by John Langan
John
Lagan expects both his novel, House of Windows, and his collection of
stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, to be published in
paperback editions later this year.
His new story very neatly and effectively dismantles a traditional horror story
to show us that its inner workings are dangerous and should not be taken
lightly.
* * * *
1. The Chase
Every Werewolf story—these days, at least—features a chase. This one is no exception.
Indeed, it may well be that the chase has become the heart of the story, its true heart, and not the scene of transformation, which, while certainly spectacular, cinematic, the opportunity for all manner of verbal pyrotechnics, is light on meaning. The change to wolf, the face opening into snout, the fingers erupting into claws, the voice rushing the register from scream to howl, is about the animal within, and, at this point in our post-Darwinian history, how new or shocking is this?—whereas the chase is about predator and prey, and so about power, and so about matters more subtle and problematic. Most likely we will, and should, identify with the prey, find the predator a figure of fear. Most likely.
It may help to imagine the chase—whose narrative purpose is to draw you into the story immediately—projected on a movie screen. So much of contemporary horror fiction references film either as a substitute for written precedents or as inspiration for elaborately gruesome descriptions that such a suggestion should not seem surprising. You will want to imagine yourself in a darkened theater, probably with a date or a friend (since who goes to a horror movie alone?). Perhaps you have a tub of popcorn, perhaps a box of Sour Patch Kids, perhaps you find food at the theater distracting and annoying. When the screen lights, the first thing you are aware of is motion, a pair of blurred legs racing forward. You hear breath panting, feet rustling dead leaves and cracking dead branches. As the camera switches to a long shot, you see that we are in a forest, one in upstate New York if you are able to determine such matters—if not, the forest will look more or less familiar, depending on your location—and that it is late autumn. If you are the kind of person to be struck by such details, you may notice that the bare trunks, the occasional evergreen, have been photographed in such a way as to suggest a maze through which the man who owns the running legs is careening. At this distance, you can obtain a better view of him, as he bolts from left to right across the screen, almost tripping on a root. He is white, of average height, medium build, possibly mid- to late-thirties although it is hard to be sure, dressed in green camouflage pants, shirt, and baseball cap, brown boots, and a bright orange hunting vest. He does not appear to be carrying a gun of any kind. In the third shot, a close up of his face, you see that it is plain, undistinguished by anything more than the terror distorting it.
There is more, much more, that you could know about this man, the facts of an entire life. (Obviously, you would not have access to this in the opening scenes of a film.) For example, you could know that he is a graduate of Harvard University, at which he obtained his MBA and his wife. You could know that his older brother, Donald, first took him hunting when he was fourteen; it had to be Donald because their father had been killed the year before in a train wreck in Arizona (decapitated). You could know that, before he left to go hunting this morning, he changed his infant son’s sodden diaper and found the pungent smell oddly endearing. You could know that he likes country music, that he enjoys bacon, egg, and cheese on a hard roll, that he has season tickets for the Yankees that he does not use as much as he would like. You could know something very bad about him—that when he was fifteen, he crushed the skull of a neighbor’s Doberman with a baseball bat—you could know something very good about him—that recently, he has contributed half the cost of a new daycare center at his church (Methodist). You could know all of this but it is, in a sense, irrelevant. It’s not irrelevant to him, of course, or to the people in his life, but it’s of little matter to us, the audience. He is the sacrifice: he is here to be murdered, and rather horrifically at that, for our interest. His death begins the Revel. Certainly, there have been others before him, as we will find out later on, but he is the first we encounter, and the spilling of his blood consecrates the story’s opening.
It would be possible to cut between the man’s running legs and another set of legs, between his wide blue eyes and a pair of yellow eyes. Depending on the subsequent portrait of the Werewolf we mean to paint, we might dip into his consciousness at the outset, an effort also more easily realized in prose than on film. We might describe the copper blood on his tongue and lips, the sharp tang of the man’s fear in his nostrils, the joyful surge of his muscles as he runs smoothly and well across the forest floor. Yet such details seem to give away too much too soon, as overly heavy-handed soundtrack music, rather than heightening tension, tends to relieve it. For the moment, then, let us keep the Werewolf off stage; for now, let him be that clash of leaves that draws ever-closer.
Perhaps the man is talking as he runs, a half-sobbing chain of sound that includes numerous Please Gods, and a few Oh Jesuses and a number of indistinguishable words. Perhaps he says something like, “My kids, God, please, my kids,” perhaps, “Blood, oh Jesus, blood.” If we want, we can flash back to the scene of carnage from which he is fleeing, to a ribcage laid open and scarlet wet, trees splashed with viscera, but again, there will be time for that later, and most likely, the man is trying very hard not to think of that, because if he did, he might find himself too afraid to run. Instead, he is trying to think of the red pickup truck that he drove out here four hours ago and that cannot be much farther. In fact, there it is, at the foot of the hill he has crested.
Now comes the cruel part of the story—the first cruel part, anyway—and that is that the man is going to be killed, at last, within sight of escape and freedom. At this point, we do not know if such cruelty is deliberate on the part of the Werewolf, or an accident of fate, simply the point at which the predator brings down the prey. It is what you are expecting, your heart pounding despite yourself: you know the man is going to be caught and killed by what is racing up behind him; the only real question is, How exactly is it going to happen? Will he fumble open the door to the truck, throw himself inside, slam the door behind him, thumb the lock, and collapse across the front seat, panting furiously, only to have the windshield crash in on him? Or will he even make it that far?
In this case, he will not make it inside the truck, because as he is running down the hill toward it—half-falling would be more accurate, his boots kicking up great scuffs of dirt and leaves—he is jamming his hand in the right front pocket of his pants, attempting to locate his keys, which do not seem to be there. His effort continues as he sprints the space between the foot of the hill and the truck, his cap, which has been ever-more perilously perched atop his head, finally flying free, revealing a head of dark brown hair. He does not stop at the truck so much as slam into it, the loud thud jarring. He continues to shove his hand into his right, then his left pants pocket, his breath coming faster, his lips releasing a steady stream of, “Oh come on,” and, “Oh God, come on,” while in the background, the sound of the Werewolf’s pursuit, as it tops the hill, bounds down it, and surges toward the truck, is steadily louder.
You will not see the Werewolf leap on the man and in one fluid motion tear out his throat. You will listen to it. What you will see is shot from underneath the truck. You watch the man’s boots, faced toward the truck at first then turning as something you cannot distinguish rushes closer. You hear the man’s scream, and a growl that becomes a roar, and the sharp sound of teeth ripping out a large chunk of meat. The scream halts. The boots wobble, then sway to the left as the man, already a corpse, topples to the ground.
