Garret knew Mr. Malvern could not leave his industry, and his wife would not leave. Both of them were too old and in too poor health to travel, so it would not have entered their minds as the most practical solution. They would not have suggested leaving.
Molly had suggested it. She had left him.
Garret fell to his haunches. He did not howl. Instead, the thick smell of salt filled his nose as human tears darkened the fur on his muzzle. Garret forced himself to round the house. He lay down on the grass under Molly’s window, and didn’t move until long after dark.
* * *
Journal Entry
Paris, France Nov. 12, 1910
My academic credentials have lain fallow for so many years that I feared my letters would be ignored. However, in my absence, my book has returned to prominence, greater than before, and I have become an unwitting patriarch of a phrenological resurgence.
Apparently, I was presumed dead, and my letters lit a fire among Europe’s intelligentsia. In years past, I would have enjoyed playing the circle of fools against one another as they sought my favor. Now I am too weary. I did, however, seize upon the opportunity, spinning grand tales of my new work, fifteen years in the making, soon to break upon the scientific world. I promised the dedication to the person who could find the final case study I require, someone who fits the exact psychological profile which, I believe, will weaken It unto Its demise.
My sycophantic colleagues are unaware of this true purpose, of course, and are similarly unaware that I could no more create another work than I could live in a house with other human beings. I am irritated by their noise, annoyed by their pointless talk, and disgusted by their nervous vanity. Only the heartbeat of It calms me. Why cannot all things be so quiet, so ordered? I keep It with me at night. I lay Its box on my chest, because the feel of Its steady rhythm is now the only thing which can bring me sleep.
For eighteen months my foolish colleagues have searched the world over, each scrambling to be the first to fulfill my needs and win my approval, while I enjoy a Parisian holiday with my nemesis. I think nothing, now, of carrying It through town, buying a loaf of bread with Its box under my arm, looking no more curious than any other parcel. As I pen this, It sits on my café table while I drink coffee and taste my first éclair in twelve years.
Yet, after months of tolerating the sycophants and their inability to assess the simplest of my instructions, the opportunity I have long sought has instead found me. Having learned of my book’s resurgence, and having nearly exhausted my funds, I contacted my publisher. They grudgingly sent my royalty cheque, and with it, a single letter written by a woman from a rural farming community in America.
She was long-winded and self-important, and her letter prattled on. I was about to discard it when she began to reveal facets of her daughter’s psychological dispensations. As I read onward, I realized my chance could finally be at hand.
I have not seen the land of Freedom and Opportunity in twenty-five years, since I left New York to pursue the hand of my bride. Elizabeth, how I wish you could be with me—with us—for this last journey. Though I have not yet examined the patient, I believe she is the one whose life will purchase our freedom. My struggle is nearly over.
It is finally time to go home.
— J.S.G.
Bang, bang, bang! Garret pounded on Dr. Grey’s front door. Bang, bang, bang, bang! He rattled the facing that time. Garret crossed his arms and stewed. Country veterinarians were used to being awakened all hours of the night, a horse with a sudden bout of colic, or a lambing gone wrong, but Dr. Grey was taking forever to get to the door. Fine, Garret would wake the whole street.
BANG, BANG, BANG!
The glow of a lamp flame descended the steps and hovered on the other side of the door glass. The latch clicked.
“You shot at me,” Garret accused as soon as the door swung open. Dr. Grey, tall, distinguished and disheveled, blinked at Garret. The moon was full and the night animals crept about, but Grey was still wearing his day vest and trousers. He squinted at Garret through puffy eyes. When he exhaled, Garret was enveloped in a wave of alcohol stink. Garret hated alcohol. It had killed his Grandfather, the strongest man he’d ever known.
“What,” Grey asked blearily.
“You shot at me,” Garret accused again, finger in Grey’s face this time. “I remember now. You were in Dr. Bentley’s house. You saw me.” Garret took a step back and to the side, mimicking their previous positions. “You were this close, and you stared at me. Then when I was on the back porch, somebody shot at me. I remember it hitting the house. It had to be you. Why!”
