Katjka turned that one back. ‘One more,’ she said hoarsely. Reluctantly I turned over – I don’t know why – the last card dealt. It was the two of spades, and there was no sign upon it except the two black pips. But suddenly that blackness seemed to deepen and grow hollow, as if the pips were really openings into emptinesses beyond. They made my eyes blur, their focus swim, so that the two swam and shimmered and merged momentarily into one, a shimmering cavernous ace. Katjka plucked the card from my fingers and with a violent gesture swept the whole pack together.
‘Nothing?’ demanded Jyp.
‘No!’ answered Katjka curtly. ‘There’s a shadow over this business. There were faint signs, but … nothing I can understand, Christe pomiluj! Nothing …’
Steps from the back of the cellar like room broke the silence, and the waft of something spicy, singing with tomatoes and peppers and frying onions, more appetising than I would have believed possible. A face rose in the gloom, round and red and wrinkled as a winter apple but sporting a majestic hawk nose and a beaming smile; it was framed by a gaudy scarf and escaping ringlets of raven-black hair. The woman who came waddling up, bearing an immense and laden tray, could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy, plump but healthy; she laid down the tray with arms brawnier than mine.
‘Dekujeti, Malinkaçu!’ said Katjka. Evidently this was Myrko’s wife; she bobbed me a curtsey and reeled off a great stream of chatter I couldn’t understand. I rose and imitated Jyp’s bow, and the old woman seized my hands and chattered again, then kissed me forcefully on both cheeks and disappeared again, still chattering.
‘She was wishing you well in your ordeals,’ said Katjka slowly. ‘And telling you that you must eat. It’s good advice; you may need strength. I wish I could help you, but I cannot; sso …’
Jyp, already tucking into his plateful, lifted his head and met her eye. ‘Le Stryge?’ he asked.
‘Sztrygoiko,’ she answered.
‘Damn,’ he said, and went back to his food again.
At first I only picked at it, too panicky almost to force it down. I could feel the evening wearing away, that strange ship and all aboard it drawing further and further out of our reach. But the spices set water in my mouth and fire in my innards, and I began to eat as hungrily as Jyp. Even so, I was glad to see he wasn’t lingering; the moment his plate was clear he stood up, took a final swig of beer and tossed down his coarse linen napkin. He raised an eyebrow at Katjka. ‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘Time to go call on old Stryge, I guess.’
‘You don’t seem too eager,’ I said.
‘It’s got dangers of its own,’ Jyp told me. ‘But at this hour they shouldn’t be so bad.’
‘Dangers?’
‘He keeps odd company. Best be going; it’s a walk, and we won’t be wanting to take that automobile of yours. The Stryge gets kind of touchy about that sort of thing.’
Katjka walked with us to the stairs. Nobody had asked to be paid for the food or the drink, and I had an uncomfortable feeling I’d offend somebody by offering. ‘You will take care of Stefan, won’t you, Jyp?’ she said urgently, and suddenly put her arms around me. She didn’t kiss me, only touched her cheeks rapidly to mine, and let go; it seemed almost like some kind of formal embrace. Jyp nodded soberly, and motioned me up the stairs. She made no move to follow, but stood looking silently after us, tapping that pack of cards nervously against her thigh.
A cool wind slapped me in the face as I opened the door, but the rain had stopped. The skies had cleared, the clouds raced ragged across the sky. I was surprised to see how light it still was without them, a kind of greyish twilit clarity that dimmed colours and made distances deceptive. Jyp closed the door carefully behind us, and motioned me up the street. Water still pooled in the gutters and gleamed in the seams between the worn cobblestones, so that the road ahead seemed to reflect the sky, and each oblong cobble became a small stepping stone across it. Jyp seemed to be brooding, and we walked in silence awhile. He was the first to speak. ‘Said I wanted to render ‘count of myself for last night.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Seems to me I do – after you saving my bacon maybe three times now. Guess you knew I was scared, huh? But it wasn’t just for me. I’ll say that. I was kicking myself good an’ hard for ever letting you get involved. Feared getting you any deeper in’d only bring down worse dangers on your head.’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘Should’ve thought of that a mite sooner, shouldn’t I?’ I didn’t answer.
‘So I thought I’d scared you off. But I got over my fright. Old Stryge, he fixed that thing good and proper, sent it wailing off in a puff of smoke – so I thought that was all right now. Next thing I heard, the Wolves have gone –’
He shook his head. ‘Steve, this is all my fault. I should’ve warned you better, maybe bought you protection. But honest, I never dreamed anything could happen to you out there. I’ve never heard of Wolves striking as deep into the Core as that, not ever before. Others, sure, now and again, but Wolves never. It looks bad, Steve.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I told him impatiently. ‘You’re not responsible for those sons of bitches. Or where they decide to tear apart. Who is, come to that? Where do they come from? You said they weren’t really folk – what’s that supposed to mean?’ I was beginning to get angry now, with the food and drink in me burning away shock and amazement. ‘What’s this about the Core? If these Wolf creeps are after me I should damn well know all about them, shouldn’t I?’
Jyp, though, was slow to answer. ‘Can’t tell you exactly all,’ he said, as we turned at the top of the road. ‘Don’t think the Wolves know it all themselves, not for sure; but I’ll tell what I can. Way the story goes, their ancestors were plain men enough, though wolfish still, a batch of ragtag pirates and their doxies down Carib way in the early days. Seems they got too much even for their buddies, and one day found themselves stranded on some little pimple of an island right off the map. An ill-famed place already, by all accounts, a sacred place of the cannibal Carib Indians of old, and shunned even by them; they dared land there only to feed their heathen gods with blood. Weren’t meant to survive, you see, those maroons. But survive they did, as vermin does, by forbidden flesh.’
‘Forbidden – you mean, they turned cannibal too?’
‘Surely, and worse, by lying with their own flesh and breeding so, kin with blood kin. Flourished, too, like the devils they were; for it wasn’t only their own they ate, but took to sharking out in crude canoes to waylay small ships that strayed near, and seeking to lure larger ones onto their island’s reefs. God help the poor souls who fell into their hands! It’s said they kept a few and bred them, like cattle, to slaughter. I’ve heard tell of some who got to living that way, in Scotland long years back – Sawney Bean, if you’ve heard of him, and his kin? But these were worse. And they got to be worse yet.’
Suddenly the food sat heavy and sickly in me. The implications of what he was saying … I forced them aside. ‘Jyp, just how do you get any worse than that?’
He kicked idly at a shred of polythene wrapping that blew into our path. ‘Well, folk who went that way almost never came back; so fewer and fewer went, till the isle was all but forgotten. Then maybe it dropped out of the way awhile, the way places do. And meanwhile they changed. Over the generations, bit by bit.’
‘Evolved, you mean.’
Jyp looked blank. ‘Don’t know about that. Sounds like this Darwin, and I was brought up strict. They changed, that’s all I know. Like as not something unhuman crept into that bloodline along the way; maybe it was just their own bad blood showin’ through – and maybe there was something else on that island. Long and the short of it is, Wolves aren’t human. Don’t look quite like any of us. Don’t think like us; surely don’t smell like us! They can’t breed with the line of man any more; only their own foul kind.’