by Jane Yolen
“Mom!” I called out. I usually didn’t like to do that for fear of reminding the wolves and bear that I was in the room with them. Then a little louder I called out, “Mom?”
She didn’t wake up and call back that everything was all right.
So then I did something I never do. I called to Jensen, who was in the next room. Ever since Phoenix we’d had our own rooms. I hated to do that because he always teases me anyway, calling me a baby for needing a night-light. A baby! He was only eleven himself.
But Jensen didn’t wake up, either. In fact I could hear him snoring. If I could only snore like that, I bet there wouldn’t be any wolves or bear around my room.
I tried to sleep, but the ghost’s sobbing came again.
I put the pillow over my head but somehow that made it worse.
I stayed that way until dawn. I didn’t sleep much.
“Do you suppose this house is haunted?” I asked at breakfast, before we headed off to our new school.
Jensen snorted into his cereal. But Mom put her head to one side and considered me for a long while.
“Yeah, haunted,” Jensen said. “By the ghosts of wolves. And a big ugly closet bear.” I had made the mistake of telling the family about them when I was littler. And back when we were a family, Dad had teased me—and so had Jensen.
“Jensen. . . ,” Mom warned.
So I didn’t bring it up again. Not at breakfast and not at dinner, either. But when we went to bed that night, I borrowed two pieces of cotton from Mom’s dresser and stuck them in my ears. Then I brushed my teeth, went to the bathroom, and jumped into bed. It was when I hit the bed the first time at night that the wolves knew it was time to wake up. And the bear.
Mom came in and kissed me good night. She turned on the night-light and turned off the overhead.
“Leave the door open,” I reminded her. Not that she ever needed reminding.
And I lay down and quickly fell asleep.
It was well past midnight that I woke. The wolves and bear were quiet. It was the ghost sobbing loudly in Mom’s room that woke me. I was surprised it hadn’t wakened her. But then she didn’t hear the wolves or bears, either. She said that since I did, I’m a hero every time I got into bed. I know I’m no hero—but I’d sure like to be.
The ghost went on and on and I began to wonder if it was dangerous. Bad enough that Dad was gone. If anything should happen to Mom . . .
I thought about that for a long time. After all, the foot of my bed was even closer to the door than it had been in Phoenix. And I was bigger.
I pulled the cotton out of my ears. The sound of the crying was so loud, the house seemed to shake with it. How could anyone sleep through that racket? I sat up in bed and the wolves began to growl. The bear pushed the closet door open and it squeaked a little in protest, inching out against the trap.
Ohowwwwwwwwwooooooooo.
And then Mom’s voice came, only terribly muffled. “Pete!” she cried. My name. And my Dad’s.
Only Dad wasn’t there.
That was when I knew that wolves and bear or no—I had to help her. I was her only hope.
“Get back, you suckers!” I shouted at the wolves, and threw the cotton balls down. They landed softly on the floor by the bed and muzzled the wolves.
“Leave me alone, you big overgrown rug!” I called to the bear, flinging my pillow at the closet door. The pillow thudded against the door, jamming it.
Without thinking it through any further than that, I jumped from the bed foot and landed, running, through the door. Two steps brought me into my mom’s room.
That was when I saw it—the ghost, hovering over her bed. It was all in white, a slim female ghost in a long dress and a white veil. She was crying and crying.
“Why . . .” I said, my voice shaking, “why are you here? Who are you?”
The ghost turned toward me and slowly lifted her veil. I shivered, expecting to see maybe a shining skull with dark eye sockets or a monster with weeping sores or—I don’t know—maybe even a wolf’s head. But what I saw was like a faded familiar photograph. It took me a moment to understand. And then I knew—the ghost wore my mother’s face, my mother’s wedding dress. She was young and slim and . . . beautiful.
Behind me in my room, the wolves had set up an awful racket. The bear had joined in, snuffling and snorting. When I looked I could see red eyes glaring at me at the door’s edge.
The ghost caught her breath and shivered.
