Furr

by Axel Howerton

  From the South, three sisters fair . . .

  The maidens of the moon

  I stand on my balcony and stare at the sinking red glow behind the edges of the haze. The smoke is so thick now that the sun is no more than the glow of a cigarette, a dying ember in a snowstorm.

  I try to sniff out the woman across the way. All I get is a nose full of cremated nature.

  I’m trying to maintain. I’m trying to contain. I walk in circles and tell myself that I’m just imagining all of this.

  Maybe it’s all a dream. Maybe I’m still sleeping.

  Then the nightmare starts tearing through into my conscious mind. Snippets of dreamland. Her voice echoing off the walls of my apartment. The smoke outside solidifies and flaps in the wind, man-sized bat wings slapping against the coming night. I close my eyes and it becomes billowing white curtains filling my mind. I hear the screams far off in some dark corner of my head. I see the blood, seeping from the walls, pooling on the kitchen floor.

  Fuck Rhodes.

  I need something else. I need something to keep me awake and not dreaming.

  I need something to take the edge off and let me relax and let me stop seeing and hearing and feeling everything.

  I need to see Devil.

  IT TAKES ME an hour to find my keys. I haven’t driven my car in weeks. I find them buried under the couch cushions. The car starts easy enough. Which always shocks me. I always expect my neglect to result in it just fading into a quiet death. I love to drive, when it’s late and quiet and the city is empty and I can open the windows to breathe in the night, and it feels like I’m running, flying through the darkness.

  Tonight the air is full of smoke, and for some unfathomable reason, I’m terrified of what’s out there in the shadows, in the mist. Those man-sized wings. Athwart the gloom. So I keep the windows up tight and suffer through the claustrophobia and the stale car stink.

  I prowl through Coach Hill, past the mini-mansions, the McMansions, and the ornate palaces beyond. Houses with stone walls surrounding them like castles. Homes with gates and trees and more grass than I step foot on in a week downtown.

  I’m looking for the car. His car. That unmistakable car.

  I know he lives around here. I just don’t know exactly where. I’m looking for that car. I’m praying that he doesn’t park in a garage. I’m praying that he’s home. Which is lunacy. What kind of drug kingpin is sitting around at home on a Wednesday night at midnight? What would he be doing? Watching The Daily Show and smoking a bowl? This is Devil, we’re talking about. Adam DeVille. The Devil himself.

  Then I see it. Curled up in a long white drive, deep-space black, gleaming like the cosmos, nose poking out into the smog and the smoke, that little chrome gargoyle on the hood. Nobody else has a car like that.

  I park on the street and hunch my shoulders against some invisible predator. I can smell something on my tail, following, lurking. I’ve been smelling it for days. Or maybe I haven’t. It was there in the park. Leaving work. Even on the train. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Imagining things. Maybe paranoia is the next step in the Total Mental Self Destruct chain. I still smell it. Sulfur stench, black ink shadows, followed by something ripe and meaty and dark. Like the monkeys at the zoo. Like the wild dogs out behind Lee Ho Fook’s Chinese restaurant, waiting for a half-eaten Styrofoam cup of beef chow mein. It was there all right. Some strange thing, some wild animal in my periphery. Always in the corner of my mind.

  I shuffle fast to the door, wary of tripwires and land mines and god-knows-what. This is Devil, after all. He might have a sniper on the roof for all I know.

  I rap lightly on the big oak door. Then a little harder. Hushed whisper.

  “Devil?”

  Harder still. Knuckles to wood. Feeling something weird under my skin. Outside of my skin. I’m not sure. Something soft between my knuckles and the door.

  “Devil!”

  I hear clomping steps. Devil in his boots. Those goddamn Fonzie boots.

  “Who in the hell?” he’s mumbling. Maybe I’ve woken him up and he’ll put a bullet in my face. Serves me right. I’m the asshole here.

  I feel him press his face to the peephole in the door. I smell his aftershave seeping through the door by osmosis.

