Blood Lite II: Overbite (21 page)

“But they eat grains and berries,” O’Meara insisted. “In addition to carrion. It says so right here.”

Mrs. Ingram shrugged and went back to her word processing. “Apparently, this one doesn’t.”

Young Jeremy Cole, who hated to be left out of anything convivial, made a great show of writing up his request on departmental stationery, and collecting a little crowd of admirers in the hallway to watch him submit it. He even made a little ceremony of reading it aloud first. “Dear Chairman Raven,” he intoned. “I, Professor Jeremy Cole, instructor in the Department of Folklore, respectfully request that I be given a new Mercedes-Benz, and this week’s winning state lottery ticket worth seven million dollars. I shall be ever so grateful for your kind assistance in this matter.” He acknowledged the scattered applause with a mock bow and slid the paper under the door with a flourish.

Nobody really expected anything to happen regarding Cole’s flippant petition, and nothing ever did. “After all,” Dr. O’Meara was heard to say, “department heads are not responsible for matters in our personal lives.” The Raven was judged to be entirely within his rights to ignore Cole’s frivolous requests, as any other department head would have done. Cole tried again later, with a less public but equally silly request, but since no one reported any sightings of Angelina Jolie anywhere near the campus, or indeed in the entire state, this effort, too, was deemed a failure.

There was a postscript to this incident, which did not become fodder for the faculty gossip mill. A few days after Jeremy’s second facetious attempt to petition the department head, he was working late in his office, and he chanced to go to the supply closet to refill his stapler. There on the floor of the closet was a sprung mousetrap, its tiny victim still warm but quite dead. On impulse Jeremy abandoned his stapler, carefully lifted the mousetrap, and set it down outside the Raven’s door.

He admitted all this privately to Henry a week later. “It was just an impulse,” he said. “I suppose I was curious.”

Henry nodded sympathetically. “And did anything happen?”

“Well, when I came in the next morning, the trap was gone. That could have been the cleaning crew, I suppose. I didn’t like to ask. But then yesterday I got a phone call from someone in Hollywood. Someone famous. They’re planning a picture set in ancient Rome, and the star had a technical question for a mythology expert.”

Henry stared. When he could trust himself to speak, he said, “Jeremy, do you mean to tell me that Angelina—”

“No. No. Russell Crowe.”

Henry, whose office was across the hall from the Raven, now kept his door open most of the time. He found himself keeping an eye on that portal, half expecting to see someone—or something—go in or out, but nothing ever did. He did sometimes get the feeling that the painted eyes of the Raven were watching him, but he dismissed this as a fancy born of his own uneasiness. When his colleagues laughed and bragged about the marvelous Raven and drew up silly wish lists, he did not join in the merriment. Henry was not amused. His mild dismay had progressed from misgivings to alarm.

In his spare time he began to read all the reference material that he could find on ravens, both ornithological information and mythology.

He learned that corvids have the largest brain size among birds, that they can speak and amass vocabularies of hundreds of words, and that they had been observed making simple tools: wire devices to enable them to retrieve bits of meat from inside a narrow pipe. Their preferred food was carrion, although they were known to hunt and kill upon occasion, and they could eat insects, seeds, and berries if nothing more palatable was available. Interesting, but not really germane to the creature behind the closed door.

Henry turned his attention to folklore. In Pacific Northwest cultures, the Raven was the trickster god, the counterpart of the coyote or of Loki in Norse mythology. That was worrying. For trickster beings, benevolence is purely a whim, and their mood could change for no reason at all. In European myths, because of their fondness for carrion, ravens are linked to war and death, as well as to prophecy.

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly, but he did think that the more information he could accumulate, the better he would feel about the situation. If anyone had asked him about it, Henry would have insisted that the granted wishes were simply coincidences, but some undomesticated portion of his mind, the part that was only in ascendance at three a.m., told him that sooner or later somebody was going to ask for the wrong thing.

The weeks went by without incident until midterm exams. One evening Henry, who had just posted midterm grades, was on his way back from the library, where he had checked out more books on ornithology. In the parking lot he was confronted by a hulking student from his nine o’clock class (Introduction to World Myths.) The young man, who was built like a thumb, was wearing a letterman’s jacket over a football jersey. He blocked Henry’s path, clenching and unclenching his fists, while his breath made little clouds in the frosty November air.
Like a dragon
, thought Henry, wondering where the campus cops were when you needed them.

“You gave me an F, man!”

