The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  Then one day, without doing anything differently, Phenex became famous, and performed her spoken words and songs for crowds in halls and theatres, and could afford real dye for her short spiky locks of hair instead of peroxide and Kool-Aid, and academic journals published articles examining what it was that she might mean by this thing or that thing she’d written in a poem or a song.

  When little Michelle came to stay, Phenex had just bought a new apartment, a studio on a high floor with a good view and better plumbing than anywhere she’d lived since college.

  Having money was still new and strange, just like the small dark girl who blinked owlishly at her and wasn’t allowed sharp objects. So the five-year-old Michelle and the newly comfortable Phenex set out to spend some money.

  They bought toys and ice-cube trays and pots of mixture which could turn whole walls into chalkboards and hats and paper lanterns and books of fairy stories and electric trains and red yarn and sculptures formed of flowers made of leather and green glass bottles filled with sand and a clockwork bird inside a cage and guns which shot little pellets made of paint.

  On the new sofa in the new living room in the evenings, after Michelle had taken the drugs which would help her sleep without nightmares, Phenex and the little girl would read old stories until the medicines began to work. The Heartless Giant, the Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, the Boy who learned what Fear was.

  In the mornings, while Phenex brewed her necessary cups of coffee and had her necessary cigarettes by an open window, Michelle ate Cheerios with strawberry milk and drank guava juice out of a cup with a chip in the rim and a cartoon bear holding a heart painted on the side and drew pictures.

  Perhaps because she felt, just a little bit, like there was no place in the world where she was entirely welcome, Michelle drew houses and castles and hovels on those sleepy mornings. “This is a Rapunzel tower,” she’d say, and hand over the paper for Phenex to dutifully attach to the front of the sleek new stainless steel fridge. “This is a Gingerbread cottage.” She liked Baba Yaga’s house the best, standing high off the ground on its nobby chicken legs, but the one she drew over and over again was Grandmother’s house from Little Red Riding Hood.

  No two drawings of it ever depicted the same house. Sometimes it was wooden, sometimes brick. Sometimes it gleamed in a crazy scatter of mosaic tiles, like the house where Phenex’s boyfriend lived and where Michelle would sit and watch the koi fish swim lazily around their pond in one corner of the rooftop greenhouse.

  Sometimes Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother lived on a houseboat, or in a van like the kids in Scooby Doo (Phenex had all the DVDs) or in lopsided, half-crumbled Dickensian mansions, the windows cracked and grimy and overgrown with vines.

  One evening, as they drove back from the house where Phenex’s boyfriend lived, and Michelle sat in the back of the car and thought about which story she’d like to read while she waited for her medicines to work when they got home, Phenex’s phone rang. Phenex had a conversation which was mostly shit and fuck and goddammit, which made Michelle smile a bit because she always liked it when adults said the words they weren’t supposed to, when they broke their own rules. It made her feel less strange.

  “We’ve got to make a real quick stop,” Phenex said. “You okay with that, kiddo?”

  Michelle sometimes felt a bit sorry for Phenex, who didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to ask kids questions like that instead of just telling them what was going to happen. Phenex didn’t know how to be a grown-up any better than Michelle knew how to be a little girl, really.

  So they drove to a street of pretty houses, and Michelle decided that she was going to remember exactly how all of them looked so she could draw them later, all in a row and all so stately and elegant like the old ladies who bought things from the art gallery that Michelle’s mom and dad looked after.

  Inside, the house was even more beautiful, and Michelle wanted to just wander through it for days and days, like Bluebeard’s wife was allowed to do so long as she didn’t try to go into the room with the dead bodies in it. Michelle always thought Bluebeard was a bit stupid, because what would have made sense would have been for him to find a wife that he didn’t have to keep the dead bodies hidden from. Then he wouldn’t have been scared at being found out, and she wouldn’t have been curious about what his secret was, because he wouldn’t have one, not from her. That sounded like a better sort of being married, as far as Michelle could see.

