And it is done.
My hands tremble.
The bitter, terrible, disgusting revenge has been repaid. The vendetta accomplished. I retch, vomiting on all fours. And I can’t help but wonder; is this the end? The end of a story where savage wild wolves take my family?
I stagger to my feet, attempting to wipe the blood from my face with my sleeve, though I imagine it only serves to smear across my cheeks like a victorious hunter. I don’t know if the wolf still breathes, I don’t know for sure if it is yet quite dead, but regardless, there is no life to live within its decimated shell of a body. Its pale blue eye stares up at me, empty and unseeing. And I stare back, noticing the weight of the knife in my hand. It has become more. It feels heavier, a burden I did not expect. It carries my curse, my revenge, and my hateful attack that still sickens my bones.
One-by-one, my fingers unfurl from the hilt, and the bloodstained blade falls, its tip penetrating into the soft red snow beside my feet.
Closure. The end of the old. New beginnings. With one last bite of venom, I kick the beast in the guts, it does not react. Then, backing away with unsteady steps, blood drunk, I stumble towards the safety of the doctor’s cabin.
9
I don’t even knock. I half barge and half fall into the doctor’s house, collapsing on the threshold.
“What the…?” Doctor Revel cries. There is a thump of a book on the ground and the clattering of something wooden—a stool or a chair perhaps, I cannot look up to ascertain. I just lay with my blood-smeared face upon the soft rug, hoping it does not stain like my own. The smells of family life lull my thoughts away; the sweetness of fresh bread baking, the musk of smoke and wood smouldering in the open hearth. Fresh sheets must be drying somewhere by the sweet perfumed fragrance enveloping me in a motherly embrace.
“Dear Lord,” the doctor cries. “Renee, fetch some blankets, the child is freezing to death.”
The doctor holds my limp wrist in his fingers, feeling for my pulse. But all I want to do is close my eyes to forget the blinding pain and biting cold… the terrible flashes of nightmarish images replaying in my mind.
Within moments, a soft, heavy warmth covers my body and a wet flannel wipes clean my hands, though not my soul.
“Don’t worry about the blood on her hands,” Doctor Revel says to his wife. He flips me onto my back and the world lurches within my stomach. With firm fingers, he opens one of my eyes, then the other. But I fail to see anything except the flash of fur and fang dancing on the canvas of my mind.
“Quickly,” he says from somewhere far away. “It’s Scarlet’s granddaughter. Looks like another wolf attack. Help me carry her to the fire, she’s a bloody deadweight.”
Hands grapple my wrists and ankles and I feel the world move, then a delightful warmth and crackle as I am set down. The doctor begins tearing at my clothes, his hands running along my body. I cannot protest, for I cannot move.
“Where’s the wound?” Renee’s soft voice tinkles and there is an unnerving and wanting silence even to my half-addled mind. “All this blood, there must be a wound.”
More tearing of clothes, more feeling of hands. More time and space and yet still I cannot rouse myself to say the words I must.
“I still cannot find the injury,” Doctor Revel says, his hands still searching my body.
“Perhaps she found someone else attacked? Perhaps she tried to save them like she did her grandma?” suggests the tinkling voice. “We should go out, see who’s out there, perhaps she came only to relay a message?”
“Out there? With the wolf at large once more?”
I can’t let them leave me here, not without finding the festering wound on my arm. I have already lost so much, I do not want to lose my arm as well, or worse. Perhaps it’s the noose of death gripping the edges of my subconscious and the windpipe within my throat, but my eyes fling open.
“Red!” Doctor Revel calls in his deep resonate voice. “Thank the heavens. What happened, who’s injured?”
“My arm,” I croak. My voice sounds weird, tinny and not my own. The doctor picks up my left arm. “No,” I say, “the other.”
Another long, heavy pause. My gaze begins to focus. I see the worried stare between husband and wife, their silent fears as they look at my arm and to each other once more.
