That afternoon, right after my dad and Max had left for work and my mom was still at her practice, I went around the house and gathered together every book I could find that might have something in it on werewolves. Knowledge is power, as they say, and I was determined to learn all I could. The thing about it was that up until then I’d been sure that Jeff and Eric were being ridiculous with all their talk of werewolves, but after seeing the hairy man in person I was a lot less sure of myself. The hairy man’s eyes had been those of a feral animal, not a sane man’s. All that hair, and the way he’d attacked me and fought with Max; it just seemed like too many coincidences piled on top of each other. Maybe there was something to the whole werewolf thing after all.
I read my mom’s books until she came home, around 7 o’clock that evening. I went through Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and even the Encyclopedia Britannica, and in the end came up with a whole lot of nothing. I found a lot on werewolves, but none of it matched anything else and all of it was different from the accepted conventions of the Hollywood wolf man.
In some accounts the werewolf transformed into an actual wolf, only larger and without a tail. In others, he retained his human mind, while in others he was carried away by pure animal lusts. Some authors said that you became a werewolf by putting on magical girdles or belts. Some said that you became a werewolf by applying a salve. Still others claimed the change was brought about by a deal with the devil, or through witchcraft. There was no mention of the wolfsbane used in the Lon Chaney Jr. films. Nor did the full moon seem to hold much importance. I was beginning to think none of these writers knew anything about their subject.
I got so into my reading that I didn’t hear my mom come in.
“Mark?”
I looked up from the stack of books spread out on my bed. “Oh, hey Mom.”
She was standing in the doorway, still holding her attaché case. “What are you reading? Is that my copy of Ovid?”
“Uh, yeah,” I admitted.
She crossed the room to the side of my bed and picked up one of the books I’d stacked there. “Why are you reading Galen?” She picked up another book. “And Herodotus?” And another. “Sir Thomas Browne–Mark, what in the world is this?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. The best I could do was shrug. Then she saw the Encyclopedia Britannica open to the entry on werewolves and the notes I’d made on one of her yellow legal pads and she put it together in about two seconds.
“Ah Mark, what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said lamely.
She sat down on the side of my bed and looked at me with the sad, yet strangely sympathetic expression she reserved for times she felt like I really needed a long talking to about how the world worked. It was the same expression she’d worn when I admitted I was too vain to get braces, or when she’d come upstairs to find my bedroom door closed and me with my hand up Lisa Rodriguez’s shirt. I hated that look.
“Your run-in with that man yesterday really scared you, didn’t it?”
Of course it did, I thought.
But of course she already knew that.
That was how she worked these conversations. She’d start with a series of questions like that, obvious stuff, softening me up by forcing me to agree with her over and over until, when I finally disagreed, it threw me off balance. It was aggravating, but effective.
“I have to tell you it scared me,” she said. “Detective Travis said he’s pretty sure it’s the same man who attacked Heather and her friends.”
I watched my mom’s eyes for some sign that she’d break down at the mention of Heather’s name, but she seemed to be holding it together.
“You were lucky Max found you.”
Again I nodded.
“Was that man really completely naked?”
“Yes.”
“You said he was hairy. That’s the same thing Rebecca Hannett said.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
She went over to my bookshelf and pulled down another volume of the encyclopedia. She flipped through some pages until she found the entry she was looking for, turned the volume around, and pointed at a picture. “Did he look like that?”
The picture showed a kid, about my age, sitting on some sort of fur-covered couch, holding a rifle and wearing what looked like a circus performer’s outfit from the late 1800s. The caption said his name was Jo Jo, the dog-faced boy, a.k.a. Fedor Jeftichew.
“What is hypertrichosis?” I asked.
“A generic medical term for too much body hair. Is that what your hairy man looked like?”
I wanted to agree with her, but I couldn’t.
“Not really,” I said. “He didn’t have that much hair. He had this long, scraggly beard and long, scraggly hair that looked like wires sticking up everywhere. All of it was kind of strawberry blond. You know that color, kind of red, kind of blond?”
She nodded.
“And his body was covered with hair too, but not like this. It didn’t look like a circus freak show or anything. He was just, I don’t know, hairy.”
“Don’t say freak show, Mark, please. I don’t like that.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright. I just don’t like to hear you be mean. People like this can’t help it.”
I nodded. But she had me wondering. “Why’d you show this to me, Mom?”
“Well, first off, you know there’s no such thing as werewolves, right?”
I didn’t want to sound stupid by saying what I really thought, so I sort of shrugged.
“Right?” she said again.
“Well…”
“Oh Mark, no. Baby, listen to me. Werewolves are a fiction. They’re nothing but folklore and the boogeymen of religious lunatics. Organizing the belief in God into religions is the sickest, vilest, most horrific and obscene act humanity has ever committed against itself. And a belief in werewolves is straight out of that superstitious nonsense. They’re fine in horror movies, but to believe in them in real life is an insult to your native intelligence.”
“But Mom, I…”
She said nothing. Just sat there looking at me, waiting for me to finish my thought.
“There’s proof, Mom,” I finally said, and there was as much defiance in my tone as I could muster.
“I’m listening.”
“Well, he’s called the hairy man for one.”
“And…?”
“And the last time he killed people it was on the full moon. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Jeff and Eric and I did. He murdered people three nights in row, and each night was a full moon. He hasn’t killed anybody since then. Here, look.” I slid off my bed and got the calendar from my desk. “See? I circled the dates from June. See the full moon symbol there in the corner?”
