her. That was the real mistake. You shouldn’t get to know people if you know you’re not going to stay with them, one way or another. It’s all right if you come and go in ignorance, but you shouldn’t know them.”

  A week or so before the full moon, she would start to become nervous and strident, and this would continue until the day preceding her transformation. On that day, she was invariably loving, in the tender, desperate manner of someone who is going away; but the next day would see her silent, speaking only when she had to. She always had a cold on the last day, and looked grey and patchy and sick, but she usually went to work anyway.

  Farrell was sure, though she never talked about it, that the change into wolf shape was actually peaceful for her, though the returning hurt. Just before moonrise she would take off her clothes and take the pins out of her hair, and stand waiting. Farrell never managed not to close his eyes when she dropped heavily down on all fours; but there was a moment before that when her face would grow a look that he never saw at any other time, except when they were making love. Each time he saw it, it struck him as a look of wondrous joy at not being Lila anymore.

  “See, I know her,” he tried to explain to Ben. “She only likes to go to color movies, because wolves can’t see color. She can’t stand the Modern Jazz Quartet, but that’s all she plays the first couple of days afterward. Stupid things like that. Never gets high at parties, because she’s afraid she’ll start talking. It’s hard to walk away, that’s all. Taking what I know with me.”

  Ben asked, “Is she still scared of the super?”

  “Oh, God,” Farrell said. “She got his dog last time. It was a Dalmatian—good-looking animal. She didn’t know it was his. He doesn’t hide when he sees her now, he just gives her a look like a stake through the heart. That man is a really classy hater, a natural. I’m scared of him myself.” He stood up and began to pull on his overcoat. “I wish he’d get turned on to her mother. Get some practical use out of him. Did I tell you she wants me to call her Bernice?”

  Ben said, “Farrell, if I were you, I’d leave the country. I would.”

  They went out into the February drizzle that sniffled back and forth between snow and rain. Farrell did not speak until they reached the corner where he turned towards the bookstore. Then he said very softly, “Damn, you have to be so careful. Who wants to know what people turn into?”

  May came, and a night when Lila once again stood naked at the window, waiting for the moon. Farrell fussed with dishes and garbage bags and fed the cat. These moments were always awkward. He had just asked her, “You want to save what’s left of the rice?” when the telephone rang.

  It was Lila’s mother. She called two and three times a week now. “This is Bernice. How’s my Irisher this evening?”

  “I’m fine, Bernice,” Farrell said. Lila suddenly threw back her head and drew a heavy, whining breath. The cat hissed silently and ran into the bathroom.

  “I called to inveigle you two uptown this Friday,” Mrs. Braun said. “A couple of old friends are coming over, and I know if I don’t get some young people in we’ll just sit around and talk about what went wrong with the Progressive Party. The Old Left. So if you could sort of sweet-talk our girl into spending an evening in Squaresville—”

  “I’ll have to check with Lila.” She’s doing it, he thought, that terrible woman. Every time I talk to her, I sound married. I see what she’s doing, but she goes right ahead anyway. He said, “I’ll talk to her in the morning.” Lila struggled in the moonlight, between dancing and drowning. “Oh,” Mrs. Braun said. “Yes, of course. Have her call me back.” She sighed. “It’s such a comfort to me to know you’re there. Ask her if I should fix a fondue?”

  Lila made a handsome wolf: tall and broad-chested for a female, moving as easily as water sliding over stone. Her coat was dark brown, showing red in the proper light, and there were white places on her breast. She had pale green eyes, the color of the sky when a hurricane is coming. Usually she was gone as soon as the changing was over, for she never cared for him to see her in her wolf form. But tonight she came slowly towards him, walking in a strange way, with her hindquarters almost dragging. She was making a high, soft sound, and her eyes were not focusing on him.

  “What is it?” he asked foolishly. The wolf whined and skulked under the table, rubbing against his leg. Then she lay on her belly and rolled and as she did so the sound grew in her throat until it became an odd, sad, thin cry; not a hunting howl, but a shiver of longing turned into breath. “Jesus, don’t do that!” Farrell gasped. But she sat up and howled again, and a dog answered her from somewhere near the river. She wagged her tail and whimpered.

  Farrell said, “The super’ll be up here in two minutes flat. What’s the matter with you?” He heard footsteps and low frightened voices in the apartment above them. Another dog howled, this one nearby, and the wolf wriggled a little way towards the window on her haunches, like a baby, scooting. She looked at him over her shoulder, shuddering violently. On an impulse, he picked up the phone and called her mother.

  Watching the wolf as she rocked and slithered and moaned, he described her actions to Mrs. Braun. “I’ve never seen her like this,” he said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mrs. Braun whispered. She told him.

  When he was silent, she began to speak very rapidly. “It hasn’t happened for such a long time. Schechtman gives her pills, but she must have run out and forgotten—she’s always been like that, since she was little. All the Thermos bottles she used to leave on the school bus, and every week her piano music—“

  “I wish you’d told me before,” he said. He was edging very cautiously towards the open window. The pupils of the wolf’s eyes were pulsing with her quick breaths.

  “It isn’t a thing you tell people!” Lila’s mother wailed in his ear. “How do you think it was for me when she brought her first little boyfriend—“ Farrell dropped the phone and sprang for the window. He had the inside track, and he might have made it, but she turned her head and snarled so wildly that he fell back. When he reached the window, she was already two fire-escape landings below, and there was eager yelping waiting for her in the street.

  Dangling and turning just above the floor, Mrs. Braun heard Farrell’s distant yell, followed immediately by a heavy thumping on the door. A strange, tattered voice was shouting unintelligibly beyond the knocking. Footsteps crashed by the receiver and the door opened.

  “My dog, my dog!” the strange voice mourned. “My dog, my dog, my dog!”

  “I’m sorry about your dog,” Farrell said. “Look, please go away. I’ve got work to do.”

  “I got work,” the voice said. “I know my work.” It climbed and spilled into another language, out of which English words jutted like broken bones. “Where is she? Where is she? She kill my dog.”

  “She’s not here.” Farrell’s own voice changed on the last word. It seemed a long time before he said, “You’d better put that away.”

  Mrs. Braun heard the howl as clearly as though the wolf were running beneath her own window: lonely and insatiable, with a kind of gasping laughter in it. The other voice began to scream. Mrs. Braun caught the phrase silver bullet several times. The door slammed; then opened and slammed again.

  Farrell was the only man of his own acquaintance who was able to play back his dreams while he was having them: to stop them in mid-flight, no matter how fearful they might be—or how lovely—and run them over and over studying them in his sleep, until the most terrifying reel became at once utterly harmless and unbearably familiar. This night that he spent running after Lila was like that.

  He would find them congregated under the marqu
ee of an apartment house, or romping around the moonscape of a construction site: ten or fifteen males of all races, creeds, colors, and previous conditions of servitude; whining and yapping, pissing against tires, inhaling indiscriminately each other and the lean, grinning bitch they surrounded. She frightened them, for she growled more wickedly than coyness demanded, and where she snapped, even in play, bone showed. Still they tumbled on her and over her, biting her neck and ears in their turn; and she snarled but she did not run away.

  Never, at least, until Farrell came charging upon them, shrieking like any cuckold, kicking at the snuffling lovers. Then she would turn and race off into the spring dark, with her thin, dreamy howl floating behind her like the train of a smoky gown. The dogs followed, and so did Farrell, calling and cursing. They always lost him quickly, that jubilant marriage procession, leaving him stumbling down rusty iron ladders into places where he fell over garbage cans. Yet he would come upon them as inevitably in time, loping along Broadway or trotting across Columbus Avenue towards the Park; he would hear them in the tennis courts near the river, breaking down the nets over Lila and her moment’s Ares. There were dozens of them now, coming from all directions. They stank of their joy, and he threw stones at them and shouted, and they ran.

  And the wolf ran at their head, on sidewalks and on wet grass; her tail waving contentedly, but her eyes still hungry, and her howl growing ever more warning than wistful. Farrell knew that she must have blood before sunrise, and that it was both useless and dangerous to follow her. But the night wound and unwound itself, and he knew the same things over and over, and ran down the same streets, and saw the same couples walk wide of him, thinking he was drunk.

  Mrs. Braun kept leaping out of a taxi that pulled up next to him; usually at corners where the dogs had just piled by, knocking over the crates stacked in market doorways and spilling the newspapers at the subway kiosks. Standing in broccoli, in black taffeta, with a front like a ferry-boat—yet as lean in the hips as her wolf-daughter—with her plum-colored hair all loose, one arm lifted, and her orange mouth pursed in a bellow, she was no longer Bernice but a wronged fertility goddess getting set to blast the harvest. “We’ve got to split up!” she would roar at Farrell, and each time it sounded like a sound idea. Yet he looked for her whenever he lost Lila’s trail, because she never did.

  The superintendent kept turning up too, darting after Farrell out of alleys or cellar entrances, or popping from the freight elevators that load through the sidewalk. Farrell would hear his numberless passkeys clicking on the flat piece of wood tucked into his belt.

  “You see her? You see her, the wolf, kill my dog?” Under the fat, ugly moon, the Army .45 glittered and trembled like his own mad eyes.

  “Mark with a cross.” He would pat the barrel of his gun and shake it under Farrell’s nose like a maraca. “Mark with a cross, bless by a priest. Three silver bullets. She kill my dog.”

  Lila’s voice would come sailing to them then, from up in Harlem or away near Lincoln Center, and the little man would whirl and dash down into the earth, disappearing into the crack between two slabs of sidewalk. Farrell understood quite clearly that the superintendent was hunting Lila underground, using the keys that only superintendents have to take elevators down to the black sub-sub-basements, far below the bicycle rooms and the wet, shaking laundry rooms, and below the furnace rooms, below the passages walled with electricity meters and roofed with burly steam pipes; down to the realms where the great dim water mains roll like whales, and the gas lines hump and preen, down where the roots of the apartment houses fade together, and so along under the city, scrabbling through secret ways with silver bullets, and his keys rapping against the piece of wood. He never saw Lila, but he was never very far behind her.

  Cutting across parking lots, pole-vaulting between locked bumpers, edging and dancing his way through fluorescent gaggles of haughty children; leaping uptown like a salmon against the current of the theatre crowds; walking quickly past the random killing faces that floated down the night tide like unexploded mines, and especially avoiding the crazy faces that wanted to tell him what it was like to be crazy—so Farrell pursued Lila Braun, of Tremont Avenue and CCNY, in the city all night long. Nobody offered to help him, or tried to head off the dangerous-looking bitch bounding along with the delirious gaggle of admirers streaming after her; but then, the dogs had to fight through the same clenched legs and vengeful bodies that Farrell did. The crowds slowed Lila down, but he felt relieved whenever she turned towards the emptier streets. She must have blood soon, somewhere.

  Farrell’s dreams eventually lost their clear edge after he played them back a certain number of times, and so it was with the night. The full moon skidded down the sky, thinning like a tatter of butter in a skillet, and remembered scenes began to fold sloppily into each other. The sound of Lila and the dogs grew fainter whichever way he followed. Mrs. Braun blinked on and off at longer intervals; and in dark doorways and under subway gratings, the superintendent burned like a corposant, making the barrel of his pistol run rainbow. At last he lost Lila for good, and with that it seemed that he woke.

  It was still night, but not dark, and he was walking slowly home on Riverside Drive through a cool, grainy fog. The moon had set, but the river was strangely bright: glittering grey as far up as the Bridge, where headlights left shiny, wet paths like snails. There was no one else on the street. “Dumb broad,” he said aloud. “The hell with it. She wants to mess around, let her mess around.” He wondered whether werewolves could have cubs, and what sort of cubs they might be. Lila must have turned on the dogs by now, for the blood. Poor dogs, he thought. They were all so dirty and innocent and happy with her.

