by Tina Smith
Her brother hadn’t cried at the funeral but his eyes teared when he saw her with her hair cut. He had enjoyed the comfort of its long, soft yellow-blonde strands that reminded him of their mother and smelt of shampoo. He traced toy cars over it when they lay on the couch, more than once becoming tangled and enjoying a little too much her hands helping his in a motherly way, firmly untangling the caught tuft.
She found her only solace in books, but now instead of Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume, she whiled away the hours reading war novels and action books, and then science fiction. Immersed in another world, she filled in the gaps in her knowledge, joined the local gun club for the training, and took judo and self-defense - much to her therapist’s delight. She watched karate from the rafters of the school hall and instinct filled in the rest. She withdrew, she showed up, smiled on cue, completed her schoolwork and waited for the end of high school. In class she day-dreamed she would find others like her, those hunters that were surely out there somewhere. She could not know if they would kill her for what she was – or maybe they could use her the way she intended to use herself, to destroy the wolves. She imagined infiltrating their pack during the many hours which filled a wolf’s day. Curiously the horrid beasts seemed to leave her alone.
After the moon began to wane she would sleep and then her energy would build again; gaining momentum as it waxed until she was feverish and almost feral. Barefoot, running through the mud and grass around the river, it was a rough existence. Until recently, unable to control herself any longer, she would phase into the disgusting monstrosity - the thing she hated most. But it wasn’t until afterwards that she would be able to despise it fully, vomiting the half digested chickens butchered in the night which quenched her taste for warm blood and flesh. The canine mind was simple, predatory and hungry. How she didn’t ever wake up in a pool of a human victim’s blood, she didn’t know. She remembered liking it too much, the thrill of the chase and the hunt even more, and the freedom. She recalled the exhilaration too fondly when she awoke from the wolf body, which was experiencing the carelessness of youth that took hold like a dose of adrenaline. She stalked the animals and they wisely feared her presence, because she was a monster.
One terrifying night on the second wax of the full moon at the end of summer she found herself covered in blood. She knew it was not her own as she came to, walking along a road naked, shaking tensely with erratic breath. As the lights of a car reached over the tarmac towards her she jumped back into the grass and for the first time phased willingly so as to escape into the bush and head for home, where she showered the dried blood from her matted hair, which trailed down the drain. She rinsed her mouth, hoping whatever she had done hadn’t, or wouldn’t, attract a crowd.
That night had been her birth as a wolf. It had struggled to emerge, but once out its thirst now quenched, it slept with less aggression, but not soundless. Continually it would have to be released. She wept a little.
She knew what her job was now, her purpose. The strange dream had confirmed it, though she hardly thought of the purpose of the symbol. She woke in the night - a rare one in which she had not roamed the town like a stray dog due to the passing of the moon.
She had experimented hunting rabbits, tasting the warm blood and for once had begun to assemble thoughts, giving in to a different instinct. One in which she was part of the forest. She found herself scratching in the fallen logs for bugs and chewing the nutty, sour flesh and this night she had hunted the blood of birds. Cresida turned into naked human form and plucked the feathers, which remained on the torn bodies and about them, still attached to flesh. She took them back to her room where she strung a mobile out of the coloured feathers as a morbid wire trophy. She lay naked and whirled it with her soil-stained foot above the bed, pondering the symbol she had envisioned, and whether she had seen it before, as she often did. She remembered her nightmares, the bad E trips she had taken not so long ago; things that she hadn’t thought of since. Her friend nursed her as she thrashed about sweating and hallucinating - the bad voice returned to her in the early hours of the morning with its evil purpose, its devil droll. It reminded her of all the things she’d done wrong; it repeated the pain over and over again, missing some things, concentrating more on others. It was not the happy voice of her childhood, which awoke with anticipation of the day ahead and told her wonderful things with optimism - this voice inside was the devil on the other shoulder. Like mould it proliferated in her misery, which grew in her tears and incubated via the animal heat of the wolf poison inside her.
On this morning however, the message was clear and she remembered it upon waking. Protect the symbol - a round ink tattoo pointed at opposite edges, like a star unmistakable; she had drawn it for Sky. Her mother had spoken to her in the dream, asked her to ‘please do her job’, her long blonde hair blowing about in a mild breeze. It had made Cresida shiver, as though it were real - though, in her reality she did not shiver from cold any longer, unless it was from phasing. Usually when she dreamt it was to search for her parents. She would stumble around her room unconscious until her aunt found her and guided her back to bed or shook her until she awoke, tear-stained and desperate; sometimes mysteriously covered in dirt and dry grass. Her Aunt Tabetha plucked the hay from her niece’s hair, perplexed and afraid, for the front doors had been and remained locked. Cresida’s room was on the second floor, too far to jump.
From that night on, since the dream, Cresida watched them, the beasts, as steam came out of their nostrils in the night air. She visited the graves of her parents, the cement slab commemorating their lives surrounded by dead weeds. She strolled through the graveyard in the darkness like an angel of mercy through the headstones. The pack was busying themselves by the full moon, hunting anything they could find and tumbling over one another like playful pups, too young to know their own strength and size. All the time they had been waiting to see what she would do. They noted her presence. She wasn’t downwind and the scent was unmistakable, so unlike their own.
Growling, Bianca tensed ready for action as the fur on her shoulders stood on end and her ravenous incisors dripped saliva. Reid steadied her with a nudge. She trembled with restraint. Sky hunched up and transformed into a man with his hand up in a sign of peace like an Indian. At first she thought she knew what she was doing and that it wasn’t a rookie mistake. She trotted into view from the cover of leaves in her grey white coat and stared at them, narrowing her human-like canine eyes. Her instincts told her to retreat. She turned and disappeared then, out of sight, back into the cover. She was testing the waters, showing how brave she was, perhaps trying to intimidate – no, it was to unsettle them. She didn’t know how they would react to her, the half-caste. Would they tear her to pieces and eat her? Or invite her in? They did not follow. From far back through the scrub Cresida kept undercover and watched them, wondering as she did about the strange dream ‘Protector of the innocent’ her mother had mouthed, before drawing an arrow and aiming it at her daughter’s heart, while feathers dropped about like snowflakes.
The pack did not know how to react to her, because there had never been one like her before. But for all intents and purposes she was a freak, someone to be wary of until they could decide what to do about her. If she remained submissive, there would be no squabble. Even in the worst outcome Sky would have protected her then and Sam hated her for it. He had temporarily succumbed to the dominant female’s will, to keep the peace. But Sky drew a line at some things and the guilt over her almost destroyed him. Reid had talked him around.
On Saturdays, they came across each other in the lot of the local shopping centre.
“Dog hunter,” Reid said under his breath and spat on the wet bitumen. He knew she could hear because she had the same specialized senses as they did. He glared at her. Reid blamed her for Sky’s condition. When Sky glanced at her from the back of the car his forehead wrinkled, sorrow instead of disgust in his eyes.
Sam in the background loading the car wouldn’
t have noticed Sky’s expression, and he made sure she couldn’t see it. Cresida however saw it through the clean dark windscreen as she walked by. Sam waved a friendly hello; Tabetha returned the gesture - all the while hiding an expression of concern whilst passing an eye over them. Where were the children’s parents? Tabetha thought eyeing Samantha Thompson and friends, following her niece through the automatic supermarket doors. Reid strolled over to the newsagent stand. After they were out of human hearing Sam started the engine of her G6 without getting in. She strolled over to Cresida’s aunt’s car and in broad daylight ran a fingernail-cum-claw along the side of the dark grey sedan in the shape of a lightning bolt with a curve at the end. She kept a lookout for witnesses and from a distance it just looked like she had brushed past the car. Her hand was concealed by a coat sleeve as it had been raining that morning, the ground was still wet and the asphalt road retained reflective puddles of clear black water. She returned to her car and jumped in the driver’s seat. Reid who had watched at first with curiosity now shook his head in resigned disapproval as he approached on his way back from the newsagent, paper in hand. He was still playing the intermediary between Sky and Sam. Before they arrived back at the cabin Sam would have looked into his light amber brown eyes, unusually clear in the overcast morning sunlight as she drove and whispered with a sly hand on his thigh, “You didn’t see anything did you Reid, no scratch – nothing?” Without knowing he would forget in a strange fog, like a hypnotized disciple.
