The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  And then he looks over at the other wolf, and sees who that wolf has become.

  It’s his roommate. His missing roommate. Jørgen. Big, hairy Jørgen, rising, naked, in all his wide-bellied Northern European resplendence.

  Despite everything, Billy grins: Jørgen is here, and he’s all right, or at least as all right as one can be, in Hell. Jørgen spots Billy, and grins back, and lifts him up into a great embrace. Both of them are still naked, so maybe this should be awkward, but Billy decides to think of it as Greco-Roman and just roll with it. It’s not the only thing he needs to just go with at the moment. Fuck, he doesn’t understand a single thing that’s happened in the last hour. He’s still half operating under the principle that maybe he’s dead, and that this is the beginning of some kind of long review of every person he’s ever met in his entire life.

  When he’s released from the crushing hug he gets a look at Jørgen’s ear, which looks, well, which looks like someone bit the fuck out of it. He remembers doing it; he remembers liking it, in the same way he liked fucking Elisa. And he remembers what Elisa said, in the gloom of last night’s bar, after she weighed him in her mind: There’s a part of you that wants to be powerful and that doesn’t give a good goddamn about anything else.

  “Shit, man,” is the first thing Billy says. “I’m sorry about your ear.”

  Jørgen touches it absently. “It will heal,” he says, after a moment.

  “I’m so—I’m so glad to see you,” Billy says. “How long have you been stuck here?”

  “Almost two weeks,” says Jørgen. “I think. Telling time here is—difficult.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” Billy says. “If I’d known, I’d—”

  Billy tries to figure out what exactly he could have done.

  “So you two know one another?” Elisa, now dressed, says. Introductions are made, a little awkwardly. Elisa won’t quite look Billy in the face, and he wonders what she thinks about what they did. Whether she enjoyed it. Whether she feels sorry. Whether she would do it again. They didn’t even use a condom, Billy realizes. But reflecting on what just happened, reminds him of the fact of the moment, that all three of them, a minute ago, were all turned into animals—godforsaken animals. Billy gets an upsurge of raw existential confusion, rising like a wave of nausea. His legs go weak.

  “What the fuck,” Billy says. He uprights the chair and sits down on it heavily. “I mean—what the fuck?”

  Elisa and Jørgen, who are managing somehow to come across to Billy as actually calm, exchange a look.

  “I understand your distress,” Jørgen says, finally. “Follow me, and we will talk. I have a room. My clothes are there. I will dress, and I will try to explain.”

  “Okay,” Billy says. He breathes hard, tries not to hyperventilate. “Okay. Let me—let me get my clothes.”

  But his clothes are ruined. He tries to see if he could salvage them, but they’re totally shredded, not even enough left to make a loincloth. He takes a second to mourn his army jacket, which he loved, mud-and-shit-covered though it had become during the day’s indignities. Deep in the pockets of his burst pants he finds a wadded-up napkin. He knows the words that are written down on it and he opts to leave it behind. He also finds Laurent’s card. The guy is an asshole, but Billy folds the card into his sweaty palm nevertheless: he has a feeling, right now, like any ally might be a good ally.

  His socks are gone but his sneakers are intact at least, and he’s seen Die Hard enough times that he knows that it’s probably a good idea to put them on.

  “Elisa says there’s no way out of here,” Billy says, as he and Elisa follow Jørgen down the hall.

  “She is correct,” Jørgen says.

  Billy falls into a worried silence that seems shared by the others. Eventually they reach a door with a broken lock, and Jørgen pushes it open. Inside it looks like any other hotel room: king-size bed, tiny desk, bad art. Billy wonders whether the end table contains a Bible.

  Jørgen gathers the sheet off the bed and offers it to Billy, who throws it over himself like an enormous drape. His legs still feel weak, and he collapses into the armchair in the corner. “Okay,” he says, and the questions rush out of him. “Where the fuck are we, and why are we here? Is this Hell? Are we dead? Did we live terrible lives and we’re now dead and stuck here forever? Oh, and, also, am I the only person who is going to mention that we all changed into fucking wolves a minute ago?”

