by Jerry
“Yes.”
“I’m glad,” Hellea whispered, her voice almost unintelligible because of its deepness. She licked her lips quickly several times, her tongue slapping against her teeth. For a moment, in the dim moonlight from the windows, I thought I saw canines. Memories of Kirt and his chimera cloak—that was all. “Well get rid of him,” Hellea said softly.
“Yes,” I said, thinking only of Hellea, wondering why she was so against involving the p.o.‘s. Hellea, for all our intimacy, was still a stranger. I’d met her at work and fallen in love straightaway. But she already had a lover, she’d said. Kirt. And then, gradually, she’d told me of how he beat her when he was on fantacin, how he was insane and violent. I talked to her for long hours and finally persuaded her to leave him and live with me. That had been only four days before, and already Kirt had found her. Scent would lead him, he had said in the corridor.
“I’m glad I came here,” Hellea whispered. She moved her fingers, brushed my eyelids and lips with them. The odor of her was smothering. “Do you love me, Courtney?” she asked, her voice still deep. I barely caught her words and could only nod. Scent, Kirt had said, and I breathed deeply of Hellea’s extraordinarily perfumed skin.
I suddenly felt far colder than the pleasant warmth of my bed could allow.
The tram to work was crowded, and Hellea and I had to push our way between two obese women to get through the doors before they closed. One woman nodded to me, but I was not in the mood for chatter, even though I recognized her. She lived in our building, a floor or two down. I remembered her as a wildebeest at night.
I had managed to sleep, finally, the night before, but only after deciding Kirt was genuinely insane. That he knew of Hellea’s unusual perfume was not unlikely; if he believed himself enough of a werewolf to lose his sanity, he could believe himself able to track scents. Insanity made anything possible. Yet I had dreamed of Kirt and imagined his claws on my breasts. They had ripped me open in my nightmare; they’d been real, not just chimera illusion. Hellea’s warmth beside me when I woke had been the only thing that had kept me from screaming.
“Did you see the program on video last night?” one obese woman asked another. “That old one, with the birds. You know, the birds that died way back.”
I wanted to tell her that all of them were dead. The large ones had been the first to vanish, eighty-odd years ago. Somehow, the birds were the first. Or perhaps we only noticed them before the rest. We had looked up and realized that almost all the large animals were gone. They’d been on endangered lists for decades, centuries for some of them, but we hadn’t paid enough attention. There were plenty of small mammals, the things that multiplied quickly, but that was all. No lionesses creeping through grasses, no lumbering elephants, no white-furred bears in the Arctic. I’d seen photographs of them.
We were lonely, in a way. It was difficult to feel kinship with the small, scurrying things. The chimera cloak came first, and people wore the animal they most admired. Then fantacin, and one could become another creature, at least for a while, and at least in one’s own imagination. Everyone did it now. Everyone who could afford it. The others watched video and dreamed of being something else when night came.
Perhaps we felt guilty about our carelessness. So now there were animals again, though they weren’t real. And some people were like Kirt, who used the chimera and fantacin to hide their insanity. People looked the other way when someone wore a chimera and played at being a rutting, aggressive beast in the night. The p.o.‘s, with their stunners and laws to enforce, rarely bothered with people in chimera. As long as you were not too violent, the p.o.‘s left you alone. They had enough trouble simply solving the chimera murders that crowded the dockets.
“I’m going to look for a new cloak tomorrow,” a voice beside me said. I turned, but it was only the second fat woman, talking to the other. “The one I’ve got is so old and shabby. Arron told me he could see my real face through it last night,” she said, her voice almost a giggle. I watched her stroke the thick skin beneath her eye, rubbing the layers of fat there. Perhaps she was a starving antelope in the night. It would be a way to forget her obesity for a few hours.
The tram stopped in front of our office building, and we worked our way to the open doors. As I stepped to the ground the man in front of me stumbled, and I reached out a hand to steady him. I saw his face go white and turned to see what he looked at.
