The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men

by Stephen Jones

  “You sure?”

  “No-one in town’s going to be drinking tonight.” We stepped out, and he locked the door to the bar behind us.

  It was chilly in the street, and fallen snow blew about the ground, like white mists. From street level I could no longer tell if Madame Ezekiel was in her den above her neon sign, or if my guests were still waiting for me in my office.

  We put our heads down against the wind, and we walked.

  Over the noise of the wind I heard the barman talking to himself:

  “Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,” he was saying.

  “There hath he lain for ages and will lie

  Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by men and angels to be seen,

  In roaring he shall rise . . .”

  He stopped there, and we walked on together in silence, with blown snow stinging our faces.

  And on the surface die, I thought, but said nothing out loud.

  Twenty minutes’ walking and we were out of Innsmouth. The Manuxet Way stopped when we left the town, and it became a narrow dirt path, partly covered with snow and ice, and we slipped and slid our way up it in the darkness.

  The moon was not yet up, but the stars had already begun to come out. There were so many of them. They were sprinkled like diamond dust and crushed sapphires across the night sky. You can see so many stars from the seashore, more than you could ever see back in the city.

  At the top of the cliff, behind the bonfire, two people were waiting – one huge and fat, one much smaller. The barman left my side and walked over to stand beside them, facing me.

  “Behold,” he said, “the sacrificial wolf.” There was now an oddly familiar quality to his voice.

  I didn’t say anything. The fire was burning with green flames, and it lit the three of them from below; classic spook lighting.

  “Do you know why I brought you up here?” asked the barman, and I knew then why his voice was familiar: it was the voice of the man who had attempted to sell me aluminum-siding.

  “To stop the world ending?”

  He laughed at me, then.

  The second figure was the fat man I had found asleep in my office chair. “Well, if you’re going to get eschatological about it . . .” he murmured, in a voice deep enough to rattle walls. His eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.

  The third figure was shrouded in dark silks and smelled of patchouli oil. It held a knife. It said nothing.

  “This night,” said the barman, “the moon is the moon of the Deep Ones. This night are the stars configured in the shapes and patterns of the dark, old times. This night, if we call them, they will come. If our sacrifice is worthy. If our cries are heard.”

  The moon rose, huge and amber and heavy, on the other side of the bay, and a chorus of low croaking rose with it from the ocean far beneath us.

  Moonlight on snow and ice is not daylight, but it will do. And my eyes were getting sharper with the moon: in the cold waters men like frogs were surfacing and submerging in a slow water-dance. Men like frogs, and women, too: it seemed to me that I could see my landlady down there, writhing and croaking in the bay with the rest of them.

  It was too soon for another change; I was still exhausted from the night before; but I felt strange under that amber moon.

  “Poor wolf-man,” came a whisper from the silks. “All his dreams have come to this; a lonely death upon a distant cliff.”

  I will dream if I want to, I said, and my death is my own affair. But I was unsure if I had said it out loud.

  Senses heighten in the moon’s light; I heard the roar of the ocean still, but now, overlaid on top of it, I could hear each wave rise and crash; I heard the splash of the frog people; I heard the drowned whispers of the dead in the bay; I heard the creak of green wrecks far beneath the ocean.

  Smell improves, too. The aluminum-siding man was human, while the fat man had other blood in him.

  And the figure in the silks . . .

  I had smelled her perfume when I wore man-shape. Now I could smell something else, less heady, beneath it. A smell of decay, of putrefying meat, and rotten flesh.

  The silks fluttered. She was moving toward me. She held the knife.

  “Madame Ezekiel?” My voice was roughening and coarsening. Soon I would lose it all. I didn’t understand what was happening, but the moon was rising higher and higher, losing its amber colour, and filling my mind with its pale light.

  “Madame Ezekiel?”

  “You deserve to die,” she said, her voice cold and low. “If only for what you did to my cards. They were old.”

  “I don’t die,” I told her. “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night. Remember?”

  “It’s bullshit,” she said. “You know what the oldest way to end the curse of the werewolf is?”

  “No.”

  The bonfire burned brighter now, burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae, and of slowly-drifting weed; burned with the colour of emeralds.

  “You simply wait till they’re in human shape, a whole month away from another change; then you take the sacrificial knife, and you kill them. That’s all.”

  I turned to run, but the barman was behind me, pulling my arms, twisting my wrists up into the small of my back. The knife glinted pale silver in the moonlight. Madame Ezekiel smiled.

  She sliced across my throat.

  Blood began to gush, and then to flow. And then it slowed, and stopped . . .

  —The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming towards me from the night

  —I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt

  —my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame, my eyes were topaz I could taste the night

  My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air.

  I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touching the snow.

  I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her.

  There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist, surrounding me. High in my leap I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soap bubble . . .

  I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor, at the entrance of some kind of citadel, built of enormous, rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.

