Two Wolves, One Shadow

by Chris Smith

When he was alive, Grandpa and James had spent a lot of time talking. James would share his experiences and all his difficulties at school. They’d sit together for hours while James expressed his suffering. His grandpa simply listened, except for the odd question, or grunt of acknowledgement, which reverberated from deep in the old man’s throat with a sense of accord. James appreciated, in the changing expressions of his grandfather’s face, that he was intellectually and emotionally absorbed in his troubles. He wanted to tell him everything, free of judgment, free of patronising comments. He felt that with his grandfather, he was free to tell it honestly, free to let go, and he did.

  ‘Listen to me. You must stop torturing yourself. There’s absolutely nothing to be gained by beating yourself up. You’re great exactly as you are, exactly as you are… regardless of what they say.’ His grandpa used this speech often in an attempt to bolster James’ confidence. The way his voice comforted him with its warmth, its understanding, its compassion and strength, never lost its impact. The speech always helped, even if he found it hard to believe. Unlike with anyone else in James’ life, Grandpa’s talks had the same effect as a priest’s absolution on him; afterwards, he walked lighter, free of his burdens, if only for a while.

  But Grandpa’s eyes captivated him the most; they twinkled like stars in the night sky, particularly when he spoke. James got lost staring into them, wondering what they must have seen, what they knew. He marvelled at the life and magic of the lights held in them. What a brilliant life Grandpa must have lived.

  ‘James, they can only hurt you if you let them, so don’t let them, don’t listen to their silly name calling, and for goodness sake don’t believe them. Maggot indeed - it’s outrageous, quite outrageous.’

  Maggot had become James’ nickname at school, which everyone used. It was so commonly used, in fact, that he half suspected his teachers might secretly refer to him in that way to one another. He’d acquired the Maggot tag without really knowing why, which intensified the impact the name had on him. In the early days, he’d agonised over this question. Did he smell? Did he squirm like a maggot? He hated the name. Who’d want to be a maggot? It placed him as the lowest of the low. James could tell that Grandpa saw the pain the name caused.

  After listening to James, Grandpa would sit back in his old armchair with a deep sigh. With his elbows resting on the chair’s arms and his fingertips touching in front of his chest, he’d tell James one of his tales. He looked much like a principal might when contemplating how to admonish a rebellious student: his face was deadly serious, stern, waiting for the right moment, the moment of greatest impact. Invariably, a huge smile would crack the seriousness of his face to destroy the austere image and release the building tension.

  ‘Shall I tell you about the time I stumbled into a nest of demons?’ His eyes ignited with anticipation, ‘But maybe you’re bored with that one.’

  ‘No Grandpa, go on—please.’

  Even though James knew the story off by heart, his grandfather was frequently inclined to change bits of the narrative. He’d add something new or twist the adventure in a slight way. James held back from questioning the inevitable contradictions as they appeared. Regardless of this distracting tendency to embellish his tales, James regarded his grandfather as an awesome storyteller. Out of all of Grandpa’s wild tales, James liked the demon story best. Able to recount the story scene by scene in great detail, he loved recreating the events in a cartoon story board.

  In this tale, Grandpa came out of deep sleep with a strong sense of deadly danger upon him. He would describe to James the strange shadowy land in which he awoke: black mist swirled around his knees and darkness hung like a veil in the distance, hiding unimaginable monsters.

  ‘I knew instantly I was being watched. My skin went cold, my heart raced, my mind froze. I was overwhelmed by the pure hatred hiding in the darkness, looking at me from every direction. Regardless of which way I looked for an escape, the presence of hatred blocked me. I thought death had come to drag me into hell.’

  Grandpa went on to explain how out of the black veil of darkness a pack of evil demons emerged, surrounding him ten deep. He identified the seven demon leaders easily, which was the latest addition to the story. Each of the leaders held a spear, made from bolts of lightning, with electricity flashing at the tip. He went on to tell James, how he’d fought with the demons while the leaders watched the sport. Grandpa kicked, punched, and head butted until exhausted. The most vicious and spiteful looking of the demon leaders sensed his growing weakness and attempted to hit him with an electric shock from his spear of lightning. But Grandpa, summoning the last of his strength, avoided the attack. He smashed his way out through the pack, and attempted to flee. However, refusing to give him up, they chased after him. Running on little else other than adrenaline, Grandpa eventually reached a dead end. A cliff face rose up into the darkness. It presented no obvious way for him to escape. The pack of demons, still on his heels, caught up a moment later. The seven leaders raised their spears and moved in, in order to finish him off. Grandpa did the only thing he could: he climbed up the face of the rocky cliff and out of their reach. When he had climbed high enough, he looked back down the cliff, where he saw below the little demons fighting with each other below.

  ‘Why didn’t they climb after you?’ James asked.

  ‘A few did,’ he replied, ‘, but they weren’t good climbers you see, too small, kept falling off as quickly as they began.’ He laughed. ‘They looked so small from high on the mountain, like a pack of rats, quite insignificant from that position. Perhaps that’s what you need to do James: lift yourself above their petty name-calling. Maybe you should think of, what’s his name? —

  ‘Pete!’

  ‘Yes. Think of him as a demon, a nasty little thing, which can only get to you if you come down to his level.’

  ‘What about the leaders, who are they?’

  ‘Mmm—they’re for another time I’m afraid; for now concentrate on climbing above them.

  James found thinking of Peter Banks as a demon very difficult. Peter was a boy in James’ class, but not just any boy; he was the top dog in their year. As James thought about the nature of demons, Peter seemed to have a lot of their attributes. He considered the most obvious differences being Peter’s athletic height and build. But in the end, even though he knew little about them, James settled on labelling Peter as an ogre. He decided that the analogy was far more fitting, if Grandpa’s solitary story about those powerful and intimidating creatures was to be believed. Peter was certainly powerful and intimidating; he had both of those attributes in abundance.

  Peter and the Banks’ family lived in a nearby street. His parents had become good friends with Mr and Mrs. Banks, and hard as it was to comprehend now, Peter and James had been good friends right from when they first started school at five. However, while James’ became a bit of an oddity, Pete seemed to grow into the image of perfection. Everyone at school thought of as Pete as Mr. Perfect. To his credit, for a long time Pete attempted to include James within his circle. But James’ weird looks and his obsessions with dark beings became an embarrassment. So by the time they’d reached their eighth birthdays Pete, aiming to create some distance between them, started name-calling. He followed this, over the next few months, with relatively harmless pushing, shoving and physical intimidation. Gradually, Pete and his mates fell into an ever-increasing pattern of abuse, which they inflicted upon James.

  Clearly, Pete’s mates, Jake the rake and Gus – short for Humongous – real name Hugh Mortimer, disliked James as much as Pete. In fact, Jake seemed to hate James most of all. His thin body resembled a snake, which taunted and spat insults at James at every opportunity.

  Jake normally greeted James with: ‘Hey Maggot seen any dragons today?’ followed by, ‘You’re such a freak.’ But Jake revelled in more than name-calling: he loved winding James up. One time, he stuck a sign on James’ back, ‘LARGE MAGGOT! BEWARE! DISEASE RIDDLED VERMIN!’ No one told Ja
mes and hours went by with everyone laughing before Mr. Preacher his Art teacher removed the sign from his jumper.

  When break time came, the playing fields normally turned into vibrant arenas, filled with kids in little cliques, playing, laughing, joking and having fun together. James, for the most part, lingered around Pete’s game in the hope they’d ask him to join in, hoping for their acceptance, hoping for a chance to be part of it all. However, every lunchtime, he would go through the same thing: he’d talk himself into believing that this time it would be different, but then…

  ‘Oh no…not Maggot!’

  ‘Get lost, freak.’

  To which James reluctantly slunk away to deal with the heartache and subsequent feelings of dejection.

