Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  There was a flat, dishpan rattle as Jake closed the door on his side. Grace switched on the radio but did not start the engine. The only sound that emerged from the speakers was a fly-wing hum in the left channel.

  “You always wanted one of these,” said Jake.

  She nodded.

  “Hey,” she said. “Now I finally get to see your place.”

  “It’s small,” said Jake.

  “Is it too small?”

  “I’m all right,” he said. He rested his left hand on the knob of the gearshift. After a minute she laid hers on top of his.

  “Nobody knows,” she said.

  “Nobody knows what?”

  “Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen.”

  “It’s nice that we can share that,” said Jake.

  The rain dripped from the fir trees that overspread the Patch’s back lot, and seeped slowly in through the windshield frame on Jake’s side. The remaining unbroken panes in the greenhouse of the old strawberry plant, a gaunt ruin on the other side of the parking lot, chimed with rain.

  “Well,” Grace said. “I guess neither of us got lucky.”

  She twisted the key in the ignition, and turned out of the Patch’s lot, onto the island highway. The last ferry of the night, of course, had pulled in at the Eastpoint dock eighteen minutes earlier. The cars in the opposite lane were strung like Christmas lights for a mile, coming out of Berthannette, and it must have been hard for Grace and Jake to be in her car as it filled up with the flash of other people’s headlights, then went dark again, and to know that everyone who passed them was headed for home.

  The first real writer I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn. He lived at the McClelland Hotel, which my grandmother owned, in the uppermost room of its turret, and taught English literature at Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a stoop-shouldered wooden suit rack that once belonged to my father. Mr. Vetch’s wife had been living in a sanatorium up near Erie since the deaths of their teenaged sons in a backyard explosion some years earlier, and it was always my impression that he wrote, in part, to earn the money to keep her there. He wrote horror stories, hundreds of them, many of which were eventually published in such periodicals of the day as Weird Tales, Strange Stories, Black Tower, and the like… . He worked at night, using a fountain pen, in a bentwood rocking chair, with a Hudson Bay blanket draped across his lap and a bottle of bourbon on the table before him. When his work was going well, he could be heard in every corner of the sleeping hotel, rocking and madly rocking while he subjected his heroes to the gruesome rewards of their passions for unnameable things.

  —GRADY TRIPP, Wonder Boys

  In the Black Mill

  By August Van Zorn

  IN THE FALL OF 1948, when I arrived in Plunkettsburg to begin the fieldwork I hoped would lead to a doctorate in archaeology, there were still a good number of townspeople living there whose memories stretched back to the time, in the final decade of the previous century, when the soot-blackened hills that encircle the town fairly swarmed with savants and mad diggers. In 1892 the discovery, on a hilltop overlooking the Miskahannock River, of the burial complex of a hitherto-unknown tribe of Mound Builders had set off a frenzy of excavation and scholarly poking around that made several careers, among them that of the aged hero of my profession who was chairman of my dissertation committee. It was under his redoubtable influence that I had taken up the study of the awful, illustrious Miskahannocks, with their tombs and bone pits, a course that led me at last, one gray November afternoon, to turn my overladen fourthhand Nash off the highway from Pittsburgh to Morgantown, and to navigate, tightly gripping the wheel, the pitted ghost of a roadbed that winds up through the Yuggogheny Hills, then down into the broad and gloomy valley of the Miskahannock.

  As I negotiated that endless series of hairpin and blind curves, I was afforded an equally endless series of dispiriting partial views of the place where I would spend the next ten months of my life. Like many of its neighbors in that iron-veined country, Plunkettsburg was at first glance unprepossessing—a low, rusting little city, with tarnished onion domes and huddled houses, drab as an armful of dead leaves strewn along the ground. But as I left the last hill behind me and got my first unobstructed look, I immediately noted the one structure that, while it did nothing to elevate my opinion of my new home, altered the humdrum aspect of Plunkettsburg sufficiently to make it remarkable, and also sinister. It stood off to the east of town, in a zone of weeds and rust-colored earth, a vast, black box, bristling with spiky chimneys, extending over some five acres or more, dwarfing everything around it. This was, I knew at once, the famous Plunkettsburg Mill. Evening was coming on, and in the half-light its windows winked and flickered with inner fire, and its towering stacks vomited smoke into the autumn twilight. I shuddered, and then cried out. So intent had I been on the ghastly black apparition of the mill that I had nearly run my car off the road.

