by Tammy Turner
From under the closed attic door, a wisp of gray smoke headed toward him. Sitting upright on his haunches, he whined and whimpered as the dirty, burning puff of air swirled around his face, sparks of fire twinkling in front of his eyes. His furiously wagging tail churned dust from the floor. A beam of sunlight strained through the single, grime-caked oval window on the wall behind him and illuminated the dirty tornado engulfing the beast.
With his eyes closed tight and his front paws steadying his stance, Cyrus relaxed on his back legs and let the taste of warm rabbit blood soak his inner cheeks and run satisfyingly down his tongue. Invisible fur and bone tickled his mouth and crunched in his fangs, as he threw down lumps of freshly boiled meat into his greedy belly until it refused to accept any more of the meal.
“Eat dat up, boy,” a familiar voice cackled in the wolf’s ears. “Eat, Cyrus, cus ya gonna need dat food in dat belly.” Jasmine’s dry laugh echoed in his ears as he savored the last bits of rabbit tumbling down his throat.
With his gut bloated and gorged, he heard her command. “Ya come on home now, Cyrus, cus me knowin dat girl gonna come after ya. There is somebody close by ya, Cyrus. Ya betta watch yaself, ya back, now ya hearin’ dat? Him close to ya. He gonna help ya git dat book back to Jasmine.”
A howl broke from the beast’s moist throat. Beneath his fur-draped flesh, broken and fractured bones knitted together, mending from the strength of the feast. With every breath of smoky air into his wounded, heaving chest, strength returned to his healing body.
Cyrus had a single goal: to get the girl with the book. He locked his deadly stare on the locked pine door. With a pounce forward, his body slammed against the wood, and the force caused red spit to splatter from his muzzle across the dusty floor. Shaking his dizzy head from side to side, he glanced up and looked hopefully for any damage. The door had splintered and cracked with one centered blow.
Once more he retreated inside the attic, far enough from the wounded door to gather momentum for his next attack. He cocked his head sideways in the shadows beneath the dirty oval window.
Smashing against the old pine door, Cyrus broke the wood into splintered shreds. He tumbled head-first down the steep, rickety attic stairs, his body an avalanche of fur and fang, somersaulting until hitting the landing below.
Growling and angry, he sprang to his four wobbling legs. He wanted to rip someone apart, to torture and kill. Regaining his balance, he spotted a wider set of stairs and sprang toward the scent of the black-bearded human who had locked him in the attic.
In Callahan’s second-floor bedroom, there was plenty of Callahan’s scent. A bare, queen-sized mattress was tucked into a cherry sleigh bed. The floor was strewn with paperback history books. Three overstuffed suitcases sat propped open on the white carpet.
Rustling his muzzle through the bags, Cyrus bit into the clothes and flung the history teacher’s black pants and capes around the room. Callahan’s smell was driving him into a frenzy. With the third suitcase nearly empty, Cyrus snatched a white tuxedo shirt in his mouth.
A spasm reverberated down his spine. His brown fur quickly retreated into his sagging, wrinkled, human skin. As he pawed at the shirt, his legs morphed into naked arms and legs. Sparse patches of white hair dappled his arms and legs. His nakedness as a human made him tremble in fear and disgust.
Hastily, he slid the shirt over his shoulders. His shaking, bony fingers buttoned the starched white cloth to his bruised chest. Cyrus swiftly shoved his legs into Callahan’s black pants, the hem falling far past his own ankles.
He opened his eyes wider and enjoyed the sight of the sun shining through the sheer net curtains that were hung clumsily over a window. This window overlooked a porch roof, and beyond that a city street. He felt almost human. Opening the window was a struggle, its frame painted long ago to the sill. Prying the window upward, he listened.
A heartbeat, strong and determined, marched closer to Callahan’s house. Cyrus stared at the graveyard across the street but heard nothing, not a peep. Even the crows kept silent as they perched on the low stone wall that separated the graveyard from the city that had sprung up around it. Nothing but resilient, eternal silence met his ears when he peered at the headstones, but still the heartbeat pressed forward and grew closer.
“Da dead comin’ back to life,” he heard Jasmine whisper.
