Weird Tales #327

by Tanith Lee

  Findlay spoke up from the front rank.

  “Yep, I guess it did. Neck bruk and all. Or was it torn out?”

  The information committee was not flustered by this. They laughed a little sadly and shook their heads, commending Findlay on his imaginative powers — but of course, he had been a writer, had he not?

  “Still am,” said Findlay, visibly nettled. “Just don’t sell no more. That don’t stop me being what I am.”

  Of course it did not. But it did mean he had over-colored somewhat the distressing facts of Donald’s mishap. It was the shock of the fall which had brought on the fatal coronary. No, Donald had not been attacked by any savage animal.

  Later, Nancy serving more coffee in the lounge, was surrounded by ladies, mostly Coral. “A wild dog?”

  “Don’t you say I said so,” said Nancy. “But heck, there was some gnawing.”

  “Rats,” said Lionel. “Goddam place is in­fested. Jesus Christ, nine hundred dollars to pick your nose, and rats every place.”

  Ernestine, standing near the fringes of all this, sipped her coffee and thought how wild things would always come to an unattended body. There need be nothing sinister about it. She could remember when Jim and she went camping those times — and here there were the pine woods, naturally, where all kinds of small things lived, hungry and feral in their habits, and not respectful of old people called only by their first names —

  * * * *

  The shadows gathered early that evening.

  Actually, one shadow. This time it lay across the floor, along the rug.

  Ernestine looked up and saw, in the window, something which was not there even in the second she glimpsed it. So she went slowly over to the window, and looked out.

  Dusk lay on Gracious Pines, and tonight there would be moonlight. A new moon, delicate and glassy, had been hung on the navy sky.

  Below there were the usual things. Whatever had reached the window must have sprung away again, vanished into the bushes or around the side of the house.

  What was it?

  All she was certain of, she thought, was its color, a whitish grey, yet silvery too, nearly phosphorescent. The shadow though, on the rug, had been much more clear, as really it always had been when it showed itself, before, sometimes in segments, strewn about the bed and walls.

  The shadow was of a kind of man shape, but the hands were not hands, and the head was not the head of a man.

  There had been eyes too, Ernestine decided, not in the shadow but over there on the ledge by the window. These were also silvery, but darker, a kind of pewter shade. Jim had had an old watch like that, in pewter, and it was the color of the eyes which had looked in through the window, from the head which was not a man’s but a wolf’s.

  * * * *

  “What are you reading?” said Findlay.

  The library was Findlay’s domain, and this a challenge more than a courtesy. Most of the other residents drifted in and out, but Findlay would park himself there most days. Now here was Ernestine, reading in one of the easy chairs, a pile of books beside her. “An old story.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A werewolf,” said Ernestine.

  Findlay leered wolfishly. “You like that stuff, huh? How about these ones here?”

  “The same,” said Ernestine. Findlay clawed up and squinted at a couple of the volumes. He did not yet need glasses, which was a source of glee to him. Ernestine had been warned, sometimes he would steal the glasses belonging to others, in order to cause consternation, which, obviously, it always did.

  “Saki,” said Findlay. “Yep, he’s a weird ’un.” He moved away, then called back in a whispery voice across the room, “That what you think it is?”

  “Yes,” said Ernestine.

  “You’re pretty crazy for an old woman.”

  Ernestine shrugged.

  The furor over Donald had died down by now. His funeral had, for obscure family reasons, been held in Sacramento, so no one from Gracious Pines had gone.

  Ernestine finished the story, closed the book, turned to another one. Some she had already read, like the Saki tale, “Gabriel Ernest.” Saki’s werewolf was physically all wolf, or all boy when not wolf. Both the creature and the boy had a fearful glamorous pagan quality, sharpened by Saki’s cruel wit. Some of the other works were less well-written, but even so they provided lessons in werewolfery. In fact, Ernestine was not surprised to discover how much she already knew. The other versions of the beast included something which, once shape-changed from the human, still stayed partly manlike, the transformation most apparent in its coating of hair, wolfish feet and hands, and the large wolf-like head, often ruffed, set with burning eyes and rapacious fangs.

