“My dear Mrs Callister,” I murmured. “What on earth makes you think—?”
“Don’t lie to me! I know that child like a book!”
“Come in, Mrs Callister,” I invited. “Look for yourself.”
She stormed into the house, stabbing a quick glance into the sitting-room and dining-room. She strode down the hall to the kitchen. “Susie! Susie! Are you hiding from me, you little she-devil? Susie! Where are you?”
I followed her from room to room, slyly watching her. She would please them. She was shapely. Her legs were nicely rounded. Her mature body gleamed white as snow through the gaps in her worn-out black dress.
Upstairs we went, down again, and finally to the cellar door. There she hesitated. For one brief instant the anger on her wretched face was supplanted by fear.
I opened the door.
“I-I ain’t goin’ down there!” she whispered.
“My dear Mrs Callister, why not?”
“I just ain’t!” Her voice rose to a screech. “Susie! Are you down there?”
It seemed strange to me that she could not hear the whispers. I could hear them. In fact, they were more than merely whispers, for mingled with them now was a kind of unearthly howling, as though down there in the gloom of the cellar a pack of wolves had gathered for some sort of feeding frenzy. I could hear them plainly, and knew exactly what was being demanded of me.
Very carefully I stepped back – so carefully that Mrs Callister did not notice. I looked at my hands and raised them, slowly, slowly, until they were poised only a few inches from her shoulders. One savage thrust, and Susie Callister’s mother would go screaming down the stairs. Then I would wrench the door shut, turn the key again, and—
But at that moment I heard the front door open, and my wife’s voice called, “Peter! Will you help me get the things out of the car, please? There’s more than I can manage by myself!”
I closed the cellar door and went along the hall. Mrs Callister followed me. Anne, her arms laden, stopped short.
“This is Mrs Callister, Anne. She – er – she is under the mistaken impression that her daughter is here. I’ve been having a difficult time trying to convince her otherwise.”
Mrs Callister said something under her breath and went past us to the door. Then she stopped. Too late I saw the tiny, frayed handkerchief lying there on the hall table.
She snatched it up and looked at it, her eyes yellow with venom. Fiercely she turned to confront me. “I know!” she whispered. “I know what you’ve done! You’ve turned into one of them, like Jim did!” Then, with a shriek, she fled.
“The woman is mad,” I said to Anne. “This is the damndest village, full of the queerest people. Well, she’s gone. That’s something to be thankful for.”
Anne was silent, but the look she gave me was strange. All morning she kept an eye on me. In the afternoon she said, “Peter, why don’t you lie down and rest a bit? I think you’ve been working too hard.”
“I think I will.”
“Please. You’re not yourself, darling. You – frighten me a little.”
I went upstairs and shut the door. To sleep? Ah, no. I lay on the bed, thinking of the promise I had made. When night fell, I would keep it.
But night came so slowly! I lay there counting the minutes. I watched the room grow dark. I thought my wife would never stop puttering around downstairs. Hungrily I listened to every sound she made, to the soft tap-tapping of her heels as she went from room to room, to the murmur of the portable radio on the fireplace mantel. I cursed her for being so stubborn.
When she entered the bedroom at last, I pretended to be asleep. She set a lamp on the chest of drawers and turned the wick low, so not to wake me. Obliquely I watched her undress.
Pretty! Ah, so pretty! Did she know I was watching? Once, just once, she turned abruptly to look at me, and for a moment stood absolutely motionless, as though my furtive gaze had actually caught her attention. Then she put out the lamp and groped toward me in the dark.
And got into bed with me.
By the sound of her breathing I knew that her back was toward me. I became aware of the warmth and subtle fragrance of her body. I waited with devilish patience until I was certain she slept.
Then I seized her.
She screamed only once as my hands closed about her lovely throat. Her eyes flew open and I saw the whites of them staring up at me in the dark. Her lips whispered my name as I tore at her pyjamas.
