Wolf Land

by Jonathan Janz

  “Donny,” Father Bridwell said, “Head over to the workbench and bring me those shears. No, not those. The metal-cutting ones. Uh-huh, the black handles.” Father Bridwell accepted them. “Thank you, son. Now,” he said, turning toward Melody. “You need to explain something.”

  He turned one of the oil paintings so she could see it, and her heart sank. It was one of her favorites.

  “Just what the hell is the gal in this picture doin’? Father Bridwell asked. “Flickin’ her bean?”

  Donny giggled. So did John. Robbie only watched her, stone-faced.

  Melody said nothing.

  Father Bridwell’s grin grew fierce. “What makes you think you can bring this kinda garbage into my home?”

  “Not garbage,” Melody croaked.

  Father Bridwell nodded sadly. “I feared you’d say that. It’s the kind of relaxed morals that led you to perpetrate this filth in the first place.”

  Melody didn’t even try to justify the painting. The woman in it was from a movie she’d once seen on the late show. Catherine Deneuve, the actress’s name had been. In Melody’s painting, Deneuve wasn’t masturbating, precisely, but her hands were positioned on her abdomen and the middle of her chest as though she were in the thrall of some unquenchable passion. Though the movie had been old and in Italian, Melody had liked it and had especially liked Deneuve’s acting. Vulnerable yet commanding. Sensual but at the same time enigmatic and full of dignity. Melody had wanted to be like that, but she didn’t know how to be.

  Yet she wouldn’t dare say any of this to Father Bridwell or her brothers. They’d never understand, and more importantly, they’d use it against her. Use it as an excuse to inflict more pain, more humiliation. She tried to swallow, but her throat was an arid field of cracked tissue, a throbbing, itching horror. How long had she been without water?

  Outside, the dogs barked louder.

  Father Bridwell made a soft clucking sound. “Mel, Mel, Mel.” He opened the shears, positioned them under the painting.

  “Please,” she croaked.

  “Too late for that, Missy,” he said. And began squeezing the shears, the sharp blades and his strong, grubby fingers more than able to crunch through the soft wooden frame and then to carve their way from Catherine Deneuve’s bare feet, up her legs, into the shadow of her cleft, slicing through her tummy, the canvas dividing easily, the image divided in two.

  Father Bridwell finished by snapping the top of the frame apart with his rough hands. He tossed the halves onto Melody’s bare torso. “Here you go. Boys, why don’t you pitch in too?”

  As one, her brothers hurried over to the workbench to fetch various implements. Donny seized a chisel, thrust it through the center of a painting, one she’d done years ago and to which she wasn’t particularly attached. It didn’t bother her, except the violation that she felt, the meanness of the act.

  The one John was desecrating—he’d taken a carpet cutter and was sawing it vertically—was important to her, mainly because it was newer and represented some of her best work. She’d drawn Glenn Kershaw in that one, shirtless. And though Glenn had stopped calling her, like all guys eventually did, Glenn had treated her nicely when they were together. He’d touched her, used his mouth on her. Kissed her in a way that suggested she was more than a slab of meat. But now the likeness of Glenn was shredded, his face a disarranged parody, some amateurish attempt at a Picasso.

  Her chest heaving, her teeth grinding, she blinked away the thick, Plasticine tears and turned to her youngest brother. Her ally. Her one hope in this unending descent.

  Robbie was staring at her, but his eyes were unseeing. He clutched a painting in his right hand and a lighter in his left. The painting was turned away from her, but she knew what it was already, knew it even before he flipped it around and moved the flame below it. The yellow cone of fire licked at it, blackening a spot on the bottom left and making a black Christmas tree shape. And that was fitting, Melody decided, because she’d gotten this first canvas at Christmas, way back when she was in middle school. Robbie had bought it for her, and it occurred to her that Robbie was the only one who knew about the attic. He’d never ventured up there with her, but once or twice she’d confided in him about it, and on one occasion he’d asked her what she’d been working on.

  The truth clanged home.

  Robbie had led them to the attic.

