by Stephen Cole
A tight-lipped smile appears on Marcie’s face. ‘Is that a fact? Such a shame. I thought if I turned someone you cared about, you’d be willing to make the sacrifice.’
‘I’m not sacrificing myself for your sick little dreams.’
Marcie shakes her head. ‘You’re not going to change your mind, are you, Kate? All you care about is yourself.’ She looks at Mark. ‘Sorry, honey. I really hoped this would work out. But I guess she just doesn’t think you’re The One, after all.’
Kate, feeling the slow burn of betrayal, shrinks from them both in disgust. Then her breath catches in her throat as Marcie suddenly drops to all fours.
Marcie licks her lips. ‘But hey, Mark, d’you know what I think you are? I think you’re dinner.’
‘No!’ Kate shrieks. ‘You wouldn’t—’
The change comes easily to Marcie. A thick stream of drool floods from her mouth as she readies herself to jump. ‘I think your prissy, stuck-up bitch of a girlfriend needs a lesson teaching,’ she snarls, arching her back. ‘She does things my way – or not at all.’
Mark stands there, frozen in shock.
Kate runs for him, to give him whatever protection her skinny body will allow.
Too late.
Kate sat straight up in the steaming bath. The tears poured down her face. She splashed the stinging water against her cheeks, rubbed it into her eyes.
It was no good. She would never be clean.
She rose unsteadily and got out of the bath.
She’d sworn then that no one else would die because of her, that she’d go along with whatever Marcie wanted. But she knew with a sick certainty, deep down, that when it came to it, she would never be able to give herself. And that by kidding herself all this time that she could play along, Tom Anderson might go the same way as Mark. And what would she do then?
She towelled her burning body dry, slipped on a robe and went to her room. The tea-light candles burning round Mark’s student card had gone out.
Kate knew she had to stop Marcie from harming Tom any further. Before it was too late.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Tom was feeling more alive than he’d ever imagined possible. His heightened senses earlier that evening hadn’t been an hallucination. They were back, crowding through his head. And he was learning to control them: if he stopped and concentrated, the mundane workings of the world about him became so intense he could barely stand it. If his mind wandered, his voracious senses slunk back into sleep, and everything seemed normal.
As normal as they could get in this house.
Like thirty minutes ago. He’d heard Kate’s door opening, and her soft footsteps coming out into the hallway. Then …
‘What’s in the folder?’ Marcie had asked. She must have been passing Kate’s door at the time.
Kate had been irritated, defensive. ‘It’s nothing. Puzzles and stuff. I thought he might be bored. I’m just trying to make the effort, like you want me to.’
‘That’s sweet, but you heard the boy,’ Marcie said softly. ‘He wants to rest up. And I think you’ve said enough to him today, don’t you?’
‘Forget it.’ Kate had gone back inside her room and slammed the door.
‘You’re not to go to his room,’ Marcie hissed. ‘I’ll be watching.’
Nuts. Everyone here was nuts. He heard Hal and Wes arguing now. Wes wanted to go out in the woods.
‘For Chrissakes, no one is going out tonight!’ Hal yelled. ‘There’s meat in the freezer. We don’t know when the boy’s going to … ’
The words were suddenly lost in the lo-fi thud and blare of some pretty hardcore-sounding hip hop. Tom smiled grudgingly. Nicely played, Wes. If you can’t leave the house, make it tough on everyone else stuck inside.
Tom reached a decision. With the blaring music covering his tracks, he could take a look around. Maybe look in on Kate, ask her what the hell was going on here. Or at least apologise for being such an utter doofus downstairs.
He crept stealthily along the corridor – then froze as he heard footsteps descending the stairs. Marcie. She must’ve meant it about watching Kate. So why give up now? A second later, the sound of the shower gurgling into life gave him his answer; Tom doubted that a soaking wet Kate was about to come running into his room with a soggy pile of puzzles.
He turned the corner. Kate’s bedroom door was ajar, so he stepped inside.
