Want to catch up? Want to start right from the beginning? Want to read the episodes all over again?
Here are the links:
Episode List From 1 – 52
Then: 53 54 55 56 57
Images below from Google, Getty Images, and Pixabay
Please read the start of the story using the link above. I promise, it’s well-worth the time to check it all out. At least then, this excerpt will make more sense
He turned the boy over and examined him again. Once the dirt was removed, he saw scars on his face that he had not noticed before.
The boy’s cheekbone had once been broken and had set not-quite evenly, it gave an odd cast to his left eye. He had a scar across his collarbone, a broken rib and his hips were not aligned correctly, giving the boy one leg higher set than the other, making it seem as though he had one leg longer than the other.
There were many injuries and damage to the boy’s form and Jack surmised that he would have been enough of an oddity to give the other street urchins excuse to ostracise him. The boy would have been lonely.
Jack did not realise, (though Hazel would have been able to explain) that his humanity was trying to justify his actions, perhaps in order to relieve the guilt that his sub-conscious anticipated.
Once his rudimentary examination was complete and Jack was happy with his findings, he took his tool roll of scalpels, scissors and the like and opened it out within easy access. He took a scalpel and began the operation.
Jack was just about to make the first incision when he heard a noise, the sound of a stone hitting the metal outer-door and he paused to listen. He put down his scalpel and moved to the inner door to listen closer.
The sound came again, a tiny noise that he would have missed had his hearing not been accentuated by his Wolfness.
Jack froze in place, wondering why he was being given a warning that someone was close. Then he heard a voice. He recognised his father’s voice and he gave a contemptuous snort and went back to his work on the boy.
The boy was still out-cold and Jack smiled. As an indulgence, he bent his head to the boy’s chest, just to hear the heart-beat and the air as it was pulled into his lungs to inflate them. Jack also imagined that he could hear the flow of the life-blood as it was pushed through veins and arteries. Jack was salivating as he straightened up.
After he had butchered the boy, piled all the bones to be disposed of and had tasted the meat (and been disappointed that it was not as delicious as he had anticipated), Jack looked to the glands he had removed. He knew the adrenal glands had an effect on him and he had become curious as to whether the other glands would also have an effect – perhaps in a different manner or to a stronger or lesser effect.
He cursed his forgetfulness as he realised that he had again forgotten to bring with him a looking-glass in order to see the effects the consuming of the glands would have – if any.
Jack pocketed the glands after wrapping them in a piece of brown paper he had brought to the laboratory for the purpose of the transporting of meat.
As he let himself out of the back entrance to his lair, he imagined that he had avoided the Wolf that had trailed him to tap on his front door.
He thought wrong.
His father was waiting for him.
“Hello Jack,” he said and sniffed the air. “Oh Jack, you insist on making mistakes at every turn. Why on earth would you want to carry glands on your person? Do you not know how tasty they smell to Wolves? Let me help you, son, you are in grave danger. Wolves that are searching for you will abandon that search in order to find the source of the delicious smell – the glands that you have in your pocket. Then they will have you!”
“Is that right?” Jack asked; a plan forming even as he spoke.
“Jack, I came to plead with you once more. Allow me to bite you, to make you full-Wolf. It may yet save your life.”
“I shall think on it father, that is all I can promise.”
Jack left his father behind, in the dank passageway between his secret laboratory and the streets of Whitechapel and continued out into the open. Taking heed of his father’s warning, using the greatest caution, he made his way back to his house to locate a mirror. Jack wanted to see what he turned in to when he consumed the glands. Then he would catalogue his findings in his journal so that he may study that as he had the Grimoire years before.
Jack prepared himself; he laid out the glands before him in the kitchen. He had carried the large mirror from his bedroom and leaned it against the table, and then he placed a chair before it so that he may study his face once he had noted the changes to his body.
He drew the kitchen curtains so that no-one could see, even were they in his back yard. He undressed and stood before the mirror, entirely naked. Then, thus prepared, he took one of the glands, the adrenal gland, and placed it into his mouth. He watched his face as his teeth burst through the flesh that encased the gland and watched as his whole body began to vibrate.
Nothing seemed to be happening at first and he attributed that to the fact that the boy’s glands were not as large as the man’s glands that he had consumed before, so he popped the other one into his mouth and, impatient to see the results, bit down hard and swallowed.
He was dismayed at the transformation. He did not resemble a Wolf at all. He looked, instead, like a man possessed of a disease such as Leprosy, one which disfigures and makes grotesque that which was once normal.
Fur sprouted all over his face and body in sporadic places and his features seemed to alter as he watched, even after he assumed that the transformation had finished.