Just an Old Legend Ch. 05

He just watched her for a time, trying not to think about the letters. That had been so long ago, and he'd tortured himself over it for decades. But a thought came to him. He was aware that she likely couldn't read anything written in his mother tongue, but for some reason, he suddenly found a desire within him that she see that he was not a stupid beast, and that the man in that old love had not been uncaring on his side of it. He thought for a minute, and then got up to walk to a low bookshelf that he'd made long ago. His nose went to the space between it and the wall, and he pushed a little.

Helen watched him, wondering if there were mice in the walls that he smelled now. He couldn't possibly still be hungry, could he? She got up and walked over.

The shelf was mostly empty, and he pushed the corner of his jaw against the wall to lever the shelf away a little with his snout. He hoped that no one had looked there. The shelf shuddered a little, and he pulled back. Helen looked, and saw the corner of a piece of paper on the floor there. She reached in, and felt more paper. In a few seconds, she had a second pile of envelopes.

She stood to examine the letters, and by the postmarks on the faded paper, she knew that she was looking at what the man had sent to Danaya. The man's wife must have brought them along when she'd come. She just didn't know why they'd been hidden there after Danaya had arrived here.

She turned to look at him, wondering how he could have known several things, like what was behind the bookshelf, like knowing that she'd be interested, and why it would be important to her. Had his nose led him here? Or had he been inside this building before? For his part, her friend just walked to the floor in front of the wood stove, lay down and closed his eyes with a deep, long, and very comfortable groan.

Helen sat reading by the light of the old oil lamp. She purposely read very slowly through each of the translation sheets, trying to feel the longing that this woman had felt. This Danaya kept calling him 'Ion'. Helen got that it was his name, but wondered if it was a short form or an endearment, or what, and thought about how it might have been pronounced. She read of her worries for him alone there in a strange and empty land, as he had described it to her, and yet there was her burning hope to hold him again as soon as it could be possible to travel to him. More than anything, Danaya had said, she wanted to feel his arms around her and be safe inside them.

The single translated letter from him to her had stated his joy that between them, she now had enough money for the passage, and how he had trouble sleeping now that he knew she'd be coming soon. He'd said that even working himself into the ground didn't allow him to sleep now that he knew. There were soft and quiet written promises to her of kissing her everywhere. Helen found herself blushing a little at the tender things that they'd written. These must have been a joy to translate, she chuckled, imagining maybe an old spinster engaged by Beamish to do this. She supposed that this letter had been destined to be mailed, but that Danaya had arrived before he'd had a chance to mail it since there was no postmark. A trip to the post office in the town wasn't undertaken in his rowboat lightly. He must have set it aside for the next time that he was going for supplies, Helen surmised.

By the dates, it had been three years that they had been apart. Danaya expressed her sorrow many times that she could likely not give him any children due to her health. She recognized that he had said that it didn't matter to him, but she had the sorrow anyway. Someone like him, she'd written, should have strong sons to help with the work and lovely daughters to be proud of. These were the fears of a woman, Helen recognized, even more real to her in that time and place. Her heart ached a little in sadness for how much they must have loved each other, and what had become of that love here on the island.

Helen's attention kept being diverted by the small sounds that her large friend made as he slept now. His deep breathing was a comfort to her if indeed she now had a possible stalker around. There were the quiet sounds of his twitching, and she hoped to God that he didn't start chasing a rabbit in his dreams. One of his barks, even asleep, could likely wake the dead, she thought.

She looked over at him fondly, happy to have him in her life. There was still the worry of him becoming tame, which she didn't want. She just needed his friendship. She watched him twitch for another moment, but then began to stare hard at him in the low light. He was doing more than twitching.

He was changing, somehow.

She didn't dare to move or even breathe as she watched spellbound. His shape changed slowly, becoming even larger for a moment. She couldn't see much of his face now because of the way that he was lying there, but she knew it must be different now too. The legs had gotten thicker, longer a little, the overall structure had changed, and it kept on. The fur that covered him began to shorten, and the feet that she saw were shortening a bit. His front paws became... hands, the long vicious-looking claws that she was sure that she'd seen there only a moment ago were now - fingernails.

She stood slowly up on shaking legs, careful not to move the chair on the wooden floor. She couldn't help herself - she had to see his face. She crept closer, looking at the muscles there on his thighs. Her eye was drawn involuntarily to his genitals. He sure didn't look much like a wolf there, either. She moved her gaze to slide along his ribcage and she didn't see much there in the way of ribs. It looked to her as though even his muscles had muscles. The shoulder that she could see was probably as large in circumference as her head, she thought, and the bicep which now covered much of his face was probably wider than her waist - from left to right.

She crept quietly to move to where she might get a look at his face. He had black hair - a little longish, perhaps, with a forelock that hung over his eyes a little. The eyelashes, what she could see of them, were normal for an attractive man, and they lived beneath eyebrows that looked kind in sleep like this. His face was in her view now, and even by the dimness of the oil lamp, she almost gasped. He was beautiful to her. For an instant, she saw him as he must have looked as a boy, and that he just had to have had a mischievous side, from the line there at the corner of his mouth. She was lost, thinking that he'd have looked adorable then, the kind of boy whose mother could never scold him for his pranks, not too harshly, anyway.

She almost jumped straight up as he rolled onto his back, but once she'd calmed herself, she kept staring at the wonder of this man, and there was no mistaking what he was now. She wondered for the first time about the legend. There was something of it in front of her here that she was looking straight at, right here and now. If this shit is real, she asked herself, could this be Ion? And if it was Ion, Helen suddenly knew that what Danaya had written was true.

