Brimstone

by Daniel Foster

  He knew exactly what to do with it, if he so chose. His knowledge of the strap was as strong as his instinctual knowledge of basic sex, yet his understanding of the strap was incomplete. He knew what to do with it, but he didn’t know what would happen if he did. He knew he wanted to try. Curiosity was eating him up. Garret snatched the strap off the door and went out the window. He didn’t know why he didn’t just use the door. Maybe the window was just closer. He grabbed the lamp on the way by his nightstand, nearly breaking it on the window frame on his way through.

  A minute later, Garret closed the woodshed door behind himself. In the woodshed at midnight, with the door closed, the murk should have been impenetrable for his eyes, but it wasn’t. The longer he held the wolfstrap, the more black and white his vision became. The loss of color dispelled some of the darkness, made shapes more clear.

  Wait, I left the lamp outside when I opened the door. He retrieved it and closed the door again. He drew a breath. Let it out slowly. He set the lantern on one of the wood piles. They heaped around him, the dead bodies of ash, oak, walnut, and hickory, their chunky arms and legs splintering as they dried, bark peeling away from the naked wood beneath. The lantern flame bobbed, and he vacillated with it.

  Garret held the strap out at arm’s length, savoring his need of it for a moment, tantalizing himself with the upcoming satisfaction. A thin wind slid through the timbers, around the log stacks, and ruffled the charcoal grey fur in his hands. The other nature within him stirred, yearning in its sleep. The strap would fit him like a sash, from his left shoulder, down across his heart, over the right side of his waist, and then up across his back in a closed loop. He knew it would fit him perfectly. It was made for him. It was his. Finally. Garret ducked his head through it and dropped it into place on his shoulder.

  Nothing happened. The nature turned inside him, uncomfortable, but remained asleep. Garret frowned. Oh, of course. He pulled the strap back off and hung it on a jutting chunk of wood. He shucked his suspenders and pulled his shirt off, hissing through his teeth when he had to move his left arm. He unbuttoned his long johns and pushed them down to his waist. The cold air merrily sank its teeth into his bare torso, bringing a wave of goosebumps.

  He reached for the strap, but paused, looking at his own arm, then down at his thin but defined pectorals, his miniature cobble-stone abdominals. He looked them all over slowly, as if he might never see them again, then picked up the strap. This time, as he ducked his head through it, his heart sped up, warmed by a sudden thrill and a surge of animalistic aggression.

  The strap settled to his shoulder and chest. Skin to skin. It grabbed hold of him, and the other nature inside him awoke, rising, filling him, surging to be free. The nature and the strap met and merged, two halves becoming whole.

  The strap’s grip on him changed, seizing his body like a giant’s hand. Garret hit his knees and gagged. The grey fur spread in a matter of seconds, covering his chest, his back, his whole body in thick grey swaths, but the fur was inconsequential next to what was happening on the inside. Paralysis took Garret, vengeful and unyielding. Not physical, but mental. His mind was overloaded with smells which it didn’t know how to process. Thousands of smells, so strong that his vision watered. A dozen earthy aromas from the woodpiles, the different clays in the earth beneath, the suffocatingly pungent humanness of his own body and clothes, the tangy metallic smell of the axe in the corner, the mouth-watering scent of a mouse, laid down by tiny feet a day or so ago. The world was filled, soaked, swamped with scent.

  The sounds came a split second later, all of them: the subtle creaks of the settling boards in the woodshed walls, the moan of a dozen different drafts of wind—the ones pulling at different parts of the eves, the ones moving over the house gables, the one pushing against the barn, even the weaker ones out in the field. He even heard his mother turn over in bed.

  The wolfstrap grew over him and through him. Then the pressure began. Garret curled up on the floor in its invisible grip. There was no pain, only tremendous weight on all points of his body at the same time. It felt like a thousand hands, in him and on him. His body began to deform under the force. He felt like dough, or clay on a potter’s wheel. Pressure waves surged through him, shoving his guts, popping his bones, stretching him, compressing him. The weight squeezed his ribs and jerked them out forward, but instead of snapping like twigs, they bent, stretched, and held the new shape. He dragged a breath after his last was violently shoved out of him, and felt the air go deep into him, entering parts of his chest it hadn’t before occupied.

