He had no name (few wolves do) and little enough of memory. And when he remembered anything at all, it was not the cold sharp air of the forest piercing his nostrils, nor the musky scent of frightened prey, for there is no need to recall what is so often there. Instead his recollections were of stranger scents: flaming bits of bodies with the blood burned out of them, and beings trapped in rolling iron boxes, each one spewing forth cloud upon cloud of deadly fumes instead of sweetly pungent droppings. These odours haunted him, along with visions of pale hairless things that staggered on their fat hind legs, their paws wrapped in dried skins stolen from other creatures. Such things were monstrous, as were the celebrations in airless wooden boxes that did not move, where there was nothing to breathe but smoking weeds and the stink of fermented fruits and grains. There might be howling in such a box, but it came from another box, and it was marred by the sound of lightning forced through scraping metal wire, and wind forced through dried dead reeds.
He dreamed of these things when the moon was round, and had he been able he might have spoken of them to his fellows in the pack. Yet he was grateful that he had no words, and wondered why he knew of them at all. They were one of his dreams.
He slept in a den with his mate and her pups; he coupled with her when she gave him the scent; yet still he dreamed of nuzzling loins that reeked of mint or even strawberry. Horror possessed him. He trembled and howled, and all the more because his tiny forebrain knew as much of the truth as it could contain: when the light in the sky became a circle, he became a man.
He whimpered and snuggled into the musty fur of his mate, wondering all the while if it was her beauty or his own bestiality that was only a fragment of his troubled sleep. He wondered where he was.
Then he was free, loping through the snow in the deep track that had been plowed for him by a wandering moose, hearing nothing but the whisper of the wind and the touch of his feet on the ice beneath them. Hunger bit at his belly, almost like another animal attacking him; perhaps that was what had started the dreams and then driven him out into the night. His pack was starving, all of them, and they could not range free from the den while the pups were new. They would not survive much longer without food, and so he hunted, on and on for more than a dozen miles, pausing only to mark the trail with his leg lifted.
It was when he lowered his leg that he realized the change was coming, for the pads on his foot turned suddenly tender, and the cold cut through them. He had lost the talent, which all wolves possess, of regulating his own body temperature, and by this sign he could tell that he was turning into a monster.
He began to shiver in the frigid air, rearing up on his hind legs to snap at nothing, a growl in his throat as he felt his teeth drawn painfully back into his head until he had only thirty-two little stumps, hardly enough to fill the muzzle being crushed back into his face. Everything was pulling back into him and everything was agony; he experienced each individual hair as it was absorbed into his stinging flesh.
And then he bloated, bulking up into a pink and swollen thing more than twice his proper weight, a thick and weak and hairless thing that feared the gentle dark. It fled shaking and screaming through the snow, and it took him with it.
With feeble, bleeding, clawless forepaws, the man he had become turned over a rock made slippery with a transparent glaze, and found the cache of clothes beneath it. He could not remember how they came to be there, but when he crawled into them the cold could not hurt him as much. Everything about him had changed except his hunger. He staggered on in search of food, his numb feet stuffed into the skin of slaughtered cows.
Much of the night had given way to his slow progress through the snow before he topped a rise and let his eyes confirm the truth his ears and nose had told him long ago: he was about to enter the other world. Below him was an endless stream of poison gas, floating over a strip of ground that looked like a dry river bed, and through that raced a succession of the iron boxes with humans caught inside. These beings seemed to be following the moon the way he was; in fact, each one of their boxes was in pursuit of two bright yellow disks of light that it could never catch. He saw that much almost at once, but decided he would follow the lights too. This was what men did. Perhaps there was food at the mouth of the empty river.
Dragging his feet through the piles of the grey slush that spattered at him, he paced behind the headlights (he began to to know their name), staying carefully to one side as it came back to him that cars could kill.
Finally he realized where they were going. It was not the moon they were pursuing after all, but a big red star whose outline glowed against the sky. There were red squiggles beside it, and somehow he knew that they meant RED STAR too, although that made no sense when the red star was right there beside them anyway. And they didn’t look like what they said; they looked like splashes of blood on black snow.
Then he saw that the RED STAR was another box, but so much bigger than the others that he could not look around it. Most of it seemed to be made of ice: it glistened in vast sheets, and light came shining through to fall on him. The cars opened, and those who had been caught inside rushed away like sensible creatures but then gravitated at once toward the giant trap that looked like fire enclosed in ice. He sensed their hunger, and despite his fear he followed them. A good hunter could steal food even from a snare.
He was startled by the glare inside, brighter than sunlight and colder than moonlight. He closed his eyes against it as death filled his nostrils. Hundreds of animals had perished here, and their bodies had not been consumed. The overwhelming sense of slaughter and of waste filled him with dread even as he felt himself begin to drool.
Someone shoved against him; he snarled and raised his upper lip before he remembered that he had no fangs to bare. Dozens of humans had gathered here, but they were not a pack. Each one was like a lone wolf without a territory of its own; each one was angry and aggressive and afraid. They had hold of other little boxes that moved like the cars did, and they pushed them at each other as they passed. Some of them put things in these small boxes, and just the sight of that made his head swim. Everything in this world was inside something else; nothing ran free.
