Fraser had arisen from his chair in a great agitation. He was staring behind them, beyond the desk at which they sat, towards the tall third-floor windows.
His interrogators didn’t seem to be aware of the frightful fluttering outside, the scratching at the panes, the darkening of dreadful wings.
INSIDE OUT
ERZEBET YELLOWBOY
Gretchen’s dreams were drenched in forests, luminous and thick. In them she ran until she faded and dissolved, a spill of black ink ever thinning on the surface of a bright moon. That moon, which also shone in her dreams, was fading now as the sun slowly burnished the landscape beyond her open window. Sheer curtains wavered as the day’s first breeze touched them. The hem of one caressed Gretchen’s face as she slept. She pushed it away and watched as mist was swept from the field by a broom made of eldritch light. She did not need an ephemeris. Her blood knew what this night would bring.
She had the day, she thought. Might as well make the most of it; her sisters would insist. They shared an old farmhouse on the far edge of town, rented it from the owners who gave up their crops many years ago. The house was run down, the shingled roof sagged and paint flaked from the wooden siding. Behind it, unkempt fields spread out, sometimes spitting up stalks of corn in late summer. Gretchen’s older sister, May, had her own small garden where lettuce, onions, tomatoes, beans and other greens Gretchen cared nothing for grew wild, almost, for May was a lazy mistress to her own crop. She worked hard, she said, at the grocer’s in town, and besides, rain and sun did most of the growing for her.
Gretchen twisted her black hair in a knot, wishing for the thousandth time for the courage to cut it all off. Her sisters would murder her and she knew it, especially Molly, youngest of the three women. Molly’s hair had never known scissors; she abhorred them. Her hair hung to her thighs in a thin wash of amber, straight as a carpenter’s line. Molly worked at the bar serving drinks to the locals, a perfect job for a pinched and unpleasant young woman. The men respected her, the women ignored her, and Molly was fine with that. There were few enough jobs to be had in this small, nowhere town, and Molly didn’t care who thought what as long as she was employed. The clients tipped her well, no doubt for her loyalty. When strangers came in for a night on the drink, she made certain they knew their place and she kept them in it.
Gretchen did not have a job and resented her sisters for theirs. If ever she could work, it wouldn’t be in this town. People asked too many questions in a place like this and she and her sisters were already considered a bit strange. What kind of women would live on their own? What sort did not entertain men? May swore she had no time for such things, while Molly kept her dalliances far away from home. As for living alone, they simply said they preferred it that way.
“Morning,” May said as Gretchen wandered into the kitchen. There was bacon on the stove and coffee in the pot, but Gretchen could not eat today.
“How do you feel?” May asked, as usual.
“I’m fine.”
“You sure you won’t eat something? I made enough for all of us.”
Every month, the same. Gretchen sighed. Good-hearted, frumpy May meant well—both of her sisters did. Still, Gretchen felt stifled by their overbearing care. Trapped, she was, no better than an animal in a cage, unable to fend to for herself.
“Thanks, but no. You know how it is.” Gretchen shrugged and sat at the table, unable to pretend she led a normal life.
“Have you seen Molly yet this morning?” May said.
“No. She worked late last night, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, traded shifts with Paul so she could have today off. She’ll sleep in, I guess.”
Molly and May both always made certain they were home on this day and the next. They did whatever they must to protect Gretchen. She should be grateful for that, but instead it made her more aware of the freak she was.
Gretchen watched May eat jealously. The scent of meat made her mouth water, but if she gave in to hunger now, it would not go well this night. She rose and pushed open the screen door leading out to the back, where bindweed covered the remains of an old stone step. In the sky, barely visible, she could see the moon outlined by the light of the sun. It would glow, fully rounded, when night fell. Her hair felt heavy and thick, it bristled along her arms and behind her neck. Her skin tightened, grew uncomfortable. She scratched at her calves with her foot.
May watched—Gretchen could feel her sister’s eyes on her. By the end of the day, she would feel everything.
Momma always said, “Beware the wolfweed, it will change you,” but Momma said many odd things. It was ten years too late to wonder at what else Momma knew. When Gretchen was fifteen years old, Momma died. May, eighteen then, took over the care of her sisters. They had been together ever since. Where their father was, no one knew.
If only Momma could see me now, Gretchen thought. She’d never say I warned you or I told you so. No, Momma would have held Gretchen as she cried, and as she changed.
Momma knew every herb in the field, every tree in the forest and every flower that bloomed by the road. Wolfweed grew wild in the woods near the house where the four of them lived, when they were a happier family. The plant was dense, dark and beneath wide, purple leaves there were thorns as long as fingers.
“This one, we can eat. This one here,” she would say, “we must avoid.”
She was soft-spoken and gentle, and stronger than anyone Gretchen knew. She must have been, to raise three daughters alone. The night she died none of them heard a thing. Momma, too proud and perhaps too strong, never once called for their help. May found their mother the next morning, sideways in her bed. Gretchen ran. Into the woods, heedless of danger, she fled from the blood-stained sheets upon which her mother had vomited up her life.
It was dark in the trees. Gretchen tripped over a root and fell. She hit the thorns before she saw them, felt the welt raise on her shoulder when she landed in the patch of wolfweed. She thought nothing of the plant, but the pain brought her back to her senses. Slowly, brushing leaves and needles from her hands, she rose and looked back toward home.
May wrapped her arms around Gretchen as she entered, put salve on the wound and said nothing of her flight. They each had to deal with Momma’s death in their own way. Molly, thirteen then, had curled into a ball on the sofa and was crying.
Two weeks later it began to happen. The moon, bloated with their grief, hung low in the sky. They were packing; May was moving them. They could not live in that house, she said. Not where Momma died. It was late, the three were tired. Molly was rubbing her eyes.
Gretchen, wrapping dishes in newspaper, suddenly felt her skin begin to burn. It started at her shoulder where the wound, red still but nearly healed, raised up, incredibly inflamed. Gretchen yelped, attracting the attention of her sisters, whose eyes widened as they turned to her.
“Gretchen, what is it?” May said as she rose from the floor and ran to her sister’s side.
“It burns,” Gretchen whimpered, her hands clutching her arms.
She began to rock back and forth as May held her. Molly crept over to her side. Huddled there, on the floor of the old kitchen, Gretchen learned the language of pain and her sisters, that of fear.
Gretchen didn’t know how they’d managed to get from there to here, but here they were, in another old house, near woods with no sign of wolfweed. Ten years gone, and it never got any easier. May and Molly still held her as it happened, still stroked her hair and whispered in her ear, we love you, Gretchen, speaking her name over and over as though to help her remember who she was. They accepted, now, there was no cure.
May put her plate in the sink as Molly staggered into the room. Gretchen turned from the door to greet her, but all she received in response was a savage grunt. Molly was no morning person, that was sure.