The werewolf ran forward, its claws brushing the ground, then stopped when it reached a point that was just a few feet from the terrified boy. The grotesque head went back, the jaws slowly parted to reveal sharp, pointed teeth, then a low growl rose to a full-throated roar.
Alan screamed.
“No . . . no . . . I’m your friend! Don’t you know me?”
The roar died away, and the monster became still, a dark, menacing figure that gave the impression it might explode into lethal activity at any moment. Then it shuffled forward, lowered its head – and sniffed. Alan shuddered when the long snout travelled up his left arm, across his chest and finally muzzled his right ear.
Then the werewolf whined.
A dog that wishes to be patted, fed or taken for a walk, might have made some such sound. It could also have come from any unhappy creature, who, through no fault of its own, has been cursed with the stigma of a monster. Alan’s fear drained away and was replaced by a warm flood of pity. His friend – the gentle, kindly man with the sad eyes – was imprisoned in that hideous form, pleading for understanding – forgiveness – a morsel of affection.
Alan was about to lay his hand on that unlovely head – when there came the sound of a rifle shot. A single, muffled report that came from the ridge. The werewolf jerked upright, gave one terrible cry of despair, then went bounding across the valley and disappeared behind Manstead Tor.
Alan was crying when Charlie Brinkley and Mr Ferrier reached him. His father put an arm round his shoulders and said:
“Thank God you’re all right, son. When I saw that awful creature so close to you . . .”
“I got him!” Charlie Brinkley-interrupted, his voice trembling with excitement. “Right between the shoulders. He won’t last long. Biggest dog I ever saw . . . and did you see? It stood up on its hindlegs! You’ll tell those nincompoops down in the Grape and Barleycorn, won’t you? It stood upright!”
“I think,” Mr Ferrier said, leading his young son away, “the least we say about this night’s work the better. I would rather not believe what I saw.”
But Alan could only repeat over and over again: “He couldn’t help being a werewolf. He wouldn’t have harmed me.”
It was two days before Alan was allowed to go out on his own, for the doctor said he was suffering from shock and needed time to recover.
When he reached High Burrow he found it sleeping under a benign sky, with moths fluttering among the hare-bells in the overgrown garden and the wind breathing through the grass, and knew that tranquillity had returned to this once happy homestead.
He walked slowly down the stone steps and directed the beam of his torch round the desolate cellar. The man who had been a werewolf lay on the bed. He was dead – but on his face was the most beautiful smile that Alan had ever seen.
Presently he covered the body with a blanket, then remounted the steps.
He never went back.
Michael Marshall Smith
RAIN FALLS
Michael Marshall Smith’s first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick Awards, and his next two — Spares and One of Us – were both optioned by major Hollywood studios. His Straw Men books, written under the name “Michael Marshall”, were Sunday Times and international best-sellers, and his most recent thriller – The Intruders – is currently under series development with the BBC. 2008 saw the publication of a short novel The Servants under a further name, “M.M. Smith”. He has also worked extensively as a screenwriter for clients in London and Hollywood, both individually and as a partner in Smith & Jones Productions. He lives in North London with his wife, a son, and two cats.
The writer reveals that the idea for the following story “leapt full-grown into my head while spending an evening in a certain pub in London’s Camden district. Though the atmosphere was not as described, there was a group of lads milling about the pub, and one in particular who had an awful fascination about him. I was glad I had a story to think about, a) because I was stuck at the end of a table out of hearing distance from the people I was with, and b) because the only people I could hear were a couple sitting opposite. It sounded as if they’d met through a Time Out ad, and they spent nearly three hours talking about Astrology in terms of the most tragic conviction. Sadly, the guy blew it by drinking too much, but on the other hand the woman never took her jacket off the entire evening, so he was probably onto a loser anyway. The story about the narrator getting his nose broken is completely accurate.”
I saw what happened. I don’t know if anyone else did. Probably not, which worries me. I just happened to see, to be looking in the right directions at the right times. Or the wrong times. But I saw what happened.
