The undine was a column of madly churning water between his hands. The base of it spread; the water-column collapsed…and something came out of it, like the song comes out of a bird, boisterous, vital, filled with a splendor of being.
Drake caught it, enfolded it with himself, made himself whole once more.
He stood erect, his hands empty. He was solid flesh and blood, sturdy boned…and only now did he know in full how much he had lost…and how much regained…
He swayed, naked in his own living room. There were no dancing undines anywhere. Zuelda was gone. Ben was gone. There was only a lilting splash of water flowing down the kitchen steps, and then that was gone.
Drake found that he was shaking. He went into the bedroom, looked down at Beverly sleeping, touched the soft, pale curve of her cheek. The westering moon shone full upon her. Her lips tilted in a tender smile, as if in her dreams she responded to a suggestive, unheard song…
“She knows,” Drake thought, “but she won’t remember…I can thank them for that, at least. I won’t have to tell her, either…and I won’t…”
He half-turned, cocked an ear toward the thickety ridge, seeing again the passionate surge of the undines’ dance, hearing the elfin lure of their song. But it was only in fancy that he saw and heard. All was silent…no, not silent…there was sound that came to his earthly ears…the shrill music of tree frogs, the trilling of crickets, and booming above them all, the rasping scream of a cicada as it yielded its life to the predacious assault of some horny-limbed horror in the moonlight.
EENA
Originally published in Weird Tales, September 1947.
The she-wolf was silhouetted sharply against the moon-gilded waters of Wolf Lake. Silent as Death in the cover of a rotting log, Joel Cameron sighted along a dully gleaming rifle barrel. He squeezed the trigger.
The gray-tipped wolf leaped high, cavorted grotesquely in midair. The beast threshed in short-lived agony upon the ground and lay still. Joel ejected the cartridge from the smoking chamber.
“Five bucks, and all profit!” he grunted, anticipating the State bounty.
In the act of legging over the log, he stopped and swiftly raised his weapon. His attention had been so intent upon the she-wolf as she slunk from the forest edge, he had not noticed the whelp that followed her. Terrified, the whimpering wolf cub galloped toward the safety of the woods. Joel dropped his rifle and sprinted.
“I’ll be darned!” he panted, scooping the wolfling up into his arms. “An albino whelp!”
In this manner, Eena the she-wolfling was introduced to the world and the ways of men.
Joel’s cabin was a mile down the lake-shore, hidden in a wooded draw that protected it from wind and weather, and separated from the edge of the lake by a thin screen of timber.
Joel Cameron had been born and raised in the high pine woods. Later fortune, through the medium of a battered typewriter and a skillful ability to weave a fanciful yarn, had led him to life in the city. But each Spring he returned to the cabin he had built in the hills and stayed there until the crispness of early Autumn presaged the coming of snow.
It was an ideal life, one to which Joel’s temperament was ideally suited. When editorial favor inclined to the lean side, which it often did, he could depend upon the cabin in the mountains for refuge from the palsied palms of greedy landlords. The state wolf-bounty kept the figurative wolf from his door by inviting the literal one within.
Eena proved to be different from the usual wolfkind. Joel recognized this from the first. Even her albinoism was different. She lacked the red eyes usually associated with the lack of pigmentation. They were gray-hazel, and they gave Joel a weird sense of being somehow human. They were distinctly out of place in the snow-white, lupine visage of the wolflet.
Eena grew rapidly and prodigiously. At one time or another, every homesteader in the valley below passed by to see the albino. Some admired her look of intelligence, the growing strength of her. Some deplored the fact that a wolf so handy for killing should be allowed to live.
Pierre Lebrut, a trapper who had a tumble-down cabin a mile away, rubbed his palms on his greasy overalls and spat toward the caged wolf.
“Cameroon,” said he, “I catch her, I keel her, you bat!” He scowled at the white wolf, and Eena’s hackles raised in response. “She bad one, all right,” Pierre growled. “She breeng bad luck. You see!”
