Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “You shouldn’t be here, buddy,” he said, not unkindly.

  I felt myself go numb. I had been caught.

  “What? Oh, no, I—I—”

  The whistle blew. The crowd of men, swelled now to more than a hundred, jerked to life and waited, nervous, on the balls of their feet, for the gates to open. The man with the yellow hair seemed to forget me. In the distance an equally large crowd of men emerged from the belly of the mill and headed toward us. There was a grinding of old machinery, the creak of stressed iron, and then the ornamental gates rolled away. The next instant I was caught up in the tide of men streaming toward the mill, borne along like a cork. Halfway there our group intersected with the graveyard shift and in the ensuing chaos of bodies and hellos I was sure my plan was going to work. I was going to see, at last, the inside of the mill.

  I felt something, someone’s fingers, brush the back of my neck, and then I was yanked backward by the collar of my coat. I lost my footing and fell to the ground. As the changing shifts of workers flowed around me I looked up and saw a huge man standing over me, his arms folded across his chest. He was wearing a black jacket emblazoned on the breast with a large M. I tried to stand, but he pushed me back down.

  “You can just stay right there until the police come,” he said.

  “Listen,” I said. My research, clearly, was at an end. My scholarly privileges would be revoked. I would creep back to Boston, where, of course, my committee and, above all, my chair would recommend that I quit the department. “You don’t have to do that.”

  Once more I tried to stand, and this time the company guard threw me back to the ground so hard and so quickly that I couldn’t break my fall with my hands. The back of my head slammed against the pavement. A passing worker stepped on my outstretched hand. I cried out.

  “Hey,” said a voice. “Come on, Moe. You don’t need to treat him that way.”

  It was the sad-eyed man with the yellow hair. He interposed himself between me and my attacker.

  “Don’t do this, Ed,” said the guard. “I’ll have to write you up.”

  I rose shakily to my feet and started to stumble away, back toward the gates. The guard tried to reach around Ed, to grab hold of me. As he lunged forward, Ed stuck out his foot, and the guard went sprawling.

  “Come on, professor,” said Ed, putting his arm around me. “You better get out of here.”

  “Do I know you?” I said, leaning gratefully on him.

  “No, but you know my nephew, Dexter. He pointed you out to me at the pictures one night.”

  “Thank you,” I said, when we reached the gate. He brushed some dust from the back of my coat, handed me the knit stocking cap, then took a black bandanna from the pocket of his dungarees. He touched a corner of it to my mouth, and it came away marked with a dark stain.

  “Only a little blood,” he said. “You’ll be all right. You just make sure to stay clear of this place from now on.” He brought his face close to mine, filling my nostrils with the sharp medicinal tang of his aftershave. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And stay off the beer.”

  “What?”

  “Just stay off it.” He stood up straight and returned the bandanna to his back pocket. “I haven’t taken a sip in two weeks.” I nodded, confused. I had been drinking two, three, sometimes four bottles of Indian Ring every night, finding that it carried me effortlessly into profound and dreamless sleep.

  “Just tell me one thing,” I said.

  “I can’t say nothing else, professor.”

  “It’s just—what is it you do, in there?”

  “Me?” he said, pointing to his chest. “I operate a sprue extruder.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, “but what does a sprue extruder do? What is it for?”

  He looked at me patiently but a little remotely, a distracted parent with an inquisitive child.

  “It’s for extruding sprues,” he said. “What else?”

  Thus repulsed, humiliated, and given good reason to fear that my research was in imminent jeopardy of being brought to an end, I resolved to put the mystery of the mill out of my mind once and for all and get on with my real business in Plunkettsburg. I went out to the site of the mound complex and worked with my brush and little hand spade all through that day, until the light failed. When I got home, exhausted, Mrs. Eibonas brought me a bottle of Indian Ring and I gratefully drained it before I remembered Ed’s strange warning. I handed the sweating bottle back to Mrs. Eibonas. She smiled.

  “Can I bring you another, professor?” she said.

  “No, thank you,” I said. Her smile collapsed. She looked very disappointed. “All right,” she said. For some reason the thought of disappointing her bothered me greatly, so I told her, “Maybe one more.”

