Running With the Pack (20 page)

“Yes.”

The wolf smiled, flashing canines like knives. “Good.” He crouched, leaning close to sniff at Anrin. “You are not like other men. They fear the forest and all things beyond their control. They are like two-legged, hairless sheep.”

Anrin considered his lifetime among the villagers and found that he agreed. “Perhaps it is because I am a whore’s son.”

“What is a ‘whore’?”

“I have never been certain. The villagers call my mother that when they think I cannot hear them. Old Baba tells me only that my mother was too curious and too free, straying too often from propriety. I don’t see how that could be so terrible, since now it seems they want me to be like her.”

“Yes,” the wolf said. “That is the way of things.” He leaned closer, sniffing at Anrin’s hair, then his ear, then down the curve of Anrin’s neck. Anrin remained submissive when the wolf took hold of his shoulders and pressed him back on the packed earth. He knew that animals often inspected one another on first meeting, checking for health and strength. As a guest in the wolf’s den, he wanted to be polite.

“You are on the brink of a change,” the wolf said, tugging Anrin’s shirt open with his teeth. He sniffed at Anrin’s chest, lapped in passing at one of Anrin’s nipples. “You have felt it coming for some time now, I think. I have seen you sitting on the hilltop watching for it.”

Anrin shivered at the brush of the wolf’s nose against his skin. “I have been watching for nothing. Just the moon and the trees.”

“In your head, perhaps. But your body has been watching for what will come. It has grown and made itself ready. Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Anrin said. This troubled him for reasons he could not name.

The wolf sat up on his haunches, straddling him now. Anrin saw that the wolf’s skin was heavily furred with down. The wolf reached down to stroke Anrin’s chest and Anrin felt the caress of fur on the wolf’s palms as well. The sensation stirred yet another strange feeling within Anrin—something powerful for which he had no name. It was like the spike of fear that had shot through him when the smith came, and yet somehow entirely different.

“Others can smell your body’s readiness as I can,” the wolf said, his eyes gleaming in the dim light. “They will steal the change from you if you do not lay claim to it yourself. That is inevitable.”

“But . . . I don’t want to change,” Anrin said. “Why can’t I remain as I am?”

The wolf’s hands paused. “Because innocence never lasts.” Abruptly the wolf rose and went over to crouch by the fire, apparently losing interest. “But perhaps you are not yet ready.”

Anrin sat up and pulled his shirt closed, his hair tumbling disheveled about his face and shoulders. The wolf spoke in riddles, and yet Anrin thought he understood. The answers he wanted were here, if he could only grasp them. If only he dared.

“What should I do?” he asked the wolf.

“That is for you to say—for now,” the wolf said. “If you want to return to your village, follow the sun east. Take the bearskin in the corner since you have so little fur of your own.”

So Anrin rose, wrapped himself in the bearskin, and went to the thick oiled-hide curtain which served as the cave’s door. He paused at the threshold, but the wolf did not turn from the fire, and so Anrin stepped out into the light.

“When you grow tired of playing sheep,” the wolf called as the flap closed behind him, “come back to me.”

With his mind full of thoughts he had never pondered before, Anrin returned to the village.

But the smell of death was on the wind as Anrin stepped out of the trees.

It came from the barn, where the half-hinged door swayed like a drunkard in the noontime breeze. The creak of the hinge stuttered now and again as the door stopped against something lying across the threshold. A pitchfork, its tines dark and red at the tips. Beyond that lay Old Baba.

After gazing down at her body for a very long while, Anrin left the cottage and went back into the woods.

The sun had just set when Anrin found the wolf’s den again. The wolf crouched beside the fire as if he had not moved since Anrin left. Anrin walked up to him and stopped, his fists clenched at his sides.

“Old Baba taught me there are secrets in the forest,” Anrin said.

“That has ever been true,” the wolf agreed.

“She told me there are things in the forest that eat fools like me.”

“There are indeed,” the wolf replied.

“Make me one of them,” said Anrin, and the wolf turned to him and smiled.

When the wolf stood, Anrin saw that his body was different: still as muscular and powerful as before, but this time a part of the wolf had grown and now stood forth from his body unsupported. It was not the first time Anrin had seen such a thing—for his own body had done the same at times—but now at last he understood the why of the phenomenon, and what it implied for the immediate future. And this understanding in turn clarified the past: the smith’s offer of the strawberry, and Old Baba’s anger, and even the circumstances of Anrin’s birth. Both the villagers and the wolf had been right all along: some things were inevitable, natural. Blood always told.

