Unnatural Creatures

by Neil Gaiman

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “I told you, I’m a magician. Only I haven’t worked for a long time. Theatrical managers are peculiar, colleague. They don’t want a real magician. They won’t even let me show ’em my best stuff. Why, I remember one night in Darjeeling—”

  “Glad to meet you, Mr…. Mr.—”

  “You can call me Ozzy. Most people do.”

  “Glad to meet you, Ozzy. Now, about this girl. This Gloria. Yunnerstand, donya?”

  “Sure, colleague.”

  “She thinks being a professor of German is nothing. She wants something glamorous. She says if I was an actor, now, or a G-man— Yunnerstand?”

  Ozymandias the Great nodded.

  “Awright, then! So yunnerstand. Fine. But whatddayou want to keep talking about it for? Yunnerstand. That’s that. To hell with it.”

  Ozymandias’s round and fringed face brightened. “Sure,” he said, and added recklessly, “Let’s drink to that.”

  They clinked glasses and drank. Wolf carelessly tossed off a toast in Old Low Frankish, with an unpardonable error in the use of the genitive.

  The two men next to them began singing “My Wild Irish Rose,” but trailed off disconsolately. “What we need,” said the one with the derby, “is a tenor.”

  “What I need,” Wolf muttered, “is a cigarette.”

  “Sure,” said Ozymandias the Great. The bartender was drawing beer directly in front of them. Ozymandias reached across the bar, removed a lighted cigarette from the barkeep’s ear, and handed it to his companion.

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “I don’t quite know. All I know is how to get them. I told you I was a magician.”

  “Oh. I see. Pressajijijation.”

  “No. Not a prestidigitator; I said a magician. Oh, blast it! I’ve done it again. More than one gin-and-tonic and I start showing off.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Wolf flatly. “No such thing as magicians. That’s just as silly as Oscar Fearing and his temple and what’s so special about April thirtieth anyway?”

  The bearded man frowned. “Please, colleague. Let’s forget it.”

  “No. I don’t believe you. You pressajijijated that cigarette. You didn’t magic it.” His voice began to rise. “You’re a fake.”

  “Please, brother,” the barkeep whispered. “Keep him quiet.”

  “All right,” said Ozymandias wearily. “I’ll show you something that can’t be prestidigitation.” The couple adjoining had begun to sing again. “They need a tenor. All right; listen!”

  And the sweetest, most ineffably Irish tenor ever heard joined in on the duet. The singers didn’t worry about the source; they simply accepted the new voice gladly and were spurred on to their very best, with the result that the bar knew the finest harmony it had heard since the night the Glee Club was suspended en masse.

  Wolf looked impressed, but shook his head. “That’s not magic either. That’s ventrocolism.”

  “As a matter of strict fact, that was a street singer who was killed in the Easter Rebellion. Fine fellow, too; never heard a better voice, unless it was that night in Darjeeling when—”

  “Fake!” said Wolfe Wolf loudly and belligerently.

  Ozymandias once more contemplated that long index finger. He looked at the professor’s dark brows that met in a straight line over his nose. He picked his companion’s limpish hand off the bar and scrutinized the palm. The growth of hair was not marked, but it was perceptible.

  The magician chortled. “And you sneer at magic!”

  “Whasso funny about me sneering at magic?”

  Ozymandias lowered his voice. “Because, my fine furry friend, you are a werewolf.”

  The Irish martyr had begun “Rose of Tralee,” and the two mortals were joining in valiantly.

  “I’m what?”

  “A werewolf.”

  “But there isn’t any such thing. Any fool knows that.”

  “Fools,” said Ozymandias, “know a great deal which the wise do not. There are werewolves. There always have been, and quite probably always will be.” He spoke as calmly and assuredly as though he were mentioning that the earth was round. “And there are three infallible physical signs: the meeting of eyebrows, the long index finger, the hairy palms. You have all three. And even your name is an indication. Family names do not come from nowhere. Every Smith has an ancestor somewhere who was a smith. Every Fisher comes from a family that once fished. And your name is Wolf.”

  The statement was so quiet, so plausible, that Wolf faltered.

