Gasping for breath, she held her gory trophy high above her head, hoping against hope that it would be enough to release her mother from the stake.
The square was almost full when Pliska arrived, holding the still warm and bleeding limb, and the crowd fell back in surprise and disgust. She could sense the raw fear in them.
When the mayor saw the limb and listened to her explanation, he was amazed. ‘We’ll go and see this wolf of yours first,’ he announced. ‘We need to see the whole animal. You could have filched that limb from anywhere.’
‘How could I have done that?’ she demanded, but the mayor was adamant.
‘What have you done?’ whispered her mother fearfully, as the procession set off from the square.
‘What I had to do,’ muttered Pliska. ‘I only hope it was enough.’
The man on the ground was instantly recognizable as one of the policemen who had taken to the mountains. He was still stirring. What was more, the limb Pliska held was changing – changing to a shoe and a sock and a foot and an ankle and – She dropped it with a choking scream of disgust.
‘Now are you satisfied?’ she asked the mayor. As she spoke, Pliska realized that the villagers’ suspicions had been correct in one way at least: werewolves, like wolves, still existed and this one had been living among them.
Elena and Pliska were allowed to return home, but Pliska noticed sadly that her mother looked deeply troubled. Was she still in shock, she wondered? Elena put the kettle on to boil and then sat down with her daughter at the scarred wooden table. ‘I have to tell you something,’ she said, gently taking her hand.
‘Yes?’
‘The thing attacked me and drew blood. It did the same to you. Fortunately they didn’t see the graze in the dark. You know what that means, don’t you, Pliska?’
Pliska nodded, suddenly realizing the implications but hardly able to take them in.
‘According to the old superstitions we could be infected, so we must leave and leave now, before they remember and take us both back to the stake.’
‘But where can we go?’ asked Pliska desperately.
‘To Goritzon. We can come as strangers. Start a new life there.’
‘But that’s miles through the mountains,’ said Pliska.
‘Yes.’
‘We’d never make it. We’ll die out there.’
‘Better out there than on the pyre,’ said Elena, and with a sinking heart Pliska had to admit she was right.
‘Did they ever make it?’ asked Anne.
‘Yes,’ said Talin. ‘They made it to Goritzon. But even so, they’ll never be free of the taint.’
Matt had got to his feet, his face tense in the firelight.
‘The cold in those mountains …’ he said. ‘I know what it’s like. I went to the Antarctic last year with my parents. We couldn’t know what was going to happen …’
8
Freeze-up
My parents are geologists and we had come as a family to live and work at a base in the Antarctic. It was spring, and we were all amazed by the beauty of the place, with the ice breaking up into floes and gigantic bergs which shimmered a kaleidoscope of colours in the sunshine. They were an incredible sight on the deep blue water, making a hollow booming sound as they majestically drifted south.
The base was sophisticated – a round metal building that had a micro-climate inside, a carefully controlled seventy degrees which made the outside temperature, despite the sun, something of a shock. We even had a swimming-pool in there, as well as a games room and a video lounge, so conditions weren’t exactly what Captain Scott had to put up with.
But it certainly wasn’t cushy. My parents were intrepid and we went for long journeys into the interior, studying rock formations emerging from the glaciers. Because I was taking a term off school I had to do some studying, but as I wanted to be a geologist too I was finding our work in the Antarctic fascinating. Until that awful day.
‘Here’s a big berg coming up, Matt.’
I can still see us now. My mother and I were standing by the shore, taking turns staring out into the sound through her binoculars while Dad checked over some equipment in the base. As usual we were surrounded by raucous penguins, and the stink of guano, their droppings, was enhanced by the on-shore wind.
The berg had drifted into the bay, right up to the slowly melting ice floes. It was as tall as a four-storey building and had the most incredible electric blue sheen to its gleaming, translucent surface.
‘Wait a minute.’ Mum handed me the binoculars, her voice shaking with excitement. ‘There’s something in that ice.’
