Homo Homini Lupus

homo homini lupus

When they are six John and Mary build a city in their bedroom. They stretch the sheets between two chairs and make buildings, up-end chests, crawl between shelves, create fuchsia rivers with Mother's scarves. They clamber onto the bed, stacked high with pillows, and proclaim themselves rulers of this land of cross-purpose and disarray.

Father indulges them for a week, but after slipping in the river and demolishing the Palace of Chairs he forces them to put everything back in its place.

But cities shift, and the lines we see are just the edges of a page.

Lines of cereal creating the courtyard of the Palace on the breakfast table, the jug of milk forming the Imperial Fountain. A maze of books becoming the dangerous alleys of the Thieves' Quarter and off to the left, the Lamp-Shade temple which reveals the message of their Gods in the patterns of light-and-shadow against the wallpapered sky.

John is always the first, and he always looks back for her; she is so afraid that one day he will turn into a pillar of salt.

He helps her up, pushes her forward, holds her steady.

He wins medals at school for sprinting, for mathematics and for model behaviour. She plays noughts-and-crosses in all of her notebooks and it always late. He is tone-deaf and she plays the violin like it is an extension of her shoulder, a wooden wing.

Mother and Father buy John chocolate for every A on his report card and muss his hair and ask him to recite the seven-times-table in front of visitors. They lock Mary's violin in a high cupboard and tell her to study.

She cries and John decides to steal it back.

That is the first time John disobeys his parents, and the first time he bleeds enough to leave stains on the carpet. Mother and Father find him sprawled on the floor with the side of his face split open, clutching Mary's violin in his hands. They are so shocked that they forget about Mary. After he's been bandaged up and fed spoonfuls of sweet black tea he gets down on one knee in the centre of their city and presents Mary her violin.

He says, "They can't ever destroy the city between us, Mary."

She plays for him, then and the music makes their imaginary buildings flicker into reality.

John is eight when he finds himself with his teeth pressed against her throat.

The sun rises before he tastes blood, but it takes a few moments of being human for him to be able to unclamp his jaws. He hears the pound of her heart in his head long after that, and sees the wolf reflected in her eyes.

Mother and Father don't believe her until the next full moon, and the day after that they hire men from the next town to attach manacles to the walls and steel bars to the doorframe.

John sits in a corner as they measure his room, small and shivering.

Father says he's a lunatic to the workmen by way of explanation but their real explanation is in the textured feel of the money pressed into their hands.

Mother tugs Father's sleeve and asks, "What about a doctor?"

Father shakes his head and looks beyond Mother's head. "There is no cure for this," he says knowingly.

Looking at his row of medals and the framed certificate for model behaviour, Father's expression softens. He tries to pat John on the head but John's hair feels like clumps of fur to his touch.

Mary is the one who locks him in on those nights and feeds him.

Meat shoved quickly through the flap in the door, risking her fingers each time she does. In the mornings she steps into his room with a handkerchief pressed over her nose and diverts her eyes from his blood-stained mouth, his claw-like fingers. She unlocks the manacles deftly, so deftly for a little girl and then rushes out of the room.

Mother makes all her favourite dishes for breakfast and they eat while John throws up raw meat in the bathroom.

Father comes home later than usual that evening and gets down on one knee and presents Mary with a new violin case.

Cities shift; but John believes theirs will remain between their hands forever. Always within their grasp. And that is true, to an extent. Their city turns to dust beneath the glare of the full moon and solidifies as the earth swings away.

John takes Mary by the waist and whirls her around the room, and it's like old times except when he dips her he realises that she's trembling.

He says, "Don't leave me, Mary."

She swallows, and ever-so-slowly places a hand on his shoulder. "There are cities between us," she says, softly, but it feels like an echo to John.

John Lupin is nine, and it is an age of rationality.

Physics-class existence: action and reaction, cause and effect.

Sometimes he creates a memory: a dark night, walking home late after an extra class and the tenderness of a kiss melting into a bite at the last moment.

Or: a rattling at his bedroom window, a scream stifled into the back of a stranger's hand and tearing pain. But there are no scars to ground his memory, and his mind unravels them under the cold precise noon light.

Mary finally gets up the courage one afternoon, and so she squares her shoulders and looks him in the eye and asks, "Why?"

The almost-memories press against the backs of his lips, slide against his tongue but he can speak nothing but the truth to her and so he says, "I don't know."

Mary plays the violin when guests come over and John, with his fatigue and pallid skin and dark circles, stays in the bedroom. It's too hard to explain the once-a-month absences and so he doesn't go to school any more, and it's Mary who brings home the praise from her music teacher, the creative writing prize and when John congratulates her Mary can't meet his eyes.

John is always first, and Mary is so very afraid that she'll be second.

John Lupin turns ten, and he begins to doubt.

The stories he has read weave their own existence within the walls of his bedroom. They wait for the magic that escapes with his breath and animate his plastic figurines, his curtains, his night-lamp. They enact Little Red Riding Hood in a makeshift theatre to no audience over&over over&over until the magic runs out.

John wakes early in he mornings to rearrange the dolls on his windowsill and rehang the curtains but he cannot explain how they are now a different colour.

