The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

Beasts

At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild…

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“This is an old, old house,” Joyce realized as they walked through the basement.

“Oh, it’s a very old house,” Peter told her. “Not just one of those vintagy things. This is the Keller House the way that where Mara and Kris live is Strauss House. This was where Aunt Natalie and my grandfather grew up, and their father grew up here too. It goes…” Peter walked from the first great room filled with boxes, to the next one, “very far back.”

Now they headed down a hallway off to the side, and there was a metal door which Peter unlocked. It was painted grey, and Joyce tried to guess at the age, surely not as old as the rest of the house. And then they went down the hall and she said, “It’s a good thing I trust you, cause this place is scary as hell.”

Peter turned back to her, smiling. “It’s a good thing you trust me because… It’s good to be trusted.”

He stood before the last door and Joyce murmured, “Now, I’m scared.”

Peter said nothing as he took out another key and twisted it into the lock of a beveled steel door.

“This is some Frankenstein shit,” Joyce decided, and Peter dragged the heavy door open and then set the latch.

“I’ve got my phone,” Peter clapped his thigh, “and Steiger, Jim’s granddad, has extra keys.”

“For?’

“In case the door slides shut,” Peter said. “It doesn’t open from the inside.”

“And that’s your inducement for me to go in?”

“You’re right,” Peter said. “How about, I’ll just show you and you stand at the opening of the door?”

Peter flipped on a light switch, and the room was plain and white. There was a high shelf to the right of the door, but the room was empty save for a metal dish in the middle of the floor and a darkened rubber mat beside.

Bloodstained, Joyce noted, and moved into the room despite what Peter had said.

But the most terror inducing part of the room was directly across from her. Hanging from the wall was a harness.

“What is that?”

“It’s what it looks like,” Peter, in his jeans and sweatshirt, said. The tall man bent down and he picked up the harness and strapped himself into it. There was a metal chain connected to it, rattling across the ground as he moved forward, and Joyce thought, I’m going to sound like an idiot if I try to be clever.

“What is it? I mean, I know I just asked you that, but…”

“You know what it is,” Peter said, setting the clasps home. “It is the harness for when I go through the Change. There,” he pointed to the dish, “is water. And there,” he pointed to the mat, “is where there is meat.”

He added, “There have been times when I was able to have a living animal in here with me. So that I could make the kill. I don’t remember what it was like, but I have seen the evidence.”

“But… There’s a way to stop it.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “The pills. They’re all on the pills. So am I, by the way. But sometimes I don’t want to be on the pills. That’s what this room is for.”

“You like becoming a wolf.”

“The Wolf,” Peter pronounced.

“I wish I could do it better, be relatively sane, control it. Do it whenever. I know the others are afraid of it. But in this house there have been precautions for it. Do you know Nate transformed? Mara and Kris’s dad. And so did mine. And… there is nothing like it.”

“I want to see it.”

“No,” Peter almost snapped.

Joyce blinked at him.

“It’s dangerous. You see those two metal doors. It’s dangerous. I only do it during the months when I don’t have the boys, and still I’m scared, but… I have to do it. The first time someone told me I could withstand the Change… I wanted to. And… when I can do it, I do it.”

“Even if it means being chained up here?”

“Yes.”

Peter jangled the harness. He began to unlock it, and he let the heavy harness fall to the ground.

“I suppose that would work if you where a wolf or a man,” Joyce discovered. “Handcuffs.. manacles…”

“Would be useless to a wolf. Would be painful. Dogs are not built like people. A pinioned dog would be tortured. And the manacles would not be enough for paws and animal ankles.”

I can’t believe we’re calmly discussing this.

“But even before the Wolf freed himself, he might hurt himself.”

Joyce said, “But… the Wolf is you.”

“Now,” Peter said. “But it could be Jim or Kris. It was my dad.”

Joyce nodded.

“If it’s all the same to you,” she said, at last, “I would love to go upstairs.”

“Yes,” Peter said. As they moved to the door he reached up and pulled down his keys and his phone.

“You must think I’m beyond strange.”

“I think you’re a werewolf,” Joyce said. “And I think you didn’t have to tell me.”

Peter cocked his head.

“I kind of did. Your best friend is my cousin, and she already knows. You are part of us, and I’m sorry for that.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“No. I’m sorry for you, glad for me. Because I like you being a part of us. And you’re the first woman in my life who ever knew this.”

“Your ex wife?”

“I never got around to telling her.”

“But your sons…”

“I know,” Peter said.

“I keep on imagining this scene where you tell me that if I tell anyone you’ll kill me.”

Peter shrugged and said, “You can tell anyone you want. You won’t do that cause that’s not you, and also no one would really believe it. People are… thick. If I turned into a wolf in plain sight they would deny it because people don’t like their world to be too huge.”

“I get it,” Joyce said as they came out of the hallway into the first of the large basement rooms. “Why you like the Change.”

“I am so… calm all the time. I have to be so buttoned down. I handle all the legal business for this family,” Peter said. “I’m always… on. And when the Change comes that all slips away and I’m free. And it’s who I am, you know. It’s my inheritance. It’s a strange inheritance. But I am the Wolf. I wasn’t born a lawyer, or even the single father of three kids. But the Wolf… even though I can’t totally remember it when it’s over, when it’s happening, and when I’m coming out of it, I feel more myself than most of the time when I’m just putting on suits. Pretending.”

Her phone rang, and she looked at the number.She didn’t know it, and usually that meant she didn’t answer, but today Marabeth Strauss did.

“Hello?”

“Marabeth?’

“Yes.”

But before he spoke again, she knew his voice.

“This is Jason.”

Shit.

She had planned to be the bigger woman. She had planned to be the person who called him, who got his number and behaved like an adult.

