by Tom Holt
Dear old Bowden Allshapes deceased, may he rest in peace. Duncan pulled out the third file from the bottom, the one containing his twenty-seven attempts at drawing up estate accounts. A fine coup, he decided, on his first day as a partner, to clear up this trifling spot of unfinished business and whack in an eye-watering final bill for the first scrap of meat he’d personally brought to the communal feast. He flicked open the file and took out a computer printout. Today’s date; efficient. The most recent entry was a debit for £4,337.97. He checked the correspondence. Sure enough, the top sheet was a bill: Messrs Craven Ettin & Trowell, final account to date of transfer of file: £4,337.97. He grinned. Credit where it was due; when it came to gouging the punters, Jenny Sidmouth sometimes displayed a reckless arrogance that was beautiful to watch.
The accounts. He took a sheet of A4 and a biro, drew his centre line, his sun and his moon, and set to work. Amazing, the difference; rather like the contrast between a fish in water and a man wading through waist-high slurry. He dived, gambolled and spun in the flow of the figures, and the mistakes fled before him, their cover blown, their pathetic attempts at deception laughable. When he’d made the last entries and drawn his bottom lines, he began to add - first the left side, then the right.
For a breathless second, he thought it was going to balance. Almost; very nearly. The discrepancy was a trivial 43p. You couldn’t buy a second of a solicitor’s time for that. He grinned so widely that his face nearly came unzipped. Just once more, to check; he did the sums.
Discrepancy £7,973.34.
Oh.
Panic grabbed him. Had it worn off? Was he going to have to go back to being a stone-deaf, puny, fragile, unable-to-smell human again? That would be more than he could bear. He had to find out. He held his breath and listened; and down in the street, someone sneezed. Joy.
Encouraged to hope, he stood up, crossed to the far wall and took down a framed print of some miserable-looking dead judge or other, the sort that seem to grow on lawyers’ office walls like honey-fungus on rotten trees. He smashed the glass against the edge of the desk, picked out a jagged shard and ran it across the palm of his hand. It tickled a bit. No blood.
Relief surged over him like car-wash suds. He was still a werewolf. He went back to his desk and added the figures up for the third time. The discrepancy had shrunk to £677.31.
He sat at his computer and wrote a letter:
Dear Ms Allshapes,
I acknowledge receipt of the files in this matter, which will receive my full attention at the earliest possible opportunity.
Yours sincerely -
Some things, apparently, don’t change just because you stop being human. Duncan shrugged. Maybe it was just as well. His life would be that little bit emptier, he decided, without Bowden Allshapes deceased. There has to be a challenge, an impossible dream, or we stop trying.
Just for fun and something to do, he added the figures a fourth, fifth and sixth time; then he screwed up the sheet of paper, ate it and started again from scratch.
He was running, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, through a misty forest of tall grey pines. His nose was full of the intoxicating scent of the prey: delicious, unfamiliar, so rich and strange that it made every nerve in his body hum and tingle with the desire to catch, kill, eat. The scent was like a filament of burning gold; it was silk and chocolate and Beethoven, and no more than a minute old. He was running impossibly fast (he could feel his lungs bursting) but not fast enough. He needed more strength. He found it.
A great leap over a trackway in a ride, flooded with stagnant water. The shock of landing squeezed air out of him like water from a sponge. He forced his back and hind legs to kick back against the mat of rotting pine-needles. Faster now. Fast enough?
The scent was almost strong enough to choke him as he flew over the trunk of a fallen tree, landed, recovered his stride. He could feel the weight of his lolling tongue.
He saw movement. Up ahead, a flash of white between the trees, moving. He arched his back and lengthened his stride. He knew he was running well, fast even for one of his kind; he also knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for more than a minute, ninety seconds at most. He was burning too much energy, putting too much strain on his joints and tendons. No stamina; he’d have to do something about that. Meanwhile, the prey—
He saw it. Only for a quarter of a second, the time it took to cross a ride. It was about the size of a small horse, slender and fine-boned, with a coat improbably white for a natural creature, and in the centre of its forehead stood a single slim golden horn.
Ah, he thought, as his mind filled with love and hunger. We meet at last, Bowden Allshapes.
