by Tim O'Rourke
I screwed my eyes shut tighter still as I sat on the edge of the bath. I screwed my eyes shut so tight it was like I was trying to rinse out the memories of what had happened last night. And in my mind’s eye, I could see myself stumbling back onto the bed. The wolf-man came slowly forward through the darkness, the light of the moon blinding me from seeing his face. Placing one claw in front of the other, he crawled up the bed toward me. I couldn’t break his stare. This close, his eyes looked beautiful. It was as if they were on fire and I could see each and every flame licking and flicking at the corners of his black pupils. He was astride me now, one claw placed over each of my shoulders. His face was so close to mine that I could feel his hot breath against my flesh. His breath smelt nice – intoxicating somehow. My heart was racing beneath my nightdress and my flesh felt hot. I feared that if I didn’t free myself of it, I might just burn up, burst into seething flames like the ones I could see dancing in the wolf-man’s eyes.
As if being able to read my mind, the wolf-man swiped at my nightdress, shredding it with his claws. It fell away. The wolf-man leant closer still and I could feel his soft fur against me. It felt like I was being smothered with a fine sheet of silk.
Brushing his face against mine, he whispered one word into my ear. “Lover?”
“Yes,” I heard myself whisper back, taking him into my arms.
“No!” I shouted snapping open my eyes, staring back at my reflection in the mirror attached to the bathroom wall. I shot up, wincing at the burning sensation that flashed down the length of my back. Gripping the sheet tight about me, I fled back along the landing to my room. I looked down at the bed, at the nightdress, then back at the open window.
Had the wolf-man that had come into my room last night… had we...? I couldn’t bring myself to even think of such a thing.
Lover? I heard the wolf-man whisper in my ear.
I spun around fearing that he had come back. He hadn’t. There was just me standing in my room, clutching the sheet and hearing myself say “yes” to the wolf-man before closing my arms around his back and…
“Stop!” I scolded myself. “It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have happened. It was just a dream.”
But the scratches down my back, around the window frame, the torn nightdress? my mind questioned me.
“Perhaps I went out last night – perhaps my nightmare had been so vivid that I had walked out into the woods…” I mumbled out loud, wringing my hands together. If I spoke out loud it made it more a reality – gave it more substance than the nightmare I had woken from or now found myself in. I glanced down at my bare feet, looking for any signs of mud or dirt that would suggest I had been sleep-walking. And why not? The dream about the wolf-man leaping through my bedroom window wouldn’t have been the first vivid dream I’d had since arriving in Shade. I’d had the dream about being chased through the graveyard and into the woods by Annabel. She had been a werewolf in that nightmare too. I’d come across Rush in those woods in my dream. We had been kissing…
But you didn’t wake to find your back covered in scratches, my mind prompted me.
“No, I woke to discover Calix in my room, on my bed and kissing me…” I started then stopped and so did my heart.
Had it been Calix who had come to my room last night? Had it been him who I had…? I pushed such thoughts far from my mind. Calix wasn’t a werewolf. It hadn’t been him who had killed Annabel. He had been with Rea – alone together in the Weeping Wolf. They had been making out. I had heard them, even though he’d denied it.
“Rush then?” I said, examining every possibility. But what was I doing? If any of the people in Shade were werewolves why hadn’t they killed me? Why give me a home and let me teach the children? Rush had lied and Calix had let his hands wander too far, but that didn’t make either of the brothers werewolves – it didn’t make them killers. And if the people of Shade were all werewolves, why kill Annabel? Why slaughter one of their own? None of it made sense. Shade didn’t make sense. But one thing was for sure, how could I stay here – in this house – alone tonight? The wolf would come back. It had come every night since I’d arrived in Shade. Had it shadowed me ever since I had climbed through that hole in the wall? I had sensed something large and hulking in the darkness even then. I’d had the feeling that I’d been followed through the woods and down into Shade.
But I couldn’t leave Shade, not yet. I had to stay. I’d come this far and however much the answer that I had come searching for appeared further and further out of reach, there was some small part of me that believed that perhaps in some way I was starting to unravel the truth about what was happening in Shade. There was one thing I knew for sure, and that was if I was going to stay and survive, I would need to be able to shoot as good as Rea, Rush, and Calix, so when the wolf did come back tonight, I could kill it, if I needed to.
Chapter Seven
After dressing in a hoodie, jeans, and boots, I strapped the gun to my thigh with the holster Calix had given to me. I ate some fruit and drank a mug of coffee. With my hair fixed into a ponytail, I made my way from the small cottage I had occupied on the outskirts of the park. Crossing it, I passed the swings where I had seen Clarabel playing on them. The park was deserted and the small schoolhouse closed as I went by. The door was shut and the windows dark. It had stopped raining, but the sky was overcast, and if there was still a sun in the sky, it was hidden behind a grey mountain of cloud.
