Wolven Memories

Autumn. Leaves rise and fall, as the breeze tickles them lazily. A rotund squirrel sits, observant, at the base of the old tree which has been at the centre of the town square for longer than anyone can remember. Drowsy hoards of pigeons coo softly from their perches on top of the skyline of thatched roofs, whilst other birds open their mouths to chorus the world. The sleepy world is painted with warm streaks of red and orange. Lethargically, the sun peers out from the horizon, warming the walls of the buildings, spreading fat smudges of light onto the leaf-littered streets. The tree seems to yawn almost audibly, a low sigh of contentment. It is a crisp morning – though in no way unpleasant, the faint scent of wood fires lingering on the air. Languidly, the world begins to wake.

In the middle of all of this, a young man walks through the streets, his shabby crimson boots creating a resounding clack on the cobbles. He is dressed almost totally in shabby dark clothes: black trousers; a shirt, with gleaming brass buttons undone just a little lower than strictly necessary; and a long coat which swirls slightly as he walks, catching in the gentle wind along with strands of his mane of shaggy blue-black hair. He hums softly to himself as he walks, a small indecipherable smile on his face and in the brilliant emerald green of his eyes. One hand resides inside his coat pocket, the other clutching the painting that he has just completed - the bold brush-strokes barely dry - streaks of paint still on his willowy fingers with the nails bitten down short. He stops, checks over his shoulder to assure himself that nobody is there, before continuing on.

This man is me. My name is Marcus, and I assure you that you shall find me to be a man just as charming and mysterious as that dainty little combination of letters suggests. As I walk through the town, I absently brush my fingers against the rough surfaces of buildings, glad to be home. I am tired, but the familiar places are comforting. For once, my overly delicate ears are not assaulted with the chatter of people, but merely with the reassuring sound of the wind sweeping the leaves along the ground below me. I take the same route as I always do – careful to avoid the houses that I know will be cooking fish, as I detest the smell, and making a slight detour to pass by the house in which I know that a young girl sings sweetly every morning – not having to concentrate at all because the way is engraved in my mind. For a moment, my smile fades slightly, as I realise that this may well be the last time that I shall take this route, the last time that I will be able to call the town home. As I cross the square, I am jerked from my thoughts as a squirrel skitters across my path, before darting up the old tree in the centre to watch me critically from the safety of the branches.

I smile as I watch its little face animate with uncertainty at what I am. I stand, just watching it as it begins to clean itself. I’m reminded of a time when I could have stood here for hours, just watching squirrels all day, oblivious to the mocking of other people. I would watch every move that they made, getting to know particular animals by their individual habits. Nobody ever did work out why I spent so much time with the things. Nobody suspected, for a single moment, that I had a reason for being so interested in squirrels.

I take a small crumb of food from my pocket, and, checking over my shoulder to see that I am quite by myself, crouch down, placing my painting beside me carefully. Clicking with my tongue and holding the food out, I wait for a response from my furry companion. Its tiny nose quivers with excitement as the squirrel sees my offering, and immediately springs down the tree to investigate. It pauses, one front leg comically raised in the air as it watches me, eyeing the gift on my outstretched palm with hungry eyes. I click again with my tongue softly, encouraging it, assuring it that I am of no harm. With a graceful bound, it comes closer, before stopping again, twitching with energy.

“Come on.” I whisper to it softly, my voice gentle. “Come on.” Satisfied that I pose no threat, it leaps towards my hand, eager to get at what I have for it. The soft fur brushes against me, as it grabs out to snatch the crumbs from me… and in one sudden movement close my hands around it and snap its tiny neck with a horrifying crack.

The rodent is almost instantly limp and lifeless. Humming to myself again, I get to my feet and carefully place this morning’s meal in my pocket. Nobody knew why I watched the squirrels – and nobody ever knew why they had an odd habit of disappearing either. Nobody ever suspected the truth. Which is probably just as well, as the trouble it would have caused would have been unbelievable. I have perfected my killing to cause as little pain as possible to the things, but I don’t suppose that such mercies would be taken upon me if I were discovered as what I truly am.

