Wilding Read online

  WILDING

  By Melanie Tem

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2016 / Steve Rasnic Tem

  Copy-edited by: Tony Masia

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Melanie Tem’s work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards, as well as a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She was also a published poet and an oral storyteller, and several of her plays have been produced.

  She is survived by her husband—writer, and editor Steve Rasnic Tem—and four children and six grandchildren.

  www.m-s-tem.com

  NOVELS:

  Black River

  Blood Moon

  Desmodus

  Making Love

  Prodigal

  Revenant

  Slain in the Spirit

  The Deceiver

  Wilding

  Witch-Light

  WITH STEVE RASNIC TEM

  Beautiful Stranger

  Daughters

  In Concert

  WITH JANET BERLINER

  What You Remember I Did

  COLLECTIONS:

  Daddy’s Side

  The Ice Downstream

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  Blood Moon – Narrated by Mikael Naramore

  Prodigal – Narrated by Christine Padovan

  Slain in the Spirit – Narrated by Ann Richards

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  This is for my good friend Esther

  who loves vampires, not werewolves, but who listened anyway.

  I owe you dinner.

  My thanks to

  Richard Carter, for the perfect title

  Richard Curtis, my estimable and hardy agent, and Jeanne Cavelos, editor extraordinaire

  Steve Rasnic Tem, who insists I see all the possibilities in everything

  WILDING

  Chapter 1

  The houses stirred on their century-old foundations. Once again, the moon was full.

  Before the turn of the twentieth century, before Denver was incorporated and while Colorado was still a Territory, four sisters built these four houses. Had them built, actually, since the sisters, though avid designers, were neither masons nor carpenters and since they were all already very old. The four houses of the four elderly sisters provided much work and talk in the pioneer town growing at the juncture of Cherry Creek and the Platte River at the foot of the Rockies. For a while, building the houses rivaled gold-mining and Indian-fighting and saloon-keeping and preaching and whoring as ways to make a living and keep life interesting.

  The work went on a good deal longer than the talk did, for people got bored, more things happened in town, and the eccentric old sisters became deceptively familiar long before their houses were finished. Each sister kept altering the details of her house, adding turrets and tower rooms to the basic agreed-upon design, changing and changing again the color of the wood trim, drawing out numerous versions of complicated patterns to be carved into stone walls, ordering loads of dirt hauled in to create the illusion of a hill—all to make her house better than her sisters’, more dramatic and elegant, more fitting.

  The sisters had come most recently from wooded, green, and rainy Pennsylvania. Before that they’d lived in the Everglades, on an island off the Carolina coast, on the English moors, at the northern edge of the Black Forest, high and deep in the Carpathian Mountains. They’d lived in caves dug or discovered in hills or mountainsides, dens made of branches and stones, once a village decimated by the Plague, once a gutted cathedral. Never before had they lived in a city, or in homes they’d had any hand in constructing.

  Many of their descendants—the daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of all but one, and even the youngest sister herself, escaping—would later assume the traditional ways again, would retreat to remote canyons at and above timberline on both sides of the Continental Divide among still-scouring glaciers and pine trees nearly unrecognizable as pines because they’d been transformed into hideous and wonderful shapes by the alpine winds. And the women who stayed in Denver would turn their attention to other things, so that the houses became simply places where they lived or did not live. But at the time, the construction of the four houses had been a spirited sibling contest and a joining of them together against all the world that was not family.

  Two of the sisters were dead now. Theodora and Emma were finally dead, their bones in the basements of the houses they’d built, their severed skulls at the foot of the basement steps like gargoyles granting or denying entrance. Mary and Hannah survived. Mary and Hannah, the murderers and devourers of their sisters, winnowing, focusing, consolidating the power. Each of the other, too, if she could. When the time was right.

  Hannah lived in the high country, isolated and pure. Hannah and her branch of the family lived the way the family had always lived, the way the family should live, she said: uncorrupted and away. She watched her city relatives with contempt and her own mountain branch of the family with intent care, and now and then over the years there had been skirmishes when the two clans had come together. Arguments among the younger women over ritual or life-style, over interpretation. Age-old battles between herself and her sister over age-old issues: power, direction, past and future. But, by mutual consent, the time had not yet been right for ultimate confrontation. It would come.

  Mary lived in one after another of the four houses, with her daughter Ruth, her granddaughter Lydia, and her great-granddaughter Deborah for whose initiation the clan had gathered at Mary’s house on this full-moon night of the summer equinox. Mary’s house was the darkest of the four, the one on the hill she’d made where there had been only prairie. Mary used to say, when she talked that much, that the city brought out the best in the family, made them stronger and surer, and that the mountain clan had never been tested but they would be one day, would be soon. She could wait.

