rolling over and over and into the gutter and his gray teeth were everywhere dark and glistening and snapping for my throat Read online

  rolling over and over and into the gutter and his gray teeth were everywhere, dark and glistening and snapping for my throat. I'm strong but not that strong - I couldn't get him off me. But there was a storm sewer behind him and I shoved him backwards into the narrow opening and wedged his head underneath the curb and he howled in fear or disgust or whatever and when he did he loosened his grip just enough for me to pop free and reach for the automatic.

  I shot him through the forehead, the cheek, the chest and through the forehead again before he stopped howling.

  And then I shot him again, right through the center of his fuzzy face, because I was so goddamned scared I couldn't stop.

  But then it was over and he was dying and I was standing there in that slick street looking wildly around to see just how much worse it was going to get...But, no, all was clear.

  The hooker was staring, eyes frantic and wide, at me.

  "Relax," I panted, thinking I understood,"I'm not going to hurt you."

  But she just shook her head and took her hand away from her mouth long enough to point a long glittering burgundy fingernail at my middle.

  I looked down and saw the blood and sank to my knees like a sack of sand.

  I knew I was all right. Just clawed up a bit. I was fine. I would live. I would heal. But that didn't make the werewolf go away. He lay there in front of me, panting his last breaths and turning back into the poor hapless bastard he'd been before the moon was full. Just as he changed all the way, he looked at me and our eyes met and he died.

  I could never read his last expression. But I think about it some.

  I clambered over to the curb and sat down. I lit a cigarette. Small groups of people, drawn by the shots and growls, began to appear in a ragged perimeter around the glow of the streetlamp.

  It seemed that even here, on the Other Side, werewolves were rare.

  The hooker had relaxed a bit and her tail had unwound from her inner thigh. She smiled weakly at me.

  "Are you all right?" I asked dumbly.

  She nodded, still staring at my chest. I looked down. The wounds were already starting to close. If you peered carefully, you could actually see it happening.

  "How do you do that?" she asked.

  I shook my head that I didn't know but I could tell she thought it meant I didn't want to talk.

  Then a man in a brown felt hat stepped away from some woman - his wife, maybe - and leaned down to stare at my injuries. After a few seconds he looked up at me.

  "Can you be killed?" he whispered in an awed tone.

  "Damn right," I snapped huskily and my voice sent him back beside his woman.

  And then we all just stayed there as we were for awhile. The hooker with the winding forked tail, the dim figures from the neighborhood and me - all staring at the same thing:

  There is a strip of fur that remains on a werewolf's spine after death. The flashing neon from across the street had cast it in an odd multicolored tint so that the breeze, pushing the hairs this way and that, made it look like someone was petting it.

  PART ONE

  THE FOOL

  ONE

  My life was crap even before the night they came to tell me I was a god.
  I was sitting at my favorite stool at "Zu's" having either my third or ninth little drinkie when I realized the woman sitting beside me was asking me a question.

  "What is it that you do, exactly?" she wanted to know.

  Zuhere, the manager, appeared suddenly behind the bar, smiling that goddamned knowing Lebanese smile of his.

  I ignored him and looked at the woman. She was pretty. Maybe the prettiest in a long, long time.So I decided to tell her the truth. That usually did it.

  "Well, I drink, of course."

  "That's obvious," she said, eyeing my glass.

  I nodded, went on. "Sometimes I watch television and some times I re-read favorite books and sometimes I work out on the punching bag - most days I do that." I paused, had a sip. "And sometimes I kill trees."

  She eyed me narrowly. "You're a lumberjack?"

  I smiled and tried to flex a bicep without spilling any scotch.

  Zuhere laughed and leaned over the bar to her. "He shoots them."

  She looked at him. She looked back at me.

  "Why?" she asked.

  "Because," I replied dramatically, "they're there."

  Her look turned to a squint.

  Zuhere laughed. "He just has his targets set up on them. He lives in the country and practices his pistols out there."

  The woman had a drink from her drink, said: "Charming."

  Zuhere seemed almost offended. "Best damn shot you ever saw."

  "I'm sure," she said to him.

  She looked back to me. "What else do you do?"

  I lit a cigarette and thought about it.

  "Did I mention television?"

  "Yes."

  "Did I mention my favorite books?"

  "You did."

  "Hmm. Well, sometimes I take a bath and change clothes and come into town for more cigarettes and..." I looked at Zuhere. "What else do I do?"

  He smiled. "Two or three times a week you get so drunk in here I have to drive you home."


  "Right! I knew I was forgetting something."

