[I recently had the opportunity to write a chapter on spec for a project dealing with werewolves. Unfortunately I didn't get the job but it was fun to write something that's so far from what I normally write. And since I didn't get the job, I'm posting the chapter here. Enjoy.]
Our Second Encounter with the Lycanthrope
We’d been in Eastern Europe for four months when we discovered that the werewolf could be killed by something other than silver. It was also during this time that we were able to observe the lycanthrope for the first time without fear of attack. Luck and an incredible set of circumstances brought us to this amazing discovery.
Privately I had begun to despair. The few encounters we’d had so far, while exciting, were extremely short lived and provided us very little hard data. While there was no doubt in my mind that the lycanthrope was real, we had nothing to show as proof and we hadn’t come any closer to understanding what the nature of the curse. I feared that the brief standoff we’d had on the roof of the warehouse that night in Poland would be the closest we would come.
Marcus, Pedro and I had left for an unnamed village or town, it was unclear, to the east that didn’t appear on our map on the advice of a young woman claimed that she had been attacked by a half man, half wolf creature there. This was a reluctant admission on her part as she didn’t want news of this attack to reach her neighbors. The village, which she assured us would be there, was only a day’s drive and it seemed the best lead we had so we decided to chance it. In any case, we’d become accustom to chasing wild leads and as long as it didn’t turn into the disaster that Mexico had been, it was worth checking out.
By the time she approached us with this new information we’d been in chasing down the leads given to us by Dr. Svinski for almost three weeks and everyone in town (and probably the region) knew who we were and what we were doing there. Most regarded us with a sort of tolerant humor; we were the odd foreigners who were chasing fairy tales. It was a reputation we did little to discourage, especially Marcus, and it seemed to disarm people. We were happy with that, we didn’t want to return to the outright hostility we’d encountered in Mexico. Even though we didn’t mind having this reputation, it was clear that most people didn’t want to be too closely associated with us. It was hard to keep perspective on their reluctance, after months of chasing monsters nothing seemed strange or outrageous anymore.
It is interesting to note that this stigma against admitting to an actual encounter with a werewolf exists in almost everywhere we’ve been from Los Angeles to Mexico to Poland and now into Russia and the former Soviet Union. Most have little trouble speaking freely about their belief in werewolves but getting them to admit to having seen one is impossible. At first I assumed that it was because anyone who has come into contact with a werewolf is at immediate suspicion for having contracted the curse. I think though it’s a cultural concern, more about how the person is perceived by their community than any real fear that they might be infected. And as we’d seen in Los Angeles, the human mind is infinite in its ability to explain the unexplainable. This is a rather large impediment in our ability to get people to discuss their experiences with us.
This particular woman had sent word to Pedro through one of the porters at our hotel that we should meet her at a small café just outside of town after midnight.
The café was empty when we arrived. A young woman[1] , college aged, was there with her boyfriend. She assured us that her boyfriend’s family owned the café and we could speak privately. There seemed to be some disagreement between the two of them and when she started speaking, he left the table disgusted and went into the kitchen. What follows is her account of the attack:[2]
I was home with my mother and sister the week before my final year of university[3] . I was excited to get back as my roommates had told me about a party that night and I foolishly left late on a Saturday afternoon believing that I could make it in time. I found myself with several hours left to drive at dusk. The roads are not safe after dark[4], especially for a woman traveling alone, and I found a town with a small inn[5] where I could spend the night.
It was sometime after midnight when a noise woke me up, it sounded like the howling of dogs. I lay there but could hear nothing. My heart was racing in my chest and told myself I was being foolish. I went downstairs to boil some water for tea. I was in the kitchen filling the teapot when I thought I saw someone staggering drunkenly down the other side of the street. It was hard to see as the street was almost entirely in shadow.
I worried that if were a man and he was drunk, he might fall and not wake up[6]. I opened the door to call to him but something stopped me. His movement was awkward and gangly but purposeful as well. I did not think it was the movement of a drunk.
At that moment, he stepped from between two buildings and into the moonlight. It was then that I saw it fully. It was taller and larger than a man but it hunched forward. I say it and not he because this was unlike any man that I’ve ever seen.
