佐倉セミナーハウス公開講座　２日目のテキストです

Lila Braun had been living with Farrell for three weeks before he found out she was a werewolf. They had met at a party when the moon was a few nights past the full, and by the time it had withered to the shape of a lemon Lila had moved her suitcase, her guitar, and her Ewan MacColl records two blocks north and four blocks west to Farrell’s apartment on Ninety-Eighth Street. Girls sometimes happened to Farrell like that.

He was lying on his back, watching a chair with his clothes on it becoming a chair again, when the wolf came in through the open window. It landed lightly in the middle of the room and stood there for a moment, breathing quickly, with its ears back. There was blood on the wolf’s teeth and tongue, and blood on its chest.
Farrell, whose true gift was for acceptance, especially in the morning, accepted the idea that there was a wolf in his bedroom and lay quite still, closing his eyes as the grim, black-lipped head swung toward him. Having once worked at a zoo, he was able to recognize the beast as a Central European subspecies: smaller and lighter-boned than the northern timber wolf variety, lacking the thick, ruffy mane at the shoulders and having a more pointed nose and ears. His own pedantry always delighted him, even at the worst moments.
Blunt claws clicking on the linoleum, then silent on the throw rug by the bed. Something warm and slow splashed down on his shoulder, but he never moved. The wild smell of the wolf was over him, and that did frighten him at last – to be in the same room with that smell and the Miro prints on the walls. Then he felt the sunlight on his eyelids, and at the same moment he heard the wolf moan softly and deeply. The sound was not repeated, but the breath on his face was suddenly sweet and smoky, dizzyingly familiar after the other. He opened his eyes and saw Lila. She was sitting naked on the edge of the bed, smiling, with her hair down.
“Hello, baby,” she said. “Move over, baby. I came home.”
Farrell’s gift was for acceptance. He was perfectly willing to believe that he had dreamed the wolf; to believe Lila’s story of boiled chicken and bitter arguments and sleeplessness on Tremont Avenue; and to forget that her first caress had been to bite him on the shoulder, hard enough so that the blood crusting there as he got up and made breakfast might very well be his own. But then he left the coffee perking and went up to the roof to get Grunewald. He found the dog sprawled in grove of TV antennas, looking more like a goat than ever, with his throat torn out. Farrell had never actually seen an animal with its throat torn out.
The coffeepot was still chuckling when he came back into the apartment, which struck him as very odd. You could have either werewolves or Pyrex nine-up percolators in the world, but not both, surely. He told Lila, watching her face. She was a small girl, not really pretty, but with good eyes and a lovely mouth, and with a curious sullen gracefulness that had been the first thing to speak to Farrell at the party. When he told her how Grunewald had looked, she shivered all over, once.

The tip of Lila’s tongue appeared between her lips, in the unknowing reflex of a fondled cat. As evidence, it wouldn’t have stood up even in old Salem; but Farrell knew the truth then, beyond laziness or rationalization, and went on buttering toast for Lila. Farrell had nothing against werewolves, and he had never liked Grunewald.

“Not as though nothing had happened,” Farrell said lamely. “The thing is, it’s still only Lila, not Lon Chaney or somebody. Look, she goes to her psychiatrist three afternoons a week, and she’s got her guitar lesson one night a week, and her pottery class one night, and she cooks eggplant maybe twice a week. She calls her mother every Friday night, and one night a month she turns into a wolf. You see what I’m getting at? It’s still Lila, whatever she does, and I just can’t get terribly shook about it. A little bit, sure, because what the hell. But I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no mad rush about it. I’ll talk to her when the thing comes up in the conversation, just naturally. It’s okay.
“Well, it’s that too,” Farrell agreed, a little embarrassed. “I hate confrontations. If I break up with her now, she’ll think I’m doing it because she’s a werewolf. It’s awkward, it feels nasty and middle-class, I should have broken up with her the first time I met her mother, or the second time she served the eggplant. Her mother, boy, there’s the real werewolf, there’s somebody I’d wear wolf bane against, that woman. Damn, I wish I hadn’t found out. I don’t think I’ve ever found out anything about people that I was the better for knowing.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” Farrell said, but he was still grinning. “Lila’s shrink says she has a rejection thing, very deep-seated, takes us years to break through all that scar tissue. Now if I start walking around wearing amulets and mumbling in Latin every time she looks at me, who knows how far it’ll set her back? Listen, I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, but I don’t want to mess up anyone’s analysis. That’s the sin against God.” He sighed and slapped Ben lightly on the arm. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out, I’ll talk to her.”
But between that night and the next full moon, he found no good, casual way of bringing the subject up. Admittedly, he did not try as hard as he might have: it was true that he feared confrontations more than he feared werewolves, and he would have found it almost as difficult to talk to Lila about her guitar playing, or her pots, or the political arguments she got into at her parties. “The thing is,” he said to Ben, “it’s sort of one more little weakness not to take advantage of. In a way.”

Farrell was suddenly dry-mouthed and shivering with fury. It was her choice of words that did it. “Well, I have reason to believe you’re a suffocating old bitch and a bourgeois Stalinist. How do you like them apples, Mrs. B?” As though his anger had summoned her, the wolf was standing two feet away from him. Her coat was dark and lank with sweat, and yellow saliva was mixed with the blood that strung from her jaws. She looked at Farrell and growled far away in her throat.
“Just a minute,” he said. He covered the receiver with his palm. “It’s for you,” he said to the wolf. “It’s your mother.”

Farrell understood quite clearly that the superintendent was hunting Lila underground, using the keys that only superintendents have to take elevators down to the black sub-sub-basements, far below the bicycle rooms and the wet, shaking laundry rooms, and below the furnace rooms, below the passages walled with electricity meters and roofed with burly steam pipes; down to the realms where the great dim water mains roll like whales, and the gas lines hump and preen, down where the roots of the apartment houses fade together; and so along under the city, scrabbling through secret ways with silver bullets, and his keys rapping against the piece of wood.

ファレルには管理人の男が地下の通路を用いてライラの後を追い続けていることが、しっかりと分っていた。彼は管理人達だけが持っているエレベーターの鍵を使って、建物の地階のもっとずっと下の階のあたりまで降りているのだった。彼等はこうして自転車置き場やじっとりとして振動し続ける洗濯室や、ボイラー室のさらに下方、電気メーターの列が壁を這い、ずっしりとした蒸気パイプが天井を覆っている通路のさらに下方、巨大な水道管が鯨のように身をくねらせ、ガス管の群れが並んで背を丸め、嘴で毛づくろいをしているあたりのさらに下方、ビルの根っこが地中にかすんでいくあたりにまで降りて行くのだ。そうして銀の弾丸を詰めたピストルを手に、板きれに鍵の束をぶら下げたまま、管理人は町の下にめぐらされた秘密の通路を駈けめぐっているのだ。