Storm Wolf (18 page)

“It was three of the last wise women of the town who discovered what the brute was: a
vilkolakis
of a sort, like you in that regard, but a
vilkolakis
so unlike you as to be another kind of monster altogether.”

“So you think that I am a monster?” Alexei could not stop himself from thinking.

Javinė spat again at the barn floor. “So ready to take offense are you, my friend? No, I can tell from your scent that you are a kind monster, a brute who seeks only to care for his neighbors rather than destroy them. I declare, they are a strange kind of
vilkolakis
that come from Estonia. But the
vilkolakis
that the wise women drove away with the lantern was a brute and a monster that not even the nightmares of Lithuanians had seen before.” 

Javinė spat on the straw-strewn floor again. “But why are you so interested, Alexei? I know the old grandmother in the house goes out each week to tend the lantern and that she has done so since it was first kindled. The three wise women entrusted that task to her because… well, it is no secret, I suppose… it was her two elder sisters who were the first and last victims of the monster.”

The sprite licked his old, cracked lips and clearly had something more to say. Alexei waited.

“But I heard her once, that old woman,” Javinė eventually resumed. “One morning. Before dawn. Here, in the barn. Saying her prayers away from where she thought anyone else might overhear her. Her sisters were the beast’s victims, but she thought she had opened the door to the monster by playing games with the
nykštukas,
the forest spirits. They had convinced her that they were the last of their race and needed a human girl to open the door to the Otherworld to bring more of their kind into the forest so she would still have playmates when they were gone.

“So she did what they asked and—whatever the rite or song or whatever it was they asked her to perform—she thought it had opened the door to the Otherworld not only to let in the
nykštukas
but the monster wolf as well.

“But you still haven’t told me why it is that you are so interested in all this,
vilkolakis
Alexei. Surely the old woman hasn’t let the lantern go out. Has she?”

Alexei hung his head in shame. “I knocked against the lantern the night I came to this place. The lantern went out, but I thought it no more than a marker to guide travelers in the night.”

“Fool!” exclaimed Javinė, scowling at Alexei and then spitting at his feet.

“But now the monster wolf has attacked,” Alexei continued as if he had not heard the sprite. “Twice. I have rekindled the lantern but that does not seem to have stopped the creature. Vakarė thinks the same magic must be done again to empower the lantern to keep away the monster, but she does not think she can remember it all now or do it all herself—since it took three old women together to do it the first time.”

Javinė coughed and sputtered with rage. “Fool! Jackass! Imbecile! How could you have been so clumsy and thoughtless! Who leaves a lantern burning at a crossroads without some purpose more important than guiding some oaf stupid enough to be walking along the road in the dark? You have exposed the whole town to this monster again! Could you have done anything more thoughtless and cruel?”

“You have no idea what else I might have done that others would call thoughtless and cruel!” Alexei snapped.

Javinė paused in his blustering and turned his head as if to study Alexei with one eye under his shaggy, arching brow.

“Well. Be that as it may,” the sprite concluded at last. “The damage is done and you must find some way to repair it.”

“And how might I do that?” Alexei wanted to know. “That was the reason I called you this morning!”

Javinė reached up and scratched his head under his cap. “I cannot say,
vilkolakis.
But I will think on it and I will find you when I have something to say.”

Alexei went about his daily chores on the farm—helping with milking and feeding the animals, brushing the horses’ coats, and repairing the plows and other tools in the barn—and thought the small handful of other farmhands seemed even more reluctant than usual to work beside him.

He went into the town to buy a handful of kitchen supplies for Vakarė and saw housewives in the streets turn their heads when they saw him coming and lean close to each other, whispering as their eyes darted to him and then away again.

“People do think I am guilty,” he realized. “Vakarė told me true. Others in the town do think that I have done something to harm those two girls.”

He finished his errand and hurried back to the farm. But as he made his way down the muddy road, he saw handfuls of men stop and stare at him, talking among themselves and pointing at him. The women had all seemed anxious to avoid his noticing that they were talking about him, but these groups of men refused to take their eyes from him, as if warning him that they were watching him and what he did. He could feel their eyes boring into his back as he passed them on the other side of the street and he hunched his shoulders up around his ears as if to protect himself from their threatening, angry stares as much as to shield himself from the cold.

“I know that I harmed those girls,” he whispered to himself, fighting back tears as he hurried along. “Knocking out that lantern, I may as well have attacked those girls myself.” He stopped and shuddered, thinking of what he had done to his family and of the threat his presence posed to Vakarė and her family. “What if the transformation seizes me again, here, while I am among them, and I slaughter them myself? There is no need for a monster wolf to come past the lantern in that case. I must find a way to stop the monster and then get away from Vakarė and her family before I slaughter them all.” He closed his eyes, but was unable to shut out the memory of his wife and children and how their torn and broken bodies had been strewn about their house. How he had torn their bodies with his teeth and broken them with his own hands, tossing them about the house in his wolf madness.

“I can’t let that happen again!” he promised himself.

The man roused himself from his drunken sleep, shaking the locks of his greasy hair from his face and kicking the empty bottles of beer that littered the floor around the stained and tattered bed. The house, deep in the forest opposite the crossroads where the lantern burned with its ineffective light, was a ramshackle hut that did little more than keep out the bulk of the dead leaves in the autumn or the snow in the winter. The holes in the roof dripped half-melted snow even as dead leaves from the many autumns past were piled in the corners of the one room that served as kitchen, parlor, and bedchamber. A pot hung over the cold ashes on the hearth and the bricks in the chimney climbed the wall precariously towards both the roof and the sky. Patches of white lichen and green moss were scattered across the crumbling bricks.