  His organs stretched, squished, and squeezed past each other. When his stomach was yanked and reshaped, he dry heaved. His joints popped out of socket, his bones creaked, stretching or compacting. Garret screamed, not from pain, but from the helpless violation of being dismembered while still in one piece, pulled out of shape like a straw man. The muscles in his neck drew tight until Garret’s head snapped back, realigned with his shoulders at a new angle. The vertebrae down his back popped like giant knuckles, expanded like an accordion, then compressed hard, settling into a new shape. Still no pain. He cried out again, terrified, begging someone to come help him. But the words wailed away into animal-like gibberish.

  His hips twisted and his legs were jerked out of place. His head, the one solid thing left in his world, elongated. His eyes blurred. When they refocused, the details of the woodshed stood out in high contrast black-and-white vision. Pure, clean, and clear.

  He tried to claw at the fur thickening across him, but his arms didn’t bend in the right way anymore, and his hands were being backfilled by the muscle and bone of his retreating fingers. Garret dry heaved again and twitched in a feeble attempt to roll onto his back. His legs flopped drunkenly. They felt short and crooked.

  Then it was done. Garret lay on the ground, whimpering. The whole process had taken less than a minute.

  Lub-dub…

  Lub-dub…

  Lub-dub…

  His heart beat solid and slow and his blood hissed gently through his veins. He heard and felt them both. Garret tried to stand, but only wallowed against the woodpile at his furry back. His arms and legs weren’t doing what his mind was telling him. They weren’t hinged correctly anymore.

  Garret had always known how his body moved without thinking about it because each part of him obeyed a particular set of rules. None of those rules applied anymore. He tried to push himself upright on his feet, but he felt top-heavy and awkwardly imbalanced as soon as his front paws left the ground.

  Paws? Indeed, his hands were gone, replaced with the biggest dog-like paws Garret had ever seen. He cried out, but instead of human fright, a canine yip bubbled out of his chest. He scrambled in his strangely jointed body. His back legs hardly worked at all. They were pinned, snared by something wrapped cruelly tight.

  The sensation of being trapped sent a sudden animal fear through him, even worse than finding that his body didn’t work right. Garret struggled mightily, kicking his rear legs in their strangely backwards motion. Cloth ripped and tore. Garret looked over his grey shoulder in time to see himself kick his shredded pants and long johns away, and his furry hindquarters emerge into the lamplight.

  He stared at his own hocks and thighs, swathed in warm grey fur, and his own bushy tail, carried low. Even though his vision was black and white, the woodshed still looked the same. The same piles of split wood were heaped around him, but now well over his head. The same oil lamp cast its wavering bubble of illumination, crystal clear in his black and white eyes.

  Garret inspected himself. Grey fur covered his wolf body. He tested his muscles, and was amazed to find how light he felt under their power. He turned, feeling his weight shift so differently than it always had. All his life he had been tall and lean, now he was long and low, built close to the ground. His shoulder didn’t hurt nearly as badly as it had before, either, though he knew better than to put any weight on that paw.

  He pushed the shed door open with his nos
e, which was a surprisingly normal motion, and sprang into the world on three legs. He could see and hear everything. A panoply of smells assaulted his wolf nose with a viciously intense pleasure, tangy whiffs of different leaves and trees in the surrounding forests wrapped over the trails of mouthwatering animals scents, the blue-cold crispness of the autumn wind. The thrill and excitement of a thousand years of instinct flooded him. This was what it meant to be free. This was what it meant to be alive.

  Garret ran, chasing scents. They emerged like guiding hands from the darkness, drawing him into the forest. It took him a few moments to get the three-legged rhythm, but once he did he found he could make an unbelievable pace. He ran with the wind, playing with its eddies as they swirled over the banks and around the trees. His muscles begged for more, and he gave it to them, sprinting. He punched through fogbanks like a cannon shot. His wolf lungs drew and expelled the cold air more easily than his human lungs had breathed while asleep. Between them surged his massive heart. It beat slow and steady, laughing at the pace of his flying paws as they flung away the rocks and trees behind him.

