FSF, July-August 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  This morning, though she has seen his car pass down Main Street on its way to the station, the Police Chief is far from her concern. She is thinking about her dreams—dream might be the better word, since it has been substantially the same thing every night: she and a tall, pale man wearing a soiled black suit walking side by side in the woods, somewhere, she knows with dream-certainty, on Frenchman's Mountain (not that she has spent much time there). The man speaks to her, and this is where the variation in the dream occurs: every night, he says something different. One night, it was, “Do you know that Doors song?” Another, it was, “But you haven't told them, have you?” A third time, he said, “I could help you.” She cannot remember all his utterances, although she has the sense that they tend to fall into one of two camps: either, “Break on through, Barbara, break on through,” or, “Let me help you. All you have to do is say yes.” Once he has spoken his piece, they stop and he turns to face her, extending his right hand in a gesture so familiar that she takes it without thinking. It feels strange, like holding a wet wire brush, and looking down, she sees that his hand with its slender fingers has become a large paw, covered in bristly fur and soaked in bright red blood, which dribbles over her skin. She starts to look up at the man, is on the verge of seeing something, something crowds the top of her vision, when she sits upright in bed, awake.

  Barbara does not believe in this man/monster as having any objective existence. Despite the fear, the weirdness, occasioned by the recurrence of him in her dreams, she understands him to be no more than the manifestation of a subconscious feeling that has become lodged—temporarily, she had thought—in the theater of her unconscious. This emotion is guilt, its source her leaving her son.

  Needless to say, we know better, don't we? In a horror story, dreams, hunches, instincts—those parts of our lives we file under the headings of the Irrational, or the Atavistic—are keys with which the narrative presents its characters. Those who accept those keys, fit them to the locks of the doors in front of them, find their way through to the next part of the maze; those who let them drop to the floor will live long enough to regret their mistake. Of course, part of the function of these elements is to add to the sense of unease the story wishes to evoke in the reader by appealing to her or his own experience of them. In addition: 1) they move the narrative along; 2) they're an economical way of introducing or incorporating the more fantastic elements of the story into it; 3) they form part of the springboard from which the protagonist(s) will take the leap into whatever impossible explanation is required for the horrors confronting them. In the end, the narrative will go beyond merely invoking this side of experience, it will validate it, privilege it, as if to say that it is in everything we do our best to suppress, to trivialize, that survival lies.

  Barbara is our anchor; she is the character who stands for the rest of the village inhabitants. Unlike the Police Chief, the Werewolf, you, Barbara cannot go everywhere, see everything. As the Revel continues and the narrative veers from extravagance to extravagance, she stays in place, refusing the madness of the dance.

  * * * *

  6. The Characters (C): The Werewolf

  What about the Werewolf, then?

  To be frank, it's a dilemma. While it remains offstage, no more than a shadow cast across its victims, the monster is a blank, an empty space you fill with your fears, with whatever chases you from sleep and makes you sit bolt upright in bed at four in the morning, heart banging. At the moment, the Werewolf is your Werewolf; it is whatever you have conjured from hearing that word and reading about his depredations. (Might we go so far as to say that, right now, the Werewolf is you? [No, no, of course not.])

  That won't do, though, will it? You would like a photograph of him, wouldn't you? over which you might linger. You would like to examine his face closely, pore over each and every detail of it, attempt to match what is outside to what is inside. Are you familiar with phrenology? It was a nineteenth century science that tried to ascertain personality characteristics through mapping the shape of the skull. You laugh at such an idea—we all do—but how far away from it are we, truly? We search the newspaper and magazine pictures of the perpetrators of whatever outrage currently confronts us, desperate for a clue to their motivation in the set of their eyes, the curve of their mouths, the tilt of their heads. We stare at ourselves in mirrors, trying to see what it is in the mystery of our faces that makes us fail the way we do.

  You would like a picture: Will a drawing suffice? Three drawings, actually: that's what Barbara Dinasha has produced on her legal pad. Her work is rough, but there is a sureness to it that makes you wonder what would have become of her had she remained in the college's Art program. The first shows the man's head: squarish, its features sharply angled, so much so that it might remind you of a piece of cubist sculpture. In her dreams, the man has impressed her as made of edges, as if his face had been struck from a block of flint by quick blows from a hammer. The hair is lank, parted on the right side; Barbara has shaded it with her pen, seeing the blue ink as dark brown that does not appear to have been washed in the last two or three days. She has dotted the square jaw to indicate the dark stubble traversing it. The nose is broad and flat; the lips full and the mouth wide; the eyes wide and dark—brown, Barbara thinks, although they may be black.

  Her second sketch is of the man's hands, which are distinguished by long, thin fingers and particularly the ring fingers, which stretch longer than the middle fingers. Fine hair covers the back of the hands out along to the ends of the fingers. The edges of the nails are ragged, dirty.