  “ ‘Here in this mighty fortress of industry,’ ” I quoted aloud in the tone of a newsreel narrator, reassuring myself with the ironic reverberation of my voice, “ ‘turn the great cogs and thrust the relentless pistons that forge the pins and trusses of the American dream.’ ” I was recalling the words of a chamber of commerce brochure I had received last week from my hosts, the antiquities department of Plunkettsburg College, along with particulars of my lodging and library privileges. They were anxious to have me; it had been many years since the publication of my chairman’s Miskahannock Surveys had effectively settled all answerable questions—save, I hoped, one—about the vanished tribe and consigned Plunkettsburg once again to the mists of academic oblivion and the thick black effluvia of its satanic mill.

  “So what is there left to say about that pointy-toothed crowd?” said Carlotta Brown-Jenkin, draining her glass of brandy. The chancellor of Plunkettsburg College and chairwoman of the antiquities department had offered to stand me to dinner on my first night in town. We were sitting in the Hawaiian-style dining room of a Chinese restaurant downtown. Brown-Jenkin was herself appropriately antique, a gaunt old girl in her late seventies, her nearly hairless scalp worn and yellowed, the glint of her eyes, deep within their cavernous sockets, like that of ancient coins discovered by torchlight. “I quite thought that your distinguished mentor had revealed all their bloody mysteries.”

  “Only the women filed their teeth,” I reminded her, taking another swallow of Indian Ring beer, the local brew, which I found to possess a dark, not entirely pleasant savor of autumn leaves or damp earth. I gazed around the low room with its ersatz palm thatching and garlands of wax orchids. The only other people in the place were a man on wooden crutches with a pinned-up trouser leg and a man with a wooden hand, both of them drinking Indian Ring, and the bartender, an extremely fat woman in a thematically correct but hideous red muumuu. My hostess had assured me, without a great deal of enthusiasm, that we were about to eat the best-cooked meal in town.

  “Yes, yes,” she recalled, smiling tolerantly. Her particular field of study was great Carthage, and no doubt, I thought, she looked down on my unlettered band of savages. “They considered pointed teeth to be the essence of female beauty.”

  “That is, of course, the theory of my distinguished mentor,” I said, studying the label on my beer bottle, on which there was printed Thelder’s 1894 engraving of the Plunkettsburg Ring, which was also reproduced on the cover of Miskahannock Surveys.

  “You do not concur?” said Brown-Jenkin.

  “I think that there may in fact be other possibilities.”

  “Such as?”

  At this moment the waiter arrived, bearing a tray laden with plates of unidentifiable meats and vegetables that glistened in garish sauces the colors of women’s lipstick. The steaming dish
es emitted an overpowering blast of vinegar, as if to cover some underlying stench. Feeling ill, I averted my eyes from the food and saw that the waiter, a thickset, powerful man with bland Slavic features, was missing two of the fingers on his left hand. My stomach revolted. I excused myself from the table and ran directly to the bathroom.

  “Nerves,” I explained to Brown-Jenkin when I returned, blushing, to the table. “I’m excited about starting my research.”

  “Of course,” she said, examining me critically. With her napkin she wiped a thin red dribble of sauce from her chin. “I quite understand.”

  “There seem to be an awful lot of missing limbs in this room,” I said, trying to lighten my mood. “Hope none of them ended up in the food.”

  The chancellor stared at me, aghast.

  “A very bad joke,” I said. “My apologies. My sense of humor was not, I’m afraid, widely admired back in Boston, either.”

