The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

  I lean down and whisper the secret into his ear.

  He looks up at me. His face transfigured by either hatred or the thing, the I-don’t-know-what, the wolf.

  He takes advantage of my momentary hesitation. Two tooth-studded gums sprout out of his mouth. They fasten around my face like a hand. I can hear the fiddle like it’s inside my head. Some abnormally powerful muscles force Taylor’s jaws together. They clamp my head. I feel movement inside me. Unintentional movement. You know. Like my skull is slowly being squashed. Something wet squeaks against the inside walls of my cranium as it is pushed, flattened. My own jaws are being twisted diagonally. I try to transform but I can’t, you know, I can’t focus. I can’t turn my mind away from the pain. The slowly shifting panels of bone. Like tectonic plates. One continent slowly shelves beneath another. And the tremors. The shaking. The shivering. The shuddering. It gets worse and worse. Dad, coughing in his hospital bed. Every fleshy lump inside quivering. Mum crying, her body tense and flickering with the strain of it. The ground beneath me and the sky above falling together, getting mixed up. My body is not quite right. I thought I was able to change and get better but I am not quite right. My body weakens and I am not entirely, you know, all together any more. And it’s a shame because I was thinking we could maybe change things, Jennifer. Not even that. I just want to leave something valuable behind. I remember shivering at the beautiful manifestoes hidden in the sleeve-notes of incredible albums. Hands pressed over my ears to block out the sound of the big black birds beating their broken beaks and their tattered wings against the glass. And the sound of modern pop covers of sad old songs layering up on the radio. One on top of the other. Building to static. And out of the window if I had the energy to stand and look I would see all the way over to the war. To the war. The breakdown at the edges of everything. But I’m not quite right any more. Teeth are breaking through into my brain. Little hard nubs. Every body fails in the end.

  JACK

  I just stood there, gaping, as Francis fell towards me, his whole body evolved to kill, and then – then Taylor was there too, and Taylor barrelled into Francis’ side. They plummeted to the ground in front of me, and rolled apart. I thought I saw blood.

  ‘Graham,’ I said. ‘The axe. Give it to me.’ Taylor had turned now. Graham would not hesitate before using the axe, I knew it.

  Kenny and Jennifer had separated as well, and Jennifer was scrambling for the wall while Kenny was getting to his feet. In one movement I took the axe from Graham and swung it – it was heavier than I expected – at Kenny’s head and he fell forward again. I stood on his back and brought the blade down in between his shoulder-blades. I dug it in until I could see his spine. He was trembling.

  ‘Kenny,’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I, Jack?’ he said. ‘I knew she’d come over to good old Kenny in the end. Kenny and Jenny. It rhymes, see. That’s how I knew. It’s about time I got myself a nice little girlfriend, anyway. My mum always said it’s about time I got a girlfriend. You’ll struggle, she’d say to me, with that funny face of yours, but you could do with a nice little lass.’

  Francis and Taylor were rolling tangled in the snow, wearing a hot melted patch into the earth. Graham remained on the sidelines.

  ‘She didn’t come over to you,’ I said. ‘That’s not what happened.’

  ‘You don’t have to believe old Kenny here,’ he said. ‘Just tell me what you want me to tell you and I’ll tell you it.’

  ‘You took her.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It was me who grabbed her away back up there, my arms around her little tummy and all, holding her dead close like. I carried her across the mountain like we’d just got married, Jack, you should have seen us. Was dead romantic.’

  ‘You abducted her,’ I said. ‘She didn’t come to you.’

  ‘Oh, she came around pretty quick after seeing our party, Jack. Was dead good it was, much better than yours. Still going on actually, even after yours has kind of stopped.’ He sniggered. ‘She joined right in.’

  Graham was turning away from the bleeding wolves, turning away from their thrusting mouths and stained paws. He walked away and knelt in the wet.

  ‘No,’ I said, to Kenny. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t expect a good proper man like you to believe old Kenny here. Not a weird old creep like Kenny. Oh no. Don’t believe me, Jack. I’m telling all lies.’

