Wolfsbane: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Mortlake Series Book 1)

by David Longhorn

  “You’re on!”

  After they’d made some provisional arrangements, he called the college accommodation bureau and checked. There was a room free. He booked it for a research assistant and messaged Tara some details, then resumed his walk. He followed the route taken by the woman, trying to remember her stride, her figure, the way she shook her hair back.

  His heart was racing. His mouth felt dry.

  Cassandra, he thought. Why would she be here? Alive or dead?

  ***

  Tara called Alfred Gotobed. She got his personal assistant, who was at first inclined to stonewall. Then she mentioned her name and was put through to the boss. Her first surprise was Gotobed’s squeaky voice—high, slightly hoarse, not that of a major-league financial whizz. But, according to her research, that’s what he was. The guy had started small in property development, then worked his way up to become a serious player in “the Square Mile”. This was shorthand for the massive concentration of banks and other big players in the ancient City of London. Basic Googling revealed that Gotobed, at forty-five, was well on his way to becoming a billionaire.

  And yet, she thought, the guy still sounded like a wimp.

  “Yes,” he said when she asked, “I would like to meet.”

  “And what’s it about?” she asked bluntly.

  Anita, sitting by her to offer moral support, made a thumbs-up sign. Tara’s phone was on speaker.

  “About?” Gotobed lowered his already weak voice. “About that unfortunate incident a couple months ago. When that… that young man died.”

  “He had a name,” Tara said. “Josh Barnett. So? What about his death?”

  “I… I would like to try and make amends. Things have gone too far. I want out. I want to meet Mortlake. I think he could help me, with his knowledge, his experience. I want this to stop!”

  Gotobed’s voice was rising in pitch now and getting louder. He sounded quite genuine. But she knew better than to trust a man just because he gets emotional and starts pleading. Anita mouthed two words, emphasizing something they had already discussed.

  “A public place,” said Tara. “I want to check you out first, and it will be in a crowded public place. And it will be my choice. I’ll message you the time and place, if I decide to go ahead with this.”

  She ended the call, then rang Mortlake to tell him what she had done. He hemmed and hawed a little, but they finally settled on a meeting place they both knew well. And it had something else going for it. There was, as Mortlake pointed out, no more obvious meeting place in London.

  ***

  After he finished speaking to Tara, Mortlake went back to his research. He had spent many hours trying to pull together folklore and fringe science, to form a coherent picture of how lycanthropy worked. But it had proved easier to dismiss common beliefs than find solid facts.

  Mortlake leaned back in his armchair, stretched out his feet to the log fire, and opened his notebook again. He preferred paper to digital and, if challenged, told people it was because the former was harder to hack. It was, in fact, mainly because he loved books and was a compulsive list-maker. There was something about writing words down, correcting them, crossing them out that appealed to his complex soul. He preferred to see how his thoughts had evolved.

  In the case of the Wyebridge Werewolves, as he’d dubbed it, there were more annotations and deletions than usual. The full moon thing—wrong. The idea that lycanthropes don’t remember what they do when they “wolf out”—that must be wrong because, if true, Gonfallon and his sick friends would get no pleasure from a kill.

  Mortlake underlined the word TRANSFORMATION, added another question mark to the three already accompanying it. This was the clincher. The evidence suggested Gonfallon and his pals transformed when they wanted to, but was it that simple? But if it was not a straight exercise of will power, what caused it?

  “Bugger,” he muttered. “Lack of data, rather than curiosity, is what really killed the cat.”

  He moved on to the next item on his list. He had originally written WEAPONS, then crossed it out. It was too on-the-nose, too violent in its implications. He had no right to take the life of anyone, even a murderer. He had replaced WEAPONS with DEFENSES, which had a more moderate feel. Here, there was at least a bit of evidence. He frowned at the list, reassessing the worth of his data.

  WOLFSBANE. He rated that as Good, a credible way to deter the creatures.

  SILVER. That was attractive but problematic. Silver was quite common, especially among the rich—designer watches and so forth. But it would not be difficult for Gonfallon and company to keep the metal at a distance. He tried to recall if Gonfallon had been wearing a watch. If the man wore gold…

  “No, very shaky,” Mortlake muttered and rated silver as a Possible.

  A thought nagged at him. It jerked him away from his musings, back to the morning walk, the encounter with the tourists. The dark-haired woman striding by, so confident, full of languid grace. Or was he remembering that falsely, kind of wishful thinking?

  Mortlake set down the notebook and went to his desk, opened the bottom drawer. He kept some whiskey there, strictly for guests who might be in shock. A lightweight himself, he could not drink without getting instantly tipsy and stupid. He took out the half-empty bottle, removed a few battered cardboard folders of long-yellowed press clippings, and found what he was looking for.

  The photograph album was old but still almost pristine, having been stashed away for many years. He could not remember the last time he had looked at it. He sat down at the desk and started to flip through the pages, noting how many were blank. They had set out to fill it with memories, or at least that had been Cassandra’s aim. He finally came to the photo she had liked best, the two of them in a punt on the Cam, her—laughing and holding onto him, him—grinning like an idiot, pretending to fall overboard.

  He could not even remember which of their friends had taken that photo. But Cassandra, looking up at young Marcus Mortlake, smiling, he had tried and failed to forget. Every now and again—like this morning—something reminded him of her. The woman with long, dark hair. The shape of a student’s face half-glimpsed in the dining hall, offering a chance resemblance. A timeless moment between waking and sleeping when he imagined the warmth of her, and reached out, and woke to solitude.

  “Cassandra Tallantyre,” he said. “Alive or dead?”

  He heard a small sound outside in the corridor. For a moment, the irrational side of his nature surged up, as if simply saying her name might have conjured her presence. He got up, walked to the door, and listened. Nothing. He opened the inner door, then the outer. The corridor was dark. Something brushed against him and he jumped. Biggleworth’s green-gold eyes looked up at him. The black tail twitched against Mortlake’s leg again.

  “Oh, has he shut you out again?” he said. “Probably having a snooze. Come on in, furry face, I’ve got a tin of tuna somewhere.”

  ***

  The St. Pancras International station bore a resemblance to the Houses of Parliament, complete with a clock tower. At midday on a Saturday, it was thronged with British and overseas passengers. As Tara arrived, a Eurostar from Paris had just arrived and a throng of out-of-season tourists and business types were surging out of the building. She fought her way through, wary of pickpockets and perverts, and finally got into the main building. As the crowd thinned, she got out her phone and called Mortlake.

  “I’m here. I’ll head over to the statue. Can’t see him yet.”

  “Okay,” came his reply. “One of my friends is watching.”

  Tara felt a slight twinge of irritation at Mortlake’s insistence that someone should keep an eye on her. The whole point of meeting in a railway station on a weekend was to make some kind of attack impossible. She could see at least three armed cops from the main entrance. Like all possible terrorist targets in London, security was tight.

  Tara walked over to the statue, which depicted a man and woman in a loving clinch. It was calle
d the Meeting Place, and some thought it was tacky. One rival artist had even used the word “crap”. But it had, according to various online sources, made the station one of the top ten romantic destinations in Europe. Certainly, there was no shortage of people doing their own hugging around the statue.

  She spotted Alfred Gotobed. He was loitering with a coffee in hand, looking distinctly unromantic. He hadn’t seen her yet, so she took a moment to study him. He was short, maybe five-five, and somehow, his expensive woolen overcoat seemed too large, and the bottoms of his pants bagged. Tara wondered if this was because his tailor didn’t respect him, or if Gotobed simply slumped and slouched too much. His shoes—real leather, no doubt—were shiny enough, but his feet were small, and the footwear only drew attention to this.

  It was his face, though, that made Alfred Gotobed seem rather pathetic. Under a receding hairline, his features were plump, pale, shining with perspiration despite the cold. His eyes were always moving, checking his phone, looking up at the clock, peering at the statue. He seemed like a nervous little man, no longer young, and worried that someone would find him out.

