The Ultimate Werewolf Read online

  Harlan Ellison

  INTRODUCTION: "Crying Wolf"

  Harlan Ellison

  Adrift Just Off the Islets

  Philip Jose Farmer

  Wolf, Iron, Moth

  Kathe Koja

  Angels' Moon

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Unleashed

  KIm Antieau

  The Mark of the Beast

  Jerome Charyn

  At War With the Wolf Man

  Craig Shaw Gardner

  Day of the Wolf

  Mel Gilden

  Moonlight on the Gazebo

  Nancy A. Collins

  Raymond

  Larry Niven

  There's a Wolf in My Time Machine

  Pat Murphy

  South of Oregon City

  Kevin J. Anderson

  Special Makeup

  A.C. Crispin and Kathleen O'Malley

  Pure Silver

  Brad Linaweaver

  Close Shave

  Robert J. Randisi

  Partners

  Bill Pronzini

  Ancient Evil

  Brad Strickland

  And the Moon Shines Full and Bright

  Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Full Moon Over Moscow

  Robert E. Weinberg

  Wolf Watch

  Robert Silverberg

  The Werewolf Gambit

  Leonard Wolf

  Selected Filmography

  INTRODUCTION

  CRYING "WOLF!"

  ▼▼▼

  Harlan Ellison

  That was one helluva year, 1941. Life on this planet was savagely altered for all time, for every human being, in ways too obscure and too terrible to predict. We began to metamorphose—to change shape and purpose—to become beasts of a different kind than had ever roamed the Earth before.

  Looking in the mirror will not reveal the face of the creature. We look about the same. But that's only because the full moon isn't shining. Try the mirrors of television, advertising, newspaper reports, crime statistics; or look out your window at the color of the sky, the litter in the street, the graffiti on the wall. It started in earnest in 1941.

  In that year, powerful influences were hardwired into our society. We went to war in the most massive assemblage of force and brutality since 1237 and the beginning of the Mongol conquest of most of the civilized world. 1941 was the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the full-bore entry of America into World War II, the proclamation on my eighth birthday— May 27th—by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of a state of national emergency; it was the year the human race poured fuel-oil on the conflagration and four years later added to the flames with the power of the split atom.

  And the world of fantasy literature was changed forever in that year. But no one seemed to notice.

  In 1941 movies were at the height of their mesmeric power over the American public. We were coming out of the Depression, millions were still on the road, selling pencils, working for what they called "coolie wages"—and radio, pulp magazines, and movies were the only inexpensive diversions. Despite the false courage embodied in Shirley Temple songs and Busby Berkeley kick-turn-kick-turn assurances that We're in the Money, scrounging up a dime for a Saturday matinee double-bill was no less than hardscrabble for most Americans.

  But, oh, what a pull on every one of us; to be drawn into those gorgeous palaces of dreams. 1941 was arguably the best year for cinema before and since. In that twelvemonth before the world pitched headlong into darkness, here is a partial list of the more than four hundred motion pictures produced by Hollywood:

  The Maltese Falcon

  Citizen Kane

  Dumbo

  Sergeant York

  Major Barbara

  How Green Was My Valley

  The Lady Eve

  Here Comes Mr. Jordan

  The Stars Look Down

  Suspicion

  The Little Foxes

  Meet John Doe

  Ball of Fire

  Leonard Maltin gives four stars to seven of those, and three and a half to the remaining six. What a lineup! Films so influential that even today, when critics are polled, at least three off that list perennially find placement among the top ten of all time. But there was one more, that went unnoticed, that altered the world of fantastic literature as surely and positively as Hitler altered the world at large sorely and negatively. Was it the John Lee Mahin-scripted, Victor Fleming-directed version of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, and Sir C. Aubrey Smith ... a film on which hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent for a lavish production by MGM, the most prestigious studio of its day? In fact, no.

  It was a minor, only-passingly-noted, "B" (for bottom) second feature on a double-bill. It was from a studio hardly known as the House of Influential Cinema. It was made on a parsimonious budget; and though it boasted such outstanding thespic talents as Claude Rains, Ralph Bellamy, Warren William, and Bela Lugosi (in a cameo role), it was by no means a big film, or even a film that Universal pushed very hard. It was intended to come, and to go; to make a few bucks, and to fill the hole in a Saturday matinee that came immediately after a Charles Starrett "Durango Kid" western.

  It has been fifty years since that intentionally disposable chunk of celluloid trash was tossed out onto the movie screens of America, like an unwanted infant wrapped in newspaper and flung into a dumpster. And if you check any exhaustive reference on the Oscars (such as ACADEMY AWARDS: The Ungar Reference Index) you will discover that in no category did that film get a nomination.

  Yet fifty years later, even with the plethora of period films committed to videocassette, aired late night on local channels, run and rerun on cable—even specialty channels such as American Film Classics—and screened in the dwindling number of revival theaters or in film schools or museum cinema programs, you will likely never see Dive Bomber, Aloma of the South Seas, Son of Monte Cristo, or Las Vegas Nights . . . all of which received Oscar nominations in one or another category.

