Part 22 (2/2)

All of which mattered not in the slightest, being that he had no car to drive, having wrapped his wheels around a tree. And he had no money to buy one with, because he'd just quit his job. Bobo was predictably compa.s.sionate; after their little encounter, this was not a surprise. But it meant no disability, no workmen's comp, no nothing.

He had managed to hold on to the cheesy hospitalization plan attached to his long-beleaguered Visa card; it const.i.tuted the sole bright light on his medical horizon. It had, at least, covered a chunk of his physical therapy.

He healed incredibly fast, of course.

Surprising everyone but himself. . .

Suddenly, Dan appeared with another gla.s.s of suds, scooping four bits out of Syd's loose change. Syd pulled back to the present, looked at Marc Pankowski, who had picked out a table near the back. Marc smiled at Syd. Syd looked away quickly, wondered what Marc's excuse was for surviving all those crashes.

It had occurred to Syd that maybe he wasn't the only amped-up critter in Monville. If Marc's inner nature did reveal itself, what would he be? A were-weasel, maybe? A were-slug?

Syd felt the pain resurging, downed another insulating gulp of beer. Nowadays, at least, his senses were so dulled by ritual sedation that he could no longer be trusted to pick one out of the crowd.

But one thing seemed certain: there were very few wolves running loose in the wild. He felt pretty sure he was the only one in town, broken or otherwise. Most people were herbivores at heart: unrealized were-cows, sheep, and pigs. If they reached in far enough to tap their true natures, you could probably sneak up and tip them in their sleep.

Syd couldn't worry about them at this point. For the last year and a half, he'd been mostly concerned with how to keep his own animal down. . . .

When the first full moon came, he hadn't known what to expect. Either he was a monster, or he was insane, or both. Not exactly a prime set of options.

Syd had spent the day alone and afraid, pacing crippled through the apartment that now functioned as his cage. It was just prior to his eviction, early on in his physical therapy, and absolutely everything hurt: from the bodily damage he'd sustained in the crash to the permanent loss of the woman he loved.

Of the two, the pain with Nora's name on it was by far the worst. The physical damage would heal, at least; the emotional destruction was beyond salvation. At first he thought the shock of her absence alone would kill him; it was impossible to sleep or eat or even think clearly.

In the end Syd had resorted to a sort of traumatic amputation of the soul, cauterizing the wound at every point where they'd connected, focusing every ounce of will he could muster on eradicating all memory of her. It left him dead inside, but at least he could sleep at night.

He was no longer afraid of his dreams: in the aftermath of the accident his sleep was black, devoid of images. As if a concrete lid had slammed down on his subconscious: shutting off the dialogue, refusing all contact.

But that didn't mean that it didn't want out. . . .

As the full moon neared he grew more restless. He'd been feeling antsy for days, fending off the now-familiar rushes of power that came with increasing frequency. They were tied to his anger, most clearly; but day by day, they were coming on stronger. He felt like the guy in American Werewolf in London, just before the big transformation scene. Only there was nothing funny about this. Not a single G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing. As he paced he fingered his gun, wondering whether or not he should just stick the barrel in his mouth and get it over with.

More than once, he came close: hefting the blue-black steel in his hands, imagining the click and the bang, the deafening sensation of his skull exploding and spraying the back wall with brains and bone and red red rain, the subsequent headlong hurtle into . . . what? The void? Some mercifully blank oblivion? How could he know that would even end it? What if this thing went deeper, was somehow embedded not just in his flesh, but in his soul? There was no guarantee that this would all be over, or that wherever he ended up would be one bit better than this.

In the end, his questions remained unanswered, rendered academic by the simple fact that he just couldn't do it. No matter how much he hurt. No matter how bad it got. The part of him that still loved life wouldn't let him, and it was ultimately stronger than he was.

Which effectively left him right back where he'd started.

All day, he had dreaded the sun's descent.

When it finally came, so did the Change . . .

. . . and he saw enough in those first moments to know that it had not been a hallucination. For hours he stood naked before the mirror in his bedroom: his leg shackled to the steam radiator sweat rolling off of him in waves. He tried to stay focused on the reflection of his eyes. His eyes were his sole anchor point, the only things that seemed stable in a universe gone mad: even dilated and bugging with fear, they were the key. He fixed and focused on them as the Change moved underneath his skin like a school of minnows. Swarming. Crazed. His muscles and tendons s.h.i.+fting and straining, fighting at their accepted boundaries.

His face tensed and contorted, a manic parade of primal impulse pus.h.i.+ng up from his subconscious. His hands clenched and clawed, came up to feel the rupturing flesh of his torso, his neck, his arms and legs and back The whole time he told himself: he knew who he was, knew what he was. He was not a monster. He would not become a monster. He would not give in.

He would not let it out.

The rushes intensified, became pain. The pain blossomed into agony. And Syd began to scream, his will locked in mortal combat with the ravening power inside. And his will said NO! to the rushes that pummeled his body, said NO! to the howling that wailed in his brain. He watched them surge, fall back, resurge and counterattack For twelve hours, he wrestled the monster within.

