by Tim ORourke
Page 22
“For hundreds of years the agreement was kept and Frances and I shared a wonderful life together. However, some fifty years ago, Frances became distressed by the thought of having to parade herself beneath the moonlight. It had become like a millstone around her neck, and she feared she would never be free of Nate Varna. So we would move around from one country to the next, as there was nothing in the agreement stating we couldn’t do so. More often than not, Nate and those he travelled with would track us down. Some years they were unable to find us, but mostly they did. I would read the foreign newspapers searching for any articles about the brutal deaths of young women, as everywhere they went, they left death behind them. In that way, I could keep a track of them, like they kept a track of me and Frances.
“Although she couldn’t see Nate, as he was never to reveal himself to her; Frances felt he was somehow inching closer to her as the years passed by – closer than the agreement allowed. On the very last occasion that Frances stood beneath the moonlight, she was convinced that she could hear him calling to her on the wind, begging her to leave me and go with him. So we packed up our possessions and moved again. This time, to France. Both of us were fluent in speaking French, so we hired a maid, and before long, we had set up a new home and started yet another new life for ourselves. Being a vampire, Frances had to sleep during the day and live by night. I didn’t have to, but I chose to so we could be together. Frances needed to drink blood to survive, but not necessarily the blood of humans, she could survive just as well on the blood from deer and other such animals. Only vampires who enjoy the thrill of killing humans need their blood. I, however, change every full moon into a wolf,” he said.
“I can see that,” Winnie murmured looking across the darkening hallway at him.
“No, this is not me as a full wolf,” he smiled, showing his pointed teeth. “I can choose to look like this anytime I want to, full moon or not. During the night of a full moon, I change into my true form, that of a giant wolf - hound - whatever people choose to call me. It’s while in that form I am unable to have rational thoughts. I become nothing more than a wild animal, unable to think or reason. I act purely on instinct and the desire to hunt and kill. Therefore, Frances would lock me away on the night of a full moon, and release me the following day. As a wolf I do not discriminate between victims. I would’ve happily ripped her throat out as that of another. ”
“But you did end up killing her though, didn’t you?” Winnie asked him.
Thaddeus lowered his head and looked at the floor, as if it brought him too much shame to say what happened next. “In France, there was a stone coalbunker at the far reaches of our land. The walls were thick and solid, made from giant slabs of stone. There was an iron door with a lock. It was an ideal place to contain me during my change,” he explained. “So on the day of each full moon, I went out to the coalbunker where Frances would lock me inside. She kept the key with her always, never letting it out of her sight. It hung from a chain around her neck. While walking away from the coalbunker that day, she noticed the chain had broken, and placed the key into the pocket of her dress.
“Sometimes, as our maid served dinner, she would casually ask what it was we kept in the coalbunker and where could she find the key should she need it. Frances politely assured the maid that she would never need the key, and steered the conversation onto other matters. Frances forgot about the key in her pocket. That evening as the maid gathered together the dirty laundry, she discovered the key. So just before dawn the following morning, before waking Frances for her breakfast, the maid crept out to the coalbunker, and using the key she had found, she opened the door. I can’t say I remember killing her, but hours later, I discovered her disembowelled remains strewn across the fields at the back of the house. I gathered together what was left of her half-eaten body and burnt her remains. She wasn’t the only person I had given a death sentence to,” he said, looking slowly up at Winnie.
“In my bloodthirsty rage, I had gone back to the house and crept up to the room I shared with Frances. I only recall brief fragments of what happened next, but Frances told me that she awakened to find me snarling at the foot of the bed. Not knowing how I had been set free, and fearing I would surely kill her, Frances desperately tried to shoo me away. As a wolf I would have smelt the fear reeking from her. I must have, as Frances later told me I lunged at her. She kicked out with her foot and I sunk my jaws into her ankle, snapping the bones as if they were nothing more than twigs. Dawn had just broken and the moon was fading, taking with it its power over me. So before I could attack Frances again, I began to change back into a man. I woke to discover Frances sobbing in pain upon the bed, and although she wasn’t dead, we knew it was only a matter of time.
“A Lycanthrope bite to a vampire is fatal, even if it doesn’t kill them outright,” Thaddeus explained. “It is a slow and painful death, tearing away the hundreds of years they have lived. It is like age catches up with them, and they grow older in a matter of months, decaying away until they are nothing more than dust. So once bitten by me, both Frances and I knew she was going to die, fade away before my eyes. Frances didn’t fear her own death, she feared mine. We knew that it was only a month or two before Nate would come again, expecting to see Frances standing in the moonlight, so he could satisfy himself that the woman he loved was still alive and well, and I hadn’t killed her as he believed I would do. If Frances wasn’t standing in the moonlight where we lived, he would know there was something wrong and come looking for me – to kill me.
