DAY OF THE WOLF.
Ned McCann.

Love, Hilde reflected as Erwin rolled off her, is short, brutal, but sweet. Erwin, reached for his wine flask, drained it, wiped his mouth and lay on his back to sleep. He left the front of his breeches unlaced, and the juices of their coupling drying to a crust on his belly.
The Angelus bell tolled across the meadow as Hilde smoothed her skirt, re arranged her bodice and retrieved her ribbon from the branch of a sapling. Toeing Erwin to the side, she picked up the cloak they had lain on and shook it free of twigs and leaves. The cloak was the colour of a Robin’s breast and as Hilde tied the neck cord she remembered with a fond smile her reflection in the mirror that morning. How the cloak’s colour glowed on her face, complimenting her pale skin and golden hair. Lifting the lid of her little basket, she checked that everything was as it should be. Honey, a piece of smoked bacon, and some snuff in a screw of paper for her Granny.
The cottage snuggled between two huge oaks whose exposed roots crawled like Troll fingers across the buckled paving stones leading to its front door. The walls were stained, needing white wash, the thatch thinning. If she left it to the old woman, Hilde thought, nothing would be done and her promised inheritance decay into the forest floor, as it seemed to do more and more each time she visited.
As Hilde made her way up the path, she was struck by the quiet. Not a leaf rustled. There were no birds and the sentinel geese, who normally announced an approach, were mute. There was not even a smudge of smoke from the chimney and she wondered if perhaps the old lady was dead at last.
Hilde pushed on the door, but the door was locked. She rattled the latch- still no answer.
She rattled the latch again, peered through a crack and fumbled in her purse for the key.
"Who’s there?" A voice croaked.
"Hilde."
"Hilde who?"
"Oh, Granny. How many Hildes do you know?" The key turned, the door opened and beamed light across the room to a bed where an old woman lay huddled under mountains and valleys of eiderdown.
"I thought you’d never come," she said as Hilde fluffed up her pillows. "What a night I’ve had."
Hilde took the pot from beneath the old one’s bed. She took it out, threw its contents on the compost heap and rinsed it under the pump.
"A wolf was over here last night," her Granny called over, as Hilde put kindling on the ashes and blew on them. Her heart chilled at the thought of wolf as she swung the kettle over the flame.
"I think he got a goose," the old woman said as Hilde put some chopped bacon in a pot with lentils.
"Clawed at the door and howled the whole night," she said as her bed was made up and the sheets changed.
The stains on the sheets were getting bigger, Hilde noticed, beginning to stain the mattress... her mattress. "I’ll tell father to come over with his traps," she said.
*
"You know that was no ordinary wolf last night?"
Hilde looked up from her bowl and watched as soup dripped from her granny’s chin.
"It was a werewolf," the old woman said.
Hilda put down her bowl. She could hardly swallow, hardly speak. "How do you know?" she whispered.
"Just when he’d nearly scratched his way in, I splashed some holy water through that crack in the door," the old woman wheezed with laughter, spilling her soup, "and he was off howling, as if he’d an arseful of burning coals."
Hilde wiped the soup from her granny’s chin and from the clean coverlet she had put on the eiderdown. "Well," she said. "If it’s a werewolf, I’d better tell father to bring his gun as well as the traps."
"And bring some more holy water, I’m nearly out." The old woman raised a pinch of snuff between twig thin fingers. "And silver bullets for the gun." She sneezed snuff and lumps of things over the coverlet Hilde had just wiped. "Werewolves can only be killed by silver bullets."
*
A wind moaned through the trees and rootlings tripped her as Hilde hurried through the darkening forest. Bramble fronds slashed her legs in red stripes, and black clouds boiled above her as she stopped to catch her breath. She turned at a feeling of something following her, but all she saw were vague shadows and some dry leaves scuttling across the path behind her. The leaves blew up around her ankles and clung to her legs. She bent down and brushed them away with her hands. The leaves clung to her wrists. She shook them away and kept on going without looking back at the darkness behind. For the trees were thinning now and she could see through them the flat land of the common.
Racing and tumbling over its tussocks and mole hills, she cried with relief when she at last saw the twinkling lights of the tavern. And, even although a good woman never did, nearly went in to the smoke and wine warmth of it. She stopped at the door as the clouds parted and a huge harvest moon gleamed through them. Full moon was Paynight and she knew Erwin, her father, and the other men, would spend it drinking as usual; ending up with their boots covered in sour vomit, or in the arms of Marthe the Whore.
When Hilde reached her father’s house she locked the door behind her, lit every lamp and candle she could find and after heaping the fire with logs sat looking into the flames until she heard his foot on the step and the rattle on the latch. Unlocking the door, she let him in and received a cuff for being slow about it.
As she put out his supper she told him of the Werewolf, but didn’t know if he heard her, for all he did was grunt as he ate. And when he had eaten, he rose and fell across his bed.
Hilde put a blanket over him, put another log on the fire and sat beside it thinking. Outside, a night creature screamed as it fell prey to another, causing her to huddle further into the ingle nook, where she lay until those other creatures, who had made it through the night, had long scuttled to their lairs.
*
The sun flowed into the kitchen and Hilde’s Father complained about its brightness as he slurped his breakfast of Kasha. When he had finished, she told him again about the Werewolf.
Her Father blessed himself. "Go and tell your Grandmother," he said. "I shall be with her shortly after this day’s Angelus hour with traps and silver bullets. And stay you with her until I come."
