A Gift of the Gods

Spring always snuck up on the children in Lakeside. The winters were so convincing and so durable that we eventually forgot about other possibilities, about a chance of change.

Then, always without warning, there were tender new leaves on the bushes surrounding the apartment buildings; a fresh, clayey smell of earth everywhere; birds picking up broom and mop fragments for making nests; summer vacation becoming an actual possibility; the bravest new flies crawling out from their hiding places along the edges of windows and wandering on the sunny panes--and the children began taking ruminative walks, going places they wouldn't ordinarily go and observing things they would ordinarily ignore.

It was the time of exploration come again, and the taste and feel of new adventure were (continued on page 148)Gift of the Gods(continued from page 94) everywhere, infusing the world, and none of the implications of any of it was lost on Henry Laird.

He had been walking, for no conscious reason, along the broad quietness of Harmon Avenue, gazing at the fine old trees and the low hills of the lawns and the looming bulks of the old mansions that lined its sides, when he found he had come to the little park that sat at the end of Main Street and faced the great spread of the lake.

The park was a small jewel of design, with its gardens gracious even now, before their real blooming; and its budding trees, waiting for their new leaves, stood composed in smooth, stylish curves and clumpings.

In the center of the park, or, rather, just enough off its center to make its location more interesting, was a small Grecian temple of the open, pillared style. Henry climbed the western steps and stood on the porch like a lost prince come at last to his kingdom.

The air from the lake wafted as gently over his face as a deliberately loving stroke, so he pulled his wool cap from his head in order to let the breeze caress more of him. He closed his eyes for a long moment and after some time, let them flutter open. At first, he looked about dazedly, enjoying the faint, odd, golden gleam that everything about him had taken on; but then he began to observe his surroundings in some detail, looking around in the manner of one who has returned home after a long and hazardous voyage.

It was then, for the first time, that he saw the greasy paper sack.

A thing as ugly as that had no business being in such surroundings. It belonged in a dingy alley next to garbage cans. It was not proper that such an object be in such a place as this. Henry advanced to the brown sack and, after a moment's hesitation over its really spectacular filthiness, bent down and picked the thing up with both his hands.

It was nowhere near as heavy as its bulk seemed to indicate. Although it was jammed full, almost to bursting, it could not weigh a full three pounds. A rich animal reek exuded from the sack, and Henry peeked down into its gaping mouth and saw that it seemed to be stuffed full of grayish-black hair. He would remove the disreputable, odious thing.

But just before he left the park--just before he stepped from its grass to the sidewalk that would lead him back into the 20th Century maze of concrete and asphalt that made up the basic webbing of this modern world--he became aware of being observed.

Something, he knew it, something with shiny, dark eyes was watching him, was carefully taking his measure as a hunter does of a rabbit or a lion of a zebra colt; and it was thinking, he could feel it in his own mouth, how Henry Laird would taste if you sunk your teeth into his shoulder until the skin split and the muscles tore and the blood spurted into your maw. And it was enjoying the taste, enjoying it very much.

So Henry quit the little park with more speed than he ordinarily might have used, and he was very glad when he reached his apartment building with his shoulder still unsplit and whole, and he was even gladder when he had gained the safety of his bedroom, having gotten past his mother, who, thank God, was busy making Jell-O with fruit in it and so hadn't caught as much as a glimpse of him or what he bore.

•

In his room, on his desk, the sack looked even worse than it had before. Its splotchings were more numerous and varied now, it seemed, and the disreputable, furtive look of it, its sullen poverty, made it stand out starkly against its present comfortable surroundings.

Henry took hold of the long, dark hair that poked from the sack's mouth, and when he tugged, it slithered forth and cascaded smoothly to the floor almost like liquid, like thick blood or oil. Henry tossed the sack aside and went to his knees, smoothing the fur with his hands, spreading it out; and then, with a silent gasp and a widening of his eyes, he saw what he had got.

From its head (for it certainly had a head) to the sharp, curving claws of its hind feet (for it had them, too), it was a kind of nightmare costume made of, as far as Henry could see, one single pelt for all its six-foot length and the wide stretch of its arms or upper legs.

It was animalskin, no doubt of it, bestial for certain, and yet there was an extremely disquieting suggestion of the human about it, too. It seemed to have been scalped from something between species, something caught in the middle of an evolutionary leap or fall.

The ears were animal in shape, pointed and high-peaked, with the wide cupping given to wild things that they might better hear their prey or would-be killer padding in the dark, and yet the placement of them, their relation to the forehead, was entirely human. And was that a nose or a snout?

