"Why?"
"I don't know for sure. A minute ago, while I was looking at it, it suddenly seemed to glow. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. It had, still has, a light, very dim but a definite glow. I . . ."
"Aha!"
Yeager jumped a little. He said, "Aha?"
Varglik was smiling as if he were trying to conceal something behind it. His mirror image showed that too plainly. He uncreased his face.
"Sorry. I was thinking of the results of an experiment I made recently in my lab. I suddenly saw the answer to something that's been puzzling me. I apologize for not giving you my complete attention. It's rude."
Yeager raised his eyebrows. He was as aware as the doctor that the explanation was dragging one leg far behind it. But he said nothing. He put on his Western hat and started toward the door. Hebe, Varglik's receptionist and nurse, appeared in the doorway.
"Phone call for you, Sheriff"
Yeager went into the front office. Varglik followed him to the office door and listened. Evidently, the wolf had gotten to Fred Benger's cattle last night and had killed four and crippled five. The Bengers had not heard anything, and the parents had not discovered the slaughter until they had returned from shopping in town. From Yeager's questions and his responses, Varglik deduced that the two sons were supposed to have put the cattle in the barn in the evening before milking them. But they had fallen asleep—passed out was closer to the truth— before the storm started. Old Man Benger's threats to kill his sons screamed from the phone. But he, like everybody in the county, knew that they were on drugs and were not to be trusted.
"I'll be right out," the sheriff said. "But don't tramp around the pasture and mess up the tracks."
He hung up and charged out of the office.
"The bastard knows!" Varglik muttered. "Or he thinks he knows. But he must also be suffering great doubt. He's very rational, not the least bit superstitious. He's struggling as much as I once did to believe this."
For years, both in his Manhattan office suite and in this Ozark office, the wolf skin had hung where his patients could see it and he could observe their reactions. Yeager was the first to see its glow! The first to comment on it, anyway. Only one kind of person could see the light. His father would call the person Kvallulf. The Evening Wolf. His mother would name him Ihmissusi. Man-wolf.
He went into the reception room to tell Hebe that he was lunching in his office. Hebe was gone. At the stroke of twelve noon, she had fled, a daylight Cinderella running away from the ball, the answering machine turned on, waiting for her to come back at one. If he ate in, he was supposed to monitor incoming calls. Today, he would let the machine do the work.
In his private office, he sat down and opened a box containing three beef sandwiches, two orders of French fries, a monumental salad, three bottles of beer, and a jar of honey. A huge bite of sandwich in his mouth, he opened a brown-covered envelope that had come in today's mail. Hebe, following his orders, had set it aside unopened for him. She must be wondering, of course, what the envelope that came every four months contained. Probably thought it was some kinky sex magazine, Hustler or Spicy Onanist Stories or The Necrophile Weekly with an updated list of easily accessible mortuaries and a centerfold of this month's lovely female corpse.
The glossy-paper magazine he pulled out was WAW, a very limited- distribution publication. How had the editors of the Werewolf Association of the World known about him? His letter of inquiry to WAW had been answered with a cryptic note. We have ways. The magazine, though in English, was published and mailed from Helsinki, Finland. A small section was devoted to articles about the problems of Asiatic weretigers, African werecrocodiles, South American werejaguars, and Alaskan and Canadian werebears and mountain lions. One article on the extinction of the Japanese werefox concluded that overpopulation and pollution and the consequent loss of forest space had caused its demise. The last line of the article was grim. The situation in Japan may soon be ours.
Another writer, under the obviously false byline of Lon Chaney III, gave the results of his survey-by-mail of werewolf sex habits. The sampling showed that 38.3 percent of male and female lycanthropes were unconsciously influenced by their lupine phases. When in their human phase, they preferred that the female be on all fours and that the male use the rear approach. They also tended to howl and yelp a lot. This had led to trauma in 26.8 percent of the non-lycanthrope partners.
One of the most interesting articles speculated that the genes for lycanthropy were recessive. Thus, a werewolf could be born only to parents each of whom had the recessive genes. But the son or daughter had to be bitten by a werewolf before the heritage was manifested. Or the offspring had to obtain a skin taken from a dead werewolf. Hence, the extreme scarcity of lycanthropes.