Hilde was terrified. What she had experienced in the forest was something beyond her imagination, something beyond the scuttling leaves and shadows. She did not want to go back there until the place had been cleaned, and told her Father so.
He called her an ingrate. Reminded her of duty, the fact that she was the old woman’s only grandchild and sole heir.... and was still going on as he stamped out of the house to get his traps, and mould his bullets.
As Hilde washed the breakfast things she began to think of what she could do with her inheritance. Sell the land, of course; she glanced from the window to the mud- rutted street, and leave this midden.
She thought of the City, a place she had only heard of, never visited; imagined wearing a long, white dress with shiny things down the front and dancing till dawn on silken slippers with slim hipped young men. What a life would be hers when the old woman died. But the old did not die readily in this parish. She could be old as the Verger just coming up the street before her Granny died.
The Verger tipped his hat to her as he passed the window. He was fifty, if he was a day, Hilde thought. Yet his ruby red cheeks glowed with health, and a mat of crow black hair lay thick on his head.
The Verger adjusted the grave digger’s shovel on his shoulder. His back was straight as a plumb line, Hilde noted. Good for another twenty or more years yet. It was then that a malevolence which had been buzzing in Hilde’s head for hours, spread its’ dark wings and became a thought. Before the thought could become a word and betray her, she had made her decision.
Hilde went to the garden shed and searched until she found a hand rake. She took a metal file from its place on a rack of tools and as if in a dream, rasped the file across the teeth of the rake until they were needle tipped, razor edged blades that cut her finger almost to the bone when she no more than touched one.
Putting the rake in her basket, she covered it with a round of cheese, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of red wine. Taking her robin breast cloak from the peg behind the door, she threw it around her shoulders. She stopped before the fount and its flask of holy water hanging from their hook on the jamb and hesitated. She did not take the flask, neither did she bless herself from the fount, as she closed the door behind her.
*
Hilde tripped over every pebble and root on the path. It was as if they were trying to stop her, and birds shrieked at her from the hedgerow as if they were trying to warn her. Oblivious to it all, the thing in her heart festering and glowing with a life all its own, drove her through the spells of night and other dark things, still wisping on tendrils of morning mist between the trees.
A sprinkle of grey feathers billowed around her feet as she came up the path. A bottom panel of the door, she noticed, was nearly scratched through. Bracing herself for what could be lying behind it, Hilde rattled the latch and waited, hoping that what she had to do would have been done.
She unlocked the door and a voice croaked, "Thank God you’ve come," as she stepped into the cottage.
*
"What a night I had last night," the old woman couldn’t wait to tell her.
"The werewolf?" Hilde laid down her basket, put her cloak on the back of the chair beside the fireplace.
"Sounded like a pack of them," she said as a gust of wind blew a flurry of grey feathers into the room. "And I think they got the last of the geese."
Hilde took off her blouse, undid the tie on her skirt and laid them on top of the cloak.
The old woman’s eyes widened as she watched her. "Did you bring the holy water? I’ve used all mine."
Hilde slipped out of her shoes and placed them by the hearth.
"Well I don’t know what you’re doing, madam," the old woman said as Hilde unrolled her stockings and hung them on a cord slung across the mantelpiece. "But you can get me dressed, for I won’t stay another night here till that thing’s caught."
She wriggled out of bed, and as she stood beside it the bright light from the still open door shone through her night dress exposing the frail skeleton she had become.
She pointed to the huge cedar wardrobe in the corner. "Get me out the black bombazine dress and the Sunday bonnet, the one with the lilac ribbons," she said. "And the boots I got for my man’s funeral and haven’t worn since."
Hilde bent down, opened up her basket and took out the bottle of wine.
"We don’t have time for a drink," the old woman said as Hilde came towards her. "And when’s your father coming?"
Hilde held the bottle by the neck and raised it above her head.
"Hilde?" The old woman turned her face away.
The bottle hit her behind the ear. It didn’t break and Hilde watched as she slid to the floor.
She lay there moaning as Hilde put the bottle back in her basket. Now she took out the sharpened hand rake, and began her slaughter. Dragging the rake in long crimson furrows down the old woman’s body, she crissed and crossed as she imagined a werewolf would use its’ claws. Before Hilde was satisfied with what she had done, the old woman was long dead of shock.
Hilde dragged the body by its heels from the cottage. She made no attempt to conceal her passing, and the old woman’s blood smeared the ferns and bracken as she took the carcass deep into the forest and laid it across the roots of an oak tree, as if it were a discarded kill.
In a pond filled by a brook bubbling from the hillside, Hilde washed her body of every bloodstain, and her mind of every dark thing done. Humming to herself, she combed her wet hair with her fingers, and stood spread naked while the drying sun’s beams speckled her body in faun dapples. From the village she could hear the first of the Angelus’ twelve strokes. Still time to run back to the cottage and dress in clothes unsullied by the bloody business she had engaged herself in. Standing by the open door, afraid to go in, she would greet her father laden with his traps and gun. Distraught and hysterical, she would point to the blood sluiced path and would never cease to blame herself for not getting there sooner.
With the wolf madness on him, the Verger leapt on her from the bushes and clamped his teeth into the sweet smelling softness below her ear. He held her in his arms until she was still. And when she was still, he laid her down, ripped her belly open with his claws and buried his muzzle deep in her blood.
Ends.
© 2005. Ned McCann. 15 Church st. BALMAIN.N.S.W. 2041. Australia.