Operation Chaos

XVII

The Earth was a dazzle of moonlight. My nose caught smells of dust, sage, cactus, kelp, and salt more remotely; my ears heard a bat’s sonar squeak, the terrified stuttering of a jackrabbit; my pelt tingled with sensations for which men have no words. I felt my human torture no longer. The lupine brain could only hold clean, murderous carnivore thoughts. It was like being reborn. I understand that some psychiatrists have gotten good results by turning their patients temporarily into animals.

Presently the old watchtower lifted its corroded outline across the moon. Every nerve abristle for attack, I entered what had been a gateway. The courtyard lay empty around me. Sand had blown in during, the centuries, weeds thrust between the flagstones, a shard of paving jutted here and there. Near the center, was a heap which had been a building. Cellars lay underneath. I’d explored them a trifle, once, not deeply enough to come on the lair of the incubus.

I bayed my challenge.

It rustled in the tower door. A white form step out. My heart made one leap, and I crouched back. I thought wildly, Could I slash his jugular on the first bite, it wouldn’t matter if I swallowed that drug-blood, he would be dead . . .

Laughter ran around me on soft little feet. She made another stride outward, so that she could stand under a cataract of moonlight, impossibly white against the black moldering walls. “Good even, fair youth,” she said. “I had not hoped for this fortune.”

Her scent entered my lungs and my veins. I growled, and it turned into a whine. I wagged the stump of my tail. She came to me and scratched me behind the ears. I licked her arm; the taste was dizzying. Somewhere in a thunderful wilderness, I thought it was no use remaining lupine. The currents of change ran through me. I stood up a man.

She was as tall and ripplesome as Amaris, and she had the same strange pointed face and eyes that fluoresced under the moon. But the pale hair fell past her waist in a cloud, and she wore a gown obviously woven by stingy spiders, on a figure that- Oh, well, I won’t try to describe it. I suppose half the fun was simply in the way it moved.

“Cybelita . . . I presume?” I managed to husk.

“And thou art Steven.” A slender hand fell upon mine and lingered. “Ah, welcome!”

I wet my lips. “Er . . . is your brother at home?”

She swayed closer. “What matters that?”

“I . . . uh . . .” I thought crazily that one can’t politely explain one’s business with a lady’s brother as being to kill him. And after all, well, anyhow- “Look here,” I blurted. “You, he, you’ve got to leave us alone!”

Cybelita smiled yieldingly. “Ah, thy grief is mine, Steven. And yet, canst thou not find it in thy heart to pity us? Knowest thou what damnation in truth consists of? To be a creature in whom the elements exist unblent-Fire of lust, Air of impulse, Water of wantonness, and the dark might of Earth to be of such a nature, yet doomed to sink like a rat in these ruins, and howl to empty skies, and hunger and hunger for three hundred years! If thou wert starving, and two folk passing by spread a feast, wouldst thou not take such few crumbs as they could well are?”

I croaked something about the analogic fallacy.

“Tis not malignancy,” she pleaded. She drew close, her arms reached to my shoulders and her bosom nudged mine. “ ‘Tis need which forces us. And after all, Steven, ye mortals are not perfect either. Were ye saints with never an impure thought, no demon could venture near. We are drawn by that in ye which is akin to ourselves.”

“Uh, well, yes,” I choked. “You have two points there . . . a point, I mean. Yes.”

Cybelita laughed anew. “But la, sweet youth! Here I stand in moonlight, embracing the most beautiful unclothed lad in this world—”

“Oh, my God!” I remembered that my outfit was a pair of skivvies. Since she didn’t shrink away, my exclamation must not have counted as a prayer.

“—and discourse on metaphysic! Nays now thou’rt a-flush.” Cybelita pirouetted from me. I’d not have the advantage of thee. That’s not true friendship. Let us be alike in garb.” She snapped her fingers and the gown vanished. Not that it made any big difference, except morally, and by then morals seemed irrelevant.

“And now, come, come, my darling. My wolf, thou’rt my first loop-garou-had I suspected so new a wonder, no time would have been wasted on the woman. Come!” She threw herself against me. I don’t know exactly what made me respond to her kiss. It was like being caught in a rose-colored cyclone.

Somehow I found a last resting place in the fragments of my willpower. “No! I have a wife!”

Cybelita laughed less pleasantly. “Ha! Where thinkest thou Amaris has been since the moment thou left the wench alone?”

I made one garroted sound.

“Tis happened now,” she purred. “What’s done can ne’er be undone. Blame not thy wife. She is but mortal. Shouldst thou be more?”

I previewed Purgatory for about a minute. Then, hardly aware what was happening, I snatched Cybelita to me. My kisses broke her lips a little and I tasted the demon blood. “Come,” she crooned, “my lover, my lover, bear me to the tower . . .”

I picked her up and started across the courtyard.

“Steve!”

Ginny’s scream was a knife driven through me.