A low growl rumbled from deep inside his throat. Sighing, he removed the clothes, although he let the tuxedo shirt linger across his shoulders. Suddenly, knowing his hope was futile, he tore the shirt into shreds with his ragged yellow fingernails, his chipped teeth and bleeding gums ripping the threads of the garment.
Naked, his weak human body exposed, Cyrus knelt on the soft white carpet. Thump, thump, thump. The heartbeat echoed inside his head as he dropped to his hands and knees. Closing his eyes and sealing his lips, he held his breath as his jaw extended violently outward from his skull into the shape of a muzzle, and razor-sharp incisors punched downward into his mouth from his gums. Brown fur sprouted across his naked flesh and bulging muscles flexed in his hind legs.
Although weak and old as a man, his body was strong as a wolf. While the human half of his soul continued to age, his wolf soul only grew wilder and more fierce, forever young and virile. One day he might no longer be human at all. His dark eyes spotted the ragged tuxedo shirt crumpled into a ball on the floor by the bed. Cyrus let out a sorrowful howl; it was a last cry for his humanity. He felt grief oozing from his beastly soul.
Through the open window, the noise and smells of the looming city barraged his senses and left Cyrus tense and eager. Alexandra could have fled with the book in any direction. But a peculiar scent blew closer. His brown fur stood at attention across his muscular neck.
What he smelled was the sweat dripping from the flesh of an approaching man, sweat that smelled like salt and honey. Cyrus had smelled this man before, and the wolf gritted his teeth, wondering if it could possibly be him.
The wolf listened closely, the rhythm of a heartbeat not his own pounding in his ears. With each approaching step of the man, the heartbeats grew stronger and faster until they roared in the wolf’s skull. Bittersweet waves of sweaty musk assaulted his nostrils.
He recognized this man, and his beastly senses had never before betrayed him. Trembling with anticipation, the wolf reared from the window. He paced on top of the clothes that were strewn on the floor of the bedroom. How could this be? His feral mind could not calculate the appearance of the approaching human.
Cyrus had to see him to know for certain, to taste his blood if necessary—though he dared not kill him, not yet. Every human tasted like the life he led, the food he ate, and what he drank. But every human family, every bloodline, had a distinct flavor all its own.
Calm descended on the beast as he contemplated his attack. Savoring the thought of the human’s soft flesh in his wide jaws, he felt his belly grumble. The human approached rapidly, as if Callahan’s house was precisely his destination.
Dat witch ain’t gonna kill me now, he thought. If he was right about the human walking down the sidewalk, then Jasmine would certainly not kill him. Dat witch hate dem Peytons.
He sensed that the stupid little girl, the brat named Alexandra, would follow him and hunt him with her friends. But despite that possibility, Cyrus grinned, his wet, black lips sliding over his fangs. Me gonna steal a treasure now, too.
14
Kidnapped
Today was not the day to start a diet, the headmaster realized as he surveyed the campus storm destruction. The energy from precisely eight ounces of freshly ble nded vegetable juice and a granola bar had worn off hours ago. The deafening need to eat forced Dr. Sullivan to ponder an expedition to the Collinsworth cafeteria kitchen.
A chorus of buzz saws hummed in unison around campus as a tidy army of salvage crews labored to clear the fallen trees and debris spewed across the stately campus grounds by the previous night’s storm.
Out on the lawn, Dr. Sullivan stood ne
xt to Callahan to examine the hole next to the cannon. Amidst the din of this noise, Dr. Sullivan was confident that Callahan had not heard his stomach roaring. Dr. Sullivan’s stomach was begging for a bacon and spinach quiche, with freshly baked rolls dripping in butter on the side. As for the history teacher, he was engrossed in the gaping hole in the ground at the foot of Bloody Mary.
The mighty disabled cannon bore no trace of disturbance by the intruder who had dug a muddy mess at her feet, but Callahan surmised it was best to hide the scene from the men toiling with the trees lest someone grow suspicious. Handy at improvisation, Callahan had located a moldy blue tarp, a wad of jumbled jump ropes, and a stack of orange cones from a storage room in the gymnasium. With these items, he efficiently proceeded to cordon off the shallow grave beside the cannon.