I stood there for a moment, watching it sniff at the air with its head thrown back. It looked to wear some sort of shaghair coat and fur cap.
Then it seemed to realize I was standing in the doorway and it burst across the street with a violence of motion that left me frozen. There was a low growling in the air, like the sound of distant thunder. It was not a sound that I’ve heard any living thing make. It moved so fast that I didn’t fully realize what was happening. Then it grabbed me by the shoulder. It has long greasy nails that cut into me. The pain shook me out of that terrible paralysis, if it hadn’t I think that I’d be dead. It snapped at me with a mouth filled with broken yellow teeth.
Luckily I still held the teapot and when I brought my hands up in terror, I smashed the teapot into the side of its head. It let me go[7] and I fell back onto the kitchen floor. I kicked the door shut and it threw itself against it, its eyes rolling in anger and its mouth snapping. I could see long strands of saliva on the glass.
Then it threw itself against the door again and the glass shattered. It would have gotten in but by then I had started to scream. The noise of my screaming along with the breaking glass brought lights from the bedrooms on the upper floors of the inn. When the creature saw the lights, it tried once more at the door cracking the frame and sliding me across the floor but when the door didn’t cave it fled into the night.
When she finished her account, she paused then hesitantly pulled her shirt down off her right shoulder. There were four ugly jagged scars on the back of her shoulder and one in the front. Each was about the size of a large finger or claw and they were still slightly red and swollen, like they had never properly healed.
“My God,” said Marcus and we sat stunned at her account of that night and at her scars. Before Marcus or I had a chance to ask her any questions her boyfriend rushed from the back and demanded that we leave. The site of her shoulder had upset him greatly.
Standing in the road in front of the café, we had a decision to make. I argued that we should go back inside and get answers from the girl but both Pedro and Marcus felt that unwise. When I finally calmed down from my excitement I could see they had a point. She had taken a risk already by speaking to us and it would be cruel to force her to answer questions she would not be comfortable with. Still it was the best account we had of someone surviving an attack and it was a shame that more couldn’t be made from it.
Instead we agreed to leave at dawn for the spot she’d marked on the map. A crossroads that sat in the low foothills to the east. We reasoned that if she had been attacked while staying there for only one night, then the residents must have had multiple encounters with the monster[8].
We were back at the apartment reviewing everything that the young woman had told us when Marcus brought up an interesting question. She had been clawed by a werewolf but not bitten[9]. Did that mean that she was herself infected? We knew that the bite of such a monster was a sure way of transmitting the curse but we still didn’t know enough about what the curse was to know if the attack could have infected her. Was it bacterial? Was it a virus? Was it something supernatural and were there environmental factors that either caused or aided in the transmission?
I was angry at myself for not pushing the matter. Cruel or not, this may have been the first time we sat across the table from someone with the curse. It was not the type of opportunity that comes twice and I feared that we missed out on something unique. By now though she wouldn’t still be at the café and we didn’t have a name with which to track her down. Just a physical description. I turned in for the night with a sense of disappointment.
We woke to a light rain that grew worse throughout the day. It wasn’t a pleasant drive. The road showed the effects of years of neglect. In places it had been washed out completely and the old BMW that Pedro had bought had trouble negotiating these stretches. More than once we found ourselves sliding in mud towards the drainage ditch that ran along the road. Pedro, as always, was unflappable and managed to keep us on the road.
Then around three in the afternoon, while we were pulling back onto the road after filling the gas tank from the gas cans we carried, the car started making a horrific grinding noise. I won’t describe the frustration I felt during the two hours it took Pedro to fix the car and we felt very exposed sitting on the side of the road. This was not a well-traveled highway and I wondered how many years it had been since any type of maintenance had been done on it. Even in the best sections, it was reduced closer to one lane than two which may have been a problem had we seen another car. There was evidence however that jeeps and some sort of tracked vehicle had crossed the road several times and I was worried we’d run into some sort of patrol[10].
