The story of how I died begins in my dormitory. I am lying on my bed. I’m not reading: I’m waiting. Vlad should be here in half an hour; one thousand, eight hundred seconds to go. I set the timer on my watch. Half an hour ticks by. He’s late – twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty seconds late.
The door swings open and Vlad strides in, casting his rucksack on my bed. He tramples mud across the carpet: that will need sweeping up; along with his un-neat hair and un-ironed clothes.
I don’t know why we’re friends. I’m in the top maths set. He does useless subjects like Art.
“Do you want to go to the woods?” Vlad asked.
The woods were forbidden, off limits to students. I didn’t want to go to the woods; I didn’t want to get dirt on my shoes.
“Come on, let’s go.” He wasn’t going to drop it – I knew that. It was just going to be quicker to give way.
We climbed over the wooden fence into the woods, crossing from order into anarchy. I was disturbed by the tall trees that spun off in every direction, also the singing of the birds and the free lifestyles of the rabbits and other creatures.
“Ever thought about being an animal?” Vlad asked.
“No.”
“What would you be?” he continued.
“I wouldn’t.”
“I’d be a dog or a wolf.”
“That’s lovely, Vlad.”
“So you’re saying you’ve never even thought of it.”
“No.”
“Then perhaps you should.”
“Perhaps.”
“So if I had the ability to make you become one, you would?”
“I suppose…”
“Let’s do it, then,” he concluded. And we crept back to boarding house.
Vlad told me to have a shower. “Washing away the old life,” was his justification. He had an answer for everything. He pointed out that it was the day of Candlemass. Also the full moon. Rubbish, I thought. Superstitious nonsense.
We’d planned to watch a film – our Wednesday night routine. Instead we were going to expose Vlad’s lies. He began pulling items from his rucksack – a stick that he called his wand, a book called ‘Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie,’ which he had clearly put together himself, staining the pages with tea. The title was in French, but the words were in some dead language.
He took out a bedsheet stolen from the school laundry; cast it down on the floor as if this were his studio. He had a can of spray paint. Such antics! So messy!
He began to paint strange symbols. He said they were runes. He drew a circle with a large star in the middle, decorated with pictures of men, eyes and pyramids. It took him seventeen minutes and thirty seven seconds.
I predicted that it would take ten minutes for Vlad to confess that this was al nonsense.
Instead, inexplicable things began to happen. There was chanting and praying. The language Vlad spoke reached my ears as a distorted blur. What I was seeing, I couldn’t believe. There was a smoky fog spreading from beneath the bed sheet. Vlad’s circle held me with invisible arms. I looked at my chest of drawers, neatly packed with clean clothes. I looked at my books lined up for the next day. Vlad swerved around and swept them off. They were consumed by the colourless fog that hung where my room had been. Towering above me, it seemed, was a strobe, which sent out flashes of light. I saw everything frame by frame, like child’s doodles from a flick book. Vlad approached me with a blade in his hand. Another flash passed and he took hold of my hand. Another, and he straightened the fingers. Another and the knife snaked across, leaving a channel of blood, which dripped into the circle.
Coughing and spluttering, I fell to the floor. Vlad watched me. I could see the grin on his smoke-masked face. He knew what he was doing. A human figure rose from the smoke, screaming as it released itself. ‘Wepawet’, Vlad called it. It spoke a single word, “Lycan”. I heard it as a command. It looked down on me as if I was an infidel.
The image broke into fragments…. I woke up, sweating. I was in bed. Everything in my room was in order.
My hand throbbed. I pulled it from beneath the covers to reveal a fresh cut across my palm. Not a dream, then… I took in a deep breath, it smelt good: rabbits, trees, birds, nature. The colours around me drained into a sepia shade. I didn’t care, and I didn’t need to. I sniffed, and tasted my way to the other side of the room, saw myself in the mirror, changed.