  “Grrrr,” growled Findlay behind her in the darkening afternoon. “Going to catch it then, with a grass rope?”

  “That is a unicorn,” said Ernestine with as­per­ity.

  “I guess it is. Hypnotize it with a diamond, then.”

  “I don’t have any diamonds.”

  “Coral, the human seal, has some.”

  “They belong to Coral.”

  “Aw, come on. You’re not gonna let a little thing like that —” Ernestine stood up and left the library to Findlay, who had written and sold fantasy and detective fiction, enough to make him quite rich. Or at least, rich enough for Gracious Pines.

  She did not want to discuss any of this with him, even though she had sensed she would be unwise to lie to him. And she had kept a firm attention on her glasses. (She suspected it would have been, forty years ago, the hooks of her brassiere.) Really, she just did believe her own eyes, and ears.

  * * * *

  Perhaps Donald had not been murdered and savaged — surely there would have been more fuss if he had, a combing of the woods, a police presence that asked questions of the inmates. But even so. Probably he had gone out for a stroll, residents did, although it was discouraged, naturally, at night. And then — had something frightened him? Frightened him so badly that he suffered a heart attack and was dead before he fell all down the steps? Ernestine met Nancy in a corridor. “Oh, Nancy, do you know, how is Louisa now?”

  “She’s doing great. That spell with her son is just what she needs. I heard there’s talk of her going to live over there. Seems they gotta spare house, something like that. These wealthy folks…when I gotta take the step, I guess it’ll be a state place for me. My son’s wife, she hates the sight of me. Take no notice now. I’m just rattled.”

  “I’m sorry. This sort of thing is upsetting.” Deliberately; switching track as if misunderstanding, she added, “Even if it was a heart attack.”

  “That. For my money, something scared the shit outa Donald. None of you saw the guy’s face. Oh sure, he was sick, but it was more than that. And this kinda stuff happened here before. When was it — about twelve, thirteen years back.”

  Through Ernestine’s mind, irresistible, the flashing of a kingfisher’s turquoise wing: not thirteen, but fifty years ago, When I was young, and Jim and I — It was not death you minded, it was loss. Each loss worse, heavier to bear, when added to the others.

  “What happened, Nancy, thirteen years back?” Ernestine heard herself asking in a little voice, that Nancy would no doubt attribute to interested and ghoulish fright, but which came from her sudden grief.

  “Well, seems this house was owned private then, and the woods come right up to the lawns. Wolves, they reckoned. A man died. I forget how it was. And later someone else —” be­coming vague, Nancy shook her head, losing her authority as story-teller. “The way I heard it anyhow, they shot this thing, whatever it was. Shot it stone dead. Silver bullet, that was it. Only thing could stop it. But y’know, you don’t catch me out there now, any night without I got the door open behind me — and then no further than the terrace.”

  “Isn’t it just dangerous,” said Ernestine cautiously, “on nights of the full moon?”

  “Nah,” said Nancy. “It sure ain’t, here. That thing with Donal
d — wasn’t even a moon that I recall.” She looked straight at Ernestine. “This thing plainly ain’t normal. Not even for something that ain’t normal anyhow. It comes and goes as it wants. And I tell you, there’s been nothing like this until now, not since that stuff thirteen years back. Something’s stirred the critter up.” And this said, Nancy swept on. Leaving Ern­es­tine to stand there and think, with a strange inappropriate modesty, Am I the one who’s done that?

  * * * *

  She lay in the bed, under the satin comforter, and she murmured to the night, to the gleam of the glassy moon beneath her blind, “Why do you want me? Is it me that you want? Do you want to tear me apart and gobble me up? Surely you can see, I’m Granny, not Little Red Riding-Hood? Not very toothsome any more, I’m afraid. Or — am I just a crazy old woman, like the writer said?”

  Through the water of the night, something — something — glimmering over the wall…not a shadow now, unless the palest shadow made of darkest light.

  And then, for one split second, a face looked down at her.

