by Tim O'Rourke
“Who is this Wolf Man?” I asked her.
“I’ve found a picture of a Wolf Man on the web,” Isidor said, clicking on a new page on the screen before him. “I think this could be him. Scary, isn’t he?”
Potter leaned forward and stared at the screen, then said, “Are you taking the fucking piss?”
“No, why?” Isidor said staring blankly back at Potter.
“That’s Michael Jackson for crying out loud,” Potter snapped, his cigarette almost falling from the corner of his mouth. “That’s him dressed up in the Thriller video.”
“Is it?” Isidor asked, squinting at the screen. “It says he is the Wolf Man.”
“Do you think this Wolf Man would run around in a red and yellow jacket, blue jeans, and white socks while he grips his crotch and moonwalks?” Potter asked in disbelief. “This Wolf Man is stealing children’s souls, not running around the place in a sequined glove for Christ’s sake!”
“He looks pretty scary to me,” Isidor said studying the picture that he had found on the web.
Then, looking at Kayla and me, Potter gasped, “Is it just me or is the kid taking the piss?”
“Okay, keep your wings on, Gabby,” Isidor shot back. “So I made a mistake, how was I s’posed to know that wasn’t the Wolf Man…”
“And stop calling me Gabby,” Potter barked at him. “My name’s not Gabriela, Gabriel or anything else, it’s Potter…”
“But the Elder said your new name was…” Isidor started.
“I couldn’t give a monkey’s toss what the Elders said!” Potter barked, the veins on his neck bulging through his skin.
“Can we just stop this bickering?” I snapped at the both of them. “This isn’t helping.”
“Well, he winds me up,” Potter shot back. “Here we are trying to figure out what the fuck has happened since coming back from the dead and you’ve got numb-nuts over here Googling the greatest hits of Michael Jackson…”
“It’s called Toogling now,” Kayla cut in.
“Whatever,” Potter hissed.
“Look,” I said, taking a deep breath. “So Isidor made a mistake, it’s no big deal. He found out a whole bunch of other stuff. But what we really need to know is, who is this Wolf Man?”
“That’s the problem, Kiera, no one knows,” Kayla said back. “He is believed to be a human. He negotiated the treaty on behalf of the Skin-walkers and in return, they cast a spell that has given him unnaturally long life. He has been around for over two hundred years. The treaty says that if his identity is ever revealed then the uneasy truce is over and the humans win. The Skin-walkers have to return to their caves beneath the Fountain of Souls and leave the humans and their children in peace.”
“So I guess we try and find this Wolf Man,” Potter said. “Let’s be honest, it shouldn’t be that hard, we’ll spot his sparkling glove a mile off.”
Ignoring him, I looked at Isidor and Kayla and said, “So do we know where the children of Wood Hill are being held?”
“In a remote boarding school on the outskirts of the town,” Isidor said, bringing up another page on the screen before him. “But I bet you’ll never guess what this school is called?”
Then, with a sense of dread falling over me as I remembered my dream of the girl falling from the sky and being chased to that big building, I looked at Isidor and whispered, “Ravenwood.”
“How did you know that?” Kayla asked me in shock.
“I had a dream about it,” I told her.
“Ravenwood?” Potter cut in. “What’s that old fart got to do with this?”
“I don’t know,” I said back, wondering if Doctor Ravenwood were still alive in this reality.
“What sort of a screwed up world have we come back to?” Potter said, lighting another cigarette. “And I thought things were bad when the Lycanthrope were out on their killing sprees.”
“Why do the authorities stand by and do nothing?” I said, feeling numb at what Kayla and Isidor had discovered.
“Like Potter said,” Kayla almost seemed to whisper to herself, “we’ve come back to a different world than the one we knew. And somehow, I think by coming back, we are to blame.”
But I knew in my heart that it was my fault. “I’m to blame,” I told them.
“How do you figure that?” Isidor asked me.