  A man in a black shirt and jeans met them in the foyer and started talking to Phenex about bridges and remastering and adding in extra backing vocal tracks, which Michelle was interested in listening to because she knew that was all music talk, and she liked music talk. But Phenex said “Timothy, slow down, this all sounds great but I can’t do any of it now, I’ve got Chelle with me and I’d have to find a babysitter and by the time I got back here it’d be hours.”

  Michelle said “I can just sit and listen. I can draw pictures. It’s okay” and the man in the black shirt and jeans, Timothy, grinned at her, but Phenex shook her head.

  “No, hon, you need to have your medicine soon and then you’ll get sleepy, and there won’t be anywhere for you to have a proper rest up in the studio, and I don’t have any fairy-tales to read to you here.”

  “I can take her,” said another man, coming into the foyer from one of the tantalizing closed doors that Michelle wished she could go explore behind. “I think I even have a book of fairy stories somewhere about the place, if the young lady doesn’t object to a substitute narrator.” He came closer, crouching down beside Michelle and holding out his hand for her to shake. “Hello, my name’s Sebastian.” He was older than Timothy, and had tired-looking eyes, but his smile seemed kind and Michelle decided that she liked him.

  “I’m Michelle,” Michelle answered. “What fairy stories do you have?”

  Sebastian had a whole library in his study, walls and walls of books, more books than Michelle could imagine anybody in the world having time to read even if they lived to a hundred years old. Sebastian chuckled when she said so, and told her that she’d be surprised just how many books a person could read in a hundred years.

  There was only one book of fairy tales in the whole of the library, though. It didn’t look like it had been opened by anybody in a long time.

  These stories were different to the ones Michelle and Phenex read together. Instead of a Heartless Giant, this book of stories had a Selfish Giant, who died but then lived forever, and instead of a boy who wanted to learn what fear was and who helped the creatures he met in the forest as he went, in this book there was a Star Child who was beautiful but cold and cruel.

  Michelle’s medicine always made her sleepy, but every time Sebastian stopped she demanded another page and another, because these stories were strange and upside-down stories, different to the others she’d heard from other books. And Sebastian smiled and said “yes, all right” and later said “I’m surprised you like these so much. I had sons, you see. I didn’t know little girls would love these too.”

  Michelle was sleepy, but she was still awake enough to tell him that he was being stupid, because stories were stories, and boys and girls alike could like whichever ones they wanted. Sebastian just smiled again and said “yes, all right” again, and read her the rest of the story.

  “Yet he ruled not long, so great had been his suffering and so bitter the fire of his testing, for, after the space of three years, he died.”

  “That’s a sad ending,” Michelle said, thoughtful, when Sebastian was done. “Most people don’t put sad endings on their stories. Phenex says that’s what stories are for, to have happy endings. She says that’s what fiction means.”

  “Then your friend Phenex is wise indeed,” Sebastian replied, with a wry and secret sort of smirk. “But fiction can mean other things as well. Sometimes it can be a way to make sad things hurt less, by writing them down. Or a way to share the sad thing with other sad people, so you all feel les
s lonely. Sometimes stories just don’t want happy endings.”

  “You can have a picture. I drew it for you,” Michelle said, handing it over. “I drew it while you talked. It’s of your house, but not really. It’s really the Grandmother house from Little Red Riding Hood.”

  “Thank you,” Sebastian said, taking the offering from her hands and inspecting it carefully. “I shall treasure it. Oh, and there’s Little Red herself, coming up the path. Is it you?”

  “No,” Michelle replied. “I can’t be Little Red Riding Hood. I’m black.”

  Sebastian looked surprised. “I don’t see why you should feel bound by traditionalism on that front, when you have seen fit to furnish Little Red’s grandmother with a spacious Chicago townhouse, my dear.”

  Michelle shrugged. She didn’t know how to properly explain to him that she wasn’t the sort of little girl who belonged in stories. She didn’t look right and had strange thoughts in her head and the people she liked were weird people, like Phenex. None of those things were like the things in stories.

