The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

  Having all that knowledge wasn’t going to help. The words were stuck in my head. I was repeating them as a mantra. Having all that knowledge wasn’t going to help. There was only one thing I needed to know, only one thing. One little thing. How did you reverse it? How did you go backwards? How did you exorcise the wolf from the human? Was that what had Francis told Taylor? What had they been saying out there? What had Graham and the axe prevented Taylor from telling me? One thing I was sure of was that I was not going to find the information anywhere in all those books. Outside the sky grew darker.

  One little thing.

  Having all that knowledge wasn’t going to help at all.

  Books all around, paper written on, screwed up, torn and strewn across the floor. The light bulb was unreliable, despite being modern, and flickered from time to time, dimming and glimmering. This was one of the few rooms that did have curtains, but they must have been torn down as part of the clean-up because now the glass of the window was naked and the darkness outside looked straight through into me. There was a smell throughout the house. We had scrubbed and scrubbed but evidently there was enough bodily matter left for the decomposition of it to raise a God-awful stink, enough left in between the floorboards and soaked into furniture and hidden behind and underneath everything that we could perceive. It had trickled into every gap, crept into the spaces that separated things. It was everywhere. It was in everything and around everything that we could see. It was almost as if it was inside me too, having clotted into some internal presence, some silent observer.

  And I’m sorry, Jennifer. I’m sorry. I wish that I was religious enough and devout enough to be owed some sort of miracle, if that’s how it works. I don’t know how it works.

  You were making that sound again, that sound like a whale far away underwater and in pain, in agony, a keening, a sad old animal song, like something huge and innocent. Perhaps innocent was the wrong word. Perhaps not. But you were making that sound again and it drew me to the window. It reminded me of Erin and her fear of whales; her nightmares of alien giants moving slowly through the deep murk of ancient oceans. She didn’t seem dead to me. I couldn’t believe that she was really dead. I found myself looking out over the darkened yard. The sky was black with cloud that night.

  No. I had to find a way.

  There was this recurring figure in the stories, in the werewolf stories that I had gathered there, and in those I had read before. The tall dark stranger, or a ‘dark spirit’, or the ‘Lord of the Forest’. And though the Shepherd may have watched his flock by night He missed the cold stranger on a horse – the Lord of the Forest come to promise the flock the power to avoid hunger and pain for ever and ever by turning into a wolf. Who would refuse a gift like that? A kind of true freedom? Except it was not a gift. It was a deal, as far as I could make out. It was always only ever a deal. In the stories, the Devil – or one of His demons – came and offered the power in exchange for the person’s soul, like Bearpit did with me. And the power – it wasn’t really power, it was more just a kind of nihilism. It was the removal of your conscience and your compassion and your capacity for emotional attachment. Coupled with the ability to change at will. So yes, there was power in it, of a kind. It seemed there were two steps. First, there was being bitten, which turned you into a kind of unpredictable, schizophrenic wolf-man, and then there was making the deal, which took you to the next stage.

  Pain burrowed through my brain again. My vision blurred and the wind carried Jennifer’s howling in waves to my window. The metal impact of the gate rang out like some semi-intelligent creature was playing with it, delighting in the noise, attempting something like rhythm. Also, I could hear the awful shrieks of the cats as they raped each other, and small wings against the window and talons scraping around on the roof. I couldn’t find the answer. I couldn’t find it.

  I woke up slumped over the pile of books, grey light stroking my eyelids with dusty fingers. White mist pressed its faceless self against the window. There was always something at the window. Something trying to get in.

  Outside, the yard and the barn and the house were hazy through the fog, and everything was reduced to just a vague shape, the suggestion of itself, with indistinct edges. I was just the shadow, the silhouette, the idea of a person.

  Through the mist, Jennifer keened, and the sound was sharp despite the clogged-up air and the wooden door between us. I made my way across the grey yard and caught sight of the gate as a bank of fog rolled back momentarily. I realised that I was still naked. I was living through a steady reduction of whatever it was that defined me as human. Leaving the house with no clothes on by accident. I shook my head and instead of going straight to the outhouse, as I had planned, I made my way over to the big barn door.

