WOLFWEIR Read online

  Vesuvio stood there in the sharp sunlight, leering sadistically, holding an iron key with a red ribbon attached.

  The gypsy slipped the key back into his vest fob-pocket and snatched a gleaming-bladed hatchet from a nearby stump. This weapon he brandished aloft, sneering, and roared a command: PUPPETS! FOLLOW!

  Alphonse heard the scrape of wooden limbs, and puppets began dropping around him from the shelves. Scrambling and twitching, they obeyed the frenzied old rogue. They poured clattering out of the wagon. They followed Vesuvio as he lurched double-time through the damp, grassy clearing, kicking aside the crickets that were too slow to leap away from his steps.

  Alphonse took up the rear. They were all moving fast, almost running. He had to hop every few steps just to keep the feverish pace. This fat gypsy moved like a hurricane.

  There were three wagons parked in the forest clearing. Two big cages were set on the grass. In one sat a melancholy looking bear with his paws clasped. In the other --

  With a shock, Alphonse's puppet-eyes met the searching blue gaze of Lucia di Fermonti, wrapped in a wolfskin, looking thin and pale and utterly forlorn.

  She smiled sadly at Alphonse, as he made a rakish salute, completing it with a bow and a skillfully doffed cap.

  She had clearly been weeping. She wiped tears from her cheeks, pointed to one of the circus wagons -- it was painted with a large mural of the grinning Vesuvio -- and mouthed:

  (Your sword. In THERE. )

  Alphonse's eyes widened. He nodded, the chin clicking on his chest.

  Of course. His rapier.

  Alphonse was no longer a real boy, but still had hands. Armed with a blade he could teach the brutal gypsy a trick or two.

  Vesuvio was suddenly roaring: LISTEN GOOD, PUPPETS!

  Alphonse gave Lucia one last sharp glance, then scrambled and bounced on his rickety legs through the grass, catching with the motley crowd of wooden boys as Vesuvio whirled on them, raising the hatchet high overhead. Bellowing: GATHER FIREWOOD. STACK OVER THERE, FOR BIG BONFIRE. DOUBLE TIME. NOW CHOP CHOP OR I GONNA CHOP YOU.

  **

  Alphonse follows the other clattering puppets.

  Into deep still woods.

  He knows that if his wooden nostrils could smell it would smell rich and clean in this vast primaeval forest.

  The treetrunks are as big as iron-hooped barrels. Branches woosh and swish faintly high up.

  The sun is dying. Its last slanting rays hit the pine needled ground like fire-reflections.

  He begins picking up dead littered wood from the earth.

  He hobbles around, his arms stacked with pine branches, until he can barely stand under the weight, then he struts toward the clearing. Blind to where his sabot-clad wooden feet are stepping, he raises his knees high to avoid stumbling on humped and twisted tree roots.

  Vesuvio is standing by the enormous stick-pile, hands on his fat hips. Glaring.

  Alphonse dumps the wood out of his sticklike arms. It slides and clatters. He hastens to stack it up neatly with the rest.

  More puppets arrive every few seconds, tossing their fuel into the pile then jolting and jittering away like sun-warmed crickets.

  The pile is growing -- to the sky.

  After a half dozen trips into the forest and back, Alphonse can barely see the ground to locate firewood.

  The sun is gone. It's night.

  His puppet body can't feel the cold, but he still shivers.

  Yes. he's completely terrified. Scared out of his bark. Why not? Wouldn't you be?

  **

  Then he sees it -- the Blue Orb.

  Vesuvio is holding it cupped in his fat hands. He's finally put down that cruel-looking hatchet.

  The fat gypsy gazes lovingly into the star-fiery depths of the Blue Orb.

  Who knows what he's imagining? Maybe he sees some fair damsel there -- some laughing black haired dimpled peasant girl from beautiful Moorish city of Palermo.

  Alphonse sees by the Blue Orb's illumination the gypsy's crude smile -- it's more of lurid grin, like a gashed pumpkin.

