The Weirdness(80)
Billy remembers her, last night, asking him whether he was bigger than Denver, stronger than Denver. But he doesn’t interrupt.
“And I realize,” she continues, “that I could do something else, too. At this point I’ve turned into a wolf maybe six times, once a month, ’cause it’s like that? But at this moment I understand that I could force the change, that I could just will myself into that form. I’d never done that before, but I could suddenly feel it in me. The wolf. I could feel it wanting to get out. It wanted to get out and take Joseph Meisner apart.”
“But you don’t do that,” Billy says, quietly. “You don’t just kill people.”
“No,” Elisa says. “I don’t just kill people. But in this particular moment I wanted to kill this guy. Just for a second. But that was enough. ’Cause that’s the thing about being a sex-demon wolf thing. You do what you want. And so I tore through my clothes and leapt down on him and crushed his throat in my jaws while Vicki stood there and screamed. I killed this guy, left his body mutilated in an alley, and just as a side effect I basically put the torch to my entire life in Philly. But you know what? It felt good. I liked it. Am I proud of it, sitting here now, talking to you? No. Was it the worst thing I ever did? Yes. But I wanted to do it, and then I did it. So you want to know what it’s like? That’s what it’s like.”
She climbs back into the front seat and they drive on for some more minutes, all of them silent.
Finally the van rounds the final corner of its route. Jørgen visors his eyes with his hand and peers through the windshield. “That’s it, isn’t it?” he asks. “I think I can see it.”
“Yeah,” Billy says. “That’s it.” The cloak no longer works on him, for some reason. He sees the tower, as menacing as it’s ever looked, maybe more so. It seems to be palpably crackling with import, as though it is siphoning relevance and meaning from the surrounding city, which has begun to seem fake somehow, a generic urban setting from a film set in New York but shot in Toronto. The gallery with the Styrofoam art-shapes is now displaying prints of Instagrammed photos of food.
Jørgen yanks the steering wheel to the right and pulls two tires up onto the sidewalk. He cuts the engine and gets out of the van, and right then everything seems to go dim for a second, to waver slightly, and Billy feels a variant of nausea stir in his guts. He stifles a burp. It tastes like roast beef.
“This is what it feels like, isn’t it?” Billy says. “When it happens?”
“Absolutely,” says Elisa, wriggling out of Jørgen’s leather coat.
Jørgen opens the van’s side door. “Clothes,” he says to Billy, pulling his shirt over his head and throwing it into the back. “Off.”
“Okay,” Billy says. He kicks off his shoes and begins to work the zipper on the jumpsuit, while he still has hands.
He cracks and extends.
This time, the change isn’t as bad: breaking the bounds of his body seems easier now that he’s already done it once; it’s as though he has permanently limbered himself somehow. He does not vomit.
He hops out of the van and lands on all fours.
The others have changed, too. The three of them stand there for a moment, hell-wolves, bristling on the sidewalk in the Chelsea dusk, wind-borne trash whirling around them. Two pedestrians at the far end of the street pause in their stride, turn and go the other way.
It is time.
Billy leads the charge. Loping again, straight toward the red door. Somewhere in the back of his mind the part of him that is Billy wonders how, exactly, they’re going to open the door: it would be his typical luck for them to get this far, this close to saving the world, only to be undone because none of them could work a doorknob.
But the wolf knows what to do. The wolf stares at the door, focuses on its surface, and something demonic rises in it. Something with powers.
His vision goes tunnely at the edges.
He intensifies his glare and channels hellish force out of the holes in his skull. It is as though his vision is a blade. It is as though his vision is a cold steel push knife being punched into the door again and again. The thought that a door could stop him seems ludicrous. It’s just wood. It’s just base matter, crude, destructible. The door trembles and warps and creaks and splinters. The red paint pulverizes; flakes of it now coat his shaggy muzzle. The brass knob smokes slightly, deforms, pops free. It takes all of ten seconds for the door’s hinges to give way.
The second door is made of metal but it yields even easier. And then Billy’s in the Starbucks. His jaws are open. It is fair to say he is slavering. Billy watches alarm crack through the blank look of the entranced employees. They scatter, their aprons billowing, the spell broken, apparently. But Billy doesn’t care about them. He’s here for Ollard.