  She lay, gazing back up at it, even after it had vanished.

  Silver-grey in silver, not quite substantial — for through the pewter eyes that were now like blue moon-rays on leaden crystal — she saw the shapes of things, the armoire, the bureau — Of course, it was not solid, how else did it come and go straight through the closed pane of the window, posing as a shadow itself, even by day?

  All over it, the thick electric smoulder of hair, over its face, its head, the great whitish mane that circled its neck, almost amusingly copying the stiffly-starched and lacy ruff of an Elizabethan gentleman. But for its pelt, it was naked. And she could see that it was, as she was, old. It was old, and there, where its heart must be, something like — the flicker of a winter star — the bullet which had killed it?

  * * * *

  “Now, Ernestine, just what was it that you wanted?”

  “I think I may have left my eye-glass case out on the terrace.

  “Or Findlay did. Are your glasses in it?”

  “No. I have them here.”

  “Well, the case won’t come to much harm. Fetch it in the morning maybe.”

  “I’d rather fetch it now. I don’t want to damage them.”

  “Then I’ll go get it for you —”

  “I don’t want to put you to the trouble.”

  “No trouble. I have the key right here.”

  It was Ernestine rattling on the door which had alerted the keepers. (Ernestine felt, as soon as she found the doors to the terrace and the grounds had been nocturnally locked, that this was now less school than jail.)

  She watched as the woman undid the glass door, closed it again from outside, and soon located the ‘lost’ article, which Ernestine had carefully left on the pavement by a pot of feverish flowers.

  “Here it is, Ernestine.”

  “Thank you.”

  Why had she wanted to go out anyway? What was wrong with her? Had she planned to take a tumble down the steps and end up like poor old Donald? Or to meet the werewolf in the woods?

  Yes, that was it. After all, it came inside the house to call on her, and had done her no harm. Lulling and luring her? Oh really, what had she planned? Wandering away from the ­terraces and closely cropped lawns, the roses and syringa organized in beds, and tidy urns of camellias or French geraniums. Out to the woods. To wildness and lawlessness. To the boundary of grim reality and the fancifully imagined.

  For none of this could possibly be true. Either she was, despite her clean medical profile, going mad, or hallucinating perhaps in the onset of some unpleasant disease — or else she was merely fooling herself, letting daydreams and night fantasies become too real.

  She had been like that when she was a girl. Even about love. All the boys she had refused to even date, gently but firmly. “Ernestine is waiting for the Prince,” friends mocked her. “Young women don’t do that any more.” No, she thought, like now they live alone, or they end up with a Not-the-Prince, some man who is mean and jealous or downright evil, who ignores them, uses them, grows bored with and cheats on them, hates and beats up on them. When she was twenty-six, still daydreaming, Ernestine’s Prince had arrived for her one blue morning, on a horse even, riding up through town towards the mountains. Jim.

  Ernestine never would settle for second best. Never. And in the end, she had found the Best. But now she had settled for — the worst. She had let herself come here — not because her daughter Lois was a simpleton and Lois’s husband Greg was a bully — but because Ernestine herself had been too chicken to stay and command her own life, in that house which had been theirs, hers and Jim’s. Just because there was a storm and a bit of roof went and she needed two little stitches in her leg. Lord’s sakes, she deserved Gracious Pines.

  Unless…there truly was a werewolf. Since to face that, to meet with that, would take less courage than to go on with all of this.

  * * * *

  Deep among the pine trees, it was possible to lose sight of the house, and so pretend it did not exist. You needed to be vigilant, however, to successfully keep this up.

  Ernestine walked slowly, the late westering sun sending copper tines between the straight boles of the trees. There was little undergrowth, only the powdery debris of shed needles, occasional stones and small pieces of bark. Sometimes a squirrel would fly by overhead from sunny bough to shadow bough, or a rustling around the claws of the trees indicate the passage of a mouse.