Reaching the furthest reaches of the park, I found the small gap in the bushes and shrubs that led to the roads which snaked their way toward the church and the hill where Calix had said he was going to take me to practice shooting. With my hoodie pulled up against the wind, I set off up the path. The trees which lined it stooped low like frail pensioners with curved spines. The wind rustled the black leaves and the sound of my footfalls over gravel startled the crows which shot from the twisted tree branches, squawking as they soared over the barren fields of Shade. In the distance I could see the crooked church spire through the trees. There were no mourners today that I could see. There wasn’t any sign of Augustus Morten either. Perhaps he didn’t have a grave to dig today. How long would it be before he needed to dig another? I wondered as my skin suddenly chilled. I reached the gate that led into the graveyard. My head told me to keep walking, but my heart told me to stop. I wanted to see Annabel’s grave. I told myself that it was only right that I went and spent a few silent moments beside it. I had been her teacher after all, albeit for a very short time. But didn’t I owe her something – a little respect at least?
Pushing open the iron gate, I stepped into the graveyard. I headed in the direction I had seen the mourners gathered the day before. Dead leaves blew amongst the gravestones as I made my way between them. Just ahead of me, I could see a small mound of raised earth. Taking a deep breath and my heart starting to speed up a little, I snatched one quick look around. I wanted to make sure that I was alone. I didn’t want some kind of a confrontation with a relative of the dead girl. All I wanted to do was pay my respects to her, then quietly leave. With my head down, I turned and made my way toward the freshly dug grave. Stopping before it, I could see that someone had placed a small posy of flowers at the foot of the grave. The flowers were blue and I recognised them at once. I had only seen such flowers once before and that had been in the old outhouse Flint and I had once discovered hidden behind the brambles. The same flowers had been left at the feet of the two skeletons that had been chained up and had had nails hammered into the palms of their hands.
I heard someone give a gentle cough behind me, and with my heart in my throat, I spun around. Augustus Morten was standing just feet away, peering at me with his white-cloudy eyes from beneath the rim of his bowler hat. How had he crept up on me so fast and so silently?
“You scared me,” I gasped.
“I’m sorry,” he said, lips twisting up into a smile. “If you would rather be left alone…?”
“No it’s okay,” I said, turning back toward th
e grave.
He came forward and stood beside me. He wore the same black undertaker’s clothes I had seen him in before. The bottoms of the trousers were splashed with mud and so were his scuffed-looking shoes. The cuffs of his suit jacket were frayed, and the collar of the white shirt he wore beneath it was turning yellow with age.
“Do you blame me like everyone else does?” I asked without turning to face him.
“Blame you for what?” he said over the whoop and howl of the wind.
“For the death of Annabel,” I said.
“Of course not,” he said, sounding astonished by what I had just said.
“So why does everyone else blame me?”
“The people of Shade are just hurting right now,” he said. “People do and say strange things when they are grieving for the loss of a loved one. They will see things differently in time.”
“How much time?” I asked. “I don’t think I can bear to be blamed for Annabel’s death for too much longer. I didn’t do anything wrong. I tried to help her.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Morten glance down at the gun strapped to my thigh. I knew what he was thinking. He was having the same thought about me as the others. His lips said one thing, but his heart thought another.
“I’m going to get better at shooting,” I said. “That’s why I’m out here. I’ve going up to the hill to practice. I won’t ever again let a werewolf kill a child that is in my care.”
“A werewolf?” Morten said, looking sideways at me with his milky coloured stare. “What makes you think it was a wolf that killed Clarabel? Did you see the creature?”
“I just saw its hands as it grabbed her,” I said.
“Then how can you be so sure that it was a werewolf that snatched the child? Are you an authority on werewolves?” he asked, unsmiling at me. The corners of his mouth almost seemed to stretch down and become lost in his pointed chin. I could see that his teeth were yellow and ivory-looking.
“No, I’m not an authority on werewolves,” I said, keeping quiet about what I believed had come into my room last night. How could I say anything if I wasn’t sure myself? “They didn’t have werewolves in Maze, the town I come from.” Wanting to change the subject, I looked back at the grave and said, “They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
“Werewolves?” Morten asked.
“The flowers,” I said, looking down at the posy that had been placed in the grave. “What are they called?”
“The flower has several names,” Morten said. “It has been called Aconitum and Monkshood, but from where I come from, the flower is better known as Wolf’s Bane.”
I looked back at the flower, knowing where I had seen it before. “You come from a place called Valais,” I said, glancing sideways at him. “Is that where the flower comes from?”
“It grows there, yes,” Morten said, matching my stare. “Does it grow in Maze?” he smiled.
My heart suddenly thumped. “I don’t come from Maze,” I corrected him. “I come from Twisted Den, I told you that once before, remember?”
“Yes,” I remember.” Morten nodded his head thoughtfully, then added, “But a moment ago you said that you’d never seen a werewolf in Maze, the town you come from.”
“It was a mistake,” I lied, feeling suddenly rattled by him. But his mistake hadn’t gone unnoticed by me. “Just like the mistake you made when you said it was Clarabel that had died and not Annabel. Which one was it?”
With his smile waning ever so slightly, Morten said, “It’s so hard to tell, the children look so much alike, they are identical.”
“Should that have been looked so much alike?” I corrected him. “One of them has died, haven’t they?”
“Of course you are right, Mila,” he said.
“See how easy it is to make a mistake?” I said.