It was hard to say, too, whether the appendages at the ends of its arms or forelegs were claws or hands, since they had something of the qualities of both. The cruelty in their design strongly suggested an anatomy too brutal to be human, yet the thumbs and the forefingers were clearly opposable, and there was something about the formation of the palms that denied their being exclusively animal.

Of course, in their present condition, these last were neither hands nor claws; they were gloves. Large gloves--far too large for the hands of Henry Laird, for instance--but gloves all the same.

Henry held his left hand over the left glove of the costume. Yes, it was far, far too small to fill that hairy, clawed container. The fingers of them were inches too long. If he slipped his fingers into them--it was a strangely disquieting thought that made all of his own skin tingle and crawl--the gloves would dangle limply hollow from the first knuckle.

Still, Henry would try; and he moved his hand down in a kind of slow swoop to where the skin gaped in a slit just under the costume's palm and slid his hand in, noting how smoothly and effortlessly it seemed to glide; and when it was in, entirely in, the glove, with an odd noise something like a cat's hiss, shrank in against the fingers and back and palm of Henry's hand until it fit him like a second skin.

Henry gave a kind of muffled shriek, stifling it with his unclad hand, and then pulled frantically at the glove. He expected a horrible resistance, but no such thing; it slid off most cooperatively--shot off, really, since he had pulled it so hard--and when Henry saw that his hand seemed none the worse for having worn it, he slipped the glove on and off again a few more experimental times.

Now it seemed that Henry's wearing of the glove had permanently affected it, for it remained his exact size, whether he had it on or not, which meant it was now ludicrously small for its opposite partner; so Henry, after giving the matter a little thought, slipped his other hand into the other glove with identical effect and the end result that the two were now precisely the same size--which is to say Henry's size.

The implications of this singular phenomenon gave Henry a clear challenge that very few boys his age could have resisted, and certainly Henry did not; and so, after going very quietly to the door and peeking out of it and listening carefully to make sure that his mother was still immersed in making fruit Jell-O, Henry picked up the costume and, with just a slight grating of his teeth and squinching up of his face, slipped it on.

He started with the legs, slipping into them as he would into pants, and gasped slightly as they shrank instantly to accommodate his size, again with that catlike hissing sound; and then he hunched into the arms, and they, hissing, fitted to him; and then there was a very alarming moment when the torso of the costume curled round his own and shrank to coat him smoothly, this with the loudest hissing of all; and then, by far the worst, the whole thing sealed up, the openings withering down to slits and the slits healing to unbroken skin, until his whole body was covered and wrapped with the dark-gray pelt.

Except for his head, that is. Henry had left the head for the last, just as he would have done with a Halloween costume.

He walked over to the mirror set into the door and gazed at himself in wonder, his pink face staring above the dark, hairy body, a mad scientist's transplant. He moved his arms and legs, experimentally at first, and watched their reflections make little, cautious movements. He reached out with one hand to touch the mirror and thrilled when he realized that he was actually feeling the glass not through the skin, as one does when wearing a glove, but with the skin!

After a time of touching and moving and carefully watching, Henry reached up behind him, groping for the mask, which was dangling down his back like a hood, and took hold of it and, very slowly and cautiously, watching anxiously all the time, slipped it over the top of his head and then his forehead; and then, closing his eyes--somehow, he did not want them to be open when they would be blind and covered--he pulled the mask completely down until the fur of its neck met the fur of the costume's chest, and he shuddered violently when he felt, with his lids still firmly closed, the whole business squeeze gently in, molding itself to the flesh of his face; and only when the catlike hissing had faded away entirely did he dare open his eyes.

There, facing him from the mirror of his own bedroom, with his desk covered with homework and a hanging model airplane for its background, was a monster--a small monster, true, but no less frightening for that.

Henry crouched a little as he studied his reflection. It seemed more comfortable that way. He moved his face closer to the glass. The nostrils worked as he breathed.

He lifted his head slightly and inhaled deeply and found he could smell the Jell-O his mother was making way off in the kitchen more clearly than he would ordinarily be able to do if he put his nose close enough to the pot to feel the heat.

He looked back at his reflection and studied his eyes intently. They were his eyes, no doubt of that, though the blueness of them was strange in their present setting. Then he opened his mouth and nearly fainted.

It was in no way the mouth of Henry Laird. It had fangs, for one thing, for the most obvious thing, but the differences did not stop there. All its teeth were as sharp as needles, every single tooth; and moving in and around them and lapping over them, constantly on the move, was a long, lean, curling tongue. Not Henry Laird's tongue. Not even a human tongue.

