Hub - Issue 12
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Hub
Issue 12 - June 22nd 2007
Editors: Lee Harris and Alasdair Stuart.
Published by The Right Hand.
Sponsored by Orbit.
Issue 12 Contents
Fiction: Man for a Moment by Jeff Crook
Reviews: Hellboy: Blood and Iron, Bernice Summerfield: Freedom of Information, Grudge 2, The Return
Feature: Gods and Monsters – The Second Doctor: 1966-69
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Man for a Moment
by Jeff Crook
From the movements of the score, Thomas knows when to change places and when to snarl and lunge at Otto, the Prussian lion tamer, to get the biggest reaction from the shrieking monkeys beyond the circle of light. The music tells him when to run out and take his assigned place at the beginning of the show. He is always the first out of the gate, slipping unnoticed into the ring while the crowd awaits the lions, who have to be prodded snarling and snapping from their cages, much to the crowd’s delight. Thomas hates performing, but he consistently turns in the most reliable performance of all the cats, never missing his cues, always following the script. It’s easy for him. It’s against his nature to attract attention to himself, unlike the flamboyant lions and tigers who enjoy their own preposterous bellowing. He feels no jealousy of the attention lavished on them. The big heavies will always get more applause than he, for they are far more terrifying to the monkeys who know no better.
He dislikes his starring moments in the ring and is glad there are only a few of them. At one point in the show, he slips from his perch and stalks Otto while the burly, bald lion tamer is busy taunting one of the tigers, theatrically unaware of the death creeping up behind him on silent pads, and frightening the audience into hysterics. Of course, Otto turns at the last moment and drives Thomas back with his whip. Another of Thomas’ tricks is to leap over three male lions—a simple feat made seemingly perilous by the obstacle of a flaming hoop. But his central moment is the shoulder carry, where Thomas endures the humiliation of being draped across the brawny Prussian’s shoulders.
Sometimes it’s difficult for Thomas to remember anything about his former self. His days are measured by the waxing and waning of his hunger pains, and the long hours of his sleep, when he dreams of being a man. And though he hates Otto and, to a lesser degree, Otto’s assistant Miriam (but only because he hates his physical need for her), he hates the other cats more, and they hate him equally and perhaps a bit more ferociously. Since Creation, lions and tigers have hated leopards on principle, gladly killing them if given a chance, but these, his companions in the circus, hate him even more because he is a leopard and yet not a leopard. They hate him because he was once a man, and in some ways he is still a man. The stench of humanity has not been completely washed away by the blood he has licked with his coarse tongue. And when he needs them, he can still summon his man’s hands.
At night, when he sits in his cage and calls to his hands, they appear. First, the claws draw back, then the fur parts and his fingers appear, sliding out of their protective sheaths, the rough pads underneath softening into calluses. His hands are light-skinned, like Otto’s, with strong spatulate fingers and thick thumb roots, calloused palms accustomed to heavy labor, yet supple enough for the delicate work of picking the lock of his cage. They have other uses as well, even though he receives regular servicing from Miriam. As assistant to the lion-tamer, she is required to regularly service all the male cats, to keep them manageable.
Thomas sometimes wonders whether she does the same for Otto. Han smell the Prussian’s stink on her clothes whenever she visits his cage. For his part, Thomas suffers her manipulations reluctantly. He hates the indignity of his hips thrusting beyond his power to control. Still, the release helps to mollify his more murderous impulses.
But there are times when neither Miriam nor his own hands are enough to satisfy his urges. Then, Thomas opens his cage, slips out, and pads through the compound until he reaches the fields and pastures beyond. Or, if the circus is near a town, he wanders the night-dark lanes, sometimes sating his fury on a wandering dog or tarrying drunkard. He kills, not out of hunger, for Otto feeds him well enough—just murder, violence. It is a muscle that needs stretching, a deadly itch to scratch and scratch.
The last time he escaped his cage, Thomas happened across a house with an open window. Most townsfolk close their windows at night and lock their doors when the circus is in town, for fear of escaped animals and thieving gypsies. But the window of this house was open to the cool autumn air. He leapt up and found a man and woman asleep in a bed beneath the window, naked and pale with their breath smoking in the moonlight. He could smell the woman’s sex and the man’s expended seed between her white thighs. They turned and groaned in their sleep as he stepped over them and dropped soundlessly to the floor. He slipped out of their bedroom, down a hall and into another room, where he found their young offspring, caged, helpless and asleep.
Thomas sits in his own cage and ignores the monkeys who pay Otto for the privilege of taunting him from beyond the iron bars. He closes his eyes and imagines the young mother the next morning staring into the empty baby cage, the dots of baby’s blood spattering the blankets of her own bed, all the bugbears of her apish imagination prickling, unable to imagine how someone carried her baby over her own bed and out her window without waking her.
