2014 January 19SundayIt’s not Stefan’s fault that his mum forgot the sage and onion stuffing.

  It wasn’t his fault that she always forgets it, or that he was staying in his room to try and rest. Lazing about, they said. He hadn’t slept properly all weekend. Every time he closed his eyes the dreams came back and he squirmed himself awake tangled in sheets that felt like branches closing in on his throat. So he was sleeping all afternoon while Mum’s big nostalgic Sunday lunch turned into a Sunday dinner.

  It was supposed to be a celebration, too. Dad might be getting back to work! Which meant no more food bank! No more scraping the budget to keep all four of them fed and comfy.

  But mum forgot the sage and onion stuffing mix. And everything got deyed. Stefan woke to a bzing row and let himself get roped into going to Tesco to fix things. A walk in cold January air helped clear his head, even if he had to take the long way around to avoid the woods and parknd that sprawled out from the university.

  He’d heard the stories. Everyone had. Disappearances in the woods. Just rumours, of course, No-one really believed them. People didn’t just go missing - not in 2014 with mobile phones and 4G and cameras - but he couldn’t bring himself to walk under the shadow of those empty boughs today. The thought of hundreds of branches all reaching out like skeleton hands made his skin crawl with echoes of the dreams that choked away his sleep.

  So he got there te and could already hear his dad’s angry rumbles when he got back. Mutterings about how he had ruined all Mum’s careful budgeting with his zing and indolence. That was his new favourite word, picked up from some television presenter rambling in long and angry ways about people coming and taking Dad’s job away.

  The big Tesco was halfway toward closing by the time that Stefan reached. No time to waste. He hurried through the aisles, setting himself hunting. Maybe, if he could get the stuffing on clearance, the money saved would help make up for everything else. If he worked hard enough, maybe he could make it work.

  Maybe. Hopefully.

  He is passing the soft drinks aisle when the smell hits him like a wall. Curdled milk and spoiled meat and a hundred other fragrances of rot all woven together into a grotesque bouquet that reaches into his nose, rummages through his sinuses and twists his stomach to knots. Stefan staggers and stalls mid-step, desperate to cover his nose against the assault of the stench.

  A grandmother looks up from comparing identical tins of beans at his sudden filing, unbothered by the ordure washing up the aisle. A man in business grey stalks intently past with the haste of the desperate shopper. A young couple wanders blithely through the fumes, chatting about something as they went. Stefan pays none of them any attention, needing all of his will to keep his roiling stomach under control as he staggers back away from the stench.

  He’s so focussed on getting away from whatever is curdling his insides that he does not notice the pretty girl until he runs into her.

  Or makes her run into him, stepping backward into an aisle to find some clear air and ending up directly in her path. At least the air is clearing enough that he can murmur out an apology without anything more than words coming out of his mouth.

  She doesn’t say anything. So Stefan apologises again as he turns, seeing her for the first time. Blue eyes that glint brilliantly in the gre of the artificial lights, flowing blonde hair and sharp cheekbones. She’s so pretty but so serious that Stefan’s second apology almost dies in his throat, so he tries again. “Sorry… I didn’t see you there.”

  She stays silent for long enough that Stefan can feel himself dying a little inside. Her eyes are looking past him, so bright they almost seem to gleam as they track along the aisle past where he stepped out. It’s only when he speaks again that her attention snaps onto him and her expression changes. The sharp edges disappear and she stares at him as if seeing a ghost.

  “It’s ok.” She smiles, a sharp expression that Stefan feels should put him at ease but all he can think is how familiar she is. Something about her but the details escape him.

  Her attention is already sliding off him as she starts to walk away, head tilting as if listening to something faint in the endless commercial burble of the store. Then, a handful of paces away, she stops suddenly. Looks back at him with those bright brilliant familiar eyes. Her smile is gentler now, something real rather than pleasantry. “You should stay inside the store for a bit, Stef. It will be safer here.”

  And with that she is gone. Long, elegant steps devour the distance between her and the exit.

  It takes Stef three heartbeats to completely ignore her advice.

  The girl doesn’t seem to run but her casual steps cover so much ground that Stef struggles to keep up with her. He tried shouting to get her attention but that just slowed him down so now he’s gulping down great lungfuls of cold January air as he jog-sprint-skids across the frost-slick pavement after her.

  He isn’t even sure why he is trying to catch up with her.

  No. That’s not quite true.

  He needs to know why she’s so familiar, why she knows his name. That name. The one that only Mark ever called him.

  He keeps running, trying not to slip on bck ice or think about what that could mean.

  Following her leads him into the rusted husk of an industrial estate that hasn’t yet been bulldozed for bright new commuter houses. A blot of of squat brick warehouses and offices lurk behind snaggletooth steel fencing tangled with barbed wire floss, their empty-eyed windows staring out accusingly at a world that had passed it by. Stef loses her as a lorry rumbles straight through the junction he was about to cross.

