“Do you know what my father thought of you?” she asked, voice tight. “My father thought your existence meant the end of all meaning in the world. But you are nothing so grand. If my father saw you now, all he’d see is a dog eager to lap cunt.”
Crying out, I knocked her aside, stumbled from the cottage, and ran into the woods.
I was not a man? I was not a monster? At best I was an animal? Then I would be one fully; she would not take that little from me: I would glory in it. Piece by piece I shed my clothes, that poor disguise of humanity that I had worn always in vain; piece by piece I shed the mask till I ran naked. In the thick underbrush, stickers and branches made a gauntlet that would flay me of this skin, stolen from men to hide the beast beneath. I ran mile after mile, deeper and deeper into the woods, until, at last, they claimed me for their own, and I was no longer not a man, no longer not a monster; I became in my mind an animal in truth, a wondrous, undiscovered species.
If only the woods had been magic as in a child’s story.… The illusion would have been complete: the forest could have woven enchantment about me and grown me hooves to cover the soles of my feet, fur to preserve my limbs and body. Imagining these, wishing for these, I felt my senses, ever sharp, flood with a beast’s thousand perceptions: I thought I smelled in the wind the next town. I thought I heard the breathy snores and muttered dreams of men, tasted a dozen women sleeping in their dozen beds.
The path before me tightened on either side with cruel thorns and jagged twists of brambles, yet both gave way like silk against my imagined fur, caressing me into feverish pleasure. On and on I ran. At a point determined by instinct alone I turned and burst through the arching branches that formed the overgrown path. I found myself in a clearing where a herd of deer had been at rest. At first paralyzed, they rose up as one and leapt away, tails flicking as they scattered to the left and right.
Setting my eyes on a young doe, I rapidly closed the distance between us till her hooves snapped at me with each vault. I matched her leap for leap till I sensed her spirit flag under my ceaseless pursuit. Only then did I quicken my pace. I reached out, grabbed her from behind by the thighs, and forced her to slow. Her hooves battered my knees, then she reared up in front to try to shake me loose, but I held on until she stopped running. I grasped her firmly along her flanks till her kicking quieted to fearful shudders, and then lifted her up to meet me, to join with me as no woman ever willingly had. She panicked and once more I gentled her, this time with a low shushing moan. I was kind to her, though it was not kindness that had led me to such desperation.
At the last moment I cried out from the pain of knowing there had been no one human to accept me.
I was Victor Hartmann. Hart-man. Animal man. Lily had named me well.
Exhaustion overtook me. I woke hours later, naked. A thousand cuts scored my flesh, and my whole body ached and stung: that was the truth, not an imagined metamorphosis. I stood up and slowly retraced my path through the woods, piece by piece reclaiming the poor possessions I had shed, piece by piece again disguising myself as a man.
Walton alone understood me. Walton alone knew what I am. Now he is dead. What am I without him?
Dawn had just begun to pinken the sky when I could see in the distance the cottage’s thatched roof.
Oh that my heart had—
I stopped. The words had no sooner whispered in my ear than I realized my habit of poetry was only a trick, a novelty, a trained response: instead of feeling, I have learned to echo someone else’s feelings. On command, the parrot sings, and I quote a verse.
Last night I had fled the violence that awaited me in this place. In fleeing, did I truly choose against violence? Or did I simply choose a corruption deemed, in men’s eyes, much worse? Perhaps that is why I walked back to the cottage, for only by returning, and seeing Lily, and not being enraged, could I learn the answer.
She sat outside the door of the cottage, already prepared to leave, dressed in the shirt and trousers she had taken from the clothespress after her bath. Over these she wore a heavy jacket. Beside her lay my cloak and a small bundle, perhaps of food.
She stood at once at the sound of my step.
“I am sorry,” she said softly, her head low. Her eyes, fixed on the ground, were red and swollen; she was still crying. “The words I spoke … were not true. Nothing I said in that room was true. Nothing.”
