I
sat at the blank Terminal, my mind working furiously, but not about Water Sprites. All thoughts of them had vanished when the screen went blank.
I had to get away from the Tree. I needed to be somewhere else to think clearly, to get away from werewolves—or part wolves—or wolf throwbacks. I had to get away from the smell of wolf, from living wood, the hairs on every surface, bones in the corners, creatures—people—I thought I understood but didn’t.
Should I take the floater down to Black Stump? Black Stump was only a few minutes away. I could have dinner there, discuss the codling moth infestation with Yorick. (I knew a little about codling moth now from Neil.) Have grubby, friendly kids like Portia and Viola and Malvolio—kids with no fangs or furry ears—climb over my knees or turn my floater into a pirate ship again.
No, it wouldn’t be like that at all, not this time. There’d be silences, as no one voiced their suspicions; or, worse, another outbreak of anger from Gloucester, an insistence I keep away from the Tree and its inhabitants for my own safety.
And all that I could offer them was my growing suspicion, based not on evidence but on what I suspected was my own prejudice.
Perhaps all humans inherit the terror of the wolf in the night—a terror of the wolf’s savagery and violence. Maybe Len was really no more or less human than his
family. But if I was looking for the person most physically capable of ripping out someone’s throat with his teeth, then I would have to choose Len.
All teenagers around here go hunting, Emerald had said. Perhaps Len hunted too. Maybe to Len a Truenorm human was as strange as a wolf was to me. ‘Murder’ is when you kill one of your own species. Perhaps Len never saw it as murder at all.
Had he taken pleasure as he ripped out the heart of Brother Perry? Or was it just the hunger of the wolf taking over. Had he grown to have a taste for human blood when he killed the Patriarch? Was that what had driven him when he ripped out the throat of Mr Anderson, and the heart out of Florrie Anderson’s life?
No, it was crazy, crazy, crazy. There was no real proof. In the City a case had to be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, but I doubted everything about this.
I needed to get out. I needed to get away. A walk. At least I could take a walk.
I had almost—I was going to say ‘escaped’ because by now it felt like that—when a small face peered around the living room door.
‘Are you going for a walk?’ It was Bonnie, ears pricked, small furry face tilted, bright eyes staring into mine. ‘Can I come with you? Please? Mummy won’t let us go alone and Uncle Dusty won’t take us and Daddy says there’s a strange smell and I’m not to go outside without a grown up.’
Not surprising, I thought, with vigilantes watching you. I shook my head. ‘No honey. Not this time.’
‘I could ask Len to come with us. Len will ‘tect us.’
I tried not to shudder. ‘No!’
She looked both hurt and surprised. I suspected there were very few ‘no’s’ in Bonnie’s life. Suddenly it was impossible to see Bonnie as anything but a delightful child, loved and cossetted by parents and aunts and uncles, and reflecting back the love they gave her. But she couldn’t go for a walk with me. Not this time. Even if I had wanted her with me—and I didn’t—it was too dangerous to take one of the cubs away from the Tree now.
I walking swiftly away from the overhanging branches, then hesitated. Which way to go? Down towards the Andersons’? Towards Black Stump? But either way I might meet Gloucester or Alan Anderson, or any of the other watchers they had recruited to the task.
Suddenly I remembered Great Uncle Rex flirtatiously muttering about a waterfall, up where the valley narrowed and the cliffs began. Had it only been two nights ago?
I’d go and see the waterfall. It hadn’t sounded far. If I kept an eye on the time, I’d still be back before dark.
I was correct; it wasn’t far.
At first the path wove through the lush green ground cover, whatever species it was. Then the grass began again, shaggy and gold now in the dryness, and sometimes so long that it almost obscured the way. But soon the path led to trees, and under the trees the soil was softer, damper, filled with maidenhair ferns and others I wasn’t familiar with. The breeze was fresh and smelt of damp soil and shade and long decaying leaves. It was a million miles from the omnipresent smell of fur and dog.
I’d never created a Virtual Reality like this. City
audiences like action, even if it’s just the action of waves or moonrise. The beauty of this place was that nothing moved. Even the dust from decaying leaves seemed to have hung in the air for a thousand years. The sun was so close to the horizon now that the light had thickened to dimness between the trees.
