Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  I did not enjoy lying. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “So it seems.”

  I bit my lip. He would not want to discuss such a peculiar subject. The Dr. Ashby of earlier years would have pursued the subject with gusto, but this was a weak and weary man, despite his cheerfulness. I should leave him alone, or talk about something else.

  He closed his eyes, and was, I thought, too weak to continue. I turned to see Eileen arriving with a tray of teacups and a pot. She murmured something to Ashby and I heard him say that he was fine. “Just thinking, like Ben here. We are two big thinkers,” he said.

  When she had left us alone again, a bee scribbled through the sunlight and vanished. Dr. Ashby eyed the teapot beside him as though he could not guess what it was. The faintest vapor unraveled from the spout.

  Then he spoke. “The werewolf,” he said. The sound of the word from his lips made me shiver with the most unusual pleasure. “I’m surprised to hear you ask. But I can’t tell you how pleased I am.” He waited, perhaps to let his strength accumulate. “I studied the werewolf as a young man. I nearly wrote a book on the subject. Now, I’m afraid I have forgotten nearly everything. You make me feel young again. Young and nervous,” he chuckled, “and eager to accomplish something important.”

  His words gave me such pleasure that I could not sit still. I poured tea for both of us, a vivid red tea that swirled into the pale interior of the cups.

  He waited for me to return to my seat, as though my presence before him gave him strength. “Why are you so curious about werewolves?”

  “Why were you?”

  “Answering a question with a question. Not exactly forthright, Ben.”

  “It has to do with understanding my dream,” I said, wanting to be at least partly truthful.

  He did not seem to hear me, or perhaps my answer did not matter. “Our culture considers the werewolf, this mythical creature, to be a dangerous fugue away from human form into that of a beast.” He thought for a moment. “But there is another way to view the werewolf. In Romania, the folklore understood that a human being could become a wolf and run with the wolves at night, and return to human form nourished—enlivened by the experience.”

  He closed his eyes. So much talk drained him, and yet he began to speak again nearly at once. “I’ve sometimes thought that when a person turned into a werewolf, it must be the human side that does the killing, emboldened, you might say, by finding itself in the body of a wolf.”

  These words took my breath away.

  He rested for a few heartbeats, and then his voice was stronger. “Perhaps if a person lived as a werewolf for a long time, he would evolve into a new sort of being, neither typically human nor a beast.…”

  Another bee flashed through the sunlight.

  He laughed quietly. “If there were such things, what a remarkable world it would be.” He gathered the blanket closer, chilled despite the warm sunlight.

  “You don’t believe such things are possible,” I said. It was not a question.

  “Of course not. And yet,” he smiled, looking aside at the green lawn. “There are reasons for such tales. Amazing things do happen. A child can grow to be a man, and learn and feel regret, and through it all still become a fine creature. It happens. Rarely, but from time to time.” He chuckled. “I’m getting too tired, Ben. Look at me—I’m old. Do you know what I think?”

  I could hardly ask. “What?”

  “I think you know I won’t live long.”

  I gasped, but he lifted a hand to silence me. “I probably won’t. How could I? You wanted to come visit me and hear some last words of wisdom.”

  He was speaking the truth, and I knew it. We both knew it.

  “Maybe I’m just another person who makes an awkward bow,” he said. “But I have nothing glorious to say. I would tell you, though, that the animal in us is wiser than we can imagine. Wiser, even, than the child in us, and the child is very wise.”

  “In the dream,” I offered, “it was not a beast following me. It was wisdom.”

  “No, Ben. It was something greater than wisdom. It was life.”

  All the way across the Bay Bridge I mused over what Dr. Ashby had told me. The traffic was heavy, and a yellow tow truck with blinking lights was backing to assist a car with steam rising from its hood.

  All around me were drivers jockeying to change lanes, sitting, staring straight ahead, all of us inching forward. I kept changing stations on the radio, not satisfied with this news, that sports report, that music—all of it failing to reach me, all of it so much noise.

