Lycanthropic (Book 1): Wolf Blood

by Morris, Steve

  Vijay stared at his feet. ‘I’m not strong,’ he said miserably. ‘I’m small and weak, and I wear glasses, and I’ve never hit anyone in my life.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re weak,’ said Rose ‘And hitting people doesn’t make you strong. There are different ways to be strong.’

  Chapter Twelve

  King’s College Hospital, Lambeth, South London, new moon

  After speaking to James, Liz went to visit her colleague, PC David Morgan. He’d just been moved out of Intensive Care and into the High Dependency unit and this was the first time she’d been allowed to visit him since the night of the wolf attack.

  The local newspaper had reported the attack on its front page, and a couple of people had claimed to see the animal roaming around nearby Clapham Common that same night. A local radio station had picked up the story and sensationalized it, calling the animal the Beast of Clapham Common. They’d tried to interview Liz about her encounter, but she had refused to speak to them. She didn’t think she would mention it to Dave either.

  She was shocked at how bad he looked. The big man lay in the hospital bed, wired up to various machines and tubes. His face was deathly pale and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. At first she thought he was unconscious, but after a minute he stirred and opened his eyes. They glowed with an unhealthy yellow sheen.

  She tried to keep her voice calm and casual. ‘Hey, Fat Dave. How you doing there, big man?’

  ‘Not so bad,’ he replied, his voice hoarse and weak. ‘I’d give you a hug if I didn’t have so many needles sticking in me.’

  ‘I’d hug you too if you weren’t such an ugly bastard.’

  Dave made no reply. His breathing was noisy and irregular, as if he’d just run upstairs. The hospital lights seemed to be bothering him and he squinted to look at her. Near the bed a row of machines displayed his vital signs. Liz knew enough to tell that his blood pressure was much lower than it should have been, and that his heart rate was wandering erratically.

  She sat down in the chair next to the bed. ‘I was going to bring you some grapes, but I thought you might prefer chocolates.’ Dave normally guzzled chocolates by the sack load. She showed him the big box she’d picked up on the way.

  Dave closed his eyes, murmuring something in reply. It might have been, ‘Not hungry,’ but she couldn’t really tell.

  She placed the box on a small pedestal next to the bed. There were some flowers and a bowl of fruit there, but the fruit was still wrapped in cellophane and hadn’t been touched. ‘I’ve just been to see that teenager we rescued on Halloween,’ she continued. ‘The one who stabbed the teacher. Do you remember?’

  Liz and Dave had attended the incident with James the evening before Dave had been bitten by the wolf. Dave grunted in response, but gave no indication whether or not he remembered. Liz persisted anyway. ‘His name is James Beaumont. He’s a nice boy. He seems to be making a good recovery.’

  Dave made no reply.

  Liz told him, ‘I bet you’ll be fine in a few days too.’ Her words sounded hollow though. Dave had sustained a much more serious injury than James. A wolf bite, not a human one. He’d been unconscious for almost ten days following the attack. She sat with him for another fifteen minutes, but he said nothing more. Eventually she guessed that he’d drifted off to sleep.

  A nurse came over and gave Liz a smile that couldn’t completely disguise her weariness. ‘How’s he doing?’ she asked. Her name tag read Chanita.

  ‘Sleeping, I think,’ said Liz. ‘But I was hoping you might tell me how he’s getting on?’

  The nurse leaned over the bed to take Dave’s temperature. She frowned and made a note on a clipboard at the end of the bed. ‘Are you family?’ she asked.

  ‘Next best thing.’ Liz gave the nurse one of her winning smiles, the kind she normally saved for old ladies and small children. ‘We’ve been colleagues for the past five years.’

  The nurse looked grim. ‘I’m no doctor, but it doesn’t look good to me. The bite wound’s actually not that serious, although he did lose a lot of blood. It should heal with just some scar tissue left behind. But he’s got a nasty infection from where that dog bit him. That’s what’s making him so weak.’

