Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale

by David Wellington

  “So you were—how many of you were there?”

  “Six of us, including myself,” Powell said.

  “Six virginal teenagers looking for prostitutes and you saw a beautiful naked woman standing by the side of the road. I assume you pulled over.”

  “Of course we did. I jumped out and ran up to her and took my cap off and asked her if she was alright and if she needed any assistance. She spoke English rather well, well enough to tell us a story we didn’t believe at the time. Something she’d obviously thought up on the spot. She said thieves had accosted her and taken her clothes. If we would give her a ride home she said she would reward us.”

  Chey laughed. “Is this a horror story or a letter to Penthouse Forum?”

  Powell stared at her with a lack of comprehension that made her realize he’d never heard of the magazine. He had been up in the north country a long time.

  “When she spoke her voice sounded like church bells off in the next valley, you know, a long way off. Almost like she wasn’t talking to us, like she was barely aware we were there. Her name, she said, was Lucie, and she was very pleased to meet such well-mannered gentlemen. I think some of us had wicked ideas before she said that, but she shamed us into our best behavior. Back then a lady could do that, make you step back into line with just the tone of her voice. You knew that some people weren’t to be trifled with. One of us offered her his greatcoat, which she took and put on, but then she didn’t tie the belt, so you could still see you know what. I thought about tying it for her, but that seemed like a real liberty and I didn’t want to impose. Instead, I opened the car door for her and she climbed into the seat beside me. I still remember the feel of her smooth, soft hip against my own. She directed us to her house then. It was about ten kilometers away in the shelter of a deep river valley. It was a castle. Not a chateau, not a villa, but a real medieval castle. It stood in pretty serious need of repair. A German shell had knocked in one of its towers. Still, it was a castle—and our mysterious guest turned out to be the daughter of the Baron de Clichy-sous-Vallée.”

  “Oh-ho, the plot thickens.”

  “We worried her father would come racing out with a pack of hounds and an old blunderbuss, maybe, and give us all what-for for offending his daughter’s honor, but it turned out we didn’t need to worry. The old man had gone off to fight as an officer in the cavalry. He had died, along with every single one of his men, leading a charge into a hail of machine gun fire.

  “So there was no Baron. But the Baroness was at home, and she met us at the door in a dusty gown. She had brown hair and haunted eyes and she carried a golden candelabra with no candles in it. Like I said, we saw a lot of crazy people during the war. She looked maybe twenty or perhaps thirty years old and when I first saw her I thought she must be Lucie’s sister. She was not.

  “Lucie went to her rooms and threw on a gown from the last century. I mean the nineteenth century. The kind of thing Josephine might have worn to Napoleon’s coronation, except that moths had been at it and there were gravy stains on the sleeves. I figured it was probably the best dress she had, and I wasn’t about to say a word against it. For one thing, it left her shoulders bare and she had shoulders like …like…”

  “Hmm?” Chey asked, but she could see that Powell was lost in a reverie. Remembering those shoulders. She cleared her throat noisily to get his attention.

  “Right, well. When she came back down we were led inside into a banquet hall lined with tapestries. The roof was full of holes and rain had ruined most of the furniture, but there was meat on the table, roast mutton of a kind we never got in the trenches. There was wine, too, of a kind that does not exist anymore. My mates and I ate and drank our fill, and perhaps more.

  “Lucie came and sat by me. For whatever reason I was the one she picked. The other fellows saw it and there were a lot of jealous looks around that table, which made Lucie shower me with even more attention, because she could tell how bad I felt. She always did love making me squirm. She hung on me all night, holding my elbow, serving me from the silver platters, making sure my wine goblet was always full. The other fellows tried to make time with the Baroness, but they might as well have been pitching woo with a howitzer for all the warmth or affection she gave them.