  “No,” she agreed, with a small, unamused smile. “Well.” She patted the long, thin strands of yellow hair atop her head. “It’s the mill, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, feeling a bit dense for not having puzzled this out myself. “Dangerous work they do there, I take it.”

  “The mill has taken a piece of half the men in Plunkettsburg,” Brown-Jenkin said, sounding almost proud. “Yes, it’s terribly dangerous work.” There had crept into her voice a boosterish tone of admiration that could not fail to remind me of the chamber of commerce brochure. “Important work.”

  “Vitally important,” I agreed, and to placate her I heaped my plate with colorful, luminous, indeterminate meat, a gesture for which I paid dearly through all the long night that followed.

  I took up residence in Murrough House, just off the campus of Plunkettsburg College. It was a large, rambling structure, filled with hidden passages, queerly shaped rooms, and staircases leading nowhere, built by the notorious lady magnate, “the Robber Baroness,” Philippa Howard Murrough, founder of the college, noted spiritualist and author and dark genius of the Plunkettsburg Mill. She had spent the last four decades of her life, and a considerable part of her manufacturing fortune, adding to, demolishing, and rebuilding her home. On her death the resultant warren, a chimera of brooding Second Empire gables, peaked Victorian turrets, and baroque porticoes with a coat of glossy black ivy, passed into the hands of the private girls’ college she had endowed, which converted it to a faculty club and lodgings for visiting scholars. I had a round turret room on the fourth and uppermost floor. There were no other visiting scholars in the house and, according to the porter, this had been the case for several years.

  Old Halicek, the porter, was a bent, slow-moving fellow who lived with his daughter and grandson in a suite of rooms somewhere in the unreachable lower regions of the house. He too had lost a part of his body to the great mill in his youth—his left ear. It had been reduced, by a device that Halicek called a Dodson line extractor, to a small pink ridge nestled in the lee of his bushy white sideburns. His daughter, Mrs. Eibonas, oversaw a small staff of two maids and a waiter and did the cooking for the dozen or so faculty members who took their lunches at Murrough House every day. The waiter was Halicek’s grandson, Dexter Eibonas, an earnest, good-looking, affable redhead of seventeen who was a favorite among the college faculty. He was intelligent, curious, widely if erratically read. He was always pestering me to take him out to dig in the mounds, and while I would not have been averse to his pleasant company, the terms of my agreement with the board of the college, who were the trustees of the site, expressly forbade the recruiting of local workmen. Nevertheless I gave him books on archaeology and kept him abreast of my discoveries, such as they were. Several of the Plunkettsburg professors, I learned, had also taken an interest in the development of his mind.

  “They sent me up to Pittsburgh last winter,” he told me one evening about a month into my sojourn, as he brought me a bottle of Ring and a plate of Mrs. Eibonas’s famous kielbasa with sauerkraut. Professor Brown-Jenkin had been much mistaken, in my opinion, about the best-laid table in town. During the most tedious, chilly, and profitless stretches of my scratchings-about in the bleak, flinty Yuggoghenies, I was often sustained solely by thoughts of Mrs. Eibonas’s homemade sausages and cakes. “I had an interview with the dean of engineering at Tech. Professor Collier even paid for a hotel for Mother and me.”

  “And how did it go?”

  “Oh, it went fine, I guess,” said Dexter. “I was accepted.”

  “Oh,” I said, confused. The autumn semester at Carnegie Tech, I imagined, would have been ending that very week.

  “Have you—have you deferred your admission?”

  “Deferred it indefinitely, I guess. I told them no thanks.” Dexter had, in an excess of nervous energy, been snapping a tea towel back and forth. He stopped. His normally bright eyes took on a glazed, I would almost have said a dreamy, expression. “I’m going to work in the mill.”

  “The mill?” I said, incredulous. I looked at him to see if he was teasing me, but at that moment he seemed to be entertaining only the pleasantest imaginings of his labors in that fiery black castle. I had a sudden vision of his pleasant face rendered earless, and looked away. “Forgive my asking, but why would you want to do that?”

