“I was attacked...fucking shot at...God knows how many times! My Inspector thought I was fucking deranged…I had to sit and watch my best friend in a snuff-movie…put up with months of fucking anguish at the thought of you dying...only to find out I have been lied to…been deceived…but do you know what hurts most of all, Pen?” I barked at her.
She looked at me and shook her head numbly again.
“To be lied to by you…to be
deceived
by you. How could you be so
fucking cruel?
” I spat.
It felt as if my whole being, my whole existence had been turned upside down. I wanted to feel relief, pleasure, sheer joy that she was still alive, but instead, I felt only anger and hatred for her.
“I’m sorry, Jim…I really am…but I had to. Marc was hurting me, he was stealing off me…he was
destroying
me.”
“Why didn’t you come to me, I would’ve
helped you!
” I said.
“I couldn’t. Marc said that if he so much as got a whiff that I had involved you, he would have killed me. And besides, I wanted you to be proud of me…I wanted you to think that I had made a success of my life.”
“Pen, I would have been proud of you whatever…” I started.
“I looked at your life and all of your dreams had come true,” Pen cut in. “You had met a beautiful girl; you became a cop and were leading a full and exciting life. The Lycanthrope aren’t meant to achieve anything with their lives.
We are just a bunch of murderous criminals, or so the Vampyrus believe. I wanted to be different. I wanted to prove to you that I was different. The Ooze Bar proved I was making a success of my life – that I didn’t want to be a criminal like my father, uncle...”
I listened as Pen told me how Marc had strolled into The Ooze Bar one day looking for work. He had been charming, funny and delightful at first, and Pen had fallen in love with him. So Pen had taken him on, and at first she thought Marc had some good ideas of how they could improve the bar and he seemed like a really hard worker. Then Steve was brought in as chef, with the intention of making the bar more of a success.
“When I asked Marc what cooking experience his brother had,” Pen explained, “he told me that he had worked in lots of kitchens preparing food. What I didn’t know then, and didn’t find out until it was too late, was Steve had worked in plenty of kitchens but they had all been while serving time in prison in The Hollows.”
When I discovered this, I confronted Marc, and for my trouble, I got a punch in the face.
“And that’s when the violence started and the truth came out. I learnt that my father had given me away to Marc’s father in a card game years ago. To Marc that meant not only was my body his, but everything I owned, too. He didn’t love me. I was just a possession. I’m a wolf just like them, and at first I fought back, but I didn’t stand a chance against the two of them.”
“You should have
come
to me, Pen,” I told her again.
“Like I said, I couldn’t.”
“So what did you do?”
“One night I was lying in bed, most of the violence started in bed. Marc would come home from the café, angry and spiteful. Marc was incredibly jealous, his jealousy bordered on paranoia. He would accuse me of picking human men up and taking them back to the house for sex while he was working at the bar. He often accused me and you of being lovers. He had got it into his head we had been more than just friends when we were kids and he told me that I was never to see or speak to you again.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him to go fuck himself,” she half-smiled.
“What did he say to that?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“He attacked me. He threw me onto the bedroom floor and started to strangle me. All the time he was screaming at the top of his voice, ‘
You fucked him! You fucked him – didn’t ya?’
And when I tried to tell him we were just friends, he rammed paper into my mouth and down my throat until I passed out.”
The images of that video swam back into the front of my mind and my initial anger that I had felt for Pen turned to Marc.
“When I woke up,” Pen continued to explain, “Marc had gone, so I seized my chance and fled from the house and ran out into the night.
I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t know who to turn to, and so I went to Annie’s.”
Pen told me how she had cried in Annie’s arms as she told her everything. Annie had begged her friend to go to the police, but what she didn’t know was that Pen was a werewolf. I learnt that Pen stayed with Annie for a couple of nights until she thought it was safe to go home again.
