The longer I looked at the photograph, the larger it seemed, until I noticed the photograph was being held between two small black paws rather than hands. I was covered in fur the same colour as my hair—black. I was too frightened to look in a mirror so I filled a bowl with water, and looked at my face. I had a long black nose and my eyes were green, as they were when I was a human. I wasn’t shocked, I didn’t feel like I looked that different. I looked at the photograph again: yes it was me, the photo booth had somehow known before I transformed. I felt an urge to go outside and went through the backyard door. I ate some old apples in a rubbish bin, killed a rat and sniffed some puddles. I wandered from alley to alley, from quiet street to quiet street—I had never been in an alleyway at night-time before, it had the inhuman liveliness of a puppet show.
Every night the same thing happened. I would put the twins to bed, read a while then, yawning, at around 9, turn into a wolf. I would then turn back into a human sometime around 3 or 4, those hours of transformation were always blurry like my memory of The Nutcracker.
As a wolf, I had no fear of jumping through windows. I stole, from bookstores, grocery stores, clothing shops, even flower shops. I carried things home in my mouth—bouquets and novels and sausages.
I was back in human form by morning, though sometimes I had stray black hairs on my chin or lips, my ears were a little long or a few of my nails were still dark and thick like claws—I told people they were damaged after being smushed under a window frame. I had a lot of small cuts from breaking windows—I told everyone the twins scratched me.
A few times, the twins were awake when I returned home from hunting and stealing. When I approached them, they crouched and covered their eyes although I had stolen them all sorts of expensive, fanciful toys. I had more breasts as a wolf, but they refused to feed from me.
It ended up in the newspapers: ‘Wild dog breaks into shops’. A man had seen me leave a toyshop with an expensive Julius Caesar doll in my mouth. ‘It was a dark and horrid beast,’ he said to the newspaper. ‘I bet it was looking for a real baby to eat.’ I needed a disguise for getting around while in wolf form.
On a weekend, I went to a costume shop and purchased a nice pink rubber mask of a girl’s face, stretchable enough to fit over my long wolf ’s nose, with yellow braids attached to it, a blue and white Alice in Wonderland dress, and a dainty pair of Victorian boots perfectly sized for my back wolf paws. I felt I could trust the girl who worked behind the counter at the costume shop. She looked somewhat wolflike herself, with a long nose. She gave me the toy pistol for free, and indistinguishable, fluffy animal ears for the twins to wear, though they cried when I tried to put them on their heads. At home, I had a Red Riding Hood cloak someone had left at our costume party. It was made out of felt and had a copper clasp.
When no one was in sight, and I found a store I wanted to steal from, I took off my costume in a hidden spot, and jumped through the windows, taking what I needed. I was much greedier as a wolf. I decided to take care of the old woman in the old home Peter and I had lived in. I broke in through the back of the shop, but when I went to eat the woman, still in a bag behind the counter, the smell of embalming chemicals was so repulsive to me that I couldn’t do it. She seemed to have shrunk. I thought it would be better to leave her there than bury her in a nearby park. Instead, I chased a fat raccoon I found rooting in a compost bin, then stole a bag of pomegranates from a fruit and vegetable store.
The next morning, when I woke up, the twins were nowhere to be found. Not in the cupboards, or the bath, or the rubbish bin. I ran up and down the street and the alley, my belly and breasts flapping like the sad wings of a fowl. They were gone. I must have eaten them in the late hours of being a wolf. Usually I remembered my wolf hours clearly, but I had no memory of making a meal of my children. Yet my stomach was stretched, as if I had eaten something large. I retched, but nothing bloody or hairy came out. I drank cupfuls of coffee, trying to digest them as quickly as possible so they would be out of my body. After I went to the bathroom I looked into the bowl to see if there were any bits in my excrement. I found a tiny white bone. It could have been from a pigeon—I loved pigeons while in wolf form.
I sold all of Arthur and Aeneas’s things, which didn’t amount to much, around forty dollars. I bought myself some books and a plaid skirt which was too small for me.
Maybe Peter had come while I was asleep and taken them away. The idea very much relieved me. I imagined him raising them somewhere along the coast of the Black Sea, speaking to them only in Latin and making them herd sheep. I called the day care and their doctor, explaining that I was moving to Rome with the children. That night, I stole enough brie from a cheese shop to make it look like I had a fridge full of moons. I made myself a meal of brie cheese, pomegranates and raw pigeons. I started to write something I called Memoirs of a Wolf. I wrote in Latin first—Latin is the human language wolves know best—then translated it into English when I was in human form again the next morning.
Sometimes Susan arrived at work with a few stray brown hairs around her mouth, or a spot of blood, but I didn’t say anything and neither did she, and we stopped asking each other about our children.
BRIAN EVENSON
The Second Door
1.