“It’s all right,” I said. “They won’t hurt us. Not here.” I put my hand out to her. “And don’t be sad. If you hadn’t gotten married, where would I be? Or Jensen?”
The ghost looked at me for a long moment, considering, then lowered the veil.
“Pete? Honey?” My mom’s voice came from the bed, sleepy yet full of wonder. “What are you doing in my room?”
“Being a hero, I guess,” I said to her and to the wedding ghost and to myself. “You were having an awful bad dream.”
“Not a bad dream, sweetie. A sad dream,” she said. “And then I remembered I had you and your brother and it was all happy again. Do you want me to walk you back to your room?”
I looked over at the doorway. The red eyes were gone. “Nah,” I said. “Who’s afraid of a couple of night wolves and an old bear anyway? That’s kid stuff.” I kissed her on the cheek and watched as the ghost faded into the first rays of dawn. “I think I’m gonna like it here, Mom.”
I marched back into my room and picked up the trap from the foot of my bed, then the one from in front of the closet door. I heard whimpers, like a litter of puppies, coming from under the bed. I heard a big snore from the closet. I smiled. “I’m gonna like it here a lot.”
The House of Seven Angels
MY GRANDPARENTS lived in the Ukraine in a village known as Ykaterinislav. It was a sleepy little Jewish town near Kiev, but if you go to look for it now, it is gone.
The people there were all hardworking farmers and tradesfolk, though there was at least one poor scholar who taught in the heder, a rabbi with the thinnest beard imaginable and eyes that leaked pink water whenever he spoke.
These were good people, you understand, but not exactly religious. That is, they went to shul and they did no work on the Sabbath and they fasted on Yom Kippur. But that was because their mothers and fathers had done so before them. Ykaterinislav was not a place that took to change. But the people there were no more tuned to God’s note than any other small village. They were, you might say, tone-deaf to the cosmos.
Like most people.
And then one autumn day in 1897—about ten years before my grandparents even began to think about moving to America—a wandering rabbi came into the village. His name was Reb Jehudah and he was a very religious man. Some even said that he was the prophet Elijah, but that was later.
Reb Jehudah studied the Torah all day long and all night long. He put all the men in Ykaterinislav to shame. So they avoided him. My grandfather did, too, but he took out his books again, which had been stored away under the big double bed he and Grandma Manya shared. Took them out but never quite got around to reading them.
And then one of the village children, a boy named Moishe, peeked into Reb Jehudah’s window. At first it was just curiosity. A boy, a window, what else could it have been? He saw the reb at dinner, his books before him. And he was being served, Moishe said, by seven angels.
Who could believe such a thing? Though the number, seven, was so specific. So the village elders asked the boy: How did he know they were angels?
“They had wings,” Moishe said. “Four wings each. And they shone like brass.”
“Who shone?” asked the elders. “The angels or the wings?”
“Yes,” said Moishe, his eyes glowing.
Who could quarrel with a description like that?
Of course the village men went to visit Reb Jehudah to confirm what Moishe had seen. But they saw no angels, with or without wings. Like Balaam of the Bible, they had not the proper
eyes.
But for a boy like Moishe to have been given such a vision . . . this was not the kind of rascal who made up stories. Indeed, Moishe was, if anything, a bit slow. Besides, such things had been known to happen, though never before in Ykaterinislav.
And so the elders went back to Butcher Kalman’s house for tea, to discuss this. And perhaps Butcher Kalman put a bit of schnapps in their cups. Who can say? But they talked about it for hours—about the possibility of angels in Ykaterinislav, and in the autumn, too.
It was pilpul, of course, argument for argument’s sake, even if they quoted Scripture. After a while, though, their old habits of nonbelief reclaimed them and they returned to their own work, but with renewed vigor. The crops, the shops, even the heder were the better for all the talk, so perhaps the angels were good for something after all.
Reb Jehudah knew nothing of this, of course. He continued his studying, day and night, night and day, wrestling with the great and small meanings of the law.
