The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

I just wanted to say thank you all who are reading and enjoying this tale. I'm glad we are together on this strange journey. How patient you all are to have come with me this way. People who travel a road together and keep traveling it, are friends. So that is what you are. Blessings!

AND NOW BACK TO THE BEASTS!

Conclusion of chapter three

Journals

Marabeth sat up, willing herself not to push the book away.

“The Man,” she murmured.

Nothing Pamela had written, not about saving her period blood even, had made Marabeth pause, but here, written down for the first time, long before she was born and certainly re written here when she was still a girl was the man who had come into her dreams two nights before, and now Marabeth wondered if the blond woman had not been Pamela herself.

I CANNOT SAY WHAT happened to me, but that night I was disturbed. I had questions, and they could not be answered, or they had not been answered. I had been content to live in the dark and now I was not. My father said, “Why are you like this, Pamela, stormy as the Witch Mountain?”

I put his dinner down, hard on the table.

“Why should I cook for you? Am I a slave?”

“I work for you,” he said. “You cook, you clean, you weave, because you are a woman.”

“I am your daughter, and I am done with all this.”

I walked away from the table, but as I did, he caught my arm. It was a hard grip, for he was a hard man, but I was not afraid of him.

“Did my mother die, or did she refuse to be your servant?”

“What are you talking about?” he growled.

“No one ever saw her. You just came back to this village with me as a baby. How do I even know you are my father?”

“You have only to look at us. I am most definitely your father. Who has been telling you these stories?”

I said nothing because I realized I might have already done damage, but my father erupted, “Frau Inga!”

Getting up from the table, without even throwing on his coat, he went out the house and I followed him into the snow. He went down the hill from our house and banged so hard on the door of Frau Inga’s house I thought he would bash it in.

She answered it calmly, and even though she was small, when she drew herself up and wrapped her cloak about her, she seemed frosty and regal.

“You old bitch! What are you telling my daughter? I’ll kill you.”

“By silent,” Frau Inga interrupted him. “You’ve already enough blood on your hands, Friederich Strauss. Put your hand down,” she commanded,

Fierce as my father was, his hand went down and she continued, “I bind you. I bind you by the signs on this door,”

She had always had elaborate signs on her door, but she was not the only one in that village. Half superstition and half tradition I had regarded them, but even now, she traced them in the air before her with her fingers, elaborate drawings of nothing on nothing.

“Have mercy,” Friederich said.

“Mind yourself,” Frau Inga returned. “Do I have your word that you will not harm your daughter?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Then go,” her voice was imperious, but when she looked at me, panting in my hurry to follow father, she said more gently, “both of you. There is much more to discuss in the morning.”
As we returned up the hill, and going up hill was far harder than going down the hill, my feet slid in the heavy snow, I began to understand what Frau Inga had meant by people like her, people like the aunt I had never known. They were hexen, witches, and maybe Friederich, in his great strength, was some manner of warlock. I did not know about that, but I knew there was something in me, and as we returned to the house, saying nothing of the violence that had just been prevented, I remembered that Frau Inga had said there was much to be discussed tomorrow.

In the morning, Frau Inga was painting a flower in a circle, and I had seen this before. I had seen much of her art, most of it in circles. But today she sat me down, and she explained, “The green is for fertility and strength, and also for youth, for those who are young. Green is the life force. Yellow is too. But it can also be sickness. Here the red, and the green in the flower is life. And the red circle is life as well, fiery life.”

And she taught me. “There are not only shapes, but forms, the form of the horse, the two rampant horses greeting each other. And there is the bear and the wolf, all of these mean many things, and you can place your force in them. For all of these things, when it is said and done mean whatever they mean to you.”

She took me through the woods and even in winter she showed me the herbs that grew out of the snow, what they meant, what they could do.

“This is a quick poison when boiled in full, and when diluted and strained it helps women who have found themselves in trouble. The priests frown upon it, but the priests are men. They know nothing of what it means to be a ruined woman.”

And she would say, “This mushroom will kill. It is different from the kind that goes in food, and this one will kill as well, but when dried and then diluted in water, it causes visions and opens the mind to the meaning of dreams.”

One day I asked her, “Frau Inga, are you an hexe?”

She looked at me sharply.

“Child, you know I cannot abide foolish questions, and a foolish question is one to which you already know the answer.”

“Then is it what I am too?”

She looked at me closely, not the way people do when they are about to lie, but the way one does when they are searching out the truth.

“Your great aunt was. Many of the women of your family have been. But their craft was still of a different order from mine, But you seem to be of a different matter even than they. And I believe your gods and your spirits will come to you soon enough.”

I was not Christian enough to be troubled by what she said. Our world was full of gods and spirits. Ours was the ancient world, and whatever Catholics had originally thought of it, the power of the Church was in recognizing that. All about and outside the churches swirled the world of the ancient gods, and there were many of them. In the old myths, there were nine worlds about the World Tree. The apparent world of men was simply one of them. But what we knew was more than nine there were nine times nine, and still nine times those.

