Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  Becca closes the curtains and turns around. “You really do look pale,” she says.

  “I—I’m not feeling too good, that’s all.”

  She passes me, lays a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll feel better,” she says. “It does get better.”

  I want to explain that it isn’t just losing a lover, it’s my colleagues lying dead and a cell block full of successful citizens who still want to kill us and a breach of faith with the world. I don’t. I always laid too much on her.

  She hands me Leo. He lies against me, heavier than I remembered, a wisp of dark hair growing on his head. He looks a little like his mother. As I hold him, he arches his back, whimpers at the feel of this new woman, this half-forgotten stranger. Becca sits down and watches me with him, and when he starts to cry for her, she doesn’t take him back. She sits quietly, and I rest Leo’s face against mine, and the two of us cry together.

  After a while, she stands up and puts an arm around my shoulder. It’s an old embrace, only half intimate, dating back to when we were children, but she’s still taller than me. I rest my head against her shoulder, and she doesn’t move away.

  THIRTY

  Once I asked Paul what it felt like, furring up. He made a face, rubbed his head, thought about it. Every time I asked him questions like that, he’d tell me that there aren’t words to describe the state because when you’re in it words don’t apply. “The closest I can get is, imagine trying to do the splits with every muscle in your body at once.” That’s what he said. “Only they’re trying to do it on their own, without any help from you.” Muscles hurt when they’re stretched, he said, and I told him I knew that, DORLA makes you do workouts and physical tests if you do catching duty, and I knew how sharp the nerves go when you pull against them. Only you’re not pulling against them, he said, they’re pulling you.

  I kept meaning to give up asking him questions like that, but I couldn’t stop. He must have felt, then, that he was right to despise us. That even we felt our deficiency.

  Now it’s moon night again.

  No one’s going to send me out. If I had a home to go to, they might send me there. Instead I have blankets, an office room with a lock on the door. They aren’t even putting me on the switchboards. Hugo said it had been decided I could do with a rest.

  Nobody notices as I head downstairs.

  The camera is unmanned. It’s a cramped room, packed in behind two-way mirrors, wires line the floor and press through my shoes, and there’s two chairs, both hard plastic and stackable as if they came from a schoolroom. The sound comes from each cell separately, every cage is miked, and a bank of switches and cables dominates the space. You can adjust what you hear without affecting the recording, if you plug in a set of headphones. Classes on bugging were never my favorites, they were for the kids who would have been recording engineers or musicians, but I remember enough. I can operate this equipment.

  Right now, I can hear all the voices together.

  “…and then they offer us aspirin, can you believe that?” It’s Sarah’s voice. Her mouth is puffy. All of them are marked. They’ll heal up when they rick, they’ll be fine by morning. It’s usual to offer prisoners aspirin on moon nights; it doesn’t make much difference to the pain of furring up, but we aren’t qualified to prescribe anything stronger.

  “You should have taken it,” says Ellaway. “You’re all crazy.”

  “Shut up.” It’s Paul’s voice, half-whispered and emphatic. One side of his face is stained purple, his eye is swollen. It gives him a tipped, off-balance look. My hands twitch as he speaks.

  “It’s the law, I think,” Albin says. “Does anyone know what time it is?”

  “I think it’s about five minutes.” Sarah kicks at the straw.

  “Maybe she sent the aspirin down.” Paul sits crouched against the back wall. He looks at no one as he says this.

  “For fuck’s sake, we’ve been over this—”

  “Enough.” Albin’s voice cuts across Sarah, and everyone goes still. “Sarah, stop bitching, we’re in this together. Paul, stop whimpering, this is not about your love life. Now, if anyone else has anything they want to add, let’s hear it now.”

  Nobody looks at him. They all duck their heads and go quiet.

  “Right,” he says. “We’d better assume sunset’s happening now.”

  Ellaway makes an angry gesture and retreats to the back of his cell. The others look around, start checking how much straw they have.

  I flick switches, turn dials, slot a plug into place to listen in to Paul’s cell, and put on a set of headphones. They’re large, soft, they cup the sides of my head like hands.

