The Wolf in the Attic

by Paul Kearney

  Here, it is quieter and there are more patches of snow still clinging to corners and dark nooks. I start to hum Bye Bye Blackbird – it is one of those tunes that gets into your head – and the dark of the old decade’s last night on earth deepens all around me, and the chill seems to seep up out of the shadows which loom under the railway bridge, and I cannot help but feel that I am being watched, though there is not another soul around.

  All of Oxford is back in the gaslight and music of New Year’s Eve, and not a person passes me as I continue on to Port Meadow and the wide darkness there, and the sky opens up above me with a few stars burning in and out of the clouds. There is no moon that I can see. But still, the notion that I am being watched, even followed, grows on me until I am turning around in my tracks every hundred yards to look back, sure that there will be a dark shape somewhere behind.

  But there is nothing, and no-one is there, so I plough on doggedly, crossing the river at Fiddler’s Island and then continuing up the western side of the Thames. The river is going quietly about its business, black in the night. I am in the countryside at last, and in the summer cattle graze here as they do on the common, but they are all gone now, and when I step in one old cow pat it breaks like a dinner plate under my foot, frozen and dry.

  The tree-covered hills of Wytham rise up ahead.

  THERE IS STILL snow in the wood, wide gouts of it pale in the darkness under the trees. Great banks of bramble and fern, all dead and dry, rise up like walls, and I pick my way in crazy zigzags, always uphill. I pass a clearing on my left, close to where Luca put his hand over my mouth and I felt his fingers against my lips. I touch my own face, remembering that more clearly than the glimpse of the wolf-shape in the dark, and it is that memory which keeps me walking.

  I would feel so much better if Luca were here. This is his kingdom, this still, empty wood all heavy with darkness at the end of the old year.

  I feel as though I have left something else behind along with the gaslight of the city. Pa once told me that snakes shed their skin every month, and in an odd way I think I may have too. There is a way of looking at things when you are alone in the woods at night. You see more clearly the things at the corner of the eye, and hear all the little crackling noises, the saw of your own breath, even the thumping of your heart. All so clear. It is as though on stepping out of the city an older part of the brain starts to work again. The part that remembers flint and bone and ice.

  I keep hoping to see firelight in the night, and hear the drum beating and the singing, but there is only the faint rush of a breeze in the treetops and the infernal rip of briars as they catch on my clothes and knapsack.

  And then something brushes against my face and scratches my cheek. I flinch away from it, imagining bats and all sorts of horrid night-creatures. But it is only the hanging spray of a tree.

  No – it’s not. I take a hold of it and find that I am grasping one of the twig-fashioned stars which the Romani had hung all around their campsite. I pull it free and feel it over in my hands, then look around. There is a little clearing here, and above me the stars are coming and going behind grey shreds of cloud, but still there is no moon.

  I stand very still for a long time, my breath a pale cloud in front of my face. I can hear my very joints creaking. Far off, there is the scratching rattle of a pheasant in the night. I have never known a silence feel so lonely.

  I can smell the ashes. I step forward until the dead circle of the campfire is at my feet. This is the place where I met Queenie and Luca and Jaelle and the rest, but they are all long gone now. The embers of their fire have been scattered. When I pick one up it breaks apart in my hand, as brittle as biscuit. I realise that I had been so sure of them again, and now that they are not here I am completely at a loss. I stand there in the appalling lonely dark, and do not know what to do.

  But I cannot go back.

  I take off the knapsack, unroll my blanket, and set about searching for the matches. Everything takes forever in the dark, but finally I get the lantern lit, and the bright glow of it immediately sets up a wall between me and the forest, and Pie sits watching me with the yellow light two circles in her black eyes.

  Then I go about the old campsite with the lantern held low to the ground, looking for I know not what. I am rewarded by a neat pile of kindling and firewood stored in a hollow under the brambles, and I pile these up in a pyramid – that is what one must do – and use a splash of lamp-oil to make sure.

  My match makes the pyramid of sticks go up with a woof like a hoarse old dog, and the rush of warmth is lovely – as bright and heartening as can be. I set up my own little camp, and am soon wrapped in the heavy wool blanket and nibbling on a biscuit with Pie in the crook of my arm. There is nothing better than firelight in a wood, and the flames are as entrancing as the screen in a nickelodeon. I start to feel a little better. Perhaps it will be all right after all.

  And then, when I look up from the bright dance of the flames at last, there is a face on the other side of them.

  I DON’T MAKE a sound. In the firelight, it seems almost that it is a mask hovering there, hanging in the dark. But the eyes blink, and it smiles, and I see long yellow teeth.

  ‘’Tis a cold and darksome night for a little girl to be out alone under the trees of the wood,’ it says.

  The biscuit turns to coal in my mouth. I cannot say anything. The face moves closer, and there is a spare frame, black and lean as a spider. It sinks on its haunches close to the fire and the flames make a long-eared skull of the face with two silver coins for eyes.

  ‘This is a special place,’ it says. ‘It is unholy ground, not for the use of just anyone. Is you lost, little girl?’