  But I'll bet you an eyeball that somewhere in these here great Yew- nited States, today, tonight, tomorrow, an enraptured audience is watching Lon Chaney, Jr., as The Wolf Man. A film created as a throw- away fifty years ago, exquisitely scripted by Curt Siodmak, directed by George Waggner, moodily art directed in the horrorstory equivalent of film noir; a film that forever cast into the American idiom the timeless words of Madame Maria Ouspenskaya:

  "Even the man who is pure in heart

  "And says his prayers by night

  "May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms

  "And the moon is pure and bright."

  Before the seventy-one minutes of The Wolf Man were unleashed on generations of kids whose spines creaked and whose hair trembled as they watched tragic Lawrence Talbot metamorphose into a blood-hungry beast thing, the werewolf was barely considered fit fodder for fantasy. Yes, there had been a 1913 silent, The Werewolf two or three French films featuring lycanthropy, and the excellent Werewolf of London with Henry Hull in 1935, but that was just about the totality. The potboiler picture no one thought would last more than a couple of weeks, has not only endured, it has skewed imaginative literature in its own image for half a century. More than any previous rendition of the werewolf mythos, The Wolf Man created an entire genre.

  Purposely, I'll not rehash the litany of the werewolf theme in classical literature: Dumas-pere's the wolf leader in 1857, Captain Marryat's "The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains" in 1839, or even the first known introduction of the werewolf antetype in English fiction—the 13th century court romance by Marie de France, "Lay of the Bis- clavaret." Nor will I dwell at length on images of the werewolf in phe- nomenological anecd
ote . . . though it wouldn't hurt you to look up Freud's Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909) in which the father of modern psychoanalysis treats the case of a wealthy young Russian whose history is now commonly referred to as being that of the "Wolf Man."

  Those who want irrefutable documentation of the longevity, fecundity, and legitimacy of the werewolf motif in literature are commended to three excellent essays: "Images of the Werewolf" and "The Werewolf Theme in Weird Fiction," both by Brian J. Frost, each exhaustive and breathtakingly lucid, and both available in Frost's frequently-reprinted 1973 paperback anthology, book of the werewolf (Sphere Books Ltd.); and Bill Pronzini's 1978 essay on the form in his anthology werewolf!

  I choose to sidestep Sabine Baring-Gould and Guy Endore (who was a terrific gentleman, whom I was privileged to know) and Montague Summers, to suggest that for all its weighty and unchallengeable credentials, the man-into-wolf story never really came into its own until Lon Chaney, Jr. assayed the role of Curt Siodmak's Lawrence Talbot and . . .

  . . . talk about casting a role perfectly: do you know about the amazing thing that happened when Lon Chaney, Jr. was born?

  Creighton Tull Chaney was delivered, stillborn, on February 10th, 1906. His father grabbed him up, rushed out into the frigid Oklahoma night, broke the ice on Belle Isle Lake with a small hatchet, and plunged the baby into the freezing water, bringing him to life. Man was bom to play that part.

  And the younger Chaney was properly proud of his performance as the Wolf Man. Though he received inordinate acclaim for his roles in High Noon and The Defiant Ones, and will always be remembered as Lenny to Burgess Meredith's George in the film of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Chaney always doted on how well he'd performed as Lawrence Talbot. He always said that others had set the models for The

  Mummy. Frankenstein, Dracula . . . but he had created the image of the Wolf Man, for all time, for all those who came after him.

  And it is that 1941 film, I submit, that is the impetus for the book you now hold. No matter how many spectacular werewolf stories had been written and published before the house lights went down and the opening credits rolled for the first time (and I've always suspected that when Jack Williamson sat down to write darker than you think for Unknown in 1939, when it was published in late 1940, when it was expanded for book publication in 1948, it was the final moment of non-filmic influence in the werewolf genre), thereafter no one could go to the form free of the tormented face of Lawrence Talbot.

  It was that film, in that tortuous moment of human existence before we plunged so totally into the bestial existence whose results we see around us today, that the world of imaginative literature absorbed completely. The Wolf Man has become so thoroughly an icon, that almost no one notices (and no one has noted in print) that the only element of Accepted Werewolf Lore now endemic to every saga of lycanthropy that predates the film, is the business about the full moon.

  The pentagram, seeing it in the palm of the next victim, silver used to kill, half-man/half-beast ... it was all cobbled up by Siodmak.

  So it is appropriate that on this more-or-less 50th anniversary of the first shape-change of Lawrence Talbot into the rending, ripping, frightful creature the entire world now identifies as The Wolf Man, that this book should pay homage to a "little trash movie" that has sown its seed of entertainment with such delicious profligacy.

  For this book was born on a freezing night in 1906, on the shore of an Oklahoma lake, where the son of a great actor-to-be was immersed in the waters of posterity. Lon Chaney, Jr. changed for us in 1941; and we've been changing ever since.