  “But a werewolf is a man that changes into a wolf. I’ve never done that. Honest I haven’t.”

  “A mammal,” said Ozymandias, “is an animal that bears its young alive and suckles them. A virgin is nonetheless a mammal. Because you have never changed does not make you any the less a werewolf.”

  “But a werewolf—” Suddenly Wolf’s eyes lit up. “A werewolf! But that’s even better than a G-man! Now I can show Gloria!”

  “What on earth do you mean, colleague?”

  Wolf was climbing down from his stool. The intense excitement of this brilliant new idea seemed to have sobered him. He grabbed the little man by the sleeve. “Come on. We’re going to find a nice quiet place. And you’re going to prove you’re a magician.”

  “But how?”

  “You’re going to show me how to change!”

  Ozymandias finished his gin-and-tonic, and with it drowned his last regretful hesitation. “Colleague,” he announced, “you’re on!”

  Professor Oscar Fearing, standing behind the curiously carved lectern of the Temple of the Dark Truth, concluded the reading of the prayer with mumbling sonority. “And on this night of all nights, in the name of the black light that glows in the darkness, we give thanks!” He closed the parchment-bound book and faced the small congregation, calling out with fierce intensity, “Who wishes to give his thanks to the Lower Lord?”

  A cushioned dowager rose. “I give thanks!” she shrilled excitedly. “My Ming Choy was sick, even unto death. I took of her blood and offered it to the Lower Lord, and he had mercy and restored her to me!”

  Behind the altar an electrician checked his switches and spat disgustedly. “Bugs! Every last one of ’em!”

  The man who was struggling into a grotesque and horrible costume paused and shrugged. “They pay good money. What’s it to us if they’re bugs?”

  A tall, thin old man had risen uncertainly to his feet. “I give thanks!” he cried. “I give thanks to the Lower Lord that I have finished my great work. My protective screen against magnetic bombs is a tried and proven success, to the glory of our country and science and the Lord.”

  “Crackpot,” the electrician muttered.

  The man in costume peered around the altar. “Crackpot, hell! That’s Chiswick from the physics department. Think of a man like that falling for this stuff! And listen to him: he’s even telling about the government’s plans for installation. You know, I’ll bet you one of these fifth columnists could pick up something around here.”

  There was silence in the temple when the congregation had finished its thanksgiving. Professor Fearing leaned over the lectern and spoke quietly and impressively. “As you know, brothers in Darkness, tonight is May Eve, the thirtieth of April, the night consecrated by the Church to that martyr missionary St. Walpurgis, and by us to other and deeper purposes. It is on this night, and this night only, that we may directly give our thanks to the Lower Lord himself. Not in wanton orgy and obscenity, as the Middle Ages misconceived his desires, but in praise and in the deep, dark joy that issues forth from Blackness.”

  “Hold your hats, boys,” said the man in the costume. “Here I go again.”

  “Eka!” Fearing thundered. “Dva tri chatur! Pancha! Shassapta! Ashta nava dasha ekadasha!”

  He paused. There was always the danger that at this moment some scholar in this university town might recognize that the invocation, though perfect Sanskrit, consisted
solely of the numbers from one to eleven. But no one stirred, and he launched forth in more apposite Latin: “Per vota nostra ipse nunc surgat nobis dicatus Baal Zebub!”

  “Baal Zebub!” the congregation chorused.

  “Cue,” said the electrician, and pulled a switch.

  The lights flickered and went out. Lightning played across the sanctuary. Suddenly out of the darkness came a sharp bark, a yelp of pain, and a long-drawn howl of triumph.

  A blue light now began to glow dimly. In its faint reflection, the electrician was amazed to see his costumed friend at his side, nursing his bleeding hand.

  “What the hell—” the electrician whispered.

  “Hanged if I know. I go out there on cue, all ready to make my terrifying appearance, and what happens? Great big hell of a dog up and nips my hand. Why didn’t they tell me they’d switched the script?”

  In the glow of the blue light the congregation reverently contemplated the plump little man with the fringe of beard and the splendid gray wolf that stood beside him. “Hail, O Lower Lord!” resounded the chorus, drowning out one spinster’s murmur of “But my dear, I swear he was much handsomer last year.”

