Sandrine crouched in the corner of the room, her head bowed and buried in her hands. She drew back her hair with them, pulling the cascading dark river over one shoulder. Then she looked up and stared hard at Henry.
“We’re not as we appear, to normal people. I know how that is, how we are viewed by the civilised world.” She feigned a laugh and said, “Civilised” again sarcastically. “We’re not monsters, Henry,” Sandrine insisted, standing in the middle of the room, “not unless falling from your faith makes you a monster?”
“But …” Henry started. Sandrine shook her head.
“Let me speak. Throughout the ages, since the founding of the Catholic Church, the damned have walked the land.”
“The damned?”
“Whom we call wolves. Outcasts, Catholics excommunicated from the Church in a most terrible way. Not satisfied with simply turning them out of the Church, those with the power and the authority cast some of the most senior and important of those excommunicated into the abyss of lycanthropy, condemning them to a tormented and terrible existence on the very fringes of society, cast out by their faith, spurned by their people, cast out by their families, their friends, their villages and towns, to be monsters, desperate and pitiful souls during the day, half starved and tormented by their shame and their eternal insatiable hunger, vengeful and driven mad by their rage at night under the moon. The true werewolves. Hombre Lobo.
“Across all lands where the Catholic Church has taken root they can be found, hiding in their lairs, cast out, on the edge of civilisation, surviving as best they can, every day agony, every waking hour tortuous for knowing who they were, what they have become and what they are compelled to do. Their rage drives them and it is their rage which disgusts them so. Every painful hour of daylight is beyond measure, every moment of night time horror agony to themselves, cursed to perform such barbarous acts in order to satiate the insatiable. Their endless hunger.”
“But you,” began Henry, finding a chair and sitting in it, intrigued and enthralled by her utterly, “why do you say you’re not like those wolves at the front, those wolves you mention, driven insane by hunger when night comes?”
“As I said, I am a half wolf. My rage and the wolf lies within, but I have control over it. I am not at the mercy of the moon’s cycle, I am not corrupted by the agony of daylight’s rays.”
“And yet you are still a werewolf?”
“A half wolf,” Sandrine corrected.
“But must you … do you feel compelled to fly into a rage and become a werewolf? Must you feed as a werewolf to survive?”
“No. I can control my rages. I am not forced to feed like the wolves to satisfy my hunger. But there are times when controlling my rages is a severe trial. Like the fault lines of the earth, sometimes they give and the resulting anger is terrible.”
“As Pewter found,” muttered Henry coldly.
“Indeed.”
“So these wolves of Fampoux, they are not alone. There are others?”
Sandrine nodded, pulling out a chair from the table and sitting herself upon it opposite Henry. “As far as the Catholic Church has reached there are werewolves. Some of us within Fampoux, we knew of the wolves. Of course, my father was one of them. We would feed them, do what we could to lessen their agony during the night time with offerings and food that we could spare. But when the Germans came, our errands to their lair were stopped. And then the wolves, half starved, came for them.”
“Are all werewolves, true wolves, cursed?”
“True wolves have been cursed by the Church, true Catholics who have lost their faith and been excommunicated. However, there are some people who are foolish and admire the might of the wolves and the strength and cunning it gives to the individual. These people have sought to choose the path of wolf themselves, thinking it will give them power that they desire, that they believe they can control. Power, yes, it does give them, but they are unable to control it in any way.”
“How would they become one of these werewolves?”
“By drinking water from the footprint of a true wolf. But by doing this you are only brought misery and pain, held forever under the control of the wolf from whose footprint you drank. Some within the clan here at Fampoux have chosen such a route, and they are the most wretched and broken of them all. There are others who can adopt the appearance of a wolf by donning the skin of a werewolf. These are rare items, for they must be taken from a werewolf whilst the wolf is still in werewolf form. Great is the pain and great must be the determination of the wolf to withstand the rage and the pain as the skin is cut from them. For when in werewolf form, the wolf’s only desires are food and survival. To stand as a wolf and allow yourself to be skinned alive, few are able to endure such a task.”
Sandrine reached forward and took Henry’s hands into hers.
“What of your mother?” he asked.
“My mother?” Sandrine shook her head. “My mother is dead. My father, he killed her. They loved each other very much but such is the curse of the wolf. She would not leave him; she could not bear to be parted from him. Even on a night. Despite his most fervent protestations. She would rather die than be parted from him. One night, she left me safe within the village and stole into his lair, hoping that her love could cast the curse from him. He devoured her, an act which haunted him to his final days.
“So you see Henry, monsters we are, yet we were made so by those who consider themselves most holy. It is the belief of all of us who carry the curse that perhaps the true monsters are those who wield the power in the Church to condemn and cast down, not those who have been cursed themselves.”
“How did this all come to be?” asked Henry as he struggled to comprehend the enormity of what she was telling him.
“No doubt the Catholic Church, who first created the mechanism and blended the secret rites to bring the curse upon the victim, would be able to say. But they have banned any mention of the tradition for nearly fifty years, burying it and its secrets deep within their libraries and vaults. They make no reference of it in public, deny all knowledge of the practice or even that they hunt and persecute those they have created. All historical documents have been destroyed. All but one. A story is told of a man, a werewolf, Peter Stumpp. Three hundred years ago, Stumpp, a Catholic, was cursed and thrown from the Catholic Faith for lying with a married woman who was not his wife. Afterwards, possessed as a wolf, his atrocities, if you wish to call them that, were terrible. He devoured many including his wife. Men, women and children, eighteen in total, until he was caught and brought before the Cardinal of Cologne.
“After his short trial, he was taken and put on a wheel, where his flesh was stripped from his body with red-hot pincers. As a bloody, weeping thing, his limbs were broken with the blunt side of an axehead, so that when he was tossed into his grave his broken form could get no purchase in the earth to heave himself out towards the moon. This broken, torn thing was then beheaded and his remains burned on a pyre. As this punishment was being meted out, before Stumpp’s eyes his daughter and mistress were flayed, raped and strangled, and their bodies tossed alongside Stumpp’s in the fire.”
Henry swallowed and gritted his teeth. But Sandrine had not finished. “As a warning to others, the Church hung the torture wheel from a mast for all to see, the body of a wolf set in the centre of the wheel and, at the very top, they placed Peter Stumpp’s severed head.”
“Good God.”
“Or not.”
“How d’you know all this?”
“We wolves have talked and passed on memories and stories. The hours are long for werewolves to sit in the silence of their lairs, waiting for the passing of the days and coming of the infernal moon.”
“Is there nothing that can be done? Is there no way to reverse what has happened? To end the curse?”
“What plan? For the salvation of werewolves?”
Sandrine laughed thinly. “The wolves are beyond salvation. But there is a greater threat coming to the church. Revenge. Revenge for all the years they have forced my people to live in the wilderness. And when it arrives, all the foundations of the Church will be washed away for eternity.”