Curse of the Night Wolf Page 9

  I shook my head angrily. I thought of Scaldy Sal, and how brave she’d been after her terrible furnace accident. And of Tom Garrick and Scobie Rathbone – good, solid individuals, grateful that someone had treated them well, easing their aches and pains, both so wickedly betrayed. And of course Old Benjamin, the retired coachman who had been such a good friend to me all my life …

  ‘I found the weak, the poor, the vulnerable – those who wouldn’t be missed – and I gave them my cordial. Then I invited them back on the following full moon for a final injection—’

  ‘The syringe,’ I interrupted. ‘Tincture of mercury and deadly nightshade.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘You have done your research. I’m impressed, Mr Grimes. I was a werewolf hunter – the greatest there has ever been. I know all there is to know about killing the lycanthrope. Yet my fixing solution is my greatest discovery – even greater than my cordial. It kills werewolves “in fur”, the victims never regaining their human form.’ The doctor rubbed his hands together delightedly. ‘As I said, Mr Grimes, I turned the unfortunate side effects to my advantage.’

  I shuddered. ‘You skin them, Doctor, and sell their pelts as—’

  ‘Westphalian trim,’ the doctor cackled, his right arm whipping up from the desk.

  I felt a sharp pain and, looking down, saw a feather-flighted dart embedded in my shoulder.

  ‘Drugged tea.’ The doctor laughed. ‘My dear Mr Grimes, there is more than one way to skin a wolf.’

  Wolf … Wolf … Wolf …

  The words echoed in my head as I tried in vain to climb out of my chair and draw my swordstick. The whole room was blurred and swimming. My body felt both numb and incredibly heavy. There was a loud buzzing noise inside my head, then …

  Nothing.

  I don’t know how long I was unconscious for, but when I came round, I was lying on the padded floor of the doctor’s laboratory. I looked around groggily – at the quilted walls, at the glinting hook high above my head.

  ‘You surprise me, Mr Grimes.’

  It was the doctor’s voice, and it was coming from the far side of the laboratory. Straining every fibre of my body, I turned my head. And there he was, over by the wall. He was wearing a white surgical smock and long rubber gloves. In his hands was a huge syringe, which he was holding up as he measured off the silvery-white contents against the calibrations. He turned and smiled thinly.

  ‘I expected you to put up more of a fight.’

  I said nothing. But inside, my stomach churned and my head screamed. How stupid I’d been! I should have skewered him with my swordstick first and asked questions after. Instead, I was now at the doctor’s mercy.

  He turned and came towards me, pushing his pince-nez up his nose as he advanced.

  ‘Apologies for the crude manner in which I had to administer the cordial,’ he added. ‘My patients usually have a three-week course, but in your case, Mr Grimes—’

  ‘My case?’ I rasped – and as I spoke, I realized how raw and bruised my throat felt.

  The doctor nodded towards the three empty blue bottles lying beside me, as well as the funnel and length of rubber tubing.

  ‘I had to give you an especially concentrated dose, you see,’ he said. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

  I wanted to leap to my feet, but I couldn’t move a muscle. The lingering effects of the drugged dart were just too strong.

  ‘Now’ – he smiled down at me – ‘shall we apply the final treatment?’

  With those words, he turned and pulled a huge hood with sinister dark glass panels for eyes down over his head. Then, reaching up, he grabbed a thick cord that hung down from the skylight, and pulled. There was a click and a creak. Slowly but surely, the slatted shutters above my head began to open. As they did so, they revealed the great white sphere of the full moon. It shone down, bathing me in a pool of silvery light.

  Have you ever felt your skin being peeled slowly away from your arms and legs? Your muscles being torn and shredded as every bone in your body fights to burst through your flesh? Every tendon and sinew stretched to breaking point as your skeleton attempts to rip itself apart from the inside?

  That is what it feels like to turn into a werewolf. And it is something I’ll never forget so long as I live.