  Surely, I tried to tell myself, I would see Dr. Ashby again. Such a man was a living work of art. We needed a man like that alive and healthy.

  Traffic stopped entirely near Treasure Island, and it was over an hour before I reached my home, and my secret.

  Nineteen

  I woke.

  The wind streamed over my body, and under it, and through my legs. I knew that I was naked again, and yet, in the darkness, I was not cold. I was running, hard.

  But this time when I was fully awake I felt my shoulder muscles bunch and release as I ran, and I felt my hind legs lope, and it was all so easy, this running on all fours, this powerful run across the wet grass in the dark.

  So that even when I tried to shake myself awake I felt myself trot and ease to a standstill, and I knew where I was by the bright scents from the buildings beyond. I was panting, my tongue spilling from my mouth, the air cool and delicious along it.

  I shook myself and slaver flew all around me, and I narrowed my eyes and continued, in that easy pace. I stole into the brush. There were people far off, their clothing squeaking and stirring around them, their shod feet crunching the fine grit of a distant sidewalk, the smell of them earthy and salt confused with a sick-sweet fake perfume.

  This is wrong. There is something wrong. And working to wake, swimming through the confusion, I did wake, completely, shaking myself, the thick hair of my neck and shoulders flinging one way and another like a mane.

  I was awake, now.

  I was awake. It was not a dream. With this realization came an instant of fear: I was not a man.

  But the fear burned out like a flash of sulphur, leaving an iron fearlessness. Because I was not a man I did not need to toy with a man’s thoughts, which are but the inner costumes of the human form. I was no longer human.

  I was some other, superior beast.

  I slipped through the snaking branches, the stems and leaves whistling along my flanks to my tail, the flag I carried, streaming behind me.

  I was hungry. This was not the meager appetite of a man. This was a gigantic, vast hunger.

  Those two people down there, I thought, growling nearly silently. Those two warm lengths of meat. They were mine.

  There was a click, and a soft hiss. Those two people walking, a man and a woman. Their sex was plain from their two very different scents. I caught the spear of stink in the air. A scent like a slap. I lowered myself to my belly and snouted the air. They were smoking.

  I had never known anything before this. All the previous months and years of my life had been tired and gray, empty of scent and sound. Now I was alive. And I was not mad, or confused. I had arrived at what I had, without knowing it, always hungered to be. My mind was clearer than it had ever been. My forepaws still had the semblance of a hand, but they had thick pads, and whispered along the earth as I ran, now, keeping myself downwind from the two walkers, those two humans inhaling and exhaling the blue stink into the air. I waited, listening.

  I was starving. I had not eaten in months, it seemed, or longer, if that were possible. I had never eaten before now, never at all. I stole easily along the ground, with an ease like slow swimming underwater. I had been hungry too long.

  It was the intelligence with which I viewed the two lovers, the two unthinking humans casting down their cigarettes, that especially delighted me. I was keen. There was no creature alive more aware, more joyful, than I was now. Their
cigarettes were scarlet points, smoldering in the dark. The two lovers turned, and their clothing interlocked, rustling stiffly as they embraced, a hand groping, seeking, finding a snap. There was the thunder of a zipper.

  I kept them upwind from me by habit—what habit? I nearly laughed. How could I have known how to do this? But I did. And even though I knew that men and women could not scent me, I knew there is a right way to approach even the ewe’s lamb. One does not grow careless. There is a way to hunt.

  And a way to kill.

  I was on them quickly, with an easy stride. I seized the man’s thigh in my jaws and opened my jaws wider, sky wide, tasting the bitter fabic of his pant leg, and then I closed around him, deep, far into the meat, the warm life welling up through the rents in the cloth, bursting into my throat; I swallowed, and it was delicious.

  The man collapsed, and at once struggled upward, his breath a stink of bitterness, the metallic sweat upon him, the fear-cold, his lungs expanding with a scream they would never make. Above me, the woman began to scream.