I was sitting at one of the tables in The Porcupine, up on the raised level. The Porcupine is a pub on Camden High Street, right on the corner where the smaller of the three markets hangs its hat. At least, there is a pub there, and that’s the one I was sitting in. It’s not actually called The Porcupine. I’ve just always called it that for some reason, and I can never remember what its real name is.
On a Saturday night the pub is always crowded with people who’ve stopped off on the way to the subway after spending the afternoon trawling round the markets. You have to get there very early to score one of the tables up on the raised level: either that or sit and watch like a hawk for when one becomes free. It’s an area about ten feet square, with a wooden rail around it, and the windows look out onto the High Street. It’s a good place to sit and watch the passing throng, and the couple of feet of elevation gives an impression of looking out over the interior of the pub too.
I didn’t get to the pub until about eight o’clock, and when I arrived there wasn’t a seat anywhere, never mind on the upper level. The floor was crowded with the usual disparate strands of local colour, talking fast and loud. For some reason I always think of them as beatniks, a word which is past its use-by date by about twenty years. I guess it’s because the people who hang out in Camden always seem like throwbacks to me. I can’t really believe in counter-culture in the ‘90s: not when you know they’ll all end up washing their hair some day, and trading the beaten-up Volkswagen for a nice new Ford Sierra.
I angled my way up to the bar and waited for one of the Australians behind it to see me. As I waved some money diffidently around, hoping to catch someone’s eye, I flinched at the sound of a sudden shout from behind me.
“Ere, you! Been putting speed in this then ‘ave you?”
I half-turned to see that the man standing behind me was shouting at someone behind the bar, gesticulating with a bottle of beer. He was tall, had very short hair and a large ring in his ear, and spoke – or bawled – with a Newcastle accent of compact brutality.
My face hurriedly bland, I turned back to the bar. A ginger-haired bar person was smiling uncertainly at the man with the earring, unsure of how seriously to take the question. The man laughed violently, nudged his mate hard enough to spill his beer, and then shouted again.
“You ‘ave, mate. There’s drugs in this.”
I assume it was some kind of joke relating to how drunk the man felt, but neither I nor the barman were sure. Then a barmaid saw me waiting, and I concentrated on communicating to her my desire for a Budweiser, finding the right change, that sort of thing. When I’d paid I moved away from the bar, carefully skirting the group where the shouting man stood with three or four other men in their mid-twenties. They were all talking very loudly and grinning with vicious good humour, faces red and glistening in the warmth of the crowded pub.
A quick glance around showed that there was still nowhere to sit, so I shuffled my way through the crowd to stand by the long table which runs down the centre of the room. By standing in the middle of the pub, and only a few feet away from the steps to the raised area, I would be in a good position to see when a seat became available.
After ten minutes I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn’t just go home instead. I wasn’t due to be meeting anyone:
I’d spent the day at home working and just fancied being out of doors. I’d brought my current book and was hoping to sit and read for a while, surrounded by the buzz of a Saturday night. The Porcupine’s a good pub for that kind of thing. The clientele are quite interesting to watch, the atmosphere is generally good, and if you care to eavesdrop you can learn more about astrology in one evening than you would have believed there was to know.
That night it was different, and it was different because of the group of men standing by the bar. They weren’t alone, it seemed. Next to them stood another three, and another five were spread untidily along one side of the long table. They were completely unlike the kind of people you normally find in there, and they changed the feel of the pub. For a start they were all shouting, all at the same time, so that it was impossible to believe that any of them could actually be having a conversation. If they were all talking at the same time, how could they be? They didn’t look especially drunk, but relaxed in a hard and tense way. Most of all they looked dangerous.
There’s a lot of talk these days about violence to women, and so there should be. In my book, anyone who lays a hand on a woman is breaking the rules. It’s simply not done. On the other hand, anyone who gets to their twenties or thirties before they get thumped has had it pretty easy, violence-wise. It’s still wrong, but basically what I’m saying is: try being a man. Being a man involves getting hit quite a lot, from a very early age. If you’re a teenage girl the physical contact you get tends to be positive: hugs from friends and parents. No one hugs teenage boys. They hit them, fairly often, and quite hard.