After a while—we had by then lost track of not only the day but of what month exactly it was—I realized that my sister had begun to speak in a language I could not understand. I cannot mark a moment when this change occurred. There must have been a period where she spoke it, or some mélange of English and this new tongue, and I, somehow, didn’t notice, responding instead to her gestures or to what I thought she must be saying. But then something, some sound, a clatter of metal falling, caught my attention and I looked for the tin or the pan that had been dropped and realized the sound was proceeding from her mouth.
Was it me? I wondered at first. Some slippage in my brain, some malfunction of my hearing apparatus? I shook my head to awaken my mind, scraped the inside of each earhole out with my smallest fingers.
“Come again?” I said.
Her brow furrowed. She spoke again, that same clatter of metal, incomprehensible. It was not the sort of sound that it was possible for a human throat to make, and yet her throat was making it.
*
But I am getting ahead of myself. I have lived alone now for long enough to no longer have a proper sense of how to convey a story to another being. Even before I lived alone, it was just my sister and I, and our relationship was, shall we say, peculiar. Even before she lost her ability to speak in the way humans do, she was odd, and we had lived together so long as to make the need to converse with one another nearly superfluous. We did speak, occasionally, but gestured more often than moved our lips, and in general lived in that brusque and silent accord enjoyed, if enjoyed is the right word, by certain long-married couples. Or so my sister suggested to me. Besides us, I have not met any couples, long-married or otherwise, so I cannot say with certainty.
Not that we were living as if married—no, our relations were at all times innocent and chaste, as if we were merely those children’s dolls that give every appearance of being human until you remove their clothing and see the smooth plane where genitalia would otherwise be. Still, we had been so long in one another’s company that she knew nearly always what I was thinking and I knew the same about her. We shared that odd intimacy that comes from living partly in one’s own head and partly in another’s.
*
I loved my sister deeply, or as deeply as any sexless doll could. Perhaps I have exhausted that metaphor. I do not wish to suggest I am, or ever have been, anything other than human. I was born in the usual way, the issue of a mother and a father—so I have been told. I have no memory of my parents, but my sister always insisted that yes, we had a mother and a father. It is important to note this fact, though I cannot independently verify it. By the time my memories began, my parents were dead.
My sister would sometimes recount their
death to me late at night, as she was trying to coax me to sleep, acting this out with the two posable dolls that we possessed. To comfort me, I suppose. An odd notion of comfort, indeed, but somehow hearing stories about their deaths allowed them to be alive again for me for just a moment, before they were once again consigned to death. She told the story each time in a different way so that I was never quite sure what the truth was. Indeed, I half-suspected that one evening she would not recount their deaths at all, but confess that my parents were still alive and waiting for me somewhere—in a concealed room in the house, say, or through the door set in one side of the house that we never used. But whether she intended to tell me this or not, she did not do so before her speech changed and she could tell me nothing at all.
*
In many of the versions she told of the story, my parents were settlers, pioneers, the first in this place, and because of a failure of some kind, left alone just the two of them. Sometimes she said we were in a remote area of a southern continent and my parents had been the only survivor of a boat that sunk. Sometimes it was a separate world entirely and they had arrived through the air or by slipping underneath the usual order of things or by passing through a mirror. “Separate world,” I mused. “Separate from what?” “From where they came from,” my sister said.
“And where was that?” I asked.
But she just shook her head. For her, this was not part of the story.
*
There they were, the two dolls that represented my parents, my sister’s hands making them jump up and down slightly as she moved them across my blanket. She made my father speak in a voice that was lower then hers, my mother higher. They stopped, looked around.
“Do you suppose it’s safe?” asked my mother in her high voice.
“Should we turn back?”
“We can’t turn back,” my father said. “We have no choice.”
And then they were screaming, moved by sleight of hand under my blanket, vanished, simply gone.
“Again,” I said. Smiling, my sister obliged.
*
Whatever the case, whatever had happened to my parents, it had something to do with our house, which was not, as my sister informed me, properly speaking, a house. Its windows were circular and made of thick glass and could not be opened without removing a series of screws and prying off a rubber seal and a sturdy metal ring. There were two dozen of these windows, strung down a long cylindrical central hallway that constituted the majority of our dwelling. At one end, traveling gently downslope, was a hatch that led to my room. It had the same circumference as the cylindrical hallway but a depth of no more than seven or eight feet. At the other end of the hallway, upslope, was a hatch leading to the room that had become my sister’s room, a kind of tapered cone with glass walls that had been burnt a smoky and opaque black.
In the middle of the central hallway, on both sides, was a door, a window in its upper half. One looked out on what seemed to be a flat and barren plain—as did all the windows in the hallway not on a door. The other door’s window opened onto deep darkness, as if onto nothing at all.
The first door, to the plain, could be used in time of need, my sister taught me. The second door, no, never. To open the second door would be to invite the end.
“What do you mean by the end?” I asked.
