Our campfire was the only light in the dark land when I finally finished the tale. In that impenetrable black beyond its glow, I took him to the Carpathians with Mina. It seemed that Texas faded away, and we were both of us with those devil women, circling in the outer dark like hooded scavengers passing seductively behind the veil of night. I did not dare to look Coleman in the eyes until I finished, and instead stared into the fire, replaying the events like flickering magic lantern pictures in the undulating flames.
When I did look up, it was to describe the penultimate hour of Quincey P. Morris’ life. Coleman’s expression was bereft of all emotion. When it was done, I did not know if we he would lunge across the fire for me and call me liar, or what.
We listened to the popping of the kindling and I chewed a bit of thick jerky while he unrolled his pallet and lay upon the ground, turning his back to the fire and me and laying his head on his saddle without a word.
As I finally lay myself down, he said, “It’s a good thing you waited this long to tell me, Professor. I never would’ve believed you before now.”
* * *
From the Journal of Abraham Van Helsing
September 3rd
After a murky day’s travel under a gloomy, overcast sky, we took shelter in an abandoned sod house, some monument left by a long gone pioneer. Coleman says her trail is a day old. We are losing her.
As we bedded down, we lit a fire in an old iron stove and I read through Callisto’s diary. Sifting through her more mundane entries and leafing through the most personal expressions of her life, I was able to piece together her history.
She had been born to a family of wealthy Arcadian vineyard owners and had been educated abroad. On the commencement of her nineteenth birthday she made mention of a ‘Change,’ the nature of which need not be related to surmise, I am sure. However, for posterity’s sake, I shall elucidate. This change did not come as a surprise to her.
She writes:
‘Tonight the Change came upon me. It was a horrid experience. I was sitting in my room reading Blake’s Infant Sorrow:
‘My mother groan’d! My father wept,
Into this dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud’
when of a sudden there came a great heat upon me, though it was late in January and I swaddled for warmth beneath a heavy down blanket. My cheeks flushed and my dress was soaked almost instantly with perspiration. The fabric clung to me and I knew only that I had to get it off. I removed it with such vigor that I tore the garment to pieces. I threw the sopping remains away and happened to glance into the standing mirror in the corner. The hairs on my body were all erect and darkening. It was as though the shadows of the room were conquering my meager lamplight and claiming my flesh. What hair I had already spread up and down my body. My eyebrows, my scalp, the hairs of my nether regions, all of these seemed to pour and flow like oil across my skin. Soon, though I was naked, a man might have come into my room then and seen nothing. Even my breasts became dark woolen hills of black grass, and my limbs were coated in a shaggy suit of the same.
Then the pains began. The calves of my legs tightened as though cramped, and the agony flared so intense that I could no longer support myself. I fell to the floor and cradled them with my trembling hands. Under my fingers, I could feel my limbs shifting—elongating. I could hear the bones groaning. My feet tapered and stretched. Then something like a crossbow bolt seemed to erupt from behind the bridge of my nose, and I felt my face shifting, heard the popping of bones, and tasted blood in my mouth as my sharp teeth pricked my tongue. On my hands and knees I tried to scream for help, but my voice was distorted, like the strident, broken cry of some tortured thing. It frightened me into silence, and it was in silence that I bore the remainder of the Change.’
She goes on to write as though she had been well prepared for the event, as some daughters are made ready by their mothers for the inevitable transition into womanhood.
‘Mother told me how the Change might come when I was particularly upset, especially during the nights of the full moon each month. She warned me at such times not to give free reign to every swing of my emotions, no matter how volatile. She told me further that I must not be afraid. That in time it would not come unless I called it. Until then, during the nights of the moon, I must lock myself in the windowless chamber, and leave off my clothes. Else, she tells me, I will ruin all my own and then have only Athene’s second hand garments for myself...’ —Diary of Terovolas
Apparently certain members of her family had been stricken (though she does not refer to her condition as negative in any aspect following the above-quoted passages) with lycanthropy since time immemorial. By the account of her family legendry, each generation bore forth a werewolf to atone for some great sin committed by the founders of their dynasty (the ‘sin’ against Zeus by King Lykos and his sons, perhaps?) The individual was traditionally protected, even to some extent revered, by the family as the bearer of sins, or the penitent. Like the traditional scapegoat of the Jews, which is driven into the wilderness. His or her health and prosperity ensured the survival of the next generation. Although, in one of its rages the werewolf might snatch babes from their cradles or bring down huntsmen in the forest, always the hunts of the authorities were deflected or sabotaged outright by the rest of the family...
‘Last night I had a nightmare about chasing down old Antony, the drunkard who lives down at the base of the hill. I was naked and chasing him through the forest, and he seemed very much frightened. It was thrilling. I awoke this morning, very tired, and Mother came to me and told me Antony had been found dead in the woods. Then she held me close and told me not to worry. I did not ask why.’ —Diary of Terovolas
Yet, by Callisto’s account, the Terovolas family was never burdened with the protection of their werewolf for long. In the previous generation, Callisto’s own father Euandros had been the last penitent. He had disappeared in the mountain wilderness before she was three years of age. It seems the werewolf is not a human being afflicted with the spirit of a wolf, but a wolf’s spirit born (and imprisoned) within the body of a human being. As the years progress, and the transformation (at first a painful and slow going affair, it eventually becomes easier and faster) is undertaken for more extended periods of time and at more frequent intervals, the individual becomes more acclimated to life as a wolf.
