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VII.

Like You Would Really Do It

It was November, and the sky leaden. Blowing through the air was a cold mist, not quite rain, not quite fog, a golden-grey world where all the trees stood in their Autumnal mourning cloaks – vanishing leaves.

A Gothic picture: vampyre's country, Appalachia become Transylvania – beauty, aching beauty, but a stark and terrible and savage beauty, a beauty that demanded something of its beholder.

Everywhere, the mountains – their soft, maternal shape marred with the bristling, gnarled things that grew upon them – ached, stoically, in the mist.

Halloween was over, and so there was no room for spectral spooks or hidden horrors, only the slow march into Winter that was marked, in passing memoriam, by this scene of decaying grandeur…

Andrew recognized this place – the great wooded mountain-slope behind Pappy's – but he only half-knew where he was.

There was a familiarity, but only a faint familiarity, not strong enough to know if it was a dream, but not maddeningly mimicking of other places and other times to be déjà vu.

"C'mon, Drew!" he heard Bligh shout – he looked up to see his best friend, young, beardless, all the promise of boyhood with those eternally piercing blue eyes, pacing slowly up the wooded hill before them.

Now Andrew shivered. "Why we gotta hunt the dang turkey ourselves? Can't Pappy do it?"

"Pappy wants us ta hunt jest us, Drew," Bligh called out over his shoulder. "Cuz he wants us ta learn how ta shoot. Now c'mon! We ain't gonna have Thanksgiving if'n we dun come back with a turkey!"

"Dang…" Andrew murmured, shivering again as the cold mist wafted onto the exposed flesh of his face.

Up the mountain the two boys went – Bligh, just ahead of him, with his grandfather's hunting rifle, and Andrew, clutching the rifle his father had lent him specifically for the occasion in his small gloved hands.

The quiet of the mountain-forest was only interrupted by the rustle of leaves underfoot, the gusts of silvery November wind, and the strange warble of Bligh's turkey-call. After what felt like too long a time, Andrew began to grow restless.

"We too young fer this!" He protested in between deep breaths from the steep climb. "C'mon Bligh this is dumb, ain't no reason sendin third graders out ta do this! Let's go home!"

"Hush, Drew! We gotta do what Pappy says! He said – he told me he was shootin turkey when he was younger'n us, so—"

Whatever Bligh said next, Andrew did not hear – his foot had slipped on a moist pile of leaves, and for an instant he was weightless, before landing hard on his stomach, his father's borrowed rifle still in his hands, underneath him.

He rose, slowly, gasping – the rifle breaking his fall had knocked the wind out of him, and for several seconds he gulped at the air in a vain attempt for oxygen.

He stood at last, hunched over, gun in hand, coughing and sucking in as much as his pulverized lungs could manage, before he heard Bligh's voice in shaky, hushed panic:

"Drew…Drew – look up, Drew. Drew. Look up."

Andrew searched his immediate field of vision for Bligh, who he saw coming toward him, cautiously, down the mountain, so as to not repeat Andrew's performance of slipping and falling…but there was something else in the corner of his eye.

There – was the sleek figure of a prowling mountain lion, whose gaze, annihilating, had fixed itself on Andrew.

Where had this beast come from? There hadn't been one seen in these parts in twenty, thirty years – how did it get here, how did it know where he was?

Andrew gulped hard, eyes widening in rapidly growing fear.

Nearer it drew, Bligh's hushed admonitions betraying a mounting sense of fight-or-flight terror:

"Drew – do sumthin."

The beast, as though hearing him, let out an unholy ululation – not quite a purr, not quite a growl – from its bared, threatening fangs.

As though on autopilot, Andrew knew he had only a slim chance to avoid certain death – he raised his gun, and clutched it, white-knuckled, forgetting in his drowning panic everything Pappy had taught him. He was doing it the way he had seen in the movies, the wrong way, if he actually fired it he would undoubtedly get knocked on his ass – but he was scared, too scared to be self-aware of his own mistake.

"Squeeze, dun pull – squeeze – dun – pull—" He was a mess: even like this he could murmur the mantra Pappy had taught him under his breath but not the proper technique.

He steeled his final nerve to perform the act.

The crouching mountain lion could not wait a second longer, and leapt, fangs bared, claws splayed to slice flesh into ribbons.

He had no time to pray, no time to react, just to shut his eyes tight and cower, the hunting gun thrown into the air as he threw himself to the ground, hands to his face.

He heard the monster cat's shrill, ear-shattering scream, nearer to death than he had ever been and would ever be again – and a loud, equally deafening bang.

For some seconds which passed as some eternities, he still cowered, his whole body in the grips of a tremor as though struck by lightning.

"Drew – Drew."

Andrew lifted his eyes, slowly, beyond the cover of his hands, to see Bligh, his own eyes wired and alert, down the barrel of his hunting rifle – as Bligh lowered the gun, Andrew jerked in a spasm to see not a foot away the mangled mess of what once was the head of the threatening mountain lion.

At last he realized what had happened – and he was overcome by a crashing tidal wave of the most debilitating shame he had ever felt in his life.

"Wha – ah – B-Bligh – I—"

"S'okay, Drew, see? I got em."

"B-but the – i-it – he almost—"

Bligh turned briefly to lay the hunting rifle behind him before venturing closer to his friend. "Drew – Drew, s'okay, he came outta nowhere. T'weren't yer fault, now, c'mon…"

A sob tore through Andrew, mounting guilt scalding his insides.

"He coulda killed ye, Bligh – he coulda tore y'up killed ya dead n'then – n'then what would I tell Pappy? I – I hid like a damn c-coward!"

Bligh kept trying to reason with his shaken friend:

"He wudn't be comin fer me, Drew, he—"

"He woulda been! He – cuz I c-cudn't shoot em, he'd git ya next and – Pappy'd be so ashamed of – m-me—"

"Drew – hey, don't—"

Andrew was inconsolable: "Wh-what if he – gone fer ye first? And th-then I'd – I'd c-cudn't've shot em, I'd-a lost ya—"

"But I'm right here, Drew."

"I c-cudn't – I wudn't ev-ever wanna th-think about ya – g-goin – l-leavin me, n-not after n-now, when y-ya s-saved m-me—"

He spoke no more – silenced, by the feel of Bligh's arms around him and a wet whisper in his ear, as it played out so many times over the years, over the past decade – as it would some nights when he was a teenager and first felt the bitter twinge of the nameless love that his father, years afterward, would cast him out for ever daring to feel.

"I'm gonna always be here, Drew. I'll never let ya go, okay?" He stopped, and repeated it, slower, no mistaking: "I will never let ya go…"

Bligh's voice echoed in Andrew's head, as vivid as if he was whispering it even now.

Glaring early afternoon sunlight pierced the darkness behind Andrew's eyelids, and he awoke, gasping – on top of his bed, alone.

And he had no idea why he was there.

It was the same soft place he had been before, atwixt waking and dreaming.

He remembered the fight on the beach – he could picture the inky sea, the Moon overheard, the palm trees, Bligh shouting at him.

But that was all he could remember.

For several seconds he seriously wondered if fighting with Bligh like that had caused him to do what he had promised himself, his brother – and Bligh, too, now that he thought of it – that he would never, ever do: relapse.

The true horror of Andrew's alcoholism was its innate inability to have him be able to discern reality and fantasy…sobriety and drunkenness.

All-night benders – sometimes all-day and all-night benders – would be awoken from drowning in false memories, images of things he may or may not have done. Worse than a blackout, where recollection is sucked into oblivion, these would have no difference in the true and the false, a disruption of Andrew's own psychic timeline that collapsed into the physical, leaving him a figure of human chicanery, a lie in flesh.

This – was similar. But worse.

He understood hangovers even when he suffered from them as a simple, mechanical process – the dehydration and electrolytic imbalance caused by overconsumption of ethyl alcohol…but what he felt, right then, blinking uselessly as he tried to piece this together, was definitely not a hangover.

"Fuck…" he said, wincing.

He tried to get off the bed – tried to, but instead he collapsed, a heap of rough soreness, as though he had not used his muscles in years, and he crawled across the floor, reaching to grab the doorframe, and pull himself up.

He groaned, pausing for several seconds, shaking, to let the waves of pain ebb away before he attempted to keep moving.

Out from his bedroom he stumbled, his legs threatening, with each step, to give out from under him and send him headfirst to the carpet – at last he made it to the couch where, collapsing on his side, he gripped the top cushion to pull himself up, to lay, as he had done two nights ago…when the world made sense.