  ‘Dog?’ Liz shook her head, and found herself saying, ‘It wasn’t a dog.’

  The nurse gave her a sceptical look. ‘You can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.’ She was referring to the Beast stories, Liz guessed.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Liz. ‘I was with him when it happened. I’m pretty sure it was a wolf.’

  ‘A wolf in London?’

  Liz shrugged. ‘Stupid, I know.’

  ‘What makes you think it was a wolf?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘I’m not an expert of course. But the way it looked, the way it attacked. I’ve never seen a dog act like that. There was a human intelligence about the way it behaved, as if it knew what we were thinking. There was nothing submissive about it, not like a normal dog. It acted more like a cat, as if it knew it was superior to us.’

  ‘Describe it to me,’ said the nurse.

  ‘It looked like a German shepherd dog, but larger, with a longer snout. It was the size of a human, with much longer legs than any dog.’

  The nurse was studying her intently. ‘Go on.’

  Liz visualized the beast in her mind. Picked out in the dark, beneath the street lamps, she remembered the way the creature had stared at her, with those glowing eyes like lanterns in the night, seeming to see right into her soul. ‘It had fine fur, very pale, almost a light ash-blonde. Its head was disproportionately large too, like a human head. But perhaps the most startling thing was the bright yellow eyes. I’ve never seen a dog with eyes like that.’ She shuddered.

  The nurse continued to study her face. Eventually she spoke in a hushed voice. ‘It’s not the first.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Liz. Now it was her turn to sound disbelieving.

  ‘Normally we get one or two dog attacks a month, but in recent months the number has been rising steadily,’ said Chanita. ‘They’ve been much more serious than the usual cases too. The wounds become infected and the patients develop a fever.’

  ‘What kind of dogs were involved?’ asked Liz.

  ‘The descriptions vary. Sometimes an animal with light fur, sometimes brown or even black. But the other characteristics are always the same. People always remember the eyes – the bright yellow eyes.’

  ‘But that’s crazy,’ said Liz. ‘One animal running wild in London, I can believe, but several? Were they reported to the police?’

  Chanita shrugged. ‘I guess so. But if the animals ran off, maybe nothing was done. What happened to the animal that attacked your colleague?’

  ‘It ran away. There was nothing I could do.’

  The nurse nodded and turned to leave, but Liz grabbed her arm. ‘What happened to the others?’ she asked, fixing Chanita with her gaze. ‘The patients, I mean. Did they pull through?’

  Chanita shrugged. ‘Some got better, some worse.’ She tailed off, seemingly unwilling to continue.

  ‘Did any die?’ asked Liz, not certain she wanted to know.

  A bell rang from the other side of the ward and Chanita looked toward it. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, her eyes pleading with Liz.

  ‘Did any die?’ Liz repeated. ‘Please, I have to know.’

  ‘About half of them,’ said Chanita. She smiled apologetically and walked briskly away, leaving Liz alone with Dave.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Catholic Boys School, Mayfield Avenue, South London, crescent moon

  Doctor Kapoor had wanted to keep James in hospital for another day at least, but he’d begged to be sent home. In the end the doctor had reluctantly agreed. James hadn’t eaten anything in the hospital, but at home his mother brought him sushi and watched in amazement as he devoured plate after plate of raw fish.

  ‘You’ll make yourself sick,’ she warned.

  ‘No,’ said James. ‘I�
��m ravenous. I couldn’t eat any of the food they gave me in the hospital. But now I could eat a horse.’ He wasn’t joking either. He really could have eaten a horse, a small one at least. The sushi was okay, but he really craved red meat. Raw steak dripping red with blood. His mum had said no to that, however.

  He’d allowed her to keep him home for a day, then he insisted on going into school the next morning. He was bursting with frustrated impatience at having been cooped up indoors for so long. He needed to get out and burn off some energy. And there was something else he desperately wanted to do.

