Wolf Asylum

by Mark Fuson

  Darwin scowled and lit a fire under his heart. It pained him to do it, but it was the only way he could help Steve without letting the infection get a new hold on him.

  “Listen you selfish cunt! You have a world up there that needs you. I can live without you, but do you have any idea how many people came to your funeral? You had no idea how many people loved you! How many people you touched! Yeah, we had a raw deal in life. Yeah, it felt like people wanted you dead! The truth was you were pure and after you died…you were missed!”

  “You can live without me?” Steve asked, as though nothing else had stuck.

  Darwin froze unsure of what to do. At the last second he did the only thing that came to his mind.

  In a decisive moment, Darwin swung his open palm full tilt and collided with Steve’s temple and eye. Steve flew backwards falling to the ground. Darwin immediately wanted to run to his side and apologize, but the front had to continue.

  “What the fuck?” he screamed in fury.

  Darwin lied, slitting his own wrists, “I’m only doing this for Teddy! He’s the one who loves you, not me! Why the fuck do you think I didn’t come to you when I knew what I was? If I loved you, don’t you think I would have been there?”

  “Teddy?” Steve asked with his veins bulging on his temple.

  “Yeah! I got to know him. I hated him but I found him amusing. He finally confided in me that he had feelings for you. I didn’t lie to you when I said he’d changed! I thought maybe if I brought you back and gave you to Teddy, I would be able to close the book on that part of my life! So, suck it up—because you must have infected him with fag-spunk that day in the shower! He’s your one true love, not me! He’s in the real world waiting for you!”

  “But the other night?” Steve asked, nearly in tears as his eye began to puff up.

  “I did it because I could!” he shouted, beginning to believe his own lies. “You really think I’d be caught dead with a prissy little faggot like you?”

  Steve choked and struggled for a breath. “You fucking bastard! Your blood; I know the truth!”

  “What the fuck do you know? You’re just white trash! If you knew anything about the gift, you’d know that blood lies! It shows you what you want to see!” Darwin screamed, bringing his own veins to the surface. “I’ve wanted you dead since we were thirteen. I don’t know why I didn’t kill you! If you hadn’t been there, my life would have turned out perfect!”

  “You’re lying! The cemetery, your eulogy!” Steve said, collapsing under his own emotional weight.

  “I used you to get what I want,” Darwin said coldly. “Sympathy is a powerful tool!”

  Steve turned and ran as fast as he could, disappearing into the afterlife. Darwin stood in place feeling the emotions he had expressed. After a moment of silence, his heart burst. His performance had been too perfect and he knew for a time he had believed what he was saying.

  Darwin’s stomach turned and suddenly he found himself in dry heaves on the ground. He had slashed Steve’s throat. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. If knowing Darwin wasn’t the one; that there was someone else, he still had hope Steve would still be willing to go back to New Haven.

  Alone in the gray forest, Darwin had no idea what to do. He was in uncharted territory with no assurance that Steve would ever come back. Worse yet, the horrible things Darwin had said could have the opposite effect and make Steve change faster. There was no way of knowing.

  In retrospect, Darwin began to feel like he had erred. There was no one in life he wanted to protect more…and he would do anything to keep Steve safe. He had done the only thing he could and now he wanted to die.

  Darwin had said things that reminded him of the abuse from high school. Wishing Steve was dead, doing things only to hurt him, using him, physical and verbal assaults; it all came so easily. It was like a drug and the more he hurt, the better it felt.

  How can I live with myself? How can I ever get him to believe that what I said was a lie?

  “Whoo,” the owl chirped from a branch high above the trail that Darwin was blindly stumbling down.

  “Did you see what I did, Hootie? I was just trying to create some distance, to protect him. Instead, I ran away with my anger and said a bunch of things I didn’t mean.” Darwin collapsed to the ground breaking down.

  The owl said nothing more, only rotated his head three hundred and sixty degrees. When his head returned to him, the eyes were glowing crimson.