A man like this should have children.

But that was over seventy years ago, she knew. This couldn't be that man today, could it? That man was supposed to have murdered his wife, and left a crudely written confession in his naturally poor English that went on and on about a werewolf. From what she'd read in Danaya's letters and the one from him that had never been mailed, those two had difficulty breathing without each other. The godlike form in front of her certainly didn't look like much of a murderer to her, not with a caring face like that.

With a soft smirk to herself, she admitted that to get to a man like this, she'd happily crawl through a few miles of broken glass, if it meant that he'd notice her with any interest. She'd never thought much of the narcissistic body builders that she'd seen pictures of. They'd never held her interest. She preferred real men. It astounded her to see that the man asleep in front of her now looked more real that any man that she'd ever seen before in her life, though he just couldn't be, could he? Everything there on him had a purpose, and had been built up during hard usage to do something other than meaningless repetitions moving weights in a gym.

She looked around for a moment at the building and thought about the farm. He'd done almost all of this alone. He hadn't done work to build this body, the body was built to do work. She knew the difference, and the results were there in front of her. If he was who she now thought that he might be, then this place had been his gym. All of his bodybuilding had been done before he came here - this was only the end that needed building for him and his woman. To have a man who could do this and be intelligent enough to work out the engineering so that he could do the things that needed more than one man to do,... well, it blew her mind as she remembered wondering at all of the blocks and pulleys that she'd seen in the barn. Now she knew what they'd been for.

As much as she'd tried over the past couple of days to include him in her chatter, he really had been a man all along? How was this possible? She looked at the well-developed musculature in wonder, from his throat to his pectorals, down to his abdomen, the muscles there now pulled down by the rise of his ribcage. Her eyes darted lower and she remembered that she'd held that part of him in her hand and joked about it. If he'd looked like this then, she probably wouldn't have let go of it yet. She looked at one scar there on his chest. It was ragged, the only imperfection that she could see on him, but it had healed that way, she guessed. She walked slowly away to collect her thoughts, looking back over her shoulder.

That's how she stubbed her toe hard against the couch.

There was a word. One word that she would have used here in response to the nerve endings which screamed their messages of pain to her brain. It was a word in the common vernacular, though she used it very seldom herself, and mostly at times like this when she'd want to yell it out loud. She clamped her mouth shut, and bit down on the first letter as she stooped to hold onto her damaged toes.

"Ffff...ffffff........"

Once she had swallowed the pain, she quickly looked back to be sure that she hadn't disturbed him. Her own sound had been very quiet, but the bang against the couch.... Her eyes widened.

He was sitting up, and his thoughtful amber eyes were looking right at her.

Her vision narrowed down instantly to those eyes, and she felt as though he were boring right through her own eyes, directly into her soul.

She was lost, so completely lost, and had one conscious thought that she had heard the tale and the warnings about looking into his eyes. As usual, she thought as her control drifted, she'd done exactly the wrong thing, and now it was far too late for her. If he'd spoken anything understandable to her now, she'd do exactly what he asked, but all he said was, "Please..."

He'd been pulled out of a deepening sleep by her noise. He'd sat up, disoriented and groggy. He stared at her in shock, and for the first time in he didn't know how long, he'd been caught. His muddled mind was scrambling, trying to assemble something coherent for him to act on. He thought that she'd be less afraid of the wolf, and began to shift there as he got to his feet.

The result of his groggy thinking showed in her eyes as sheer horror. To get to the wolf, he had to pass through the middle form, and now towered as he stood, his long ears growing to stand straight up, adding to his formidable size. Recognizing his mistake, he wanted to reassure her that he had no thought of harm to her, but he was already beginning to approach the wolf, and suddenly knew that the wolf couldn't speak, and began a hasty shift back - through the middle form again. He tried even now to talk to her, "P-Please... wait."

It was too much. Whatever spell she might have been under might have held her if he hadn't moved his eyes, but he'd looked down at himself once, and now Helen stood with her pretty mouth agape, quaking from her legs, her arms trembling far outside her conscious control. The rest of her wasn't receiving the appropriate directions from her locked-up brain. The organism that was Helen took over its own management - fight or flight. That's all it had. Fight was right out, so it prepared for flight, and it wasn't about to carry a full bladder around. He stared at the dark spot growing there in her jeans, and wanted desperately to try to calm her, but knowing that if it had gotten to this point, there was no hope of it at all.

What was left of her control struggled to turn and even to grasp the doorknob. That took her three tries - two before she could even close her fingers on it. She pulled the door open, and heard his anguished voice, "Please, .... Do not..."

He was stuck. Frantically, he searched his mind for the English word 'leave'. All he could summon up was the word in Romanian. She began to turn back at the pain in that voice, and saw this large fur-covered animal take one step toward her. He was actually trying to beseech her, but she didn't see it that way. The information passed to her brain by her wide eyes only caused more terror, and in a last-ditch effort, the system went into automatic launch mode. She took the first strong step of the run for her life and then turned as she went.

The edge of the open door caught her solidly just to the left of her nose with a bang.

Helen saw a bright flash as she recoiled backward, and he was already shifting as he moved quickly to catch her before she hit her head on the floor. Helen's vision was a mess of glowing painful sparks on the left side.

The right side saw those concerned amber eyes upside down as he held her up while her body twitched itself toward limpness. She had a slightly nauseating sense that she was sinking. Her last thought was that she had been right.

He did have a caring face.

And then, as the old romances say, she knew no more.