  James attended the Catholic Boys School on Mayfield Avenue in a leafy well-to-do part of South London. His father was a stockbroker and could easily afford the cost of living in such an upmarket location. The school was a small Victorian institution attached to the Church of Our Lady on the adjacent plot. While the school wasn’t strictly Catholic, many of the boys were, and the priest, Father Mulcahy, sometimes took morning assemblies at the school, and gave religious instruction to boys after classes were finished. The priest was old and quite severe, but James needed to speak to him urgently. He needed to confess his sins.

  Coming back to school felt very strange. Although he’d been away for just two weeks, and not much seemed to have happened in his absence, for James himself everything had changed. He struggled to talk to any of his old friends. They all wanted to know about the madman, and how it had felt to stab someone with a knife. James refused to talk about it. The boys he had regarded as his peers now felt like silly schoolboys, emotionally under-developed and with trivial concerns. There was no point trying to tell them anything about what he felt, because they just weren’t equipped to understand.

  Only God would understand his thoughts and feelings. And the nearest thing to God was Father Mulcahy. After school classes had finished, instead of walking home, James made his way out of the side gate that led to the Church of Our Lady. He crossed the graveyard that bounded the old stone church, stopping halfway to sit on a wooden bench.

  At this time of the year, the afternoons quickly turned to dusk and then to night, and James enjoyed watching the day fade. With it came a growing sense of peace.

  The horse chestnut trees that screened the church from the school had already been stripped bare by the winter wind, but the churchyard itself was far from bleak. A squirrel darted across the top of a headstone, grey on grey, quick life in the midst of death. The clipped masses of the yew trees remained green all year round, a symbol of Christ’s undying love, and James found the churchyard a strangely comforting place.

  He sat alone on the bench for a good while, watching the last rays of the sun dip behind the moss-draped stone wall of the church. The whole churchyard seemed to hesitate for a while, as if waiting breathlessly for twilight to slip away to nothingness. He felt calmer than he had done for days. Then a boy walked past on the gravel path that led to the church, and the hunger rose up inside him once more. He wanted to jump at the boy, grapple him to the ground, rend and tear his flesh, and taste the blood and meat.

  To his alarm, he found that he had unconsciously risen to his feet and followed the boy several steps before he even knew what he was doing. He had fallen into a natural hunting pattern, probing the boy for weakness, looking for an opportunity to strike.

  James turned abruptly away from the boy and covered his face in his hands. The sooner he spoke to the priest the better.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Clifton Blood Clinic, North London, crescent moon

  ‘Samuel Smalling?’ enquired the nurse at the blood clinic. She was petite and pretty, her auburn hair tied back sensibly in a ponytail, her skin rosy, her arms toned and firm beneath her navy-blue tunic. She smelled of blood and antiseptic, and underneath that, the faint but appetizing aroma of living human flesh.

  ‘That’s correct,’ confirmed Samuel. He nodded and smiled broadly at the nurse – Dawn, according to her name tag. She was being very attentive after all. Everyone at the clinic had been very polite and professional.

  ‘Have you given blood before?’ she asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘First time, I’m afraid, Dawn. But I wanted to give something back, to play my part in society, you know?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve got the results of your test here, Mr Smalling, and everything seems to be in order. Your haemoglobin level is nice and high, and we’ll be screening your blood for any infections that could be passed to a patient via a blood transfusion. Your blood group is O Negative, which is particularly useful, because it means that we can safely give your blood to patients with any other type of blood group.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ said Samuel.

  Leanna would be pleased about that. This was her idea after all. She was determined to spread the condition as widely and as quickly as possible. Their research indicated that blood transfusions would be an effective way to transmit it, and this was as good a way as any to get started. It was a lot less risky than running around the Common at night searching for strangers to bite.

  ‘What infections do you test for?’ he asked.

  Dawn consulted her notes. ‘Syphilis, hepatitis B and C, HIV, and human T-lymphotropic virus. We’ll write to you if we find any of those infections in your blood sample.’

  ‘Excellent news,’ said Samuel. ‘So, what happens now?’

