The Wolf -Chapter IV: The Last Time

IV: The Last Time

1.
As the sun sank over the horizon, darkness swallowing the world, Adrian and Katy sat in the living room of his house, and were silent.
Adrian wrung his hands, disappointment battling cautious optimism in his heart.
“So,” Katy said, glancing out the window. “You’ve told other people?”
“A few, yeah.”
“And you just…let them go?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Adrian said.
She looked at him as though he had asked a stupid question. “They could tell someone.”
“And? Who would believe them? What I am is a punchline to a bad joke.”
“Well what if there are others like you out there?” She asked. “I mean, hypothetically speaking.”
He sighed. “It’s come across my mind a few times, I suppose. Guess I always hated it so much that meeting another person like me…it’s never been something I was interested in, I suppose.” Adrian rubbed his head and glanced up at Katy. “Even still, how would I go about finding others like me? If I asked some random nobody on the street if they were a werewolf, they’d look at me like I was crazy. It’s like looking for someone who thinks like you do; you can never be entirely sure unless you get in their head.”
A pause. “I guess so.”
Silence again.
“You could always show me,” she said cautiously. “The full moon’s only one day away.”
“No,” Adrian said. “That isn’t possible. When I shift, it isn’t me. It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t think-”
Says you.
“-it just does. I’d pass out telling you to run one night, then wake up the next morning to a pile of bones and organs.” He said this so matter-of-factly that Katy shivered.
Another silence. “So…basically, I just have to take your word for it.”
He sighed. “More or less.”
She nodded as if taking all the information under deep consideration, then asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Uhh, end of the hall on the right side.”
Katy stood and took a few awkward steps away, then turned around and said, “I noticed you don’t have a TV in here.”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “What’s there to watch?”
She nodded the same way as before and went to the bathroom.
The door locked with an audible click.

2.
Adrian sat alone, glancing around the room, his heart rate slowing. His frustration at her reluctance to believe was curbed by her willingness to listen. He realized that he had not expected to come this far, and now that he was here he didn’t know what to do next.
Yes, you do.
The voice had not spoken up in some time, and Adrian was almost surprised.
“Really now?” Adrian asked silently, “And what is that?”
Perspective.
Adrian considered this for a moment, then nodded. Sometimes he pushed the voice back, most times he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t there (it laughing at him all the while), but there was no denying it had saved his life on several occasions. Perhaps this was one of those times.

3.
When Katy returned from the bathroom, Adrian had already taken some objects from the wall, set them on the center table, and sat back down. She opened her mouth to speak, but Adrian held up his hand.
“I can’t convince you that I’m telling the truth,” he said. “The best I have is my own certainty. My memories of the life I’ve lived. All I can do is tell you what happened and how, and hope that you don’t hear any lie in my voice.”
She sat down and sipped her water. After a long moment of consideration, she spoke.
“Alright then.”