  Robbie, who clutched the painting she’d made of him and her, the pair of them holding hands. It wasn’t the incineration of her artwork that wounded her—she’d been a shitty artist back then, with nary a clue how to draw faces—but the fact that Robbie had started this. Her protector. Her one friend.

  Her betrayer.

  “Look at her!” Donny hooted. He was stabbing at his painting, the chisel popping through the canvas like exit wounds in a pale man’s back. “She’s gettin’ riled at us, I can tell!”

  John eyed her over his ribboned canvas. “Good. Maybe she’ll show some life when I take me a piece.”

  Father Bridwell discarded the mutilated image of Catherine Deneuve and began shearing a canvas of a man and woman making love, this one also inspired by a film, a dirty one her father had left in the VHS player. It was how she’d learned about sex. Well, that and having her father and brothers fuck her.

  Her brothers were laughing now, sharing the joke. But not Robbie. He was staring at her over the flickering oil painting of them holding hands, and he was really staring at her now, seeing her. She appealed to him with her eyes, raised her head as far as she could so he’d see her face and understand the agony she was in, but the more he stared back at her the less he appeared to care.

  No, that wasn’t right. He did care, but not in the way she’d hoped he would. He hated her, was glaring at her with steely contempt. And it wasn’t just her behavior, her sleeping around. He hated what she was. Hated her all the way to her soul. And she thought, How could you, Robbie? How could you be so unfeeling and selfish? How could you not care about what’s happening to me? How could you—

  Her thoughts snapped off as she realized how he could let this happen.

  He didn’t care.

  He’d never cared.

  He’d only been nice to her so she’d sleep with him, so she wouldn’t make him rape her the way the others did. Robbie liked her to be willing. Robbie liked her to be tractable. Robbie wanted her to spread herself for him and French kiss him and pretend it was okay, it was perfectly natural. And the memory of those warm nights with him, those nights swaddled in the illusion of their shared regard, those nights when he’d stayed with her after using her and allowed her to bask in his warmth and his gentleness, the thought of it made her tendons creak, her muscles bunch. Donny was still laughing, but not Father Bridwell. He’d always been smarter than his sons, if no less diseased. Father Bridwell understood that something profound was taking place between her and Robbie, and it could have been that understanding that made him shift uneasily in his work boots.

  Or maybe it was something else, she decided. For his eyes had swung to her left arm, which she realized was straining against the rope. This made Donny and John laugh harder, but not Father Bridwell. Father Bridwell was frowning—and sweating, she saw—but Robbie was merely drinking in her expression as the painting of them burned and burned. The flames were licking up the canvas now, the oils scorched and smelly. And the odor of it, the corrosive, unhealthy reek that clogged the room was making her angry, was making her furious, though not as furious as the look on Robbie’s face was making her.

  Forsaker.

  Melody jerked on the rope. It strained taut. From behind the pole barn, the dogs were going absolutely berserk now, their barks so fast and fierce they merged into an unceasing buzz.

  Deceiver.

  Melody convulsed. She was dimly aware that John and Donny had ceased laughing. She glowered at Robbie, whose dead-faced mask was finally alteri
ng into something that might have been alarm.

  Betrayer.

  She growled at him.

  Father Bridwell held up a hand. “Now, don’t you go getting bent out of—”

  “BETRAYER!” she bellowed.

  With a roar, Melody tore in half the rope binding her left arm.

  Donny shrilled out his terror. John backpedaled and tripped over one of the unspoiled canvases.

  Father Bridwell was edging toward the stairs.

  But it was at Robbie she was staring. Robbie who’d dropped the flaming canvas, the image there long since having scorched to a brown-black smudge. She strained to her left, heaved, and the rope around her right wrist snapped free. The pulsing, strobing pain in her back, her rib cage, her entire body, it doubled, tripled, skyrocketed. Yet as she flopped over onto all fours, her elbows hyperextending with twin blood splats on the grungy cement floor, she kept her eyes trained on Robbie, on the Forsaker, on the one who’d brought her to this place. Her paintings were the only things she had left, the only things they hadn’t taken from her, and now they were gone gone gone gone gone, and the laughing brother, she couldn’t remember his name, was scrambling over the work bench toward the window. The unsmiling one

  (John? Was it John?)

  was still spread-eagle on the cement, watching in numb shock, but the oldest one

  (Father, it was her father)

  was making for the stairs and she knew she didn’t have much time so instead of spilling Robbie’s guts she went for the oldest one.

