A cold chill to the skin. A fine, faint spray hung in the air, cocooning the
sodium light of a market town evening as if the world were lit by giant bumbling glow
worms. Lucy was tired and ever so slightly tipsy. The Mad Hatter in fresher’s week.
Girls and boys from the Royal Agricultural College wearing spiders webs for clothes
and daring September’s spiny little teeth to bite if they could. Youth and optimism
and the first rush of freedom combined with Bacardi mixers to make Lucy feel just a
little giddy. The boy in the red polo shirt, the boy with defiantly tousled hair and yard
boots, he would be the one. Virginity sucks, she thought, and spun round once on the
pavement outside W H Smiths.
The low greyness of the sky blotted out the stars, but as Lucy headed up the
road towards Waitrose and the uphill walk towards Chesterton, past the old hospital
and the mouldering bones of the old Roman amphitheatre, she felt sure that some
astral guardian would bring the boy to her arms and to her digs soon enough. She felt
a tingle of excitement at the thought of her own nakedness before him, warming her
from within as she walked.
September’s clarion call to looming winter began to gnaw at the flesh on her
exposed legs. The skirt that she was wearing was a last throw of a summer wardrobe
designed for hot, sultry Greek nights, and barely covered her modesty. Great in the
bar, so long as you remembered to bend the knees when sitting, but of little use in
preventing the onrush of hyperthermia amid winter’s close called icy tendrils. The
light fleece top that she had ultimately decided to bring along sat snugly over her
shoulders, not worn, as that would be too much admission of sensibility, but
comforting nonetheless.
Her boots, brown and calf length, heeled but slim and forgiving, were the only
part of Lucy’s attire suited to the time of year. Lucy was particularly attached to the
boots, reminding her as they did of her mother and father’s glinting lasciviousness.
The example set for Lucy by her parental role models was neatly summed up in her
father’s succinct way of describing her mother’s love of long, tall boots…”Chase me,
shag me, boots”.
Despite having reached the age of eighteen intact and undefiled, Lucy had
definite views about Fresher’s week. The right time and place. She was grown up,
away from home, an independent woman dealing with a bright and shining world on
her terms. The boy in the red polo shirt. Lucy grinned inanely as she reached the main
Tetbury road and started to walk up hill towards the underpass that opened out onto
Chesterton Lane and her new home.
There seemed a deepening of the chill in the air as she climbed up and out of
the town, as though the imminence of winter was more profoundly announced away
from the lights and the chirpy clatter of bars and restaurants. Lucy shivered and felt
the reverie slip away from her grasp. She was alone. Why? Her new friends, the girls
sharing her digs had elected to go on to a small club a few yards down the street, but
not she. In the bar, wrapped in the warm embrace of alcohol and the fantastic promise
of the boy with the tousled hair and that cheeky smile, she had suddenly felt
compelled to decline the offer of more fun. She wanted to go home. It was an
imperative, an unquenchable thirst, almost a universal longing for an end to this
particular night. So here she was, about to walk down the ramp and into the
underpass, with the first dread impulse to run back to the lights and bars rising from
the pit of her stomach.
As she took her first step down towards the underpass she noticed a slight
change in the atmosphere. The sound of rumbling rubber from the cars on the dual
carriageway seemed to drift above her and hold its metaphorical breath. The sky
weighed upon her shoulders as if she was walking into the maw of a deeply black and
ebonised catafalque. The spindle limbed bushes that edged the footpath seemed to
tangle and spin around her, casting her into the middle of a trawling net. Her heart
raced, thumping against her ribs fit to split them asunder. Another step. She wanted to
turn and run back towards the light, anywhere other than here. The usual horrors of
the Waitrose car park seemed ambrosially soft compared to this hard, cold, terminal
descent. Instead of turning, however, Lucy placed one unwilling foot in front of
another, feeling amid the were-growl at the base of the world as if she must and
without delay enter the realm of the beast. The tingle engendered by thoughts of the
boy in the bar remained with her, stronger now, so much so that the strange
compulsion to return home positively engulfed her.
The sound of cars faded completely as Lucy took a tentative step off the ramp
and into the underpass proper. There was no other place in the world than this dank,
graffiti covered passageway between the streets of her new place of abode. Lucy’s
nostrils filled with the inevitable familiarity of the damp earth musk of the
subterranean, of watered down piss pools, and the reek of old, decaying tobacco. On
the wall, half way along and to her right a security light shone weakly from behind its
cage, singing a song of light as plaintive as the lark held captive beneath a towering
sky. Motifs and signals. Colours splashed across the walls.
