by Melanie Tem
“I don’t do a very good job,” Lydia said.
“You do a great job!” Pam protested. “You take care of everybody! But, Lydia, who takes care of you?”
Lydia was speechless. Pam had moved to the foot of the stairs and Lydia was now on the first step, so the two women had come quite close to each other. Pam’s bright brown eyes and generous mouth were at the level of Lydia’s breasts, almost touching them.
“I admire you,” Pam told her softly. “And I worry about you.”
Lydia took the step down to the floor. Friedrich had settled himself in front of the last riser, and when she stepped over him his fur was silky against the back of her ankle. Easily, Pam put her arms around her. Holding her breath, Lydia allowed her cheek to rest very lightly on the top of the curly head.
“If there’s anything I can do, I’m here,” Pam murmured, stroking Lydia’s back. The rhythmic motion both hurt and soothed. “I am your friend, you know.”
Then Lydia felt Pam’s small, sturdy body pull away. Certain she’d done something foolish, she started to pull away herself, stiff and trembling with the embarrassment of anticipated rejection.
But Pam reached up, took her face in both hands, and kissed her full on the mouth. Sweetly, lingeringly. Lips parted just a little, breath warm.
Lydia couldn’t breathe. Her heart beat wildly against Pam’s, which she could feel beating hard, too, but steadily, regularly. Lydia’s throat constricted as if she would cry, which, of course, she would not. “I—I have to—go check—” she stammered, and pushed around Pam toward the kitchen.
“I’ll come with you. I might be able to help with her.”
“No!” Pam looked at her, startled. Lydia managed to control herself enough to say relatively calmly, “No, she’s very old and sick and she doesn’t want anybody outside the family in her house.”
“Will you be long?” Pam smiled. “Shall I wait?”
Recklessly, Lydia answered, “Yes, please, wait,” and fled through the house, out the door, and across the courtyard to her grandmother’s dark house.
Her grandmother wasn’t there.
Wasn’t anywhere.
Lydia searched the mother house first, called, sniffed, looked and listened in every room and every denlike cranny of the complicated old structure. Then she searched the houses on the north and south sides of the courtyard, facing 32nd and 33rd avenues, the houses where no one had lived, really, since her great-aunts had been murdered there; in the basements their cracked skulls leered downward, sideways, utterly uninterested in her.
Standing in one place and shading her eyes, she searched the courtyard. Panic-stricken now, hardly thinking at all, searching instinctively but with tangled and unreliable instincts. Aware there was terrible danger but unsure of its exact source or nature: Pam discovering Mary, Mary killing Pam, both or either of them leaving her.
In her house she looked through the unused back room, then in the kitchen where the sink was full of dirty dishes even though she’d done a load that morning, then ran up the narrow winding back stairs where dust lay thick as fur, onto the second floor, through her bedroom, Deborah’s bedroom (hardly thinking Deborah but afraid for her daughter, too, who wasn’t anywhere, either), the bathroom with the clawfoot tub, the unused room at the end of the hall, up the stairs to the attic, through the nearly bare attic to the room her grandmother used under the far east end under the eaves. Mary was nowhere to be found.
Realizing with a plummeting stomach that she hadn’t looked in the basement, Mary could at this moment be slinking up the basement steps toward Pam or hiding down there waiting to see what would happen next, Lydia raced down the three flights, nearly falling, nearly losing her breath altogether, and searched through all the half rooms and open areas of the basement. Years and years of accumulated dirt and dung, some of it fresh. Boxes of clothes, boxes of plastic dishes, bags of newspapers, cans for some reason without labels. The odors and noises of other creatures, but not Mary.
Mary was not here. Mary was gone.
They would say it was her fault. It was her fault.
“Lydia?”
Pam was coming down the basement stairs. Lydia could hardly believe it. Friedrich stood behind her in the doorway to the kitchen, peering down and whimpering, unwilling to try the steep, dark incline. Pam, though, was already halfway down, setting her feet carefully on the rickety steps and holding on to both the railing and the wall, but looking at her.
“Lydia? Are you all right? What’s wrong?”
“Wait! Wait, I’m coming up.”