He closes his eyes and recalls the soft satisfying crack as his canines penetrated the baby’s skull, the ease with which he carried it into a tree outside their open window, the sweetness of its velvety flesh. The taste of blood remains tart as a penny in his mouth. Perhaps some day a storm will blow the baby’s little bleached bones down from the joint of the branch where Thomas wedged the leftovers. Won’t the monkeys be surprised then!
Thomas has often considered leaving the circus altogether, escaping and never returning, but the lingering man part of his mind knows how that must eventually end. Still, every day his needs grow stronger, while Miriam’s ministrations barely suppress his urges. Though it has only been a few days since he last fed his lust, he has already begun to dream of the surprised yelp of his next victim, dog or man – it matters little to him – and to yearn for the flurried scramble of legs, the strangled moan, the crack of bone, and the sublime stillness of death.
*
Thomas wakes to find Miriam reaching through the bars of his cage. The smell of the air and the rumbling of the elephants across the compound tell him that morning is still some hours away. He rises and stretches, yawns, then steps over her coaxing hand. She stretches out her hand to him, her face pressing against the bars. She speaks to him in a voice soft and breathless.
Miriam wears a yellow nightgown that had been patched numerous times and needs patching again. Thomas leans against the bars on the opposite side of the cage, studying her with his amber eyes. Her gown is torn at the neck, and he smells blood and Otto’s seed mingling with the perfumey soap of her recent bath. Her feet are bare, her legs beneath the gown silhouetted by the moonlight, her arms brown and strong, narrow hands lithe, teasing. Her hair, freed from its usual wrap, spills down her shoulders in a profusion of thick black braids.
She whispers soothing noises as she withdraws her arm and eases around the side of the cage. He leans against the bars and watches her, a human word fluttering in his throat like a small bird. Instead, he makes a soft kecking sound and grimaces, unable to control the muscles of his face. She puts her cool hand against his side and probes between his legs. He steps over her hand and retreats to the far side of the cage. The smell of blood confuses him, confuses his desires. He sits in the straw with his back to the bars and curls his tail around his feet, covering himself. He flattens his ears, grimaces again at the smells coming from her.
She speaks to him and Thomas stares at her, barely understanding. Her words slip away almost as she speaks them, finding no lodging in his fevered brain. He begins to pant, to feel the panic of the hunted as she stalks around his cage, whispering fiercely. She thrusts her hands through the bars and pushes against his flank, trying to coax him to his feet so that she can reach between his legs.
Instead, he moves to the center of the cage and flops onto his side. Head up, he watches her, his tongue lolling between his teeth. Tears pool in her brown eyes and slide down her cheeks. She eases around the cage, her hands slowly slipping from bar to bar, until she reaches the cage door. Then she stands back and reaches down, grabs the edges of her nightgown. She pulls the yellow nightgown up and over her head. It falls from her fingertips onto the trampled grass. Her breasts, small as two halves of a pear, heave with a sob, her dark nipples shrink and harden in the cool night air. Glancing quickly around, she slides the bolt back and opens the cage, then climbs inside with him.
Thomas scrambles to his feet and crouches at the back of the cage as Miriam crawls toward him, pushing through the thick hay on the floor. The unlocked cage door beyond her beckons to him. Thomas’s yellow eyes flicker from the woman to freedom, then back to the woman. When she reaches the center of the cage, she turns and prostrates herself, lips flecked with bits of gamey straw, her hips lifted to present the black patch of curly hair heavy with confusing scents. With eyes closed and arms outstretched, she waits as though crucified to the floor of the cage.
The way is open. All he has to do is step over her. But blood flecks the inside of her thighs and the smell of it drives like a spike up through his mouth into the howling part of his brain. He leaps. His paws force her shoulders to the straw-covered planks, while a pained and helpless growl constricts his throat, trying to be born into words. His teeth touch the soft hair of her neck. His whiskers tickle her ear, and he inhales the sweetness of her breath as she gasps, lifting her buttocks to meet him. Yet he hesitates, two conflicting hungers crying for gratification, restrained by an aborted memory.
As he crouches over her, his hands emerge from his paws to grasp the soft warm brown flesh beneath them. At the feel of his fingers closing around her shoulders, Miriam presses herself even closer, urging him with her movements and the small sobbing noises from her throat. “Come back to me, Mein Mann,” she cries. His growl becomes an almost-human cry as he seeks her, pressing himself into her, entering her at last. The feel of her flesh, of her bones and skin and the muscles gripping him, the smell of her breath and her sex tears though him, bringing flashes of euphoria, brilliance, waking sense, remembrance, guilt, regret.
And then a sound, tiny and distant, reawakens the clarity of his animal instincts–the metallic click of a turning cylinder, a hammer drawing back. The pistol pops like a firecracker, its bullet pings off the iron bars of the cage and whirrs away in the night.
