Running with the Pack

Running with the Pack Page 55

A silver hatchback was parked in front of one of the houses Charles ducked under, and he waited there until the trio of white kids came down the stairs, their fear stinking more than the dried-up pot in their pockets or the cigarettes in their hands. Charles kind of wanted the beast to take over then, at least to scare them, but one of the Holten Street Clique who had jacked Charles was with them, and even bristling with teeth and claws Charles was scared of the big thug—he had a funky, metallic smell about him that might well have been a gun. Otherwise the kids smelled the same, more or less, which meant something, Charles supposed.

Charles moved on as they jawed in front of the hatchback, and in a vacant lot he rested by a worn fence and watched three men pass around a glass pipe, their fingers the only parts of their bodies not shaking as they smoked the stinking, sour lumps. Charles realized with a single sniff that one of them was the father of the Holten Street bully who was with the white kids two blocks over, and he wondered if the boy knew his dad was a junkie. The kid certainly had nicer clothes than his father, but that wasn’t saying much.

Deeper in the night and the Southside he found a group of men and women enjoying a midnight grillout in a backyard, and further on a fenced-off yard where several pitbulls woke up growling at his approach, the dogs ripe with anger, their throats scarred from fighting, the stink of their dead fellows rising out of shallow graves beside the fence. Charles checked the address of the house to report them to the police in the morning. By then he was starting to fade, his tongue panting, his limbs sore, and he followed his own scent back to Holten Street, toward his bed.

His father was asleep on the front porch, an ashtray and the cordless phone on a stool beside him. Charles nosed the screen door open and padded inside the dark house. Hopping onto his bed, he curled up and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

“Boy, don’t you sleep naked in your gramma’s house!” Charles sat up in bed at his father’s voice, his head pounding, his whole body sore and scratched and bruised and his eyes watering from the ruthless sunlight. “Charlie, I don’t wanna call the police on you but you cannot be stayin out all night, not callin or nuthin. You don’t wanna go where I’ve been, Charlie, trust me. What’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry,” Charles blinked away the tears and saw his father had turned away from him in the doorway. “I was—”

“I don’t wanna hear it,” his father shook his head. “But this is it, understand? No more. One free get-out-of-shit card and you just used it, son—no more. I lied to my mom for you, Charlie, I told her you got in right after she went to sleep. How do you think that made me feel? I rented us another wolfman movie and you make me stay up all night thinkin you run off or got yourself killed with that smart mouth of yours. Where you get off . . . ”

Charles wondered if he would transform the next time the moon swelled. His father droned on, clearly taking satisfaction in the lecture, and Charles realized that he had been wrong about a whole hell of a lot of things. He was actually relieved that he had woken up human, and more than even knowing how the night-air of Tallahassee tasted or what the full moon smelled like, that was the most surprising thing about the summer that Charles became a werewolf.

THE BARONY AT R?DAL

PETER BELL

In Norway and Iceland certain men were said to be eigieinhameer, not of one skin . . . . The full form of this superstition was, that men could take upon them other bodies, and the natures of those beings whose bodies they assumed . . . and a man thus invigorated was called hamrammr.

—Sabine Baring-Gould, 1865

The excursion to Norway was something of a new departure for Fraser, who had previously rarely travelled abroad.

It had long been his habit to spend his holidays visiting botanic gardens. Powerscourt beneath the Wicklow Mountains, storm-lashed Tresco Abbey in the Scillies, the Hebridean splendours of Achamore, Arduaine and Inverewe—Fraser had visited them all; as well as countless others, by no means all of which were open, officially at least, to the public; but, by fair means or foul—for he was not averse to trespass—he had ticked them off his list.

Now, with the broad plain of retirement extending before him, he was exploring pastures new: a cruise of the Norwegian fjords, courtesy of his daughter, Eloise. The stark northern climes of Scandinavia had never previously struck him as a likely hunting ground for exotic flora; but Eloise, who had worked for a time at Kristiansand University, assured him that the cherry trees bloomed prodigiously all along the grey banks of the fjords, hinting at treasure troves as wonderful as Kew, trees mightier than anywhere back home in Argyll. Fraser was not convinced.