  Most people fidget before moonrise, tense up. Nobody likes imminent pain. Paul, though, seems relaxed, or at least, matter-of-fact. He sweeps the straw across his floor, makes a heap of it. I cover my mouth as he starts to unbutton his shirt, and he pulls it over his head with only a few buttons open. He always did that. I’d undo it, open it out and push it back over his shoulders, running my hands down his arms, but if left to himself, he’d strip it off like a T-shirt. His back, turned to me, is marbled with bruises. I watch the shift and weave of his shoulder blades under his smooth, battered skin, flexing like wings.

  He drops the shirt over the straw. Someone says something to him, and he turns. “Well, this stuff scratches like hell,” he says.

  It’s Sarah speaking. I watch her mouth move, soundless. Probably she’s pointing out that if he rips up his shirt, he won’t get another one, and she’s right, he won’t. He shrugs, picks up the shirt and tosses it onto a shelf above his head. One hand runs through his hair and he rubs his scalp. It’s a habit I recognize, something he often did when his clothes came off and air hit his skin. The other hand undoes his belt, and he kicks off his shoes.

  This is nothing I haven’t seen before. I just thought it was mine. The others are peeling their clothes off with equal composure; they don’t stare at each other or avoid looking. This is familiar to them. I can’t take my eyes off him, but they barely notice. He’s theirs.

  I listen in to his cell, the sound of him breathing, the soft crackle as his bare feet tread on the straw.

  The moon will rise in a couple of minutes.

  Paul shakes his head, swings his arms around a couple of times like an athlete and then lies down. He inhales, sighs, inhales again. He doesn’t fidget. Instead, he lays his hands over his chest, not crossed but side by side. His head shifts a little on the straw, but it’s a hard floor, he’s never going to get comfortable.

  A voice sounds over the intercom. I jump at the sound. Paul just opens his eyes and turns his head, then closes them again. “Attention please: moonrise begins in one minute.”

  Paul’s hands rise and fall on his chest as he breathes in, breathes out, relaxing. A strand of straw clings to his arm at the elbow. He doesn’t brush it off. He lies there, quiet as a man waiting to fall asleep.

  The process takes hold of him a few seconds later, and he stiffens and breathes a little faster. His eyes shut tighter, his forehead wrinkles. It looks like the face of a man trying to keep discomfort under control, but when a muscle tightens in his jaw, as if he clenched it, it doesn’t stay still but flexes tighter and tighter, pulling his face into line. The changes come on gradually in the first minute, but then they quicken.

  He arches his back, his legs press against the ground. A spasm passes through him, jolting him against the floor, but he reaches back with his head, breathes hard, and the shuddering stops, his legs still and stretch out. His stifled moan rises over the grating click as his knees flex and unhinge, bending backward. The arms go slower, the bones in his shoulders grind like an arthritic joint, trying to find a position.

  I take hold of the headphones with my shaking hands, clutching the soft pads closer to my head, and Paul twists on the floor half-formed, like a misshapen child that should never have been born, like a man crippled from hours on a rack. Already his face is going, dark hairs are twining out of his
skin, trembling like flowers turning in the sun, but his voice as he gasps and murmurs is still my Paul’s.

  Then another spasm takes him, shaking his arms into place at the front of his chest, and this time he can’t control it. He opens his mouth and there’s a high, shivering whine, inhuman, not animal, almost instrumental like a choirboy’s treble, and as he drags air into his lungs his chest rises and rises again, the muscles on his stomach shift and flatten themselves as if he was lifting a heavy weight, and he topples onto his side. I can see the tail form, his coccyx rise and stretch, and for a moment it’s almost sexual, memories tumble inside me, but then his mouth stretches out, and there are his teeth, pushing out through his gums like a cat’s claws, too white against the flushed, darkening gums.

  His legs kick against the ground, and I know he’s lost. He could handle the pain at first, he could bear it, but his mind is changing inside him and his reason is going. He’s forgetting how to endure. There are more cries, and I don’t recognize them, the voice is wrong. He can’t talk himself into calmness, he can’t talk at all anymore, his tongue has stretched and flattened and he couldn’t speak to me if I asked.