It was hard to believe there could be a waterfall here, in this silence—no, I realised, it wasn’t silence. The rustles of the tree tops created a white noise that shielded you from other sounds, because suddenly I saw it. There was a break in the trees in front of me, a hill that rose in a tumble of rocks and chocolate soil and the gauzy sparkle of a waterfall between the boulders.
It wasn’t a large stream, nor was the fall very high. But it was satisfactorily steep. And the water rushed between its rocks with a proper degree of white splash and spray, falling at last into a pool that probably looked deeper than it was, the still water brown and purple now in the late afternoon light.
There were rocks to sit on. So I sat on a flat-topped boulder with rounded edge that seemed to have been specially created by years of smoothing water for me to rest on.
It was almost unbearably peaceful. I might have been the only person in the universe, though as I looked around I saw signs that others visited here too. The path, for one thing, was too well worn to be used only by wallabies or wombats coming here to drink. There were bones by my rock—the cubs, I supposed, and paw prints and footprints in the thin border of sand around the far end of the pool.
It would be fun to swim here in the heat of the day when the sun streamed down through the trees onto the water
and warmed the rock I sat on and the other rocks as well, so you could lie lizard-like, absorbing heat. I supposed you could slide down the rocks too—probably the cubs did. If Neil were here it would have been fun to…
Something growled behind me.
There was no need for the hair on the back of my neck and along my arms to tingle. No need for my body to feel like cold water had washed through my veins. It was probably Uncle Rex, come to try a little late afternoon dalliance, or Bonnie refusing, puppy-like, to understand the word ‘no’. They’d followed me, or they’d guessed or smelt which way I’d come.
There was no reason at all to think it might be Len. Len who had decided to stop my questioning; Len who could also track me along the path…
I turned. It wasn’t Len.
It was a dog, or Dog perhaps. It was too large to be a normal dog, though surely whatever genes had been added to its parentage were never human. It was higher than my waist, but broad-shouldered. It would have been massive if it had not been so thin, the ribs above the thick strong legs distinct under the fur.
It growled again. I froze on my rock.
The beast stepped forward. I could see the colours of its shaggy coat now, the dark colour of its lips.
‘Stay,’ I ordered. My voice shook. The beast ignored me. If it had ever known human commands, ever been subject to human orders, it was no longer bound by them. It continued to pace towards me.
I glanced around. The trees were smooth-trunked and tall, had been tall for hundreds of years. There were no branches to help me climb them.
Perhaps if I dived into the pool…but dogs could
swim. The beast would follow me into the water and savage me there, where I could least defend myself. My body would sink onto the sand below, and stay there till it decomposed and floated up into the light…
All this I thought in a fraction of a second as the beast moved steadily towards me. I gazed around frantically for a weapon. But these didn’t seem to be the sort of trees that dropped their limbs, or perhaps they were gathered for campfires too often.
Another low rumble. The creature was so close now I could smell him. Rank with an undertone of decay. I could see the mange on his flanks, the skin erupting and flies feasting on the pus.
I had to scream. I had to run. But there was nowhere to run, the beast was in front of me, the pool behind and rocks to either side. I’d have to scramble over them. I forced my limbs to work, I forced my throat to scream; the beast tensed as though to leap.
‘Noooo!’ I screamed.
There was no point screaming really—no one to hear. But by a miracle someone answered, ‘Hold on! I’m coming!’
The beast hesitated and turned around. And then another beast was on it, a wolf that ran on four legs, a wolf with tail flailing and animal teeth, a wolf that tore at the beast’s eyes with claws, that forced its head back with paws it used as hands so that I heard the crack as the beast’s neck snapped.
The beast lay dead at my feet. Len stood before me. He was naked—no, not naked. The wolf hair covered his whole body, except the chest and stomach, so even his genitals were covered in the long dark fur. His long black tail waved behind.
‘Flaming hell…are you all right?’
‘Yes…sure. I’m…’ My voice wouldn’t say any more.
‘I didn’t think I’d be in time. Dad said he smelt something strange when we got home. Dusty was worried too. Then Bonnie said you’d gone out for a walk and Emerald panicked, said we’d got to find you fast! I reckon that thing’s been hanging around for weeks. It must have had enough sense not to come too close to the house or we’d have found it before. I suppose it’s been after the deer.’