  “When we were all finishing up, all drunk and stuffed full of food, Lucie leaned in very close until I could smell her perfume and she looked up into my eyes. She gave me a very complicated smile, lots of different things going on in that smile. Then she whispered in my ear that she had something to show me. She had washed her white face and in her old-fashioned gown she looked like some ghost from a story. Even as I rose from the table, even as the boys whistled and cheered me on, I felt as if I were under some enchantment. Perhaps I was.”

  Chey held her tongue.

  “Lucie led me deep inside the castle, through dark and dank hallways, our only light coming from a single candle she carried in her hand. I saw hot wax roll across her knuckles, but she did not cry out, and I wondered who this spirit could be. She led me down a flight of stone stairs, into the cellars of the place. The vaulted ceilings were white with niter. The floor lay submerged under a couple centimeters of murky water. Her dress dragged through the muck, but before I could say anything she hurried on, faster and faster, and it was all I could do to keep up. We passed racks of wine bottles, some of which had burst because there was no wine steward anymore to tend to them. We passed piles of furniture stacked to the ceiling, pieces that would be priceless antiques today, but these were left to rot. We came at last, at long last, to a narrow room that contained only a single enormous cage. It stood three meters high and twice as wide and the bars were made of solid silver. In the candlelight they glimmered like mirrors.

  “‘The moon is rising,’ Lucie told me. I didn’t understand, of course. ‘Will you be my guest for the night? The accommodations are more comfortable than they appear.’ I stared at her, thinking she must be some kind of maniac. More than just crazy. I think you can guess what happened next.”

  “She changed,” Chey said.

  “She changed.”

  16.

  One of the truck’s wheels fell down into a deep pothole and the two of them lifted off the bed and fell crashing back. Chey’s hand jumped over to grab Powell’s arm, for support. When she realized what she’d done she yanked it back quickly. He didn’t seem to notice. He was wrapped up in telling his story.

  “This beautiful French girl turned into a wolf before my eyes. I guess you’ve never seen the whole transformation—the first time you saw me change, you were changing too. It’s a weird thing to see. The body turns ghostly and transparent. Almost like the human being is fading out of existence. You can see the skeleton melting like wax from a candle; you can see the entire body collapse in on itself. Then it seems to stagger back up to its feet and become solid again. Color and then solidity return—but in a new form. Suddenly you’re staring a vicious animal in the face. Drunk as I was, as weird as that day was, I knew it wasn’t just a trick of the light. This snarling, slavering thing was going to kill me and it was going to hurt.

  “I stepped backward, away from this monster. Behind me the silver cage stood open and inviting. Even as the she-wolf lunged for my throat—and believe me, she didn’t waste a moment—I leapt back into the cage and slammed the door shut. The key was in the lock and I turned it with shaking fingers, locking myself in. For just a moment, though, that meant my hand was outside of the cage. She got her teeth into it. She clamped down. Then she tore it right off and swallowed it like a piece of meat.

  “The pain was unbearable, of course. I screamed and fell back on the filthy straw at the bottom of the cage and screamed and kept screaming. You couldn’t live in the trenches as long as I had without learning a little emergency medical aid, so I did what I could to stay alive. I wrapped my belt around my spurting wrist to try to stop the blood loss, and did my best not to panic. That wasn’t exactly easy. The whole time the she-wolf was throwing her
self at the cage, over and over, making the bars ring like bells. The pain just got bigger and bigger, but the horror I felt was almost worse. There was the horror of being alone with that wolf, which was pretty bad. But I saw soon enough that it couldn’t get through the bars. They weren’t that thick, but every time the wolf touched them she jumped back as if they were red hot and she’d been burned. So once I knew I was safe, my mind started wandering to other subjects. Like what had just happened to my hand. I imagined what it would be like to live the rest of my life, my normal human life, with only one hand. I’d seen plenty of amputees on the battlefield. Bits and pieces of soldiers were always being blown off. I’d never truly thought it could happen to me, but now I had a ragged stump staring me in the face, confronting me with the reality of it. What woman would ever want me again? How would I find work?