  As he rolls over, feet on the ground, the contractions slow. Here and there a muscle twitches. He raises one foot off the ground, then the other, but it’s over, he’s all right now and it’s over. He looks around the cell, stretches himself.

  Then he runs at the bars. He slams into them, scrabbles to keep his balance, turns around and studies them. One foot reaches through, but he can’t follow it, he’s caged.

  At this moment, some people start to tear at the walls, bite themselves, panic. I wait, watch, one hand against my mouth, but Paul doesn’t do it, he circles the cell, goes around at a rapid trot, as if gauging the distance.

  I turn up the other microphones. They can’t speak now, they can’t say things I can’t stand hearing. There’s a yell from one of the other cells, a crash. Ellaway is throwing himself against the walls. Paul turns, crouches, his teeth are bared and there’s a low, rasping snarl coming from his throat, but then Albin shouts out and he turns away, goes quiet. Instead, he paces up to the corner of his cell and sits down near Sarah. She reaches her head through the bars and they touch, nose to nose.

  He’s touching her, that sharp-edged woman, the woman who told him I wouldn’t help, the woman who insisted so much against me. We’ve been over this, she said. Now he’s sitting beside her and they smell each other’s faces, moving their heads like a dance.

  Albin barks and she rises to her feet, goes over to him. Paul gets up again and starts to circle his cage.

  Ellaway is still worrying the bars, howling. Bad lune. The noise he’s making seems to intimidate Carla, who huddles in the corner of her cage farthest away from him, whimpering to Albin, who goes over to her, touches his face to hers. It’s a trouble to him, Albin, caged between Sarah and Carla, that he can’t be near more than one person at a time.

  Paul’s out there. Once we lay in bed together, and he said he thought lunes were beautiful. I study him, the dark, glossy hair, the swinging limbs as he paces, his swift, sure gait. I don’t know anymore. He was always beautiful.

  I open the door and step out into the cell block. All heads turn as it closes behind me. The smell in the room is sharp, ammoniac, the smell of luning.

  My legs aren’t quite steady, my hands twitch, and I’m slow and graceless as I approach the end cell. I hear my own voice, faltering, lost.

  “Paul?”

  He turns. There isn’t even a pause. He runs straight at the bars, mouth open, teeth vivid and huge in his mouth, and he flings himself at me. The cage door shakes as he crashes against it.

  My hands cover my face, as if fingers could keep his claws out.

  Paul backs away, studies me. His eyes are gray, black-rimmed, his neck is poised like a cobra’s. He looks at me, this creature he can’t reach, with a steady, predator’s gaze.

  When you love someone, you tell yourself that they’re not like other people, that they’re too special for that. But Paul paces the bars like any other caged lune. Why be surprised? This white-toothed fast-paced lune that hurled himself at me jaws open is Paul just as much as the one who talked his way into my life. There’s nothing in his cell that wasn’t in my bed.

  It’s a long time before sunrise. The announcement comes, and I hear it over the loudspeaker. They hear it in the cells, too, they look up at the sound of her voice, but it doesn’t register much with them. No one understands language when they’re in that state. They’re tiring by this time, Carla sits in the corner of her cell, as close to Albin as possible, Albin is cleaning himself, and Paul—Paul is still pacing. It’s a slower walk, to and fro in front of the bars, swinging his head as he turns. It isn’t until Albin yells to him that he stops, turns, sits down on the straw. Ellaway is still tearing at the walls. The others turn at the sound of Albin’s voice and settle, but Ellaway doesn’t calm down. He’s been like this all night, furious at his cage, snarling at Paul if he gets too near, relentless. He’s going to start hurting in a minute.

  Paul looks around him. He raises his head and howls, and the others join, there’s a moment when a chord rings through the echoing cells, but then it stops. Sunrise.