Having gobbled down all the solid food, his belly packed and yet still feeling hungry, Varglik spooned out the honey from the jar into his mouth while he read the Personals column.
WM, single, 39, handsome, vivacious, affluent coll. grad, loves Mozart, old movies, long walks in the evening, seeks young, lovely, coll. grad, polymorphous-perverse WF. Children no problem, won't eat them. Photo exch. req. Write c/o WAW.
Jane, come home. I love you. All's forgiven. You may use the cat's litterbox. Ernst.
The magazine articles were serious scientific papers. But, surely, the WAW staff was making up most of the Personals column. Maybe to relieve the grimness of their lives. After all, being a lycanthrope was no fun. He should know.
Having read the magazine, he put it through the shredder. It hurt his bibliophile soul to do that, but the publisher's urgings to her subscribers to destroy their copies after reading them made good sense. On the other hand, the publisher might be keeping a small inventory of every issue hidden away, knowing that they could become quite valuable collector's items. His doubts about her intentions were probably unfounded. But being a lycanthrope, like being a dweller in the Big Apple, made one downright paranoiac. He had double reason to know that it was better to be suspicious than to be sorry.
It was also best to always play it safe. But the lycanthrope ejaculated all caution when the full moon was up. That had been yesterday. It did not matter. Two nights on either side of the full moon exerted almost as strong an influence. He was as helpless against the tug possessing him— soon to be a flashflood—as the moon was against the grip of its orbit.
Unable to fight the forces of change, not even knowing how to do it, he had once tried to cage himself during the metamorphosis. When its time was near, he had locked himself in a windowless room of his Westchester house with a side of beef as fuel for the re-transformation back into Man. Then he had pushed the key through the lock so that it fell on a paper in the hall just outside the door. As soon as he had felt the change beginning, a shudder running through him even more sweet and powerful than sexual arousal, he had smashed the furniture and bitten off the doorknob and howled so mightily that he would have awakened the entire neighborhood if his house had not been so isolated.
He had no memory of his agonies during his frenzied attempts to escape to freedom. But the wrecked room and the wounds in his arms, legs, and buttocks where he had bitten himself were just as good evidence as if he had taped the drama. When he regained consciousness as a man, he was so crippled and weak from loss of blood that he had almost not been able to pull back under the door the paper holding the key.
Somehow, he had gotten up, unlocked the door, put on his clothes, cut and torn them over the wounds, and phoned a physician friend to come to his house to attend the wounds. The doctor had obviously not believed his story about being attacked by a large dog while walking in the woods, but he had not said so.
Since the police could not find the dog, Varglik had had to take a series of painful rabies shots.
That was his -first and last attempt to cage himself.
A diligent and experienced detective, the sheriff would have found out about the supposed attack. A few phone calls or letters to New Yo
rk would be enough. He would also have learned about the dogs and horses slain in the area, though the scenes of the killings were twenty miles from Varglik's house. Yeager would have learned about the mutilation-murders of two hikers and two lovers in the woods. The police suspected that the killer was a man who had butchered the four so that they would appear to have been killed and partly eaten by wild dogs. Yeager would tend to believe that the killer was neither man nor dog.
"It must drive him nuts to have to believe that," Varglik muttered. "Welcome to the funny farm, Sheriff."
Whatever Yeager did or did not believe or intend to do, Varglik could do nothing about what was going to happen to his persona. He could control where he would be when the inevitable happened.
At six p.m., he left his office. The wolf skin, rolled up, was in the attache case he carried. He waited in his house, eating a huge supper and afterwards munching on potato chips, until 10:30 p.m. Then he drove his car through town, watching behind him, going in an indirect route, stopping now and then to check for possible shadowers. Within thirty minutes he was on a gravel country road deep within the county just north of Reynolds County. After ten minutes, he pulled into a sideroad and stopped the car in the darkness of an oak grove. The only sounds except for his accelerating breathing were the shrillness of locusts and the booming of frogs in a nearby marsh. Then, the whine of mosquitoes zeroing in on him.