  “That is not exactly right,” Jørgen says, zipping up his jeans.

  “Did you see us a minute ago?” Billy says.

  “Yes, my friend.” Jørgen gathers up an undershirt, pulls it on over his enormous, squarish head. “But we weren’t changed a minute ago. We were never changed. We were born this way.”

  “But,” Billy says. He looks from Elisa to Jørgen and back again.

  “That doesn’t make sense. I’ve never turned into a wolf before.”

  “I have,” Elisa says.

  “As have I,” Jørgen admits, scratching his blond beard. “Many times.”

  Billy grips his head. “We’ve been roommates for two and a half years,” he says. “How could I not have noticed that you were on occasion turning into a wolf?”

  “I was out at night a lot,” Jørgen says, looking a little pained.

  “You were in the music scene,” Billy says. “You told me you were going to shows!”

  “Yes,” Jørgen says, remorsefully. “Yes, and for this? I apologize. I had intended to tell you the truth earlier.”

  “I would have liked that,” Billy says. “You’re saying that you knew that I was … like this, too?”

  “I did,” Jørgen says. He shakes his head sadly. “I knew it the first night we met, the night the toilets exploded.”

  Elisa arches an eyebrow at this.

  “I could smell it in you. I thought we could learn things from one another.”

  “But you didn’t learn anything from me,” Billy protests. “I mean, I didn’t have anything to teach you. I didn’t even know that I was … this. Whatever it is that I am. That we are. How is that even possible? How could I be, like, a wolfman and not know it?”

  “You didn’t know it,” Jørgen says, settling his weight down onto the edge of the bed, “because someone—a person, or a group of people—hid it from you.”

  “Explain,” Billy says.

  “I cannot fully explain,” Jørgen says. “I do not have all the answers. But I have pieced some things together. You remember last year, when I went home, to Norway?”

  “I remember,” Billy says. “You were gone for a month. You told me you were doing audio engineering for some power electronics band.”

  “And that was true. But on that trip I also did research. I found people who had some information about a thing, a type of being, called Fenrissonr.”

  “Can you spell that?” says Elisa. She’s sitting at the desk and she’s jotting things down into a little Moleskine notebook. Jørgen assents to the request.

  “Fenrissonr are creatures talked about in Norway, Sweden, Finland. But they are not animals. They are not organisms. They are not a thing that belongs on earth.”

  Elisa pauses in her scribbling. “What the fuck are they, then?”

  “They are demons.”

  “Demons?” Billy says.

  “Wolf-demons.”

  “Hell-wolves,” Elisa says.

  “If you like,” Jørgen says. “And on my trip I spoke to some people, old men, part of the Scandinavian occult underground. They claimed to be eyewitnesses to a ritual that occurred sometime in the early eighties. A sex magic ritual.”

  “A sex magic ritual?” Billy says.

  “Sex, magic, ritual,” Elisa says, copying down the phrase. Billy can hear her put a period at the end of it.

  “A sex magic ritual,” Jørgen says, “presided over by Lucifer himself. And in this ritual, these old men said, three witches were impregnated by three Fenrissonr. They say that Lucifer was trying to breed a new race of c
reature. Not ordinary wolves. Wolves with powers. Wolves that could serve as an elite guard for the Devil himself. I think that we, the three of us, were the result of that ritual.”

  Something starts to spin wildly in Billy’s head at this. “But wait a second,” he says. “We weren’t raised by witches. I mean—we have parents. Real parents.”

  “I was adopted,” Elisa volunteers. Billy whirls, looks at her with wild accusation in his eyes. She lifts her palms and gives him a what-do-you-want-from-me expression.

  “It is—hard to determine what happened next,” Jørgen says.

  “From what I pieced together, it seems like the operation was sabotaged by mystic operatives who had infiltrated the coven. The three infants were taken from their witch-mothers, and put under the protection of—”

  “Don’t say wards,” Billy says.

  “Yes,” Jørgen says. “Wards.”

  “Motherfuck it,” Billy says.