"Hey – hey! You're awake!" In an instant, Cody appeared over him, diving down to kiss his cheek. He was, Andrew noticed at once, wearing his favorite purple Volcom shirt, but also the Adidas workout pants and the Bucs beanie he usually saved for cold weather –"S-sorry, I was in the bathroom, I didn't hear you wake up."

Andrew let himself smile, relieved at the sight of his beloved. "Hey – hey Baby—"

"You slept a long time."

The phrase caught Andrew offguard, and he blinked, hard. "I did?" Cody nodded at him. "I – huh – I guess I did…"

He sat up, Cody joining him, when he stopped, jerking his head, sniffing hard at the air.

A whiff of something, a strange, faint odor, here and then gone, had come to Andrew's nose – it reminded him of that agarwood cologne he'd wanted to get at Neiman Marcus when he was still dating that guy who was doing lab work at Moffitt – his mind was at once unfocused because smelling it made it unfocused.

But then – it was gone.

Cody put his arm around Andrew, holding him by the shoulder, a naturalness to his action that eased Andrew's earlier paranoia: "Baby?"

Now Andrew shook his head, swallowing hard, feeling how horridly dry his throat was. "I'm fine—" he muttered. "I thought I smelled – something…" Once more he shook his head, harder this time. "Damn…"

"What is it?"

"I – remember getting into a fight with Bligh – at the beach—" He stopped. "Oh, dude, please don't tell me I was – so about upset Bligh I got drunk?" He looked into Cody's eyes for reassurance.

"No!" Cody exclaimed, shaking him. "No – no, nothing like that."

"Thank God," Andrew said. "But still – holy Hell, I feel like shit…and if I – didn't do that – why did I sleep so long?" His eyes turned distant, moving slowly to the coffee table as he considered it, pulling away from Cody

Cody smiled at him – mouth closed, Andrew noticed for some reason. "Well – you're still good, Andy – you're still – still sober – you – don't worry about that."

There was a nervousness, a hesitance in Cody's voice that Andrew tried to square – it sounded so unlike him, like an appliance had caught fire in the kitchen and Cody was pretending nothing was wrong.

Andrew shot him a glance. "Uh…"

"What?" Cody said back.

"Nothing," Andrew murmured – he thought the dank, woodsy smell he had detected before was back, a waft, a drift into his nostrils, and as before it cut off his words, it distracted him enough that he rose from the couch, once again sniffing the air around him. "Don't you smell that—?" he asked – to Cody, maybe, but really to nobody at all.

"S-smell what? I don't – um – smell anything—"

The strange odor gone as soon as it came, Andrew paused, looking to Cody, then the coffee table, then the floor, as if any of them could give him an answer.

"You – okay?"

"I dunno," Andrew said, again to nobody at all – but then, with a horrid bolt of epiphany: "Wait – wait a minute—" He caught his breath. "The fight – he had – he had a knife—" The pieces came together, the snatches of memory from the night before coalescing into something he could at last understand. "And it had – green shit all over it—"

He paced halfway back to the bedroom, blind to his surroundings.

Now he remembered – vividly, the kind of memory seared into a boy's brain the way all the cruel ways humans torment animals seem to be – Pappy, taking a long knife that had been dipped in the hemlock that grew endemic around Tempest, and incising the throat of a poor, wide-eyed beef, watching it collapse under its hooves.

That is why he passed out at the beach, Andrew realized, the full horror of the mystery now coming to him – that is why he felt so awful, because what was all over Bligh's knife was that noxious, paralyzing herb Pappy would use to ready cows for the slaughter.

…but why would Bligh use it on him? Why, why would Bligh ever do such a thing?

His mind was painfully ablaze with questions – but as he neared the bedroom he stopped, abruptly, his nostrils assaulted by the same dark-wooded smell that he thought he detected on the couch yet once more.

Over his shoulder, he called to Cody: "Dammit, Cody, don't you smell that?" he murmured, mostly to himself.