  My fingers and toes lengthened and transformed themselves into hard, claw-tipped paws. My neck strained, my belly cramped, my muscles knotted and rippled. Suddenly my tongue – long and glistening – was lolling from the corner of my mouth, as my nose and jaw lengthened into a snarling snout, which bared to reveal drooling fangs. And, as I writhed and squirmed in a torment of pain, from every part of my body there sprouted thick, lustrous, dark-brown fur …

  ‘Aaah-ooo-ooo!’ I cried, despite myself, throwing back my head and howling at the moon.

  When I looked down, I saw the doctor’s syringe glint in the moonlight – the syringe that bore the tincture of mercury and nightshade that would kill me. All at once it all became horribly clear.

  I would be hung from the hook, like all those others before me whose splattered blood still stained the pale-grey padded walls. I would be skinned from top to toe, and my pelt would be sold to Madame Scutari, no questions asked, to be turned into a sought-after fur collar or cuff for a wealthy customer: the celebrated Westphalian trim.

  No, I told myself, fighting to regain the vestiges of the human being I had once been. I refuse to become an animal!

  Summoning all the strength I could muster from the very depths of my being, I tensed my muscles as the sinister figure of the doctor approached me, the deadly syringe grasped in his hand.

  Closer … Closer …

  All at once, with a curdling howl, I sprang at the doctor, knocking him backwards. We hit the floor with a loud thud. The doctor let go of the syringe, which bounced away across the padded floor.

  To this day, I don’t quite know what came over me – but I was a wolf, and in danger, and I reacted like any cornered animal would. I went for the doctor’s throat. What I got was a mouthful of thick cotton-like gauze that made up the doctor’s hood, which I tore off with a flick of my neck.

  For a moment I found myself glaring down into those steel-grey eyes as they glinted in the moonlight. They stared back at me, the absolute terror clear in their gaze.

  ‘No,’ the doctor moaned. ‘No … No, no, no …’ His voice was loud and crazed. ‘No!’

  He twisted round and stared up at the white disc of the full moon, his face contorted with fear …

  ‘N-aaah ooo-ooo!’ His voice broke, switching at that moment from a human cry of anguish to a terrible wolf-like howl.

  At the same instant his body began to buckle and convulse. I saw his limbs flex and his muscles writhe, as if he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. The doctor was going through the selfsame transformation that I had just endured.

  By my reckoning, Klaus Johannes Westphale was over one hundred and fifty years old, kept youthful and vigorous by the use of his accursed cordial. Unlike his unfortunate patients, though, he’d always been at great pains to protect himself from the rays of the full moon. Now his luck had run out.

  As I watched, horrified, I saw his fingers elongate and curl, and the nails harden to savage claws. I saw his spine arch and bend backwards; his jaw lengthen and sprout glinting fangs. And as this hideous trans formation took place, deep, guttural sounds rumbled in his throat, becoming less human and more bestial by the second.

  And then, as I stood transfixed and rooted to the spot, his clothes split and his body began to sprout fur. Thick, glossy and as white as pure, driven snow, it appeared all over his wolf-like body. Up his limbs and across his back it went, growing especially long and luxuriant up the curve of his neck. Over his ears, round his eyes and down the snout to his teeth – which were bared and snarling and full of hatred …

  With a blood-curdling cry, the hellish creature that the doctor had become pounced, knocking me hard against the padded wall of the chamber. For a moment I was
stunned and winded, but only for a moment. The next, I swerved out of reach of the white wolf’s glinting fangs and spun round, my own bared teeth snarling menacingly as the fur at my neck and down my back stood on end.

  With a blood-curdling cry, the hellish creature pounced…

  A dark surge of unspeakable fury welled up in me. I didn’t just want to kill the white wolf circling round me, its fangs glinting, its piercing grey eyes narrowed to evil slits as it sized up my throat; I wanted to tear it limb from limb, claw my way into its innards and rip its entrails out with my bare fangs.

  With an ear-splitting screech, the snow-white beast flew towards me, claws outstretched and slavering jaws agape. I launched myself back at it. Suddenly we were entwined in a savage, snarling, snapping embrace. A red blur filled my vision as my animal limbs coursed with a supernatural energy. My jaws bit and tore as my talons flashed and clawed. We thudded against the padded walls and floor in a blind frenzy of hatred and rage.