  Even through his tears Darwin had seen the owl. “Go ahead! Kill me!” he shouted at the underworld emissary.

  Darwin sat up on his knees and began panting heavily forgetting about his tree top voyeur. He clutched his sides and screamed, “why does it hurt? Oh, fuck—it hurts so much!”

  “Shhhh!” The earthy woman blew into his ear. “You want to wake them?”

  “Help me please!” Darwin beseeched, barely able to make out her appearance.

  She looked at him now. “The pain of love lost; no pain compares. It’s special, it hurts more than physical damage and it’s everywhere. Worst of all, there’s only one cure.”

  “I’ll do anything to make it stop.”

  “Time,” she said assuredly. “In time the pain will subside. Mind you, it is possible to rekindle the love and that too, can end your pain. However, I heard how you treated him…you’ll be lucky if he ever speaks to you again!” She chuckled.

  “I had to save him. It’s because of me he was changing into…a demon I guess,” Darwin defended.

  “Oh, child!” She laughed. “Steve was never going to become a demon. No, he was just a plain old werewolf. He would have changed and been forever stuck in that skin. His humanity would be gone and he would have served his underworld masters—he still will.”

  Darwin jumped off the ground and wiped his eyes clear to get a look at the short woman. She wore layer upon layer of tattered rags; her teeth were yellow and green, and she smelt of urine and other delightful oddities. After one good look at her, he knew that the woman before him was the one he had been seeking.

  “Lynda Aspen?”

  “The one and only!” She smirked now, exposing gaps behind the corn and pea colored teeth.

  “Shawn told me to find you. I need your help,” Darwin said calmly, trying to keep his pain from resurfacing.

  “Is it Steve or Marta you need help with?” she answered, showing her reach of knowledge .

  Stunned, Darwin shook his head in confusion. She knew about Marta, what else could she know? If she already knew, then why ask?

  “Everything,” Darwin replied, resigned.

  She took a step back and her big eyes drooped. “Keeping it simple, I like that. Okay, come on sunshine let’s see what we can do.”

  Lynda began walking off trail through the thicket of branches and twigs. She stopped before disappearing and looked back only to see if Darwin was following.

  “What about Steve?” Darwin asked.

  “We’ve wasted too much time as it is. If it’s meant to be…” She continued walking and mumbling but most of what she said couldn’t be understood. Lynda turned one final time and made a statement, “two men in love…they would have burned you at the stake in my day.”

  For the first time, Darwin found that uncomfortable feeling absent.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Shawn wasn’t entirely wrong about where Lynda resided. The entrance to her home was under the blood, but not in the sense of a blood lake. They actually did see a pond that appeared red and for a time, Darwin expected they would be going for a swim. The duo kept the conversation to a minimum.

  The door to her home was in plain view if it even had been visible. It was under the blood, near a ledge in a rock face—that much had been true. Like Shawn’s cave, when Lynda walked past a certain point she merely vanished. She could still be heard quietly moving around just on the other side. The spot where Lynda disappeared was next to a large tree that oozed globs of blood all around the doorway; it was a bloody mes
s.

  Darwin closed his eyes and walked through the barrier, entering the world of Lynda Aspen. Unlike Shawn’s home, Lynda’s domain felt like a prism with the outside world being refracted and shattered. Her home was not large, but it felt like a solarium, giving it a very open feel.

  “Wipe your feet please!” she demanded. “Damn blood gets tracked all over the place. If the location wasn’t this good I wouldn’t live here.”

  “Don’t the foot prints outside give you away?” Darwin asked, scuffing his feet on the unknown rawhide.

  “I rarely go out, so it’s not a problem.” Lynda moved to her work bench that was piled with papers, jars and other gelatinous substances. “It took some getting use to—being out in the open—but for all the times things have come near my home, they’ve never found me.”

  “Shawn said you’re human. Why did you come here?”