  He didn’t seem able to move, apart from his mouth. I looked over to where Jennifer was, and she was watching, horrified, as Francis sunk his fingers into Taylor’s arms. I had this impression that everybody was quickly changing from one thing into another and back again, their skins reversing so that the hair was outside one moment, inside the next, their joints bending one way and then the opposite.

  Up there on the fell the night was snow-muffled, colourless, starlit and cold, although fires still danced down by the lake and we could still hear the fiddle, now slow and moaning, like a huge, dying animal.

  ‘She’s a hot one, Jenny is,’ Kenny said. ‘Can do all sorts of things with her insides. You want to keep hold of her. Ha ha. Some advice is better never than late, eh?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be here?’ he said, one cheek pressed into the snow. ‘Anybody with any sense would be here.’

  ‘Did you offer something?’ I said. ‘Did you – were you approached?’

  ‘Mm,’ he said. ‘I got bit by something that had been a girl, a dead fit girl, in her bedsit. She was fucking gorgeous, Jack, dead fit. Not as fit as Jenny, though. Anyways. Some feller came to see me afterwards, bit weird he was, and said he could make it easier. But I told him where to go.’ He coughed. ‘You know what mothers say about trusting strange men. Told him to fuck right off. Stupidest thing I ever did cos it’s not like I had anything to lose.’ He seemed to think for a moment. ‘That was I don’t know how long ago. Maybe I closed down eventually anyway. Not everyone does, like. Most get all dead sad and mad and fucked up. I just locked my self away deep down and tried to forget about it. It still comes back though sometimes, Jack, and it’s like God when it does, huge and angry. Wish I’d got rid of the fucker when I had the chance. Had no plans for it.’

  I stood there, one foot in the small of his back, the other holding the axe down in the hole I’d made. Every now and then a tremor ran through his spine. It sounded like Francis and Taylor were talking and snarling but I didn’t look over.

  ‘So you were a werewolf at work?’ I asked.

  ‘What, back at the call centre?’ He laughed. ‘’Course I fucking was. You’re only ever a step away from us, Jack. We’re, like, everywhere.’ He coughed. ‘Jack, let me see Jenny one more time before you, like, finish me off.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re sick. Dangerous.’

  ‘Nothing I don’t already know,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want to be?’

  ‘No. I don’t ever want to be anything like you.’

  ‘OK.’ He closed his eyes, and shivered. I felt another tremor and I thought he was trying to change, but the axe was still buried in his spine and he could not close over it. ‘I’ll believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.’ He coughed again and spat something black out into the snow. ‘But what about Jenny?’

  I lifted the axe quickly and brought it down hard on the back of his head which seemed soft and rotten and split open easily. He stopped talking, and wriggled a little more, then stopped moving completely.

  Somebody put their hand on my shoulder and I turned to see Graham. He looked concerned.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘You did the right thing.’

  ‘I know.’ I’d not doubted myself for a second. ‘Jennifer!’ I said. I stumbled towards her, and her towards me, and I held her tight to me and she was covered in blood, her black dress torn and ruined. ‘We need to get you back to the house. Oh God. I’m so so sorry.’

/>   ‘No,’ she said. ‘No! Francis!’

  I turned and saw Taylor standing, licking the blood from his mouth. Francis’ dead body lay at his feet, the face torn off, the front of his skull visible – his teeth, the hole behind his nose, and the eyes in their sockets, coming out of their sockets, the skull crushed into a peak at the front. And yet the skin was still intact around the rest of his head, his hair was still there on the top. The window on his skull made me feel sick and I felt like a pervert, looking at something that I was not supposed to see.