Hastily, he opened the car trunk, removed the skin, doffed his clothes, and put them through the open window into the front seat. His breath sawed through his nose. He panted. His body seemed to be getting warm, and it was. The fever of metamorphosis was nearing its peak.
The wolf skin was draped over his shoulders when he stepped out from under the shade to stand in the full shower of moonlight. Though he was not holding the skin, it clung like a living thing to his back.
The moonlight beams, pale catalytic arrows, pierced him. His blood thumpthumped. The great artery of his neck jumped like a fox caught in a bag. He reeled, and he fell through a cloud of shining silvery smokepuffs. His head and neck hairs rose; the curly pubic hair straightened out. An exquisitely pleasureful sensation rippled through him. He swelled like the throat sac of a marsh bullfrog. His nose ran; the fluid oozed over his lips, which were puffing outward.
Without his will, his arms lifted and straightened. His legs expanded as if blood had poured through the skin. His bowels contracted and expelled his feces with the sound of an angry cat spitting. He emptied his blade in a mighty arc. Then his penis became enormous and lifted toward the moon until it had almost touched his belly and seemed to his darkening senses to howl shrilly.
Howling deeply with his mouth, he fell hard backwards on the ground. The wolf skin was still fastened to him as if it were a giant bloodsucking bat. He felt forces shooting through the ground and then through him like saw-topped oscillograph waves, chaotic at first then organizing themselves into parallel but curving lines. They shook his body until he had to claw deep into the dirt with his outstretched hands to keep from falling off the planet.
He shot out his spermatic fluid, again and again, as if he were mating with Mother Earth Herself. His human spermatozoa were gone, and his glands were already pouring Wolf fluid into his ducts.
After that, he knew nothing as Man.
Only the moon saw his hair and skin melt until he looked like a mass of jelly that had been formed into the figure of a man. After a minute or so, the jelly quivered, and it kept on quivering for some time. It shone as pale and semisolid as lemon jello. Or as some primeval slug that had crawled out of the earth and was dying.
But it lived. The furious metabolic fires in that jelly had already devoured some of the fat that Varglik had accumulated so swiftly. The fires would eat up all of it and then attack some of the normal fat before the process was completed. In the dawn of Varglik's awareness of what he was heir to, he had tried to diet. He reasoned that if he lacked the fat, he would lack the energy needed to carry out the metamorphosis. But the sleeping Wolf in him had defeated him. Varglik could no more stop eating great quantities of food than he could stop sweating.
The jelly darkened as it changed shape. The arms and legs shrank. The head became long and narrow, and newly formed teeth shone like steel spears. The buttocks dwindled, and from the incipient spine, now a dark line in the mass, a tentacle extruded. This would become the tail, smooth at first, then hairy. Other darknesses appeared in his head, trunk, legs, and arms. These were at first swirling, the cells shifting as they were reformed by the magnetic lines generated by the Wolf in him.
The wolf did not become conscious until the change was completed. The wolf skin had become a living part of the living jelly and then of the metamorphosis. That completed, what had fallen as two-legs rose as four-legs. He shook himself as if he had just emerged from swimming.
He sat down on his lurry haunches and howled. Then he prowled around, sniffing at the feces and the fluids. He investigated the car despite its repulsive and overpowering stench of gasoline and oil.
A moment later, he was running through the woods. He ran and ran. He loped through a world that had no time. He saw the bushes and trees and rocks he passed as living beings which moved. He saw the moon as an orb that had not existed until then. He had no concept of a changeless moon rising from above the Earth in its orbit. It was a new thing. It had been born with him.
But the wolf knew what it wanted. Flesh and blood. And, being a werewolf, it desired human flesh above all flesh. Yet, like all creatures two-legged or four-legged, it ate what it could. Thus, he bounded over a fence and gripped the throat of a barking watch-dog and carried it over the fence into the woods where he slew and ate it. That was not enough. He needed more prey to kill to thrill his nerves with ecstasy and to fill his belly for fuel for the change back into Man. He ran on until he came to a pasture on which horses grazed or slept. He killed a mare and disemboweled her and began tearing at the flesh until the aroused farmers came at him with flashlights and guns.