Dragging her from the bed, I gathered her up in my arms and prowled to the door, leaving the torn remnants of her night-garb in a pitiful heap on the floor. If I kissed her mouth and crushed her against me in a wild, hungry embrace, it was not for love, for by that time I was laughing, and the low, bestial laughter that poured from my throat was not even remotely human.
“They want you!” I howled.
Down the dark stairs I carried her to the lower hall, and now the old house was alive with howlings and echoes of howlings, urging me on. Down the hall toward the cellar stairs I went.
All at once I heard voices and heavy footsteps on the porch.
I stopped. A snarl curled my lips. Lowering my limp burden, I prowled stealthily through the sitting-room to a window and crouched there, peering out.
There were many of them and they carried every conceivable kind of weapon. Up from the village they had come, led by the mother of the girl I had locked in the cellar and by Everett Digby, the doctor who knew more about this house than he had admitted.
Even as I watched, Digby hammered the door with his fist and demanded admittance, while the others crowded closer, their faces grim and gaunt in the glare of flashlights and lanterns.
“Open the door or we’ll break it down!”
I slunk from the window. For a moment I thought wildly of confronting them, but the beast I had become was afraid. And yet, there might still be time to thwart them. If I could reach the cellar in time . . .
Trembling and afraid, I crept into the hall. There lay my wife, mercifully unaware of my intentions, her sweet body a white, soft heap on the floor. And the howlings were thunder in my brain, lashing me, driving me on. I stooped to seize Anne’s arms, to drag her. But there was not time enough.
The door crashed inward and I wheeled in a crouch, snarling like a predatory beast driven from its prey. For one terrible moment I faced the mob, faced the awful accusation in the eyes of Everett Digby and the burning hatred in the stare of Mrs Callister. Then a rifle cracked and a bullet splintered the ancient timbers of the cellar door behind me. I whirled and ran, leaving my wife there on the floor.
With animal strength and cunning I sped through the kitchen, tore open the rear door and fled into the night. Darkness closed around me. At top speed I fled through the rank grass of the yard to the vast black shelter of the woods, easily escaping the frenzied swing of their searchlights.
There, exhausted, I lay snarling. And watched.
That night will live long in the memory of those people. An ambulance came from the Harkness hospital. Men in white rushed into the house with an empty stretcher and rushed out again with someone – my wife, I desperately hope – lying on it. The ambulance raced away. Lanterns moved in weird procession through the blackness as men from the village hunted me. Flashlights were glittering fireflies swarming in the night. Voices, some angry, some fearful, rode the breeze, and heavy feet tramped through the underbrush, sometimes within yards of the patch of brambles in which I cowered.
I waited. They will give up soon, I thought. Then I can go back. But in that I was mistaken. For as the first dull gray of dawn appeared, a crimson glow sprang up to rival it. Flames rose to the sky, devouring the ancient timbers of my honeymoon house. Huge clouds of smoke billowed up from the inferno.
I crept as close as I dared, and from the fringe of the woods I cursed the flames and the grim-faced men who stood by, watching the house burn. I cursed the truck that came at daybreak, when the blackened foundations had cooled. I silently reviled the
men who sweated there in the dawnlight, mixing concrete with which to fill the cistern in the cellar.
When they departed, I crept into the woods again, bitterly cursing my fate. For this I knew: in the cellar of that house had existed the doorway to another world – one to which I was now irrevocably committed but to which, God help me, I could never return. The taint of that world, its foulness, its corruption, had touched me as it had touched the father of little Susie Callister.
Susie was part of that world now, too – unless they had wanted her for something else. But even if she lived as one of them, I would never see her again. I was doomed to spend the remainder of my existence alone, unable to return to them and never to see my beloved Anne again.
With that understanding came another, which must have been lurking just under the surface of my consciousness. How clear it all seemed now! Working there in the cellar, Jim Callister, too, must have fallen prey to the whisperers. They had turned him into the kind of creature I had now become. His wife had seen it happening.