  Taylor stood there, his clothes, ripped and torn and falling off, piling up around his feet. He was walking towards us – me, Jennifer on my right, Graham on my left – and his body was lean and wiry, his eyes were spilling black light, his hands and mouth stained red, his hair a dark shock surrounding his pale face. He had the glamour that folklore and story often attributed to those imbued with some sort of dark power – not glamour in the modern sense, but in the old sense, the charm, the aura, the beauty. He seemed to have drawn it from the mountain, the snow, the blood. He pointed at Jennifer.

  ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Listen to me.’ His voice was deeper, more commanding. ‘Francis told me that—’

  The axe arced through the air towards him. Taylor’s eyes shifted from me to the axe, and he jumped backwards, but it still caught him, the heavy, rusty blade slicing into his leg, and he fell. Graham stepped forwards.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘Graham—’

  ‘You saw him!’ Graham shouted. ‘You saw him!’ He swung the axe downwards as Taylor grew up from the ground like the primal thing he was, like the beast from beyond the firelight. The wolf that crossed the frozen river, born in the space beneath the world we knew.

  ‘He was trying to tell me something,’ I said. ‘Graham. He was trying to tell me something.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it really matters,’ Jennifer said. ‘I don’t think anything can matter that much after all of this.’

  ‘You do,’ I said. ‘You are all that matters now. You were all that ever mattered really, Jennifer. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t say sorry,’ she said. ‘Jack. Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  Yet more blood was flowing from the bodies of Graham and Taylor as they writhed across the fell, but I couldn’t work out who was who, or who was doing what, or who was what. Darkness seemed to be closing in on me, and the music from the lake was increasing in tempo and pitch, and either Graham or Taylor managed to stand and start making his way towards us, but the other one pulled him back. Their faces were masks, their bodies a tangle of hair and skin and bone that couldn’t be untied.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I said. ‘We have to get back to the house.’

  ‘Graham is going to become one of them,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  As we made our way, slowly, across the fell, the music seemed to fade. The sounds of orgiastic revelry, too, faltered away – not completely, just enough for us to feel like we had put some distance between them and us. The way was hard and steep, and we were tired. We looked at each other, and at ourselves – at our far-away-feeling limbs. I was blue with cold, and Jennifer was wide-eyed and bloody. Our bodies ached but we carried on walking. I imagined Graham and Taylor straying too close to the edge of the crags and both of them falling off, bouncing down the fellside and finishing their fight somewhere on the valley floor.

  Every now and then I slipped and stuck out my hand, looking for something to grab hold of.

  As I saw the dark, hard-edged shape of the barn emerge out of the sky up ahead Jennifer pointed backwards, eastwards, and said, ‘Look!’

  I turned.

  ‘It’s getting light,’ she said. The row of mountain peaks stood out sharply against the yellowy-blue glow emanating from the out-of-sight sun, and they looked like teeth. We were inside a mouth and the light was coming in from outside, silhouetting the row of ugly, sharkish teeth. A mouth full of stars, but dark despite them.

  ‘So it is.’ I struggled with the sudden conviction that we had to turn around and head towards the light, away from the house. The house was in the wrong direction, being in the direction of the remaining darkness. I struggled with the idea for too long, and stood there, torn, until a sickening wail rose up from where we’d just come, agonised and hopeless.

  ‘Was that Graham?’ Jennifer asked. ‘Or Taylor?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell.’

  We passed the trees. In the half-light of dawn they looked ill, misshapen, like they had been damaged as they’d grown, or maybe been planted wrongly, somehow, and I didn’t look at the bloody, muddy ground – we just kept on walking.

  We reached the house and stood before it. The truth was that it terrified me, and I didn’t want to go inside. I really didn’t want to go inside.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

  ‘We had that fight,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about that. The fight. I’m sorry.”

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘What happened afterwards?’