  Barbara's final drawing is of the man in whole, a slender figure dressed in a dark suit and white dress shirt open at the collar. Like the others, it sufficiently resembles the man from her dreams that, were the police pursuing him—as they are, though they do not know it—they could do no worse than show these drawings to men and women on the street, post copies of them in conspicuous places. Barbara, however, is as unsatisfied with this one as she is with the two others. In part, her discontent arises from the limitations of her medium. There is no way for her to render the man's voice, which lingers in her ears as if he had whispered there a moment ago. It is deep, more so even than her father's, and he sang bass for the church choir, and it possesses a calm authority that she would find appropriate to a surgeon. The remainder of Barbara's discontent is rooted in her inability to reproduce the feeling the man leaves in her. Were she to take up her pen once more and add a pair of goat horns to his head, goatee his chin, bedeck him with a barbed tail, pitchfork, and surround him with a corona of flames, the effect, while exaggerated and cartoonish, would more closely approximate the effect he has on her.

  Something more? Something more definite? How about this: there's an old man, Mr. Dock, the former head librarian of the village library, who has retired to his bungalow halfway out to Frenchman's Mountain. Were you to show him Barbara Dinasha's sketches, his brow would contract, he would remove his glasses for a clean from a handkerchief, then inspect the drawings again. Unable to deny his recognition, he might tell you about a young man who left Huguenot to study medicine up in Albany when he, Mr. Dock, was thirteen, some seventy years gone. Alphonse Sweet, came of the Quebecois who moved into the region at the end of the nineteenth century; a bright lad, though cruel, terribly cruel. He didn't return, Alphonse, killed, it was said, up in some sort of ghost town in Western Canada under dubious circumstances. He was buried there. No, Mr. Dock doesn't know what Alphonse was doing there.

  (Oh—and hungry: the Werewolf is always hungry.)

  * * * *

  7. The Characters (D): You

  Yes, you're part of this. Do you even need to ask? You leap from character to character, a voyeur rifling through home movies of the most intimate sort:

  —You're the Police Chief receiving the call that Ed Cook, the County ME, has been found dead in the doorway to his apartment. Rubbing the sleep from your eyes, you listen to Shelley Jacobson struggling to keep her voice calm as she
says that Ed had been torn open, there was blood all over the place, and while they aren't sure, it looks as if certain ... parts have been removed from the body. Bile burning at the back of your throat, you say, Let me guess: kidneys, part of the liver, and the tongue. That's right, Jacobson says, the emotion in her words momentarily overwhelmed by her surprise. You don't tell her that the same selection had been removed from each of the hunters found on Frenchman's Mountain, that Ed Cook had phoned you to discuss this last night. Looks like we've got a gourmand on our hands, he'd said, almost his final words to you. You don't repeat his attempt at witticism; instead, you tell Shelley that you'll be right there and hang up.—

  —You're Barbara Dinasha, opening the latest letter from the oncologist, skimming his most recent plea to you to return for treatment; even if the cancer isn't curable, there's a decent chance that treatment could earn you another three months, possibly more. You remember your doctor telling you that your constant tiredness wasn't chronic fatigue: it was your body exhausting itself on the invader that already had colonized most of it. You're not that far away from the overwhelming panic that rose in you as you left the doctor's office, that manifested itself in the desire to run, to escape, to leave the life you had and keep moving until nothing familiar remained—within a week, it was this impulse that would take you from your home and family to the apartment over the store, a flight that solved nothing, simplified nothing, that only made the situation of your dying worse. By the time you understood that you needed to talk to Tom, to Brian, things had reached the point that you could not see a way to do so. You drop the letter into the trash and, for an instant, hear a voice saying, “I could help you, Barbara. All you have to do is ask."—

  —You're each and every one of the Werewolf's victims. You're the quartet of hunters sitting around their early-morning fire, fighting the chill air with a flask of Talisker, your rifles propped against the logs you're sitting on, less concerned with firing those guns than with maintaining an annual tradition fifteen years old, a kind of secular retreat, and if one of you should by luck take down a prize buck, that would be nice, but it's not essential. You're the single mother out for a morning jog who's decided to take one of the paths on the Mountain, even though it's hunting season and your mother has warned you about the idiots who can't tell the difference between a woman and a deer. You're the ME, wishing you felt one-tenth as calm as you did your best to sound to the Police Chief, glad that at least you spoke with him before you opened the bottle of gin chilling in your freezer, which you already know will do nothing to dilute the images of those four men's remains—and never has that euphemism been so accurate—but which may help to still the shaking that has seized your hands since you drew to the end of the final autopsy. You're a pair of dancers leaving The Blue Belle out on Route 299, discussing whether to drive into the village for a drink at Peter's Corner Pub, because although it's close to two, Pete's will still be open, and the two of you are wound tight from too many cigarettes and too many lap dances for too many freaks, who seem to have been drawn from their caves, their mother's basements, by the last few days’ carnage. You're the chef, sous-chef, and waitress in early to the Toreador on Main Street to assemble salads, start soups, and decide on the day's specials, the three of you unable to discuss much besides the killer who has chosen Huguenot as his theater, and about whom a host of rumors, most centered on what he's taken from the bodies of those he's butchered, are in heavy circulation.—

  —You might even be the Werewolf, himself, which the hunters experience as something enormous, dark, snarling, that leaps into their midst and lays one of them open before any has registered its presence. For the single mother out on the mountain trail, the Werewolf is first the tall, pale man whose black suit is soaked with the blood of the man in whose exposed insides he's rooting around, and then he's something else, something she knows the moment she pivots away from she has no chance of outrunning, but maybe she can call for help before it's too late. For the ME, the Werewolf is a tall, pale man in a soiled black suit standing outside his apartment door, who, when he grins, shows a mouth with many too many teeth. For the dancers, the Werewolf is a rising growl in the backseat of the car. For the staff of Toreador, the Werewolf is a roar and shape too big for their narrow kitchen.—

  * * * *

  8. Some Headlines (In Lieu of Successive Descriptions of, Essentially, the Same Thing)

  HUNTERS KILLED: Four Men Found Murdered on Frenchman's Mountain; Woman Who Notified Police Missing.

