Unnatural Creatures

by Neil Gaiman

  “So,” he said, “Jenny Haniver. What do you think about her story now?”

  “It’s the same thing,” I said. “She gets sewn up. She turns into a monster. She leaves.”

  “I think you’re lacking some inspiration.” Mr. Jabricot made two scolding clicks at the back of his throat. “Or, you’re lying. The moral of the story is: you can’t see anything unless you look at it inside another skin. Your friend can’t figure that one out, but I assume you’re smarter than he is.” He patted my shoulder.

  I decided that I had been lying, but hadn’t realized it until he made me consider the possibility. I was about to apologize, but Mr. Jabricot opened the door at the end of the hall. The room inside was cold and smelled of plaster, chemicals, and the sharp, uncomfortable scent of strong disinfectant. There were shelves full of tools and bottles and boxes piled with soft scraps that looked like fur. Matthew was sitting on the edge of a long table, poking through a tray of mismatched glass eyes.

  “This is Mr. Jabricot’s office. My mom never comes here. She says it’s creepy.” Matthew held a flat gold eye with a slotted pupil up to his face. “I think it’s the most gorgeous room in the world. Every time I come here, I feel like the excitement is going to punch me in the face.”

  I sat on the table next to him. Mr. Jabricot moved around the room, returning boxes to shelves and sweeping a dry paintbrush across the bared surfaces. Fur and dust drifted to the floor.

  “You really work here?” I asked.

  “Of course. I take care of the collection. Patch up moth damage, reset loose eyes, paint on the stripes and dapples when they start to fade. Everything else, I squeeze in around the edges.”

  “Like the Jenny Haniver?” I asked. “And the raccoon?” I wondered if the raccoon had been put away in a storage room, or thrown away, or if it were somewhere outside, prowling the halls on nimble, dark-nailed feet.

  “Yes,” Mr. Jabricot said. “And this new thing I’m working on. The one I was hoping to show you.” He moved toward a cabinet at the side of the room, but Matthew was off the table and ahead of him, pulling the doors open and gathering in his arms a mound of sable, a sliding, ruddy pile of fur that fell in sheets to the floor and ended in something that dragged and clattered. He held it up to me and then spun around, sliding his arms in, ducking his head under, and coming up again, dressed in a fur coat.

  “It’s a manticore,” he said. He smiled so hard that his face went shiny where it stretched over his cheeks and his chin.

  He just looked like Matthew in a fur coat. A fur coat with one set of paws dangling from the cuffs and another flopped on the floor. It had a sad, crooked tail with a spike tied to the end of it and a fluffy collar that rose all the way to his ears.

  “You look silly,” I said. Matthew rolled his eyes.

  “A manticore,” Mr. Jabricot said, “has the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a dragon.” He held up a needle, curved at one end and straight at the other, and threaded it with a strand of something long and dark. Matthew held up his own needle and they began stitching him up, one from the top and one from the bottom.

  “It has a terrible voice, like a dozen trumpets,” Matthew said. “It has a mouth full of teeth, three rows of them, like a shark.” As they stitched, the coat shrank. It clung to his back, wrapped around his legs, and pulled his shoulders over so he was bent, then kneeling, then standing on four paws. The claws scraped the floor.

  They stitched and stitched. I told them to stop.

  Stop, I said. It’s stupid, whatever you’re doing. I don’t believe it, I said. Why is that tail lashing? I can’t believe how stupid I was to come. I’m going to close my eyes and when I open them, I won’t be here, you won’t be here, none of this will have happened.

  They didn’t hear me.

  A manticore’s voice sounds exactly like a dozen trumpets, if a dozen trumpets were playing twelve different jazz scores and all the musicians were deaf and stranded at different points in time.

  I opened my eyes.

  The manticore was standing on Mr. Jabricot. Its claws pierced the brown tweed of Mr. Jabricot’s coat and its tail swung in an arc that shrank the world down to nothing but the poisonous spike tracing the edge of it. The manticore knocked Mr. Jabricot’s hat from his head, and I could see that the top of Mr. Jabricot’s head was balding, a circle of tender, shiny flesh ringed by short hair as plain as the coat of a mouse.