Now, one day an eighth angel came to visit him, an angel dressed in a long black robe that had pictures of eyes sewn into it, eyes that opened and closed at will. There was a ring of fire above the angel instead of a halo, and he carried an unsheathed sword. He held the sword above Reb Jehudah’s head.
It was Samael, the Angel of Death.
Reb Jehudah did not notice this angel any more than he had noticed the others, for he was much too busy poring over the books of the law.
The Angel of Death shuddered. He knew that as long as the rabbi was engaged in his studies, his life could not be taken.
All this Moishe saw, peeping through the window, for he had come every day to watch over Rabbi Jehudah instead of attending heder or working on his father’s farm. As if he were another angel, though a bit grubby, with a smudge on one cheek and his fingernails not quite clean.
When Moishe saw the eighth angel, he shook all over with fear. He recognized Samael. He had heard about that sword with its bitter drop of poison at the tip. “The supreme poison,” his teacher had called it.
“Reb Jehudah,” Moishe called, “beware!”
The rabbi, intent on his studies, never heard the boy. But the Angel of Death did. He turned his awful head toward the window and smiled.
It was not a pleasant smile.
And before Moishe could duck or run, the Angel of Death was by his side.
“I will have one from this village today,” said the angel. “If it cannot be the rabbi, then it shall be you.” And he held his sword above Moishe’s head.
Seized by terror, the child gasped, and his mouth opened wide to receive the poison drop.
At that very moment, the seven angels in Reb Jehudah’s house set up a terrible wail; and this, at last, broke the good rabbi’s concentration. He stood, stretched, and looked out of the window to the garden that he loved, it being as beautiful to him as the Garden of Eden. He saw a boy at his window gasping for breath. Without a thought more, the rabbi ran outside and put his arms around the boy to try and stop the convulsions.
Head up, the rabbi prayed, “O Lord of All Creation, may this child not die.”
The minute the rabbi’s mouth opened, the poison drop from the sword fell into it, and he died.
The Angel of Death flew away, his errand accomplished. He would not be back in Ykaterinislav until early spring, for a pogrom. But the seven angels flew out of the open Window, gathered up Reb Jehudah’s soul, and carried it off to Heaven, where Metatron himself embraced the rabbi and called him blessed.
All this young Moishe saw, but he knew he could not tell anyone in Ykaterinislav. No one would believe him.
Instead he became a great storyteller, one of the greatest the world has ever known. His tales went around the earth, inspiring artists and musicians, settling children in their cots, and making the evenings when the tales were read aloud as sweet as nights in Paradise. “It was as if,” one critic said of him, “his stories were carried on the wings of angels.”
And perhaps they were.
Great Gray
THE COLD SPIKE OF WINTER WIND struck Donnal full in the face as he pedaled down River Road toward the marsh. He reveled in the cold just as he reveled in the ache of his hands in the wool gloves and the pull of muscle along the inside of his right thigh.
At the edge of the marsh, he got off the bike, tucking it against the sumac, and crossed the road to the big field. He was lucky this time. One of the Great Grays, the larger of the two, was perched on a tree. Donnal lifted the field glasses to his eyes and watched as the bird, undisturbed by his movement, regarded the field with its big yellow eyes.
Donnal didn’t know a great deal about birds, but the newspapers had been full of the invasion, as it was called. Evidently Great Gray owls were Arctic birds that only every hundred years found their way in large numbers to towns as far south as Hatfield. He shivered, as if a Massachusetts town on the edge of the Berkshires was south. The red-back vole population in the north had crashed and the young Great Grays had fled their own hunger and the talons of the older birds. And here they were, daytime owls, fattening themselves on the mice and voles common even in winter in Hatfield.
Donnal smiled, and watched the bird as it took off, spreading its six-foot wings and sailing silently over the field. He knew there were other Great Grays in the Valley—two in Amherst, one in the Northampton Meadows, three reported in Holyoke, and some twenty others between Hatfield and Boston. But he felt that the two in Hatfield were his alone. So far no one else had discovered them. He had been biking out twice a day for over a week to watch them, a short three miles along the meandering road.