“Yes, I see it.”
“That doesn’t seem like strong evidence to you?”
“That this man is a werewolf?”
I paused. “Well, yeah,” I finally said. It had been proof enough for me when Eric pointed it out to me. It had been proof enough to color my opinion with doubt anyway. But from the look on my mom’s face, it clearly didn’t mean anything to her.
“Mark,” she said, “can I tell you something?”
“Sure,” I answered, and dropped down into my desk chair.
“Some people say that the Catholic Church murdered more than fifty thousand people during the course of the Inquisition and the witch trials that went along with it. In a little over two hundred years, they systematically wiped out fifty thousand innocent lives. We’re talking mostly women here, and nearly all of them poor and uneducated women from the fringes of European society. People like gypsies and Jews and newly converted pagans. We’ve led ourselves to believe this romanticized view of the witch trials that it was equals against equals, but that simply doesn’t mesh with the facts. Real life isn’t an Arthur Miller play. Nearly all of the Church’s victims were poor farmers and herbalists and midwives whose only crime was not conforming to the mainstream. The Church picked off the low-hanging fruit in order to assert their dominance over the masses. Does this make sense to you, Mark? The Inquisition was never about good and evil, but about the Church asserting its political strength in Europe’s yet to be assimilated frontiers. Do you understand?”
I wanted to say, No, Mom, I have absolutely no fucking idea what you’re talking about, because I didn’t. But instead I said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“No, you don’t. I can see that. I’m not being plain. I’m sorry. Look, superstition pisses me off. I’m sorry. Let me try to explain. During the height of the Inquisition, if you were odd, or crazy, you were going to be stigmatized. The Catholic Church was the biggest bully on the playground back then, and the weird kids, the helpless ones, those were the ones the Church picked on. Werewolves weren’t a major part of the witch trials, but they did kill people for foolish beliefs like that, and they got their knowledge of what a werewolf was from the same books you’re going over now. I’m begging you, don’t re-create a dark and ignorant time. Don’t look to superstition when the real truth is out there, just waiting for you to discover it.”
I sat there sullenly. She was talking to me like an adult, and I appreciated that, but she could still make me feel a child when she gave me lectures and injunctions. Don’t be ignorant. Don’t be a superstitious fool. Let me tell you about the finer points of Medieval Church politics. I wanted to tell her that none of that meant a rat’s ass to me, but I held my tongue because I knew I couldn’t argue with her without sounding shrill and irrational, which would only prove her point and garner more lectures, more injunctions.
Instead I waited for her to speak.
Finally, she said, “Do you want to know what I think?”
“Sure,” I said, but I’m afraid I sounded a little more petulant than I wanted to sound.
“I showed you that picture of Fedor Jeftichew because I wanted you to see how irrational people can be in the face of people strange to them. In the Middle Ages, and even later in some parts of Europe, he’d have been strung up as a werewolf for sure. And all for a random curveball in his genetic makeup. Luckily, there have been fewer than a hundred documented cases of extreme hypertrichosis since then. I say luckily, but really I shouldn’t even say that. At least hypertrichosis was a strange enough sort of thing to make the uneducated and the ignorant local leaders of the day react along superstitious folk tale lines. But were they the real culprits of the day? No, I don’t think so. I think the real culprit was the Church upper echelon trying to crush what it couldn’t assimilate or understand. The confessions they obtained, whether under torture or at the threat of torture, were as fictitious as the werewolf itself. Your hairy man out there on the marsh, I think he’s nothing but an insane homeless man who’s seen too many bad movies. He’s one of the ones the Church would have strung up for sure. He is the lurker on the threshold, the intruder, the Grendel, but he’s no more a real monster of folklore than Richard Nixon or Pol Pot or Jim Jones.”
“So, you don’t think he deserves to be punished for what he did to Heather?” I asked.
She shook her head vigorously. “Absolutely not. I’m not one of those people who believe the criminally insane deserve a free pass just because they’re insane. For what he did to you, and to Heather, I’d string him up myself. It’s the calling him a werewolf that gets me mad, Mark. Do you see that? I believe you should call a thing what it is, and a crazy mass murderer is just that. Your hairy man is no more a werewolf than Jim Jones was a prophet.”
She waited for a moment for me to say something, anything, but when I didn’t she sighed and rose from the bed and went to my door.
“Mark, I want to smooth out all the wrinkles for you. I do. I want to blast away every roadblock you’re ever gonna face. But I know I can’t always do that. You’re like your dad in so many ways…so strong, so brash. You’ve even got his good looks. But I think you got your hardheadedness from me. You’ve always had to find things out for yourself before you believe them. It was the same with me. Drove my dad crazy, and my mom even crazier. So if you need to find the answers out on your own, look up Johann Weyer. Read what he did, and then come down to dinner. I’m making a salmon loaf.”
With that, she went downstairs.
It took me a while to look away from the empty doorway.
That was, without a doubt, the strangest, and yet the most honest, conversation I’d ever had with my mom, and I’d barely said three sentences to her during the whole of it.
But I knew enough to know that my mom was an intellectual force to be reckoned with. She was smart. And though I did a lot of dumb things as a teenager, ignoring her was not one of them. She was, after all, like a footnote that could not help but be followed once engaged.
I picked the W volume of the encyclopedia up from my bed and turned from werewolf to Weyer, Johann (1515-1588), and started reading about the first real learned opponent of the Inquisition.