The Ultimate Werewolf

by Byron Preiss (ed)

  But wolves had ten toes, too; he knew that from the book he had gotten from the library. Had stolen, really; ashamed but it was so, he had no library card and no money to buy a book like that; and he had to have it. He had to find out what he was like when swept by angelic change, and there was no one to tell him, no way to ask. So with clumsy dread he struck the book down his shirtfront, where it lay thumping arrhythmic counterpoint against the beat of his heart as he bicycled home. Snow chivvied him, made it hard to ride, to keep the bike straight, but could not increase his hurry. Snow on his bed from the broken window, drifting small and dusty across the slick gray paint of the concrete floor. He had to put the book aside to tape the window shut again, but as soon as that was done he sat down to read; no bathroom, he did not even eat; he had a greater hunger.

  At once he found that most of these words were as well beyond him, too long and hard, like roads made up entirely of stone, and in his anger he pounded at his forehead: stupid, stupid, he should have stolen a children's book, something easy. But at least there were pictures. For an hour or more he studied them, the yellowish cool of the short-lashed eyes, the firm muscled landscape of their pelts. Despite himself he felt a shameful pleasure in their strength; if he was really so, then he was something to be proud of. He fell asleep with the book on his chest, tucked back inside the wilting flannel of his shirt as if it were a living thing whose heat he must protect to the limits of his own.

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  The room was ten by ten, a basement storage area for the abandoned building above, the origin of which he could not guess. It was not precisely a house, but if it had once been a business then it was a small business indeed. When he first came, he had cleaned it out, piled the scatter of boxes and containers neat as a puzzle in the far corner. None of the boxes held anything he could use—plastic squares of various colors, some tiny metal pieces that looked like the atom genesis of machines—but he would not discard them, in case the owners one day came looking.

  The bed was a twin-sized mattress, mildew-bleached and only a little rank, balanced carefull) atop its plywood boxspring and four blue plastic milk crates which he had weighted with rocks selected for their potential immobility as well as their size. He had three other milk crates which were chairs and table, or sometimes pantry when he had food enough to warrant storage: stale chewy saltines, cereal which he ate by hand, or his favorite, raisins, they would keep forever. He also had a boombox with one speaker and no batteries; he had to save the batteries for the camping-out light, although sometimes he would filch their power to listen for a precious hour to the Top 40 station; he loved the bright thump and screech he found there, he could repeat word for word the DJs' promos. He had three shirts, two summer and one winter, and two pairs of socks which he wore together; when he was not wearing the shirts he kept them rolled into neat balls; he liked their shapes, like little animals curled and burrowed against the cold. Sometimes it got so cold in his room that he could not bend his hands.

  When he was changed, though, no weather could touch him, nothing disturb that heedless fierce insouciance. Dirty winds, thrown bottles, broken glass scattered on the pavement, the bravado snarl of lesser dogs: less than nothing. It was hard to remember, at first, how things felt, but he was getting better at it, the angel-time memories bright with sparkling dread. Each time it happened, and it had happened three times so far since the first gibbous wax of autumn, he found the memories both easier and more fantastical, as if waking drowsy and bemused from a dream of kings and terrors to find in one hand a scepter and in the other a bloody ax. He knew that all of it should have frightened him more, been more horror than horrible pleasure—another brick in the highrise tower of self-loathing—but knew also that this terror's edge was born blunted from other, blacker troubles. Once the worst has happened, perspective changes to reflect the new reality, and evil, like pain, is more relative than ever.

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  Sitting on a parking block in the co-op lot, carefully peeling the secret sweet layer of foil from a candy bar found like a jewel on the sidewalk outside the store. The smell released from paper was nearly overpowering, rich as gas in his nose. Since becoming an angel he had found his sense of smell raised to a disturbing level of precocity, his appetite provoked now by ant-crawling dog-chewed hamburger rinds as well as more pedestrian treats, like candy bars. Yesterday he had had an almost unbearable impulse to eat a dead bird.

  Chewing slowly at the candy, letting it melt unto dissolution between his sore teeth, he was aware of the people around him, passing on the sidewalk, parking their cars, loitering outside the store. A complex threnody of scents: the sour explanations of old men, dusty fart of a starting car's exhaust, cigarette smoke, flat stink of grease, unexpected flower of menstruating women, tumbled skein of food odors as the store door opened again. Young woman, red shoes, an odor like unease beneath the false mask of perfume that never covered entire. She paused to step past him; he was sitting on the parking block next to her car.

  "Excuse me," she said, rote courtesy, but responded to his smile. Looked at him, as people rarely did; the mad, or even mad-appearing, are anonymous by virtue of false perception, fear of potential danger; don't make eye contact, he might do something. Still their mutual smile held until something, some thought, fluttered under her skin to break the pleasant tension into wariness and he began, slowly, to wrap the uneaten candy back in its wrinkled jacket of foil, prefatory to flight.

  She was not smiling at all, now.

  "You're Ethan Parrish," she said, and he bowed his head.

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  Ethan?

  What.