His eyes adjusted surprisingly quickly to the dim candlelight. A red folder sat by the pillow. He opened it up and found it stuffed with newspaper clippings. Even a cursory glance gave him the gist of it: a spate of missing persons and violent murders in Twin Falls, Idaho. The last one was dated three years ago. About the time the family moved away, Wes had told him.
He suddenly got the creepy feeling he was being watched. But turning round, the only eyes on him were those of Mystery Mark looking out sightlessly from his student card through the flames of fresh candles.
Tom closed the folder, a chill shivering down his spine. As he did so he noticed a note scrawled on a yellow sticky on the back of the file.
Pull back the sheet
Get rid of it
With an uneasy feeling he pushed Kate’s pillow and quilt to one side, then paused. Did he really want to do this? He could smell traces of her scent on the bedding. Such a good smell …
Tom’s face grew hot with embarrassment. Great. He was sniffing around girls’ bedrooms. Maybe he should go through her underwear next.
Holding his breath, with a sharp yank Tom tugged a corner of the pristine white sheet away.
There was nothing there. Just a pink patterned mattress.
Tom put things back just as he found them and left the room. But as he arrived back at his own, there was the quiet crack of a pebble at the window.
Tom sat up, senses alert again.
Something hit the wall below the window with a thud.
He leaped out of bed and crossed to see what was going on.
Beyond the jutting lip of the porch roof beneath him, Tom caught a fleeting glimpse of Kate, ducking from sight. But the shower was still running! How’d she get out there? He opened the window and craned his neck round to see if he could catch sight of her again.
What he saw instead was the towering spire of what must be a ham radio aerial. The mast bisected the full moon louring down at him from a starless sky. In that bright glare he noticed too what seemed to be a telephone cable snaking across the brickwork above his window.
At once he broke out in a cold sweat, felt suddenly breathless. He willed himself to stay calm. OK, so they had a ham radio, and a phone line. They could’ve got a message out to the authorities about him if they’d wanted to. But maybe it was broken. And the phone line might be an old one, disconnected when they came here. Or maybe not.
He couldn’t concentrate with the moon shining so brightly in his eyes. It was like staring into a hundred-watt bulb. His skin was tingling like he had sunburn, and a surge of panic and nausea welled up inside him.
He hung out through the window in case he was sick. And he saw what had thudded on to the porch roof. Tentatively, he reached for it.
A newspaper, wrapped around a rock and held there with an elastic band.
Why was Kate chucking old newspapers at him? No one had been out anywhere to pick up a new one. No one could get out …
He stared at the date. Blinked. Stared again. This had to be a joke. A misprint.
The newspaper was dated September 16th. He’d gone swimming, been faced down by the bear, smashed himself stupid on August 17th. And that had been just a week ago. Right?
The world seemed to tilt away from him.
Tom staggered back away from the window and collapsed with the paper on the bed. He tore through its oversized pages, scanning the print for anything familiar in the news, stuff that would show up the mistake with the date.
His eyes froze on a small headline circled in red ink. The column was buried right in
the middle near the classifieds. The sort of page where old news goes to die.
HOPES FADE FOR MISSING BOY
His eyes flicked over the story, his mind numbly cataloguing the bones of it. ‘Youth missing for a month … Clothes found by river bank … bear tracks … no sign of a body … Family advised to prepare for the worst … ’
Then he took in the missing boy’s name. ‘ … Sixteen-year-old Tom Anderson … ’
He stared, transfixed. Tears welled up from some cold place deep inside.
Everything he’d been told was a lie.
The Folans could contact the outside world any time they chose. They just chose not to.
They chose to keep him here for almost a month while feeding him bull about the flooded causeway – bull he’d swallowed like a good little invalid. And that was another thing. To fool him about the time like that … he must’ve been drugged.
‘My herbal cures have been fixing you up,’ Marcie had said. ‘Better than any fancy drugs a hospital can give you.’
He looked at his still-swollen hands. He’d come into contact with Belladonna, Marcie had said. Then Kate had told him Belladonna was cultivated here. So why?
He bit his lip. Started to shake.