Not just deer, I thought. If it had been successful as a deer hunter, it wouldn’t have been so thin. But humans don’t run as fast as deer. It knew that humans were meat too.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ The young voice seemed half concerned, half worried that I might do something embarrassing like burst into tears or, even worse, fall into his arms and sob.
‘No, I, yes…I mean thank you. I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘Here, we’d better get home before it’s dark. Ben and Jen are coming too, but Dad told me to go ahead. I’m the fastest of us.’ It was said confidently, without modesty, but without boasting either. This was a young man who knew what he was and knew the strengths of his body too.
He took my hand to help me up. His hand was a hand, I saw. Despite the claws where fingernails should be, despite the wolf-like body, his hands were more human than Uncle Dusty’s, though the fingers were stubby and the palm calloused in a way I’d never seen before—from long contact with the ground, I supposed.
I stood. He fell back to all fours, grinned up at me and
he was a wolf again. ‘Do you mind if I go like this? I mostly go on hind legs when I’m with ‘norms but, well, it’s easier like this.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said faintly. And it was true. On all fours he was a human-seeming dog, not a wolf with human form. I tried not to look at his hind legs in case the dangling genitals flashed into view.
Len prodded the beast with one foot. ‘Dad’ll have pink fits when he hears about this,’ he said. ‘An interloper on our territory.’
I glanced at the beast. ‘Are you…are you sure it’s dead?’
‘I’m sure,’ he said gently. ‘Dad and I’ll come back for it tomorrow.’
‘What will you do with it?’ I had sudden visions of them tearing it triumphantly to pieces or Emerald roasting it on the giant spit.
But Len just said, ‘Bury it, of course. Don’t want it stinking up the swimming hole.’
He padded beside me as I walked, somewhat shakily, along the track. ‘Do you swim here often?’ I was talking for the sake of talking, to fill up the silence that now seemed too heavy, no longer peaceful, around us.
‘The cubs do. Ben and Jen sometimes. I don’t like it much.’ Another grin, a true grin despite the wolf-like jaw and teeth. ‘Too much wolf, I suppose. Like a dog not liking baths.’
‘I never understood why dogs don’t like baths.’
The long nose wrinkled. ‘You would if you were covered in fur. Fur takes forever to dry and you feel twice as heavy while it’s wet. And it washes off your smell too. Takes hours till you feel yourself again.’
‘I…I hadn’t realised.’
‘You’d have to be a wolf to know,’ said Len cheerfully. The incident by the pool didn’t seem to have upset him at all. But of course he was my rescuer, my hero. What teenage boy wouldn’t feel cocky after that?
‘Len?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you ever think…I mean, well, about what will happen when you grow up?’
‘You mean when I challenge Dad?’ He said it quite calmly. ‘Yeah, of course I have.’
‘You will challenge him?’
The small dark eyes blinked up at me in surprise. ‘Yeah, sure I will. It’ll be me that does the challenging too, not Ben. I’m the strongest, you know, and I’ve always been, well, sort of the leader too, if you know what I mean.’
‘Is that important?’
‘Well, sure. Being a leader isn’t just about being strong. You have to, you know, lead too. Take the initiative, stuff like that. Someone who is a real leader can win even if they aren’t the strongest just by, you know, sort of intimidating the others. But it sure helps to be strong.’
‘What about the cubs? Johnnie? Or the new ones, when they’re born? Will one of them challenge you one day?’
‘Sure, maybe. Don’t think so though.’ His walk was definitely cocky now. ‘I mean, look at me. There’s no way Johnnie will ever be as strong as me, and it’s pretty unlikely any of the new ones will be either. No, I reckon I’ll be top dog till my own sons challenge me.’ Another grin in the gathering darkness. ‘And that’s a long way off.’
His sons with whom, I wondered. His litter-mate Jennie? Or perhaps one of the cubs—Bonnie, maybe. Would she grow up stronger than Jennie? I forced the thought away.
‘I’ll be a good leader,’ he said, as though he sensed I needed reassurance, though he wasn’t sure exactly what I needed reassuring about. ‘I won’t kick Dad out either. No fights to the death for me, thank you very much. Besides, he’s Dad. I couldn’t do something like that.’