She was spread awkwardly on the pavement, her head canted oddly to one side. Her face was hidden from me, but I could not help staring at the back of her neck, for a line of blood started there and flowed to the gutter. A circle of people was drawn around her, but no one touched the dead woman, not even the p.o. who stood off to one side, his hand resting on the butt of his stunner. He seemed to be waiting for his superiors before he disturbed her.
“Oh, my god,” I heard Hellea whisper. Her eyes were wide as she stared at the body. “How could he do this?”
I felt a sudden chill on my arms and realized. the dead woman looked familiar, even from the back. Her hair was auburn, her limbs long, and her hands large for her wrists. I walked around the edges of the circle until could see her face. Through her contorted grimace and the already-drying blood on her throat. I recognized her face. I recognized her because she looked so much like me.
“Somebody’s idea of a joke, I suppose,” the p.o. investigator said as he drew back the chimera cloak from the woman on the ground. The outline of the shape on the pavement shimmered for a moment and then solidified. It wasn’t human. It was the body of a sheep. A sheep in human guise. The zoo-compound markings on the animal’s chest were plain to see, even through the darkening from the torn throat.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Someone killed this poor creature, wrapped this cloak around it,” the investigator said, holding the chimera in his hand at arm’s length, as if it were contagious, “and then dumped the carcass here. Have any Idea why?” He looked at me, and when I said nothing he went on. “The cloak is of you. Or close enough not to matter. Custom-made, by the looks of it. Shouldn’t be too hard to trace back to whoever commissioned it. Someone you know enjoy killing zoo-compound animals? Against the law. you know. You wear these?” And he held up the chimera again. I felt Hellea’s hand on my arm.
“Yes, yes I do.”
“I suppose all your friends do. too,” he said, looking at Hellea, his disgust not quite concealed. He was like most p.o.’s; he hated all chimera for its ability to hide the guilty. “You have no idea who might have done this?” He pointed to the dead sheep that still lay on the pavement. Perhaps it was only imagination, but I thought I smelled the same odor as in the hallway the night before. Death smell.
“Can’t you see the shock she’s had?” Hellea asked. “Of course she doesn’t know who did this. Leave her alone.” She glared at the p.o. investigator, who was silent and blinked his eyes often.
“I apologize,” he said finally. “But we have to investigate. A zoo-compound animal’s not killed and just forgotten. . . .”
“Is it more important than she is?” Hellea asked. She stepped forward and tried to push me behind her.
“Stop it,” I said. “Stop it.” I pulled Hellea’s hand from my arm and looked at the p.o. investigator. “Yes, I think I know who did this. He’s threatened me before. Last night, in fact.” I could sense Hellea’s eyes on me, so I turned to her. “Let me talk. This is the only way we can get rid of him.” Back to the investigator again. “He’s insane. He’s jealous because Hellea left him. He brought some dead thing to our apartment last night and said it was a warning for me. To let Hellea go back to him, I suppose. His name is Kirt. What’s his last name. Hellea?”
She glanced at me for a moment, and it wasn’t hard to see the fury in her face. But she answered. “Gallins. Kirt Gallins.”
“He thinks he’s a werewolf. A real one,” I said. I heard Hellea inhale quickly.
“Obviously,” the investigator said, and wh
en I shook my head in confusion, he bent down beside the sheep’s carcass. “Unusual wound,” he said, pushing his fingers into the ripped throat of the sheep. “See the ragged edges? Here and here? Didn’t use a blade, that’s plain. Something blunter, rounder perhaps. Like a tooth.”
Had he actually placed his mouth on the thing’s throat when he killed it? Could he be that mad?
“May I go home now?” I finally asked. He looked at the place where the sheep lay, turned back to me, and nodded.
“I’d stay in tonight if I were you,” he said, pointing to the bison’s-head ring on my left index finger. Though his advice was sound,
I knew I wouldn’t take it. “We’ll see what Kirt Gallins has to say about this. Shouldn’t be hard to find him. Call, if you think of anything we might want to know?” His eyebrows edged up and stayed there.