  “Powerful wards, designed to both contain the wolf part—the Fenrissonr part—and to keep Lucifer away from the infants. And then I think the infants were smuggled away, and raised by the operatives, who tried to raise them normally. As normal children.”

  “And here we are,” Elisa says. “Normal as blueberry pie.”

  “Bullshit,” Billy says, his voice going wild and high. He says this less because he’s certain it’s bullshit and more because it’s just too much, finally too much, he can’t take on one more world-shattering revelation after every other thing that’s happened this week. “I mean, you could test this theory, right? Just ask your parents?”

  “I cannot,” Jørgen says. “My parents are gone. Their house burned in an accident, five years ago.”

  “Shit,” Billy says. “I knew that. I’m sorry.”

  “Do not apologize,” Jørgen says, shrugging. “But I should tell you this detail. The first time I ever turned into a wolf was less than one month after they died.”

  Billy has nothing to say to that, really. He turns to Elisa. “What do you think?”

  Elisa claps her notebook shut. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s pretty fucked up, but some of it fits. I was adopted, like I said. Also, my parents are both dead. They both contracted viral myocarditis two years ago, in Thailand. Aaand, the first time I turned into a wolf? Less than one month after they died. That’s a close fucking match.”

  Billy takes in this information.

  “So I might be adopted? My mother and father might have been—fucking—mystical secret agents or some shit?”

  “That is what I am proposing,” Jørgen says.

  Billy remembers his mother’s swords and his father’s books. He remembers all the voice mails he never listened to this week. “I should … call my dad,” Billy says, slowly, trying to remain as calm as possible. “Do either of you have a phone?”

  “Well, yeah,” says Elisa, “but signal sucks here.”

  They all sit there for a second in silence.

  “I want a cigarette,” Elisa says.

  “I want a drink,” Billy says. He wonders if there’s a minibar in this room somewhere. He figures, wearily, that there probably is, only each drink comes with a terrible cost.

  “There is one last thing I can’t figure out,” Jørgen says, to Elisa. “You and I turned into wolves after our parents died. This suggests that our parents were probably maintaining the wards on us, secretly, throughout our lives. But”—he turns to Billy—“your father is still alive—and yet—”

  “Yeah, no, the Devil tricked me,” Billy says. “He got the ward off me a different way. He—he used Ollard to do it. Which reminds me. Did the Devil fill you in on that whole part of the story? The deal with this guy Ollard? The guy who wants to, whatever it is, destroy the world?”

  “I’m glad that you mention that, Billy,” says Lucifer, who is standing there, in the doorway, watching them. They all jolt and look at him. He’s a little dressier than Billy’s seen him before: he’s wearing a white tuxedo shirt, with French cuffs. Must be a big day. He has a garment bag slung casually over his shoulder.

  “It’s good to see all three of you together,” Lucifer says, “and we’ll have ample time to enjoy one another’s company later. I hope you’ll forgive me for cutting the niceties short for the moment, however, as Mr. Timothy Ollard is still very much a pressing concern. He has dispelled the fifth of the seals that separate the Neko from this world, faster than I expected, and I can feel that he’s close to dispelling the sixth. By my sense of things, I would guess that we have less than a day left.”

  “Fuck,” Billy says.

  “Fortunately, my little cubs, we don’t need a day. We don’t need twenty-four hours; we don’t need twelve. We simply need to go to Ollard’s tower—”

  “I can’t go back in there,” Billy says. “The last time I went in there I got tortured. He could have killed me.”

  “Billy,” Lucifer says. “With all due respect, I would hope that you can see the difference between the last time you went in there, and this forthcoming time. Before you were a scared little man, with your potential tamped down deep within you, jammed in a box you’d never opened. But now—now you are something very different.”

  “I don’t want to be different,” Billy says, but Lucifer ignores this, throwing Billy the garment bag.

  Billy unzips the bag. Inside is a single-piece jumpsuit, high-visibility orange. Billy half expects to turn it over and see PROPERTY OF HELL stenciled on the back.

