The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

  I am heading for some distant laughter. And the bright light of real fire. Many of the scents are of things that have died. The endless reaches of bracken. The rot. All of the plants that I sense are dead. The scents are of things that are turning to soil. Birds-eye primrose. Butterwort. Purple saxifrage. Spring gentian. Yellowmarsh. Carniverous sundew. I remember these names from my mother’s books.

  Creatures like me, down by the lake. Inside out. Bent over. Half-split. Full wolf. Four-legged, human head. Cracked open. Long tongues. Full human. Humans, covered in hair. Humans, long tongues, licking their own necks. Bald wolves. Dead eyes. Closer. Slowly. I mean, I thought I was ill. I just thought I was ill. But these, here. They are inside-out. Hunched wolves. Foetal people. Naked and newborn ancients. Other things twisted backwards. Stretched open, self-regurgitated. Shattered skulls. Soulless bodies. They are dancing, fucking, bruising, whooping, bleeding, laughing, singing, howling, swimming, playing, screaming, eating, drinking, burning, stripping, fighting, living. Wild. I know it now. I know I’m one of them. Not human. Not animal. There are fiery pits, burning pigs, gutted sheep. Shrieking lunatics. Spilling whisky. Nakedness. Riotous joy in every movement, every feeding frenzy, every sacred blasphemous fuck. There are made-up things. Above us all, there are lights in the sky. They are other creatures. Little ghosts, or fairies, or something. I don’t fucking know. Dad would be happy to see these lights in the sky. But they are all just symptoms of something rotten. Something that isn’t right. Isn’t right at all.

  I find myself in the middle of the happy wolves. But I am safe. I am one of them. I know it now. We are all dancing round in circles. Going around and around. The music is led by the fiddle-player. Perched atop a huge worm-eaten log. Eyes like mad stars all sucked together. In human form but His tongue flapping around His chest as He hops. There is power, here. There is power in Him. The music and the howling echoes across the black lake. Jennifer must be here somewhere. But I am slipping under. I am writhing in the press of them all. I am falling for the ease of it. Sometimes the wolves are women like goddesses. Sometimes I see other wolves appearing at the edge of the firelight. Tall with pride. They join us.

  JACK

  The thing took another step, unsteadily, as if weak or newborn, and then just stood watching us. We were deathly silent, not breathing, not moving, not speaking. It moved a little closer, shaking, but not with fear – more with a kind of suppressed energy, or excitement – and it held its arms out before it and as it got closer, we saw that it was changing – constantly changing – and something was emerging from its mouth, like another head, this one longer and more pointed. More like a wolf’s head, and its old head kind of stretched open and fell backwards, a pouch slack at the back of the neck, leaving its new head all slick and wet and grinning at us.

  I just stood there.

  It leapt – it jumped so high and so far, and it landed on Taylor. Its claws were blurred, swooping down and gouging handfuls of black specks out of Taylor and throwing them backwards, scattering them on the snow. It only had time for that one blow before Graham, wailing, threw himself at it, the axe leaping like it had a mind of its own, and the heavy metal head punched a hole in the stomach of the thing, the thin waist. It howled like an injured dog and fell. Graham raised the axe and brought it down on the thing’s arm. It whined and keened, writhed and morphed, wriggled and shrank.

  Taylor was lying on his back, breathing quickly. His shirt was ripped open at the front and his breath hung over him, shapeless, visible. A large black patch shone unhealthily on his chest.

  The creature squirmed and squealed like it was in tremendous pain and incapable of standing back up. Graham raised the axe again.

  ‘No!’ I shouted, and grabbed his arm. ‘No. Look – it’s changing – human. It might be her. It might be her.’

  ‘We should kill it,’ Graham said, panting.

  ‘No. It’s a werewolf. I mean – it could be her. Jennifer. Let it change. Just – keep it there.’

  Graham kept the axe pressed down on its throat and stood by its head so that its flailing legs didn’t catch him.

  ‘Werewolf,’ he said, and spat. ‘As if.’

  ‘Unless you can explain it otherwise,’ I said, slightly sickened by the ease of his violence.

  ‘Jack,’ I heard Taylor gasp from behind me.

