by Eric Ellert
"In the woods? Why don't you make water?" Faudron tossed the recyclables out the window. "Hippies."
"Why are you in such a bad mood?"
"You were right."
"That's good, about what?" Moren asked.
"Experiments," Faudron said. "That lama's no good. It came to the window when you went upstairs, called me an ugly &(&(&, told me not to leave the house after dark and peed on the lawn everywhere. And why's that song playing?"
Moren was too busy laughing to answer at first. "Mrs. Rochambeau must be at the gin. I'll go check."
"I can't sleep."
"It's this place. Same reason the phones don't work."
"Really?"
"Aha. Electro-magnetic interference."
"You don't even know what that means."
"Can I have those eggs?" Moren asked.
"Sure. She isn't like the other neighbors?"
"No, she is the neighbor," Moren said. "No one else left up this way."
"Something you're not telling me about her?" Faudron asked.
"Yeah, you're not mom, shut up."
"What you said last night. About Rau?"
"I read his diary," Moren said.
"How?"
"It's in his basement. Not like a girl's diary, more like a log, like he had to do it."
"Who is he?" Faudron asked.
"I think it means he's on duty," Moren said.
"What kind of duty?"
"You know, a five year mission to meet the putzes with telescopes. Ask him. He just left with the horse."
"No. How you know that?"
"The (&(&(* lama told me. It does have a foul mouth but not with me; it likes me. It was talking about you when it cursed. Don't look at me like that. It comes to the window and we gossip."
Faudron wanted to check next door. She'd been putting off the lama talk. Maybe if she pulled its tail, it would write everything down for her. "Promise to stay put and lock the door."
"I'll be next door."
"Come right back," Faudron said.
"Yup."
Moren was lying, maybe not. When Faudron got to the door, she knew that Moren was lying but she couldn't be in two places at once.
"You like him don't you?" Moren asked.
"Sure."
"If you marry him, move to Oregon. It's better for the kids. Mr. Spock said so."
"Dr. Spock."
"No, mom hated him. But the good Mr. Spock knows his stuff."
"I hate you," Faudron said.
Faudron went to the mouse tank and stuck her hand in. The mouse crawled up and down her arm.
"Mice have germs," Moren said.
She stared at Moren, but didn't like the look on her face and stared at her feet. Something sat under the table. "Hey, look at the telescope under the table. Rau must have been here."
Moren pulled the camera-like eyepiece from the telescope. "He's got all kinds of gadgets like this."
Faudron waited for an explanation but Moren shut up; she was just trying to be like that.
"Doesn't he mind you taking his things and where'd you get that shirt? His?"
Moren tossed the eyepiece over.
Faudron stared into it and saw Rau staring back. She backed into the table and knocked the loose leg down. "Get that will you?" She shook the eyepiece again and saw Rau standing on a porch overlooking a city in a valley, all tall buildings and bluish light. She shook it again. It showed the same porch. He wasn't there. The lights were out. In the distance, the burning skeletons of skyscrapers lit the sky and smoke wafted across her view. A moment later, she saw a clear sky, the stars, so distant but the distance was an illusion and the view grew closer and closer until it rested on the spot he'd come from, probably so full of people and now empty.
She closed her eyes, and pictured a wind howling through the empty streets of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Omaha and San Francisco. The others were rumors, but rumors she believed, if Rau's home was in such a ruined state.
"Isn't it weird how you can see stars whatever you point it at?" Moren asked.
If she hadn't seen it, Faudron wasn't in the mood to share. She felt like she did when looking at a traffic accident. "That's all you saw?"
"Yeah." A second later, her expression grew wary and she took a few steps closer. "What did you see?"
Faudron put it in her pocket and grabbed Moren's windbreaker. "No, it's nothing, kiddo."
"Sure, I guess you can have that." Moren smiled. "I've borrowed enough of your clothes."
"If I go find him, will you promise to stay here?"
"Sure."
"And lock the door?"
"Locked."
"And don't answer the phone?"
"Sure," Moren said.
"And close the window."
Faudron looked when the bushes outside the window moved. She crossed the room to shut the window, swearing she'd ask the Lawn Doctor guy to cut all the bushes down. When she put a hand on the window, the lama stuck its head in and spit.
"I don't think it likes you," Moren said as she went upstairs. "And I'm, not cleaning that up."
"And no more borrowing his stuff."
"What, sure," Moren shouted from, upstairs, then La Vie En Rose started again and Mrs. Rochambeau ran the vacuum cleaner out her window, somehow backward because all the dust from inside it flew into their window.
Faudron coughed, looked at the lama and over-pronounced her words as she spoke. "Find Rau. Can we find Rau?"
"I'm not deaf and I'm not dimwitted," it said.
"Perfect."
"Apologize," it said.
"No?"
For a moment, it stood like a stupid cow chewing its cud as it made up its mind about something. "Oh, come outside and get on. He's looking for your mother on the island. And he's looking for his brother."
"Why?"
Chapter 13
"Kau will kill him," Mrs. Rochambeau said to Moren. "He will kill his own brother and be damned." She smiled as the last word curled off her lips, as if she liked the taste of it.