In the seconds it took for her to get to Pam, Lydia realized all in a flash: Her grandmother was gone. Her daughter was gone. Her mother and Marguerite and all the cousins from the mountains were gone. For the moment or for the rest of their lives, she and Pam were alone.
“Wait,” she said again, this time meaning don’t leave although Pam showed no signs of leaving other than having retreated back up into the kitchen. “Nothing—nothing’s wrong. My grandmother is—sleeping. Would you—would you like to stay for dinner?”
She made a spinach quiche. It surprised her that she remembered how; no one in her family would eat anything so exotic, but Jake used to like it and she did still remember. Pam liked her cooking. Pam still sat across the kitchen table from her when the quiche and the tossed salad were gone and they were sipping the white wine Lydia had remembered in the top cupboard. Friedrich snored between their feet. Pam sighed contentedly and said, “That was wonderful. Thank you. You’re a really good cook. Your family is lucky to have you.”
Pleased out of all proportion, distrusting her own pleasure, Lydia did say, “Thank you.”
The single glass of wine, the imminent and profound danger, the ease of Pam’s company were all so heady and arousing that after a time Lydia wondered if maybe this was how she would, after all, transform. Not into a were-creature but out of one, for all her life she’d been a sort of were-woman, no more fully human than fully anything else. Maybe she would transform into her true nature by falling in love. With a woman. With this woman, with Pam Sandahl. She had not thought it possible.
The house was very quiet. All four houses and their courtyard were quiet. No one else was there. Lydia brewed coffee, not nearly as strong as her mother and grandmother took it in the morning, and she and Pam carried cups of it and plates of brownies into the living room. Lydia considered the living room tacky and was embarrassed to have her friend there: the elegant beige drapes were threadbare at the scalloped edges, the carved wooden mantelpiece badly needed refinishing. But Pam exclaimed, “What a charming room!” and—hesitantly, not sure what she was agreeing to—Lydia agreed.
Lydia sat on the long brocade couch. Pam came and sat beside her. Trotting along behind, Friedrich looked longingly at the matching chair in the corner made by the bookcase but couldn’t jump high enough, so he contented himself with stretching out on the carpet, dark brown on lighter brown. Lydia saw, to her dismay, wolf fur adhered in the whorls of the carpet, even though she vacuumed every carpet in all four houses every day.
They finished coffee and dessert without saying much. Lydia kept an ear cocked for footsteps, breathing, but she heard nothing, and among all the odors of the house she didn’t smell her mother or her grandmother. She was sure no one else was here. She couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t understand her own reaction, either, and she knew how dangerous it was; while she was nervous, tingling with tension, her head was also light with the sensation of freedom.
They were holding hands.
Pam’s head was resting against her shoulder. Pam’s hand was gently turning her face, and they were kissing.
After a long, slow moment, Lydia tentatively brought her hand to the back of Pam’s head and tangled her fingers in the soft curls, careful not to hurt with her nails. Late afternoon, late summer sunlight came in still high through the western windows and spread across them—today’s sunlight, the sunlight of a hundred years ago.
Pa
m’s hands were on the small of her back, inside her shirt on her hardening nipples, between her legs. Without taking her mouth off Pam’s, without closing her eyes, Lydia unbuttoned the other woman’s silky blouse and slid it off. Pam’s breasts, shoulders, belly were round and smooth.
Lydia and her lover held each other, caressed each other, arms and legs wrapped around each other and cream-colored, golden, rosy, dark brown in the marbled sunshine, mouths to each other’s bodies, voices and breathing raised. The house pulsed with the pungent scent of female sex. Lydia wanted, wanted, and Pam was murmuring that she wanted, too, and murmuring Lydia’s name. Pam slid her open mouth down Lydia’s body—breasts, navel, labia. Resisting the impulse to hold her breath, Lydia breathed deeply and rhythmically, and with each inhalation and exhalation her arousal deepened.
Then, not wanting to, she half heard, half smelled someone else in the house. Lydia looked and saw them, but Pam did not. Lydia cried out, and her lover gave a muted answering cry of passion, or love.
From the hallway Ruth roared and leapt.
The lovers separated, screamed, reached for each other. Lydia cried, “Ma!”