Headmaster Sullivan briefly worried that the blue tent would draw attention from the young men in yellow hard hats and sleeveless shirts bounding around the campus. But they maintained a safe distance from Bloody Mary. Their sideways glances at the brewing commotion were enough to warn them that it was probably best to stay away. They could see the pacing headmaster and his companion, who preferred to crawl across the ground around the cannon on his belly while he held a magnifying glass to his dark eyes. If any of the clean-up crew did not find that scene disturbing enough, the holdouts were dissuaded by the history teacher’s loud, yelping cries of satisfaction that emanated from within the leaning blue tent when he disappeared inside it. They could not have guessed that his satisfied cries came from rubbing his fingers probingly across the disturbed human bones lying helplessly inside the grave.
“What are you doing in there, Callahan?” the headmaster called impatiently from the other side of the tarp. He wiped his damp brow with the handkerchief that he carried in his pants pocket. Callahan ignored the intrusive voice of the annoying administrator.
“Shall I fetch us some lunch, then?” Dr. Sullivan asked hopefully.
“Yes,” Callahan answered gruffly. “Go away,” he mumbled under his breath.
Relieved from his post, the headmaster broke into a slow jog toward the cafeteria, the keys to the locked door jingling anxiously in his fingers.
Under cover of the makeshift tent, Callahan examined the skeleton. He wondered who would have come there to dig in such a violent storm. The hollow eye sockets stared back at him from the smooth skull. Every bit of soft flesh had decayed a century before then, but the tattered remnants of a faded gray Confederate officer’s coat remained upon the bones. With a brush of his hand, the cloth crumbled to dust. Running his fingers across the cracks and crevices of the skeleton, Callahan winced at the prick of broken bones upon his fingertips. He explored the cracked rib cage, stroking his palm along the splintered fragments of bone that had once been Colonel Charles Collinsworth’s chest, if the old tales were true. As the story was told, a witch had stabbed him in the heart.
With his hand inside the chest cavity of the skeleton, a twitch abruptly jerked his fingertips. Callahan braced himself against the muddy pit with one hand, clutching at a wet lump of grass and dull rock. He allowed his other hand to rest lightly on the white bones. Searing heat shot through his forearms and pierced his chest. The world around him morphed from the steaming interior of a shabby blue tent into a forest of towering Georgia pines. The trees were cloaked in the dense darkness of a cloudless, starry night.
The horse beneath his legs bucked and whinnied at the approaching shadow. When a feral cry of hate rang through the trees, his horse reared up and tossed him to the earth. A jagged rock, the size of his fist, met the back of his head. Round, red orbs clouded his vision as he strained to see in the moonlight. The sound of fleeing horse hooves faded in the distance. He called for the frightened steed to return to him, but his breath caught in his tightening throat as the witch appeared.
Long, tangled, gray hair, as dry as harvested straw, hid the witch’s face. But he knew with certainty it was Mary, his family’s servant. She had become a wild animal, a frenzied woman, since the death of her son. Her son had died in a war that he had supported with his own money, land, and life. Now her hollow black eyes bore into his skull.
As she slithered closer in the pale moonlight, her thin, white lips slid back from her jagged, yellow teeth. She screamed, her withered body trembling with the strength of anger, and she plunged a blade into his heart.
He clutched at his chest where her blade had punctured. Blood came out through his mouth and ran down into the soil. Heat seared through his body. Quickly, the black night absorbed his soul.
A jolt of pain stung Callahan in the ribs as he groggily returned to consciousness from his trip into the last moments of the life of Colonel Charles Collinsworth. The tip of a shovel pricked at his ribs and roused his senses. Rising to his knees, he shook his head and realized he had fainted backward during his vision.
There was a slow trickle of blood dripping down to his hip from the base of his ribs. He wiped at it with his hand. He stared, cold and shaken, at the skeleton lying in the shallow grave. “Your story is not over, Mr. Collinsworth,” he firmly told the pile of bones.