  “My father did it,” said Dexter, his voice dull. “His father, too. I’m on the hiring list.” The light came back into his eyes, and he resumed snapping the towel. “Soon as a place opens up, I’m going in.”

  He left me and went back into the kitchen, and I sat there shuddering. I’m going in. The phrase had a heroic, doomed ring to it, like the pronouncement of a fireman about to enter his last burning house. Over the course of the previous month I’d had ample opportunity to observe the mill and its effect on the male population of Plunkettsburg. Casual observation, in local markets and bars, in the lobby of the Orpheum on State Street, on the sidewalks, in Birch’s general store out on Gray Road where I stopped for coffee and cigarettes every morning on my way up to the mound complex, had led me to estimate that in truth, fully half of the townsmen had lost some visible portion of their anatomies to Murrough Manufacturing, Inc. And yet all my attempts to ascertain how these often horribly grave accidents had befallen their bent, maimed, or limping victims were met, invariably, with an explanation at once so detailed and so vague, so rich in mechanical jargon and yet so free of actual information, that I had never yet succeeded in producing in my mind an adequate picture of the incident in question, or, for that matter, of what kind of deadly labor was performed in the black mill.

  What, precisely, was manufactured in that bastion of industrial democracy and fount of the Murrough millions? I heard the trains come sighing and moaning into town in the middle of the night, clanging as they were shunted into the mill sidings. I saw the black diesel trucks, emblazoned with the crimson initial M, lumbering through the streets of Plunkettsburg on their way to and from the loading docks. I had two dozen conversations, over endless mugs of Indian Ring, about shift schedules and union activities (invariably quashed) and company picnics, about ore and furnaces, metallurgy and turbines. I heard the resigned, good-natured explanations of men sliced open by Rawlings divagators, ground up by spline presses, mangled by steam sorters, half-decapitated by rolling Hurley plates. And yet after four months in Plunkettsburg I was no closer to understanding the terrible work to which the people of that town sacrificed, with such apparent goodwill, the bodies of their men.

  I took to haunting the precincts of the mill in the early morning as the six o’clock shift was coming on and late at night as the graveyard men streamed through the iron gates, carrying their black lunch pails. The fence, an elaborate Victorian confection of wickedly tipped, thick iron pikes trailed with iron ivy, enclosed the mill yard at such a distance from the mountainous factory itself that it was impossible for me to get near enough to see anything but the glow of huge fires through the begrimed mesh windows. I applied at the company offices in town for admission, as a visitor, to the plan
t but was told by the receptionist, rather rudely, that the Plunkettsburg Mill was not a tourist facility. My fascination with the place grew so intense and distracting that I neglected my work; my wanderings through the abandoned purlieus of the savage Miskahannocks grew desultory and ruminative, my discoveries of artifacts, never frequent, dwindled to almost nothing, and I made fewer and fewer entries in my journal. Finally, one exhausted morning, after an entire night spent lying in my bed at Murrough House staring out the leaded window at a sky that was bright orange with the reflected fire of the mill, I decided I had had enough.

  I dressed quickly, in plain tan trousers and a flannel work shirt. I went down to the closet in the front hall, where I found a drab old woolen coat and a watch cap that I pulled down over my head. Then I stepped outside. The terrible orange flashes had subsided and the sky was filled with stars. I hurried across town to the east side, to Stan’s Diner on Mill Street, where I knew I would find the day shift wolfing down ham and eggs and pancakes. I slipped between two large men at the long counter and ordered coffee. When one of my neighbors got up to go to the toilet, I grabbed his lunch pail, threw down a handful of coins, and hurried over to the gates of the mill, where I joined the crowd of men. They looked at me oddly, not recognizing me, and I could see them murmuring to one another in puzzlement. But the earliness of the morning or an inherent reserve kept them from saying anything. They figured, I suppose, that whoever I was, I was somebody else’s problem. Only one man, tall, with thinning yellow hair, kept his gaze on me for more than a moment. His eyes, I was surprised to see, looked very sad.