(Fear, she thought then. She knows now—desire.)
When she came downstairs again, he was standing outside. There was a wolf’s footprint in the snow outside the cabin. It was the same length as Mark’s foot, and as wide; her claws had pierced right through the snow and dug up four thin sprays of black dirt across the white as she ran.
He passed his foot over it, smoothing the snow free of the evidence. She waited, wondering what she would do if he threatened to expose her.
(It was a lie. She knew what she would do. On four legs, she could hunt without thinking.)
After a long time, he took a step backwards, closer to her, without turning.
“Does it frighten you?” he asked.
She said, “Always.”
When he came at her, the kiss drove her against the door with a thud, and he tore away the blanket as if he wanted some part, any part, of her fight.
She dragged her nails over his back, five thin trails of red against his skin.
The dire wolf that lives in human form spends the day of the new moon curled in a corner, trembling, aching, grinding her teeth as the bones scream for change. The moment of transformation is unbearable (there is always the wrenching cry), but it passes, and the bones and the fur and the teeth of the wolf are her relief.
A dire wolf can turn at will, but it’s the last line of defense; between pain and death, some choose death.
Changing at every new moon from human to wolf and back can drive you mad. Most dire wolves eventually give in to their true form, and make their homes in forests, or tundra if arctic wolves are nearby, or desert caves. They can go anywhere once the moon has lost its power over them. What animal would stand up to a beast twice as large as a wolf, twice as fast, twice as cunning?
Legend, which looks for monsters within its own neighbors, claim that werewolves are people who achieve the body of the wolf.
This is untrue.
The dire wolf took on a human form; down at the bone, between every breath, each of them is really the animal. The human shape is a useful trick, that’s all.
(Adapt or die.)
Christopher’s waiting at the lab when she comes back.
“Mark says it looks like an Arctic wolf that got on the wrong side of a bear attack,” he says. “What are you thinking it is?”
“I think that wolf had a pretty sad end,” she said. “Did you find anything else of the skeleton?”
Christopher shakes his head. “We don’t have the manpower we used to, but as far as we looked, there was nothing to find. Maybe the head got carried over to where our guy found it.”
“Was there any skull? Any other bones?” She thinks about the deep, low temporal fossa—a jaw is easy to disguise, but the skull would be hard to explain.
He shakes his head.
“Where’s Mark?”
“Went out looking for you,” Christopher says. “I’ll call him back in on the radio.”
When she’s alone, she looks at the jaw under the magnifying glass, marks on her report the hundred tiny dents where the birds pecked the flesh away, the smooth expanses where the insects got there at last, carrying away whatever was hanging on.
The bone is cool, and smooth as human skin.
Mark opens the door too fast, gets too close.
“I saw the tracks,” he says, quietly, so Christopher won’t hear. “It’s big.”
He means, it’s bigger than you. His breath is warm on her scalp.
“I’ll win,” she says.
After a little silence, he says, “I’d forgotten what it feels like to be close to you.”
She doesn’t know what he means; doesn’t dare ask.
The dire wolf was too slow to evolve, everyone knew.
“Poor guys,” Alice said (she pitied all the bones). She waggled the saber-toothed tiger skull she was working on, like it was nodding. “The saber-tooth says nature cuts us all down sooner or later. He should know. Poor kitty.”
Alice always got punchy near the end of an excavation.
“Nature might surprise you,” Velia said, ran her tongue over her teeth.
“Promise me you won’t fight,” he says.
They’re in his room. He’s pacing; she’s watching the moonlight play over his face. When he passes back and forth, his shoulder brushes her shoulder.
“It doesn’t want to fight,” she says.
He stops and looks at her. “What can I do? How can I help you?”
She doesn’t know how to explain how he’s only ever been a danger. She doesn’t know how to tell him how different he is from most of his kind, in loving her.
(Most wolves find a mate in each other, because humans are frail; because when faced with a monster, a normal human senses danger and retreats.)
She says, “Live where there are no wolves.”
He frowns like she’s cut him. She knows that pain.
She wants to leave here with him and go somewhere where there are no wolves, carve some narrow sliver of love from each of them, see what it can build.
Doesn’t dare.
They don’t embrace; his hands are shaking, her hands are fists. He kisses her temple, presses his lips to the temporal fossa; she holds her breath, closes her eyes.
At night, the wolf ’s tracks are easier to follow. There’s a better quality of shadow when the moon is out, and in her waxy coat and bare feet, Velia is an extension of the snow; only her dark eyes and black hair give her away.
(They used to be the color of dust, and her face was broad and sharp-mouthed. There’s too much human in her face, now.)
The den is in a shallow cave, close to the surface. It’s shallow enough that by the time Velia smells decay, she is looking past the narrow entry through the darkness to the wolf and the human body of its dead mate.
Of course there were no wolf bones to find; the human shape is the dire wolf ’s last defense.
But Velia’s eyes have always been sharp, and she can see from where she’s standing that there’s an empty shadow beneath the torn throat, the wrinkled skin. (She was old, old enough for even the true wolf to die.)
The break in the jaw was a clean one. It must have snapped as he dragged his mate’s body to the shadow of the den, before the change, where he could make sure no stranger would find her.
