“I guess…” Kateryna mumbled.
“Don’t sound so unsure. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“Very well,” Vadoma said. “For centuries my people have lived on the fringes of Europe. However, by being excluded we’re able to see life as it is and not as it’s made to seem.”
Kateryna knew of the Roma’s plight, and the ancient hatreds many mainstream Europeans had released upon these nomadic people.
“Your openness is most welcome.” A smile crept up Vadoma’s leathery cheek as she took in the sympathetic look on Kateryna’s face. “Nevertheless, the wolves you should fear most are amongst you and not in the forest.”
“Who are they? Who took my Aleksandr?”
“My poor girl,” Vadoma said. “Your prejudices betray you. It’s as if you walked into a theater after the movie started and that trustworthy looking person in the expensive suit explains to you how the story has unfolded. But he tells you only part of it. He leaves out the juiciest bits about how life works in this world, and what that means for people such as us.”
“I don’t…”
“Let’s talk about why you’re here.”
“You know why,” Kateryna said, gritting her teeth.
Vadoma shuffled over to a cabinet as Kateryna glanced out the one open window in the house, the shadows deepening on the wall. After what seemed to be forever Vadoma placed a tea pot on the stove. Smoothing her apron she sat down.
“What do you know of wolves?”
“Don’t you mean—”
“I mean wolves,” Vadoma said.
“They are vicious animals, responsible for killing thousands across Europe.”
“According to whom?”
“The history books. There was the beast of Gévaudan in France. He killed over a hundred people.” Kateryna said. “Another wolf killed twelve people in Sweden. There were others.”
The tea pot shrieked, the eerie noise causing Kateryna to flinch.
“What happened when the villagers killed the wolves in question? Did the attacks stop?” Vadoma said, standing and preparing two cups.
“No, but—”
“Now that the wolves are repopulating Europe are we hiring hunters to protect ourselves?” Vadoma sat down and sipped her tea. “There’s something else going on here, yes? Tell me, in all your research when did all of these people go missing?”
“You know?”
“Of course.”
Kateryna’s stomach churned.
Vadoma glanced sharply out the window, “It’s late.”
“Wait, how do I stop it?”
“You don’t know enough,” Vadoma said. “Even if you did I’m not sure you possess the fortitude to do what’s necessary.”
“How can you say this? It took your son?”
“I respect nature and the lessons it teaches us,” Vadoma said, rising and trundling off to her bedroom.
A twinge of anxiety slipped across Kateryna’s skin at the thought of what was happening down the hall. Then the bedroom door swung open. Out stepped Vadoma appearing human as ever, but clutching a folder. “Take it,” She waved Kateryna to stand, pressing the folder into her arms. “You’ll have more time to make use of this than shall I.”
“Vadoma!” Kateryna exclaimed.
“There will be questions. I hope that is all,” Vadoma said, hustling Kateryna outside. The sun was a deep orange ball peeking above the horizon.
“Are the methods for battling their kind, are they—”
“Forget it. All of it. Don’t ever come back to this place,” Vadoma said, slamming the door shut…
Finished with her story, Kateryna sat back, her eyes flickering from Brody, to Cindy, and Ernie.
Cindy sat back in thought. Dibrovno’s geography, the book from the library; it all made sense. As the entry point to one of the few passes through the Carpathians, Dibrovno would have seen a constant infusion of random strangers served up as perfect victims.
Ernie stared out the window, a sickening understanding turning to nightmarish dread.
“What are you saying?” Brody said, staring at Kateryna. “That Dibrovno is a town of werewolves?”
Chapter 22
June 2016 – Dibrovno, Western Ukraine
Vadoma cursed her stupidity.
She had lingered in the forest for far too long.
It had been a gorgeous afternoon and she had plucked countless brown capped mushrooms littering the forest floor. Such was her luck she also had found a bevy of elusive yellow striped maslyata butter mushrooms. Her thoughts had turned to dinner and frying up a batch with some onions when she realized how far she had wandered, and how dark the forest had become.
She started for home. Time and again she nearly tripped over branches lying across the slender path and which had been so easily avoided during the light of day. Though she had long since known the forest’s risks she had never felt immediate personal danger, even when Boiko was taken. Then that reporter had come.
Why had she blathered on like such an old fool?
The night of the woman’s visit she had slept fitfully; startled awake every hour by some strange noise or another. She had checked her windows and doors a dozen times over, but each time found nothing. Over the following days however she couldn’t help but feel she was being observed. During the past week however, that unsettling feeling finally and mercifully disappeared. She felt comfortable outside again. Perhaps too relaxed. She glanced up, shivering as she caught sight of the moon rising between two towering pines. She picked up her pace.
A twig snapped behind her, back in the woods.
She froze, her breath coming quick and shallow.
Head cocked, she listened.
Something rustled in the bushes nearest the path.
It came closer.
Vadoma spun away as fast as her old body could move. In spite of the chill seeping into her bones a sliver of sweat slipped from under the babushka tied around her head. Between her rattling lungs and the swishing sound of her feet churning through the leaves she made too much noise. But something inside told her it didn’t matter.
The wind shook the trees.