“So we fled here, to England, just days before his arrival in France. With a full moon only days away, and Frances too sick and frail to lock me away, I had to find someplace where I could be kept from harming her or anyone else. It was then I discovered the cave which you pointed out on the beach yesterday morning,” he said, staring at Winnie. “I would walk around the cove while the tide was out. At night it comes in, pulled by the force of the full moon. Here I could change, unable to get back to shore. The rocks surrounding it are far too smooth for me to scramble up. So I am trapped there until the moon fades at dawn and I change back. ”
“That’s where you were last night, wasn’t it?” Winnie asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “I had to go there so as not to harm you – just like I harmed Frances. ”
“It was her in those pictures I found in that room upstairs,” Winnie breathed, as some of what Thaddeus was explaining slotted into place. “She was the old woman in the photographs. ”
“Yes,” Thaddeus said, the light behind his eyes fading. “She turned to dust in that room a year ago. Her remains looked just like ashes, so I took them down to the shore and set her free at last. I boarded the windows over as Frances became too weak to leave the room in the end, and she was in there day and night. I couldn’t risk any daylight creeping in. So as you can see, Winnie, I did kill Frances, but not as you have been led to believe. ”
Winnie sat by the door, her knees still tucked beneath her chin as she tried to make sense of everything he had told her. She glanced up at the pictures hanging opposite each other on the walls. “So are those paintings of you and Frances?”
“Yes,” he said, glancing up at them. “They span the three hundred years we spent together. ”
“So how old are you then, because you don’t look a day over twenty-five,” Winnie said.
“Thanks,” Thaddeus half-smiled.
“It wasn’t a compliment, dickhead,” she snapped.
“Four-hundred and twenty-three, give or take a year or two,” he said back.
They sat quietly, neither of them knowing what to say. Then when the silence became almost unbearable, Winnie looked at him and said, “You’ve used me. ”
“I know I have,” he said, unable to bring himself to meet her stare. “It had been almost a year since Frances had died. I’d been searching those foreign newspapers for news stories about brutal deaths. I knew by the horri
fic stories I found that Nate and the other two, who sometimes travelled with him, were closing in. If they found me here, and Frances wasn’t standing in the moonlight, they would suspect something had happened to her. If they discovered that she was dead, then my stay of execution would be over and the last of my race would be dead. I was called to London to meet with my publisher, that is true, but by chance I happened to see you one evening outside the tube station, as I’ve already explained. To look at you was like looking at Frances – it was uncanny. Those nights I sat looking at you, it wasn’t because I wanted you to take Frances’s place in my heart. I wanted you to take her place in the moonlight. ”
“You bastard,” Winnie said, now truly understanding the level of Thaddeus’s deceit.
“I was scared and desperate,” Thaddeus tried to explain. “I thought that perhaps if you dressed in Frances’s clothes and stood in the moonlight with the hood up, Nate would believe that he had seen Frances, and go away. That would have given me another year or perhaps more to escape, truly hide my tracks from the vampires forever. I remembered what Frances had told me, how she suspected Nate was watching her on more than just the night of the full moon. So I needed to be seen out with you. I needed him to see us together, happy, holding hands. ”
“That’s why you took me out to that restaurant,” Winnie suddenly gasped, feeling as if she had been punched in the stomach. “That’s why you kept looking over my shoulder and out of the window. You were checking to see if he was out there, watching. So you made me sit with my back to the window just in case he was, so he believed he was looking at Frances, because we had the same colour hair. ”
“Yes,” Thaddeus whispered, ashamed by what he had done. “I wasn’t really mad about the fish fingers – in fact, I quite like them. I needed a reason to get you out and about at night, as Frances and I would have so often done. Then as we made our way back to the house, I noticed the moonlight. I wanted to see if you really did look like Frances beneath it. I wanted to know if I could fool Nate. So I decided to take a photograph of you. I wanted to study this later to see if you truly resembled her. However, I couldn’t find my camera, and when I returned outside, you were shaken and spoke of seeing three pale faces reflected back in the windowpane. You said also that you heard voices, and I knew then that Frances had been right in her suspicions. Nate had been trying to speak to her and had been watching her more than just the one night agreed.