Without giving any thought to it, Henry pulled the skin costume from his head, his arms, his whole body, and threw it to the floor.

Again he studied himself in the mirror, touching his forehead, feeling his arms, wiggling his fingers; and then, only after all those preliminary tests, he opened his mouth and nearly cried aloud in his relief in seeing nothing more formidable in it than the ordinary incisors and molars with the occasional filling put here and there by Dr. Mineke, the family dentist, because of Mounds bars and licorice.

The skin was returned to its filthy paper sack, the sack was stuffed into the rear of the bottom drawer of his bureau and Henry took the most meticulous shower of his life and scrubbed his mouth three times in a row with Stripe tooth paste.

•

About ten that night, when Henry was just about to go to bed and had almost convinced himself that there was nothing waiting in his room, the doorbell rang and his father got out of his easy chair with a grunt and pushed the button by the doorbell so that he could talk with whomever it was downstairs and said, "Yes? Yes? Who's there?"

At first, there was nothing but breathing from downstairs; then they all heard a voice, Henry and his father and his mother--a deep, growly sort of voice.

"I want it back," the voice said, muffled and distorted.

"What?" asked Henry's father. "What did you say?"

"You give it back," the voice said, louder; and this time you could hear the saliva in it, the drool. "It's mine, you! They gave it to me, see?"

"Look here," said Henry's father, "I don't know who you are or what you're trying to say."

"Who is that, dear?" asked Henry's mother. "What does he want?"

Now there was only breathing, heavier than before and with the hiss of spittle.

"You're going to have to speak up," said Henry's father. "I can't make out a word you're saying."

But now the breathing was gone and there was only the sound of rain, near and insistent as it battered and spattered against the windows of the apartment. Henry quietly gathered up his books from the table where he had been doing his homework.

"Hello? Hello?" said Henry's father, pressing impatiently on the Listen button. "I think he's some drunk."

Henry started down the hall, holding his schoolbooks to his chest.

"Whoever he was, he seems to have gone," said Henry's father, and the rain, which had suddenly grown much fiercer, began throwing itself against the windows in alarming, angry-seeming gusts.

"Well, he certainly doesn't sound like anyone we know," said Henry's mother, and his father, chewing his lip a little, casting a glance or two at the front-hall door of the apartment, settled again into his easy chair.

•

Lying in his bed, staring up at a ceiling too dark to be seen, Henry listened to the roaring wind and considered the situation.

Outside, in the wet wildness of this awful night, prowled a being dangerous to Henry and his family. It would not do just to give back what was asked for. Wearing the skin had roused something in Henry that knew all that and relished what it now made necessary.

When it seemed from the stillness of the apartment that his parents were asleep, Henry rose, carefully and quietly, padded across the floor to his bureau, extracted the skin from its double confinement of sack and drawer and slipped it on.

The cat hissings merged into one smooth, unbroken cry when he donned the costume all at once, going from a kind of throaty purr to a final yowl of triumph as the mask sealed on, but all blended into the sound of the rain. Henry was sure his parents had heard none of it.

His passage through the apartment to the kitchen was so near to silent that even his hearing, heightened astoundingly by its joining with the high-peaked ears of what he wore, was unable to detect any of it save for the tiniest clicking as he turned the back-door lock. He took a deep breath, opened and closed the door as quickly and softly as he could, and he was standing in the wind and pelting rain on the apartment's back porch.

He rested his claws--for they were claws, not hands--on the wooden railing of the porch and peered down and around three stories below at the apartment's huge back yard.

There were occasional lights mounted here and there, none too solidly from the wild way they swayed in the wind: some on posts, spewing their swaying beams on parked cars; some fixed to the brick walls of the building, making a dancing shine on dark, wet windows or creating ominous shiftings of shadows in the depths of basement entrances; but none of them did much to dispel the dank gloom all about.

Henry lifted his snout and inhaled deeply and questingly and got a wild medley of night odors: rain and cinders; something strong blown in from the lake; a nest hidden on a nearby roof whose smell of new eggs and bird flesh made his mouth, with its needle-sharp teeth and long, lolling tongue, water--but not a whiff of his enemy.

He began to trot quietly down the rain-slicked wooden steps, glancing sharply about with his incongruous blue eyes as he moved.

