‘I’m sure we can,’ the priest smirked.
‘No … please, no…’ Mr Li wheezed.
‘Come now uncle,’ the priest said, his tone mockingly jovial. ‘The bile of a rich, powerful man is potent medicine! It’s far stronger than mere bear bile. You’ll be providing someone with a wonderful and wealthy future. It is a worthy sacrifice, is it not?’ The priest’s expression then hardened into a carved demon mask, and he spoke one last, icy sentence before turning and walking off into the gloom. ‘Goodbye uncle. See you in hell.’
Then the cutting began.
8
NATHAN
30th June 2020. Elderwood Plantation mansion, near Napoleonville, Louisiana, USA
Two figures strolled along the mile-long avenue, which was lined on either side by sprawling two-hundred-year-old oaks. In the expanse of leaves cloaking the ancient trees, the golden light of the late afternoon sun danced and shimmered, its brilliance draped over the boughs and across the trunks, and gilded upon every leaf; the toil of a detail-obsessed artist working in bronze and copper.
One of the figures traversing the falling dusk walked with a cane in his hand and a slight limp; a persistent souvenir from a war fought many decades ago on foreign soil. The other hopped and skipped on stumpy legs and giggled with delight at the sight of fireflies igniting their magic glow and drifting their neon green luminosity in languid paths through the whispering grass. Up ahead, the lights of the three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mansion began to flicker on, warm tungsten beacons at the end of the darkening path.
The child looked up at his grandfather, and sudden fear flashed across his face.
‘Grandpa, grandpa!’
It was the sound of the unbridled urgency of burning childhood curiosity; the unwavering faith in the mouths of the elders to utter nothing less than the incontrovertible truth of all things. The old man stopped walking and leaned on his narwhal-tusk cane, taking his weight off his aching left leg. The embedded shrapnel shards were becoming agitated in their pockets of scar tissue; the length of this walk had been a tad too ambitious.
‘What’s got yer goat, young Samuel?’
The crisp smoothness of his tone, delivered in a rich Southern accent, belied both the man’s seventy-three years and his penchant for pipe tobacco.
‘I’m scared.’
At five years of age the boy was too young to know that, in males of the human species at least, and especially with the rigorous honour culture of this particular region and his class of society, admission of fear was considered shameful; this unspoken code had not yet been cemented in this pliable mind. A solid hand, thick and wiry, ruffled the boy’s ash-blonde hair with reassuring gentleness and sympathetic compassion.
‘Now what out there is frightening you, Sam? These itsy bitsy fireflies, floating around like lil’ ol’ Christmas lights? The buzz a’ the straggler bees in the fruit orchards over there, who’ve forgotten t’ get back t’ their hives? Or—’ The old man ducked and chuckled as a pair of bats, flitting rapidly in haphazard flight paths, zipped past them and hurtled through the avenue. ‘Or is it the bats that’re giving you the willies, little Sam?’
The boy stood on tiptoes and beckoned with a cupped hand for his grandfather to squat down so that he could whisper in his ear, for he was afraid that to mention his fear too audibly would be to summon it from the dark depths in which it lurked. The old man capitulated to the boy’s demands, and with a creak in his bones and a shot of pain through his knees he bent down low, trying his best to hide the grimace on his face.
‘Monsters,’ Sam whispered in as low a tone as he could.
The old man smiled with reassuring benevolence.
‘You don’t really believe in monsters, do you? Who’s been telling you tall tales, now? You mustn’t believe everything people tell you, you know.’
‘Well, I…’
His voice trailed off as he realised that what he was about to admit would incriminate him, and for a few brief seconds a fierce debate raged beneath that thick mop of blonde hair. Fear, of course, won; its immediacy was far closer than the distant threat of punishment for the transgression of certain boundaries.
‘I was, I was watchin’ a movie,’ he admitted with a quivering lower lip, as tears started to rim his eyes.
‘Oh, you were watching a movie, were you? Where were you watching this movie, Sam? In your cinema … or Susanna’s?’
The boy began to sniffle, and now he could not meet the old man’s eyes.
‘S-, S-, Susanna’s,’ he stammered, doing his best to stifle the sobs that were rising up the inside of his throat.
The old man’s tone took on a stern cast, but he made sure the boy knew that he was feeling far more sympathetic than judgmental.
‘Now Sam, we’ve told you you’re not supposed to go into Susanna’s personal cinema. Them films she likes, well they ain’t suitable for someone as young as yourself. She’s seventeen years old, see? And now it seems that you’ve gone and watched one of those silly horror films of hers, and it’s gotten under your skin now, hasn’t it? Go on, it’s all right. We all make mistakes sometimes. Tell me what you watched.’
Tears had started their passage earthward, tracing the smooth, soft ridges of the boy’s cheeks.
‘It was … it was called … The Wolfman.’
Something flickered across the old man’s face; the boy caught it, and the sight of it kicked off a hammering beat in his little heart – but as quickly as it had appeared it vanished, concealed behind a mask of paternalistic sympathy.
‘That’s the one about a werewolf, isn’t it?’ the old man asked.
‘Yes sir,’ the boy answered, his eyes still wet with tears. ‘A big scary werewolf who can tear people in half an’ rip their heads off. Are … are there any werewolves in the woods here?’
The old man chuckled, a little too forcefully.
‘Of course not!’ he scoffed. ‘There’s a lot you’ll learn as you get older, young Sam, but you have
