Authors: Simon Morden
‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’
‘Stanislav will have,’ said Elena.
‘We’re not going to ask him for advice,’ said Dalip. ‘Why don’t I check the rooms and see if there’s anything without a window? Or ask someone who knows, which’ll probably be quicker.’
He wasn’t gone for long, when he came running back.
‘Stanislav’s gone.’ He paused. ‘He’s also killed the steward.’ He paused again. ‘It’s … not good.’
Mary caught his meaning better than the others. She looked at Bell’s reaction. She’d just lost her … what? Servant? Slave? Friend? Lover? And there was nothing except barely contained glee that their plans were going awry.
She knew people like that, back in London. They were the ones to avoid, the strange, dangerous ones who ended up getting locked away for the rest of their lives.
‘Then we’d better go and find him.’
The steward was over by the door to the bridge. And under the table. And halfway up the wall where something, some part of him, had been thrown with great force and stuck.
‘It looks like a fucking abattoir,’ said Mary, and retreated quickly, intercepting Luiza with a muttered, ‘You don’t want to go in there.’
Dalip had been to an abattoir, where they killed animals to eat according to Sikh rules. Quick, clean, one cut. The room – the killing floor, because that’s what it was called – had been almost spotless. The store room was far from that.
He stepped across the threshold and looked around. Stanislav could now be anywhere, either in the castle or even outside it. But he could still be here, hiding behind the barrels and the shelves, and he needed to check. The far door was still barred, but he peered into the shadows made barely lighter by the meagre lantern.
The steward had been decapitated, his head torn off with a force that was beyond human capacity. Hopefully, he’d been dead before that, because the thing that was glued to the wall was the sticky remains of his burst heart.
Dalip walked the room as if he was in a dream, the knife not even in his hand. What could he possibly do in the face of such primal forces except succumb? But Stanislav wasn’t there, and he stepped outside and back on to the staircase to report.
‘If he didn’t come up, he had to go down.’ He tugged at the hair on his chin. ‘We need to stay together. I think … I think he’s having some kind of psychotic episode. He was in a war where he came from, and he’s pretty much reliving it now. The very worst parts of it.’
‘Was that the guy’s head?’
Dalip nodded. ‘I don’t think Stanislav used anything but his hands to do that.’
Mary grimaced. ‘Seriously, he should be easy to find. He’ll be covered in blood, everything. Just, where the fuck are his footprints? Hand-prints? I’ve seen places where some kid got stabbed, and it’s everywhere: floors, walls, ceiling, and there’s always footprints and smears and marks on the walls where you brush against them. I mean, just look.’
Dalip did. His bare feet were leaving almost perfect dark impressions on the stonework, like a child’s printing set.
They searched the stairs, inspected the stonework, went down to the kitchen at the bottom of the tower, where their barricade was still mostly intact.
‘He can’t have come this way,’ said Dalip, rattling a big chair hard enough to make the table resting on it fall to one side. Once it had all finished moving, he added: ‘See?’
‘You climbed in the window,’ said Luiza. ‘He must have climbed out.’
‘I don’t know if he could. He doesn’t seem the climbing sort.’
‘He doesn’t seem the kind of bloke who’d rip someone’s head off, either,’ said Mary. ‘But here we are.’
Dalip leaned back against the wall. Stanislav had saved his life, more than once. And now this. He’d been brought up to be loyal, and deferential to his elders. This … this was difficult for him.
‘Luiza. The two women we found in the room above. Where did they go?’
She blinked. ‘They came upstairs with us.’
‘But they’re not there now.’
‘No.’ She tutted. ‘I suppose we must look for them too.’
‘This is getting stupid, right?’ Mary stared into the darkness up the stairs, and Dalip couldn’t help but see how her scars shifted.
‘We should go back to the top floor,’ said Luiza, ‘and wait until morning. We cannot see what we are doing.’
‘At this rate, there may be no one left by morning.’ Dalip pulled out the knife. ‘We brought him here. We have to deal with this. One way or another.’
‘Well, he’s your mate,’ said Mary.
‘In which case, I might get a chance where no one else will. I’m not saying we have to do anything, you know, permanent, but who else is going to stop him? There’s no one but us.’
‘Every room, then. Every door. If he’s not in the tower, then that’s something.’
When they got back to the store room, Dalip made to go in again. Mary was about to stop him, and tell him they’d already looked there. Then she caught his expression and said nothing.
He opened the door, pushing it with his foot. It was exactly as he’d left it, except that the bars that should have been sealing the way to the bridge were lying on the floor, and the door chattering and rattling in the rising wind. The draught stole around his ankles on its way through the tower.