  The door swings wide. He’s in his boxer shorts. And his boots. He’s covered with strange markings. Beautiful, ornate tattoos, but interspersed with ancient-looking letters and symbols. Viking runes and tribal swirls in hard blacks, odd Arabic-looking symbols in seven different colours, lines and circles and triangles topped with more triangles and crescents and letters I don’t recognize. I haven’t seen him without a shirt since High School gym class. He has a hard, rectangular piece of black metal in his hand. It’s a gun. A handgun. The kind of gun you see in cop movies, the kind with a clip and a hundred bullets.

  “Jimmy? What the fuck, man?” He’s rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. Can I come in, please? Please, Adam.”

  Devil bugs his eyes wide open and clears his throat. He looks at me closer, makes up his mind.

  “Yeah. Yeah, man. Get in here.”

  IT’S A NICE house. A big house. Open and clean and tasteful. Everything smells like wood and leather. Real leather. It smells like heaven. A soft, natural heaven. The whole place is a monument to the good taste of understated sensibility. No noxious perfumes and ammonia smells. No bright lights, and loud TVs, and blaring music. Just shelves full of books, paintings on the walls, and tastefully matched pieces of art. He has swords on the wall, and some sort of Zulu death mask. I don’t have to ask to know that they’re authentic, or that he knows how to use the swords. I always thought that, had he not become the city’s biggest drug dealer, Adam DeVille would have travelled the world writing books. Probably more Henry Miller than Hemingway, but he would have been huge, and he’d be the same man, the same Devil. Or maybe he could have been a professor—Archaeology, maybe—like Indiana Jones.

  “Sit down, Jimmy,” Devil says. He’s pouring himself a drink. He looks back at me, eyeballing me, pondering something. He pulls out another glass and splashes some scotch into it, but barely half of what’s in his own tumbler.

  He sits down across from me, motioning me to follow suit. The chair swallows me up like a Venus flytrap, wrapping me in soft, brown leather.

  “You look like shit, Jim,” he says, passing me the drink. Slouching back in his chair. He’s still just in his boxers and those big black boots.

  “Do you ever take those off, Devil?”

  He’s in a good mood now. Comfortable. He shuffles forward and leans down to stare at his feet.

  “Only when I’m fucking your sister.”

  I don’t have a sister, but he always says it anyways. He sits back again, working his way into the seat, pushing his muscles into the flesh of the chair. The hundred arcane symbols twisting and writhing with his skin. Once he’s there, held in good and tight, he takes a swallow and sets the glass on the thick roll of leather and wood beside him.

  “You look like shit,” he says again.

  What he’s really saying is why are you here, Jimmy Finn?

  I feel the aggression in the way his shoulders are tensed, in the way his fingers are locked around the glass, the way he looks at me without blinking.

  “We’ve been friends for a long time, Adam. I was in the neighbourhood. I thought I’d drop by.”

  All of the bullshit. All of it. But he knows. He keeps watching me with his devil eyes.

  “We were friends, Jim. A long time ago. Now I’m the guy who sells you weed.” He shakes his head and mutters under his breath. “Do I look like a guy who does fucking favours?”

  “I’m sorry I came here. I get it. Not cool.” I’m up and backing my way out of the room.

  Devil stops me with a look. “What do you want, Jimmy? And don’t say meth, or crank, or any of that shit, or I’ll beat you to death and leave you in the trunk of that shitbox car you parked out in front of my house.”
/>   “I . . . I don’t do that stuff, man. Look, you’ve always been into this weird, supernatural kind of shit, Adam.”

  “Don’t call me Adam.” He takes another swig from his glass. Losing patience, but holding himself back. “I don’t call you James, do I?” Not wanting to take care of business in his living room. In his sanctum sanctorum. “You sure look like you’ve been tweaking out to me, Jim.”

  “No. I . . . I don’t know what’s wrong with me, man. I’m . . . I’m broken. I’ve been seeing shit . . .”

  “Then the last thing you need is more fucking drugs, Jimmy.”

  He’s right. I know he’s right. He was always right. In High School, he was the one with all the answers, coasted through class after class. Already making more money selling pot than most of the teachers made in salary. Always with a plan, never getting caught. He has rules, and plans, and calculated business models. He has a Zulu death mask on his wall.

  “Devil. I just need something to stay awake. OK? Something to take the edge off, sure. But something to stay awake. No more nightmares. No more blood, no more screaming.”

