by Sean Little
There was still the matter of getting back to civilization before dark, though. Clarke and Shaw were a long way from the village, and they had only an hour of daylight left in the sky. Clarke suggested running, and Shaw took the lead. They left what gear they could in the cave to make their run lighter, taking only food, water, guns, and ammo.
They ran in silence, mindful of the fear-force, but also mindful of the woods. The thick canopy overhead cast them into near darkness. The sun, already on the horizon in the west, could barely penetrate the thick growth. For all intents and purposes, it was nighttime in the forest.
Clarke ran with the Winchester in front of him, clutched in two hands—the same way he carried his rifle when he’d made the retreat at Anthony’s Hill after General Forrest routed the Union there. It brought back unpleasant memories in vivid detail in his mind. Was that a side effect of the fear force, too?
The night air was brisk. It felt like a freeze was coming. Their breath left their mouths in ghosts of white that quickly dissipated. The forest was too quiet for Clarke’s taste. Other than their footsteps, breathing, and the sound of their thighs and chests hitting branches and scrub, there wasn’t any noise. The night birds were quiet. The air was still. There wasn’t any wind.
After ten solid minutes of running, Shaw stopped to drink water. She bent over, hands on her knees, and breathed hard. “I’m not used to running,” she confessed. “I haven’t done it a long time, not since I was a child.”
“It’s like riding a horse. You can’t forget.”
“I haven’t ridden a long time, either. Lord Bobbins prefers carriages.”
“I would imagine,” said Clarke. “You a good rider?”
“Incredible,” said Shaw. She arched her eyebrow at him.
A wolf’s howl lifted from the mountains behind them, very close. Too close. Clarke had never been that close to a wolf while it was howling. The sound was louder than he imagined it could be. It cut through the night and chilled him.
“That’s a real wolf,” he told Shaw. As if to confirm, a second howl in the distance answered the first one.
Clarke caught motion out of the corner of his eye, something fast. He spun, raising the Winchester as he did. Shaw followed suite, bringing up her revolver and pointing it in the direction of Clarke’s rifle.
“What is it?”
“I saw something. A shadow. I’m not sure what it was.”
They listened. Clarke felt like the silence of the forest was drumming a tattoo against the sides of his head. After a moment, he realized it was the sound of his own pulse in his ears. They heard the snapping of twigs to their left, and they whirled with the guns.
Shaw moved closer to Clarke and spoke lowly in his ear. “It’s stalking us.”
Clarke nodded. “Move back from me. Back up thirty paces. It can’t stalk us if we’re far apart. It will have to choose one of us.”
Without a word, Shaw moved away from him. Clarke felt her presence growing smaller behind him, but he didn’t dare turn his head. When he was in India years before, one of the farmers in the Sundarbans told him that was when tigers pounced: when they felt the human was distracted or when his back was turned. If you faced them and did not look away, they would not attack.
A shadow moved and Clarke fired at it. The crack of the Winchester was deafening. Clarke popped the lever with a smooth and practiced motion, never moving the rifle from his shoulder as he did. Behind him, Shaw shot at something. Something moved in the brush, something large. Clarke wheeled around and tried to spot the beast by following the sound, but it was too muffled. Were there two of them?
Clarke saw a flash of white and he fired again. It was coming closer. How could it move without being seen? Clarke spotted a shadow and tried to fire ahead of it, like when he shot birds. Shoot where it will be, not where it is. He had no idea if he’d hit anything. There was no noise, no howl of pain.
Two shots blasted from Shaw’s revolver, in quick succession. Clarke wheeled around again and the beast sprang from the growth. Clark barely got around in time to get his arms up. Something massive and white collided with him. It was solid, more solid than muscle and bone, and covered with fine hair that felt like glass-paper. It hit him like a sledge. Clarke flew backward into the scrub. He tried to spin away from the creature as he did. The creature swiped at Clarke’s chest with a paw the size of a dinner plate. Talons dug into Clarke’s flesh and slashed bloody lines across his chest. The Winchester was torn from Clarke’s hands and sent spinning into the darkness of the forest.
