I have not noticed anything different about the cell. I was sure that she had had some improvement made, but the lock is the same and the padding is still torn in places. Perhaps she had the workman come to make an estimate and intends to have the work done next month. I wish that I had thought to put a brighter light in, however. It is difficult to write, and the corners are in shadow. If . . .
I have just made a horrible discovery. I am at a loss to understand what it means. A cold sliver is knifing up my backbone and my flesh is like ice. I was writing before and I glanced at the wall and . . . there is a hole through the wall! It is a small hole, and I didn’t notice it immediately. It is in the corner by the door, and it is large enough for someone to look through . . . to look into the cell. The hole was not there before, and there is still some concrete dust on the floor, so I know that it was made recently. That must have been why the workman was here. But why did my wife have the hole made? Whatever has possessed her? Why would she do such a fiendish thing? She must be mad! She must intend to look into the cell after the change has occurred! But why would she want to? It is beyond belief, it is monstrous. The thought that she will see me . . . see me become . . . something other than a man. I am crouching against the wall with the hole and I cannot be observed from there, but I don’t know what to do about later . . . after I change. The thing is not rational, or does not care about rationality. It will not remain here against the door where it cannot be seen. I have considered trying to plug the hole with my shirt, but I fear that the shirt will become torn loose when the disease is at its frenzied pitch. Or she might poke it free with a stick. There is nothing I can do. She is going to see me!
I am sick with dread. I feel that I shall vomit. My head is spinning. Why would Helen do this to me? Is it simply morbid curiosity? Has she some perverted twist to her nature that I have never before observed? Or is it that she still doubts me, and wants proof that I am not mad, that I do not imagine it all? I do not know. The thought that she will see the change is terrible, and God knows what effect it will have on her! I can only hope that she recognizes it as an illness, and that the truth will not drive her out of her mind. But her mind is not strong and I fear . . . I have seen the look on other faces when they see me changed. The drunkard . . . the girl . . . There was a look of madness on those faces, and Helen is not strong . . . I have seen the fear in her eyes even when I am normal. After she read those lies in the newspapers, those horrible tales of mutilation and dismemberment . . . the other night in bed . . . and that fear that makes her face glow white as the moon, makes it shift and tremble until I can see only that terror and everything else fades away and I look . . . I feel . . . I feel that such fear must not be left to survive . . . How will I ever face her again after . . . when I am normal . . . when . . .
I heard the door close.
I think she is coming down . . .
August 2?
I presume it is morning. I am all right now, although I am exhausted. My clothing is torn to shreds. Helen will be down soon to open the door. How will she face me now, after last night? I begged her to go away and she would not even answer me, she just looked into the cell and waited. My agitation brought the sickness on sooner than it should have come, and I lost all control. She saw everything. I hate her. I hate her for what she has done to me. I am on fire with rage and shame and hatred! When she opens the door I shall have to exercise great control to keep from striking her. She deserves to be struck. She deserves worse. For what she has done to me there could be no punishment too great. She made it much much worse than it has ever been before. I can clearly remember raging against the wall, trying to tear my way out, trying to rip the hole apart, and all the while she was standing there, on the other side of that indestructible barrier, looking in at everything. She is a monster, a fiend, a devil! There are no words to describe her . . .
August
I don’t know the date. There is no way to tell the time. It seems an eternity. I no longer care about this record. It seems futile now. And my pen is nearly out of ink. The light seems to be growing dim too, and soon I shall be in darkness. I might be able to write with my own blood, but it hardly seems worth the effort . . . I don’t like blood, it reminds me of too much. Still, trying to record something occupies my mind. It is an ally against madness. I can bear the hunger and the thirst but I could not bear to lose my mind.
I cannot understand why she has done this to me. I no longer hate her, I just cannot understand. She comes down and looks in once in a while. Once a day, once a week . . . I don’t know. It is all the same here. She never says anything. She won’t answer me when I speak to her. She makes a strange noise sometimes, a cackling sound. I suppose she is insane. When I plead with her she goes away . . .
?
I am so hungry.
I have tried to eat the padding from the walls, but it is no good. It makes my thirst greater. The light is nearly out now. Only by standing directly beneath it can I see to write. My vision is blurred as well. I am very weak and dizzy. I don’t suppose that I will be able to write again.
I know now that I must die here. I am resigned to it. It seems proper that, if I must die, it is through no fault of my own. I have done nothing to bring this about. Like all the suffering of my life, I am innocent of the cause, I have suffered through the sins of my ancestors, and now I die through the madness of my wife. It is unjust, but proper. I must lie down now. I am sure that there will be nothing more to record.
I know it is night. I bit my arm . . .
That was the journal that I found in my aunt’s drawer. There were some pages after the last entry that had been marked, but they were undecipherable. They may have been an attempt to write in the dark, or they may have been the heedless markings of something with the hand of a man. I did not look long at them. I closed the book slowly and stared out the window at the rain. A loud clap of thunder sounded and the big elm tree in the yard whipped under the wind and the wind rushed under the clouds. Somewhere a dog howled. I sat there for a long time and then I got up and put the journal in my pocket. It was getting late. I went into the hall and opened the door that led down to the basement. I had to go down there. I hesitated but I had to. The air was thick and foul and it was like walking into a grave, but I went down.