I have lived here for as long as my memory can recall, grown up here, so that the place is as much as part of me as I am a part of it. Almost every person here is known to me, and I am known to them too – the quiet, shy artist, whose charming smile has managed to attract more than a little attention from the many young women of this place. I am the man whose voice is as gentle as an angel’s, the man who will politely decline any offer of alcohol made to him. I am the man who everyone thinks they know completely – and yet, they know next to nothing. I am the man who everyone trusts, in his reserved and silent manner. To the many female admirers I seem to manage to collect effortlessly, I am a saint – the delightful young man who speaks so sweetly in poems and pretty words to them. To the many children, I am the man to whom they should always be polite, to whom they should aspire to be like. (If only their parents knew more of who I am, they would be horrified to think that they wanted their offspring to be like me.)

As irresistible as I may be, however, the people here are nothing to me other than a way to try and fill my need for company. The ladies who speak to each other of my stunning eyes and voice so lovely it is surely not natural, they hold very little for me. I cannot claim to find any one of them particularly attractive, nor their conversation enthralling. Whilst I enjoy their company, I need something more. Whilst I can revel in their affections, to love them is something that I do not think I could do. This place, for all that it gives me, is simply not where I truly belong. That place, I know, exists a long way from here. Which is why, today, I say a sad yet silent farewell to everything about this town, and tomorrow morning leave for somewhere very different.

There are some things about this place that it tears me apart to have to leave: the old meat shop on the corner, with smoked bacon that I doubt can be bettered; the way that I know every street and alley, every building and every cobbled path; knowing every person here and knowing that I have their trust. Yet, there is something I want, something that I am all too horribly aware that this place can never give me, but that I am convinced that somewhere will be able to offer. It is for this thing that I am willing to leave behind all of these beloved places, people, memories. I have spent all of my life here, and it is becoming more and more apparent that it may be time for this bird to finally leave its home and build a nest completely its own.

Turning a corner, I pass a couple, walking hand in hand. The woman’s face is flushed, not with the cold, but with excitement; her partner’s filled with a simple smile of complete joy. My sharp ears prick up, hearing the way they whisper and giggle quietly with each other. I am walking straight toward them, but they do not seem to notice, because they are so enthralled in each other’s eyes. It is only when I am almost next to them, close enough to reach out and touch them, that they break the enchantment of their gaze and stop to greet me. Tiredly, I smile back, muttering a few words before continuing on my way. It is not until I turn and see that they are out of sight that I let out a long low sigh. It is a mixture of sadness and irritation, as the thing that I want so badly is thrown in front of my very nose, but just that little bit too far for me to grasp. The thing that I am willing to leave this place to find.

Whether it is some bizarre form of blessing, or a hidden curse, I am torn from my thoughts by the smell of cooking fish. Almost instantly, my small nose wrinkles into a look of complete shock and disgust. I never have been able to stand the horrific odour of fish, and doubt that I ever shall be. My route through the town has been chosen a long time ago so that I could avoid every place that I knew there would be fish for breakfast. It seems, however, that I have somehow managed to miss one house. I cough, as I hurriedly scurry past the offending building towards my own home.

As I turn one final corner, my face breaks into a smile, my perfectly white lupine teeth, for a rare moment, showing. I am standing only feet away from the place that has, for so long, been my home. It is a tall old building, the brickwork a little chipped in places but otherwise still the same as it always has been, with a thick oak door. Now crossing to it, I run my fingers over the wooden door for a moment, my smile staying as I recognise every dip and groove in the panelling, memories flaring up of much younger times.

I would wait impatiently at the door for my father to open it and let me inside; a tiny childish bundle of scruffy black clothes and dirt. Tumbling across the wooden floor straight into my mother’s arms, I would huddle close to her as she commented dryly that I seemed to become dirtier every day, and smile contentedly to myself as she attempted to neaten my hair, her thin fingers becoming entrapped in its tangled mess. I would bury my face in her shoulder, inhaling the faint scent that her clothes had, feeling the safest I have ever felt. My father; a tall and silent man, would merely watch quietly as I snuggled into my mothers embrace, an odd expression on his harsh features that I never did learn to read.