Mrs. Rochambeau was so spooky, Moren wondered if she talked to other people like that. Moren had sort of lied to Faudron; next door wasn't actually out. The lawns did sort of connect and though Moren had brought over a microwave meal, it was cooking in a way.
"Rau was born to kill his brother," Mrs. Rochambeau said.
Moren couldn't follow her exactly. Mrs. Rochambeau had rambled on from the moment Moren had stepped in the door and none of it had made any sense at all, but it felt true.
"You don't follow me, do you? I'll start at the beginning."
"You mind?" Moren asked as she put her cellphone on the table between them.
The footage played in fast forward over the screen, searching for her mother's picture as it recorded Mrs. C's screens.
"What does that do, child?"
"It takes silly pictures."
Mrs. Rochambeau stared at it, then tapped it the way a kitten taps at yarn. When she was done, she wiped her fingers on her skirt. "I'll make it brief. I'm the only one who knows everything."
"Why everything?"
"Cause I'm the mother wolf, queen of wolves. It's nice Laura has a daughter who loves her so much. Not like that other one over there?"
She'd said queen of wolves so matter-of-factly, Moren wasn't afraid, but couldn't think of anything to say. Retired werewolves? Now that she thought of it, she supposed they might. "How would you know that?"
"I listen and listen and listen and listen." She leaned forward and took Moren by the hand. "I was minding my business back in France just before the Revolution, sitting in my fine house, entertaining my friends. I was very lovely then and the clothing we wore...but I wasn't truly minding my business then; I was a werewolf."
Moren noticed she'd stopped breathing and as if to make up for it, her heart tapped against her chest, trying to move from the right side to the left. The word werewolf, spoken with that accent, conjured up images of smoky graveyards, that grew larger as she
ran towards the gate. It was a dream of her's, and worse, Mrs. Rochambeau somehow knew, as if she'd read so many people she could trip them up and frighten them with the tells in their faces. French Revolution. That long ago? She couldn't believe it, but as she took a quick look around the room, she could. Mrs. R. didn't just have antiques, she had antiques arranged in an antique manner, like in a museum.
"It doesn't matter how it happened. There were a few of them. The local people had killed the rest but the king of wolves told me what he was before he died; he told me what he had turned me into, and he told me that others like us would find me."
"But they didn't speak the other night."
"They're diluted things. We walked upright. We were the men of wolves, neither, either and both. But as the world grew more crowded there was less and less room for us and our doings. If you owned land as I did, you could make someone disappear and no one would point a finger at you. There was the odor of revolution in the air and people wanted blood, and believe me, we could not truthfully hold it against them, liking the blood spilling so very much ourselves. Then one day that man came to my door. He never gave his name, but he was one of those people like Rau, one of them from the Back Beyond." She leaned forward. "The Back Beyond outside the fence, you see. He said he'd move me to a safe place and he did. I didn't exactly say yes, but I didn't exactly say no. I expected some type of title transfer, I thought I'd have time to get my daylight affairs in order, but I just went to bed in the woods one night. You see, sometimes the nighttime affairs, as we called them could tap a person's energy and you might not make it all the way home. And I woke up with a different season under a different tree. And that land wasn't an island then but there, there right there was a house just like mine, just like it in every way but having me in it." She stood and tried to cross the room, got caught up in the bicycle cable around her leg, then smiled as if she was very silly for doing so. "Empty but for my children. There was a difference in the houses. But you can imagine, even a werewolf mother realizes there's a problem in her household. It most likely was for the best, still. But them Nords, they asked a lot of questions and at night I roamed the woods about there. There was no point to hiding. There were so few people on my mountain. None, really but wandering types. Days were fine. In those days, I couldn't resist the hunt. Don't worry, can't now but then the silver miners came, so I had to hide and when they were gone. It took a number of years for them to get most of the silver out of the ground. I took to sleeping deep in the mines, way down deep. Something about the silver made me hurt but something about it kept me from changing in the evenings and I came up to hunt a deer that wandered on my island and I thought of it as such, from time to time as the reservoir came. Who was the wiser or hurt but that deer? And, and I'm not proud of this, the occasional flower picker. They did come to the island, now and again. Though, fewer left than arrived I would attest if asked."
She stood and mimicked the hunt and the kill, her hand like a front paw, swiping the air low, as if to trip a fleeing animal, then she moved forward and mimicked the bite, then looked rather proudly at Moren as if to say it took only one.
Moren felt ill but kept her face still and a moment later Mrs. Rochambeau was back in the present.
"But the people from the government came and by then the mine was filling with water. They brought all sorts of equipment and then they built that big radar station and one day they shot one of the Nordic ships out of the sky but it worked out well for everyone. Everyone got a little bit of what they wanted. The Nords wanted to be able to stay here but NASA people wanted to travel far in space but their bodies would not let them, so they tried to make one like the other and it worked out well for everyone involved, as I often say, until I bit one of hem. That was Rau's brother."
"So you started this?"
"He was an evil, evil man. Rau's brother, Kau. Experimenting on people, making them scream and plead for mercy down in those deep, dark mines. Don't you judge me."
