I’m writing this story as my therapist has advised me journalling is a type of catharsis. I’ve lived with my bad experience from my schooldays for many years and have decided to put pen to paper as a way of sharing it and maybe getting some relief from the horrors that haunt my dreams. I’ve taken Prozac for many years as prescribed by the doctor and recently got into mindfulness. But nothing has helped me to shift the terrible memories of that awful day.
The year was September, 1988. Madonna was top of the charts and my friend Steve had a cassette tape of hers on his Walkman. We had not seen a Walkman before and took turns to wear the headphones and listen to the tape. It was a pain having to rewind it each time but we had enough batteries to last the weekend. Steve also had a tape of Billy Idol and one of The Clash. He wore his hair in a spiky blonde style which was all the rage in those times and wore a shell suit.
We were on a school trip staying at a place in the cotswolds called Stonybrook. There was a damp coldness to the building we were staying in, it was built from ancient irregular stones and there were drystone walls all around it. I saw the biggest spider I’d ever seen one day in the hallway. In the evening we had dinner in the communal hall with the teachers and during the day we went on adventure activities. There was meant to be abseiling but no one had done that yet. We visited the local reservoir and were told all about the wildfowl that lived in it.
It was the evenings when life became interesting. We all had rubber torches and followed each other in a procession down to the outbuilding where we gathered to sing songs and listen to talks by the teachers. This time there was going to be a midnight feast. The teachers had promised us lots of sweets. I put my coat in and walked along side Steve.
“Let me race you,” I said. “See who gets there first.”
We started running, at an even pace. I picked up speed but Steve was still alongside me. I went faster to try to outrun him but he was still there, falling back slightly then gathering speed. It looked like he was going to overtake.
“The werewolf is coming, Steve! It’s coming for you. It’s right behind you!”
I noticed a genuine look of panic on Steve’s face and felt satisfied with the power it was giving me over him.
“Keep going Steve, it’s getting closer..it’s right behind you!”
I zoomed off ahead and laughed as Steve suddenly collapsed and disappeared in the darkness.
I kept running with my torch and arrived at the meeting hall with the other kids. I’d forgotten Steve, I was sure he would catch up though.
As we sat cross legged in the dimly lit hall the teachers opened the boxes of sweets for the midnight feast and spread them around the hall.
A roll call was done, and it was noticed that one person was missing. Some of the teachers left the building and went outside to look for Steve.
They came back in looking concerned. They asked everyone if anyone had seen Steve. I said nothing.
On our way back we walked up the hill with our torches in a procession, rather like the villagers in Frankenstein, but with the benefit of modern electric light. An owl hooted in the forest and some large moths were drawn to our torches. As we entered the warm and welcoming light of the games room, I was relieved to see Steve playing with the Ghosts n Goblins arcade game. He had an amazing high score and was still playing.
“How did you get that far?” I asked, impressed.
It turned out Steve had hacked the machine by rewiring the back of it. He was a pretty skilled electronics engineer even at that age. Normally you would have to pay a pound for each game but he was doing all this for free. I asked if he could do the same with the Space Invaders game. Our parents had given us some pocket money but we didn’t want to spend it.
After it was lights out we were sent to our bunk beds where I read my abridged version of Frankenstein with a torch. I was loving this story, having discovered it for the first time. I gave it to the boy on the bunk bed below me when I had finished and he read it too, by the light of his torch, just as enthralled.
I turned off my torch and tried to get to sleep. I tossed and turned. Frankenstein’s monster haunted my dreams. I looked out of the window at the downland landscape. It was a full moon and the milky white light illuminated the hills for miles. An ancient barrow stood out on one of the distant hills, it was the furthest object I could see.
Suddenly I was shocked by the appearance of a furry mass outside the window, it brushed past in a fraction of a second but was followed by an enormous claw. The claws were like sharp blades of iron which scraped the window.
I pulled the sheet on the bed above my head and tried again to sleep. It was useless.
In the morning we had some time to ourselves to play games outside. With a group of boys I explored the pond and we walked through some tall grass to look for wildlife.
We noticed something white gleaming on a patch of bare earth. I approached it and prodded it with my finger. It seemed to be a bone. I stood up and Dave, one of the other boys, kneeled down to have a look. As he scraped the dry earth away with his hand the shape of the bone became clearer and eventually we realised it was a human skull.
Dave picked up, then panicked and threw it in the pond where it sank to the bottom. It was full of mud and dirt which weighed it down as it sank slowly through the silt and disappeared.
“We should tell someone,” I said in a concerned voice.
“Let’s just forget about it,” said Dave.
“But it’s a human skull. Means someone has been murdered here.”
“There’s not much you can do now. It’s gone. It was just an old bone. So what?”