She walked slowly on. Shadow. Lucy thought that she could make out one
patch of other darkness at the far end of the underpass. She hesitated, catching her
breath on the barb of her fear, her heart pounding on and on. Her eyes watered and she
tried to wipe away the blindness, but merely managed to shift the focus of dread to the
dead pool of black something blocking her way. She had no choice. On she must go.
The shape shifted. An irregular mass elongated and stretched itself, revealing
the rough shape of torso, limbs and head, all of them covered in what seemed to be a
coating of thick, black, flowing cloth. The head was hooded. On the ground the shape
seemed almost frail, as though it could not carry the burden of terror that forever
dogged its tracks, but as Lucy moved closer, as the figure gathered its limbs together
and began to unbend, began to straighten and stand, she saw with horror that he, for it
must be masculine, was tall and thick set and lithe, as if he were a wolf or a hunting
cat.
Lucy swallowed, desperate to bring succour to her parched throat. She could
not see any feature on the man except for darkness. She could sense no personality
save for that one weird sense of longing that seemed to flow from his soul. Lucy was
afraid of the moment but somehow she was not terrified. She felt the fear that comes
with expectation still wrapped in tinsel and bright paper. Strange, she thought, as if a
logical examination of the moment might reveal the joke. She sensed something other
here but not evil, not in its own right, describing it to herself as rather a feral air, as
though the man were wild and untamed as yet. The tingle. The compulsion. Lucy
could not help herself. She stopped beneath the squalid light.
“I just want to go home”, she said, trying to breathe softly while mustering the
militia of authority to protect her exposed flanks.
The creature growled rather than spoke, a belly-growl, a bark almost, but the
words were plain enough to Lucy. “That is all anybody wants”.
“Will you move out of my way, please”, she continued, struggling to form the
words and sounds as a coherent whole. “Will you?”
The creature reached his full height and girth, his hands stuffed into deep
jacket pockets, the hood low over his forehead. Lucy thought for a moment that she
saw what she could only describe as a whisker twitch at the edge of that black hood.
Was that fur she could spy tufting out of his trouser leg bottoms?
“If that is what you really want, then I will move”, the creature replied in his
low, guttural purr. “But first I want to ask something of you.”
Hell, thought Lucy, this is it. This is the stuff my mother always warned me
about, the perv in the park, the bogeyman offering venomous sweeties, the wolf in
sheep’s clothing. In a childish attempt to make the creature disappear she closed her
eyes tightly and tried to breathe slowly.
“Think”, she muttered to herself. Could she out run him? Where was there to
go? It seemed to Lucy as if the whole world existed within this short, dank
passageway. She opened her eyes slowly, as if that might make the world around her
change. She looked up expecting to see rough, serrated concrete but saw instead and
to her utter amazement stars in their millions. Where the feeble lamp had spewed out
sluggish particles of light there now hung a low, full moon. The painted walls were
swaying tufts of long eared grass. Lucy gasped. Her heart rate quickened once again.
The creature withdrew his right hand from his jacket pocket to reveal a slender, grey-
brown paw, talons gleaming like black diamonds in the moonlight. He beckoned her
towards him and spoke with that soft, serrated, killing voice.
“A kiss is all I ask, just a simple kiss from your soft, ruby girlish lips. One kiss
for the beast, for the Lord of the North Wind, and you will be utterly free.”
Lucy took a step forward, knowing that with movement that she would reveal
herself to him, but the musky smell of this noble carnivore seeped into Lucy’s soul.
She should cut and run. She should think about the boy in the red polo shirt, think
about marriage and babies and college and so, so many things, but not one of them
meant anything at all to her in this moment. She felt the tingle, felt the longing in her
groin spread throughout her body, warming and teasing her, making her skin sensitive
to the touch of hem and weave and seam. She couldn’t help but let out a long, low
sigh.
