The Worm in Every Heart (15 page)

Smiling.

(IN)

“Aren't you a little slut, to eat the flesh and drink the blood of your own grandmother?”

—“Little Red Riding-Hood,” traditional.

THIS IS AN OLD STORY
. Most stories are. Anyone who says different is lying, or perhaps simply misinformed.

But thus, and even so:

Once upon a time, my darlings, these woods were full of wolves—yes, even here in the wilds of Upper Canada, where the light which seeps between evergreens and maple trees alike is as brown and stinging as though it comes filtered through a thousand mosquito wings at once. Here where the sky is clogged with bark and cobwebs, where black biting flies hover thick under the branches and each step stirs the pine-needle loam up like hay, or sodden grey-brown snow; here amongst the tangle of crab-apple trees and blackthorn bushes, where even the quietest footfall is enough to send little toads hopping clear, like brown clumps of dirt with tiny, jewelled eyes . . .

Even here in these dim and man-empty places, where things leap from tree to tree far overhead, just out of sight. Where under the mulch and muck of dead leaves a veritable feast of dust lies waiting—a fine, dun carpet of ground and yellowed bones.

Which is why, if you hear footsteps behind you as you make your way along the forest's paths, it may be best to stop and hide and wait—as quietly as possible—until they pass you by. And if you see something high in the leaves above, something that looks like eyes travelling fast through the darkness, it may be best to ignore it, even if one is sure it can only be swamp gas—though in truth, there are few real swamps nearby, unless that sump of downed maples and frozen mud you struggled your way through to get to The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise tonight counts as such.

For there are so many things in these woods left still uncounted, even now: Trees whose branches rise high as church-spires, a perfect shape for the keels of bewitched canoes to scrape themselves upon. Caves in which squat the dried-out corpses of savages, hunted beyond endurance and sick with strange diseases, who starved to death rather than allow themselves to be captured and corralled like animals; their hungry ghosts may yet be heard keening at twilight, ill-wishing any white man whose shadow dares to cross their doorstep. A lake that goes up and a cathedral that goes down and a woman dressed all in birch-bark walking, rustling, with her left hand clutched tightly to her chest—that dead-white skeleton hand whose touch to the unwary forehead means madness, whose touch to the unwary back means death . . .

Yet here we sit snug and warm and dry nonetheless, traders and settlers and immigrants bound for even more distant places alike, before this open, welcoming fire; here we may eat and drink our fill and go ‘round the circle in turn, each of we travellers swapping a story for our place beneath this roof ‘till morning. And I will be more than glad to add my own contribution to that roster, if only it should please you to bend your ear and listen.

Might it be that you have a place already set at your table for a poor old woman such as I,
Monsieur? Madame?
A place at your sideboard for a starving, childless widow,
mesdames et messieurs, s'il vous plait?

Oh, no matter; I have walked far tonight, expecting to go yet farther, before I saw your sign and heard your merriment. But I am not yet so weak with hunger that I cannot seat myself.

* * *

Once upon a time, and a time it was . . .

. . . there were two sisters who lived all alone, with no mother and no father to care for them, in the very deepest and darkest part of the woods. They lived in the house of their grandmother, who was often away on long trips, but they were not lonely, these two; never so, not in each other's company. For they were used, from long experience, to making their own amusements.

And what brought this lopsided little family to the heart of the forest,
deux gamines
and one old woman, so far away from everything that is soft, feminine and civilized? Their property dated back to before the Plains of Abraham, before the French Revolution; granted land in perpetuity, as dowry and domain, ‘till one of them might be inclined to sell or give it away—and if that sounds like a curse rather than a gift, then so be it. A not-so-self-imposed exile in the no longer-New World for reasons untold, or (at least) unspoken.

The name,
messieurs?
Ah, but our names have come to mean so very little here in this empty country of ours, have they not? Just as our definitions tend to . . . shift, down the centuries.
Tessedaluye, Tesse-dal'oeuil, Tete-de-l'oueil
—“head of the eye,” no? Or perhaps a misapprehension never corrected: Head of something very, very different.
L'oueil, la luce, la loup . . .