“Certainly, if we think of anything.” I turned then and walked to the tram stop, glad to be among a crowd, even in the daylight. I didn’t wait for Hellea to move with me. The group made me comfortable, for it felt as if someone were standing just outside my view, waiting for me to step outside the crush of others. But every time I looked around, the only familiar face I saw was Hellea’s.
“Why did you tell him?” Hellea asked. “We could have dealt with Kirt ourselves. Now the p.o.‘s know everything.”
I stared at her. A madman had killed an animal and dressed it in a cloak to make it look like me. The meaning was less than subtle. Yet she still thought we could do something about him ourselves.
“That’s the point,” I said slowly. “What can we do? Kill him? I don’t have the stomach for that, Hellea. The p.o.‘s will find him and lock him away.”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me to her until her lips were only inches from mine. “No,” she said, and I could feel her breath hot on my face. “I’ll deal with him myself. He’s mine, and I’ll do what we’ve always done with those like him.”
“We’ve done?” I asked, feeling her hand still tight around my arm. But she wouldn’t look at me. even when she spoke.
“He’s insane, Courtney. But don’t let the p.o.’s force him to see that. Let me.”
She might as well have continued with her unspoken words. Let me, because I still love him. That was why she did not want the p.o.‘s involved. She was afraid for Kirt. I wanted her to speak those unspoken words, but I was afraid she would answer and put an end to everything.
She seemed to read my mind. “Please, Courtney. No more questions. Just let me take care of Kirt.”
“Let’s go home,” I said, suddenly afraid of losing her.
Damn Kirt, damn him, I thought, and for a second I even believed I could do him harm to keep Hellea with me.
I gazed stupidly across the park meadow and imagined I chewed on the grass. It was not the prairie that I dreamed of, but it was the best in the city, the widest expanse of open ground. Someday I would make it to the plains, but not tonight. I was only a bison in the city tonight.
There were at least three dozen others around me, people I knew vaguely in their human forms, better in their chimera cloaks. The great shaggy bull toward the treeline was Mestern. the young cow beside me was Hellea. It was my herd, my group, and the sense of security was thick in the air as we moved slowly through the grasses.
I’d taken a low dose of fantacin and so kept sliding in and out of myself. Most of the time I realized I was human dressed in chimera; occasionally I lost track and only knew when I came out of the blankness that I’d truly thought of myself as bison. We are a stupid animal, really, but one with group instinct. I was an animal I liked to be.
In that brief moment of human consciousness I caught the scent of Hellea on my skin. We’d gone to the apartment from the scene of the p.o.‘s and the chimera-cloaked sheep to make love. Hellea had said nothing, only made love to me with furious energy. When we were done and exhausted on the sheets, she massaged my back, rubbing our mixed perspiration into my skin. She’d seemed nervous then, but still said little to me. Now that her strange perfume was rubbed deep into me,
I felt secure in her love. Perhaps all my misgivings were only lover’s paranoia.
The comforting warmth of the herd as we closed up made me slip from my humanity then, but I recovered quickly. Even knowing what I was, the sense of protection overwhelmed me until I felt every worry, every anxiety fall from my busy mind, until it was emptied and confident. Nothing could harm me here in the herd.
A nervous flicker seemed to run through, all of us. I looked down, and though the chimera I wore made me see the thick shoulders of a bison, I knew I was human and was really only glancing at my waist. Still. I saw my matted hair move again as the flesh beneath it twitched. We’d smelled something wrong in the air.
A short howl from the trees told me what it was. Wolves: either ones that ran on four feet or werewolves. Both kinds would be chimera-driven. The members of the herd moved closer together, three of the bulls on the outside of the ragged circle, calves in the middle. I slipped into the dreamworld of fantacin and lost my thoughts.
I awoke to see Kirt’s werewolf face filling my sight. He peered at me through yellow eyes, his nose wrinkled up as he inhaled deeply. His massive head shook as if he were confused. I caught a trace of strange odor when he breathed in my face. Again the fantacin pulled me from consciousness. My eyes finally opened, and even though I knew they were only human teeth wrapped around the throat of Hellea’s imaginary bulk, I couldn’t help but scream inside myself as she struggled against the werewolf who sawed at her neck.