The cell was in the corner, as the book said. My footsteps were incredibly loud as I crossed the concrete floor. The door was barred and I lifted the bar quickly, without thinking about it. It groaned and rust flaked off. I tried the door but it would not move. It had been locked with a key as well. It was a large lock and the door was very strong. I stepped to the corner and after a moment found the hole. The edges had begun to crumble. I looked through it but I could see nothing within. It was black inside. I turned and walked very calmly across the basement and up the stairs. I had every intention of searching for the key to the cell. I knew that it must be somewhere in Aunt Helen’s possessions. As I reached the top step it gave way under my weight. I had to leap to keep from falling. I landed off balance in the hallway and suddenly I was running. I went out of the front door and into the storm. I am as brave as the next man, I am fit and very strong, but that day I ran and kept on running until I was far away from the house and drenched with rain. I had forgotten my coat.
That was some time ago and I have never been back to the house that I inherited from Aunt Helen. Someday I shall. I am often curious as to what is in the cell now. Surely there could be nothing there that would harm me. It all happened long ago. And Aunt Helen must have been in herself at some time, because she had the book. I have checked the old newspapers carefully, and found a report of an unsolved murder that might have been the one he wrote about. Or it might not. He was surely mad, and perhaps it was all in his mind. Of course it was all in his mind. And yet . . . I cannot help but wonder what Aunt Helen saw when she looked into the cell that night. Did she realize then, for the first time, that he was insane, and leave him for that reason? Or did she see something else? Somet
hing that drove her mad? I shall never know, at any rate. I don’t expect that she kept a journal of her own. It doesn’t really trouble me. Not really. I have never been a superstitious man. But I have determined that I must never have children. Because, you see, Aunt Helen was related to me by marriage. It was her husband who was related to me by blood. I have kept the book and sometimes I read it through again, trying to find the truth. Sometimes I read it on those long white nights when the moon is bright and round and I have nothing at all to do but sit alone by my window. I live alone. I would like to have a pet, but animals don’t like me. Dogs are afraid of me. It is rather boring and I shall have to start keeping a diary to occupy my time on those nights. As it is I just sit, watching the moon, watching my hands . . .
Suzy McKee Charnas
BOOBS
Following her work with the Peace Corps in Nigeria and a drug abuse treatment team touring New York high schools, Suzy McKee Charnas’ first novel, Walk to the End of the World, was published in 1974 and was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. She has followed it with Motherlines, The Vampire Tapestry, Dorothea Dreams, The Furies and such young adult novels as The Bronze King, The Silver Glove, The Golden Thread and The Kingdom of Kevin Malone.
Her offbeat werewolf story “Boobs” gives a feminist slant on the age-old myth, and it won the Hugo Award for best science fiction story in 1990. The version published here (which originally appeared in Lisa Tuttle’s anthology Skin of the Soul) restores the original ending, as the writer explains: “ ‘Boobs’ addresses a matter of concern to one half the human race (menstruation, not werewolfery), but it was not exactly suitable for Redbook or Mademoiselle; Seventeen wouldn’t touch it, and Ms told me they weren’t taking fiction. In the end Gardner. Dozois bought it for Asimov’s. He asked for a minor rewrite of the ending, something to take a little of the chill off, so to speak. My stepdaughter had reacted in a similar fashion, objecting that Kelsey is too cold-blooded about wolfish violence.
“I reminded her of: a) the tendency in the young toward a very narrow morality (‘What hurts me is unforgivably awful and what I do is okay”); b) the surprising failures of empathy in children that can lead to the most shockingly loathsome behaviour committed in a very casual manner, for example, the true beastliness of teenage boys in packs. Personally, I am pleased to see the original ending restored, for readers who may be disinclined to have their angry young heroines sweetened.”
The thing is, it’s like your brain wants to go on thinking about the miserable history mid-term you have to take tomorrow, but your body takes over. And what a body! You can see in the dark and run like the wind and leap parked cars in a single bound.
Of course you pay for it next morning (but it’s worth it). I always wake up stiff and sore, with dirty hands and feet and face, and I have to jump in the shower fast so Hilda won’t see me like that.
Not that she would know what it was about, but why take chances? So I pretend it’s the other thing that’s bothering me. So she goes, “Come on, sweetie, everybody gets cramps, that’s no reason to go around moaning and groaning. What are you doing, trying to get out of school just because you’ve got your period?”
If I didn’t like Hilda, which I do even though she is only a stepmother instead of my real mother, I would show her something that would keep me out of school forever, and it’s not fake, either.
But there are plenty of people I’d rather show that to.
I already showed that dork Billy Linden.
“Hey, Boobs!” he goes, in the hall right outside Homeroom. A lot of kids laughed, naturally, though Rita Frye called him an asshole.
