| 13 Moons: #6 |
[Mar. 24th, 2006|10:56 am] |
June 24, 2005
Lockup in rural Alabama isn't the most fun I've ever had. It's my own fault I'm here - I was running late thanks to some car trouble, and wound up having to just pull over, lock the car and head for the woods. I put my clothes under a rock in the culvert for safekeeping and changed. Come the next morning, I washed the deer blood off my face and hands then went to get my clothes.
They weren't there - or rather, they were, but torn and fouled. Coyotes. My wallet was gone. The underwear weren't too bad, so I washed them off and put them on. The keys weren't under the rock, nor were they under the front tire, where I've left them before.
I saw them, then. Sitting in the ignition. Mocking me.
The sun was getting up in the sky - traffic was going to pick up soon, so I picked up a rock and smashed the window. Just as I reached in to unlock the door, I heard the whoop of a siren.
The deputy listened to my explanation, then put me in the cruiser. "I reckon it might be your car, sir, but you still ain't explained why you're standin' out here in your underpants."
Blood tests, breathalyzer, pissing in a cup.
Whee.
A call to the rental agency and a check of my trunk got my ID established - thankfully, I'd secured some extra ID. The tests came back negative, of course. Still, I got to spend several hours in a cramped county jail wearing an orange jumpsuit and sitting next to a smelly old drunk. When I puked up the deer meat, the drunk freaked out, but I managed to flush the toilet and rinse my mouth before the deputy came back to see what the fuss was about. Explaining half-digested raw meat and copious amounts of blood wouldn't have made things any easier.
A few delays getting the car out of the impound lot, but a repair shop in town was able to replace the window. I'll get my credit cards replaced when I get out of this state. |
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| 13 Moons: #5 |
[Jan. 31st, 2006|11:32 am] |
May 23, 2005
Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada
Fifty-odd years ago, this was the capital of the Yukon. The road to Alaska had just opened when I got in to town. The Klondike gold rush was long over, and Dawson City was inching towards respectable.
I stopped in Dawson long enough to buy some supplies, then headed downriver. I wanted to get away from people, get to a place I could let the wolf out and not worry about killing anyone. It took me weeks to get a small hut built. Nothing fancy – one room, one door, one window. No stove, just a stone firepit and a small sleeping platform.
I lived there for a couple of years, the wolf hunted fur animals and I traded skins at the Trondëk Hwech'in reservation downstream. The reservation was a depressing place – rampant alcoholism and grinding poverty were the least of its worries – but Charlie Tetlichi made up for it. He was old, so old he didn’t know when he was born. He’d made a small living during the gold rush hunting for the miners, and had saved enough money that he was able to afford a little better than the rest of the village.
Age had made him tiny, skin like parchment stretched over knobby bones, black eyes gleaming from his withered face. Charlie traded the skins I brought him for food and clothes, some of which I took back to my cabin, some of which he had me leave outside houses in the dead of night. Everyone knew Charlie was the source of the gifts, but it was understood that to publicly acknowledge them would bring shame on the giver and the recipient. When men from the government came to the village, it was Charlie that talked to them.
From the start, he knew what I was. He made me promise to stay away from the village during the week of the full moon, but otherwise he and the others welcomed me. I brought in food they couldn't get otherwise, brought them pelts they could trade for more luxuries - books, fabric and thread, bullets for the few rifles in the village. For my end of the bargain, I got comfort, warm human voices and a friend.
One day, when I knocked at his door, Charlie didn't answer. I saw him sitting at his table, not moving, so I broke the door open. He was alive, paralyzed - he'd had a stroke. I carried him to his bed, cleaned the caked shit off of him and tucked him in, dribbled some water in his mouth. I sent one of the young men to get the government doctor, a day's hike away. I stayed by his side, feeding him, talking to him. His eyes were still alive, black and deep, frightened. He knew what was going on, but he couldn't talk or move at all.