Luiza, in charge of the lantern, held it high over Dalip’s head. ‘He was in there all the time,’ she said.
Dalip moved back on to the stairs and pulled the door firmly closed behind him.
‘Mary, when you turn into a bird, how do you do it?’
‘How? I just … I don’t know. I just can. I want to be it, and there I am. Some big-arse bird.’
‘And the first time, what happened?’
‘I grew wings. Bell’s dragon cut me open, and when I got the boilersuit off, I had wings. I really don’t know how this works.’ She stopped, and asked: ‘Why?’
‘So you can turn into a hawk, she can turn into a dragon, this man Crows turns into a sea serpent. I think Stanislav can turn into something, too. Something not good. Very strong.’ He struggled with the whole idea, even though he himself may have been changed, and was in the process of changing. ‘Do you get a choice?’
‘Of what you change into?’ Mary shrugged. ‘Maybe, but I think you just become whatever it is that suits you best. Have you got any idea of what he’s going to be?’
He knew. ‘It’s a wolf. He’s going to be a wolf.’
‘There is a thing, where you get stuck as an animal, and you forget what you were. Is that what’s happened to him?’
‘No,’ said Dalip. He thought about the conversation he’d had, about wolves and sheep. ‘I think he’s got stuck halfway. A wolfman, who’s actually part-wolf, part-man.’
‘A werewolf. Fucking hell. How the fuck do we deal with that?’
‘Silver,’ said Luiza. ‘We need silver.’
Dalip’s mouth had gone dry. ‘We don’t have any silver, whether or not we can make weapons out of it, and anyway, if he’s just like Mary or Bell, they don’t need anything special to hurt them. But I should be able to talk him down. He’ll listen to me.’
‘You’re kidding yourself, right? Dalip, he’s gone crazy. This isn’t like telling a mate not to do something stupid. He’s gone way beyond that.’
‘She is right, Dalip. He is a danger to everyone.’ Luiza poked him in the chest. ‘Especially you.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you will not treat him with care. You will remember him as he was, not as he is. In that moment, he will kill you.’
‘He’s not going to kill me,’ said Dalip, and realised he was lying to himself. Loyalty again; misplaced loyalty. ‘Okay. Maybe he’ll try. We – I – have to find him first. Go back upstairs. I’ll do—’
He was at a loss. What was he supposed to do? Warn the remaining guards for certain. Track Stanislav down and confront him in whatever form he’d taken, and stop him from killing his way through the castle’s inhabitants. He’d have to keep him at bay while he talked to him. He could do that. Stanislav had, ironically, taught him well. And if that didn’t work, if it came down to a fight: he’d been taught how to do that, too.
‘I can help,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll be able to spot him, if he’s outside, and if you’re right about him being a wolf, I can just fly out of reach. Luiza, go and tell the others what we’re doing. Don’t leave the room until one of us tells you it’s safe.’
‘What if he comes for us?’
‘You throw everything you have at him. Including Bell if you have to.’ Mary moved uncomfortably, her wounds raw.
Luiza left them the lantern and scurried up the last few turns of the stairs, leaving Dalip and Mary not staring at each other.
‘Do you,’ he said, ‘want me to find you a pair of trousers, or something?’
‘Because running around in my pants makes me feel like a fucking superhero, right?’ She blew out a breath, long and heartfelt. ‘If you’re hiding a pair of jeans somewhere, then yes. Otherwise, we’re just wasting time.’
Under normal circumstances, he’d have found it distracting. He was used to women covering up. These weren’t normal circumstances, and she wasn’t a Sikh. ‘I can cope if you can.’
‘This is fucking stupid, you know that? We’re just kids, and we’re hunting an actual werewolf.’
‘It would be even more stupid if you couldn’t turn into a giant bird of prey.’
‘That’s actually a good point. We can do this, can’t we?’
Dalip pulled a face. ‘No one else is up for it, so I’m game if you are.’
‘You really are a posh kid.’ But she smiled as she said it.
‘Doesn’t mean I’m bad or wrong.’
‘You’re all right really. What first?’
‘Let’s find the guards. They don’t deserve this.’
They dismantled the rest of the barricade and checked the whole of the downstairs area. There were more store rooms off the main kitchen, and each one involved a sweaty-palmed grip of the latch and a flinging wide of the door, expecting to be attacked in a flurry of fur and teeth, and gratefully disappointed when it didn’t happen.
