The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

Need

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“What do you do for work? Have you seen Hamilton? Isn’t it a shame Hilary didn’t win?”

“What?” Joyce said.

“Wasn’t it a awful about Game of Thrones? Have you seen the new season of Black Mirror?”

“I don’t even know what the fuck you’re getting at?”

“Oh, you know,” Peter said, “all of the dull and stupid questions people ask when they meet you. All the stuff no one really cares about. What do you do? ‘Why do you give a fuck what I do?’ I always want to say.”

“I actually have the temptation to do the same thing, but that’s because I’m an artist who hustles doing low wage jobs.”

“Like Marabeth,” Peter said. Then he shrugged. “That’s probably how you met Mara.”

“No, I met Mara in college when we were becoming the nobodies we are today. You know when your mind just works this one certain way, and you’re always looking for someone who understands you, and then you find that person? When you finally find them, you know a lot of trouble’s gonna happen.”

“No,” Peter said. Then he said, “I know what it’s like to want to meet that person, but no. I haven’t met that person.”

Peter pulled his legs up onto the couch. His jacket was gone and he was just in pants and white shirt, his tie hanging like a thin and half hearted noose. Joyce knew all the men in Marabeth’s family, even Kristian, stayed in suits, some of them shabbier than others, but still she wondered how you could wear one all day.

“It’s funny,” Peter said, “I think people get married because they think their spouses will be their best friends. It’s like the two of you are supposed to be everything to each other.”

“That might be true,” Joyce allowed, “if we were lesbians.”

Peter snorted, laughing out loud.

“I think,” Joyce continued, while Peter recovered from laughing, “that men think their wives are going to be everything, and women never expect that from their husbands. It’s strange cause most of the women I know will do anything to get a man, and most of the men I know do so little.”

Peter had stopped laughing, and Joyce said, “I’m sorry to be so brutal.”

“No,” Peter said. “You’re right. I did too little.”

“You know what?” Joyce said, “I feel like that’s bullshit. I feel like men who do too little never know it. I’m looking around here and you’re raising three kids and going to work in pressed suits every day and, apparently, being a big brother to Jim, and I feel like you’re doing a fuck of a lot. You seem like one of those guys who is always beating himself up. You seem like one of those guys girls were afraid to date because they were on their way to Harvard and head of the Young Republicans.”

“What the fuck?” Peter said.

“What?”

“I was, in fact, head of the Young Republicans until I became a Democrat, but… You know what?”

“I talk too fucking much.”

“Maybe,” Peter allowed, “but I like you. You make wild crazy assumptions which turn out to be true.”

Marabeth made her wayup the steps and down the hall to Kris’s room.

“I have to get out of here,” Kris was saying even before she came to the door.

“How did you know it was me?”

Kris looked up at her tiredly, “It really wouldn’t be anyone else. What’s up, Sis?”

“If you have to go—”

“Siddown,” Kris said, “You know I’ve always got time for you.”

Marabeth nodded and sat on the bed while her brother stopped combing his hair and came to sit beside her.

“I’ve been reading that book all night. I had to stop for a while.”

“What have you learned?”

“I can’t talk about it with anyone downstairs. I tried. All I said was… that Pamela thought she was a witch. That she was raised by a witch. But not by her mother. She and Friederich grew up some place in Germany—which we knew—some village and… I’m not telling this very well. She actually slept with him.”

“Slept with who? Slept with whom? Who?” Kris screwed up his face. “Slept with Friederich?”

“Yes.”

“She fucked her own father?”

“Yes, Kris,” Marabeth said, “and that’s not the half of it. Well, it is the half of it, but… She says she saw Friederich turn into a wolf. She says Friederich was a werewolf. Not only that, she says she was too.”

Kris’s expression had changed, and now Marabeth said, “What?”

“There was that letter, the one I gave you from Eve about the herb her grandfather showed Pamela… the medicine.”

“Wulfbane.”

“Yes.”

Kris stood up and moved to his bureau. He gave Marabeth the tablets and she said, “What is this, birth control? You know the girl you’re sleeping with takes these and not… what the fuck is aconitum carmichaelii?”