4.
Adrian holds the knife loose in his right hand. Its handle is warm and familiar and tailored to suit his needs, its blade worn but sharp. In his right is a thick branch whittled down to a point. It has been carefully made, but not without taking into consideration the likelihood that it will only be used once. His thumb rubs against the butt of his knife, the blade pointing outward. He is not walking so much as flowing; his forward motion is fluid, each step silent and equal as can be managed in the underbrush of the forest.
He remembers a distant time when he had no reason to hunt, before the fire took his mother and his life. He had spent a long time asking himself how it happened, how it could have happened, when she had always been so careful. But time passed and answers did not come, and he was left to fend for himself whether he had closure or not.
A voice had spoken to him three years ago –he reckoned it was three years, because three winters had passed since then- and told him to go the city. And at the time those had been reasonable words. It was a goal, and having such a thing went a long way towards keeping you alive. Were it so simple.
At first the voice had been soft and mostly kept silent. Suggestions came to him in moments of doubt, some of which were taken and others ignored. But each full moon gave it resonance, and Adrian realized after several months that it was the mind accompanying that voice which took over his body when the moon was full. Each morning after such a night he woke in pain and misery just as he had the first time, but as the years went on he learned ways to bear it. His body grew accustomed to the change, and he had grown very strong because of it.
But Adrian feared the moon. In the weeks leading up to a full night, he would look up at the stars and curse the waxing orb for making him endure such pain. When the night would come he tried to hide from it, but there was no hiding; he did not need to see the moon to know it was full, and even still didn’t need to know the moon was full to shift. There was no escaping its grasp, and Adrian hated that surety. And despite the voice being a giver of good advice, its association with the moon made him hate it all the more.
So it was that as Adrian had approached the outskirts of the city, led by the mingling scents of human life, he turned back. The voice protested, but could do nothing, and Adrian had only smiled. He reasoned that he would only hurt people if he went into the city. This was a place of civilization and humanity; Adrian was neither.
And so the voice grew cold, resentful, and sarcastic. Adrian pushed it back, and there came a time when it would go weeks without saying anything at all. But always on the week of the full moon, it laughed. For all the control Adrian had of his own body, his own life, there was one thing he could not control, and that was the domain of the voice. The wolf rode high on his misery, and often made sure to leave Adrian hanging from trees or in deep trenches when his time was done.
Adrian hates the voice, and he hates the moon, and he hates his mother for dying, and his blood for making life so complicated; he is beginning to think that, deep down, he hates everything.
But now he is hunting. Now he is stalking a wounded deer; he does not know how the animal has come upon the hole in its leg, but he does not care. Adrian is hungry, and several miles back, in a hollow tree, a fire waits to cook fresh meat. He can practically taste it.
He sees it through the underbrush and is blessed to have not been seen; even with his silence, animals often sensed his presence, even the wounded ones. This one must be bad off. He considers holding off on the hunt and just following it until it dies, but he shakes the thought away. He is hungry now.
There has to be a clear line of progression from where he stands to where the animal is going to be. His path must be known or else it could very easily get away, hurt though it might be. He waits for the opportunity to present itself, and as the deer stops in its path to sniff the earth, it does exactly that.
Adrian makes a mad dash towards the animal, meaning to jump off a fallen log and throw his makeshift spear through the deer’s side and pin it to the ground, or take it down long enough for him to get close and slit its throat. But then there is a loud explosion, and pain erupts in Adrian’s body, and his leg gives out. The sound rolls out over the hills, and now Adrian hears footsteps coming his way. Suddenly his heart has jumped into his throat, and all his conceptions of the world are falling apart. His leg is screaming in white hot pain, his thoughts melting and dripping away at its intensity, and for a moment he can only lay on the ground and hold his leg and try his damnedest not to scream.
He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what to do, and that is more frightening than anything he has ever experienced.
The deer is long gone, it has limped away into the forest, and now Adrian is the wounded animal, and he wonders if now he is the hunted, and those footsteps are the signs of a hungry man. Whatever made that explosion is coming for him now, and Adrian knows that he has to run.
He checks his leg and feels his stomach drop to see a bleeding hole on one side and a bleeding hole on the other. He was shot straight through, and he wonders if it might have severed his bone, but wherever it did go it hurts more than anything he has ever felt. He stands, to the best of his ability, pushing off most his weight on his uninjured leg, and makes to run, but pain explodes across his lower half, and he stumbles and catches himself on a tree.
Through the chaos and panic in his mind, the voice speaks in a slow, deliberate voice.
You don’t have time to run. You need to go up.
Adrian does not think about it. He does not weigh the pros and the cons, because he knows that the voice is absolutely right. He does the best he can with his one good leg and pulls himself up the tree, as high as he can go, already feeling cold in a way that is painful and sickening. He is panting from the exertion, but the steps are near enough now to hear and so he makes himself stop. His leg is hanging limp from his side, blood running down the trunk of the tree, and his chest is heaving, and his brain is hurting, and he does not understand what has happened. Within the space of a single moment the entire world has changed, the tables have been turned against him, and now he is sitting in a tree, his arms hurting to just to keep him in place, and he is screaming in his mind, but he dare not give it voice, and he can only hope that whatever comes out looking for that deer does not see the blood running down the tree, and look up to find Adrian instead.
A man in a bright orange vest steps out into the clearing, holding a long, slender, metal thing, and though Adrian does not know what it is, he can tell from the way the man is holding it that it is not a tool of peace.
He looks around, and for a time that feels like eternity but can really only be just a few seconds, Adrian is sure that this man will turn his head and look up, see Adrian, smile, and point that thing at him, and then Adrian will be shot through again, only this time it will be a killing blow, and he’ll fall from the tree, hit some branches on the way down, and land on the earth with a dull and unastounding thump, and maybe for a few moments he will feel the earth beneath his face as his eyes lose their ability to see, and the man in the orange vest will drag him away and chop him up, and in a few days he will be nothing more than a pile of bones and shit left to rot in the forest. No more voices, no more full moons, no more fires or hunting or doing much of anything at all. That will be the story of him.
But the man in the orange vest simply utters a curse under his breath, and moves forward in the direction of the deer. Let him have it, Adrian thinks, and at that he almost laughs.

