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by Karen Mahoney
I. The Cage
I don’t have very
long.
I can taste the moon
on my tongue, feel it in the pit of my stomach, even though
I can’t see the sky. My blood is being called and there’s
not a damn thing I can do about it.
Groaning, I roll
onto my side, discarding the tattered copy of Jane Eyre
behind me on the narrow cot. I push the rough blanket away
from my burning flesh and try to remember how to breathe.
The simple white tunic and trousers provided for me by The
Program hang heavily on my limbs. There’s a growing part of
me that wants to be free.
“How are you
feeling, Miss Monroe?”
The voice startles
me and I whip my head around, searching the cage,
half-expecting to see someone sitting right next to me on
the cot or perhaps materialising in the middle of the tiny
eight-by-eight space.
“It’s Neil, again,
Miss Monroe. Sorry to alarm you.” The male voice moves
closer, and a shape emerges from the shadows as it slowly
approaches the cage. Neil Sheridan is resting his hands
against the silver bars, smiling in that annoying way of
his.
I sit up, waiting
for my eyes to adjust to the suddenly brighter lights of my
‘safe room’, while trying to see outside into the dark
chamber surrounding it. It is rather like being inside a
little silver box, which in turn has been placed inside a
much larger iron box. I feel as though I am trapped at the
heart of a Russian nesting doll puzzle.
“What do you want,
Sheridan?”
“What I’ve always
wanted, Kate. To help you.”
“Screw yourself.”
Laughter greets my
childish outburst, and I feel more embarrassed than angry.
I decide to change
tactics. “All right, so you want to help me. Help me do
what?”
“Why, to Change of
course.”
My rebellious
stomach turns over and I regret asking him anything at all.
Next time, I should just keep my mouth shut.
Sheridan grips the
silver bars. “It’s almost time, Kate. Can’t you feel it?”
Feel it? Of course I
can bloody well feel it. My blood’s on fire and I want to
tear the flesh from my own bones. But I’m not telling him
that. I just shake my head.
“Tell me how it
happened. Please. You know there won’t be any going back –
no second chances. Once you’re infected you change, and
that’s it. It’s not the way they show it in the movies,
Kate.”
I snap, “You already
know how it happened.” I can’t stop the jittery urge in my
legs – the constant itch to pace and move and not be still,
even for a moment.
“I know where and
when. That’s not the same as how.” If I weren’t so freaked
out by the churning sensations in my gut, I’d be seriously
unsettled by the sickly fervour in his pale blue eyes. He’s
been watching me for what feels like days. I don’t even know
how long I’ve been in here – time can only be measured by my
breath or the beating of my heart. All I really know is that
I don’t have much of it left.
And then I just
think, Fuck it. All right, I’ll tell you what you goddamn
want to know. Maybe it’ll do some other poor bastard some
good. Maybe.
“If I tell you
this,” I say, “will you deliver the letters to my family and
friends?” My voice is shaking but I don’t care.
“Yes, yes. We’ve
already assured you of that. Just so long as you tell me.”
He leans forward, unable to keep the eagerness from his
face. The false light catches his glasses and dazzles me for
a moment. “Kate, you’re the only one who can.”
And so I do.
II. The Park
I was
sitting in St James’ Park after work, settled on one of the
splintered benches by the lake, watching the wide variety of
Londoners, tourists and wildlife pass me by on that summer’s
evening. The sun was just setting and I remember my eye
being caught by the dark blood-red stain against the sky.
The colours were breathtaking. It was times like these that
I forgot I lived and worked in the city.
As the darkness
crept up on those of us still enjoying the evening balm, I
decided to call it a day and head home. I had walked maybe
half-a-dozen steps – no more than that – when the screaming
began.
People were running
and scattering in all directions. I watched as a young
couple dashed through a flower bed, leaving a pile of
devastated petals in their wake. It looked like
multi-coloured confetti blowing in the breeze.
I clutched my bag
closer to my side and tried to decide which way to run. My
feet were rooted like the branches of the tall trees nearby,
fenced off in regimented sections. I took a few steps,
forcing myself to move despite the rising fear.