We would have never known where the town was had we not crested a hill to find it lying flat and uninspired in front of us. It was never going to be mistaken for anything other than an industrial manufacturing center and was almost unnaturally depressing even for this part of the world. Had we arrived much later in the day than dusk, I would have assumed that it was deserted. As it was, there were only a few people out trying to keep dry in the steady rain. The architecture reflected the very worst of the old Communist function over form and the low-slung concrete buildings that sat almost invisible against a gray backdrop of rain clouds.
“Does something seem wrong to you?” Marcus asked as we slowly made our way down out of the foothills.
“Other than the fact that this place should have been abandoned years ago?”
“Something’s not right here.” We rode for along for some moments in silence when he almost shouted, “There, don’t you see it?” and pointed at the houses that stood along the street.
“See what?”
“They’ve boarded up their windows,” he said and as I looked into the darkness I could see this was true. Here and there light leaked out from cracks but for the most part the houses stood dark, even the ones where we could see smoke from the chimneys in the fading light.
“Now why would they do something like that?”
“I don’t know but that’s the act of a very scared group of people.”
We had agreed to try and find the inn that the young woman had stayed at. As we drove through the town looking for it there was little to dissuade my earlier impression. I would guess that at some point in the recent past, the population had been measured in the tens of thousands. I would have been surprised to find that it now stood at even a tenth of that. For every inhabited building we passed there stood two that were slowly rotting into the ground, their concrete walls crumbling into the broken street.
Finding the inn turned out to be easier than we had expected. We asked a bent old woman standing in the doorway of an apartment building where we might rent a room for the night and she pointed further down the street at a badly faded sign. “That is the only place that rents rooms,” she said in between great hacking coughs.
The inn turned out to be nothing more than a three-story apartment building. The windows along the street level had been boarded over but we could see light from an apartment on the second floor. The door was locked and we knocked for some minutes before a woman of indiscriminate age, she could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty so great was the fear and exhaustion in her face, answered the door.
She regarded us with suspicion and I didn’t think she was going to let us in. Finally she stepped aside and let us enter, but only after Marcus promised to rent the entire top floor of apartments. While expensive, this gave us an excellent view of the surrounding streets and rooftops. Unfortunately by the time we’d brought our gear up out of the car it was well after dark and there was no one out on the streets. Marcus tried to ask the woman why all the windows had been boarded over but she ignored the question and wouldn’t meet his eyes after that.
This scene replayed itself all week. We were greeted with suspicion or outright hostility everywhere we went. There was a market down the street from us and it looked like it had been carved out of a city block that had been bombed flat then bulldozed. Most of the stalls were empty. The few vendors who bothered to put out goods were desperate for our business until Marcus tried to explain that we were doctors following the outbreak of plague. Then they either asked us to move along or actively ignored us until we left. From all of them we got the same mixture of fear and hostility.
The market seemed to be more of a meeting place than anything else. Once or twice a day we would see groups of men dressed in rough clothing or in the cast offs of old Soviet Army uniforms with hunting rifles congregate for a few minutes before splitting up again.
Beyond the market, the only other place that we had a chance to speak to anyone was at the café / bar that inhabited what I can only guess had been at one time some sort of office building. Someone had taken the time to knock down the internal walls and the lower level was a café with mismatched tables and chairs. In a backroom there was a wood-burning oven that was used to prepare all of the food. The upstairs was a bar that only served bottles of beer from coolers filled with ice.
Here too we were unable to learn anything. Marcus tried introducing us as doctors to the bartender who wanted nothing to do with us. We were moments from getting thrown out and the only thing that saved us were the letters we’d forged on the UCLA medical center letterhead. I doubt that the bartender could read English but the letters, with their official looking crests and stamps, did lend us an air of credibility. While those letters saved us from a beating they didn’t inspire him to give us any answers. Even I could understand the conversation without the need for translation.
“Is there a doctor in town?” “Nyet.”
“Has anyone been attacked by a wild animal or maybe by a person with rabies?” “Nyet.”
“Where does one go if they need medical attention?” “Moskva.”
The next day, while exploring the town we did find what looked to be a clinic but it had burned at some point and now as just a shell of a building. We also found a supermarket that had been looted, all the windows smashed. After walking for hours through abandoned neighborhoods, it was clear to us that everyone had moved into the Northeastern corner of the city.
“Now why would everyone do that?” Marcus asked as we sat on a set of stairs that led up to a building that was no longer there.
“Safety in numbers,” I said as it was the only thing that came to my mind.
“But the fighting ended here a long time ago,” he said, gesturing at the wasteland in front of us.
“These people don’t believe so.”
While Marcus and I explored, Pedro tried to track down parts for the car. There was no mechanic in town and the abandoned cars that were everywhere were too rusted and old to be of any use. Still Pedro managed to find a group of three men with a truck who came into town once a week to trade goods. They were from the Caucuses further south and from what they told us, were regarding with almost as much suspicion as we were even after years of trade.
The men told Pedro that they never spent a night in the town. They came in the morning, dropped off what they had and left in the afternoons, preferring to either make camp outside of the town or drive through the night. After much convincing on Pedro’s part, he got one of the men to speak with Marcus.[11]
This town is cursed. Anyone who spends more than a few nights here either inherits the curse or is killed. Even the milicija[12] do not come here. When the Soviet Union fell the milicija came here, same as everywhere else. They tried to carve out a little kingdom of their own.
The first year there were terrible attacks on the milicija. Soldiers who were out after dark were slashed in the face, beaten, sometimes torn to shreds.
This is was when there was still a city here. The commanders didn’t know what was happening. The attacks seemed too savage to be the caused by the town’s people. They didn’t know if it was wild animals or the beginning of a revolt? And since they practiced a brand of brutality not seen since Stalin, they had no real contact with the people who lived here. They did not know that the attacks were happening to everyone, not just soldiers.
They assumed it as a revolt. Better to be safe. So they rounded people up, disappeared them, tortured and killed them. Fantastic stories of savage animals that hunted men began to emerge, but who is going to believe a story like that?
News of the milicija’s atrocities reached the outside world. There was pressure on Russia to do something and while Moscow didn’t care about these people, at the same time they didn’t want to seem weak. They didn’t want the world to think that they couldn’t control what was happening within their boarders.
This didn’t just happen here, this happened all over Western Russia.
The politicians sent in the army. The army drove out the militias and where they found these stories of monsters that hunted men, there were told to investigate and ‘resolve’ the matter[13] . Russia wanted to be seen as having inherited the power of the old Soviet Union. To have to admit that your population believes that there are monsters in the dark who feed upon them, this kind of thing would make Russia look foolish to the world.
Moscow is not stupid, they know that driving out the militias is not enough. They also have to the people who are left rebuild. There is redevelopment money that is given to those who survived the fighting to help them rebuild their homes and cities. This money is available to business that helps in the redevelopment as well. This is the new face of capitalism here. Free market trade in the rubble of a destroyed town.
There is a commander who lives just outside of town, Moscow sends him money and he pays us to bring what the town needs.
I do not know if the curse is real. These people believe so. Do you not see them sometimes with their rifles, leaving for the hills? They meet with Gregorio out there; they say he hunts the monster even as it hunts them.
I do not care whether it is true. We trade with them and leave them to their lives. I don’t not want to stay here, even one night. And they do not want us to stay here so everyone is happy.
Before this meeting, we had discussed moving on as things were at a dead end. Maybe back into Belarus to see if we could uncover anything else from what Dr. Svinski had told us or maybe further into Russia. After speaking to the trader we were sure that we had to stay. We’d already seen the groups of men meeting in the market. After speaking with the trader we began to focus on them. Marcus or I would watch them from one of the apartments at the inn while Pedro would drive the foothills and mark on a map where they parked their cars and trucks.
Marcus decided to approach them again, this time openly. When they met in the market the next day he walked towards them and called out “I know what you’re hunting and we can help” but only got several guns pointed at him for his troubles. That night, when we appeared at the café for dinner there were several men that let us know, at rifle point, that we were no longer welcome and come the next day it would be in our interest to be very far away.