Nah. Get real. Couldn’t be.
In that old book of Kate’s it said Belladonna formed part of the ritual that made men into werewolves. What else – hemlock? Camphor? Those ointments Marcie had been rubbing into his skin …
The image of the yellow sticky note flashed into his brain.
Pull back the sheet
Get rid of it
There’d been nothing on Kate’s bed, because she’d meant to bring the folder to his room. The message was for him. It was his sheet she was talking about.
Slowly, carefully, Tom eased himself off the bed like it might devour him if he made any sudden moves. He pushed aside the pillow and quilt, then pulled out one corner of the sheet from beneath the mattress.
As he yanked the sheet away, he saw it.
He backed away, wanted to cry out in horror but the bile was too hot and sharp in his throat.
There, stretched across the mattress like some well-fed, basking animal, was the thick, sleek pelt of a wolf.
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CHAPTER SIX
Kate sneaked carefully back into the house, shutting the kitchen door soundlessly behind her. It was a routine she was well used to. You could get out through the bathroom window, if you were ready to risk the drop down into the bushes, but you couldn’t get back in the same way. Wesley used the route regularly – he had to, seeing as he’d been grounded for most of his teens – but Kate hadn’t sneaked out the window-way for ages. She had no one to see, nowhere to go.
She could hear the hissing of the hot water pipes in the wall beside her. Had her ruse with the shower been enough to convince her mother to give up the guard duty for twenty minutes?
Beside her, on the wooden worktop, was a huge hunk of raw meat. Deer, probably; there used to be a lot in the forest. Blood pooled stickily around it and was dripping down on to the usually spotless floor.
Kate looked away, revolted, and saw another hunk of meat was lying in the corner by the washing machine. Judging by the messy track marks it had been kicked there.
Mom must be having one of her ‘moods’.
Kate took a deep breath. When Marcie was like this …
Over the muffled beats of Wesley’s music she could hear her mother flipping out at Hal in the living room. Typical. Guard duty looked like it was no longer Marcie’s priority. Her tone was charged with the hopeless urgency of a crazy person.
There was no way she could sneak past them to get to the stairs.
‘But I need to go out and kill,’ said Marcie, like this was the most reasonable thing in the world. ‘Come on, honey. Please, baby. I want it. That’s only natural, isn’t it? You must want it too … Let’s just go do it.’
Kate’s dad responded uneasily, talking to Marcie like she was a child: ‘Marcie, we agreed we’d cut back on the—’
‘Don’t give me that “we agreed” shit!’ Marcie shrieked back. ‘It’s what you agreed, you son of a bitch!’
Kate tip-toed to the kitchen door. She opened it a fraction.
‘Marcie, the boy must be close to turning,’ Hal said reasonably. ‘We need to be here for him when—’
‘Hal, baby, be here for me right now, OK? Please. I need to go out.’ Marcie was quieter now. Her slow, sly voice was somehow scarier than the yelling. ‘I’m not strong and stoic like you. Can’t live off cold, dead stuff my whole life.’
‘You go feeding too much. Stray too far.’
Marcie snorted derisively. ‘I can’t stop.’
‘You can. We all can. It’s a choice, we don’t have to—’ Hal broke off.
Kate froze. Hal had seen her. Defiance blazed in her eyes. ‘Right! So it is a choice!’ she mouthed back at him.
Hal didn’t react, just stared at her.
Then he turned back to his wife, keeping her attention on him. ‘Please. Stay in, with me.’
‘What part of this aren’t you getting, Hal?’ sighed Marcie. She cupped his face. With each whispered word, a different nail gouged the skin on his cheek: ‘I’m – going – outside – tonight.’
Kate watched as her father put his fingertips to his scratched face and took them away slick with blood. Her mother kissed his cheek, rubbed her face against it.
Hal looked over at Kate. ‘Go on,’ he mouthed to her.
Kate nodded, and crossed the room silently to the stairs.
Marcie was clinging to Hal now like she was too drunk to stand. She laughed, a harsh rattling sound. ‘I’ll bring you back something real nice, Hal. Nice romantic dinner for two, right? Like we used to.’