Then it was gone, but the scent was still there. Incredibly, he found a little more speed from somewhere and drove himself on; he knew he was damaging himself, that a professional predator can’t afford to carry an injury, no matter how slight, but this wasn’t about feeding any more. It was love at first sight, the obsessive love of the hunter for his prey, an overwhelming desire to reduce the fugitive thing into possession. Closing his mind to the pain and the warnings, he forced himself to maintain the pace. Run yourself to death rather than give up; that’s what love’s all about, isn’t it?
A blinding sparkle up ahead, so bright it blinded him (which is also love; blind in perpetual light instead of darkness). For a moment he almost believed it was the glow of the prey’s white coat. Instead, it was the sun reflected on the face of a broad river.
His strength left him, like a bird escaping from a cage, and he tumbled to a halt on the very edge of the river. No sign of the quarry. The scent ended at his feet, and the rushing of the river water over its stony bed drowned out all other sound. He lifted his head and, with the last dregs of his strength, prepared to howl, as a spasm rocked him—
‘I said wake up, for crying out loud.’
Luke was shaking him by the shoulder. ‘Woof?’ Duncan asked; then, realising the question was rather vaguely phrased, added, ‘What time is it?’
‘Five to six. Come on.’
Pressed between his elbows and the desk was a sheet of A3 paper, densely covered in scribbles. He remembered: his sixteenth (or was it seventeenth?) attempt at balancing the Allshapes estate accounts. There had come a point when he’d had to close his eyes just for a second or two, to rest them. That had been two hours ago.
‘Fell asleep,’ he explained. ‘It’s these accounts. Can’t quite figure out where the problem is.’
Luke didn’t seem interested. ‘Come on, if you’re coming,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, we’re going without you.’
The thought of being left behind (from what? Something had been scheduled for six o’clock, but he couldn’t remember what it was) panicked him, like vertigo. ‘I’m coming,’ he yelped, stumbling to his feet. Werewolves get pins and needles just as badly as humans do. Possibly worse.
Luke led the way down the corridor, going left down a turning that Duncan hadn’t noticed before. It led to what Duncan deduced must be the service lift; a battered old grey steel door with a panel of plastic buttons on the wall beside it. The others were gathered there. When they saw Luke, they stopped talking immediately, as though someone had hit the mute control.
‘We all fit?’ Luke called out.
The door slid open. No brushed chrome or mirrors in this lift. It opened onto an underground car park, in which there were no cars.
‘Fifty laps to warm up,’ Luke said. ‘Ready? Go.’
Fifty laps? Duncan opened his mouth to protest, but the others were already running. He didn’t seem to have any choice. He ran after them.
- Game of soldiers, he gasped to himself as they passed the lift door for the fifth time. He felt shattered; his chest was heaving and his throat burned. ‘- The fuck are we running for, anyway?’ he mumbled. But Pete, directly in front of him, gave no indication that he’d heard.
Then he remembered. Silly mistake to have made, actually. Of course; he wasn’t human Duncan Hughes any more, th
e pathetic sedentary blob who couldn’t have run ten yards if all the bulls in Pamplona were after him. He explained it to his lungs; they understood perfectly and stopped hurting.
I could get to like this, he thought.
Indeed. The hearing had been pretty good, likewise the sense of smell. Being able to do a day’s work in a matter of minutes had a lot going for it, and he wasn’t exactly turning his nose up at invulnerability, either. But if he had to choose just one of the strange and wonderful transformations he’d experienced today, it’d probably have to be this. For more years than he could remember, Duncan (shallow and unregenerate creature that he was) had dearly wanted to own a Ferrari. Nuts to that, he realised. Why settle for owning one when you can be one?
And oh, the difference. It was nothing at all like running as a human. As he indulged his legs in bliss, a small, objective part of his mind paused to analyse. Not rocket science; simply a matter of evolution and instinct. Humans run to get away from danger. We chase.
Which made him realise what was missing, the one ingredient that kept this experience from being quite perfect. He was chasing Pete, he supposed, in the sense that he was following him, but that wasn’t the same thing at all; like going to the pictures with your sister instead of your girlfriend. Once he’d figured that out, of course, it spoiled the whole thing. What the hell was the point of running round and round a car park, with nothing to run after?