  (Father Bridwell, Father Bridwell)

  Melody launched herself onto the side of the staircase, clambered under the single rail, and rose, hulking over Father Bridwell, and in the swirling shadows of the naked bulb she reached toward him, lifted him higher, higher, and he was saying “Daughter, my Daughter, please don’t do this, please don’t hurt me”, and she smelled his tobacco-stained teeth and his unwashed body, like a heap of rotten mushrooms, the stink washing over her as it did when he rutted his foulness into her this week, last month, last year, a decade ago, back when she was twelve, and sex was nausea, sex was shame, sex was holding down the vomit and avoiding punishment by not crying because of the bleeding and the depression and the horror and the shame.

  “Don’t, daughter,” he pleaded. “Don’t—”

  And she reached down and tore through his jeans and scooped the hot mess of flesh and scrotum and blood and withered penis and shoved them all into his quivering face. Something hit her down around the ankle, and she dropped Father Bridwell and stared past her slashed ankle and beheld…

  …John, the stoic one, with a hacksaw, the rusty-toothed implement that had opened her skin, made her bleed, and the growl was deep in her throat and good and growing and John realized how he’d angered her and backpedaled, and the smell rising from him into the stairwell was fear mixed with hot, tarry shit. She lunged under the stair rail, more lithe than any creature on earth, reveling in the fear stink and the soiled pants. With a bound he was under her, like a mewling, squealing baby, and all of his toughness was gone, all of his meanness. He’d raped her with a broom handle the night before, raped her and lubed her with her own blood and then taken her and pounded her while she wailed and blacked out and swam into consciousness again, and thinking of this she reached down, jerked his legs apart so hard that his pelvis cracked, and then she thrust her claws under the hot, squelching stinkpit of his ass and began steam-shoveling at the seat of his jeans, striping the tough fabric, ribboning the jeans and the underwear and the buttocks beneath, and he squalled and kicked and writhed to be free, and with the shit and the blood smeared up to her wire-haired forearms she made a fist and drove it up his rectum. His scream became a braying siren and though it hurt her sensitive ears she grinned, her slaver dripping into his thrashing, wild-eyed face, and then she was thrusting the fist, savaging his bowels, his small intestine, and the harder he screamed the wider her smile grew. She heard the window over the workbench hinge open and knew she’d have to finish before Donny got away, so she flicked open her hand, her razor nails shredding John’s intestines, and his screams pleased her, so hoarse, so frail, so she opened her fist, closed it, scythed through his internal organs until the cement floor was a scarlet pool and John was a jittering shit-stained rag doll.

  She shot a look at Donny, who’d gotten lodged in the rectangular window, the disused metal rusted and unyielding. Donny was wailing out a garbled combination of prayers and obscenities and entreaties for help, and Melody, rising to her new, full height of seven feet, two inches, strode right past her youngest brother, past…past…

  …past Robbie, who was cowering on the floor not far from where John lay thrashing in his death spasms. And behind her on the stairwell landing lay her father. He was still alive, she realized, and was sobbing quietly to himself, maybe mourning his missing genitals. And…

  …and not needing to climb onto the workbench to take hold of Donny’s kicking legs, Melody reached up, made to grab one of his boots, and was promptly kicked in the face. She snarled, seized the foot, and wrenched it in a fierce one-eighty. Donny howled at the gruesome spiral fracture of his tibia, but his body was wedged so tightly in the rusty aperture of the stuck window that he could only buck and strain. Loving the sound of his wails, Melody twisted his other foot, but this time kept going, winding it counter-clockwise until the ankle skin split open and the bones snapped and she came away holding the foot and the hemorrhaging stub of ankle and the scent of the marrow was too enticing to resist. And then she was licking it, scooping the delicious lifesauce out of the bone shards and laughing at Donny’s caterwauling screams.