  “I’m a black arts specialist, at least that’s what Shawn called me, and I kinda liked the name. In my time, they were burning people who didn’t conform to societal norms. Basically, if you weren’t a white Christian you were in trouble. At the time I saw nothing wrong in magic. I wasn’t a bad person, I just wasn’t a God fearing Christian like the rest of the herd. So, like all witches of the day, they were rounding up the suspects and I knew I had to flee.”

  “Why?”

  “I may have started a small pestilence and that may have caused a bit of a famine, but that was not my intent!” she insisted. “Anyway, I fled west. I had been told through another mystic that it was possible to enter a magical world where I would be free to explore my desires. Finding the entry point was the hard part,” she said as she flumped into her woven twig chair.

  “You mean a gate?” Darwin asked.

  “Call it whatever you want. It goes by many names. There are hundreds of points all over the planet where you can enter the other world. I had no idea that this place was Hell, though!” she said, mystified.

  “So, how did you find it?”

  “With a lot of effort,” she answered. “I used dowsing rods. It was a lot of trial and error, but I eventually found a spot.”

  Darwin was mystified. “How did you get in?”

  “A little ceremony and some offerings were enough to crack open the door enough for me to slip inside.”

  “That was it?” Darwin asked, expecting more.

  Lynda laughed and kicked back in her chair, nearly toppling herself. “Once you find the door, slipping inside really doesn’t take much. Getting out, that’s a different story—but it can be done, especially if you’re human.”

  “I have a plan for escape!” Darwin insisted. “The gate is opening; as it opens we should be able to leave.”

  Lynda shook her head. “The gate is one way only. If you knew when the door was being opened on Earth, you might be able to time it…but it slams shut so damn fast! Also, you don’t know where the gate will open here; it could be anywhere.”

  “The door is being wedged open! Like you using your magic to open the gate, we found a way the gate can be forced open. Werewolves emit a power and that power is opening the gate near my hometown, and it’s not closing! The more werewolves there are, the faster the gate opens,” Darwin educated.

  Lynda slumped further into her chair digesting the information. “How many werewolves are there?”

  “Thousands!”

  “Then Marta coming home was no accident,” Lynda confessed. “What you are proposing, it can work, but the world we send you back to…you might not want to be in.”

  “I can’t fight them here!” Darwin shouted.

  “You can’t fight them on Earth either,” she said quietly. “No one really knows what evil is, but I’ve been studying it for hundreds of years. It’s infectious. It doesn’t make you do anything; it merely influences you to do things your soul already wanted to do. It taps into us and plays us like a doll. There’s an old legend, it predates the bible but I think a lot of the stories stem from these legends. The idea of Heaven and Hell are not new. There will always be good and bad, greed and kindness. The dark lords were cast out, the fallen angels; they were sealed in the underworld in an attempt to keep them at bay. Every now and then a piece of them manage to escape into the real world and they infect more people with their reaping. That’s how they grow! That’s how one day they may escape. How many people live on Earth now?”

  “Around seven billion.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “The gates have a feel for them. In the old world, people could feel the evil and would just naturally stay away from the gates. With that many people on the planet, more people are being forced to live near these wells. It’s no wonder they’re making a push for escape. If they get out, it might truly be end times.”

  “I need your help!” Darwin insisted, slamming his palms on the wooden table.

  “I’m not sure that I can,” she said softly. “I wasn’t sure what Marta was when she arrived. She is something new. The baby she carries is even stranger. Everything I know says she’s a succubus, a female demon who seduces men into sex which ultimately consumes them. I’ve never seen anyone arrive and flock directly to the void.”

  “Void?”

  “It’s where they lurk, mostly. It’s like a den of snakes, cold and wicked. We’re a long ways from there so you needn’t worry.”

  “Marta is my sister and it’s my child she carries!” Darwin blurted out forgetting tact.

  “You’re not right in the head, are you?”

  “It’s a long story. The short version is the baby she carries, we believe it’s something called Se Venire, at least that’s what we call it.”

  “That’s just Latin for–he is coming. What will happen when he arrives?” she asked, having no insight.