Shaw shot the beast, emptying the remaining three shots from her revolver in rapid succession. She drew her other pistol and put six shots into the animal. Clarke fumbled at his holster, trying to draw the Colt. This was one spot where the length of the barrel worked against him. Between the ground and beast, Clarke had no leverage. The gun was stuck. The weight of the animal was enormous. Clarke felt like the life was being squeezed from his soul. In a last ditch effort, he used an old gunfighter’s trick and just tilted the gun, holster and all, and squeezed off three rounds through the bottom of the holster.
It worked. The animal leapt off him, disappearing into the trees and scrub with alarming speed.
Clarke lay still, gasping for air. He could feel blood soaking his shirt and running down the sides of his chest. It was superficial cuts—bad, but not deep. They wouldn’t kill him, but they would scar horribly and add to his collection.
Shaw was at his side in an instant pulling the bandages from her ruck.
“That was something you don’t see every day,” said Clarke. “Keep your face up. Make sure it doesn’t come back.”
Shaw stuffed the linen pads into Clarke’s shredded clothing and pressed hard against the wounds. “You put three bullets into its guts. I don’t think there are a lot of animals that will stick around to see if there’s more where that came from.”
“I don’t think it was an animal,” said Clarke. “It didn’t feel like any animal I’ve ever felt. Did you notice it didn’t make any noise? No snarling. No yelping.”
“I got a good look at it. If there are such things as werewolves, then that was what I saw. I wonder if you’ll change into one now that you have been scratched.”
“If I do, it could only be an improvement on my looks.”
Shaw helped Clarke sit up, and then she tied the bandages tightly to his chest. She helped him to his feet. The world spun and he felt dizzy for a moment. He sagged against her, but she stood firm. She was clearly no palace princess.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“Don’t have much choice, do I?” said Clarke. Somewhere deep in the wood, the beast uttered a low howl, something that resonated halfway between grief and madness.
“Quickly, then,” said Shaw. “Quickly!”
Clarke and Shaw emerged from the woodsman’s path well after dark. The town was silent, but eyes peeked out from the edges of curtains and no one was asleep. Clarke was feeling better and was able to walk on his own before they’d even gotten back to town. He’d lost some blood, but it was nothing a hot bowl of soup, a few glasses of ale, and a good night’s sleep wouldn’t replace.
They went back to the Crying Pig. They weren’t willing to make the trek back to the castle in the dark, and no one from town would take them a carriage in the dark, so the little inn was the only option. Shaw beat on the door until the owner answered.
Mr. Petran answered the door with a shotgun in his hands, but it was quickly stowed on pegs above the door as he greeted them with kisses on the cheek and hugs. He spoke rapid Romanian and dragged them in off the street. He dropped a thick oak beam across the door to barricade it, and ushered Clarke and Shaw to one of the many empty tables in his pub.
Without a word of common communication needed, large mugs of an adequate ale were produced and a bottle of regional wine deposited on the table with two glass tumblers that could pass for clean in that part of the world. Petran hustled to the kitchen and began stoking the
fire in the cook-stove, heating up a large pot of something with a heavenly aroma and breaking out warmed loaves of crusty bread. He served them a vegetable soup and a plate of various cheeses. The pot held a roast that had been simmering most of the day, a simple hunk of beef that when paired with potatoes and carrots soaking up the juices running off the meat, transformed into a grand meal. There was rich, salty butter for the bread, and every time their mugs of ale got close to empty, a new one was brought swiftly to the table.
There, in the safety and the quiet of the Crying Pig, with a fire in the hearth that warmed them through, Clarke felt almost human again. His chest hurt miserably, and it would for weeks, he knew. But that was a small price to pay for still being alive. The inn was delightfully old-fashioned, destitute of any little steam-powered knick-knacks or clunky clockwork minions like all the pubs in England. It was a nice change of pace to enjoy the silence of a crackling fire without the additional chug-and-huff of mechanical devices.
Clarke looked over the top of his ale mug at Shaw. She was drinking from her own mug. They caught each other looking and burst out laughing. At first it was a pleasant chuckle, but it quickly built into the sort of hysterical laughter that only almost dying can bring.