  “Oh no,” Mr. Jabricot said. “Oh no oh no oh no.”

  The manticore’s mouth was full of teeth, three yellowing rows of them, and it ground them together as it studied all the soft and delicate parts of the man lying beneath its claws. The twelve trumpets screamed and Mr. Jabricot covered his ears.

  The teeth looked terrible shoved into Matthew’s face. They stretched his mouth so wide that his lips couldn’t close over them. They crowded his nose and pressed his chin back to accommodate their three rows, turning Matthew’s face into a different shape. It wouldn’t have been able to laugh, or smile, or twist its lips up at one corner over something it found more interesting than anything else in the room. It didn’t look like Matthew at all.

  “Spit those out,” I said. I reached out and grabbed the manticore’s fur. I pulled it toward me, or maybe it pulled me toward it. I couldn’t be sure because Mr. Jabricot struggled up from the floor and ran from the room. He was sobbing; I could hear it underneath the trumpets screaming and doors slamming and the voices of people coming down through the halls. I worked my fingers into a seam, already wearing out and pulling apart. I ripped it and the manticore bit my arm.

  “Stop that,” I said. The manticore ignored me, so I ignored the teeth sinking into my arm, the smell of blood, and the aching, blinding pain, and found another seam and ripped that one too. The manticore was unraveling now. Its fur peeled off in long strips. Its teeth fell out, one by one. It let go of my arm and ran for the door, howling in a brassy voice that sounded less and less like a roar.

  My arm was bleeding, so I sewed it up. There were needles in a cupboard and I used a piece of hair from my own head. It hurt more than I thought it would, but less than having a manticore’s teeth stuck in your arm. It healed in a week and when my mom asked what happened, I said I had been scratched by a cat.

  “Do you need an antibiotic?” she asked.

  I told her that I didn’t think so. It wasn’t anything dangerous and, besides, it was almost healed.

  Matthew was grounded. They found him in a closet in the museum, asleep in the wreckage of a very expensive specimen, a half-lion, half-tiger skin that Mr. Jabricot had been commissioned to mount as part of a display on rare hybrids of the world. His mom made a formal apology to the museum board and tried to quit her job out of embarrassment, but they begged her to come back, with the condition that Matthew would never go into the museum again.

  I haven’t decided what I am going to say to him yet. I think he still might be my best friend.

  The scar on my arm is very faint and narrow. It’s about the width of a piece of hair and curves three times between my shoulder and my elbow. Sometimes, on hot and quiet afternoons, I’ll go outside alone and look at it in the sun.

  On the rare occasion, I sing.

  A trumpet, just one, sounds sweet when it finds the right tune. If you’re lucky, a monster does too.

  13

  The second werewolf story in this book. If I love werewolves (and I do) it is because I read this story, with its professor, magician, Nazi spies, and Hollywood film actress, at an age where such things left lasting impressions. It is a very silly story by a very good writer and editor, ANTHONY BOUCHER.

  Professor Wolfe Wolf, unlucky in love, is drowning his sorrows in a bar, when he meets a magician, who informs him that he’s not destined to be a professor, but a werewolf. Detectives, spies, brainy secretaries…Things, needless to say, do not go at all according to plan.

  THE PROFESSOR GLANCED AT THE NOTE:

  Don’t be silly—Gloria.

&n
bsp; Wolfe Wolf crumpled the sheet of paper into a yellow ball and hurled it out the window into the sunshine of the bright campus spring. He made several choice and profane remarks in fluent Middle High German.

  Emily looked up from typing the proposed budget for the departmental library. “I’m afraid I didn’t understand that, Professor Wolf. I’m weak on Middle High.”

  “Just improvising,” said Wolf, and sent a copy of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology to follow the telegram.

  Emily rose from the typewriter. “There’s something the matter. Did the committee reject your monograph on Hager?”

  “That monumental contribution to human knowledge? Oh, no. Nothing so important as that.”

  “But you’re so upset—”

  “The office wife!” Wolf snorted. “And pretty damned polyandrous at that, with the whole department on your hands. Go away.”

