The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men

by Stephen Jones

  Gary couldn’t see the name catching on. For, although nocturnal livestock losses had been reported by farmers, no humans had yet been attacked in this series of sightings, and, in any case, the cats had been spotted throughout the region from Brighouse to Warrington, Blackburn to Wilmslow. For the rest of the journey he looked out of the window at the changing landscape: more space opened out between the clusters of houses, and the moors loomed sullen as stormclouds.

  The first creative writing class took place four days later. In that time Gary had found a flat and moved in, sampled a few local pubs but found them a bit slow (he would find out where the students went drinking), and been for an enjoyable but unproductive walk on the moors. His flat had a cylinder gas fire, the smell of which reminded him of the newsagent’s where he’d worked for a spell after giving up his paper round. He thought about travelling across the city to see if the shop was still standing, but decided it could wait.

  One of the reasons Gary had been surprised to get the job was because of his lack of experience. He’d worked on and off with local schools in the East End, though more off than on, and taught English as a foreign language to diplomats’ sons in Kensington for six months. His natural approach was more laidback and informal than had been appropriate – “The principal is a little concerned about your earring,” one of the suits had informed him – for the tutelage of young Kuwaiti gentlemen in W8, but he still spent half an hour trying on clothes before the first creative writing seminar, finally settling on a pair of baggy black trousers, white T-shirt and check overshirt. “How do I look?” he asked his mirror. Young, free and desperate.

  He gave the students five minutes in which to arrive before him then rolled in, looking back through the closing door as if to wave goodbye to someone in the corridor, affecting an air of distraction and nonchalance and thinking it was all quite pathetic.

  “Hi,” he said, brushing his floppy blond fringe out of his eyes. “Everyone here?”

  A boy and a girl who sat close to each other like a couple looked around at the others, one guy looked at them, another looked straight at Gary and a girl in a big bobbly blue jumper stared over his shoulder straight out the window. Five of them. Good, there had been talk of a sixth, but he’d only been able to get hold of five copies of Geoff Dyer’s The Search which he was going to send them all away with to read at the end of the seminar. For the time being the books were in his bag which he placed on the floor by his chair. Everyone sat around a big desk; Gary’s seat was on the far side from the door, just by the window.

  “OK,” he said, trying to hide his nerves because he already sensed a slight atmosphere, “Let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Gary . . .”

  The couple were Jim and Vicky, both had long blond hair and a sort of spacey aura; the guy next to them was Thom, who looked dauntingly serious with his Malcolm X specs and goatee beard – “That’s Thom with an H, as in Thom Gunn”; the boy who’d been looking straight at Gary introduced himself as Con, he had a prominent brow, soft grey eyes and pretty much the same clothes on as Gary; and finally Catriona, bluey-green jumper, greeny-blue eyes, nice-looking girl. Gary clapped his hands and rubbed them together without realizing how stupid it made him look until he’d been doing it for four or five seconds.

  “So, let’s talk about writing,” he said, thinking about anything but, as he looked at Catriona. “Catriona, what have you written or what do you want to write? Why are you here? What made you apply for the course? I’ll shut up now,” he added.

  How old was she, he wondered as she murmured something about short stories he didn’t quite catch. Twenty-three, twenty-four? If that. She’d had a couple of stories published, but really wanted to write poetry. Jim and Vicky were interested in drama and wanted to do a Mike Leigh-type thing with the college dramatic society: lots of improvisation, not much writing. Con had sold one or two pieces to literary journals but had found his favourite science fiction magazine a tough nut to crack, indeed, so far, “cast-iron walnut”; and Thom had written a novel which took as its subject the very act of creation, the process of novel writing, much as Dyer had in the book Gary had brought for them all to read. The difference being that Dyer’s novel was published, and Thom’s more than likely was a crock.