This is the beginning. Should we mention that the man’s keys were in the left breast pocket of his bright orange hunting vest, tucked there by him because it had a button flap and so would keep them secure? This is just the kind of ironic detail that horror narratives love, isn’t it? No doubt the irony has its effect, but no doubt, too, such occurrences validate the secret sense we have—perhaps it is more a secret fear—that such little things as what pocket you put your keys in are what make the difference between life and death, and not such big things as your faith in God or your lack thereof. The narrative to come will embrace this savage irony, take it to its breast, to the extent that it will be tempting to read the Werewolf as the incarnation of this trope. But it isn’t, is it?
* * * *
2. The Setting (A): The Village
Here we are with the Chief of Police as he’s driving along Main Street on his way to work. Slideshow, in rapid succession: shopping plazas, traffic light, animal hospital, traffic light, Indian restaurant, insurance agent, houses, churches (Episcopal and Methodist), gas station, bus station, florist, Chinese restaurant, bank, bars, barber, deli, boutiques, bookstores, Greek restaurant, record store, traffic light, bar, bank, police station, bridge (across the Svartkill), Frenchman’s Mountain (a long ridge stubbled with bare trees that walls the near horizon).
Of course the village he’s driving through is based on a real place, so much so that it might be more honest to call it the name that marks it on the map of upstate New York. You have wondered—who hasn’t?—to what extent the places you meet in stories and novels are tied to real locations. The answer is: more closely than you think. (The same is true of the people in them.) Nonetheless, we wish to preserve some freedom of movement, so that should we need the police station to be on the western edge of the village, as opposed to the center of downtown, we will be able to have it there. Let’s call this place Huguenot, which should be an obvious enough clue to anyone who lives in or around the actual village to its true identity—but please, hold it loosely in mind.
Interesting, isn’t it? how it has to be a village. It does seem as if much of horror fiction takes place in small communities, doesn’t it? Of course there are exceptions: you can name one or two or ten narratives that contradict such an assertion, but consider the vast tide that fulfills it. Horror thrives in community, and what embodies community better than a village? Large enough to contain a number and variety of people, yet small enough for the majority of them to know one another, the village is the place where the threat to one can be felt by all. Perhaps there’s a certain amount of nostalgia, too, in horror’s love for the village, a longing for a kind of ideal community we don’t experience anymore. Or perhaps not.
* * * *
3. The Setting (B): The Forest
Imagine tall trees stretching back into gloom on every side of you. It is not important that you have much arboreal expertise: if you do, picture oak, maple, the occasional birch; if not, picture your generic tree. The majority of trees in this area are deciduous, and thus autumn-bare, but a few evergreens jostle for elbow room. The ground is a jigsaw of yellow, brown, red, and orange leaves. Huguenot, like so many other American settlements, was built within the great forest that once blanketed the North American continent, a blanket whose edges have steadily been pushed back, even as more houses, more buildings, have been constructed within the forest, in quest of the privacy that is supposed to be a mark of personal wealth and success. But the forest has not gone so far away as we might suppose. There are still groups of trees scattered throughout the village, and you do not have to drive very far—ten minutes, fifteen depending on the direction you choose—before you find one of the forest’s fingers.
It may be that you think of the forest as little more than an abstraction; it may be that you are one of the people who believe in the forest as a pristine natural paradise, Robert Frost’s woods so lovely, dark, and deep. If either of these is the case, take your car on one of those ten- or fifteen-minute drives, until you arrive at one of the digits the forest pokes into the world. Park your car. Leave your cell phone, your BlackBerry, your iPod in the glove compartment. Lock the car. Be sure you put your keys someplace safe—someplace you can get to them quickly should the need arise—and walk out into the trees.
Don’t stop after ten or fifteen minutes: keep going for an hour, two, until you are deep in a place you have not seen before. Feel free, should you like, to lean against a tree, sit on a log—mind it isn’t rotten, though. Now, here, feel how far away you are from everyone and everything you know, feel to what distance your life—which is to say, the routines you inhabit—has receded. Look at the trees around you. They almost seem to form a maze, don’t they? Feel how exposed you are. Something could be watching you, couldn’t it? It sounds silly to say, yes, but something out behind one of these trees could be watching you. Try not to jump when you hear that crashing in the undergrowth. Most likely, it’s a pair of squirrels chasing one another, or a fawn still clumsy. Do you think you can find your way back to your car? You did walk in a straight line, didn’t you? What direction was that from? Something could be watching you, couldn’t it? Can you feel the hairs on the back of your neck prickling? They really do that, you know.
What would you do if a tall, pale man in a soiled black suit stepped from behind one of the trees? What would you do when you saw that his eyes were yellow? Would you bolt? No one would blame you if you did. You would find, though, that an hour is a long time to walk, and the woods are perhaps not so friendly as you had thought. Branches tug at your feet as you run over them; tree limbs whip your face and arms. You might find that everything looks the same, that you cannot find the route that brought you here. A look behind—do you dare risk a look behind? You know what you hear: growling (which makes you think of that dog you were so afraid of as a child), tree limbs snapping as something large barrels through them. It does not matter where you put your car keys, does it? because like our friend at the beginning of this story, you aren’t going to have the chance to use them; you will not come close to finding your car. As you feel your pursuer closing in on you, you might as well scream, vent your rage and fear and frustration, empty your lungs. There is a deep laugh, the kind of laugh a big dog or a bear might make if such things could laugh, and then a lightning bolt of pain scores your neck as a massive paw strikes it open, almost separating your head from your body, which falls dead on the leaf-strewn ground. Your vision bursts white, and that is all you know. What remains of you will be found the following day, when the police chief is realizing that something very bad, an unprecedented bad, is on his hands.
The woods are dark and deep. Lovely?
* * * *
4. The Characters (A): The Police Chief
Tall, six foot three, but more than height, he gives the impression of size, as his weight pushes the red needle on his bathroom scale ever-further from two hundred and fifty pounds and ever-closer to three hundred. His doctor has told him to slim down, which he fully intends, but he can still bench as much as he could in the Navy, experiences no shortness of breath or chest pains, and finds it difficult to accept that his health has been or in any way might be impaired by what he estimates is a few extra pounds. His hands and feet are almost abnormally large, so much so that it is difficult for him to find shoes that fit in any of the local stores, and his face is similarly large. His eyes are blue and liquid, his cheeks crisscrossed by red nets of capillaries, his nose narrow and close to his face. He wears his hair crew-cut short. If he does not look particularly friendly, neither does he look particularly hostile; the principle impression he gives is of wariness.
He has held his position for the last half-dozen years, and he prides himself on knowing all of Main Street’s merchants, and all of the town’s clergy, by name. It is true that he knows not a few of them from various infractions of the law, ranging from Bill Getz—owner of Pete’s Corner Pub—passing out in the middle of Main Street at four on a Saturday morning after sampling a bit too much of the thirty-year-old Armagnac a friend brought him from the south of France, to Judy Lavalle—former manager of the White Orchid boutique—stabbing her husband in the leg with a packing knife after she uncovered his affair with her assistant manager.