  A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.

  She was standing in the doorway, in front of me. She was now six-, maybe seven-feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.

  There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms, and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.

  I felt like I was being crushed. I couldn’t think any more.

  She moved towards me. The weed that surrounded her head shifted. She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds; and somewhere in all that I knew she was smiling.

  I pushed with my hind-legs. We met there, in the deep, and we struggled. It was so cold, so dark. I closed my jaws on her face, and felt something rend and tear.

  It was almost a kiss, down there in the abysmal deep . . .

  I landed softly on the snow, a silk scarf locked between my jaws.

  The other scarves were fluttering to the ground. Madame Ezekiel was nowhere to be seen.

  The silver knife lay on the ground, in the snow. I waited on all fours, in the moonlight, soaking wet. I shook myself, spraying the brine about. I heard it hiss and spit when it hit the fire.

  I was dizzy, and weak. I pulled the air deep into my lungs.

  Down, far below, in the bay, I could see the f
rog people hanging on the surface of the sea like dead things; for a handful of seconds they drifted back and forth on the tide, then they twisted and leapt, and each by each they plop-plopped down into the bay and vanished beneath the sea.

  There was a scream. It was the fox-haired bartender, the pop-eyed aluminum-siding salesman, and he was staring at the night sky, at the clouds that were drifting in, covering the stars, and he was screaming. There was rage and there was frustration in that cry, and it scared me.

  He picked up the knife from the ground, wiped the snow from the handle with his fingers, wiped the blood from the blade with his coat. Then he looked across at me. He was crying. “You bastard,” he said. “What did you do to her?”

  I would have told him I didn’t do anything to her, that she was still on guard far beneath the ocean, but I couldn’t talk any more, only growl and whine and howl.

  He was crying. He stank of insanity, and of disappointment. He raised the knife and ran at me, and I moved to one side.

  Some people just can’t adjust even to tiny changes. The barman stumbled past me, off the cliff, into nothing.

  In the moonlight blood is black, not red, and the marks he left on the cliffside as he fell and bounced and fell were smudges of black and dark grey. Then, finally, he lay still on the icy rocks at the base of the cliff, until an arm reached out from the sea and dragged him, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, under the dark water.

  A hand scratched the back of my head. It felt good.

  “What was she? Just an avatar of the Deep Ones, sir. An eidolon, a manifestation, if you will, sent up to us from the uttermost deeps to bring about the end of the world.”

  I bristled.

  “No, it’s over, for now. You disrupted her, sir. And the ritual is most specific. Three of us must stand together and call the sacred names, while innocent blood pools and pulses at our feet.”

  I looked up at the fat man, and whined a query. He patted me on the back of the neck, sleepily.

  “Of course she doesn’t love you, boy. She hardly even exists on this plane, in any material sense.”

  The snow began to fall once more. The bonfire was going out.

  “Your change tonight, incidentally, I would opine, is a direct result of the self-same celestial configurations and lunar forces that made tonight such a perfect night to bring back my old friends from Underneath . . .”

  He continued talking, in his deep voice, and perhaps he was telling me important things. I’ll never know, for the appetite was growing inside me, and his words had lost all but the shadow of any meaning; I had no further interest in the sea or the cliff-top or the fat man.

  There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could smell them on the winter’s night’s air.

  And I was, above all things, hungry.

  I was naked when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like an animal in a newspaper cartoon.

  The snow was stained a fluorescent crimson where the deer’s belly had been torn out.

  My face and chest were sticky and red with the stuff. My throat was scabbed and scarred, and it stung; by the next full moon it would be whole once more.

  The sun was a long way away, small and yellow, but the sky was blue and cloudless, and there was no breeze. I could hear the roar of the sea some distance away.

  I was cold and naked and bloody and alone; ah well, I thought: it happens to all of us, in the beginning. I just get it once a month.

  I was painfully exhausted, but I would hold out until I found a deserted barn, or a cave; and then I was going to sleep for a couple of weeks.

  A hawk flew low over the snow toward me, with something dangling from its talons. It hovered above me for a heartbeat, then dropped a small grey squid in the snow at my feet, and flew upward. The flaccid thing lay there, still and silent and tentacled in the bloody snow.

  I took it as an omen, but whether good or bad I couldn’t say and I didn’t really care any more; I turned my back to the sea, and on the shadowy town of Innsmouth, and began to make my way toward the city.

  Kim Newman

  OUT OF THE NIGHT, WHEN THE FULL MOON IS BRIGHT . . .

  Kim Newman is a multiple award-winning writer. His 1993 novel Anno Dracula (which started out as a novella in The Mammoth Book of Vampires) became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and has attracted plenty of interest from movie-makers.