Henry found student confrontations distasteful, but he was inured to them by now, and he never allowed himself to be swayed by threats or pleas for mercy. “I didn’t give you anything,” he said calmly. “You earned the grade you received.”

The young man thrust his face close to Henry’s, and in a cloud of beer fumes, he roared. “You can’t flunk me! Do you know who I am?”

“Darris Bradshaw, I believe,” said Henry, mentally ticking off names on his roll sheet.

“The starting quarterback, that’s who! Averaging nineteen points per game, that’s who!” Henry might have been more sympathetic if Mr. Bradshaw’s research paper had not seemed so familiar to him. He could not prove it, but he suspected that, with minor changes, this paper had been handed down through the ranks of the Athletic department, copied over the years by various unknown scribes, like an academic Book of Kells. He was not impressed with this student’s honesty, with his intellect, or with his class attendance record.

“And I took your stupid fairy tale course for an easy A, because if I get less than a 2.0 the coach will bench me.”

“That is unfortunate,” said Henry, attempting to edge past him. “But the grades have been sent to the registrar. It is out of my hands.”

“Yeah? Well, who’s your boss?”

Inadvertently, Henry glanced up at the dark stone building that housed the Folklore department. In one window there was light. “I suppose you could take it up with the department head,” he said, pointing toward the glowing window.

Darris Bradshaw took a step back, scowling upward. “So this department head—he’s your boss? If he says you have to change my grade, then you’d do it?”

“I believe I would,” said Henry softly.

“Well, okay, then.” He stepped aside to let Henry pass. “I’ll go see him now. And he’d better listen to reason, or else.”

Henry put his hand on the student’s arm. “Are you sure you won’t reconsider? It isn’t the end of the world, you know.”

Bradshaw scowled and pulled away. “No. It’s worse. It’s the end of my football career. But I’ll get that grade changed if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Henry glanced over his shoulder, watching for a moment as Darris Bradshaw lurched toward the folklore building, and then he hurried to his car and drove away without looking back.

Darris Bradshaw did not turn up for class the next day. His disappearance made the front page of the local paper’s sports section and headlines in the campus newspaper, but despite all the publicity and the anguished sound bites from the coaching staff, who saw their winning season go down the drain, the promising but academically hopeless young athlete was not seen again.

For the next few days people complained about a bad smell on the floor where the folklore department was located. “Drains,” said the maintenance man. Henry went out and bought a case of air fresheners.

The rest of the term passed uneventfully. Henry heard no more tales of his colleagues making requests of the department head, but he carefully refrained from bringing up the Raven in faculty meetings or even in casual conversation. The copy machine never seemed to be out of order anymore; they finally got the new phone system they had been requesting for months, and, unless it was his imagination, there seemed to be fewer spelling errors in the students’ written work. Still, things do occasionally go well from time to time, even at a state university. Maybe that’s all it was.

One sunny spring afternoon when Henry was in his office, grading essays to the soothing sounds of Grieg, the door burst open and the dean bustled in, the ill wind in an otherwise balmy afternoon.

“Ah, Dr. Garner! How are you this fine day? Spring in the air!”

“Why should I?” murmured Henry, still intent on the essay.

“No, I meant—well, never mind. I came to have a word with you, if you can spare me a few moments.”

Henry looked up, wondering what would happen if he said no. But that, he decided, would only prolong the encounter, so he laid down his pen and arranged his features into an expression of polite attention. “Yes, Dean?”

The man couldn’t come to the point immediately, of course. Settling himself in the guest chair, he embarked upon three minutes of weather-related chitchat (Henry got the impression that the dean actually rehearsed these conversational gambits, and perhaps even timed them). But finally, daunted by Henry’s brief, noncommittal responses, the dean said, “I just wanted a word with you about administrative matters. We are contemplating changes.”

Henry felt a nerve in his cheek begin to twitch. “Oh? What changes?”

“Well, you know, this business of having an imaginary creature as a department head was a charming bit of whimsy—although it did not generate as much publicity as we might have hoped. Still, it was a fiscal necessity, but over the long term, you know, it won’t do. It simply won’t do.”

“The arrangement seems to be working well enough,” said Henry carefully.

The dean steepled his fingers and endeavored to look sympathetic. “Still, we feel that it is time to resolve the situation with a more permanent solution.”

Henry’s silence was like a wall, but the dean heaved his bulk over it and reached the point at last. “In view of the reduced size of the Folklore department and its lack of a chairman, we—that is, the provost—has decided that the best solution would be to merge this department with Anthropology. Thus, their department head, Professor Simpkins, would oversee both faculties.”