I soon saw what she was on about. Frozen into the ice was a giant wolf.
‘It’s enormous,’ I whispered.
My mother nodded. ‘And old.’
‘Old?’
‘Could be neolithic,’ she said hopefully. ‘The wolf might have been in the ice for centuries. This is a real find.’
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked, wondering if my mother was getting carried away.
The berg was drifting nearer now in the strong breeze, and as I stared at it through the binoculars I could see that the eyes of the giant wolf were open; for a moment I had the foolish but uncomfortable feeling that it was watching us.
‘This on-shore wind should keep the berg here for a few more hours of daylight, but we need cutting equipment first. We’ll get the wolf out and put it in one of the deep freezers. Then we’ll take a look at it in the lab. Of course, it’s going to be the biologists’ baby,’ Mum said regretfully. ‘Anyway, he makes a change from inanimate rocks.’
‘How do you know the wolf’s a “he”?’ I asked, amused by all the assumptions my mother was making. She seemed to have completely abandoned her usual procedure of scientific reasoning.
‘I’ve got a hunch,’ Mum replied.
Her hunch proved to be correct. The wolf was a male, and when cut out of the glistening ice he was much larger than I had imagined and perfectly preserved.
‘It must have got trapped in the ice,’ said Professor Lomas, the chief biologist on the base, as all the scientists gathered around the table in the lab on which the beast lay.
The hide of the wolf was jet black, and his enormous limbs, spread out on the table, looked as powerful as they must have been when he was alive. In fact it was hard to believe the thing was really dead.
‘What happens if he gets properly thawed out?’ I asked the professor.
‘He’ll disintegrate, so he’s going back on ice. What a specimen. Who would have thought the beast could have remained intact for centuries like this?’
‘Were wolves all as big as he is then?’ I asked.
The professor shook his head. ‘He’s special.’
That night, just before I went to bed, I met Professor Lomas in the corridor.
‘I’m going to put the wolf back on the table,’ he told me. ‘I want to take another look.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
But the professor didn’t reply. Instead he said, ‘Would you be prepared to give me a hand lifting him out of the freezer? I was going to wake one of the lab assistants but they’re both on early shift and –’
‘Of course I’ll help,’ I replied.
*
In the end we only just managed to lift the wolf from the freezer to the table. At one point we staggered, and for a moment I thought we were going to drop him on the floor. I also had the strangest feeling that for a split second the thing had moved. But the wolf was frozen solid and had been dead for centuries and I dismissed the idea as ridiculous, born out of my own fatigue.
‘That’ll do,’ snapped Professor Lomas abruptly, and when I met his gaze I saw that he was looking impatient, as if he wanted to be alone with the wolf and resented every moment of my presence. Reluctantly he managed an apologetic smile. ‘Thank you, but I have further studies to complete and they may take me some time.’
I wanted to ask what they were, but took the hint and went to bed. It was
some time before I slept.
I woke early the next morning, well before my parents were up. The lab was not far from my bedroom so I decided to take a stroll over there, although I was far from certain whether I was going to get a good reception. If Professor Lomas was still there it wouldn’t be the first time he’d worked all night. He was a man consumed by his work and I had often almost envied him for that. To have such burning curiosity must be wonderful.
When I reached the lab, I saw that the door was half-open. This surprised me, knowing Professor Lomas’s obsession with privacy. I paused, knowing how angry he would be if I just barged in. Hesitantly I crept towards the half-open door so that I could just peer round it and then quickly back off before he saw me. Curiously, the room appeared to be empty. The table was bare, so he had clearly put the wolf back in the freezer, although how he had managed to do so without my help I couldn’t imagine. Maybe he had had to resort to waking up one of the lab assistants.
Then I saw the red lake on the floor.
Professor Lomas was lying on his back, his eyes open and staring ahead, his lips twisted in a snarl of surprised, frenzied horror. There were teeth marks on his neck and face. The blood was everywhere.