  The escalation of James’ problems with Pete and his mates coincided with his grandfather’s death, which happened a few months before his tenth birthday and his first visit to the specialist doctor. Maybe they sensed his vulnerability. Jake became bolder, which climaxed when he dropped a spider down James’ shirt. The spider bit him on his neck. Within the hour, the bite swelled into a large blister much to the classroom's amusement. James’ mum raced to school and rushed him to the doctor. Another time, Gus, built like a barn but twice as strong, knocked him over with his huge shoulder as he walked past. Of course, Peter always hung about at the scene directing, laughing and goading on the perpetrators of these assaults.

  Without Grandpa, art became James’ only refuge. In class, he’d forget everything except his work. Living moment by moment, immersed totally in his subject, he was reclusive, manic and totally fantastic. His awesome creations put him on top. In Art, he took the position of top dog where everyone marvelled over his painting, even Pete and the gang.

  He began to enjoy the power of this position and played with shocking his audience. He created sickening images, such as a fearsome giant crushing people skulls, eyes popping out of their sockets and brains spilling onto the floor; or a vile witch drinking blood and spewing vomit, with a knife in hand cutting open the guts of some animal for her cauldron. His freaky and disturbing pictures people, nevertheless, considered to be wonderfully creative, imaginative and surreal.

  While the images were still fresh in people’s minds, James noticed that many took a different view of him for a short time. They’d shoot cautious glances at him or shuffle out of his way. He revelled in his ability to unsettle them. Perhaps they believed he was actually capable of doing such things. However, they soon reverted to form and treated him as ‘Maggot’ again.

  In this period immediately after his grandfather’s death, James created his most gruesome pieces of work. The need to intervene and curtail some of his creations became obvious to his teachers. So after some counselling from Mr. Preacher, his Art teacher, James toned down the strength of his paintings. Even so, over the next couple of years he constructed a superb surreal portfolio. In fact, one particular piece of work, his most recent, had been an ongoing project for some weeks. At the time, he would have struggled to explain the driving force and motivation behind the initiation of the painting. With Grandpa gone, who would have believed him anyway? He hardly believed the situation himself. But there they were, little whispers as clear as day, telling him what to do, forcing him to keep at the creation and driving his appetite for revenge. Little by little, day after day, the whispers of James’ shadow went to work planting vindictive seeds of retribution. The shadow sowed one thought after another until the ideas took firm root in his mind. Then James went to work with the voice directing his anger. Possessed with a rage bursting to get out, he released his fury in the form of a portrait of Pete and his cronies.

  James painted them with rotten teeth and dark sunken eyes, and he turned them into zombies with rotting flesh. Overwhelmed with his feelings, he filled their mouths with maggots until they spilled out. Then he surrounded his victims with dragons and werewolves, the creatures that intrigued and frightened him most. He drew scorpions crawling across their faces, their tails injecting black venom into sallow skin. Finally, he inserted Grandpa’s demons with their bolts of lightning. He imagined the boys as feeble, frightened laboratory rats, tortured and racked in pain. He made them look exactly the way they made him feel.

  However, this painting had had consequences. Now on his own in the quiet of the house, James regretted listening to the sniping voice spurring him on to paint that damned portrait. It had initiated a sequence of events which landed him in trouble from every direction.

  Exhausted from the day’s events James pulled away from the bedroom window. Maybe he’d seen a werewolf, maybe not. He crept out of his bedroom and along the corridor to his parent’s room. He opened their door and entered. He found the painting of Pete, Gus and Jake on the dresser. Quietly, he picked it up and left the room. James headed back down the corridor, selecting the precise spots on the floorboards he knew to be safe. Silently, he navigated his way to the bathroom. Unknown to James his shadow, wearing a cloak of darkness, followed him. Had he turned around, he would have seen the frightening enormity of its size, which grew up the wall onto the landing ceiling; he would have seen the evil smile on its face!

  Chapter Three: Sweet Revenge