‘OK.’ Luke was slowing down. ‘That’s fifty.’ He wasn’t even breathing hard. ‘Now then, where do we fancy going tonight? Don’t know about you lot, but I’m getting a bit sick of St James’s Park.’
There blossomed in Duncan’s mind the image of six men in business suits and shiny black shoes yomping grimly through the dark greensward, terrorising the sleepy ducks. Someone was sure to notice; and anyway, didn’t they shut the gates? It was bound to be against the law. Most things were, these days. On the other hand, he had a feeling that the Ferris Gang probably wouldn’t be too fussed about breaking laws. Werewolves and lawyers: all the bases covered, when you thought about it.
‘How about Richmond?’ Clive asked hopefully. ‘It’s been ages, and you said we’d probably be all right to go back there once things settled down again.’
Luke shook his head. ‘They’re still running extra patrols,’ he said. ‘I checked. Apparently the RSPCA gave them a hard time, so we’d better stay clear of there for now.’
‘Hampstead,’ Micky said. ‘We’d have to take out the CCTV cameras on the way in, but that’s a piece of cake - you just bite through the cable.’
A popular suggestion, but Luke shook his head again. ‘I thought we’d save that for later in the month.’
‘There’s always Wimbledon,’ Kevin said. ‘There’s usually masses about round there. And my aunt Carol says they’ve got these new recycling bins with lids that don’t shut properly. Bringing ’em in from miles around, apparently. And rats.’
A look of disdain from Luke. ‘Well, that’s fine if being a terrier’s the limit of your ambition. Personally, I like to think we can aspire to better things.’
‘They move fast, though,’ Kevin said wistfully, ‘specially if you get them cornered in among the bins or something. Besides, where there’s rats, there’s always—’
‘No.’ His master’s voice, Duncan couldn’t help thinking. That little extra touch of firmness, and Kevin subsided immediately, as if the gas under him had just been turned down. ‘No more cats, not after Putney. Call me a shrinking violet, but I don’t particularly enjoy reading about myself in the papers. No,’ he went on, ‘I was thinking of Chiswick.’
Silence. Then Pete said, ‘That’s a thought.’
‘Quite.’ Luke grinned smugly. ‘One of the best preserves north of the river. All those yuppies, chucking out their past-its-use-by-date Ardennes pâté; and if we’re lucky and find them in the right place, there’s that cracking run along the river. The only problem’s if they go to ground up by the Fullers brewery, but—’
Some of the terminology was beginning to ring bells, but Duncan wanted to be sure. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Are you talking about, well, hunting?’
Luke’s eyebrows raised. ‘Yes.’
‘Hunting what?’
Luke frowned, but the others laughed. ‘Foxes, what d’you think?’ Pete said. ‘They’re an absolute godsend, urban foxes. Don’t know what we’d do without them.’
‘But that’s illegal,’ Duncan pointed out.
The laughter was mostly kind. ‘Only if you use hounds,’ Luke replied. ‘And why on earth would we want to do that? It’d be like barking yourself and having a dog, if you see what I mean.’
‘Oh,’ Duncan said, and he thought: Richmond Park, deer, no wonder they can’t go back there again in a hurry. And no more cats. No more cats—
‘Don’t tell me,’ Micky said, ‘you’ve got ethical issues. In which case—’
‘No, of course not,’ Duncan heard himself say; and, just for once, he agreed with himself. The unicorn dream was still there, deleted from his conscious mind but still present in his mental Recycle Bin. Even now he could just about catch a faint flavour of that scent, and the desperate need to run. A great longing came over him to recapture that feeling for real, not just in a dream. Maybe that was what was really meant by the pursuit of happiness. Happiness that stands still and lets you take it probably isn’t worth having. If it’s going to mean anything, you’ve got to chase it first. ‘I just thought, if we got caught, we’d be in all sorts of trouble—’
Laughter, not kind. ‘It’s all right,’ he heard Luke saying. ‘It’s his first day. He’ll be settled in fine by the weekend.’