  The barn door squealed as I pulled it open, and I imagined animals everywhere lifting their heads as they heard the sound, baring their teeth, breaking into a run at the high-pitched pain. I imagined people, if there were any left in the world, turning pale and shuddering, locking the doors and drawing the curtains. I imagined the dark red sky that I had seen from the window during my delirium.

  Inside the barn everything was as grey as the world outside, but darker. My jeans lay on the ground, hard and crusty with filth. I picked them up and struggled into them, looking around as I did so, and I realised that the uneven patch of ground over there, the place where I had buried all the bodies, was not really ground at all – it was just the bodies: limbs and joints and other bits level with the surface, some almost broken through. I couldn’t tell one from the other. It could just have been one many-limbed thing from deep down, worming its way up to our world.

  I turned to leave.

  I closed the barn door behind me and turned to fasten it, and then stopped dead, a huge panic blossoming in my stomach and throat like smoke.

  The axe was leaning against the wall. The last time I had seen the axe had been when Taylor and Graham were fighting.

  One of them must have been here.

  I took the axe and held it firmly in both hands, across my body like a bar. The mist was cold and impenetrable. I moved slowly around the back of the barn towards the outhouse, and saw that the car had been moved away from the door.

  The door was wide open, swaying gently to and fro.

  The mist turned to ice on my bare skin and I gripped the axe tightly.

  My head was thudding with the flow of my body, each heartbeat carrying the impact of a battering ram, although making no sound at all – everything was completely silent.

  I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t want it to be like this.

  Jennifer. The house. A future together. I had wanted it to happen but not like this. I’m sorry.

  I heard fast-moving feet behind me and turned to see a huge four-legged something looming through the air towards me. I lifted the axe and the wolf landed on me, knocking me to the ground, but also smashing its throat against the handle of the axe. It fell back, choking, saliva raining from its huge mouth, and I stood, feeling stronger than I ever had before, and brought the axe down on one of its hind legs. There was a splintering sound and a long, high scream. I cut again, and was astounded to see the leg come away from the body. My heart swelled with pride as the wolf limped away, and I bent to pick up the severed limb.

  By the time my hand fastened around the hairy thigh, it was not hairy, or even a thigh. It was the lower part of a human leg; it was the lower part of a female human leg. I looked up at the wolf to see Jennifer, crying, lying on her stomach, thick blood pouring from the stump of her right leg, truncated at the knee. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Jack,’ she said. She pushed herself up from the ground and rolled over, so that she was sitting up. Already the flow of blood was slowing.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  She managed to laugh, painfully, through her tears. She was naked in the fog. ‘What kind of question is that, really?’ she asked. ‘After everything?’
/>   ‘How did you get out?’

  ‘The door was open. I think it was Balthazar.’

  ‘Balthazar? Who’s Balthazar?’

  ‘You must remember, Jack. Our snowman. Don’t tell us you don’t remember. He’ll be offended.’

  ‘Ha ha!’ I said, my voice and face cracking. ‘Glad I’m not the only one to have had some sort of mental break-down!’

  She shook her head and grimaced with the pain. ‘It’s worse than you think,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t be joking.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said, and shivered. I hadn’t been joking. I hadn’t even meant to laugh. The cold ate into me. ‘Oh God, Jennifer. I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the outhouse. I’m sorry about crushing you in the door. I’m sorry about your leg and everything and I just don’t know what to think.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Is that an explanation?’ she asked, eventually.

  I looked back down again, focused on the dim sheen of moisture covering a cobble. ‘No. An apology.’

  ‘Would you be apologising if I was still locked in that little cell?’

  ‘You attacked me.’

  ‘Anger does funny things to you,’ she said. ‘And I can’t help but wonder what you were planning to do with that axe if I hadn’t got out. Maybe crush my skull. Or sever my neck.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead,’ I said. ‘Jennifer. Why didn’t you just kill me before I had the chance to lock you up? Why aren’t you killing me now?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have killed you!’ She shook her head again, exasperatedly. She had stopped crying now, and didn’t seem to be in so much pain. The bleeding had stopped. ‘There are so many fundamental things that you don’t understand. When I am human, I am human. I only change into the wolf when I choose to.’