“You are still beautiful,” he told the wolf.

“As are you,” said the wolf, who then took Anrin’s hand and laid him down on the bearskin and tore his clothing away. He caressed Anrin again with his down-furred palms, and licked Anrin with a long pink tongue, and finally lifted Anrin’s legs up and back, bracing them both to proceed.

“You’re certain?” the wolf asked. The smoke-hole was above them; a shaft of moonlight shone into Anrin’s eyes. In silhouette only the wolf’s teeth were visible.

“Of course not,” Anrin whispered, shivering with ten thousand fears and desires. “But you must continue anyhow.”

At this, the wolf smiled. That smile grew as his mouth opened impossibly wide, the canines flashing. He leaned down and Anrin trembled as those teeth touched the skin of his shoulder, then pressed, warning of what was to come.

Then the teeth pierced Anrin’s flesh, hard, burning like fire. In the same moment something else pierced him, just as hard but larger, just as painful but stranger, and Anrin cried out as his body was invaded twice over. The wolf growled and worked his jaws around the wounds, as if to make absolutely certain that the wolf-essence would pass properly. His teeth slid out, then in again—a little deeper, a little harder. And again. And again. And between Anrin’s thighs, the wolf’s hips mirrored his jaws.

And then Anrin was writhing as the change began somewhere deep within him, in his belly, in his veins, spreading outward like fire and consuming every part of him. Somewhere amid the searing waves the pain became pleasure and fear turned to savage delight. And as the wolf tore free to turn his bloodied face up to the moonlight, so too Anrin arched with him, and clawed him back down, and howled over and over for more.

In the morning Anrin slept, for it was the nature of wolves to shun the day. Toward evening he awoke hungry, and the wolf took him outside and taught him to read scents and to hunt for good, hot, fresh meat. When night fell the wolves ran together through the forest, traveling east to the edge of the village.

Old Baba had been wrong, Anrin understood now. The forest had its dangers, but so did the paths of men; in the end, it was simply a matter of choice. Sometimes it was better to charge roaring into the shadows than be dragged helpless and broken through the light.

He smiled to himself, wishing Old Baba could see him. What big teeth you have, she would have said.

All the better to eat men, Anrin would have replied.

Then with his packmate at his side, he slipped into the village to do just that.

ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN?

GEOFFREY H. GOODWIN

Once again, Yvette startled awake from the nightmare where she was devouring the twelve-year-old boy from down the street. And the day-old daffodils on her nightstand had turned rotten. She checked the small clock above the room’s door. She’d been asleep for nineteen minutes.

The first few times, the recurring dream—and how it had the capacity to turn fresh-cut flowers into black lumps of rot in the waking world—freaked her out. The last few times, the dream was becoming a form of personal exploration. Yvette was uncertain whether this was good or not, but the transformation from freaky dream to prismatic memoir was worth noting.

She couldn’t shake the belief that if she paid enough attention, was observant and clever enough, she would solve her mysterious recurring nightmare.

The Institute let her stay for longer periods of time and she was grasping the basics of lucid dreaming. Yvette had accepted that controlling these bizarre dreams was the most important facet of her personalized treatment plan. She’d learned how to flip light switches, how to see colors that didn’t exist in nature and, a new favorite, she was learning how to cut off the fingers of her right hand, one by one with pruning shears, to prove she was having a dream and that the evil visions—like the boy from down the street, and the fork, knife and dinner napkin—were not real.

Or these events were real, but not occurring the way they did in dreams. Her doctors stressed that she’d make a better decision if she mustered a few granules of serenity and inner peace. Her recurring nightmare got in the way of most forms of mustering.

Yvette was afraid she’d cut off her actual fingers but hoped that the Institute wouldn’t leave dangerous shears lying around. Over time, through astute observation, she concluded that pruning shears were rarely found lying around in the waking world’s incarnation of the Institute.

The cannibalistic dream didn’t happen every night. That was the worst. Before proving that she really needed long-term professional help and thereby earning a free pass to stay in the Institute whenever she wanted, Yvette had tried everything: stuffing her face, exercise regimes, dozing on the couch, drinking a glass of warm milk, drinking seven glasses of ice cold brandy. She’d called psychic hotlines, worn a glowing lightmask over her eyes that was supposed to stabilize her beta waves but was pure quackery, and she’d even tried sleeping every other night to see if that would make her tired enough that she wouldn’t dream of eating the boy. It distressed her that she kept dreaming of chewing his flesh and couldn’t control her nightmares.