  Well, she thought as she walked over, you kind of outed yourself, Alfred.

  The moment he caught sight of her, she smiled widely, and without waiting for him to react grabbed one of his hands and pumped it up and down in both of hers. His hand had a dead fish feel to it. She squeezed his short fingers with all of hers.

  “Alfred,” she said, “so good to finally meet you!”

  She was wearing warm boots with two-inch heels, so she was about an inch taller than him. She saw a passerby smirk and knew they had made an assumption about the young redhead and the middle-aged guy. Eventually, after gawping at her for a few seconds, Gotobed pulled his hand from her grip and found his voice.

  “I… thank you for coming, I didn’t think… well, here you are… and now…”

  He ran nervous fingers through thin, mousy brown hair. Tara felt pity that was instantly quelled by the thought of what this man might have done. What he might be. She took his arm and steered him to a small hot drinks stall, explaining that they would walk and talk so there was less chance of being overheard.

  “Quite, quite, a good idea,” he said quickly, glancing around. “I do think that large man over there by the Eurostar gate is looking at one of us. You, perhaps?”

  Tara took out her phone and used the camera to peer over her shoulder. There was a big guy looking their way. He was dressed in woolen cap and dark clothes, neat but nondescript. He could well have been a plainclothes cop, there were probably a few around. But she knew someone as rich as Gonfallon could afford to have both Gotobed or Tara followed.

  “Okay, if he watches, he watches,” she said. “Big city, lot of curious people. He can’t lipread at that distance.”

  Tara got herself some chicken soup. Gotobed clumsily offered to pay, but she turned him down firmly. It seemed important to accept nothing from him, and she certainly felt no desire to be polite. He reddened as she walked away, scuttling after her in his twinkling shoes. Those shoes had, she saw now, little gold chains on them. Somehow, that made him seem more pathetic. But she told herself to be careful, not to lower her guard, even in public.

  “Okay,” she said, as they passed the Meeting Place statue and skirted the couples taking selfies. “What do you want to tell me?”

  Gotobed stammered out a not-very-coherent story of how he had wanted to be part of the “smart set”, as he called it. There had been rumors a year or so earlier that Gonfallon was forming an exclusive hunting club. Gotobed, not meeting Tara’s eye, said he had spent time shooting and big game hunting trying to win friends and influence people.

  “My mother would like me to have a knighthood,” he added. “It would mean a lot to her.”

  In that remark, Tara saw much of the man’s character revealed. But she resisted psychoanalyzing him and, instead, kept probing, trying to dig up hard data. And she got a fair amount. Yes, Gonfallon had brought a girl from somewhere—and she was not normal. Yes, it was a bite or scratch from the girl that gave them the power.

  “You call it a power, not a curse?” she interrupted.

  The little man looked startled, as if the thought had never occurred to him. Tara dismissed the point and asked how the transformation occurred. She was as keen to know this as Mortlake.

  “It’s—emotion, I suppose,” Gotobed said. “You feel strange, sick at first, when the wound is taking effect. Then you feel wonderful—much more powerful, focused. That wears off after a while. But if you experience intense feeling, of a certain kind, you—you change.”

  He ran his hand through his disheveled hair again, and Tara looked closely at his fingers. Gotobed hesitated, and she smiled encouragingly, looking him in the eye.

  “Go on, Alfred,” she urged. “How do you actually do this?”

  “You’ve got to really clear your mind of everything except a kind of intense…”

  Gotobed stopped, looked past her, and his eyes widened in fright. Tara spun round to look but saw nothing but milling people. Gotobed was already heading for the car park exit, and she had to run to keep up.

  “What is it? Tell me, Alfred!”

  She grabbed his arm, and he pulled away. His hand flapped in a gesture of dismissal, and Tara saw something, a data point, a piece of evidence she had hoped to discover. An experiment had succeeded. She kept following him, bombarding him with questions he did not answer, until they reached a silver-gray Mercedes. As he unlocked it, the little man stammered out a few words.

