by Tim Collins
It was interesting to see the different attack methods of the wolves. Alan and Janice shared a sheep between them, taking turns to hold the struggling creature down while the other enjoyed a chomp. Richard stood on his hind legs, tilted his head back, and virtually swallowed one of the poor things whole. But by far the most vicious was Paul, the yappy little werepoodle. He ripped into his sheep with amazing speed and ferocity, reducing it to a pile of bones and offal in seconds. I made a mental note never to tease him about his wolf form.
Anyway, I’m back again now, so it’s time for five hours’ sleep, five hours’ revision and then the third and final night of our little gathering.
Saturday 12TH May
I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. I’m going to leave the pack. I’m going to tell Ryan I’ve had enough. This has all gone too far. I didn’t sign up for any of this. I don’t…
Sorry for the interruption to the last entry. I got so stressed I transformed while writing, which would have been very embarrassing if Mum had walked in. Luckily, I’ve managed to calm myself enough to return to human form now, but I’m still very stressed about what happened last night.
It all started well, with another transformation and another dash across the moors. Then when the sun came up, we all turned back into humans and hiked to Ryan’s house.
Ryan said he wanted to say a few words before we went home, so we gathered in the living room.
Ryan thanked us for another enjoyable full moon, and congratulated us on resisting the stranded humans. Just when I thought he was wrapping up, he said he had a big announcement to make.
He said he’d decided that the next full moon should be the date for the vampire attack. Everyone in the pack whooped with delight when he said this, except for Chloe, who looked down at the floor.
Then Ryan pointed at me and said that now we had another alpha wolf on our side, we were bound to defeat the vampires. This sent the pack into another frenzy of applause. He told them he’d already started my combat training and was convinced I’d be able to slice vampire heads off with a single stroke by the next full moon.
Woah, hang on a minute. Vampires? Ryan didn’t mention anything about vampires when he was training me. I didn’t even know they existed! You might not expect this to be a big shock to someone whose friends are nine-foot dogs, but it still takes a bit of getting used to. Who else is going to turn out to be real? Hobbits? Daleks? The Easter Bunny?
Rather than going into any more detail about the attack, Ryan then went off on a frenzied rant about how vampires were evil, and they were going to pay for what they’d done.
The whole pack let out howls of anger as Ryan spoke. I felt like I should join in, but I couldn’t help wondering why we wanted to fight these creatures if they were really so merciless. Shouldn’t we start by battling some less bloodthirsty creatures, like cows?
I asked Ryan if I could have a word with him when he’d finished his speech, but he told me to go home and rest before my training tomorrow.
I pointed out that my GCSEs start on Thursday and it would be more convenient for me if we could put off the attack for a while. But then Ryan said that if we were victorious, we’d own an entire island with a massive castle on it. I’d be so rich I wouldn’t even bother opening my GCSE results when they came.
I agreed to go back tomorrow, but now I’m not sure. I don’t want to fight any vampires. I want to focus on my exams and go to sixth form and maybe start a role-playing games club. That way I can enjoy all the excitement of battle without the danger.
Sunday 13TH May
I’ve only slept a couple of hours since I got back yesterday morning. Every time I drifted off to sleep I had a nightmare about battling Dracula or Nosferatu or Grandpa from The Munsters and got so scared I woke up in wolf form. In the end, I gave up on sleep and tried to get on with my maths revision instead. But whenever I had to add up it reminded me of The Count from Sesame Street and I got frightened again.
I’m not going to go round to Ryan’s house today. He can fight his own vampire battle. I’m not doing it.
Just got this email from Ryan:
I suppose I should at least tell him in person that I don’t want to fight. I’ll thank him for all his help so far, explain why I won’t join his battle, come straight back here and get on with my revision. I’m sure he’ll be fine with it.
Monday 14TH May
I’m back from Lunar Hall again now. I tried to explain to Ryan that I didn’t want to fight, and he seemed to accept it. But then he said he wanted to explain a little more about vampires before I made my decision.
Ryan spoke calmly at first, but with increasing fury as he described how vampires prey on innocent humans and leave them as drained, lifeless corpses. He said they were feral, dirty parasites with no more right to live than a louse or mosquito.
He asked me if I thought killing vampires was wrong and I said that killing any living creature was wrong. But then he said that vampires aren’t actually living creatures at all. They’re just corpses brought back to life by disease, and if you end their perverse existences you’re effectively curing them.
So even if we didn’t have a quarrel with any particular vampires, it was our duty to track them down and destroy them. But in fact we had been wronged by a vampire coven, so we had no choice but to fight them.
Ryan said that he’d recently discovered documents proving that the remote Scottish island of Hirta was stolen from the Lunar Wood Pack by a coven of vampires over a hundred years ago. The undead fiends still live in a castle on the island, and seem to think we’ve forgotten about their theft. Which means it’s the perfect time to pay them a visit.