Then, in his wide circuit through the woods, he crossed a moonlight- filled meadow because sheep scent drifted across it to him. As he got close to the edge of the woods, he smelled, along with sheep, that flesh he most lusted for. A man stepped out from the darkness of the trees, the moon shining on the rifle barrel. He lifted it as Wolf leaped snarling at him.
▼▼▼
Sheriff Yeager had not joined the hunting party just north of Benger's farm. Instead, outtricking his prey's every trick to detect a shadower, he had followed Varglik to the oak grove. He had sat in his car down the road until the wolf-howl had told him that what he had expected to happen had happened. After ten minutes, he had gotten out of the car and cautiously approached the grove. He was just in time to see the bushy tail disappearing into the dark woods.
Using his flashlight, he followed the pawprints in the wet earth. After a while, he heard distant shots. Guessing from which direction they came, he cut at an angle through the woods. Just before he got to the meadow, he saw the enormous wolf loping across it. He waited until the beast was almost ready to plunge into the forest, and he stepped out. His rifle cartridges contained no silver bullets. That was bullshit. A
high-velocity .30-caliber lead bullet would kill any animal, man included, weighing only one hundred and eighty pounds. The werewolf might seem to be of supernatural origin. But it was subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as any other animal.
The bullet entered the gaping mouth, bounced off the roof of the mouth, tore down the throat, and angled into the liver. The wolf was dead and so was Varglik. Nor was there a change into the human body such as shown in so many movies. The cells were dead, and the transformation principle could not act on the cells. The wolf remained Wolf.
Yeager did not want questions or publicity. He skinned the carcass and dug a grave and buried the wolf. In the process of re-metamorphosis, the skin would have fallen off, he supposed, separating from the body and other parts of the skin. But it remained whol
e now, the process of change having been erased with the end of life.
▼▼▼
Now, the pelt was stretched out against the stone of the fireplace in the sheriff's house. Every night, its light seemed to Yeager to be getting brighter. He considered destroying it. He knew or thought he knew what he would do soon if the skin stayed within his sight or within the reach of his hand. He had to burn it.
The hungry wolf will try to get at the meat even if it sees the trap. An iron filing does not will not to fly to the magnet. The moth does not extinguish the flame so that it will not be incinerated.
ANGELS' MOON
Kathe Koja
▼▼▼
HE thought he might be an angel. Angels had transformations, he was reasonably certain of that: from man to spirit and back again, it was in the Bible. Fear not, they said when they changed.
On his back, not quite staring up at the ceiling, arms at his long sides like a patient on a table. His hair was short and blond and dirty. He was dirty all over, no wash since winter; there was no more water upstairs in the pipes and he had no idea how to turn it back on. Memory of the change, creep and stutter, rolling up his body like the movement of some relentlessly disfiguring disease. Leprosy. Did people still get leprosy, or was it one of those things of which the world was permanently rid, old scourge conveniently crisped to nothing by the microwave heat of medical science?
One of the two windows was broken, small rectangle kicked to chips and sullen cracks. He had tried to seal the pieces retrieved with duct tape, dull silver like the surface of a nickel. The wind still found purchase, there was no way to keep it completely out. Still he didn't mind the cold. There were worse things than weather.
Exploratory scratch at his chin; he had not shaved since the angelic change, but his beard had not grown at all. The hair on his arms, his chest, his legs and groin, all seemed the same, but then it was hard to tell, it wasn't the kind of thing you would notice. Maybe it was a little coarser, but then again that could be imagination. At first he had tried to tell himself it was all imagination, some manifestation of his inner illness, some new unbearable loss. First the poems, then the words, and now humanity entire, forced transcendence on a specimen already so weakened that mere living was a challenge unhealthy in its force. He remembered waking, frightened, naked on the cement floor, compulsively counting his toes and fingers as if he might have dropped one changing back.
The Ultimate Werewolf Page 6
