by Melanie Tem
Deborah had drawn her knees up as far as she could and tried to clasp her hands around them, but her stomach was too big and she was afraid she’d hurt the baby or the baby would hurt her. She was cold. She swore she could feel the baby shivering inside her, blaming her for not keeping it warm.
“Some of my compatriots,” Julian said, “spend the cold winter days traveling by bus from one library to another. I know perhaps half a dozen of them by sight—we do not know each other personally, of course. There is one gentleman who comes to the Englewood Public Library every winter afternoon to read both Denver dailies; he seems to take a particularly avid interest in the sports page. There is an older lady whom I see regularly in the main branch of the Denver Public Library, researching somewhat esoteric topics such as the etymology of certain words in English and German and the particulars of subatomic theory.” He paused and then added, a little shyly, “Actually, I have been traveling the library circuit myself recently, researching child development and baby care.”
Deborah had been going to tell him this place was fine and she wasn’t moving anywhere. Now she didn’t.
Julian was still talking. “And then, of course, there are the shelters. It is quite true that occasionally, if the lines of the homeless and needy are not too long, one can in fact secure a meal and a place to sleep at a shelter, but there are definite disadvantages. For one thing, they are not physically safe. I’m afraid that desperation brings out the worst as well as the best in our fellow human beings, and the worst is often more —oh, noticeable, shall we say. For another thing, shelters, like all other aspects of our social welfare system, tend to be disrespectful to the point of actual psychological degradation. The system exacts too high a price for its benefits, in my opinion, in terms of invasion of privacy and other acts of dehumanization.”
Deborah’s stomach cramped. She gasped.
Julian’s odor, strong as she knew it to be, was almost lost in the cold air. She could smell the baby coming. She didn’t want it to come. She was afraid for it to come, afraid of what it would do to her getting out, afraid to bring it into this world. She tightened the muscles of her vagina. That hurt, and made her think about all the cocks and fingers and tongues that had been in there and that would be in there again before her life was over.
Under the bright green, almost new blanket Julian had found in a Dumpster behind a motel and happily brought home to her (Who’d used it, and for what? Why did they throw it away? Maybe just because it was such a gross color. It really was a gross color), she stuck her own hand inside her underwear and probed. Her cunt was different. Bigger. Shocked, she jerked her hand away, then put it back. She could feel where the vaginal walls had already stretched, and where they would have to stretch some more in order for the baby to get out.
She probed. The long nail on the little finger of her left hand, untrimmed now for weeks, probed, and she had to force herself to hold back to keep it from hurting herself and the baby. She didn’t want to hurt the baby. At the same time, she wanted it dead, wanted it dead.
Julian was watching her closely. He knew something was wrong. But he just kept talking in his singsong voice about shelter. “Also,” he was saying, “I don’t know of a shelter that would accept us both. There are some that specialize in working with homeless teenagers, but they would not allow me to stay there. There are some that house only women and children. Those that take single men require that their customers be out on the street, presumably looking for work, during daytime hours. There are a few shelters for families, but I’m afraid they would not consider you and me and the baby to be a true family. It is human nature, an instinct we must all seek to transcend if we are to realize our true potential, to rely on preset rules and definitions to help us interpret reality rather than to look at the reality itself.”
She hadn’t thought about anything like that before, and it made her mad. She didn’t know why it should; she didn’t much like the word “family,” anyway. She didn’t say anything except “Fuck.”
“And so,” Julian said, like a teacher summing up a lecture or something, “I really do not quite know what we are going to do. But it is clear that you will be giving birth soon, and that we cannot allow the baby to be born here.”
Then he just stopped talking for a while. She didn’t know if he was waiting for her to say something or what. The snow made the silence sound weird, kind of muffled and turned in on itself.
Deborah didn’t like this. Who was Julian to tell her he didn’t know what to do? That was why she was with him, because he always knew what to do. How the fuck was she supposed to know? She’d never been homeless before. She’d never been pregnant before, either.
Her mother had been pregnant. Her grandmother had been pregnant. Her great-grandmother had been pregnant—a lot of times, Deborah thought, and a really long time ago. All of a sudden and briefly, Deborah felt herself to be part of a long line of women, all of whom gave birth to monsters and to saviors.
Julian asked carefully, “Would you consider going home?”
“Sure,” she said, to shock him. Clumsily, she crawled out from under the blanket and stood up in the snow. “Let’s go.”
He peered up and out at her. He looked stupid in the stupid Broncos cap. Deborah tried to laugh at him. “I doubt that your family would accept me with open arms,” he said.
“They won’t accept me with open arms, either. But it’s my home, too, and you’re my friend.” She couldn’t believe she’d said that. Now that she had, it hovered between them, something warm and glowing. “Come on,” she said, furiously.
But he hesitated. “Tell me,” he said, “about your family.”
“We’re werewolves,” she told him at once, and then laughed.
He didn’t laugh. He asked, “How so?”
She’d started this, but she could still back off. She could pretend she’d been kidding, or hadn’t known what she was saying. Instead, she demanded defiantly, “Do you even know what a werewolf is?”