"Smell what, Andy? That's the second time—"

"That—" He inhaled deeply – yes, there it was. "God, it's so—" A word, a face, a name came to him to match the scent: "It's – it's Bligh – that's Bligh—"

"Andy what are you talking abou—"

He didn't finish the sentence, a strange look coming over his face that Andrew tried, but failed, to gauge – he didn't have time, as it was, because Bligh's smell, even faint, even barely noticeable, still lingered…still close…

He stepped forward, cautiously, the strength coming back to his legs enough that he could walk a little better – his tongue moved slowly on the edge of his teeth as he kept smelling, kept puzzling: Bligh had a smell?

Maybe – Pappy's house was always saturated in the blowsy odor of that ancient cologne the oldtimer sometimes wore, and Bligh often smelled of it too, but…this was different. This was some strange new mixture that Andrew felt he had never experienced and yet – somehow knew belonged to Bligh.

"Bligh?" he said to the room. "Bligh? Are you in here—?"

Only silence answered him.

Cody hesitated not a few times, struggling to answer: "Andy – he's – he's n-not—"

Yet again Andrew stopped, struck by something he had not thought of before. "Wait a second. If he's – gone, then – why—?"

Another thought, ringing and electric, came to him, and he paced, unsteady still with the abating pain, to move to the balcony's sliding glass door. He stepped out onto the patio, where yesterday he and Cody had waited, perhaps foolishly, for Bligh to arrive.

The early afternoon Sun greeted him, harsh and brilliant as it rises in the Florida meridian sky – he adjusted his eyes as he looked about the parking lot before him, searching for that blue Ford Ranger which had been the harbinger of so much terror.

The space where Bligh had parked was now occupied by some nameless neighbor's Toyota, and the truck itself had vanished, as though it had never been there at all.

Andrew recoiled to grasp the sliding glass door, hanging his head – what had he been expecting? Of course Bligh was gone – he had told him to go – so only his strange scent, effervescent, enigmatic, remained.

"He left…"

His gaze drifted to the patio floor, his mind racing – but where could he have gone? Back to Tempest? Somewhere else? How much money did Bligh have, anyway?

"He – uh, no, Andy, he didn't." He fidgeted where he stood.

Andrew spun on his heel: "He what?!"

Cody's eyes shifted to the floor. "He's not – gone – he's – he's still here."

"I told him to go back to Tempest."

"Well, he – didn't."

"How do you know that?"

"He – he just left for a little to get something to eat, uh – um, because he didn't want to eat your – our – food—"

Andrew held up a hand, like he always did when he needed Cody to hold on to a thought – but Cody's mouth clamped shut, his head dipped down just slightly enough to be in a state of almost…submission.

It was as though in his oddly nervous state Andrew now had the power to silence him, and Andrew regarded him with the full skepticism that his nervousness deserved: "How do you know that, Cody?" he repeated.

"I – I, um—"

"Forget it – just wait there, I think Bligh got something on me, that what I must have been smelling."

He actually didn't – it was a pointless, counterfactual thing to say – but he wanted to feel clean, he wanted things to reset, mentally, and washing his hands would do that.

He paced into the kitchen, coming to the sink, watchful of Cody, the whole time – now he pumped a generous spurt of that lemony foaming soap that Cody had bought him, flicking on the spigot.

Cody appeared at the threshold, as though he had become too fitful to sit on the couch.

"Hey – hey, are you okay?"

"Yanno, I uh, gotta tell ya – I should ask you the same," Andrew rejoined, reaching for the dishrag to dry off. "What's gotten into you?"

"N-nothing!" Cody smiled – a forced, stiff smile, still without his teeth showing.

Andrew's eyes returned to narrowing: "No…something's up, I can—" He stopped. "Why are you wearing your hat? It's not hot out."

"I – I just felt like wearing it."

"Don't lie to me."

Now he remembered – but why did he remember? – fear, choices, a precipice that he sat on, long ago…there was something about greyness, there was something about mist, young, up a mountain, but he could not put it together, all he knew was danger, all he knew was that unknown, upon which he refused to totter, God is not in Heaven but so shall there be order in the Universe, Amen.

He nigh-leapt toward Cody, closing the distance in less than a second – he stared him down as he had never down before, a rift of distrust they'd never had ripping open between them.

"Don't – lie to me—"

"I've never lied to you," came Cody's instant response, but still with that strange look in his mouth, like he wasn't trying to show his teeth. "You know that!"

"But you never wear that hat."

"I do too!"