The Police Chief has an almost surprisingly forgiving attitude toward such faults. This is because he believes that, at root, human beings are hopelessly corrupt, depraved, every one of us always ready to cross some law or code of behavior should the opportunity present itself. The Police Chief does not understand why humanity is this way; he just knows it is. He is rarely surprised by any of the crimes, small or large, to which he is called on to respond. That is about to change.
Is it necessary to say, the Police Chief is the narrative’s representative of order? In a horror narrative, it is rare for there not to be such a figure, either institutionally sanctioned or self-appointed. Such a character embodies the social structure(s) under assault from the monster. Close to the center of the story’s events, s/he has access to all manner of information, as a result of which, s/he serves as a kind of guide through the narrative’s winding corridors. (This figure may also have ready access to all manner of weaponry, the benefits of which are not to be underestimated.)
Nowadays, it is common enough to show this character flawed—perhaps to express our continuing unease with the powers that regulate our lives, our suspicion that the institutions attacked by the monster were already rotting; or perhaps in the interest of heightening narrative tension. In case the Police Chief’s sour view of humanity is not sufficient instance of this, it may help to know that, two years ago, in his official capacity, he systematically harassed Harold Stonger, former bartender at Dionysus bar and grill, over the course of three months, to the point that Stonger attempted suicide by opening his wrists with a box cutter. The Police Chief’s reason for doing so was a car accident involving his then-eighteen-year-old daughter, Chloe, who had used a fake ID to consume four margaritas before sliding behind the wheel of her 1990 Volvo. It was not the first time Chloe had used this ID, which was of almost professional quality; while the accident her drinking led to consisted in her driving her car off the road and into a small tree at a relatively slow speed; although the consequences at home were severe, Chloe walked away from her car unharmed. Nonetheless, the Police Chief made it his personal mission to allow Harry Stonger no peace. Persistent and involved traffic stops, several raids on Dionysus leading to one sizable fine, a handful of visits to Stonger’s apartment, left the man no doubt that the Police Chief wanted him gone from Huguenot. In all fairness to the Police Chief, he in no way encouraged Stonger to open his wrists, though when he learned of it, he could only express his disappointment that the EMTs had not arrived at Stonger’s apartment a little later.
* * * *
5. The Characters (B): Barbara Dinasha
Proprietor of the Dippie Hippie mostly used clothing store on Main Street, she is mid-forties, her long hair more gray than blond. Currently she lives in the small apartment over her store, where she sits at a black table next to the bay window that overlooks Main Street. She wears a white terrycloth robe over a peach cotton nightdress. There is a mug of coffee on the table, beside a yellow legal pad on which Barbara draws the man whose face has filled her dreams every night for the past two weeks. She uses a blue ballpoint pen whose scratch on the paper is the only sound aside from Barbara’s breathing.
Barbara has resided in the apartment since last winter, when she moved there after having left her husband of fourteen years and their eight-year-old son, for reasons of which no one was sure but everyone had an opinion. Her husband—as yet, they remain legally separated, and when he has been drinking too much at Pete’s Corner Pub, Tom Dinasha still expresses hope of an eventual reconciliation—is a carpenter and handyman and well-liked, as is her precocious son, Brian, who is a star pitcher in the local Little League, but since Barbara draws most of her clientele from the SUNY college, her consequent dip in popularity with the village’s permanent residents has not appreciably decreased her store’s business.
Barbara likes the college students: she herself attended the State University twenty-five years before, which was how she came to Huguenot from Northport, Long Island. She majored in Studio Art before dropping out to spend the next seven years of her life on the Grateful Dead tour, which was not inconsistent with the reasons that had brought her upstate in the first place, namely, a desire to be at the school whose reputation was for maintaining the spirit and behavior of the Sixties, in which Barbara was just old enough to regret not having been able to participate.
At a diner in Carbondale, Illinois, she met her future husband, who, as it happened, was a lifelong resident of Huguenot who was hitchhiking cross-country to see the Dead in St. Louis. They spent six months on the Dead tour, then returned to Huguenot, where Tom learned carpentry from his father and they lived together in an old barn that he gradually rebuilt into a house. Tom Dinasha became a fixture in Huguenot, first as the guy you could call on when your regular guy couldn’t make it, then as your regular guy. Barbara remained his elusive and somewhat aloof companion, observed taking the occasional art course at the college, but otherwise keeping to herself until a modest inheritance arrived after her father’s death and she decided to open the Dippie Hippie. By that time, a year had passed since she had found herself pregnant and she and Tom had married because, as each said to her and his close friends and relations, neither of them was brave enough not to. At the wedding, Barbara’s father had been well enough to give his daughter away; in six months, the cancer that had eaten one lung would have finished the rest of him. (Barbara’s mother left the house when Barbara was fourteen, and she has not heard from or about her since.)
She doesn’t care for the Chief of Police, who, from her interactions with him over the years, especially since opening the store, she has come to view as slow-moving, dull-witted, provincial, and bigoted. She knows he sees her as little more than an aging, would-be hippie who likely burned out what little there was of her mind to begin with years ago. (She does not know, but would not be surprised to learn, that he also suspects her of moving some kind of drug, probably pot but possibly something harder, through her store. While he has only entered the Dippie Hippie once, when it opened, to wish Barbara well in her enterprise, he and his officers make it a point both to watch it and to make Barbara aware that they are watching it.)
This morning, though she has seen his car pass down Main Street on its way to the station, the Police Chief is far from her concern. She is thinking about her dreams—dream might be the better word, since it has been substantially the same thing every night: she and a tall, pale man wearing a soiled black suit walking side by side in the woods, somewhere, she knows with dream-certainty, on Frenchman’s Mountain (not that she has spent much time there). The man speaks to her, and this is where the variation in the dream occurs: every night, he says something different. One night, it was, “Do you know that Doors song?” Another, it was, “But you haven’t told them, have you?” A third time, he said, “I could help you.” She cannot remember all his utterances, although she has the sense that they tend to fall into one of two camps: either, “Break on through, Barbara, break on through,” or, “Let me help you. All you have to do is say yes.” Once he has spoken his piece, they stop and he turns to face her, extending his right hand in a gesture so familiar that she takes it without thinking. It feels strange, like holding a wet wire brush, and looking down, she sees that his hand with its slender fingers has become a large paw, covered in bristly fur and soaked in bright red blood, which dribbles over her skin. She starts to look up at the man, is on the verge of seeing something, something crowds the top of her vision, when she sits upright in bed, awake.