As the basis for this, I cite:
‘The Change came so easy to me tonight! It was like nothing at all...’
And:
‘I am beginning to feel ill at ease among my friends and neighbors, and even the grand old house begins to seem to me like a great breadbox in which I am shut up. At nights sometimes I awake in bed and am terrified to see the ceiling above me. The sheets of my bed seem to tangle like a net about me, and I kick them to the floor. “Where are the stars and where is the breeze?” I think at such times, before I remember that I am human.’ —Diary of Terovolas
After that, the roles of clan and penitent are reversed, and it becomes the werewolf’s burden to remain in the bosom of family.
‘Why should I remain here? What purpose can I serve, except to endanger them with my nightly rovings? In the forest I can be who I truly am, and am not forced into a role which I cannot fulfill...that of a daughter, or a wife, or a lady in some spinning circle. Yesterday the ladies from the village came and I sat beside mother at the loom. The order of the patterns of the yarn and cloth seem like a maddening snare woven by the insidious shuttle. My soul is caught within it, thrashing like a fly in a web. Twice the other women spoke to me and Mother had to prod me to recognize them. I keep staring out the window, at the forest clustered beyond the edge of the vineyard...’ —Diary of Terovolas
The mores of the human family begin to seem unnatural to the werewolf, and his or her company becomes something of a nuisance to the family...
‘Today I was censured by Mother and Grandmother at dinner.
Roasted lamb was served, and, forgetting myself, I clambered upon the table and began tearing into the meat with my teeth and hands. When Uncle Nikolas tried to pull me away, I bit his hand. I was quite unaware of what I was doing or indeed who I was...wolf or woman.’ —Diary Of Terovolas
By the time of parting with her human family, she seems to have quite lost any pretense towards familial affection.
‘Mother wept openly and the sound of it grated upon me. The eyes of Athene were glistening, and Uncle Nikolas told me they would all of them never forget me. It is not as though I am dying. I am only going to live in the forest as I feel that I should, as father did. It is only over the next rise, though I may go further back up into the mountains. I have promised to write them but I doubt I shall have much time for even this journal.’ —Diary of Terovolas
It seems at this point, that she did not, for that entry is dated April the fifteenth, 1894, and the entries do not resume until May the eighteenth 1896.
Then the writing is stilted and full of imperfections, as though Callisto had been quite out of practice, or as though her human reason had deteriorated due to neglect.
‘I am going home,’ is all she writes, and ‘I am’ are the only words spelled correctly.
For the next year the entries are much in the same vein and it is difficult to glean any useful information from them. Why she returned to her family home from the wilderness is not known. But what she found when she returned was that poverty had struck along with sickness, and a great many of her family had died, along with her mother. While I do not know if Callisto was bereaved at this news, as her writing is vague and concerned only with the fact of the matter, she did not remain in Arcadia, but traveled for a time in greater Europe.
By the pattern of her travels, it seemed as though she were looking for something or perhaps someone. Always she shied from the established cities. She seemed to be gravitating toward towns on the edge of great wilderness. Freiburg, near the Black Forest. Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. Even Sighisoara at the foothills of the Carpathians (whose geography I am all too familiar with).
‘I have gone searching in this world,’ she writes in her old way, as though her months of exposure to humanity had helped to return her to her former lucidity, ‘and have found nothing but black smoke and buildings. I am going to my true home.’
Wherever her travels took her, she eventually crossed the path of Sigmund Skoll, and struck perhaps by some preternatural instinct, he tracked her to her home forest. She writes of their first meeting:
‘I did not know this man — only that he was a man and he was in my forest. He was dressed strangely, all in animal skins. By their lingering musk, I knew them to be wolf pelts, and thought that he must be a hunter. I Changed and came from the brushes, meaning to bring him down and taste his life over my tongue. I was hungry, there being nothing to eat but skinny hares for weeks. He did not run as so many others had. Instead he lowered himself to my level, so that I could see his lake-blue eyes, and he brought his yellow haired head beneath mine. Then it was that I realized that I had smelled him before. His had been the strange new scent I had found intermixed with my own markings on the trees and shrubs about my den. Who is this man, that he knows my true language? He was handsome enough, and despite the peculiarity of the situation, it was my time and so I allowed him. I had never known a man before, and he told me after, he had never known a wolf...’
Skoll had seen her briefly on a passenger steamer, and used his considerable resources to track her to her home forest in the Arcadian Wood. There he revealed to her the tenets of his ulfheonir beliefs, and though she secretly derided some of them, they developed a love for each other.