Billy is the one that started it, sort of, because he always started everything, him with his big mouth. At the beginning of term, he came barrelling down on me hollering, “Hey, look at Bornstein, something musta happened to her over the summer! What happened, Bornstein? Hey, everybody, look at Boobs Bornstein!”
He made a grab at my chest, and I socked him in the shoulder, and he punched me in the face, which made me dizzy and shocked and made me cry, too, in front of everybody.
I mean, I always used to wrestle and fight with the boys, being that I was strong for a girl. All of a sudden it was different. He hit me hard, to really hurt, and the shock sort of got me in the pit of my stomach and made me feel nauseous, too, as well as mad and embarrassed to death.
I had to go home with a bloody nose and lie with my head back and ice wrapped in a towel on my face and dripping down into my hair.
Hilda sat on the couch next to me and patted me. She goes, “I’m sorry about this, honey, but really, you have to learn it sometime. You’re all growing up and the boys are getting stronger than you’ll ever be. If you fight with boys, you’re bound to get hurt. You have to find other ways to handle them.”
To make things worse, the next morning I started to bleed down there, which Hilda had explained carefully to me a couple of times, so at least I knew what was going on. Hilda really tried extra hard without being icky about it, but I hated when she talked about how it was all part of these exciting changes in my body that are so important and how terrific it is to “become a young woman”.
Sure. The whole thing was so messy and disgusting, worse than she had said, worse than I could imagine, with these black clots of gunk coming out in a smear of pink blood – I thought I would throw up. That’s just the lining of your uterus, Hilda said. Big deal. It was still gross.
And plus, the smell.
Hilda tried to make me feel better, she really did. She said we should “mark the occasion” like primitive people do, so it’s something special, not just a nasty thing that just sort of falls on you.
So we decided to put poor old Pinkie away, my stuffed dog that I’ve slept with since I was three. Pinkie is bald and sort of hard and lumpy, since he got in the washing machine by mistake, and you would never know he was all soft plush when he was new, or even that he was pink.
Last time my friend Gerry-Anne came over, before the summer, she saw Pinky laying on my pillow and though she didn’t say anything, I could tell she was thinking that was kind of babyish. So I’d been thinking about not keeping Pinky around any more.
Hilda and I made him this nice box lined with pretty scraps from her quilting class, and I thanked him out loud for being my friend for so many years, and we put him up in the closet, on the top shelf.
I felt terrible, but if Gerry-Anne decided I was too babyish to be friends with any more, I could end up with no friends at all. When you have never been popular since the time you were skinny and fast and everybody wanted you on their team, you have that kind of thing on your mind.
Hilda and Dad made me go to school the next morning so nobody would think I was scared of Billy Linden (which I was) or that I would let him keep me away just by being such a dork.
Everybody kept sneaking funny looks at me and whispering, and I was sure it was because I couldn’t help walking funny with the pad between my legs and because they could smell what was happening, which as far as I knew hadn’t happened to anybody else in Eight A yet. Just like nobody else in the whole grade had anything real in their stupid training bras except me, thanks a lot.
Anyway I stayed away from everybody as much as I could and wouldn’t talk to Gerry-Anne, even, because I was scared she would ask me why I walked funny and smelled bad.
Billy Linden avoided me just like everybody else, except one of his stupid buddies purposely bumped into me so I stumbled into Billy on the lunch-line. Billy turns around and he goes, real loud, “Hey, Boobs, when did you start wearing black and blue make-up?”
I didn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that he had actually broken my nose, which the doctor said. Good thing they don’t have to bandage you up for that. Billy would be hollering up a storm about how I had my nose in a sling as well as my boobs.
That night I got up after I was supposed to be asleep and took off my underpants and T-shirt that I sleep in and stood looking at myself in the mirro
r. I didn’t need to turn a light on. The moon was full and it was shining right into my bedroom through the big dormer window.
I crossed my arms and pinched myself hard to sort of punish my body for what it was doing to me.
As if that could make it stop.
No wonder Edie Siler had starved herself to death in the Tenth Grade! I understood her perfectly. She was trying to keep her body down, keep it normal-looking, thin and strong, like I was too, back when I looked like a person, not a cartoon that somebody would call “Boobs”.
And then something warm trickled in a little line down the inside of my leg, and I knew it was blood and I couldn’t stand it any more. I pressed my thighs together and shut my eyes hard, and I did something.
I mean I felt it happening. I felt myself shrink down to a hard core of sort of cold fire inside my bones, and all the flesh part, the muscles and the squishy insides and the skin, went sort of glowing and free-floating, all shining with moonlight, and I felt a sort of shifting and balance-changing going on.
I thought I was fainting on account of my stupid period. So I turned around and threw myself on my bed, only by the time I hit it, I knew something was seriously wrong.
For one thing, my nose and my head were crammed with these crazy, rich sensations that it took me a second to even figure out were smells, they were so much stronger than any smells I’d ever smelled. And they were – I don’t know – interesting instead of just stinky, even the rotten ones.
I opened my mouth to get the smells a little better, and heard myself panting in a funny way as if I’d been running, which I hadn’t, and then there was this long part of my face sticking out and something moving there – my tongue.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 53