He watches her with gleaming eyes, and she braces herself against his sorrow.
She says, “We found the bone. You’re safe. You can find another place.”
The head droops, and a huff of breath mists over the black for a moment.
Then the wolf lies down beside its mate and stretches its neck along the ground, waiting for the strike.
Velia hadn’t known enough true wolves to know what can happen when a wolf is parted from its mate. She had hoped her parents were the exception, and not the rule. But the dire wolf does what she dreaded; it mates for life.
No, she thinks, I can’t, I can’t, but the wolf is willing. (The human form is just a trick; at the roots, the wolf is always waiting.)
When the change comes over her, the other wolf whimpers a welcome. She chokes through the pain before the wolf form takes, bites down on her cries.
Old habit. The wolf is silent when it hunts.
According to the fossil record, dire wolves hunted in packs to the exclusion of good sense, leaping into the tar pits by the dozens until every last one of them was drowned.
“Live together, die together, I guess,” sighed Alice, cleaning dirt off her chisel. “I mean, what could possibly drive an animal into the tar pits, once you saw what happened to the others? They couldn’t all be stupid.”
Velia blew a layer of dust off the skull at her feet and wondered about that first wolf, the first one who had retreated from the edge of the tar. She wondered how it got desperate enough to turn to humans just to find some pack to live among.
That was the dire wolf that had fathered them all. The true wolf had always been separate; had been always alone.
When Velia can stand on
her two feet, she washes the blood off in the river, then pulls on her waxy coat and walks back the way she came.
She scuffs gently over her footsteps on her way, so that no one might find the tracks and disturb the dead.
She leaves that night. She doesn’t ask where Mark was going. Doesn’t dare.
(When the dire wolf bites down, it holds on. That’s what it’s made to do.)
Do the dead lose their egotism and their one-time need to limit and dominate earthly households? wonders Caroleen. Her deceased twin had maintained Caroleen as a sort of extended self, and it had resulted in isolation for the two of them . . .
PARALLEL LINES
TIM POWERS
It should have been their birthday today. Well, it was still hers, Caroleen supposed, but with BeeVee gone the whole idea of “birthday” seemed to have gone, too. Could she be seventy-three on her own?
Caroleen’s right hand had been twitching intermittently since she’d sat up in the living room daybed five minutes ago, and she lifted the coffee cup with her left hand. The coffee was hot enough but had no taste, and the living room furniture-the coffee table, the now-useless analog TV set with its forlorn rabbit-ears antenna, the rocking chair beside the white-brick fireplace, all bright in the sunlight glaring through the east window at her back-looked like arranged items in some kind of museum diorama; no further motion possible.
But there was still the gravestone to be dealt with, these disorganized nine weeks later. Four hundred and fifty dollars for two square feet of etched granite, and the company in Nevada could not get it straight that Beverly Veronica Erlich and Caroleen Ann Erlich both had the same birth date, though the second date under Caroleen’s name was to be left blank for some indeterminate period.
BeeVee’s second date had not been left to chance. BeeVee had swallowed all the Darvocets and Vicodins in the house when the pain of her cancer, if it had been cancer, had become more than she could bear. For a year or so she had always been in some degree of pain—Caroleen remembered how BeeVee had exhaled a fast whew! from time to time, and the way her forehead seemed always to be misted with sweat, and her late-acquired habit of repeatedly licking the inner edge of her upper lip. And she had always been shifting her position when she drove, and bracing herself against the floor or the steering wheel. More and more she had come to rely—both of them had come to rely—on poor dumpy Amber, the teenager who lived next door. The girl came over to clean the house and fetch groceries, and seemed grateful for the five dollars an hour, even with BeeVee’s generous criticisms of every job Amber did.
But Amber would not be able to deal with the headstone company. Caroleen shifted forward on the daybed, rocked her head back and forth to make sure she was wearing her reading glasses rather than her bifocals, and flipped open the brown plastic phone book. A short silver pencil was secured by a plastic loop in the book’s gutter, and she fumbled it free—
—And her right hand twitched forward, knocking the coffee cup right off the table, and the pencil shook in her spotty old fingers as its point jiggled across the page.
She threw a fearful, guilty glance toward the kitchen in the moment before she remembered that BeeVee was dead; then she allowed herself to relax and looked at the squiggle she had drawn across the old addresses and phone numbers.
It was jagged, but recognizably cursive letters:
Ineedyourhelpplease
It was, in fact, recognizably BeeVee’s handwriting.
Caroleen’s hand twitched again, and scrawled the same cramped sequence of letters across the page. She lifted the pencil, postponing all thought in this frozen moment, and after several seconds her hand spasmed once more, no doubt writing the same letters in the air. Her whole body shivered with a feverish chill and she thought she was going to vomit; she leaned out over the rug, but the queasiness passed.
She was sure that her hand had been writing this message in the air ever since she had awakened.
Caroleen didn’t think BeeVee had ever before, except with ironic emphasis, said please when asking her for something.