And so it was, after all:
Tete-du-loup,
“head of the wolf.” Wolf's-head.

A strange name, certainly. And yet I know it as well as though it were—my own.

The savages who had occupied this particular plot of land began to shun it soon after the family first arrived to take possession of their new hunting-grounds. For they were ferocious hunters, these ones, male and female alike; from winter through spring, summer and fall, each season to its own sort of prey. In the old country, it had been whispered that the Tessedaluye kept their own calendar, and maybe even their own prayer-book too—had pledged themselves neither wholly to the Catholic nor the Hugenot faith, in those dark days after Catherine de'Medici and her brood split France limb from limb, twisting the wound so that it would never heal cleanly again. Which made them no sort of Christians at all, perhaps.

Or not
good
ones, at any rate.

And where was this house, you ask? Oh, not so very far from here at all. Not so very far that they were not often diverted by the light and noise of The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise which spilled towards them from across the lake, since they had never seen a public-house before, or travellers in such numbers: music, laughter, the rumble of ox-carts, bright city-bought fabrics, men and women dancing like leaves in the wind. These things were mysteries and amazements to the two sisters, poor solitary bumpkins that they were!

For they knew many things, these girls, you see, though the ways of Man were not among them. How to trap a rabbit, and skin it. How to tell the track of stag from that of moose. How to cook a hedgehog under an earthenware bowl, peel its stinging quills free, and crack it for its tender meat. What parts of every creature may be dried for carrying, which must be hung awhile before they become palatable, which may be pickled, or otherwise preserved. And which parts are best eaten just as they are, raw and red and dripping, on the very spot where they were butchered.

The human animal, only, was one they had never hunted. Let alone . . .

. . . tasted.

* * *

Girls are curious creatures, a fact their grandmother was well acquainted with—fated to be wild in their season, just as she had been in hers. So even though she understood that her warnings would (in all probability) go unheeded, she was constrained to voice them anyway.

Come close, my darlings, come closer; listen to me a while, before I go where I must. We do not meddle with those we do not know, yes? Therefore keep always to the safest path, the well-trod road of needles rather than the easier-seeming road of pins—back and forth to Grandmother's house, where you may pull the bobbin and the latch will go up, open the door and come in.

And perhaps you should have stayed behind, old woman, if you feared so for their safety; this is what you may be thinking, and not without cause. But we cannot always choose the way things happen. I have my habits and my instincts, just as they . . . did.

A cry from the back, now: You, sir,
repetez-vous?
Ah,
were they pretty,
of course. For the most important questions must be answered first, naturally.

Well. We all know the tale of Rose Red and Snow White, do we not? From which one may gather that one was coarse and the other fine, one dark and the other fair. One might have been considered pretty, even in this company. The other—

—the other, not so much.

It was winter by then, which made things harder. Winter settles hard upon us all in this inhospitable place, am I mistaken? For when the light grows thin and the nights long, there is very little to amuse one's self with, aside from sleep. Or hunting when the hunger takes you, which is often enough.

The people at the inn, also hungry—some of you here amongst them, no doubt—tried their hand at hunting as well. But when one does not know the territory,
c'est difficile
. The girls watched their distress mount, counting down the days to their grandmother's return, and I think that it must have seemed to them that without their aid the men and women of The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise must surely pine and die like bear-cubs woken too early, beaver kits trapped in an icebound lodge . . . for they were tender-hearted creatures, as all girls are. Yes, indeed.

Almost as much so as they were also born hunters, long-used to watching and waiting while prey struggled deeper and deeper into its own trap. To check for signs of struggle in the snow or drops of blood in the underbrush, for the uneven prints of some weakened thing, for whatever Nature herself might have selected—pre-ordained, in her own magnanimous way—for them to cull.

* * *

The Feast of Stephen, Saint Stephen's Day, has long been set aside for charity. So that was the day our two sisters set out for the inn across the lake, bearing gifts with which to barter their welcome: furs they had cured themselves, berries and fruits they had stored, a goodly portion of meat left over from their own store-room.

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.