That was why, when on the night the moon was high and full, and Father said he would go out, and I must not wait up for him, I did not obey him. Before Frau Inga I had paid no attention to his comings and goings but now, trained in witchly arts, if not a witch, I understood he left on the full moons. And did he go to worship his gods? For Friederich had said he was a heathen.

That night I stayed with Frau Inga until after midnight. She did not tell me to be careful, but simply pronounced a charm on me and sent me up the hill back home. It was slippery, for the snow was melting and it was approaching my birthday. The sky was full of the moon and bright with stars in a darkness that, past the time of electricity, it is impossible to comprehend. My heart danced with fear because I thought tonight I would learn what I was.

I entered the house. The door was never locked, and crossed the front room. Beside the kitchen there was a small room where the housekeeper slept, for since I had stopped cooking, Father had hired one. I did not go upstairs to my room, but went into his. He was gone, of course, and the window was open and moonlight shone in, and I thought of closing the window, but also thought I’d better not. I simply sat on the bed and waited.

That whole time I did not tire. There was not a part of me that wished to go to sleep. Perhaps it was because I had slept some at Frau Inga’s or perhaps it was because I knew I had to wait for Father, wait for what was going to happen. Still, as the night progressed and the air changed indicating that morning was almost here, I did fall into a dreamlike state. I was not as awake as I might have been, and this was why, perhaps, I was not shocked or afraid when it happened. Or maybe there were other forces at work in this.

By now the moon’s arc had passed from the sky, and I sat in darkness. In the darkness I suddenly saw a form, white and massive and covered in fur and not immediately did all the shapes in my mind mass themselves into the face of what through the window had come that I had never seen so close. Large and full and with terrifying force emerged a massive white wolf. Though it slay me, it was the loveliest thing I had ever seen. It did not look to me.

It had no idea that I was there, and even as I began to comprehend it, it changed before my eyes into the tall, well muscled, naked form of Friederich Strauss.

Marabeth pushed the book away from her,shook her head and looked about the room which was suddenly too dark, and too cold. She turned the book on its face and then got out of bed, feeling her muscles aching from sitting in one position, and walked across the floor, out of her room, and down the hall to Joyce’s room.

She came in without knocking.

“We need to go on a drive,” Marabeth said.

“Sure?” Joyce said, her brow furrowed.

“I need to get out of this house. I need to get away from what I’m reading.”

“You’ve been mighty silent,” Joyce said as they drove up Dorr Road, “which is, by the way, completely allowed.”

“It’s still Christmas, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Joyce said in a tone of discovery. “Yes, I guess it is. And not even that late.”

“Everything’s shut tonight.”

Joyce nodded.

“I guess it should be,” Marabeth said. “With Christmas and all.”

“We could go to Weary Wood. You know, with all the Christmas lights.”

“Yeah,” Marabeth said. “We should make that happen.”

Every year the residents of the Weary Wood subdivision would set up elaborate light displays in their yards, Santa Claus racing eight reindeer on top of a house, giant Nativity scenes, a whole Nutcracker Suite, the sides of houses turned into lit billboards flashing: JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON.

“It’s strange,” Marabeth said as they passed a long house with a display of trotting reindeer, “this year all of these lights just seem like dull little points in the darkness. Everything was so bright today, and now everything seems so drab.”

“I can’t listen to you the way I should if I’m driving. I-Hop’s open. It’s always open.”

“Are you going to tell me what was in that journal?”

Marabeth poured the coffee for Joyce, and looked around the brightly lit restaurant. It wasn’t as warm as it should have been, but it felt better to have a little cool weather, too much light, ordinary people walking in. A homely dark haired family was entering. Across from them sat a large black family, and it seemed like the booth could not have been enough for all of them.

“It’s all about Pamela,” Marabeth said. “Well, it’s her journal. All about her life in Germany. They lived in some village near a town I don’t know because I don’t know shit about Germany and… to make a long story short, it seems like Pamela was a witch.”

Joyce, who was not nearly so welcoming of strange things as Marabeth had been frowned at her, and Marabeth said, “Well, that’s what she says. A witch, or something like a witch. And she was raised by a witch. A woman called Frau Inga.”

“Oh, com’on,” Joyce laughed.

“Look, I didn’t write it. You asked what was in the book, and I’m telling you what I’ve read so far. She was taught by a witch called Frau Inga and I stopped reading when I got to the part where… She goes to her father’s room, my great grandfather Friederich, at night. He’s not there, because he goes away a lot. But this night a wolf comes into the room, and the wolf turns into Friederich.”

“What?”

“And that’s where I stopped.”

“When this woman said that her father was a werewolf?”

“Where my Aunt Pamela said her father was a werewolf.”

Neither one of them spoke immediately, but then Joyce said, “You believe it. Don’t you?”

Marabeth frowned.

“I don’t not believe it,” Marabeth said, calmly. “My family—our family—is strange. Pamela was a strange woman, and from what I’ve heard about Friederich, he was strange too. My father killed himself for some reason. Things happened in our family for some reason. I thought that if I said it here, in an I Hop in fluorescent light, it would seem crazier, but it doesn’t seem crazy or… if it sounds crazy, it doesn’t sound untrue.”

More before the week is out. we're going to take a break to give people time to catch up and myself time to do a few essential things.