He did not stop at the foot of the steps--there was a revealing pool of light from a lamp--but ducked quickly into a sooty patch of shadow before he crouched and sucked in great pulls of air, analyzing each one carefully before turning an inch or so to sample again. Then, suddenly, he froze and blinked and inhaled again without moving, this time even deeper, and a snarling kind of chuckle came from his throat, and his teeth were bared in a human, if singularly cruel, grin.

Bent low, ducking craftily from shadow to shadow, Henry dodged his way nearer and nearer to the wide gap in the wooden fence that led to the alley in back of the building.

He pressed himself against the wall, listening with his animal ears and feeling the rain exactly as though it were falling on his own bare skin. He could make out the motor of a far-distant car; someone in an apartment was playing dance music on a radio and humming to it; there was a muffled mewing from a covered nest of kittens; and there was the harsh, slurred breathing of his enemy.

He was near. His smell was mixed with garbage smells: moldering oranges and lamb bones gone bad mingled with a hot hate smell, a killing smell out there in the dark. He was very likely watching the opening in the fence. Henry slowly backed up along the fence away from the opening until it joined a porch. After a listening pause to make sure the enemy had not moved, he stealthily climbed the porch's side, which gave him a perch just overlooking the alley.

The tar of the alley gleamed like black enamel in the rain from the light of the bare bulb mounted over the rear door of the apartment building opposite. The first sweep of his glance seemed to indicate that the alley was innocent of anything save a tidy army of garbage cans beside the building's concrete landing and a less respectable accumulation of cans and rubbish just outside the back yard of a private house farther down, but a squinting second look showed an ominous bulk hunkered down between the second batch of garbage and a low wooden fence.

Silently, hurrying as fast as he could so as not to give the enemy time to mull things over and change position, Henry made his way through his building and around the block so that he could approach the alley fence of the private house from its rear. Once in the house's back yard, he dropped to all fours and inhaled deeply. He grinned again, and this time the grin was significantly less human than it had been before. His prey was still there.

The impulse to rush with all speed so that he might throw himself at once upon his enemy and rip his skin and drink his spurting blood was so devastatingly strong that the flesh of Henry's flanks rippled suppressing it. He hunched down, puffing from the effort of wresting control from the sudden killing urge. He could not let such a thing master him. A blind scurry forward might undo all his cleverness so far. He had done well as a neophyte; he must continue to do so.

But still the smell of the enemy, the rich meatiness of it, was maddening. It seemed he could even detect the pulsings in the veins and arteries!

He forced himself into calmness, hunching low into the wet grass. He took a deep snuff of the earth scent in an attempt to clear his head and then began to work his way slowly and silently forward toward where the pile of garbage and his victim were lumped together on the fence's other side.

But as he drew nearer, he became aware of some confusion. It seemed the garbage stench was growing stronger than his victim's. Then it crossed his mind that that might well have been the reason that place had been chosen. He was, after all, dealing with someone far more experienced than himse----

Then there was a terrific shock and a sidewise lurch, and Henry's head exploded in a searing blast of light followed by a great, black rushing that threw him into a confusion of motion, not himself moving but himself being moved, roughly, brutally, and he screamed because of the awful, horrible pain--someone was tearing the skin from his face, ripping it off him, roots and all, and now his scalp and now the flesh of his neck--and he screamed and screamed and cried out, "Please, please stop!" but the tearing of the flesh from his body did not stop, only went on and on; and with each violent ripping and rending of himself from himself, the raw agony burned over more and more of him, until he was nothing but a scorched, stripped leaving thrown aside.

He lay naked on the wet grass, confusing his tears with the rain running over his body, and was profoundly grateful for the tears and the rain, for they were cooling and healing the rawness of him so that he was becoming aware of something other than pain, aware of the night and of movement before him.

There was the enemy before him, the victor, not the victim, huge and smelling--even to Henry's human nose, the stench of him was clear enough--hunched down and pulling this way and that at something in his hands.

"You spoiled it, goddamn, you little bastard!" the enemy sobbed and, leaning over, huge and dark in the night, sent a pale fist lashing out and knocked Henry's head back painfully against the fence. "You fucked it up, you little prick!"

Henry curled closer into himself and for the first time realized that the thing the enemy was tugging at was the costume. He did it with such absorption and violence that at one point his hat fell from his head and the rain streaked his long, black hair in curling ribbons down his furrowed forehead without his noticing.

The enemy's eyes were shiny and black, as Henry had sensed they were back in the park with the Grecian temple, and his teeth, though human, seemed much more pointed than the norm, the canines longer and sharper. All were bared in alternate snarling and sobbing, for the enemy was desperate. At length, he threw the costume down in fury and then lunged at Henry, taking him by the shoulders and shaking him hard enough to make his teeth rattle.