  All at once the white wolf let out a piercing yowl of pain, so loud I reeled back across the floor. For a moment all I could see was stars shooting, but when the shock waves cleared and my eyes focused once more, I saw the white wolf lying slumped and motionless across the chamber from me.

  Slowly, cautiously, my tail lowered and, neck hair on end, I crossed the floor. I lowered my head and sniffed …

  The deadly syringe was sticking out of the white wolf’s arched back, the plunger compressed, the glass cylinder emptied.

  A fierce animal surge of triumph coursed through my powerful body. I threw back my head and howled at the moon.

  Strange as the events of that night were, the events of the morning after were stranger still. When I came to my human senses, I was naked in a padded chamber containing a very big and very dead white wolf. The early dawn light confirmed that I had resumed my human form, just like poor Scaldy Sal before me, only I was lucky enough to have lived to tell the tale.

  Not that I felt particularly lucky at that moment. My head ached and every muscle in my body felt as if it had been beaten with a meat-tenderizer. Still, I was able to pull on the doctor’s overcoat, which I found hanging on his office door, the feel of its Westphalian trim making me shudder; pick up my ripped poacher’s waistcoat, my swordstick and hat, and get out of there.

  My first drop that morning was at the third-floor laboratory of Professor Pinkerton-Barnes. I told him of the horrors of the night before; my stupidity in allowing the doctor to get the better of me and his terrible fate. PB assured me that the other victims of the doctor were all safe and well, and that I would be too. Though, as he pressed the small bottle of dark-green tincture into my hand – the result of many long hours in the laboratory – I still had my doubts.

  As I drained the bottle to its dregs, all I could do was pray that PB’s discovery – following his endless testing of innumerable patent medicines – was indeed correct.

  I needn’t have bothered, for that evening, as I stood at the open window of my attic rooms beneath the silvery glow of the full moon, I was as smooth and hairless as a newborn baby, thanks to the remarkable hair-loss associated with Old Mother Berkeley’s Patent Tonic!

  I wish I could say that the horrors of the previous night were as easily banished, but I cannot. The memory of my terrible transformation still haunts me. But worse even than that is the memory conjured up when a coach-and-four rattles past me in the street. Then a wave of unbearable sadness fills me as I remember Old Benjamin and his terrible fate.

  Poor Old Benjamin, transformed into a werewolf as he sat in his coachman’s chair. That night he had sought out the beguiling moonlight up on the rooftops, where I, his friend, killed him.

  Could I have done any different? Perhaps – I don’t know. That question is the most terrible one of all.

  As for the doctor, well, I’m tempted to say I never saw hide nor hair of him again. But that would be a lie.

  His consulting rooms were cleared out by his business partner, Madame Scutari, and the whole sordid mess hushed up by her cousin, the mayor. Not that the elegant madame had ever asked questions. She had just taken the furs that the good doctor supplied her with – and was happy to do so.

  When her supply dried up, so too did the demand for Westphalian trim. The well-to-do fashionable crowd deserted Madame Scutari’s shop in droves and she went out of business.

  Serves her right, I say!

  The good news was that I was able to introduce the pretty Ellen to an enterprising dressmaker in Taplow Square, where she soon made her name anticipating the latest thing. A season later, the ladies of Gallop Row and Regency Mall had moved on to Japanese silk and jasmine corsages …

  All, that is, except Countess Oleanska Cantata, who excited much talk in the society gossip sheets by stepping out that season at the Beech Grove races – where I saw her with my own eyes – in a quarter-length jacket of the most exquisite white Westphalian fur anyone had ever seen …

  RETURN of the

  EMERALD SKULL

  Turn the page for an exclusive peek at the first chapter of the new Barnaby Grimes book, in stores spring 2009.

  Excerpt from Barnaby Grimes: Return of the Emerald Skull

  Copyright © 2008 by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell

  All rights reserved

  C ut out his beating heart,’ the ancient voice commanded, each syllable dripping with a dark evil that I was powerless to resist.