  “While I lay there feeling sorry for myself my buddies were still upstairs. The Baroness de Clichy-sous-Vallée was tearing them to pieces. Maybe they tried to fight her off—we all had weapons with us, side-arms or trench knives at least—but they never stood a chance. Lucie had locked the big doors at either end of the hall and there was no escape. I saw what was left of them later and it wasn’t much more than scraps of their uniforms and the occasional bone with shreds of meat still attached. Lucie, I came to realize, had gone out of her way to protect me from that fate. She had other plans for me. She liked me, you see, liked my face, and she wanted to keep me around for a good long time. At least until she got bored of me. She hadn’t even wanted to turn me into a wolf, at least not right away—it was just bad luck that I’d reached for that key at the wrong moment. She couldn’t control herself when her wolf was on her. None of us can.”

  “You sound like you forgive her,” Chey said, a little startled.

  “Not at first. But with time …when the moon set the Baroness and Lucie came downstairs and let me out of the cage. They saw at once what had happened to me and they knew I was part of their family. Instantly they treated me that way, even when I fought against them. Even when I called them horrible names and threatened to kill them. They knew better. They knew I would come around.”

  “The cage,” Chey said. “Why did they have that cage?”

  “You haven’t guessed yet?” Powell asked. “Lucie was the black sheep of her family. So to speak. She’d been injured by a wolf some time before I met her. Some time centuries before I met her.”

  “What?”

  “That story about the Baron riding into machine gun fire was only half true. He had been a cavalry officer—but he had died during a very different war, back in the seventeenth century.

  “As for Lucie, she’d been alive since then, and she’d had her wolf since she was a child. She could barely remember a time when she’d been fully human. She got the curse when she was twelve years old, she told me.”

  “Most girls do,” Chey told him.

  Powell looked confused for a moment. Then he blushed and shook his head. “Ah, blast, you know that’s not what I mean. I mean that’s when she got her wolf.”

  Chey nodded. It had been too good to pass up, that was all.

  “At the time that was about the age when she was expected to get married, so she’d been out being courted by the cream of French nobility. A bunch of young men in blue silk suits with wigs and painted faces. She despised them all. They took her hunting, and gave her a little spear with a garland of flowers around the point. They tied a fox to a tree and led her right to it so she could have the experience of what it was like to go hunting with the boys. She had thanked them profusely and with great charm and wit—anyway, that’s how she put it—and then cut the fox’s chain with her spear. The fox knew a good thing when it saw it and dashed off. She followed, riding so fast after it the boys couldn’t keep up. She followed it over hills and well off her father’s property, but she was having such fun she didn’t worry about it. Then, when she finally cornered it, just when she was about to catch it and make it her pet—out of nowhere a giant wolf came charging out of a thicket and snapped the fox up in its jaws. Lucie spurred her horse and was off like a shot, but not before the wolf had taken most of the flesh off her back and arms.

  “Her family found her tied to her saddle with her own reins. She was a tough little jeune fille, I will never say otherwise. They brought in doctors who could do nothing but put her to bed, assuming she would die by morning. Instead, she changed.

  “I think she hurt somebody, that first time. Maybe killed some of the servants. She wouldn’t say. She told me that she wanted to turn herself in but it would have shamed her family if people knew about what she was. At the time werewolves were being burned at the stake all over France and Germany, thousands of them every year, and some of them were even real. That would have been her fate if anyone even suspected what had happened. So instead she went to her mother, the first Baroness, who listened to everything she said and promptly went mad on the spot and drowned herself in the river. Somebody in the family stayed sane long enough to have that cage built, and laid down the law about how they would keep Lucie’s secret. For twelve hours out of every day they locked her inside and waited for the moon to go down. She would smash against the bars, batter at them with her own muscles and bones, but she couldn’t get free no matter how hard she tried. For generations one member of the female line of her family had tended to her, sat with her, prayed for her soul. Mother had passed the duty on to daughter, who had passed it on to her own daughter, and so on. The Baroness I met was the last of those attendants.

