by Tim O'Rourke
The farmhouse itself was neat and tidy and had been looked after. There was a small kitchen and living room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs with a tiny bathroom that was just big enough to fit a tub. The nicest thing about the house was the real fireplace that was set into the far living room wall. It was surrounded by red coloured brick and the owner had been kind enough to have stacked a pile of freshly cut logs before it.
Isidor took one of the bedrooms and Potter and I took the other. Once we had settled in, I checked my emails on my iPod to see if I’d received a message from Kayla. There wasn’t one. Looking out the living room window across the fog-covered moors, I wondered if Kayla was safe. I still had fears about her locked away in Ravenwood, and if I’d had my way, she wouldn’t have gone. But Kayla wasn’t my sister, although I thought of her as one. I loved Kayla and did feel in some way responsible for her, even though she was only four years younger than me. I understood how Kayla felt, and even though she had been through so much already in her life, I still found her a little naive at times — just like a younger sister would be.
“What now?” a voice said from behind me and I turned to see Potter standing at the foot of the wooden staircase which led into the living room.
“I’m going to drive into town and visit the local police station,” I said. “Make some enquires into Emily Clarke’s disappearance.”
“Her sister has already tried that,” Potter reminded me.
“Yeah, but she didn’t have one of these,” I said, holding up my police badge.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“No, stay here,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to go in heavy handed,” I said as delicately as I could. “We want to try and get the local coppers on our side. We might need them.”
“So what am I meant to do?” he asked me.
“Get that fire going,” I smiled at him.
I pulled into the car park of the local police station, killed the engine and made my way inside. With an air of confidence, I flashed my badge to the clerk behind the front desk and asked if I could speak to whoever it was in charge. The clerk told me to take a seat.
I waited for several minutes until a large looking head with a shock of white hair appeared around the edge of the door that led into the station. It was a tired-looking face, a face that had seen too many late nights and long hours.
“Kiera Hudson?” the face asked.
“That’s me,” I said standing up.
The door was pushed open further to reveal a well-built man, wearing a shirt which was open at the throat, and smart trousers that looked too tight about his waist.
“Inspector Cliff Banner,” he said thrusting out one large meaty hand towards me. “What can I do for ya?”
I shook his open hand, which he pumped up and down with such force that I thought he was going to snap every one of my fingers. Once I had the feeling back in my hand, I produced my badge and showed it to him.
“I’m from out of town but I could do with some help.”
“Sounds intriguing — follow me.” He ushered me through the door from the small waiting area into a sterile and brightly lit corridor. I followed him to his office, where he gestured me towards a seat. We sat facing each other on opposite sides of his cluttered desk.
“Excuse me,” he said, “I was just in the middle of my supper.” He picked up a half-eaten sandwich which looked small and ridiculous in his huge hand, and took a bite. Peanut butter oozed from it and onto his bushy white beard, which he wiped away with a piece of crinkled tissue paper that lay amongst the other litter on his desk.
“So how can I be of help?”
“A friend of mine, Emily Clarke has gone missing.”
“How old is this friend…a kid is she?” he asked as he chewed the remains of his sandwich.
“No, she’s an adult, a little older than me.”
“What she’s vulnerable then…you know…like retarded?”
“No, she’s just like you and me,” I told him. I knew where he was going with this without him saying anything else.
“Well there’s the trick. If she ain’t a juvey and no retard then there’s nothing we can do about it.” He screwed up the piece of grease-proof paper that his sandwich had been wrapped in and threw it at the rubbish bin on the other side of the room. “You should know there ain’t nothing we can do about it, you being a cop and all.”
“Yeah I know all that, but this is different,” I told him.
“Oh, how come?”
“Emily was teaching at the Ravenwood School…” I began to tell him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he whistled through his teeth. “Stop right there. That school has been taken over by the wolves — the Skin-walkers.”
I shook my head. “So?”
He stared at me blankly.
“My friend, Emily, told her sister, Elizabeth Clarke before she went missing that…”
“Who did you say?” That name seemed to have grabbed his attention.
“Elizabeth Clarke,” I repeated.
“Ah, that’s right,” he said thumbing through the paperwork strewn across his desk. Then, holding up a sheet of peanut butter smeared paper, he added, “she came in here yesterday spouting on about how her sister had been murdered. Can you believe that? Murdered! Reckons that Headmaster McCain did it.”
“Have you had dealings with him before?”
“Never,” he said, combing his overgrown moustache with his fingers.
“So how can you be sure that he’s not capable of murder?” I said defensively.
“Well damn me,” he chuckled.
“Look, I can see that you find this all very amusing, but are you gonna help me or not?” I asked him.
“Listen, Karen…”
“Kiera,” I corrected him.
“Kiera, for a cop, you ain’t half naive. These people…wolves…Skin-walkers, whatever you want to call ‘em…they don’t live like us,” he warned me in an almost fatherly tone.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“You know…they don’t live by the same rules as us. People may not like it, but that’s the way it is. It’s been like it for hundreds of years.”