Take me, for example. I’m a nice middle-class bloke, and I grew up in a comfortable suburb and went to a good school. It’s not like I grew up on an estate or anything. But I took my fair share of knocks, recreational violence that came and went in a meaningless second. I’ve got a small kink in my nose, for example, which came from it being broken one night. I was walking back from a pub with a couple of friends and three guys behind us simply decided they’d like to push us around. For them the evening clearly wouldn’t be complete without a bit of a fight.
We started walking more quickly, but that didn’t work. The guys behind us just walked faster. In the end I turned and tried to talk to them, idiot that I was at that age. I said we’d had a good evening and didn’t want any trouble. I pointed out that there was a policewoman on the other side of the street. I advanced the opinion that perhaps we could all go our separate ways without any unnecessary unpleasantness. Given that I was more than a little drunk, I think I was probably quite eloquent.
The nearest of them thumped me. He hit me very hard, right on the side of the nose. Suddenly losing faith in reason and the efficacy of a logical discussion, I turned to my friends, to discover that they were already about fifty yards up the road and gaining speed.
I turned to the guys in front of me again. Two of them were grinning, little tight smiles under sparkling eyes. The other was still standing a little closer to me, restlessly shifting his weight from foot to foot. His eyes were blank. I started to recap my previous argument, and he punched me again. I took a clumsy step backwards, in some pain, and he hit me again, a powerful and accurate belt to the cheekbone.
Then, for no evident reason, they drifted off. I turned to see that a police van was sitting at the corner of the road, but I don’t think that had made any difference. It was a good eighty yards away, and wasn’t coming any closer. My two friends were standing talking to a policeman who was leaning out of the passenger window. There was no sign that any action was going to be taken. There didn’t need to be. That’s what violence is like, in its most elemental, unnecessary form. It comes, and it goes, like laughter or a cold draught from under a door.
I trotted slowly up the road, and my friends turned and saw me with some relief. The policeman took one look, reached behind into the cab, and passed out a large roll of cotton wool. It was only then that I realized that the lower half of my face, and all of my sweatshirt, was covered in blood.
My face was a little swollen for a couple of days, and my nose never looked quite the same again. But my point is, it was no big deal. The matter-of-fact way in which the policeman handed me something to mop up with said it all. It wasn’t important. If you’re a man, that kind of thing is going to happen. You wipe your nose and get on.
And that’s why when a man walks into a pub, he takes a quick, unconscious look around. He’s looking to see if there’s any danger, and if so, where it’s likely to be located. Similarly, if a fight breaks out, a woman may want to watch, a little breathless with excitement, or she may want to charge fearlessly in and tell them all to stop being silly. Both reasonable reactions, but most men will want to turn the other way, to make themselves invisible. They know that violence isn’t a spectator sport: it has a way of reaching out and pulling you in. It won’t matter that you don’t know anyone involved, that you’re just sitting having a quiet drink. These things just happen. There’s generally a reason for violence against women. It’ll be a very bad reason, don’t get me wrong, but there’ll be a reason.
Amongst men violence may be just like an extreme, cold spasm of high spirits. There may not be any reason for it at all, and that’s why you have to be very, very careful.
The string of guys standing and sitting near the bar in The Porcupine were giving off exactly the kind of signals that you learn to watch out for. Something about the set of their faces, their restless glances and rabid good humour, said that unreason was at work. The one by the bar was still hollering incomprehensibly at the barman, who was still smiling uncertainly back. Another of the group was leaning across his mate to harangue a couple of nervous-looking girls sitting at a table up against the bar. One of them was wearing a tight sweater, and that’s probably all it had taken to kick-start the man’s hormones. The look on his face was probably meant to be endearing. It wasn’t.