Had he actually died of a heart attack? More likely of poison, as she tried desperately to save his soul and protect herself and the child. Poison, as the undertaker fellow had suspected. And if so, Dr Digby must have helped her, for she was a simple woman who would have had no knowledge of poisons and no access to them.
How I wish my wife had poisoned me!
And so . . . this letter, this manuscript, this confession or whatever you may choose to call it. I have written it laboriously, using pencil stubs and scraps of paper gathered from trash cans in the village, where I prowl at night in search of food. I will leave it tonight under a stone on the steps of the Harkness church, where someone – perhaps the pastor – will be sure to find it. Then I shall go away.
Where to? God knows. The world of the whisperers is forever closed to me, and in the world of men I have no place. Day by day the lines of my face change, my lips recede over teeth that are slowly becoming fangs, my eyes grow smaller and more luminous, my head shrinks into the bulge of my shoulders. Day by day the cold white skin of my misshapen body becomes more hairy.
Pray for me, please. I did not ask for this to happen.
David Sutton
AND I SHALL GO IN THE DEVIL’S NAME
David Sutton has edited, produced and contributed to a wide range of small press publications over the past forty years, most notably with his own magazine, Shadow, and through periodicals for The British Fantasy Society.
A winner of the World Fantasy Award and multiple British Fantasy Awards, he is the editor of the anthologies New Writings in Horror and the Supernatural 1 and 2 and The Satyr’s Head and Other Tales of Terror, and co-compiler of The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, and the Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series.
His own short fiction has been published widely in such anthologies and magazines as Best New Horror 2, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, Final Shadows, Cold Fear, Taste of Fear and Skeleton Crew, and his fiction has recently been collected in Clinically Dead and Other Tales of the Supernatural.
As the author explains: “As with a number of my stories, the present yarn came out of a visit to a weird, inspirational place. Bute is a quiet, picturesque Scottish island dotted with megaliths and ruins. From the hills you can invariably observe the sea, the mainland or other islands, and often all three. Yet you seem to be lost or trapped in another world.
“The Celtic monastery ruins and their location are real, so is some of the witchcraft lore. If this particular anthology wasn’t about werewolves I’d probably have written a story about jellyfish – the whole of the island’s shoreline was absolutely clotted with their corpses – big ones!”
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again.
Isabel Gowdie, Scottish witch, 1662
Samantha stepped through the meadows with long-legged strides, her calf and thigh muscles aching slightly as she negotiated the slopes of Lubas Crag. For a moment, as she glanced down the way she had come, she glimpsed between gently rolling hills the calm blue waters of Dunagoil Bay. The hills of Arran were a faded blue-grey in the distance beyond. Then they vanished behind gorse and grassy hummocks as she climbed higher. The day’s heat was hoping to stall her booted step.
But she would not let it.
Beyond a stile, the indeterminate footpath skirted a farmer’s field in which sheep had latterly grazed. Their wool lay scattered in little patches, as if someone had grabbed handfuls and thrown them to the wind.
Like remnant smears of melting, grubby snow, she thought.
This was early Summer though, and as if to emphasize the point, a hare darted carelessly across Samantha’s path. A friend to witches and supernatural beings, she recalled, as the jack swerved upon seeing her and turned a right angle. He leapt ten feet at one and the same time, landing on higher ground beyond the footpath in the next field.
Leaping without furry feet touching earth in between.
Samantha wished her trek were as easy as the hare’s. The animal’s feet and the long, muscular hind legs propelled the mammal into the air, its black-tipped ears swept back, streamlined by its speed.
Tortoise-like, she would be the last of the two of them to reach St. Blane’s Chapel, higher up, nested in a natural bowl at the summit of the hill. An old site, and similar to the hare’s form, hollowed and hidden somewhere in the meadows. Likewise the granite stones of the Celtic ruin: weathered into the grass in a depression a thousand years’ ancient.
