Where Wolves Run: A Novella of Horror by Jason Parent

 
     
     
     
    Where Wolves Run
     
     
     
     
    1.
     
    Konrad’s father had been hunting the beasts since long before his birth. Father’s pursuit had brought him all across Europe, from the coldest wilderness of Muscovy, to the hidden glens of the French Alps. Weary feet had at last turned toward Rattenberg. Years of traveling had brought him home.
    But it was not a happy return. Their quiet house sat beyond the outskirts of the declining town, its neighboring copper and silver mines picked clean. Lost souls seeking fortunes had been lured away by new mirages, leaving behind those who had sprouted from centuries-old Bavarian roots, never caring which empire claimed them.
    Theirs was a simple home, a mixture of wood, wattle, and daub providing a safe haven for Konrad and his family. He and his mother worked the land, grew more than they needed to survive, and traded the surplus. Meat came from the hunt, and, at twelve years old, Konrad had already become quite good with the bow. He hunted rabbit and deer in the surrounding forest and protected the livestock from the occasional wolf. Thin and lithely, he pranced over rock and root with the grace of those indigenous to the forest.
    Mostly, he and his mother lived alone, happy. Father was away much of the year, bartering or taking odd jobs in far off places. When he stopped home, it was never long before he left on some new adventure.
    Konrad did not know much about Father, nor did he care to learn—the man had been no true father to him. In all the time Father spent away, Konrad worried that he had been the reason for his father’s absence, whether his father had ever loved him at all. After years of doubt and remorse, Konrad eventually stopped caring, and so died the last embers of affection he fostered for his kin.
    Konrad knew as little of the world beyond his home’s border as he knew for the man who had abandoned him for it. Their land sat at the southern edge of a vast wilderness, and Konrad had come to know all the wild within it. The trees were his playground, the streams his pools. He felt at home there, free from daily chores and Mother’s orders.
    Yet Konrad had never met or seen before the wild things that arrived on their doorstep. These beasts were worse than savage. They were evil.
    When they came one night in late September, Mother seemed as though she knew what they were and why they were there. Father was away on some vague trip to mountains in the west. He had left Konrad and his mother alone to face an unspeakable brute and its cohorts in sin.
    Mother shoved aside the wooden table upon which they had just finished their supper. Beneath it, the floor consisted of large flat stones arranged like puzzle pieces in dirt. The largest was irregularly shaped, nearly two meters long and less than a meter wide. Yanking a pickaxe from the wall, she drove it into the dirt and wedged it beneath the rock, prying it loose.
    The rock covered a storage area as shallow as a coffin. “Get in,” Mother urged. She propped up the slab at an angle. Howling broke the silence outside: wolves. Their haunting refrains came from all directions.
    “Quickly!” Her voice was low but sharp. She pulled him close, her wet cheek smearing against his. She assisted him into the hole.
    A clever but unlearned boy, Konrad did not fully understand his mother’s apprehension. Still, he did as she commanded. His big brown eyes widened as his mother lowered the lid, blocking out all but a crack of the hearth’s warm glow. She told him, begged him, to stay quiet no matter what he might hear. He nodded, chin quivering, knowing something was terribly wrong, his imagination filling in the details.
    Shock made him keep his promise of silence. He choked up in panic as terrifying sounds, growling and pounding, came from just outside. Scratching at the walls followed. The nauseating cacophony traveled through the dirt as if to mock Konrad for his cowardice as he lay in his sarcophagus. Is that