5.
The next few days are a blur of pain and sickness, at the end of which Adrian wakes to find himself in a comfortable bed, looking up at a white ceiling, where a fan is making its motions.
He tries to recall how he got here, but nothing comes. He remembers only a storm, and thunder so loud he could feel it in his teeth, and running as fast as he could away from it despite the hole in his leg.
And he remembers the voice saying something to him, but any more than that and Adrian begins to ache. He is warm, and he can’t remember the last time he was in a bed, or in a house, but still his leg is throbbing and his body is shaking and it hurts just trying to remember.
And then there is a sound to the left of him that Adrian does not at first recognize as an opening door, and for the first time he sees the old man.
Who, despite everything, is smiling.

6.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he says, his voice thick and brazened.
Adrian does not laugh. He has made a point of avoiding people for the past three years, and the last one he saw put a hole in his leg. Without thinking, he pulls the covers up to his nose.
The old man’s toothy grin widens. “How old are you, son?”
Adrian slants his eyes and considers the question. He remembers language as well as he ever did, conversations have taken place over the years with himself and with the voice, but it has still been a long time since he has engaged in conversation with another physically present person.
The question hangs in the air like a baited hook, and somewhere deep down Adrian understands that this man will wait all night if he has to for an answer.
Finally he says, peeking out from under the blankets just the slightest bit, “Nineteen.”
The old man nods his head, then pulls up a chair and sits down across from him.
“So, this is how it is,” he says in a tone of grave seriousness, though Adrian can’t tell to look at that smile. “I found you on my prop’ty bleedin’, shiv’rin’, delusional, and very nearly dead. I could’a called the cops, but I gathered from the looks’a ya’ that you picked up roots a while back.” He looks at Adrian as though he just asked a question.
“Three years,” Adrian admits.
The old man nods once more. “I would’a put it at five m’self, but close enough for gov’ment work. So where you been livin’, son?”
Adrian doesn’t know what to say. Out in the woods, feeding off deer and squirrels and rats, sleeping in trees and holes in the ground, engaged in a perpetual self-argument as to whether or not to breach the invisible border to civilized society? This is a man who looks to have lived in extravagance for quite some time (though he does have a rugged edge that eases Adrian’s mind just the slightest), and the question of where is a difficult enough one to answer without considering the elephant in the living room, a certain particularly furry and agile and bloodthirsty elephant who is considered by most a thing of fiction.
Adrian looks at the old man with wide, begging eyes, and he seems to glean some understanding.
“Not on the streets, then,” he says, now stroking his beard. “Guess ‘at makes you a wild boy, I s’pose. Must’a had a whole lotta luck. I have some friends couple miles west’a here, big huntin’ folks, and they say the huntin’ round here’s not s’good.”
More than luck, the voice says. Adrian shakes his head to push it back.
The old man takes this as a silent agreement.
“I hafta’ say, you are a lucky kid. Any’a the other folks ‘round here would’a turned you out in a heartbeat.”
Adrian shifts in his bed and squints as pain shoots up his lower half.
“Careful!” the old man says, leaning forward, concern showing on his face. “You got y’self in some shit, son. Shot with a pretty heavy rifle, and you bein’ out in all this wet without even puttin’ on a tourniquet sure as hell didn’t make it better. You’re lucky I was a medic back in the war. Had to fix wounded soldiers all the time, and conditions like yours was standard back then. But just ‘cause I know how to fix a shot through leg don’t make you fixed. It’ll be damn near a miracle if you don’t have a limp when all this is through.”