We walked back to the group and the teachers who made us give them our sheets of paper where we had written down the names of all the flora and fauna we’d discovered.
The image of the skull played on my mind that night, I didn’t know what to do about it. Should we report it to the teachers or call the police? But there were no mobile phones in those days and you needed money to use a payphone. We did not even know where the nearest payphone was. We decided not to tell the teachers.
That night I had trouble sleeping again, I started to feel homesick and wrote a postcard home to my Mum. But sleep still evaded me. As I looked out of the window at the moonlit landscape, I saw the claw appear once more and it tapped on the window like a branch. Then disappeared. I got out of bed to check the window, feeling braver. As I looked closer I realised there was indeed a branch tapping at the window. So what I saw the previous night must have been an illusion. Feeling relived I turned and went back to the bunk bed. I climbed to the top and lay on my side, looking towards the window. I knew there was nothing there but it was good to be facing it just so I could be on my guard in case. I began to feel sleepy and watched the branches waving in the gentle wind outside. Then I saw a gigantic eye, like something belonging to a huge beast, a bloodshot white eye with a black pupil, the size of a football, staring at me and blinking slowly. As I watched it moved away and the window showed the moonlit landscape once more before I fell into a deep sleep.
The next evening I decided I was suffering from hallucinations caused by lack of sleep. There couldn’t possibly be any real werewolves. I was simply an imaginative child who read too many books. Perhaps I had conjured it from my own imagination? But such a thing wasn’t possible.
I went to the assembly with the other boys as usual, walking across the fields with the other boys. This time our teacher Mr Smith was going to give us an interesting talk about something, we didn’t know what it was yet, it was going to be a surprise. We knew he was a magician though and that he might be going to entertain us with a magic show.
I sat next to Dave with Steve and we waited in anticipation as Mr Smith arrived and stood in front of us. There was a full moon outside. Mr Smith looked different, he appeared to be more muscular and was growing longer hair. As I watched with disbelief, long hairs seemed to sprout through his clothes and his face became a long snout. He grew a mouth of ferocious teeth and his clothes fell off as the long hairs burst through his body. He appeared to be in a sort of pain but none of us understood what was going on until it was too late.
As he became a wolf, Mr Smith started howling at the moon and headed towards one of the female teachers who screamed as he bit into the flesh of her arm. The bone snapped with a horrible crunch. Everyone was panicking and screaming as we evacuated and ran outside into the night.
I ran as fast as I could back to the dormitory with Steve and Dave. We closed the door behind us and got into our beds, pulling the sheets up over our heads to shut out the night.
My therapist says I have a type of PTSD. She doesn’t believe I saw what I did, that it must have been a type of mass hallucination. But I remember seeing Mrs Johnson coming to school the next week with her arm in a sling. We were told she had broken her arm doing a handstand at the weekend. But we all knew what we saw.
I’ve been back to Stonybrook many times since to try to come to terms with what happened. The dew pond is long since dried up but still exists as a sort of impression in the ground. I read in the local papers they found a body there. DNA evidence on the skull turned out to be female, it was thought to be a young girl who drowned there in the dew pond back in the 60s. They could not identify the marks on the bones where it looked like they’d been chewed.
Mrs Johnson has since retired. I’ve met her a couple of times at the local concert hall where she was involved with the choir. I have asked her about Mr Smith but she wouldn’t talk about him and tried to change the subject.
So this is my account of what happened in that September week when I went on the school trip. Now I feel better writing it down and hope that someone will read it and maybe sympathise with my plight.
The thing is that one night when I was walking back from the concert hall with Mrs Johnson, something came over her and she changed. I couldn’t see what was happening very well in the darkness, as there are no street lights in our village (it’s a modern initiative to keep out light pollution) but I felt a sudden pain in my shoulder and realised she was biting it. In the half light it looked like she had changed into a large black wolf. Her eyes glowed red as she sank her jaws into my shoulder. I know it sounds ridiculous but that’s what happened.
When the moon waxes and wanes it affects my mood, especially when the moon is full. That’s the worst time. I thought it was because my star sign is Cancer. But now I always have to go out when the moon is full. I like to run up and down the hills, when the moonlight shines over them or in total darkness when there are no stars. My eyesight seems to have improved so I can hunt in almost complete darkness. I can run very fast and outrun almost anything. Nothing can keep up with me. I like to go to the lake where I sometimes eat the birds, or a chicken from the farm. If I’m lucky I can find a sheep or two. But most of all I like children. They have so much meat on their bones, it’s enough to last me several days. So life is good and I never get hungry.
But it’s when I change back that life becomes difficult. It’s so hard to adapt to being a human. I now feel I am a natural wolf. The doctors call it lycanthropy. They say it’s all in my head. I keep taking the medication the doctors give me. It is the only thing that stops me shooting myself with a silver bullet.