Barbara does not believe in this man/monster as having any objective existence. Despite the fear, the weirdness, occasioned by the recurrence of him in her dreams, she understands him to be no more than the manifestation of a subconscious feeling that has become lodged—temporarily, she had thought—in the theater of her unconscious. This emotion is guilt, its source her leaving her son.
Needless to say, we know better, don’t we? In a horror story, dreams, hunches, instincts—those parts of our lives we file under the headings of the Irrational, or the Atavistic—are keys with which the narrative presents its characters. Those who accept those keys, fit them to the locks of the doors in front of them, find their way through to the next part of the maze; those who let them drop to the floor will live long enough to regret their mistake. Of course, part of the function of these elements is to add to the sense of unease the story wishes to evoke in the reader by appealing to her or his own experience of them. In addition: 1) they move the narrative along; 2) they’re an economical way of introducing or incorporating the more fantastic elements of the story into it; 3) they form part of the springboard from which the protagonist(s) will take the leap into whatever impossible explanation is required for the horrors confronting them. In the end, the narrative will go beyond merely invoking this side of experience, it will validate it, privilege it, as if to say that it is in everything we do our best to suppress, to trivialize, that survival lies.
Barbara is our anchor; she is the character who stands for the rest of the village inhabitants. Unlike the Police Chief, the Werewolf, you, Barbara cannot go everywhere, see everything. As the Revel continues and the narrative veers from extravagance to extravagance, she stays in place, refusing the madness of the dance.
* * * *
6. The Characters (C): The Werewolf
What about the Werewolf, then?
To be frank, it’s a dilemma. While it remains offstage, no more than a shadow cast across its victims, the monster is a blank, an empty space you fill with your fears, with whatever chases you from sleep and makes you sit bolt upright in bed at four in the morning, heart banging. At the moment, the Werewolf is your Werewolf; it is whatever you have conjured from hearing that word and reading about his depredations. (Might we go so far as to say that, right now, the Werewolf is you? [No, no, of course not.])
That won’t do, though, will it? You would like a photograph of him, wouldn’t you? over which you might linger. You would like to examine his face closely, pore over each and every detail of it, attempt to match what is outside to what is inside. Are you familiar with phrenology? It was a nineteenth century science that tried to ascertain personality characteristics through mapping the shape of the skull. You laugh at such an idea—we all do—but how far away from it are we, truly? We search the newspaper and magazine pictures of the perpetrators of whatever outrage currently confronts us, desperate for a clue to their motivation in the set of their eyes, the curve of their mouths, the tilt of their heads. We stare at ourselves in mirrors, trying to see what it is in the mystery of our faces that makes us fail the way we do.
You would like a picture: Will a drawing suffice? Three drawings, actually: that’s what Barbara Dinasha has produced on her legal pad. Her work is rough, but there is a sureness to it that makes you wonder what would have become of her had she remained in the college’s Art program. The first shows the man’s head: squarish, its features sharply angled, so much so that it might remind you of a piece of cubist sculpture. In her dreams, the man has impressed her as made of edges, as if his face had been struck from a block of flint by quick blows from a hammer. The hair is lank, parted on the right side; Barbara has shaded it with her pen, seeing the blue ink as dark brown that does not appear to have been washed in the last two or three days. She has dotted the square jaw to indicate the dark stubble traversing it. The nose is broad and flat; the lips full and the mouth wide; the eyes wide and dark—brown, Barbara thinks, although they may be black.
Her second sketch is of the man’s hands, which are distinguished by long, thin fingers and particularly the ring fingers, which stretch longer than the middle fingers. Fine hair covers the back of the hands out along to the ends of the fingers. The edges of the nails are ragged, dirty.
Barbara’s final drawing is of the man in whole, a slender figure dressed in a dark suit and white dress shirt open at the collar. Like the others, it sufficiently resembles the man from her dreams that, were the police pursuing him—as they are, though they do not know it—they could do no worse than show these drawings to men and women on the street, post copies of them in conspicuous places. Barbara, however, is as unsatisfied with this one as she is with the two others. In part, her discontent arises from the limitations of her medium. There is no way for her to render the man’s voice, which lingers in her ears as if he had whispered there a moment ago. It is deep, more so even than her father’s, and he sang bass for the church choir, and it possesses a calm authority that she would find appropriate to a surgeon. The remainder of Barbara’s discontent is rooted in her inability to reproduce the feeling the man leaves in her. Were she to take up her pen once more and add a pair of goat horns to his head, goatee his chin, bedeck him with a barbed tail, pitchfork, and surround him with a corona of flames, the effect, while exaggerated and cartoonish, would more closely approximate the effect he has on her.
Something more? Something more definite? How about this: there’s an old man, Mr. Dock, the former head librarian of the village library, who has retired to his bungalow halfway out to Frenchman’s Mountain. Were you to show him Barbara Dinasha’s sketches, his brow would contract, he would remove his glasses for a clean from a handkerchief, then inspect the drawings again. Unable to deny his recognition, he might tell you about a young man who left Huguenot to study medicine up in Albany when he, Mr. Dock, was thirteen, some seventy years gone. Alphonse Sweet, came of the Quebecois who moved into the region at the end of the nineteenth century; a bright lad, though cruel, terribly cruel. He didn’t return, Alphonse, killed, it was said, up in some sort of ghost town in Western Canada under dubious circumstances. He was buried there. No, Mr. Dock doesn’t know what Alphonse was doing there.
(Oh—and hungry: the Werewolf is always hungry.)
