Imprisoned at Werewolf Keep (Werewolf Keep Trilogy)

by Nhys Glover

  ‘He’s a ghost, Cassie. And he’s only ever seen shortly before someone…’ She broke eye contact and sat down heavily on a cushioned kitchen chair.

  ‘A ghost? No, there was nothing ghostly about the man I saw in the garden. He was as solid and real as you or me.’

  ‘Was he? That’s odd. Mostly he’s described as an apparition. His details are clear, but he’s not solid. People see through him.’

  ‘I definitely couldn’t see through this man, Marnie. Maybe someone is playing a practical joke. Could someone be trying to scare you? Has anyone been pestering you to sell again?’

  ‘No dear, not since that developer who bought the rest of the property gave up on me. And, no one else knows about Hawk. No one could play such a trick.’

  ‘Hawk? His name is Hawk? How fitting!’

  ‘Actually, his name was some alphabetical soup that no one could pronounce properly. Polish is a very difficult tongue. His nickname in the squadron was “Hawk”.’

  ‘Polish? How could he be Polish and be in England in 1940? Poland was annexed by Germany in ‘39.’

  ‘Yes, and many of their pilots fled the country so they could go on fighting the Nazis. They were excellent pilots. Daredevils, I think you’d call them; took outrageous risks, but most of them paid off. They had higher kill-rates and fewer losses than most of our own squadrons ever had.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that before. How odd. But how did you meet a Polish pilot?’

  ‘He wandered into our farmyard one day. He was on day-leave and just started walking from the base – so Gran told me – and ended up here. Gramps asked him in.

  ‘He loved this house right from the first moment he set foot in it; told me once that it “called to him”. Nowhere else had ever done that to him before. I suppose that’s why he haunts the place. It’s where he felt at home.’

  Marnie had taken a seat at the table, part of an upmarket country kitchen dining setting she’d bought shortly before Fran’s death. Her face was still pale, and a fine sheen of perspiration had sprung up on her forehead.

  ‘And you’ve never seen this… ghost?’ Cassie sat down across from her, glad to be off her feet. She was feeling decidedly lightheaded and woozy.

  ‘No, dear. Only people who are…’ Marnie stopped abruptly and seemed to be desperately searching for some way to finish her sentence. ‘Only certain people see him. Just leave it at that.’

  ‘Psychics? Clairvoyants? I’m not one of those fruitcakes. Fran enjoyed a tarot reading every so often, but I always saw that stuff as rubbish.’

  ‘No, not psychics. We had ghost hunters in here once, but they couldn’t find anything. It’s just ordinary people who see him. You don’t have to be a sensitive or anything. I… I must get back to dinner.’ Marnie climbed to her feet and hurried back to the stove where something was merrily steaming. ‘Are you ready to eat now? You have to start putting some flesh on those bones again. You’re so thin…’

  This was a familiar refrain, and Cassie just nodded and smiled. She would do her best to eat, but since chemo, when she’d gotten sick after eating anything but dry crackers, she’d found food less than appealing. And she looked thin because she no longer had breasts. Her body was now that of a twelve year old.

  They’d wanted her to have reconstruction at the same time as the bilateral mastectomy, but she hadn’t wanted that. There was already too much to get used to. A set of plastic, Barbie boobs would have been just one too many. There was no hurry. There’d be time for that later… if she survived.

  ‘Will you tell me if you see him again?’ Marnie asked, as she took what turned out to be pasta off the agar and poured it into a metal colander on the sink. The steam fogged up the windowpane above.

  ‘Him? The ghost? Of course. But I still can’t believe you think that’s what I saw. You’re usually so level-headed.’

  ‘And so are the others who’ve seen him. Dad was the first, we think. When Dad saw him, Hawk was leaning against the oak smoking, just as you described. Dad had never met him. He and his brother had returned to active service a month or so before Hawk came to Leconfield.

  ‘At first, Gran thought Hawk had come back for a visit and she’d missed him, but when she checked, she found out he’d died over France in 1944. He’d become an ace by then. Fifteen kills. Few pilots matched him. Then she saw him a few years after Dad died. My Gran was down-to-earth Yorkshire, without a superstitious bone in her body. If she said she saw a ghost pilot in the garden, then there was a ghost pilot in the garden.’ The steam from the pasta was adding to Marnie’s sheen, and her hands were shaking more than usual as she put the empty saucepan in the sink beside the colander.

  ‘Couldn’t it have been someone else? One of the other pilots who’d survived? How could she remember him so well if he’d only been here a few times?’

  ‘Hawk was memorable. You must realise that, now that you’ve seen him. Gran never forgot him, and neither did Gramps or I. Gramps saw him about ten years later, but I was living in London then. I rang him one night, and he was very rattled. Not much rattled Gramps. He’d seen it all in World War I. But seeing Hawk… well… I came up straight away, but by the time I got here, he was dead. A heart attack in his sleep, the doctor said.’

  ‘Oh, how sad. You didn’t get to say goodbye.’

  ‘Oh yes, we said our goodbyes. By then we’d started to suspect what seeing Hawk meant.’ She looked flustered, as if she’d said too much. Opening the bottom cupboard, she began rummaging around for a smaller saucepan.

  ‘What did it mean?’ Cassie asked, not willing to be sidetracked again. This was the sort of mystery that fascinated her. Not the ghost aspect of the story, because she didn’t believe in ghosts, but the multiple sightings did indicate that something odd was happening here, and she wanted to understand it more fully.

  ‘Don’t listen to me. I’m just a silly old woman. I’ll be putting the milk in the pantry instead of the fridge next.’

  ‘Marnie, you’re not silly. What did seeing Hawk mean?’

  Marnie turned to her slowly, eyes troubled, as their gazes meshed. ‘Don’t press me, dear. You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I saw him… I saw your ghost pilot. I want to know what it means.’

  Marnie’s face crumpled and she let out a gasping sob. ‘It means death, Cassie dear. It means death to the person who sees him.’