It was then that Pen started to receive letters from the bank and the brewery, who demanded money for unpaid debts. Pen also found credit cards in her name hidden under the counter at the bar. Pen told me how she had telephoned the credit card companies and they assured her the cards did belong to her. Marc and his brother had been getting cards in her name and Pen was horrified and scared when she discovered they had run up debts of £15,000, £19,000, and £21,000
on different credit cards.
Pen explained her initial confusion as she considered why they needed so much money and what it had been spent on. It was only by chance one day, Pen had gone down into the basement to change a keg where she found Marc and Steve using heroin. Marc and Steve said that it helped them fight their curse.
“It was then I realised I had been unknowingly supporting their drug addiction,” Pen said. “I felt trapped and overwhelmed by them. I didn’t know how to get them out of my life. I knew that if I didn’t, they would drag me down with them, or worse, Marc would end up killing me.”
We walked back to the lake. The snow had begun to ease a little. I looked at Pen as she started to talk again.
“I knew I had to do something and it was you who gave me the idea.”
“How?” I asked.
“It came to me one day when we were talking on the phone. You were telling me all about your adventures at work and how you spy on wolves…you know…what’s the word?
Surveillance? You told me all about those dinky little cameras you used. I got myself one, and as you now know, I hid it in my ruby slippers in that display cabinet,” Pen said.
“Wasn’t that a bit risky? Marc could have found it,” I said.
“You were hiding them from experienced criminals and they never spotted them. Marc was a violent, small-time thug who was always drunk and stoned. He would’ve never spotted it. I put it there for insurance, really. I’d turn it on every night before I went to bed. I was scared that one night he might go too far and kill me. At least then, there would be some evidence of it. It wouldn’t matter that I was a wolf once I was dead, but it would have mattered to Marc if you and your cop friends had found the recording. Anyway, that night…the night I
died
…he came home in another drunken rage and attacked me again.”
“I saw what happened on the DVD,” I said. “But you looked dead. It looked as if he had
killed
you.”
Pen pulled her coat tight about her naked frame. “The next thing I knew was when I woke up, in the dark, wrapped in a blanket with my throat feeling raw,” she said. “I knew I was in a vehicle and could tell it was travelling at speed. I guessed I was in the back of Steve’s truck as it was cold and I was outside. I didn’t know how long I had been unconscious for, but I guessed it had been for a while from snippets of conversation I could hear every now and then between Marc and his brother. ‘Why are we bringing her all the way up here? We’ve been going for hours,’ I heard Steve ask Marc.”
“Where were they taking you?” I asked Pen.
“I wasn’t sure, but I was scared of what they were planning to do with me,” she said.
“Didn’t you try and escape?”
“The vehicle stopped a couple of times, I guess at traffic signals, and I did consider uncoiling myself and jumping out the back of the vehicle, but they would have seen me and then finished me off properly,” Pen explained.
“So what did you do?”
“I waited. I didn’t know what else I could’ve done. Eventually, we stopped and I heard them climb out of the cab and come to the back of the vehicle. I could hear them talking clearly now.
‘How do you know this is the right place?’ Steve asked Marc. ‘Because no one ever comes out here other than wolves,’ Marc told him. I couldn’t believe what I had heard. I knew they had brought me here,” Pen said, looking over her shoulder at the forest.
“Here?” I asked, startled. “But why all the way out here?”
“Like Marc said, these forests and the lake is secret from the rest of the world. There was very little chance my body would be found here by anyone other than another wolf,” Pen explained. “They lifted me out of the back of the truck and between them, they carried me through the forest and dumped me back in those bushes.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
“It was freezing cold, but I stayed wrapped in that old blanket for as long as I could,”
Pen said. “I lay there until I heard the engine of Steve’s truck start up then drive away.”
“What did you do then?” I asked incredulously.
“I went home,” Pen said. “Back beyond the Fountain of Souls.”
“But you said you would never go back there...”
“I know what I said, but I was desperate.
