Free Love and Sleep by John Crowley

authority to anyone, who assume that all proscriptions are ad hoc and negotiable and that those in power are mere men, more or less like themselves. Pierce might do all he could to avoid being subject to the power of others, of rule-makers and -enforcers, but he neither thought to question their right to enforce their own rules, nor supposed their rules were bendable. Joe Boyd always did.
    "You don't have to do that,” he said to Bird, who was busy mulching and tidying a bare spot that Sister Mary Philomel had decided would be a flower garden in the spring. “Just because she says so."
    "I don't mind."
    "This isn't her place,” Joe Boyd said. “This isn't her property."
    "I don't mind."
    "Are you going to do everything she says? Would you jump in the river if she said?"
    "That's dumb."
    " You're dumb."
    Their father, about to sit on the toilet of the bathroom beneath whose window the garden was being laid out, overheard this, and came out.
    "Joe. Why are you pestering her?"
    "I'm not.” He thrust his hands in his pockets defensively as Sam approached him.
    "Huh? Why are you taunting her? She's doing something useful and beautiful, and you're doing nothing."
    "I wasn't."
    "You can just leave her alone. Go find something to do yourself. I can think of several things if you don't have any ideas."
    He turned to go, putting his magazine under his arm; Joe Boyd went off, but as he did so he tossed a final sneer at Bird for her submission: Teacher's pet.
    Sam heard him, and rounded on him.
    Sam never hit his children, and almost never raised his voice to them: he had never needed to. Bird watched now in horror as he seized Joe Boyd by the collar with both hands and thrust him hard against the wall.
    "Did you hear what I just said?" His nose inches from Joe Boyd's face. “Did you hear me tell you to leave her alone? Why did you just turn right around and insult her? Huh ?"
    There was no answer, and Joe Boyd knew better than to make one: and yet even looking into Sam's furious face his gray eyes were unflinching, unafraid, alert to possibility. Bird, scandalized, dismayed to have been the occasion for this outrage, wouldn't forget his courage or his cool.
    Pierce that afternoon was hiding in the attic with a book.
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    Five
    WEREWOLF: Men (more rarely women) who occasionally have the form of wolves are Werewolves. The greatest question concerning Werewolves, and one debated since the Middle Ages by learned writers and doctors, is whether Werewolves can actually change their forms, or only think they have changed them; whether, as a result of their nature or through the power of the DEVIL (q.v.), they are actually capable of transformation, or rather suffer from a delusion (Lycanthropy) in which they believe themselves to be so transformed, though they remain human. The psychological explanation came to predominate, though it explains far fewer recorded instances than the physiological.
    Across one end of the cool dusty-gray attic Pierce had run a rope, and on the rope had hung four old drapes he had found there, flowered with maroon roses; behind them, lit by the pointed attic window, was the clubhouse of the Invisible College—not of the physical chapter, but of the other, the one that consisted of Pierce alone. Sometimes the adventures that the College undertook up here were told of in the regular nighttime meetings: sometimes not.
    Augustine thought that what is transformed is the phantasticum, a sort of spectral double that goes out in a form able to be seen, while the sleeping person dreams its experiences. More than one Werewolf, however, has claimed that his wolf's pelt is a real part of him, only turned inward like a hairshirt (versipilis). One Werewolf who claimed that his hair was inside was so badly cut by the surgeons trying his claim that he died. That was not, seemingly, the “inside” of which he spoke.
    Pierce shuddered, but not from cold. He put his finger on the page,