An arrow whipped past his shoulder as he knelt down and he raised the tip of the spear again, jamming the blunt end cap into the stony ground, to stiffen the shaft against the second Hell-hound that would soon hurl itself upon it. Then the feathers of the arrow which had passed him so closely came back into view, shaking like a trembling hand as the thing into which they were fixed sprinted toward him. Another arrow, from Grundig’s bow, slipped passed his arm then the second creature flew at the tip of his lance, its mouth red and bloody, howling with hate. Elias braced the lance with all his strength, whispered a prayer and shut his eyes.
Chapter One
Jungle Rock
‘Damien, who were those two men in the black overalls?’asked Mitsu Yamada, one of the four waking night security staff at Charlwood Zoo, as she approached the gate to the rhino enclosure with her partner. ‘Were there any maintenance appointments for tonight, I did not see any contractors passes left out for us?’
‘Them two in the masks?’
‘Yes. I am sure I have seen them before somewhere, did you recognise them also?’
‘Nope –never seen‘em before.’
‘It was the way one of them was walking. I have seen someone here before walking strangely like that.’
‘Let’s just see what’s spooked Edith first. Do you see any foxes or badgers about?’asked Damien, as he stepped up to the padlocked metal bolt on the gate. ‘Your eyes are better than mine.’
‘I cannot see anything now. Would you like the torch?’
‘No. Just leave it off for the moment Mit, it’ll only wind her up even more. She must have stopped charging about inside, she’s just snorting and breathing heavily,’ said Damien hesitating, holding the fingers of his free hand against his earpiece. Let’s do a circuit and check the outside first,’ he said, putting away his keys. ‘She’s probably just woken ’erself up farting. Check your safety’s on too,’ he added warily, pointing to Mitsu’s rifle, ‘we don’t want any more accidents this year, or the guvnor might lose his licence and we’ll be out on our arses.’
‘Out on our arses? Is similar to something I already hear…’
‘It’s Yorkshire slang for losing yer job.’
‘Oh. It is rude? I have also heard a close expression “out on your ear”. Arse is bum– yes?’
‘Aye, “out on yer ear” is for the company of yer elders an’ betters; and “out on yer arse” is just amongst friends.’
‘People say my language – Japanese, difficult to learn. I think English!’
‘Well lass, there’s a few friends o’ mine would agree wi’ya there. They can’t speak proper English either.’
‘Do you smell that?’ Mitsu asked, wrinkling her nose suddenly.
‘What – the dung?’
‘No. That chem – ical smell– how you say? It smells like air freshener – or ozone. Can you smell also?’
‘Now you mention it, I did catch a bit of a whiff of something. Smells like that gloopy lemon disinfectant stuff the cleaners use in the bogs.’
‘Why would that smell be here?’
‘Mebee them two blokes have been using it in t’sewer pipe junction.’
‘Oh.’
‘There’s an inspection hatch cover at the back of ‘er shed. It links up wi’ t’mains sewerage pipe that runs by front gate. We probably just caught the smell o’ somethin’ coming out o’ that.’
‘Ah, so you are right – how are Edith’s breathings now?’
‘Her arse is breathing fine.’
Dave and Brian Drake, the men responsible for Edith the Rhino’s intemperate outburst, were striding briskly away from the scene of their aborted visit to her stable block, still without their property –a red Snap-on toolbox full of gold doubloons that their nephew had hidden behind her storage bins in a fit of pique.
To reduce the risk of vomiting from the smell of the young rhino’s anal emissions while they were creeping about inside her bedchamber, Brian had foolishly added a small glug of car air freshener concentrate into the filter cavity of his decorator’s mask, though its effect on his vision and sense of balance had been far from neutral.
‘Ocean breeze… more like kamikaze wind…’ groaned Brian, trying hard to ignore the throbbing headache that the air freshener fluid had induced. ‘Smells like bloody screenwash. I’m gonna kill that stupid little bastard; sticking my gear in a bloody rhino enclosure – is he off his friggin’ head?’
‘Do you want to try again in a while Brian, when it’s calmed down again?’ asked Dave, his brother.