Next full moon, we’ll all drive to Northport, and then Richard will sail us to Hirta in his trawler. Then, when the moon comes out, we’ll march out onto the island and ‘go and whoop some vamp’.
While we battle the vampires in wolf form, Ryan will stay human, so he can sneak around driving wooden stakes into their hearts.
After we’ve regained Hirta, Ryan intends to make it a safe haven for oppressed wolves, and eventually establish the largest pack in the world. Then he said as I was the only other founding alpha wolf, I’d be a natural choice for deputy leader!
I can’t believe I could soon be the deputy leader of the biggest wolf pack in the world. There I was thinking I had to plough through GCSEs, A Levels and degree modules before I could get a taste of power, and I now could be in a leadership position before my sixteenth birthday.
Just imagine all the brilliant speeches I’ll be able to deliver:
‘Tough on vampires, tough on the causes of vampires.’
‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And vampires.’
‘We shall fight them in the graveyards, we shall fight them in the coffins…’
‘Werewolves of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your leashes.’
I was so excited about becoming the deputy leader that I let Ryan restart my training right away.
He dragged another sheep carcass out into the garden, and this time he made a cape for it out of a binbag so we could pretend it was a vampire. I transformed and worked on my claw slashes until Ryan was happy. Then I struck out at the sheep’s neck and took its head off in one slice. Ryan said that if I could do that on the night, we’d defeat the fanged fiends in no time.
So I’ve now agreed to resume my training and fight next full moon. I’m sure it won’t effect my revision too much.
Tuesday 15TH May
I can’t believe I’ve got my history exam tomorrow. I’m planning to revise the First World War between now and nine, the Second World War between nine and eleven, the Cold War between eleven and one, pop round to Ryan’s house for some more training, and then come back and do the Russian Revolution before bed.
It’s now 11pm and I’ve just got back from Lunar Hall. It’s a bit later than I originally planned, but I think I can manage another spot of revision.
We had another
good training session today. I learned the flying kick, the lightning pounce and the spinning tail attack. They were hard to get the hang of, but I know I’ll be better at them by the time the full moon comes round.
I’m still frightened about facing the vampires, but the more Ryan tells me about them, the more I’m determined to destroy them. Apparently, they’ve been systematically stealing our land and property for centuries.
According to Ryan, us werewolves have always been in favour of peaceful coexistence, and we’ve drawn up countless treaties to fairly divide land. We even offered to urinate around an entire county to mark it out as our territory once. But vampires have broken their promises time and time again.
He says this is typical of their slippery evasiveness. They have hypnotic beauty and lilting, seductive voices that draw you in and trick you. This is why you have to attack them before they can speak.
By the time Ryan had finished I was ready to go up to Scotland and fight the vampires right away. I have to admit I’m feeling a little more nervous about it now I’m back home, though.
Wednesday 16TH May
I just got back from my history exam, and I think I did a good job of keeping recent events out of my mind. At one point I got a little mixed up and wrote that the Nazis were ‘as bad as the vampires’, but I’m sure the examiners will dismiss this as a figure of speech. I don’t think I’ll get an A star, but I’m sure I passed. Under the circumstances, that’s not bad going.
I’d originally planned to take the afternoon off, but I started thinking about vampires and it made me so angry I went right round to Lunar Hall to continue my training. Ryan said he was impressed by my dedication to the cause, and repeated his promise to make me deputy leader.
After practising neck slashes for an hour, I asked Ryan if the vampires wouldn’t just turn into bats and fly away when we tried to attack them.
He laughed and said that was just a silly myth, which I thought was a bit rich coming from someone who spends much of his time as a large pack animal.
Apparently, loads of the stuff you hear about vampires isn’t true. They can’t be killed by sunlight, but they can be killed if you ram a wooden stake into their hearts or remove their heads.
It’s true that they hate garlic and crucifixes, but it’s not true that they sleep in coffins filled with soil, as they don’t sleep at all. I wish I didn’t have to sleep. I could fit training and revision in really easily if it wasn’t for boring old sleep.
They can be seen in mirrors and photographs, although they try to avoid the latter because they would prove that they don’t age, and this would bring them to the attention of their legions of human fans.
The more I find out about vampires, the less I understand why humans love them so much. They’re blood-guzzling corpses. How exactly is that sexy? It’s outrageous that we should allow teenage girls to put posters of them on their walls. We wouldn’t let them do it with any other mass murderers.
Thursday 17TH May
This is all very confusing. I was about to plough through my science revision this morning when Mum burst into my room with a massive grin on her face. She said my girlfriend was here, and I looked out the window and saw that Chloe from the pack was standing at the door.
I dashed downstairs, popping a Smint into my mouth just in case she actually had come round for a date. When I got to the door, Chloe said we should go to the park where no one could overhear us, which I’m ashamed to say raised my hopes further.