When speaking of his war days, even in passing, the old man loses some of his accent.
There is a moment of awkward silence, and Adrian looks at the wall on his left.
Up there are pictures of various age; children posed in their Sunday best, colorless with eyes of eerie resonance. A single face, round and almost always smiling, is constant throughout, and Adrian soon understands that this is his as-of-yet unnamed benefactor. The pictures become more casual as they bleed into color, with college snapshots and portraits of vast green landscapes capped with snowy mountains, families happily at play as parents look on in silent pride and sadness. And while all of these have been artfully grouped and spaced, one is set off from the others, almost an after thought; A widely smiling man, an equally joyful woman with slender hips and curly dark hair, and a pair of children, the boy’s face a mirror of his father’s, the girl holding one arm with the other and looking like getting her picture taken with her family was the worst thing in the world. At this last, Adrian points.
“Your family?”
The old man swallows and nods, his grin fading. “Yuh, that’d be them.”
“What happened to them?” Adrian asks. He looks at the old man with hard eyes, trying to keep him from asking “What do you mean?” because they both know exactly what he means
“Oh, not a whole lot, I s’pose. Ala –thas my wife, ‘ere- she divorced me ‘bout a month after ‘at picture was taken.” He says this in the dry tone of a man who has rehearsed it many times to many people, and adds this last much as the picture had probably been added to the wall for the sake of posterity. “Took the kids with her.”
Now it is Adrian’s turn to nod, though he does not entirely understand. He feels a fool for it, but he has to ask.
“What’s ‘diforced?’”
The old man straightens at this, looks at Adrian with confusion and a slowly dawning grin. “Are you serious?”
Adrian only blinks, not sure what to say.
The old man bursts into laughter so suddenly that Adrian jumps, and he finds himself reaching for his knife once more –though this time it is simply instinct, rather than genuine fear. The old man slaps his knee and rocks back and forth, screaming his laughter to the ceiling. When the gale subsides, he wipes a tear from his eye and says, “Boy, I don’ think’ere’s any man could tell you.”
Adrian nods once more, still oblivious. It is not a matter of great importance, anyway.
The old man watches Adrian’s utter lack of reaction with growing confusion.
“You really ain’t been around much, have you?” he says more as a statement to himself than anything.
Adrian gives voice to the question that has actually been bothering him, not without some discomfort. His voice is still scratchy, and his thoughts are muggy from pain and confusion.
“What do you want from me?”
The old man considers this for a few moments before saying, “I haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe,” mehbee, his drawl annunciates, “all I want’s ta save ya life and letcha get on yer way. Ain’t gonna make you repay me, leastways.” He grinned. “Not that you’d have much ta give me, in any case. I can tell you got some secrets, and thas just fine. I got plenty’a secrets m’self.”
He takes in a breath as if to say more, but closes his mouth. He nods some more, then stands up.
“I’ma go downstairs and grab me some food, you’re welcome to some if y’want.”
At this Adrian nods vehemently, considering his rumbling stomach, and the fact that he had missed his last meal, and that was the whole reason he was here now. At least, so far as he understands.
Somewhere deep down, he feels that there was more to the days that had passed than just delirium, but he can plunge no further than that.
The voice remains silent, but Adrian thinks it knows exactly what happened.