Again, she just shook her head.
“What’s out there?” I asked, peering through the window of the second door, through the only window that looked out into darkness.
“Is anything out there?”
“Don’t open that door,” she said firmly. “Promise me.”
*
Despite my promise, I tried once, to open the second door. There was a procedure required for this to happen, a process inscribed on the door itself. First the door had to be primed, then a countdown would begin. Then, finally, I would have to throw a lever and the door would spring open.
I got as far as arming the door. I had not realized that this would also trigger a dimming of the lights and the peal of an alarm siren. The sound brought my sister running from her room. She immediately unprimed the door and scolded me. The whole time she was doing so, I was wondering if I had the strength of will to disable her and continue the process.
Apparently I did not.
*
When my sister was still alive, we kept mainly to ourselves, to our own quarters. My sister referred to them as quarters and so I did as well. We would meet for meals in her quarters, feeding off the provisions that were stored behind the panels of the central hallway.
Eventually, my sister never tired of informing me, our provisions would run out. In preparation for this, she had begun to forage outside. Sometimes she would slip through the door—the first door, not the second—and come back with something to eat. She would be gone mere minutes sometimes, other times hours. Often, when I was young especially, I would stand by the door and await her return. Sometimes I would go instead to the second door and consider pursuing the procedure to open it, but I worried that my sister, who, after all, knew my thoughts almost as well as I knew my own, was waiting for this, just outside the first door, and would stop me if I tried.
I often placed my hand on this second door. It was cold to the touch. It would have taken a mere flick of the wrist to activate the sequence, and yet I never did.
When she returned, it was dragging a carcass, of a sort of creature unlike anything she had taught me about: a tangle of legs, oozing clusters of eyes, limbs that continued to throb even in death. Or simply gobbets of flesh, still oozing fresh with blood, cut from what creature I couldn’t say. Out of breath, she would drag her latest find into her room and close the hatch. When she next opened it, there would be no sign it had ever been there.
*
“What’s out there?” the dolls who are my parents would sometimes say as they were propelled across my blanket by my sister’s hand. “Why does the view out the first door’s window look so different from the view out of the second? Why is there darkness out only one window?” But they never had an answer.
“Shall we go through the first door?” one would say to the other.
“Shall we go through the second?” the other might respond.
If the dolls went out the second door, they would die immediately. If they went out the first door, they might wander for a time before eventually dying.
“Either way, they die,” I pointed out.
“Yes,” said my sister. “Remember that. In the end, they always die.”
*
Why did the view from one window look so different from the others?
I asked my sister this, expecting her, like the dolls of our parents who she in fact spoke for, to have no answer. I was surprised when she gave the question serious consideration.
“It is as though we are in two places at once,” she finally said. “One door opens onto one place, and the other onto another.”
“Then,” I said, steadying myself on the wall beside me. “What place does that make this?”
“No place,” she said. “This is not a place at all.”
But if something is not a place, what is it? Can it be said to be anything? And what can be said of those living within it?
2.
My sister had always been the one to instruct me. In the absence of my parents, she fed me, clothed me, reared me. Everything I know about what it means to be human I know from things she said to me or from images, moving or still, she showed me on the still-functioning screen in her quarters. Now that she is gone, the screen will not work for me. I wonder sometimes how much of what I think I know is embroidered falsely upon these images, is my mind working with what it was given to create another, fuller, more promising world.
*
“Can you understand me?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Say yes,” I said.
A distressed screech, proceeding unnaturally from her mouth, though she did not seem unsettled by it. Indeed, she
seemed placid, calm.
“Do you not hear that?” I asked. “How you sound?”
A long hesitation, then she shook her head. She opened her mouth and it was suddenly as if I were inside a vehicle as it crashed, metal buckling and crumpling all around me.
I fled.
*
Another attempt, an hour later, perhaps two, once I had steeled myself again. There I was, knocking on her hatch until she opened it.
“Hello,” I said.
When she responded, in a low whisper, it was as if a pot was being scoured by sand. I winced, and she immediately fell silent.
I extended to her a writing pad, a pen. “Perhaps this will work better,” I said.
She nodded and took them with a little bow. Furiously she scribbled on the pad, filling first one page, then a second. When she finally, triumphantly, handed the pad back to me, however, it was covered only in senseless script, clotted and gnarled: gibberish.
*
For a time we simply avoided one another. I hoped from one day to the next that something would change, that I would simply awaken one morning and find everything to have reverted back to normal, to have us both speaking the same language again. Instead, with each day, the gap between us grew until, after a week, a few weeks, once the plain outside the first door glittered with frost, it was as though there had never been intimacy between the two of us at all. The meals we had shared before we now took separately, each in our own quarters. If I came out of my quarters to find her in the central hall, I would turn around and retreat to my own quarters, and if the situation were reversed she would do the same.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 33