  He told them a little about what he’d written, so they wouldn’t think they’d been landed with a total loser, then took out the Dyers and asked them all to read it before the next seminar. “I know this is supposed to be about writing rather than reading,” he said, “but it’s very short and it’s the only thing I’ll ask you to read that isn’t by a member of the group. See you all on Thursday.”

  Was it his imagination or did Catriona seem to take slightly longer than the others to pack up so that she was the last one in the room with him? He had to bite his tongue, which wanted to ask her to go for a drink. It would be stupid, especially right at the beginning.

  Then she lifted her head and used her whole arm to sweep her long, thick hair out of her face. “I read one of your books,” she said.

  Shocked, Gary couldn’t think what to say.

  “The one about the murders in the Bengali community.”

  “Really?” Gary asked. His fourth novel, it featured a racist villain brought to justice by Gary’s unnamed private eye hero who learned a few things about his own prejudices during the course of the hunt.

  “Good on racism but the sexual politics were a bit out of date, weren’t they?”

  Gary was intrigued. “You mean because he’s always on the look-out?”

  “He screws around.”

  “If he gets a chance, yeah,” Gary said. “It doesn’t make him that unusual.”

  “See you on Thursday,” she said and she was gone, slipped through the door before he had a chance to come back at her.

  For the next couple of days Gary hung around the students’ union, strolled – in sub-zero temperatures – through the campus to the halls of residence, and generally came on like a “sad fuck”, Estelle’s choice of words and she was a fine one to talk. In the union bar he spotted Jim and Vicky all over each other in the corner and later, grabbing lunch in the refectory, he passed Thom who had the Dyer novel propped up against his sugar bowl. He hesitated a moment too long and Thom looked up, offered the facing seat to Gary who couldn’t really say no.

  “It’s a bit transparent,” Thom said of the novel. “It’s like, you can see the skeleton through the skin of the prose, you know.”

  Like, when are you due back on the mother ship, Thom? Only Gary didn’t say it; he nodded, stroked his chin, wondered why he couldn’t have bumped into Catriona instead.

  That evening, waiting for a bus to head back to his flat in town, Gary stamped his feet on the frosty pavement to keep warm. His breath froze in the air like the little clouds on the weather map; he tightened his scarf. On his own at the stop, he looked up the empty road and suddenly, for no reason other than something picked up by his sixth sense, he felt as if he wasn’t alone. He was scared to look behind at the chain-link fence and the patch of scrubland beyond it. The halls were 300 yards away, mere furniture draped in dust-sheets of fog.

  A smell was gathering around him in the freezing air, a hot, meaty smell that made his scalp prickle and his stomach lift. White shreds of frosted breath drifted between his legs which threatened to give way beneath him. Then he heard a muted sound and the smell was gone, quick as a jogger’s sweaty draught. He listened for any sound but could hear only the bus approaching, poking shaky white rods of light into the damp gloom. He jumped on board with relief, and, as he sat down upstairs, rubbed clear a circle on his window to see if he could spot anything between the scrub and the halls. But it was too dark and misty. As the bus rumbled towards town he wondered if he should report his experience in case of danger to the students, but decided against it because he didn’t wish to appear foolish: new kid in town is taken in by press hysteria and imagines big cat on campus, that sort of thing.

  During the night, however, an anim
al, something “very large and very strong”, killed three sheep belonging to a farmer whose land abutted the campus. Gary listened to the story on the local radio news as he got dressed, hopping about trying to keep his balance in front of the sputtering gas fire. He would know better next time, and he was relieved it had only attacked sheep. He tried to imagine how he would have felt if it had gone for any of the students. Then he felt sick as he realized how vulnerable he had been himself.

  They talked about it in the seminar. Apart from Thom they were all quite excited by the reports. Thom just wanted to talk about the Dyer. “We will, Thom, in a minute, but shouldn’t writers respond to events like this?” He held back from telling them about his own brush with the beast.

  Jim and Vicky constantly shook their long manes of hair out of their faces and said it was cool that there was a lion roaming around campus.