Unfortunately, romance wasn’t on her mind. Instead, she asked me what I thought about Ryan’s plan to attack the vampires. I repeated everything he’d told me about how the island was stolen from our pack and how aggressive vampires were. But then Chloe asked if we weren’t the ones who were acting aggressively. Also, if we had Lunar Hall and they had their island, why couldn’t we just leave each other to live in peace?
Chloe said she’d tried to discourage Ryan when he’d told her about his plan three months ago, but he wouldn’t be swayed. Now the attack was approaching, all she could do was visit everyone in the pack individually and convince them that war was wrong. She invited me to come along and I told her I’d consider it.
The more I think about it, the more I think Chloe might be right. I’m sure vampires are just as evil as Ryan claims, but that doesn’t mean we should invade their island. Wasps are pretty horrible too, but I don’t feel the urge to pick up one of their nests and smash it on the floor.
I’ve always been a pacifist, and I don’t see why that should change now. Admittedly, I spend a lot more time wanting to sink my teeth into the throats of innocents as if they were raspberry doughnuts, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t seek peaceful solutions to problems when I’m in human form.
I’ll email Ryan and tell him I need a break from training to focus on my exams. Then I’ll go around with Chloe and convince the rest of the pack to boycott the war. When enough of them have signed up, we can all tell Ryan at the same time, and he’ll have to accept it. After all, he can hardly battle the vampires alone.
Mum just came into my room and asked me loads of questions about Chloe. I kept insisting she wasn’t my girlfriend, but she was having none of it. In the end, I pretended she was so I could get on with my revision. But that only made Mum go on about how I should treat my girlfriend with respect and not like how Dad treated her. I closed my textbook and put my pens away. I knew from experience that when that conversation starts, I could pretty much write off the rest of the evening.
Friday 18TH May
Chloe called round again just before lunch, and was overjoyed when I agreed to join her peace campaign. She said that with the backing of an alpha werewolf, it would be much easier to win the other wolves over.
Then she showed me a map with the addresses of all the pack members marked on. They’re scattered within a forty-mile radius of Lunar Hall, so this is going to take a while, but we thought we might as well make a start on the nearest ones.
The first member we visited was the scaffolder called Steve. He looks like he’s in his mid-twenties, but it’s quite hard to tell with wolves. He could be fifty for all I know. He wasn’t in when we called round so we followed his scent to a nearby construction site.
He was happy to come and speak to us, but he couldn’t believe we were being serious when we said we wanted to prevent the battle. He kept slapping me on the back and telling me what a classic windup it was. Then he said he had to get back to work, but he was looking forward to seeing me at the rumble with the vampires.
The next member we tried was Paul, the bouncer who turns into the werepoodle. He was very friendly at first, and invited us inside his terraced house for tea and giblets. But when we tried to recruit him for our peace campaign, he got really angry and threw us out. He said that vampires were the most evil creatures on earth and he’d been waiting his entire life for a chance to have a pop at them.
Chloe asked him if he’d ever met a vampire, and he seemed to find the very question offensive, saying that if he’d even been within sniffing distance of one, he’d have ripped its head off and turned it into an ashtray. He then suggested that we leave before he did the same to us.
The only other pack members in walking distance were Alan and Janice, who lived in a semi-detached house in the northern suburbs of Newchester. By the time we found their house, it was early evening, and they were watching a Shaun the Sheep DVD with their five-year-old son. I wonder if they were explaining that those are the animals that mummy and daddy ate alive last full moon.
They wouldn’t let us in, but we were allowed to whisper to them in the porch. It was hard to put our point across this way, and we didn’t get very far. They said they were sure Ryan had the best interests of the pack at heart and they were happy to go along with whatever he wanted. Then they said they had to go before their son asked who we were.
You can’t blame them, really. With two werewolf parents, that boy’s almost certain to turn wolf as soon as he hits pubert
y, so they just want to give him as normal a life as possible until then. But he’s going to find it a lot harder to adjust to the change if he loses both his parents in a supernatural battle. Imagine if he ends up in an orphanage. It will be like putting a furry time bomb in there.
It’s going to be harder than we thought to convince the pack not to fight. I’ve agreed to meet up with Chloe again tomorrow so we can rethink our approach. In the meantime, I’ve got my science exam on Monday so it’s fossil fuels time for me.
Saturday 19TH May
Chloe came round this afternoon and I showed her up to my bedroom. Mum kept coming in to ask if we wanted anything and she was really staring at Chloe. I could tell she wanted me to introduce her, but we had more important things to get on with so I ignored her.
As a result of our brainstorm, Chloe and I have decided to form the Werewolf Peace Front. I think the other wolves will find it easier to get behind our cause if we make it a proper organization with leaflets and stickers.
We’ve already designed a logo of a werewolf’s paw making a peace sign, and devised slogans like ‘Keep the wolf from the war’ and ‘I’m a sheep in wolves’ clothing’.
I’m not saying the other wolves are stupid, but I think they’ll find these kinds of soundbites easier to follow than complex arguments.
We’ve also come up with the following ideas to promote our cause:
