The Howling Wolf

Photo, "Wolf and Moon" by nixxphotography, courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Halloween wouldn't be quite the same without a werewolf or two.  Full moon and total body conversions aside, werewolves, like vampires, ghosts, demons and witches, are the staples of modern halloween, and they are creatures steeped in legend.  Mythologies across the world have their own versions of werewolves, so when exploring Halloween and the start of winter in search of inspiration for chilling stories, I cannot avoid werewolves.

Like the whole concept of vampirism - the sucking of blood to retain some kind of evil immortality - was terrifying to me as a child, so the idea of shapeshifting into something that feeds on human flesh, unwillingly at particular points in time (notably on a night of the full moon) also had me utterly unnerved.  These days I'm slightly more tolerant of things dark and fearful, but only slightly.

I suppose what is particlarly unnerving about werewolf, is that they are in fact human monsters, people who can change shape, are endowed with enormous strength, and are cannibals.  Cannibalism is one of society's enduring taboos.  And as with witches, there are historical events associated with the werewolf legends, such as werewolf trials.  For example, in 1521, two Frenchment, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun, were executed as werewolves.  It seems that they were a serial killer team, and later that century, in 1573, a Gilles Garner, known for his crimes as the "Werewolf of Dole", was executed, found also to be a serial killer.  It could be that at a time when wolves were a very real threat to country people, serial killers who had perhaps eaten parts of their victims, i.e. exhibited bestial behaviour, were related to beasts.

Jupiter turning Lycaon into a wolf, engraving by Hendrik Golzius, photo courtesy of Wikipedia

The myth itself seems to have its origins in a story told by Ovid of King Lycaon, who offended the gods by serving to them human meat at a feast.  Jupiter punished him by transforming him into a werewolf, who would shift shape and become a wolf to consume human flesh.  Having said this, Ovid could simply have been recounting an earlier oral tradition.

The connection to the full moon is very much a traditional connection which associated the moon to madness - periods of "lunacy" were in ancient times observed to be linked to phases of the moon.  Wolves were known to howl on moonlit nights - but let's not fall prey completely to myth: wolves howled on dark nights too.

Werewolves are either the creation of the human imagination to explain serial killings associated with disemberment and cannibalism, or they have some kind of grounding in reality.  Whatever their origins, they are deliciously useful for gruesome tales, as is evidenced by the werewolf's popularity in fiction and film-making, and a traditional part of Halloween fun.

Photo "Butcher's Block and Knife" by Simon Howden, courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Inevitably I found myself drawn to the idea of a modern werewolf, one who is beautifully disguised as a normal person, a shopkeeper,perhaps, maybe a butcher, discovered  by accident by an innocent child.  I wrote the short story, Of Moonlight and Meat, which is part of the collection: The Dark Closes In.  Here is an extract.  I hope you find it to your taste!

Jayron was exactly thirteen years old at the precise moment that the full moon began to creep up in the eastern skies that blood-filled Halloween.  It had been a hot day, but with half term in full swing, he had been hanging around at home with his mother and older sisters.  At sunset, he was particularly grouchy.  As if it wasn’t bad enough being the youngest of four, he had to be stuck being the only boy among a gaggle of squawking girls.

“Look, Jayron, I know it’s your birthday today, but it was your idea to wait till your Dad’s back at the weekend to celebrate.  It’s Thursday today – not long to go,” said his mother, elbow-deep in the froth of the kitchen sink.  That did not stop Jayron from stomping off muttering under his breath.  He had become pretty good at doing that lately.

From the front room he could hear the rising cackles of his sisters as they dressed each other up ready to go “trick or treating”.  They were dressing up as witches.  “Shouldn’t be hard for them,” he muttered resentfully, angry and yet ridden with guilt at feeling that way.  He was supposed to be going with them, shrouded in black and carrying a lamp, but he missed his father and he doubted he could be bothered.

Skulking about his room while his sisters draped themselves in their black and purple outfits, fitted wigs and painted their faces, he flicked open his laptop and prodded at the keyboard.  Facebook, Messanger, Skype, Twitter – they were all unusually quiet, his friends obviously partying without him.  Most of them had gone away on holiday, but he hoped they would be back to celebrate his birthday.  Those who had stayed behind had long since made arrangements for Halloween, and none of these involved Jayron.  If he was going to get any entertainment this evening, it would have to be going out with his sisters.  He abandoned his attempt to socialise and began to browse.  It was Halloween.  There was a full moon.  There was only one word suitable to type into a search engine: werewolf.