* * * *
7. The Characters (D): You
Yes, you’re part of this. Do you even need to ask? You leap from character to character, a voyeur rifling through home movies of the most intimate sort:
—You’re the Police Chief receiving the call that Ed Cook, the County ME, has been found dead in the doorway to his apartment. Rubbing the sleep from your eyes, you listen to Shelley Jacobson struggling to keep her voice calm as she says that Ed had been torn open, there was blood all over the place, and while they aren’t sure, it looks as if certain ... parts have been removed from the body. Bile burning at the back of your throat, you say, Let me guess: kidneys, part of the liver, and the tongue. That’s right, Jacobson says, the emotion in her words momentarily overwhelmed by her surprise. You don’t tell her that the same selection had been removed from each of the hunters found on Frenchman’s Mountain, that Ed Cook had phoned you to discuss this last night. Looks like we’ve got a gourmand on our hands, he’d said, almost his final words to you. You don’t repeat his attempt at witticism; instead, you tell Shelley that you’ll be right there and hang up.—
—You’re Barbara Dinasha, opening the latest letter from the oncologist, skimming his most recent plea to you to return for treatment; even if the cancer isn’t curable, there’s a decent chance that treatment could earn you another three months, possibly more. You remember your doctor telling you that your constant tiredness wasn’t chronic fatigue: it was your body exhausting itself on the invader that already had colonized most of it. You’re not that far away from the overwhelming panic that rose in you as you left the doctor’s office, that manifested itself in the desire to run, to escape, to leave the life you had and keep moving until nothing familiar remained—within a week, it was this impulse that would take you from your home and family to the apartment over the store, a flight that solved nothing, simplified nothing, that only made the situation of your dying worse. By the time you understood that you needed to talk to Tom, to Brian, things had reached the point that you could not see a way to do so. You drop the letter into the trash and, for an instant, hear a voice saying, “I could help you, Barbara. All you have to do is ask.”—
—You’re each and every one of the Werewolf’s victims. You’re the quartet of hunters sitting around their early-morning fire, fighting the chill air with a flask of Talisker, your rifles propped against the logs you’re sitting on, less concerned with firing those guns than with maintaining an annual tradition fifteen years old, a kind of secular retreat, and if one of you should by luck take down a prize buck, that would be nice, but it’s not essential. You’re the single mother out for a morning jog who’s decided to take one of the paths on the Mountain, even though it’s hunting season and your mother has warned you about the idiots who can’t tell the difference between a woman and a deer. You’re the ME, wishing you felt one-tenth as calm as you did your best to sound to the Police Chief, glad that at least you spoke with him before you opened the bottle of gin chilling in your freezer, which you already know will do nothing to dilute the images of those four men’s remains—and never has that euphemism been so accurate—but which may help to still the shaking that has seized your hands since you drew to the end of the final autopsy. You’re a pair of dancers leaving The Blue Belle out on Route 299, discussing whether to drive into the village for a drink at Peter’s Corner Pub, because although it’s close to two, Pete’s will still be open, and the two of you are wound tight from too many cigarettes and too many lap dances for too many freaks, who seem to have been drawn from their caves, their mother’s basements, by the last few days’ carnage. You’re the chef, sous-chef, and waitress in early to the Toreador on Main Street to assemble salads, start soups, and decide on the day’s specials, the three of you unable to discuss much besides the killer who has chosen Huguenot as his theater, and about whom a host of rumors, most centered on what he’s taken from the bodies of those he’s butchered, are in heavy circulation.—
—You might even be the Werewolf, himself, which the hunters experience as something enormous, dark, snarling, that leaps into their midst and lays one of them open before any has registered its presence. For the single mother out on the mountain trail, the Werewolf is first the tall, pale man whose black suit is soaked with the blood of the man in whose exposed insides he’s rooting around, and then he’s something else, something she knows the moment she pivots away from she has no chance of outrunning, but maybe she can call for help before it’s too late. For the ME, the Werewolf is a tall, pale man in a soiled black suit standing outside his apartment door, who, when he grins, shows a mouth with many too many teeth. For the dancers, the Werewolf is a rising growl in the backseat of the car. For the staff of Toreador, the Werewolf is a roar and shape too big for their narrow kitchen.—
* * * *
8. Some Headlines (In Lieu of Successive Descriptions of, Essentially, the Same Thing)
HUNTERS KILLED: Four Men Found Murdered on Frenchman’s Mountain; Woman Who Notified Police Missing.
CORONER MURDERED: Was Working on Slain Hunters; Police Chief Refuses to Rule Out Connection to Previous Crime.
DANCERS MISSING: Were Seen Leaving The Blue Belle Two Nights Ago; Car Found Abandoned and Bloody.
RESTAURANT MASSACRE: Staff at Local Café Victims of Horrific Crime.
HUGUENOT HORROR: Upstate New York Town Terrorized by Savage Murder Spree; Twelve Confirmed Dead, Additional Deaths Feared; Residents Panicked; Local and State Police Baffled.
* * * *
9. A Small Town in the North
Where does he come from, the Werewolf? What drew Alphonse Sweet (it’s him: no need to play coy) to that ghost town in Western Canada? What did he find there? Why did he leave his studies at Albany in the first place? What was he looking for?
The answers lie on the other side of an experience that the monster himself cannot articulate; when he tries to bridge it to them, he sees images sparse and stark.
White.
Whiteness. The town,
Distant on the tundra.
Words on white paper.
—
Two rows of buildings,
The town sits on the plain, lonely
Even of ghosts.
—
Wind whistles up Main
Street. Empty windows return
No reflections.
—
Snow breaks underfoot.
Wooden planks groan, protesting
The wind’s attention.
—
Flurries cloud the air.
At the heart of swirling snow,
Five figures standing.
—
Heavy fur robes drape
Bodies. Carved animal masks
Substitute for faces.
—
A plea, an offer,
A withered hand extended,
Taken. Whiteness. White.
* * * *
10. Trees Painted on Plywood Walls
For Barbara, the narrative’s climax begins with a crash that jolts her from a (blessedly) dreamless sleep. Eyes wide, heart thwacking against her sternum, she sits up in bed, a single question, What was that? flashing in her mind in great neon blue letters. She does not know the answer. Was it a lamp? She doesn’t think so. This sound was not the dull clang of metal echoing off a hardwood floor: it was brittle, the sharp crack of glass breaking—one of her windows, maybe, or the full length mirror hung sideways in the living room to give the space the illusion of increased size. Is there an intruder in her apartment? She listens for the floor creaking under the weight of an intruder’s sneaker, but hears nothing.
Barbara throws back her bed’s heavy quilt and rises from it, stooping to take the heavy flashlight she keeps under the bed in case of a blackout. The flashlight has a nylon loop at its end to slip around your wrist; Barbara does so, gripping the flashlight close to the end because she does not want it for illumination: she wants it for a weapon. Should there be anyone prowling her apartment, be he sociopath or drunken fratboy, she intends to beat him senseless first and ask questions later. She does not feel self-conscious or melodramatic in the least. Nor does she recognize her response to the noise within the context of a horror narrative as ill-advised, if not a mistake of the fatal variety; Barbara doesn’t care for horror stories—though no doubt she would know the scene she is in if you pointed it out to her.
She slides across the floor to the door, where she listens while counting to two hundred, time enough for any intruder to think that the noise he heard from her bedroom was nothing more than her turning over in her sleep. She leans her head out of the doorway far enough for her to see down the short hallway to the living room. The living room appears to be empty. She cannot see all of it from here, however, so, flexing her fingers on the flashlight and raising it, Barbara steps from her bedroom and crosses the distance to the living room, more calm than she would have predicted had you asked her to imagine herself in such a scene, yet still apprehensive lest one of the boards in the hall floor creak and betray her. None do. She halts at the threshold to the living room and tilts forward, peering from side to side. She still cannot see every last bit of the living room, but it appears empty; neither does she observe evidence of broken glass, either from the windows or the mirror on the wall. Taking a breath, Barbara steps into the room.