When the doctor arrived, he walked into the room, listened to Charlie's heart and gave his diagnosis, speaking to me as if Charlie was already dead. "He's had a stroke, and he won't recover. I can get him to a provincial hospital he might linger on a while longer there. He's as good as dead now, his brain's probably already gone. Really, it's a miracle he lived as long as he did."
I thanked the doctor and walked him out the door, talked to him before he drove away in his truck. "We'll make a decision and let you know."
When I came back in, I looked at Charlie. "Well, old man? Do you want to stay here?" He blinked his eyes rapidly at me. "Hold on - one blink for yes, two for no. Do you want to go to the hospital in Dawson?"
blink-blink
"Do you want to stay here?"
blink-blink
"What do you want, then?"
blink-blink
"No? I don't understand - where do you want to go?"
blink-blink
"You've got to live somewhere! I can stay and help, but-"
blink-blink
"Do you want... do you want to die?"
blink
"I can't do that."
blink
"No, I can't! I can't do that!"
blink
All night long I sat with Charlie, talking, telling him stories about the world I'd seen - the trenches of The Somme, Paris, London, Poland, San Francisco, the Alps, the jungles of Africa. His face never lost its rubbery slackness, the drool still trickled out the corner of his mouth, but his eyes smiled. All night long I talked, and when the sun came up, my voice hoarse, I asked him. "Are you sure about this?"
blink
"I'll miss you, old man."
blink
He closed his eyes then, and I pulled out the syringe I'd got from the doctor. It took some doing, but I got it into the vein on his arm, drove the plunger home. I like to think the morphine took him back to his childhood, when his people owned the forests and there were no whites and no government men around. I held his hand until he stopped breathing and grew cold, then walked out the door. No one in the village would meet my eyes, and I knew I wouldn't get the same welcome there any more.
When I got back to my cabin, I got good and drunk and didn't come outside for a week. Three months later, a mining concern bought up the land I was on and I was out of there.
Coming back now, I can tell that nothing's changed - not the important stuff. The river's more polluted, the First Nations are still treated like shit, the wild places get a little smaller each year. There's nothing here for me now, nothing worth staying for. I drive out of town to a secluded area, take off my clothes and shift, letting the wolf take over again. Tomorrow I'll move on, probably south, try to figure out where this trip is taking me. |
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| 13 Moons: #4 |
[Jan. 25th, 2006|08:39 am] |
April 24, 2005
Warszawa, Poland
I stopped in the Okopowa Street cemetery today. Yitzchak Korczak is buried here, one corpse among many in the mass graves of ghetto fighters. He died, his sister told me, charging a squad of Wermacht, his cleaver upraised. A little man, just over five feet tall, his back bent from a childhood accident. He'd studied to become a Rabbi, but gave up and apprenticed himself to a butcher. I was shivering in an alley, hiding in a pile of rubbish, red with blood - my own and others'. He took me in, fed me, clothed me. I spent several months with him, locked in his freezer on the full moon, sweeping his shop and serving as a shabbas goy on Saturdays.
I was giving the wolf a little more freedom in those days, attacking the gangs of thugs that preyed upon the Jews in the ghetto when I could control it, locking myself up securely when I couldn’t. Yitzchak knew what I was, but he ignored the wolf and spoke to the man. "You try to be good, yes? That's more important than you think." Over coffee, we'd argue - was man inherently sinful, or was sin a false construct? What was the source of evil? Was I evil, or was it the wolf, or both, or neither? We'd swap sides, never reaching conclusions, often ending up laughing at each other's earnest defense of the position they'd recently attacked. The coffee was black and sweet – “dark as the Devil’s heart and sweet as a stolen kiss”, Yitzchak would say. 60 years on, I still order my coffee that way.
Yitzchak never married and doted upon his neices and nephews. He presented them with candy, with coins pulled from behind their ears, with jokes and silly rhymes.