  ‘Taylor,’ I said. ‘How badly are you hurt?’

  ‘It hurts like hell,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. It hurts. It could have been worse though. Just its fucking fingernails.’

  ‘It didn’t bite you?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘It didn’t bite me,’ he said, and struggled to raise himself on his elbows. ‘It’s so cold out here. What the hell are we doing? What are we playing at? What the fuck is happening? Where’s Erin? Where’s Francis? Where’s Jennifer? I want to see Erin. Where is she? What’s happened to us out here? What’s happening, Jack?’ He looked over to Graham. ‘What’s that thing? Oh God. What is it? What’s Graham doing? Where’s—’

  ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Quiet. We can’t think about it. We won’t get anywhere if we stop to think.’

  ‘Where’s—’

  ‘Erin’s safe,’ I said. ‘You know that. She’s safe. Back at the house. She’s looking after Francis. Don’t worry. She’s safe. You know that she’s safe.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know that at all. We don’t know anything.’

  ‘We have to believe it, then,’ I said. ‘Or we’ll all fall apart. We just have to keep on going. The only other options are to go backwards or stand still. And neither will help us now.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Don’t think,’ I said. ‘Stand up. Come on. Tie your scarf around your chest. Keep your jacket closed. Here.’ He took my hand and I pulled him up.

  ‘Werewolves,’ I said, as we turned back to Graham and the thing. ‘That’s what they are.’

  Graham’s face was grim. We all looked down at the creature, although it was not so much a creature really, not any more, it was actually an old man – naked and weak, thin-limbed and brittle, with the same hollowed-out stray-dog look of the younger specimens that gate-crashed the party. Tears ran down his face.

  ‘You lads,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea how lucky you are to be young. Wait until you’re my age, and you’ll see. You’ll pay any price, lads. Any price at all to be able to run again. To live a little. To feel strong. To dance. To fuck all night.’ He paused. ‘You might think you are good people. And maybe you are. You just don’t know, is what I’m saying.’ He paused again. ‘Impotence is a terrible thing. And hunger too. Any price, lads. Any price.’

  ‘We should kill him,’ Graham said.

  ‘What?’ Taylor said. ‘Why?’

  ‘He might turn back if we don’t.’

  ‘Ha!’ The old man laughed a sad, wheezy laugh beneath the axe-head. ‘Might?’

  ‘We should keep him with us,’ I said. ‘We need to know more about this. More about them.’

  ‘Werewolves?’ Graham said.

  ‘Yeah.’ I shook my head. ‘Werewolves.’

  I was not proud of what we did. Trying to retain control of something with nothing to lose, something that could regenerate any wound, something that, once healed, could summon incredible strength, was not easy, and I’d like to say that we had some honourable motive. I thought we did. I wanted – needed – to find Jennifer, but even if that were possible, did it justify what we were doing? And Graham and Taylor – what was driving them forward, other than me? Maybe I was all it took, given the fear they felt. Maybe I was solely responsible.

  We were confused and we didn’t know what we were doing, but we knew that we had to do something. The world had turned into something huge and terrifying and strange that we didn’t understand, but we wanted to make it better. That is all I can tell you about our motives.

  Maybe we should just have stayed inside.

&n
bsp; ‘Here,’ Graham said. ‘Hold his hand. There. Against the rock.’

  ‘Just don’t hit me,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ he said.

  I took the old man’s hand and pressed it firmly against the rock. I could feel some sort of resistance in his fingers, but against the whole of my body weight it wasn’t quite enough.

  The axe powered through the air, the blunt back of the head smashed the old man’s wrist, and he screamed.

  ‘Now,’ Graham said. ‘The other one.’

  I took his other hand and pressed it down.

  The crunch. The scream.

  ‘This is wrong,’ Taylor said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Graham said. ‘How many people have you killed, old man? How many kids, across the decades? How many old couples in their little cottages out in the country? How many?’

  ‘You really don’t get it,’ the man said. ‘I don’t know. A few, yeah, alright, but I didn’t always know what I was doing. You get something growing inside you and all else goes flying out your head. But you don’t do it for the killing. That’s the price you pay. Not the reward. Unless you’re one of the sick ones. And yeah. Fair enough. There’s a few of them about.’