Of course, I grew up. Over time, it would become that my father always walked so much ahead of me that the door was opened in expectance long before I even contemplated the idea of going back inside. The games with my mother slowly dwindled until, one day, they ceased to exist altogether. At the time, I do not imagine that I cared much, or even paused to think about how much things were changing, but now, something in me misses the feeling of being in somebody’s arms and having them tell me that everything was just right. Now that I can no longer have that same love, I sometimes wish that I had not wasted so much of my time in watching squirrels or drawing my pictures so solitarily, and had instead chosen to come home and make each precious moment with my mother so dear to me that I might now remember a little more of her than the blurred images and hazy recollections.

My mind jolting back to reality, I reach into my pocket to draw out the twisted metal spine of the key. It has become so rusted over the years that it is a miracle indeed that it still works, but it still fits the door perfectly. With a tiny shiver of excitement that I still get every time I return home, I twist it, hear a satisfying click, and slowly push the door open to reveal the tall hallway beyond. Lingering for a moment in the doorway, I breathe in the comforting scent of home, before stepping inside and, with a final glance over my shoulder to assure myself that I have not been followed, close the door with a faint thud as it resettles in its frame.

I stay for a brief moment, letting the taste of the place that means so much to me capture all of my abnormally clear senses. Even though this room has no windows, my eyes adjust almost instantly to the light, perceiving the thick wooden table which resides in the centre, chairs pulled across the floor, candles not yet extinguished and plates littered about as though guests have just left it… but I have had no guests. I am alone in this house, having been such ever since my mother passed away all those years ago when I was still a little too young to consider leaving here. The mess on the table is merely the product of my haste to leave the house to paint.

Shrugging off my coat and placing my painting on one of the chairs, I take one of the candles, now nothing but a mess of melted wax, and begin to light the lamps around the room. Gradually, the hall becomes lighter, until, by the time I have lit the main fire, it is almost as bright as the daylight outside, and most certainly warmer. A sad smile crossing my features, I go over to the candles that, by habit, I always leave until last. Silently, I lower the flickering flame of the light that I am clutching in my hand to the candle resting on the mantelpiece, until the wicks meet, and there is a burst of flame; illuminating the paintings of my parents that reside there.

Putting aside the candle that I am holding, I silently stroke my fingers over the cracked brush-strokes of my mother’s, her eyes smiling comfortingly. I let out a tiny growl of loneliness, as I am reminded once again of just how much I miss the beautiful woman who stares back at me. Her face is, indeed, beautiful – she cannot be much older than I am in this painting, though I remember her as looking a little more tired. Her hair swirls around her shoulders, a light brown that is complimented by eyes as green as mine are. I have inherited most of my looks from my mother, having surprisingly little resemblance to my father. (Though, by some misfortune, I have received a great deal of his character – including my horrendous vanity.)

Shifting my focus, I concentrate on clearing the table so that I may eat my squirrel, which has, no doubt, gone cold by now. Once I am finished with stacking the piles of plates, I extract it carefully from my pocket to check – and find that, to my disgust, it is positively frozen. Sighing slightly, I sit in one of the chairs, toying with my food idly. Resting my head in my hand, I poke at the thick furry tail, twirling it around my hand. I realise now that I am not at all in the mood to eat, and so the squirrel is abandoned.

Scraping the chair across the floor as I get to my feet again, and licking my fingers to kill some of the flames lighting the room, I saunter up the stairs, my hand brushing against the thick banister. Once at the top, I pause to glance at my reflection in the long mirror that is resting against a wall. Running my fingers through my hair, I neaten my shirt, and try a smile to see what I look like – being pleased with the result. I’m still as attractive as ever, and growing vainer by the day.

