8.55 p.m.
THEY WERE SILENT AS PAUL drove down the road. It was slow progress, and there were a couple of vehicles that had obviously been unable to ascend the hill and were parked haphazardly on the kerbs.
‘Stop,’ said John.
Paul glanced at the boy in his rear-view mirror. ‘John?’
‘Stop. Now. Please.’
Paul braked and the car slid to a halt. John was out and running back up the Lane before Luke and Paul realised what the slammed door meant. They stared at each other. Paul mentally shook himself and said, ‘You go and tell Sergeant Delahaye that thing is at Dowry House.’
Luke was obviously afraid but he nodded. Paul parked the car with the other forsaken vehicles. The orange motorway lights turned the sky to a brown sheet above them, but over the top of Leach Green Lane, they could see flashes of blue light bouncing off the low cloud. Luke would follow the blue light like a nativity star.
After watching Luke sprint under the Flyover towards Russet Lodge, Paul ran after John.
* * *
The Wolf howled in harmony with Ava. The wind snatched the song, and broadcast it wide to the surrounding lacuna so that dogs by firesides, by radiators, on laps or on beds joined in the chorus, communicating a rise-and-fall melody that was aeons old in the dominion between earth and stars.
There was no point in being frightened. She was here now. Turning her back on the Wolf would delay its capture or it might just as well kill her despite Nathaniel still inside it. She withdrew her gloved hands from her pockets then barked once. It trotted towards her, its stride graceful, as if it didn’t have long fixed clavicles or a central magnum foramen or flat feet or wing-set scapulae.
It paused a few feet away and tried to catch her scent but the wind stole it with each swooping pass. This close, it was big, its bony head at her waist level, and she could see the patchwork of its pelt. There had been endeavours to taxidermy – the ears were leathered and stiff with amateur attempts to preserve. The underbelly was dark clothing and the whole was strapped on somehow. The wrists were bound by thick leather bands to support and protect the tendons beneath from strain. Her heart sank: malice aforethought. If it had modified a costume to better aid and abet its hunting, it wasn’t only madness that governed it – it was a will to destroy on purpose, with desire. Pain and madness often mongrels cruelty but sometimes cruelty is born pedigree.
She could see Nathaniel’s lower face framed by the jutting mandible that formed a chin strap. She couldn’t see his eyes but the weight of his gaze was like a concrete slab. The sockets were full of the reflective gold lenses of vintage goggles she’d seen him wear in all weathers and she guessed they made the world even in colour and depth, be it night with or without snow. He sat on his haunches then, slowly, he removed the glasses and threw them aside. The wind brought her the new stink of the Wolf’s rotting hide but also his heat for he was generating warmth like a fever. He wasn’t well and, when he stood back to look at her, she saw, with a sadness she barely understood, that all the good in Nathaniel was truly gone. His black eyes glowered beneath the ledge of bone, the distinction of his heterochromia iridum lost in blown pupils rife with agony, lunacy . . . and glee.
Ava kept calm. She and the Wolf faced each other whilst the snow flurried, the wind screamed, and the world spun. She extended a hand, and it padded to sniff the proffered glove, recognising it. The Wolf dipped its scabrous head and she touched the bald pate, its stink greater when closer, and she huffed in return. She had listened all her life to animals’ words without words – and mimicked. She realised that this ability might save her life.
In stories, films and TV programmes, the villain, when faced with his trapped enemy, would reveal his plans to take over the world; explain why he had to kill and spread his evil then reinforce his reasons with an evil Vincent Price-style laugh. Not this villain: Ava was not a Marguerite Poirier to this Jean Grenier – the time for boasting and explaining had long departed. Ava, facing her villain, expected no reasons or excuses because there never are for murdering children.
She remembered Bryan in his wolf suit, leaning his warm weight against her as she read to him in silly voices: she touched Tom’s scar on her lip, her letter to Kelly – their absence from her life because of the Wolf. She thought of Little Adam and how he always expected her to know the answers to his questions about animals. Such memories were cushioned in anger. She turned her back on the Wolf, and walked away.
The Wolf followed for how could it not? Ava knew it had lost its pack, its territory, its prey, and it was alone except for her. She felt as well as heard its rank breath gush in and out of it, as its feet crackled on the bone-strewn floor: dead creatures whose only crime was to cross the Wolf’s path between big kills. The Wolf had stolen its fur coat from the very dogs he professed to love. Whatever Nathaniel had been was finished.
At the crux of the roof, John appeared in the doorway of the turret. The shock of seeing him there – unexpected, unpredicted – forced her to stop in her tracks, fear sweeping her calm away in a brutal current. The Wolf rose slowly onto its hind legs, and towered behind her.