  The gold capped teeth glittering. Then:

  THAT'S A ENOUGH, PUPPETS! Vesuvio shouts.

  The puppets stop their feverish work. The stringless wooden boys in the woods dump what's left in their arms and troop back to the clearing, obedient slaves.

  The Black Riders

  Alphonse sits down in the grass to observe. He doesn't mind that the dew-dampness spreads into his short pants -- he can't even feel it, really.

  He sees Vesuvio, still carrying the Blue Orb in one fat hand, go over to a small tin outdoor stove where a faint charcoal fire is glimmering. Vesuvio picks up a dead stick that's been wrapped in cloth and soaked with oil, and thrusts it into the fire.

  It flames up. Ghastly hell-light.

  He tosses the torch whirling at the stacked pine branches. In a few moments, part of the woodpile is smoking. Then it bursts into bright flame. Soon a veritable bonfire roars up, showering sparks.

  Lost in the shadows, Alphonse decides to use this moment to creep to Vesuvio's wagon and retrieve his father's sword cane.

  But, as he makes his rickety progress around the edge of the clearing toward the parked circus wagons, he notes the sudden appearance of two riders who gallop as if "hellbent for leather" into the clearing.

  Both riders are shrouded in billowing black capes lined with red silk. Both wear antiquated-looking tricorner hats. Their horses, reined in at the edge of the glaring firelight, stamp, frothing sweat.

  He crouches in the cold grass to watch as the riders dismount.

  The fat gypsy hastens over to the pair, still holding the Blue Orb, bowing obsequiously again and again -- bowing so low he nearly scrapes the ground with his sweaty forehead.

  The short-tempered gypsy sorcerer "bowing and scraping" to these two mystery riders. Why?

  Then Alphonse sees, and his puppet teeth clatter. The two black riders are the strikingly pale and elegant Lord Edward and Lady Edward Blackgore.

  (YOU'RE NEXT)

  Under those black capes they're both dressed to the nines in what appear to be matched evening-out clothes, opera tuxedos even.

  White bow-ties -- the scum!

  He can't hear what they're saying, but he sees Vesuvio move to kiss Lady Edwarda's hand. She waves him off, scornfully, and Vesuvio bows again.

  Lickspittle! thinks puppet Alphonse. Next the obese old fakir will be kissing their riding boots!

  But no. Lord Blackgore speaks sharply to the gypsy and gestures toward the cages. Vesuvio bows and shambles off, out of the glaring firelight.

  The cages. Lucia.

  Alphonse is now thinking, in his hollow and frantic puppet head: Haste. Go steal back your sword-cane already, puppet boy.

  Alphonse makes all puppet boy haste, his gangly limbs rattling (cheap pine wood! he thinks) around the clearing edge to the circus wagon daubed with Vesuvio's sweaty, grinning mug.

  He tries the latch. Unlocked. He lifts it and enters, shutting the flimsy door.

  It's dim inside.

  There's a dangling sailor's hammock. Clothing and underwear scattered underfoot.

  Trembling, Alphonse knocks against an oil lamp, which rolls but doesn't shatter. He rights it, the oil sloshing.

  He finds a box of matches on the same grimy table. Strikes a match. It flares with a hiss. By its light Alphonse sees:

  -Boots, lined up regimental style.

  -Boot polish.

  -Rows of bottled hair-grease. Herbal extracts. Snake oil.

  -Wine bottles, mostly empty.

  -Dirty plates in a heap, crawling with roaches. (Gross.)

  **

  E voila: grandfather's Toledo sword cane, stuck in a barrel with some Gypsy junk and a French horn.

  Alphonse grabs it. As he turns to go, his match blinks out.

  He drops it, fumbles in the box, lights another. Striking it with a rasp on his own forehead.

  By this weak light, he glimpses a pair of silver-inla
id dueling pistols hung high up on nails.

  Holy Marionettes! Alphonse thinks.