"Not when it's ninety fucking degrees, Cody!"

He saw Cody's defenses collapse at one: "S-sometimes – s-some – times—"

"Take it off."

"I don't—"

"Take the hat off."

Shutting his eyes tight, looking as though he was barely breathing, Cody did as he was told – and all Andrew could do was suck in a sickened gasp.

His head was down, flinching, as though expecting to be struck – his eyes were closed, his breath unsteady and hesitant – but it was his ears, quivering with that same fear evident throughout the rest of Cody's that Andrew saw.

Cody's ears were not those that Andrew remembered – they had, somehow, changed, they did not look or behave like they should have, those elfin, pointed, furry things attached to Cody's head, for all the world like a wolf's, or a dog's…they were no longer human.

Rushing up to his nose at the same time was a smell that overwhelmed and replaced the faint but tenacious agarwood that he somehow associated with Bligh – now there was something else – a fleeting whiff of resin, or pine needles, with a kind of sweetness mixed in, like that of milk…this, now, he understood, from no other input at all, was Cody.

But he had no time at all to process this – he blinked rapidly, wondering if, in the span of a few seconds, he was experiencing the phantosmia before a stroke – he recovered himself just enough to open his eyes again, refocusing them on his boyfriend, seeing him look at Andrew with the same kind of fearfulness as before…his lips were parted, his mouth was agape, and now Andrew could see the second bit of horror, what explained, hideously, why Cody had tried to hide his teeth up til now – in his mouth were fangs, sharp, for tearing, for biting, all animal.

"You – y-your ears—" He recoiled all the way back. "Your – teeth!"

"Andy – Andy hold on, it's not that bad—"

"Not that bad?!" Andrew roared back, neither noticing nor caring that Cody wilted before him as he raised his voice. "How the fuck – h-how the fuck did this – happen?!"

Cody was actually shaking, his stance unsteady on the carpet before him. "M-me and Bligh – we – he—"

"What, Cody?!" Andrew exclaimed. "What?!"

"Don't yell!" Cody squeaked.

"Tell – me."

"Bligh – Bligh did it – he – he was the one – to – do it to me – he changed me—" And then, with a burst of pure panic: "But wait, wait, don't leave me, Andy, please, it was – I didn't – w-wait—" But Andrew drew back from him, shrinking back, horrified into speechlessness.

"Please…" Cody said, the word squelching itself into silence.

"Changed?" Andrew repeated, dumbstruck in a way that his mind was almost completely blank – and then again: "Changed – changed?"

Back, back he went to the kitchen – he had been clutching the dishrag in his hand but, now, plunged in a tidal wave of interiority, the muscles in his hands relented, and he dropped it onto the linoleum.

Changing – how was it possible for Cody's body to just change like that? His body had altered its form, and DNA just didn't work like that, unless it was cancer, but this wasn't some sort of neoplasm, no, the changes seemed to work with Cody's body to become a part of it…

None of it made sense – nothing made sense. His god of science, of logic, of an ordered universe, had failed him. And he had nothing to say or show for it.

Bligh, a monster in secret, had made the love of Andrew's life the same as he – changed him, with whatever disease caused the transformation into a canine-human hybrid.

That word again – changed – as if from a virus, or an infection. But what if the infection wasn't really an infection, but a permanent, insidious form of magic, like a curse? Was there hope in that? Or was he dreaming? Was – this – all a dream…?

A scientist. Was not he still a scientist? Did not the dream of greatness – to rise above the curse of his family name, to set out and conquer the world on his own terms – mean anything, anymore?

This was the absolute closest he'd ever been to a complete nervous breakdown, in the literal sense of his neurons unable to handle the strain, and his brain threatening to shut down because of it.

From the corner of his eye he saw Cody, in tears, at the kitchen's threshold: "Andy – Andy, don't be like this, p-please talk to—"

"Get away from me!" Andrew said, unable to hide the pain in his voice.

He had spun on his heel to face him – but his foot caught the dishrag, still damp from having spent one too many days at the corner of the sink.

He cried out in shock as he completely lost balance – there was a catastrophic sensation that he was unheavy and without weight – then a sharp pain that struck the back of his head as it slammed on the counter.

And then he heard Cody scream in anguish – the last thing that reached him still conscious, before a merciful darkness enveloped him.