  I retired early and dreamed dreams that were troubled by the scratching of iron on earth and by a clamoring tumult of men. The next morning I got up and went straight out to the site again.

  For it was going to take work, a lot of work, if my theory was ever going to bear fruit. During much of my first several months in Plunkettsburg I had been hampered by snow and by the degree to which the site of the Plunkettsburg Mounds—a broad plateau on the eastern slope of Mount Orrert, on which there had been excavated, in the 1890s, thirty-six huge molars of packed earth, each the size of a two-story house—had been picked over and disturbed by that early generation of archaeologists. Their methods had not in every case been as fastidious as one could have hoped. There were numerous areas of old digging where the historical record had, through carelessness, been rendered illegible. Then again, I considered, as I gazed up at the ivy-covered flank of the ancient, artificial hillock my mentor had designated B-3, there was always the possibility that my theory was wrong.

  Like all the productions of academe, I suppose, my theory was composed of equal parts of indebtedness and spite. I had formulated it in a kind of rebellion against that grand old man of the field, my chairman, the very person who had inculcated in me a respect for the deep, subtle savagery of the Miskahannock Indians. His view—the standard one—was that the culture of the builders of the Plunkettsburg Mounds, at its zenith, had expressed, to a degree unequaled in the Western Hemisphere up to that time, the aestheticizing of the nihilist impulse. They had evolved all the elaborate social structures—texts, rituals, decorative arts, architecture—of any of the world’s great religions: dazzling feats of abstract design represented by the thousands of baskets, jars, bowls, spears, tablets, knives, flails, axes, codices, robes, and so on that were housed and displayed with such pride in the museum of my university, back in Boston. But the Miskahannocks, insofar as anyone had ever been able to determine (and many had tried), worshiped nothing, or, as my teacher would have it, Nothing. They acknowledged neither gods nor goddesses, conversed with no spirits or familiars. Their only purpose, the focus and the pinnacle of their artistic genius, was the killing of men. Nobody knew how many of the unfortunate males of the neighboring tribes had fallen victim to the Miskahannocks’ delicate artistry of torture and dismemberment. In 1903 Professor William Waterman of Yale discovered fourteen separate ossuary pits along the banks of the river, not far from the present site of the mill. These had contained enough bones to frame the bodies of seven thousand men and boys. And nobody knew why they had died. The few tattered, fragmentary blood-on-tanbark texts so far discovered concerned themselves chiefly with the recurring famines that plagued Miskahannock civilization and, it was generally theorized, had been responsible for its ultimate collapse. The texts said nothing about the sacred arts of killing and torture. There was, my teacher had persuasively argued, one reason for this. The deaths had been purposeless; their justification, the cosmic purposelessness of life itself.

  Now, once I had settled myself on spiteful rebellion, as every good pupil eventually must, there were two possible paths available to me. The first would have been to attempt to prove beyond a doubt that the Miskahannocks had, in fact, worshiped some kind of god, some positive, purposive ent
ity, however bloodthirsty. I chose the second path. I accepted the godlessness of the Miskahannocks. I rejected the refined, reasoning nihilism my mentor had postulated (and to which, as I among very few others knew, he himself privately subscribed). The Miskahannocks, I hoped to prove, had had another motive for their killing: They were hungry; according to the tattered scraps of the Plunkettsburg Codex, very hungry indeed. The filed teeth my professor subsumed to the larger aesthetic principles he elucidated thus had, in my view, a far simpler and more utilitarian purpose. Unfortunately, the widespread incidence of cannibalism among the women of a people vanished four thousand years since was proving rather difficult to establish. So far, in fact, I had found no evidence of it at all.

