The Orphan (30 page)

His breathing labored in his chest so that he felt strangled as he tried to control it, and now he could feel that hated presence again, the powerful urge coming over him as it rose inside him, and he whispered inside his mind, “NO! NO!” But it came on, flooding him with tension and a presence, as it had with Flossie. Now if he were found here. No. Anything, but don’t make a noise now. He clung to the sandpaper-feeling roof as if it were tilting him over an abyss while the idiotically happy Beast rose in him, coursing in his blood, and he feeling its awful joy in his agony of shame and frustration, actually to feel it luxuriating in his flooded nervous system as he shook with fear and lust and shame, and all he could do, his eyes still boring through the curtain as he was afraid to make any movement at all, was to hold himself still as that thing inside him crawled about its loathsome business of savoring his painful state. Miss Wrigley had gotten into bed and was reading her book, glancing in the general direction of the window once and then again. Finally, she put the book down and blew out the lamp. At the moment she turned her head to blow out the flame, Charles lowered his head, feeling dizzy and almost demented with agony and shame. His defenses were low, so concentrated was his attention on not disturbing one single particle of that roof. And his mind was saying, what if old man Peaussier is down there, watching me, waiting, has been watching me all the time, so that his body shivers and quakes as he tries to move.

I rise in the boy, feel his disturbed state and am growing angry at this constant irritation and frustration he seems determined to put himself and me through. I must do something. I rise and shift.

With one spring I leave the roof silently and hit the ground next to the two dogs. They would cry out, but I have no time for them, so I grip each one with a claw and hold their throats until they are almost dead. Now they will not bother me for a time. I feel the surroundings with my full senses, the yard becomes bright as a lighted field. I sense two cats getting ready to fight over near the crib, the rabbits on the other side of the garden plot in the weeds sitting like warm stones in their darkness, the barn full of life radiating its vibrations, its joy, into the darkness where I feel my full power again. An odor catches me as I drop the dogs. Tantalizing, musky, exciting, almost as if there were something waiting especially for me in that barn. Yes, the Jersey. It is her odor. My excitement is high as I stalk the odor, letting it guide me precisely, feeling as it wavers to one side of my path or the other, like a beacon. I move silently across the barnyard, the cats scatter like snowflakes from my path. Beyond the barn I hear the poor bull in his agony. That will not be my fate again. I have entered the broad door. To the right, the box stall. I hear her stirring now and smell the sweet alfalfa odor of the cow like a setting for a jewel, the jewel of mating scent that fills me with desire now and blocks out all but the most peripheral of warning senses. I look into the stall, grasping the form with my spatial sense, closing on the odor, I snap the latch on the door, swing it wide, press my face into the scent that is so delectable, pressing my face to the cow, feeling all the liquids in my body turning hot and heavy, pressing along her side, her smooth flank, whispering to her, “I could be your bull, my dear. I could be your lover, but you must stand me as I am, sweetheart, for I have suffered. How I have suffered.”

The cow, the lovely ginger and velvet black Jersey flicks her ears like signals, stamps her feet, begins to bawl a little. I mount her and begin.

I try to remember not to hurt her with my claws, but it is so hard, as the movements make themselves astoundingly without my volition, and I float upward on an ascending rise of beating blood to which I keep time. There is music, I hear and feel music as in that dark hallway, piano, drums now, there were no drums, but yes, drums, ascending. I hear outside my reddened universe of pleasure the cow moaning and crying now, but nothing can stop me now as the blood inside me begins to explode, explode, and goes farther and explodes more, and I am crying out with much pleasure, raking the cow with my claws and crying out. And I feel all my life and energy and blood lust and power sporting out, shooting in a great trajectory into pitch blackness, and I fall forward across the cow’s back, my hind feet wedged in the sides of the stall, still engaged with this animal, my mind completely gone as the dark almost closes around me.

Lights go on suddenly, brilliant, blinding lights. I cry out, but there are people coming from outside. I am confused and weak, must not try. I use my last concentration and shift.

