“And that man hurt my mother,” he smiled weakly. “So my father only did what you did to protect the person he loved.”
“I never cut you into tiny pieces…” I started.
“My pain was just as great, if not
more!”
he suddenly screeched at me. My father suddenly groaned in the chair behind him as if being woken from a deep sleep.
“At least the fat man’s pain was brief –
mine has spanned two hundred-fucking-years
thanks to you!”
Jack screamed, leaping back across the room at me on his stick-like legs. “My father didn’t make that man suffer. He didn’t feel the pain that you have put me through!” he hissed into my face. Spit sprayed from his lips, and it felt hot against my stone-cold skin and I knew it wasn’t long before I totally became unmovable like a statue. I had an hour at the most to save my father and Potter.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my lips feeling cracked and broken. I felt dust fall onto my chin.
Was I sorry? I wasn’t sure anymore. Jack’s story – his life as a boy had been a troubled one – and although I could never condone or understand the despicable crimes he had committed, he had been a child once, just like I had. Were people born evil – or were they gradually made – molded into what he was now? If that were true, then I knew who it was who had molded him.
So looking at him, and slowly turning my wrists behind me, I said, “Why do you think your mother told you such horrific and graphic stories about your father?”
The question seemed to strike Jack like a slap across his face, and he took a step back from me. I needed to get him talking, take his mind off what was going on in the room. So I said, “Did she want you to hate your father?”
“Yes,” he said, the anger now seeping out of his voice again. He paced to and fro across the wooden floorboards. He seemed on edge and his mood unpredictable. However sad his story was, I had to remember I had been imprisoned by a killer.
“Why?” I whispered, trying to keep my voice even, soft, so as not to anger him again.
While he was deep in thought, he seemed to have forgotten about my father on the other side of the room. That was good, that’s what I wanted.
“I believed she was trying to scare me.
She didn’t want me giving into the curse,” he said, his pacing back and forth growing quicker. “If she told me about my father – made me scared of him – then I wouldn’t want to become him. Just like the pictures you see of diseased lungs on the backs of cigarette packets. You’re being scared into quitting.”
“So she was surprised then when you said it was the landlord’s actions that you hated and not your father’s?” I asked him softly, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of my sessions with Doctor Keats after returning from the Ragged Cove.
Would Jack see what I was up to, just like Doctor Keats tried to see through me?
“She was surprised, and I think angry at me,” he said, his gangly legs opening and closing like a pair of scissors as he continued to stride back and forth across the room.
“Angry?” I asked. “How?”
“It was like she wasn’t getting through to me somehow – that I wasn’t hating my father quickly enough,” he said.
“Why do you think you found it so hard to hate him, despite everything she had told you about him?” I asked, glancing down at the little pile of dust which was growing bigger. “Was it because you could sympathize with him in some way, could understand what he had done? Just like how you understood his motives for killing the landlord?”
“No!” Jack suddenly spat, shaking his head from side to side as if confused. He rubbed at his narrow temples with his fingers and looked at me. “I just couldn’t ever remember my father being like that. My memories of him were different to the pictures she was painting inside my head of him. So one day, I went to my mother and said…
Jack
“How did my father get away with behaving like he did?”
“Your father had two sides to him. He acted normal in front of others, but in our cave, when the shutter was down, his true self would come out and he would hurt me and your sisters.
Then there were those darker times when he would disappear for days beyond the fountain and the forests into the human world. I did try telling my mother once, but even she didn’t believe me.”
“How come?” I asked her.
“Well, your father was so plausible.
Whenever my mother came to the cave, she would see how nice it was, the tidy yard, and all of the toys he had given you. Joshua would be on his best behaviour and be very polite and courteous.
She fell for it.”
I accepted her explanation and used it in the future to try and reconcile the conflict I had when remembering him alongside the terrifying stories my mother continued to tell me about him. I believe she told me these stories to instill in me what a monster my father could be. I racked my memory but could not recall any incidents of my father acting in an aggressive way. I remembered him as a soft and quiet man. See, one of my clearest memories showed my father in a completely different light, and I just couldn’t get it from my head, however much my mother tried to hide it with her tales.
We weren’t the richest of Lycanthropes, but we weren’t poor, either. My father was a carpenter. I remember my father had just been paid, and we had congregated by the shutter to our cave. We were going to the marketplace to buy meat and vegetables to keep us fed for the week.
My father always kept his money rolled tightly together with a piece of string. He would free several paper notes and hand them to my mother to pay the market traders for the food. The rest of the money he would deposit with the bankers on the other side of the market. He would go ahead, deposit the money, and then meet us in the market in time to help my mother carry home the sacks of vegetables. So as usual, he set off minutes before us and disappeared between the maze of narrow passages. As we left our cave, mother spied something on the ground on the other side of the shutter, and picked it up. As she straightened, I saw the money, rolled together by that piece of string, in my mother’s hand. Lorre spoke up, stating that our father must have dropped it.
Mother turned and pulled us close, and whispered, “Don’t you dare tell your father that I have this money! I need it more than he does. It’s mine now.”
She didn’t say another word and led us down through the caves to the market, where other Lycanthrope hustled the market traders, seeking the best of the food which was displayed there. It wasn’t long before my father joined us.
He looked pale and panic-stricken. He approached my mother.
“Oh, Kathy, I can’t find the money. I’ve lost my wages!”
Hearing the worry in my father’s voice, my stomach somersaulted and I glanced at my sisters. My brother lay asleep in the sling across my mother’s back, blissfully unaware.
My mother spoke sharply to my father, “What do you mean you’ve lost your wages!”
“I got all the way to the banker’s, but when I got there, it was gone!” he said, rummaging through his trouser pockets. “I must have dropped it somewhere!”