  The woman frowned. "Two or three times a week?"

  "Yep."

  "Every week?"

  Zuhere smiled some more. "Every week."

  "It's important, " I assured her, "to have a routine and stick to it."

  She eyed me some more. She looked briefly at Zuhere.

  "Excuse me," she said next and got up to fight her way to the Ladies'.

  Zuhere watched her go and then pointed that sad look of his at me.

  "Alexander, why do you do that?"

  "Me? What about you? 'Two or three nights a week I have to drive him home.' What about that?"

  He nodded, looked mournful.

  "I know. Sometimes I slide into it with you. I can't help myself."

  I patted his forearm. "I'm a bad influence. No doubt about it."

  Two drinkies later.

  Zuhere exchanged my empty glass for a full one and announced: "She's not coming back."

  I sipped a fresh sip. "Looks like."

  He sighed a sigh I couldn't hear over the music. "You drove another one away. Or we did," he added sadly.

  I grinned and shook my head, lifted my glass. "Naw, Buddy. It was the Truth. And here's to it - works every time."

  And I had another sip.

  Zuhere frowned and leaned closer. "Alexander, how can you laugh? It is the truth. And it isn't funny!"

  I shrugged lit a cigarette, started to say something else smart ass... And then I noticed his face.

  He really didn't look so hot.

  "Look, Zuhere, I haven't been on my game for the past few weeks, maybe, but..."

  "The past few weeks? How about the past nine months?"

  "Nine months?"

  He nodded vehemently. "You've been doing this since last January. It's October."

  I let out a puff. "Well, consistency is important, too."

  "Damnit, Alexander!" he snorted.

  And then he was off to fetch someone's drink.

  So I sat there alone in the crowd and went back to enjoying the bar. "Zu's" was always crowded when it started to get late. A tiny place, a
pub, with some hundred-odd beers from all around the world and loud rock and roll and lots of loud people of all ages. I loved the place. If you could wangle yourself a barstool you could sit there in that crush of sound and smoke and absolutely disappear.

  Nine months? Was it really nine months?

  Since the dreams started?

  Then Zuhere was back and leaning over me again. He snapped: "Alexander, this is your life!" before taking off again.

  And I put out my cigarette and lit another and drained my glass and whispered, though I knew he couldn't hear me:

  "Are you sure?"

  I paid my tab and left.

  October is kind to Texas. The air was clean and clear and mild. There was a storm coming in from the north - I could see the sharp glow of distant lightning - but I figured I could get home before it started. So I climbed into the Vette and put both windows down and tried to beat the rain home. It took twenty minutes on the highway to get from "Zu's"to the estate and during that time I hardly moved in the seat. I didn't smoke. I didn't play the radio or a tape. Usually I was so drunk I needed all those things and more just to focus my way home. But not that night. Just the wind. And the engine. And the sound of those fat tires sucking at the pavement.

  The storm was starting to blow in by the time I reached my exit and pulled off the ramp to the lonely unlit intersection for the country lane to my house. I sat there a second, engine humming into the wind, watching the lone stop sign twist with the gusts. Then I yanked the wheel and kicked the Vette in the butt. I had used to love to roar down that road, only lately I had been too drunk to even think about it. But that night I was only about half drunk and it seemed like a good idea. And the blowing winds seemed to shoot me through the sharp curves, through the storm of fall leaves and those damn fir trees or whatever they were that hugged that narrow lane so tightly, those huge green branches flashing in the storm like wise and knowing druid gods urging me on...

  It was great. Really great. Almost as if...

  But nothing happened. The road just got me home like always. The great iron gates to the estate glowed in my headlights like always. The long driveway through the pecans to the great house looked just the same. And the house itself, looming high and mighty in the lightning, was just as empty as when I'd left it.

  And since when had that become such a comfort?

  TWO

  I was already awake when the rain finally stopped around three - the dreams had done that. Dreams of my father, of his face and voice and smell. I lay there in the dark gazing at the shadowy ceiling and wondered why I should be dreaming of him again after so long - almost ten years now. But I'd been dreaming of him, and almost nothing else, for nine months.

  I watched the shadows a bit longer, then swung my legs over the side of the bed and turned on the light. I lit a cigarette. My house felt even lonelier than usual. Even the surrounding woods were silent and thoughtful.

