The Ultimate Werewolf by Byron Preiss (ed) Page A

way the grind and whirl of his own thoughts.
    We were talking, her voice soothing, prompting, her gaze on his dirty hair, the sagging socks, about what you used to do, before. You were a writer, weren't you.
    So uncomfortable he could barely speak. Her office was so hot, and all this red: carpet and chairs, the pictures on the wall, all as red as a chambered heart. The styrofoam cup of coffee sat untouched and lightly steaming on the desktop before him. The first half hour had been all smiles, coffee and bustle, over and over her pleasure at finding him, really uncanny, it was not a part of town she visited often (he could believe that) but a meeting with a hospital administrator had run late, she had stopped at the first grocery she saw, and. And.
    She was looking at him to answer; for a moment the question stayed beyond him, then returned with its shiver of shame.
    I was a poet.
    I know. I've read your work, it's brilliant. You're an extraordinarily brilliant man. But you stopped writing a lo…
    Her pause elongated in the larger silence, as if she had offended, done something bawdy or cruel. You were hospitalized for awhile, she said finally. At Bridgemoor.
    I didn't like it there. All I did was lose things.
    What do you mean?
    I mean I lost things, I couldn't find them any more. I lost all the words and all I had were the, the pictures, the images, you see? That's all I had so I had to hang onto them.
    Is that why you left the hospital?
    Yes. Frowning; was it there that the angel-change had begun, come to him in the night like another kind of nurse? He used to remember; it seemed like. But she was waiting, again, for another answer. Yes. They were trying to medicate me too much. They do it to keep you quiet but I was quiet already. So I left. It wasn't really that hard, they don't watch you as much as they think they do. Plus they think because you're crazy, you're dumb.
    You're not crazy, Ethan.
    His pale shrug. What difference does it make now?
    Firmly, A lot of difference. To a lot of people. I'm not going to give up on you, Ethan. No matter what it takes. Taking out her card, making a business of placing it in an envelope and the envelope within his reach. I'm keeping my eye on you! And her vigorous nod, smile, more answer to her own inner torment than his: sweet, beautiful and sick, those eyes, that tender bruise of a smile as he gathered up his dirt- scabbed hat, his book, a ninth-grade biology workbook, the hard words laboriously underlined with the fading green of a cracked felt-tip pen, his poetry was taught in graduate courses at the university from which she had received her degree and he could no longer understand a simple word like predator.
     
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    Claws on the sidewalk, hard against his hard pads. Shiver of hair about his ears, pointed to the moon, cacophony of smells inside his wise nostrils. He had just ripped a small mongrel cat to rags, for no reason, all reasons. Nothing spoken, in this world, and everything understood.
    Except the human smell, sometimes, caught inside—inside!—his own aroma: that was disquieting, but in the way of his kind he did not mull or worry it, worried instead the cat's carcass, dropped both to bend, lick silver from a puddle of ice. Noises in the alley, and with the long empty grin of his kind he padded off, heavy nails too short to click warning against the pavement, short with use, and use, and use.
     
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    At the co-op grocery the woman behind the counter stopped him as he picked up his irregularly-donated rations—broken boxes of Hi-Ho crackers, a crushed can of cocktail peanuts, hothouse tomatoes lounging on the voluptuous edge of rot. He could not recall her name past the S that began it but her smell had the unhappy power to drive him out of the store at vulnerable moments.
    "Hey," she said. "I gotta note for you."
    Frightened, he stepped back, feet choosing flight before his heart could make an opposing decision. "Wait a minute,"