I went to the freezer and opened it. The space was empty. I wheeled round, expecting to see the huge wolf crouched in a corner, waiting for me, but there was no sign of the beast. My gaze returned to what had been Professor Lomas, and I stared down into his sightless eyes while my mind raced in circles, returning again and again to the conclusion that I didn’t want to accept: the wolf had somehow become animated and the little movement I had felt had been the first stirrings of renewed life. Now the thing was free and prowling the base, searching for more victims.
Somehow I forced myself outside the lab and raced down the corridor to my parents’ bedroom, thinking the wolf would leap out on me at any moment. But I reached them in safety and slammed the door shut behind me with relief. It took some time to convince them of what had happened to Professor Lomas.
‘I’ll go and check,’ said my father at last. ‘You’re in shock, Matt, and …’
He went to the door in his dressing-gown but I yelled at him in panic, ‘Don’t go outside, Dad. For God’s sake – don’t go outside.’
‘Sit down.’
But by this time, I was barring the door. ‘Don’t you see – it’s wandering the base. You haven’t seen – what it did to him.’
My father went to a cupboard and took out a hand-gun. ‘Emergency use only,’ he muttered and tried to smile reassuringly.
I stood aside reluctantly as he walked out into the soft light of the corridor.
The wail of the emergency siren went off just as my father returned, looking shocked and ill. ‘Something got him,’ he muttered. ‘It’s unbelievable.’
‘The wolf –’ I began.
‘How can a creature like that, frozen in ice for centuries, reanimate? It’s just a coincidence the carcass has disappeared. Someone must be –’
‘I felt it coming back to life, Dad. Don’t you see – we’ve released it.’
‘There’s no sign of the thing,’ he snapped. ‘Someone attacked Lomas and took the wolf. Professional jealousy can be –’
‘Leaving teeth marks on him like that? It’s out there somewhere,’ I promised him.
The wail of the siren was cut short by an announcement over the Tannoy. ‘Attention. Attention. We are on Red Alert. Repeat. We are on Red Alert. It is essential that all personnel remain in their quarters. We have a large animal loose on the base. The animal has been located and is about to be shot. Keep your doors closed. I repeat. Keep your doors closed until you are notified that the Red Alert is over.’ The voice was replaced by the renewed wail of the siren.
The knocking on our door was panic-stricken and my mother rushed to open it. Ted Morgan, one of the security men, flung himself in and slammed the door. He acted only just in time, for seconds later it shuddered with an enormous impact. But the door held, although the impact came again and again.
Then there was a long silence while Morgan, my parents and I watched the door in terror, waiting for another attack, waiting for it to splinter, wondering if, with a terrible sound of rending wood, the thing would be upon us.
Still shaking, Morgan sank down on the bed. ‘Bob,’ he muttered over and over again. ‘Bob.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘It ripped him to pieces. There was nothing I could do for him. Nothing.’
‘But you were both armed,’ said my father unbelievingly. ‘Why didn’t you shoot the wolf?’
‘I did,’ said Ted Morgan. ‘I emptied this gun into it. But the bullets didn’t have the slightest effect.’
‘It must be badly wounded,’ I said hopefully.
‘There wasn’t a mark on him,’ replied Morgan.
Something stirred in my mind. A legend. An impossible legend.
‘Suppose it was all true,’ I blurted out. ‘Not a myth after all.’
‘True?’ Morgan turned on me in angry frustration. ‘What the hell are you on about?’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said impatiently. ‘I mean we could be dealing with a werewolf.’
They all three stared at me in amazement, and although a look of angry contempt immediately crossed Morgan’s face my parents remained uneasily silent.
‘This isn’t a time for jokes,’ Ted Morgan said angrily.
‘It’s not a joke,’ I insisted, suddenly confident that I was right. ‘I mean it. And you’ll only destroy that wolf with silver bullets.’