  Overhead, the moon slid slowly but inexorably across the face of the sun, casting the courtyard into a dreadful dusk. And as the light faded, so did the last vestiges of my will to resist. There was nothing that I could do.

  A circle of shadowy figures clustered around the great slab that lay before me, like a flock of hideous vultures. Their beaked faces and long, rustling feathers quivered with awful anticipation as their dark eye-sockets turned, as one, towards me.

  On awkward, stumbling legs, I approached the wooden altar like a sleepwalker, climbing one step after the other, powerless to resist.

  The hideous figures parted as I drew closer. At the altar, I looked down. There, stripped to the waist, lying face-up and spread-eagled, was a man, roped into place. There were cuts and weals on his skin – some scabbed over, some fresh – and his ribs were sticking up, giving his chest the appearance of a damaged glockenspiel.

  His head lolled to one side and, from his parted lips, there came a low, rasping moan.

  ‘Please,’ he pleaded, gazing up at me with the panic-stricken eyes of a ferret-cornered rabbit. ‘Don’t do it, I’m begging you…’

  At that moment, the final dazzling rays of the sun were extinguished by the dark orb of the moon. In shock, I looked up into the sky. The whole disc had turned pitch black and from the circumference of the circle, a spiky ring of light streamed out in all directions, like a black merciless eye staring down from the heavens.

  The tallest of the feathered figures stepped forward to face me. It wore a great crown of iridescent blue plumage. Behind him, nestling like a grotesque egg on the cushion of a high-backed leather chair, was a hideous grinning skull. As I stared, the huge jewels in the skull’s eye-sockets started to glow a bright and bloody crimson, which stained the eerie twilight of the eclipse.

  The feathered figure reached into its cape and withdrew a large stone knife, which it held out to me. Again the ancient voice rasped in my head.

  ‘Cut out his beating heart!’

  Despite myself, I reached out and gripped the haft of the stone knife in my hands. As I did so, I felt my arm being raised up into the air, as if it was attached to a string tugged upwards by some unseen puppeteer.

  I stared down at the figure tied to the altar. A vivid cross of red paint marked the spot beneath which his heart lay beating, I was sure, as violently as my own.

  My grip tightened on the cruel stone knife, the blade glinting, as the blood-red ruby eyes of the grinning skull bore into mine. Inside my head, the ancient voice rose to a piercing scream.

  ‘Cut out his
beating heart – and give it to me!’

  Watch out for

  RETURN OF THE EMERALD SKULL

  in spring 2009.

  THE EDGE CHRONICLES

  THE QUINT TRILOGY

  Follow the adventures of Quint in the first age of flight!

  THE CURSE OF THE GLOAMGLOZER

  Quint and Maris, daughter of the Most High Academe, are plunged into a terrifying adventure that takes them deep into the rock upon which Sanctaphrax is built. Here they unwittingly invoke an ancient curse …

  THE WINTER KNIGHTS

  Quint is a new student at the Knights Academy, struggling to survive the icy cold of a never-ending winter, and the ancient feuds that threaten Sanctaphrax.

  CLASH OF THE SKY GALLEONS

  Quint finds himself caught up in his father’s fight for revenge against the man who killed his family. They are drawn into a deadly pursuit, a pursuit that will ultimately lead to the clash of the great sky galleons.

  ‘The most amazing books ever.’

  Ellen, 10

  ‘I hated reading … now I’m a reading machine!’

  Quinn, 15

  THE EDGE CHRONICLES

  THE TWIG TRILOGY

  Follow the adventures of Twig in the first age of flight!

  BEYOND THE DEEPWOODS

  Abandoned at birth in the perilous Deepwoods, Twig does what he has always been warned not to do, and strays from the path …

  STORMCHASER

  Twig, a young crew-member on the Stormchaser sky ship, risks all to collect valuable stormphrax from the heart of a Great Storm.

  MIDNIGHT OVER SANCTAPHRAX

  Far out in open sky, a ferocious storm is brewing. In its path is the city of Sanctaphrax …

  ‘Absolutely brilliant.’