  Three stories tall and with basements and attics, the houses were brick, like so many in this nearly treeless country. Not the soft brick that withi
n decades would crumble around its mortar, but the earlier, denser brick. These houses had not crumbled. Each faced one of the four streets that formed this city block, now named Harvey and Ingram Streets, 32nd and 33rd Avenues, but at the time the houses were built called Mountainview, Hillside, Riverview, and Prairie.

  The four houses took up the entire block, one on each street. Stone walls—as high as a woman’s head, higher than a wolf’s—surrounded the lots in the front and on both sides, in more recent years followed by sidewalks, so that the block was entirely enclosed.

  Not an unusual design in this part of Denver, the open area in the center of the block had been intended by early city planners as a place for horse-drawn carriages to turn around. Four alleys had been cut to crisscross it, providing eight routes for entrance and exit. But in this block all the alleys had been closed off by the stone walls, leaving no access to the central area except through the houses and their yards, and no escape either.

  So it was a courtyard now, an extension of all the houses, especially of Mary’s. Hard-packed dirt and worked soil. Rocks scattered both haphazardly and in elaborate runes. Weeds that grew all over the city out of sidewalk cracks and curbside mulch (ragweed, bindweed, hollyhock, dandelion, rabbit ears), garden plants (mostly of the nightshade family: tomatoes and bell peppers), and tended herbs (belladonna, henbane, deadly nightshade, sage).

  In the west-facing house on Ingram Street, Mary’s house, the clan had gathered tonight, and the moon was as full as it ever got. Every month some of them came together, here or in the mountains, for reasons mostly trivial, social, even though the full moon signaled their gathering. But they all converged, could all bear each other’s company, only for the least frequent and most vital ceremonies: initiation, sacrifice, birth. When together they ate heart and brain, coated themselves with unguent, and might be transformed.

  On this night of the midsummer full moon, Hannah was there, of course, grim and growling, very old and lean. The stench of the city poisoned her, she claimed. She vomited and excreted in Mary’s house and in the courtyard without any attempt at control, insisting she was sickened by the hard edges, straight lines, right angles, flat planes of the city, and by its surfaces without pores, without blood or breath. At home, in the high narrow canyons, rituals were ready to cleanse and protect everyone she was responsible for, the moment they had all safely returned.

  For all that, Hannah wouldn’t have missed this. In an odd way, she’d always been fond of Deborah. And this was family: ultimate alliance and danger more intimate, more knowing than any other.

  Hannah’s twin daughters were there, Margaret and Marguerite, and their daughters, Margaret’s four and Marguerite’s three, and their daughters (sibling groups of two or three, ten or twelve sisters), and all their daughters—some newborn or nearly so, including one gratifying set of quintuplets, all girls.

  The mountain branch of the clan had always prided itself on producing large, occasionally enormous families—multiple births and pregnancies in rapid succession, well over half of them girls. In the city branch, only a single daughter out of every generation survived. Each faction believed (Mary and Hannah ferociously, their descendants with varying degrees of fervor) that its method of propagation better served the interests of the family, proved the adaptive wisdom of its own evolutionary choices, and demonstrated its moral and metaphysical superiority over the other.

  All of them were gathered now in a huge room that extended all the way across the back of Mary’s house and opened via half a dozen doors (some made for humans, rectangular with knobs and latches; others smaller, squarer, closer to the floor, swinging in or out at the nudge of a shoulder or a head) directly onto the courtyard. The four women of the city branch of the family, four generations, had been standing for long minutes in one another’s arms, surrounded by the milling and watching others, for this was to be the initiation of the youngest of them, the coming of age, the coming out.

  Now they moved apart. Blue flames guttered and swelled on green candles set around the room in sconces created by years of wax pooling and hardening and pooling again. In the long fireplace across the inside wall, the wall opposite the doors, hot sweet ashes were just settling among strata of ashes from last month and from a hundred years ago. On each end of the big room was a single tall narrow window; their translucent shades glowed, and moonlight etched their edges like a silver claw.

  Tonight’s initiate was Deborah, who since the last full moon had marked her fifteenth birthday and conceived a child. Thin and hollow-cheeked, Deborah could encircle her own wrist with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand, could count her ribs just by looking. Sometimes she counted her ribs compulsively; sometimes she pinched and pinched again the tiny bit of flesh she could tease loose from the skeleton at her waist or the back of her arm, and then for a while she would be unable, unwilling, to think of anything but how to get rid of the fat.

