Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

by Ray Garton

  Roger shook his head.

  "Because if you tell someone he's a monster long enough, he becomes one. If you say it's evil to be gay and enforce that, then gay people have to find their companionship in a dark, secret place, and it becomes dirty. Evil. If you tell a writer it's evil to write stories because stories that aren't true make people ill, depress them, whatever—I believe Mrs. White said something along those lines, didn't she?—then harass him and tell him he's going to burn for doing something he loves, well, pretty soon it affects his work. The stories become dark tales. Bleak. Stories of pain and violence. Evil stories, if you want. You see, Roger, their little plan is really quite beautiful. With all those rules, they create their own monsters. Otherwise, they would have nothing to fight. No one to control. No one to blame. But," he smiled, "they didn't get me. That's why I'm one of the lucky ones. And they haven't gotten you, Roger, not yet. Even though they're still trying. But this girl, Sondra..."

  Josh shook his head and his eyes darkened. His sunken face soured in an expression of bitterness. It was so bitter that Roger asked, "What's wrong? I thought you said you're at peace with them."

  "Oh, no, no. I'm at peace with my whys. I'll never truly be at peace with the Mormons. Or any of them, actually. I hate the fuckers." He paused a while, resting his face against a palm, then said, "My father called about six months ago, when he found out I had AIDS. I hadn't heard his voice since the day he chased me out of the house, but I knew it immediately. He laughed at me and said, 'God always finds a way to spill the blood of the sinners.' See...that's what bothers me the most. He thinks I'm being punished for my wicked life. I don't think that. I just happened to be one of the unlucky ones who got this horrible sickness that gave me a death sentence. But after I'm dead, he'll smile, and all his friends will smile, and all the people who used to be my friends...and they'll think that they are right. That they are victorious. I'm at peace with myself in spite of how they tried to make me feel. The truth is, I'm right. They're wrong. But there are only a few like me. Like you. Most people are controlled and are in turn controlling others. The only truth to them is that list of rules. What bothers me most is...in the end, they always win. People like you and me, Roger...we're outnumbered. In the end...they always win."

  Roger sat in confused, overwhelmed silence for a while, drained by what Josh had said. He thumbed through the book, glancing at the stills from old werewolf movies, the sketchy illustrations of bodies writhing through hideous transformations.

  Josh said, "Take it."

  "I'll bring it back."

  Josh laughed dryly. "Keep it, Roger. I have no use for it." He stood with effort, as if his frail body were several times its actual weight. "I think there are some things in that book that you'll find interesting. I wish I could be of more help."

  "You listened."

  "Happy to."

  "Sorry to dump on you like—"

  "Hush." He struggled away from the chair. "I don't mean to be rude, Roger, but why don't you take off now. I'm very tired."

  Roger closed the book and said, "Sure, Josh. You gonna be okay?" He realized even as he was speaking how stupid the words were.

  "No." Josh laughed.

  "Jesus, I didn't mean—"

  "Don't worry about it." He hobbled toward Roger, his bony shoulders rising and falling slowly above his stiff arms like the pistons of a dying engine. He stopped, lifted his arms with the canes dangling from his hands, swayed slightly, and embraced Roger as he said, "Thank you for coming by. You take care of yourself, Roger."

  He cautiously returned Josh's hug, afraid the man might break, and said, "I'll come back in a couple of days and let you know what I think of the book."

  Josh smirked as he pulled away. "You do that."

  It was the last time Roger would ever see him.

  29.

  Roger went home, made some coffee, and sat down to read the book

  It was poorly written and not even bound very well, but once Roger skimmed through the first three chapters, all of which dealt with the Hollywoodized myth of lycanthropy, he began to find passages that rang chillingly true.

  There were several different theories behind the physical transformation that allegedly plagued victims of lycanthropy. Some attributed it to supernatural curses: A gypsy's hex, a witch's spell. Others claimed it was a rare disease that caused hair to grow over its victim's body at regular intervals, made him unable to walk upright, and caused him to crave raw meat. It was a subheading in bold print near the end of the chapter that fully captured Roger's attention: LYCANTHROPY AND RELIGION. He read the section slowly, then read it again.

  A psychiatrist in Boston had linked religious repression to a mental and physical aberration that resembled lycanthropy.

  "Often, one who is raised in the confines of a fundamentalist faith," Dr. Regis Maine said at a 1978 psychiatric conference in Washington, D.C., "will, at some point, begin to doubt or reject the doctrines of his church. This independent thinking is inevitably met with severe negative reinforcement from family and friends within the religion who try, through various means of exclusion and harassment, to convince the subject that the fault is with him rather than the church."

  "No shit," Roger muttered as he read.

  Dr. Maine claimed to have several patients who, after extensive counseling, admitted that they were "monsters" and were physically transformed with increasing regularity—some at times of anger, others with feeling of sexual arousal or even simple happiness and contentment. He even claimed to have witnessed one of these transformations.

  "While the physical alterations were nothing like those seen in films or on television, they were, without doubt, complete and inhuman, animal-like, and the patient became extremely violent and exhibited a drastic increase in physical strength."