Cresida didn’t know yet that if Sam had killed her, Sky would have killed Sam, with Reid's help. And none of them knew or suspected, except Lily, what Sam’s aggression and deceitful feelings really made her capable of.
Sam had compromised in her act of revenge for Sky loving Cresida, as there was more than one way to skin a cat, which was easy since she had already implemented her revenge: brainwashing the woman in the car to drive out in front of Cresida’s parents, and to have no memory of the beautiful, skinny blonde-haired girl who persuaded her to do it. Both of Cres’s parents dead was a better result than she had aimed for. She did it because she was scorned- and all’s fair in love and war. Only Lily knew Sam’s capability. She knew without asking that Sam had played a hand in murdering Cres’s parents. But their loyalty in sisterhood was strong. Sam had been the first Lily had turned.
Sam sped the black sedan along the wet road towards the cabin. Giny had called awakening them with the news that morning. The paper Reid collected from the newsagent read, as Giny had stated, DEER CARCASS ATTACKED. They would have to lie low for a bit. Wild dogs had been blamed. They all knew it was Cresida's mess; they’d made the run to town especially for the paper. The much more inconspicuous corner store they single-handedly kept in business wasn’t open Sundays.
“She’s in her adolescence,” Sam said, gesturing towards the paper and changing gears. Reid thought pride laced her tone. He looked at Sky in the back seat.
16. Repent or Perish
Cresida noticed the mark on her aunt’s sedan after they arrived home as she unpacked the boot; she kicked the car tyre in anger. Tabetha who had been keeping an eye on her, spied her outburst through the kitchen window. She wondered what she was going to do about this damaged child who was obviously acting out, who had been entrusted to her - but thought nothing else of it as she unpacked the groceries.
The next day at school Cres walked across the lot to the teacher’s car park and in front of glancing students took out her house key and ran a screeching wavy line along the side of Sam’s shiny black G6 sedan, twin to the one on her aunt’s car.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Tabetha. With so many broad daylight witnesses, Cres was suspended. Tabetha had been quiet too long; she had suffered being ignored, the hours Cresida went missing, the dishevelled appearance, abhorrent self-mutilation and the drug-induced stupors at the dinner table. She had endured the criticism of her food and the missing clothes. Tabetha had attended the counselling sessions and she saw this behaviour as the ultimate disrespect of her tolerance for Cresida. The little woman, who never said much, suddenly became a typhoon. Blatant public vandalism was the last straw, as far as she was concerned. This was the final slap in the face.
Following a phone call from Principal Crealy, Tabetha shouted that night at Cresida standing in the house.
“I have been far too understanding for too long, thank you, John.” Tabetha's voice was hard, cracking with disappointment into the receiver. “Goodbye, Mr Crealy.” She hung up the phone and turned to face Cresida. “I’m sorry, Cresida, that you weren’t with them,” she cried, shrilly. “I’m sorry, but you’re alive and one day you will be dead!” She wailed through flowing tears “But you’re not dead now, you’re alive. You were lucky, you have a life - so you owe them to live it, darling. No one is invincible! So you live it!” Tabetha screeched. She lowered her voice, pleading. “Set an example for those of us who are still here.” She gestured to the couch in the adjacent room. Tabetha's resolve softened and the nerves set in. Her body was now trembling. She normally avoided confrontation. She had done all she could for the troubled teenager; She wiped her shaking swollen hands on her apron. Tabetha thought with sadness again how she had been so naïve. The way she had imagined at first that it could work, this situation with her and the children, and she thought what a fool she’d been to think things would settle.