  I closed on his throat, cutting through the jugular, that slim sinew of blood so near the surface of the skin. I crushed the voice, and the wind tube, my jaws finding a grip so powerful the cartilage between the vertebrae popped.

  Finished with the man, I rose to my hind legs and silenced the woman, her scream broken off, air unscored by her voice hot in my ear. I killed, and ate as I killed, until her throat was gone. I let her fall, half supporting her, ripping at her clothing.

  Through it all I knew exactly what I was, and who. I was myself, made whole. I recalled my human life easily. I knew where my office was, and which streets ran about me toward what destinations, and I knew that here in the park I was safe. I knew that I would be safe nearly anywhere there was darkness, because I would not make a mistake. I was lucid, more lucid than I had ever been in my life.

  I ripped open their bellies and ate the softest flesh, and then, because I was eating so fast, swallowing so quickly, I was suddenly unable to eat anymore. I raised my head, and lifted a call, a call to the others far away, a call to all of them to come share. Because in my new awareness of where I was and what I was doing, I knew that greed was wrong. A kill should be shared with the others.

  Where were they? Where were my companions, my Others, the ones I knew were out there somewhere, lost, trotting through darkness?

  I lifted my voice again, the far star-touching song I knew would find them. Come to where I am. Come to where I am, I have found food.

  I have found life. But there were no answering calls. No voices around me in the night, though I lifted my ears, and raised myself to my hind legs and made myself the center of the broad earth so no sound would miss me.

  There was nothing. Or almost nothing. Tiny voices, far away. My kind, I thought. I fell to my four legs. My kind.

  My kind was out there. I wanted to romp with Belinda, but tonight other voices called. It was clear that each time I would achieve this state I would do so more completely, bringing with me more and more of my memory, and achieving greater clarity of mind.

  On other nights like this one I had sought Johanna, and I knew that while I would never hurt her I could only terrify her as I was now. Belinda had always delighted in me, but tonight I wanted to run a wider circuit, and find my new, my always loyal friends.

  Now I had to reach my companions, the family I had not met. They were far across the city, and I thought I knew where. How could I reach them? How could I get to where they called back to me?

  It would not be difficult. I knew the streets. I was off, running hard, my body bunching and unbunching like a fist, bounding so far with each leap that I was off the ground far more than I was on it, nearly flying, regretting that I had to touch earth at all.

  When I reached the pavement I was across the street before even a single pair of headlights could catch me. The concrete of the sidewalks rasped under my claws. The sweet stink of humans closed around me, and the snout-slap of car exhaust.

  None of it mattered. I bounded past the houses, and then speared my way up an alley, my forepaw splashing a trickle of water. These poor, blind, snub-faced creatures never knew a moment of life.

  A cat froze, and I smelled the rancid cat tang, the feline gut contracting with fear. What a breed-deformed runt this cat was. I did the creature no harm. I laughed, a rich, full-throated laugh, and did not give the cat another glance, leaving her behind me. A rat shot away through a fence crack. A dog opened with a yap but silenced as he caught my scent and fell fear-stunned where he was, behind a fence at the end of a tinkling chain.

  Then I reached the prison.

  It was easy. I had forgotten how powerful I was. They were in a compound near the ocean, amidst a richness of beast life. The smells were like a tumble of voices. I wanted to visit each, but I had no time.

  This zoo was a place where good never happened. But tonight, for the first time, there would be freedom. I lifted my voice again, the first song, the long, drifting first word. It lifted high, and then fell, minor key, more heavy with meaning than any human music.

  They answered me, and I found my companions, and plunged over the fence, and their snouts joined mine, sniffed, as canny and all-seeing as I was. I towered over them, huge and dark. Yet they were my fellows in this prison, and I exhaled a low growl that turned into a song. These brothers should run with me. We would run, all of us.

