صدای جانور

CHAPTER TWO

Voice of the Beast

I sleep with my eyes open. My ears hear the smallest sound and I wake. If air moves softly over the hairs on my body, I will know that there is a living thing near me. Smells of animals brought by the wind can reach me over hundreds of kilometres.

Are you afraid of the dark? You are right to be afraid. We live in the darkness and there we do our work. You can be sure that we want only what is bad. Only what can hurt you. When you are feeling weak, we will know.

Then we will watch you while you sleep, waiting for the time when we can take you into our darkness. In the night, we talk to you and call you to come to us. The knock on the door that wakes you in the night - that is one of us, come to invite you to a living death. Do not listen. Close your ears, if you want to escape with your life.

We have always been here. We have been here from the start of time.

Many thousands of years ago people ate with the gods. At that time, in Arcadia in Greece, there was a man called Lykaon. In Greek stories, Lykaon was the son of the first man on earth. He was the king of the people who lived on the hills and in the woods of Arcadia.

But Lykaon was a man who did bad things, and one day the god Zeus heard about them. So he paid a surprise visit. Lykaon killed a child and gave it to Zeus to eat. Zeus was so angry that he turned Lykaon into a wolf.

Lykaon had to leave his people and live in the woods by himself.

He was half man and half wolf.

The sons of Lykaon, my brothers and I, have been on the earth all this time. But we left Arcadia and travelled the world. Each one of us went alone. We lived in hiding in many different places. Sometimes, we showed ourselves to people, but they were terribly afraid of us.

They used guns and shot us with silver bullets. They made big fires and burnt us alive and cut off our heads.

But we did not die. We just changed. Into the undead.

We move around the earth in many forms. You do not see us but we are among you, in all parts of the world, from the east to the west, from the north to the south, in Venezuela, France, Mexico and Florida, from the Caucasus to the Alps, from Georgia to Greece, from the icy fields of Russia to the green hills of England.

You can hear our cries if you listen hard. They are carried on the hot winds from the south and across the white mountains of the north.

There is nothing you can do to escape from us. You may think you can kill us with your silver bullets. But you cannot. We move from one body to another, from one place to another. We need blood and dead meat and we are always hungry. We will kill anything that lives: babies, cows, children, sheep, goats, chickens, men, women.

How can you know us? Well, what do you think you will see? Sometimes, for example, I am an animal of the night like a bat or a wolf or an owl. Or a wild black dog, like the dog that sits at the entrance to the Underworld.

Sometimes I am the ghost that lies down next to you when you sleep. Or I am a beautiful young man or woman whom you want more than anything else in the world.

I am all of these things and I am none of them. I move between your world and mine as easily as a fish through water. You cannot understand how easily. You may see something moving in the corner of your eye. If you turn to look, there will be nothing there. Just a leaf blowing in the wind, you think. But I am following in the darkness behind you. I am your worst dream.