“It’s a manticore,” he said. He smiled so hard that his face went shiny where it stretched over his cheeks and his chin.
He just looked like Matthew in a fur coat. A fur coat with one set of paws dangling from the cuffs and another flopped on the floor. It had a sad, crooked tail with a spike tied to the end of it and a fluffy collar that rose all the way to his ears.
“You look silly,” I said. Matthew rolled his eyes.
“A manticore,” Mr. Jabricot said, “has the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a dragon.” He held up a needle, curved at one end and straight at the other, and threaded it with a strand of something long and dark. Matthew held up his own needle and they began stitching him up, one from the top and one from the bottom.
“It has a terrible voice, like a dozen trumpets,” Matthew said. “It has a mouth full of teeth, three rows of them, like a shark.” As they stitched, the coat shrank. It clung to his back, wrapped around his legs, and pulled his shoulders over so he was bent, then kneeling, then standing on four paws. The claws scraped the floor.
They stitched and stitched. I told them to stop.
Stop, I said. It’s stupid, whatever you’re doing. I don’t believe it, I said. Why is that tail lashing? I can’t believe how stupid I was to come. I’m going to close my eyes and when I open them, I won’t be here, you won’t be here, none of this will have happened.
They didn’t hear me.
A manticore’s voice sounds exactly like a dozen trumpets, if a dozen trumpets were playing twelve different jazz scores and all the musicians were deaf and stranded at different points in time.
I opened my eyes.
The manticore was standing on Mr. Jabricot. Its claws pierced the brown tweed of Mr. Jabricot’s coat and its tail swung in an arc that shrank the world down to nothing but the poisonous spike tracing the edge of it. The manticore knocked Mr. Jabricot’s hat from his head, and I could see that the top of Mr. Jabricot’s head was balding, a circle of tender, shiny flesh ringed by short hair as plain as the coat of a mouse.
“Oh no,” Mr. Jabricot said. “Oh no oh no oh no.”
The manticore’s mouth was full of teeth, three yellowing rows of them, and it ground them together as it studied all the soft and delicate parts of the man lying beneath its claws. The twelve trumpets screamed and Mr. Jabricot covered his ears.
The teeth looked terrible shoved into Matthew’s face. They stretched his mouth so wide that his lips couldn’t close over them. They crowded his nose and pressed his chin back to accommodate their three rows, turning Matthew’s face into a different shape. It wouldn’t have been able to laugh, or smile, or twist its lips up at one corner over something it found more interesting than anything else in the room. It didn’t look like Matthew at all.
“Spit those out,” I said. I reached out and grabbed the manticore’s fur. I pulled it toward me, or maybe it pulled me toward it. I couldn’t be sure because Mr. Jabricot struggled up from the floor and ran from the room. He was sobbing; I could hear it underneath the trumpets screaming and doors slamming and the voices of people coming down through the halls. I worked my fingers into a seam, already wearing out and pulling apart. I ripped it and the manticore bit my arm.
“Stop that,” I said. The manticore ignored me, so I ignored the teeth sinking into my arm, the smell of blood, and the aching, blinding pain, and found another seam and ripped that one too. The manticore was unraveling now. Its fur peeled off in long strips. Its teeth fell out, one by one. It let go of my arm and ran for the door, howling in a brassy voice that sounded less and less like a roar.
My arm was bleeding, so I sewed it up. There were needles in a cupboard and I used a piece of hair from my own head. It hurt more than I thought it would, but less than having a manticore’s teeth stuck in your arm. It healed in a week and when my mom asked what happened, I said I had been scratched by a cat.
“Do you need an antibiotic?” she asked.
I told her that I didn’t think so. It wasn’t anything dangerous and, besides, it was almost healed.
Matthew was grounded. They found him in a closet in the museum, asleep in the wreckage of a very expensive specimen, a half-lion, half-tiger skin that Mr. Jabricot had been commissioned to mount as part of a display on rare hybrids of the world. His mom made a formal apology to the museum board and tried to quit her job out of embarrassment, but they begged her to come back, with the condition that Matthew would never go into the museum again.
I haven’t decided what I am going to say to him yet. I think he still might be my best friend.
The scar on my arm is very faint and narrow. It’s about the width of a piece of hair and curves three times between my shoulder and my elbow. Sometimes, on hot and quiet afternoons, I’ll go outside alone and look at it in the sun.
On the rare occasion, I sing.
A trumpet, just one, sounds sweet when it finds the right tune. If you’re lucky, a monster does too.
13
The second werewolf story in this book. If I love werewolves (and I do) it is because I read this story, with its professor, magician, Nazi spies, and Hollywood film actress, at an age where such things left lasting impressions. It is a very silly story by a very good writer and editor, ANTHONY BOUCHER.
Professor Wolfe Wolf, unlucky in love, is drowning his sorrows in a bar, when he meets a magician, who informs him that he’s not destined to be a professor, but a werewolf. Detectives, spies, brainy secretaries…Things, needless to say, do not go at all according to plan.
THE PROFESSOR GLANCED AT THE NOTE:
Don’t be silly—Gloria.
Wolfe Wolf crumpled the sheet of paper into a yellow ball and hurled it out the window into the sunshine of the bright campus spring. He made several choice and profane remarks in fluent Middle High German.
Emily looked up from typing the proposed budget for the departmental library. “I’m afraid I didn’t understand that, Professor Wolf. I’m weak on Middle High.”
“Just improvising,” said Wolf, and sent a copy of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology to follow the telegram.
Emily rose from the typewriter. “There’s something the matter. Did the committee reject your monograph on Hager?”
“That monumental contribution to human knowledge? Oh, no. Nothing so important as that.”
“But you’re so upset—”
“The office wife!” Wolf snorted. “And pretty damned polyandrous at that, with the whole department on your hands. Go away.”
Emily’s dark little face lit up with a flame of righteous anger that removed any trace of plainness. “Don’t talk to me like that, Mr. Wolf. I’m simply trying to help you. And it isn’t the whole department. It’s—”
Professor Wolf picked up an inkwell, looked after the telegram and the Journal, then set the glass pot down again. “No. There are better ways of going to pieces. Sorrows drown easier than they smash. Get Herbrecht to take my two o’clock, will you?”
“Where are you going?”
“To hell in sectors. So long.”
“Wait. Maybe I can help you. Remember when the dean jumped you for serving drinks to students? Maybe I can—”
Wolf stood in the doorway and extended one arm impressively, pointing with that curious index which was as long as the middle finger. “Madam, academically you are indispensable. You are the prop and stay of the existence of this department. But at the moment this department can go to hell, where it will doubtless continue to need your invaluable services.”