“That bad?” I ask trying to sound a little light or hopeful, but sound neither.
“Red?” The doctor asks. His voice solid and professional. He is not talking to me as a long time family friend anymore. “Red, what happened… out there?”
“My arm!” I scream, cursing their concern for the dead wolf. “Tell me, how bad is it!”
But he doesn’t tell me, instead he places his hand on my clammy forehead. “She has a fever,” he says to his wife, then to me, “is anyone else injured?”
He speaks slowly, as if I am a child that might not understand his simple words. I gather just enough strength to sit up, though it takes every ounce I have. Grappling my arm, I shove the wound, oozing black blood, to his face. “Tell me, please? Will it kill me?”
“Will what kill you?”
“The wound!” I scream.
“There is no wound.” The doctor’s eyebrows scrunch together—his forehead a ploughed and furrowed field of lost hope.
My mouth drops open as I stare at him, then my septic wound, and back to him again. I hear his words but am unable to process what he’s saying, unable to process my own thoughts.
“It could be the fever,” he whispers to his wife. “The fever can cause hallucinations. Or perhaps it’s something else, some way to deal with the internal pain of losing Scarlet to the wolves like her mother before.”
“I’m… I’m not hallucinating…” I say but am unsure if the words leave my lips or simply circulate in my mind.
“But that does not explain the blood,” Renee says, and I can’t tell if her whispering is quieter still or if I’m slipping away from the world.
I claw at consciousness, grasp it tight. “What about my blood, my black blood!” I scream and this time they both look at me. My wound blisters with searing pain. “It’s right there between your fingers.”
The doctor shakes his head and with an all too mournful face, says, “The girl is losing her mind.”
Then their words are just mumbles and muffles as I fade into a place that does not exist.
Interlude - Everything
Fangs, flesh, rotting blood. Claws, fur, moon. Images flicker and morph, a continual dream of doom with no sense or meaning.
You can’t have her.
You can’t have her.
You can’t have her.
Grandma’s voice. Grandma’s call. Swirling in my head filled with fragments of moments past.
Blades, wounds, fading life. Consciousness, madness, a blood-dripped knife. Trees enclosing. Moon bearing down. A howl. A promise. A change.
She’s losing her mind.
On repeat. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over… Has my mind already gone? Gone where? Where am I? Who am I?
Four holes in my arm, calling me home.
Be quiet. Be still. Rest in this place.
No. You can’t have her.
Tick tock tick tock.
My grandmother’s clock stares at me—its face a full moon. Its pendulum a swaying knife dripping with blood. I’m losing sense of time, rhyme, life.
I fight it. I fight this venom in my blood and claw my way out of the dream…
10
I wake with a start, jolting upright on the too soft bed. Sunbeams force their way through the window shutters—golden lines of light gilding all it touches within the dim shadows.
“Red? Oh, thank God.” Blaxton all but pins me back to the bed with his embrace. His scent is intoxicating and confusing and I don’t know where I am.
Feeling my unease, he collects himself, his ruggedly handsome face pale and gaunt with worry. He rests a hand on my forehead and he smiles. Despite myself,
I cannot help but smile back and for one sweet moment, none of this has happened. Grandma. The funeral. The killing of the beast. And yet…
“I did it,” I say, triumphant. “I killed the wolf that mauled Grandma.”
His smile fades and another look takes over his features. What is it? Pain? Sadness? Pity?
The door bursts open and Doctor Revel blusters through the doorway.
“Thank the heavens. You’re awake.” His face is red from the cold, his breath short. His hands, although clean, still has traces of blood sticking to the cuticles around his bitten down nails. He looks at me in the way only a doctor can, and gulps. “Are you, well?”
“Thirsty,” I say and the doctor nods.
“Of course. I’ll fetch you water. Blaxton, perhaps you will assist me?”