  “When the war came, and the castle was abandoned by the rest of the family, it had become clear they couldn’t take Lucie with them. Not unless they wanted to explain to the army authorities why they had a pretty naked girl locked up in an extremely expensive cage. The Baroness had volunteered to stay behind and take care of Lucie. Instead, the moment the two of them were alone, she turned to Lucie and said she wanted to make a deal.

  “She’d been watching the wolf for years and she wanted it too. Like I said, she was crazy as a cat in a bathtub. She knew what she wanted, though. She wanted that strength and power. She said there was no need for cages anymore, that Lucie could go free now. In the anarchy of the war the two of them could hunt together as a pack. That Lucie could run free and hunt as she pleased. She was crazy enough to think that was what they were meant for. Lucie was crazy enough to think that was a great idea. So they made it happen. Lucie was the Baroness’s great-great-great-aunt, you see, and when I met her the Baroness had only just changed for the second time. She needed to learn, just like I taught you, except Lucie thought she needed to learn how to hunt bigger game. So Lucie brought my buddies home for the Baroness to play with.”

  “But why did Lucie protect you?” Chey asked.

  Powell’s shoulders tightened. “Because the two of them wanted a mate.”

  17.

  Dzo’s truck rolled ever onward, back toward the little house. How far had the wolves run, Chey wondered? The light was already changing, the day getting away from them. Powell didn’t seem to notice the time. He barely even glanced at her as he spoke. She recognized the look on his face from the many years she’d spent hanging out in bars—he was lonely. He hadn’t spoken to anyone but Dzo in years. He wanted so badly to tell this story that it would have been an act of deliberate cruelty on her part if she asked him to stop, or even interrupted too much.

  So she didn’t.

  “I thought I knew the rules. I thought I understood what I had become, but I was wrong. I don’t suppose children in this day and age tell stories about werewolves to each other when their parents aren’t looking. When I was a boy that was a favorite pastime: seeing who could scare the other boys with the most gruesome, the most vicious story, the best blood-curdling howl. So when Lucie and the Baroness imprisoned me I had reason to believe I knew what they wanted, that they were going to eat me. Why they should bother to change me into one of their own kind first was not something I spent much time thinking on.
I spent the first few days trying to remember everything my boyhood companions had told me about lycanthropes.

  “There had been wolves like us in Europe for thousands of years, I recalled. The older stories suggested there was something called a wolf strap—a belt, or a girdle, and when a person put it on they could take the shape of a wolf. Whenever they wanted to they could take it off again and regain their human form. Later on, when I was free again, I wasted a lot of time researching the wolf strap, trying to find if such a thing existed. Maybe, I thought, the strap actually prevented the change. Maybe there was a way to make myself normal. No dice, I’m afraid. That part was just a myth.

  “The werewolves of the Renaissance couldn’t live in normal human society any more than you or I can. They changed, they ran free. They killed people. There were times when they almost overran the human population. In Germany and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were thousands—tens of thousands—of werewolves burned at the stake or hanged or tortured to death. Church and political authorities shouted from the pulpits about an epidemic sweeping the land, about the wickedness of the people finally catching up with them. In some places whole villages were put to the torch because every last inhabitant was deemed to be a werewolf.”

  Chey whistled in disbelief.

  “The strangest part is that werewolves were turning themselves in. Confessing, in enormous numbers. I’m still not sure if there were that many wolves or if it was just mass hysteria. It didn’t matter, often enough. Whenever the authorities caught a werewolf the punishment was always death. Traditionally they were buried with their heads cut off and their hearts impaled by a silver cross.”

  “Yikes.”

  “The burning and hanging wouldn’t have killed them permanently. As soon as the moon rose their bodies would try to change, even inside their coffins. Those silver crosses would have finished them off. But not instantaneously.”