  Alphonse leans his sword cane on the wall and clambers cricket-quick onto a grappa cask. He snatches the pistols and shoves them into his Basque-style red sash.

  Next, scrabbling in the drawer of a cheap armoire, he finds a bag of powder and shot. This also he stuffs into the sash. He sticks the sword cane there, too.

  **

  He rolls the grappa cask to the door, pushes it wide. Then he bumps it down the three wooden steps. If we weren't made of wood, our Alphonse would now be sweating like a stevedore.

  He rolls the sloshing cask across the wet grass, toward the lurid firelight.

  Lucia, he beholds at a glance, is gone from her cage. The bear, gazing straight at Alphonse, lets out a small, sad woof.

  Alphonse picks up speed, the cask bouncing as it rolls.

  As he approaches the center of the clearing, he sees with pine-sap weeping puppet eyes: LUCIA.

  But she isn't a little blonde girl now. She's a bristling-furred, fang-gnashing, foaming at the snout, blazing eyed White Wolf.

  Chained to stakes driven into the grassy earth, she's whirling and snapping at the puppet boys stabbing at her with forked sticks.

  Nearby stands Vesuvio, his greasy lips pursed in a smile, holding aloft the Blue Orb. No doubt it will play a role in whatever black magical ceremony the Gypsy has planned for Lucia.

  He doesn't see Lord and Lady Blackgore anyplace. Maybe the Vampyres have stepped out to get into character, or to change into something more terrifying.

  **

  But he, Alphonse, has no time for heart stopping terror, nor for so much as a frisson of doubt.

  He rolls the grappa barrel, bouncing and jolting, straight at the bonfire.

  Dashing aside the clueless puppet boys like ten-pins.

  Into the searing heat and light.

  BOOM!!!

  **

  The explosion blasts Vesuvio to his knees. It's raining grappa-laced flames. Puppet boys, transformed into living torches, dash wildly in all directions.

  Alphonse runs to the Wolf Girl, ripping his sword free. Those iron chains -- the Toledo steel cuts them like tent ropes. Snap, snap, snap.

  And Lucia, growling and bristling and wild, is free.

  **

  Whirling on Alphonse, the White Wolf bares her drooling fangs even as Vesuvio -- nimbly, for a fat man -- leaps from the shadows, swinging his hatchet like a lunatic chicken farmer.

  Alphonse, dodging, parries with his blade and with a clang the hatchet spins off into the darkness.

  He is bracing himself to run the astonished Gypsy sorcerer through the heart with his whip-thin length of steel even as Lord and Lady Blackgore float into the glare like monster bats.

  Lucia lets out an electrifying growl. Alphonse, taking this as an invitation, leaps onto the Wolf's back, and they're off like a shooting star. Running for their lives.

  The Sewers of Paris

  Alphonse does not stop to reflect that this White Wolf is four and a half times the size of the little golden-haired Lucia di Fermonti -- or that she has slavering fangs and bristling fur.

  No. He leaps onto the Wolf, seizing her scruff in both puppet fists, the rapier gripped between his dentures, and they tear off like ball- lightning, the Wolf dodging tree trunks that appear to Alphonse only as dark, whizzing blurs to either side.

  As they break into open space -- the grass whipping Alphonse's gangly wooden legs -- Alphonse sees it: the vast, silent MOONRISE.

  So that's what the silly ghouls were waiting for. Some kind of moonlit occult ceremony, thereby to transfer the Wolf's power to the Vampyres. But no time for thought.

  The Wolf is dashing through fields at breakneck speed, and Alphonse thinks with a rush of pleasure that even the Vampyre's frothing demonic black horses won't be able to keep this insane pace.

  When he glances back, he can't see the bonfire -- it's not even a spark.

  Then he glimpses, not far ahead, a moonlight shimmering curve of the Seine -- and a wooden bridge spanning the fast current.

  A decrepit road sign reads PARIS, 2 km.