  With continued therapy, Dr. Maine learned that each patient, all of whom were raised in very conservative fundamentalist homes, had been the subject of what he called "intense reconversion or ostracization campaigns" designed either to woo the backslidden, wayward patient back into the fold or shame or even frighten him into rededicating himself to Christ. During this process, the patients became convinced that they were in some way monstrous or even possessed, that they were indeed evil and deserved the treatment shown them. It was during this time that they began to experience mysterious physical ailments—particularly severe abdominal pains—all of which escaped the diagnosis of doctors, even after extensive tests. These eventually developed into the physical metamorphosis which Dr. Maine suggested had, for centuries, been identified by the superstitious and fanatically religious as a demonic curse that turned its victims into ravenous wolves.

  "It was not a curse at all," Maine said, "but quite likely a severe mental and physical condition imposed upon its victim by the very people who feared it most."

  Dr. Maine proposed a treatment. If the patient were convinced that the desires and aspirations considered to be so evil and monstrous by the religious oppressors—sexual longings, artistic goals, alternate lifestyles—were perfectly natural and healthy, and if those things were encouraged and ultimately acted upon, the patient would come to accept and love himself and learn to reject the harmful accusations and teachings of the religious zealots surrounding him.

  No one took Dr. Maine seriously. According to the book, by the time Dr. Maine went public with his theory, he was exhibiting some rather bizarre behavior himself. He had just lost a great deal of weight, his hands shook as he stammered through his address, and his fellow psychiatrists speculated that Dr. Maine was nearing a breakdown.

  They were right.

  Only two weeks after the 1978 conference where Main shocked his colleagues into an embarrassed silence with his "findings," he was forcibly admitted to a mental institution, hysterical and violent, after being found running naked down a city street babbling wildly about monsters, "horrible flesh-eating monsters."

  30.

  Dr Maine was a smal
l man with wiry hair the color of a silent film and, because it seemed appropriate to Roger's subconscious, he spoke with a stereotypical German accent. He sat facing Roger in a Naugahyde chair, hugging himself in a straitjacket and clamping a sweet-smelling pipe between his teeth. A strip of perspiration glistened like jewels above his wide, darting eyes.

  "Sumzink is vorryink you, no?" the doctor asked through clenched teeth, puffing smoke. "Ze monster, perhaps?"

  "Yes."

  "Yours or hers?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Your monster or Zondra's monster?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Vell, zat is ze problem, no?"

  "The problem?"

  Dr. Maine began rocking in his chair. "You und ze girl, you are zo much alike, no? Und your zymptoms are zo much alike, no? You vant her, und yet you fear her. She brings you too close to zem. You fear zat, had you not fought zem, fled zem, und continued to exorzize your demons on paper mit your writing, ze pain vould have continued. Vould have come out. Like hers. No?"

  "Come out?"

  "Like zat," Dr. Maine laughed, nodding toward Roger's stomach.

  Roger looked down to find that he was naked and his belly was bulging as something pressed at the flesh from the inside, tore at it, cut it, sliced through it, until a hideously gnarled claw ripped its way out of him, dangling bracelets of viscera.

  * * * *

  When he woke from the nightmare, he was sitting up, holding his belly and grunting. The pain was snacking on his guts again.

  Roger had reread the section titled LYCANTHROPY AND RELIGION until he almost knew it by heart. That section of the book could have been written specifically for him, meant to be read by him.

  Meant to frighten him.

  And frighten him it did.

  He tried to go back to sleep and did drop off a couple of times, but his sleep was shallow and diseased with nightmares he had thought long gone.

  He heard the thunderous footsteps of a giant raging Jesus destroying the neighborhood as he bellowed, "Where's Carlton? Where is that little shit?"

  He hid in black filthy corners—a child again, weak and terrified—as the Sunday-keepers stormed around him with bright flashlights and powerful guns, shouting, "There's one over there!" and, "Hah! I got another one!"

  He writhed in bed as he dreamed that his skin was moving over his body, changing, twisting.

  And the claw. He saw it when the pain came in his sleep, its curved talons dark with blood.

  He finally gave up and sat at his bedroom window with a drink, watching as the sun rose behind the thick veil of raining clouds that glowed a dull steel gray. As he watched the day begin, he imagined Sondra waking, showering, eating breakfast as Bill limped silently around the house on his clicking leg. She would go to school, go from class to class, eat lunch with friends, acting like just another high school senior, a shy and silent teenager...acting as if she had never hurt a soul, ended a life, tasted blood, or eaten human flesh. Until it happened again.

  And when will that be? he wondered.

  Roger decided he had to talk with Sondra soon.

  Today.

  31.

  Roger parked outside the high school and waited for thirty minutes. Shortly before three o'clock, students began to spill down the front steps and scatter in the parking lot to board buses and speed away in cars. When he spotted Sondra, he honked his horn and called to her out the window.

  She approached the car warily.

  "We have to talk," he said.

  "I can't. I've gotta work."

  "I'll drive you. Get in."

  "Roger, I'm not even supposed to see you, and if I—"

  "Get. In."

  Once she was in the car, he turned to her and asked how she felt.

  "I'm...fine, I guess."

  "You look tired."

  She shrugged.