“If I’d made my choice back in The Hollows like I was meant to, then none of this would have happened,” I said, lowering my head in shame.
“You don’t know that,” Kayla said, placing a hand gently on my shoulder.
“She’s right,” Isidor said. “Who knows what changes would have happened if you had chosen the Vampyrus over the humans or the other way around. However, had you chosen there would have still been changes to the world. You were in an impossible situation.”
“The Elders said that I would be cursed for failing to make a choice,” I told them, unable to look in their eyes. “They weren’t kidding, were they?”
“It’s the Elders who have done this, not you, Kiera,” Potter said.
“But it’s me who has to put it right,” I said, still unable to look at them.
“Not just you,” Kayla said, gently squeezing my shoulder. “We’re all a part of this. We’ve all come back. Like you said, Kiera, we’ve come back for a reason.”
“We just need to find out what that reason is,” Isidor said softly.
“I think that’s obvious, don’t you?” Potter snapped at him.
“Okay, keep your halo on,” Isidor bit back. “So what is the reason?”
“Like the guy in the shop said,” Potter hissed. “We push back. And we push hard.”
“But where do we start?” Kayla asked him.
“How about with that email?” he said, pointing at the laptop screen.
The three of us turned our heads to see that an email had appeared in my inbox. The subject line read:
I’ve been pushed!
Chapter Fifteen
Kiera
Within an hour of receiving the email, the sender was sitting across from me in the consulting room that I had prepared earlier that day. Elizabeth Clarke was in her early twenties and very pretty, something that Isidor had obviously noticed. He sat to the side of me, his mouth open. Elizabeth had blond hair that she had piled on top of her head in a loose-fitting bun. Little wisps of hair lay against her perfectly formed cheekbones. Her green eyes twinkled and her full lips glowed with a faint shade of pink lipstick. She was smartly dressed in a white blouse and light blue pencil skirt and jacket.
“Are you any good?” she asked me.
“At what?” I smiled back, but I knew what she meant. I had advertised my services as a private investigator and she wanted to know if she was going to be wasting her money or not.
She glanced at Potter who slouched against the wall in the corner, lost in a cloud of cigarette smoke, then at Isidor and Kayla who sat on either side of me. “Perhaps I’ve wasted my time,” she said, getting up from her seat.
“You’re not married, Miss Clarke,” I started, and winked at Kayla. God, this was so easy but it felt so damn good to be back at doing what I enjoyed the most. “However, you are dating someone and he hasn’t shaved for at least two days. You’re a school teacher by profession. You were raised in the town of Wood Hill but left some years ago and haven’t been back for some time. You live in a city that is some distance away. Your journey today was long enough for you to need to stop at a petrol station and refill your car. You’ve come about a family matter. Not a friend. A member of your family…”
“Okay, you’ve made your point,” Elizabeth said, sitting back down. “How did you know all that stuff about me — have you researched me in some way?”
“All I knew was from what you said in your email, that you had been pushed and that your name was Elizabeth,” I assured her.
“So how do you know then?” she asked me. “Are you psychic?”
“No,” I smiled, shaking my head.
&
nbsp; “She sees things,” Isidor added.
“So you are a psychic then,” Elizabeth said. “I have no need for one of those.”
“You’re not married because you don’t wear a wedding ring,” I smiled. “That was the easy part. You haven’t removed one or forgotten to put it on as there is no red mark left on your finger. You are, however, in a relationship with a man who either hasn’t shaved for a few days or has a very short beard. He has travelled with you and is probably waiting for you back at your motel.”
“How can you be so sure about that?” Elizabeth asked me, looking startled.
