Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“We’re not going inside there,” he said in a monotone. I saw come into his eyes the dull, dreamy look that was there whenever he talked about going to work in the mill. “It isn’t allowed.”

“It’s just for a minute, Dexter. That’s all you’ll need.”

I put my hands on his shoulders and gave him a push, and we stumbled through the dank, close passage, the light from our lanterns veering wildly around us. Then we were in the crypt.

“No,” Dexter said. The effect on him of the sight of the time-ravaged naked body of Carlotta Brown-Jenkin, of the empty tombs, the hideous idol, the outlandish ideograms that covered the walls, was everything I could have hoped for. His jaw dropped, his hands clenched and unclenched, he took a step backward. “She just died!”

“Yesterday,” I agreed, trying to allay my own anxiety with a show of ironic detachment.

“But what … what’s she doing out here?” He shook his head quickly, as though trying to clear it of smoke or spiderwebs.

“Don’t you know?” I asked him, for I still was not completely certain of his or any townsman’s uninvolvement in the evil, at once ancient and machine-age, that was evidently the chief business of Plunkettsburg.

“No! God, no!” He pointed to the queer, fanged idol that crouched with a hungry leer on the late chancellor’s hollow bosom. “God, what is that thing?”

I went over to the tomb and cautiously, as if the figure with its enormous, obscene tusks might come to life and rip off a mouthful of my hand, picked up the idol. It was as black and cold as space, and so heavy that it bent my hand back at the wrist as I hefted it. With both hands I got a firm grip on it and turned it over. On its pedestal were incised three symbols in the spiky, complex script of the Miskahannocks, unrelated to any other known human language or alphabet. As with all of the tribe’s inscriptions, the characters had both a phonetic and a symbolic sense. Often these were quite independent of one another.

“Yu … yug … gog,” I read, sounding it out carefully. Yuggog.

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything, as far as I know. But it can be read another way. It’s trickier. Here’s tooth … gut — that’s hunger — and this one—” I held up the idol toward him. He shied away. His face had gone completely pale, and there was a look of fear in his eyes, of awareness of evil, that I found, God forgive me, strangely gratifying. “This is a kind of general intensive, I believe. Making this read, loosely rendered, hunger … itself. How odd.”

“Yuggog,” Dexter said softly, a thin strand of spittle joining his lips.

“Here,” I said cruelly, tossing the heavy thing toward him. Let him go into the black mill now, I thought, after he’s seen this. Dexter batted at the thing, knocking it to the ground. There was a sharp, tearing sound like matchwood splitting. For an instant Dexter looked utterly, cosmically startled. Then he, and the idol of Yuggog, disappeared. There was a loud thud, and a clatter, and I heard him groan. I picked up the splintered halves of the carved wooden trapdoor Dexter had fallen through and gazed down into a fairly deep, smooth-sided hole. He lay crumpled at the bottom, about eight feet beneath me, in the light of his overturned lantern.

“My God! I’m sorry! Are you all right?”

“I think I sprained my ankle,” he said. He sat up and raised his lantern. His eyes got very wide. “Professor, you have to see this.”

I lowered myself carefully into the hole and stared with Dexter into a great round tunnel, taller than either of us, paved with crazed human bones, stretching far beyond the pale of our lanterns.

“A tunnel,” he said. “I wonder where it goes.”

“I can only guess,” I said. “And that’s never good enough for me.”

“Professor! You aren’t—”

But I had already started into the tunnel, a decision that I attributed not to courage, of course, but to my far greater vice. I did not see that as I took those first steps into the tunnel I was in fact being bitten off, chewed, and swallowed, as it were, by the very mouth of the Plunkettsburg evil. I took small, queasy steps along the horrible floor, avoiding insofar as I could stepping on the outraged miens of human skulls, searching the smoothed, plastered walls of the tunnel for ideograms or other hints of the builders of this amazing structure. The tunnel, or at least this version of it, was well built, buttressed regularly by sturdy iron piers and lintels, and of chillingly recent vintage. Only great wealth, I thought, could have managed such a feat of engineering. A few minutes later I heard a tread behind me and saw the faint glow of a lantern. Dexter joined me, favoring his right ankle, his lantern swinging as he walked.

“We’re headed northwest,” I said. “We must be under the river by now.”

“Under the river?” he said. “Could Indians have built a tunnel like this?”

“No, Dexter, they could not.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment as he took this information in.

“Professor, we’re headed for the mill, aren’t we?”

“I’m afraid we must be,” I said.

We walked for three quarters of an hour, until the sound of pounding machinery became audible, grew gradually unbearable, and finally exploded directly over our heads. The tunnel had run out. I looked up at the trapdoor above us. Then I heard a muffled scream. To this day I don’t know if the screamer was one of the men up on the floor of the factory or Dexter Eibonas, a massive hand clapped brutally over his mouth, because the next instant, at the back of my head, a supernova bloomed and flared brightly.

I wake in an immense room, to the idiot pounding of a machine. The walls are sheets of fire flowing upward like inverted cataracts; the ceiling is lost in shadow from which, when the flames flare brightly, there emerges the vague impression of a steely web of girders among which dark things ceaselessly creep. Thick coils of rope bind my arms to my sides, and my legs are lashed at the ankles to those of the plain pine chair in which I have been propped.

It is one of two dozen chairs in a row that is one of a hundred, in a room filled with men, the slumped, crew-cut, big-shouldered ordinary men of Plunkettsburg and its neighboring towns. We are all waiting, and watching, as the women of Plunkettsburg, the servants of Yuggog, pass noiselessly among us in their soft, horrible cloaks stitched from the hides of dead men, tapping on the shoulder of now one fellow, now another. None of my neighbors, however, appears to have required the use of strong rope to conjoin him to his fate. Without a word the designated men, their blood thick with the dark earthen brew of the Ring witches, rise and follow the skins of miscreant fathers and grandfathers down to the ceremonial altar at the heart of the mill, where the priestesses of Yuggog throw oracular bones and, given the result, take hold of the man’s ear, his foot, his fingers. A yellow snake, its venom presumably anesthetic, is applied to the fated extremity. Then the long knife is brought to bear, and the vast, immemorial hunger of the god of the Miskahannocks is assuaged for another brief instant. In the past three hours on this Walpurgis Night, nine men have been so treated; tomorrow, people in this bewitched town that, in a reasonable age, has learned to eat its men a little at a time, will speak, I am sure, of a series of horrible accidents at the mill. The women came to take Dexter Ei-bonas an hour ago. I looked away as he went under the knife, but I believe he lost the better part of his left arm to the god. I can only assume that very soon now I will feel the tap on my left shoulder of the fingers of the town librarian, the grocer’s wife, of Mrs. Eibonas herself. I am guiltier by far of trespass than Ed Eibonas and do not suppose I will survive the procedure.