A vegetarian himself, even before he’d joined the Metallica commune in Turner’s Falls, Donnal had developed an unnatural desire to watch animals feeding, as if that satisfied any of his dormant carnivorous instincts. He’d even owned a boa at one time, purchasing white mice for it at regular intervals. It was one of the reasons he’d been asked to leave the commune. The other, hardly worth mentioning, had more to do with a certain sexual ambivalence having to do with children. Donnal never thought about those things anymore. But watching the owls feeding made him aware of how much superior he was to the hunger of mere beasts.
“It makes me understand what is meant by a little lower than the angels,” he’d remarked to his massage teacher that morning, thinking about angels with great gray wings.
This time the owl suddenly plummeted down, pouncing on something which it carried in its talons as it flew back to the tree. Watching through the field glasses, Donnal saw it had a mouse. He shivered deliciously as the owl plucked at the mouse’s neck, snapping the tiny spinal column. Even though he was much too far away to hear anything, Donnal fancied a tiny dying shriek and the satisfying snick as the beak crunched through bone. He held his breath in three great gasps as the owl swallowed the mouse whole. The last thing Donnal saw was the mouse’s tail stuck for a moment out of the beak like a piece of gray velvet spaghetti.
Afterward, when the owl flew off, Donnal left the edge of the field and picked his way across the crisp snow to the tree. Just as he hoped, the pellet was on the ground by the roots.
Squatting, the back of his neck prickling with excitement, Donnal took off his gloves and picked up the pellet. For a minute he just held it in his right hand, wondering at how light and how dry the whole thing felt. Then he picked it apart. The mouse’s skull was still intact, surrounded by bits of fur. Reaching into the pocket of his parka, Donnal brought out the silk scarf he’d bought a week ago at the Mercantile just for this purpose. The scarf was blood red with little flecks of dark blue. He wrapped the skull carefully in the silk and slipped the packet into his pocket, then turned a moment to survey the field again. Neither of the owls was in sight.
Patting the pocket thoughtfully, he drew his gloves back on and strode back toward his bike. The wind had risen and snow was beginning to fall. He let the wind push him along as he rode, almost effortlessly, back to the center of town.
Donnal had a room in a converted barn about a quarter of a mile south of the center. The room was an easy walk to his massage classes and only about an hour’s bike ride into Northampton, even closer to the grocery store. His room was dark and low and had a damp, musty smell as if it still held the memory of cows and hay in its beams. Three other families shared the main part of the barn, ex-hippies like Donnal, but none of them from the commune. He had found the place by biking through each of the small Valley towns, their names like some sort of English poem: Hadley, Whately, Sunderland, Deerfield, Heath, Goshen, Rowe. Hatfield, on the flat, was outlined by the Connecticut River on its eastern flank. There had been acres of potatoes, their white flowers waving in the breeze. Earlier in the morning, he’d taken it as an omen and when he found that the center had everything he would need—a pizza parlor, a bank, a convenience store, and a video store—had made up his mind to stay. There was a notice about the room for rent tacked up in the convenience store. He went right over and was accepted at once.
Stashing his bike in one of the old stalls, Donnal went up the rickety backstairs to his room. He lined his boots up side by side by the door, he took the red scarf carefully out of his pocket. Cradling it in two hands, he walked over to the mantel, which he’d built from a long piece of wood he’d found in the back, sanding and polishing the wood by hand all summer long.
He bowed his head a moment, remembering the owl flying on its silent wings over the field, pouncing on the mouse, picking at the animal’s neck until it died, then swallowing it whole. Then he smiled and unwrapped the skull.
He placed it on the mantel and stepped back, silently counting. There were seventeen little skulls there now. Twelve were mice, four were voles. One, he was sure, was a weasel’s.
Lost in contemplation, he didn’t hear the door open, the quick intake of breath. Only when he had finished his hundredth repetition of the mantra and turned did Donnal realize that little Jason was staring at the mantel.