  ‘No,’ I manage at last, and it feels like someone else speaking, calm and clear. ‘I came here to find some friends. Queenie and... and the others, but they’ve moved on.’

  It nods. ‘Aye, that’s what happens with their folk. They sets up for a spell, and then they gets the itch and must put their feet to wandering again. That’s their curse. They was made to be like that for the evil deeds they done, way back in the history of the world.’

  It raises its head and sniffs the air, and I see the black holes of its nostrils widen and close again almost to slits. It is like a man, but it is not. A withered, sickened man, perhaps, with features that look impossible even in the sinking firelight.

  ‘You going to finish that biscuit?’ it asks me suddenly.

  I toss the cracker across the fire, and a long hand reaches out and snatches it from the air. It worries the morsel like a dog, and the hand which holds it has black nails.

  ‘My name is Anna Francis,’ I say. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you my name, girl,’ he says with a horrible grin. ‘And I know yours already.’

  ‘How do you know it? And who are you?’

  ‘Bless you dear, I have so many names I’ve forgotten most. I have been gifted with ’em all down the years by those as loves me and those who don’t. And as for you, you is the orphan child from the Old World. Your mother is long lost by the shores of an ancient sea, and your father is in a pauper’s grave in Sepulchre graveyard.’

  I clutch Pie to my chest. There is no warmth in the fire now, and the forest is utterly still above me, as if even the trees have stopped to listen.

  ‘We needs more wood on the fire,’ he says, and uncoils. I see him rise up, and he walks into the dark as silent as if he is stepping on velvet. There is a snapping in the blackness, and he returns with a couple of wrist-thick logs. He breaks these in his thin hands as easily as if they were matchsticks, and places them on the campfire. Then he strokes his hand through the flames the same way Queenie once did – as though he is petting a cat – and for a moment the flames flutter up green and blue about his fingers, then rise up in a flare, and in the greater light I can see his ears, as pointed as horns.

  ‘Who are you?’ I whisper.

  ‘You don’t know?’ He laughs, and the sound i
s like an iron nail being scratched on glass. ‘What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and calls it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization.’ He shakes his bony head. ‘But you takes a single life, just one, and that is murder most foul, and they will pin you for that, and lay it against you the rest of your life. It hardly seems fair.

  ‘There are men in frock coats and top hats with the blood of the world on their hands, and they eat with silver forks and white napkins every day, and they will give up their last breath in a linen-made bed whilst the ones they sent out to die lie forgotten in the earth, mouldering bones with the poppies fat and red above ’em. Ah, mankind.’ He laughs again. ‘It’s a caution and no mistake.

  ‘The time is coming to an end when you can wander the roads of the world as free and easy as you like, and meet a stranger across firelight. They will fence in the world entire ere they are done, the clever men of this earth, and there will no space left on it for vagabonds, and dreamers... and little lost girls running from their fate...’

  He has a smile like the blade of a knife, and his eyes, when he smiles, close to two slots from which the silver light gleams, and the fire has no reflection there.

  ‘You seek Queenie’s people you say. Well little Anna, they was here, ’tis true. But they left the night your father died. Now why would that be, you think? Your boy Luca, he came scampering back into this wood as though his tail was afire.’

  ‘You know Luca?’ I ask him, and it feels as though my lips are numbing even as I speak.

  ‘I know him and all his folk. For were they not the guardians of the secret doors? I set them there before Abraham thought of slaying Isaac. When Cain killed Abel, I was there. And the skinchangers are the Children of Cain, who carry still that ancient sin upon them. My dear child, do I not know thee too? And do I not love thee as mine own?’

  He begins giggling, a horrible sound which makes my hair bristle like the fur of a cat in a thunderstorm.

  ‘Yea,’ he says, and sweeps out one bony arm, ‘Are not the least of these precious to me and mine? For I have counted the very hairs on thy head, and I know when even so much as a sparrow falls to earth...’

  I feel that the night deepens when he speaks, and the sky is hidden, and in the dark beyond the firelight there are things which were not there before, writhing shadows that are fawning on him.

  ‘How would you change your life, if you could little one?’ he asks, very soft. ‘What would you have different in the manner of things?’

  ‘I would have my Mama and Pa alive, and my brother Nikos too. I would have us all living in the city by the sea again, and the Turks would never come.’

  ‘Ah.’ He raises one white finger. ‘That would entail the living of another life. You cannot make such changes while you are still in this one.’

  ‘You asked me.’

  ‘I did.’ He wags his head. ‘Such simple things, love, and life. And so hard to come by in this world. What price would you pay, to have things that way, little Anna? What would you do, to have that just as you imagine?’

  ‘Anything,’ I find myself saying. ‘I would do anything for it to be like that again.’

  He closes his eyes. ‘Anything is just what it would take my dear. Anything and everything.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  He shrugs. ‘What’s in a name? You do not even admit to your own, Anna Sphrantzes. And your darling mother, she ran from the hills of her birth and forgot hers as quickly as she could. But what she carried in her was passed down. Names change, but in flesh and bone there lies a stain indelible.’

  His face becomes still and grave, like that of a sober gargoyle.