Kicking his booted toe at a loose pile of dirt, he said, “If this much of the ghost tale is true, then he should have been buried with gold and treasure.” A patch of mud fell from the lip of the pit onto the skull. “So where is it, sir?” Callahan asked the skull. But this part of the legend, the bones could not tell Callahan.
There had been fresh footprints in the rain-soaked ground around the grave. This clue assured Callahan that any treasure buried with Charles Collinsworth had been the goal of the grave robber. He could not think of any other reason that someone would dig up bones in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Underneath the blue tarp, the air sweltered like a sauna. The acrid smell of wet earth and decay permeated the cloistered gravesite. Suffocating, dripping in sweat, and pestered by mosquitoes, Callahan decided he would be joining Charles any minute if he did not emerge. He crawled from under the plastic tent, leaned on the cannon Bloody Mary, and gasped for clean air.
The cacophony of chainsaws clearing the fallen oaks from the campus drowned his shouts for the headmaster. “Where are you, Dr. Sullivan?” Callahan yelled.
The bell tower of Drake Hall answered his cries with a single chime, and Callahan realized that the morning had passed and that the sweltering afternoon probably promised him more questions than answers. Checking his watch, he wondered when a delivery truck he was expecting would arrive at his home.
Callahan rested his left hand tenderly over the blood gathering under his rib cage and soaking through his t-shirt. He walked to the parking lot adjacent to the campus administration building, so that he was directly in front of Miss Daisy, the last of the fallen magnolia trees that were being cleared away. The grand old trees were being loaded on trailers hitched to mud-caked pickup trucks. Exhausted young workers in hard hats wrestled their heavy loads into the trailers. Their tanned skin had been scraped ruthlessly by tree bark and branches. They secured the loose limbs down with purple bungee ties.
Callahan’s eyes darted across the quad in front of the administration building. In the main campus parking lot, the monster trucks fired their engines and blew clouds of gray exhaust from their bulging tailpipes.
He peered down at the spot of blood widening across the front of his t-shirt under his ribs. He could not fathom how such a thin sliver of flesh could hurt so badly. Gritting his teeth, he realized that he had to go home. It was time to check on the specimen anyway. The headmaster would forgive him for skipping lunch, he reasoned.
As for Dr. Sullivan, he was inside the cafeteria kitchen. He had buried his head in a five-gallon tub of chocolate pudding. He had forgotten momentarily about his history teacher, and he never heard Callahan’s anxious calling. The headmaster finally decided to drop the spoon to the floor and just dive into the bucket.
“Sullivan!” Callahan called one last time as he traipsed past the cafeteria toward Drake Hall. The be
ll tower chimed once to indicate 1:30 p.m. When he gazed at the sky, his mud-stained hands shielding his eyes from the glaring sun, he heard a hellish howl, a sound not of pain but of assault.
He knew just how far it was to his house. A cemetery lay on the other side of Drake Hall, a building he knew was a converted church, and beyond the silent field of gravestones sat his rented Victorian mansion on Mockingbird Lane. The beast, Callahan’s prisoner, was no longer asleep in the mansion’s attic. He was very much awake and perhaps even loose.
His eyes searched the ground for the path he knew Alexandra and Taylor had worn around the old church when they needed a break between classes. He spotted the faint trail in the overgrown grass that led around the rear of Drake Hall. Breaking into a gallop, he leapt from the familiar cement sidewalk and tore past prickly holly bushes and towering dandelion weeds. Low-hanging limbs of dogwood trees hid the rest of the trail from the sun-soaked quad, and in a few swift seconds, he found himself facing a low stone wall at the perimeter of the cemetery. With a silent thanks to years of track and field training at boarding school, he leapt, nimble as a tomcat, to the top of the wall—just as another howl ricocheted off the cement headstones.
When he planted his ankles firmly atop the wall, a bolt of pain shot through his right leg. He realized that the ankle injury was probably due to securing the beast the previous night. He shivered and winced, betraying a crack in his invincibility.
“No weakness!” he shouted at himself and jumped gingerly down from the stones into the cemetery. “Where is that delivery truck?” he muttered. Dragging his foot tenderly behind him, he stalked past the headstones toward Mockingbird Lane. The wicked whine of a wolf rang in his ears.