Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  ‘Didn’t the police come here?’

  ‘It goes without saying,’ he said.

  ‘But you were away, and had left no trace.’

  He grinned at me slowly.

  ‘And the smoke. Doesn’t anyone see?’

  He said: ‘There’s always that.’ He seemed to think he was protected, and conceivably he was.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said at last.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I thought you might like to.’

  ‘Confession?’

  ‘Or boast. Who else would listen?’

  ‘Plenty of people would listen.’

  ‘Do you remember any childhood?’ I asked him.

  He looked at me a long while, as if gauging the limits of my understanding. Then he shook his head. His hair was a shaggy flamy thing in the firelight. His brown-silver eyes shone, when they were in the dark out of the fire, hard and flat and green. Human eyes do not do this. Wolf eyes, however human, do.

  ‘Then, when did it begin? When they dug up the grave?’

  ‘Yes.’ He moved closer — we were both seated on the floor. He touched my face gently, with his long-fingered, long-nailed hand. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘you remember your childhood, but you don’t feel, do you, it was truthfully you? That was someone else.’

  ‘Yes, that’s so.’

  ‘Well. I know he was a child. Another person. I simply recognise that it wasn’t myself at all. I’m George here and now. I’m here, I’m now.’

  ‘And the grave — ’

  ‘Like lifting the lid of a kettle. The lid, down, gives the illusion of suppression. But I was there, underneath.’

  He said there was a darkness and he came out of the darkness in the way one comes out of sleep. There might have been dreams, or not. He asked, had I ever woken up and for a while not known where I was, or the day or date even, not minding it, knowing I would recall, but not yet recalling. I had, and said I had. Well, he said, it was like that for him. Then, he found himself walking through the town. It was quite unfamiliar, yet — like days and dates — he realised it would become recollected, he had only to wait. And then he saw a girl, by the canal. Probably she was soliciting. He went up to her and asked her for a cigarette. (George had seen his father and brothers smoke. It would be normal for him to assume that he, when an adult, would smoke also.) The girl gave him the cigarette. (He asked me if I knew the prostitutes in Roman times had been called ‘she-wolf’ — not as an insult, but to indicate their honourable usefulness, linked to the motif of the wolf-mother of the city, and the werewolf festival of Lupercalia.) Then she suggested he might like to go with her, to a café, but instead he took her into an alley he had already found, and there he killed her. It seemed perfectly natural to him, he was excited but competent, knowing instinctively, as with sex, what should be done. In fact, it was like sex, and afterwards he was worried he had not possessed her before killing her. He did not abuse the corpse. The ethics of the bourgeois Vaudron family intervened. He found another girl to satisfy concupiscence, and then arranged to meet her again the next night. When he met this second girl this second time, he first made love to her and then tore her to pieces. He killed her in the middle of orgasm, both hers and his own. This was highly fulfilling, it seemed, and became thereafter his modus operandi. Sometimes he fed at these times. He also ate other food. The cafés and hotels threw things out, or gave them to him, or he stole them.

  It came to me that the town had remained a wood for him, and in a way I wondered if he even saw the buildings and the roads as such, or if they were somehow caves and trees, and savage woodland glades. By this formula, too, he might have his uncanny protection, making himself in turn invisible to the town, and to its police force. Seeing him quite frequently, as they must do, they had never seen him.

  The fire sank. It was cold in the boarded house, February weather.

  ‘Sometimes I go to a church,’ he said. ‘Once, I did make confession. But not the killings. You see, for me, the killing is not a sin.’

  ‘No, I understand that.’

  As he moved to put more cones and branches on to the fading fire, I told him the dream I had had, the night he — no, George — had died. About the blue wolf who gave birth to me in the great tree, and her sad eyes. I mentioned the idea to him that the mother-birth is the second birth, that the ejection of the seed — the paternal birth — precedes it. I wanted to inquire after the metamorphosis he himself underwent, perhaps during this ejection, or directly before. Presumably, it did happen. But how did he accomplish it? He seemed totally physically real, and if he was, such a displacement of atoms must be impossible.