  ‘You are marked, little one. Your fate is set. You may run from it for a while, but it will overtake you in the end. It is far less taxing to give in with grace.’

  He stands up, a black pole rising with that ivory-pale skull on top of it. ‘Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium nostrum.’ He holds out a hand. ‘Come with me, child.’

  I sit frozen, and hold Pie tight against me. I want to take his hand, to have him lead me from this empty dark wood, and the empty life that is mine now. The world seems vast and cold and without light, and I even think I see kindness in his silver eyes.

  But the calm, clear voice inside me which has always been there speaks clear as a ringing bell in my head. And without another thought, I repeat aloud what it is saying.

  ‘I reject you, here, now and always; and I bid you leave this place.’

  His face spasms, and his thin lips draw back from long, savage teeth, more fearsome than those of a dog. The silver light flashes out from his eyes, and there is nothing human about that face at all. He steps backwards as though I have struck him, and the white hands fly up as though to scratch the air.

  ‘Witch-spawned bitch!’ he snarls, and spittle flies from his mouth and streams down his chin. I see a black tongue stab out, as pointed as that of a lizard.

  He opens his arms. The big white hands seem to float in the dark. And he looms up taller – as though his body has lengthened, or left the ground. The white face, the eyes, they glare at me, and I feel my own tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. I cannot look away.

  ‘You dare bid me leave? Well, that is your privilege. Myself, I bid you stay,’ he says, and his voice is as the hiss of a serpent.

  ‘Stay here and rattle around in the shattered shell of your sorrowful little life. Like your worthless father, you will walk the roads of this earth until your soul is sick and weary of it, and one day we will meet again, you and I. And you will be on your knees before me, begging for what was freely offered this night.’

  Just like that, he is gone. A few brown leaves skitter through the air in a sinking circle. And the night, black though it is, seems lighter, and there is warmth from the light of the fire again.

  I WAKE UP in the dawn greyness, shuddering with cold. The fire is a circle of black and grey ash with one or two stubborn little red glows still worming about the embers. My nose is numb, and I rub it, and then my ears. There is a thin frosting of white on the blanket and across the fallen leaves of the campsite.

  I think of my warm bed in Moribund Lane and the smell of toast, and sigh.

  I do not want to cast aside the blanket and meet the cold of the morning, and there is in my head a queasy image, like the aftertaste of medicine. A vague memory or dream of the night before. Like all dreams, it seems so vivid for a second upon waking, but in moments it falls apart as I wake up properly, and it is gone. There is the unsettling image of a white face floating above the fire, but soon that, too, fades away.

  I look around at the empty campsite as the light grows. The twig-stars hang forlorn and forgotten and where the earth is bare it is packed hard and tight as linoleum in the cold. There is nothing for me here. In the unforgiving grey of the winter morning, I begin to see my own foolishness. Perhaps the grown-ups are right. Perhaps I should simply do as I am told, buckle down, and get on with whatever life still has in store for me.

  I am thirsty, but the water in my bottle is half frozen. I suck back shards of slush from it, and my teeth tingle with pain. I am hungry, but the thought of the biscuits I have in my bag makes me strangely queasy.

  Luca spoke of a place the Romani gathered on the Old Chalk Road. He spoke of the White Horse on the downs to the south. I remember it as clear as if he were uttering the words here and now. I’m sure I have heard of this place; I may even be able to give it a name, if I think hard enough.

  Then that is what I will do. I must go south, to the high downs, to the castle he spoke of. I cannot just give up, not so close from where I started.

  I stand up and stretch, then almost at once I bend low again to peer at the ground on the other side of the fire.

  I was not alone in the dark. It looks as though the deer were wandering about the campsite as I slept, for dug into
the hard cold earth by the embers are their cloven footprints, as though they had watched me with the dying of the fire in the night.

  14

  I KNOW WHERE south is. Perhaps it has to do with Pa showing me the North Star when I was very young, but I have always had a good head for directions. As I leave the dimness of the wood on the first day of the New Year I know that I am North West of Oxford, and the way I must go is to my right. I wonder if it is very far. Though I slept longer than I ever thought I would, there seems to have been little good in it, and the bad taste of the dreams I had takes a long time to wear away.

  The white face, hanging above the fire with shilling-bright eyes. It is all I can recall, but it is enough to make me decide I shall never sleep in Wytham Wood again.

  I tramp south, and the sun rises slow and stubborn from out of a great bank of brown cloud over Oxford, and the spires of the city are black against it, like something from a far-off past. I have no idea what time it is, but the world seems so quiet that it might be another century I have woken up in instead of another decade. The quiet road which leads to Botley is deserted, but I would not be surprised if a knight in armour came trotting down it.

  Something is moving on it though. As the sun rises higher I see the long straight track more clearly, and up ahead there is a black shape walking along it towards me. In the dim winter light I cannot make out much more, but even as I watch, it goes off the road and disappears into the hedge.

  For some reason that unnerves me. I clutch Pie tightly, and my steps slow. I do not want to draw even with the place where the shape disappeared, and I am half ready to take out across the fields myself, straight towards Port Meadow and the Thames again.