  “They didn’t say it was on campus,” said Catriona, looking slightly concerned. “There’s a fence at the edge of the farm land. It could be contained on the farmer’s territory.”

  Con scoffed at that and immediately apologized as Catriona shot him a look.

  “They didn’t say it was a lion either,” Thom said, with an air of superiority. “Previous eye-witnesses described what sounded like a black panther.”

  “Melanistic leopard,” Catriona corrected him, concerned, Gary thought, more with undermining Thom than with pedantry about the animal’s identification. He hoped the group were going to get on. Although, Gary thought, some tension could spark off creativity and might make it easier for them to criticize each other’s work. Thom was holding up his copy of Dyer’s novel. Gary took the hint.

  “Thom’s right: we should be discussing the novel I asked you to read.” Gary pulled his chair forward. “But Cat raised an important point . . .” – he used the abbreviated name self-consciously having seen that she’d written it on the front of her notebook. “We can choose, when we write, to use formal, precise language like melanistic leopard, or we can use more everyday forms like black panther. Chances are, more people will know what you mean if you say black panther. But if we persist in using the familiar, the correct terms become so rarely heard that they slip out of usage and language dies a little.”

  They nodded and he felt pleased, as if he’d actually got them on his side as a group. “Let’s talk about the book,” he said, brushing his hair out of his eyes, aware that Catriona was looking at him intently from behind her own blonde curtain. She wasn’t just cute, Catriona – he thought to himself as he pressed on with discussion of the novel – she was deep as well. Something serious going on behind those eyes.

  He packed up quickly at the end of the seminar, hoping to catch up with Catriona in the corridor. He could hear the voices of Thom and Jim as they faded away down the hall arguing some point raised by the discussion. He stood just behind the door, bag packed, giving it another moment before heading out, and of course when he did turn into the corridor he stopped short: Catriona was ten yards away looking at the noticeboard.

  “You never know what you’ll find,” she said as he approached her. “Sometimes I think I should move out of hall and get a room in town.”

  “I think I might go for a drink,” Gary said, scanning the notices. “Do you fancy one?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, taking a packet of Silk Cut out of her multicoloured patchwork bag and slipping one between her lips. She lit up using a bright pink Bic lighter and took a long drag, blowing the smoke towards the floor. “But a few of us are going to the union bar later. Why don’t you come along?”

  “I might do that,” he said, furiously calculating the odds against this being a veiled come-on. Whatever, it was definitely worth turning up at the union bar.

  “About half six,” she said, swinging her shoulder away from the wall and looking back at him briefly as she padded down the polished corridor in her green Dr Marten’s and fake fur coat.

  Entering the union bar Gary stamped his feet to get warm and brushed the season’s first snow off the arms of his leather jacket. There was a hum of activity, rugby players with turned-up collars and ruddy cheeks leaving the bar laden with pint after pint, an old Christmas single on the juke box. As he advanced slowly he looked around for Catriona, his eyes trailing over the main seating area, then he stood stock still, a gallon of ice water sloshing in his belly. He turned suddenly hot, as if standing next to a raging furnace. A pack of animals sprawled in the middle of the bar, legs playfully swiping at bewhiskered heads, incisors flashing. Gary blinked, feeling something loosen in his stomach, and Catriona was beckoning to him. “Over here,” she seemed to be saying. The vision had vanished, replaced by a shifting sea of mohair jumpers, dreadlocks, straggly beards, cigarettes, and Catriona shaking her hair back, waving at Gary. She was sitting next to a scruffy boy in a khaki jacket who had his hand on her arm. Gary rubbed his eyes, shook his head and picked his way through the crowd towards her group.

