by Foster, L.
Olivia’s eyes were darting rapidly back and forth between me and the entrance. She seemed to be contemplating whether she should stay and help me fight off the bear, or leave me and make a run for her own life. Finally she yelled, “Henry, come on! We have to leave now.”
“I’m not leaving,” I said firmly.
Ever since the night we met I had been looking for a chance to prove myself to her and her friends on the mainland, and here it was. I might have no family to speak of, I might be unemployed and living in a cave, but I had one redeeming quality: I could protect her. No one else on this island would ever dare go toe-to-toe with a Pacific western bear, but I was willing to risk it if it meant silencing the voices of my accusers forever.
“OOF!” One lunge forward and I immediately regretted my course of action. I threw myself at the bear’s body, wrapping my arms across her chest. I was supposed to have transformed in mid-stride, like I had always done before, but something had gone wrong. I was still me, still human. And I was rigidly locked in a bear’s embrace.
“It was supposed to work!” I yelled, as the bear raised a paw in anger. “It’s always worked!”
“Henry, what are you DOING?!” Olivia demanded. “You can’t fight this.” Her usual pretense of invulnerability had vanished. She was a desperate woman scared for her life.
The bear swiped down at me with its ragged black paw, sending chunks of blood and hair and sweat flying across the room.
I fell backwards, stunned and faint. This hadn’t even been a fight. The bear loomed over me, preparing for the final blow.
I shut my eyes tight, wondering what death was like, whether it hurt, whether I would see my parents and grandparents again. When she bore down on me, would I find them waiting for me? Would I ever wake up at all, or would I just wink out? And I suddenly felt immensely sad, realizing this was how my life ended: cowering on the floor of the cave where I lived, waiting to be devoured by a bear, in front of a woman I had been unable to protect, because I had stupidly been trying to prove my own worth by taking on a creature three times my size. Instead I had been humiliated in every possible way.
Instinctively I clinched my fists into a praying position. They fastened on the green stone, which I happened to be wearing around my neck. It was then I remembered the words that Olivia had translated a few minutes before, the ones that had seemed so significant at the time: “The owner of this stone poses no danger to others, so long as he keeps it in his possession.”
Growing up I had been forced to keep my emotions at bay because any outburst of intense passion stoked the risk of transformation. Once I had gotten in a schoolyard fight with a bully, a kid three times my size, who turned and ran in the other direction when I suddenly turned into a bear. He fled, and no one ever believed him.
Then, a few years later, I had hooked up with a girl. Things had gotten heated, and I was unhooking her bra when the metamorphosis took a place. She never returned my calls after that.
I had resigned myself to a life of having to force down my deepest feelings, a life of perpetual emotional privation, of never getting married, never having sex with a woman, never letting myself get lost in the throes of grief or anger or despair, a life with no sense of catharsis. It was the reason (though the rest of my extended family would never forgive me for doing it) why I had skipped out on my grandmother’s funeral. I had loved her, but I wasn’t going to interrupt the service by turning. Instead, I went home and sobbed and turned in private.
It was the reason I had tried to send Olivia away. Because of my condition, even if we dated there was no way our relationship could ever be fully consummated.
But in every fight I had ever had, I had transformed. So naturally, I had easily won every fight I had ever had until now. This time something was different. And I might never have known what it was, might have gone to my grave wondering what had gone wrong, if it hadn’t been for the inscription that Olivia had spent the last half-hour translating.
“Liv!” I gasped, pulling the stone from around my neck and flinging it, with my last ounce of strength, towards the entrance. It rolled along the ground with a disheartening series of clinks. “Take this.”
Numb and uncomprehending, Olivia ran forward and grabbed the stone, clutching it in both hands like a trinket she had just been awarded in someone’s will.
The last thing I was conscious of hearing before the transformation took effect was Liv shouting something from what sounded like a great distance. I was losing the ability to recognize language. She was saying the same words as before, but in my ursine brain they became muffled, incomprehensible, just another series of groans in the savage dark.
My arms broadened, becoming hairy and bulky. Hair covered my face, my legs, my back. My legs became stout as tree trunks. My newly sensitive nose was full of the most peculiar sensations. My brain, suddenly free of the burdens of intellect, became a repository of primal urges. I was no longer conscious of an I. There was a lumbering thing standing straight up in the recesses of the cave, and it was me. It was hungry. It wanted to hunt, and eat, and copulate, and fight. And right now, more than anything else, it wanted to kill.
I rose up on my hind legs. I stood face to face, paw to paw, with another bear. The only reality was the struggle, the struggle of flesh against flesh, of fur against fur, as both bears battled for supremacy, for turf, for possession of the pale woman who stood cowering in the cave’s entrance.
I thrashed at the she-bear with my left paw, landing a major blow on the back of her head. Fur, blood and fat went flying into the air.