Thomas rips himself out of Miriam, tearing a scream from her throat, and pours from the cage in a long, sinuous silent moment, vanishing into the shadows underneath the wagon. Otto staggers toward the cage, a Mauser pistol wavering in one hand, a reeking bottle of gin in the other. “Gott verdammt Hexen!” he shrieks, firing again. Thomas flattens himself in the grass, but the bullet cracks high, splintering the wooden floor near Miriam’s head.
Otto stumbles to the cage and drags Miriam out by her braids. He violently obliges her to kneel, then crouches over her, reeling drunkenly, the sharp black nose of the pistol stabbing into her back. Miriam cowers beneath him and clutches at the blood flowing down her trembling brown thighs. Otto tilts the bottle to his lips and drains the last of its contents, then flings it aside. It lands with a thump between Thomas’ hands.
“Haben Sie keine Schande? No shame at all, you God damned whore?” Otto spits. “Du können den Fluch nicht brechen. Not like that.” He grabs a fistful of braids and drags her away between rows of long brightly-painted wagons. Carnival people and acrobats and clowns without their faces stare out for a moment at noise, then quickly retreat from the red-faced, drunken Prussian and his wild pistol.
Miriam screams as she claws at Otto’s massive fist. Thomas hesitates at the edge of the wagon’s shadow. He grasps the empty gin bottle; the smooth curve of its cold glass fits into the palm of his man’s hand as though made for it. The touch of it brings brilliant flashes of memory—of a room lit by yellow light, the scuffling of boots on the rough wooden floor, a chorus scrape of chairs, a pistol shot. There is the Prussian’s face, not so fat or red or bald as now, younger, with better teeth, bared in a snarl, the broken neck of a brown bottle lifted in his hand. The crack of a wooden chair, a table tilting up like the deck of a ship in a storm, with glasses and cards and coins and soiled money sliding down it toward him. He scrambles and
quickly regained his feet, surrounded by German and Askari soldiers, but not before someone pulled his pistol from the holster at his belt. Weaponless, he faced them with the courage and arrogance that was his birthright as a German officer. The little canvas and clapboard officer’s tent had grown silent. Otto stood at the head of the mutineers, smiling.
“Arrogant bastard,” Otto said. “Not so arrogant now that we know about that black slut you call your wife.”
“When the general hears of this, you’ll all be shot,” Thomas said.
“General von Lettow-Vorbeck will never hear of this,” Otto said as the men surged forward, grasping, pulling
The gin bottle slips from Thomas’ fingers, clinking on the cold ground. He reaches for it again, grabbing for the memories that are even now slipping away, fleeing from the leopard part of his mind. He touches it
a blackened face, wizened like a raisin, yellow eyes bright and keen, bent over and holding a gourd to his lips, poured some thick bitter brown liquid down his convulsing throat. Otto, behind him somewhere, said, “Now take the witch doctor’s medicine, Herr Kapitän. You have black water fever and this is the cure.”
And then pain, his bones broken from withi
n, animal screams torn from his throat, a harsh leather collar closed around his neck. He twisted in agony, his spine bending almost upon itself. Through eyes swimming with blood he saw Otto pin Miriam’s arms behind her back, force her to the ground before the naked, befeathered savage that had forced the potion down his throat. Miriam, his Swaheli wife, kneeled on a dirt floor in a grass-walled hut lit by a firepit, while Askari soldiers smoked cigarettes in the red shadows, trying not to look at him, or her, or anything, while they waited their turn at her and he helpless, paralyzed by pain
Thomas boils from beneath the wagon, his fingers clawing at the grass. But his hips feel disjointed, his spine stiff, his movements clumsy and uncertain. He staggers forward a few steps, then rolls onto his side and stares at his legs in surprise. His tawny fur has paled and receded, the black rosettes faded to the merest hints of spots. He wants to lick his legs to ease the ache swelling up through his hips and spine. The world around him darkens, smells fade, sounds dull to blind whispers. Yet he forces himself up, crawling on hands and knees while the lions and tigers pace their cages and shake the air with furious roars, hating him more than ever.
He follows Miriam’s screams, and when she no longer screams, the thudding rain of blows. Thomas crawls toward Otto’s glowing tent until, unable to bear his awkwardness any longer, he rises up and stands on his hind paws, unsteady, his legs reedy beneath him. Upright, his joints seem to finally slip into their natural places, relieving his pain and awkwardness.
Otto’s shadow hulks enormously against the inside walls of the tent, his coarsely-shaven head scraping the canvas. Thomas stops at the edge of the lamplight spilling from the open tent flap. As a leopard, he learned to trust only what he could smell, but now he can neither see Miriam nor smell her, nor does he detect Otto’s familiar gin-soaked leathery scent. He edges closer to the light, hating it, hating the way it exposes him.