There was no mirror hanging above the basin and pitcher where he washed his face, but he had no need of one. He knew his teeth were broken and yellowed, his eyes bloodshot and jaundiced, his skin cold and paler than was typical among the men in the town. He splashed the cold water on his face, ignoring the tiny crystals of ice that had formed along the edges of the dirty water in the basin, left over from his ablutions the day before and the days before that. He pressed one grimy hand against a nostril and snorted, clearing the snot from his beaked nose into the basin water.

One of the children—the youngest boy, maybe?—who slept huddled in a corner whimpered in his sleep.

He ladled some of the cold porridge from the pot over the hearth into a cracked bowl, which he sat down to eat at the cracked wooden table nearby. The three-legged stool on which he sat, one leg just enough shorter than the other two to make it difficult to stay balanced as he ate, creaked beneath his shifting weight.

Another of the children—the girl?—shifted about, causing the floorboards to creak beneath her and the small shackles that linked them all together, bound to the ring set into the stonework of the chimney, to clink and rattle. But the children—tired, cold, hungry, and frightened—still slept. He had heard them whispering and shivering in the night until they had finally fallen asleep only a little while ago. They had refused his offers of porridge, but they would eventually succumb to their hunger. He knew they would. They would eat the porridge he offered them and they would be glad to have it.

After all, they hadn’t refused the water he had offered them, had they? He had brought in chips and chucks of ice from the nearly dry well in the yard, ice full of bits of dirt and leaves, and he had let the ice melt in the pitcher on the floor beside them. They hadn’t been too proud to drink the dirty water as the ice melted. They would soon happily take the porridge as well.

He had lived alone there, in that broken-down hut in the forest, since that lantern had been lit to keep him away from the town. He had remained there, patient, knowing that sooner or later the light would go out and the protection the lantern afforded the town would fail. While he waited, he had slept and hunted the animals in the forest, brewed his own beer, and occasionally found a traveler lost in the woods. He licked his lips as he ate the cold porridge, remembering some of the travelers he had encountered. Some of their gnawed-on bones were still scattered about the floor of the hut.

Outside, a rusty steel cage leaned against the hut and its bottom was also—beneath the snow that blanketed the woods—strewn with dead leaves and the bones of the half-dozen would-be apprentices he had collected during the time he had hunted in the town before. But those foolish old gossips had found a way to keep him from hunting in the town, and he had been forced to eat the apprentices he had collected. Without the full number of twelve, he could not change the little ones into apprentices, and so the hunt had been for nothing.

But now? Now he had begun collecting again. But he had learned that keeping the children in the cage outside in the cold weakened them too much and so he had decided to keep the results of his hunt this time inside the hut with him.

He leaned back and closed his eyes, content to anticipate his next excursion into the town. He smiled. The fresh meat of the young girls who were to be married beckoned to him. And the would-be apprentices that he would add to his collection beckoned as well.

The sun had finally set. No one in the town could remember a day on which the moments had seemed to pass so slowly. With little work to be done in the barns until after Epiphany, there was nothing to distract the men from the fear and anger that gripped them. A few kept looking for the missing children, but there had been no sign of them, and most folk agreed that they must have been taken by the monster wolf into the forest and eaten near its lair. Few hearts held any hope that the missing children would ever be found.

What should have been a festive evening meal in the homes of the town to mark another of the twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany was instead a quiet, somber meal, as each household barred its doors and parents planned to keep watch through the night to prevent their children from becoming victims of another attack.

In a house on the other side of the market from Vakarė and her family’s farm, a mother and father tucked their three children—ages twelve, ten, and seven—into their beds for the night. The mother sang a lullaby and then another as the children tried to be brave and not show their fear. But how could they not be afraid, when they had heard all the grown-ups that came to pass the day in their mother’s kitchen tell the stories about the wolf attacks? Attacks in which the wolf always seemed to break into houses during the night?

But they could tell that their mother was trying to be brave so as not to frighten them, and so they had agreed, without needing to say a word about it between themselves, to look brave so as not to disappoint her. Finally, the mother’s singing was rewarded by the soft and gentle rhythmic breathing of the sleeping children, and she slipped out of their bedroom back into the kitchen to join her husband.

So far, the only homes the wolf had broken into were homes in which a young woman about to be married lived. None of their children were anywhere near marrying age. So the mother thought their house safe.

“But how can we know for sure that the wolf won’t change his habits and begin hunting in homes with younger children?” her husband had demanded. So now he was sitting in a rocking chair beside the stove, the kerosene lamp on the table turned down low and his shotgun resting in his lap. The mother sat at the table and rested her eyes. She had reluctantly agreed to take turns with her husband, watching through the night, shotgun ready to stop the great wolf if it should attempt to break into their house.

The rocking chair creaked quietly in the dim light.

Eventually the father’s snoring mingled with his wife’s gentle breathing. The moon set and the stars prepared for sunrise, but there was no hint of the coming dawn yet when the window near the kitchen door exploded inward as the great wolf came snarling and lunging through it.

The mother screamed as the shattered glass rained down around her and the wolf sank its teeth into her throat. The father cried out, startled, and shot the gun hastily and without aiming. The wolf dropped his wife back into her chair and leapt across the table onto the father’s lap.