Chase the Morning

Katjka walked with us to the stairs. Nobody had asked to be paid for the food or the drink, and I had an uncomfortable feeling I’d offend somebody by offering. ‘You will take care of Stefan, won’t you, Jyp?’ she said urgently, and suddenly put her arms around me. She didn’t kiss me, only touched her cheeks rapidly to mine, and let go; it seemed almost like some kind of formal embrace. Jyp nodded soberly, and motioned me up the stairs. She made no move to follow, but stood looking silently after us, tapping that pack of cards nervously against her thigh.

A cool wind slapped me in the face as I opened the door, but the rain had stopped. The skies had cleared, the clouds raced ragged across the sky. I was surprised to see how light it still was without them, a kind of greyish twilit clarity that dimmed colours and made distances deceptive. Jyp closed the door carefully behind us, and motioned me up the street. Water still pooled in the gutters and gleamed in the seams between the worn cobblestones, so that the road ahead seemed to reflect the sky, and each oblong cobble became a small stepping stone across it. Jyp seemed to be brooding, and we walked in silence awhile. He was the first to speak. ‘Said I wanted to render ‘count of myself for last night.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘Seems to me I do – after you saving my bacon maybe three times now. Guess you knew I was scared, huh? But it wasn’t just for me. I’ll say that. I was kicking myself good an’ hard for ever letting you get involved. Feared getting you any deeper in’d only bring down worse dangers on your head.’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘Should’ve thought of that a mite sooner, shouldn’t I?’ I didn’t answer.

‘So I thought I’d scared you off. But I got over my fright. Old Stryge, he fixed that thing good and proper, sent it wailing off in a puff of smoke – so I thought that was all right now. Next thing I heard, the Wolves have gone –’

He shook his head. ‘Steve, this is all my fault. I should’ve warned you better, maybe bought you protection. But honest, I never dreamed anything could happen to you out there. I’ve never heard of Wolves striking as deep into the Core as that, not ever before. Others, sure, now and again, but Wolves never. It looks bad, Steve.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I told him impatiently. ‘You’re not responsible for those sons of bitches. Or where they decide to tear apart. Who is, come to that? Where do they come from? You said they weren’t really folk – what’s that supposed to mean?’ I was beginning to get angry now, with the food and drink in me burning away shock and amazement. ‘What’s this about the Core? If these Wolf creeps are after me I should damn well know all about them, shouldn’t I?’

Jyp, though, was slow to answer. ‘Can’t tell you exactly all,’ he said, as we turned at the top of the road. ‘Don’t think the Wolves know it all themselves, not for sure; but I’ll tell what I can. Way the story goes, their ancestors were plain men enough, though wolfish still, a batch of ragtag pirates and their doxies down Carib way in the early days. Seems they got too much even for their buddies, and one day found themselves stranded on some little pimple of an island right off the map. An ill-famed place already, by all accounts, a sacred place of the cannibal Carib Indians of old, and shunned even by them; they dared land there only to feed their heathen gods with blood. Weren’t meant to survive, you see, those maroons. But survive they did, as vermin does, by forbidden flesh.’

‘Forbidden – you mean, they turned cannibal too?’

‘Surely, and worse, by lying with their own flesh and breeding so, kin with blood kin. Flourished, too, like the devils they were; for it wasn’t only their own they ate, but took to sharking out in crude canoes to waylay small ships that strayed near, and seeking to lure larger ones onto their island’s reefs. God help the poor souls who fell into their hands! It’s said they kept a few and bred them, like cattle, to slaughter. I’ve heard tell of some who got to living that way, in Scotland long years back – Sawney Bean, if you’ve heard of him, and his kin? But these were worse. And they got to be worse yet.’

Suddenly the food sat heavy and sickly in me. The implications of what he was saying … I forced them aside. ‘Jyp, just how do you get any worse than that?’

He kicked idly at a shred of polythene wrapping that blew into our path. ‘Well, folk who went that way almost never came back; so fewer and fewer went, till the isle was all but forgotten. Then maybe it dropped out of the way awhile, the way places do. And meanwhile they changed. Over the generations, bit by bit.’

‘Evolved, you mean.’