As the coach traversed the mountains, they listened with exas-peration to their prattling Norwegian tour guide, Inge, a rotund, rosy-cheeked, middle-aged woman, with curiously idiomatic English, whose appearance reminded Fraser of a garden gnome.

“To your right you see the Gr?nnfjell.” She gesticulated towards the wooded slopes, adopting a melodramatic tone. “And here, in the forests, long ago there lived man-wolves and bears, and things that are drinking blood, including the terrible bloody fox . . . ”

“Like something out of Bergman!” Eloise exclaimed.

“Bergman is Swedish, my dear. I wouldn’t let our guide hear that, it’s like saying the Welsh are Scottish! . . . ”

“Well, a lot of the old Norwegian noble families have Danish or Swedish blood in their veins. They’ve all been united one time or another.”

Still the guide droned on: now it was trolls.

“ . . . and these trolls, they lived in caves up on the hillside, and hidden away in dark dells, and on a lonely dark night, if a traveller he meet a troll, then he might not live to see the day, or will go mad with fear . . . ”

There was something about the guide’s jolly, lilting Scandinavian vowels that, to an English ear, sounded vaguely comic, curiously and uneasily framing the horrors.

“This is as bad as Scotland!” declared Fraser. “Nothing but ghosts and legends! Where are all these wonderful gardens?”

“Stop complaining! You’re the one who’s always telling people Grandmother Campbell had second sight!”

They were entering a tunnel.

“ . . . and above here, in a high pass, there was a slaughter in the olden days, very bloody . . . ”

“She’ll be blaming the Campbells next!” he said.

“Not unless she’s a MacDonald!”

“Aye, they get everywhere!”

The guide’s history lesson continued, of questionable accuracy.

“Notice how she glosses over the War,” whispered Eloise. “Nothing but heroics. They’ve buried the past here, alright.”

Eloise was a historical researcher, her specialism Norwegian resistance in the Second World War. Indeed, her scholarship had won her the fellowship at Kristiansand, a post she had been reluctant to vacate, having unearthed previously unstudied material in the National Archives that shed new light on the Nazi occupation. It involved some of Norway’s most respected families. The picture was, however, incomplete; further research was needed, not to speak of circumnavigating the suddenly disobliging attitude of the university authorities. Fraser got the impression she had left under a cloud. The present trip, he suspected, was as much inspired by his daughter’s scholarly agenda as by a desire to indulge him in the botanical wonders of the North.

Eloise had arranged things so she would have time at the end of the trip to revisit the Archives in Oslo; and, beforehand, to network with colleagues from Kristiansand. Fraser had been left to wander the old university town alone, which had not been without its rewards. Meanwhile, Eloise had not wasted her time: an interview with a surviving member of the Norwegian Resistance, Evald Aker?, great-uncle of a former colleague, had left her quite excited.

“Aker? told me about a Resistance operation to help refugees escape to Sweden that ended in a massacre,” she explained over supper in the sterile luxuriance of the Bergen Radisson, “It involved one of Norway’s oldest families, the von Merkens. This ties in with hints in my own research. Some of these nobles were only too glad to sell out their people for the sake of a quiet life! Aker? gave me the name of an old servant who’s apparently still on the estate. Said he could tell a few tales about goings-on during the War when a certain Anders von Merkens was in residence.”

“Where’s that?”

“The Baroniet R?dal!” Eloise declared, smiling.

“That’s on our itinerary, isn’t it?” he responded. “You knew that all along! I thought this was a holiday!”

“Let’s call it a mix of business and pleasure!”

“So what’s this place, R?dal?”

“Oh, you’ll love it! An old Norwegian manor house with landscaped gardens. Over a hundred species of rhododendron—they should be at their best now—and ten thousand English roses! R?dal—the Red Vale! So called for its brilliant autumns.”

Later, in bed, Fraser studied the glossy brochure. R?dal was on the final day. Intervening visits were less alluring, though this was perhaps unfair: had his interests not been so obsessively botanical, there was much of promise, including a visit to Edvard Grieg’s house, complete with special piano recital; and a trip to the “magnificent island home” of another nineteenth century composer he had never heard of, ?le Bull, described as Hardangerfjord’s “best kept secret.”