When the Germans came in to the ghetto, Yitzchak was one of the leaders of the resistance. I was long-gone, had wandered on south. When the letters stopped, when I read of the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, I worried, but not too much - with the Poles busy fighting two invaders, I thought, the Jews might actually get a break. I hadn't paid much attention to the posturings of that foolish man in Germany, not even when Austria and then Czechoslovakia fell without a fight. I was busy, after all. I was trying to find a cure, trying to stop the monster inside me.
I was blind to the greater evil.
After the war, I made my way back to Warsaw. Yitzchak's sister was aged, bone-thin. She alone of her family had survived. Her children, her parents, her cousins, her brothers - all had gone into the ovens. The blue numbers on her arm were her only link with them now - her home, her history had been wiped out by first the Germans, then the Polish collaborators and finally by the Soviets. "Yitzchak said many times he was glad you were gone, that he hoped you were safe, Joseph. He tried to protect us, hiding the children in his freezer when they came to take them." She recited the names of the dead, her voice calm and even as I sobbed, mourning the loss of my friend, and of her family, and mourning that I was nowhere near to help them when they needed me. I never saw her again - a neighbor told me later she went to Israel, but I could not track her down there. I sensed that she wanted it that way, that I was one more reminder of a world that failed her and her people in their time of need.
Tonight, in the graveyard, I can see toppled memorials covered with swastikas and antisemitic slogans. The sun is setting and I hear voices, a gang of skinheads are cavorting through the graveyard near me, drunk on cheap vodka and spoiling for trouble. To them, the thin man kneeling by a grave is an easy target, another Jew they can push around, use as a target for the frustrations of their useless, wasted lives. I don't even try to get up, don't try to run for the cement cell I've rented. I welcome the change this time, savoring the pain and as my consciousness slips beneath that of the wolf, I drink in the horror on their faces as they realize their easy meat is going to eat them instead.
April 25, 2005
I washed in the Wista river, beneath one of the docks. A pair of overalls stolen off a line of washing covered me. It felt good to let the wolf out last night. I shouldn't have, I'll be sick later, but right then, and right now, I'm glad I did it. Yitzchak wouldn't have approved - he'd have pointed out that I was punishing children for the sins of their grandparents, "So, what, I should find the child today descended from the procurator that burned the temple in Jerusalem, and I should cut his throat? Who would that benefit?" Yitzchak is dead, though. He died riddled with bullets, his skull smashed by a rifle butt and his beloved nieces and nephews starved and gassed and burned in an oven. I'm alive and alone, and even though I know that killing a gang of drunk skinheads won't bring back my friend, I can't feel guilty about it. Not today, not here. |
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| 13 Moons: #3 |
[Jan. 24th, 2006|08:09 am] |
March 25, 2005
Gévaudan, France
They still talk about it here. Children are warned if they misbehave, "La bête vous mangera vers le haut, enfant !" The Beast will eat you up, child! My kind still come here, but we do not hunt. Some of the caves have shelters - for some reason, we like to be near here, near where our ancestor, the Beast of Gévaudan, killed so many. The locals watch us, though. THere is an uneasy truce - as long as we do not hunt, they leave us be.
In my wanderings, I've tried to make sense of what I am, what I've become, what I should be. If I'm careful, I could live another hundred years or so. Coming here, to the home of the most famous of my kind, brings memories bubbling to the surface.
World War II in the hills of Serbia, Tito's partisans throwing Nazi collaborators into my cage when the moon was full, placing bets on how long each would last, their coarse peasant accents harsh on my ears. Working my hand out of my shackles, breaking two fingers to do it but getting at the latch for the cage and running through the camp, worrying at their throats, their blood gushing into my muzzle. Their bullets ripping into my skin, the smell of freedom overpowering even the hunger and the pain, I left them bleeding and screaming for their mothers as I ran into the hills.