Fantacin again touched me, and I could only stare dumbly as the werewolf tore my lover’s throat with immense canines that glinted in the dim moonlight. He dropped her body, her carcass, then seemed to stare into my eyes. I tried to blink but could not, for fear was in my mouth and squeezed my face tight until I felt my temples throb. He leaned on his heels, arched his head back hard, and howled at the half-moon. I stepped back, turning to my left, bringing my immense head directly in line with him.
I would not die easily. But Kirt did nothing but howl once again, wave a hand to indicate Hellea beside him on the ground, whirl, and run for the trees.
Driven away by the fear-created adrenaline. fantacin burned from my body, and I peeled off my chimera cloak and held it in my hand. Several of the others in my herd were doing the same. The ones still playing bison snuffed around the spoor of the vanished werewolves. Hellea had been the only casualty.
And then the enormity of what Kirt had done struck me. He’d murdered her; the p.o.‘s would hunt hard for him now. A howl echoed from the tree line, and the sheer sound of it made me sick. I was on the grass, my hands splayed in front of me, my mouth gasping for air as I vomited. For a moment, I even forgot what he’d done to Hellea. I was next. I was sure of it. But I still did not know why he’d left me for last.
The p.o.‘s that came and knelt on the grass to look at Hellea s still-cloaked body told me they would search for Kirt but not to expect too much. It was going to be hard finding him when chimera cloaks could be donned at will. I knew they were right.
A p.o. went home with me on the tram and even walked me up the stairs to my door, but after I opened it and he thrust his head inside, he simply withdrew and shrugged his shoulders. No Kirt. Nothing.
I waited until he’d left, then closed the door, leaving it unlocked. The ancient revolver lay heavy in my hands as I crouched in the darkness at the far end of the corridor, my eyes on the stairway where Kirt would have to show himself. I checked the revolver. All I had to do was pull back the hammer and yank on the trigger. It was better than doing what the p.o. recommended: spend the night with him and wait until Kirt was found. They might never find him. I wanted an end to it, but the images of the false woman on the pavement, blood under its throat, and of Hellea’s bulk, silent on the meadow grass, kept interfering and urging me to flee. I sat. nevertheless. Perhaps it was the bison in me.
He crept up the stairs. I could hear his hind paws on the l
andings. Pulling back on the hammer, I felt better after I’d heard it click into place. But it was not Kirt who slunk along the walls, one side of his face in the shadows. It couldn’t be Kirt, for the face was all wrong. There was no cleft in the chin, the nose did not jut from the flatness of the face, and the canines no longer looked merely awkward. They looked like they could tear flesh.
I held the image of the sheep-woman in my mind, then tasted the same sourness in my mouth as when I’d been in the park where Hellea had died. This man was mad. He thought himself a real werewolf, an animal that had never existed except in the imagination of chimera-wearers. And now he’d bought another chimera. Still werewolf but slightly different. I’d never seen one like it, but it had to be a cloak. There was no other explanation.
I thought of Hellea, felt her touch, delicate even in my imagination, on my throat and face. This man, this thing, had murdered her. I pulled hard on the revolver’s trigger, listening to the roar of it as it fired. The darkness I hid in was illuminated by the flash, and in the brief glare I saw Kirt stagger and heave against the wall. He was down on the floor now, slumped in the junction of floor and wall.
“Kirt?” I asked. He nodded after what seemed too long a pause.
“Does this mean you don’t love me, Hellea?” he asked, his breathing labored as he moved one furred hand to hold the wound at his side. The corridor was filled with his odor. It was the same clinging scent I’d smelled before. But there was no small dead thing in the corner now. There was only Kirt. “I came to you, Hellea. We belong together, you and I. We’ve no choice now. I know the others want me dead. They want you dead, too, for consorting with a human. She’s dead now, and there’s only me. You can’t go back to the others: they’ll kill you.” His speech was understandable but only barely so, for his voice was surprisingly deep and filled with noises from the back of his throat.
“Hellea is dead, Kirt. You killed her. Don’t you remember? In the park tonight.”