From the door in the kitchen, Petran even joined in the laughter. He had no idea what he was laughing at, but his deep, basso profundo laugh boomed across the tavern and only made Clarke and Shaw laugh harder.
Clarke leaned back in his chair and wiped his eyes. The laughing made his chest hurt. Their laughter died away to silence, and for a long moment, neither spoke. Clarke finally broke the peace. “What is going on in this town, Ms. Shaw?”
Shaw reached out for the wine bottle and swiftly popped the cork from the top. The wine was a thick red. She poured two glasses. She sipped the first one. “I have no idea, Mr. Clarke.”
“Whatever that werewolf-thing was, I don’t think it was real.”
“You didn’t hallucinate those scratches, Mr. Clarke.”
“No. That was real enough, to be sure. That cave, though—that cave has some secrets. It’s not a den. There’s nothing that really lives in there.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’ve seen bear dens, wolf dens, fox dens—you name it. They’re all similar. There’s hair. There are footprints. There are usually discarded bones or something like that. This cave was clean. Too clean. And when that thing hit me, it didn’t give like an animal. A bear, a lion, a tiger—they feel like any other sort of animal. There’s their fur, sure, but beneath that is muscle and tissue, like a man. There’s some give. Whatever hit me in the woods was as solid as solid gets. It was like a rock or bone. It wasn’t right.”
Shaw finished the glass of wine she was holding and poured more. “Maybe mythical beasts have a different makeup than your standard animals.”
Clarke sipped some of the wine. It had surprising depth and he could taste a hint of late summer in its bouquet. “I once faced down a Kodiak in northern Canada—do you know what a Kodiak is?”
“Some sort of giant beast?”
“It’s a bear, a big, huge, goddamned bear. They live in the far north of North America. When they get up on their hind legs, they stand a good eight or nine foot tall, easy. They weigh about as much as a horse, maybe more. I’ve seen Kodiaks knock over a small tree with an easy swipe of a paw just because they felt like doing it.”
“Sounds like a jolly good time, do go on.”
Clarke couldn’t tell if Shaw was patronizing him, so he continued. “Anyhow, I was on horseback outside of Yellow Hat, and the horse starts throwing fits. Before I can rein him in, this Kodiak comes blasting out of the trees. At a full sprint, they can run almost as fast as a horse. Well, this horse decides that he’d rather not have me weighing down his odds of surviving so he rears up and dumps me. The Kodiak sees the fleeing horse and me just sitting there so he takes the easier prey and comes after me.”
“This is just like the cowboy dime novels my grandfather loves!” said Shaw with a broad smile. “Did you kilt yerself the b’ar with yer knife?” Her exaggerated American Southern accent made Clarke smile.
“Not quite. I ran like a scared kitten up the nearest tree. Black bears can climb. Kodiaks can’t. They just try to knock you out of the tree with sheer power. That bear tried to knock over the tree for a good hour. At first, I was just going to shoot him in the head with my pistol, but I worried that might only make him mad. After a while, he got tired and stopped trying to push over the tree. I think he got curious about me, actually. I wasn’t screaming or crying, which I imagine is usually the last thing people he has seen before have done. He raised himself up to his full height to get a better look at me and I reached out a hand stroked his head. This is the biggest thing I’ve seen before or since, and he felt just like any other animal. That werewolf was different.”
The smile disappeared from Shaw’s face. “It’s clear there is more going on here than we know. I have a feeling we’re going to learn some horrible truth.”
Petran put two brass keys on the table and pointed to the stairs that led to the small bedrooms above the inn. He said something in Romanian and mimed sleeping by resting his head against his hands.
“I think we’ve been invited to stay overnight,” said Clarke.
“I don’t know how well I’ll sleep, but the thought of a bed and a bit of a wash-up is very agreeable.”
Clarke finished his wine. He shook Petran’s hand and thanked him, hoping the gesture and the sincerity on his face would cross the language barrier. Petran responded with another bear hug and more cheek kisses.