“Willard Simpkins is not in control of his
own
faculties,” said Henry before he could stop himself.

The dean chose to take this remark as a witticism. “Always so clever, Henry. Such a quick thinker.” He hoisted himself out of the chair. “Such a pleasure to see you, as ever. But I must run along now. Must be doing. I can rely on you to inform your colleagues of the administration’s decision, can’t I?”

After a moment’s pause, Henry nodded. “But who’s going to tell—er, the present department head?”

The dean’s laughter echoed down the hall as he left. “Such a wit!”

“So there you have it,” said Henry.

In the conference room, his four colleagues were regarding him with varying degrees of consternation.

“Merge with Anthropology!” said Hillenberg. “You cannot be serious. Their idea of research is to collect anecdotes from waitresses.”

“Not the Earth Shoe People.” Jeremy Cole shuddered. “The jargon! We’d need a translator to attend department meetings.”

“Never mind the meetings!” wailed Apoorva Acharya. “They’ll try to make us attend their beans and rice suppers in support of Guatemala. Or Guantanamo. Or one of those G-spots.”

“We can’t let them do this,” said O’Meara. “My blood pressure won’t stand it. We must fight this.”

“I think we must,” said Henry Garner. He handed each of them a blank sheet of department stationery.

Half an hour later, the faculty of the university folklore department had adjourned to the hallway, where they stood in silence before the painted image of the Tlingit deity. Then one by one they slipped their memos under the department head’s door.

Barewolf

DANIEL PYLE

As the Case-thing padded through the woods, his paws sank into the moist earth all the way to his dewclaws. Shallow pools of mud filled the bottoms of the prints he’d left behind. Many prints. He’d been hunting all night. He walked under a dead pine and saw the moon in the empty space above. Not full, but close enough. He resisted the urge to call to it.

His stomach growled. Saliva dripped from his jagged fangs, and he licked his muzzle with his long, black tongue.

Less than a mile to the north, a man-snack moved from inside a den to outside. The Case-thing stopped and sniffed. His nostrils flared, and he lifted his snout higher. The saliva in his mouth stopped dripping and started pouring.

He licked his muzzle again and ran.

He stopped in the bushes just shy of the man-snack, poked his head between two bunches of leaves, and flared his nostrils. His stomach growled again, but he doubted the man-snack could hear. Men-snacks usually only responded to the growls that came from the Case-thing’s throat.

The man-snack walked across a wooden platform and stepped into a box filled with hot water. He wore no clothing. His dangling parts slapped against his thighs as he moved. The Case-thing could smell the dangling parts. They smelled very chewable.

Once inside the water-filled box, the man-snack leaned back and closed his eyes.

A woman-snack exited the den through a sliding glass wall. She was also exposed. Her hairless teats bounced a little but didn’t sway. The Case-thing could smell plastic inside, beneath the real meat.

She carried two containers filled with liquid that smelled both sweet and salty. It wasn’t the same liquid that filled the box. He wondered why they needed anything but water.

The woman-snack brought the containers into the water box and handed one to the man-snack. He said something to her in a language the Case-thing could almost remember, and she laughed. She moved around the box and sat beside the man-snack. She was in heat. As was the man-snack, of course. Men-snacks were always in heat.

The wooden platform stood a whole jump above the ground. The Case-thing eased between the bushes and slunk toward the snacks.

The woman-snack laughed again, and then the two snacks were sharing saliva. They were both sweating now, and not just from the hot water. Even through the water, the Case-thing could smell the blood rushing into the man-snack’s dangly bit.

When the Case-thing came close enough to the platform, he put all his weight on his back paws and sprang into the air. His saliva trailed from the sides of his muzzle and streamed back across his head. He cleared the railing on the side of the platform and landed paws first on the wooden planks.

The snacks separated and screamed. Their screams were pathetic things: quiet, weak, gurgly.

The Case-thing’s snarl echoed off the house to the side, the platform below, and the snacks ahead. The man-snack emptied his bladder as the blood moved from his dangly bit to his thumping heart. The Case-thing listened to the woman-snack’s heart, which was also scrambling like a trapped animal. She held on to her urine, and he reminded himself to drain her before he snacked. There was nothing worse than a mouthful of pee.

He sprang onto the edge of the water box. The woman-snack tried climbing out over the opposite side, but the man-snack didn’t move at all. He stared at the Case-thing. His wide eyes looked delicious.