"It's all gone small, you little son of a bitch!" he shouted into Henry's face, and the stink of his breath made Henry gag. "What did you do, hah, you fucker? How did you make it shrink, you shit?"

"I put it on!" Henry sobbed, his head bouncing crazily as the enemy continued to shake him. "I put it on!"

A crafty look sprang into the enemy's face. He held Henry still for a long second, staring closely at his face.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I remember. It changed when they gave it to me!"

He threw Henry hard against the fence and clawed up the skin, holding it spread open before him like a huge, soggy bat.

"Yeah," said the foe to himself, his wet face gleaming, his long canines shining. "Yeah!"

Then, with a growling chuckle, he lifted the costume's arm, pushed his huge hand into the skin glove of it and grinned wider and wider until it seemed that all of his teeth, his not really human teeth, were showing. The glove had stretched easily, and that which had been a small claw when Henry wore it was now something like a grizzly's paw.

He held his hand wearing the glove high into the rain in savage triumph, the rest of the costume trailing from it like a shaggy banner, and then he thrust it in front of Henry, waving it as a fist under his nose.

"You wait, you little piece of shit!" he crowed. "You wait till you see what I do to your face with this!"

He pulled on the other glove with equal ease, then stood and stepped into the hairy costume with his long, powerful legs, roaring with laughter when they slid in smoothly. A great flash of lightning made Henry blink, and when he opened his eyes, it was to see the costume curling round his enemy's chest, fitting it with a loving closeness.

His foe looked down at him with a grin of hate that made Henry shudder, and then, as a sudden crash of thunder made the ground jump, the grizzly paws took hold of the costume's mask, pulling it over the brutal, laughing face, so that the following volley of crackling lightning showed the monster standing there complete, towering awesomely over Henry, striding toward him, bending down and picking him up with a paw clutching either side of his throat. "I got you now, you little fuck!" the monster said, and Henry felt his weight making the long claws dig into his neck as he was swung in a high arc close to the hairy face grinning with fangs of such a fearsome length and sharpness that he almost vomited at the sight of them.

Then the monster suddenly froze position, and as Henry watched, the ghastly maw's grin made a weird, rapid transition, faltering, twisting and finally turning to a wide gape of dismay.

"Naw!" his enemy snarled. "Naaaw!"

And then came a shocking crash of thunder, loud enough to make the very ground of Lakeside shudder, and as it pealed and pealed, rolling round in the sky, Henry saw the monster's eyes bulge impossibly, and then the paws released him with a spastic gesture and he landed with a hard thump on the ground to stare up in astonishment.

Lit by endless lightning, all sound of him drowned out by the ceaseless, merciless, air-flung cacophony, the monster pranced wildly in a crazy dance, arms and legs swinging like a mad jumping jack's, and from the gape of his horrible jaws and the spewing of blood and saliva, his screams must have been bloodcurdlingly ghastly could they have been heard.

But they could not; thunder censored all--and so it was in a kind of earsplitting silence that Henry saw the monster's eyes bulge more and more until the roundness of them projected entirely outside the sockets of the mask, and then they were violently ejected in a double spray of blood, and Henry found himself staring unbelievingly at the extraordinary sight of his blinded enemy beginning to shrink before him!

At first, the process was uneven, one huge paw shriveling at a time, an arm bunching oddly and then shortening in a jerky telescopic fashion; but then, almost as if getting the feel of it, the whole creature began to reduce itself in step, so to speak; and as Henry watched in appalled fascination but with an undeniable undertone of profound satisfaction, he saw the being crushed down by stages, dancing and screaming all the while, kept alive and conscious by some horrendous magic until it was no larger than he had been while in the costume--until, that is, the costume had returned itself to a perfect fit for Henry Laird. Only then, and not before, was the suffering of his enemy terminated and the creature allowed to drop to the rain- and blood-soaked grass on which it had danced these last awful minutes.

Its murderous readjustments completed, the costume opened its various slits and slowly disgorged Henry's enemy, now only a shapeless, glistening redness, washing itself carefully in the pouring rain after it did so. When it was entirely free of all traces of its recent tenant, and not before, it slithered smoothly over to Henry's curled and shivering legs, very much as a cat will work its way to the side of a beloved master, and, snuggling close to him, waited to see what he wanted to do next.

"Something with shiny, dark eyes was watching him and was thinking how Henry Laird would taste."