And then I heard a
deep howling, as though an injured animal were cornered or
dying. The sound made the back of my neck tighten and my
scalp itch. It made me want to cower on the ground and cover
my ears. Again and again that sound reverberated around the
park and people continued to run, their feet pounding on
pathways and flying over benches. There was less screaming
now, although I could still hear people calling to friends
and loved ones – gathering in small groups before heading
for the nearest exit.
I knew what it was –
how could I not know after all the hysterical news reports
of the past weeks – but it was one of those times when you
just can’t believe it, no matter the evidence of your own
senses. I’d never been one of those people who wanted to
believe, but there I was in a situation that was about to
give me the proof my inner cynic couldn’t be bothered to
demand.
I felt like I was
wading through molasses as I joined the spill of people
flowing by. My chest heaved and I staggered as a tall man
pushed me out of his determined way. As my knees buckled I
twisted my neck, trying to find the source of that inhuman
sound; the howls now interspersed with a deep growling that
caused my whole body to tremble.
The clouds parted
across the face of the moon, like a glistening pearl in a
bed of indigo velvet, and I could see clearly beyond the
grass, all the way to the footbridge. A huge animal padded
across the bridge, bristling with grey fur and a wet muzzle
that sniffed the summer air. Eyes that glowed silver –
whether they reflected the moonlight or shone with their own
ethereal radiance, I couldn’t say. Whatever caused that
silver light, I was drawn to it in a way I still can’t
explain. All I remember is that my feet suddenly took me in
the opposite direction from the fleeing crowd.
I heard sirens, but
they seemed muffled and still too far away, like they’d been
bottled and stored for another time.
The wolf bounded
towards me, its long strides carrying it across the bridge
and the stretch of yellowing grass in a matter of seconds.
It stopped and opened its jaws, howling at the benign moon
gazing down on us. Small hands tried to tug me away and I
glanced down, feeling trapped in a dream. A young girl with
deep red hair pulled at my bag, staring at me with
beseeching blue eyes, before her mother whisked her into her
arms and ran away without sparing me a backward glance.
Leaving me to my
fate.
As those beautiful
silver eyes leapt towards me, propelled by bone and fur and
muscle, I fell underneath the monster’s weight and screamed
– too late – as jaws clamped around my arm and tore. I
remember the pain: a bright jewel cut to the sharpest
points, glinting until you have to turn away. I remember the
smell of fur in my nostrils – coarse fur and animal sweat. I
even remember the screams of people running past: “Look at
that thing!” “It’s got a woman – there’s a woman there!” “Oh
my God, look at all that blood…”
I don’t remember
what happened next; my eyes closed and I gave myself up to
blissful oblivion.
III. The
Epidemic
They
told me that my arm would heal and I could have skin grafts;
that my throat would be scarred but that I’d recover. They
told me how lucky I was. But as they said these things, they
looked at each other with some other knowledge in their eyes
– dark and slippery, a dangerous truth left unspoken.
They
weren’t telling me that I wasn’t infected. They weren’t
giving me a date for my release from hospital. Not that St.
Thomas’s was a bad place to find yourself after a vicious
wolf attack. I just wanted to go home.
Nobody knew what had
brought the plague to London, and it took far too long
before the problem was taken seriously. There were ironic
jokes in the press about the spread of Lycanthropy; lots of
tasteless references to An American Werewolf in London. But
later on, the general consensus – or at least the public
story – was that an infected individual had made it to
London before their first Change, and the disease had spread
from there. Just one person had started all of this chaos.
Of
course, this wasn’t a plague that killed the carrier – not
unless a Hunter got to them, anyway. No, the Mayor was fond
of saying; the real victims were those who had their throats
torn out. He actually said that, while crocodile tears
glistened in his cold eyes. I remember seeing an interview
with him, just a few weeks before I was bitten, and he was
still trying to blame the deaths on wolves released into the
city by animal activists. But how could that be true, when
an ex-employee of London Zoo claimed that all their grey
wolves were accounted for.