Slick, coppery and oh so sweet the taste of the blood to the wolf, the wild lesser brothers smelling it and surrounding me half snarling at the smell of men and half cringing beneath the power the glory of my breed wolf's instincts mixed with the savagery of the man to make something more, something less I cannot stop thinking about the blood and the taste of fear in the flesh and I am doubled over and sick with the memories but also painfully erect, my cock throbbing at the taste of fear in my memory and I cannot stand it
It's bad this month, I can tell it's going to be bad. At dinner, I didn't even eat the beef - it was too rare, and I didn't trust myself to eat it without tearing at it and snarling.
I lock the door to the shelter then close the manacles around my wrist, double-checking to make sure they fit.
March 26, 2005
When the moon shines through the bars, I feel the change begin, as always the wash of different perceptions and the mind of the wolf coming in waves, overwhelming me. The pain as my bones and joints reshape themselves, the anticipation of the hunt and the shock and panic of the beast as it realizes it is trapped, battering against the bars and tearing at the chains.
Waking up in a cell, shackled to a massive bolt in the floor, it's not the best way greet the morning. It's better than waking up covered in blood in an alley, though, or with a mouthful of entrails. I dry heave a few times, then punch in the combination to drop the key into the cell.
The shelter keeper, an old man with a cast in his eye, comes to unlock the cell door. He says nothing, points to my clothes - washed and neatly folded - in the corner. I can smell breakfast in the next room. He and his wife have been here for decades. No one knows who pays him, and the shelter always has the most up-to-date, reliable technology. I dress, eat in silence.
Outside, it's a bright day - that special color of light you see only in the south of France. Still chilly, but the sun is warming me up as I walk.
I don't know what possessed me to take this trip, to wander at this point in my life. I've had this affliction for almost a century and there's no cure short of death. For a time, I reveled in it. Later, I fled from it, lived for years in the Yukon, running wild at night, surrendering entirely to the wolf. I've been probed, analyzed, tested, conditioned and hypnotized. I've tried Scientology, EST, ECT, exorcism, high colonics and baptism. The wolf is always with me, hungry and tearing at the walls I put around it.
Where to next, I don't know. |
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| 13 Moons: #2 |
[Jan. 20th, 2006|11:41 am] |
February 24, 2005
There's a safe house in Baghdad. Quite a few of us gravitate to places like this, where it's easier to disguise our predations. Farouk used to be in the Mukhabarat - Saddam found that having staff that could eat their victims came in handy.
I've got a nice room, steel walls with solidly welded chains. There's a table bolted to the floor with some stains on it that indicate this room's been used for more than just housing transient skin-changers.
Farouk invites me to eat with his family - his daughter-in-law standing in for his wife, the victim of an American cluster bomb in the first days of the war.
"Joseph, my brother, you should stay. I have contacts with the government, and someone with your... talents... could be very useful to them. The Iranians are pushing hard, trying to get a firm grip on the ruling coalition so that when the American dogs leave they can control the oilfields. We need your help."
I say nothing, wipe my pita through the juice the lamb kabobs have left on my plate.
"In'shallah, you will understand what I mean. The Americans are losing their will to fight, and my people are growing stronger." He beckons to his daughter-in-law, who stands next to him meekly. He lifts her veil to show her scarred cheek. "Shrapnel. The infidels shelled her school, claimed a sniper was in one of the buildings. 3 of her students died. My son, her husband, he died when the Kurds attacked his unit in Mosul." Her eyes are empty, dull. She used to be pretty, I can tell. If her eyes had any life in them, she would be still, despite the scar tissue. "The Americans and the Iranians are fighting over the body of my homeland, and we cannot let either one win."
"Farouk, I sympathize. You have welcomed me into your home, a penniless traveller, one that suffers the same affliction as you, and I am an ungrateful wretch, but I cannot."