  The paws themselves were enormous. His Pa had told him that most timber wolves went about eighty pounds, bigger ones might grow a shade past a hundred. One hundred and fifty pounds made Garret a small blacksmith, but it made him a huge wolf.

  He ran with so little effort that it felt like low-level flying. Through his life, Garret had often gone into the woods to hunt, but now hunting wasn’t what he did, it was his being. He was part of the woods, part of the moon above and the stream below. He belonged. He skimmed under the dark boughs and into a field. He was a silver-furred gust of wind, a ripple of fleet paws across the leaves.

  Above, the moon’s brightness called to him, and Garret answered with a long howl.

  Chapter 13

  As summer gave way to fall, the din of insects faded, making the forest feel as if half its inhabitants had fled. As fall gave way to winter, even the furry animals began to disappear, and when ice gripped the forest, only an occasional deer stirred the empty air. Or so Garret had thought. Now he bounded across the leaves on fleet paws, and his eyes, ears, and nose told him that the open forest of fall was as full of life as a clear sky was full of stars.

  As a human, rugged terrain had always been a minor challenge, something Garret walked, climbed, and jumped to overcome. As a wolf, it was his playground. He slipped through the rolling hills, crossed creeks on swift paws, picked up scents and reeled them in easier than a bluegill on a line. He threaded rocks and trees as if the curvy path was straight and clear.

  Though his vision was now monochrome and his sense of touch had dulled, his ears and nose painted a clearer picture of the world than his human eyes could ever have given him. Scents lay and drifted around him in layers and tangles. His eyes could show him where things were, much as his human eyes had, but his wolf nose showed him where they had been, rooting in the leaves, running from a predator, sweating out fear, or simply sitting on a branch, preening. Garret detoured from his route to paw the leaves after a mouse, but it escaped him. He bounded away, sniffing and listening. Little creatures crawled, climbed, and slept everywhere. The deadest night was fully alive, but he’d been unaware of it all his life.

  Garret took off again, and his fur shed the wind as a ship’s bow sheds the night seas. He skimmed up a bank and diagonally down the other side. A stream trickled through the bottom of the ravine, and Garret turned to follow it. He had already known it would be there because its trickling sound had greeted his ears hundreds of yards before, and its sweet smell a quarter mile earlier.

  Garret left the stream, nose to the ground, inhaling the scent of a groundhog. The trail dropped down a large hole, but not large enough for Garret to follow, so he turned away up a draw. At the top he was panting, but only from excitement. He’d picked up a scent that made his mouth water. Rabbit. The trail was fresh and warm as an armchair someone recently vacated, so Garret pursued. The trail was new enough for him to see the rabbit in his mind’s eye, its white tail bobbing before him as it ran. Actually, though, it wasn’t running. It was sitting on the leaves at the base of a beech tree fifty paces away, watching him with a bright eye, its nose quivering.

  Garret flung himself at it, and it took off in a flurry of leaves. The rabbit ripped across the ground, zig-zagging as if momentum meant nothing. Garret had watched rabbits try to evade Babe with such maneuvers, and they usually succeeded. He’d often wondered how his hound managed to keep up as well as she did. Now he knew.

  Low to the ground and on three powerful wolf legs, Garret did better than Babe. He approximated the rabbit’s turns, and closed on it with each measure of straight ground. Every part of the chase—the sounds, the scent of rabbit, now mixed with the tangy odor of fear, the jerky zigzagging of its tail—heated Garret’s blood into a frenzy. Here and there the rabbit sprinted, ears flat to its skull, dark eyes shining in the moonlight. It flashed under a fallen log and out the far side. Garret cleared it in a stealthy bound. Down a bank they ran, and Garret closed the gap. In a panic, the rabbit pulled a switch-back and leaped across a rock. Garret took a short cut around the rock.

  The rabbit skirted a small depression and leaped, aiming for the dark hole beneath a nearby rock. Moving on instinct, Garret had leaped a split-second before the rabbit did. In midair, Garret closed his jaws around the rabbit’s head and neck. Despite the added weight, he landed well-balanced, though he stumbled a bit because he couldn’t use his left front leg to catch himself evenly. The rabbit’s legs kicked hard and blindly. Garret bit down, and the rabbit went limp in his mouth. It was over. The rabbit’s smell changed slightly. No longer something to draw him on the chase, but something to satisfy his hunger.

