Unnatural Creatures

by Neil Gaiman

  “This is Moon Lafferty,” said Fergus. “FBI man. He’s been helping me track down this ring of spies ever since I first got wind of them.”

  “You got them—all?” Wolf asked.

  “Picked up Fearing and Garton at the hotel,” Lafferty rumbled.

  “But how— I thought—”

  “You thought we were out for you?” Fergus answered. “That was Garton’s idea, but I didn’t quite tumble. You see, I’d already talked to your secretary. I knew it was Fearing she’d wanted to see. And when I asked around about Fearing, and learned of the temple and the defense researches of some of its members, the whole picture cleared up.”

  “Wonderful work, Mr. Wolf,” said Lafferty. “Any time we can do anything for you— And how you got into that machine-gun turret— Well, O’Breen, I’ll see you later. Got to check up on the rest of this roundup. Pleasant convalescence to you, Wolf.”

  Fergus waited until the G-man had left the room. Then he leaned over the bed and asked confidentially, “How about it, Wolf? Going back to your acting career?”

  Wolf gasped. “What acting career?”

  “Still going to play Tookah? If Metropolis makes Fangs with Miss Garton in a federal prison.”

  Wolf fumbled for words. “What sort of nonsense—”

  “Come on, Wolf. It’s pretty clear I know that much. Might as well tell me the whole story.”

  Still dazed, Wolf told it. “But how in heaven’s name did you know it?” he concluded.

  Fergus grinned. “Look. Dorothy Sayers said someplace that in a detective story the supernatural may be introduced only to be dispelled. Sure, that’s swell. Only in real life there come times when it won’t be dispelled. And this was one. There was too damned much. There were your eyebrows and fingers, there were the obviously real magical powers of your friend, there were the tricks which no dog could possibly do without signals, there was the way the other dogs whimpered and cringed—I’m pretty hardheaded, Wolf, but I’m Irish. I’ll string along only so far with the materialistic, but too much coincidence is too much.”

  “Fearing believed it too,” Wolf reflected. “But one thing that worries me: if they used a silver bullet on me once, why were all the rest of them lead? Why was I safe from then on?”

  “Well,” said Fergus, “I’ll tell you. Because it wasn’t ‘they’ who fired the silver bullet. You see, Wolf, up till the last minute I thought you were on ‘their’ side. I somehow didn’t associate good will with a werewolf. So I got a mold from a gunsmith and paid a visit to a jeweler and—I’m damned glad I missed,” he added sincerely.

  “You’re glad!”

  “But look. Previous question stands. Are you going back to acting? Because if not, I’ve got a suggestion.”

  “Which is?”

  “You say you fretted about how to be a practical, commercial werewolf. All right. You’re strong and fast. You can terrify people even to commit suicide. You can overhear conversations that no human being could get in on. You’re invulnerable to bullets. Can you tell me better qualifications for a G-man?”

  Wolf goggled. “Me? A G-man?”

  “Moon’s been telling me how badly they need new men. They’ve changed the qualifications lately so that your language knowledge’ll do instead of the law or accounting they used to require. And after what you did today, there won’t be any trouble about a little academic scandal in your past. Moon’s pretty sold on you.”

  Wolf was speechless. Only three days ago he had been in torment because he was not an actor or a G-man. Now—

  “Think it over,” said Fergus.

  “I will. Indeed I will. Oh, and one other thing. Has there been any trace of Ozzy?”

  “Nary a sign.”

  “I like that man. I’ve got to try to find him and—”

  “If he’s the magician I think he is, he’s staying up there only because he’s decided he likes it.”

  “I don’t know. Magic’s tricky. Heavens knows I’ve learned that. I’m going to try to do my damnedest for that fringe-bearded old colleague.”

  “Wish you luck. Shall I send in your other guest?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Your secretary. Here on business, no doubt.”

  Fergus disappeared discreetly as he admitted Emily. She walked over to the bed and took Wolf’s hand. His eyes drank in her quiet, charming simplicity, and his mind wondered what freak of belated adolescence had made him succumb to the blatant glamour of Gloria.

  They were silent for a long time. Then at once they both said, “How can I thank you? You saved my life.”