After discussing our options that night, we spent the day reluctantly packing, hoping to find some excuse or promise of help with which to stay in the town. It seemed though that we had worn out our welcome.
It was early afternoon and we were making our last preparations to leave when we heard the gunshots and the first howls.
They weren’t like anything I had heard before. This was not the howl of the werewolf hunting or even feasting, as horrible a sound as that is. This was something different all together, a sound which ripped through the town and made my skin crawl. We were standing just inside the doorway of the inn paying the last of our bill and the woman who owned the place turned completely white and her hands shook so badly that Marcus had to lead her to a chair to sit. Her eyes were unfocused and she looked right through him, the perpetual scowl gone, her face frozen in fear.
There was silence for a moment then more howls and the three of us dashed outside. Pedro ran to get the car and we sprinted down the block to the market. There, the men with rifles had begun to assemble but this time they didn’t threaten us as we approached. They milled about waiting for someone to take charge and didn’t notice us until Marcus ran up to one of them and grabbed him by the shoulders yelling “Where? Where is it, damn you?” The man looked dazed for a moment then pointed north along the main road that lead out of town and into the low foothills.
I feared that we wouldn’t be able to find the beast but I shouldn’t have worried. As we sped up into the hills we found two cars haphazardly pulled off of the road. Pedro slammed on the breaks and we slid to a stop behind them. I grabbed my kit and Marcus did the same and we sprinted up the hill that ran along side the road until found ourselves at the top of a ridgeline. We could hear voices and we sprinted along the ridge as it veered away from the road. Soon the road was out of sight. Looking down the side we could see a shallow stream and as we rounded a bend we found the source of the voices. Three men, all soaked to the knees, their clothes dirty and ripped, were trying to lift a fourth onto a tarp spread between two long branches. He was hugging his jacket to his chest and I could see blood running from beneath the jacket.
But that’s not what took our breath away and stopped us dead in our tracks. On the wall of the opposite ridge there had been a rockslide and partially buried beneath the debris lay the monster. “My God,” I almost screamed and ran down the side of the ridge and into the stream. As we emerged on the other side the men stopped to look at us but that was all.
This was the first time any of us had seen the lycanthrope up close. My first impression was of its size. It was so much larger than a man and for a moment I wondered if it was indeed a man at all. The torso and arms were thicker, bigger than a man’s and heavily muscled. Shaggy, thick, coarse fur covered its head and most of its body. The fur was a dark brown and oily but here and there I could see patches that faded almost to gray. Only on its face and the backs of its hands could I see the beast’s skin. And the skin was unlike any I’d seen before. It was dark, almost black, and thick. Reminding me more of leather than actual skin. Its fingers were similarly thick and at the end of each was a long curving claw also dark in appearance. But it was the eyes that caught me. From where I stood they were black, with no trace of humanity in them, just a deep burning rage and need to feed. Even trapped as it was, I still felt the need to take a step back when I met those eyes.
The face itself was vaguely human although it had its lips pulled back in a snarl of pain and anger. I could see elongated canines and a jaw that looked much stronger and better built for biting and tearing than a man’s. Around the mouth I could see dried blood crusting the fur and I looked at Pedro and Marcus to see if they had caught that. Marcus met my worried glance with one of his own.
While we stood there taking the creature in, it thrashed and raged against the rock that had crushed its legs. The rock was at least a foot taller than I and must have weighed several thousand pounds. The beast had been shot as well, several times in the chest and arms and still it snarled and gnashed its teeth.
Suddenly it howled again and all of us flinched, the Russians[14] crossing themselves and averting their gaze. One of the men shouldered his rifle and took aim at its head.
“Wait.” I shouted, stepping forward and waving my hands. “We need blood samples, skin samples, we need to study it. We need …” I trailed off not knowing exactly what we needed but I wanted to stop him from shooting the creature. As I said it I tried to interject myself between the man and the beast hoping he wouldn’t shoot me as Marcus hastily translated all of this into Russian.
It was a tense few minutes as Marcus struck a deal with the men. The man with the rifle was Gregorio. He agreed that we could do whatever tests we wanted on the beast provided we helped their friend.