  CORONER MURDERED: Was Working on Slain Hunters; Police Chief Refuses to Rule Out Connection to Previous Crime.

  DANCERS MISSING: Were Seen Leaving The Blue Belle Two Nights Ago; Car Found Abandoned and Bloody.

  RESTAURANT MASSACRE: Staff at Local Café Victims of Horrific Crime.

  HUGUENOT HORROR: Upstate New York Town Terrorized by Savage Murder Spree; Twelve Confirmed Dead, Additional Deaths Feared; Residents Panicked; Local and State Police Baffled.

  * * * *

  9. A Small Town in the North

  Where does he come from, the Werewolf? What drew Alphonse Sweet (it's him: no need to play coy) to that ghost town in Western Canada? What did he find there? Why did he leave his studies at Albany in the first place? What was he looking for?

  The answers lie on the other side of an experience that the monster himself cannot articulate; when he tries to bridge it to them, he sees images sparse and stark.

  White. Whiteness. The town,

  Distant on the tundra.

  Words on white paper.

  —

  Two rows of buildings,

  The town sits on the plain, lonely

  Even of ghosts.

  —

  Wind whistles up Main

  Street. Empty windows return

  No reflections.

  —

  Snow breaks underfoot.

  Wooden planks groan, protesting

  The wind's attention.

  —

  Flurries cloud the air.

  At the heart of swirling snow,

  Five figures standing.

  —

  Heavy fur robes drape

  Bodies. Carved animal masks

  Substitute for faces.

  —

  A plea, an offer,

  A withered hand extended,

  Taken. Whiteness. White.

  * * * *

  10. Trees Painted on Plywood Walls

  For Barbara, the narrative's climax begins with a crash that jolts her from a (blessedly) dreamless sleep. Eyes wide, heart thwacking against her sternum, she sits up in bed, a single question, What was that? flashing in her mind in great neon blue letters. She does not know the answer. Was it a lamp? She doesn't think so. This sound was not the dull clang of metal echoing off a hardwood floor: it was brittle, the sharp crack of glass breaking—one of her windows, maybe, or the full length mirror hung sideways in the living room to give the space the illusion of increased size. Is there an intruder in her apartment? She listens for the floor creaking under the weight of an intruder's sneaker, but hears nothing.

  Barbara throws back her bed's heavy quilt and rises from it, stooping to take the heavy flashlight she keeps under the bed in case of a blackout. The flashlight has a nylon loop at its end to slip around your wrist; Barbara does so, gripping the flashlight close to the end because she does not want it for illumination: she wants it for a weapon. Should there be anyone prowling her apartment, be he sociopath or drunken fratboy, she intends to beat him senseless first and ask questions later. She does not feel self-conscious or melodramatic in the least. Nor does she recognize her response to the noise within the context of a horror narrative as ill-advised, if not a mistake of the fatal variety; Barbara doesn't care for horror stories—though no doubt she would know the scene she is in if you pointed it out to her.

  She slides across the floor to the door, where she listens while counting to two hundred, time enough for any intruder to think that the noise he hea
rd from her bedroom was nothing more than her turning over in her sleep. She leans her head out of the doorway far enough for her to see down the short hallway to the living room. The living room appears to be empty. She cannot see all of it from here, however, so, flexing her fingers on the flashlight and raising it, Barbara steps from her bedroom and crosses the distance to the living room, more calm than she would have predicted had you asked her to imagine herself in such a scene, yet still apprehensive lest one of the boards in the hall floor creak and betray her. None do. She halts at the threshold to the living room and tilts forward, peering from side to side. She still cannot see every last bit of the living room, but it appears empty; neither does she observe evidence of broken glass, either from the windows or the mirror on the wall. Taking a breath, Barbara steps into the room.

  No one is there. Having established this fact through a series of quick glances, Barbara verifies it by turning in a slow circle, flashlight held at the ready. The room is empty of anyone save herself; nor have its contents been disturbed. Whatever she heard must have come from outside. Relaxing her grip on the flashlight, Barbara walks to the bay window and surveys Main Street. It's quiet. A group of college kids, most of them underage, no doubt, stands in front of Pete's Corner Pub, smoking and talking—given the presence of the killer, an exercise in collective bravado. A state police car cruises up the street, drawing glances from the kids. It would appear that none of the plate glass windows opening into the shops along Main Street has been smashed. Barbara steps back and, with one more look around the living room, exits it.