  “I’m not wearing this,” he says, pulling his bedsheet tighter around him.

  Lucifer gives Billy a beseeching look, holds it for a good five seconds while Billy watches it impassively. Eventually he drops it.

  “Jørgen’s van is parked in Lower Manhattan,” Lucifer says.

  “I’m going to take you to the van, and you will drive to Ollard’s tower, go into the tower, and do what is expected of you. By doing so, you will save the world. Are we understood?”

  “Absolutely not,” Billy says.

  “Remember, Billy. You no longer have a choice.” He raises his hand and snaps his fingers, only instead of the old-timey flashbulb noise there is instead a noise like a peal of thunder, followed by a sharp feedbacking whine that causes everyone except Lucifer to clap their hands over their ears.

  “How odd,” Lucifer says, when the whine has subsided. An expression of concern crosses his face. “Normally that—goes differently.”

  He leans out into the hallway.

  There is the sound of automatic weapons fire.

  Lucifer is blown back into the room; blood gouts from his chest and from a wound in his throat. A great wet plum-colored stain spreads across the tattered front of the tuxedo shirt. Billy, Jørgen, and Elisa all leap away, horrified. Lucifer stumbles backward, gets tripped up by the desk chair and goes crashing down. Someone screams. Billy realizes that it’s him.

  Lucifer clamps a hand over the breached artery in his neck, and struggles to speak.

  “Ultimately,” he says, “should someone choose to write my story, I hope that author will take the time to mention that my entire existence really was characterized by my being profoundly, uniquely misunderstood.” This descends into a jag of morbid coughing; blood surges from his mouth in three great waves and then he’s still.

  Standing in the doorway are two bearded commando-looking dudes, dressed in gray fatigues webbed with meshes of black nylon, holding stubby automatic weapons at their waists. The older one—his beard almost entirely gray—enters the room and prods Lucifer with his boot. The guys smells like hot machine oil and pipe tobacco, a particular type of sweet Virginia tobacco that hits Billy square in the sensorium and unlocks, of all things, a strong memory of childhood. It’s the smell of home.

  And that’s finally the thing that allows Billy to recognize the bearded commando, allows him to realize that he knows him quite well, has in fact known him for his entire life, even though he never expected to see him in this kind of outfit, or in this kind of context.r />
  “Dad?” Billy blurts.

  “Put your clothes on, son,” says Keith Ridgeway, Billy’s father. “We’re getting out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BACK TO WORK

  CIRCUMSTANCES • ADOLESCENT FEELINGS • GEOMETRY • RELEASING THE CLUTCH • LIFE IN WISCONSIN • BATSHIT INSANITY • FINALLY YOU GET TO FULL STOP • CHINESE FOOD VS. THE VOID • CAN I GET AN AMEN? • A FACT ABOUT OCEANS

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Billy says, looking into the face of his father. “You’re not—I mean are you really—?” He’s suffering a surge of astonishment at seeing his father here, standing over the bullet-riddled corpse of the Devil himself, and he can’t quite shape it into the form of a question. Just the sight of his bookish father holding a gun: just that alone is a shock to his system.

  “Billy,” Keith says. He takes a pair of his familiar technocratish glasses out of a Velcro pouch lashed up under his armpit, rubs them with the hem of his combat jacket, and dons them. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “I’m not all right,” Billy says. He feels a little truculent, saying it, ’cause clearly his dad is here to rescue him, and maybe this is the part where he can begin to relax, just lie back and be shunted to safety, but right now all Billy can think is that he has been lied to his entire life, and that kind of crowds out any major feelings of gratitude that he might otherwise be enjoying.

  “I understand,” Keith says. His eyes, magnified by the wide lenses of his glasses, look sad, although Billy finds himself doubting the sentiment. “I am sure some of the occurrences of the last week have been—disorienting.” And then the sadness gives way to intensity, a completely unfamiliar blast of goddamn derring-do or something, and he turns to look at the other commando, a tall, thin man with a West African cast to his features. “Jean,” he barks, “get me a reading on these three.”