A voice came with it, whispery, tinged with anger and need...Vadooommmaaa...
”Who’s there?” She said, stopping in fear and confusion.
Nobody answered.
A cluster of spruce trees crowded close, their branches reaching out.
Bad thoughts whipped through her head.
Something snarled.
She dropped her basket, arms raised, hands protectively grasping the small cropping knife as she backed away. She risked a peek over her shoulder, catching sight of a light flickering in the distance. It came from the Bibik homestead just past the cemetery.
The bushes crackled, the heavy breathing of a large animal within. Vadoma turned to run.
It stepped onto the path.
Vadoma skidded to a halt, eyes widening in terror.
A smile traced up one side of the enormous beast’s long muzzle, exposing impossibly large fangs. Black yearning eyes fixed on her as if she were a suckling pig.
The werewolf covered the distance between them in two bounding steps.
Vadoma jerked her arm up. The knife’s short blade arced through the air as she swung. Once.
The moon loomed fat and full above pine trees old to the world’s bloody ways transpiring beneath their weighty boughs.
The screaming began.
------------------
Vasily Malinovsky had been raking leaves in the cemetery when a high pitched shriek broke the evening calm.
The scream was followed by another.
And another.
He shivered as the final scream turned into a long pleading babbling cry of pain and terror before abruptly cutting off. Petrified, he
gaped down the eerie sunken land running past the Bibik farmstead. The pile of leaves dancing around his feet long since forgotten—
Something howled, a vicious sound hitting Vasily in the face with the whapping impact of a club. He dropped the rake and grasped his chest, momentarily afraid he was having a heart attack. The pain subsided, but his quivering hand couldn’t let go.
That’s not possible.
As Vasily fled toward town the blood curdling cry drifted ahead of him, into the ghetto where the Roma huddled and chanted while rubbing garlic and silver, hoping to keep it from punishing them for the sins of one of their own.
That terrible howling rode the wind into the town center where Yuri and Leonid looked up from their chessboard in the square that suddenly felt far too empty. As they scrambled to their feet the howling carried into Katya Cisyk’s home on the dark riverbanks. She had been setting the family table for dinner when the unearthly noise caused the last plate to slip from her hand, shattering into a thousand shards on the tile floor.
At the town hall the young mayor rose at the sound of the beast, staring outside, shaking his head in disgust. Then he forgot all about his anger as he fervently hoped that he wasn’t the only person left in the office.
That night everybody in Dibrovno heard it.
Hours after the sun had burned off the morning fog, old man Bibik shrugged off his wife and stepped outside; rifle in hand, his shoes squishing in the wet grass. He and Nastya, his wife of forty years, had spent the night on their tiny couch, trembling and staring at their thin paneled front door. Gaunt faces flickering in the dim light provided by the same kitchen lamp Vadoma had so mistakenly thought offered her a beacon to safety. The kitchen light which Nastya had switched on shortly after sunset, the only light she would touch that night, dinner ice cold on forlorn plates. Bibik’s SKS semi-automatic carbine had rested across his lap, its stripper clip loaded with ten rounds of steel jacketed ammunition. However, the old man had learned much in his eight decades. He held no illusions as to what this rifle could, or more likely could not do, against what stalked the forest.
When Bibik crept out into the morning he didn’t need to go far, fighting the sour bile that came rushing up his throat in response to what he saw. Spread across the path and hanging from the tree branches was the gutted carcass of what had once been a human being.
------------------
August 2016 – Lviv, The Ukraine
“Not a town of werewolves,” Kateryna stated emphatically, as a corner of her mind wondered why Vadoma had ignored the letters she had sent since her visit. “Such a profanity would have been discovered years ago. No, the truth is even worse.”
She flipped to the photo album’s last page, ignoring Brody’s pointed looks at the clock. Attached to the album’s back cover was a small folder, the same one Vadoma had given her a few months before. She slid out a document sealed in a plastic bag, laying it in front of Ernie and Cindy, handling it as carefully would a collector showing off rare jewels.
Ernie inhaled sharply.
Cindy glanced at him and then at the old document, the ink faded on the yellowed page.
“You know what this is, yes?” Kateryna eyed Ernie.
“It’s a ledger,” He replied as his eyes scanned down the page. “Names, place of death for victims in Dibrovno. On the right is the month and day of death. There must be sixty names here, but no year.”
“There are seventy two names,” Kateryna said. “I too was initially stumped as to the when. But one day an American from the University of Arizona walked into the library. He was on a research grant. As it turns out, he specialized in dating old works.” She pointed. Four ragged cuts marked the bottom edge of the page, each no more than one by six millimeters.
“Radio-carbon dating,” Cindy said.
Brody scratched his scalp.
“Radio-carbon dating can give us the century in question,” Cindy explained. “The University of Arizona has an accelerator mass spectrometer that does just that, via finding a unique radio-isotope found naturally in low concentrations. During their life cycle plants and animals absorb Carbon-14. When that living creature dies the Carbon-14 dissipates at a quantifiable rate.”
“I discovered this ledger originated sometime between the years 1350 and 1450,” Kateryna said. “However, do you notice anything else about it?”