  The question remains: who among us are the real beasts?

  ADRIFT JUST OFF THE ISLETS

  OF LANGERHANS:

  LATITUDE 38° 5 4' N

  LONGITUDE 77° 0 0' 13" W

  ▼▼▼

  Harlan Ellison

  WHEN Moby Dick awoke one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed of kelp into a monstrous Ahab.

  Crawling in stages from the soggy womb of sheets, he stumbled into the kitchen and ran water into the teapot. There was lye in the corner of each eye. He put his head under the spigot and let the cold water rush around his cheeks.

  Dead bottles littered the living room. One hundred and eleven empty bottles that had contained Robitussin and Romilar-CF. He padded through the debris to the front door and opened it a crack. Daylight assaulted him. "Oh, God," he murmured, and closed his eyes to pick up the folded newspaper from the stoop.

  Once more in dusk, he opened the paper. The headline read: Bolivian ambassador found murdered, and the feature story heading column one detailed the discovery of the ambassador's body, badly decomposed, in an abandoned refrigerator in an empty lot in Secaucus, New Jersey.

  The teapot whistled.

  Naked, he padded toward the kitchen: as he passed the aquarium he saw that terrible fish was still alive, and this morning whistling like a bluejay, making tiny streams of bubbles that rose to burst on the scummy surface of the water. He paused beside the tank, turned on the light and looked in through the drifting eddies of stringered algae. The fish simply would not die. It had killed off every other fish in the tank— prettier fish, friendlier fish, livelier fish, even larger and more dangerous fish—had killed them all, one by one, and eaten out the eyes. Now it swam the tank alone, ruler of its worthless domain.

  He had tried to let the fish kill itself, trying every form of neglect short of outright murder by not feeding it; but the pale, worm-pink devil even thrived in the dark and filth-laden waters.

  Now it sang like a bluejay. He hated the fish with a passion he could barely contain.

  He sprinkled flakes from a plastic container, grinding them between thumb and forefinger as experts had advised him to do it, and watched the multicolored granules of fish meal, roe, milt, brine shrimp, day-fly eggs, oatflour and egg yolk ride on the surface for a moment before the detestable fish-face came snapping to the top to suck them down. He turned away, cursing and hating the fish. It would not die. Like him, it would not die.

  In the kitchen, bent over the boiling water, he understood for the first time the true status of his situation. Though he was probably nowhere near the rotting outer edge of sanity, he could smell its foulness on the wind, coming in from the horizon; and like some wild animal rolling its eyes at the scent of carrion and the feeders thereon, he was being driven closer to lunacy every day, just from the smell.

  He carried the teapot, a cup and two tea bags to the kitchen table and sat down. Propped open in a plastic stand used for keeping cookbooks handy while mixing ingredients, the Mayan Codex translations remained unread from the evening before. He poured the water, dangled the tea bags in the cup and tried to focus his attention. The references to Itzamna, the chief divinity of the Maya pantheon, and medicine, his chief sphere of influence, blurred. Ixtab, the goddess of suicide, seemed more apropos for this morning, this deadly terrible morning. He tried reading, but the words only went in, nothing happened to them, they didn't sing. He sipped tea and found himself thinking of the chill, full circle of the Moon. He glanced over his shoulder at the kitchen clock. Seven forty-four.

  He shoved away from the table, taking the half-full cup of tea, and went into the bedroom. The impression of his body, where it had lain in tortured sleep, still dented the bed. There were clumps of blood-matted hair clinging to the manacles that he had riveted to metal plates in the headboard. He rubbed his wrists where they had been scored raw, slopping a little tea on his left forearm. He wondered if the Bolivian ambassador had been a piece of work he had tended to the month before.

  His wristwatch lay on the bureau. He checked it. Seven forty-six. Slightly less than an hour and a quarter to make the meeting with the consultation service. He went into the bathroom, reached inside the shower stall and turned the handle till a fine needle-spray of icy water smashed the tiled wall of the stall. Letting the water run, he turned to the medicine cabinet for his shampoo. Taped to the mirror w
as an Ouchless Telfa finger bandage on which two lines had been neatly typed, in capitals:

  the way you walk is thorny, my son, through no fault of your own.

  Then, opening the cabinet, removing a plastic bottle of herbal shampoo that smelled like friendly, deep forests, Lawrence Talbot resigned himself to the situation, turned and stepped into the shower, the merciless ice-laden waters of the Arctic pounding against his tortured flesh.

  ▼▼▼

  Suite 1544 of the Tishman Airport Center Building was a men's toilet. He stood against the wall opposite the door labeled men and drew the envelope from the inner breast pocket of his jacket. The paper was of good quality, the envelope crackled as he thumbed up the flap and withdrew the single-sheet letter inside. It was the correct address, the correct floor, the correct suite. Suite 1544 was a men's toilet, nonetheless. Talbot started to turn away. It was a vicious joke: he found no humor in the situation; not in his present circumstances.