  ‘He grabbed me. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know who he was. I felt his arms around my stomach and I tried to pull them off and they were covered in hair. I looked down and saw that he had about five knuckles on each finger. That was what it looked like. I might have been wrong. I must have been wrong. And all the while he was dragging me backwards, pulling me backwards, and I was trying to hook my heels into the ground but they just kept bouncing off. I don’t know how he was moving so fast. Then he lifted me up so that I was lying across his arms. He didn’t speak. I was screaming because I didn’t know what he was. I was just seeing these hairy arms and all those knuckles. He kept laughing. I was watching his feet, he was barefoot, and his feet were an animal’s feet. His legs bent the wrong way and they were strange-looking, well, obviously they were strange-looking. He took me across the fell down towards the lake. It seemed to take forever even though he was moving so fast. My shoes came off and my feet turned blue and he put me down at one point and I cut my feet up on the scree. He was taking me to where the noise was coming from, I thought. The next thing I knew we were on the road that leads to the lake and I could hear them all closer. We were nearly there and I was crying and screaming because I thought, like, if they’re all like him. What are they going to do to me? And then we were there, in the middle of them all, and it was awful, Jack, awful, they were all screaming and laughing and fighting and fucking each other and eating people and I thought they were going to do that to me, and they were all strange, like swollen in strange places or some of them had other creatures erupting out of them, that’s what it looked like, or they were half-human, half-dog. And then he started dancing with me, spinning me round and around and around and I was still crying and I saw his face and he had a wolf’s head, but at that point his body was completely human. He spun me round and around. It was like being inside a burning, rolling car. He had an erection. He just kept spinning me round and around and the fiddle-player from the party was there. And then another one jumped on to the one that took me, and they were fighting and howling like wolves and then another one grabbed me, the fat woman from the shop, and she held me down and tried to—’

  ‘Did any of them bite you?’

  ‘No. No, she tried to – tried to kiss me and pour this drink into my mouth, but he – Kenny – suddenly jumped up and pushed her away and he must have fought the other one off, I don’t know, and he said, “We’re going somewhere else,” or something, and he started pulling me along again, but I said, “It’s OK, I don’t want to stay here,” and he let me walk and I thought once we’re away from this place I’ll just hit him with a rock. That was what I thought.’ She paused.

  ‘The fat woman from the shop?’ I asked. ‘One of them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  A scratching metal sound drew our attention to the barn and we saw that the barn door was open. The wind was pushing it gently and the door moved slowly across the yard, creaking forlornly.
r />   ‘Did you?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you hit him with a rock?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No, I didn’t. I picked one up but he saw it and knocked it out of my hand. Then he hit me. I kicked him and he hit me again. I started hitting him properly, punching him in the face, but it didn’t do anything. Then he threw me face first on to the ground and pulled my dress up. You saw – you saw what he was doing.’

  ‘Here,’ I said, and held her slim, trembling body close to me, the house looking down at us, staring down at us, and gradually the day dawned. I tried to think of something else to say.

  The first thing I did once we were inside was try all the light switches, and on finding that they were working again I danced an unhinged little dance there in the kitchen, hopping from one foot to the other, completely unmoved by the thick opaque globs of liver-coloured something that were smeared across the dark slate.

  ‘Ha ha!’ I shouted. ‘Light!’

  Jennifer sat down at the kitchen table, which was covered in the empty tin cups of burnt out tea-lights and empty bottles and paper plates and broken crisps. She looked around fearfully, as if the room was full of things that I couldn’t see.

  ‘Part of me thinks that I shouldn’t say this,’ I said, ‘but another part of me thinks that it’s a perfectly OK thing to say.’

  ‘Just say it,’ she said, tiredly.

  ‘The kettle works.’

  She did not reply – just looked at me.

  ‘I’m making a cup of tea anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m going to make you one too, and you can decide whether or not you want to drink it.’

  I turned and opened a blood-spattered cupboard door. Inside the cupboard, it was as if the whole night hadn’t happened – everything was clean and undamaged. I took out two mugs and put them down on the worktop, on the edge of which there were marks and a nastily shaped bloodstain that suggested somebody’s head had been smashed down on to it, their upper jaw bearing the brunt, the teeth shooting forwards and underneath the toaster. It looked as if the teeth were nesting beneath the toaster.