No one is there. Having established this fact through a series of quick glances, Barbara verifies it by turning in a slow circle, flashlight held at the ready. The room is empty of anyone save herself; nor have its contents been disturbed. Whatever she heard must have come from outside. Relaxing her grip on the flashlight, Barbara walks to the bay window and surveys Main Street. It’s quiet. A group of college kids, most of them underage, no doubt, stands in front of Pete’s Corner Pub, smoking and talking—given the presence of the killer, an exercise in collective bravado. A state police car cruises up the street, drawing glances from the kids. It would appear that none of the plate glass windows opening into the shops along Main Street has been smashed. Barbara steps back and, with one more look around the living room, exits it.
She is at the doorway to her bedroom, which is to say, she has walked a short distance in a short time (though it has been time enough for her to wonder if the noise she heard was a vivid dream [not that she knows anything about those]), when there is another crack, louder than the first, the same crash of shattering glass, without a doubt from the living room. Barbara jumps, then turns and runs back into the living room, flashlight firmly in hand.
This time, she sees immediately that the mirror has fallen completely from its frame, which contains only darkness. “Shit,” she says, crouching to search for pieces of glass, which, she thinks, it’s a wonder didn’t slice her foot.
Although there are no lights on in Barbara’s apartment except for the nightlight in her bathroom, there is enough light streaming in through the front window for her to be able to see around the living room surprisingly well. As she slides her hand over the floor, that light dims, as if someone had his hand on a dial and turned it all the way to zero. It’s like the descriptions Barbara has read of losing consciousness: everything goes black; the only difference is that Barbara maintains awareness as the room vanishes around her. She is not afraid, only confused, wondering what has happened; some type of power outage, she supposes, which reminds her of her flashlight, whose switch she locates and slides on.
She is no longer in her living room. A corridor stretches in front of and behind her, its walls unstained plywood, its ceiling somewhere in the darkness overhead. Her apartment’s hardwood floor has been replaced by gray concrete. The plywood walls are decorated with trees painted in black, white, and gray, some thick, some thin, as if trying to suggest perspective. All of them have been painted with branches bare. Looking at them, Barbara thinks of her dreams, of standing with the tall pale man in the woods on Frenchman’s Mountain. Barbara points the flashlight from walls to floor, from floor to ceiling (undistinguishable), from ceiling to walls, from walls to ceiling, from ceiling to floor, unable to understand what she is seeing, the part of her brain that processes information jammed. The mundaneness of her surroundings only adds to her confusion. Were she to find herself transported to an alien jungle teeming with wailing blue flowers, slithering pink vines, a six-legged green beast with a mouth of curving fangs creeping toward her, the landscape and its inhabitants would be consistent with the strangeness of the shift; the weirdness of this move, however, strains against the ordinariness of her slapdash surroundings, the kind of thing you might expect at a low-budget haunted house at Halloween. Walls, floor, walls, ceiling, floor, walls, walls, walls: she jerks the flashlight from one to the other frantically, as if one of the surfaces is going to surrender the secret of what has happened to her. She drags her free hand through her hair, hoping the pain of her fingers tearing through its tangles will yank her out of this place and back to reality. But all the pain does is confirm the concrete cold beneath her, the painted trees shining on the coarse walls.
Barbara switches off the flashlight, plunging herself into darkness once more. She counts to ten, then turns the flashlight back on. When she does, she is again faced with the plywood walls and their arboreal decorations; this time, though, the sight of those walls prompts her to action. Perhaps a failsafe switch has been thrown somewhere in the depths of her brain; perhaps the neurons that had stalled have been bypassed. Barbara stands and approaches the wall to her right. It is solid, braced, it feels like, from the other side. Letting the flashlight dangle, she tries with both hands to move it, with no more luck. Annoyance prickles her skin, causes her to mutter, “What is this?” There is as much reason to walk forward as back, so Barbara starts walking forward. As she does, she sees a white light shining in the distance ahead. Thinking it might be the flashlight reflecting on a window or mirror, she slides the switch to off. When the light continues to shine, Barbara switches the flashlight on and hurries toward it. She keeps the beam on the floor in front of her, but the glow is strong enough for her to be able to see the walls on either side of her. The trees painted on them appear to writhe as she passes them; a trick of the light, she is sure.
As she moves ahead, Barbara notices that the corridor branches off on either side of her at irregular intervals. While she wonders where those branchings lead, she does not linger at any of them. Should this light in front of her be a disappointment, there will be time for her to return to them. It occurs to her that she is walking through a giant maze—being led through it, more like—and then she hears something. It is difficult to say what it is; it is one of those sounds that is so low, so soft, that you are not sure you even heard it in the first place; you are not sure it was not your mind whispering to you. If there is someone in the room with you, you will say, “Excuse me?” and the other person will look up from their book and say, “I didn’t say anything.” Barbara stops walking, and the sound appears to halt as well. Maybe it was only her feet echoing off the concrete and plywood. There it is again, faintly, a sound, a sound like, a sound like someone weeping, like someone at the hiccoughing end of hours of unrelenting crying. It seems to be coming from the other side of the wall to her right; how far back from it, Barbara cannot guess. Could it be another person, someone else trapped in here with her? What else could it be? Barbara takes a deep breath and calls out, “Hello! Is there anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Hello! I’m over here! Can you hear me? Hello?” Her voice slaps flat against the plywood. She looks at the wall, which is painted with a series of spectral white trees that remind her of birches. There is no answer. The weeping fades. Barbara repeats her call, receives no answer, tries a third time. When she judges she has waited a sufficient time for a reply and has had none, she continues toward the light. She does not hear the sound of weeping anymore.
Before long, Barbara sees that the light in front of her is a single lightbulb, dangling at one end of a cord running into the darkness overhead. It marks the end of the corridor: a third wall connects those to either side of her, blocking her way. A single black tree, squat, enormous, its branches spreading out like a web of nerves, decorates the surface. Barbara’s pace slows as a combination of anger and unease seizes her legs. She is on the verge of turning around when she notices what appears to be the outline of a door set in the wall, at the heart of the tree. Directing the flashlight’s beam at it, she sees that there is a door: there is the doorknob; there are the hinges. With her luck, she thinks, it’ll be locked.
She is wrong. When she grips the doorknob and turns it, the door swings open easily. Stepping through it, she finds herself in a large dark space, at the far end of which a man sits at a table, lit by a source she cannot identify. When Barbara sees the man, her pulse quickens, sweeping the anger and unease from her. From her place at the door, she calls, “Hello? Hello?” and walks toward him.
“Barbara, welcome!” the man says.