She was remotely glad that she was sitting, for her heart thudded alarmingly in her chest and she was dizzy with the enormous thought that BeeVee was not gone, not entirely gone. She gripped the edge of the bed, suddenly afraid of falling and knocking the table over, rolling into the rocking chair. The reek of spilled coffee was strong in her nostrils.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay!” she said again, louder. The shaking in her hand had subsided, so she flipped to a blank calendar page at the back of the book and scrawled OKAY at the top of the page.
Her fingers had begun wiggling again, but she raised her hand as if to wave away a question, hesitant to let the jiggling pencil at the waiting page just yet.
Do I want her back, she thought, in any sense? No, not want, not her, but—in these past nine weeks I haven’t seemed to exist anymore, without her paying attention, any sort of attention, to me. These days I’m hardly more than an imaginary friend of Amber’s next door, a frail conceit soon to be outgrown, even by her.
She sighed and lowered her hand to the book. Over her OKAY the pencil scribbled,
iambeevee
“My God,” Caroleen whispered, closing her eyes. “You think I need to be told?”
Her hand was involuntarily spelling it out again, breaking the pencil lead halfway through but continuing rapidly to the end, and then it went through the motions three more times, just scratching the paper with splintered wood. Finally her hand uncramped.
She threw the pencil on the floor and scrabbled among the orange plastic prescription bottles on the table for a pen. Finding one, she wrote, What can I do? To help
She wasn’t able to add the final question mark because her hand convulsed away from her again, and wrote,
touseyourbodyinvitemeintoyourbody
and then a moment later,
imsorryforeverythingplease
Caroleen watched as the pen in her hand wrote out the same two lines twice more, then she leaned back and let the pen jiggle in the air until this bout, too, gradually wore off and her hand went limp.
Caroleen blinked tears out of her eyes, trying to believe that they were caused entirely by her already-sore wrist muscles. But-for BeeVee to apologize, to her . . . ! The only apologies BeeVee had ever made while alive were qualified and impatient: Well, I’m sorry if . . .
Do the dead lose their egotism? wondered Caroleen, their onetime need to limit and dominate earthly households? BeeVee had maintained Caroleen as a sort of extended self, and it had resulted in isolation for the two of them; if, in fact, they had added up to quite as many as two during the last years. The twins had a couple of brothers out there somewhere, and a least a couple of nieces, and their mother might even still be alive at ninety-one, but Caroleen knew nothing of any of them. BeeVee had handled all the mail.
Quickly she wrote on the calendar page, I need to know—do you love me?
For nearly a full minute she waited, her shoulder muscles stiffening as she held the pen over the page; then her hand flexed and wrote,
yes
Caroleen was gasping and she couldn’t see the page through her tears, but she could feel her hand scribbling the word over and over again until this spasm, too, eventually relaxed.
Why did you have to wait, she thought, until after you had died to tell me?
But use your body, invite me into your body. What would that mean? Would BeeVee take control of it, ever relinquish control?
Do I, thought Caroleen, care, really?
Whatever it might consist of, it would be at least a step closer to the wholeness Caroleen had lost nine weeks ago.
Her hand was twitching again. She waited until the first couple of scribbles had expended themselves in the air before touching the pen to the page. The pen wrote,
yesforever
She moved her hand aside, not wanting to spoil that statement with echoes.
When the pen had stilled, Caroleen leaned forw
ard and began writing Yes, I’ll invite you, but her hand took over and finished the line with
exhaustedmorelater
Exhausted? Was it strenuous for ghosts to lean out or in or down this far? Did BeeVee have to brace herself against something to drive the pencil?
But, in fact, Caroleen was exhausted, too—her hand was aching. She blew her nose into an old Kleenex, her eyes watering afresh in the menthol-and-eucalyptus smell of Bengay, and lay back across the daybed and closed her eyes.
A sharp knock at the front door jolted her awake, and though her glasses had fallen off and she didn’t immediately know whether it was morning or evening, she realized that her fingers were wiggling, and had been for some time.
She lunged forward and with her left hand wedged the pen between her twitching right thumb and forefinger. The pen began to travel lightly over the calendar page. The scribble was longer than the others—with a pause in the middle—and she had to rotate the book to keep the point on the page until it stopped.
The knock sounded again, but Caroleen called, “Just a minute!” and remained hunched over the little book, waiting for the message to repeat.
It didn’t. Apparently she had just barely caught the last echo—perhaps only the end of the last echo.
She couldn’t make out what she had written. Even if she’d had her glasses on, she’d have needed the lamp light, too.
“Caroleen?” came a call from out front. It was Amber’s voice.
“Coming.” Caroleen stood up stiffly and hobbled to the door. When she pulled it open, she found herself squinting in the noon sunlight that filtered through the avocado tree branches.
The girl on the doorstep was wearing sweatpants and a huge T-shirt and blinking behind her gleaming round spectacles. Her brown hair was tied up in a knot on top of her head. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.” She was panting, as if she had run over here from next door.
Caroleen felt the fresh air—smelling of sun-heated stone and car exhaust—cooling her sweaty scalp. “I’m fine,” she said hoarsely. “What is it? Had she asked the girl to come over today? She couldn’t recall doing it, and she was tense with impatience to get back to her pen and book.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 63