  “Colleagues!” said Ozymandias the Great, and there was utter silence, a dread hush awaiting the momentous words of the Lower Lord. Ozymandias took one step forward, placed his tongue carefully between his lips, uttered the ripest, juiciest raspberry of his career, and vanished, wolf and all.

  Wolfe Wolf opened his eyes and shut them again hastily. He had never expected the quiet and sedate Berkeley Inn to install centrifugal rooms. It wasn’t fair. He lay in darkness, waiting for the whirling to stop and trying to reconstruct the past night.

  He remembered the bar all right, and the zombies. And the bartender. Very sympathetic chap that, up until he suddenly changed into a little man with a fringe of beard. That was where things began getting strange. There was something about a cigarette and an Irish tenor and a werewolf. Fantastic idea, that. Any fool knows—

  Wolf sat up suddenly. He was the werewolf. He threw back the bedclothes and stared down at his legs. Then he sighed relief. They were long legs. They were hairy enough. They were brown from much tennis. But they were indisputably human.

  He got up, resolutely stifling his qualms, and began to pick up the clothing that was scattered nonchalantly about the floor. A crew of gnomes was excavating his skull, but he hoped they might go away if he didn’t pay too much attention to them. One thing was certain: he was going to be good from now on. Gloria or no Gloria, heartbreak or no heartbreak, drowning your sorrows wasn’t good enough. If you felt like this and could imagine you’d been a werewolf—

  But why should he have imagined it in such detail? So many fragmentary memories seemed to come back as he dressed. Going up Strawberry Canyon with the fringed beard, finding a desolate and isolated spot for magic, learning the words—

  Hell, he could even remember the words. The word that changed you and the one that changed you back.

  Had he made up those words, too, in his drunken imaginings? And had he made up what he could only barely recall—the wonderful, magical freedom of changing, the single, sharp pang of alteration and then the boundless happiness of being lithe and fleet and free?

  He surveyed himself in the mirror. Save for the unwonted wrinkles in his conservative single-breasted gray suit, he looked exactly what he was: a quiet academician; a little better built, a little more impulsive, a little more romantic than most, perhaps, but still just that—Professor Wolf.

  The rest was nonsense. But there was, that impulsive side of him suggested, only one way of proving the fact. And that was to say The Word.

  “All right,” said Wolfe Wolf to his reflection. “I’ll show you.” And he said it.

  The pang was sharper and stronger than he’d remembered.

  Alcohol numbs you to pain. It tore him for a moment with an anguish like the descriptions of childbirth. Then it was gone, and he flexed his limbs in happy amazement. But he was not a lithe, fleet, free beast. He was a helplessly trapped wolf, irrevocably entangled in a conservative single-breasted gray suit.

  He tried to rise and walk, but the long sleeves and legs tripped him over flat on his muzzle. He kicked with his paws, trying to tear his way out, and then stopped. Werewolf or no werewolf, he was likewise still Professor Wolf, and this suit had cost thirty-five dollars. There must be some cheaper way of securing freedom than tearing the suit to shreds.

  He used several good, round Low German expletives. This was a complication that wasn’t in any of the werewolf legends he’d ever read. There, people just—boom!—became wolves or—bang!—became men again. When they were men, they wore clothes; when they were wolves, they wore fur. Just like Hyperman becoming Bark Lent again on top of the Empire State Building and finding his street clothes right there. Most misleading. He began to remember now how Ozymandias the Great had made him strip before teaching him the words—

  The words! That was it. All he had to do was say the word that changed you back—Absarka!—and he’d be a man again, comfortably fitted inside his suit. Then he could strip and play what games he wished. You see? Reason solves all. “Absarka!” he said.

  Or thought he said. He went through all the proper mental processes for saying Absarka! but all that came out of his muzzle was a sort of clicking whine. And he was still a conservatively dressed and helpless wolf.

  This was worse than the clothes problem. If he could be released only by saying Absarka! and if, being a wolf, he could say nothing, why, there he was. Indefinitely. He could go find Ozzy and ask—but how could a wolf wrapped up in a gray suit get safely out of a hotel and set out hunting for an unknown address?