  "Has it happened again?"

  "Roger, I told you to forget it."

  "I can't. And neither can you. It's only going to get worse unless you try to do something about it. Look, I think I know what's wrong, what's causing it. It's not your fault, Sondra, it's—"

  "I have to go to work." She opened her door and Roger reached across and pulled it shut, then started the car.

  "Where?"

  "Vintage Video."

  Jesus, he thought, first they let her work in a deli serving food they'd never let her eat, now they let her work in a store that rents movies they'd probably never let her watch. They may say I'm evil, but at least I'm consistent.

  As he drove, he told her what Niles had said about Sidney.

  "They know something," he said. "I'm afraid maybe they've found him."

  She seemed not to hear him.

  He parked the car in front of the video store, getting angry.

  "Goddammit, Sondra, quit acting like nothing's wrong, like nothing's happened!" he snapped. "I think I can help you. I need to know if Bill knows about—"

  Sondra gasped, looking out her window.

  Bill stood on the sidewalk in front of the video store glaring at them.

  "Oh, no," she breathed, closing her eyes, "oh, no, no, no..."

  "Jesus," Roger hissed. The dread in Sondra's face made him ache for her. He reached over and squeezed her hand as Bill began to hobble toward them. "Listen, Sondra, listen to me, you can get my number from Betty and call me, I want to help you. We have to talk. Is there anything you should tell me?"

  She looked at him with terrified eyes and whispered, "You should be very careful. Be careful of—"

  Bill opened the door.

  "C'mon," he said, his voice low and ominous.

  Sondra quickly got out and Bill leaned into the car.

  "I had to talk to her, Bill," Roger said quickly, "please believe me, I had to—"

  "You've got nothing to say to her."

  "Bill, we've got to talk, you and me, it's important, very important, it's about Sondra, and I'm afraid that—"

  "You've got nothing to say to me, either. And if I ever...ever...see you with Sondra again..." His lips trembled with quiet rage.

  "Listen, Bill, we have to put our differences aside and talk about—"

  "Don't let it happen again." Bill stared at Roger with stony eyes a moment, then shook his head and said, "You were stupid to come back here." He slammed the door so hard the car shook.

  As he drove home, Roger pounded the wheel with his fist, furiously cursing God, the church, and Bill Dunning.

  32.

  When Roger got home, he was useless. He was angry and afraid and exhausted. He couldn't think or relax or sit still. He searched his bedroom, hoping to find a little pot to calm him down. He finally found some old stuff in a baggy with a pipe tucked away in his closet—

  —along with his gun.

  It was in its box, wrapped in red cloth, where it had been since he had moved from North Hollywood. He stared up at the closet shelf where it lay under a stack of books and, a few moments later, took it into the living room.

  As he filled the pipe, Roger stared at the gun lying on his coffee table. He took a couple of hits, then picked up the gun and hefted it. The phone rang and he had the urge to aim the gun and stop the noise with one shot, but the gun was empty.

  The answering machine picked up.

  A dial tone hummed into the recorder.

  It would be nice to end his problems with a single gunshot, but shooting the phone wouldn't do it. They would find another way to contact him, harass him. He could shoot them until his trigger finger fell off, but there would always be more to replace them.

  There was only one person he could shoot to end all of his problems.

  God always finds a way to spill the blood of the sinners ...

  He returned to his closet and found a box of ammunition, then sat down and loaded the gun. Before he could finish, he heard someone crying outside his door. The bell rang and he recognized Sondra's voice callin
g his name. He hurried to the door, pulling his robe closed and tying it.

  She was covered with blood and her left eye was nearly swollen shut. Her clothes hung in tatters on her otherwise naked body and she was hugging herself, her whole body violently shaking. She looked much the same as she had looked after killing Sidney Nelson, and Roger wondered who had died tonight.

  "I'm cuh-cuh-cold," she whimpered, falling into his arms.

  The blood was cold and sticky and clung to Roger's bare chest when his robe fell open. He kicked the door shut and carried her into the bathroom. The remnants of her clothes peeled from her body easily, like tender meat from the bone, and he tossed them into the bathtub.

  "What happened?" he asked, holding a washcloth under hot water.

  "I-I-I'm not sure."

  "Are you hurt?"

  She nodded.

  "Did Bill hurt you?"

  "He buh-beat me. But I'm cut, too."

  "Cut?"

  "I think."

  "Is all this blood yours?"

  She shook her head.

  The dirty copper smell of blood turned Roger's stomach and he flipped on the fan, then began to gently dab the blood away with the cloth.

  "Does he hit you often?" he asked.

  "Never this bad." She flicked her tongue over a loose tooth and muttered, "Think I'm gonna lose that one."

  "And all this blood? Where did it come from?"

  "Some...man, I think. Out in the woods."

  "Where?"

  "Off Silverado Trail."

  "Jesus Christ."

  Once her face was clean, Roger hunkered down in front of her, took her bloody hands in his and spoke softly.

  "You've gotta let me try to help you, Sondra. You can't keep doing this. And it'll never stop on it's own. You have to at least let me try."

  With a slight shake of her head, she said, "That's why Bill beat me. Because he found me with you."