The man went away, and Joel crouched by the chicken-wire fence of Eena’s pen. He had got into the practice of talking softly to the animal.
“Kill you? Not you, my beauty!” He chuckled fondly. The half-grown wolf cocked her head at him and stared with unblinking, gray-hazel eyes.
“Sometimes I wonder if you’d let me scratch your ears?” He smiled through the fence. Eena lolled her tongue with a friendly grin. “On the other hand,” Joel told her, “I need both my hands to type with! You’re an independent she-cuss. Maybe that’s why I like you!”
Eena furnished Joel with material for several stories that went over well. As the Summer drifted somnolently past, he regarded her with increasing fondness. By the time Fall came around, Joel considered himself on friendly terms with the wolf, though he never dared venture close enough to touch her.
* * * *
By this time, too, the curiosity of the countryside was more or less satiated in regard to the albino wolf, and the traffic of visitors had long since returned to normal…one every two weeks.
Pete Martin worked the first homestead on the country road that led to Valley Junction. Pete Martin was the valley’s pride as a wolf hunter.
“Sent three sons an’ a daughter through college on wolf-hides!” he often asserted, referring to the monthly bounty checks from the State.
“I’ll give you fifty bucks fer that wolf-bitch,” Pete told Joel. “You’ll be winterin’ in the city pretty soon, an’ you can’t take the hellion with you. I want to cross her with some o’ my best dogs an’ raise me a breed o’ good wolf-hunters.”
Eena, six months old now and as big as a grown wolf, snoozed in the shade of the kennel Joel had built for her. Joel frowned.
“If I could think of some way to keep her,” he told the homesteader, “I’d never part with her. Under the circumstances, I’ll take your offer. I’ll be driving to the city within three days. I’ll bring her by then.” The two men shook hands solemnly on the agreement.
That night, Eena burrowed under the chicken wire fence of her enclosure. Like a silent wraith, she disappeared into the trackless wilds of the pine forest.
Joel drove his battered coupé back to the city, fifty dollars poorer than he might have been.
October winds rustled the waters of Wolf Lake. Deciduous trees turned red and gold and brown. The foothills blazed with Nature’s paintpot.
November skies were leaden. The frost giants awakened in the earth. Snow smothered the valley and the hills. Existence in the wild turned bleak and harrowing. On silent pads the wolfpack stole into the haunts of men. They followed the lead of a great, white she-wolf, the largest and most cunning wolf ever seen.
The wolves swept down from the hills and lurked in the swirling skirts of the blizzard to strike and kill. They took a costly toll from the livestock that pastured in the valley. The homesteaders cursed the white she-leader of the pack. Joel Cameron’s name was anathema on every tongue.
Eena was a year old the following spring. The handful of wolfling Joel Cameron had carried to his cabin a year before was now twice the size of the largest, sturdiest male, in her pack. It was to this, and to her wise cunning, that she owed her leadership.
Eena regarded the black wolves lolling around her in the warm sun. These were her kind, yet not her kind. She knew she was different in more ways than size and the color of her pelt. For weeks she had felt a restlessness stirring inside her, an inexplicable thrilling
of unknown significance.
Across the lake which glittered like a turquoise jewel in its setting of forest emerald, the sun sparkled upon the snowy mantilla of the mountain that thrust bare stone shoulders up from a clinging bodice of pine woods.
Memory stirred the mind of the white she-wolf. She was thinking of a cabin hidden in a woodsy draw, hard by the waters of the lake. She remembered a clean-lined young face, a soothing voice that had spoken to her in pleasing, unintelligible syllables. She remembered kindness and something that amounted to friendship with a creature who was called man. Eena whimpered and got up.
The wolves rose with her and ringed around expectantly. For a long moment Eena stood poised and silent, dwarfing the members of her pack. A thought, feeling…a command…went from her to them. The wolves sank back upon their haunches, tongues lolling. Eena turned and trotted alone into the forest.
The white wolf padded silently along sun-barred aisles of the forest. Her path led in an easy circle around the lake. Near sunset, she came unerringly upon the clearing occupied by Joel Cameron’s cabin.
