The Worm in Every Heart

After all, I, too, have been known to prey on the unwary, in my time. I, too, have followed close behind travelling families and used their love for one another to harry them to their doom. I, too, keep a cellar full of bones.

Yet I will give you this one thing for gift, mesdames et messieurs of The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise: This much, I will tell you for free. That there is more than one reason, traditionally, why a wolf who speaks—a wolf with human hands—should always be burnt rather than eaten.

You killed one of my children, and ate the other. But I do not begrudge you—since, in doing so, you have allowed yourselves to be eaten from inside-out by this same raging hunger that has always driven us, I and my kind, down all the long years before we came to this country, and after. In a way, you have become my children, my kin; Tessdaluye by nature, if not by name. And how could I harm my own kind, after all?

Well . . . easily enough, as I have explained already.

Nevertheless, I catch myself feeling generous, for now. For as a fellow hunter, I do so admire your arrangement here—this inn, sprung perpetually open like a trap disguised as providence; this fine, new trick of letting the little pigs come to be served and watching them serve themselves up, in turn. A steady stream of travellers lodging once, then moving on, and never being seen again: Only tracks in the snow, covered over before the moon next rises, and (here and there, in the underbrush) the rustle of soft paws following. With nothing left behind but the hard, dark scat of some unseen thing, so concentrated it must surely eat nothing but meat.

Oh yes indeed, ca marche, absolutement. Ca ira.

But never forget whose sufferance you live by from this moment on, curs. As last of my line, I am first in the blood here—alpha and omega, the aleph and the zed. And so you will come to my call, heel at my command, because I am—

—ah, ca phrase?

“Top dog.”

You may even call me grandmother, if you wish.

A Single Shadow Make

They dance together then ‘til dawn

/> And a single shadow make.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

1.

The first thing I saw was your face. I recall it now, as I always will.

* * *

“Tu es tres beau, comme un ange d’argent,” my cousin—Count Ivan—murmured to me, in his execrable Russian aristocrat’s French, and his choice of form alone told me what would follow. But it was 1818, I was twenty-five already, and sorely needed money if I was ever to reach my stated goal—the re-Creation of new life from death.

And: “Ah, mon ange blanc, mon ange tombe,” Ivan moaned, much later that same night. And at last, altering my Irish mother’s suitably Heavenly—yet a touch too . . . plebeian—choice of name (Michael) for something more to his own taste, as he finally reached his climax: “Oh, Mikela, Mikela.”

All of which I took with a not inconsiderable grain of salt, bemused to find myself the object of such passion—having always personally judged my attributes more freakish than anything else, seeing the “moon-bleached” hair Ivan extolled more as bordering on albino, the “silver” eyes mere light grey, and as defiantly crossed as any Siamese’s. Quite unworthy of Ivan’s intent, melancholy lust, all told.

But as I’ve said, he was rich, and I not. So, to bed—and after, to the bank.

* * *

A blank slate, empty of all but the most brute sensation, I lay there unprotesting on the slab in my first dazed shock of life. Then came feeling—your hands running up and down my limbs, checking reflexes, testing for damage. A tickle at my brow as your scalpel’s blade traced my face’s outline through the gauze. And when the veil was drawn away I blinked, eyes watering, as the light flooded in. I looked up—

—into your face.

You bent over me, tensed for certain failure. I gaped. And triumph leapt in your slant, rain-filled eyes, so vivid under those pale brows—in that pale, pale face. Ivory hair fell about you, released from its loosened bow. I saw you clearly.

You were the first thing I had ever seen, and the only thing I have ever seen since.

* * *

From earliest days on, my greatest fear has been that of death.

I was born and raised in Ireland, son of a Russian trader lost at sea and the frail, white-gilt Catholic woman whom I came to worship. One day, when I was perhaps ten, we went out riding past an ancient, beehive-shaped structure of crumbling grey stone and mortar—the proper term for which, she told me, was “a tomb.”

“Where we go when we are dead?” I asked.