She didn’t know him at all well and sometimes couldn’t even remember that his name was Timothy.

She was certain that she’d never been particularly drawn to blood-drinking or soul-slurping. So the phenomenon, until these minor breakthroughs, had remained quite a mystery.

The process, of healing or of “learning to embrace her true preponderance of selfhood” or whatever it was she was trying to do—whatever it was she was trying to accept now that she was finally chipping through her grungy patina of self-resignation—began when she consulted the family physician at her yearly checkup.

Yvette hadn’t wanted to schedule a special appointment just to discuss her nightmare of devouring Timothy.

Dr. Burningheart squiggled several notes on his clipboard before eventually chuckling and saying, “I’ve known your parents for almost twenty-six years and we didn’t want to pressure you or tell you before you were ready, but you’re going to have to choose between being a vampire or a goblin.”

Yvette hadn’t liked the sound of either choice, but her dreams had cost her several jobs—including hostessing at a lovely supper club—so she asked, “Will that make the nightmare go away?”

“Probably not, but finding your true incarnation might help you learn to enjoy the nightmare . . . ”

“I’m not very familiar with all this.”

“None of us are. The last thing my patients want to find out is that we’re all responsible for our own wellness and that wellness has a rather healthy time commitment. Few, at first, are comfortable with the idea of killing in order to live. It takes time to make a thorough adjustment.”

“What’s the difference between vampires and goblins?”

“That reminds me of a joke that gets me slapped. We used to think they were quite similar, but recent research believes that the distinction is decided by motive: vampires eat people because they want darkness while goblins eat people because they want souls.”

“So I have to figure out why I want to eat people? That’s gross.”

“
Everyone
has to figure out what they want, not just you. It’s tough but that’s how it is. Anyone who says that life is easy is lying through their teeth.”

Yvette was certain she didn’t want to eat people for any reason, so she started screaming uncontrollably.

The police were kind. They took Yvette to the gothic halls of the Willis & Rothgate Institute, inaugurating her visits.

Yvette was getting used to visiting Willis & Rothgate too. Further episodes of uncontrollable screaming were why she was no longer hostessing at the supper club and why she’d lost most of her other jobs. She’d even been fired from a tobacconist’s shop. They hadn’t minded the screaming but—no matter how hard she tried—she couldn’t smoke enough to be a convincing saleswoman. Even hardcore tobacco fiends are put off by a saleswoman who coughs and gags frequently.

Because of her nightmare, the Willis & Rothgate Institution became her second home. She learned to adore how the orange gelatin tasted spicy like Mexico and the blue gelatin tasted like the planet Earth looked in satellite photos.

And the staff was carefully trained in non-confrontation. Non-confrontation, Drs. Willis and Rothgate believed, was the most caring approach for helping the clients they called bispecials. Yvette liked the idea of being special, just hated the consequences that came with it.

Her room at the Institute had a machine that could read her thoughts and play music that fit her mood. And they brought her fresh flowers every night. The methods of non-confrontation believed that the pleasant stimuli of flowers led to purer dreams.

The staff was exceedingly nice—even when they took away the horridly nasty flowers every morning—though, once, a few candystripers held their noses and commented that no one had ever blackened so many flowers.

Bispecials, she learned early on, in classroom sessions called Chalk Talks, were exceedingly rare. Most people were just people. They could no more become a vampire or a goblin than they could become a time-traveling wombat or an Oriental rug, but some people did become vampires—no need to bite the neck, you could bite the big toe or solar plexus if you preferred—and some people wanted to drink blood so badly that a stray force, unknown powers with an electric crackle of menace, just let them turn into a vampire.

Other people, for equally nebulous reasons, became goblins, and a truly rare minority manifested slight signs in both directions and then had to consciously decide whether they wanted to be a vampire or a goblin. Bispecials had to choose which characteristics they wanted to embrace, as difficult as the decision could be for more sensitive individuals.

The signs were sometimes so minor that they were overlooked. A penchant for doing a bad Transylvanian accent at parties or obsessing over the poems of Christina Rosetti and paintings by Pre-Raphaelites were classic indicators of impending transgressions.

Yvette learned that a bit of dander could be all it took to tilt a person’s scale. It amazed her that as little as a drop of blood could make a person irrevocably sick.

It wasn’t something people would volunteer for or want, more like being conscripted. Yvette detached from the process, understanding that purer brainwaves led to purer dreams, as if they were an attempt to get back to cleaner living. But she didn’t want this mission: the mood-reading music machine, going beyond flipping light switches in dreams to controlling the actual gradation of light, the sensory deprivation tank, orgone box, and vegan raw food diet.