* * * *
11. A Cabin in the Woods
For the Police Chief, the narrative’s climax begins on Frenchman’s Mountain, to which he has driven this afternoon in order to revisit the site of the first murder—well, the first victim he discovered, when he pulled his cruiser up behind the dusty black pickup parked well back from the road up and over Frenchman’s Mountain in a makeshift lot favored mainly by occasional hunters. In twenty years on the job, the Police Chief can count on his fingers the number of cases he’s worked that have stymied him the way this one has, left him feeling he’s playing perpetual catch-up. Of all the unpleasant sensations that attend his job, this is the one he likes the least; in fact, he detests it. Things are bad enough that were the State Troopers, or even the Feds, who appeared yesterday, to untangle this mess, he could not only live with, but be happy about, it. As things stand, though, the smug attitudes the State Troopers brought with them melted away at the sight of the first group of victims; nor have they had any more success stopping, let alone catching, the killer than the Police Chief and his staff. For the first time, he actually feels a certain solidarity with the men and women he generally considers his rivals. Should things continue the way they have been, he expects even the Feds will seem more human.
However, the Police Chief doesn’t intend to let the situation progress any further, so he’s driven out here, to revisit the scene of that first discovery. He’s parked at one end of a dirt road that curves away from Route 299. To his right, the ground is straight for about fifty feet, then rises in a steep hill down which the marks of the first victim’s run remain visible. To his left, the ground dips to a line of trees that stretches around in front of him and climbs the side of the hill. Directly ahead of him is the spot where the hunter’s boots and jeans were visible sprawled beside the truck over which the rest of him had been splashed. The ground remains dark from the blood that soaked into it.
Despite his belief in humanity’s innate depravity, the Police Chief has been shocked by what he has witnessed this last week. Like listening to a talk in a language he only partly understands, his mind cannot process everything it has taken in. He has not felt afraid so much as amazed, as if he has voyaged to a strange new country whose people follow customs utterly alien to him. Before now, the worst thing he had seen had occurred when he was in the Navy and serving on the flight deck of the Intrepid. In a moment of fatal carelessness, a sailor walked into the spinning propeller of an airplane. That had been worse than bad, but it had been an accident. The savagery of this past week reeks of intention, but an intention neither the Police Chief nor anyone of his fellows has been able to see to the bottom of. It’s the kind of over-the-top behavior you find in Hollywood melodramas, not daily life. And yet, here they are.
As a rule, the Police Chief is not afraid of the woods. Over the course of his life, he has spent a good deal of time in them, and he possesses the confidence that comes with experience; in addition, he is sufficiently large that most things he might encounter in the woods of Upstate New York have the good sense to avoid him, and any that do not, he has more than a fair chance of being able to handle, and well at that. (The handgun riding his hip doesn’t hurt his confidence.) Now, though, he feels a finger of fear tickle the base of his spine as he realizes that he is being watched. The forest is quiet, so much so that his breathing, the leaves crackling under his shoes, sound loud as thunderclaps. With the certainty of religious revelation, he knows that the killer, the monster behind the murders of twelve men and women, is standing about halfway up the hill to his right, just far enough back in the woods to prevent him from being seen. He is watching the Police Chief’s actions with a keen and rapacious intelligence, a savage humor. Were the Police Chief’s sense of the killer’s location a shade more definite, he could draw his gun and do his best to validate that hunch. Since it isn’t, there is nothing for him to do but sprint in that direction, certain that, by the time he arrives at the man’s position, he will long since have been reabsorbed by the trees.
As his quadriceps and calves burn with the effort of propelling him up the hill, as his hand grips the butt of his pistol, ready to haul it from its holster, the Police Chief realizes that the killer is not moving, that he can feel the man’s gaze on him still, a spotlight illuminating him as his feet push off soil that slides away beneath them. He knows that it can’t be this simple, that the killer isn’t just waiting for the Police Chief to take him in, that either he’s ready to bolt or this is a trap, but if the killer will wait until the Police Chief reaches the top of this hill—if he judges there’s no way this big a man could catch him, the Police Chief is ready to put that conceit to the test. If the man has laid some sort of trap, the Police Chief is ready to try that, too.
He gains the top of the hill and keeps going, pushes himself not to slacken, to slow. His lungs are bellows full of fiery air. Ahead and to the right, about fifteen feet into the trees, is that ... ? A tall figure regards his approach, its shadowed face broken by a bright grin, and the Police Chief’s gun is out and in his hand. Now the killer turns, but it’s too late, even as he breaks into a run, the Police Chief is too close for him to escape. He considers dropping to a firing crouch, but there are too many trees, not to mention the possibility—though faint—of a random civilian out for a walk. It’s no matter: the sight of the tall man running has sent a tide of adrenaline through the Police Chief, and the prospect of closing his hands on this maniac fills his pounding heart with fierce joy.
The killer leads the Police Chief along a trail so faint as to be nonexistent, cutting right, left, right, left and left again. Leaves crash, sticks snap, the occasional stone shoots away from the toe of the Police Chief’s boot. One misstep and he’s down with a broken ankle, but he doesn’t slow his pace. As the killer turns right, down a short rise, then left along a dry stream bed, the Police Chief stays on him. When he dodges right over a large mound and along another trail barely there, the Police Chief draws closer to him. He does not recognize the place to which he has been led. Rows of evergreens zigzag away like the walls of so many hallways. The air is full of the Christmas smell of pine. In front of the killer, a line of evergreens lock branches in a dark green wall.
Without breaking stride, the tall man plunges into the trees. The Police Chief follows. For a long moment, he can see nothing. Branches whip his face; he raises his forearms and lowers his head. The trees extend deeper than he had anticipated. He can hear the killer pushing through trees mere feet ahead of him. If the man wants to ambush him, coming out from this thicket offers a perfect opportunity: a second to gain your bearings, and then turn your attention on your pursuer. Guarding his face with his free hand, the Police Chief lowers his gun.
Events are moving too quickly for the Police Chief to articulate what he expects on the other side of these evergreens. Were it possible to slow time, he might say that he judges it most likely that the killer will be on the move once more; however, he would not be surprised to find the man standing off to one side or the other, a knife or hatchet in his upraised hand. Whatever he expects, it is not what confronts him as he bursts free of the trees at last. It is a cabin, the kind of slope-roofed box hunters use to insure they’re in proper position as the sun is on the rise. The entire structure sits a foot or so off the ground, raised by concrete blocks to discourage pests and keep seasonal floodwater out. Its walls are maybe ten feet to a side; the largest one holds a wide window. To the left of the window, a door hangs open.
Gun in front of him, the Police Chief circles the back of the cabin. It wouldn’t do for the killer to slip out a back or trap door while the Police Chief frets a possible ambush at the front. A quick duck to the ground to glance up under the cabin confirms the front door as the only entrance. The Police Chief pauses his survey as he approaches the front wall and its large window. No doubt the killer can hear him rustling the leaves out here, but sound can play tricks on you; no need to assist the man with a clear view of him. Stepping close to the cabin, the Police Chief lowers himself and eases around it, well below the bottom of the window. In front of him, the open door blocks his view of the cabin’s interior. The Police Chief has a vision of the killer standing in the doorway, a loaded shotgun in his hands. Or worse, a bomb, something that will reduce the two of them to burnt blood and carbon.