  “Professor Mortlake… I need to meet him… He must help me!”

  Later on, when Gotobed had left and Tara had found a quieter spot to talk, she took out her phone and called Mortlake again, described what had happened. They discussed how credible Gotobed was. She argued that he might be a brilliant actor, but he seemed genuinely worried about the turn his life had taken. Mortlake pointed out that he had no idea how to cure lycanthropy, but that was a side issue. Rescuing the captive girl was the most important thing, and Gotobed would have useful information about the house where she was being held.

  “Message received,” she said. “But he’s skittish about public places. And I can’t ask him round to the house—too many innocent people at risk.”

  “I understand,” said Mortlake. “I’ll have to face this sooner or later. I believe there are ways to curb the lycanthrope, if not cure them. I will prepare a few defenses. But getting information on that poor girl is the main thing.”

  “Agreed,” she said. “Oh, by the way, I conducted a little experiment of my own while I talked to Alfred.”

  “Nothing dangerous I hope?” he said.

  “Not to me,” she replied and explained what she had done.

  “Clever!” Mortlake sounded truly impressed. “It confirms the old folk wisdom. Well done! Now I must make a visit to the chemistry department. And the herbarium people, I’ve not seen them in a while. Try and arrange a visit from Mr. Gotobed for next weekend. I’ll have a few things ready by then.”

  Chapter 9

  “One should drive nails through the cursed individual’s hands,” Tara read, looking up from a bulky Victorian tome. “Seriously, some of those old-time guys were sadists.”

  An elderly woman at the next table darted her a warning look. She resisted the urge to raise a finger in response. It was late afternoon in the college library, and she was helping Mortlake with some last-minute research. They had been shushed several times. This was mostly thanks to Tara’s reactions to folk remedies for lycanthropy.

  “The internet is a wonderful thing,” Mortlake said. “But we’ve got to go through the original texts. Quietly. Just in case. Libraries are your friend. I know you’re used to everything being instantly available on-screen, but remember, not everything is online, and not everything you find online is right.”

  Tara was irritated, in part by the obvious logic of his remarks.

  “Yeah, but the original texts on lyca
nthropy are all, like, Latin or medieval French or old-time German or whatever,” she pointed out. “I can’t read them! Why am I here?”

  Patiently, Mortlake pointed out that she was providing a kind of backstop, going through English-language texts that referenced the source material. It was sensible to explore every option, and as Mortlake’s Latin was rusty and his French poor, she might well save him some time.

  “I guess,” she said. “But we already know about wolfsbane and silver, right? Why bother with, I dunno, stuff like this? ‘Some Christians believed it was merely necessary to address the werewolf by his own name, repeating it three times, to remove the curse.’ I mean, if it was that easy…”

  Mortlake wagged a finger at her in admonition.

  “Sounds a bit feeble, at first glance, but think—you’re being attacked by a big, toothy, hairy monster. You have to be damn sure you get the name right and have the time—and sheer presence of mind—to repeat it three times. It’s not so easy as you might think.”

  “Yeah,” Tara said, deciding to play along. “And what if their name is Montmorency or Concepcion, and not something nice and short like Vic or Buzz? It’s a linguistic minefield. Oh, and here’s another brilliant idea from our inbred ancestors, ‘Sicilians believed you should strike a werewolf on the forehead or scalp with a knife.’”

  “Another one to file under ‘easier said than done’,” agreed Mortlake.

  The old lady at the next table slammed shut the book she was reading and stomped off into the labyrinth of shelves. Tara stuck her tongue out at the woman’s retreating back. Then she leaned back, making her ancient wooden chair creak. It was already getting dark, shadows pooling in the ancient building. Normally, Tara would have liked to prowl the aisles, looking for books in her own field. It was interesting to check for the names of scientists long dead, read through theories of the universe now long since discredited. But this particular library seemed to sum up that the past—a dark, mysterious, and too often violent past—was never far away.