With my fingertip, I tapped my cheek and said, “Miss Clarke, your cheeks have a rather healthy glow, as does your chin. That might be due to exceptionally good health, but the redness to the chin — no that looks more like a rash of some kind — like you’ve been kissing a man recently who hasn’t shaved. He has travelled with you today as you’ve come a long distance and the rash would have faded by now. The spattering of chalk dust on your right sleeve tells me that you have been writing recently on a chalkboard, which suggests that you are a teacher of some kind. The raised pimple of flesh on the middle finger of your right hand tells me that you like to write a lot — more than just the occasional note or two, so I’m guessing your mark a lot of homework.”
“And how do you know that I’ve travelled a long distance today…”
Before she had the chance to finish her question, I said, “By the fact that you needed to refill your car with petrol — you’ve splashed some on your skirt. You would have only come such a long distance if it was a matter of urgency. For instance, a problem with a family member. I’m guessing by the fact that you are staying in a motel that it is a brother or sister who is working in this area. If it had been a parent, you would be staying with them.”
“How can you be so sure that I’m staying at a motel?” Elizabeth asked.
“Because no one would have left their own home on such a wet night dressed like you are now,” I smiled at her. “When you set off today, you had no idea that the weather would be so bad once you got here and you hadn’t packed adequate clothing.”
“Very good,” Elizabeth said staring at me.
“Good?” Kayla gasped, “That was awesome!”
Not wanting to waste any more time, I looked at Elizabeth. “You said in your email that you’ve been pushed. Please explain what you mean by that?”
With the back of her hand, Elizabeth knocked away one of the loose strands of hair and said, “I saw your advert in the shop window and it reminded me of something my sister used to say.”
“Your sister?” I asked her. “And where is your sister now?”
“What makes you think that she has gone somewhere?” Elizabeth shot back.
“You spoke of her in the past tense,” I smiled. “What was her name?”
“Emily,” Elizabeth said, taking a picture from her pocket and sliding it across the table towards me.
I picked it up, glanced at the photo and said, “An identical twin?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “We were identical in more ways than just our looks. Emily, like me, was a teacher. I’ve taught now for the past two years at a school in Linden.”
“Don’t you mean Lond…” Isidor started and I kicked him under the table.
“Please continue, Miss Clarke,” I smiled at her.
“Emily decided against a career in Linden and decided to teach closer to where we were raised in the town of Wood Hill,” Elizabeth continued. “She was so happy when she got herself a position at Ravenwood’s, a nearby private school. The pay was good and she seemed very happy for a time.”
“So what changed all of that?” I asked her, my interest growing in the case on hearing that Elizabeth’s sister had been working at Ravenwood School.
“The wolves came,” Elizabeth said. “As you well know, we all spend most of our teenage years fearing that the wolves would come to our town to match, but obviously like yourselves, we were lucky and the wolves didn’t choose our home town while we grew up. So we escaped the matching. Like everyone else, we heard the stories and the rumours about the schools and the children where the wolves had chosen. That’s one of the reasons that both Emily and I decided to be teachers, we wanted to try and help those children should the wolves ever arrive at the schools where we taught. I think somewhere deep inside the both of us, we both prayed that would never happen. As you know, it has been more than five years since the wolves came to match and this time around they chose the school where Emily taught. We have always been close even though we have lived apart over the last few years,” Elizabeth continued, and I could see tears standing in her eyes as she recalled her sister. “Within days of the wolves arriving at Ravenwood School, the teachers there started to leave.”
“Why?” I asked, curious to know what had taken place there.
“The wolves arrived, but you must understand that they don’t look like wolves, they look just like us humans,” she explained. “They wear the skins of the children that they matched with years ago. They erected searchlights and towers and covered the tops of the walls with razor wire. Emily called me one night and said that Ravenwood was now more like a prison than a school. She told me that some of the parents had tried to break into the school to free their children, they wanted the treaty that had been agreed to hundreds of years ago ripped up.”
“What happened to these parents?” Potter asked, stepping from the corner of the room.
“Emily didn’t say,” she answered him. “I remember one night that she was very upset and I could tell that she had been crying. A pack of juvenile wolves had arrived wanting to be matched. Emily had been close to all of her students but she had a couple of favourites. Both of these had been chosen for matching and she said that they changed — they were no longer the children that she had once taught. Within days they had left and she never saw them again, nor did their parents.”