Never mind, he thinks, as he creeps around the door. As long as the killing stops, never mind.
A glance shows the doorway empty, the edge of what might be a couch on the right. The Police Chief’s best guess, the killer is hiding behind the couch, using it for cover. The Police Chief is reasonably certain his gun will find that couch little of an obstacle. He releases the safety, clears the door. On the floor, gun to the right. On the count of three. THREE!
* * * *
12. Six Drawings Hung In A Coffeehouse
At last, the height of the Revel, the moment the characters gather to enact the story’s culmination. Here exposition, explanation, digression, flashback, analysis, have ceased their usefulness; here we have reached the point of the pure image. How many such images does it take to convey a story’s climactic actions? Two, four? How about six?
You may want to imagine these as large drawings, each one done on paper eleven inches wide by fourteen inches long. They’re mounted on black cardboard that presumably intends to frame them, but each one has been placed slightly askew—apparently in error, since the misplacement adds nothing to each picture—and it’s hard not to be annoyed by this. The pictures have been executed in pencil traced with pen and ink, colored in places with dabs of watercolor. Their style: if you know about such things, you will recognize the debt they owe to the early work of Bernie Wrightson, who illustrated the original Swamp Thing comic books; the figures display the same rubbery fleshiness that distinguishes Wrightson’s drawing from this time, the same feeling of texture.
This is not the kind of display you are likely to find in your local museum, unless you live near one of those institutions that prides itself on surfing the cutting edge. You are more likely to encounter these images at your neighborhood coffee shop, whether corporate or independent, alongside samples of other local art. To see them—to study them—you will have to lean over other patrons at their undersized tables, drawing the irritated glances of couples clasping hands over their lattes, businessmen flourishing their copies of The Wall Street Journal like personal banners. Ignore them.
In the first drawing, Barbara Dinasha, her back to you, stands in front of an unfinished wooden table at which sits a man with the head of a beast. She is wearing a long-sleeved nightdress that descends past her knees; the man has on a soiled black suit and a white dress shirt whose top button is open. Although Barbara’s face is not visible, the stiffness of her back, her arms close to her sides, indicate tension; while his face is visible, it is harder to read the expression on the man’s animal features, which could be described as those of a wolf but which also suggest both a bull and a goat. Barbara’s peach nightdress commands the center of the picture; to either side of the beast-headed man, blue-white semi-abstractions suggest open mouths.
The second drawing shows a hand cradling an apple. Its fingers are slender, their joints slightly enlarged, the thick nails that end them jagged, dirty. Fine hair covers the skin, thickens toward the wrist that extends from a white cuff. The apple is the apotheosis of the fruit: large, perfectly proportioned, its skin shining. The reflection of Barbara Dinasha’s face curves over the right side of the apple, foreshortened and distorted by the angle from which the artist has chosen to portray it, but the expression on her features appears to hover somewhere between horror and surprise. Dull yellow, the fingernails are the only color in this piece.
For the third drawing, the artist has turned the paper lengthwise. The Police Chief, in profile from the waist up, is at the left-hand edge of the picture. Together, his gun at hip level, his left hand outstretched, his eyes narrowed, suggest a man walking in little light. Behind him runs a wooden wall, the swirling grain of which composes figures twisting upwards, their mouths exaggerated screams. On the wall, a line of trees has been graffitied. Tall, thin, their branches bare, they would be easy to confuse with the writhing forms were it not for the fact that they have been painted. Gray, white, and black, they seem to recede into the paper.
Also done lengthwise, the fourth drawing is the most involved; perhaps this is why the artist has chosen to leave it in black and white. Set in the same space as the first, its left side is taken up by the man with the beast’s head. He is in motion, his left leg up and bent, his left foot on the wooden table, his arms out and slightly forward. His suit strains against his arms, his legs. Its fabric looks more ragged, worn, almost hairy. Lips peeled back from a forest of curved fangs, the beast mouth is open in a snarl you can almost hear. Above, behind the man, the air is turbulent, a chaos of swirls, as if full of something that is expressing itself through this figure. In the center of the picture, Barbara Dinasha is diving to the floor, her eyes shut, her mouth taut, her hands over her head. It is as if she is trying to leap free of the scene in which she has found herself. The picture’s right shows the Police Chief, his right arm straight out, braced with his left, his index finger already tightened on the trigger of his gun, which is just about to erupt with fire and noise. Lips drawn back from his teeth, the Police Chief’s face is bright with rage. Above, behind him, the air is still, empty.
A single color, a deep, almost luminous red, splashes across the fifth drawing as if some terrific act of violence has burst across it. It’s blood, an explosion of it, on the left side of which is the right shoulder of the man with the beast’s head, and on the right side of which is the top of his right arm. His back is to you, the coat that looks even more rough, hairy, pierced by three holes surrounded by starbursts of blood. The beast head is thrown back, the eye you can see wide with pain, the mouth gasping at the wound being done to it. Behind him, the Police Chief leans forward and to his left, the pose of a man putting all his force into a throw. His eyes are shaded by the brim of his hat, but his mouth is open, his teeth clenched. Study the drawing and you will discern the fingers of his right hand gripping the right hand of the man with the beast’s head.
Drawn from the floor of this space looking up, the final picture shows Barbara Dinasha to the left, leaning against the unfinished wooden table with her right arm. Her nightgown, her hair, are wet with blood. She is not looking at the Police Chief, who stands on the right, bent slightly at the waist, still holding the hand of the man with the beast’s head’s right arm, the torn end of which rests in a pool of blood on the floor. The arm is sinewy, covered in thick, coarse hair. The Police Chief’s uniform is also stained with blood. His eyes do not register Barbara; like hers, they are focused on the object in the drawing’s foreground, in its left-hand corner: an apple, only the right side of which is in view. It is impossible to tell whether the apple’s skin is undisturbed, or if the white of its flesh shows through a bite. The artist has painted the apple pale-green-going-to-red, but that isn’t what causes you to linger on this drawing, ignoring the customers shaking their newspapers at you, edging past you with weighted Excuse me’s—no, it’s the reflection the artist has suggested on the apple’s shining skin. It’s you.
At first, you aren’t sure—actually, you are sure, almost before you realize what you’re seeing, but there’s no way it could be you, is there? A double-check of the artist’s name confirms that you do not know him. Yet there you are; it isn’t some quality of the paint making it a mirror. You’re in there with Barbara and the Police Chief. And the man with the beast’s head, too: he must be in there, even though you can’t see him. Well, his body must be. The expression on your face is difficult to read. Is it curiosity? Eagerness? Hunger?
For Fiona: eleven years and counting (and with thanks to John Skipp for the prompt)