  Adam DeVille looks at me with pity on his face. A look he used to give me when we were sixteen and comparing shitty mothers and sharing cigarettes outside the gymnasium doors.

  “You still having those dreams?”

  I’m weeping. Bawling. Sobbing like a baby in the dark. I’m falling apart in Devil’s living room.

  “I don’t know what the fuck is happening to me.”

  Devil gets up and clomps across the room, sits on the arm of my chair and holds me in his arms. I cry harder at the first human touch I’ve felt in months, outside of somebody’s crotch in my hands on the C-train.

  “WHEN’S THE LAST time you ate, man?”

  Devil’s piling my third plate full of eggs and bacon.

  I’m feeling raw and nervous, but lighter than I have in weeks, months maybe. Almost . . . comfortable. My head feeling clear for the first time in as long as I can remember.

  Devil has a half-dozen books piled next to us. He’s flipping back and forth looking for something. Index to contents to page numbers, book to book to book. It’s an odd sight—this hard-ass, muscled and tattooed drug dealer, glasses balanced on the end of his nose, buried in textbooks and thick reference books. When he finds what he’s looking for, he taps his finger on the page, nailing it down, the other hand stroking his chin. Like Rhodes, but Rhodes played by somebody with a six-pack and a handgun.

  “Clinical Lycanthropy.”

  The eggs sink from my stomach into my pelvis, and I feel like I’m going to soil Devil’s kitchen stool. I know that word. Of all the words he’s been muttering and mumbling for the last half-hour, I know that one—Lycanthropy.

  I choke on a pebble of scrambled egg as the standard equivalent for that word creeps past my lips.

  “Werewolf. You think I’m a werewolf?”

  Devil sighs. It must be annoying always being the smartest guy in the room.

  “No, dummy. You think you’re a werewolf.”

  He sits down next to me, wrapping a thick arm around my shoulder, pulling me closer as he reassures me.

  “It doesn’t even mean that you think you’re a werewolf. Maybe you just believe you’re reverting to some kind of animalistic state . . . wolf, cheetah, an albino fucking alligator. The point is that you’re having some kind of breakdown, and this is how your brain is dealing with it.”

  He slaps me on the back and hops off of his stool, walking around the counter and rummaging around in a cupboard, coming up with a messenger bag of some sort, pulled out of who-knows-where.

  He pulls out pill container after pill container, examining the labels, looking down his nose through his glasses to read. He finally finds the two he wants and slides them across the countertop at me.

  “Here,” he says, almost proudly. Maybe he should have been a psychiatrist. He’d already been of more help to me in an hour than my own doctor had in a quarter century.

  “These will keep you awake—if that’s what you really want . . .”

  He picks up the second plastic tube.

  “These will help you sleep, which is what I think you really need. No dreams, no nightmares, just rest.”

  He comes back around and hops onto his seat.

  “The human brain is a delicate piece of machinery, Jimbo. You can’t fuck around with it so much.”

  “Says the drug dealer,” I mumble behind a mouthful of bacon.

  “I’m not the one losing my shit, Jimmy.” Cold, but accurate. Definitely should have been a doctor. Then his lips curl up and eyebrows arch. “Unless you are turning into a werewolf,” he grins.

  “Don’t tease me. Please.”

  “Who’s teasing? You have no idea what kind of shit is out there, man. You see this?” He points to a patch of ink on his chest. A cross with fleur de lis, smaller crosses and snowflakes surrounding it, a star at both ends. There’s a crescent moon on a stick crossing the central image, Victorian flourishes on every terminus, except the moon-stick.

  “What is it? A weathervane or something?”

  “That is a Veves. The symbol of Papa Legba, gatekeeper to the spirit world. Voudou.”

  “Voodoo. Seriously?”

  “Voudou. Yes. Seriously. This dude from New Orleans cursed me. He killed my dog and sent all kinds of nasty ghost-shit after me. His poltergeists trashed this place, crashed my car . . . almost killed me . . . I don’t know how many times. A Voudou priestess gave me this symbol, and it all stopped.”

  “What the fuck did you do to the guy?”

  “I killed him. Obviously.” Devil winks.

  “I mean what did you do to make him curse you?”