As Kate quickly climbed the stairs, she couldn’t help looking back at the thing that was her mother snuffling at her father’s bleeding face. His eyes met hers for a moment.
Each could see the fear in the other’s.
Tom stared helplessly at the pelt stretched tight across the bed for what seemed like forever. Then he tore it free and rolled it up as tightly as he could. It felt warm from his lying on it, and smelled of aniseed and smoke.
And of him.
He slung the pelt to the corner of his room with all the strength he could muster. Then he buried it completely beneath bedclothes.
He was hyperventilating. Fresh air. He needed fresh air. He staggered over to the window – then recoiled from the bright, bloated moon shining through the glass. Sweeping the curtains closed, Tom sank back against the wall.
Just what had the Folans done to him? Something was wrong with him, horribly wrong. All the weird stuff he’d been going through, it had seemed so random at first. But now it was starting to add up. And the answer seemed crazy.
The violent dreams of a hunched creature with yellow eyes … the old books and Belladonna … the way his senses had sharpened … the moon tugging him to the window … the pelt on the bed … Mystical, superstitious crap. Stuff to scare little kids with. Except it really was happening.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed before the front door slammed shut downstairs, making him jump. A few moments later, Wesley’s music was switched off.
Tom’s skin was squirming like there were bugs beneath it, driving him out of his mind. He needed some proper answers.
Kate. Surely she would help him?
He stretched out with his senses, realised the shower had stopped running. Kate must’ve got back inside the house undetected, or he’d have heard the fuss – right? He stumbled out of his room and down the corridor to the landing, and raised his fist to knock on her door.
‘Hey, Tom.’
He spun around. Wesley was perched halfway up the stairs. In the glare of the landing light, his red hair seemed brighter than ever and emphasised his pale complexion. He looked sick and sweaty but there was the ghost of a smile on his face as he looked up at Tom, grey eyes gleaming. ‘S
o … wanna hang out?’
Tom stared down at him. ‘What have you done to me?’
Wesley’s smile grew broader.
‘You all … You all said I’d been here a week.’ Tom gritted his teeth. ‘It’s been a month.’
Wesley sniggered. ‘Well, time flies when you’re having fun.’ He turned and walked down the stairs.
‘Wait.’ Tom started after him, almost losing his balance. His head was buzzing, the itch inside making him madder, but he kept going down the stairs. He had to stay angry. Anger would give him a focus. ‘I’m not through with you, Wesley,’ he snarled.
At this, Wesley turned around, eyebrows raised, amused. ‘Is that right?’
Tom took a step closer. ‘What have you done to me?’
‘You’re the big tough guy now, right?’ Wesley shook his head. ‘I think you know what we’ve done to you.’
‘I think you and your whole family are crazy … delusional. You all get off on thinking you’re something you’re not, and for some sick reason you’ve kidnapped me to make me think I’m like that too.’
‘Like what, Tom?’ Wesley cupped a hand to his ear, making out he was deaf. ‘I wanna hear you say the word.’
‘You think you’re … ’ Tom flushed. ‘You think you’re wolf people or something.’
‘Wolf people?’ Wesley spluttered with laughter, then slicked back his ginger spikes with both hands. ‘I think the term you’re looking for is werewolves?’
‘You think this is funny?’ Tom snapped. He marched up to Wesley and shoved him with both hands, knocking him to the floor. ‘Think this is some big joke?’
‘Hey, I’m just happy for you, man,’ said Wesley, getting up. ‘You’re one of us, now. You were a tough turn, but we got you.’ He smirked, and a flash of yellow seemed to glow through his eyes. ‘Welcome to the family.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Tom demanded.
Wesley pointed to his neck. ‘You were bitten, man. On the riverbank.’
Tom closed his eyes, remembering. Two narrowed yellow eyes, glinting, low down in the shadows. ‘But it was barely getting dark then,’ he argued desperately. ‘Werewolves only change at night, when it’s a full moon.’