Lucy took another step forward towards the outstretched paw. She caught a
brief reflection from within the hood, a pale white howling light cast back at her from
his eyes, a reflection of the moon and his ice cold soul. Lucy longed to nuzzle into his
fur, to bury her face in the texture of death. She knew that one touch would be
enough. Lucy saw with absolute clarity under this calm but deep moonlight, that
accepting the request would bring freedom of a kind that, at her tender and exciting
age, she had never yet considered. It tasted delicious. Those eyes. How she longed to
look into those eyes just once before the fang and the crack of her neck.
The wolf spoke again, smothering the moment with his reek and the furnace
heat of his breath. “You think you know what freedom means. I see it in your eyes.
But you are mistaken. My kiss is not death. It is the one truth of a life immortal in the
time of man.”
This was not what Lucy expected. She felt the magic in the air begin to waver
around her head, revealing glimpses of stone cold wall and hard, puddled
tarmacadamed floor amongst the grasses and the starry sky. This was the instant of
doubt, the point where the prey loses its fear of those mesmerising eyes and runs for
dear sanctuary, but in that instant when Lucy felt that she might regain control of her
legs and speed back towards the light of town, the wolf slid the hood from his head.
What big eyes, full of fire and wind. What big teeth, slavering and razor sharp.
The light changed once again. The sweet smelling air of a cold, crisp open plain
standing before the wooded foothills of some primeval mountain range filled the
world, an air that brings with it the promise of silence on snowfall, of the wandering
track of paws discovered on a bright, blue freeze of a morning.
Lucy watched as the beast flung off the black cloak. She gaped and swooned
as the wolf prince, this Lord of the North Winds, revealed himself to her. Time stood
still around her, the grasses hushing their endless tidal sweep, and now, without any
further movement of her feet, she felt herself glide towards his beckoning paw. With
every inch covered her senses reeled with ever deeper revelation. The smell of him;
taught and unfettered, canine and warm, dripping with libido. The look of him;
rippling and strong, lithe and leggy, powerfully quick to the prey. The sound of him;
deep and endless, a calling wind from the birth of time itself, assured and confident.
The taste of him; oh the taste to come, the wetness of his muzzle, the razor edge of his
teeth, the fetid and yielding lust on his hot breath as the bite went home.
“I…I don’t…understand”, she whimpered as she placed her delicate pink hand
onto his rough skinned canine pads.
If a wolf and a man combined can truly ever smile, then he did so now,
revealing the full width and depth of the terror of the world in that one reflexive
response to emotion and the kill.
“All this and more is mine. Every field, every mountain range, every wood. I
roam free, beyond the gun and skinning knife. I wait in dark places, in alleyways and
passages, amid dereliction and decay, and once in a white killing moon I listen for the
call, and take a willing kiss from an innocent. Not from the unknowing but from one
whose potential is as boundless as my realm, from one who feels my strength but
knows not yet how they will be set free. I can set you free.”
“But…who are you?” Lucy asked quietly, laying herself down beneath the
wolf, feeling soft grass prick her bare legs.
The wolf sank onto all fours, straddling the girl, nuzzling at her breasts and her
cheek softly. His eyes burned red with the fire of his kind now. He looked directly at
Lucy and spoke his last words softly, like a lover spent after the first new tenderness
of the night.
“These places are my trails between worlds. You came calling my name. I am
simply he who answers your call. Soon the wolves of your world will be no more. My
mortal folk are lost. But as with all things the time of man will end. Until then I
answer the call of those like you who know in their hearts what it is to be free. When
the time comes you will tread this path again into a cleansed and virgin world and you
will howl at mother moon and set my folk free. Know, girl, that I am the Lord of the
North Wind and that I love you with all my heart.”
Lucy could swim in his eyes forever, she felt, as she gazed at her own
reflection in the deep ruby fire of his timeless stare. She saw there not the girl, but the
she-wolf, the alpha female, in her prime, maned and dripping blood from the kill,
suckling at pups, standing at the edge of the world baying for the return of her great
lunar matriarch. She saw a time to come when the world would be at peace and left
without the mark of human death, a time when lone wolves would appear as out of the
air to reclaim their eternal place in the heart. She heard the welcoming in the hills and
forests as each of these immortal beasts sang with joy in the bright light of full moons.
As Lucy felt the waters of the wolf rising above her head, entombing her in his
flesh, as she watched, fascinated by the bending of his neck and felt the first exquisite
piercing of his canines within her flesh, she whispered one last question.
“Am I really like her, the wolf-woman in your eyes?”