Mother grew angry and spoke to him as if he were a disobedient schoolboy. “I just don’t
believe you, Joshua
! How are we going to buy food without any
money
?”
My father continued to rummage through his pockets, hoping he would find the roll of paper bank notes hidden in some recess of clothing his fingers hadn’t yet explored. He spoke again, “I’m sorry, Kathy. I just don’t know what could have happened to it... I just don’t...”
Wheeling around, she turned her back on my father and walked away. As she went, she spoke loud enough for him to hear. “Useless!
Absolutely useless!” She glanced back at my sisters, her eyes bright and fiery, and growled, “Come on!”
We mooched away from our father and joined our retreating mother. I remember I felt awful for him, so fucking awful. I looked back to see my dad just standing there, looking pathetic.
Remembering him like that was at odds with the picture my mother was painting of him inside my head. The contrast became even starker with the stories she continued to tell.
Jack
My mother’s bedroom was decorated with statues of the Elders. They were fucking creepy looking. They had been made in porcelain and were cracked all over. Their faces were covered with hoods and I would often wonder what they looked like. I think my mother had become obsessed with the Elders, and I often discovered her bent forward on her knees, rocking back and forth before the statues, deep in prayer.
Whenever she caught me goofing around or if I did anything she now considered wrong, she would tell me that the curse would get me – that it wouldn’t be lifted and I would never be free of it.
Although my mother told me that even telling the smallest of lies would cause the Lycanthrope curse to take hold of me, it didn’t stop her getting me to create an untruth for her.
One day, towards the end of that year, my mother beckoned me into her bedroom and closed the door. As I sat at the foot of her bed, she said, “Your father is denying the charges made against him.”
Hearing this, my heart leapt into my throat, and I gasped, “The Vampyrus have caught him then?” How long had she known and why hadn’t she told me? Did my elder sisters know? I had so many questions I wanted to ask her. I could see that my mother was so angry, I didn’t dare ask her the questions I now had screaming around in my head.
“He has the nerve to say that I am a liar!”
she barked at me.
She went on to explain that Father Paul, my newfound dad, had sat with my sisters and made written accounts of the alleged abuse they had suffered at the hands of my father. He was going to fight to prove that he was innocent, claiming that it was my mother, not him, who was dammed by the curse.
“Have the Vampyrus hunted him down then?” I dared to ask. “Do they have him?”
“No,” she hissed, shaking her head. “They nearly had him again. Your father is a cunning creature and managed to elude the Vampyrus hunters. He left them a letter, just like he left you that present. He wrote in it that he was innocent and was going to prove it!”
With her eyes blazing, she told me again how my father, like all those Lycanthrope who had given in to the curse, had attacked her and my sisters. Again, she stressed the importance of not letting them know I knew this. Then, pulling me close, she stared at me and said, “Jack, did your father ever hurt you?”
“No,” I said. “He never did anything to hurt me.”
“Are you sure?” she persisted.
I felt uncomfortable. I shifted on her bed so I could avoid having to look into her face.
Again I told the truth, my father had never hurt me. I could sense she was becoming frustrated with me and I just wanted to leave her bedroom.
“Listen, Jack, if we’re not believed, then your father…you know what that’ll mean, don’t you?” she barked at me.
I began to feel tears sting at the corner of my eyes and my bottom lip began to tremble.
“You will have to go back and live with your father,” she continued. “Do you want that to happen? After everything I have told you about him. How do you think your sisters will feel?”
I felt like screaming at her that it wasn’t my fault.
“Do you want to go back and live with
him
?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, you are going to have to help me and your sisters.” She looked straight at me with her blazing stare and spoke again. “You’re going to have to tell Father Paul that your father beat you, too.”
I couldn’t believe what she was asking of me.
“It is the only way if we’re going to be believed,” she insisted.
I began to cry and shook my head. I didn’t want to be in the room with her.
“Jack, you don’t want your sisters to have to go back to
him
, do you? Can you imagine what he would do to them?” she whispered.
“But, Mother, it’s wrong, it’s lying!” I pleaded with her.
My mother’s voice turned ever more hostile towards me.
“Don’t you dare tell me what’s right and wrong! I know what would be wrong, if you didn’t stand up for your sisters, that would be
wrong
!”
I remember just wanting to vanish, to disappear. I slumped forward. She had asked the impossible. But I hated the thought of letting my sisters down, so I agreed.
My mother eased up beside me and placed her arm around my shoulders. She kissed the side of my face. She explained I was correct, it was wrong to tell lies, but there was always an exception to the rule. Saving my sisters was one of those exceptions, and the Elders would forgive me.
“Look, just tell Father Paul your father beat you a few times, that he scared you, was cruel, too.” She whispered in my ear, so it was just our secret.
I felt hot bile claw its way up my throat and into my mouth, where it burned like acid. I tried to think of something that would get her to change her mind.
“I can’t do this,” I howled, wanting this burden to be taken from me. I couldn’t remember my father hurting me – I couldn’t remember him hurting anyone.
I looked at the floor and wished I were someplace else.
“Say your father beat you,” she whispered again.
“What will happen then?” I asked.
“Father Paul will write down what you have said and pass it to his brother, who is tracking your father. It will be put forward as another piece of evidence against him. Then when he is finally caught, he will be imprisoned by the Vampyrus, or worse.” She made it sound so easy, so simple.
“And that’s it? That’s all I have to say?”
“That’s all. I know it’s a terrible thing to ask you to do, but just think of your sisters,” she said, staring back at me.
It was a few nights later, when Father Paul got me on my own with my mother, he looked very serious, his pale face looking long and drawn.
“Your mum says you have something you want to tell me?”
I looked across at my mother and she nodded. “Go on, Jack, it’s okay. Tell him what you told me,” she said.