  Emily’s dark little face lit up with a flame of righteous anger that removed any trace of plainness. “Don’t talk to me like that, Mr. Wolf. I’m simply trying to help you. And it isn’t the whole department. It’s—”

  Professor Wolf picked up an inkwell, looked after the telegram and the Journal, then set the glass pot down again. “No. There are better ways of going to pieces. Sorrows drown easier than they smash. Get Herbrecht to take my two o’clock, will you?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To hell in sectors. So long.”

  “Wait. Maybe I can help you. Remember when the dean jumped you for serving drinks to students? Maybe I can—”

  Wolf stood in the doorway and extended one arm impressively, pointing with that curious index which was as long as the middle finger. “Madam, academically you are indispensable. You are the prop and stay of the existence of this department. But at the moment this department can go to hell, where it will doubtless continue to need your invaluable services.”

  “But don’t you see—” Emily’s voice shook. “No. Of course not. You wouldn’t see. You’re just a man—no, not even a man. You’re just Professor Wolf. You’re Woof-woof.”

  Wolf staggered. “I’m what?”

  “Woof-woof. That’s what everybody calls you because your name’s Wolfe Wolf. All your students, everybody. But you wouldn’t notice a thing like that. Oh, no. Woof-woof, that’s what you are.”

  “This,” said Wolfe Wolf, “is the crowning blow. My heart is breaking, my world is shattered, I’ve got to walk a mile from the campus to find a bar; but all this isn’t enough. I’ve got to be called Woof-woof. Goodbye!”

  He turned, and in the doorway caromed into a vast and yielding bulk, which gave out with a noise that might have been either a greeting of “Wolf!” or more probably an inevitable grunt of “Oof!”

  Wolf backed into the room and admitted Professor Fearing, paunch, pince-nez, cane, and all. The older man waddled over to his desk, plumped himself down, and exhaled a long breath. “My dear boy,” he gasped. “Such impetuosity.”

  “Sorry, Oscar.”

  “Ah, youth—” Professor Fearing fumbled about for a handkerchief, found none, and proceeded to polish his pince-nez on his somewhat stringy necktie. “But why such haste to depart? And why is Emily crying?”

  “Is she?”

  “You see?” said Emily hopelessly, and muttered “Woof-woof” into her damp handkerchief.

  “And why do copies of the JEGP fly about my head as I harmlessly cross the campus? Do we have teleportation on our hands?”

  “Sorry,” Wolf repeated curtly. “Temper. Couldn’t stand that ridiculous argument of Glocke’s. Goodbye.”

  “One moment.” Professor Fearing fished into one of his unnumbered handkerchiefless pockets and produced a sheet of yellow paper. “I believe this is yours?”

  Wolf snatched at it and quickly converted it into confetti.

  Fearing chuckled. “How well I remember when Gloria was a student here! I was thinking of it only last night when I saw her in Moonbeams and Melody. How she did upset this whole department! Heavens, my boy, if I’d been a younger man myself—”

  “I’m going. You’ll see about Herbrecht, Emily?”

  Emily sniffled and nodded.

  “Come, Wolfe.” Fearing’s voice had grown more serious. “I didn’t mean to plague you. But you mustn’t take these things too hard. There are better ways of finding consolation than in losing your temper or getting drunk.”

  “Who said anything about—”

  “Did you need to say it? No, my boy, if you were to— You’re not a religious man, are you?”

  “Good God, no,” said Wolf contradictorily.

  “If only you were…If I might make a suggestion, Wolfe, why don’t you come over to the temple tonight? We’re having very special services. They might take your mind off Glo—off your troubles.”

  “Thanks, no. I’ve always meant to visit your temple—I’ve heard the damnedest rumors about it—but not tonight. Some other time.”

  “Tonight would be especially interesting.”

  “Why? What’s so special of a feast day about April thirtieth?”

  Fearing shook his gray head. “It is shocking how ignorant a scholar can be outside of his chosen field…But you know the place, Wolfe; I’ll hope to see you there tonight.”