7.
Adrian shifted uncomfortably in his chair. A silence had descended upon the room once more, and Katy sat across from him still, twirling her empty cup in her hand, mulling over the story.
She looked up at him and asked, “So how did you go from being that kid to…” she motioned her cup at Adrian.
“Well, he brought up some food and we kept talking. I think he liked me because I never had much to say, and was pretty much as naïve as they came, and I liked him because he had so much to say about so many different things. It was a good five days before I was well enough to get out on my own again, and by that time I’d gotten so used to our conversations that the prospect of going back and living on my own just seemed boring. And unnecessary.”
Another pause.
“That’s incredibly serendipitous.”
Adrian smiled. “I bet you’ve used that word more times tonight than you have in your entire life.”
She laughed and nodded, went to take a drink, then slumped in disappointment. She looked up at Adrian with playful eyes and a raised eyebrow.
“You, uh…” She licked the corner of her mouth. “You want to break out something a littler harder?”
Adrian was taken aback.
“Are you comfortable with-”
“I have no idea what to think about this whole werewolf thing,” she said bluntly, holding up her hands. “Either you’re crazy or you’re joking with me, or you’re telling the truth, and that… I don’t even know how to go about understanding that right now. But despite all that, I really like you. You’re a damn good story teller if nothing else, and I haven’t met anyone like you before. And I am fucking thirsty, and I get the feeling if this keeps on, water isn’t going to do me any good. So bring on the heavy stuff, and if it gets too awkward I’ve got a can of pepper spray in my pocket.”
At this Adrian shrugged, got up, and went to the phone. He picked it up and shouldered it, hand positioned at the buttons to dial.
“Pick your poison,” he said with a sly smile.

8.
Nine hours and two bottles of vodka later, Adrian panted from his side of the bed. He thought over the night’s events, a muddled and confused tangle of conversation, flirtation, alcohol, and sex, and then looked over at Katy, arms behind her head, chest bare.
“What was that about pepper spray?”
She laughed uproariously at this, then rolled on top of him and kissed him.
“God…” Adrian said.
“What?”
“I have no idea how we got here.”
She smiled and kissed him again. “Who gives a shit?”
Adrian shrugged, and Katy rolled back to the other side of the bed. Turned towards Adrian, she put an arm across his chest and sighed.
“This has been a fucked up night,” she said.
Adrian smiled. “I agree.”
The ceiling fan turned above them, the light dim. There was a low hum from its engine which made Adrian content.
He wasn’t sure how long they had been silent, himself drifting slowly into sleep. There were thoughts in his head, but they were like the jagged edges of a shattered mirror, producing many angled and disparate representations of the same basic reflection. Somewhere there was coherence, but he could not find it, and did not care to at this point in time.
A few words spoken in a low voice brought him out of his haze, and Adrian asked, “What?”
“I said, ‘I’ve missed sharing a bed with someone.’ It’s been a while.”
Adrian nodded. “I understand,” he said, and truly meant it. His eyes began to flutter closed once more, his bed and the woman next to him and the unbelievable warmth underneath the blankets just too damned comfortable altogether for him to stay awake for long.
“I don’t get it,” she said, not aware that Adrian was almost too far away to hear. She spoke her next words with hesitation, almost as if tasting them, weighing them for their truth “I think I might actually believe you.”
Her fingers traced the faded lines of several scars on his chest. They were scattered sparsely all across his body.
“What is it like living alone?” she asked.
Adrian’s now slow, rhythmic breathing should have told her that he was fast asleep, but she was herself in a daze, one not helped in the slightest by the alcohol she had taken in during the course of the night.
And though he was asleep, he spoke an answer to Katy’s question. After this his hand ran through her hair, and her worries were swept away by a moment of physical sensation, and she fell asleep. She would only barely recall the words in the morning that would follow, might forget them entirely as time went on, but in any case she would never know that it was not Adrian who spoke to her that night. She had been too drunk and too tired to notice that his voice had been much deeper and much more clear than it should have been, especially considering the amount of vodka in his system.
The wolf spoke through Adrian with a great deal of sadness in his heart.
“It is the most horrible thing you could possibly imagine.”