  Paul turns in the straw, he rolls over and over, he kicks at the air and wails. The sounds cut me bone-deep. My hands tighten over my padded ears, I can hear my sharp inhalations, and Paul thrashes and cries. I knew this would happen, I knew it happened last month and every month before that, I knew that he was down in the cells with people knocking bruises into his flesh, hitting him hard enough to draw blood. When I was away from him, I knew all that, and I could stand it. If I didn’t have to listen to him cry, I could go on bearing it. But as he stretches out, as his limbs rise and his muscles drag themselves into place, I hear him, and the lupine howl deepens, grows ragged, until it’s a man’s voice that’s moaning.

  Then there’s a break in it, he drags in air, I hear him panting for breath. His body is still contracting, hair sloughs off and the skin beneath is flushed scarlet like a newborn’s or a fever case, but he’s trying to recall himself, he’s still half luning but he’s rising by the moment, and with every second that goes by he understands better what’s happening to him.

  He falls back onto the straw with a groan, his arms and legs still stiff and frozen into place. If he leaves them for a few minutes, they’ll loosen, he’ll be able to unfold them. He doesn’t wait, though. His face convulses as he bends one arm at the elbow, then the other. He closes his fingers one at a time, biting his lip as the stretched and abused muscles resist. It doesn’t stop him; he starts to work his face, too, clenching and unclenching his eyes, opening his mouth wide, pulling his lips over his teeth. It should look ugly, lying on the floor grimacing, but it doesn’t. It’s almost graceful, like a child. As the red fades from his skin, I see I was right. The bruises have healed up as he ricked back, he’s pristine again.

  The straw crackles as he pushes himself into a sitting position, rubs his hands over his face, gives a sigh like a tired runner. After a moment he shakes himself, covers his arms, and I realize how cold it is down here. No one heats the cells, and it’s winter. Paul grabs one of the bars and pulls himself to his feet, reaches up onto a shelf to take his clothes down. He shakes them, examines them and holds them to his face. They’re dirty. As he dresses, I see the others are also getting to their feet, shivering in the morning air. This is the coldest time of day.

  Carla walks to the edge of her cell, reaches through. Albin touches her hand, a brief greeting like a kiss of peace given during Mass. Then he crosses to the other side, touches Sarah’s hand, and Sarah crosses to Paul to touch him. I stand up, but he doesn’t see me behind the mirror. Letting go of her hand, he glances over his shoulder to where Ellaway is sitting against the wall, head in his hands as if hungover. Paul shrugs. I think I see dislike on his face before he turns away, sits back down without passing the greeting along.

  “What’s to
remember?” he says. He’s a little hoarse, but it’s the right voice now, I recognize it. “Still, not much else to do.”

  “Wait for them to come round and have another little chat with us,” says Sarah. She sits down as Paul has, cross-legged against the wall.

  “They won’t,” Paul says. “Not for today, at least. I don’t think so. They’ll have been up all night. Lola was always in pieces on the first day, I doubt she could have hit a cushion.”

  He said was.

  “Did I dream it,” says Albin, “or does anyone else have the feeling Paul’s girlfriend was down here last night?”

  I stiffen as Carla shrugs, Sarah pulls a face.

  “Maybe,” Paul says. “I don’t—maybe she was.” It’s almost a sigh. He closes his eyes, and they all follow suit. They just sit, cross-legged, for ten minutes, silent, absorbed. They’re so contained. I almost bang on the glass to disturb them.

  Ellaway sits silent, scowling. After ten minutes, he breaks in, saying, “For God’s sake, what are you all playing at?”

  “Remembering.” Paul opens his eyes and gives Ellaway a look. His voice is sharp. “You remember better if you do this just after sunrise. Remember? We taught you. Oh wait, you didn’t stick around to try it.”

  “Paul.” Albin speaks, and Paul looks around. “It’s too early for this.”

  “I’m sorry.” Paul doesn’t sound very sorry. “Just—stop him talking. I don’t want to listen to him talk.”

  “Please don’t,” Carla says. Her voice is almost inaudible. “Let’s not have bad feelings so soon after.”

  “Fine.” Paul drops his hands into his lap. “Sorry, Carlie.”

  “Do you think they’ll leave us alone today?” Carla says.

  He looks at his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Do you suppose when they were hunting they—”

  “Anyway,” Albin interrupts, giving her a serious look. He doesn’t finish the sentence.

  They sit in silence.