How they must have smiled when they drew within sight of these doors, as the moon rose and the snow began to fall—a night much like this one, come to think! For inside was light, warmth and singing, pedlars with their wares spread out on tables, all manner of strange and interesting folk from all manner of places they had never dreamed on, let alone been. And how the inn’s inhabitants must have smiled to see them coming, also: These two girls, unaccompanied, with their basket of goods and their gawky, gawping stares. Like veritable manna from Heaven.
I was far away by then, mes amis, following my quarry under a lead-colored snow-storm sky. Yet I do believe, nevertheless, that I can reckon the very moment during which my granddaughters’ rash actions led them somewhere they had never wanted to be.
You at the back—yes, you: I have no doubt you thought my Sylvie “pretty,” when you knew her. And my Perrinette, with her puppyish ways; you must have thought her a bad bargain in comparison, though well worth the price of such company. When you fed them both grog and gin, played your fiddles and dared them to dance with each other, dressed them up in your cheap whores’ cast-offs and rouged their lips and cheeks to make them look more . . . appetizing? Oui, madame, c’est veritable: I know for fact that you were there that night as chief inciter, if not ring-leader, in those drunken revels. And how, you may well ask?
Let us say that if I wrinkle my nose just so, I can—without a doubt—
—smell it on you.
Their only mistake—the “sin” that condemned them—was that they had never learned how men, too, prey on men, poor little ones. I had spared them that knowledge, foolishly, out of some vain hope of preserving their innocence; far too well, as it turns out. And for that I will no doubt have to make amends, in time.
This glittering mess-hall, this carbuncle, squatting over a field of shallow graves. This poisoned honeycomb, a nest to trap and drown flies in. This place where off-season travellers sometimes simply disappear, leaving nothing but their few sad treasures and a table or so of full bellies behind.
But you were surprised as well, I am sure, when—after the girls saw you, for the first time, in your true shapes—they let you see them, in theirs.
* * *
My Sylvie found a thin place in the ice with her paw as they broke from the inn, and sank like a stone to its bottom. But my poor Perrinette, hampered by her fine new clothing, was easily brought to ground. And though she snapped at you with her slavering jaws and tore at you with her clever, clawed hands, you shot her all the same: put a ball in her brain, tore her limb from limb, flayed her wolf’s skin away from the man-skin still lurking below, then dragged what was left of her back inside.
For there is much meat to be had from a wolf, if one knows where to make the cuts. Almost as much, in the end, as there is on a poor girl, taken by surprise.
* * *
Yes, it is a sad story indeed. And though you do not seem eager to hear the end of it, I will tell it to you all the same.
These woods were full of wolves when we first came here, but we drove them out, hunting them almost to their extinction. For they knew the truth of our nature, just as the savages did: We are the sort who do not care to share what is ours, not even with our closest kin. So when the wolves had fled we hunted savages, and because we hunted them, the savages dressed up like us and prayed to us, prayed to us not to eat them. We became their gods for a time, until they fled as well, to find themselves others. Or—perhaps—to seek out a place with none.
But we are not gods, and never have been. We are Wolf’s-heads. Tessedaluye. We are . . .
. . . shall I really have to say the word aloud, my friends?
The primal sin of those like myself, mes amis, is that because we were once people who acted like beasts, we are forever cursed to be beasts who know they were once men. A wolf hunts in a pack, to eat, not to kill—it is a proponent of all those most wonderful, natural qualities: Liberty, loyalty, fraternity. But a were-wolf hunts to kill rather than eat, a creature whose unslaked hunger is only for blood and slaughter, defilement and degradation. It will prey even on its own family, for the bonds of kinship mean startlingly little to it; it can violate the families of others, and will, for much the same reason. The were-wolf likes to play, to torture, and takes a grim humor in its continual masquerade, the toothy animal face beneath the gentle human mask.
Perhaps this is because the oldest story behind the myth—one which those amongst us educated in the Classics may well recognize—is that of King Lykaon and his fifty sons; Lykaon, whose disgusting crimes caused the old god Zeus to flood the known world, washing it clean for future, less perverse occupants. Lykaon and his sons, who were transformed into wolves for profaning and denying the gods, for serving strangers human meat, for ravening the land they were supposed to protect like bandits rather than rulers. And since sometimes Lykaon’s name is linked with that of Tantalus, perhaps it follows that the rule he broke was the one which warns us not to share in the eating of our own children, or others’. For to force or trick others into sharing the flesh of your own line is always an evil sort of victory over them, a potential spreading of moral contagion.
Later, in Arcadia, followers of the cult of Lykaian Zeus believed that each year, one of their number would be doomed to turn into a wolf. If that person could only live for a year without tasting human flesh, he or she would return to human form; if not, he or she would remain a wolf forever. But to be a man turned wolf makes the hunger for human flesh a dreadful, and constant, temptation . . .
Ah, yes. Perhaps you have felt it too, by now: That very different sort of greed, aching in all your bones, at the root of every tooth. That itch beneath the skin, just where you can never quite reach. That song in your blood which calls out to the rising moon, dinning in your ears like some evil tide.
For we are all were-wolves here, make no mistake. Every parent who beats and rapes their own child, every man driven to eat his fellow’s flesh—like a savage, though they most-times have better reason for it—by seasonal extremity. He, she, I, you; all of us who break the social compact by treating each other as something . . . less than human.
And the cry, the cry, echoing down unchanged throughout the ages: It is not so, nor was not so, and God forbid that it should be so!
But it is so. Is it not?
And still: Calme-toi. How could I possibly hurt you, m’sieu—an old woman like myself? Look at me. Look.
Yes, just that way.
Sit. Stay. Assayez-vous, each and every one of you, before I am forced to let my—worser—nature slip.
. . . better.
Ah, and now I recall how when I was but a gay girl like my poor Perrinette, still foolish enough to risk myself for trifles, I wore nothing but scarlet velvet . . . scarlet, so the stains would not show so badly. You understand.
Yet how times change, and how they do not. How do they never.
But I do not blame you for her death, any of you—oh no, not I. How could I, and not count myself a hypocrite? For I, of all people, should know how very difficult it is to refuse fresh meat when it presents itself, especially out here in this bleak and denuded frontier landscape. Out here, where hunger rules.