After a couple of minutes the two girls gathered up their stuff and left, but I didn’t swoop over to their table. It was too close to the men. Just by being there, by getting too close to their aura, I could have suddenly found myself in trouble. That may sound paranoid, or cowardly: but I’ve seen it happen. I had every right to sit there, just as a woman has every right to dress the way she wants without attracting unwelcome attention. Rights are nice ideas, a comforting window through which to view the world. But once the glass is broken, you realize they were never really there.
So I remained standing by the long table, sipping my beer and covertly looking around. I couldn’t work out what they were doing here. One of them had a woolly hat, which was doing the rounds and getting more and more grubby and beer-stained. I thought it had the letters “FC” on the front somewhere, which would almost certainly stand for Football Club, but I couldn’t understand why or how a group of football supporters could have ended up in the Porcupine when it’s not near any of the major grounds. One of the groups linked arms to shout some song together at one point, but I couldn’t discern any of the words.
I was glancing across to the bar, to see how long the queues were and decide whether it was worth hanging round for another beer, when I saw the first thing. It was very unexceptional, but it’s one of the things I saw.
The door onto the main street had been propped open by the staff, presumably in a vain attempt to drop the temperature in the crowded room to something approaching bearable. As I swept the far end of the bar with my gaze, trying to judge the best place to stand if I wanted to get served that evening, a large grey dog came in through the door, and almost immediately disappeared into the throng. I noticed and remembered it because I was sort of expecting its owner to follow him in, but nobody came. I realized he or she must already be in the pub, and the dog had simply popped out for a while. The owner would have to be a he, I decided: no woman would want a dog like that. I only got a very quick sighting of it, but it was very large and slightly odd-looking, a shaggy hound that moved with a speed that was both surprising and someho
w oily.
At that moment I saw a couple who were sitting at a table in the raised area reach for their coats, and I forgot about the dog. The couple had been sitting at the best table in the pub, one which is right in the corner of the room, up against the big windows. I immediately started cutting through the mass of people towards it.
Once I’d staked the table out as my territory I went to the bar and bought another beer. It may have been my imagination but it looked to me as if the staff were very aware of the group of men too: though they were all busy, each glanced out into the body of the pub while I was there, keeping half an eye on the long table. I avoided the area completely and got myself served right at the top of the bar, next to the door.
I settled myself back down at the table, glad that the evening was getting on track. I glanced out of the window, though it was mid-evening by then, too late for much to be going on. A few couples strolled by outside in a desultory fashion, dressed with relentless trendiness. Some kind of altercation was taking place in the Kentucky Fried Chicken opposite, and a derelict with dreadlocks was picking through a bin on the pavement near the window. If I can get the window seat early enough I like to sit and watch, but the strong moonlight made the view looked distant somehow, unreal.
A fresh surge of noise made me turn away from the window and look out across the pub. One of the men had knocked over his beer, or had it knocked over. Those nearby were shouting and laughing. It didn’t look like much was going to come of it. I’d opened my book and was about to start reading when I noticed something else.
There was one more person in the party than there had been before. Now you’re probably going to think that I simply hadn’t registered him, but that’s not true. I’d looked at them hard and long. If I’d seen this man before, I would have remembered it. He was standing with the group nearest the steps which led up to the area where I was sitting. I say “standing with”, because there was something about him that set him apart slightly from the other men, though he was right in the middle of them, and had the cocky pub charisma of someone who’s used to respect amongst his peers. He was wearing jeans and a bulky grey jacket, typical sloppy casual, his dark hair was slightly waved, and his face came to a point in an aquiline nose. He exuded a sort of manic calm, as if it was the result of a bloodstream coursing with equal quantities of heroin and ecstasy, and he was listening to two of the other men with his mouth hanging slackly open, head tilted on one side. When there was another wave of noise from the other part of the group he raised his head slightly, the corners of his mouth creased in a half-smile of anticipation, keen to see what was going on, what new devilry was afoot. He was at home here. This is what he knew, what he was good at. This was where he lived.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 11