  ‘Well, maybe the wolves did birth you,’ he said. ‘You arrived at the house an orphan.’

  ‘I don’t remember my parents,’ I said.

  ‘I remember mine,’ he said. ‘His.’

  ‘Do you remember our grandmother?’

  ‘A big mouth, always telling us things she shouldn’t have. But you were a strange child. That’s how I see you now. I wonder what happened to that other girl…’

  ‘Bettany?’ I paused. Bettany had married a banker, and become another woman who ate chocolates and produced children. I had not seen her for years. Neither of us now wanted to talk about Bettany. I think it was only some associative memory stirring in George’s brief past, like a nerve. Eventually, I pushed her right away, and said, ‘And you remember the story our grandmother told us?’

  ‘The girl with the mantle made of blood,’ he said. ‘Like you.’

  ‘Do you worship the old gods? Do you make sacrifices to Pan?’

  He laughed. The laugh was wonderful. He sat back on his heels, laughing, warm February fire all over him. He ate life. It had filled him. He was unlike anything, human or beast.

  ‘No. Pan? Pan is dead. Or is that a pun — Pan — du pain — bread — peine — pain — the body of Christ?’

  ‘I meant, how do you effect the transformation?’

  He lowered his eyes — with a dagger-green flash — like a modest girl who has been asked by a man if he may touch, very politely, her breast. ‘What is that?’ he said.

  ‘Man into wolf. Is it possible?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Do you want me to show you?’ he said, looking at me now in the old sly way, under his lashes.

  ‘No,’ I said. But I did want him to. ‘Could you not simply describe for me — ’

  ‘If I do it,’ he said, ‘you may be frightened. You may go mad. Or I may kill you.’

  ‘You would stop being yourself.’

  ‘I should become myself.’

  ‘There’s no self to become,’ I said. ‘Whatever you are, not really. So, I suppose you could become anything. Is that what the answer is?’

  ‘I remember the girl in the story,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t submit.’

  ‘Then she did.’

  ‘Yes. Then she did. Do you actually think,’ he said, ‘that any one of us is truly what we’re pleased to call “real”? All matter, flesh, skin, trees, stone, bricks, blood — it’s all illusory, fluid, non-existent, formed from nothing — therefore capable of any alteration, and of complete change. Wouldn’t you say? Where else do the woods go to, when they turn into concrete? How else? And the bread that’s a body, and children who grow up, or turn into a heap of calcium in the ground?’

  ‘What about the needle and the pin?’

  ‘There’s no choice between them. They’re the same. They both pierce and they both join together.’

  ‘Is that what it meant?’

  ‘In the story she told us.’

  ‘Show me, then,’ I said.

  ‘Look at me, then,’ he said.

  So I did look. I looked hard, too hard. And then I let myself relax, even my eyes, I allowed them to unfocus a little, just a very little, and gradually, by the broad gusts of fire through the shadow, I began to see the wolf. There was no violence, no tearing or twisting, no flare up of pelt, the
skull re-shaping itself, a howling frenzy. Frankly, it was all already there. By allowing myself to see, I merely saw it. Then again, the terror of it, for it was quite terrifying, was all because it was not a wolf at all, but some intrinsic fear-thing that was to do with man’s phobia at wolves, primeval, matted, dark, fathomless. It was the head of a creature that was the head of fear, and with a man’s body, a man’s long wolfish hands, with which to work the horror out.

  Presently I looked away, and opened my purse and took out a cigarette. When I had struck the match and lit it, I offered the packet to him, and he had become a young man again, a wolf-boy, much more wolf-like in his human form. The werewolf was only the image, the icon of the nightmare.