The Case-thing swiped at the woman-snack’s neck, severed her spinal cord with his scythelike claws, and nearly took off her head. She slumped over the side of the water box, her smooth hindquarters pointing up at the sky, one arm caught beneath her body, the other swinging through the arc of blood jetting from her neck.

After he’d turned to the man-snack, the Case-thing licked his lips. He leaned forward, sniffed the snack’s face, opened his mouth wide, and with a single, lightning-quick chomp, bit off the top of the snack’s head.

Bone and hair and brain dribbled out of his mouth and fell into the water as he chewed. The man-snack’s body drooped to the side and splashed into the water, which had gone from clear to pink to red. The Case-thing crunched bone, swallowed throatfuls of half-chewed remains. He stuck his snout in the water and bit into the man-snack’s arm. He pulled the rest of the snack out of the water and dragged it out onto the wooden platform. The snack dripped water, dripped blood. The Case-thing buried his mouth in the snack’s guts and scarfed up chunk after chunk of his innards. He smelled the woman-snack’s flowing blood slow to a steady drip and growled satisfactorily as he sucked up a long string of intestines.

In his frenzy, he almost didn’t smell the approaching she-thing. She was halfway to the platform before he looked up from his snack and sniffed at her. She was wet and muddy, of course, but also starving. He could smell the drool in her mouth, hear her gurgling belly.

She jumped onto the platform near the water box and lowered her head submissively. The Case-thing chewed for a moment and watched her. He took one more bite of the man-snack’s guts and then backed away from the kill.

The she-thing raised her head and stared. He dipped his head toward the carcass and took another step back.

Have some.

Never lowering her eyes from his, the she-thing took a hesitant step forward. When she seemed to be sure he wouldn’t attack her, she rushed toward the fresh meat and pulled out a muzzleful.

He watched her eat. Her fur was lighter than his own. A blond coat that looked brown and might have been downy fine if it hadn’t been thick with mud. Her long, wide muzzle sported dozens of teeth that gnashed and clicked as she fed. She was a little scrawny, but still well-muscled. Her tail wagged as she dipped her head back into the flesh crater the two of them had made.

A few swallows later, she looked up at him and dipped her own head toward the meat. He guessed she’d staved off the worst of her hunger and went to join her. Together, they picked the body clean and then dragged the she-snack from the hot water. They finished half of the second snack before the she-thing accidentally chewed into one of the plastic nonteats and hacked little bits of it back onto the platform.

When neither of them could eat another bite, the she-thing lowered her head in a kind of bow.

Thank you.

She wasn’t in heat yet, but she was close. Close enough.

The Case-thing moved in and licked a streamer of blood from the she-thing’s muzzle. She returned the gesture, and the two of them bathed each other for a long while. When his blood had completely filled his own dangly bit, he rubbed his head under hers and began to move along her side. He would circle around to her rear and take her from behind. He could smell the hormones coursing through her body—telling him to do it, to do it hard—as well as his own thick musk.

Except he never got around to her tail end. Halfway there, she growled and pulled away from him. Her hormone smell disappeared. He looked at her, saw that she was looking at his back. She took another step away and wheezed at him. Hyenalike.

The she-thing’s laughter infuriated him. He crouched and growled at her. Spittle and blood sprayed from his mouth as he bared his teeth.

Instead of getting into a defensive stance, the she-thing wheezed again and jumped off the platform.

The Case-thing considered giving chase, hunting her down and ripping the laugher from the bitch’s throat, but in the end he stayed with his kill and let her go.

He knew what had driven the she-thing away. He’d first noticed it two or three cycles ago. It had started as a thin patch, but was now a hairless swatch of back skin that no doubt shone in the near-full moon.

His bald spot.

The doctor was an old man with thick glasses and a stooped gait. When he came shuffling into the room, he had his nose buried in a chart and squinted his eyes like a kid trying to see Mars through a pair of toy binoculars.

“Mr.—” He blinked at the chart. “Oswald.”

“It’s Case,” said Case. “Jerry Case.”

The doctor squinted harder and Case was afraid the old geezer was going to burst a blood vessel or something.

“Uh . . . are you going to be doing my procedure?”

“Oh, yes,” the doctor said. “I perform all the intricate surgeries here.” He looked up at Case, smiled, and winked a too-large, magnified eye.

Case was glad to see that at least the doc’s sense of humor hadn’t totally shriveled up with the rest of him.