Marcus and I tore into our kits. I gave him the gauss and morphine and he handed me our supply of syringes, vials and glassine bags.
The beast had lost a lot of blood. For the first time I realized that the ground around where the rock had crushed its legs was soaked with it and there was a sharp coppery smell in the air. The beast snarled at Pedro and I as we approached but between snarls I could see that it was panting in pain. While it was focused on Pedro and I, Gregorio removed his belt and made a loop on one end. Deftly stepping forward he caught one of the beasts arm with it and pulled hard.
“Quickly,” he said Pedro followed his example trapping the other arm. One of Gregorio’s men then stepped forward and caught the beast’s head with a long piece of rope and they tied all three off with the rope then ran that around the trunk of a tree. Even tied off in this way they struggled to keep the beast relatively still. “Now,” Gregorio said but I found myself unable to move forward so great was my fear. After a moment I forced myself to step forward and jabbed the syringe into the arm of the beast. The first syringe bent and broke and I had to grab the largest one we had, one meant for polar bears. For a moment I thought it wouldn’t be enough to pierce the monster’s skin but it did and I slowly began to draw its blood into the vials.
This close to the beast I could smell rotting flesh on its breath and see the long yellowed teeth. Each one seemed to end in a point. There was no humanity in that face. Like looking into the face of a feeding shark there was nothing but the instinct to kill and feed.
Being so close to the monster wore on me. I could feel it watching my every movement and I could feel the waves of hostility radiating off of it. Soon though I had blood, skin and hair samples and when I was finished I slumped onto the ground a safe distance from the monster. I felt exhausted, the fear of being so close to it had sapped the last of my strength.
I nodded at Gregorio and he took his rifle from where it rested against a tree. I wondered if it would even have an effect. So far the only thing we had seen have an effect against the lycanthrope was silver. Even now, with so much blood loss and the gunshot wounds that littered its arms and chest it didn’t look ready to expire. It strained against the belts and snarled at us. We had seen a werewolf smash through a door many times stronger than these belts in Poland however so that was an indication of just how much it had been weakened.
Gregorio stepped forward and pushed the rifle against the top of werewolf’s head. He pulled the trigger and the back of its head disappeared in a spray of bone, blood and brains. It twitched a few times and lay still. The eyes were open but dull now, staring at nothing.
By now the wind had begun to whip up again and a light rain was falling. The clouds obscured the last of the afternoon sunlight and it was dark there under the trees next to the stream. Even in the darkness we could see that the lycanthrope start to shrink before our eyes. Within an hour, while Marcus and I worked to save the other man’s life, the torso and arms had taken more human proportions. The leathery skin had begun to dry and crack and soon the wind was shearing it off in layers. Underneath was a layer of pale pink skin. The claws fell out and lay in the dirt. Marcus stepped forward and picked one up, looking at it for moment before bagging it with the other samples I’d taken.
Soon there was nothing left of the monster in front of us. Only a slender man, his legs crushed by a giant rock, his torso riddled with bullet wounds any one of which would have killed a normal man and which had only enraged the monster that had so recently lain before us. All through this process the men stood stoically. I had expected surprise or horror at the transformation but they stood silently as if it was nothing more than they expected.
Gregorio’s man was in bad shape. He was pale and unconscious, a light sweat having broken out across his forehead. Although we had bandaged and cleaned his wounds, blood was spotting through the gauss[15].
“He needs to get to a hospital.” Marcus said to Gregorio then paused for a moment, either struggling with the words in Russian or else not knowing what to say. “He’s running a fever. He might have been infected with the curse.”
“If he has been, as you say cursed, then we shall take care of it.” Gregorio said and I was all too aware of the rifle in his hand. In the background we could just start to hear the sounds of car engines. “You should go. They will not be pleased to find you here.”
“But there’s too much work left to do.” Marcus exploded in frustration. “There’s tests we can do, we may be able to help save his life. And him” Marcus pointed wildly at the man crushed under the rock “we don’t know who he is, or where he was infected. We can help. We want to end this.”
“There’s nothing for you to do here. If the government finds out what has happened here, it will mean the end of us. You have seen the effects of their liberation.”