Grey blinked again, like an owl roused from slumber. Grey’s eyes widened with recognition, and he slammed the door.
“Go away!” he slurred through the door and the alcohol. His lamp flame retreated a step or two. “I’m not kidding, Mr. Vilner. I have a gun.”
Garret blinked, astounded. “Are you threatening to kill me?”
“Get losht!” Grey slurred.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Garret yelled. “What’s wrong with this town?”
Garret flung himself off the porch and reached for his shirt to tear it open. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He wasn’t wearing anything. Butt naked in the moonlight, he ran through Grey’s yard, veering towards the fence.
He’d lain under Molly’s window for hours, until the sound of a gun, a distant hunter, had roused him. That was when he’d remembered what Grey had done, which gave him some place to focus his anger and loss. He must have shifted back to human as he climbed the porch. The strap was gone though. Yes, he remembered tossing it aside in the yard. He didn’t know where his clothes were. Neither did he care.
He wanted to break down Grey’s door and scream at him, beat him up for Molly, for Pa, for all of it, but even more than he wanted that, Garret wanted to run. His blood boiled with the need to expend the energy, to fly through the forest with the wind in his fur, to do some damn thing the way it was meant to be done. He called the wolfstrap to himself.
Garret leaped the fence on two legs and landed on four, fur rippling across his body, the world becoming crystalline black and white. Down the length of Ruffner Avenue he went, under the stars. Across Main Street, between two buildings and into the forest. As the shadows engulfed him, covering him with their comforting blanket of darkness, he howled, long and sad.
* * *
Journal Entry
America, The Appalachian Mountains. March, 1911
The time has come. The girl is a mirror of the young woman the creature took almost a year ago, the woman who so weakened It so that It lay for days without moving. We will at last be free. I will be free. Humanity will never know what I have done for them, yet they will live for generations, for millennia to come, because I have sacrificed myself and my life to deliver them from this predator, and that is enough for me.
Nay, I will, this once, be honest with myself. If I ever cared for the good of humanity, I have forgotten it long ago. I both need It and loathe It. As I feed yet loathe myself. Once It is dead, I will return to Bedburg, and go into the forest to the grave of my wife, to the place where It killed her. I will kiss her stone, lie down beside her, and cut my own throat. I have seen it many a time in my mind’s eye. I play it again and again for the peace of it. It is restful to me. A cessation to the long war in which I have fought alone, in silence and in pain.
Soon, I will sleep. One would think I would relish an end to the screams, or that I would yearn for the end of the walking and traveling, or that I would cut off my own hands to rid them of imaginary blood stains, but all of this is meaningless to me. To my shame, I know I will miss sleeping with It near, Its heartbeat lulling me into sleep, my only relief.
In truth, there is but one thing I long to escape. It fills my nightmares and my waking senses. Even in past days when It still fled from me, when It would escape and run a hundred miles to Its next victim, I smelled It as if It had saturated me and I had become
one with It.
As the old stories told, It truly is the heart of hell. Some days, I feel that oblivion may not free me from Its stench, that my nose and mind and heart will be eternally filled with the burning of sulfur.
I fear I will never be free of the reek of Brimstone.
— J.S.G.
Garret sprinted through the forest, challenging the cold with his presence, bristling his hackles at the trees as if they should bow to him, and howling at the moon to let it know even it was not beyond his reach. He sprinted, a silver-furred bullet through the forest, his powerful paws and heart propelling him through his domain. Scents trailed past him, hundreds and thousands of them, all twisted together, or laying on each other like the heaps of leaves, or wafting around with hints of warmth as if they were new.
He picked up the trail of a squirrel, fresh and enticing. He went after it as his wolf-desires and his human anger wrestled for control. Valleys didn’t stop him, hills couldn’t hold him back. He traded the squirrel scent for the trail of a groundhog, which ended at a hole. He couldn’t make himself stand still long enough to dig at it. He ran away, howling, wishing someone would answer him back.