  He swears under his breath - less a word and more a frost-misted growl of frustration - and paces to try and see any sign of her. Unblinking and never realising it.

  Movement catches his eye. The girl’s hair glints like spun gold under a fading streetlight. She is pushing her way through a break in the fencing around a particurly dipidated building decorated with a sign that barely mumbles “Russell’s Tiles, Now Open” from under successive yers of graffiti.

  Several more cars and lorries rumble past too fast for Stef to risk slipping through the traffic, forcing him to wait again. Forcing him finally to think and to breath and to realise what he is doing. He’s chasing a woman down. She’s running from him, terrified of the dangerous young man pursuing her. And he feels his spirit crumple at that thought.

  He turns to go. Maybe if he runs then he can make it back to Tesco, get the stuffing and get home. They can have their celebratory dinner with the dry, overcooked chicken that cannot be wasted after Mum saved so much for it, and he can forget all this. “Stupid boy…” He murmurs to himself with the weight of a curse.

  But then he hears the scream.

  It’s piercing and cold, so sharp that it skips right past his teeth and sets his skeleton on edge. And Stef is already moving, imagining the girl with the golden hair in a hundred different horrible situations that could wrench that noise from her throat. A car brakes hard to avoid him as he sprints across the junction, driver punctuating angry obscenities with bsts of his horn.

  Stefan hears none of it. Never looks back.

  He’s past the sign for Russell’s Tiles and slipping through the break in the fencing before the driver finishes his horn tirade and finally drives on, anger spent for now.

  Beyond the fencing lies industrial wasteground. A concrete desert of former carpark or loading bay now slick with frost-rimed moss and broken by the dead remnants of dandelions. Even in the gloom Stefan can make out dark patches of liquid sprayed across the moss-greened asphalt. Something wet and fresh and stained bck under the flickering orange of old sodium lights. It stinks of coppery blood and spoiled oil and spatters out a broken trail deeper into the wasteground. Stefan plunges forward, follows toward the back of the warehouse without thinking.

  He sees her as he rounds a corner. She lies against a wall at the centre of his tunnel vision, spyed out like a broken doll thrown away by a petunt child. A livid crimson stain has been spatterdashed to the wall above her and her golden hair is stained bloody dark. Crimson lines have been scored along her broken limbs and the ground around her is scattered with shining shards of broken gss.

  Stefan sprints toward her. He doesn’t even know her name to shout in anger and despair. Just a long wordless sound of frustration and anger that tears itself from him as he closes the distance.

  There’s so much blood and the air is sweet with its coppery tang. His stomach knots as he tries to remember the school first aid course. Breathing. Heartheat. Airway. He feels for a pulse at her neck and it beats hammerbeat strong under his fingers.

  His hand flinches back slick and warm and crimson as her eyes open at his hand on her neck. Golden pupils in night-bck eyes. Her pupils narrow and those cute cupid-bow lips split into a bare-fang snarl with a feral sound that could never come from a human throat.

  Then she sees him and her expression softens. Those golden eyes widen with fear and the growl resolves into a rough-hewed version of the voice he had heard in Tesco, the words coming in sharp bursts between rumbling breaths “You can’t be here. Get away.”

  “What…” Stef stumbles to find words. He takes a half-step back from her and feels his foot skidding on crimson stained ice. Bance fails, he falls. She rises faster. An arm snaps out and violently unbreaks itself. A hand catches him in a grip like jagged iron. Talon-nails press sharp enough into his skin to draw fresh blood but he does not hit the ground.

  Panic thunders in his chest. He feels himself pulled inexorably toward the monster woman. Even using only one arm she is ludicrously stronger than him. She pulls him close enough to smell the herbal notes of perfume and conditioner under the sweet copper tang of her blood still clinging to her hair. Her mouth opens. Fangs keen enough to sunder his throat in one bite fsh bright.

  And she speaks, a low rumbling almost-whisper that cuts through fear to old memory. “It’s not safe here, Stef.”

  That voice. He knew that voice, even though he had not heard it in nearly two years. “Mark…?”

  A fsh of pain clouds her expression and Stef immediately regrets speaking. Of course she’s not Mark. How could she be... He starts to mouth an apology but she cuts him off with a sudden hug, fierce and bonebreakingly close.

  “Not any more.” Her words are heavy den and cracked by emotion, thick with loss and relief and shone through with a warmth that even the rough growling edge to her voice cannot hide. When she finally releases her grip on him, Stef can see her golden eyes are wet with unspent tears.