  A former semi-professional kazoo player and cabaret performer, he is now a freelance writer, film critic and broadcaster. His non-fiction studies include Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film Since 1986, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), the Bram Stoker Award-winning Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), and Wild West Movies. Amongst his other books are In Dreams (co-edited with Paul J. McAuley), the novels The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum and The Bloody Red Baron, a series of gaming adventures under the pseudonym “Jack Yeovil”, and such recent collections as The Man from the Diogenes Club and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club.

  As the author explains: “Having done an intricate vampire story for The Mammoth Book of Vampires, I was hunting around for an idea to work up a similarly ambitious piece for this volume when I hit upon the immediate inspiration for this story, the Cordettes’ record of the Zorro theme song, from which the title comes. I must also credit three invaluable books for crystallizing my feelings about Los Angeles, California history and Zorro: Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Carey McWilliams’ North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States, and Bill Yenne’s The Legend of Zorro.”

  Given his encyclopaedic knowledge and eclectic tastes, it should come as no surprise to those who know the author’s work that Newman expertly integrates the legendary swashbuckling hero and near-future LA riots in the following novella about a mythic shapeshifter . . .

  Oppression – by its very nature – creates the power that crushes it. A champion arises – a champion of the oppressed.

  The Mark of Zorro (1920)

  I

  “Stuey,” Officer García began, “how about this for high concept?”

  The idea bulb above his cop cap practically turned the inside of the windscreen into a silver-black mirror.

  “These two cops in East LA, man . . .”

  García grinned at Officer Scotchman, who kept eyes on the street, hands on the wheel.

  “. . . and they’re really werewolves . . .”

  The hispanic officer half-turned in the patrol car’s front passenger seat. Neck-twisting, he looked back at Stuart with glittering, amused steel eyes.

  “. . . and the title of the cho is . . .”

  The cruiser eased over a speed-bump, unsettling Stuart’s jet-lagged stomach.

  “Prowl Car.”

  Maybe it wasn’t a speed-bump. Maybe it was something lying in the road.

  García snickered at his high concept, repeating his projected title like a mantra. Stuart shrugged in the shadow of the rear compartment, blackly invisible to the cops up front. Scotchman’s face, impassive in reflection, slid up the windscreen as they cruised under one of the rare functioning streetlights.

  When García first introduced the other cop, Stuart assumed his name was Scotch, man. He sussed Scotchman thought his movie crazy partner was a prick.

  “How d’ya like it, Stuey? Think it’ll play in Peoria?”

  Stuart shrugged again. Last night, García had come up with a dozen movie ideas. Cop movies.

  “Take it to New Frontier, man,” García insisted. “Prowl Car, man. Will be the werewolf cop movie. Be boffo boxo. Can write it together. Like a collaboration, man. Split credit.”

  García’s eyes rolled like the comedy Chicano he pretended to be when he wasn’t beating someone. He howled at the moon. It was nearly full tonight, a sliver away from a perfect
circle.

  The cop had a Cheech Marín moustache, but was skinnier in the body than the straighter half of Cheech and Chong. He had overdeveloped forearms like Popeye’s. He would look proportioned if his torso were Schwarzeneggered out by kevlar body armour.

  “Werewolf cho, man. Everybody loves el hombre lobo. Specially when he wrestle with El Santo. Those were great chos, man. Scotchman, you get yours when the moon is full and bright?”

  Scotchman’s eyes swivelled to one side and back again. Reflection cut in half by shadow, his eyes shone in the dark upper half of his face. He looked like Batman.

  Or Zorro.

  His hair was gathered at the back of his head into a Steven Seagal ponytail which seemed to pull his face flat into lizard-like impassivity. The officer worked at being scary. He had the kind of hardness and smarts they called “onstreet” this year.

  This was the second night of Stuart’s three-week ridealong with García and Scotchman. The LAPD had good relations with New Frontier; Ray Calme, the so-called studio head, had been able to arrange this tour of duty with no hassle.

  There was the usual jaw-drop when the Brit writer turned out to be black, but it passed. Most cops he’d met so far were black, latino or Asian. The city had just appointed its first Japanese-American Police Chief, Yasujiro Ryu. Whites, actual anglo Angelinos, were a minority, barricaded in secure enclaves, hiding behind “Armed Response” signs on their lawns.

  They passed through dark streets. Stuart had the impression of people scurrying away from the cruiser’s path. Every building was tattooed, each block with its own style of graffiti. The overlapping scrawls were an endless layering of tag upon tag. Some called it art, but the coloured chaos looked to him like a canvas signed so many times there was no room for a painting.

  He was supposed to pick up background for the Shadowstalk script. The book (Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture) was set in a North London council estate, but the movie (the cho, García would say) was relocating to Anybarrio, USA. He was now learning what an American hellhole looked like from the inside. He’d have been happy enough to spend a long weekend with tapes of Boyz N the Hood, South Central and a couple of PBS social problem documentaries, then make it all up. It was more or less how he had done the novel.