“So they are allowed to get away with murder?” I said sarcastically. “My understanding of the Wasp Water Treaty is that they can match with children every five years, although that is bad enough. But are they allowed to murder innocent people? I thought that’s what the treaty was brought in for — to end the killing.”
“Look, what goes on behind the walls of that school is wolf business,” he said.
“So that makes it all okay then?” I argued.
“All I’m saying is that your friend…Emily…has probably found herself another teaching post and moved on.”
“So what you’re saying is, Emily just woke up one morning and left her home, her job and hasn’t been in contact with her sister since?” I pushed him.
Realizing that he wasn’t going to change my mind, Banner sighed deeply and said, “What’s a pretty young copper like you gone and got herself caught up in something like this for?”
“What, police work you mean?”
“Wolf business,” he said, staring at me from across his desk.
Without breaking his stare, I said, “Look, one cop to another…are you gonna help me or not?”
Banner pulled a notepad and pen from beneath the mountain of rubble on his desk. “Who does she bank with?” he asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“She’s gotta eat, ain’t she? Fill up her car with petrol?” he said as if he was teaching me something new. “I’ll run a few checks to see if she used her bank cards in the last few days; that should tell us where she is.” He tossed the pad and pen across the desk at me.
I scribbled Emily’s full name, date of birth, address, and banking details onto the pad. I was just about to hand it back when I paused and then added the
address of where I was staying. I then pushed it back across the desk towards Banner.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I ain’t promising you nothing. If it wasn’t for the fact you’re a cop, I’d kick your arrogant arse outter here!”
I got up and left his office.
Chapter Twenty
Kayla
I was relieved to discover not only was I sharing many of the same classes as Sam, but we had rooms next to each other. Sam seemed friendly enough, and I guessed I would need a friend at Ravenwood. My room was little more than a box, three floors up in one of the school’s winding towers. To get to the room, I had to navigate a set of stairs that spiralled upwards like a corkscrew. The stairwell was dark and the steps echoed with each snap of my heel.
A metal framed bed lent against the far wall of my room, and the sheets were rough and made my skin itch. It was like falling asleep in a bed of stinging nettles. The walls were made of stone and a desk crouched in one corner.
I intended to stick close to Sam, as I tried to find my way around Ravenwood and understand many of the odd rules that seemed to be at its heart. On my first night I took my iPod and sent a brief message to Kiera. I told her about the freaky Greys and how I had made a friend who might be able to give me information about what had taken place at the school. I stressed that I needed to be careful as I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Within minutes of sending my message, Kiera sent one back explaining that she and the others had arrived at the nearby farmhouse. I took comfort from knowing that. Kiera also said that she had made a visit to the local cop shop, but wasn’t holding out too much hope that they would help her.
Once I had read her message, I deleted it as she had told me to do. Should my iPod be found and the messages read, then that would have given our whole plan away.
Was there a plan? I wondered, hiding the iPod into a gap in the seam of the bag that Potter had sliced open for me with one of his claws. With the iPod hidden again, I reached into the bottom of my bag and took out a bottle of Lot 13. During the day, my cravings had progressed from feeling like a mild itch to an aching need in my stomach. Potter had given me enough bottles of Lot 13 to last me seven days. I unscrewed the cap and gulped down the slimy pink liquid. It coated the inside of my mouth and throat. I swallowed the bittersweet fluid and those cravings for the red stuff eased.
I pulled the blanket made of stinging nettles over my head. The feelings of uncertainty and loneliness that I suddenly felt as I lay in the dark were almost suffocating.
Had I done the right thing by putting myself in the middle of Ravenwood? I couldn’t help but now wonder, as I lay and listened to the way off sounds. The background noise seemed almost deafening. None of the sounds were familiar to me — not like sleeping at the manor where I had grown up. I had gotten used to the noises back there. But at Ravenwood, as I lay in the dark, I could hear the sound of the Greys’ robes swishing across the cold stone floors as they patrolled the corridors in the dark. I could hear the sound of sobbing as if coming from some far-off place. But above all, I could hear the sound of wolves howling.
Unable to bear it any longer, I reached for my bag, slipped my fingers into the tiny tear in the fabric and pulled out my iPod again. I wore the earphones and scrolled through the tracks I’d downloaded during my last night at Hallowed Manor. I dragged my fingernail down the screen until I found the song that I was looking for. With the blanket over my head and my eyes closed, I listened to Ugly by The Sugababes. It was the song that I had often cried myself to sleep listening to during my time spent at boarding school. Ugly and Stickleback were the names that the other girls there had called me. The song was one constant in this new world that I now found myself in. I don’t know how long I had lain awake listening to that song, but eventually I fell into a restless sleep where I dreamt of those girls that had bullied me and made my life a misery for so long. I had been their dumping ground. Every school had one, even Ravenwood School, as I was about to find out.