  “I slept with his mother.”

  “Obviously.” I laugh, a little more nervously than I intend. “But you don’t really believe that shit, do you? That I’m actually some kind of mythical man-beast?”

  “I’ve seen shit that would turn you white, Jimmy-boy.”

  “Isn’t that from Ghostbusters?”

  “And Voudou was some silly shit from an old Bela Lugosi movie, until I met Dominique Dufresne.”

  I LEAVE A half hour later with the two pill bottles and a big bag of pot. Devil hands me a little box. It’s a phone. The kind you buy at the 7-11. The kind drug dealers use and throw away.

  “My number is the only one in there. Don’t use it for anything else. Call me if you get in any trouble you can’t get yourself out of, all right?”

  “From the south, three sisters fair

  Ran athwart the gloom

  Dressed of fur and fierce of tooth

  The maidens of the moon.”

  I don’t know why I say it. It just comes to me altogether for once.

  “Poetry, Jim? Not really your style.”

  “Have you ever heard that before? You’re into poetry, right?”

  Devil smiles softly, pats me on the shoulder.

  “Well, it ain’t Whitman, if that’s what you mean.”

  Devil DeVille. Gangster. Drug dealer. Scholar. Voudou expert. Poetry lover. Hugging me as I step back out into the night.

  “Be good, man. Be careful,” he says.

  I PICK UP that same dangerous scent again, as soon as I turn away from the door. Sulfur, followed by a rush of air, then replaced with some kind of monkey-stink. It’s coming from the trees in the yard next door. I run to my car and clamber inside in a panic, every ounce of hope and normalcy and compassion I’d scraped together in Adam DeVille’s living room, gone. I try to pull myself together. I’m imagining things. This is all in my head. I pull out the two pill bottles. Blue for sleep. Red to keep running.

  Clinical Lycanthropy. Werewolf. Fucking maniac. Dressed of fur and fierce of tooth.

  I’m losing my mind.

  I have to keep running.

  9

  I’M BACK WALKING in circles.

  Maybe Devil was right. Maybe I took the wrong pill.

  Blue for sleep. Red to keep run
ning.

  Too late now. Too very late. Three A.M. and I’m still running.

  I can’t stay locked up inside anymore. I need freedom, and space, and air . . . even if it’s filled with smoke and death. I’m wide-awake and my brain continues to bubble and spatter, frying itself into nothingness inside my skull. I can feel it shrivelling up and drying out, my last connections to reality sizzling off like so much fat. Very soon there won’t be anything left in there to argue, nothing left to hold me back from . . . whatever it is I’m becoming.

  Clinical Lycanthrope. Beast-man. Werewolf. Crazy person.

  They’re going to lock me away again. This time for good.

  The bottle is clinking in my pocket. None of it seems to make a difference anymore. Not the booze, not the weed. I smoke half of what Devil gave me. Enough to paralyze an elephant with mellow thoughts of cool water and plentiful fields of bamboo. Me? The noises and smells get fuzzier, the inside of my head becomes a vast echo chamber. Just a bigger pot to fry in.

  I pop the top and guzzle it back. The icy fingers of whiskey snake out from my stomach, into my chest and my arms, and turn from ice to fire, but never reach my head. I’m whispering to the bottle. Whispering to myself. I’m crying again. Anger, frustration, misery.

  This place is keeping me crazy. These walls, always talking. All of these TVs blaring, endless noise, and disembodied voices floating through the walls. All these smells and vibrations. Trapped inside, alone, yet surrounded. A hundred strangers forcing their way into my head.

  I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I’m dressed and my keys and my bottle are tucked into the pockets of my jeans. I’m already fifteen floors down, my legs carrying me down the stairs in a daydream. I pass the other human refuse on the way—a Russian I’ve seen in the alley, drifting in a corner, strap still loose around his arm, sour pus on a half-dozen sores that smell like death; in the fourth floor stairwell there’s this girl—a hooker, I guess—she’s maybe seventeen, all wrapped up in a purple, fake fur jacket, and I’m walking through a cloud of tangerines and wine cooler. Her arms and legs are twisted around some skeezy bastard with his pants around his ankles, his legs all pimples and wiry hair underneath her.