‘Tonight? No way – the bloody thing’ll be wired for the rest of the night now. What the hell did you tread on? Oh God – I think I’m going to throw up…’
‘I stood on one of its bloody footballs.’
‘Didn’t you see it?’
‘Of course I didn’t bloody see it. If I’d seen it I wouldn’t have bloody stepped on it. It was under the straw. Are you all right?’
‘I feel a bit queasy, it’s that stuff I put in the mask… all this for a fistful of coins.’
‘You managed to get some!’
‘Just a fistful. I’d got one hand in the top drawer. I just hope I put back enough hay to cover the floor in front of its storage bins before we had to leg it.’
‘Is it locked?’
‘Oh yeah. At great personal risk I might add. I’m not going back in there, with great grunting Bertha again. We’ll have to find some way of getting it out of its shed with some kind of bait, so we can go back in and get our stuff, without being mauled, flattened or punctured. Keep your eyes open a minute,’ said Brian, disappearing quickly behind a conifer to retch.
‘What are you doing Bri?’
‘Bringing up me tea, if you’ve got to know.’
‘The feeding hatch is jammed Damien,’ whispered Mitsu, noting the buckled wooden shutter on the side of the stable.‘She must have struck the frame with her horn.’
‘Okay. We’ll log it when we get back inside an’maintenance can fix it tomorrow. There’s nowt else out o’ place that I can see. Let’s get back and put t’radio on – see if there’s any more news abaht that ship exploding.’
‘Damien?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘There’s something shiny on ground there, next to her scratching post. It looks like coin.’
‘Pick it up and bring it wi’you. You never know, it might be lucky.’
Dave and Brian ducked behind a huge stone statue of Pan, on the edge of the drive, as the other pair of night security guards drove past in their van; pulling up at the bottom of the steps in front of the house to speak to Lord William Henry who was on his way to the rhino enclosure.
‘What the hell’s that daft old bastard wearing now?’
‘Who?’
‘Him – Lord Whatsisface…’
‘Woollens?’
‘Lord Crackpot.’
‘Look at that thing he’s holding. It looks like a ruddy rocket launcher made from a vacuum cleaner.’
‘Let’s get back to the Saab, one near-death experience is more than enough for tonight.’
Chapter Two
Saturday Morning
Charlwood House, the ancestral seat of the Warner Woollens family, lay within an arrow’s flight of the Cloughton to Whitby road. Four miles distant from Cloughton village and six miles south from Robin Hood’s Bay, it appears abruptly to the unready eye of passing motorists on the A171, at the top of a low ridge, between two dark blocks of forest.
Built in the Palladian style, in Bath stone, around a central three-storey building crowned by a large triangular pediment over Ionic columns, it had two large wings, set back slightly from the main building and identical in style to the central edifice. The ridge of the main house roof ran east to west and was slated. Each wing fea
tured a conservatory-style roof at right angles to the main house, set within a lead gulley and surrounded by a rooftop walkway ringed by a waist-high stone balustrade. Two sets of steps directly in front of the main portico – and also at right angles to the house – connected the lower gardens to the terrace, which ran the full length of the front of the house.
The surrounding estate ran to nearly two thousand acres of coarse woodland, undulating fields and wild moorland between the River Esk and the A171, the main road from Whitborough to Whitby. Before the establishment of the zoo, the estate drew its income from logging and hosting shooting and walking parties, the woodland supporting a large breeding herd of deer and wild boar. There were also many firm alluvial banks, stream pools and jetties on the western banks of the Esk, from which the estate’s guests could fish on the river and its tributaries.
The present Lord Woollens– William Henry– had built a considerable fortune in his own right through investments in several large construction companies at the start of the motorway construction boom. This allowed him to indulge his passion for exotic animals and reptiles. Unlike many zoos, Charlwood maintained an indoor reptile house in a south-facing corner of the estate, attached to an annexe of the boiler house, where visitors could study the large collection of snakes and lizards. There was even a breeding pair of Komodo dragons, Stan and Hilda, in their own, purpose-built enclosure. Underfloor heating, insulated earth bank walls and thermoplastic roof panels ensured the ‘desert house’ kept its exotic tenants at a comfortable 28 degrees Celsius, whatever the temperature outside.