“How had they changed?” Kayla asked.
“Emily didn’t say,” Elizabeth said, and I watched as a tear spilled from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. “But I knew she was, at times, terrified of what was happening at Ravenwood. Then, she started ringing me and saying that she had started to be plagued by vivid dreams. In these dreams she saw a different world. At first I thought it was just Emily wishing that things could be different, but she became convinced that the world as we know it had been…pushed…somehow. That’s how she described it, Miss Hudson, just like you did in your advert. Emily started to believe that the world had been pushed off course. She told me that the world had once been different. Where there weren’t any wolves — Skin-walkers. She described a world not too dissimilar to the one we know, but it was a world where children weren’t matched.”
“Where is Emily now?” I asked her, wishing that I could speak with her to discover what else she knew.
“She’s vanished,” Elizabeth said, trying to fight off a stream of tears that were desperate to roll down the length of her face.
“Vanished how?” Isidor gently asked her while handing her a piece of tissue.
“Thank you,” she said, mopping away her tears. “I believe she has been murdered.”
“What makes you think that?” Potter cut in.
“Emily told me that the Headmaster of the school just left or disappeared,” Elizabeth explained. “A wolf by the name of McCain took his place. He was a harsh man and he replaced the teachers with people who wore hoods and gowns. Emily told me that you couldn’t see their faces. These new teachers, if that’s what they were, were cruel to the children. Emily said that on several occasions their cruelness was something close to brutal. She went to McCain and objected at what she had witnessed. McCain told her that if she didn’t like how the school was being run, she was free to leave. But Emily couldn’t — she wanted to stay and protect the children, and besides, like most of the other teachers had, she lived on the school grounds, it was her home.
“The
n, one night she called me to say that she had woken the night before to find McCain standing in her room, staring down at her while she slept. She asked him what he wanted and what he was doing in her room in the middle of the night, but he left without giving an explanation. Emily said she was now in fear for her own safety and I begged her to leave. But she told me how she had bought herself one of those tiny video cameras. She explained that she was going to try and capture on film some of the cruelty that the children endured at Ravenwood School and then send it to the press. She was also going to hide the camera in her room at night to see what it was that McCain was doing in there while she slept. Emily feared that he had perhaps been into her room before but she hadn’t woken.”
“And did she capture anything on film?” I asked her, now gripped by the story.
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said, that red rash on her cheeks now gone. “I haven’t heard from Emily since that last phone call. I’ve tried ringing her mobile, I’ve sent emails, but have heard nothing from my sister. I’ve tried to contact McCain but he refuses to return my calls. So today, unable to continue with my life until I find out what has happened to my sister, my boyfriend, Harry and I drove the long distance to Wood Hill to visit Ravenwood School. We didn’t get any further than the main gates, which are locked with chains and padlocks. Emily was not exaggerating when she said that Ravenwood had become something close to a prison.
“Eventually, McCain came down to the gates and told me to go away before he called the police. But I could see in his eyes that he had murdered Emily,” Elizabeth said.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked her.
“Because when he saw me standing at the gates, he looked as if he had seen a ghost,” she said. “He hadn’t known that Emily had an identical twin. For a moment, he thought I was her.”
“What did he say?” I asked her.
“After realising his mistake, McCain told us that Emily had left the school some weeks ago, but I knew that was a lie because I’d only spoken to her a few days before,” Elizabeth said. “Knowing that McCain would never tell me the truth, Harry and I headed back into town and paid a visit to the local police station. I spoke to an officer there by the name of Banner, but he didn’t seem interested. It took me over half an hour to get him to agree to file a missing persons report. So, feeling as if I had wasted my time and was still no nearer to the truth, we decided to stay in town, but we soon realised that the place was like, really weird.”