Even so small a reference to last night summoned up each poisonous remark. The blood beat in my temple, the skin there jumped, the heat rushed to my face. How might I answer such an apology? How might I regard the evidence of her tears?
I said nothing, fighting for self-mastery. On tiptoe, she reached up and for a brief wounded moment laid her palm against my scarred cheek. Her hand, cool in the morning air, quivered like a butterfly’s wing. All I could see was how easily it might be crushed.
“My father’s opinion meant much to you, did it not?” Her ability to cut to the heart of me was unerring. “The words I claimed were his … those were my uncle’s words.” I still did not reply, and she said, “In the beginning, my father spoke well of you. He thought you had shown courage and restraint given my uncle’s treatment.”
“And later,” I said, speaking at last, “what did your father say later? After he had discovered the truth and tried to kill me? Before I then killed him.”
“Later, he spoke very little.” She risked a glimpse at my face, so swift a look I felt myself to be Medusa. “He was disappointed in himself for having reacted with such severity.”
“And you, Lily, are you disappointed in yourself? Will you now tolerate the freak and treat it as a man? Perhaps it does not matter. I’m certain you could hate a man just as well.”
“You are not a freak,” she said.
She touched me lightly on the arm, although her eyes did not meet mine, and she seemed to curl in upon herself and grow smaller. But I was not to be appeased.
“If I am not a freak, what am I?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, as though that answered my question.
“I think your sorrow is another lie. Your words of contrition are as deliberate as the words you spoke last night.”
This time her glance was sharp and direct.
“I am not my words,” she said, with a faint smile, as if to say that included the apology she had just made. “Here is my deed instead: I will stay with you.”
“Where is the benefit in that?”
She would have spoken again, rashly I think, but in the end decided to keep still. I, too, kept still, till my blood beat more softly and my face felt cool in the dewy morning air.
At last I bent down to pick up my cloak and the bundle. I saw, for the first time, that Lily wore not the shoes she had yesterday taken from the cottager but a pair of boots, new and unmarked, save for a dark stain on one toe.
December 7
Three days without writing … My memories of the cottage and the woods were so painful, should I have used blood for ink? So short a time ago I had written, I hasten toward, rather than from. I did not know that within my mind hid another hunter.
With one step I vow to abandon Lily. Another step, and Winterbourne rebukes me for endangering the daughter I stole from him. A third, Walton gloats at my solitude. A fourth step, and I count the days with dark satisfaction. Another, and Lily says something that makes me fear for the future.
Yesterday morning, seeing a city in the distance, she said, “Oh what gossip I’ll inspire when I return home! Tarkenville will turn out, eager to see both my new house and me!”
Her eyes danced, but in sockets ringed with purple shadow. Daily she grows thinner, but she yields to her illness not an inch of her ferocity. Later in the day, she stuck two fingers into her mouth and yanked out a back tooth.
“It has been loose awhile now. The worm has found a way to eat even when I do not. Clever worm,” she said. “Soon it will suck the marrow from my bones.”
She tossed away the tooth, a pearl with a blood
y stump.
During the night, the false excitement in her eyes was replaced by something softer, and in the morning:
“Life has not treated you fairly,” she said, over a breakfast she did not eat. “And neither have I.” There was no sarcasm in her voice, just a sad, dreamy concern. She smiled. “I am all extremes, without moderation. Perhaps that is what holds us together.”
And more of Walton’s journal:
This morning I found blood on my pillow and thought, “Somewhere he bleeds.” Panic made my heart thrum like a netted bird’s: I was again being cheated! I had been robbed of everything—robbed now, too, of the last triumph left to me.
I realized with relief that such a small spill of blood, like a finger tracing a mysterious word, could not signify his, our, death; no, if such a thief comes in the night, I will wake in a scarlet sea, I will gag on great mouthfuls of clots, and that is how I will know he is dead.
He lives still, and for the moment, so do I. In my doubled soul, I envy the sliver of glass, the sharpened blade—whatever licked him with its cruel cutting edge.
December 10
The groan of wagon wheels, a clank of metal, a hushed voice.
I touched Lily’s lips to be quiet. The night was damp and fell, with blinding fog and a frost so heavy I breathed ice. We were standing on the steps of a church, where I meant to stop for shelter. The building had coalesced from the mist, sudden, tall, menacing—its spire swallowed whole by grayness. Next to it was a graveyard. The stones in what must have been its older section canted at dizzying angles. The newer tombstones beyond disappeared in the fog, ghostly soldiers marching off to a ghostly war.
A whinny, another clank.
“Someone’s coming,” I whispered. “Be still.”
Now I heard the horse’s hooves as well. Their slowness, combined with the late hour, suggested someone who desired stealth as much as we.
At last: a smudge of bobbing light and then a man’s face, lit by a sickly yellowish cast. He walked in front of a wagon, a lantern held before him to mark the road. His expression was one of unsteady nerve, and he whispered to himself as he walked. The wagon followed the edge of the graveyard. After a few minutes, there sounded a metallic bang like a bell tolled and then damped. My mind had scarcely understood, when I doubled over with mirthless laughter.
“What is it?” Lily asked, who had trailed behind me.
“Everywhere I go, life seeks to teach me a lesson,” I said. “I asked the question, ‘What am I?’ and now life will answer. Or rather, death.”
I led her through the thickening fog. For the first time I felt resistance from her.
“What is that noise?” she whispered, holding back.
“You don’t recognize it? Of course not,” I said, chuckling. “Your life has been much too sheltered to have been exposed to the commonplace. It is the sound of my birth pangs.”
I pulled her into the graveyard, using the distant lantern as a beacon. As we approached, the fog muffled the light in hazy confusion, blinding us to, rather than illuminating, the surroundings.
The noise grew louder: a metallic scrape, a soft shush, scrape, shush, in a tireless rhythm. Realization widened her eyes. For a moment she refused to walk. I tightened my hold and urged her forward. Then she stuck out her chin and ran ahead, as if to say, “This, too, is just something else to see.” She caught her foot on a headstone and tripped.
“Who’s there?” asked a quavering voice.
“Friends,” I called out.
Hearing a sudden scramble, I rushed toward the light.
The lantern stood among the graves next to a shallow hole, out of which a man was clumsily trying to crawl; next to him lay an abandoned pick and shovel. At my hurried approach, the horse became skittish and trotted off. I hauled the man out of the hole by his collar. As he turned his fearful face toward mine, I was assailed by the reek of liquor. I patted his coat till I found a hard bulge and drew out a flask.
“The night’s work requires courage, does it not?” I let him go and handed over the flask. His hands trembled as he tipped it to his lips.
“I do nae know what you mean,” he said, his burr hoarse.
“Tell me, sir,” I said. “I’m a foreigner here. What’s the prevailing rate for bodies?”
“A grave robber!” Lily said.
The man peered at her in surprise.
“She’s a woman!”
“Is she?” I asked with bitterness. “I think she’s a sexless wretch. Still, it’s no matter that she is not a woman, since I, after all, am not a man.”
The false merriment in my words stung; I stifled what might have been a laugh—just as easily a moan—stepped into the hole, and picked up the shovel with feigned relish.
“Let me finish for you. I did say I was a friend, and I have some experience in this work, although I do confess it was from a different angle.” I undid my cloak and tossed it over a headstone. “Look at me, sir, and guess where your night’s work might lead.”
The man’s lips pulled back. “I do nae understand,” he said in a low voice.
“Nor should you. If you did, you would run away, babbling senselessly.”
I began to dig at a furious pace.
“Victor,” Lily pleaded, hugging herself. “I do not wish to stay here.”