  I knelt to untie the canvas tarp I had stretched across my digging of the previous day. I was endeavoring to take an inclined section of B-3, cutting a passage five feet high and two feet wide at a 30-degree angle to the horizontal. This endeavor in itself was a kind of admission of defeat, since B-3 was one of two mounds, the other being its neighbor B-5, designated a “null mound” by those who had studied the site. It had been thoroughly pierced and penetrated and found to be utterly empty; reserved, it was felt, for the mortal remains of a dynasty that failed. But I had already made careful searches of the thirty-four other tombs of the Miskahannock queens. The null mounds were the only ones remaining. If, as I anticipated, I found no evidence of anthropophagy, I would have to give up on the mounds entirely and start looking elsewhere. There were persistent stories of other bone pits in the pleats and hollows of the Yuggoghenies. Perhaps I could find one, a fresh one, one not trampled and corrupted by the primitive methods of my professional forebears.

  I peeled back the sheet of oiled canvas I had spread across my handiwork and received a shock. The passage, which over the course of the previous day I had managed to extend a full four feet into the side of the mound, had been completely filled in. Not merely filled in; the thick black soil had been tamped down and a makeshift screen of ivy had been drawn across it. I took a step back and looked around the site, certain all at once that I was being observed. There were only the crows in the treetops. In the distance I could hear the Murrough trucks on the tortuous highway, grinding gears as they climbed up out of the valley. I looked down at the ground by my feet and saw the faint imprint of a foot smaller than my own. A few feet from this, I found another. That was all.

  I ought to have been afraid, I suppose, or at the least concerned, but at this point, I confess, I was only angry. The site was heavily fenced and posted with NO TRESPASSING signs, but apparently some local hoodlums had come up in the night and wasted all of the previous day’s hard work. The motive for this vandalism eluded me, but I supposed that a lack of any discernible motive was in the nature of vandalism itself. I picked up my hand shovel and started in again on my doorway into the mound. The fifth bite I took with the little iron tooth brought out something strange. It was a black bandanna, twisted and soiled. I spread it out across my thigh and found the small, round trace of my own blood on one corner. I was bewildered, and again I looked around to see if someone was watching me. There were only the laughter and ragged fingers of the crows. What was Ed up to? Why would my rescuer want to come up onto the mountain and ruin my work? Did he think he was protecting me? I shrugged, stuffed the bandanna into a pocket, and went back to my careful digging. I worked steadily throughout the day, extending the tunnel six inches nearer than I had come yesterday to the heart of the mound, then drove home to Murrough House, my shoulders aching, my fingers stiff. I had a long, hot soak in the big bathtub down the hall from my room, smoked a pipe, and read, for the fifteenth time at least, the section in Miskahannock Surveys dealing with B-3. Then at 6:30 I went downstairs to find Dexter Eibonas waiting to serve my dinner, his expression blank, his eyes bloodshot. I remember being surprised that he didn’t immediately demand details of my day on the dig. He just nodded, retreated into the kitchen, and returned with a heated can of soup, half a loaf of white bread, and a bottle of Ring. Naturally after my hard day I was disappointed by this fare, and I inquired as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Eibonas.

  “She had some family business, professor,” Dexter said, rolling up his hands in his tea towel, then unrolling them again. “Sad business.”

  “Did somebody—die?”

  “My uncle Ed,” said the boy, collapsing in a chair beside me and covering his twisted features with his hands. “He had an accident down at the mill, I guess. Fell headfirst into the impact mold.”

  “What?” I said, feeling my throat constrict. “My God, Dexter! Something has to be done! That mill ought to be shut down!”

  Dexter took a step back, startled by my vehemence. I had thought at once, of course, of the black bandanna, and now I wondered if I was not somehow responsible for Ed Eibonas’s death. Perhaps the incident in the mill yard the day before, his late-night digging in the dirt of B-3 in some kind of misguided effort to help me, had left him rattled, unable to concentrate on his work, prey to accidents.

  “You just don’t understand,” said Dexter. “It’s our way of life here. There isn’t anything for us but the mill.” He pushed the bottle of Indian Ring toward me. “Drink your beer, professor.”

  I reached for the glass and brought it to my lips but was swept by a sudden wave of revulsion like that which had overtaken me at the Chinese restaurant on my first night in town. I pushed back from the table and stood up, my violent start upsetting a pewter candelabra in which four tapers burned. Dexter lunged to keep it from falling over, then looked at me, surprised. I stared back, chest heaving, feeling defiant without being sure of what exactly I was defying.