  Christ, did I just kill a rabbit with my mouth? Garret opened his jaws in shock, and the rabbit flopped to the leaves. The sight of blood and a dead animal didn’t bother Garret. He’d killed many animals to help feed his family, especially rabbits. But not like this.

  Garret lay down in the leaves, put his muzzle on his paws, and whined. The rabbit had been alive a few moments ago, now it was as dead as the crumbly leaves on which it sprawled. Its large eye was open, but glazing, like his Pa’s eye had surely glazed as he died. The rabbit’s smooth fur was mussed with the double row of holes from Garret’s teeth, much as his Pa’s body had been punctured by the creature’s teeth. His Pa had died alone, somewhere in the forest, torn and bleeding, just as the rabbit was torn and leaking blood onto the ground.

  Garret had killed the rabbit as his Pa had been killed. Garret was no longer a hunter with a gun, but a predator. He whined, pawing at his muzzle, trying to wipe the pervading scent of death from his nose. It wouldn’t leave. Garret howled, whimpered, and rolled, grinding himself into the leaves as if it might tear the grey fur from his body. Reflexively, he bit at his shoulder where the strap had lain. The fur was loose. Garret clamped his jaws down and pulled much harder than was necessary, desperate to tear the fur off of himself. It slid away easily, and the same popping, forceful pressure wracked him.

  The transformation went more quickly than before. A few seconds later, Garret lay naked in the leaves, curled in the fetal position, shivering. The wolfstrap was tangled around his left arm. The cold penetrated his thin human skin and he shivered violently. Five feet from the dead rabbit, Garret lay in the leaves, shook with cold, and cried for his dead Pa.

  * * *

  Garret dragged himself to the smithy the next morning. He’d cried for a long time, and it had felt surprisingly good. He’d been suppressing his grief without realizing it, and the release was so badly needed, that he was able to cook the rabbit (and a heap of potatoes) for himself and Sarn the next morning. Garret was less surprised about being able to turn into a wolf than he was amazed by how ravenous it left him. He wondered if his priorities had anything to do with being sixteen years old, but he didn’t waste much thought on it.

  Ma got out of bed later than usual, just as Garret and Sarn finishe
d eating the entire heap of food they’d prepared. Garret caught himself right before suggesting that Ma should get something to eat from the pantry. With the sky staying dark later and later, and a full stomach for the first time in days, the road to town felt even longer. The lantern in Garret’s hand only illuminated a circle around him, and beyond it, the Appalachian hills slept under their mist blanket and twilight comforter.

  Despite the breakfast with Sarn, and the temporary relief from a few tears, Garret’s feet were heavy. Not only from Pa’s death and Garret’s lack of sleep, but from the understanding that there might be little point in returning to the shop. Malvern had obviously passed down some kind of orders to his men. Malvern could have been underhanded about it, but there would have been no need. It didn’t matter if it was fair, no one would dare disobey Mr. Malvern. Whether he expressed general dislike for Garret’s family or flatly said, “If the Vilners do work for you, then you won’t do work for me,” his men would not dare set foot inside Garret’s door, and they would make sure their wives didn’t either.

  Oh, and there was still the little matter of the Not-Quite-Visible thing that had forged a magic Get-Low-And-Furry sash out of an old chain. At least his shoulder didn’t hurt nearly so bad. He was healing at remarkable speed.

  After an eternity of doing the swollen-stomach-waddle towards town, Garret arrived at the shop door. He steadied himself. What lay beyond the door no longer felt like the comfortable welcome of the worn old shop his family had owned for three generations. Now, the feelings oozing around the door were vague and snaky. He had no reason to believe the not-quite-there thing would be lurking. But he dropped the keys twice anyway as he fumbled them out of his pockets, before he realized he’d left the door unlocked the night before. Garret stood to the side, pressed against the outside wall, arm fully extended, and pushed the door open a crack.