Enraged, she swung one paw at me, then the other. I stumbled back, overwhelmed by the fury of this sudden assault. Seizing her advantage, she leapt on top of me, her snout aiming straight for my neck. The complexity of my feelings having been reduced to a pinch of their former selves, I felt only rage and fear and an all-conquering instinct for self-preservation.
I roared. With both paws I pushed her away, shoving her against the wall, which rattled slightly. Stalactites fell to left and right; one narrowly grazed my right paw and I yelled again, kicking it out of the way. The she-bear roared in return and for a moment the cave resounded with the sound of our yelling. Rocks fell. I could feel blood spurting from my neck and chest where I had been bitten by teeth and slashed at with claws. I felt dizzy, and dimly wondered which of us was more wounded. Blood gushed from the top of my skull, landing in drips and plops on the uneven ground.
Instinctively sensing that she was outmatched, the second bear sought a way of escape. I had pinned her to the wall. I could have killed her. But with the small part of me that was still human I sensed how unfair this would be—she wasn’t fighting an ordinary bear, but a man-bear with a cunning human intelligence. Even if she had had the upper hand at the beginning, her chances of victory had long evaporated. It was a core tenet of shifter philosophy that others of our kind, even if they lacked human intelligence, should never be killed except in extreme cases where we would die otherwise.
There had been a moment when killing her might have been the only way to save myself and Liv from a gruesome fate, but that moment had passed. I lunged for her neck as though preparing the death-blow, then at the last second let out the loudest of all roars. She looked at me, confused. With my right paw, I knocked her towards the entrance, Olivia scurrying out of the way. Perhaps realizing this was her one chance of escape, the bear fled through the cave-mouth into the rainy dusk.
And then, I was a man again.
Cursing loudly, Liv ran towards me. My bear-mind was still transitioning back into my man-mind and I swiped at her with one hand, regretting it the moment it happened. Undaunted, she continued forward and grabbed both my arms. Coming from someone who had spent much of the day looking for ways to kill me in self-defense, this came as a bit of a shock.
“Lie still!” she said. “I just want to see your cut! Lie still!”
It is a dangerous thing to advance on a man who has just shifted out of his bear f
orm, and I think she knew this, but it never seemed to trouble her. Such was her determination and strength in that moment that I found myself pinned to the floor of the cave while she knelt on top of me, brandishing the flaming torchwood at dangerously low levels, awareness and understanding alight on her face.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” she said, breathing deeply, “that you were a shifter?”
“I could be bleeding to death right now,” I said, “and that’s what you’re worried about?”
She pinched my arm hard, hard enough that I momentarily forgot the pain of my wound. “OWW!” I yelled indignantly, throwing her a scathing look.
Liv nodded sagely. “If you can feel that,” she said, “you’ll be fine.”
“How deep is the cut?”
“It’s actually not that bad. But you’re still going to need a few stitches.”
While she applied pressure to the wound with a sleeve from my torn shirt and we waited for the bleeding to subside, we discussed the tattoo that seemed to be exerting a greater and greater fascination on her. “All this time,” she said, half to herself. “It was you all along and I never guessed.”
“What’s up?”
“It was you, on the site.”
“And you were—let me guess—that snarky woman?”
“The one and only,” Liv replied.
“This explains so much.”
She blushed a deep shade of scarlet, the look of a woman who had spoken passionate words to a man she had never expected to meet. “Why did you never reply?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“I thought we were friends, I thought we might even be more than friends, and then you stopped talking to me completely. You have no idea how much that hurt me.”
“Liv, isn’t it obvious?” I said. “I wasn’t lying, I was going away in search of my grandfather.”
She looked at me, blinking back tears, as if willing herself to be convinced. But she had been holding onto her grudge for so long, it was hard to let go.
“Liv,” I said again, “I never bailed on you. I’ve been here the whole time.”
She nodded tearfully. For a moment the struggle was visible on her face, but slowly resignation and acceptance crept to the fore. Then her misgivings passed away in a joyful exhalation of release.
“And the stone,” I said, reaching for the emerald. Olivia picked it up off the cave floor and slid it into my right hand with a clink. “I have never in my life been able to express intense emotions. The stone changes that. As long as I’m wearing this, I’m free to do things I was never able to do before. I can be angry, I can feel grief, I can fight… I can make love?”
I said the last words in a question, unsure to what extent they were true and how much I would be risking by finding out. Still flush with the adrenaline of the fight, and heady with the intoxicating pull of her courage, I said quietly, “Look at me, Liv.” When she looked the other way, I said, “No, look me in the face.” This time she looked up at me. Her eyes were huge in the torchlight.