“Hello,” she forced not brightness, but lack of embarrassment, into her voice. “How are you?’

“I’m good. I’m real good. I was thinking about you. How’ve you been?”

“I’ve just been reading the journal and everything. And we’re waiting to hear back from the funeral home. About Dad’s funeral.”

“Right. Right.”

“As soon as it happens we’re going to go travel and learn some more. About Dad, I guess.”

“Yes. Right.”

And then Marabeth thought, well, here is the chance to behave like a grown up..

“Would you like to go out for coffee?”

“I don’t really like coffee,” Jason said.

“Oh.”

“I like dinner though.”

“I need to get out of this house.”

“How about I come by at… Well, what time is good for you?”

“How about,” Marabeth said, “I go back to my own place, and you can pick me up there. I’m not lying. I really do have my own place.”

“See, I just thought you were like a Bronte sister, and you’d never married so you stayed in that room upstairs.”

“I’ll have you know, one, that Charlotte Bronte was married, and two, so was I.”

“Were you?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Clearly nothing.”

Jason laughed.

“You’re a funny woman, Marabeth. You’ll send me directions?”

“I’ll send them now. 1916 Birmingham.”

“Downtown. Alright then. What time?”

“Six seems too early. Eight seems too late.”

“That does leave seven.”

“Yeah, I think seven with a touch of the fashionably late.”

“See you then.”

Her mind retreated from what had gone on between them the night before. Apparently his did too. They were speaking so socially, in a joking manner like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant out of a nineteen thirties movie. But there had been sex back then too. It simply wasn’t talked about. That was what subtext was for.

An hour ago she’d heard Kristian come up the front stairs. He knew when people would be up and where, and always came up the stairway furthest from where anyone was. He wasn’t hiding that he’d been out all night; he had simply not wanted to publicize it, and the family respected him.

He’ll take me home. I need him to. Joyce is busy humping my cousin, I guess.

But for now the book.

Now, as she read it, she read with longing, and rather than reading the story of a long dead ancestor she had hardly known, who had declared Marabeth her heir, the journal became the story of a woman who, in some ways, was herself.

“I wanted to tell you myself,” Peter said, rumpled and unshaved in old jeans and a hoodie. He was sitting across from his aunt at a table in the little solarium of her convent.

Sister Marianne Keller nodded grimly, the heavy stones of her rosary twisting through her long fingers.

“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. She took another breath.

“Where should we go to lunch, Pete?”

Peter’s eyes bulged as he looked at the not exactly old woman with her whitish blond hair.

“Are you serious?”

“You didn’t come here for us not to go to lunch?”

“But, Nate—”

“But sweetie,” the nun, touched her nephew’s cheek. “Surely you didn’t think he would still be alive. It’s sad. I loved Nathan I hoped. I prayed for a long time, then one night I let it go, and I thank God that Natalie and Becca and Marabeth have some peace, but…. Surely you knew.”

Peter blew out his cheeks and shifted in his seat, looking like a teenager to his aunt.

“I didn’t want to know. I wanted to hope.”

“I know,” Marianne nodded.

She was wearing a cardigan, and the only sign she was a nun, aside from perhaps the rosary, was the geometric, modern little Cross of her order that she wore on a thin chain about her neck.

“Poor Kristian,” Marianne said, “He was so somber already. You know they named him after Kristin, Nate’s sister, and she was mad as a hatter. Nathan was the stablest thing Jimmy and Natalie had. Oh, and Jim must be…. Nate was a dad.”

“Especially after Delia died.”

Marianne frowned at her nephew.

“Now, I was in Costa Rica on a mission at the time,” Marianne said, “and even I know Delia didn’t die. She killed herself.”

Peter looked like he’d never heard this before, but she knew he had.

“Not just killed herself, jumped straight ouf ot a goddamned window. All Lassador knew. She was a nutty bitch, that one.”

“Dad said something to the effect.”

“Delia and your dad had an… uneasy relationship,” Marianne said. “Hell, we all had an uneasy relationship with Delia Frey.”

“We shouldn’t be…” Peter started, trying to stop himself from laughing. “You shouldn’t be gossiping. It’s… It’s not Christian.”

“It’s one of the few pleasures left to me,” Marianne said, “and if you can’t talk about your dingbat family, who the hell can you talk about?”

“Dingbat—”

“Dingbats,” Marianne pronounced. “All of them.”

And Peter understood that Marianne, who had always found a great deal of pleasure in being a nun, was doing the most Christian thing she could, which was making him feel better and pushing away whatever pain he knew she had for a cousin she’d always been close with.

Marianne sighed and stood up readjusting her purse on her shoulder.

“Time for a good lunch,” she declared. “Because you’ll be paying with that Strauss money I renounced.

“You meet anyone new?”

“Uh,” Peter pushed his chair in and zipped up his hoodie.

“Yes, actually. And you’re not going to believe who?”

“Uh?” the older woman raised an eyebrow and waited.

“She’s Marabeth’s best friend.”

Marianne cackled and said, “Good, maybe the two of you can finally get on. She’s the most sensible member of this family. There’s something of the nun about her.”

“How you figure?” Peter frowned.

“Better to say,” Marianne said, “there is something…. Of the spiritual world about her. The women of our family are… or used to be…. Different. She had it. She reminds me of my Great-Grandmother Ada and her mother, from what I’ve been told.”

Peter blinked at the nun, wondering how much she knew and how much she kept to herself.

“This girl? Does she have a name?”

“Joy.”

“You need some joy in your life.”

Peter smirked.

“It isn’t… serious. Yet.”

“Oh, Peter,” Marianne said, “Everything you do is serious. It’s just kind of your way.”