Draw the Veil

V. The White Elephant

After the incident_sorry, the attack_things changed in the Lupin household. Somewhat. Eventually, my mum and dad decided that the best way of handling my 'condition' was to lock it away and throw away the key. We were not allowed to speak of it. We were not allowed to ever say the words aloud. We could never call 'the incident' what it was. We could never call me what I was: a werewolf. It was as if I had some shameful secret, as if I were gay. (Which is kind of an ironic comparison, really.)

The firewhiskey my father drank that night was not his last. Every night, he would come home from work, kiss my mother on the cheek, make polite small talk over dinner, and retire to his study to read his books and drink glass after glass of the stuff. He smelled of alcohol all the time. Even now, the smell of firewhiskey reminds me of him.

At one point, I read that some people who live with such grief and guilt end up taking their own lives. I thought of my father's liver, and more importantly, his very soul, and realised he was doing the same, only very slowly. My father was never one to rush things.

My mother, meanwhile, dealt with the situation by becoming an exaggeration of her former self. She became even more overprotective of me. She spent even more time cooking and cleaning. She smiled all the time, no matter what happened, anxiously trying to pretend that everything was OK.

As for me...well, I was OK most of the time. The frequency of my nightmares of the attack decreased steadily. Instead, they were replaced by even worse dreams, ones in which I would hurt and kill my family and neighbours. In some, I would attack people while still in human form. One still haunts my sleep to this day:

The moon is full and bright, lighting up the darkness around me. I realise that I am in the back garden of my childhood home. A soft breeze cools my skin, and I look down to find that I am completely naked, but for some reason, this does not bother me.

I am overwhelmed by an urge for human blood, the only thing my animal mind knows will slake my overpowering thirst. In that moment, I know that I am both human and animal_either a human who has tapped into his primal urges or an animal with a human body, I am never sure.

I walk through the garden towards the back door and slip inside as silent as a thief. A large butcher knife is glinting in the moonlight, lying on the kitchen counter from when my mother had prepared dinner hours before. My human side knows that I will need it because I have no claws or fangs, so I pick it up, admiring the blade, testing its sharpness against my finger and licking off the resulting drops of blood.

In no time, I have gone up the stairs to my mum and dad's room. I push the door open as gently as possible but have forgotten that it creaks rather loudly on its hinges.

'What the hell?' my father mutters drowsily and looks up to see me standing over him, a knife in my hand and a grin spreading across my face. 'Remus!' he shouts, which wakens my mother, who is lying there in her ridiculous head scarf and curlers. 'Nancy, get out!' he shouts to her, but she is frozen to the bed, staring at me in terror.

What happens next is a blur of blood spatters and screams. I am only glad that it is over so quickly and that I wake up so soon after because I am vaguely aware of what my dream self does next. I do not want to think about it.

I never told my parents about that or any dream. It was part of my lycanthropy, and my lycanthropy was not something we discussed.

My parents took me out of the muggle school I attended to tutor me at home and forbade me from seeing any of my mates at all. 'You might...hurt them,' my mother would say, desperately searching for a reasonable-sounding explanation of these new rules. 'And they might find out what you are.'

Deprived of my mates and with only a neurotic mother and alcoholic father for company, I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading my father's old books, losing myself in stories of people who had better lives than I.

Every so often, I would go out into the back garden and ride lazily around on my broomstick, glad for a little fresh air.

But always, I would just return to my room and my stories. Some of them were adventures_stories of pirates or powerful wizards. Others were romantic tales of handsome men and beautiful women in fantastical surroundings. But I remembered one story most particularly, a story by a muggle author named Franz Kafka, a story called The Transformation: Metamorphosis.

In it, a young man named Gregor awakens to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. At first, the transformation is merely a practical concern, but over time, he becomes less and less human, scurrying around on the floor and eating rotten food. Horrified, his parents lock him in his room. And when he tries to escape one day, his father kills him.

I thought of that story often.