She crept into a thicket of elderberry trees and peered expectantly forth. Not toward the cabin, for that with the setting sun was at her back. Her questing glance winged across the darkening blue waters of the lake and fixed upon the glowing summit of the mountain.
Fascinated, Eena watched the fading beauty of it. The sky turned smoky-hued. A star or two glittered diamond-hard. A golden glow paled the sable sky beyond the shoulder of the mountain.
Crouched in the voiceless shadows, Eena held her breath and tingled with suspense. Instinct gave her thrilling warning. She was about to witness the essence of her difference from the wolfkind.
The moon came up full, a pumpkin-yellow disk, and rested its chin upon the mountain to ponder the scene thoughtfully before commencing its climb into the sky… And Eena changed.
The change shook her with ecstasy. Bubbling rapture accompanied the smooth flowing of supple muscles, the adjusting of bones in their sockets. An excitement of sensual pleasure engulfed every nerve and sinew. Afterward, she lay supine for a long time, one arm flung across her eyes to bar the eldritch glare of the moon, panting, trembling with remembered delight.
She sat up at last and thrilled to the shapely beauty of her form. Eena knew she was a woman, and she was content. She did not question how this had come about.
Eena crept down to the water’s edge and surveyed her reflection in the dark surface of the lake. A faint-breeze stirred the platinum tresses against round, golden shoulders. Her face was eager, full-lipped with flaring brows accenting her gray-hazel eyes. Her body was high of breast and long of leg, and the moonlight caressed her with a touch of mystery and magic.
The cabin was still, high-lighted and shadowed in the moon-brimming canyon.
Eena padded around it in a cautious circle. The air was dead, without scent. The man with the kind face and soothing voice was not here.
Puzzled and hurt, Eena turned away. She swam awhile in the icy waters of the lake, reveling in the tonic effect of the chill.
Later, she roamed aimlessly, enjoying the easy response of her nerves and muscles. Once, her keen wolf-sense detected a rabbit quaking in a patch of brush. She started it up. As the frightened animal ran out, she sprinted swiftly and seized it in her hands. The rabbit uttered a thin, terrorized shriek, and died.
Eena sank her teeth in the rabbit’s throat and exulted to the gushing warmth of blood. She sat down upon the needled turf, methodically tore the animal to pieces and ate it.
From time to time in her wandering, Eena responded to her woman’s nature and crept down to the lake to admire her reflection.
The night was short…too short. Eena’s aimless peregrination brought her just before dawn to another cabin. Pierre Lebrut lived here. Eena’s sensitive nose caught the trapper’s reek strong upon the air. A sluggish memory stirred in her brain. Eena snarled without sound and retreated with the prickling of invisible hackles stirring the length, of her spine.
A twig snapped under Eena’s foot. Steel piano-wire sang, and a bent sapling straightened with a rush. Eena was flung to earth, one foot jerked high in the wire noose of a snare. She threshed in wild panic, clawing and snapping wolf-fashion at the searing pain in her ankle.
Within the musty cabin, Lebrut sat up in his tumbled bunk.
“By gar, she sound like bear in dat trap!”
He slipped into heavy boots—he slept in his pants and undershirt—seized his rifle and hurried outside.
Gray dawn lighted the east, reflected palely into the forest. Lebrut saw the woman caught in his snare, laid down his rifle, and hurried to release her.
“Sacre nom d’un loup!” he muttered, slackening the wire to remove the noose from Eena’s threshing ankle. “Lady, you pick fine time an’ place for peecneec—an’ w’at you do wit’ no clo’es on?”
Pierre was excited and his voice shrill. The scent of him was overpowering in Eena’s nostrils. She bit him savagely on the calf.
Pierre yelled in sudden fright. He fell heavily on the wolf-girl, and she snapped and clawed in renewed terror. The man grunted with anger and fought her, pinioned her arms.