  Wolf laughed. “Let’s not argue. Let’s say we saved our life.”

  “You mean that?” Emily asked gravely.

  Wolf pressed her hand. “Aren’t you tired of being an office wife?”

  In the bazaar of Darjeeling, Chulundra Lingasuta stared at his rope in numb amazement. Young Ali had climbed up only five minutes ago, but now as he descended he was a hundred pounds heavier and wore a curious fringe of beard.

  14

  NALO HOPKINSON is a Caribbean writer of horror, myth, magic, and science fiction, and is equally as good at whatever she chooses to write. Here’s a contemporary story that feels like an old myth.

  Gilla swallowed a cherry pit, and now her mouth is full of startling words she’d never normally speak. In the old stories of the saints, trees take root through flesh, but in this one, a gift from a tree transforms into teeth.

  “There was a young lady…”

  “Geez, who gives a hoot what a…what? What is a laidly worm, anyway?” Gilla muttered. She was curled up on the couch, school library book on her knees.

  “Mm?” said her mother, peering at the computer monitor. She made a noise of impatience and hit a key on the keyboard a few times.

  “Nothing, Mum. Just I don’t know what this book’s talking about.” Boring old school assignment. Gilla wanted to go and get ready for Patricia’s party, but Mum had said she should finish her reading first.

  “Did you say, ‘laidly worm’?” her mother asked. Her fingers were clicking away at the keyboard again now. Gilla wished she could type that quickly. But that would mean practising, and she wasn’t about to do any more of that than she had to.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a type of dragon.”

  “So why don’t they just call it that?”

  “It’s a special type. It doesn’t have wings, so it just crawls along the ground. Its skin oozes all the time. Guess that protects it when it crawls, like a slug’s slime.”

  “Yuck, Mum!”

  Gilla’s mother smiled, even as she was writing. “Well, you wanted to know.”

  “No, I didn’t. I just have to know, for school.”

  “A laidly worm’s always ravenous and it makes a noise like a cow in gastric distress.”

  Gilla giggled. Her mother stopped typing and finally looked at her. “You know, I guess you could think of it as a larval dragon. Maybe it eats and eats so it’ll have enough energy to moult into the flying kind. What a cool idea. I’ll have to look into it.” She turned back to her work. “Why do you have to know about it? What’re you reading?”

  “This lady in the story? Some guy wanted to marry her, but she didn’t like him, so he put her in his dungeon…”

  “…and came after her one night in the form of a laidly worm to eat her,” Gilla’s mother finished. “You’re learning about Margaret of Antioch?”

  Gilla boggled at her. “Saint Margaret, yeah. How’d you know?”

  “How?” Her mother swivelled the rickety steno chair round to face Gilla and grinned, brushing a tangle of dreadlocks back from her face. “Sweetie, this is your mother, remember? The professor of African and Middle Eastern studies?”

  “Oh.” And her point? Gilla could tell that her face had that “huh?” look. Mum probably could see it too, ’cause she said:

  “Gilla, Antioch was in ancient Turkey. In the Middle East?”

  “Oh yeah, right. Mum
, can I get micro-braids?”

  Now it was her mum looking like, huh? “What in the world are those, Gilla?”

  Well, at least she was interested. It wasn’t a “no” straight off the bat. “These tiny braid extensions, right? Maybe only four or five strands per braid. And they’re straight, not like…Anyway, Kashy says that the hairdressing salon across from school does them. They braid the extensions right into your own hair, any colour you want, as long as you want them to be, and they can style them just like that. Kashy says it only takes a few hours, and you can wear them in for six weeks.”

  Her mum came over, put her warm palms gently on either side of Gilla’s face and looked seriously into her eyes. Gilla hated when she did that, like she was still a little kid. “You want to tame your hair,” her mother said. Self-consciously, Gilla pulled away from her mum’s hands, smoothed back the cloudy mass that she’d tied out of the way with a bandanna so that she could do her homework without getting hair in her eyes, in her mouth, up her nose. Her mum continued, “You want hair that lies down and plays dead, and you want to pay a lot of money for it, and you want to do it every six weeks.”