She agreed to join his pseudo-pagan society as a volva, a kind of sacred priestess. They lived together alone in Denmark for a period of a year, but the near discovery of their occult activities necessitated their flight from the country. Part of their rituals involved a kind of re-enactment of a Wild Hunt, and after several deaths in the vicinity of their cottage were capitalized by the disappearance of a constable out hunting, they made an expeditious emigration. Her reasoning of these slayings is the philosophy of a madman.
‘We slew no one that was young and useful, only the infirm and the unwanted. The constable was an old hermit with spotted hands and a failing liver. I know because I tasted it.’ —Diary Of Terovolas.
Callisto returned first to Arcadia while Skoll gathered up the rest of his cult and came here to America.
‘I will wait for him and his men to send word that I may rejoin him in the West.’ —Diary Of Terovolas.
They had come West for the abundance of open land, and Skoll had cultivated the persona of a foreign investor interested in cattle land in Austin, with the help of Vulmere. Then, when all was ready, Callisto was sent for. But their intent had not been solely to live in harmony and practice their religion away from prying eyes.
I found mention of what seems to be the ceremony that was enacted in Misstep Canyon, which Buckner Tyree heard or witnessed and at which Plenty Skins’ nephew Picker became a sacrifice. It was not a wedding (Callisto and Skoll had been wedded just prior to leaving Denmark, and she had there stepped through a wolf membrane — an ancient pagan ritual designed to foster the birth of werewolves), but a vision seeking ceremony.
‘According to their rites, they raised me upon a high seat of birchwood and girded me in cat skins. Then Sigmund’s men set out into the dark and returned after an hour bearing the carcass of every animal they could find. Among them was a red Indian boy. They butchered him along with the animals, and took their hearts and boiled them in a stew with some hellbroth that I was expected to drink. I did so, for Sigmund’s sake, but whatever agents were in it made me fall into some kind of swoon. I saw things which I don’t entirely understand or believe.’
Among the visions she saw was the death of Vulmere.
In my study of the diary I have learned little else of interest and nothing of real use in our hunt. She makes no mention of the vulnerabilities of the werewolf. It may be as simple as a bullet in her heart, or it may be wolfsbane or an iron cudgel. I do not know.
But there is a nagging doubt in my heart now. In reading her words, I have come to know her more. While I cannot entirely ignore her crimes, I cannot entirely condemn her. For it seems, I understand her. But this is nonsense. Had I stumbled upon some personal narrative of Dracula’s, would my heart have been softened too? Then what would have become of Miss Mina? She would have suffered the same fate as Miss Lucy. But then again, perhaps Quincey Morris would not have died.
William Blake has taken the place of Sabine Baring-Gould in my thoughts.
Thro’ the Heav’n & Earth & Hell
Thou shalt never, never quell;
I will fly & thou pursue,
Night & Morn, the flight renew.
Later…
Before dawn we were startled awake by the screaming of our horses. I had barely risen before Coleman was standing in the doorway firing his rifle out into the lightening darkness. I was at his side in moments, in time to see a dark low form go galloping over the prairie.
“She must have doubled back, circled us sometime last night and found us. She might’ve been leading us all over the damn country,” Coleman said.
Our horses had both been hamstringed and thrashed about on the ground, unable to stand. They were in great pain and there was no alternative but to put them down.
Our pursuit was at an end. As the second rifle shot echoed in the predawn stillness, I felt my emotions rise to a boil, and called out into the empty land.
“This is not ended! So long as we live, it cannot be! We will return with more men! You cannot wash the blood from your hands, no matter the distance you flee!”
Then I stood, feeling foolish.
But in a few moments there came an answer. Her voice was haggard, but a clarion in the quiet dim.
“Why? Abraham? Why? Have you and your companions not tormented me enough? Y
ou have slain my love and would put myself and my unborn children to the knife! They are all I have left! What sort of men are you?”
“You speak of injustice! How many have you killed and devoured? How many have you been a party to? Tyree, Searls, Picker, the Indian boy...to say nothing of your victims across the sea! I have read your diary, Callisto! I know everything!”
There was silence, and we thought she had gone. But then:
“You have read everything, have you? And yet you feel nothing! I was wrong, Abraham! You are a true man of science! No pity in your heart for one who must live between midnight and day — not a whit of understanding for one without a family or home among wolves or men! Come and take our lives, then, Abraham! But you will pay a dear cost! I will not so easily part with the only thing that is rightfully mine in this world!”
“And yet you have taken that very treasure from others without recourse!” I called back. “Who are you to decide the lives of men?”
“I am a hunter!” was her answer. “It is all I can be! The feeble old stag can understand this, and bears no ill will to the hunter. Why can’t man?”
“Because we are not animals!”
“And I am not human! But come if you will, Abraham! Come, and die!”
I called her name, but she would not answer.
Coleman grabbed hold of my arm.
“Don’t let her make you forget, Van Helsing.”
“Forget? Forget what?”
“Aurelius. Alvin. Early. Weir...”
I nodded.
“I won’t forget.”
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