  He offered to buy a round but no one was drinking. Catriona disengaged herself from the scruffy boy, who snarled and turned his back on her, and she touched Gary’s elbow. “We’re going on somewhere,” she said. The others were laughing at something Gary hadn’t understood. They looked at him at one point and laughed. He turned to Catriona for support; she was suppressing a grin. The vision had cleared in a second but its effect stuck around. He was confused, out of his depth. Someone used the word “Granddad” and he knew he was being paranoid. Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody” came on the juke box and he worked out that although he clearly remembered dancing around the lounge to the sound of what was still the best Christmas record ever, probably none of Catriona’s friends had been born when it was first released. If they’d heard of Slade at all it would be as slightly disappointing heavy rockers.

  “Cool record,” he heard one of them say and wondered if he was taking the piss. Gary started to think that he should leave, get out before he did something he’d regret later, but Catriona gave him a look and a smile as she took out another Silk Cut. He stayed. They smoked so much these days. Maybe young people always had done, but they seemed different to how he’d been at their age. More Suede than Slade.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” he asked Catriona. “I’m going to the bar. If you want anything . . .”

  She shook her head slowly and he got himself a pint, cradling it in his left hand while his right was splayed on the seat only a hair’s breadth from Catriona’s left hand. She wore a couple of ornate silver rings with complicated designs.

  She turned to look at him from under her fringe. “We’re going to a club,” she said. “That’s why we’re not drinking.”

  “You’ll be drinking there?”

  “Drinking’s not cool, Teach,” she teased him, touching his hand with a soft finger.

  “So where’s this club then? The Hacienda, is it? I’ve heard of that. Do you know who Joy Division were?”

  She stroked his hand and smiled. “You can’t drink and take Es,” she said. “You’d flip out, you could die.”

  He looked at his pint, his head swimming, tummy tying itself in knots with desire, frustration – she let go of his hand, puffed on her cigarette, shook her hair back. He glimpsed a soft nest of tiny curls behind her ear.

  “What about tomorrow?” he asked her. “We could do something tomorrow.”

  “Breakfast?” she joked.

  But it turned out she hadn’t been joking.

  Gary was turning in his bed, dreaming of a log cabin deep in the woods. The trees were huge firs which made him think it was Canada. He had a cold, but every time he took a tissue from the box to blow his nose it turned into a set of tiny antlers and he threw them down in disgust. Every sound was the approach of wild moose but when he turned to the iced-over window all he could see was snow and tree trunks. Something scratched at the door. He retreated into his bed, pulling the thin blankets over his head, but the scratching continued. He knew he mustn’t open the door whatever
happened. His life depended on it. So as he rose from the bed, powerless to prevent his feet heading for the door, he felt dread spreading through him like a bloodstain on a sheet.

  “Who is it?” he asked sleepily, rubbing his eyes, having realized what was going on and got up.

  There was renewed scratching but no one spoke. Gary opened the door a fraction and a weight on the other side pushed it out of his hand. A large dark furry ball unrolled on to the carpet, head lolling, and Gary jumped half out of his skin. The image blurred before his eyes before he recognized Catriona’s thick coat. He got down on his hands and knees to support her.

  “Hi,” she said thickly. “Breakfast?” The effort of speaking knocked her out again and Gary picked her up carefully and carried her over to his bed. He unlaced her boots and removed her fur coat before tucking his quilt up to her chin and gently brushing the hair away from her forehead.

  After showering and getting dressed he sat with her while he had his breakfast. It seemed better to let her sleep. When he came back up to the flat from fetching a paper she had turned on to her side and curled up. She had a light dusting of perspiration just below her hairline but she looked peaceful. Outside it had been snowing all night and it was at least three inches thick on the ground. There was a class scheduled for after lunch; he didn’t know if they would make it to the campus. It might be better to try to contact the other students and cancel it. He realized with a start that Catriona had woken up and was watching him as he stared out of the window at the gusting flurries of snow.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. “Did you have a bad trip?” They probably didn’t call it that but it didn’t seem to matter any more: she lifted up the edge of the quilt high enough for him to get in.

  Around one o’clock he realized he’d done nothing about cancelling the class.