Michael Chabon: Werewolves in Their Youth

“Carlotta Brown-Jenkin died last night,” he said. “Friend of my mother’s. Tough old lady.” He shook his head. “Influenza. Shame.”

I remembered that awful, Technicolored meal so many months before, the steely glint of her eyes in their cavernous sockets. I did my best to look properly sympathetic.

“That is a shame,” I said.

He set down the box of food and looked past me at the entrance to my tunnel. The sight of it seemed to disturb him.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” he said.

I assured him that I did, but he continued to look skeptical.

“I remember the last time you archaeologist fellows came to town, you know,” he said. As a matter of fact I did know this, since he told me almost every time I saw him. “I was a boy. We had just got electricity in our house.”

“Things must have changed a great deal since then,” I said.

“Things haven’t changed at all,” he snapped. He was never a cheerful man, George Birch. He turned, hitching up his trousers, and limped on his wooden foot back to his truck.

That night I lay in my bedroll under the canvas roof of my tent, watching the tormented sky. The lantern hissed softly beside my head; I kept it burning low, all night long, advertising my presence to any who might seek to come and undo my work. It had been a warm, springlike afternoon, but now a cool breeze was blowing in from the north, stirring the branches of the trees over my head. After a while I drowsed a little; I fancied I could hear the distant fluting of the Miskahannock flowing over its rocky bed and, still more distant, the low, insistent drumming of the machine heart in the black mill. Suddenly I sat up: The music I had been hearing, of breeze and river and far-off machinery, seemed at once very close and not at all metaphoric. I scrambled out of my bedroll and tent and stood, taut, listening, at the edge of Plunkettsburg Ring. It was music I heard, strange music, and it seemed to be issuing, impossibly, from the other end of the tunnel I had been digging and redigging over the past two weeks — from within mound B-3, the null mound!

I have never, generally, been plagued by bouts of great courage, but I do suffer from another vice whose outward appearance is often indistinguishable from that of bravery: I am pathologically curious. I was not brave enough, in that eldritch moment, actually to approach B-3, to investigate the source of the music I was hearing; but though every primitive impulse urged me to flee, I stood there, listening, until the music stopped, an hour before dawn. I heard sorrow in the music, and mourning, and the beating of many small drums. And then in the full light of the last day of April, emboldened by bright sunshine and a cup of instant coffee, I made my way gingerly toward the mound. I picked up my shovel, lowered my foolish head into the tunnel, and crept carefully into the bowels of the now-silent mound. Seven hours later I felt the shovel strike something hard, like stone or brick. Then the hardness gave way, and the shovel flew abruptly out of my hands. I had reached, at last, the heart of mound B-3.

And it was not empty; oh no, not at all. There were seven sealed tombs lining the domed walls, carved stone chambers of the usual Miskahannock type, and another ten that were empty, and one, as yet unsealed, that held the unmistakable, though withered, yellow, naked, and eternally slumbering form of Carlotta Brown-Jenkin. And crouched on her motionless chest, as though prepared to devour her throat, sat a tiny stone idol, hideous, black, brandishing a set of wicked ivory fangs.

Now I gave in to those primitive impulses; I panicked. I tore out of the burial chamber as quickly as I could and ran for my car, not bothering to collect my gear. In twenty minutes I was back at Murrough House. I hurried up the front steps, intending only to go to my room, retrieve my clothes and books and papers, and leave behind Plunkettsburg forever. But when I came into the foyer I found Dexter, carrying a tray of eaten lunches back from the dining room to the kitchen. He was whistling light-heartedly and when he saw me he grinned. Then his expression changed.

“What is it?” he said, reaching out to me. “Has something happened?”

“Nothing,” I said, stepping around him, avoiding his grasp. The streets of Plunkettsburg had been built on evil ground, and now I could only assume that every one of its citizens, even cheerful Dexter, had been altered by the years and centuries of habitation. “Everything’s fine. I just have to leave town.”

I started up the wide, carpeted steps as quickly as I could, mentally packing my bags and boxes with essentials, loading the car, twisting and backtracking up the steep road out of this cursed valley.

“My name came up,” Dexter said. “I start tomorrow at the mill.”

Why did I turn? Why did I not keep going down the long, crooked hallway and carry out my sensible, cowardly plan?

“You can’t do that,” I said. He started to smile, but there must have been something in my face. The smile fizzed out. “You’ll be killed. You’ll be mangled. That good-looking mug of yours will be hideously deformed.”

“Maybe,” he said, trying to sound calm, but I could see that my own agitation was infecting him. “Maybe not.”

“It’s the women. The queens. They’re alive.”

“The queens are alive? What are you talking about, professor? I think you’ve been out on the mountain too long.”

“I have to go, Dexter,” I said. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay here anymore. But if you have any sense at all, you’ll come with me. I’ll drive you to Pittsburgh. You can start at Tech. They’ll help you. They’ll give you a job. …” I could feel myself starting to babble.

Dexter shook his head. “Can’t,” he said. “My name came up! Shoot, I’ve been waiting for this all my life.”

“Look,” I said. “All right. Just come with me, out to the Ring.” I looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour until dark. Just let me show you something I found out there, and then if you still want to go to work in that infernal factory, I’ll shake your hand and bid you farewell.”

“You’ll really take me out to the site?”

I nodded. He set the tray on a deal table and untied his apron.

“Let me get my jacket,” he said.

I packed my things and we drove in silence to the necropolis. I was filled with regret for this course of action, with intimations of disaster. But I felt I couldn’t simply leave town and let Dexter Eibonas walk willingly into that fiery eructation of the evil genius, the immemorial accursedness, of his drab Pennsylvania hometown. I couldn’t leave that young, unmarked body to be broken and split on the horrid machines of the mill. As for why Dexter wasn’t talking, I don’t know; perhaps he sensed my mounting despair, or perhaps he was simply lost in youthful speculation on the unknown vistas that lay before him, subterranean sights forbidden and half-legendary to him since he had first come to consciousness of the world. As we turned off Gray Road onto the access road that led up to the site, he sat up straight and looked at me, his face grave with the consummate adolescent pleasure of violating rules.

“There,” I said. I pointed out the window as we crested the rise. The Plunkettsburg Ring lay spread out before us, filled with jagged shadows, in the slanting, rust red light of the setting sun. From this angle the dual circular plan of the site was not apparent, and the thirty-six mounds appeared to stretch from one end of the plateau to the other, like a line of uneven teeth studding an immense, devouring jawbone.

“Let’s make this quick,” I said, shuddering. I handed him a spare lantern from the trunk of the Nash, and then we walked to the edge of the aboriginal forest that ran upslope from the plateau to the wind-shattered precincts of Mount Orrert’s sharp peak. It was here, in the lee of a large maple tree, that I had set up my makeshift camp. At the time the shelter of that homely tree had seemed quite inviting, but now it appeared to me that the forest was the source of all the lean shadows reaching their ravening fingers across the plateau. I ducked quickly into my tent to retrieve my lantern and then hurried back to rejoin Dexter. I thought he was looking a little uneasy now. His gait slowed as we approached B-3. When we trudged around to confront the raw earthen mouth of the passage I had dug, he came to a complete stop.