“Wulfbane.” Kris said.

When his sister blinked at him, he continued.

“Yes. Do you remember when I went crazy as a teenager? When Mom and Dad put me away and then took me to the doctor? This is my medication, Mara.”

Marabeth nodded, and then she said, “Kristian, I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

“I have the same thing Dad had that drove him nuts. That made him go away and never come back. His dad, our granddad had the same thing and maybe Uncle Byron. What if they were the same as Friederich?”

“Are you saying you believe this?” Marabeth gestured out the hall, because it was as close as she could get to pointing at the book.

“Are you saying you don’t?” Kris demanded. “Because if you didn’t, why the fuck would you have come up here to tell me about it? Why wouldn’t you be laughing in your room about it? You know there’s something about us, Marabeth.”

“That we’re werewolves?”

“Or that I am,” Kris said. “It… I know you never expected to hear that from me, but I think that’s why Uri took me to Chicago, so that I could really look at… every option.”

“But Kristian,” Marabeth said, “If this is true, and I think something is true, I really think something is happening, but if this was true, wouldn’t I be a werewolf? Wouldn’t everyone in our family be one? Wouldn’t we all be taking these pills? And why weren’t they? Pamela and Friederich? Because they aren’t like movie werewolves. I mean they turn into full on wolves.”

“The wolves in fairy tales did too. Werewolf is a German word that went into the French. In the French stories the man turned into a wolf, not a wolf man.”

“But once a month. Because of the moon. He couldn’t help it.”

“And these pills stop it?”

“Maybe?”

“But why not take them only on the full moon?”

“The direction are specific,” Kris said. “Maybe they’re all sugar pills and the ones that have an effect I only take on the full moon. Or maybe, like birth control, it’s really a gradual dosage you have to take all the time.”

“I don’t want to believe that. I don’t want this to be… I also don’t want to say this is so crazy it’s not possible. I don’t want to be one of those silly people in books and movies who takes the whole plot to believe. Anything’s possible, I guess. But… Pamela did not take pills or herbs. She changed when she wanted to and didn’t when she didn’t. So…”

“You’ve just got to keep reading,” Kris told her earnestly.

Marabeth nodded.

“Are you still going out?”

“Yeah,” Kris said. “I have to. Maybe you should too.”

“No, I’ve had enough out, and the only thing open is I Hop. Joy took Peter home and I guess she went back to her place cause she isn’t back here, and Jim either went to bed or is still downstairs.”

“Pancakes sound great. Oh—” Kris started.

“Oh, what?”

Kristian Strauss cleared his throat.

“I did a shitty thing.”

Marabeth looked at her brother.

“Jim came up here and I tore into him. He wanted to talk about Dad and I told him how our Dad wasn’t his dad, he was just a cousin and I was tired of him trying to act like he was our brother. And…”

He stopped at the look on his sister’s face, but continued.

“I told him his sadness was nothing compared to mine and he didn’t have a right to try to … I was really awful.”

Marabeth looked sad and horrified and she said, “How could you do that?”

When Kris didn’t say anything, she said, “That’s not like you. It’s something about Jim that always makes you do things like that.”

“Maybe it’s exactly what I said,” Kris said miserably “Maybe I really didn’t want him trying to be our brother.”

“But he is. Dad loved Jim. Dad was there after both of his parents... His mom and dad died years ago. All he has is us.”

“I know that!” Kris said, miserably. “I know that. I felt awful for saying all that.”

“You have to say you’re sorry.”

Kris shook his head.

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“You don’t understand. That’s not the relationship we have. I… I can’t say I’m sorry for saying that I said. That doesn’t cover it. And it’s really too late for me and Jim to be friends. I think I’m a very jealous, nasty person.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Jim’s life… has been shitty, and it never gets him down and he built a real life for himself and I had everything. Until now. Had a mom and a dad. And… I’ve always been jealous about keeping what I had, always thought Jim outshone me. I’m mean and I’m hateful and Jim knows that about me. I show it to him all the time. There’s no use saying sorry.”

Marabeth reached out to touch his hand, but Kris shook his head and stood up.

“I’m gonna go, Sis, See you in the morning.”