  We smoked our cigarettes in silence, and then he lay down, his head in my lap. The fire played on the planes of his face. I watched him, trying to memorise his beauty, as one does with some work of art one may never see again. After a while, he said that he often slept here, but he was cold tonight, did I feel the cold as he did? He thought not. His blood was hotter than mine. So then I took off my red coat and laid it over him, drawing it up to his chin.

  He slept after an interval, and I, my back propped against the rotted boards, also slept a few moments. I dreamed I was in the tree again, in the act of birth from the belly or the penis of the lupin-blue wolf. I thought, That’s the riddle then. Not to find the bestial in humankind, but this constant thrust to be free of it, the coming out from the beast, the ancestor in his sheath of hair and hunger. Then I woke, and he slept, still. I got up carefully, not to wake him; I did not want to make him start. But as I moved to the fire, I half believed I caught the flash of his eyes, watching on under their lashes. Yet who goes in the wood, knowing the wood, is there to tempt his fate. He recalled, he had told me so. I pulled one of the last twigs out of the grate, and carried the bud of February fire back to him. I even still waited an instant, letting the glare and heat of the burning twig flicker above his face, as Psyche did, when she stared down on her shape-changer monster-god in the legend of love. But now he did not open his eyes, if he ever had.

  I put the flame to the edges of my coat, all the way around, then threw the last smoulder of the twig down into his hair.

  At first, there was nothing, just a ripple, sparks, smoke. Then suddenly, all of it went up, the coat, the wolf-mane, and he too, a spasm of fire, scarlet on the shadow, the colour of blood, redness covering him, obliterating him. He gave no cry, and scarcely changed position, only rolling a little, as if to be one with the warmth and comfort.

  I found it very cold outside, after the fire. The house was burning by the time I reached the canal. I could see the light on the sky, and the smoke going over the sinking moon.

  My grandmother’s grave, in the transported cemetery, has flowers growing on it, and ivy, but no lupins. I took photographs of that, and other Vaudron graves. That was really all modernisation had left me. The dwellings and landmarks of my childhood were gone. There was some excitement in the town that day, about a derelict house which had caught on fire in the night. Tramps had been using it, and no one was astonished that the cooling clinker revealed the remains of a man. Then again, however, they were not sure it was a man, or anything, for that matter, ever alive. At the correct temperature, even bones will melt. You can rely on the constancy of nothing.

  Having to buy a coat, I was disconcerted by the women in the shop. They were so interested in all the other aspects of their lives, that for them I hardly existed. I had become a sort of ghost. I left the town near evening, by the night train for the south. In the city I knew I would be recognised, and spoken to, I knew I should be perfectly alive and real.

  THE GORGON

  Suddenly the Greek islands arrived in my brain, and with them this story, which later won the World Fantasy Award. Though I was delighted with the award, I know perfectly well this is not a ‘fantasy story’. It is about the harshness of the here and now, clad only in a white dress and some green leaves.

  The small island, which lay off the larger island of Daphaeu, obviously contained a secret of some sort, and, day by day, and particularly night by night, began to exert an influence on me, so that I must find it out.

  Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess) was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbour or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes or the bottle glass of certain spirits.