There is a medley of screams, some of them coming from the young man, Charles, who has found himself compromised by the perfidy of that power which he now knows he must serve or be destroyed. Some of them come from the gathering of usually silent Peaussiers who have rushed to their barn to safeguard their most valuable cow from what sounded like an attack by the bull that must impossibly have broken in to get her. And the most piercing of all comes from Miss Jessie Wrigley, twenty-four-year-old local teacher who had been roused earlier by some noise and was the one who woke the family. Miss Wrigley witnesses a sight that may to the end of her life remain stamped in her memory, if she does not resolutely deny its reality in a moment or two, or if she does not faint, which she is not in the habit of doing. She sees in the sudden illumination of the electric barn lights which have only this month been installed, her favorite and star pupil, Charles Cahill, obviously in a painful state of post-coital remorse, lying over the back of the Peaussier’s favorite milker and valuable cream cow, Sherry, who seems less the worse for wear than her student who appears to have died in the act.

The details of Mr. Peaussier, a man not to be nonplussed by any natural or unnatural act of man or beast short of doom’s blast, withdrawing Charles from his love object are not lost on the stunned onlookers, so that there is no doubt in the minds of any present what has been happening. The young man stands as if he were a puppet whose strings had been cut, sagging and obscene until Mr. Peaussier steps forward and says his first and last words to the boy.

“Get yourself decent.”

And with suddenly maddened eyes, Charles Cahill leaps at the aging farmer, knocks him to the floor of the barn and speeds out into the darkness where he vanishes in every sense of the word. Twenty feet from the bright lighted rectangle of the open barn door where three standing people and one recumbent one watch, along with a rather scratched-up Jersey cow, something else appears and disappears, something very large and very fast, so that the watchers can only individually assume they have seen a trick of the light, an optical illusion that none of them will ever mention to anyone. The incident itself has been quite enough.

***

If this hill has a name, I have not heard it. Hills are so rare in this country they are not even named, called perhaps just “The Hill,” but it is a good vantage point from which to survey the little river valley. Now in the first cool silence of dawn when even the birds have not thrown off the dimness of night, I exult in my newly discovered sensations and wonder at Charles and his human foolishness. All this night he has been only a burning rage inside of me, like a sour stomach, I think, grinning. I sit on my haunches at the edge of the steep side of the hill, the east side, looking down at the brown pathway of the Iroquois River half a mile away. If I turned back the other way I could see most of the county where my last nine months have been spent. How much I have learned here, I think, yawning suddenly, surprised by fatigue. The river is not yet struck by the rising sun that is just up and tangled in the trees and farms along the horizon. The river is as brown as a road, an unpaved road leading northeast.

“Charles,” I call again, having called him many times in the night, receiving for answer only the slow burning of his absent rage.

“This is no way for a hero to act.”

Silence.

“We can leave here, go to the woman, Claire Lanphier, in Chicago. She loves you, Charles, would be your mother, help you. You might go on to high school, the university.” I cannot continue against his resolute absence.

“If I had not shifted,” I say, “they might have killed us both.”

“Charles? It’s not that bad. People forget.”

But there is no answer and my fatigue reduces my patience with the boy. I have always liked Charles, even with his ridiculous ideals, as if he were a Midwestern Sir Galahad. I turn back and look over the low, level farmlands to the west, the Peaussier farm laid out like a checkerboard of new grain and corn, a line of tiny cows being drawn out to pasture along the almost invisible string of their path. Nearby, along the little black cinder road, the oblong schoolhouse sits in its yard with the two cottonwood trees and the outhouses like tiny toadstools, the copse of solid foliage in which Mrs. Stumway hides from the world, the double siloed and immaculate farm beside the highway bridge where Douglas Bent is perhaps strapping on his brace to begin another day, the far off town with its low haze of smoke.

One last try. “So Beast wins the Beauty?”

I listen, but even the hot fuming of his rage has disappeared now.

“Well, Charles, my dear hero, farewell. Who knows, perhaps this monster will yet become a prince.”

And I set off down the hillside for the river, heading north-east.

The End of
The First Book of the Beast

a wild-eyed, five-clawed creature with a taste for blood. But the strange ways of destiny changed his form. When he found he could be human, he became little Robert, hid in a barn and was adopted by a farm family.

Robert had his own will and wanted to stay human. Still the beast arose unbidden, shifting form without warning. Neither beast nor child could conceal the danger, as their dual nature threatened to reveal itself, to destroy their cover - and to leave them at the mercy of forces unknown!

LOOK FOR:

Volumes II and III in The Book of the Beast

THE CAPTIVE

THE BEAST