Farouk's face darkens as I speak, then breaks into a smile. "My brother, forgive me. This is a reunion, a meal of brotherhood. I have shamed you, by asking of you what you cannot give." He waves his hand and his daughter-in-law - why can't I remember her name? - retreats to the kitchen, then returns with iced fruit and a bottle of wine. Farouk notices me staring at the wine and grins. He pulls the cork, sticks his finger in the neck of the bottle and flicks a drop on the floor. "The prophet said a good Muslim should not drink a drop of wine. I am reasonably certain he spoke of that drop there." The wine is good, sweeter than I normally prefer, but it goes well with the fruit.
After we eat, we retire to the roof and smoke, scattered gunfire to the south and east staccatto counterpoint to the relaxed discussion.
"I do not understand, Joseph, why you do not control the beast as the rest of us do."
"I can't give in to it any more, Farouk - to control it, I have to feed it, and I can't do that any more." Unbidden, memories of my last visit with Farouk come to my mind - running through Iranian trenches, tearing into the cadres of young boys lined up for their next human wave attack, some of them not even holding rifles, just clutching papers with Koranic verses on them, their lips speechlessly cascading first prayers to Allah the All-Merciful and then blood as Farouk and I attacked. I shudder. "It weighs too much, I can't bear to remember any more."
"Come, brother." Farouk pulls me up, embraces me. "You should get ready to sleep."
February 25, 2005
I can't get the smell of Farouk's daughter-in-law off me. She came to my cell last night, locked the door as my change started. It came as no surprise that she was one of us, and we changed together. She was in heat, and I could no more refuse her than I could stop the moon from changing. In the morning, she dressed without a word, refusing to make eye contact. Farouk saw me out - I know he knows what we did, but he says nothing. Is he hoping she's pregnant? That he'll have help in his fight for a regime that's dead and rotting already?
Leaving Farouk's I am stopped by American soldiers. The headscarf makes me look like a native, and I am slammed against a humvee and barraged by questions. Who am I? Where am I going? What was I doing, leaving the house of a Ba'athist? Farouk has provided me with ID cards - according to them, I am a German reporter. I didn't ask what happened to the reporter that had them before me. The Americans push me around but ultimately let me go. The people on the street look at me with something approaching respect. If they knew I was an American, or that I was a lycanthrope, I'd likely find myself facedown with my throat cut.
I've got a little cash now - the advantage of knowing someone that helped stash Saddam's money. Time to move along, though. |
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| 13 Moons - #1 |
[Jan. 19th, 2006|09:41 am] |
January 25, 2005
Mandhradevi, India. My kind aren't common here, but I'm out of time and after the Ukraine, I know I don't want to be on an airplane or train when the moon's full.
Some kind of temple celebration in the area, it should be noisy and mask the noises I make tonight. The chains should be set up as I requested. The owner of the warehouse thinks I'm crazy - possibly thinks I'm making pornography, rape films are supposed to be popular here. That's fine - he'll see that there's no one in the building with me, and even if he wants to call the police, their hands will be full tonight. Tomorrow, I'll hike out and be long gone.
January 26, 2005
oh god oh god must get out of here get cleaned up the chains broke
Later
The owner of the warehouse and two other men came in during the night - one of them climbed in a ventilation window and used a bolt-cutter on the chains I'd put on the door. I don't know if they were going to rob me or just wanted to know what I was doing in there, but they got into the office and they must have come too close to the wolf they found. Once it tasted blood, it couldn't be stopped - the chains didn't hold and none of them survived. I broke the window getting out and from the blood there was on my body when I woke up, I knew the wolf was sated. I vomited then, chunks of flesh pouring out of me onto the floor. Outside, I could hear screams and the wailing of ambulances. I cleaned my face and hands, threw on my clothes and ran, stopping only to dump some paint thinner over the bodies and light a match, hoping it would at least delay pursuit.
I found a stream outside of town that was relatively isolated, and cleaned myself off.
The commotion in town is because of a stampede last night - someone (or something) got a crowd panicked and hundreds of people died. I hope it masks the ones I killed.
I can still taste the blood.
I'll know better next time, and I'll get where I need to be in plenty of time to get everything set up right. |
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