  I leaped the ditch, and ripped the fencing without effort. The scent of torn earth was in the air. I helped them struggle up the embankment, and then I paused. I smelled fowl, and cat, and ape. Beasts everywhere, their wealth of life trapped. I sang to all of them, and they answered, a cacophony of cries. Of voices, lives. I wanted to free them all, but there was danger here. I called once more.

  And then we ran.

  Part Three

  Twenty

  Where we ran, and what we did in our triumph, I could not see.

  There was a sense of earth rolling under my feet, and the delicious night air. There was a joyous sense, too, of my companions.

  But then I slept, or ran without being aware of where I was running. Even in my semiconscious state I was aware of these passing hours, and I felt cheated. I wanted this experience, and I felt the loss of full awareness as the theft of something precious, the diminishing of an essential part of my life.

  When I was aware of anything it was grass, and my own naked body, wet with dew. I sprawled, but what baffled me was that I was not a lucid creature any longer, not powerful and shaggy, and yet, at the same time, I was not human.

  I was panting. And then a feeling like agony rose outward from my bones. If there were any part of the night that was dreamlike, it was this. This shrinking, this spill of myself, as though my body were a membranous bag of fluid that had ruptured, and flowed now into a new shape.

  And then there was sleep. Exhausted, pure, the sleep that heals.

  I was in my garden when I woke. There was no confusion. I knew what I had done. I knew it all, the feeding in Golden Gate Park, the romp with the wolves. There was no horror, now, because what had been human in me was diluted. I was no longer what I had been. I was changed.

  But still myself. I did not want to kill, now that I was in human form. I felt only sharp regret that I could not remain as I had been, a four-legged beast Out There. But I knew it would happen again. The wonderful thing would happen again. I shivered. My new life was delicious, and I wondered that I could ever have tolerated anything so slim as a life that sprang from two legs and an appointment book. It was the preoccupation with facts and dates that troubled me. The human mind itself was a crowded, scribbled book. To be human was to be without hope.

  I lingered, naked, in the garden. The air was cold, but the sun was warm blood on my body. At last, reluctantly, I went inside and washed with soap that smacked of pungent chemicals, artificial scents and antiseptics. I dressed like a man returning to his prison garb.

  My entire human body seemed to not quite fit, li
ke a borrowed tux. Why, I wondered, did I not feel remorse? I had killed, and eaten. But the human conscience, that seat of propriety and smallness, was feeble now. Besides, if I stepped from my door this morning and, as a human, killed a postman, then I would feel terrible indeed. What I did Out There, however, fell under a different sky, a different code of life. What I did then had been innocent.

  Still, I mused, people were dead. It was not a mere dream. I could no longer deny what was happening. When I had seen the huge paw print in Johanna’s garden I had felt wretched. Now I felt detached from every deed, even from my body. My new state, I supposed, was consuming me like a drug, and like a man who has been injected with morphine I knew that my state was unnatural, yet I could not resist it.

  Such joy, and such peace, could not be wicked. Perhaps I felt such calm because I had fed well the night before.

  The day was bright, the grass green and beautiful. Sparrows announced their territories, and a snail drew himself toward the ivy on a road of mucilage that he spread as he went. Animals were no longer the unimportant specks they had been. The birds, the yellow butterfly, had always been like the flecks on an old film, something one merely looks through, barely aware of seeing them, toward the more important, human images on the screen.

  Now the world was alive. The very earth. Moss erupted under the geraniums, and the azaleas were a forest for glittering insects, sow bugs, earwigs. I stood with the trowel in my hand.

  And then there was an intruder. Her step was in the house. Her hand was on one doorknob, and another. Her voice was calling my name.

  I gripped the trowel hard.

  “Oh, here you are.”

  She looked at me, and her expression told me she was about to say something about herself. How she felt. She was going to tell me she had some pain, some ache, some displeasure with her body. How lost she was in her life!

  “I came back for the rest of my clothes,” said Cherry.