  “How should I know? All I know is, my family…somewhere in time…we were marked. My sister, my brothers…all of us were touched by the underworld. I think the plan all along was to get my sister pregnant; like a way of concentrating the evil. It was slow and methodical, but they were always advancing. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I think I almost have it figured out. I still don’t know when they got Marta, but I think they’ve been trying to get anyone from our family since the camping trip my brothers and I took to the woods near the gate.”

  “Explain,” she asked.

  “Marta brought the evil into the house—I’m not sure how. What I do know is it grew over time. I think she infected Zack; he in turn began abusing me after Marta was taken away. I think he got Cornell, too. The infection was mild or not enough. My brother abused me but he stopped, so he still had some free will.” Darwin thought about it, he was close to the answer, but he knew it wasn’t all there.

  “You sound unsure of yourself,” Lynda commented.

  “Not unsure, there’s just something missing still. You see, the night my brothers and I went camping in the woods near the gate, Zack saw our father killed. By his description, today I would have said it was a werewolf. Strange thing was the next morning when we found my brother, there no sign of anyone being killed. We raced home and our dad was just fine. My dad had to go back to the campsite because we had left everything behind. We never saw him again. I think what was happening was the forest was trying to draw one of us in and it didn’t matter who. It never quit, it kept trying. It got my Dad; I never knew what happened to him. If he had become a werewolf he would have come home but he didn’t, so I believe he died. It wasn’t long after my brother Zack killed himself. Probably from the guilt he felt for sending my dad to his death. Cornell and I stayed away from that part of the woods and I never returned until I was a werewolf, years later. It was Steve they used to get to me and even he felt that was exactly what they wanted. Steve was made a werewolf through the hot spring; they touched him because they knew he was connected to me and he was within their reach.”

  “Why are you so important?”

  “I’m not!” he shouted. “That’s the thing. They used me! To open the gate they needed thousan
ds of lycans. I did all of that because I thought it was the right thing to do, improving the species, getting rid of rotten elements in society. They tapped my hatred of mankind and manipulated me because I was vulnerable. They were sly, making me believe I could do as I wanted but I would have to pay any negative consequences. Of course I couldn’t see the wrong; they were just playing with me! It was what they wanted all along! As soon as I impregnated Marta, they stopped talking to me. I was no longer needed.”

  Lynda said, “The one thing I’ve learnt over the years is the underworld can be disconnected in what they want. Anyone from the surface who has come here has always said they were tricked into doing something they would never have agreed to. The messages they sent made no sense or could be interpreted in several ways.” She paused for a moment. “So, what about your brother Cornell…what happened to him?”

  “Yeah Darwin, tell us about you and Cornell,” Steve said now standing at the entrance of the prism.

  “Steve! I’m so sorry!” Darwin rushed over to give him a hug but was greeted with coldness and a hand that pushed him away.

  “How did you find us?” Lynda asked, worried about her own security.

  “I followed you. Don’t worry, I was careful. Tell us about what you and Cornell use to do,” Steve again sneered. “The blood doesn’t lie, does it? I saw what you did.”

  “Should I leave?” Lynda asked.

  “Steve, don’t…you don’t want to know that side of me,” Darwin begged.

  “I already do, but I want to hear it from you! If you love me, you’ll be honest for once! What I saw, it was true wasn’t it?” Steve asserted in a way that Darwin had never seen before.

  He was caught. A secret Darwin had carried with him for years; a sick pleasure that he had been brought into, groomed and trained in. No one had known, both Cornell and Darwin had gotten away with it, but Steve had seen it.

  “Cornell and I were infected. I didn’t know that then, but I think that’s exactly what it was,” he said, turning his back on Steve. “After Zack died, Cornell began disappearing for long periods of time. My mother was an absent parent, so she never said anything. One day, maybe a year after Zack had died, Cornell says he has a secret he wants to show me. So he takes me out to this cabin. A summer place, but it was the fall so it was abandoned. In the shed there was an ATV. Cornell found a hidden key, so we take it and travel deep into the mountains to this place, a really thick place, very hard to find.”