  ‘This is wrong,’ Taylor said again.

  ‘It’s either this,’ Graham said, ‘or we let him change back. And I for one don’t trust him.’

  ‘Well,’ Taylor said, ‘not now, not after everything we’ve done to him, eh, Graham?’

  ‘What’s happening here?’ I asked the man. ‘Why are you all here in Wasdale?’

  He looked at me with his watery eyes.

  ‘It’s the Leaping, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The Leaping. And may it all be over soon.’

  ‘Now,’ Graham said. ‘The legs.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘The Leaping? What’s the Leaping?’

  ‘It’s like a party. A real big party. Lasts for days. A traditional thing. And there’s a contest at the end. The Leaping. Who jumps the furthest.’

  ‘Why are there no lights in the valley?’ I said. ‘No satellites?’

  ‘Because, it’s the Leaping, boy,’ he said. ‘The Lord Himself is here tonight. Takes us all out of the natural way of things. The time and place as you know it is gone for the time being. Everything goes dark. Like we could be hundreds of years ago. Or hundreds of years into the future. You all just kind of got caught up in it, because you were in His house. The Lord’s house. Ha. Some of your friends might’ve got eaten. The rest just killed.’ He wheezed a laugh. ‘I would say it’s very stupid of you all to be living in His house. But there’s no way of knowing, I guess. What would the world be like if you knew something was a mistake before you did it?’

  ‘The Lord?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The Lord.’

  ‘You mean like God?’ Graham said. He shattered the old man’s ankle with the axe before he could answer. He screamed and screamed.

  ‘Like God?’ he wheezed, eventually. ‘I don’t even know what you mean.’

  We stumbled across the fellside for what felt like hours. The size of the mountains was deceptive – their various features always appeared closer than they were, because they were so big.

  Of course, in the dark, when we couldn’t see much apart from the silhouette of the land against the sky, it was difficult to get any kind of handle on the scale of it at all.

  Hours later. It had to have been hours. We stood by a stile over an old drystone wall, looking down at the flickering firelight bouncing off all of the trees below us, by the lake. ‘You really don’t want to go down there,’ the old man said. ‘I don’t know what you’re looking for, but if it’s down there, you won’t want it no more.’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘That’s the Leaping?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It is. Well, it’s the gathering beforehand. Can go on for days before it really starts.’

  Taylor was shaking uncontrollably. The fronts of his shirt and jacket were stained black with blood and gleamed wetly. He was standing with a forward stoop, so the skin of his stomach hung loose and relaxed.

  ‘Why is it not getting light yet?’ he muttered. ‘Why is it not getting light yet?’

  ‘Because that Lord of theirs is down there too,’ Graham said. ‘That’s why.’

  I was worried about Taylor, and not for his health – not in the normal sense – because he seemed OK or, at least, capable of moving. I was worried that he’d been bitten and he’d turn into one of them while Graham and I weren’t looking, and that’d be it, then.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Graham said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t see that we need to keep him any more.’ Graham tossed his head towards the old man.

  ‘He’s just an old man,’ Taylor said.

  ‘We should kill him,’ Graham said. ‘We’re not going to be able to keep an eye on him once we’re down there.’

  ‘You won’t be able to do anything if you’re going down there,’ the old man said. ‘Not ever.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ Graham said.

  ‘He’s just an old man,’ Taylor said.

  ‘He’s not just an old man,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus,’ Graham said. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

  I thought back to when we’d found Graham in the Fell House kitchen – alone, sitting in the middle of the aftermath of a terrible slaughter. I took a few steps back, so that he was no longer behind me.