Singing softly to myself under my breath, I tear myself away from my beloved mirror. Sometimes I think that I could will away a lifetime just staring at my own reflection, which is utterly repulsive, I know. We are all vain, in a sense, but my vanity is quite different. It is such inhuman vanity – obsession with my own image to a point of being disgustingly so.

I am what you might describe as a werewolf, tragically blessed with looks that most mortal women find utterly irresistible, and with such a love for romantic poetry that I can recite to you almost any verse that you might desire to hear. The town’s women are quite correct in their giggled whisperings that I cannot be wholly natural, though their assumption that I am something heavenly is nothing but amusing. Angel I most certainly am not, but I can claim to be more than half lupine, and am nothing of the popular image of a savage beast that people are so fond of imagining my kind as, no, I am quite the opposite. Rather than being hideous and disgusting, everything about me is simply too perfect to be completely human.

The curse of such beauty, however, is not only the unwanted attention that I receive, but the fact that I find it almost impossibly hard to appreciate what humans perceive as beauty. I can stand in front of a woman who the town will whisper is the fairest thing to ever breathe, and yet find her nothing remarkable. A painting that I dismiss as being one of my more hasty and rather boring works will be the object of such great admiration. It is not simply sight either – no, music that to the human ear is stunning will have me grimacing at the horrible imperfection of it.

That is not to say that I can appreciate none of the beauty of the human world – just pitifully little of it. My work as a painter came about because there is so much beauty in my mind, that I long just to express the tiniest example to others, but sadly mere paints on canvas cannot achieve that. The colours of the paint are too dim to my eyes, showing nothing of the overwhelming perfection that I can imagine.

Tiredly, I kick the crimson boots from my feet, collapsing onto my four-poster bed, my fingers lightly kissing the worn covers. Spending entire nights painting is nothing short of exhausting. Nestling under the roughly patched blankets I allow my eyes to drift closed. There is a faint musty smell on the blanket, which I find oddly calming, and the hypnotic rhythm of leaves tickling the closed shutters lulls me into sleep. As I begin to slip into dreams, I realise vaguely that I am now hungry. This faint awareness roars into a burning need for food. Letting out a low growl of irritation, I drag myself from the warmth of my bed to where I have left the lifeless squirrel, grab its tail roughly and retreat once again to the warmth of my bed, gnawing at the dead creature to satisfy my want for blood.

I shall explain now that, although I cannot deny that I crave for blood as a werewolf, it is an infrequent event rather than an ongoing lust for death. It is true that, when the full moon rises on the sky, the cravings grow more desperate, so that I am almost driven to insanity with this hunger for the only food that provides me with proper nourishment. If I ignore it, or worse try to resist the temptation that nags at my mind, it only makes my need more desperate. The lupine part of me grows so much stronger that it completely overpowers my human thinking. It is almost comparable to sleepwalking – I am aware that I am doing something, though exactly what, I am unsure until I see the destruction the next morning.

The blood is cold; my prey having been dead for quite some time, but it still manages to send me into complete soaring ecstasy. My already acute senses rush into a whole new sharpness as the familiar taste takes over my mind. My own blood roars in my ears. The room begins to spin. Giddy with pleasure, I lap up the blood. I let out a half groan half growl of bliss. My vision explodes into white. My heart is racing. I breathe faster... and then, it’s over, leaving me panting for air, grinning. A little shiver of thrill shudders down my spine, as I lick the last traces of blood from my slightly pointed canine teeth. Getting to my feet, I fling open the shutters and, squinting against the light that is now filling the world, unceremoniously drop the drained squirrel.

Now satisfied, I contentedly crawl into bed, feeling tired but fulfilled. Tugging the covers up over me, I allow my eyes to close, and lie in silence; the only sound my own still ragged breathing, and the hypnagogic gurgle of the pigeons on the roof above me. My heart gradually slows to its normal rate, as does my breathing, and soon I am beginning to fall asleep, losing my thoughts in the confusing mess of my mind. There is a small dark smile playing across my face as I descend into dreams.