“It seems as if we have both made a mistake – a mistake about each other,” he said. I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but before I’d had a chance to say anything, Morten changed the subject and added, “How many bullets do you have?”
“Six,” I said. “Why?”
“Well, your gun practice is going to be very short-lived if you only have six bullets to shoot,” he said, smiling again, before turning his narrow back on me and striding away across the graveyard. With one quick wave of his hand, he shouted, “Follow me.”
Taking one last look back at the grave, I followed Morten back across the graveyard in the direction of the church. The crooked spire towered above me, weather-beaten, the bricks and stone cracked and lined with age. Morten led me around the side of the church. In the distance I could see the treeline from where Annabel had been snatched. I looked away. I didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened there.
“I thought you said you lived near the church,” I said as he came to a sudden stop outside a small door set into the wall of the church. The door had once been painted green, but most of the paint had since flaked away and I could see the knotted planks of wood peeking through from beneath.
“I said I lived in the church,” Morten reminded me, pulling open the door.
I peered over his stooped shoulder and beyond the door. There was a small poky room that was cluttered with old furniture and tools. He shifted a spade to one side. “You live in there?” I frowned. “It’s nothing more than a storage room.”
“I don’t live in here, I live up there,” he said, pointing up at the spire.
“Up there?” I gasped, leaning backwards on the heels of my boots and staring up.
“I have a small room up there,” he said. “It is adequate for my meagre needs.” He then reached into the small room and pulled out an old shoe box, which he shoved into my hands. “There should be enough in there for you to practice with.”
Removing the lid from the box, I looked down at the bullets inside. “Where did you get these from?”
“Spares,” he said, closing the door to the room. “I have no use for them anymore. I haven’t fired a gun in years.”
I watched him stride away around the side of the church. “Years?” I whispered to myself before replacing the lid on the box and setting off after him.
Turning the corner, I could see that Morten had stopped just outside the main door that led into the church. He watched me from beneath the brim of his bowler hat as I made my way toward him, gun slapping against my thigh with each step I took. “How many years have you lived in Shade?” I asked, drawing level with him.
He looked at me. “What did Rush tell you?”
“Ten years,” I said.
“Then why ask?” he smiled, before opening the door to the church and disappearing inside.
Without looking back, he closed the door, leaving me alone in the graveyard holding the box of bullets he had given to me.
Chapter Eight
Tucking the box of bullets under my arm, I made my way out of the graveyard. Although I was grateful to Morten for giving me the spare bullets for my gun, I couldn’t help but also feel unnerved by what he had said. Why had he so curtly shrugged off my question about how long he had been living in Shade? Was it that neither of us truly believed what we spoke to each other? Morten had slipped up about Annabel and Clarabel. But he had caught me out, too. I had made a mistake when I’d said I’d come from Maze and not kept to my original backstory that I had left Twisted Den because it was too dangerous for me to live there. What was he now going to do with that information? Tell Rea? Go running to Rush and Calix? Would he tell them that I was a liar and couldn’t be trusted? Maybe Morten wouldn’t say anything at all. Perhaps he liked me – trusted me more than I realised. Why else then had he given me a box of bullets? Why would he want me to learn how to be a better shot if he didn’t trust me? I wouldn’t want an enemy of mine to be strolling about town with a gun strapped to their thigh. However unlikely I thought it to be, could I have a secret ally in Augustus Morten? Did we share a mutual distrust and trust for each other? Only time would tell, I guessed, as I closed the gate
behind me and headed toward the hill in the distance.
Reaching the stile I’d climbed over the day before with Calix, I scrambled over it and into the field. With the box of bullets clutched to my chest, I made my way up the hill, bent forward at the waist as the wind slammed into me. At the brow of the hill, I saw the small, red brick building that Calix had pointed out to me the day before. With the village of Shade behind me, I made my way down the hill toward the building.
There was no door. It had long since been ripped from its hinges. There weren’t any windows either. Only jagged slithers of glass remained, jutting from the warped window frames like broken teeth. The wind howled outside, sounding like waves breaking over some distant shore. Pulling back my hood, I peered about the empty shell of the building. On the far wall, I could see that someone had sketched out with chalk the shape of what looked like human forms. They stood in a row, like targets at the end of a shooting range. I moved closer toward them, my boots crushing over broken pieces of glass that covered the stone floor. The outlines were painfully thin, and the hands had been drawn into long, pointed claws. The bricks where the outline of the head had been drawn was pockmarked with bullet holes. They all were. So perhaps this was where the villagers came to learn how to fire a gun. Maybe Calix hadn’t brought me out here to taunt me with a view of the graveyard and the mourners gathered around Annabel’s grave. To think such a thing only made me feel even guiltier than I already did about the fight that had taken place between Calix and Rush. I knew in my heart that I had only told Calix what Rush had confided in me because I was angry with him for bringing me out here. I’d said what I’d said because I had been angry with him and I’d wanted him to hurt like I had. But looking now at the shapes etched onto the wall and the hundreds of bullet holes peppering the walls, I wondered if that anger I had felt for Calix had been misplaced. Had he really just been trying to help me after all? Something else to add to my ever growing list of fuck-ups.