The more he tried to outrun his feelings, the more the lines blurred between his wolf and human mind. Maybe he was losing himself to the wolfstrap. Or maybe he was lost already. Or maybe he had never been human at all.
* * *
Dawn had broken before Garret stumbled up against the back door of his shop. He fell into it, rising from four limbs to two, grey fur retreating from his naked skin until the wolfstrap hung limply across his chest. His paws stretched out to fingers, leaving him with forest dirt beneath his nails. The partially dried beaver blood on his muzzle crackled and flaked and became blood around his mouth. The taste of it filled his human taste buds, and he spat red on the dirt.
He pushed open the rear door and stumbled into the shop. The rear of the shop faced the woods, so more than likely no one had seen him change, but he didn’t care if they did.
Weaklings and turncoats, the lot of them. I hate them all.
Garret lurched through the door, pulled the strap off and dropped it. This was his home, his den, and he would do as he wished in it. He slammed the back door, sealing himself in the dark. Shoulders hunched, he looked around at the dark shapes of the forge, anvils, coal bin, and tool cart. His forge. His anvils. His tools.
But Malvern was trying to take them all away. Malvern was the animal. Not Garret. That anyone would lay hand on Garret’s food or his brother or his mate was unthinkable. Malvern would pay somehow.
The early morning cold was settling into Garret’s naked body. He stalked across the shop, scratching absently at the blood around his mouth. More of it flaked away. He snatched a pair of old work over-pants from behind the parts shelf and pulled them on. He pulled his leather apron on over his bare chest. There was nothing wrong with his bare skin. Why shouldn’t the customers see it? Assuming he had any customers today.
Garret ground his teeth and shot a glance at the empty work bench. Malvern. He didn’t think the name so much as he felt it. Feelings were the only things inside him, wolf body or no. He wasn’t thinking. He was existing. Moving and growing in a swelling flood of instincts and feelings.
He picked up his favorite cross-peen hammer, gripping the familiar weight in his hand. I need to make something.
He would forge glowing iron into something useful and good, because that was who he was and no one would take it from him. He turned to the forge, but stopped. The coal bed was waiting, a pile of dark chunks. He needed only light them aflame. He needed fire. He had to light the fire. But the thought brought beads of cold sweat out on his forehead.
Fire.
He pictured it in his mind, the orange glow, the heat, the insatiable, voracious crackling. He knew what fire did. It consumed and destroyed. It burned. It was never satisfied. Nothing was as dangerous to him and his kind as fire. The sight of it in his mind’s eye—the orange hunger of it—brought out cold sweat all down his back.
But I love fire. I need it. Don’t I? He shook his head to clear it. Fire was his life. It made everything in his life warm and good. But he dropped his hammer on the dirt floor.
Fire terrified him. Fire was the enemy. He had to get away from the forge. Right now. Now! Garret fled, falling to all fours as the grey fur shot across his chest and back. His joints popped back into place, out of that gangly, slow, tall form, and into his real self. He clawed the door open. He used the front door because he was closer to it.
Women screamed, hitching up skirts and running, parcels flying. Men yelled and stomped across the boardwalk, cursing. Garret paid little mind to any of it. He was running, straight down Main Street. Behind him, he caught the clack of a lever-action rifle shuffling a shell.
He ducked left around the corner of the textile shop as the rifle boomed and wood flew from the siding. He went into the woods. Where was his pack, his brother? This was not a time to be alone. This was a time to rally and fight. This was a time to stand together and win.
Or die. Like his Pa.
Early sun beams reached to the forest floor, dappling the grey leaves with spots of whitish gold. Garret flashed through them, his instincts guiding him home. He ran up the last hill, and the familiar smells of his home and family came down to meet him. The smells were homey, and yet they were foreign and unnerving at the same time. He dropped to a trot. Just before he broke from the trees onto the road, he decided to circle the house and approach from the rear, which was closest to the cover of the woods.
He broke from the treeline a couple minutes later, and seeing no one in sight, he crossed the yard on all fours, only standing and shedding his fur as he set a paw on the porch. His spine realigned as he stood, his finger joints popping back into place as he grasped the backdoor knob and turned it. His hips dropped back and upright as he stepped across the threshold.