  ‘Now we take your blood,’ said Dawn, smiling. She took hold of his arm and cleaned it with an antiseptic sponge. ‘You don’t feel the cold then?’ she asked, indicating his T-shirt and lack of any kind of winter jacket.

  Samuel shook his head. ‘Not at all. I like it. It helps me chill.’ This small talk was intended to distract him while she inserted the needle into his arm. But Samuel wasn’t bothered by needles. ‘The median cubital vein,’ he remarked, as she inserted the sharp point of the needle into the wall of the vein with her gloved fingers.

  She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘I’m a medical student,’ he explained.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dawn, knowingly. ‘They’re usually the worst.’ She secured the needle in his arm and began to draw out the bright crimson liquid.

  Samuel allowed himself a hearty laugh. The rich smell of the blood had put him in a mellow mood. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘You won’t get any complaints from me. Take as much as you like.’

  ‘Just one pint will be fine,’ she said. ‘I’m going to leave you now and come back in around five to ten minutes. The machine will draw blood and stop automatically when it reaches its limit. It may beep from time to time, but don’t worry, that’s normal. If you need any assistance, just raise your other arm.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Samuel. ‘I’m enjoying everything so far.’ He lay back in the plastic chair. It was rather like reclining in a deck chair by the seaside. He had always been comfortable in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. A car crash at the age of twelve had killed his parents and younger brother outright and left him in a critical condition. Doctors had spent two years rebuilding him, carrying out emergency surgery to treat a collapsed lung, repairing more than a dozen broken bones, and grafting skin onto his burned arms and legs. He still had metal rods in his left thigh. The experience had left both physical and mental scars that remained with him to this day, but it had also kindled a strong interest in medicine and a desire to become a doctor himself. It had led him to that fateful expedition to the mountains of Romania.

  Samuel had been the first of Professor Wiseman’s three students to succumb to the condition. He had only himself to blame for that. He’d been careless with one of the test subjects they’d managed to bring back to their lab. Six months of careful tracking and trapping in the forest to catch a live werewolf, then just a single second to ruin everything. They’d captured a woman from a nearby village. The villagers had told them of a wolf that attacked and killed livestock and had once tried to break into a house. It hadn’t taken long for the professor and his team to identify the infected villager – a childless woman in her early thirties, the
widow of a man killed by a wolf attack the previous year. Loose talk among the villagers themselves confirmed the conclusion.

  Samuel had been working alone in the lab late one evening, tired and thirsty. He ought to have stopped, but he was close to finishing his tests for the day. Just one momentary lapse of concentration and he’d felt the jaws of the woman lock onto his arm. He’d struggled to free himself, but already he knew it was too late. The condition always took hold after a vein or artery was breeched. There were no exceptions. Every documented werewolf attack had just two possible outcomes – death or infection.

  At the time, he’d hoped for death. How foolish that wish had been. Becoming lycanthropic himself had been so much more rewarding than he could ever have imagined.

  Since returning to London with Leanna and Adam, he’d been reading up on the history of lycanthropy. The word came from the Greek lycanthrope, a synthesis of lykos or wolf, and anthropos, meaning human. It was a surprisingly well-researched and documented field of study. Stories of shape-shifters were as old as human civilization, and in late medieval and early modern times, scholars had treated it as seriously as conditions like syphilis. It was only since the late nineteenth century that scepticism had pushed it beyond the accepted field of scientific investigation.

  Just like Ebola, HIV and the Zika virus, lycanthropy had existed for thousands of years on the margins of humanity. And just like those diseases, it had persisted quietly, infecting small numbers of victims in localized areas, until conditions were right for it to suddenly explode into a worldwide epidemic. All it needed to take root was a high enough population density.

  Medical science had received ample warning of lycanthropy. Gilles Garnier, the infamous Werewolf of Dole; Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun, who confessed to being serial-killing werewolves; the German werewolf, Peter Stumpp, who ate his own son and was caught by villagers while actually in wolf form – the number of documented cases went on and on. In Europe during the sixteenth century alone, dozens of accused or confessed werewolves were put on trial and executed.