  Often she refused to eat at all. Or she would gorge and purge; the cuticles of both index fingers were ragged from stomach acid that welled over them when she stuck her fingers down her throat. Or she would jog twenty, thirty, fifty times around the block, do countless jumping jacks and sit-ups, delirious by the time she finally had to stop but no thinner, surely not a pound thinner.

  Whenever Deborah looked in a mirror (sometimes she would squeeze her eyes shut tight when she passed one, and sometimes she would stare, could hardly stand to leave her reflection behind), her shape changed and she saw a loathsomely obese creature whose face and form were never quite alien enough. No matter what she did to disguise or mutilate herself (purple Mohawk, nose rings, skin peeled and flesh gouged from cheeks and chest, baby implanted), the creature in the mirror still looked just like her.

  The baby would look like her, too. Purposely, she didn’t know who the father was; she didn’t dare know. There’d been a party; everybody drunk or stoned, she deliriously stoned and hardly aware of any of it, no pain or pleasure and certainly no intimacy, nobody coming anywhere near her though she thought there’d actually been a line outside the door of the bedroom where she lay and waited and received them one at a time and sometimes in groups. She didn’t dare imagine any face but her own, the female face of the family, taking shape now in the deep den of her womb. The minuscule fetus, no bigger than the long black nail on the little finger of her left hand, was already draining nourishment from her, taking flesh and fat, thinning her from the inside.

  Mary was the eldest of these four. Deborah’s great-grandmother, Mary had lived countless years and would live countless more, might even live forever (though some of the mountain branch were openly skeptical of this). Her gray-brown skin heavily tufted with gray-brown fur, her thick black nails clicking on the dirty floor, Mary slid now out of the awkward ritual embrace and dropped to her haunches into the shadows massed on the floor. By this time in her life, she had no more need to literally gaze on the moon than to name the precise sources of her rage. She settled there, compacted herself, and fixed her narrow yellow gaze on Deborah.

  The girl’s grandmother and the ancient creature’s only surviving child was Ruth. Ruth crossed to the window on the south end of the long room, moving with both the accumulated wisdom and the accumulated stiffness of her seventy-four years. More and more often the older she got, she found herself bewildered, unsure what to do. Not now. For a long, prescribed moment she stood very still, allowing the power to gather, willing the power to transform her fully this time. Shoulder muscles lengthened and bulged. Sinews tautened in neck and hairy flank.

  Under the heirloom wolfskin girdle, which was pliant and flesh-colored from so many wearings, her own flesh quivered in anticipation and in frustration.

  The windowsill was layered with generations of dust, pocked by generations of fingerprints and paw prints. Ruth braced the heavy front half of her body and nosed aside the shade so that moonlight could fall full on her through the smeared pane. Familiar tides of anger swept through her, waxing and waning more to the
moon’s pulse than to her own.

  As she’d long been taught, Ruth pulled into consciousness one from the multitude of individual faces and voices, particular scenes, specific memories of betrayal and hurt carefully collected and arranged from her long life. She focused on it, as she’d begun learning to do when she was younger than Deborah, much younger. Her teeth bared, maybe grew a little. Her claws raked the window glass. Her ears stood up sharp and cupped, listening for Deborah. She bayed.

  The girl’s mother, Lydia, who was Ruth’s only surviving child, came—reluctantly but without hesitation—to her daughter’s side. Deborah had never seen her mother quite like this, although a lot of things about her were familiar. Certainly her demeanor was familiar; Lydia was always angry, although she denied it.

  Her body was familiar, too. Deborah remembered (tried not to remember but couldn’t help it, remembered with great embarrassment and also with fierce nostalgia and a sense of loss) having nursed at those moonlike breasts, sucking hard, punching and pinching and biting, her mother wincing and even crying sometimes but allowing her to do it, never telling her to stop or pushing her away. Never welcomed her, either; Lydia did her best to take no position on anything.

  Deborah gorged herself on her mother’s milk but was always hungry; apparently the milk had never been rich enough for her, hadn’t contained enough of the right kinds of nutrients. But she’d kept trying, had suckled till she was nearly three years old and occasionally after that; the ferocity of her unsatiated hunger had kept the milk flowing and Deborah had kept trying to be nourished by it for much longer than she should have, while Lydia had neither held her nor pushed her away, had simply lain there with her eyes closed and her breasts bared one after the other until Deborah finally gave up. Since then, all food made Deborah sick, all food disappointed her, although sometimes, to her deep shame, she still craved the feel of her mother’s nipple in her mouth, and sometimes she still foolishly imagined that there was some nourishment somewhere that would make her full.