I dropped my burden. Cybelita landed on her lovely tokus and said a most unlovely word. I gaped at Ginny. She crouched on our Persian carpet, it hovered over the broken gateway, her red hair tumbled past her bare shoulders and I knew, in that moment when I had already lost her to Amaris (for it could nevermore be the same between us two), that she was all I would ever want.

Cybelita rose. She looked bleached in the moonlight. I had no further desire for her. To hell with her.

To hell itself with her.

She sneered toward Ginny, turned back and opened her arms to me. I said: “Defend yourself!” and became a wolf.

Cybelita skipped back from my lunge. I heard Ginny cry out again, as if from another existence. My whole attention was on the succubus. Cybelita’s body pulsed, grayed suddenly she was a wolf too. She grinned shamelessly at me and her femaleness hit me like a club.

I didn’t take the offer. I went for her throat. We rolled over and fought. She was tough, but hadn’t been trained in combat lycanthropy. I know the judo breaks for my animal-shape, too. I got under her jaws and clamped my teeth where I wanted them.

The demon blood was sweet and horrible to taste. But this time it couldn’t rouse my wishes. The powers in me of Love, for my wife; and Hate, for the thing I fought, were too strong. Or, if you insist on outmoded terms, my glands were supplying enough testosterone and adrenalin to swamp whatever hormone was in that ichor.

I killed her.

In the last fragmented second, I heard-not with my ears—the shriek of the foul spirit within. I felt—not with my nerves—the space-time turbulence as it struggled to change the mathematical form of its Schrodinger function—thus fleeing to the Low Continuum where it belonged and leaving me with the exchange mass. But my fangs had been too quick and savage. The body perished and the soulless demon was no more.

I lay by the wolf corpse, gasping. It writhed horribly through shapes of woman, man, horned and tailed satanoid. When its last cohesive forces were spent, it puffed away in gas.

Piece by tattered piece, my wits returned. I lay across Ginny’s dear lap. Moonlight poured cool over us, under friendly stars, down to a castle which was nothing but piled stones. Ginny laughed and wept and held me close.

I became a man again and drew her to me. “It’s okay, darling,” I breathed. “Everything’s okay. I finished her. I’ll get Amaris next.”

“What?” Her wet face lifted from my breast to my lips. “Don’t you n-n-n-know? You have!”

“Huh?”

“Yes. Some of my education c-c-came back to me . . . after you’d gone.” She drew a shaking brew “Incubi and succubi are identical. They change sex as . . . as . . . indicated.... Amaris and that hussy were the same!”

“You mean she didn’t-he didn’t you didn’t—” I let out a yell which registered on seismographs in Baja California. And yet that noise was the most fervent prayer of thanks which Our Father had ever gotten from me.

Not that I hadn’t been prepared to forgive my dearest, having had experience of the demon’s power. But learning that there wasn’t anything which needed to be forgiven was like a mountain off my back.

“Steve!” cried Ginny. “I love you too, but my ribs aren’t made of iron!”

I climbed to my feet. “It’s done with,” I whispered, incredulous. In a moment: “More than done with. We actually came out ahead of the game.”

“How’s that?” she asked, still timid but with a sunrise in her eyes.

“Well,” I said, “I guess we’ve had a useful lesson in humility. Neither of us turns out to own a more decorous subconscious mind than the average person.”

An instant’s chill possessed me. I thought: No average persons would have come as near falling as we did ... on the second night after their wedding! Nor would we ourselves. More than the resources of a petty demon was marshaled against us. More than chance brought us to its haunts. Something else wanted us destroyed.

I believe, now, that that Force was still at hand, watching. It could not strike at us directly. No new agents of temptation were near, and we were fire-tempered against them anyway. It could not again use our latent suspicions and jealousies to turn us on each other; we were as purged of those as common mortals can be.

But did it, in its time-abiding craftiness, withdraw the last evil influences from around and within us—did it free us of aches and weariness—and itself depart?

I don’t know. I do know that suddenly the night was splendor, and my love for Ginny rose in a wave that left no room in me for anything else, and when many days later I remembered that encounter on the sea cliff, it was as vague to me as the former ones and I dismissed it with the same casual half-joke: “Funny how a honk on the conk always gives me that particular hallucination.”

There in the courtyard, I looked upon her, drew her to me, and said-my throat so full of unshed tears that the words came hoarse- “In what counts, darling, I learned how you do care for me. You followed me here, not knowing what might be waiting, when I’d told you to run for safety . . .

Her tousled head rubbed my shoulder. “I, learned likewise about you, Steve. It’s a good feeling.”

We walked onto the carpet. “Home, James,” I said. After a pause, when James was airborne: “Uh, I suppose you’re dead tired.”

“Well, actually not. I’m too keyed up yet . . . no, by gosh, I’m too happy.” She squeezed my hand. “But you, poor dear—”

“I feel fine,” I grinned. “We can sleep late tomorrow. ”

“Mister Matuchek! What are you thinking?”

“The same as you, Mrs. Matuchek.”

I imagine she blushed in the moonlight. “So I see. Very good, sir.”

Which turned out to be a prophecy.