  Ethan, it's important we do this.

  Scowl, the pick and flutter of his fingertips against the grainy wale of his oversize corduroys, and the waistline cinched with a woman's chain belt, cheap goldtone and flashy buckle filigree. She could smell the unfresh odor of his clothing from where she sat, carefully not across the desk from him, too distancing, too formal, too authoritarian. Instead she sat in the chair not quite next to him, legs calm together at her ankles, expensive shoes. The micro recorder open on the table did not disturb him; he liked to pick it up and watch, hypnotic smile as if the tiny whorling of the wheels mimicked in some more orderly way the grind and whirl of his own thoughts.

  We were talking, her voice soothing, prompting, her gaze on his dirty hair, the sagging socks, about what you used to do, before. You were a writer, weren't you.

  So uncomfortable he could barely speak. Her office was so hot, and all this red: carpet and chairs, the pictures on the wall, all as red as a chambered heart. The styrofoam cup of coffee sat untouched and lightly steaming on the desktop before him. The first half hour had been all smiles, coffee and bustle, over and over her pleasure at finding him, really uncanny, it was not a part of town she visited often (he could believe that) but a meeting with a hospital administrator had run late, she had stopped at the first grocery she saw, and. And.

  She was looking at him to answer; for a moment the question stayed beyond him, then returned with its shiver of shame.

  I was a poet.

  I know. I've read your work, it's brilliant. You're an extraordinarily brilliant man. But you stopped writing a lo…

  Her pause elongated in the larger silence, as if she had offended, done something bawdy or cruel. You were hospitalized for awhile, she said finally. At Bridgemoor.

  I didn't like it there. All I did was lose things.

  What do you mean?

  I mean I lost things, I couldn't find them any more. I lost all the words and all I had were the, the pictures, the images, you see? That's all I had so I had to hang onto them.

  Is that why you left the hospital?

  Yes. Frowning; was it there that the angel-change had begun, come to him in the night like another kind of nurse? He used to remember; it seemed like. But she was waiting, again, for another answer. Yes. They were trying to medicate me too much. They do it to keep you quiet but I was quiet alr
eady. So I left. It wasn't really that hard, they don't watch you as much as they think they do. Plus they think because you're crazy, you're dumb.

  You're not crazy, Ethan.

  His pale shrug. What difference does it make now?

  Firmly, A lot of difference. To a lot of people. I'm not going to give up on you, Ethan. No matter what it takes. Taking out her card, making a business of placing it in an envelope and the envelope within his reach. I'm keeping my eye on you! And her vigorous nod, smile, more answer to her own inner torment than his: sweet, beautiful and sick, those eyes, that tender bruise of a smile as he gathered up his dirt- scabbed hat, his book, a ninth-grade biology workbook, the hard words laboriously underlined with the fading green of a cracked felt-tip pen, his poetry was taught in graduate courses at the university from which she had received her degree and he could no longer understand a simple word like predator.

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  Claws on the sidewalk, hard against his hard pads. Shiver of hair about his ears, pointed to the moon, cacophony of smells inside his wise nostrils. He had just ripped a small mongrel cat to rags, for no reason, all reasons. Nothing spoken, in this world, and everything understood.

  Except the human smell, sometimes, caught inside—inside!—his own aroma: that was disquieting, but in the way of his kind he did not mull or worry it, worried instead the cat's carcass, dropped both to bend, lick silver from a puddle of ice. Noises in the alley, and with the long empty grin of his kind he padded off, heavy nails too short to click warning against the pavement, short with use, and use, and use.

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  At the co-op grocery the woman behind the counter stopped him as he picked up his irregularly-donated rations—broken boxes of Hi-Ho crackers, a crushed can of cocktail peanuts, hothouse tomatoes lounging on the voluptuous edge of rot. He could not recall her name past the S that began it but her smell had the unhappy power to drive him out of the store at vulnerable moments.

  "Hey," she said. "I gotta note for you."

  Frightened, he stepped back, feet choosing flight before his heart could make an opposing decision. "Wait a minute," she said, misunderstanding. "I'll read it to you if you want." Leaning across the counter, she opened the note—flat white rectangle, short dashing slant of letters.

  He was out the door before she had finished the first sentence entire; he knew where it came from by the scent. Pity and kindness no small disguise but no match in the end for his wariness, developed by necessity, more honed perhaps even than his sense of smell, and underneath it all he smelled the cage. Again. It always started out this way, started nice, warm like a blanket with the soul of a net. For your own good, they would say, she would say, with her red shoes and her wide, pained smile. You're a brilliant man. Hold still.

  That night he lay small and frightened, all his clothing stretched over him like a blind of rags, praying now for the change to come, take hold and stay forever, remove him from contention with this end of the world which he could never hope to navigate without disaster and place him, like a jewel in prongs of waiting silver, in that other, colder, simple place where everything was two things: hot or dead.