  Gilla pulled her face away. The book slid off her knee to the floor. “Mum, why do you always have to make everything sound so horrible?” Some of her hair had slipped out of the bandanna; it always did. Gilla could see three or four black sprigs of it dancing at the edge of her vision, tickling her forehead. She untied the bandanna and furiously retied it, capturing as much of the bushy mess as she could and binding it tightly with the cloth.

  Her mother just shook her head at her. “Gilla, stop being such a drama queen. How much do micro-braids cost?”

  Gilla was ashamed to tell her now, but she named a figure, a few bucks less than the sign in the salon window had said. Her mother just raised one eyebrow at her.

  “That, my girl, is three months of your allowance.”

  Well, yeah. She’d been hoping that Mum and Dad would pay for the braids. Guess not.

  “Tell you what, Gilla; you save up for it, then you can have them.”

  Gilla grinned.

  “But,” her mother continued, “you have to continue buying your bus tickets while you’re saving.”

  Gilla stopped grinning.

  “Don’t look so glum. If you make your own lunch to take every day, it shouldn’t be so bad. Now, finish reading the rest of the story.”

  And Mum was back at her computer again, tap-tap-tap. Gilla pouted at her back but didn’t say anything, ’cause really, she was kind of pleased. She was going to get micro-braids! She hated soggy, made-the-night-before sandwiches, but it’d be worth it. She ignored the little voice in her mind that was saying, “every six weeks?” and went back to her reading.

  “Euw, gross.”

  “Now what?” her mother asked.

  “This guy? This, like, laidly worm guy thing? It eats Saint Margaret, and then she’s in his stomach; like, inside him! and she prays to Jesus, and she’s sooo holy that the wooden cross around her neck turns back into a tree, and it puts its roots into the ground through the dragon guy thing, and its branches bust him open and he dies, and out she comes!”

  “Presto bingo,” her mum laughs. “Instant patron saint of childbirth!”

  “Why?” But Gilla thought about that one a little bit, and she figured she might know why. “Never mind, don’t tell me. So they made her a saint because she killed the dragon guy thing?”

  “Well yes, they sainted her eventually, after a bunch of people tortured and executed her for refusing to marry that man. She was a convert to Christianity, and she said she’d refused him because he wasn’t a Christian. But Gilla, some people think that she wasn’t a Christian anymore either, at least not by the end.”

  “Huh?” Gilla wondered when Kashy would show up. It was almost time for the party to start.

  “That thing about the wooden cross turning back into a living tree? That’s not a very Christian symbol, that sprouting tree. A dead tree made into the shape of a cross, yes. But not a living, magical tree. That’s a pagan symbol. Maybe Margaret of Antioch was the one who commanded the piece of wood around her neck to sprout again. Maybe the story is telling us that when Christianity failed her, she claimed her power as a wood witch. Darling, I think that Margaret of Antioch was a hamadryad.”

  “Jeez, Mum; a cobra?” That much they had learned in school. Gilla knew the word hamadryad.

  Her mother laughed. “Yeah, a king cobra is a type of hamadryad, but I’m talking about the original meaning. A hamadryad was a female spirit whose soul resided in a tree. A druid is a man, a tree wizard. A hamadryad is a woman; a tree witch, I guess you could say. But where druids lived outside of trees and learned everything they could about them, a hamadryad doesn’t need a class to learn about it. She just is a tree.”

  Creepy. Gilla glanced out the window to where black branches beckoned, clothed obscenely in tiny spring leaves. She didn’t want to talk about trees.

  The doorbell rang. “Oh,” said Gilla. “That must be Kashy!” She sprang up to get the door, throwing her textbook aside again.

  There was a young lady of Niger…

  “It kind of creaks sometimes, y’know?” Gilla enquired of Kashy’s reflection in the mirror.

  In response, Kashy just tugged harder at Gilla’s hair. “Hold still, girl. Lemme see what I can do with this. And shut up with that weirdness. You’re always going on about that tree. Creeps me out.”

  Gilla sighed, resigned, and leaned back in the chair. “Okay. Only don’t pull it too tight, okay? Gives me a headache.” When Kashy had a makeover jones on her, there was nothing to do but submit and hope you could wash the goop off your face and unstick your hair from the mousse before you had to go outdoors and risk scaring the pigeons. That last experiment of Kashy’s with the “natural” lipstick had been such a disaster. Gilla had been left looking as though she’d been eating fried chicken and had forgotten to wash the grease off her mouth. It had been months ago, but Foster was still giggling over it.