  ‘You made the deal?’ I asked. ‘You gave them your – your soul?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ she said. ‘You should have seen it, Jack, down by the lake. All of the music and dancing and the drinking and the laughing, and all of the sex. The honesty. To be able to control it – it’s a gift, Jack. Not to mention easier. Imagine how you’d feel if you came to one morning and found you’d been out killing people. If you’d made the deal, then you would have known what you were doing and you wouldn’t feel guilty. If you hadn’t – well.’

  ‘So why didn’t you kill me?’ I asked. ‘If you could – could change shape at any moment? If you wouldn’t suffer any guilt?’

  ‘Why would I have killed you? I had no reason to kill you.’

  ‘For the house.’

  ‘I already had the house.’

  ‘But—’ I couldn’t think of anything to say. A kind of heat emanated from within, like the precursor to some sort of life-changing wave of relief. ‘But – so we’re OK? You can stay human if you want to?’

  ‘I don’t know how human I feel right now,’ she said. ‘When I am human I am human, but you have hardly treated me like a human being, have you?’ She showed sharp teeth through a humourless smile. ‘Besides. I don’t think this is over yet.’

  I took a step backwards.

  ‘You’re trembling like an injured kitten, Jack,’ she said. ‘I used to have a kitten. It was one week old and tried to eat the food we put out for the dog. The dog didn’t even see the thing as he went to eat his food; just bit through it. His tooth went straight into the kitten’s eye. You’ve never seen such shaking. Was it fear or pain or brain injury, do you think, Jack? The end when we see it is a pitiful, trembling thing.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing to understand. It’s just a story.’

  ‘If you’re going to kill me, let me ask some questions first.’

  ‘You’re shaking, Jack,’ she said. ‘Why are you shaking? I’m not going to kill you. I’d have to wait for my leg to grow back, and that’ll be hours yet.’

  ‘Why did you say Balthazar opened the door?’ The pain in my head.

  ‘There is another world,’ she said. ‘He is a part of it. He is here, now. Look.’

  I followed the direction of her pointing finger to look behind me, and sure enough I saw the sad-faced mound of snow. Balthazar. He lifted a cold, numb arm, slowly, to wave.

  ‘The house,’ I said.

  ‘Belongs to our world,’ she said. ‘The other world. It is that simple. It is our house. Our kind have always been here. The Lord built it and it is His house and it shall be His house forever.’

  ‘The Lord,’ I said.

  ‘He will take your soul in return for the gift,’ she said. ‘Or send somebody else to do it for Him. You know who He is. Even if you haven’t met Him yet.’

  ‘What do you mean when you say “soul”?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ she shrugged. ‘But I don’t miss it.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t ever miss it,’ she said. ‘How can you miss what you never knew you had?’

  ‘What about Taylor?’ I asked.

  ‘Taylor made the deal too.’

  ‘Kenny,’ I said.

  ‘Took me and bit me and we fucked.’

  ‘But he’s a creep,’ I said. ‘You’re so much better than that.’

  ‘Sure, as a human he’s a creep,’ she said. ‘Time and misery and guilt had made his human aspect a creep. But when we’re wolves, Jack. You have no idea what it’s like. Pure physicality. Pure emotions. No mediation, no guilt, no worry, no politics. All of us, when we’re wolves, are beautiful.’

  ‘You weren’t a wolf when we found you,’ I said.

  ‘We were lost. We didn’t know what we were by that point.’

  I looked around at the mist. After a short while, I said, ‘Erin.’

  ‘Francis ate her.’

  ‘And Francis?’

  ‘Francis loved me,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t love him back. Before you ask.’

  ‘You just fucked him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And now I miss him. And I miss Erin too.’

  From out on the fellside, the faint sound of a fiddle drifted.

  ‘How can I make it better?’ I asked.