“You wild one, hein?” Eena’s body was closed, arched and quivering. Pierre grinned. “Maybe Pierre tame you wit’ a kees, hein?”
The sun came up over the shoulder of the mountain and tinged the lake with blood.
…And Eena changed.
It was no sensation of pleasure to return to the wolf. Eena felt the agony of the change in every muscle and nerve. She screamed with the horrid crunching and grinding of bones in her head, lengthening into the lupine muzzle. Albino fur sprouted like a million thorny barbs from her tender skin.
Pierre was still wide-eyed and frozen with horror when the fangs of the agonized wolf ripped the life from his terror-stricken body.
* * * *
Pete Martin looked grim as he pried open the stiffened fingers of the dead trapper. The wind stirred a tuft of albino fur on the dead man’s palm.
“Your albino bitch, Joel,” the homesteader said.
Joel bit his lip.
“It’s a devil of a thing for a man to come back to, Pete.” He looked stolidly down at the dead man. “Poor Pierre! He died hard.” Joel brought his glance up to meet the kindly stare of the homesteader. “I know the valley blames me for not killing Eena when she was a pup.”
Martin shrugged. “It’s too late now for blame, Joel. Maybe I’m to blame for not takin’ her with me the day I offered to buy her. I dunno.” He scratched his long jaw. “Well, we better see about gettin’ Pierre properly planted, I guess.”
Joel’s expression was darkly stormy. “I feel responsible for the cattle…for Pierre.” He wondered silently when and where the white wolf would kill again. He tongued dry lips. “I’ll track her down and destroy her.”
“There’s a thousand dollars on her hide, Joel. Every homesteader in the valley chipped in.”
“If I bring in her hide,” Joel clipped, “it won’t cost the homesteaders a cent!”
The homesteader’s gray eyes lighted with a friendly gleam.
“Figured you’d look at it like that, Joel. I’ll give you what help I can…”
Joel spent the following month in the hinterland, returning to his cabin at intervals only to replenish supplies. The wolves were wary. He seldom came upon wolf-sign and saw no wolves at all. But he heard them. By night their lonesome song rang eerily through the forest and echoed from the mountains.
Joel made final return to his cabin, and that night drove his coupé down a moonlit road to the Martin homestead.
“Reckoned you wouldn’t find her,” the homesteader acknowledged Joel’s acquiescence to defeat. “She knows she’s hunted an’ will always manage to be some place else. She was here night
before last with her pack an’ got my prize heifer.”
Joel made a gesture of despair. “You see what I’m up against? Besides, I’m behind in my work: I came up here to finish a book. The publisher is yelling his head off for it. How can I write a book and hunt wolves, too?”
The homesteader spat a fine stream of tobacco juice. “You go ahead an’ write your book, son. You’ve made your try, an’ ’twarn’t your fault you failed. Some of us are gittin’ together in the mornin’. We’ll take to the wolf-trail an’ stick it out till we git her!”
Joel’s heart felt heavy. He still had a fond memory of the white she-wolf he had nursed from babyhood. He remembered her attitude of sage intelligence, her qualities that had made her seem almost human. Then he remembered she had turned killer, and he peered into the moon-shadows as he drove along the county road, half afraid he might spy her lurking there. He turned down the indistinct ruts that led to his lakeside cabin, and another mile of bumpy going brought him home. The wobbling headlights swept across the cabin front, revealed an open door.
Joel suffered mild panic. Had a bear forced entry? He could imagine the shambles the animal had made of the interior. He sprang out and approached the house cautiously, rifle ready. Everything inside was in order. He lit the mantle of the kerosene lamp, went out and shut off the car lights and reentered the cabin.
Eena lay curled on a bearskin rug in front of the stone fireplace. Her platinum curls glistened silver contrast against the dull gold of her naked skin. She supported her chin with her hands and watched him with wide, wary eyes. A patch of full-moon brilliance, brighter than the lamplight, puddled the floor at her feet.
Joel stared. She was a dream come to life. The shock of seeing her there dismayed him. “Who are you?” he essayed at last.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 20