The first time he notices how much they look like wolves is when he sits down shakily to breakfast. Father and Mother have become thin and rangy, skin unsticking from their bones but Mary's stretches even more tightly. Their eyes are always hungry now, and their sharp fingers pick constantly at the frayed edges of their clothes.

Mary spoons out the broth into three bowls and Father pushes a portion of meat towards him roughly; he can eat nothing but raw meat now.

They watch him eat the meat as they spoon the thin, watery substance into their mouths. Their stomachs, their eyes, their fingers burn. John feels the weight of the meat in his stomach.

They have been living on water and resentment.

He gets up with a clatter and stays in the bathroom until he's throwing up bile.

Three days before the full moon:

John paces from one end of his bedroom to the other, ignoring the ache in the back of his legs.

Mary scrubs at the manacles until her hands bleed and then cries when Mother asks her about it.

When full moon comes this time she pushes a few bones through the slit and they splinter in his throat. He crawls under the bed and stares up at the moon, but when he opens his mouth to howl he coughs up blood. When he turns back into human form his fingernails are bloody from scratching on the door.

John has eaten nothing in almost a month, drinking licks of water from the frost forming on the window. The meat rots in a pile at his door but if they notice the smell, they do not comment on it. He stays in his room and reads books, fingers spreading reverently over the delicate diagrams, the careful print.

He does not know whether it is the hunger or the fatigue or something else altogether that makes him see the bearded man rise out of the pages wearing a pointed hat and smiling and wishing him a happy eleventh birthday. It has been so long since John has seen that expression that he shrinks back.

The man says, "I am Hope."

No. He says something else, a name, but that is what he is to John.

Hope says, "There is a way out."

John has little choice but to believe him.

He falls out of his bedroom window one morning- at least that is what he tells himself- but the point is that when he hits the ground he bounces.

And he realises: it is my name.

Fate.

To be named a wolf is to be a wolf.

Fate as the stranger bending bending for a kiss. Fate as the spinner of stories.

He begins to imagine his words caught between quotation marks, set down on a page.

That night he twists until he can hear the click of his spine, and the click of the muzzle slipping from his jaw. He knits together a memory with the warmth of blood, the solidity of flesh, the purity of bone and there are scars to pull the memory from conjecture to reality.

He wakes with his own blood drying on his teeth, his lips frozen in a snarl. He no longer imagines his words scribbled down like a sheet of dialogue but his nightmares are always of slipping into the space between the pages of a book.

Later he says: I was a very small boy when I received the bite.

But he still knows: names are important.

When the full moon comes he is so hungry that he tears at his own flesh, but can swallow nothing. He pushes his body into a corner and stretches his back against the wall and tries to fade into it. For the first time, John surrenders to the wolf, surrenders to oblivion. The wolf breathes, breathes and whimpers.

The sounds of the violin filter into his room through the slit in the door.

The notes compel him to his legs, standing shakily on his paws. Mary is playing one of her favourite pieces- perhaps Bach, the wolf cannot remember- all he knows is that it is beautiful.

She did not even bother to manacle him this time and so he simply pads to the door and raises himself on his hind legs. He pushes and then pushes again and then finally throws the weight of his body against the door and pants as it crumbles. Mary drops the violin with a scream as he advances toward her, but he knows that he is safe; he cannot even move his jaws because of the pain.

He gets closer and tries to push her violin towards her, to make her continue playing, to make her understand- the music pulls their imaginary city into reality, and it flickers tantalisingly before his eyes.

He tries to open his mouth to explain it to her, but all that emerges is a low whine.

Mary screams, and drops her violin. It breaks into two.

Father picks up a crystal vase from the table. He swings it at John threateningly, like a lion tamer, hissing, "Back! Get back!"

John feels the strength leave him with his next breath and drags himself backwards, slowly, slowly, as Mary sobs into Mother's arms. "It is a beast!" She cries. "A monster! A terrible, terrible monster which eats our food and sleeps in John's bed and tries to kill us!"

Mother pats her on the head rhythmically.

"You saw it, Papa- even you, Mama!-- he waits for a chance to leap on us, to tear our throats. I refuse to give my brother's name to this monster!" Mary's trembling breaths cut into each sentence. "It is not simply the full moon- he has changed even under the skin, he is a werewolf even in human form."

"She's right," Father says, pushing the door closed. "She's right, Mama."

Mary shakes her head and says, "This has become unbearable."

The door clicks shut and signals silence, but John has heard enough.

Midnight brings its own torment with it, and the worst torment is hope.

Hope says, "Magic."

Hope tells him of a place far away filled with ghosts and Tooth-Flossing Stringmint and plants that wind around your ankles and portraits that talk.

Hope says, "You can leave this all behind."

John has little choice but to believe him.

If there's one thing John remembers it is that: names are important.

And so, he picks a new one from the shelf of history books. His name becomes both cause and effect, because now John knows that the two are not so separate.

He says his name to himself over&over like a chant. "Remus Lupin."

Cause and effect.

They step into his room in the morning of September 1st, with the last traces of moon peeling away from his bed and find his corpse stretched out on the bed. Mary steps forward while Father and Mother curl their fingers around each other.

"He was so thin," she says, and slowly slips her arms underneath his body.

Now: John Lupin is nothing but flesh and fur.

Now: a smiling skeleton walks the halls of Hogwarts.