That was all I needed, that curious combination of vulnerability and courage combined with a desperate look of affection that she strove in vain to conceal. Like a chemical reaction, the effect was so heady that nothing except a determined act of will on both our parts could have stopped me. She nodded, still scared, but with a new glint of steely determination in her face. I pulled her in close and smothered her in fierce kisses and caresses, inhaling her scent which smelt strongly of honey and lavender. I wrapped my right arm, still smarting from the pinch, around her back, and placed my left arm (still aching from the bear’s blows and buffets) on her waist, as she began fumbling awkwardly for the button of her jeans and flinging shirt, socks and pants left and right across the cold cave floor.
Chapter 9—Olivia
I’ll pass lightly over all that transpired in the next few hours, except to say that the floor of the cave was exceptionally hard and I came to regret that neither of us had showered following our trip around the island that afternoon. I wondered how long it had been since Henry had had a proper shower: having been barred from using the facilities at most of the hotels in town, he had been forced to rely on streams of running water in order to stay clean. These, as I now know, are no substitute.
But I was willing to be gracious given his current living condition. He was clumsy in love, but no more so than any other man who had delayed his first sexual encounter until his mid-twenties (the age he was now, though he looked considerably older). Not since college had he been with a woman; he had never slept with anyone but me. Somehow this knowledge, through some inexplicable alchemy of love, endeared him to me further. I felt like an experienced Cleopatra tenderly instructing some naive youth in the arts of love, and was willing to forgive his ignorance of technique for the earnestness and sincerity of his lovemaking.
I don’t know how long we lay there together, after it was over. I might have spent several hours listening to the sound of his breathing, the beating of his heart, and the soft plink of a water droplet falling to the ground every 12 seconds. His chest rose and fell. When I knew for certain that he was asleep, I slipped my t-shirt back on and slipped out of the cave’s mouth into the bright moonlight.
I felt slightly sick to my stomach from the sheer number of emotions I had been forced to experience in the last day or so: fear, suspicion of a friend, the hollow ache of regret, the humiliation of thinking I was going to die, first at the hands of a man I had trusted, and then in a cave fighting a bear. The resolution of that last event had somewhat compensated for what came before, but now that the afterglow was fading I felt anxious about the future.
I had grown up knowing that just because I slept with a guy didn’t mean we were committed to a relationship. I could have a casual fling, and maybe that’s all this was. The fact that we were in a cave on an island searching for buried treasure certainly seemed to suggest as much. Yet I suspected that for Henry it had been more than that. Yielding myself to him had been a way of signaling that we were together, that from now on we would be inseparable, that only death would come between us. Never mind that I hadn’t necessarily meant to convey that. I still valued my freedom and independence, and sex is not a magically binding contract. I remained free to go where I pleased and to sleep with whomever I wished.
But he wouldn’t see it that way. And having seen what he was like when his anger was aroused, I was afraid to point out the discrepancy in our interpretations of that night’s events. My body was one thing—I had been loved by several men. My heart was another matter.
One thing was clear, though: we were going to have to talk about it sooner or later. I didn’t want Henry operating under some romantic illusion about our relationship. We had slept together; that was it. It didn’t mean anything, or at least (I thought with a sigh, as I turned to go back inside) that was what I told myself.
* * *
Henry was only beginning to stir as I made my way back inside. By the light of the fire I could see him rubbing his tired eyes and groggily fumbling for his clothes. Even with the fire blazing the night was uncharacteristically cool, and a chill wind reverberated through the cave like a dim echo of loneliness.
It was Henry who finally stirred and got us moving again. “Liv, we need to get going,” he said, as he nudged me aside and reached for his shirt in the dim light. “We should have moved hours ago.”
He nodded in the direction of the cave depths.
“But we don’t know what’s in there,” I said, the memory of the attack still fresh in my mind.
He threw me a look as if to say, you seriously think I can’t handle it?
So we walked. With Henry clutching the torchlight, we descended into the cave’s entrails. The darkness overwhelmed, but my fear slowly subsided as we encountered nothing but an endless tunnel forever moving forward in one direction.
How long we walked without encountering anything more significant than a large granite rock in the middle of our path, I don’t know.
I confided to Henry that it felt like hours, though I suspect he was able to bear the monotony considerably better than I was because he was accustomed to walking for hours with nothing to distract him but the brisk him of his own thoughts. But by comparison with this abyss, even the dullest part of the island was a visual feast of leaves and trees and swaying branches and woodland creatures and human trash. Here there was nothing, nothing but the two of us and the flicker of torchlight on walls that never narrowed or widened by a single inch.
I remembered seeing movies when I was a girl where a plucky band of adventurers crawled through dark spaces, sometimes on their hands and knees, toward the center of the earth. The notion had always appealed to me (movies like that were one of the reasons I’d become an archeologist), but the reality was something quite different. The smell was rank and I could hardly breathe.