He
disappeared soon afterwards.
I lay in
my hospital bed, the needles and tubes poking out of my body
making me feel like the prize at the centre of a complex
maze of coloured fluids. I was tired and fuzzy from the
drugs, not even sure what day it was – how long ago it had
been since the attack – and I found myself wishing the
monster had killed me. It might as well have done; I knew
the truth, even if nobody wanted to discuss it.
My
mother hated to hear me talk like that, sitting at my
bedside clicking her knitting needles. The noise irritated
me, but I knew it helped her fight the nicotine cravings –
it gave her something to do with her hands. She got this
strained look around her eyes and mouth whenever I asked
about the virus or simply begged her to tell me the truth.
Had I contracted Lycanthropy? Why did the doctors insist I
would be all right, when I could already feel something
moving inside my body? As though something was alive just
behind my ribcage, shifting restlessly beside my heart like
a bad case of indigestion.
No
answers. Instead, I had to lie there in that suffocating
room (How lovely, Mum said, your own room) and stare out of
the tiny window with its view of the staff car park. I tried
to ignore the ghostly pallor of the thickening moon, as it
peeks between the yellow blinds.
Not for
the first time, I thought about the very real possibility
that I’d never get out of that hospital. The days and nights
began to merge into one another, and I measured time by the
click of Mum’s needles.
And then
everything changed.
IV. The Hunter
The call comes at
seven-thirty, when he is already showered after his morning
run. He hates to be caught unawares and, although most of
his business is conducted at night, he doesn’t need much
sleep. He leaves the apartment at eight and arrives at the
meeting with time to spare.
His dark glasses
make him feel anonymous and powerful. He doesn’t care that
nobody else is wearing them at this time in the morning,
despite the soft fingers of sunlight stroking the stone
lions. He stands in the shadows.
“When do you need it
done by?” A simple question, but loaded with possibility. He
can already taste the thrill of the hunt – the kill – on his
tongue. It is exhilarating. Death is the only thing he lives
for.
She looks at him and
he bares his teeth in what he hopes is a smile. He forgets
how to do that, sometimes. She says, “There are eight days
until the next full moon.”
That’s all the
answer he needs. He nods and they walk away from the square,
heading in opposite directions. He glances backwards with a
sharp pang of regret – not over leaving her, but because the
park isn’t far away. He wants to examine the site of this
latest attack, but knows it would be best to return tonight.
Perhaps there will even be a chance of snaring the beast,
but the odds don’t look good. All the weather reports
indicate heavy summer showers; the creatures hunt most often
under clear skies, while the moon smiles her approval.
He doesn’t know how
many werewolves reside in London, but he isn’t the only one
who believes their numbers are far greater than the Secret
Service estimates. He admires the creatures’ tenacity – how
they remain hidden, even though the transformation is only
one way. Once they Change, the wolf remains. Government
officials have buried their heads in the sand for too long,
so it’s now the responsibility of more clandestine agencies
to counter the preternatural threat.
Preternatural
threat. His lip curl at the irony.
The hunter returns
to his lair to make plans. He tucks the thin file under his
arm as he hails a taxi, intending to read the documents
before he visits the hospital tonight.
* * *
The file on
Katherine Monroe lacks any useful information. Her life is
clearly laid out before him: Aged twenty-four, English
Literature graduate, working in a bookstore while she
‘finds’ herself; living with her mother after three years
away at university; father absent; no current boyfriend; no
debts beyond the usual student loans; no siblings or pets –
she is allergic to most kinds of animal fur (a fact that
raises what might be a genuine smile).
He sips Château
Lafite Rothschild, turning the crystal glass and watching
the ruby liquid shimmer and glow under the soft lighting. He
gazes at the selection of photographs, fixing Monroe’s
pretty features in his mind. She is an assignment, nothing
more. Just because she has blue eyes and a single dimple in
her left cheek – reminding him of his Diana – that’s no
excuse for turning down a job. It’s an easy mission; a
simple locate and retrieve. The first part – locate – has
already been done for him; all he has to do is get her out
while avoiding an incident.