  Questions flow out of Stef as he finds himself able to breath again. “What happened? Are you…”

  She seems about to speak then suddenly stills and raises a hand for silence, accidentally fshing talon-nails too close to Stef's throat for his comfort. Her eyes fix on a long-empty brick warehouse at the opposite side of the former carpark, head tilted to catch a sound below his hearing.

  Stef turns to follow her gaze and sees a shattered upper-floor window. Ground zero of the explosion of the gss scattered thirty feet across the ice-slick concrete. Something rumbles deep inside. An impact. Almost inaudible save for a new rain of gss sent spalling from the frame.

  Cold dread is settling around Stef’s heart, closing about it with gcial patience. "Did you…fall?” He stumbles on the word as he grasps for some token of mundanity. Tries not to hear the arhythmic rumble coming from the building even as it creeps into hearing through lulls in the distant traffic noise.

  "Thrown." She shakes her head in a sharp, whipcord gesture, muscles tensing under her skin as she steps forward, pcing herself between Stef and the looming building. Her hands flex with as she fres her cws.

  Silence now, lingering just long enough that Stef can hear his own heart thundering. The cold is reaching through his veins like vines rising toward the sun. Then a sound - the rasping scrape of heavy objects on metal - motion from within the warehouse.

  “What is that?” Stef cannot keep the tremble from his voice.

  Before she can answer him, a hammerblow strikes the doors of the warehouse from within. It is a wet meat sound; a carcass sledgehammer pounding on steel and concrete. A second blow comes. A third, accompanied now by a sound like splintering kindling and a tatter-throat scream.

  “You need to run, Stef.” The woman who was Mark Vogel looks back over her shoulder to meet his gaze and Stef can see a face changed and still changing in the half-light. Her voice has dropped another chord. Every word growled out of a changing throat. Golden eyes plead at him from beneath heavy brows. A jaw growing more fit for crushing bone than speech struggles to form the words. “Run. Please.”

  The doors of the warehouse explode outwards with a final exultant chorus of straining metal and splintering bone, and the ragged remnants of a figure in business grey tumbles out into the night.

  It is a broken ruin of a man, still standing because it has not realised that injury should slow it down. The grey of its suit is tattered and wet with oily bck liquid that seeps from the great rends and tears across its form. Ribs push through the meat of its chest like broken-tipped bdes through torn cloth, shuddering with each slow half-spasming breath it takes. One arm hangs limp from a broken shoulder, shattered beyond any recognition of human form.

  But the worst is its face. Lolling, broken-necked and split through like cleaved fruit. The wound is jagged and uneven, weeping bck liquid from where a jaw and throat should be. Something squirms in that stained ruin. Oily vine-tendrils spill out of the wreckage of its skull, writhing to taste the cold night air, each dotted with dozens of perfect human teeth and stained fresh crimson.

  Its breath rattles again as its attention focuses upon Stef. A strangled mockery of nguage pours out of the depths of the thing, dragging silence from the world. It is as though the air itself flinches back from it, afraid of the stain of its touch. And in that emptiness comes the charnel stench from before.

  The gcier grip of terror steals everything from Stef. His mind rebels from the sight. He is deer-in-headlights still, nightmare-victim still as the ruined man moves forward. Broken limbs grind with each step as the tendrils grasp hungrily toward Stef and drag the rest of the man behind.

  It manages three steps before a shadow bursts ungainly from the depths of the warehouse. A lupine nightmare of midnight fur and shining fangs vaults forward, huge and bleeding from a dozen wounds with one forelimb twisted and broken. It falls on the ruined man with a howl of triumph. Monstrous jaws scythe through a cluster of writhing tendrils, severing and scattering them in a spray of oily liquid darkness.

  The ruined man stumbles to one knee, swinging the shattered remnant of an arm wildly. A cudgel of meat and jagged bone hammers at the wolf-thing. One blow catches it across the brow, splitting skin and crushing bone, driving it back.

  "RUN." More a subvocal growl than a word. She. The woman who had been Mark. Now not even a woman but a gaunt-limbed predatory thing. A lean nightmare shape of wolf and cws and shining fangs, spindle-limbed to the point of emaciation. It growls the word as it unches itself into the ruined man, cws tearing deep into its broken flesh.

  But it is enough.

  The fear becomes fire. Something deep in Stef’s soul screams in inchoate fury as he starts to run. The howls of rage and pain and exultation behind him echo deep within him and something needful boils up from the depths, yearning to join those songs, only to be drowned in cold fear. There are no words. No thoughts. Only the need to escape. To find the light of civilisation and sanity and blessed mundane reality.

  His feet skid on blood-slicked ice. Bance fails and is regained in desperate vaulting-sprinting-sliding steps.

  Out past the torn fencing. Out past the sign and the graffiti. Out onto the street.

  Traffic noise drowns the other sounds. The ones he cannot bear to hear, the ones he yearns to hear.

  He doesn’t even see the car before it hits him.