“But think of the story you can tell at your next ball!” I said cruelly. “Remain here, if only for the anecdote.”
Perhaps emboldened by the liquor—or else convinced I was just a hallucination caused by it—the grave robber became increasingly calm. He seemed as much fascinated by me as by my assistance and looked on as I worked.
“We are much too far north to be of use to the medical school in Edinburgh,” I said to him.
“S’for a young doctor up in Malverness,” he answered. “Says he needs more trainin’.”
“And how many times has he asked for ‘more training’?”
“This is the third. But if he do nae know a head from a toe by now, I would nae bring my cat to him.” He stared at Lily with open curiosity. She edged away, wrinkling her nose. The only sound was the rhythmic digging of dirt. Into the silence I quoted:
Our course is done! Our sand is run!
The nuptial bed the bride attends;
This night the dead have swiftly sped;
Here, here, our midnight travel ends.
“What a fine voice for recitin’,” the man said. His tone was tenuous, as if he wasn’t sure whether to attempt conversation. “Is it a song?”
“It’s a poem about a young girl who curses God when her lover does not return from war,” I answered. “One night, he appears on horseback! To her delight, he carries her off: she is at last to be married! She does not know that she is riding on a nightmare, and that her lover is already dead.”
Metal screeched against wood; both Lily and the grave robber jumped. I cleared the dirt off the coffin. I felt myself sink into the poem’s doomed hopelessness, and yet continued: “The dead man urges the horse on furiously until they arrive at his grave. There he tells the terrified young girl, that is her wedding bed. The young girl looks around and sees—”
Thin, sheeted phantoms gibbering glide
O’er paths, with bones and fresh skulls strewn,
Charnels and tombs on every side
Gleam dimly to the blood-red moon.
Picking up the spade again, I broke the coffin lock, bent down, and wrenched off the lid. Lily clapped a hand over her nose and mouth, but stepped closer to look.
“What happens to the girl?” the man asked.
“She at last sees her lover for who he really is:
Lo, while the night’s dread glooms increase,
All chang’d the wondrous horseman stood,
His crumbling flesh fell piece by piece,
Like ashes from consuming wood.
“But it’s too late,” I concluded, fixing my eye on Lily. “The dead lover descends into the grave, and howling spirits drag the woman down
to join him.”
Death itself lived in the poem; it lived here in the graveyard, too, though with less art and more stink.
Slowly I unwrapped the winding sheet. Instead of a beautiful woman, before me lay a stout matron of fifty, her fleshiness slack as a deflated balloon, her ashen face spotted with black. I stared at her blank visage. If she had had a soul once, if any human had one, it was gone now. What was left was as stupid and unyielding as the dirt. How could I expect any share in humanity when assembled from such as this?
I grasped the woman under her arms and began to haul her up like an unwieldy sack of flour. The task should have been easy for me, a second’s effort. I breathed rapidly, even panted, as if I had just dug a million graves. I left the body propped halfway out of the coffin and paused to quiet myself.
“Well,” the grave robber said. “It’s a great favor you’ve done me, but I don’t think you’ll be shoulderin’ the corpse all the way to Malverness. Let me see what’s happened to the wagon.” He wandered into the fog.
“Just leave it, Victor,” Lily urged when we were alone. Ignoring her, I once more put my arms around the body and lifted. This time I easily pulled it up over the edge and onto the ground. The same perversity that had brought me here tonight—that bid me grab a shovel and quote poetry—now made me sit at the hole, feet dangling, and gather the corpse up close. I balanced it on my lap as one might hold a child.
How could something so cold not be ice itself? The body made my flesh shudder in fits and strained my arms. I should have been loath to touch it. Instead—nerves throbbing, tears pricking my eyes—I smoothed the woman’s gray hair, cupped her chin to tilt her face up, pressed my lips upon hers, and with feigned fondness said, “Mother!”
“You cannot know her, Victor,” Lily said.
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