The main bathroom in the family wing of Charlwood House was almost as large as the footprint of a typical Victorian inner terrace. In winter, the first Lord Woollens could sometimes be heard rolling boules along the tiled floor of his water closet whilst enthroned in spirit, awaiting the arrival of spring. Lord William Henry was inside enjoying a shower and a sing-song of the kind only a sufferer of aphasia, or a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band could better.
‘You be– my rexy dinnerlady – I’ll be your king,
You be – my ma – mamar malady,
My chips are gin…’
His song, such as it was, was suddenly interrupted by a call from his butler on the voicepipe. ‘My Lord, Ibrahim wishes to speak to you when you have showered and dressed. He’s awaiting you in the library.’
‘I’ll be quickettycan Haskins.Betsyheavenses! It’s been a night of f-fun.’
Ten minutes later, Lord Warner Woollens returned to the gloriously gilded, decadent splendour of the master bedroom, dressed in one of his favourite Sandhill Tweed three-piece suits, brushing out his hair and beard. He approached one of his closets and opened the doors, stepped inside and unclipped the sling of his great ancestor’s repeating crossbow from its hanging rod and fastened it around his shoulder, balancing the great weapon on his chest, before retracing his steps, looking like some corrupted Daliesque vision of a medieval crossbowman.
When he had first been disturbed, just before midnight hours earlier, alerted by the home-made status alarms dashboard beside his bed, he had taken out his spear gun but thought better of it after accidentally discharging it into the floor above the staircase. Now, six hours later he was up again, though his wife, Lady Antonia, was far from pleased at being disturbed in the midst of her reverie; but not so uninterested in her husband’s labours, that she was going to withhold her waspish observations.‘William… where are you going with that thing?’she snorted,observing her awkwardly retreating husband through a narrow gap in her damask and cashmere eye mask.
‘The alarm board began to blink again this morn Antonia, though it was an amber light, so there is no need for me to be there straight away. But I am pervyclothed and clothyprepped now,’ he replied, turning himself about, to address the small hill under the bedspread which had come back to life.
‘Then why do we employ all these people, twenty-four hours a day if not to ensure you get a decent night’s sleep?’replied the mound.
‘The staff still need my advice and guidance from time to time my dear and the benefit of my executive eye, especially when one of our most precious new beasts is out of sorts.’
‘You’re certainly not going to help matters turning up with one of your grandfather’s unholy contraptions; it’ll put the fear of God into that poor bloody Japanese girl… Whatever help you can offer is going to be somewhat diminished if it goes off in company. It should be in a display case in a military museum, where it can’t do any more harm.’
‘The Warner Woollens cartertridge machine crossbow is one of my ancestors’ greatest achievements, Antonia; and as good and safe as any Winchester or Martini-Henry, if handled respectfully. Now I must go and speak to Ibby. He’s been waiting patiently for me in the library.’
‘Just don’t leave it where someone else might pick it up. Remember what happened to Incapability (the estate’s head gardener). We were jolly lucky he didn’t sue, and now we’re the only family in the district that actually subsidises our groundsman’s bar bill to help him forget about the pain of being speared by that thing.’
Chapter Three
Up Around the Bend
The same morning in Cloughton village, several miles north of Whitborough and two miles from the estate, a Caledonian Ptarmigan tour coach, with a works party from Fort William, drew up in front of the Shirestones Hotel and began to disgorge its passengers onto the single skinny pavement opposite, blocking out the light and most of the road for the six small cottages directly behind the bus stop and shelter. The young and old, couples and children, carried their cases and belongings between the cottage fronts and the side of the luggage bins. They then started to emerge either side of the coach’s bodywork, peering out nervously onto the high street from the offside taillights and front grille to check the road was clear before they dashed across the narrow strip of tarmac onto the hotel’s forecourt which was crammed with small round table and chair sets, squeezed together beneath their accompanying branded sun umbrellas.
