SYNOPSIS.

The time is of the present, but soft around the edge. The action takes place in a small farming community. The cottages, although rude, are stoutly made of timber. Their roofs are thatched, and the single unpaved street deeply rutted and muddy.
Heliga, a young girl about 17, lives in one of the cottages. There, she keeps house for her father. Everyday she visits her grandmother, who lies bedridden and crotchety in a cottage on the village outskirts.
Heliga is not happy. She knows that there is a glittering life to be enjoyed beyond the village and the menial tasks allotted by her father and grandmother.
The young men of the village are no help, with imagination going little further than the tavern dartboard. Besides, toasts have been drunk and money changed hands between her father and his crony, the church verger, in a marriage arrangement when Helig should come of age 18.
Helig hates the verger, turns her head when he leers at her through the kitchen window as she washes dishes, slaps him away when tries to cop a feel. Her father just laughs.
Helig’s only way out is through her grandmother. For her grandmother is a woman of property, property Helig will inherit when the old woman dies. However, although bedridden, the old one is robust. Pink cheeked and querulous, she is in jolly good health and far from dying.
Helig is concerned about the property she is to inherit; a property the old one is obviously unable to maintain, or care for. For each time Helig visits, she notices how run down the place is becoming.
On one of her visits, Helig sees the bloodied body of a dead goose on the grass outside her grandmother’s cottage. Inside the cottage, her grandmother, lying in bed with the quilt pulled up to her chin, tells Helig that a wolf has been around. Not an ordinary wolf, but a werewolf. And she knew it was a werewolf, because when she threw holy water at the door the creature ran away, ‘as if it had hot coals up its arse.’
This figment of an old woman’s imagination gives Helig an idea; an idea that flows through her mind like black, wriggling tadpoles to become a reality. A reality, which takes her to the garden, shed, where she sharpens the prongs of a hand rake.
She puts the hand rake in a basket, along with the provisions she is taking to her grandmother.
When she arrives at the cottage, she notices deep scratch marks on the door. The old one is distraught, refusing to spend another night there. For the wolf had been back during the night and taken the last of her geese. Helig quietens her and prepares her meal. While the old woman eats it, Helig strips herself of clothing and slaughters her grandmother with the sharpened hand rake; knowing that the rips on the old woman’s flesh will be construed as being caused by a wolf.
She goes to a pool behind her grandmother’s cottage, washes and stands in the pool, triumphant, cleansed of the blood mark. To the song of larks ascending, she sees herself in the city- dancing with elegant young men.
The vision fades as she hears a noise behind her. The verger is standing by the poolside. His leering face morphs into that of a wolf. He leaps.




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