An angry crowd, a mob it would seem, appears out of a blind alley to block my way. “Surprise,” they shout in one voice. “Many happy returns.”
The Curse
The awful hair didn’t foliate all at once or at the cosmic theater of a full moon (as prescribed by legend), but gradually, irresistibly, over a period of seven years.
“I didn’t want to say anything,” my wife said to me one morning, “because I know how sensitive you are about your appearance, but the fact is you’re getting repellently hairy.”
“I’ve been thinking of growing a rabbinical beard,” I said.
The fangs were harder to explain. Fortunately, for the academic appointment in Anthropology I held at a prestigious midwestern university, the lupine incisors only occasionally showed themselves during daylight hours.
It is my intention in this paper to draw sharp distinctions between superstition and fact, between latent content and manifest reality.
I am cursed.
A woman at a cocktail party, a poet (so she said), unread, perhaps unpublished, put a curse on me.
What did I do or say that provoked her? Was it that I asked her to marry me or that I didn’t? I can’t remember. We argued about something that seemed trivial at the time. She flew into a rage. “There’s a curse on you now,” she said with a wicked grin.
Perhaps my father, who was said to have spells, suffered from the same affliction.
On certain nights, unable to control his vile need, the wolf wanders the shadowy streets in obsessive quest of strange women.
From all available evidence, he likes them fat, with barely perceptible defects of character.
What I do: I don’t know what it is — my wolf self a comparative stranger. The morning after one of his escapades I wake up in my own bed as from a nightmare too frightening to survive the light. There are mud stains on my boots. After breakfast I check the morning papers to see if anything has been reported for which I might be accountable. There is always something. Too much responsibility is like having none at all.
I copy them down in a notebook, the violent crimes I might own and some others, though less likely, which strike dim chords of recognition, in the hope of coming to know my other self. In the past nine months, as of yesterday, I have collected the imprecise accounts of two hundred and seventy-nine savage crimes.
My wife says, “Though I have tried, God knows, I can’t love a monster even if he is my own husband.”
Today at the college, the chairman of my department asked me into his office for one of his mildly apologetic dressings down. He had no objections to beards as such, he wanted me to know, a neatly trimmed beard certainly doing no violation to the canons of academic propriety, but….didn’t I think it might not be the wisest thing, antagonizing others where antagonism might be avoided.
I kept my hairy hands in my pockets while he spoke. The wolf going through a particularly dangerous phase.
I woke without regret this morning, feeling if anything some relief as if during the night I had shed some burden. We are learning to live together, the wolf and I, have reached a sort of unspoken accommodation.
At the college, a note in my mailbox from a G. Tress in the Classics Department. “When will I see you again?” it asks. The curious thing is I have no recollection of having seen Tress before.
My therapist, Roper — this, my first visit in almost a year — asks if I’ve had any new incidents. I admit with sheep’s grin to a few. “If you didn’t dwell on it,” he says, disturbed at his failure with my case, “it would go away.” He has no faith in curses.
A dreamless night. No sign of mud on my boots for the first time in seven days. Miss Tress (at lunch with her in the Faculty Club): though characteristically plump, is more attractive than the women the wolf ordinarily pursues. I apologize for my behavior at our last meeting, devious as a fox, in the hope of finding out what it was. She winks at me and laughs. What was it that she finds funny? I ask. “Nothing,” she says, blushing. She opens her blouse to show me a terrible scar between her breasts. I hold the menu in front of her to block the eyes of others. — How did that happen? — Your claws, she whispers. Don’t you remember?
Her wound, the dizzying spectacle of it, makes my eyes water. “You are a sentimental beast,” she says. “Would I have showed it to you if it were not something of which I was proud?”
The wolf prowled again last night. The same telltale signs — mud on boots, blood in tooth glass. Each day I get a little closer to feeling his ravenous need.
I ask my wife if she heard me when I came in last night. She pretends not to hear the question.
This is what I remember of last night’s dream.
Rain. I am walking in a forest on all fours like a wild animal over ground covered with pine needles and damp moss. Small animals and birds scatter and shriek at my fearful step. I am hungry. It is my calling to be perpetually hungry. Later (somewhere the loss of time), I have a fight with another animal who threatens to tear out my heart. I am, it appears, the more determined to survive. When the fight is done I grieve over the death of my enemy, heartbroken at what I have lost. Hunger its own master, I stuff down the remains.
Today, while I am lecturing on “Religion and the Family,” the fang on the right slips out. A girl in the back row runs from the room screaming. The rest of the class continues taking notes.
In my dream, the woman without a face flies out the window to her death. “It is not me,” I call after her. “You’ve made a mistake.”
I have written down in a notebook the means of his destruction, which is traditional and permits some sense of honor in this vile career. Our fates are in the same hand.
Goldie Tress has not been at the college for the past three days, which leads to grim speculation. I value her as never before, enamored after the fact — an aspect of the curse, I suspect — with the ones I destroy.
An emergency session with my therapist, Roper. He refuses to believe my nightmares have corresponding manifest reality. “The beast in you, which is in all of us, walks only in your dreams,” he says in the voice of authority.
I ask him to explain the fresh mud on my boots each morning. He makes as usual an evasive answer, turning the question back to me. It is how he handles the inexplicable, a man with a frail sense of mystery.
“Maybe you think I put it there myself.”
“Do me this consideration. Put the boots to your nose one morning and tell me what you sense.”
In the past the wolf has never shown himself except in minor ways to the doctor’s eyes.
Briefly, willed by the doctor’s skepticism, the wolf makes a sudden full appearance, shattering the room with his howl, blowing the doctor from his chair.
“Bravo’” he says smiling when he collects himself, “I’d be much surprised if we ever hear from this wolf again.”
A strange old man with a heavy foreign accent is waiting for me in the living room when I come home. He identifies himself as an insurance investigator but after a few minutes of conversation it is clear that he is something else. Dr. Von Elfant, he calls himself. I know the name from the books of lycanthropic lore. He is a wolf hunter, one of the most famous and successful of that breed. We exchange ironic insinuations. “That is a fine looking wolf beard you have,” he says.
“It is the bane of those closest to me,” I return. “You ought to see it at night when its true colors come out.”
“I half come have way around the world for just that purpose,” says my learned enemy.
These remarks are thrown out from opposite sides of the room, an indication of mutual respect. There is no question of friendship. In these duels, it is death to indicate the slightest self-doubt.