Daisy Mae, Robert Cunncliffe’s eight-year-old Yorkshire Terrier and the last occupant of the coach, began to whimper and tremble again as she was carried yelping from their seats for the second time in her tartan travel caddy. Mr Cunncliffe had set down her little stoneware drinking bowl and a small dish of bacon scraps on the kerb a few minutes previously. His poor pet had leapt back into the coach and was cowering under a seat near the middle aisle, refusing his generous offer of crispy chicken skin and mayonnaise left over from his lunch. Since the coach had parked, Daisy Mae had already nipped his ankle and relieved herself on the breast of his polo shirt before they were even disembarked; all because his dog had caught the invisible scent pheromone trail of their host, who was having a few difficulties of his own. Not with his arrangements, or his guests, but with his new alter ego: a vicious, moonstruck, twenty-five stone carnivore with five inch fangs and constipation.
Lindsay Boldwood – the landlord of the Shirestones– and the source of Daisy Mae’s inexplicable angst, had assembled his usual complement of extra staff, drawn from the sons and daughters of the village for the Easter break. He was checking every detail before the arrival of his guests; unwittingly impregnating the air inside and outside the premises with a scent that was guaranteed to send every cat, dog and corvid in the immediate vicinity into a paralysing fit.
Dale and Matthew Penny, the twin sons of the local vicar, home from their first spring term at Cheltenham Art College, worked between the bars and restaurant.
Gemma and Bonnie Westmorland, his regular part-time staff, the daughters of John and Carol Westmorland of Wythall Farm, were also on duty for the Bank Holiday weekend to clean the bedrooms, ensuites and toilets, see to the laundry, lay the tables, and cut and arrange fresh flowers in the corridors and lounges. They were about to experience the most extreme set of circumstances of anyone at work in hospitality and the pub trade since the Se
cond World War. By Tuesday morning, Dale would be bald, Matthew would have developed a permanent nervous hiccup and the girls would have moved as far away from the countryside as possible and would probably never pick up a copy of Little Red Riding Hood again.
Boldwood had recently become a live carrier of an ancient Nordic strain of a lychanthropy virus that had nearly cost him his livelihood the previous Tuesday, the occasion of his first transformation. Whitborough was now one video store proprietor short, as a direct consequence of his wolfish urges. He had also devoured, in reverse order – a much loved Gloucester Saddleback boar and two house cats, one of which had been close to his heart, but had died a few inches away from the very same organ on its journey down his oesophagus.
The ancient, mutated lycanthropic virus – which had erupted in the flesh of their employer a few nights before – had once been widespread in Scandinavia, but had almost died out before its arrival in the British Isles. Around three to five per cent of Scandinavians still carried a dormant version of the condition, but of those, only a tiny percentage would go on to suffer full-blown attacks. For this to happen, the infected subject must have been born when Mars was in transit through the sign of Aries, in the twelfth house of the subject’s birth chart. In astrology, Mars is said to be exalted or in dignity in Aries, whilst the twelfth house, in astrological tradition, is the place which governs the hidden self, the unconscious. The house of secrets.
As well as the northern European strain, there were also Balkan and Indian forms of the disease, which also required the same astrological conjunctions, but this branch of the virus had never spread out into the other races as effectively as it had done within families who were of Nordic descent.
Once the sympathetic host is fully mature, the virus goes active in the hypothalamus, at the next full moon, or the first full moon after the completion of puberty in the young. Only when the first full transformation has been achieved is the victim able to change whatever the position of the moon, during times of great emotional stress or anger, but still only during the hours of darkness. Strong ultraviolet light on twenty percent or more of the incubator’s exposed skin area or foods with a reasonably significant magnesium content will inhibit the ability of the virus to produce sufficient quantities of lychanthropic hormone to effect a full change. Instead, the subject will develop and shed up to two coats of body hair during their deepest sleep cycle. This postponement will also increase the life expectancy of the subject, to a greater or lesser degree, if the transformation is continually frustrated. Some retain the memory of their time as the wolf, others hold no memory whatsoever. Lindsay was one of the latter, but would soon become one of the former.
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