Standing in the doorway, he pulled the strap off, surveyed the kitchen, and inhaled suspiciously. He knew each of the thousand scents by heart, and they told him of generations of his family. The house was cold. Why wasn’t his fur keeping him warm? Oh, because it was hanging from his hand instead of covering his back like it should be.
Garret crossed the kitchen and went into his bedroom, making no more noise than a mouse. He pulled a pair of pants and a work shirt out of his dresser. They were folded crooked, the way Sarn always did it. His Ma wasn’t doing laundry again. Garret’s vision greyed-out as a flash of anger took him. He pulled his clothes on. They felt strange, not as warm or comfortable as his fur. They hung loose on him and rubbed him in all kinds of weird ways as he moved.
Where was Sarn anyway? Obviously, he wouldn’t be working at Mr. Malvern’s mill anymore, so he should be here. Garret missed his brother. He straightened and began to look around the house for him. Color returned to Garret’s vision, and his clothes suddenly felt normal. “Sarn?”
No reply. Garret searched the house and found no one. He stepped out on the porch and caught voices coming from the barn. Garret clenched his teeth. That damn well better not be who it sounds like. He stalked off the porch. His sense of smell doubled and his hearing brought him every bird chirp and twig snap within a half mile. He caught the scent of sickly death. The Predator was close by. Garret still had the wolfstrap in his hand, and it wrapped itself around his arm, clinging to him like a furry snake. He hit the ground on all fours and began to run, but then the sounds from inside the barn registered on his human mind. He tripped in surprise, tumbling into a sprawl. Garret lay on the ground and listened, stunned. The strap let go of him, slid away from his body and mind as an apple would fall from the hand of a man who had been shot.
His joints popped back into place. Their rightful human place. Weakly, Garret stood and stared at the barn, a hundred yards away. His clothes were ripped in a few places from his partial shift, but they still clung to him. His human ears were too weak to tell him anything now, but he knew what he had heard.
/> Garret crept around the edge of the barn door and was greeted by the sight of wanton sex. His Ma and Dr. Grey were wrapped around each other up against a barn stall. His mother’s dress had been both torn open down the front and hiked up to her breasts. Grey was shirtless, his white skinniness almost glowing in the barn twilight. His pants were around his ankles as he drove himself deep into Garret’s mother time and again.
She arched, writhed, grinding her breasts into his face. He held her as best he could, as if she was more woman than he knew what to do with. Garret stood and stared in horror. His Pa’s dead body had cooled off, what, a week ago?
His Ma wrapped one of her hands behind Grey’s neck and slid it around until her palm was resting on his chest. It was a simple gesture, and the least disgusting thing that was happening, but Garret was suddenly on his knees, crawling away from the barn and trying not to black out. In his memory, he could feel a hand on his chest like that, pinning him down. He tried to focus on the frosty grass beneath his hand, but instead, he began to see something that had happened a long time ago, that same motion his mother had just made. His mind fought him for the memory, trying to lock it deeply away again. But the feeling of it couldn’t be contained. He gasped, whimpered and tried to scramble away. He couldn’t escape. He was trapped, pinned down. Beneath him wasn’t frosty grass, but a warm bed. His bed. Garret grabbed his head between his hands and tried not to scream. It didn’t work.
* * *
Garret sat at the kitchen table with a mug of hot cider in his hand. He felt like a storm-beaten corn stalk. Weak, and frail.
“Garret,” his Ma said, setting her own mug on the table and sitting down, but not too close to him. “Garret, look at me.”
She said it with the same belligerent tone she always used. He didn’t raise his eyes.
“Garret,” she said, holding her chin high. “I was deceived. Dr. Grey is a powerful man and he’s a—”
“A what, Ma?” he said. “A whore? A selfish person who doesn’t care about anybody but herself?” He didn’t say it out of anger. It just slipped out, an unfortunate honesty.
Brimstone Page 27