Wolf-Alice-2

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    Her first blood bewildered her. She did not know what it meant and the first stirrings of surmise that ever she felt were directed towards its possible cause. The moon had been shining into the kit when she woke to feel the trickle betweehighs and it seemed to her that a wolf who, perhaps, was fond of her, as wolves were, and who lived, perhaps, in the moon? must have nibbled her t while she was sleeping, had subjected her to a series of affeate nips too geo wake her yet sharp enough to break the skin. The shape of this theory was blurred yet, out of it, there took root a kind of wild reasoning, as it might have from a seed dropped in her brain off the foot of a flying bird.

    The flow tinued for a few days, which seemed to her an eime. She had, as yet, no direotion of past, or of future, or of duration, only of a dimensionless, immediate moment. At night, she prowled the empty house looking fs to sop the blood up; she had learned a little elementary hygiene in the vent, enough to know how to bury her excrement and se herself of her natural juices, although the nuns had not the means to inform her how it should be, it was not fastidiousness but shame that made her do so.

    She found towels, sheets and pillowcases in closets that had not been opened sihe Duke came shrieking into the world with all his teeth, to bite his mothers nipple off and weep. She found once-worn ball dresses in cobwebbed wardro>9９ｌｉｂ.</a>bes, and, heaped in the er of his bloody chamber, shrouds, nightdresses and burial clothes that had ed items on the Dukes menus. She tore strips of the most absorbent fabrics to clumsily diaper herself. In the course of these prowlings, she bumped against that mirror over whose surface the Duke passed like a wind on ice. First, she tried to nuzzle her refle; then, nosing it industriously, she soon realised it gave out no smell. She bruised her muzzle on the cold glass and broke her claws trying to tussle with this stranger. She saw, with irritation, then amusement, how it mimicked every gesture of hers when she raised her forepaw to scratch herself ed her bum along the dusty carpet to rid herself of a slight disfort in her hindquarters. She rubbed her head against her reflected face, to show that she felt friendly towards it, a a cold, solid, immovable surface between herself and she -- some kind, possibly, of invisible cage? In spite of this barrier, she was lonely enough to ask this creature to try to play with her, barieeth and grinning: at once she received a reciprocal invitation. She rejoiced; she began to whirl round on herself, yappiantly, but, whereated from the mirror, she halted in the midst of her ecstasy, puzzled, to see how her new friend grew less in size.

    The moonlight spilled into the Dukes motionless bedroom from behind a cloud and she saw how pale this wolf, not-wolf who played with her was. The moon and mirrors have this mu on: you ot see behind them. Moonlit and white, Wolf-Alice looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether there she saw the beast who came to bite her in the night. Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kit, she entered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innoce.

    Soon the flow ceased. She fot it. The moon vanished; but, little by little, reappeared. When it again visited her kit at full strength, Wolf-Alice was surprised into bleeding again and so it went on, with a punctuality that transformed her vague grip on time. She learo expect these bleedings, to prepare her rags against them, and afterwards, ly bury the dirtied things. Sequence asserted itself with  and then she uood the circumambulatory principle of the clock perfectly, even if all clocks were banished from the den where she and the Duke inhabited their separate solitudes, so that you might say she discovered the very a of time by means of this returning cycle.

    When she curled up among the ders, the colour, texture and warmth of them brought her foster mothers belly out of the past and pri on her flesh; her first semory, painful as the first time the nuns bed her hair. She howled a little, in a firmer, deepening trajectory, to obtain the inscrutable solation of the wolves response, for now the world around her was assuming form. She perceived an essential differeween herself and her surroundings that you might say she could not put her finger on -- only, the trees and grass of the meadows outside no longer seemed the emanation of her questing nose a ears, a suffit to itself, but a kind of backdrop for her, that waited for her arrivals to give it meaning. She saw herself upon it and her eyes, with their sombre clarity, took on a veiled, introspective look.

    She would spend hours examining the new skin that had been born, it seemed to her, of her bleeding, she would lick her soft upholstery with her long tongue and groom her hair with her fingernails. She examined her new breasts with curiosity; the white growths reminded her of nothing so much as the night-sprung puffballs she found, sometimes, on evening rambles in the woods, a natural if discerting apparition, but then, to her astonishment, she found a little diadem of fresh hairs tuftiweehighs. She showed it to her mirror littermate, who reassured her by showing her she shared it.