  On my first morning, having come onto the natural terrace (the only recommendation of the hovel-like accommodation) to look over this strange green ocean, I saw the smaller island, lying like a little boat of land moored just wide of Daphaeu’s three hills. The day was clear, the water frilled with white where it hit the fangs in the interstices below the terrace. About the smaller island, barely a ruffle showed. It seemed to glide up from the sea, smooth as mirror. The little island was verdant, also. Unlike Daphaeu’s limited stands of stone pine, cypress, and cedar, the smaller sister was clouded by a still, lambent haze of foliage that looked to be woods. Visions of groves, springs, a ruined temple, a statue of Pan playing the panpipes for ever in some glade — where only yesterday, it might seem, a thin column of aromatic smoke had gone up — these images were enough, fancifully, to draw me into inquiries about how the small island might be reached. And when my inquiries met first with a polite bevy of excuses, next with a refusal, last with a blank wall of silence, as if whomever I mentioned the little island to had gone temporarily deaf or mad, I became, of course, insatiable to get to it, to find out what odd superstitious thing kept these people away. Naturally, the Daphaeui were not friendly to me at any time beyond the false friendship one anticipates extended to a man of another nationality and clime, who can be relied on to pay his bills, perhaps allow himself to be overcharged, even made a downright monkey of in order to preserve goodwill. In the normal run of things, I could have had anything I wanted in exchange for a pack of local lies, a broad local smile, and a broader local price. That I could not get to the little island puzzled me. I tried money and I tried barter. I even, in a reckless moment, probably knowing I would not succeed, offered Pitos, one of the younger fishermen, the gold and onyx ring he coveted. My sister had made it for me, the faithful copy of an intaglio belonging to the House of Borgia, no less. Generally, Pitos could not pass the time of day with me without mentioning the ring, adding something in the nature of: ‘If ever you want a great service, any great service, I will do it for that ring.’ I half believe he would have stolen or murdered for it, certainly shared the bed with me. But he would not, apparently, even for the Borgia ring, take me to the little island.

  ‘You think too much of foolish things,’ he said to me. ‘For a big writer, that is not good.’

  I ignored the humorous aspect of ‘big’, equally inappropriate in the sense of height, girth, or fame. Pitos’s English was fine, and when he slipped into mild inaccuracies, it was likely to be a decoy.

  ‘You’re wrong, Pitos. That island has a story in it somewhere. I’d take a bet on it.’

  ‘No fish today,’ said Pitos. ‘Why you think that is?’

  I refrained from inventively telling him I had seen giant swordfish leaping from the shallows by the smaller island.

  I found I was prowling Daphaeu, but only on the one side, the side where I would get a view — or views — of her sister. I would climb down into the welter of coves and smashed emerald water to look across at her. I would climb up and stand, leaning on the sun-blasted walls of a crumbling church, and look at the small island. At night, crouched over a bottle of wine, a scatter of manuscript, moths falling like rain in the oil-l
amp, my stare stayed fixed on the small island, which, as the moon came up, would seem turned to silver or to some older metal, Nemean metal perhaps, sloughed from the moon herself.

  Curiosity accounts for much of this, and contrasuggestiveness. But the influence I presently began to feel, that I cannot account for exactly. Maybe it was only the writer’s desire to fantasise rather than to work. But each time I reached for the manuscript I would experience a sort of distraction, a sort of calling — uncanny, poignant, like nostalgia, though for a place I had never visited.

  I am very bad at recollecting my dreams, but once or twice, just before sunrise, I had a suspicion I had dreamed of the island. Of walking there, hearing its inner waters, the leaves brushing my hands and face.

  Two weeks went by, and precious little had been done in the line of work. And I had come to Daphaeu with the sole intention of working. The year before, I had accomplished so much in a month of similar islands — or had they been similar? — that I had looked for results of some magnitude. In all of fourteen days I must have squeezed out two thousand words, and most of those dreary enough that the only covers they would ever get between would be those of the trash-can. And yet it was not that I could not produce work, it was that I knew, with blind and damnable certainty, that the work I needed to be doing sprang from that spoonful of island.

  The first day of the third week I had been swimming in the calm stretch of sea west of the harbour and had emerged to sun myself and smoke on the parched hot shore. Presently Pitos appeared, having scented my cigarettes. Surgical and government health warnings have not yet penetrated to spots like Daphaeu, where filtered tobacco continues to symbolise Hollywood or some other amorphous, anachronistic surrealism still hankered after and long vanished from the real world beyond. Once Pitos had acquired his cigarette, he sprawled down on the dry grass, grinned, indicated the Borgia ring, and mentioned a beautiful cousin of his, whether male or female I cannot be sure. After this had been cleared out of the way, I said to him, ‘You know how the currents run. I was thinking of a slightly more adventurous swim. But I’d like your advice.’