  FRANCIS

  Drumming fucking carnival. I start walking on two legs. Eat some meat from a pit, let the fat run down my chin and blister my skin. I realise that I am becoming humanoid again, and it’s painless, effortless. All around me these creatures are in flux. Some of them, you wouldn’t know they weren’t human at all. I am naked. The women here are beautiful, vicious. Dancing with sticks, torches, claw-hammers. But they all put Jennifer in my head, thrust her forcefully into my mind. As clearly as if they were shouting her name with every movement, every word of every song, every fang, every item of clothing falling to the floor, every strand of hair, every fucking one of them, every fucking thing. Every torch. Every flame. Every hammer. Every guitar. Every van. Every tent. Every bodhrán. Every bloody transformation. Every orgiastic pile-up. Every torn-up ghost. Every giggling hobgoblin. The music is a whirlwind. Whipping weird things about and around the shore, the beach. The water is alive. Bubbling up with formless animals as they change shape. Their solid bodies churning around like the liquid they flop in. Squealing like the pigs they’ve been eating.

  But she’s not here.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Balthazar says, who has crept up beside me.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I would be able to tell if she was here. What about you? What are you doing?’

  ‘You’re one of us now,’ he says. ‘You enter into our world, you can see us all.’

  ‘One of you?’ I say. ‘What are you? I thought I was brain-damaged. So what does that make us?’

  ‘You can see us, can’t you?’

  ‘The – the things? Like you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The faeries?’ I say. ‘Goblins? Spirits? The abominable snowmen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will I see them all the time?’

  ‘Well.’ Balthazar pauses. ‘Tonight’s a special night.’ He turns to look at me. His eye-sockets are overflowing with icy, tumescent lumps. I shiver. ‘He’s here, tonight. You’ve seen Him leaping. Hopping up there on that rotten log.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who,’ he says.

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘I am just something that came to you,’ he says. ‘This world doesn’t work like it used to. Erin told you a story before you ate her. About the boy and the bear. About the Lord on the horse. Swearing allegiance. The soul.’

  ‘But we built you,’ I say.

  ‘It’s strange the way things turn around. In honesty, this body is just a body. I am something else that inhabits it.’


  ‘So – fuck’s sake, Balthazar. You haven’t explained anything.’

  ‘I chose to come to you,’ he says. ‘To guide you into this existence.’

  I look over at the frantic mad thing on the log. He has strangely shaped boots. Short grey hair. His tongue is slobbery and loose. His grin is impossibly wide. Stretching from below one eye to below the other.

  I don’t know what to say. It feels like a joke that I don’t fully understand.

  ‘Balthazar,’ I say. ‘Who’s that on the log?’

  ‘That’s Him,’ Balthazar says. ‘That’s the Lord. Of course He doesn’t always look like that. He is a changeable sort.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Francis,’ he says. ‘How do you really feel about Jennifer?’

  ‘She’s everything.’

  ‘What about everything else?’

  ‘It devours me. I look in the mirror and all the world devours me.’

  ‘Then let us help you forget.’

  ‘Fuck you, Balthazar. All this crap is no help at all.’

  ‘Don’t think for a moment that I have any answers, Francis,’ he says. ‘Besides, fucking is somewhat beyond me. Look at the state of this.’ He gestures downwards, to his penis. It is massive, misshapen. Grotesque with tumours.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Have you got cancer?’

  ‘Don’t be such a fool. I’m a snowman. It’s just the way you built me. Your fear is in everything you touch.’

  ‘Have I got it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t matter now. It can’t kill you. Nothing can. That’s the joy of it.’

  A woman with long black hair and a red dress runs past, shouting. She is being chased by a hairless wolf-thing with a human head. It scampers past on all fours. It hoots with laughter.

  ‘I can’t die?’ I say.

  ‘Complete dismemberment might kill you,’ he says. ‘Certainly for a while. Maybe you would retain some level of consciousness. And you can return, if you so choose; you could be a human again. And then you would be able to die. You would be prey. Cancers would stalk you through the woods. Through every waking moment. Various fears would make up the tune that you dance to. There are so many things to be scared of. The BNP. Terrorists. Paedophiles. Traffic accidents. Earthquakes. AIDS. Your conscience. Loving somebody. Nuclear war. Christianity. Topshop. Fast food. The Daily Mail. Used needles. Global warming. Tidal waves. Rape. America. Imagine subsidence – the ground beneath your feet opening up. Imagine infertility. Inexplicable headaches. Various pressures can materialise in the brain – they come from nowhere and nobody understands them. And then of course, there are the wolves. They never went away.’