  He was trapped. He was lost. He was—“Absarka!”

  Professor Wolfe Wolf stood up in his grievously rumpled gray suit and beamed on the beard-fringed face of Ozymandias the Great.

  “You see, colleague,” the little magician explained, “I figured you’d want to try it again as soon as you got up, and I knew darned well you’d have your troubles. Thought I’d come over and straighten things out for you.”

  Wolf lit a cigarette in silence and handed the pack to Ozymandias. “When you came in just now,” he said at last, “what did you see?”

  “You as a wolf.”

  “Then it really—I actually—”

  “Sure. You’re a full-fledged werewolf, all right.”

  Wolf sat down on the rumpled bed. “I guess,” he ventured slowly, “I’ve got to believe it. And if I believe that—but it means I’ve got to believe everything I’ve always scorned. I’ve got to believe in gods and devils and hells and—”

  “You needn’t be so pluralistic. But there is a God.” Ozymandias said this as calmly and convincingly as he had stated last night that there were werewolves.

  “And if there’s a God, then I’ve got a soul?”

  “Sure.”

  “And if I’m a werewolf—hey!”

  “What’s the trouble, colleague?”

  “All right, Ozzy. You know everything. Tell me this: Am I damned?”

  “For what? Just for being a werewolf? Shucks, no; let me explain. There’s two kinds of werewolves. There’s the cursed kind that can’t help themselves, that just go turning into wolves without any say in the matter; and there’s the voluntary kind like you. Now, most of the voluntary kind are damned, sure, because they’re wicked men who lust for blood and eat innocent people. But they aren’t damnably wicked because they’re werewolves; they became werewolves because they are damnably wicked. Now, you changed yourself just for the hell of it and because it looked like a good way to impress a gal; that’s an innocent-enough motive, and being a werewolf doesn’t make it any less so. Werewolves don’t have to be monsters; it’s just that we hear about only the ones that are.”

  “But how can I be voluntary when you told me I was a werewolf before I ever changed?”

  “Not everybody can change. It’s like being able to roll your tongue or wig
gle your ears. You can, or you can’t; and that’s that. And as with those abilities, there’s probably a genetic factor involved, though nobody’s done any serious research on it. You were a werewolf in posse; now you’re one in esse.”

  “Then it’s all right? I can be a werewolf just for having fun, and it’s safe?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Wolf chortled. “Will I show Gloria! Dull and unglamorous indeed! Anybody can marry an actor or a G-man; but a werewolf—”

  “Your children probably will be, too,” said Ozymandias cheerfully.

  Wolf shut his eyes dreamily, then opened them with a start. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t got a hangover anymore! This is marvelous. This is— Why, this is practical. At last the perfect hangover cure. Shuffle yourself into a wolf and back and— Oh, that reminds me. How do I get back?”

  “Absarka.”

  “I know. But when I’m a wolf I can’t say it.”

  “That,” said Ozymandias sadly, “is the curse of being a white magician. You keep having to use the second-best form of spells, because the best would be black. Sure, a black-magic werebeast can turn himself back whenever he wants to. I remember in Darjeeling—”

  “But how about me?”

  “That’s the trouble. You have to have somebody to say Absarka! for you. That’s what I did last night, or do you remember? After we broke up the party at your friend’s temple…tell you what. I’m retired now, and I’ve got enough to live on modestly because I can always magic up little…Are you going to take up werewolfing seriously?”

  “For a while, anyway. Till I get Gloria.”

  “Then why shouldn’t I come and live here in your hotel? Then I’ll always be handy to Absarka! you. After you get the girl, you can teach her.”

  Wolf extended his hand. “Noble of you. Shake.” And then his eye caught his wristwatch. “Good Lord! I’ve missed two classes this morning. Werewolfing’s all very well, but a man’s got to work for his living.”

  “Most men.” Ozymandias calmly reached his hand into the air and plucked a coin. He looked at it ruefully. It was a gold moidore. “Hang these spirits; I simply cannot explain to them about gold being illegal.”