“A werewolf,” he replied carefully, watching her, “is a human being who transforms into a wolf.”
“You got it.”
“There have been were-creatures in nearly all cultures,” he went on thoughtfully, as always taking her utterly seriously. “The beast aspect of the dual nature is expressed in the form of whatever animal threatened people in the particular geographic area. Were-tigers in Asia, were-leopards and were-lions in Africa. There have even been were-snakes. The werewolf is primarily based in central European legend.”
“Well,” she said irritably, knowing he was believing her and not believing her at the same time, “we’re it. We’re werewolves. My grandmother and my great-grandmother and me. Not my mother. My mother isn’t a wolf and she isn’t a woman, either. She doesn’t know what she is. She just looks like some lady, except hairier. My mother is nothing. But the rest of us are were-wolves, and so will this baby be, if it’s a girl.”
He kept looking at her steadily. He nodded.
“You don’t seem very surprised,” she accused him.
Then he laughed, shrugged. “Oh, Deborah, I have seen a great many manifestations of human nature in my day,” he told her. “A great many expressions of transformation.”
“You don’t think I mean it. You think it’s”—she struggled for the right word from a long-ago and nearly ignored English class—”a metaphor. An allegory. Whatever.”
He was looking at her now with such gentle intentness that she thought he’d melt the snow. He was paying such attention to her. He loved her. He loved her. Deborah was suddenly enraged, and the baby in her womb kicked, clawed, was starting now to fight its way out.
“You asshole!” she shrieked, and dropped to all fours. Her body swelled and toughened. Her heart and brain exploded. She flung herself at this man who loved her, whose love she couldn’t doubt. Her mouth hit his cheek, which was cold and rough under her parted lips; she felt the hollow left by his missing teeth, pushed her face into the yielding
hollows of his skull. She drew his blood, drew his blood again, felt the quick warmth of it on her tongue and its rapid cooling in the snowy air.
He didn’t fight back. That didn’t surprise her. But he was surprisingly strong, and he got away from her.
“Deborah!” he cried. The sound of his voice crying her name broke her heart.
He ran across the river to get away from her. There was no solid ice yet, and she knew his thin holey tennis shoes were getting soaked, even though the water was too shallow to go over their tops. He crawled up the other riverbank, not taking either the steps or the ramp, and disappeared into the pale towering city. She imagined his blood bright red across the snow, but the city twilight faded all colors and, anyway, snow was falling hard now, covering his footprints and his blood, covering his shadow and his scent. She let him go.
She destroyed their place. Raging, she knocked down the wooden and metal walls, which were flimsy anyway and didn’t take much force, didn’t use up much fury. Snow muffled the noise; the wood hardly made any noise, and the metal rattled a few times and then stopped. She shredded the blankets, sleeping bag, clothes, her throat clogging with wool and down. She tore apart boxes and bags of food, hurled cans into the river. She upended the grill, noticed the abrupt absence of the little heat it had generated, bent and tore it apart till nobody but she and Julian would have known what it was for.
He was gone. She’d lost him. She’d chased him away, let him go. And the baby was raging now to be born, clawing at her insides, drawing her blood for its own.
Howling, roaring, Deborah bounded out from under the bridge into the full force of the blizzard. Whipping down the river valley from the northeast, the wind and snow hit her full in the face and chest, but didn’t come close to knocking her down or even breaking her stride.
She had to go home. She didn’t have anywhere else to go.
She had to get the baby home before it was born.
Chapter 18
The clans gathered.
Separated all these years, they had known to maintain contact, waiting until it was time to come together again. To join, or one to consume the other. One way or another, to consolidate power.
It was time now, and fury was as intimate as love.
The mountain clan was legion, and well prepared. Hannah led them, of course, with her twin daughters Margaret and Marguerite, and their daughters, Margaret’s four and Marguerite’s three, and their daughters, sibling groups of two or three or ten or twelve sisters, and all their daughters, some newborn or nearly so, including the gratifying quintuplets and a newer set of quadruplets, all girls. They came silently out of caves and from behind red and gray ridges, from between split rock faces and along the streams that had split them. Twisted shrubs and wind-stunted trees at timberline showed themselves to be wolves. They knew what to do. They took their places.
From the city came Mary, alone. Mary was all that was left of the city clan. Lydia was dead, untransformed heart and brain offered and consumed. Ruth was captive somewhere. Deborah was gone, and with her the baby, although Mary did not believe they were gone forever. Mary was alone. That suited her. She came to the mountains eagerly, and although they were expecting her, she took them by surprise.
Hannah was sitting tall and massive on a sharp ridge, the moon just past quarter casting bright light on the slopes in either direction down from the Continental Divide, when Mary sprang up at her from underneath. A tunnel in the rock, an old fissure or a newly formed stratum, and Mary’s fangs ripped Hannah’s underbelly, her genital and rectal orifices, and her throat.
The ancient sisters tumbled together off the ridge and down the barren eastern slope. With her hooked upper teeth Hannah severed the tendons in Mary’s right shoulder where long ago their mother had shot her, trying and failing to kill her. Hannah tried and failed, too.