“I’m Dr. Abrams.” The old guy offered the five liver-spotted digits at the end of his arm and Case shook carefully, afraid that if he squeezed too hard, the wrinkled fingers might turn to dust in his hand.

“Jerry Case,” he said in case the doc had already forgotten.

The doctor pulled a stool from the other side of the room to a spot just beside the table on which Case was sitting and plopped down on top of it. He closed the file and held it on his lap. “So,” he said. “You need some more hair?”

Case nodded.

The doctor brought a hand up to the side of his mouth and whispered, “Pubes?”

“Wha—” Case floundered. “What? No . . . I . . . no. Gross.” He wrinkled his nose and scooted away from the old man.

“Some guys like a hairy thatch,” Abrams said. “You wouldn’t be the first.” He squinted up at Case’s head. “Anyway, you can’t want it on your head. I know I don’t exactly have a pilot’s vision, but I can see well enough to know that you’ve got a full ’do up there. The hairline might be receding just a smidge, but nothing a man your age needs to worry about.”

The doctor’s own hair was a wispy spider’s web draped across his gleaming scalp.

“I don’t need it for my head.” Although he doubted the doctor could really see him even from just those few feet away, he lowered his gaze. “I—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “I need it for my back.”

He looked up in time to see the old man cock his head and furrow his brow. “Your what?”

“I have this spot—”

“Your back?”

Case nodded, realized the man probably only saw a swaying blur, and said, “Yes.”

Abrams wheezed, brought a fist to his mouth, coughed into it, and then wheezed again.

Case had a brief recollection of a female werewolf hyena-laughing at him. He gritted his teeth.

“I’m sorry, son,” the doctor said when his bout of coughing ended. “We don’t do that sort of thing here.”

Case asked him why not.

“Why would we?”

“Because,” Case said. “I need a transplant, and you’re a hair transplant specialist. What do you care where I put it?”

The old man wheezed again but managed to get hold of himself a little more quickly this time. “We’re in business to help people, Mr. Case, not make sideshow freaks.”

Case glared at him.

The old man coughed again, and Case imagined him hacking up one of his internal organs. The thought sent a hunger pang through his stomach, which rumbled almost immediately. Case licked his lips. They’d started to thin already. He felt his nose recede into his growing snout. His teeth stretched into wicked fangs, his ears flapped against the sides of his head, and his body began to rip its way through his clothes.

When the doctor realized what was happening, Case was no longer Case. He was the Case-thing.

The doctor screamed, but it was too late. For him, and for everyone else in the building.

• • •

Walmart’s rug selection was pretty sparse. Case wondered if maybe he should have gone to Target instead. While he browsed, a woman strolled into the aisle steering a wobbly cart with one hand and pushing the loose strands of hair out of her face with the other. A drooling toddler sat in the front of the cart, slobbering all over the handlebar and the woman’s fingers. A pile of food large enough to gag a whale filled the cart’s main compartment. The woman pawed through a couple of nasty-looking rugs that appeared to have been barfed upon—maybe to hide stains so you didn’t have to clean it as often. She passed on those particular monstrosities (from the dusty looks of the things, she wasn’t the only one who had) and wheeled her cart closer to where Case stood.

“Not much to choose from, is there?” she asked when she noticed him.

Case shook his head. He squatted and pulled out a thick, brown, two-by-three-foot number. The rug certainly wouldn’t have looked good anywhere outside a shrine to the ’70s, but the fibers were thick, silky, lustrous.

“What do you think of this one?” He held it up for the woman’s inspection.

She said nothing, but the eyebrows she arched spoke whole diatribes.
Your call
, the brows said.
It’s your rug, but we wouldn’t put that thing in our house. Hell, we wouldn’t use it to wipe our shit. If eyebrows could shit.

“That bad?”

She shrugged. “It’s definitely not my style, but maybe it will go with your décor.”

Case’s décor was the last thing on his mind. “Yeah,” he said after studying the rug for another few moments. “Maybe it will.”

He thanked the woman, tucked the rug under his arm, and went off in search of some superglue.

In his shoebox of an apartment, Case used a pair of heavy-duty scissors to cut the rug to size. He stripped out of his clothes, kneeled on the floor beside the reshaped rug, and spread the entire 16-oz bottle of superglue (“SUPER DUPER-SIZED SUPERGLUE” the label proclaimed) on the rug’s underside. He sat down at the end of the rug and did a reverse sit-up until his back pressed against the film of sticky glue. When he was all the way down, he wriggled a little from side to side, back and forth.