Morgan laughed contemptuously. ‘And how do you come to that conclusion?’
‘I read it in a graphic novel – kind of comic,’ I added unguardedly.
He laughed again, harshly sarcastic.
‘Wait a minute,’ said my mother. ‘It’s also recorded in folklore. I remember reading it as a child.’
‘If real bullets don’t work,’ said my father, ‘why not try silver? What have we got to lose?’
‘Because we don’t just have them lying around.’ Ted Morgan was incredulous now, gazing at all three of us as if we were completely crazy.
‘Silver bullets could easily be made in the lab,’ said my mother. ‘All we need to do is melt down part of the director’s tea service and use an ordinary bullet as a measure. It could take – an hour or so.’
‘While that thing’s on the rampage?’ Morgan wasn’t convinced; he just seemed stunned at the sheer lunacy of the idea.
‘Anything’s worth a try,’ said my mother.
The thundering on our door began again, but this time it was the desperate beating of human fists. Morgan opened the door a crack and John Slater, the director, pushed his way in.
‘The damn thing’s devouring somebody in the gym. God knows how I got past it. There was nothing I could do for the –’
My father interrupted, not wanting Slater to go on for our sake or his. ‘Is it – still eating?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to the laboratory on my own.’ He looked meaningfully at my mother. ‘Three of us can’t risk being attacked.’
Reluctantly she agreed.
‘I’m going with you,’ I insisted.
But he was adamant. ‘No one’s going with me. No one at all. Stay here – I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He took Ted Morgan’s gun, opened the door, peered outside and then vanished up the empty corridor.
Time passed with aching slowness, and the tension between us all reached such a pitch that I found it increasingly difficult to breathe. I repeatedly looked at my watch, praying for my father, trying to blot out all thought of the deadly creature outside. But I failed, seeing the werewolf at the door of the lab with my dad working desperately against the clock inside. I saw the thing run at the door – I saw the door splintering, buckling under its weight. Then I saw the wolf landing on his shoulders, bearing him down to the floor while its teeth … Again, yet again, I stared helplessly down at the relentless hands of my watch and
saw that, somehow, an hour had passed.
‘I’m going after him,’ said Morgan. ‘I can’t take this any longer.’
‘That would be very foolish.’ Slater stood with his back to the door, but Morgan was determined.
‘Get out of my way!’
‘I order you not to go.’ Slater still stood there, while my mother and I felt the tension in the room increase to unbearable heights.
Morgan ignored him and pushed straight past him. ‘Bolt this up tight and don’t try to follow me,’ he said as he wrenched open the door.
The werewolf sprang, its huge teeth buried in Morgan’s throat, while my mother and I watched helplessly.
With a sinking heart I realized that the werewolf would simply gorge itself on us all, one by one.
My father stood on the threshold, his face twisted in loathing, gripping Ted Morgan’s gun and aiming it at the wolf. But he had arrived too late for the security guard.
A wave of helplessness swept over me as he aimed the gun at the werewolf’s head. His hand was shaking as the creature looked up at him, but I saw – or thought I saw – a knowledge in the wolf’s eyes.
He fired again and again, the silver bullets penetrating the head and then the body. There were little soft splats as they made contact, but there was no blood, no tissue. The thing swayed, feebly sprang at my father – and swayed again. Then the wolf fell on its side, splayed right across the centre of the small room, thrashed wildly and at last lay still.
‘It’s dissolving,’ said Slater unbelievingly. He was wrong. A haze of steam rose and we saw that the fur and sinew were undergoing a change. A few minutes later, the steam-like substance cleared and to our amazement we could see a large man, completely naked, with an ape-like forehead.
‘He’s neolithic,’ breathed Slater, but in seconds the body began to decompose before our eyes. Soon there was nothing more than a pool of dark stagnant water on the carpet.
Werewolf Stories to Tell in the Dark Page 6