I was in pain, soaking wet and freezing cold. The night was fading and I knew that I had to get into hiding before it got light. Besides, my father had long since left the caves. I hadn’t been back since I was girl. No one knew me.”
“Why didn’t you come to me? I would have helped you. We could have got everything sorted out once and for all. You had the DVD of Marc attacking you, we could have taken it to my Inspector, just like you had planned, and that would have been the end of it,” I said.
Pen looked at me with her bright orange eyes and said, “I wanted Marc to
pay
, Jim. I wanted him to
suffer
for what he had done to me.
Together, Marc and his brother had ruined The Ooze Bar and they had ruined
me
. I knew that while they thought I was dead, I was safe. So like Dorothy, I went home.”
Murphy
The night sky gave way and unleashed a blizzard of snowfall that almost engulfed us. Pen went back over to the bush and hurriedly yanked back the bramble and we forced our way back in.
We hunkered down onto the ground where we had earlier made love. Pen sat opposite me, her knees drawn up beneath her coat.
She looked at me, then said, “It was while I was hiding out in the caves for those few days, I hatched my plan.”
“And you decided to drag my sorry arse into this?” I whispered.
“I knew that if I could get you to realise I had suddenly gone missing, then you would start to nose around and ask questions,” she said.
“So how did you get the notes to me? And who did you get to write them, as it wasn’t your handwriting?” I asked her.
“In the dead of night, I would leave the caves. I would run through the forest, some blank sheets of paper, envelopes, and a pen in my pocket. I skulked about the back streets, keeping to the shadows and searching behind the stores, until I came across this old homeless guy hidden beneath a pile of cardboard boxes. He thought God had sent me from heaven when I offered him money to write me out four short notes. His spelling wasn’t up to much, so I had to write down what I wanted in each one and then he copied them word for word. I realised that by the morning, after he had finished off the liquor he would have bought with the money I had given him, he probably wouldn’t have even remembered me.”
I couldn’t believe Pen’s cunning but secretly admired her tenacity.
“While I still had the cover of darkness,”
she continued, “I headed over to your place and posted the first letter. And that was that, the ball was rolling and the rest was pretty much out of my hands.”
Pen sat and stared at me, waiting for me to speak, to say anything.
“So the note posted under my hotel room door, that was you, too?” I eventually asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“How did you know I was staying there?”
Pen cupped her hands around her mouth and blew warm air over them.
“It was simple, Jim,” she sighed. “There are only two hotels in town. One is a flea pit and the other half decent. I called the decent one, said I had a meeting with you but couldn’t remember your room number. Simple. Then all I had to do was deliver the note.”
“And the rest I know,” I said thoughtfully.
Then looking at her, I added, “So what happens now?”
“What do mean?” she asked right back.
“How are we gonna get outter this mess?”
“I’m not,” she said flatly, staring me straight in the face.
“Pen, you can’t go around for the rest of your life pretending you’re dead,” I snapped.
“Why not?”
“Because tomorrow night someone is gonna get their fucking head chopped off for a crime they haven’t committed,” I reminded her.
Pen looked away. “So what.”
“So what?”
I gasped. “You can’t let Marc be executed for a crime he hasn’t committed!”
“Yes, I can,” Pen insisted. “He tried to kill me, and as far as he’s concerned, he did.”
“Are you fucking insane?”
I exploded.
“There’s a world of difference between trying to murder you and
actually
murdering you!”
“Like what?” she asked stubbornly.
“Like you’re still fucking alive, that’s
what!”
I yelled at her.
“He deserves to die for what he did to
me!”
Pen hollered back.
“Look, Pen,” I said, trying to remain calm.
“You’re gonna have to think of something…some way of coming back from the dead.”
“Like what?” Pen sneered.
“I dunno…pretend that you’ve been suffering from amnesia for the last few months and you’ve only just remembered who you are,” I suggested. I knew it was a crap idea, but my mind was scrambling to think of a good one.
“I don’t believe you! Are you for real?”