“Some dates are repeated,” Brody said. “That means that the dates of death must be from multiple years.”
“Exactly,” Kateryna said. “Though, I was initially confused as to what years. Then I understood. The answer was right there in front of me.”
Ernie and Cindy glanced at each other.
“Your NASA has a list of tables that provide phases of the moon going back centuries,” Kateryna said. “I took the tables for the centuries dated 1301 to 1500, calculated Dibrovno’s time zone in comparison to the Universal time zone used by NASA, and this is what I found.” She pulled out another piece of paper.
“These tables are focused on select dates during the years 1404, 1408, 1415, 1416, 1423, and 1442,” Kateryna said, pointing as she spoke. “Each year is broken down into months, and a specific date for each month. For example, look at the data for the year 1404 and compare it to the dates on the ledger.”
Brody’s eyes shuttled from the tables to the ledger and then widened, “They match.”
“Guess what else these dates correspond with?” Katernya said.
“The full moon,” Ernie said.
“This is a record from a time when the people of Dibrovno were preyed upon as viciously as anyone else.” Kateryna jabbed her finger at the page as she spoke.
“But since?” Brody said, shooting another glance at the clock screaming that they needed to get moving.
“The werewolves needed a sanctuary,” Kateryna said. “The people of Dibrovno went from being victims to partners. Today a resident of Dibrovno who does what they are told lives a comfortable life. But for the outsiders, or those that break their promises…”
Brody’s lips tightened, his jaw set hard.
“Ordinary men and women as it may be,” Ernie mused.
“Huh?” Brody grunted, desperately trying to ignore the clock’s relentless ticking.
“It’s a theory about how regular people enabled or participated in the Holocaust,” Ernie said. “Everyone in Germany knew what the Nazi’s were doing, and the overwhelming majority looked the other way. It’s the only way Hitler could have pulled off industrialized mass murder. Compare that situation to Dibrovno’s. If the locals wanted to make trouble then the werewolves couldn’t kill them all. The escapees would return with help, and no werewolf that survived the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would want to return to its dark ages.”
Brody pulled his vibrating smart phone from his pocket. From the second he swiped the screen everyone could hear the tinny voice on the other end as it screamed without pause, interspersed with Brody grunting in response. Another several minutes he ended the call, a look of exhaustion on his face.
“Two investment bankers recently died under mysterious circumstances,” Brody said. “My people want to know what the hell I’m doing with my final thirty-six hours out here and the best lead I have on Karlovic is…” Brody’s eyes widened as he glanced at the clock again, “We have to go, now.”
This time nobody argued with him.
Brody plunged into the dimly lit hallway. His friends followed close behind, clutching their books and documents. Brody moved carefully, hand wrapped around the reassuring bulk of his .45 as he followed the creaking claustrophobic stairs down to the apartment’s entryway.
There they clustered, peeking through the white curtained windows. Brody studied the woods on the far side of the street, and then shifted his attention to the car. Moonlight dappled across the hood. Far more time had passed than he would have liked. Someone could be h
iding in the darkness.
He watched and waited.
After several more moments staring he decided it was safe.
Taking a deep breath, he signaled go and exploded out the door, hitting the car in a rush. He slid across the front seat, Kateryna on his heels. Cindy pitched into the car’s back seat.
Ernie came last. He had just about made it when he tripped, sprawling across the sidewalk. Three sets of eyes searched the shadows as one, hearts racing as Ernie scrambled to regain his footing, shoes sliding on the slick pavers. Then his right foot caught the edge of an upraised cobblestone, propelling him forward, a horrible ticklish feeling skittering up the back of his neck as if something was reaching for him…He lunged for Cindy, falling into the car, pulling his feet in, the swinging door slammed shut behind.
Kateryna floored it, tires screeching. She executed a series of quick turns, doubling back several times before Brody was sure that they were not being followed, the full moon illuminating the winding road out of town.
They entered the forest. A dark tension pervaded the car. Several hours later they approached Dibrovno. The blacktop narrowed and then crumbled in the dim headlights, devolving into a single rutted lane. The forest throbbed and swayed with the threat of something awful within.
Something that might already have Owen.
Something that would be coming for them.
Chapter 23
August 2016 – Dibrovno, Western Ukraine
Owen couldn’t believe how good he felt. Until tonight he hadn’t realized how much he needed to be close to someone, how much he needed a woman in his life. And what a woman. Tanya was smart, caring—he skidded to a halt.
The silence was deafening.
The thousands of frogs that otherwise serenaded the night had been quieted as if struck down en masse.
Owen turned in a circle, flickers of fear tugging at the edges of his mind. In spite of his reluctance to believe Anna’s story he would have been lying if he didn’t admit that the tale creeped him out. On the other hand, the rational side of him couldn’t help but remember that he and Tanya had made the same walk just hours before without once being threatened by anything, no less a wolf. Nevertheless, he looked around once more, carefully taking in the swaying waist high grasses shining white under the silvery moonlight. He saw nothing, but again a primordial concern welled up from within, his heart beating harder. Without looking he reached into his pocket for his smart phone, cursing as it slipped from his grasp and thumped onto the path’s soft dirt—
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