Blaxton frowns at the doctor then smiles at me apologetically. His thick lips now pulled into a tight line. He rises and follows the doctor from the room, though he clings to my hand with an outstretched arm until only our fingers intertwine, finger tips, then I feel nothing but space.
A space and a private peace. The beast is dead, and I killed it.
Looking down at a clean night slip I’m wearing, I realise someone has washed the blood from my body and I can’t help but wonder who. The thought of Blaxton seeing my naked skin beneath my clothes both thrills and terrifies me, the idea of his hands trailing the contours of my waist, my hips, my… I calm myself with the realisation the deed was probably carried out by Renee, the doctor’s wife and any thoughts of passion are dampened.
The wounds on my arm are clean, and without the oozing blood and puss obscuring my view, I can see their depths more clearly. They are no longer mere puncture wounds the size of a wolf’s malicious fangs, but seem to emulate four moon phases of the blackened eclipse. And the veins, or vines, connecting them, dance in intricate patterns. A delicate dance of shooting stars and expansion. I can’t help but stare. Stare deep down into those holes. Losing myself in another universe.
Falling.
Compelled.
Tick tock.
A cluttering of a bowl in the kitchen breaks the strange hold on me, and I shake my head, woozy, before checking if my strange compulsion has been witnessed. It has not, but it has reminded me of the doctor’s last words before I fell out of consciousness.
There is no wound… The fever could be causing hallucinations.
But I have no fever now, and yet the mark is still here as clear as day.
There is the mumble of hushed conversation in the next room. I recognise Blaxton’s tone and I strain to hear the words they wish to hide from me.
“Grief is a powerful emotion, so too the denial of it,” says the doctor. “It can push people to the edge of their emotional limits—make them do things they would otherwise never consider. Tread lightly, for the worst thing one can do with a patient fraying on the edges of madness is to confront them with their own fantasies.”
“You don’t think she…” Blaxton trails off and there is an awkward silence.
“I think we need to be on our guard. Allow her to talk with you, believe—allow her to think you believe in her tales, hallucinations, anything else that might somehow give us clues to her real mental state and capacity.”
“I will not deceive her,” Blaxton says, his voice louder now, a sharp edge to its tone.
“No, no.” The doctor’s voice placating. “Merely for her own benefit, allow her to open up to you. We need to get to the bottom of this before any further action is taken.”
Blaxton starts to speak but his words are cut off by a crashing door and a roaring call.
Woolsey. I can hear that rich tenor to his silken smooth voice despite his bitter tones. “It happened last night, so I am told. Why did no one alert me of this massacre sooner?”
“Please, Master Frey,” the doctor hushes. “Please, this is a delicate matter and Red is in a delicate state.”
Delicate? If there is one way I do not want Woolsey and his hungry eyes to think of me, it’s delicate.
“Red?” Woolsey says. “What is she doing here? What has she to do with this blood bath?”
I rise, and tip toe between shadow and light as the sunbeams continue to push their way through the shutters of the darkened room. I peep through the gap in the door, and some relentless force pulls me forward.
“I have everything to do with the blood bath. It was me,” I say through clenched teeth as I tramp into the room. The front door is still open and the low setting sun blazes on the snow outside. In the distance I see the bulk of the dead surrounded by stains of crimson and revenge. “It was me, last night. I killed the wolf who attacked Grandma—the wolf who attacked me.”
The doctor crosses himself and takes a step away. Woolsey and Blaxton stare at one another. No one speaks. I shuffle on the spot, suddenly aware I am dressed only in a nearly translucent white night shift. It is the doctor’s wife Renee who fills the heavy silence.
“It was not a wolf we are talking about, Red,” she begins. Her face is pale and drawn. Her hands are shaking. “Kaya, her body was found just yards from the here—”
Kaya, the girl who feigned and fawned over Woolsey at Grandma’s funeral.
“—The wolf killed Kaya? How? When?” I ask, amazed that the beast could have resurrected itself from my attack, and I begin to wonder, again, about superstitious gossip and full moon curses.