But when dawn came, and he realized that he didn't have to Change-that it was still, ultimately, something he could control-he no longer felt like the Lawrence Talbot character in a third-rate Universal Pictures sendup, bemoaning that horrible wolf man curse what had been visited upon him. This wasn't the movies, and there were some fundamental differences. What, exactly, those differences were was something he determined to figure out.

And thus Syd entered his In-Search-of-the-Magical-Werewolf-Within phase: a phase that carried him through the spring and summer, clear into the following fall. Most of that time was spent based out of Tommy's bas.e.m.e.nt rec room, which was where he gratefully crashed when his eviction came through. He didn't have a job, couldn't bring himself to try and find one. He still had his stereo and alb.u.m/CD collection, though he couldn't bring himself to listen to the music anymore. When Syd insisted, Tommy reluctantly took it in trade.

During that time, Syd studied everything he could get his hands on. By day he limped down to the Monville Public Library or hitched up to Pittsburgh to haunt bookstores and pore over werewolf stories, from Native American wolf rituals to northern European legends to cla.s.sical Greek and Roman myths and on, as far back as ancient Syria.

Some were benevolent; most, malign. For every Romulus and Remus-style recounting of feral children raised by loving mother wolves or beneficent lupine-spirits aiding a p.a.w.nee hunting party, there were dozens of darker tales. In Aristotle's Historia Animalium and Pliny's Historia Naturalis, in the Physiologus or Olaus Magnus's History of the Goths, Swedes and Vandals nightmares abounded: of werewolves that fed on human flesh, werewolves that raided villages and feasted on the succulent meat of babes, werewolves that gathered together for drinking bouts and raided the wine cellars of the devout on Christmas Eve. Navaho werewolves raided graveyards to mutilate the corpses of the dead; in White Russia, they struck men dumb with their gaze and caused deformed children to be born of women who crossed their tracks.

In medieval lore, it was even worse. Haunted by the Plague, molded by the Church, and enforced by the Inquisition, the hysteria burgeoned to new heights of insanity: wolves were nothing short of the Devil's hounds, agents of debauchery and sacrilege, symbols of everything vile and depraved in the soul of man. Stoked by the dictates of the Malleus Malefaric.u.m, thousands were accused of werewolvery at the slightest provocation, convicted on the flimsiest of evidence, tortured to grisly confession and burned at the stake. The legends even migrated to America with the settlers, became the foundational basis for the great wolf purges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the systematic slaughter of tens, even hundreds of millions of animals, drove them to the brink of extinction. What Nora had said came back to haunt him.

Theriophobia. Fear of the wild thing inside.

Having read himself to death each day, Syd would hobble over to Blockbuster Video, then head home, tapes in hand, to watch every movie that even alluded to his condition. From Wolfen to Werewolf of London to The Howling parts one through one million, from Altered States to Teen Wolf to Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, Syd religiously sifted through the garish and distorted Hollywood hok.u.m for some grain of usable truth.

But did it give him the answers he needed? Not really. Every once in a while, he'd stumble on an interesting sc.r.a.p, but it was obvious that most of the available information was a mishmash of old wives' tales, folklore, or out-and-out lies.

After a while, even thinking about it made the pain in his head throb mercilessly, like a never-ending migraine from h.e.l.l. And as his frustration mounted, one thing became clear: he had a lot more to fear from his worsening temper than he did from any stage of the moon or nocturnal nightmare.

It could well up at any moment. Whatever peace he found in the knowledge that he need no longer live in fear of a particular time of the month or getting a good night's sleep was instantly mitigated by the understanding that, at any moment, he might hit some emotional trip wire and go off.

It was like walking a tightrope twenty-four hours a day. And he found, to his dismay, that the longer he spent in that state, the less it took to set him off. A harsh word. A busy signal. A b.u.m hitting him up for change.

One morning when Tommy's new girlfriend Annette had chastised him for some inconsequential domestic crisis-leaving the toilet seat up or squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle, or some such triviality-Syd had very nearly lost it.

He flipped out, ranted and raved, and totally terrorized her for over an hour, ended up breaking a kitchen chair into kindling with his bare hands before storming out screaming. It was all he could do to not rip her throat out.

He came back later, apologizing profusely, and confessed that he couldn't remember exactly what she'd said that had set him off. He chalked it up to stress, made nice in the worst way, and tiptoed around her for weeks. Annette eventually forgave him, but the damage was done. From that moment on, she was genuinely scared of him. And Tommy never looked at Syd the same way again.

It was at that point that suicide started to seem like a viable alternative.

But what could kill him? He had no idea. Evidently not the same things that, for example, went into totaling cars. Or maybe he'd just been lucky; he really didn't have a clue. He wasn't particularly into the idea of hanging himself or sticking a gun in his mouth just to find out.

At one point he'd wandered into a jewelry shop, asked the perplexed shop owner if he had any silver bullets on hand. The guy looked at Syd like he was crazy, which wasn't far off the mark. Syd found himself helplessly, morbidly staring at the glittering bits of metal that lined the cases. Can that kill me? he wondered, his hand reaching out like a tentative child's first encounter with flame.

Nothing happened, of course. It was kind of like learning that your mom's spine wouldn't actually fracture if you stepped on a crack, or that golf b.a.l.l.s weren't actually filled with a powerful explosive.

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