Yes, Yvette saw the irony in avoiding meat and animal byproducts even though cannibalism was her likely end. She saw the irony and it made things worse. Veganism meant she had to give up the flavored gelatins that she’d liked.

Dozens of Chalk Talk sessions, some even led by the illustrious Drs. Willis and Rothgate, helped Yvette gain a greater understanding of her condition, but they never—because of their belief in nonconfrontation—urged her to come to her decision hastily. She was encouraged to take the time she needed to make up her mind.

Mutual-help groups had people who’d chosen to be goblins come in and talk about how they learned to enjoy soul-slurping. Some kept regular jobs and tried to keep their species a secret. An engaging presentation was given by a radical sect of attractive young women who were professional roller-skaters known, before an incident, as
The Groovy Goblin Girls
. Now, sadly, they were wanted by the police for eating audience members. Even the youngest one, who’d always been friendly and respectful, had stopped returning Yvette’s text messages.

A wealthy vampire from New Hampshire offered Yvette infinitely free room and board if she’d stay with him while she thought things over. Her various counselors and social worker considered it a dangerous idea and discouraged her from following up.

For Yvette, the hardest part was watching people from her various groups come to their deeply personal decisions, fill out the special permission slip and leave the Institute. She understood the loops of logic that people applied to their choices. She knew it wasn’t like Halloween. Being a vampire or a goblin wasn’t a vinyl mask you decided to don one day and could change later. Once you embraced a choice, actually sat down, drew the
G
or
V
at the bottom right-hand corner of the permission slip and signed it, that was it. The incarnation couldn’t be shucked or chucked; most people started to mutate, often first noticeable by elongating fangs or bulging forearms, within twenty-four hours.

You were stuck with your new incarnation, until undeath did you part.

One girl, Larissa Blackweight, had signed out from Willis & Rothgate on a day pass and leaped off a high bridge. She’d brought an indestructible cassette recorder with her to record her last thoughts and they’d been transcribed and posted all over the Net, but most bispecials ignored “The Gospels of Larissa the Leaper” claiming they were fraudulent and insane rantings. The gist was that everything in the world was a sham and that people blossom their own destinies, that nothing in life was a clear-cut binary choice. Dr. Willis told Yvette, privately, that he felt Larissa the Leaper’s issues were not related to her being bispecial. He told Yvette’s parents, at the last encounter group they attended before telling Yvette that they loved her but didn’t want to hear any more from her until she’d made up her mind, that Larissa had been a troubled girl who enacted a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Yvette could relate, maybe even see suicide as the appropriate sacrifice. Sometimes, to herself when no one was around, she’d kneel in one of the showers on a vacant men’s floor. She’d surmised that men, especially older ones, made their decisions hastily. Either that or the Institute had multiple men’s floors and this one was used less often. Gut instinct told her that men were macho about life and death, less interested in personal fulfillment.

She understood how Larissa could jump, how a conflicted young woman could crunch the variables and decide to plummet. Even though Larissa had been a brilliant painter. Even though they’d had one late-night chat where they’d considered becoming the same monster so they’d never be a species of one.

Friends made in institutions, Yvette realized, were different from other friends. Wishing she could talk to Larissa, in effort to sort everything out and resume some semblance of camaraderie, she kneeled in the shower, trying to hallucinate a conversation with the only kindred spirit she’d ever found.

“Larissa, I know you’re dead and that puts a damper on conversation, but I thought maybe I could pretend . . . ask myself questions, then imagine your answers . . . ”

At first, nothing happened.

“Seriously, I’m desperate.”

“Yeah, I know. But this is lame. Can’t you use a Magic Eight Ball or something?” said a ghostly voice that was barely audible over the shower’s hissing water.

“Just let me rant to myself, maybe interject a joke or a platitude near the end. I need room to talk to myself without thinking I’m crazy,” Yvette said.

“Okay,” the voice answered, noncommittally.

“See, red hot poker an inch from my left eye, I’m still unsure. I mean, Larissa, I know the distinctions as well as you did. And I understand how you could leap. With a goblin, you know where you stand—somewhere after nightfall, you’re going to be cuisine. They sup on people’s sins: no hand behind the curtain, no pretense or performance. Vampires, well, everyone knows that vampires drink their fill of sins early on, then become laconic and overly chatty. Their strength is kept up by the totality, like how a seasoned blood-drinker can chug a priest or a prostitute and barely taste the difference, finding a palatable measure of darkness in either . . . ”