  She looked down and shook her head. ‘I have to be honest, this isn’t how I imagined things would end up. I don’t think you can make it better now.’

  ‘Jennifer,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘So’m I.’

  ‘One more question.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Leaping,’ I said.

  She looked up at me and shook her head slightly, narrowing her eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The Leaping!’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s terrible,’ said a wet voice from behind me, and I turned, and saw that Balthazar was standing next to us. He was tall and bulky and looked ill, because his head was too big and was covered in strange lumps. ‘It’s a contest. And woe betide the loser.’ He nodded at me, slowly.

  ‘Why are you helping me?’ I said.

  ‘You both helped build me, after all,’ he said. ‘Helping you now is the least I can do. So listen to me: go. You both have to go now. As fast as Jennifer is able. I don’t know if you can escape it. But you have to try. You must.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I went over to Jennifer to help her up, but she waved me away.

  ‘We have to change,’ she said. ‘I’ll be faster that way.’

  ‘Won’t you attack me again?’

  ‘Not if I don’t want to.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Thank you, Balthazar,’ she said. ‘Now, Jack. You just close your eyes – and let all the fear rise up. And let your-self grow, transform and shift. Break open. Split. Splinter. Crack and rupture. Open up and burst. Mutate. Fall apart. Change.’

  It rose up out of the earth and into me, ancient, like God.

  Falling apart.

  Coming back to myself, I realised that I felt badly p
ut together inside. I tried to stand and choked with the pain, only managing to get half-way up. I felt something lodged behind my ribs, something restricting my breathing, and it was heavy and sticking into my lungs. I hit myself on the chest again and again, trying to dislodge it. I tried to stand a little straighter and felt it slip and fall into my abdomen, where it felt right. The pain eased and I stood up tall. I thought it was my stomach. And I knew that couldn’t be right, couldn’t really be medically possible, but the science that governed such things had been lifted from me and now I had this new freedom. No longer bound by natural law.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I said, as she changed back beside me. I helped her up and she stood with her right arm around my shoulders. Her leg was coming back, but was not nearly fully grown yet. I thought back to the werewolf we had captured on the fellside. Maybe the speedy regeneration came with time. There was so much to look forward to.

  I looked around and we were still in cloud, on a shallow rocky slope, still on the fell, or at least one of the fells, or at least still on a fell, for I had no way of knowing how far we had run. The clouds there were not clouds so much as grey skies that just came down low. The whole world might have been beneath that cloud.

  I wished I could remember how it felt to be the wolf, to be truly powerful and free. But that memory loss didn’t stop the steadily increasing flow of warmth and relief and hot light from flooding through me, growing inside me. I started laughing again, happy, relieved, happy, immortal! And Jennifer was still there, still with me, despite everything, and even if she left me, then maybe I would cross her scent on some grassy hillside on some summer’s day a hundred years from now or maybe a long-forgotten mossy pathway through deep green woodland where only the animals go. We could run together through the rocks, the fells, the rivers, the firs, the pines, the evergreens, the snow, the driving rain, the never-ending sun, the day, the night, the dark, the fells, the meadows, the flowers like stars in the earth, beautiful red deserts, the night above us, stars like wolves in the sky, great burning wolves with white fiery eyes howling between solar systems. We would run over the great plains, ancient and noble and wise and cruel and everlasting, and we would make love for days, bodies locked together, molten and eight-legged and snarling and animal, making love with the northern lights above us. We would run with our pack, hundreds of us, thousands, swarming over the forested peaks and the misty valleys and the bleak moors and the red deserts and the great plains and the verdant meadows and the green fields and the frozen rivers and the sleepy villages. We would howl and the sleepy villagers would rise up and join us and we would take on the towns and the cities and the IF NOT YOU, WHO? graffiti and the IF NOT NOW, WHEN? graffiti and the towering offices like old gods made of glass and stone. There would be snapped wires and broken windows and blood in the gutters and all things running through the streets and overturned cars and burning horizons and blackouts over and over again and then the dark. And we would move on. And I would run by Jennifer’s side. And she by mine.