Cresida looked into her brother’s eyes; he had heard all the yelling. He was bundled up in despair on the couch as she looked at him. Cresida felt sorry for what she had done. She wanted to take it all back. A twinge of pain struck in her chest. She felt the familiar anguish, that feeling of something she couldn’t express to the real world, about what had happened to her. It was all around her, inside her, she wasn’t herself anymore in so many ways and she couldn’t change it, but she could change the way she reacted to it. She was caught between two worlds, literally, and it meant so much to the little eyes looking back at her from the couch that she participate in it, for him. It was easier to be sad now rather than angry. Cresida knew if she was to get enraged there was no telling what would happen to her aunt - little did she know it. Her aunt started dribbling something about going to Christian meetings as Cresida went over to him. Her sudden movement made her aunt jump but she eased when she saw Cresida slump onto the couch beside her brother, throw a limp arm around him and smile weakly. She picked up the children’s book he had dropped and continued to read the tattered copy of ‘The Blue Balloon’, like the old Cres would have.
Her aunt had wiped the great lumping tears from her cheeks. She had her hands full with the little boy and time for Cresida had fallen to the wayside. Tabetha had never had a daughter and hadn’t the faintest idea how to treat her on top of all her new responsibilities, especially as Cres was almost grown, nearly a woman in her prime.
Tabetha had her old prematurely failing arthritis-ridden vessel of a body and her Christian morals, her passive anger and now a makeshift family of children not her own. And she had never been a particularly nurturing woman. She had rarely allowed her son to hug her; she didn’t even care for herself in many ways, because it wasn’t holy.
She hadn’t expected this reaction from Cres and, not for the first time, she felt conflicted about the psychological welfare of this makeshift family. Particularly for the boy; he was so quiet. The voice inside her asked her again what she was doing. She went back into the kitchen in her scuffs, picked up the spatula and continued to cook. She had taken on the responsibility of Cres and her brother before thinking through the implications. Maybe things would be better now. She knew though, that this was a brief respite, and she couldn’t let up. This was her roof, and these children had been left to her care. She would look under the beds if necessary - for gang paraphernalia, knives - though the thought frightened her. She would read diaries, check emails, talk to the teachers, she thought, with a shaky spatula in hand stirring the roux nervously. She was a plain and ordinary woman whose alcoholic adult son h
ad left home years before to live with his father and he was difficult at the best of times. She was beaten down by life. Whether she would have the guts to follow through with disciplining the children would remain to be seen. Women of her generation were taught to be placid wives. Punishment was harsh, anger was internalized which caused hypertension and headaches and the symptoms were treated with prescribed drugs. Nevertheless she was going to lead by example. These kids had been thrown a rough blow and if she admired their strength, she wasn’t the type to show it.
The church congregation gave her a determination and her bible group instilled her with a desire to overcome her weaknesses. Had it not been for Delma Barkel and Eliza Timbly giving her Christian encouragement and teacake, Tabetha might have dragged Cresida off to a delinquent’s home, and perhaps no one would have blamed her. The penetrating fear of Delma’s judgment, of her determined failure to trust in God, was enough to spur her on. In Tabetha’s mind she wanted to keep face in the community - in church especially. ‘God doesn’t give you what you can’t handle,’ the congregation had concurred. Her belief system told her God had entrusted their care to her and she was adamant she would not fail. Feeding the children was her version of love and housing them was her only notion of care. On an emotional level she was absent. The child within Tabetha had been locked away where she couldn’t be hurt by her father, her ex-husband, or her son. She did not know how to care for herself let alone deal with the two children of her hippy sister with strange habits who didn’t eat tomato sauce. She popped her aspirin and blood pressure medication, wincing as she swallowed it down. Her rheumatoid arthritis was bad this evening, so she reached for the Rufin for good measure. Shortly after this, following further disturbing incidences, she added a nip of brandy to her evening cup of tea with milk. The brandy she now kept under lock and key.