Running with the Pack

Page 25

When I put the sweater on Elsbet she complained, said it was itchy. Her cries sounded like bleating. She’d always worn shirts under her sweaters before, but they’d all gotten too tight and she had to wear it against her skin. Over the next few days I noticed her face and her hands and feet got darker, her ears longer. Then one night when I went to put her to bed I couldn’t get the sweater off, it had grown into her skin. Elsbet? I asked. Maaaa, Maaaa, she replied. She couldn’t say anything else.
She wouldn’t eat mutton after that night, or goat. It made her sick. But she could graze on leaves and dry grass when I raked away the deep, deep snows, cracked the ice. It was so cold.
As for me, I was ravenous for meat.
I’d sold most of the yarn I’d spun from Fred’s sheep, and I hadn’t much to trade other than that. Times were lean. I was hungry constantly, I even ate the wolf I’d shot, it had frozen solid in the snow and been preserved well enough. When I couldn’t stand the hunger any longer I took the axe and chopped it into pieces and fried them up, gnawing them down to the bones after I put Elsbet to bed. The more lamblike she became the more it distressed her to watch me eat, and I admit now, it was probably a pretty grisly sight.
Gradual changes never seem like change at all, which is why I think I didn’t notice what was wrong with me until I went next door to my neighbor’s house to beg for some hay for Elsbet—they kept horses, and she’d clipped the lawn bare, front and back, and we were friendly, I’d traded them some of the yarn I got from Fred. I knocked, I heard my neighbor come to the door, but he fumbled with the knob for a while before getting it open. When he saw me he screamed and slammed the door in my face. I knocked again but I heard him through the door, Go awaaaay, go awaaaaaay. I growled at him, I just wanted some hay. When he didn’t respond I stole it, desperate times, wondering the whole time if they’d gone crazy, shut up in their house like everyone else, trying to keep the cold at bay. But when I came back to my house I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror and I understood.
The pointy ears and muzzle had grown so slowly I don’t think I ever would’ve noticed them if my neighbor hadn’t said something. When I looked down at my hands I realized it hadn’t been the cold in my joints that had prevented me from knitting recently, they were little more than paws. I paced back and forth and then unknotted my wolf-fur belt and peed in my favorite corner, thinking hard. Where was Elsbet? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her, but I finally remembered tethering her in the yard to graze—had it been this morning, or the morning before, or the morning before that? Her wooly coat made it less important for her to be inside, she seemed to like the cold. I spent most of my hours in front of the wood-burning stove, curled up, always hungry, always sleepy. But that wasn’t right, she was my daughter. She should be inside.
Either I don’t remember so well what happened next or I’ve tried to forget for so long that I’ve convinced myself I don’t remember. I know I opened the door to our back yard and saw her, standing in the twilight, shivering, nibbling something. I had hay for her, I remembered then, and I ran and got it from where I’d dumped it in the foyer, and brought it outside. She must have smelled the hay first, Maaa, Maaa, she bleated, but then she smelled me and her eyes went wide. I certainly smelled her, the dung smell farm animals have, and also her little-girl smell, plastic dolls, juice. Delicious. I dropped the hay and loped towards her, I was so very hungry, ravenous, I was salivating and she couldn’t run away, easy prey, an old dog’s collar around her neck, tethered to the tree in our backyard. I had nursed her under that tree when she was an infant, later, tea parties with the My Little Ponies that had been mine when I was a girl. Maaa, Maaa, she said, begging me, but then I was curled up by the wood-burning stove again, full, warm, the rich taste of blood and stringy muscle caught in my teeth.
Elsbet. Where was she? I ran upstairs, maybe it was a dream, I remember hoping I had just eaten some more of that old frozen wolf, but she wasn’t in her room. At some point my pants tore off of me as I ran, frantic, the tail popped them and they hung in shreds, my crooked legs didn’t fit anymore, but the belt stayed on, part of me, that gray belt, gray like my own fur. She wasn’t upstairs. I paced her room, back and forth, growling, and hopped up on her bed to look out the window. There she was, what was left of her. The collar was still around her neck, her little mauled head surrounded by stripped bones and pieces of meat, lots of white wooly fluff.