Her natural strength transformed by rage and pain and by the moon—which was, of course, the whole moon, light and dark sides taken together, something Mary knew well how to do—Mary flung Hannah against the branchless lower trunk of a lodgepole pine. She pinned her there with the claws of her right hand that she could not directly manipulate now but could use like a passive weapon strapped awkwardly to her shoulder, and with a great sideways swipe of the thick left-hand claws cut off her sister’s head. Using her left hand and her teeth to remove her right claws from her sister’s throbbing body and from the trunk of the tree, she swung around to take on the others.
The one named Olivia, guard for many years of Little Ralph Amoratti and lately emboldened by his heart—which had turned out to be strong, which would have kept on beating for a long time—came at Mary with three of her sisters or daughters. Mary sank her fangs just below the ear of one and the claws of her hind feet into the long, plump belly of another. Blood and feces spurted, and the bodies of six female fetuses not ready to be born.
Mary used her left hand with its strong opposing thumb to lift the third attacker and throw her with as much force as she could muster one-armed into Olivia, who was hurtling toward her with full force of her own. Both went backward over a ledge and down a steep slope. Their fall set off a small avalanche, boulders and rocks and sharp pebbles like hail careening and coming together to form another layer whose source, months or years later, would not be apparent.
A phalanx of sisters, daughters, nieces, cousins, granddaughters surrounded and buried Mary. She fought up through them. Blood flew. She tore into necks, cheeks, eyes. Thought she tasted heart blood, thought she smelled brains. They hurt her, ravaged her groin, pulled great patches of fur off her flanks, and more than one of them went for her heart, got fangs and claws into her chest before she bit through her neck, threw her against the rocks at the end of the stream, crushed her against an outcropping that, finally, crumbled under the force of the blows.
Mary fought them all. Was hurt: one eye gouged out, one front leg useless and hind legs dragging, finally, from the terrible wound reopened in her groin. Chest and belly slashed, but heart still beating, still beating.
Bodies of wolves across the rocky slopes, among the trees, bodies of women. Young, babies, swarming around her, running away, so many tiny flickering hearts that she couldn’t eat them all, so many brains with almost no power at all.
Fought them all, killed them all. Was terribly wounded herself, but killed them all. Except Marguerite. At first she saw Marguerite watching, thought she fought her and gutted her, then realized it was her twin sister Margaret, then lost her, did not see her again. Blood filming her eyes like tears. Did not see Marguerite.
Burrowed underground and found Ruth. Found her daughter.
Found her in an underground labyrinth, not bound, not fenced, but lost. Utterly lost, wandering, whimpering and snuffling past words. Running, stumbling, along paths that ended in walls, down inclines that dipped into sudden holes, around corners that went round and round. Running to her mother like a child.
Her mother terribly hurt. Unbelievably hurt.
Not dying, but profoundly wounded, changed. Bleeding, dazed. Blood from her ears, from her torn eye, from between her legs. Blood on Ruth, her mother’s blood, but still her mother found her, she could not have found herself.
They lay together somewhere under the ground. Mother and daughter, grandmother and great-grandmother. Two old women. Two ancient beasts. The moon rose and set and rose again, grew larger.
Waiting. Waiting for Deborah.
To save them or to kill them. To take her place, and the place of the newborn girl.
When it was time.
Chapter 19
Deborah stumbled, crawled, ran and didn’t know where she was going, didn’t know where she was. She had to stop a lot to catch her breath. She had to stop because the long muscles in her legs were shaking so hard, growing and moving, that every few minutes they wouldn’t hold her and she had to squat or lie down in the gathering snow.
Buildings all looked alike, and looked like trees, like mountains, and looked like surre
alistic buildings or buildings you might sneak inside and live in for a while. Streets looked the same as the river. Snow covered her footprints before she was done with them, filled them before her feet were even out of them—sometimes two footprints running, sometimes four.
She imagined blood—her blood, the baby’s—pouring out of their still joined bodies and pooling in her footprints, but she didn’t dare look back to see for fear of losing balance and momentum. Anyway, snow would be covering up the blood right away, too. She could hardly see anything for the snow, and it muffled sounds, diluted odors.
Crawling, stumbling, running, she kept moving. The baby was raging to get out, hurting her to get out. Because of the baby, she couldn’t move fast enough or far enough.
Somebody was following her. Something. She kept seeing a shape, different every time she saw it, close or far away, bigger or smaller. She heard something. Somebody was waiting for her. Snow and blood kept her from knowing who it was, and pain.
Buildings, trees, mountains became people, became wolves. She tried to follow streets and the river, but she didn’t know which streets and she couldn’t smell or hear the river, wasn’t sure whether she was really following it or not, kept losing it. Snow fell hard. Wind blew hard from all directions, swirling up and down. She was lost.
But then, all of a sudden, she was there. She came down some street, turned some corner, and she was there. The four old houses on their walled-in block, the house where she’d grown up, Nana’s house on its dark hill.