“I think we’re engaged now,” said Clarke. “Good night, Ms. Shaw.”
Shaw picked up her own key, but did not get up from the table. “How did you get away?”
“From what?”
“From the Kodiak? How did you get away from the bear in the end?”
Clarke shrugged. “I feel asleep in the tree. He got bored of waiting for me and mosied off somewhere, I guess. The next morning, he was gone and I ran back to Yellow Hat. Found my horse still saddled outside the livery stable.”
“That was anticlimactic,” said Shaw. “I was hoping for blood and gore, perhaps some hand-to-hand combat against this bear.”
“If it had come to that, I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it.” Clarke winked at her and went to bed.
The town of Cărbunasatul was a hive of activity in the morning. The word of the primar’s arrival to the castle had spread and people were gearing up to meet the man who was to save them all. Families milled about, preparing for the journey to the castle. They spoke in low tones. There was still worry amongst the villagers, a heavy, invisible fog that coated everything. The people knew that Bobbins might be their last chance to lift the misery.
Petran had a simple breakfast of bacon rashers, beans, and bread ready for Clarke and Shaw when they had roused and dressed. There was strong tea to go with it. After a semi-sleepless night enduring the burning of his chest wounds, Clarke was only interested in the tea. He felt as though he was starting to come down with a cold. He felt weaker than normal. His chest felt hot. He was sure the slashes were infected, despite his best efforts to clean them before bed.
By the time Clarke and Shaw finished their breakfast, there was a steady stream of villagers walking the road to Castle Bobbins. They were dressed in their best clothes, and in this part of Romania, that meant deep, rich reds complemented with golden accents. The women wore shawls that were usually only worn to the church. The men wore ornate vests over a store-bought shirt (probably the only store-bought clothing they owned), and they chose not to wear coats over their vests, for fear of covering up the finest articles of clothing they owned. Children were freshly scrubbed, their hair matted in place with creams and oils. Those who had buggies or wagons polished them to a gleaming shine before hitching their freshly combed horses to them.
The people were in hopeful. It was the first time in days that many of them had
been outside of their homes. There was a feeling of change in the town. Many of them were certain that their new primar would put things right. Clarke and Shaw joined the line of walkers and made the pilgrimage with them. They listened to the happy chatter, the laughter. It was a pleasant counterbalance to the always-present feeling of unease that the fear force cast over the village.
A large man with a potbelly and a wild mane of white hair was standing on the steps of the church. He wore brown robes tied with a dirty white cord at his waist. A large wooden cross hung from a leather strap around his neck. He bellowed at the crowd, calling to them in Romanian. Clarke didn’t speak a word of the language, but he’d seen enough evangelists in his day. The beats and rhythms were always the same. Hellfire and damnation didn’t need translation.
When they rounded the bend and got their first look at Castle Bobbins in the distance, it was clear that Vasile, Andrei, and Csupo had been very busy. The castle was bedecked with drapes and banners sporting the Romanian flag and the Union Jack. A large St. George’s Cross flag waved from one corner of the castle. A St. Andrew’s Cross from another, and the white-and-green Y Ddraig Goch of Wales flew from a third. The blue-yellow-and-red Romanian tricolor flag flew from the final corner of the wall.
“Where did he get all the flags and drapery?” said Clarke.
“All those crates you loaded onto the wagon—that was a large part of it.”
“He doesn’t have the Irish flag.”
“He’s mad at the Irish right now.”
“Should I ask why?”
Shaw shook her head and heaved an exaggerated sigh. “It’s really better if you don’t. Let’s just say there was a profound disagreement over the ingredients of a proper Shepherd’s Pie. It’s a whole thing.”
There was a carnival feel to the assembling people outside the gates of the castle. Some had brought instruments and were playing jazzy, folky tunes. Someone had constructed a fire in the field and was already cooking what looked to be a large goat on a spit. Children played games with each other. Women laughed and chattered, catching up on gossip. A few men stood watch with rifles near the corner of the castle, straying glances toward the woods at the castle’s rear, but as long as the horses were standing quietly, there wasn’t much reason to be worried.