I’d like to say I felt remorse, that I feel it now, but I’m not sure anymore what I make up—what are stories I tell myself as I sleep by the wood-burning stove after I’ve eaten—and what is real. I’d like to say I howled, mourning for a daughter lost, but I know what I felt was fullness, of being sated, not hungry, warm. It is how I feel as I eat Fred’s sheep, one by one, sneaking into the barn at night. It’s safe against most predators but not against me. I hear them whispering stupid sheepish things to one another as they stand together, huddling for warmth. I have culled the flock, they are fewer now. Some of the females are pregnant, I can smell it on them, and that means lamb in the spring. I like to think I will keep enough alive that I can leave them be through the summer, to breed, to last through the next winter, eating the deer that are too skittish and skinny to bother with now. But if I cannot, if I get too hungry, I saw Fred looking at me through the window, in the long underwear I knitted for him and nothing else. I smiled at him, toothy, and he ducked away from my gaze, but not before I saw him fumble to shut the white curtain, his hands useless, mere cloven hooves.
ROYAL BLOODLINES
(A LUCIFER JONES STORY)
MIKE RESNICK
Back in 1936 I found myself in Hungary, which ain’t never gonna provide the Riviera with any serious competition for tourists. Each town I passed through was duller than the last, until I got to Budapest, which was considerably less exciting than Boise, Idaho, on a Tuesday afternoon.
I passed by an old rundown arena that did double duty, hosting hockey games on weeknights and dog shows on Saturdays, then walked by the only nightclub in town, which was featuring one of the more popular lady tuba soloists in the country, and finally I came to the Magyar Hotel and rented me a room. After I’d left my gear there I set out to scout out the city and see if there were enough depraved sinners to warrant building my tabernacle there and setting up shop in the salvation business. My unerring instincts led me right to a batch of them, who were holed up in the men’s room of the bus station, playing a game with which I was not entirely unfamiliar, as it consisted of fifty two pasteboards with numbers or pictures on ’em and enough money in the pot to make it interesting.
“Mind if I join you gents?” I asked, walking over to them.
“Either you put your shirt on backward, or else you’re a preacher,” said one of ’em in an English accent.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked.
“We’d feel guilty taking your money,” he said.
“You ain’t got a thing to worry about,” I said, sitting down with them.
“Well,” he said with a shrug, “you’ve been warned.”
“I appreciate that, neighbor,” I said, “and just to show my good will, I absolve everyone here of any sins they committed between nine o’clock this morning and noon. Now, who deals?”
The game got going hot and heavy, and I had just about broken even, when the British feller dealt a hand of draw, and I picked up my cards and fanned ’em out and suddenly I was looking at four aces and a king, and two of my opponents had great big grins on their faces, the kind of grin you get when you pick up a flush or a full house, and one of ’em opened, and the other raised, and I raised again, and it was like I’d insulted their manhood, because they raised right back, and pretty soon everyone else had dropped out and the three of us were tossing money into the pot like there wasn’t no tomorrow, and just about the time we all ran out of money and energy and were about to show our cards, a little Hungarian kid ran into the room and shouted something in a foreign language—probably Hungarian, now as I come to think on it—and suddenly everyone grabbed their money and got up and started making for the exit.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I demanded. “Where do you guys think you’re going?”
“Away!” said the British feller.
“But we’re in the middle of a hand,” I protested.
“Lupo is coming!” said the Brit. “The game’s over!”
“Who the hell is Lupo?” I demanded.
“He’s more of a what. You’ll leave too, if you know what’s good for you!”
And suddenly, just like that, I was all alone in the men’s room of a Hungarian bus station, holding four totally useless aces and a king, and thinking that maybe Hungarians were more in need of a shrink than a preacher. Then the door opened, and in walked this thin guy with grayish skin and hair everywhere—on his head, his lip, his chin, even the backs of his hands.
“Howdy, Brother,” I said, and he nodded at me. “You better not plan on lingering too long,” I added. “Someone or something called Lupo is on its way here.”