"I don't know what I was thinking. Please, go on."
"And the others did not like that at all. They figured it out and they were looking for me. So I did the best thing I could think of. I walked out there, outside the fence and I took a bus back in and asked the real estate agent in town, real nice-like, that I'd like to buy this house, with silver I might add, good silver. I had acquired quite a bit here and there and I hid right here until they stopped looking for me. You see, Moren, you have to."
She understood, fangs and blood ripping out tendons, then Gin soaking and baking pies for Moren.
The telephone beeped when it found footage of mom from two weeks ago when she said she was leaving.
On the screen, she got on the barge and disappeared into the fog. Mrs. Rochambeau was going on about something or other as if she'd figured out the meaning of life then stared at Moren's eyes strangley as she noticed the barge footage that played over and over on the flashing red and blue screen of the cell phone.
"Nasty infernal machine, the world does not need another machine, not one. I have seen that before, child."
The reservoir terrified Moren; she'd always feared there were nasty things beneath it. She made it to the door. "I have to."
"I know."
Chapter 14
There were no houses on the other side of the road and the lama took paths too prone to rock fall. The creature, as Faudron called the miserable lama by now, didn't step like a horse, but bounced like a goat. Faudron was sure the last bush they had tumbled through had been poison ivy and it had known. She closed her eyes, saying, "Don't touch your face, Faudron," over and over. She'd done that once with poison sumac, giving her blisters inside her throat that laid her up in bed for weeks and she realized how it had been for mom, since Faudron now had Moren to take care of. There were no days off, no time for risk. "Say something."
The lama turned its head to spit.
"I'll pull your ears," Faudron said. The worst thing about this creature was that the hair on its head looked just like a bob cut, and its face was cartoon cute, like a Disney girl character. You might be foolish-enough to like it but inside it had the personality of a goat and everyone hated goats. That's why people had started eating them in ancient times and feared their image ever since. "Say something."
"I speak to convey necessary information, you (*&(*&(*&."
"But how do you speak? And spit?" Faudron hated herself for even thinking it, but she wondered if the circus would buy it or TMZ, but she wasn't sure if they'd pay. There had to be a catch, some magic hat made of snow it had to wear in order to come alive that would melt when they got to Los Angeles, leaving only the spitting and the eel pies. She wondered where she would get them. She had a strange feeling she'd be taking care of it when Rau didn't make it home one evening.
It stopped short. The narrow path was surrounded on either side by iron slag from what Moren had said had been old iron pits going back to the 1840s. Below them, Lake End Road held boarded-up houses. There were, however a few that must still be occupied. Little things gave them away, laundry on the line, full garbage cans by the side of the house, a flickering television light peaking through a badly measured plywood window covering. Did they fear the night or the day? She was about to tell the lama to take her to one when it leapt in the air, spun and landed then ran.
Faudron put her arms around its neck as it climbed over a slag wall, kicking large stones down the hill and spilling them onto the roadway below them.
They came to a craggy path cut like a v into the mountainside, so narrow Faudron could touch both sides. She did as first one of her shoulders then the other scratched against the sides as the lama swayed.
"There," the lama said as it stopped short.
Faudron fell against its neck, tried to hold on then slipped around and under it like a loose saddle. She let go, fell to the ground and crab-crawled away from the lama's front hooves.
She got up and looked around. Before her stood markers in rows of four packed together in co
lumns thirty-yards-long. Old flowers, mementos and photos hung from the rocks above them.
"There's your sister's playmates. Or would have been, some of them, if they had lived past the first wilding hour. Some, they say, were eaten in their cribs when the werewolf at home did not go out in the evening. But who's to say?"
Faudron felt cold, as if some unpleasant ghost had stepped through her. Mud took the place of grass around the tombstones where water must spill during a rain. "How'd this place get so rotten?"
Even the moss on the stones looked like something that grew at the bottom of a urinal. Old pit mines surrounded the other end of the cemetery, where the hill flattened out again, none much more than ten feet across. Just beneath their still waters, mossy, flowery-looking growths grew. Faudron couldn't place them, even to phylum or species. It was as if bacteria were tying to form a flower but they looked just like the things that grew atop a coral reef.
"No one comes here but me," the lama said.
"I don't believe that." But she didn't want an answer. The answer might taint her parents. If her parents had walked the woods enough for mom to get a dear tick up her leg, they had enough time to come here. No, she mustn't think like that.
"Don't tell Rau," the lama said. "He thinks that by killing the king of wolves on the island, them in the town will be free of their curse." It paused, looking as dumb as a cow until Faudron swatted it.
It bit so Faudron pulled its tail.
"They want to be like the werewolves on the island. If they know what Rau actually does in the evenings, they'll murder him."
"He's too strong, too smart."
"Chlorine gas from a truck might do it. I can think of other ways. Would you like to hear them."
"And what are you?"
Without an answer, it charged back down the hill. Faudron ran after it, knocking rocks down and soaking her legs as she stumbled through bushes.
***
It waited for her when she called and she climbed on its back.
When they came upon Rau, the lama planted its front hooves into the soil and dropped Faudron over its head.