Woolsey bites his lip. Blaxton runs his hands through his thick blonde hair and turns his face from me. The doctor slumps in his chair making dust particles explode upwards to dance in a stray sunbeam.
Renee takes one minuscule step toward me. Her hands are held in a strange way at her sides, as if any moment she may turn and take flight. “Kaya was not attacked by a wolf, Red. She was killed—murdered.”
Murdered.
Tick tock.
Fangs and flesh and rotting blood.
“Murdered?” I repeat, replaying last night’s attack in my mind. The one blue eyes staring up at me in the snow.
“Yes. And the murderer left their knife next to her body…”
And the murderer left their knife…
“What about the wolf’s body? Where did you find that?” Perhaps it’s the wrong question when a young girl has been found dead, but I can’t think straight, my mind, it shatters. Renee shakes her head a sure ‘no’. Fragments of memory and imagination spread outwards into the universe. “But I killed the wolf. I killed the wolf just there!” I cry, if only to remind myself of what really happened. I point outside to a lifeless bulk in the distance, surrounded by crimson stained snow. They all follow the line of my finger. Nobody looks back.
“That’s Kaya’s body,” Blaxton says but he looks directly at Woolsey, whose eyes shift, uneasy. “There was no wolf found.”
There was no wolf found.
There is no wound.
But there is a knife.
And I know I left it in the snow next to the fur-covered body.
11
A loaded silence. The ticking of time stops, hovers. The world holds its breath.
Outside, a dark cloud tracks over the sun, devouring the morning light and replacing it with shadows. Shadows of doubt. Shadows of suspicion. The gloom creeps along the snow from the open door, consuming the once glinting light. Its shadow prowls over the threshold, moving along the floorboards towards the tip of my toes. I cannot bear to look at the faces I know are staring at me.
“Red?” Doctor Revel asks quietly, as if I were a wild animal that may attack at any moment. “I need to ask you something…” He hesitates for so long I am forced to look at him, to read his face, his terrified and horrified face. “Are you quite sure a wolf killed your grandmother?”
His words, his accusation slams into my chest, gripping my bruised and assaulted heart. I stagger backwards as the unspoken words spell themselves out in the chilling air.
“You think I made it up? You think I murdered my––”
“Doctor!” Blaxton y
ells, cutting me off. In three rushed strides, he is at my side. “You can’t possibly be accusing her of…”
An unspeakable accusation.
Blaxton pulls me to him, wrapping me entirely into his protective embrace. The doctor raises one eyebrow and turns to the crimson-stained snow outside. To the bulk of a dead body and my knife.
Woolsey glares, his nostrils flare. He says not a word but his venom is palpable even from the other side of the room, splitting through the gaps between Blaxton and myself; penetrating, menacing, but nowhere as near as dangerous as my own thoughts.
Was it a wolf I killed last night?
Was it a wolf that killed Grandma?
There is no wound.
She is losing her mind.
Grief.
Denial…
No. Their accusations are ludicrous. It can’t possible be. I know the facts. I was there, so I should know. Nobody else stood witness.
Nobody else stood witness…
Nobody can back up my claims.
Kaya is dead, and my knife will be found next to her body.
But I have my wounds to prove the wolf’s attack on Grandma. The wounds the doctor cannot see. The wounds his wife cannot see.
“Blaxton,” I whisper. “My arm, please tell me you can see the wounds on my arm?” My voice quivers because I am not mad, despite what they think, yet I can find no way to prove my sanity.
Blaxton’s embrace unravels. He looks to the doctor to my arm and back to the doctor again. His lips pull into the tight line, an attempted smile resembling nothing of the sort. My mind whirls. I am so sure. I see the wounds, moving, coalescing, shooting stars and expanding skies. And somehow, the wound no longer pains me, as if it has become me, but nobody else can see it.
“You can’t see it either?” I sob, backing away.
Moon Bitten Page 3