  He pulls hard on the Wolf's bristling neck and points.

  The White Wolf snarls and plunges left, downhill and through a flowering cherry orchard --ah, it must smell divine -- and then they are crashing across the planks.

  But now Alphonse's pine-wood body turns to cold iron. The White Wolf lurches to a snarling stop.

  For a black shape has settled down from the sky, congealed almost, to block their escape onto the far riverbank.

  It wears a cape and a tricorner hat and its ghoulishly pale visage -- chalk green in the moonlight -- is pulled in a lopsided, toothy, vampyric leer.

  It's Lord Edward Blackgore, brandishing what can only be a naked sword.

  Alphonse glances fearfully over his shoulder just in time to see the other inky shape soaring down at them bat-like -- it's Lady Edwarda, screeching, a saber in her hand -- and without a thought or a feeling he draws the pistols from his waistband and fires one pistol, BANG, dead center at the chalk-faced harridan.

  The report is so deafening that it drowns out the White Wolf's frenzied howl. The pistol ball strikes Lady Edwarda in the ample chest, spinning her like a top -- and as the Wolf springs at Lord Blackgore, Alphonse discharges the other pistol, point blank, into his vampyric grin.

  Alphonse sees the face explode into a mess of blood and teeth and other stuff but, almost at the same instant, weirdly and magically recompose, grin intact, as the spent pistol ball drops to the planks.

  It's a sight that might have been enough to kill the little boy Alphonse with fear -- but a puppet, luckily, has no heart for fear to stop.

  Black powder smoke envelops them both as the Wolf springs OVER Lord Blackgore, Alphonse screaming with hatred and disgust and, of course, a dash of unbridled puppet terror

  **

  As the Wolf's paws touch down, ka-thump, Alphonse sees their salvation clearly in the moonlight -- a sewer pipe sticking out of the grassy bank.

  Of course. The sewers, stretching all the way to Paris. Fetid, but preferable to being sucked dry by Vampyres.

  The Wolf sees it too and leaps over the rickety railing. They splash into the suffocatingly cold Siene, Alphonse -- having stuck the twin pistols back into his sash mid jump-- clinging to the Wolf's neck, and within a few seconds they are at the pipe, and the Wolf clambers into its reeking mouth, out of the moonlight-glare.

  Then they're moving again, splashing through ripe -- lucky he can't smell it -- sewer-muck, Alphonse's harlequin cap brushing corrugated steel.

  He doesn't know how much time has passed or how many sharp left and right turns they've made in the ink-blackness -- presumably the panting Wolf can see well enough in the dark not to crash at the turns -- but in the end Alphonse breathes fresh air and glimpses light. The Wolf stops, and he lets go of her neck and slides off.

  It's another sewer opening, and peering outside the pipe-mouth Alphonse sees the lit up Ile de la Cite and moonlit coal barges moving on the smooth, heavy river current. The moon looks fabulous.

  Ah, Paris,

  Something clinks in the passage behind them. Alphonse whips the sword free from its cane, turning to meet an anticipated attack from Lord or Lady Blackgore -- yet no such attack materializes. It was probably a rat.

  He hears the surging river current, bullfrogs croaking, distant bells -- that's all.

  The White Wolf shakes herself, soaking Alphonse with cold sewer filth. She's shivering. Alphonse lays a wooden hand on her muzzle, and she licks it, warmly.

  He can still hardly believe their luck.

  Pont Neuf

  Dawn -- a sooty Paris sunrise -- finds Alphonse wide awake on a stone parapet under the dark arch of the Pont Neuf by the sluggishly moving Seine, a little girl with fiery blonde curls tucked into his wooden arms.

  They're both filthy, and must reek of Paris sewage. He's wrapped the little girl in newspap
ers and his jacket, or she'd be totally naked.

  His pine wood body can't possibly warm her flesh -- she's just clinging to him for mental comfort, the way one holds a doll. Shivering, her cheeks are almost blue.