Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

First madness spent, they circled the room restlessly, their eyes glowing as dogs’ and wolves’ eyes do not glow. In time they settled into a light, reluctant sleep-Garrigue under a chair, Arceneaux in the ruins of the rug he had torn to pieces. Even in sleep they whined softly and eagerly, lips constantly twitching back from the fangs they never quite covered.

Towards dawn, with the moon gray and small, looking almost triangular because of the moisture in the air, something brought Arceneaux to the barred window nearest the door, rearing once again with his paws on the sill. There was nothing to see through the closed metal shutters, but the deep, nearly-inaudible sound that constantly pulsed through his body in this form grew louder as he stared, threatening to break its banks and swell into a full-throated howl. Once again he clawed at the bars, but Garrigue had screwed down the bolts holding them in place too tightly even for a loup-garou ’s deftness, and Arceneaux’s snarl bared his fangs to the black gums. Garrigue joined him, puzzled but curious, and the two of them stood side by side, panting rapidly, ears flattened against their skulls. And still there was no hint of movement anywhere outside.

Then the howl came, surging up from somewhere very near, soaring over the trees like some skeletal ancient bird, almost visible in its dreadful ardency. The werewolves went mad, howling their own possessed challenges, even snapping furiously at each other. Arceneaux sprang at the barred windows until they shivered. He was crouching to leap again when he heard the familiar whimper behind him, and simultaneously felt the brief but overwhelming pain, unlike any other, of distorted molecules regaining their natural shape. Coming back always took longer, and hurt worse.

As always afterward, he collapsed to the floor and lay there, quickly human enough to curse the weakness that always overtook a returning loup-garou, old or young. He heard Garrigue gasping, “Duplessis… Duplessis…” but could not yet respond. A face began to form in his mind: dark, clever, handsome in a way that meant no good to anyone who responded to it… Still unable to speak, Arceneaux shook his head against the worn, stained floorboards. He had better reason than most to know why that sound, that cold wail of triumph, could not have been uttered by Alexandre Duplessis of Pointe Coupee Parish.

They climbed slowly to their feet, two stiff-jointed old men, looking around them at the usual wreckage of the cabin. Over the years that they had been renting it together, Garrigue and Arceneaux had made it proof, as best they could, against the rage of what would be trapped there every month. Even so, the rugs were in shreds, the refrigerator was on its side, there were deep claw-marks on the log walls to match the ones already there, and they would definitely need a new card table. Arceneaux pointed at the overturned Calvados bottle and said, “Shame, that. Wish I’d got the cap back on.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Garrigue shivered violently-common for most after the return. He said, “Jean-Marc, it was Duplessis, you know and I know. Duplessis back .”

“Not in this world.” Arceneaux’s voice was bleak and slow. “Maybe in some other world he back, but ain’t in this one.” He turned from the window to face Garrigue. “I killed Duplessis, man. Ain’t none of us come back from what I done, Duplessis or nobody. You was there, Rene Garrigue! You saw how I done!”

Garrigue was hugging himself to stop the shivering, closing his eyes against the seeing. Abruptly he said in a strangely quiet tone, “He outside right now. He there , Jean-Marc.”

“Naw, man,” Arceneaux said. “Naw, Rene. He gone, Rene, my word. You got my word on it.” But Garrigue was lunging past him to fumble with the locks and throw the door wide. The freezing dawn air rushed in over the body spilled across the path, so near the door that Garrigue almost tripped over it. It was a woman-a vagrant, clearly, wearing what looked like five or six coats, sweaters, and undergarments. Her throat had been ripped out, and what remained of her intestines were draped neatly over a tree branch. Even in the cold, there were already flies.

Arceneaux breathed the name of his god, his loa, Damballa Wedo, the serpent. Garrigue whispered, “Women. Always the women, always the belly. Duplessis.”

“He carry her here.” Arceneaux was calming himself, as well as Garrigue. “Killed her somewhere back there, maybe in the city, carry her here, leave her like a business card. You right, Rene. Can’t be , but you right.”

“Business card.” Garrigue’s voice was still tranquil, almost dreamy. “He know this place, Jean-Marc. If he know this place, he know everything. Everything .”

“Hush you, man, hush now, mind me.” Arceneaux might have been talking to a child wakened out of a nightmare. “Shovel out back, under the crabapple, saw it last time. We got to take her off and bury her, first thing. You go get me that shovel, Rene.”

Garrigue stared at him. Arceneaux said it again, more gently. “Go on, Rene. Find me that shovel, compe ’.”

Alone, he felt every hair on his own body standing up; his big dark hands were trembling so that he could not even cover the woman’s face or close her eyes. Alexandre Duplessis, c’est vraiment li, vraiment, vraiment ; but the knowledge frightened the old man far less than the terrible lure of the crumpled thing at his feet, torn open and emptied out, gutted and drained and abandoned, the reek of her terror dominating the hot, musky scent of the beast that had hunted her down in the hours before dawn. The fear, Damballa, the fear-you once get that smell in you head, you throat, you gut, you never get it out. Better than the meat, the blood even, you smell the fear. He was shaking badly now, and he knew that he needed to get out of there with Garrigue before he hurled himself upon the pitiful remains, to roll and wallow in them like the beast he was. Hold me, Damballa. Hide me, hold me.

Garrigue returned with the rusty shovel and together they carried the dead woman deeper into the woods. Then he stood by, rubbing his mouth compulsively as he watched Arceneaux hack at the hard earth. In the same small voice as before, he said, “I scare, me, Ti-Jean,” calling Arceneaux by his childhood nickname. “What we do to him.”

“What he did to us.” Arceneaux’s own voice was cold and steady. “What he did to ma Sophie. ”

As he had known it would, the mention of Arceneaux’s sister immediately brought Garrigue back from wherever terror and guilt together had taken him. “I ain’t forgot Sophie.” His gray eyes had closed down like the steel shutters whose color they matched. “I ain’t forget nothing.”

“I know, man,” Arceneaux said gently. He finished his work, patted the new grave as flat as he could make it- one good rain, two, grass cover it all- and said, “We come back before next moon, clean up a little. Right now, we going home.” Garrigue nodded eagerly.

In the car, approaching the freeway, Garrigue could not keep from talking about Sophie Arceneaux as he had not done in a very long while. “So pretty, that girl, that sister of yours. So pretty, so kind, who wouldn’t want to marry such a fine woman like her?” Then he hurriedly added, “Of course, my Elizabeth, Elizabeth was a fine woman too, I don’t say a word against Elizabeth. But Sophie… la Sophie… ” He fell silent for a time, and then said in a different voice, “I ain’t blame Duplessis for wanting her. Can’t do that, Jean-Marc.”

“She didn’t want him,” Arceneaux said. There was no expression at all in his voice now. “Didn’t want nothing to do with him, no mind what he gave her, where he took her, never mind what he promised. So he killed her.” After a pause, he went on, “You know how he killed her.”