In the cold cellars underneath his shop, Gonzalo tied his hair back tightly.  He then bound his beard with an elastic band and strapped hair nets over his head and under his chin.  He set to work like he did each evening, to prepare the meat for the morning shoppers.  Under the sharp lights the room gleamed: stainless steel surfaces polished until he could see his reflection in them.  In the centre of the room, illuminated by the kind of spotlights usually found above a dentist’s chair, stood a massive slab of grey granite, topped by another slab of thick white marble.  Along one side of the room, neatly arranged in order of size, hung dozens of knives, cleavers, saws – even an electric saw, whose edges were so sharp they could have sliced silk as well as bone. 

From one of the vast refrigerators that lined the walls, Gonzalo hauled a large carcass wrapped in the finest muslin.  The carcasses he obtained were always of the best quality, bled thoroughly, hung for exactly long enough for the meat to be perfectly tender.  Even carcasses like this one that he was working on himself, from bleeding to skinning to gutting to carving, right from the first kill.

Gonzalo let out a long sigh as he hoisted the carcass onto the marble carving slab.  The lights and the cooling system hummed.  He could feel the first stirrings of unease deep in his own entrails, a fluttering that rose into his chest to make his heart drum a shade faster than usual.  It happened always at full moon, all his life, ever since he was young enough to remember.  He knew the hunger would be bad tonight.  Halloween was always bad, especially when the moon was full and bright on a cloudless night as this.  The first cut was the worst; the sensation of the flesh giving way as he angled the cleaver perfectly, tingled all the way up his arm and drove a low, guttural groan from his throat.  The smell of the meat, each part with its different scent, the high notes of rib-eye steak and the deeper waft of slices of liver, had the saliva springing to the edges of his lips.  But through sheer force of will, he drove back the hunger and worked on."

"As they headed towards town, Jayron could see the moon just rising over the edge of the Rock, shedding a pale yellow light on the treetops at the upper edges of the mountain-side.  It looked like a giant pumpkin, a cardboard cut out pinned to a black velvet curtain, the sort of backdrop found in schoolrooms across the city.  Worse than that, thought Jayron, it was casting an evil light on those who mocked the power of Halloween.  He pressed his hand discreetly into his chest, where underneath his black tee shirt he could feel the rosary beads he had hung round his neck, along with cloves of garlic, a number of crucifixes and other religious medals he had borrowed from his mother’s collection.  In his trouser pockets, pressing into his leg as he walked, he felt the cold metal of his father’s silver letter knife.  At least this would offer some protection for what might be lurking out and about tonight, thought Jayron.

In town, surrounded by tall buildings and the looming presence of the Tower of Homage, Jayron lost sight of the moon and its hypnotic light.  He felt a surge of relief; there was less likely to be an attack here, where so many people were out and about dressed up in daft costumes and sporting gruesome masks trying to frighten each other for fun.

Jayron was quite certain that there would be some kind of attack, although he could not imagine what the details might be, but he had spent months on his laptop tracking incidents that appeared insignificant on their own, but which Jayron was convinced were all linked: the disappearance of a teenage girl one year; and old man found dashed by the cliff edge near the lighthouse, the pieces of his body torn by some creature’s teeth; a badly decomposed head discovered in a cave near the Ape’s Den and one year, a scattering of human teeth, DNA tested to show they came from the same individual found among the base of some trees high up in the Nature Reserve, strewn along the ground as if they had been seeds sown for the reaping.  And only last autumn the body of a woman had drifted to shore at Eastern Beach, legs and rump neatly sliced off as if by a supernatural blade.  That had been the start of Jayron’s researching and plotting, visualising in 3D charts after hours pinned to his computer.  He added information gleaned from Spanish websites: children that had been snatched and disappeared; appeals from people looking for missing relatives; Romany’s complaining bitterly that their camps had been ferociously attached and some of their young carried off while the authorities shrugged and could not discover what had happened.

In the chart that spun slowly on his computer screen so he could see the information from all angles, Jayron could see a pattern, and the pattern pointed to the full moon and Halloween.  Right now, he was nervous, because he had both.

Lost in thought, Jayron trudged up Castle Steps with his sisters.  He had compared all the injuries and causes of death and had concluded that they could only have been caused by some vicious creature with powerful jaws.  Except for the neat slicing on some of the limbs.  That was puzzling and Jayron tended to think the murderer might be using alien weapon technology rather than demonic powers, powers that he was convinced would claim his life.  He looked gloomily about him, but had no idea what to look for, what sort of attack might come, nor when.  At the top of Castle Steps he turned to see how far back his sisters were behind him and his heart skipped a beat when he realised he was alone.  They had gone off, wondering through the labyrinthine passages and steps of the old town, riddled as it was with shadowy alleys, foul-smelling and damp with fetid, un-drained rainwater.

“Well, that’s me done for,” he declared out loud, as much to whatever was out there lurking in the dark corners of The Rock, as to himself.  A sickly moon had risen high now and peered mournfully down at him. Tonight seemed to be the perfect night to follow his fate......."

The rest of the story can be found in the collection of short stories: "The Dark Closes In", out in time for Halloween on Amazon!