  “And where is the Big Bad Wolf in this rendering of the fable, may I ask?”

  “Oh, he’s already inside the Grandmother house,” Michelle answered, pointing to the yellow squares of the lit windows in the drawing. “In there.”

  “Wouldn’t that make it a Wolf house, then? If he’s already gobbled Grandmother up and taken her place?” Sebastian asked.

  Michelle gave him a withering look. Grown-ups, even interesting grown-ups, could be so stupid. “No. Because that’s a stupid name.”

  That made Sebastian laugh. “My mistake. Aesthetics are the law above all laws, of course.”

  Michelle thought she was being made fun of, which made her cross, but she was too sleepy to care very much anymore. She curled up on the soft, soft cushions of Sebastian’s sofa and closed her eyes.

  A few seconds later, she felt the comforting weight of a blanket come to rest over her, and Sebastian’s hushed voice whisper to her as she began to drift into sleep.

  “I hope someday there’s a story where children like you feel at home, my dear.”

  ALEXANDER

  Dear Tim

  If nothing else, this trip has been a quick and intense education in the art of pretending to eat a full dinner in human company. Tonight’s false meal was in the company of Nell and her companions again, and another pair, a writer named Bram Stoker and his wife. Nell and Blake seem to collect artisans of all sorts as others collect baubles.

  Nell’s companions are three young men—they look young, at least, none older in appearance than twenty-five or so—and she refuses to make up a consistent story about what her relationship is to them. Sometimes she claims they’re her brothers, or sometimes they are her lawyer, her doctor, and her valet. Lately she’s been claiming that they’re her husbands.

  An exchange tonight, between Nell and Bram:

  Bram: But they cannot all be your husbands, Eleanor. A woman cannot have three husbands.

  Nell: Why not? Younger wives than I are happy widows made, and widows remarry. If I had them one after the other, you wouldn’t think anything of it at all.

  Bram: But widows’ husbands are dead, my dear.

  Nell: And who’s to say that mine aren’t?

  Society has shrugged this assertion off as yet another of her eccentricities; she has enough money to afford to have a lot of eccentricities. I don’t know what the general assumption is about their true relationship to her.

  The three are: Quinn, who’s from France but spends most of his time in Texas, and has done since Texas was French, back more than 200 years ago. The two of us had great fun being interrogated by Bram Stoker about cowboys and frontiers. I think the writer expected the myth to look a little different in the flesh. Even older than Quinn is Owen, who is beautiful, quiet, and steel-eyed with a supple, cruel grace. Owen’s from France as well, but from a France much, much older than the one Quinn began in. I don’t know how old Owen is. Like Nell, he keeps his beginnings to himself. But I think those beginnings were an unimaginably long time ago. Nell’s third companion is a slyly clever Englishman named Arthur, and he’s the only one of them who’s human.

  ~

  Of all the commonly-held beliefs about vampires, the one Alexander is most glad is fiction is that vampires have no choice but to sleep leadenly through the daylight hours. It would make running businesses, even nocturnal ones, much more complicated. Also, it would mean that at the height of summer a vampire’s waking hours would begin very late in the evening and end very early in the morning.

  The truth is that the sun burns, and burns terribly, and keeps them indoors for the day. But vampires don’t need all that much sleep. Less than humans do, because humans begin to fray if they miss even a few hours of the rest they need in a night, whereas most of a vampire’s health and strength can be restored with a few extra mouthfuls of blood even if they haven’t slept at all. Severe exhaustion comes with a lack of feeding, not a lack of slumber.

  That said, an overtired, cranky vampire makes for less than ideal company.

  “Go to bed, Ashley. It’s almost midday,” Alexander says, standing in the doorway to her room. She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed, typing away at her laptop and making notes on a pad of delicate mint-green paper beside her in vivid purple pen.

  “In a second, yeah, sure, give me five minutes more.” She doesn’t look up, red hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail which bounces with each small movement of her head.