Alan Dorsey was small for his age and very burnt. The rumour was that his parents had been killed in a house fire, a fire that Dorsey had managed to escape from; but the flames had left their mark, a permanent reminder of what had taken place that night. His face was scarred, the skin stretched tight across his face, and in places it looked as if it had run like melted candle wax. Dorsey’s eyes were two narrow slits, his nostrils looked like two puncture wounds in the middle of his face and his mouth was pulled into a permanent grimace. Dorsey knew that the other kids at Ravenwood stared at him, and I guess he didn’t blame them. No more than I now blamed those girls who had stared at me. After all, wasn’t it human nature to stare at the freaks?
On my first morning at Ravenwood, I had overslept. Fearing that I would be in trouble with the Greys for being late for class, I showered in the communal girl’s bathroom and hurried down to join the queue for breakfast, which snaked across the schoolyard. The day was overcast and dull-looking again, but at least the rain had stopped. It was still very cold, though. I found Sam, propped up against a wall.
“What you doing?” I asked him. “Not joining the line for breakfast?”
“Waiting,” Sam said, and it was only in the pale winter light that I realised how good looking he actually was. It wasn’t only his thick, black curly hair, it was his eyes; they were a brilliant blue that had such a look of mischief in them.
“Waiting for what?” I asked, looking over his shoulder at the other kids on the schoolyard. Some of the girls stood chatting, while a group of boys kicked a scruffy-looking football about.
“For the fight to start,” Sam said.
“What fight?”
Sam nodded in the direction of the boy who I had caught staring at me from the back of the class the day before — the one with the scrunched up face and Marine haircut. “See Pryor over there? He’s gonna smash Dorsey,” Sam told me.
“How do you know that?”
“He’s been winding-up that kid for weeks,” Sam said. “Pryor’s a bully — an animal.”
“What makes you think he will — ” I started, but before I could finish, Sam stepped away from the wall.
“Watch,” he whispered.
I looked at Pryor amongst the crowd of boys with the football. He stood amongst them and watched Dorsey walking alone. I saw Pryor’s eyes narrow as he followed Dorsey’s progress. Unaware that he was being watched, Dorsey made his way towards the school building, his head bowed, chin almost touching his chest. Pryor broke away from the pack. Slow at first, and I could hear his shoes whispering against the concrete. Then, he was running, narrowing the gap between himself and Dorsey.
“You’re dead!” Pryor screamed, leaping through the air and crashing into Dorsey.
The first Dorsey knew that he was under attack was when the back of his head bounced off the ground and the air from his lungs belched out through his burnt and twisted lips. Dorsey looked up to see who it was that had knocked him off his feet, his eyes wide and full of bewilderment.
“You fucking freak!” Pryor roared, straddling Dorsey.
From where I was standing, I could see the loathing Pryor had for Dorsey in his eyes. Dorsey could see the hate in them too and he knew he was in trouble. Throwing his hands in front of his face, Dorsey managed to block the first wave of blows that Pryor threw at him.
“Freaks like you should be caged!” Pryor spat, smacking Dorsey up the side of his head.
“What have I done?” Dorsey cried out.
“You should be in a circus!” Pryor said, punching Dorsey in the face.
I stepped away from the wall. The first thing that struck me was the sound Pryor’s fists made as they pounded into Dorsey’s face. They didn’t make the crunching noise that I had so often heard in the movies, but more of a Whap! Whap!sound. Seeing Pryor’s fists raining down on Dorsey made me feel as if I had a heart that was beating, but not in my chest, in my stomach. Those sounds made me feel sick.
I wanted to stop Pryor. No
t for Dorsey’s sake but for my own. I couldn’t bear that Whap! Whap! Whap!sound. If I had to listen to it for much longer, I believed that I might just go insane, right there on the edge of the schoolyard.
Pryor must have been at least fourteen-stone and over six-foot in height. Although I was way smaller than him, I knew I could kick his arrogant fucking arse all over the schoolyard- but that would’ve just brought me unwanted attention to myself and my abilities. But I couldn’t bear to watch Dorsey taking a beating.
Maybe I could go and get one of the teachers. Wouldn’t they put a stop to Pryor? I wondered. But I knew that they probably wouldn’t be interested. I glanced at Sam, who stood beside me, his face grim and pale. The spark in his eyes had faded and he looked as sick as I now felt.
“We can’t just stand and watch!” I said.
Sam didn’t say anything. He stood and continued to watch the fight and the large group of boys and girls who had gathered like vultures around Pryor and Dorsey.
Whap! Whap! Whap!
Pryor looked down into Dorsey’s tear-stained face. “What’s the matter with you?” Pryor roared. “Why do you have to
look like that?” And he punched Dorsey in the face again.
Whap!
The sound of that last punch made my stomach cartwheel. Without considering what I was about to do or the shit I could be getting myself into, I raced towards Pryor. Pryor’s back was facing me, and it looked as broad and as sturdy as a dining room table propped on its side. With my fists clenched so my claws wouldn’t spring out, I focused in on my target.
Some of the other kids who were gathered around the fight saw me coming and parted like waves so I could get at Pryor. Raising my fist above my head like a hammer, I swung it down in a swooping arc. But before it connected with the space between Pryor’s shoulder blades, a hand gripped my wrist and yanked my arm backwards.
I spun around to find myself looking into Sam’s face.