  Gilla crossed her arms. Then she checked out the mirror and saw how that looked, how it made her breasts puff out. She remembered Roger in the schoolyard, pointing at her the first day back at school in September and bellowing, “Boobies!” She put her arms on the rests of the chair instead. She sucked her stomach in and took a quick glance in the mirror to see if that made her look slimmer. Fat chance. Really fat. It did make her breasts jut again, though; oh, goody. She couldn’t win. She sighed once more and slumped a little in the chair, smushing both bust and belly into a lumpy mass.

  “And straighten up, okay?” Kashy said. “I can’t reach the front of your head with you sitting hunched over like that.” Kashy’s hands were busy, sectioning Gilla’s thick black hair into four and twisting each section into plaits.

  “That tree,” Gilla replied. “The one in the front yard.”

  Kashy just rolled her perfectly made-up eyes. “Okay, so tell me again about that wormy old cherry tree.”

  “I don’t like it. I’m trying to sleep at night, and all I can hear is it creaking and groaning and…talking to itself all night!”

  “Talking!” Kashy giggled. “So now it’s talking to you?”

  “Yes. Swaying. Its branches rubbing against each other. Muttering and whispering at me, night after night. I hate that tree. I’ve always hated it. I wish Mum or Dad would cut it down.” Gilla sighed. Since she’d started ninth grade two years ago, Gilla sighed a lot. That’s when her body, already sprouting with puberty, had laid down fat pads on her chest, belly and thighs. When her high, round butt had gotten rounder. When her budding breasts had swelled even bigger than her mother’s. And when she’d started hearing the tree at night.

  “What’s it say?” Kashy asked. Her angular brown face stared curiously at Gilla in the mirror.

  Gilla looked at Kashy, how she had every hair in place, how her shoulders were slim and how the contours of the tight sweater showed off her friend’s tiny, pointy breasts
. Gilla and Kashy used to be able to wear each other’s clothes, until two years ago.

  “Don’t make fun of me, Kashy.”

  “I’m not.” Kashy’s voice was serious; the look on her face, too. “I know it’s been bothering you. What do you hear the tree saying?”

  “It…it talks about the itchy places it can’t reach, where its bark has gone knotty. It talks about the taste of soil, all gritty and brown. It says it likes the feeling of worms sliding in and amongst its roots in the wet, dark earth.”

  “Gah! You’re making this up, Gilla!”

  “I’m not!” Gilla stormed out of her chair, pulling her hair out of Kashy’s hands. “If you’re not going to believe me, then don’t ask, okay?”

  “Okay, okay, I believe you!” Kashy shrugged her shoulders, threw her palms skyward in a gesture of defeat. “Slimy old worms feel good, just”—she reached out and slid her hands briskly up and down Gilla’s bare arms—“rubbing up against you!” And she laughed, that perfect Kashy laugh, like tiny, friendly bells.

  Gilla found herself laughing too. “Well, that’s what it says!”

  “All right, girl. What else does it say?”

  At first Gilla didn’t answer. She was too busy shaking her hair free of the plaits, puffing it up with her hands into a kinky black cloud. “I’m just going to wear it like this to the party, okay? I’ll tie it back with my bandanna and let it poof out behind me. That’s the easiest thing.” I’m never going to look like you, Kashy. Not anymore. In the upper grades at school, everybody who hung out together looked alike. The skinny glam girls hung with the skinny glam girls. The goth guys and girls hung out in back of the school and shared clove cigarettes and black lipstick. The fat girls clumped together. How long would Kashy stay tight with her? Turning so she couldn’t see her own plump, gravid body in the mirror, she dared to look at her friend. Kashy was biting her bottom lip, looking contrite.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have laughed at you.”

  “It’s okay.” Gilla took a cotton ball from off the dresser, doused it in cold cream, started scraping the makeup off her face. She figured she’d keep the eyeliner on. At least she had pretty eyes, big and brown and sparkly. She muttered at Kashy, “It says it likes stretching and growing, reaching for the light.”