    The damned Duke haunts the graveyard; he believes himself to be both less and more than a man, as if his obse difference were a sign of grace. During the day, he sleeps. His mirror faithfully reflects his bed but he meagre shape within the disordered covers.

    Sometimes, on those white nights when she was left alone in the house, she dragged out his grandmothers ball dress and rolled on suave velvet and, abrasive lace because to do so delighted her adolest skin. Her intimate in the mirror wound the old clothes around herself, wrinkling its nose in delight at the a yet still potent sts of musk and civet that woke up in the sleeves and bodices. This <q></q>habitual, at last b, fidelity to her very movement finally woke her up to the regretful possibility that her panion was, in fao more than a particularly ingenious variety of the shadow she cast on sunlit grass. Had not she and the rest of the litter tussled and romped with their shadows long ago? She poked her agile nose around the back of the mirror; she found only dust, a spider stu his web, a heap s. A little moisture leaked from the ers of her eyes, yet her relation with the mirror was now far more intimate since she knew she saw herself within it.

    She pawed and tumbled the dress the Duke had tucked away behind the mirror for a while. The dust was soon shaken out of it; she experimentally ied her front legs in the sleeves. Although the dress was torn and crumpled, it was so white and of such a sinuous texture that she thought, before she put it on, she must thhly wash off her coat of ashes ier from the pump in the yard, which she knew how to manipulate with her ing forepaw. In the mirror, she saw how this white dress made her shine.

    Although she could not run so fast on two legs iicoats, she trotted out in her new dress to iigate the odorous October hedgerows, like a debutante from the castle, delighted with herself but still, now and then, singing to the wolves with a kind of wistful triumph, because now she knew how to wear clothes and had put on the visible sign of her difference from them.

    Her footprints on damp earth are beautiful and menag as those Man Friday left.

    The young husband of the dead bride spent a long time planning his revenge. He filled the church with an arsenal of b<s>.９9ｌｉｂ.</s>ells, books and dles; a battery of silver bullets; they brought a ten gallon tub of holy water in a wagon from the city, where it had been blessed by the Archbishop himself, to drown the Duke, if the bullets bounced off him. They gathered in the church to t a litany and wait for the one who would visit the first deaths of winter.

    She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significe.

    It seemed to her the gregation in the church was iually attempting to imitate the wolves chorus. She lent them the assistance of her own, educated voice for a while, rog platively on her haunches by the graveyard gate; then her nostrils twitched to catch the rank stench of the dead that told her her cohabitor was at hand; raising her head, who did her new, keen eyes spy but the lord of cobweb castle i on perf his ibal rituals?

    And if her nostri..ls flare suspiciously at the choking reek of inse and his do not, that is because she is far more sehan he. She will, therefore, run, run! when she hears the crack of bullets, because they killed her foster mother; so, with the self-same lilting lope, drenched with holy water, will he run, too, until the young widower fires the silver bullet that bites his shoulder and drags off half his fictive pelt, so that he  must rise up like any on forked biped and limp distressfully on as best he may.

    When they saw the white bride leap out of the tombstones and scamper off towards the castle with the werewolf stumbling after, the peasants thought the Dukes dearest victim had e back to take matters into her own hands. They ran screaming from the presence of a ghostly vengean him.

    Poor, wouhing. . . locked half and half between such straates, an aborted transformation, an inplete mystery now he lies writhing on his black bed in the room like a Myaean tomb, howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour, and bleeds.

    First, she was fearful when she heard the sound of pain, in case it hurt her, as it had done before. She prowled round the bed, growling, snuffing at his wound that does not smell like her wound. Then, she itiful as her gaunt grey mother; she leapt upon his bed to lick, without hesitation, without disgust, with a quick, tender gravity, the blood and dirt from his cheek and forehead.

    The lucidity of the moonlight lit the mirror propped against the red wall; the rational glass, the master of the visible, impartially recorded the ing girl.

    As she tinued her ministrations, this glass, with infinite slowness, yielded to the reflexive strength of its own material stru. Little by little, there appeared within it, like the image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a formless web of tracery, the prey caught in its own fishihen a firmer yet still shadowed outliil at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, geongue, finally, the face of the Duke.

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