  “I am not going to touch another drop of that beer!” I said, the words sounding petulant and absurd as they emerged from my mouth.

  Dexter nodded. He looked worried.

  “All right, professor,” he said, obligingly, as if he thought I might have become unbalanced. “You just go on up to your room and lie down. I’ll bring you your food a little later. How about that?”

  The next day I lay in bed, aching, sore, and suffering from that peculiar brand of spiritual depression born largely of suppressed fear. On the following morning I roused myself, shaved, dressed in my best clothes, and went to the Church of St. Stephen, on Nolt Street, the heart of Plunkettsburg’s Estonian neighborhood, for the funeral of Ed Eibonas. There was a sizable turnout, as was always the case, I was told, when there had been a death at the mill. Such deaths were reportedly uncommon; the mill was a cruel and dangerous but rarely fatal place. At Dexter’s invitation I went to the dead man’s house to pay my respects to the widow, and two hours later I found myself, along with most of the other male mourners, roaring drunk on some kind of fruit brandy brought out on special occasions. It may have been that the brandy burned away the jitters and anxiety of the past two days; in any case the next morning I went out to the mounds again, with a tent and a cookstove and several bags of groceries. I didn’t leave for the next five days.

  My hole had been filled in again, and this time there was no clue to the identity of the filler, but I was determined not to let this spook me, as the saying goes. I simply dug. Ordinarily I would have proceeded cautiously, carrying the dirt out by thimblefuls and sifting each one, but I felt my time on the site growing short. I often saw cars on the access road by day, and headlight beams by night, slowing down as if to observe me. Twice a day a couple of sheriff’s deputies would pull up to the Ring and sit in their car, watching. At first whenever they appeared, I stopped working, lit a cigarette, and waited for them to arrest me. But when after the first few times nothing of the sort occurred, I relaxed a little and kept on with my digging for the duration of their visit. I was resigned to being prevented from completing my research, but before this happened I wanted to get to the heart of B-3.

  On the fourth day, when I was halfway to my goal, George Birch drove out from his general store, as I had requested, with cans of stew, bottles of soda pop, and cigarettes. He wa
s normally a dour man, but on this morning his face seemed longer than ever. I inquired if there was anything bothering him.

  “Carlotta Brown-Jenkin died last night,” he said. “Friend of my mother’s. Tough old lady.” He shook his head. “Influenza. Shame.”

  I remembered that awful, Technicolored meal so many months before, the steely glint of her eyes in their cavernous sockets. I did my best to look properly sympathetic.

  “That is a shame,” I said.

  He set down the box of food and looked past me at the entrance to my tunnel. The sight of it seemed to disturb him.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” he said.

  I assured him that I did, but he continued to look skeptical.

  “I remember the last time you archaeologist fellows came to town, you know,” he said. As a matter of fact I did know this, since he told me almost every time I saw him. “I was a boy. We had just got electricity in our house.”

  “Things must have changed a great deal since then,” I said.

  “Things haven’t changed at all,” he snapped. He was never a cheerful man, George Birch. He turned, hitching up his trousers, and limped on his wooden foot back to his truck.

  That night I lay in my bedroll under the canvas roof of my tent, watching the tormented sky. The lantern hissed softly beside my head; I kept it burning low, all night long, advertising my presence to any who might seek to come and undo my work. It had been a warm, springlike afternoon, but now a cool breeze was blowing in from the north, stirring the branches of the trees over my head. After a while I drowsed a little; I fancied I could hear the distant fluting of the Miskahannock flowing over its rocky bed and, still more distant, the low, insistent drumming of the machine heart in the black mill. Suddenly I sat up: The music I had been hearing, of breeze and river and far-off machinery, seemed at once very close and not at all metaphoric. I scrambled out of my bedroll and tent and stood, taut, listening, at the edge of Plunkettsburg Ring. It was music I heard, strange music, and it seemed to be issuing, impossibly, from the other end of the tunnel I had been digging and redigging over the past two weeks—from within mound B-3, the null mound!