Howl!
Howl!!
Howl!!!
He hears and he runs.
His name is Scott, his mum raised him Catholic, his dad raised him wizard, and now he’s beginning to wonder if maybe his mum wasn’t on to a better thing. Usually he combs his hair back over his scalp to hide the premature bald spot that was another unwelcome genetic inheritance. Now his hair stands up like the quills of a hedgehog facing down a cement truck, and if he has any time to interact with it, it’s to pull it out, strand by strand.
He runs until he can’t breathe, and pauses on a street corner to fumble with his phone.
“Help me!” he shouts into it. “Help me!”
“The secret,” replies the voice on the other end of the line, “is not to look back.”
“It’s coming for me!”
“It wants you to be afraid.”
“You said you’d protect me!”
“I also told you to run, and here we are.”
“I’m coming. Keep your phone on. Run.”
He runs, shaking with fear; his body become his new worst enemy. At times like this, he feels, his legs should grow wings, his back should become light, his stomach full of helium and he should fly along, every muscle feeding off the urgency of his mind and making it easier for him, blocking out the pain. That doesn’t seem to be how it works. He’s never been so tired, nor so far from home. He runs, not knowing or caring about the direction any more, just straight, in a straight line until he reaches the edge, and he hears behind him–so much worse than the howling in the night–he hears a silence. The thick impenetrable silence that comes when the traffic stops, the deafening roar of a silent fan, the impossible nothing of a non-dripping pipe. His is the only noise in these sleeping streets, his the only movement, a firework at a funeral. Don’t look back.
He realises that he repents.
Fear can do that when guilt fails. And he has plenty of fear.
Lights ahead, a main road–no one dies on the main road, the idea is ridiculous–he runs towards it, a night bus swoops by at the end of the street fulfilling its role of perpetually never being quite where you want it. He staggers onto Fleet Street, a road too narrow for the daytime traffic that clogs it, too wide for this night-time emptiness. The tall shops and offices are clustered in recognition of their sometime medieval ground plan, inconsistent grandeur mixing with modern slabs of concrete, old porticos bearing stone faces that guard the way to the latest sushi bar. Not 400 yards away he can see the back of a black dragon on a stone plinth, its head turned outwards towards the place where the City of London meets the City of Westminster, its spiked wings as tall and sheer as the Gothic ornamentation on the Royal Courts sat right by it. He gasps down a shuddering breath and staggers towards it down the middle of the street, feet flapping on the tarmac, head tilting forward, ready to fall. He can see a figure waiting just the other side of the dragon, a man dressed in a tatty coat, a flash of blue from his eyes–impossible at this distance, a thing imagined–and from the phone in his hand he hears a faint voice proclaim, “You’re nearly there. Don’t look back.”
His mouth opens in an unstoppable grimace, he wants to laugh even though the dragon is still so far, and hears behind him, so close:
hhhhhoooooooooowwwwwwwwwwillllll!!!!
hunting cry
a snuffling, a shuffling, a thing that becomes the bounding rhythm of a gallop, soft paws on the ground that wouldn’t make any noise but that the thing above them is so heavy, a thump of unstoppable force beating against the street and a bellowing of breath through tight black nostrils and it’s here, it’s here so close now and must be this second, must be now and
“Don’t look!” shouts the man at the end of the street. “Don’t look!”
he can feel its heat, smell the blood and dog stench in its fur and
“Don’t!”
he knows this is how the others died but they couldn’t stop it either and
he looks.
He didn’t realise jaws could be so wide.