Samantha sat for a moment on an outcrop of grey rock and examined her hiking books. The wetness of the grass had somehow penetrated beyond the wax she had that morning applied in her hotel room in Port Bannatyne. She almost wished she could take off her boots and proceed barefoot, wanting the caress of rough and uneven turf.
There were things she craved beyond rational thought. Beyond the grime of everyday life. Sitting here in the warm breeze, she now understood that her boyfriend would not have appreciated the inexplicable desires. She was glad he wasn’t with her.
Damon had already complained that morning that they were pursuing their walking holiday as if the whole island and its mysteries must be explored in a brief couple of days; when in fact they had two whole weeks. And much more to explore than merely the island of Bute itself, he’d added. With no further comment she’d known he was silently dissociating himself from her interest in the island’s history.
“I’m taking the bus to Rhubodach,” he’d announced after breakfast, flinging an empty rucksack on the bed, “and taking the quick ferry. Then I might see if I can’t get up to loch Fyne. You coming?”
His question was a veiled threat. Don’t accompany me, and that’s it: some undefined punishment looming as if she were an unruly child. Samantha had wanted to ask if he were prepared to walk to the loch from the mainland, quite a distance; or if he were, as his mood now implied, inclined to public transport.
Instead she said, “I’d rather stay on the island.”
“Where will you go?” he asked, now dropping the indignation from his voice, if not the frown from his features. The frown that now reminded her of the hare’s face and its bulbous, startled eyes.
Samantha had edged around the side of her bed, a bath towel wrapped modestly across her breasts. Her thighs were squeezed by the narrow space between the bed and the wardrobe. “St Blane’s,” she’d answered. “As we’d planned for today, if you remember.” She grabbed a hairbrush off her bedside cabinet and swept it through her short, damp hair, cold droplets of water cascading against her back.
The water made her skin goosebump, although it might have been caused by her contemplation of seeing the mysterious chapel. She wasn’t prepared to admit that there was something undefined in her mind that was nonetheless curiously compelling and at the same time distinctly uneasy about wanting to go to the chapel.
As Samantha was finishing her hair, she was about to try to persuade Damon to change his mind and
accompany her, but there were his legs to think about. Suddenly, on this holiday, Damon had become lame. His customary stamina and his inexhaustible energy had ebbed away as if he were an animal caught in a gin trap, its wide shark teeth sucking on the blood, cracking the bones, tearing the sinews and exhausting the creature. Draining not only his body’s potency but his mind’s, too.
He wasn’t about to admit it, but age, his diet and drink were immobilizing him, slowly but surely. The result was plain to see on this holiday, in which pub lunches had already been favoured to traipsing heather-purpled hills.
During their days here, Samantha had been the one who set the pace, much to her surprise. At first she thought he was coming down with the flu, but he was angry with her when she had suggested the previous evening that he might be.
An irrational argument had flared between them in the darkness of their cheap hotel room, as if a flame was igniting the space between the beds.
“A good job the owner gave us a twin-bedded room by mistake!” had been Damon’s final goodnight communication.
Samantha waited in the darkness. For the three years she had been with Damon, she never had been able to sleep properly in a separate bed. Finally she did sleep, though, but warned herself on the edge of slumber that she was not an arm of Damon’s personality; not a withered twin, about to follow the stronger half because if she didn’t, she would be lost.
Damon was not the stronger half. They weren’t even halves. She was not a fraction, she told herself. She was a whole.
In the morning Damon remained sullen. His dark hair was greasy, but he’d refused to shower when Samantha had shouted from the bathroom that she was finished and he could take his.
Well, he could stay greasy and fat, for all she cared. Podgy was how she now viewed his stocky figure. She was eyes and forehead taller than him, but with his broad shoulders she hadn’t cared, up until today. Now, well now there was something pathetic in a taller woman being around such a fat slob of a man . . .
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 23