“At least tell us who he is,” Marcus pointed at the man under the rock, desperate. “It could mean finding the source of all this. There are others, this doesn’t end here, today with his death.”
“His name was Alexander. He was a Captain in the Soviet Army. He was also a part of the Russian forces who ‘liberated’ us. When the army left he stayed as Moscow’s representative, he’s the one who gives handouts to those fools down there. Just enough to survive but never enough to rebuild and he gets fat on what is left. He knew what he was. He left a wife a child behind when he stayed here. He came out to the edge of the world to feed on us and they let him because he was the golden tit from which their precious money flows. I had my suspicions but those cowards have forgotten how to live unless it is on their knees, and so I did nothing.” The car engines were louder now. “Go now. Before they come. As I said they are cowards, and cowards and bullies are often one when fear is involved.”
We quickly gathered our gear from the ground taking care with the samples we’d gotten from the monster. Pedro pointed the car north figuring that soon enough we could turn west and skirt the abandoned parts of the city. Before leaving, Gregorio had pointed out on our map where Alexander had been stationed before coming to the town. It wasn’t the greatest lead, but if we were to find where this all started, it was our only one to go on.
—
[1]She did not give us her name and asked that certain identifying details be changed which I have done.
[2]What follows is Marcus’s translation of what was said.
[3]She did not identify which university although it’s easy enough to guess which one she was referring to. Given that, she must have moved to this town recently.
[4]This has been our experience as well. On Pedro’s advice we do not travel at night and he’s kept our routes far away from the local militias. Except for border crossings (which I’ve discussed in detail) we’ve had no real problems.
[5]Akin to a Bed and Breakfast. Motels, as a general rule, do not exist in this part of the world. The motel only came about after the creation of the highway system. In countries where there is no highway system, locals who can afford to travel stay in inns. Hotels are only found in larger cities and are generally for tourists and the wealthy.
[6]Not an unreasonable fear. Because of the depressed economy young men who can’t find steady work often fall into alcoholism. In the fall and winter, it’s not uncommon for a young man to pass out on his way back from a night of drinking and die of hypothermia. This is often referred to as “northern sleeping sickness.”
[7]Perhaps the teapot was inlaid with silver? Given her small stature it is unlikely she could have hit the werewolf hard enough to make it let go.
[8]From what we know of the Lycanthrope’s hunting behavior, it stood to reason that it must have seen this whole town as a hunting ground.
[9]Or at least, she didn’t admit to having been bitten.
[10]We still had not officially resolved our visa problem although Pedro had secured for us a number of very good forgeries. Compounding this was the problem with maps in this part of the world. Basically, just because a border is shown on a map that doesn’t mean that a local army or militia commander will honor that border. Nationality is often determined by the men with the most guns especially when there is money, or in our case, medical supplies involved.
[11]The following is Marcus’s translation of what was said.
[12]Russian for Militia. The meaning here is unclear as this can refer to anything from a government sanctioned paramilitary group to a well organized rebel group to the groups of bandits that make travel so dangerous. What was clear however, is that even in a region with so little stability no one wanted anything to do with this town.
[13]Investigate and resolve was official policy of the Russian Government towards these stories. It was interpreted by local commanders, with tacit agreement from above, as a policy of killing or driving the population out of the town in question then leveling the town. The destruction could be blamed on the fighting with the rebel groups. If, after the town had been secured, there was no town then no investigation was needed or indeed even possible. It is unclear what those in power thought was happening. There is some indication from Russian medical documents that this was the policy to deal with any sort of bacterial or viral outbreak that might reach epidemic status. So while it is unlikely that the Russian government gave much credence to the stories of werewolves, they may have thought they were stopping the outbreak of a communicable disease.
[14]From here on I refer to these men as Russians although it is still unclear to me whether they are, in fact, Russian. I’ve done this to simply the narrative and because they spoke Russian to us as well as to each other. Belarus does have two official languages Belarusian and Russia so I can’t be completely sure of their nationality.
[15]From here forward is the conversation I witnessed between Marcus and Gregorio as translated by Pedro.