  In the morning, crosslegged and weary, eating one by sumptuous one the cocktail peanuts, he made decisions. First and most stringent, he must give up the co-op grocery, which meant his shopping would now be confined solely to dumpsters. Very well, he was prepared to make sacrifices. If by some terrible miscarriage of luck she found his basement home—and now, this moment, how good it looked, milk crates and camping light, boombox and bed, how sorrowful and dear—then he must find another nest, this one deeper, less visible to light and the curiosity of strangers who mean so ruinously well.

  But. Would the missing words come looking, here and leave if he was not? That was insupportable; the last unbearable thing; he shook the thought away with the small frantic motions of a man putting out a fire inside his own head. Surely they were more resilient than that. Surely they could find him wherever he went, if they came looking. But they would never come looking to a hospital, he was sure at least of that.

  So. Made almost light with resolution, the acceptance of a plan of action, he curled back on the bed to seek the sleep denied by last night's worry, found it at once and at length and lay in the gray luxury of its trench, dreaming of a time beyond angel time when thoughts were not words and words were not pain, ache perpetual in their terrible insubstantiality where once they had been so close and concrete, a time when no one cared to find him or even knew that he was; even himself.

  When he woke it was to a fragile restoration, body sleep-rich and possessed of a well-being so rare and giddy it deserved, he thought, celebration. Slotting the batteries in the boom box, turning it on, and up, loud so the small room reverberated, pushy music and his own flat- footed dance, slapping a hand against the outer wall in time to the beat's demands, louder still and in the smiling second's worth of silence between song and patter, a different noise.

  Broken sounds. A man's voice, brusque, walking back and forth, the scrabble of kicked plastic. "Hey!" and in that echo rabbit-heart, he shut off the boom box before realizing that was the surest signal of all. "Hey," again, more sure this time; and he bent, breathless, hinge- spined to grab everything at once, realizing he could not both run and carry, wondering in a weakening flash of greater terror if there was time, or room, to run at all. The shadow of the net and he dancing, blind and stupid, in its fall, no wonder he had lost his words, he did not deserve to have words.

  "Hey, anybody down there?" Heavy-set, bright flashlight, blue uniform: it was the uniform, finally, that sent him bursting empty-armed up the stairs, madder than a wardful of patients, long springing limbs like desperation as he swung past the utility worker—not a policeman after all—and out into the street. Running and trying to breathe through the open mouth that could only weep loud tears, horrible tears, he had to fall at last from sheer airlessness and did, lay curled in a burned-out doorway to find, when he could breathe enough to think, to take inventory, that he had only one shirt on, socks but no shoes. One heel was gouged, splintered glass he at once picked out with clumsy fingertips. Sweat-slippery, hair crimped wild by sleep and wet to the roots, standing on comical end like fear's caricature. Shivering already in the negative chill of thirty low degrees as he gathered himself in the best fold he could make of flesh shaken by adrenalin exhaustion, pressed into the cold welcomeless embrace of the doorway's rectangle.

  By numb rote he reviewed what he could remember of shelters, rejected each in turn as risks too bold to take. It would be dark in perhaps three hours. He could hide, in the dark. Until then, wait, and he did, camouflaged by the obvious disguise of need into something no one would look at, searching or not.

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  His dreams, afire.

  Angel time?

  I see my own face in the moon.

  And awake all at once, under its ice, naked in the parking lot of the co-op grocery—how?—cold beyond sensation's grasp into some primal sluggishness; still not deep enough to hide in, still life without words, only the spaces unoccupied, as if his body lay pocketed with the emptiness of missing organs: liver, heart, brain, soul. Driven to his knees by that endless irretrievable loss, so vast that it transcended even grief, it was too large for grief, it was at last too large for his body so he dropped to all fours, limbs twisting against the asphalt, mouth a mere empty howl as if scourged breathless by pain. It would never be the same. They would never come looking, those missing words, and with what resources he had left he could never make right. All gone, this time, but hurt and the ragged ghost of hunger.

  Dazed in the gripe and flex, the cold on his body, he tried to rise and predictably fell, the cut on his heel bleeding again, slow cold blood. His breath was beautiful under the moon. An empty tortilla-chip bag blew against his side, scaring him so he cried out, loud, the exquisite gasp of breath again and as if in punishing response he heard cars, somebody's angry laugh and he tried to judge the moon
, was it truly angel time? It was hard to see in the dark, harder than it should have been, but still it was flesh and not fur. Not time yet. He got up, paralytic slowness, all his responses deadened by the underwater cold, tried to move across the lightless street to the memory of the alley beyond. And in the motion the sound of a motor, his slow startle, one too many and somebody's laugh now a bellow, his running stagger a full-length moonlit sprawl and

  oh God

  the blessed flash of fur, yes, telescoping legs and arms into limbs that hit the ground running, yes, the one skin in which he could hide forever, the rhythm of safety in the sound of his claws grabbing purchase on the street into an immediate dazzle like lightning, growl like the biggest wolf in all the world, too big for even such a rib-scarred veteran as he; and past impact the taillights of the swerveless car reflecting on the scored and icy concrete the wordless husk, the rorschach blood of angels.

  UNLEASHED

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

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