Later, he sleeps for
ninety minutes. He doesn’t dream.
* * *
The hunter prowls
the staff car park’s perimeter, noting the lack of security
lighting and wondering that the female staff don’t complain.
He nods, satisfied. The gloom suits his purposes, and it is
easy to avoid the few tall streetlights that are stationed
around the mostly empty lot.
He wears dark
colours, soft materials. He moves without making a sound –
perhaps just the whisper of air as he moves through the mild
night. The promised rain hasn’t materialised, although he
can taste its nearness on the tip of his tongue. He steps
over a discarded syringe and finds it bleakly amusing.
There are thin
yellow blinds, half-closed over the mark’s window. He shakes
his head, annoyed with himself for using the word ‘mark’ –
even just in his mind. Katherine Monroe is a retrieval
operation; the true mark is still out there somewhere. He
shivers with anticipation, his fingers stroking the heavily
laden weapons belt strapped to his chest. He wants to hunt
tonight.
He angles his head
and manages to block his own reflection in the window enough
to see a sliver of the tiny room. She is sitting up in bed,
propped up on pillows and attached to a drip. There is some
colour in her cheeks and he remembers that the report stated
her shockingly fast recovery. Her left arm is swathed in
bandages, but he can see the claw marks in her neck,
extending above the standard-issue white hospital gown. The
television flickers above her but she isn’t watching it.
She is watching him.
Their eyes meet and
he twists away, flattening his back against the wall. Shit.
He breathes deeply, steadying his heart and beginning to
think that Diana had been right. He is losing his touch.
No, he refuses to
believe this. Diana was a child; she had judged him because
she worried about him. The hunter narrows his eyes and heads
back towards the staff entrance. Monroe couldn’t have seen
him, not with the angle of the blinds and bright lights
surrounding her. She was only daydreaming – or perhaps
watching her reflection. Nothing more.
He punches the
security code into the keypad and enters the facility, as
silent as the stars above. Katherine Monroe is leaving the
hospital tonight.
V. The Program
“Miss
Monroe, lie still or you’ll hurt yourself.”
The
man’s voice was rough with a husky edge – it sounded like he
wasn’t used to speaking. I hoped it was just that he wasn’t
used to speaking to terrified women bound hand and foot on
the back seat of his car, but I doubted it.
I
couldn’t tell much from his pale face because of the dark
glasses he wore, Terminator-style, despite the darkness.
He had
wrapped me in a long coat and practically smothered me with
a thick blanket that smelled of real wool. Apart from the
silver handcuffs and chains around my ankles, he was
treating me pretty well.
I felt
vulnerable in my hospital gown and, if it weren’t for the
fact that he was kidnapping me, I might’ve been glad that I
didn’t have to walk across the car park in bare feet. He had
carried me like I weighed nothing.
Not for
the first time, I wondered what kind of security there was
supposed to be in this hospital; but back then I hadn’t
known he’d taken out the cameras in the corridor outside my
room. I didn’t know anything about the security guards –
assigned especially to me because of my unusual condition –
and how they now lay unconscious beneath the useless
cameras. Before I knew much of anything, I was handcuffed to
him with a gun pressed into my ribs.
It is
strangely easy to relive my terror from a distance – from
the relative safety of my cage – but at the time I’d felt
like I was going to vomit or pass out or start a screaming
fit that might never end. My mind had been filled with a
confused mosaic of thoughts: What would my mother do when
she found out I was missing? Where was my mobile phone? Why
do the handcuffs and chains make my skin unbearably itchy?
The man
drove in silence. It hurt my neck to watch him for too long,
so I just lay still and wondered when he was going to kill
me.
The
longer we were on the road, the worse I began to feel. I
realised it had nothing to do with shock or travel sickness,
but more to do with the strange feeling in my chest – as
though the thing from earlier was still trying to claw its
way out. Only it was getting closer to the surface. I could
feel my ribs being slowly pushed apart; something was
reaching through and poking at the muscle and other tissue
lining my chest. I had an unbearable urge to cough, like I
might be able to spit out whatever was crawling inside of
me.