  “A moral lesson for all of us,” he announced sententiously. “Don’t fool with strange, eager ladies, they’ll kill you.” He was a little hysterical. Then, two blocks ahead of him, he saw the gaunt shape in the grey light of the river; alone now, and hurrying. Farrell did not call to her, but as soon as he began to run, the wolf wheeled and faced him. Even at that distance, her eyes were stained and streaked and wild. She showed all the teeth on one side of her mouth, and she growled like fire.

  Farrell trotted steadily towards her, crying, “Go home, go home! Lila, you dummy, get on home, it’s morning!” She growled terribly, but when Farrell was less than a block away she turned again and dashed across the street, heading for West End Avenue. Farrell said, “Good girl, that’s it,” and limped after her.

  In the hours before sunrise on West End Avenue, many people came out to walk their dogs. Farrell had done it often enough with poor Grunewald to know many of the dawn walkers by sight, and some to talk to. A fair number of them were whores and homosexuals, both of whom always seem to have dogs in New York. Quietly, almost always alone, they drifted up and down the Nineties, piloted by their small, fussy beasts, but moving in a kind of fugitive truce with the city and the night that was ending. Farrell sometimes fancied that they were all asleep, and that this hour was the only true rest they ever got.

  He recognized Robie by his two dogs, Scone and Crumpet. Robie lived in the apartment directly below Farrell’s, usually unhappily. The dogs were horrifying little homebrews of Chihuahua and Yorkshire terrier, but Robie loved them.

  Crumpet, the male, saw Lila first. He gave a delighted yap of welcome and proposition (according to Robie, Scone bored him, and he liked big girls anyway) and sprang to meet her, yanking his leash through Robie’s slack hand. The wolf was almost upon him before he realized his fatal misunderstanding and scuttled desperately in retreat, meowing with utter terror.

  Robie wailed, and Farrell ran as fast as he could, but Lila knocked Crumpet off his feet and slashed his throat while he was still in the air. Then she crouched on the body, nuzzling it in a dreadful way.

  Robie actually came within a step of leaping upon Lila and trying to drag her away from his dead dog. Instead, he turned on Farrell as he came panting up, and began hitting him with a good deal of strength and accuracy. “
Damn you, damn you!” he sobbed. Little Scone ran away around the corner, screaming like a mandrake.

  Farrell put up his arms and went with the punches, all the while yelling at Lila until his voice ripped. But the blood frenzy had her, and Farrell never imagined what she must be like at those times. Somehow she had spared the dogs who had loved her all night, but she was nothing but thirst now. She pushed and kneaded Crumpet’s body as though she were nursing.

  All along the avenue, the morning dogs were barking like trumpets. Farrell ducked away from Robie’s soft fists and saw them coming; tripping over their trailing leashes, running too fast for their stubby legs. They were small, spoiled beasts, most of them, overweight and shortwinded, and many were not young. Their owners cried unmanly pet names after them, but they waddled gallantly towards their deaths, barking promises far bigger than themselves, and none of them looked back.

  She looked up with her muzzle red to the eyes. The dogs did falter then, for they knew murder when they smelled it, and even their silly, nearsighted eyes understood vaguely what creature faced them. But they knew the smell of love too, and they were all gentlemen.

  She killed the first two to reach her—a spitz and a cocker spaniel—with two snaps of her jaws. But before she could settle down to her meal, three Pekes were scrambling up to her, though they would have had to stand on each other’s shoulders. Lila whirled without a sound, and they fell away, rolling and yelling but unhurt. As soon as she turned, the Pekes were at her again, joined now by a couple of valiant poodles. Lila got one of the poodles when she turned again. Robie had stopped beating on Farrell, and was leaning against a traffic light, being sick. But other people were running up now: a middle-aged black man, crying; a plump youth in a plastic car coat and bedroom slippers, who kept whimpering, “Oh God, she’s eating them, look at her, she’s really eating them!”; two lean, ageless girls in slacks, both with foamy beige hair. They all called wildly to their unheeding dogs, and they all grabbed at Farrell and shouted in his face. Cars began to stop.