  “Thanks. But my troubles don’t need any supernatural solutions. A couple of zombies will do nicely, and I do not mean serviceable stiffs. Goodbye, Oscar.” He was halfway through the door before he added as an afterthought, “’Bye, Emily.”

  “Such rashness,” Fearing murmured. “Such impetuosity. Youth is a wonderful thing to enjoy, is it not, Emily?”

  Emily said nothing, but plunged into typing the proposed budget as though all the fiends of hell were after her, as indeed many of them were.

  The sun was setting, and Wolf’s tragic account of his troubles had laid an egg, too. The bartender had polished every glass in the joint and still the repetitive tale kept pouring forth. He was torn between a boredom new even in his experience and a professional admiration for a customer who could consume zombies indefinitely.

  “Did I tell you about the time she flunked the midterm?” Wolf demanded truculently.

  “Only three times,” said the bartender.

  “All right, then; I’ll tell you. Yunnerstand, I don’t do things like this. Profeshical ethons, that’s what’s I’ve got. But this was different. This wasn’t like somebody that doesn’t know just because she doesn’t know; this was a girl that didn’t know because she wasn’t the kind of girl that has to know the kind of things a girl has to know if she’s the kind of girl that ought to know that kind of things. Yunnerstand?”

  The bartender cast a calculating glance at the plump little man who sat alone at the end of the deserted bar, carefully nursing his gin-and-tonic.

  “She made me see that. She made me see lossa things and I can still see the things she made me see the things. It wasn’t just like a professor falls for a coed, yunnerstand? This was different. This was wunnaful. This was like a whole new life, like.”

  The bartender sidled down to the end of the bar. “Brother,” he whispered softly. The little man with the odd beard looked up from his gin-and-tonic. “Yes, colleague?”

  “I listen to that potted professor another five minutes, I’m going to start smashing up the joint. How’s about slipping down there and standing in for me, huh?”

  The little man looked Wolf over and fixed his gaze especially on the hand that clenched the tall zombie glass. “Gladly, colleague.” He nodded.

  The bartender sighed a gust of relief.

  “She was Youth,” Wolf was saying intently to where the bartender had stood. “But it wasn’t just that. This was different. She was Life and Excitement and Joy and Ecstasy and stuff. Yunner—” He broke off and stared at the empty space. “Uh-mazing!” he observed. “Right before my very eyes. Uh-mazing!”

  “You were saying, colleague?” the plump little man prompted from the adjacent stool.

  Wolf turned. “S
o there you are. Did I tell you about the time I went to her house to check her term paper?”

  “No. But I have a feeling you will.”

  “Howja know? Well, this night—”

  The little man drank slowly; but his glass was empty by the time Wolf had finished the account of an evening of pointlessly tentative flirtation. Other customers were drifting in, and the bar was now about a third full.

  “—and ever since then—” Wolf broke off sharply. “That isn’t you,” he objected.

  “I think it is, colleague.”

  “But you’re a bartender and you aren’t a bartender.”

  “No. I’m a magician.”

  “Oh. That explains it. Now, like I was telling you— Hey! Your bald is beard.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your bald is beard. Just like your head. It’s all jussa fringe running around.”

  “I like it that way.”

  “And your glass is empty.”

  “That’s all right too.”

  “Oh, no it isn’t. It isn’t every night you get to drink with a man that proposed to Gloria Garton and got turned down. This is an occasion for celebration.” Wolf thumped loudly on the bar and held up his first two fingers.

  The little man regarded their equal length. “No,” he said softly. “I think I’d better not. I know my capacity. If I have another—well, things might start happening.”

  “Lettemappen!”

  “No. Please, colleague. I’d rather—”

  The bartender brought the drinks. “Go on, brother,” he whispered. “Keep him quiet. I’ll do you a favor sometime.”

  Reluctantly the little man sipped at his fresh gin-and-tonic.

  The professor took a gulp of his nth zombie. “My name’s Woof-woof,” he proclaimed. “Lots of people call me Wolfe Wolf. They think that’s funny. But it’s really Woof-woof. Wazoors?”

  The other paused a moment to decipher that Arabic-sounding word, then said, “Mine’s Ozymandias the Great.”