I must
have groaned or made some kind of noise, because the man
glanced round before focusing back on the road. “What’s
wrong?”
I realised that he
had an accent, maybe American. Or Canadian. One of my
colleagues was Canadian and hated it when I mixed up the two
accents – but I always thought she was being unfair. There
are so many different variations on the American accent, how
was I supposed to tell the difference between all of those
and the Canadians?
“Are you
in pain?”
He
actually expected an answer. Here was a man who had taken me
at gunpoint from my hospital bed – yanked the IV out of my
arm – handcuffed me and then dumped me in his car. I
swallowed, trying to ignore the stench of wet fur that
suddenly filled my nostrils. “I’m fine.”
“No,
you’re not. The full moon isn’t far away.”
My jaw
clenched and I closed my eyes, hoping he wouldn’t say
anything else.
He said,
“You don’t have long; a matter of days.”
“Stop
it,” I whispered.
“You’ll
be safer with them. Better with them than alone, out there.”
I opened my eyes in time to see him nod in some mysterious
direction. Out there.
“Safer
with who? What are you talking about?”
“If
you’re out there,” he continued, as though I hadn’t spoken,
“you’d have to face me, or others like me.”
I
shivered, even under the coat and blanket, and turned my
face into the back of the seat. I didn’t want to see his
profile – those blank lenses and the flash of sharp white
teeth. What did he mean, others like me?
He
glanced back at me again, before I could ask him any more
questions. “Don’t worry, Miss Monroe. The Program will take
care of you.”
VI. The Cage
Time has
no meaning.
The only
thing that means anything now is the cool glow of moonlight
on my cheek as the roof of the cage slides open. Neil
Sheridan watches the operation with an almost joyful
expression. I’m half expecting him to burst into a chorus of
hallelujahs.
“Kate,
can you feel it?”
I ignore
him and continue to gaze at the roof. A huge gap is open at
least twenty feet above me, like a trapdoor has sprung open
in the ceiling. Beyond the top of my cage, I can see the
roof of the building we’re in. I have no idea where the
Program is based – the hunter blindfolded me before we
arrived. I remember feeling grateful that I didn’t have to
see the moon winking at me through the car windows.
I squint
and try to focus; it looks like there’s a skylight in the
corrugated steel ceiling far above the cage. It’s like a
massive warehouse. I can see the fat white moon for the
first time since leaving the hospital, and I wonder why I
was so afraid of it before.
The beast wants to
be set free. Excitement wrestles with fear in my belly, and
I long to tear off the clothes that restrain me.
What
will the Program do with me once I’ve Changed? Will I be
studied – kept locked up for the rest of my life? Perhaps
they’ll kill me. I think about the strange man who brought
me here – the hunter. Will he be the one to do it?
The moon
glows brighter than ever as the skylight slowly cranks open.
I turn my back on Sheridan and crane my neck, trying to get
as much of that natural light on my face as possible. I
hadn’t realised how warm the moon’s rays could feel. It’s
like a hot summer’s day, even though it must be the middle
of the night. I am bathed in pearly light, and it feels
fucking amazing.
I am
more alive than I have ever been, and the sensation that my
skin wants to split open doesn’t even scare me anymore.
I think
of Mum and feel a moment of sadness. I don’t believe she’ll
get my letter – not for a minute. But I still told Sheridan
what he wanted to know. Why not? My last moments as a human
being might as well be spent talking to another – no matter
how fanatical and potentially crazy.
The wolf
stirs in my chest and I let her breathe. She deserves to run
free. I pull down the neck of the white tunic and touch my
scars – almost healed now. I gaze at my arm and can only see
faint tooth-marks where there was once a wreckage of bone
and cartilage. The muscles dance and ripple under my skin
and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
As I
raise my arms in the moonlight a primal cry builds in my
chest, and my gut clenches tight around a sudden knot of
pain. I wonder what it will feel like to have fur instead of
flesh, four legs instead of two. Flexing my jaw, I feel it
unhinge.
I throw
back my head and howl.
END. |