  “Unnatural!” someone was screaming from behind her. “That’s unnatural!”

  She climbed on the workbench, used her talons to spread the meat of Donny’s calf, to gnaw at the muscle tissue, the gristle beneath, and she smelled more piss, more shit, and knew Donny had voided his bladder and bowels. That bothered her because the acrid yellow liquid dribbled down his leg onto her writhing lips, and in a fury she slammed his lower body down, breaking Donny’s back, the blood and spinal fluid spurting out of his distressed flesh. She’d let him dangle there, she decided, while she tended to the other one, the Betrayer.

  She strode over to Robbie and sprayed piss all over his face. The ammoniac odor was eye-watering, but it was hers and beneath it she caught a whiff of burned oil, of charred canvas. She was about to rip his head off when she heard herself asking, in a voice like none she’d ever heard before, “Why?”

  The Betrayer sobbed out an answer, while from her right the voice kept shouting, “Unnatural! It’s not natural!” and she knew it to be true, at least with regard to her life. None of it had been natural, none of it, and she saw Robbie gaping up at her with hope in his eyes and it was too much and she jammed her sharp-nailed thumbs into his eyeballs, the ocular fluid splurting over her knuckles, and she dug and dug, and soon her nails were splintering through the back of his skull, scraping on concrete.

  John had long since bled out. Donny was scarcely quivering too, the workbench and old tools lapped over with blood, and her father, the fool, was still clutching his nonexistent private parts and calling her unnatural, and she marched over and seized him by the hair, towed him up the stairs after her, dragged his flailing body into the kitchen, slammed it onto the table, and plunged her maw into the gory hole she’d made in his abdomen. She moaned with pleasure while he shrieked, and she feasted of his entrails for many minutes after he expired. She became aware that the dogs had ceased barking.

  At some point she found herself weakening. She realized the change had ended. Maybe the intensity of it had been too much for her to sustain. She didn’t know. What she did was head down to the basement, where the rope was stored. It didn’t take her long to make what she needed, for she had practiced it before. And she soon found herself climbing the pull-down ladder into the attic, where only a handful of
her canvases remained. She didn’t take time to glance at these. What was the point? She had a chair up here, of course, because it got tiring to paint while she stood, and before long she’d tied the rope off, looped it under her chin. Without pause she stepped off the chair and felt the rope go snug around her neck. And then her vision darkened and she remembered the horse, the way it had hated her. Like everything she loved. It had hated her. Hated her. Hated…

  Part Four

  Reunion

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Glenn stared at the whiteboard Joyce had wheeled out of the library office. They were in the rear of the main floor, the board facing the tall casement windows that looked out on the twilit trees. Joyce had arranged it so they could spot anybody entering the library in time to erase what was written on the whiteboard:

  CATALYSTS

  GLENN: JEALOUSY.

  WEEZER: LUST.

  GARNER: RAGE/REVENGE.

  JOYCE?

  MELODY?

  VARIABLES

  SEVERITY OF BITE

  DEPTH OF WOUND

  TOTALITY OF CHANGE

  SPEED AT WHICH MEDICAL AID WAS ADMINISTERED

  BLOOD LOSS

  LUNAR CYCLE?

  But all Glenn could think about was the drive-in. The big oaf he’d disemboweled on the sink. The poor biker bastard who’d stumbled upon them and gotten killed for his bad timing.

  Glenn knew he wasn’t going to live much longer. Cosmic justice forbade it. Even if he was a different person than he’d been only last weekend, there was still a taint on him, an indelible stain that marked him as a monster, a defiler, a creature who deserved to be hunted, deserved to be killed.

  It was a matter of time.

  “We’re missing something,” Joyce said. She chewed her bottom lip, frowned. She jerked, her eyes opening wide. “Of course!” she said, and proceeded to add MANNER OF DEATH to the whiteboard.

  Glenn eyed the big letters. “Isn’t this a little morbid?”