A small brown form threw itself against Ruth’s chest, yipping frenziedly, thinly growling. It was enough to distract Ruth’s attention and deflect the attack. Pam shrieked, “Friedrich!”
Ruth swiped at the dog, lifted him skewered on her claws, and sank her teeth into his throat. He howled. She howled. She flung him down and broke open his rib cage with one easy blow, removed his heart and ate it. Then she pushed aside the bleeding carcass and dropped to all fours. Another beast was beside her, huge and hump-shouldered, growling. Marguerite. Together they advanced.
“Ma!” Lydia heard herself cry again. “Oh, Ma!”
Pam gasped, “Lydia!”
Ruth’s feral gaze was fixed and yellow. Lydia had seen that look infrequently from her mother, but had feared and coveted it all her life. Nearly a wolf, with nearly human eyes.
Lydia was half-clothed. Her breasts swelled with the fresh memory of Pam’s hands and mouth on them. Her nipples were bright pink nubs, hurting from interrupted and redirected passion. The engorged areolae, ringed with dark bristling hairs, were tingling. Her heart pounded savagely, making her dizzy, thrilling her with its power, opening and closing its valves, pumping her blood through its four chambers and sending it, changed, coursing back out through her body again, through her brain.
Pam’s frilly white blouse was open over her large breasts and round belly, its tails framing her buttocks in back and the gold-brown mound of curly pubic hair in front. The soft trail of hair was vivid, leading up the smooth expanse of her abdomen to her navel, where Lydia’s moistened fingertips had probed just moments before.
Pam’s face shone with tears. Friedrich lay just beyond her reach at the feet of the wolf, still quivering. His blood shone like her tears, as did the fluids that bathed his exposed and ruptured intestines, as did the semiliquid excrement that spread over the fine wooden floor and the opened cavity where his heart had been.
Lydia’s nostrils flared and saliva gathered in her mouth, well beyond her control. “No!” she cried, and then whispered, “Yes.”
Marguerite shouldered past her cousin. Her single eye glittered yellow. The other socket was an equally vivid black. Lydia’s mother turned her head, obviously lost her concentration, growled, “No.”
As had happened once before in her life—when she’d come home with Deborah (Deborah)—the realization came abrupt and fully formed into her mind: This is her chance. But this time she understood, with a painful rush of adrenaline, that the chance was her own.
The chance to choose.
The chance to inhabit fully one nature or another.
The chance to save someone she loved and set her free, or to devour her.
Either way, to be, at last, transformed. Lydia shivered with indecision.
Pam moved against her. Pressed against her, her back against Lydia’s chest. Not looking at Pam’s back now or touching it, Lydia so vividly remembered the feel of it that her tongue itched from the inside out and her breath came ragged out of her throat. Terror, rage, and intense sexual arousal raced along the pathways of her nervous system between her skin and her flesh, burning new pathways, exploding into new synapses carrying new messages. Lydia trembled.
She felt hair forcing itself out through her pores, saw it darken her thighs, her arms, her breasts until it hung down itching over her abdomen. She tasted her own blood as her teeth elongated and punctured her gums and bottom lip. She heard the sudden alteration of sounds—how clear they became, how they multiplied, how she knew what each was without naming it. She smelled the sudden wild proliferation of odors. Her eyes ached from their abrupt perception of colors she had never seen before.
More herself than she’d ever been, Lydia found herself lowering her head, which was longer and heavier now, and putting her mouth to the back of Pam’s neck, which was exposed to her under damp curls. Tendons buzzed, sprang back against her dry lips and tongue. Soft flesh rose into her teeth.
“Lydia, I love you!” Pam pleaded, and then managed to turn to face her. Her eyes widened at the sight of Lydia, so close. “My God, what are you?”
I love you.
Fur retracted back under the skin, hurting. Fangs pushed painfully back into their sockets, and again Lydia tasted blood. Physical sensations dulled while thoughts and emotions vivified. Once again, Lydia was more herself than she’d ever been, this time more fully human.
Again she bent over her lover. Pam tried to pull away and almost fell off the couch. She clutched at Lydia to keep from tumbling backward into the reach of the wolf.