  “You’ve barely slept all week. I’m the last person to scold someone for being a workaholic, but I know I don’t give you this much work to do for your schooling.”

  Ash sits back, looking up at him now with a little smile. “I finished that stuff hours ago. I’m working on my future business empire.”

  “Oh yes? May I hear the details?”

  She motions for him to come inside and sit on the edge of the bed beside her. “I’ve bought a small catering business. It’s nothing, really, they do sandwiches for corporate things and stuff like that. And I’m gonna buy an event-planning firm—that’s what I was looking up now; there’s one I’ve got my eye on. I’m gonna buy it as well and amalgamate them, and then start working my way into getting connections in the hotel business so I can work my way bigger.”

  “I thought you weren’t interested in running a company just yet?” Alexander asks. “I’d’ve been happy to talk about financing anything you wanted to do.”

  “I don’t want to be in debt to anybody. I want to be someone who has people in debt to them,” Ash answers with a proud tilt of her chin. Alexander feels a swell of affection for the girl; just a short time ago she was a shadow of the lively creature beside him now. She’s grown up so much, grown into herself and her strengths. “I want my name as powerful as Blake’s in this town.” She clicks into another window of her browser, gesturing to the figures in her bank account. “I’ve got enough money to do this on my own. It’s not hard to get enough to start with, if you aren’t worried about getting your hands dirty.”

  She looks down at her hands then, almost as if she expects to metaphorical dirt to be physical, visible. Her fingers are the cool lily-white they always are, unblemished and neat.

  “You’ve moved past your no-killing vow, then, I assume?”

  Ash rolls her eyes. “There are other ways of being a criminal apart from murder, Alex. Geez. Way to think the best of me. I haven’t killed anyone since… since I said I was going to stop doing that. Sofie’s put me in touch with her foster father, who has a lot of counterfeiting contacts. I’ve been working with the cops on Blake’s payroll to get some channels open for them. It’s been pretty wild, actually. Like, who knew that replicating Eames chairs and passing them off as the real deal was a way that some people make fortunes?”

  “I didn’t know Sofie was in contact with her foster father.”

  Ash looks down at her screen again, typing another line of text into an open email. “I don’t think she is, really
,” she says to Alexander. “It’s… families are complicated, you know?”

  He puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes. “I know.” Ash’s mother threw her out when Ash told her that she was a vampire. Like most people in the very upper echelons of the business world, Ash’s parents had been privy to the open secret that the living dead walked among them and often signed their largest checks. But tolerating such a thing in a professional associate was a very different matter to accepting it about one’s own daughter.

  Faced with a test of their parental responsibilities, Ash’s mother and father had failed miserably. Alexander knows the wound is still fresh and painful for the girl, so he lets the conversation end at that and stands up.

  “Finish what you’re doing and then get some rest. It will still all be there in the evening, all right?”

  “’kay,” Ash replies, distracted already. Alexander tries not to smile to himself until he’s out of the room and on his way back to his own bed.

  ~

  “If you continue to be so dramatic about it,” Alexander warns, a few hours later. “I’m going to make you move down to the ground floor until you recover. You’re being a disruption and a nuisance. Even the cat is distressed.”

  “You don’t like the cat,” Blake counters pitifully, drawing the coverlet up to his chin. He looks quite wretched, and Alexander would feel sympathetic to his plight if it wasn’t entirely his own fault.

  “Stop being a child, or I won’t bring you a cup of tea.” Alexander pushes the drapes back from the windows, opening the heavy glass panes. The night air is bracing, sharp and crisp and cold, and Alexander breathes it in just for the feel of it, even though he doesn’t need to.

  “Ugh,” Blake groans, burying his face in the dark silk of the pillow. “No tea. Blood. Is Jay here?”

  “You know Jay would have no sympathy for you at all,” Alexander says cheerily. “But I can ask him to come over if you like. I think I’d rather enjoy seeing how quickly you’d recover from your current state. You’re far too vain to let him see you like this, and we both know it.”