Stamina was clearly going to be a problem. According to Luke, Victoria Embankment to Chiswick along the banks of the Thames was a nice brisk little jog, just right for warming up before the fun started. By the time they eventually got there and stopped, however, Duncan was unmistakably out of breath. But there were worse things than puffing a little, and the run had been wonderful; as though he’d been cooped up in a confined space for thirty-odd years, and this had been his first opportunity to stretch his legs a little.
‘Right,’ Luke was saying. ‘We’ve got Chiswick House behind us over there, so watch out they don’t double back; and it’d be better if we stay clear of Kew tonight - we don’t want the Osterley mob getting uptight with us for poaching. Otherwise—’
‘Just a second,’ Duncan interrupted. ‘What Osterley mob?’
Broad grin. ‘Oh come on, Duncan,’ Luke said. ‘You don’t imagine we’re the only pack in Greater London, do you? No, we’ve got our territory, we respect other people’s boundaries and they respect ours. Besides, the Osterley boys are all right, for dentists.’ He shook himself and clapped his hands. ‘Too bloody cold for standing about,’ he said, ‘so I suggest we wind up the debating society and get down to business.’
Instantaneously and simultaneously, like well-drilled soldiers on parade standing to attention, all five of the Ferris Gang lifted their heads and sniffed. Pathetically inadequate word for what they were doing. Nostrils flared, eyes half-closed, they sampled the air like wine-tasters, turning their heads slowly like searchlights, drawing the delicately flavoured air smoothly and evenly down into their lungs. Duncan tried his best to follow suit. There was obviously a knack to it that didn’t come entirely by light of nature. In spite of his inexperience, however, he was stunned by the tidal wave of information that broke over him as he inhaled. Why the hell, he wondered, do people muck around smoking grass or hash, when you can get so unbelievably high on just plain ordinary air? In a split second he became aware of every living creature that had passed that way during the last forty-eight hours: species, gender, size, age, weight, and all superimposed, like seeing an entire movie in one frozen image.
One of the scents was unfamiliar but extremely strong; not only that, it was scrummy. It was Stilton cheese, the Stones, the feel of sandpaper on the skin and a sort of garish rusty purple. He wanted it,
very badly.
‘I think he can smell it too,’ Micky said.
The others were looking at him, smirking, and Duncan felt like a toddler observed doing something unbearably quaint. ‘That smell,’ he said. ‘Is it—?’
‘Dog fox,’ Luke said. ‘About six hundred yards south-east, elderly with a touch of mange, twenty minutes ago. Not in the peak of condition, so it should be a nice, easy run. Ideal for a beginner, in fact. Mr Hughes,’ he added, with a slight bow. ‘Would you care to do the honours?’
No second invitation required. Duncan found himself breaking into a trot, which quickly flowered into a fast, almost desperate run. From time to time stuff got in his way - walls, gates, fences - but he hurdled them without thinking. Every last scrap of his attention was fixed on the golden filament of scent and he had to follow it, almost as though it was a thin but strong wire looped round his neck.
Over a low wall, through a bit of a shrubbery; each step he took made the scent stronger. He was dimly aware that the others were just behind him. He could sense them holding back, to allow him to go first. He wasn’t sure whether he should resent that or feel grateful, but it didn’t matter in any case. The scent drew him on, whether he wanted to follow it or not. Three years of law school, he thought, two years articles, and here I am, being cruel to animals with the Ferris Gang. But the thought was synthetic. This was right.
He vaulted a garden wall and landed in a cold frame. Glass shattered around his ankles, but he knew it couldn’t cut him. A dog barked somewhere - bloody hell, he said to himself, I can understand what it’s saying. The wonder was diluted a little when he realised that all it was saying was ‘Intruder alert! Intruder alert!’ like the ship’s computer in a sci-fi movie. Nevertheless.
The scent tugged impatiently as he scrambled over a flimsy featherboard fence and waded through a tangle of knee-high flowers. They erupted scent as his shoe soles bruised them, but he couldn’t stop to savour the explosion. Another dog had started barking; a bitch this time, and as far as he could gather it was making improper suggestions. He shoulder-charged a rickety trellis, cleared yet another fence, and found himself in the open. The moon gleamed silver on the sinuous curve of steel rails. They reminded him of the river in his dream.