Lydia caught her easily, steadied her. She pressed the aching pads of her palms against Pam’s naked sides, intending to hold and protect her. But her nails raked the soft flesh and drew blood.
Pam cried out. Lydia cried out, said Pam’s name. Said, “I love you.”
Lydia lifted the smaller woman in her arms. Not recognizing this as protection, Pam shrieked and fought, managing to slam the back of Lydia’s wrist hard against the edge of the fireplace. Pain and then numbness shot through Lydia’s fingers, and her grip loosened enough that Pam got free and tried to run for the door.
Ruth snarled but didn’t move, as if she didn’t know what to do. Marguerite simply leaned into Pam’s path and pushed her roughly back into Lydia’s arms.
Mary didn’t show herself. But Lydia heard her now, smelled her.
Deborah, of course, hadn’t come home. But her presence, her absence, the impossible demands she made, were as palpable as the stench of all of them in this house, the stench of all the years and of Lydia herself, of Pam.
Marguerite said clearly, “Eat.”
Pam reached up and touched Lydia’s face. Her hurting, misshapen face, too round and soft for a wolf’s and too angular for a woman’s. “Love me,” she said.
Thinking somehow she could obey them both and so wouldn’t have to choose, Lydia bent and pressed her face into Pam’s breasts. Pam’s heart was kept from her now only by a thin layer of skin and flesh and delicate bone. She kissed the breast, the nipple, the heart. Her own heart swelled.
Her mother growled. “Lydia. Now.”
Her lover called her name.
Lydia could not bear it. She couldn’t choose, and her rage at being forced to choose, her terror, was unbearable. She would not choose. She would not participate. She would leave them all, and they could do whatever they were going to do without her.
Lydia let Pam fall between Ruth and Marguerite, on her back on the floor with throat, body, genitals exposed. She heard Pam’s breath leave her body under the force of the impact and the massive presence of the two advancing wolves. She saw Marguerite’s muzzle drop between Pam’s spread legs.
Lydia howled. She leapt past the others, slipping and leaving her footprints in the blood that slicked the floor. She lunged against the door and wrested it open. Warm twilight air assaulted her, ne
arly blinded her. She ran out of the house, off the front porch, down the steps, out the gate, into the street.
Neither wolf nor woman, Lydia ran away. She did not choose. In the house she left behind, the heart of her lover was devoured by someone else.
Chapter 14
Sated from the fresh kill and infused with an almost unbearable energy, Ruth wanted to leave the house right away and roam the city. She would love the city tonight even more than usual: autumnal crispness in the evening air, cornucopia of sensations, all those people. But Marguerite said to wait.
Waiting, Ruth became drowsy. She lay on the floor beside the eviscerated corpses and almost fell asleep. Marguerite said no, stay alert. I need you to be alert.
So they ranged through the four old houses and the courtyard. Marguerite was wild. She stripped wallpaper from walls, exposing older wallpaper underneath, exposing, finally, old plaster and older brick. She tore up furniture, scattered foam like bloodless flesh, pulled down and shredded drapes as if from bone. She dug up the gardens in the courtyard, bell pepper plants and nightshade, hollyhocks and belladonna; some she devoured and some she left lying unused, useless then, on the dry turned ground.
Trying alternately to rouse and to calm herself, Ruth went from one house to another, far more haphazardly than her cousin and forgetting often what had happened and what she was waiting for. In the basement of the house on 32nd, she nudged at the skull of her aunt Emma, its long snout, and its cracked jaw. In the courtyard she dug up bones, knew briefly that they were the bones of a baby boy born and killed a long time ago, the bones of her son, and then looked at them, licked them, wondered what had died here and why it had been buried.
Then, at last, the sky was as dark as it ever got in the city. Traffic on Ingram and Harvey Streets, 32nd and 33rd Avenues diminished to single vehicles with long gaps between them, headlights and taillights discrete, sound of tires on pavement and motion of displaced air discrete. The moon was halfway up in the eastern sky, a little northerly. An unremarkable quarter moon without, Ruth thought, much power. She didn’t need the power of the moon. She and Marguerite didn’t need it.