  There were no tracks of a wolf, no hints of one. But Ernestine had not thought there would be. Not even of a wolf which was also a man. And what she was looking for was perhaps more ­elusive even than that — his grave. She had come out this morning, before breakfast, to the startle­ment of two of the patrol-men, who were standing under the lowest terrace, smoking and talking about girls, and who looked bemused when they saw her.

  “Morning, Ma’am. Where are you off to? It isn’t even six yet.”

  “I like to be about early,” she had said, winsome and guileless, cursing them, wondering if they would try to return her indoors. But no, they were quite young and wrapped up in their own affairs, like everybody else.

  “You take care now,” they said, and promptly forgot her, as she ambled apparently docilely off around the garden’s edge, now and then sniffing flowers. The sun was up. They probably thought, if they considered anything peculiar went on at all, that it was a night business, and after sunrise everything was safe.

  She had wondered too, slipping off, once out of their sight, into the pines, why the werewolf had no interest in these men, for they, or others of their kind, supposedly patrolled the grounds regularly through the night. Perhaps they just never did, or only those areas nearest the house. But then, Donald had been very near the house . . .

  So you don’t intentionally kill? she thought. No? Well presumably, you can’t, not now. How can you? You’re not what you were, not flesh and blood any more. Now you’re the ghost of a werewolf. Your only violent power is fear.

  What would the patrol-men do if they met this being? Not believe their eyes, or else take it for an intruder in a fur-coat and Halloween mask. If they fired at it — the bullets would hardly do any harm. Not under the circumstances nor ever. They were not silver.

  * * * *

  She went back dutifully, (cautiously) for break­fast and for lunch. And she would have to go back again soon, for the too-early six-thirty dinner, after which they would lock the doors.

  The sun was going now anyway. Did she really want to be out here after dark? She was alone now. No Jim to reassure her about the glowing eyes beyond the camp fire. No Jim to reassure her about anything.

  Besides, she had about completed her circuit of these woods, and found nothing. Really it was crazy to think she could find anything. If it were true, they would hardly have marked the spot: Hic jacet Werewolf — which we recently shot; do not disturb.

  Then, between one pine trunk and another, she found the grave.

 
The light, fluctuating, fading, had made her strain her eyes to see, and so she did see. A glint of grey stone under scattered soil. Some animal had been digging there, she thought.

  Ernestine knelt stiffly. She brushed some of the dirt away, and saw a piece of the stone, artificially smoothed, placed flat, and with a little shape cut into it. The shape was a cross.

  That was all.

  She stared, then drifted the soil back over.

  Poor thing, she thought.

  * * * *

  “Hi, Ernestine,” said Greg the Gruesome. “How you doing? Sure is a swell place, this. You don’t know your luck. I wouldn’t mind all this, put my feet up, waited on by comely slaves.” Lois scowled. “That woman is much too big, Greg.”

  “Nah, just right. I like the fat ones, baby. Y’know I do.”

  Lois, thin and withering before her time, childless but for one truly awful son of nineteen, a more scholarly, know-all replica of Greg (Gruesome Junior?) turned her eyes from Nancy, who had served the tea. As if by ignoring it all, it would go away. Which, of course, it never had.

  Greg himself was quite big, not fat exactly, but large. Baseball had been his game when younger, and even now, over-weight, overbearing and in his forties, he still had the confidence of a golden, well-built youth. That was no doubt how he saw himself — a young man, only slightly his son’s elder, but with distinguished grey in his thick wiry hair that, Ernestine regretted, he would probably never lose. Lois had been reduced, you could clearly see, to the rôle of mother to both of them, a skinny nag who must be loftily tolerated because she did the chores, or saw that others did them, and nervily tried to put the comforts of her ungrateful menfolk first.

  Where on earth had she learnt that? Ernes­tine guiltily suspected it had come from Lois’s growing up in the shadow of a happy, a perfect relationship, which had also not really needed her. Had she and Jim shut Lois out, despite their best efforts not to? Or was it only Lois who had been looking for a Prince, and incredibly thought (temporarily blinded by Greg’s youth and baseball honors) that Greg was he?

  “Well, Ernestine,” yodelled Greg, “this is real nice.”