The Seducer: A Gone From Daylight Inspired Story - 25. William Harker’s Journal: Entry 25

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Sunday, October 14, 1989

I was running!

Faster than I’d ever ran before!

It was like I was running on top of clouds, but I was not running with any sense of joy. I was running in abject fear! Panic and an instinct for flight rather than fight had taken over me. I was being chased! Hunted! Soon, I would be in terrible pain and then, finally, dead! Dead at the jaws of the pack of wolves mere yards away from my back!

They were close…and closing! Hunger drove them. Hunger for my living blood!

I could hear their slavering growls as the blood-madness kicked them to run faster to catch me! Soon, time was at an end for me as I found myself blocked by a steep cliff in front of me. They had known where to drive me! They had known that if they drove me here that I’d be trapped and at their mercy…and they were without mercy!

The tang of their scent hit me. It was the smell of their hunger nearing me and soon my night-sharp eyes could see them emerge from the shadows of the trees, their eyes glowing with yellow lupine intensity!

All growled in dark victory as their meal had finally come to rest. Soon my blood would be in their jaws and my pain would vanish into a cold, bloodless, numbing death.

They circled me menacingly, their fangs dripping expectantly with saliva. The first to attack would be the Alpha, a great grey wolf three times the size of me. I was just a little thing…young and unwanted by this pack of murderers. I would be consumed, yes, as nature wastes nothing. But, it was not just for hunger that my pack sought to kill me. I was weak. I would not grow up to be a burden to the pack…at least that’s what the Alpha thought. I was not of his stock, so I could not live. Such was the rule for his pack.

I growled and snapped angrily at the Alpha, my last breath would be one of defiance against his tyranny. It almost seemed like the Alpha smirked fondly at my pitiful challenge. His answer was to calmly saunter up to me and show me his flank…an invitation to attack. He was cruel enough to bait a young cub he was about to kill mercilessly.

I only backed away feeling the wall of the cliff at my rump. Again, I looked for any hole I could dart through to escape my grisly fate, but the pack had, by then, completely encircled me, cutting me off from all hope of escape. They were all determined to see me dead. The hate flashed in their yellow basilisk stares. Why should I be so hated? What wrong could I have done them that they should hate me unto death? Me…a little cub?

The Alpha, tired of his sadistic game, turned to glare into my eyes. I saw nothing but death there! The yellow of his eyes seemed to brighten and he opened his huge jaws into a jagged death’s-head grin. The blood froze in my body and I felt my haunches sink to the ground. What small courage I had fled from me as my spirit tried to leave my body before its inevitable demise.

It was at that point that I knew I’d feel those bone crushing jaws bite down on my body, filling me with my death agony. I would stay locked inside that cage of pain until, by Mother Moon’s mercy, I should pass into black nothingness. My life’s blood would be the nectar for this cruel wolf who should have been my father, but was not.

The Alpha lunged, but before his slavering jaws could impale me, a great shadow appeared and the Alpha’s looming form was violently knocked from my sight! I followed the movement and saw a sight that would be burned into my wolf-mind from that day forward!

A giant black wolf, greater than any I’d ever seen before, had taken the Alpha by his neck with its gleaming white fangs. The Alpha struggled mightily, but could not break the grip of the great black beast! The other members of the pack did not interfere, they merely stood back from the battle and watched. This was clearly a battle for dominion and the Law forbade interference with such a thing. Also, unfortunately for the cruel Alpha, there was very little true loyalty harbored for him. There was none especially from his mate, the Alpha Female, since it was her cub that the Alpha had sought to kill!

With a loud final yipe, the Alpha went limp in the jaws of the mighty black wolf. The Alpha’s neck was broken and he was dead! The Black Wolf dropped his opponent and proceeded to stare down the rest of the pack silently. He was calling for any one of them to challenge his newly earned dominion over them. His terrifying red glowing gaze turned on me and my terror redoubled impossibly! If what I saw in the Alpha’s eyes was pure death then what I saw in the Black Master’s eyes was something seemingly beyond death! If a little cub could even understand such things, one could say that what he saw behind those eyes was Hell itself!

Then, I caught a glimpse of my own paw! It…was as black as the Black Master’s! I looked from my paw to the Master and the connection was made!

I was his son!

The Great Black Wolf’s eyes had their Hellish fires extinguished and his gaze reverted to a less threatening natural yellow. They seemed to soften upon seeing my petrified form.

He trotted gently up to me. Frozen with fear, I did not move as he came. He reached down and licked the top of my head and then nuzzled my ear.

A voiced echoed in my mind…

“…I protect my own!”

~~

I woke up from my dream clutching the wolf pendant around my neck!

Never have I experienced such a vivid dream! Even my ‘maybe-a-dream’ that I had with Jake was not as vivid as this dream! If, indeed, what happened with Jake was somehow real, this wolf-dream was, like, hyper-real!

I removed the pendant to look at it again. It was made of a metal brighter than silver. I’ve heard that platinum or white gold can be brighter than silver. The pendant was as heavy in my hand as it had been around my neck. Not painfully heavy, but a weight that you couldn’t forget was there.

The shadows in the room reflected in the bright metal making it seem black in color. All that remained bright were the two ruby eyes that stared out from the wolf’s head. They seemed to glow like they had their own light!

It instantly reminded me of the Black Wolf in my dream and the shock of that caused me to drop the pendant from my hand and onto the bed between my legs. Was there somehow a connection between my dream and this pendant? Was this amazing yet simple thing enough to inspire such a vivid dream?

“I protect my own…” I mouthed the words from my dream. Words I kept hearing in other dreams too.

Exactly, who thought I belonged to them and what were they ‘protecting’ me from?

I sat up on the edge of my bed pondering these things for most of the night. I couldn’t get back to sleep. It did not help that the wind was blowing fiercely outside causing howling noises as it whipped around corners and over hollows in the great house’s façade.

The wind seemed to mock me because it sounded, for all the world, like a pack of wolves howling together. Children of the night…making their music - a reference to something Dr. V had said one evening when hearing real ones howl in the distance.

Another sound mocked me as I sat there in the dark…a faint womanly laughter. It was so faint that I was sure it was all in my mind.

Was Dr. V’s house playing its weird tricks again?

Honestly, in California, what could cause a windstorm like that to blow so strongly around a house except for an El Niño storm or a Santa Ana wind? But then, everywhere in Santa Clara County seems to have more weather than other parts of California - more rain, more fog, and more cold winds.

Suddenly, I heard a loud groaning, cracking, and popping sound coming from what seemed to be the edge of the ‘parkway’ outside my room. The parkway is a vast expanse of lawn that separates the house from the edge of the pine forest. I recognized the sound as that of trees falling and branches snapping. I quickly went to my window to see if I could make out what stand of trees had fallen, but it was too dark. The wind drummed on my window causing me to step back involuntarily. My instinctive thought was that it might shatter right in my face! Such a storm! Such winds and then, finally, a bright flash and a near-deafening crack of thunder. With that the wind subsided almost as quickly as it had ramped up and then came the soft, relaxing sound of rain fall. It served to calm my rapid heartbeat and my quickened breathing.

I returned to bed, rescued my new wolf pendant from my bedsheets, and put it safely on the nightstand next to my bed. I wouldn’t wear it while I slept anymore. I figured that might keep me from having any more strange dreams about black wolves and being a wolf myself!