The noise he had dreamed about washed over him again: wires and reeds, and skins struck by sticks, with the scraping of hair against gut wailing over them. He found himself humming along with it against his will; he was becoming more like the humans with every minute he spent among them. He took a shopping cart and did with it what the others were doing. The light was so intense it almost blinded him, just as darkness would blind a man, and the music made him deaf. Only the stubby pink nose he had been cursed with told him anything at all. It spoke of meat.
He was in an aisle filled with meat. The floors were meat and the walls were meat, and they stretched out before him as far as his dazzled eyes could see.
The sight should have brought him joy, but there was terror in it, too, the terror that only excess can bring. Had there ever been a time when so many animals had died at once? What could have killed them all, and what had stopped it from eating them? The fur on his back would have stood on end if it had not vanished hours ago.
He could smell cattle and sheep and pigs, chickens and turkeys and ducks, a few kinds of fish he recognized and many more that he did not. He could smell hundreds of dead creatures, thousands of them, and on each of them was the stench of decay. This was not fresh meat, still quivering with the hot pulse of blood; this was something sliced and drained and spoiled.
It was cold, too. He felt the chill of death seep into his hand as he clutched involuntarily at part of a cow. The meat had already been chewed up, like what he regurgitated to feed his cubs, and it was enclosed in transparent ice like the stuff that made up the walls of the BIG STAR. With trembling fingers he dropped it into his cart. Nearby lay pigs which had been masticated and then stuffed into their own intestines, even though such parts of an animal were not good to eat. He passed them by, but he could not resist the chance to
sweep three chickens into the cart, even though they were as cold and hard as stone.
Then he was on a rampage, grabbing with numb fingers at the ribs of a hog, the leg of a lamb, the brain of a calf. He snatched at a cluster of chicken livers, still swimming in chilled blood, and felt the sticky liquid squirt out over his hand. He licked at it and saw a female staring at him. He growled at her.
It was time to go, time to escape with this meat before he joined it in those frigid walls that surrounded him. Panic surged through him when he saw that the way out was blocked, and then he recognized the checkout line for what it was. This standing in a row was something only humans did, and he was delighted by his cleverness in understanding it. Perhaps he would get away after all.
He followed a metal cage that had been loaded with the icy fragments of dead animals. Humans stood before him and behind him, similarly laden, their wire traps having captured creatures that were already corpses, but it was not this ugly image that made him shiver. Instead, he was possessed by the idea of taking these broken bodies to a place where he could expose them to a flame and watch the fat and juices flare into the sky, leaving him nothing but a dried husk to chew. The very thought made him gag, but he knew he would carry out this mad plan unless something stopped him. He tried to hold on to a picture of his pups, waiting in the burrow he had dug with his own paws, but somehow they seemed very far away, and he knew that they might die without seeing any of this meat he had hunted down for them.
Squinting against the glare around him, he watched those ahead of him file out into the night. Some sort of ritual seemed to be involved. They had to pass before a young female, hardly more than a cub herself, and they had to let her touch each one of their treasures as they greeted her. And there was something else. Each one made an offering to her, passing her something that looked like a green leaf, and sometimes more than one. But where could they have found green leaves in the winter? At this time of the year they were scarcer than prey. His twitching hands were empty, and the clothes he wore began to itch. He laid out his catch before the female and allowed her to touch it.
“Forty-two forty-nine,” she said.
He had no idea what these sounds meant. She looked at him. He suddenly felt dizzy.
“Forty-two forty-nine,” she said.
He thought of green leaves, and of summer, and of plentiful game. He dropped to his knees.
The human behind him saw what was happening and sprinted for the dairy section at the back of the store.
The cashier leaned over her register to get a better look just as he rose again on his hind legs. His slavering jaws closed on her face.
He fed, and not on putrid, juiceless carrion. He experienced the taste of living blood splashing in his mouth, the feel of hot flesh throbbing against his tongue. The purity, the truth of it. His throat was full.
He shrugged off the last of his clothing and ran. The BIG STAR opened up its glistening wall of ice and set him free. He danced around a stream of rolling traps and capered across the unbroken snow until he reached the shelter of the trees.
The chunks of the young cashier were safe inside him, ready to be coughed up when he was home at last. His children would eat tonight.
Nicholas Royle
ANYTHING BUT YOUR KIND
Nicholas Royle was born in Manchester in 1963. He is the author of five novels – Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp – and two novellas – The Appetite and The Enigma of Departure. He has published around 120 short stories and to date has one collection to his name, Mortality.
Widely published as a journalist, with regular appearances in Time Out and the Independent, he has also edited thirteen original anthologies, including two volumes of Darklands, Darklands 2, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams and ’68: New Stories From Children of the Revolution.
Since 2006 he has been teaching creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has won three British Fantasy Awards and the Bad Sex Prize once. His short story collection was shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize.
About the background to the following story, the writer reveals: “In the UK we’re used to the idea of there being very few wild animals – where once we had wolves and wild boar roaming free we now have domesticated Alsatians and farmyard pigs – so the many sights of big cats in recent years have really captured the public imagination. Virtually every species has been reported in many areas of the country, though the black panther crops up most frequently . . .”
It wasn’t until the Rugby radio masts came into view on the right-hand side of the train that Gary felt he had really left London behind. They marked a psychological half-way point for him and once past them he was nearer his native north country than the city in which he’d spent the last ten tears, drifting in and out of dull jobs and dangerous relationships.
When the polytechnics were converted into universities practically overnight, new courses sprang up everywhere, and Gary had applied to teach the creative writing MA at what had once been his local poly without seriously considering what he’d do if they actually offered him the job. So when they did, he looked around, decided he’d miss the East End supply teaching like he’d miss having raw chillis rubbed on the inside of his eyelids; considered the answer machine at his flat, its tape worn thin with whining messages from Estelle, the last brooding hysteric he’d made the mistake of chatting up during a cigarette break in a Forest Gate staffroom; ran his finger along the spines of his own series of south London detective novels, whose anti-hero he’d killed off in the last book through sheer boredom; he looked around at all of this and opened up the job acceptance template on his Toshiba.
The flat was a rented one-bed hard-to-let affair in the unfriendliest corner of Dalston – a fiercely contested honour – so moving out was hardly a wrench and, once he’d had time to think about the idea, he was so glad to be returning up north he didn’t care about losing a month’s rent. It was all pretty much last minute, which included the setting up of the course itself: in short, it hadn’t been, and it would be more or less up to Gary to do what he wanted. He supposed the Government – or more likely private sponsors – had been throwing money at the new universities and they hadn’t known what to do with it. The Faculty of Arts and Letters, McDonald’s Building; English Department, Scottish Widows Wing. Who cares, he thought as the train crawled through Stafford, it’s a job, it gets me away from London and I’ll be surrounded by students. He’d been feeling old lately and figured some new blood was just what he needed.
He stood on the platform and took a deep breath of wintry air. He half convinced himself he could taste the dark-red, flash-strobed excitement of his youth, then had a dry chuckle at his own expense and swung his bag over his shoulder. The man on the barrier returned his smile: yes, he was home again. Stepping out into the street he was about to hail a cab when he had second thoughts and began the long walk down the hill towards the bus station. Estelle had said many times he should pack his bags and go back up north if he hated London so much, but for some reason he’d never taken the idea seriously. As he looked about him now at the familiar street names and road signs he knew he should have done it long ago. He felt like a kid again, running out of school into a wide leaf-strewn playground. He only hoped the north would accept him back after so long.
The first surprise was the trams, their muffled klaxons honking like foghorns in the sharp white gaps between redbrick edifices. He’d read about the return of the trams, of course, but his was a generation that was more used to trams that were metallic shrieks cutting through the smells of fresh coffee, sausage vendors and Gitanes in Brussels, Cologne and Zürich. Manchester was a different matter, with its Waddingtons, chippies and Capstan Full Strength, but as soon as he saw the trams – a horn brought him to an abrupt halt and he watched the grey-green snake slink by – he felt they belonged. The bus station held another shock: gone was the criss-cross, Bridget Riley repetition of
orange and white, to be replaced by a pantone chart of bus liveries. When he’d left, the Tories had only recently seized power and so were still a long way from their deregulation of the buses with its riot of colour and chaos of timetable.
He picked up a copy of the Manchester Evening News which had fresh sightings of the big cats splashed over the front page. He remembered when the MEN was a broadsheet and his parents were proud to take it, but the big cats story had captured his imagination.
As the bus bounced and creaked through the city’s northern outskirts, Gary plugged in his Walkman and listened to an old compilation tape. He asked the jolly rosy-cheeked conductor for a single to his early twenties and his soundtrack was The Fall, Joy Division, Performance, The Passage. The copper-bright Rochdale canal cut through the industrial wasteland like a rusty wire through cheesy nostalgia.
He opened the Evening News and read about the big cats. Although there had been rumours and reports for some years about animals roaming free in the British countryside – jungle cats in North Wales and Shropshire, a black panther in north Devon, the “Fen Tiger” and the “Surrey Puma” – and a man in Worcester even shot some video film of what looked like a melanistic leopard, these sightings in the north-west had captured the nation’s imagination with their frequency: over 50 sightings had been reported since mid-summer. Nothing had yet been recorded on film but photographers and TV crews were coming from as far afield as Caithness and Cornwall to hang around shivering on Black Hill at the Lancashire/West Yorkshire border. In Gary’s earphones The Passage sang their ironic tribute to James Anderton, God’s policeman. A party of hikers from Chadderton, Gary read, had been confronted on their path across Saddleworth Moor by a black cat the size of an Alsatian. It had growled at them once and a Chester zoologist wrote that they had probably been saved by their very fear which rooted them to the spot. The hikers spoke of the animal flicking its tail and vanishing behind a peat bank. “Needless to say,” Gary read, which made him wonder why the reporter had bothered to say it, “the party returned the next day with cameras but the Moors Mauler failed to reappear.”
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 42