‘Outside, then,’ said Dalip. The doorway, with its broken door on the floor was full of wind and noise. ‘This castle was grown? Seriously?’
‘It’s weird, but it’s true.’
‘I should be getting used to that, but I don’t think I ever will.’ He stuck his head out and remembered to look up and behind him at the wall. The sky, black already, was low and heavy and churning with cloud. The invisible moon was no help, and the unattended fire in the courtyard burned low and fitful.
‘You go first,’ said Mary. ‘You’ve got the knife.’
He looked at it, its broad blade and short length. ‘Something longer would be so much better. My grandfather had a sword, a proper sword: he even used it during the war.’
‘He’s not here though, is he? You are, and that’s what we’ve got.’
When they both stepped outside, they were surprised at the violence of the weather. The gusty wind took hold of them and shook them hard. To the south, behind the bulk of the mountain, lightning flickered.
‘It’s only a storm, not like before,’ said Mary. She clutched at Dalip’s arm. ‘Fuck me, it’s cold.’
‘I did say.’
The grass was sharp and brittle under their feet as they trotted across to the guard house. Lights glimmered from the window slits, and more ominously, from the open door.
Dalip slowed, and he pulled Mary back.
‘We don’t want to fight them. But they won’t be happy. We’ve turned everything upside down for them.’
‘Fuck them.’
‘We still need to be careful.’
Dalip crossed the remaining distance, past the fire, to the steps up. The door was sideways in the doorway, deep scratches running against the grain of the wood. He leant it against the wall, and beckoned Mary in.
‘This isn’t good,’ she whispered.
‘Worked that out for myself.’
The room inside had a fire in the grate, drawing hard in the draught, crackling hard and burning bright. Chairs and tables were strewed across the floor, overturned, some broken, plates and mugs mixed in with the debris. There was a closed door in each of the far corners.
‘Left or right?’
‘Both of them, eventually. So it doesn’t matter.’ He thought of his grandfather, waving his age-spotted sword and screaming his defiance like he was still a young man facing his enemies. Then, the war-cries had been a party piece: now, he was repeating them silently, his tongue and lips finding their way around the syllables and accents of his ancestors. ‘Left.’
He picked his way across the floor, trying to be as quiet as possible, though he didn’t exactly know why. He put his fingertips against the door, gave it a little shove: it creaked a little, a crack of weak light opening out. He glanced around at Mary, who was busy shoving a fallen crust into her mouth.
‘What?’ she said, spitting out crumbs. ‘I’m fucking starving.’
He rolled his eyes and put the flat of his hand to the wood. The door swung aside.
It took a moment, then a moment longer, then a very long moment that only ended when Mary reached past him, leaning out around him so she didn’t have to set foot inside that back room, and pulled the door shut again.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no, no, no. No.’
She pulled him back, all the way to the entrance, and he let himself be led, unblinking, to where the wind buffeted his clothes and tugged at his loose hair.
Mary looked up at him, and he’d never thought of himself as tall until that moment.
‘You said a wolf. A wolf!’
‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘that’s what I said.’
‘That, that thing is not a wolf.’ Her voice was as tight as a drum, as high as a bat.
‘But it is Stanislav. I guess.’ He finally did blink, and the fleeting instant of his eyes closing showed him a writhing mass of barbed tentacles, tooth-lined mouths, glistening, dripping spikes, vacuous sucking holes, and eyes. So many eyes, and all of them disturbingly human.
‘We can’t fight that,’ said Mary, pointing back inside.
‘I know, I know. But … it’s him.’
‘Dalip. He’s gone. Whatever he was, has gone.’
‘But you, you’ve changed backwards and forwards. Maybe he still can.’
‘I change into a bird. The first couple of times almost broke me. You ever seen him like that before?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘When Crows was showing me how to do magic, I got a bit carried away. This … thing, like that thing, appeared. It was sort of me, but not me. I told it to fuck right off, and it disappeared. If Stanislav took one look at his true self and gave it a big, wet kiss, then he’s finished as a human being. Your mate’s come home. That’s what he really wants to be.’
Dalip thought about the shifting, pulsating mass, constantly forming and breaking down. A wolf, a werewolf even, would
have been reasonable, understandable. Instead, they had unfathomable chaos.
‘What should I do?’ he asked.
‘You cannot go in there. I mean, fuck. Did you see what he’s done to the guards?’
Dalip had. There were bits of them everywhere, just rolling around on the floor at the urging of the ever-moving tentacles, and some seemed to be in the process of being absorbed into the main mass.
‘There might be part of him I can still talk to.’