  The thing is, I should have been dreaming about my mother, if anybody. My parents had only stayed together long enough to have me.It was Mom that did all the rearing. Dad was fine, even exiting, for an absentee father. And he always remembered my birthday and Christmas and we took trips together and he was always there with money whenever we went broke. Which wasn't that often. Yes, my mom was the Jonesy Gabriel: model, photographer, film maker. And, God knows, she made a fortune. Several fortunes. She had to. Because every time she made one, she'd spend it. Mom wasn't just a free spirit. She was a Professional Free Spirit, as in - Kids, don't try this at home - and sooner or later her style would exceed her grasp.

  And that's when Dad would show up as a temporary fix it. But that was never often. And towards the end, not at all..

  He didn't show up for her funeral.

  I tried calling around to all his friends and accountants and the like. Because I was worried. This really wasn't like him. But they all just laughed and assured me. He'll turn up soon, they said, laughing like he always did and bearing baskets of money.

  But I knew he never would. I knew he was gone. Had been gone for some time. In fact, I was sure I knew it the moment he had died. And that had been three years before Mom.

  So I should have been dreaming of her. I missed her every single day. I'd only kept the damned mansion because she'd been there, alive and laughing and beautiful and nuts.

  No other family, really. Just the house. And the woods.

  I put my cigarette out and went into the bathroom and stared at the wall for as long as it took. Then I went back in and sat down on the bed and surveyed my room with its magazines and paperbacks and dirty dishes and beer cans that might or might not have been empty, might or might not have cigarette butts in them. I didn't even like beer that much. I only drank it, it seemed to me at that moment, for the interior decoration statement.

  I figured I was hungry or thirsty or something so I lit another cigarette and went downstairs to find out which. On the stairway I passed the photograph of my fraternity graduating class with its broken glass the exact shape of my right fist and decided, for the 99th time, to take it down in the morning. Not that I really had anything against those guys. I just envied them so damn much. True, some of them had let the sixties drop them out, but for the most part they were doing what they had been bred to do: change the world. Make money. Create jobs. Invent industry. Vote Republican. And I?

  I hadn't done a damn thing.

  Not that I hadn't tried. Hell, I tried everything. Acting, writing, painting, photography. I raced stock cars for three years. I worked for a private detective another two. I was a semi-pro quarterback for a season. I even smuggled marijuana along the Texas border and, No, I have no bloody idea why I did that - I didn't even smoke the stuff. I opened and closed a couple of bars and one restaurant. I had a video arcade in a mall for several months once. I managed to sell out at a profit before killing any thirteen year olds.

  I once worked in an office an entire day.

  But nothing. Nothing worked or even came close to feeling right. And I'd sit there in front of a mirror and look at myself and get so frustrated! I was smart and healthy and determined and strong and even( thanks, Mom) good-looking enough but...

  I was a good machine, all right. But not much of a device.

  I keyed on the lights to cross the living room and the sixth of the nine overhead lights burned out. That left only the ones over the great hearth illuminating my mother's portrait of my father and me when he was ... My God, I realized suddenly, my age.

  And then I realized something else : today was my birthday. I was thirty-three.

  So I guess it was that unlikely, unworthy image of myself - standing there with a cigarette and boxer shorts and bruised knuckles from the punching bag - that made me pad across the deep Persian rug to sit in the chair my mother always made my father sit in when he came. Big red leather, brass buttoned man-chair now so dusty. And when the fog began to fill the room I thought it was the haze from my tears but it was not.

  In the center of the fog, three figures appeared.

  Just suddenly there, grey-robed, bald, Budda-fat men and they were smiling with these incredibly blue eyes but I was frightened, terrified- and angry, damnit! Don't come busting in on me! - and my mind whirled frantically trying to remember where I had left my automatic and I was out of the chair and moving when the lead Budda, the one with the bluest eyes, made his incantation and the air around me became like gelatin and I could neither run nor move but only slip slowly back into my father's chair where I sat absolutely paralyzed.

  They walked slowly toward me, still smiling. Then they knelt and put their palms together flat on the rug and bowed down until their foreheads touched the backs of their hands. After a second the middle one, the lead Budda who had frozen me, lifted his head and smiled that huge smile and spoke:

  "Greetings, Lord Gabriel."

  And I slept.

  THREE

  And I dreamed a dream which was not a dream, but a memory.
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  It is strong now but it was hidden and dim until that night, stored away deep in my hindbrain or right shinbone or where ever it is that grown men hide little boy memories which, faced with the ugliness of the morning after, seem too good to belong in their unworthy lives.

  I was nine and my Daddy, who had been away a long, long time, appeared at my bedside late one night, strong and sure and smiling. It was to be my birthday that morning, but I was too sleepy at three am to even remember to be excited.