The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group (9 page)

‘Is it a dead possum?’

He stared at me, bug-eyed. ‘
Possum?
’ he squawked. ‘What the hell kind of man-eating possums do you have around here, anyway?’

‘Fox?’ I guessed. ‘Or . . . I dunno . . . tomcat?’

‘It’s you, Toby.’ Reuben stepped off the path into the undergrowth. ‘Either that or someone else in this neighbourhood has the same condition.’

It was my turn to gape at him.

‘What are you
talking
about?’ I exclaimed. ‘Are you off your nut? I don’t smell like that!’

‘You did on Monday night,’ he retorted. ‘This smells just like my bank vault does, after I’ve been knocking around in it for a few hours.’ All at once he bent over, his hands on his knees. ‘Mmph,’ he said, peering at the ground. ‘That’s interesting.’

I was certain he’d spotted our paw prints, so I ploughed into the bush after him. The musky smell was much stronger beneath the canopy of palm fronds.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing. My heart sank. Even in the dim light, it was obvious that he hadn’t found any paw prints. Instead he’d stumbled on a scattering of feathers. ‘See that?’ he queried. ‘See the way they’re all stuck together in clumps? Dried blood makes ’em do that.’

‘So?’

‘So something’s
been eating the ducks.’ He began to forge ahead, down a shallow slope towards the lake. Branches caught at his loose, tangled hair. They scraped across his bare arms and legs.

Then he stopped, so abruptly that I almost ran into him from behind. I’d been distracted because I’d walked straight through a spider’s web and was still trying to peel it off my eyelashes.

‘Ugh . . . yuck . . .’ I muttered, before realising that I was right at the water’s edge. Over Reuben’s shoulder, I could see the fountain, the flags, and the function centre.

I could also see Fergus’s paw prints. Reuben was gazing down at them.

‘Nice try,’ he said.

‘What?’

He folded his arms and pulled a face. But he didn’t say anything else. He just turned and headed out of the undergrowth, a red flush slowly staining his olive cheeks.

Damn
, I thought.
Damn, damn, damn
.

‘What is it?’ I called after him. ‘Hey! Did you see these? What do you think they could be?’

‘You should know,’ he growled, crashing over dead leaves and dry sticks. ‘You put ’em there.’

God, was that ever a sucker punch! I was floored. My stomach seemed to drop through the soles of my feet. I would have jumped in the lake and swum for it, if my phone hadn’t been in my pocket.

But as Reuben kept retreating, my panic began to subside. I realised that he wasn’t searching for a blunt instrument. He really was marching away, before he totally lost his temper. Those prints had been the last straw.

He was pissed off with me, big-time.

For a split second I felt relieved. Then it occurred to me that pissed off doesn’t mean scared off. What was to stop him getting madder and madder and coming after me at a later date? Nothing. I had no defence. Unless I calmed him down – unless I lied my head off – he would turn into a ticking time bomb.

‘Hey!’ I yelped. ‘Wait!’

When he didn’t even pause, I tried to close the gap between us.

‘Hey! Hang on! Ouch!’ A branch had slapped me in the face. ‘What’s the problem? What did I do?’

Still no answer. By this time he had reached the path; I saw him silhouetted against the glare for an instant as he hesitated, glancing from side to side. Then he disappeared, swerving off to the right at a rapid trot. I figured he was making for the car park near the function centre.

But if that was his ultimate goal, he had to deal with a few obstacles along the way. When I staggered out of the undergrowth, scattering leaves and twigs, I saw him rooted to the spot not half a dozen metres from where I stood. He was staring at a mangy-looking shrub, behind which two hunched figures were clearly visible.

‘Oh, man . . .’ The words popped out before I could swallow them. They weren’t very loud, though; I don’t think Reuben heard me. He was too busy intimidating my friends.

Amin was certainly intimidated. I could tell by the set of his shoulders. Fergus, however, rose to the challenge. He must have made a snap decision to brazen it out, because he emerged from the undergrowth with a lot of noise and movement, as if to demonstrate that he wasn’t hiding from anyone. He wore a huge grin, and was fiddling with his fly.

‘Hey!’ he said. ‘It’s you! Are you stalking us, by any chance?’

Reuben’s jaw-muscles twitched.

‘I was
busting
,’ Fergus added breezily, by way of explanation. ‘There aren’t enough toilets in this park, eh?’

I don’t know if he was expecting an answer, but he certainly didn’t get one. Reuben fixed his gaze on Amin, who had followed Fergus onto the path.

‘Oh!’ Amin coloured. ‘It wasn’t like – I mean, I wasn’t watching him pee, or anything.’

‘God, no!’ Fergus yipped, momentarily aghast. His grin vanished. ‘Amin was just looking for his . . . um, you know . . .’

‘My football!’ Amin exclaimed. ‘I kicked my football into the bushes.’

Fergus rolled his eyes. I couldn’t blame him. For one thing, neither he nor Amin had been carrying a ball back at the kiosk. And for another, Amin doesn’t look like someone who plays football. Though certainly
shaped
like a ball, he’s the sort of kid who always ends up at the bottom of every pile-up. I used to play on the same soccer team as Amin – as central midfielder, because of my fancy dancer’s footwork – and I never even saw him touch the ball.
Ever.
He just couldn’t get anywhere near it.

Reuben must have realised this, because he wasn’t fooled for a second. As he leaned forward to prod Amin in the chest with a one grimy finger, his expression was a mixture of rage and disgust.

‘Let me tell you something, Mr Smartarse,’ he hissed. ‘Next full moon, chances are that
you’ll
be Toby’s first meal. And you won’t be laughing then, mate.’

Amin swallowed. It was Fergus who opened his mouth to reply. But before he could think of a suitably cutting rejoinder, Reuben had gone.
Phht!
Just like that.

It was enough to make you believe in teleportation.

T
he next morning
I had an appointment with Dr Passlow.

Mum came with me. I guess she wanted to be there in case the doctor announced that I was an epileptic. By this time, I’m sure, she’d convinced herself that I was – though of course she wouldn’t admit to it. ‘There’s no point worrying until we have the results back,’ she kept saying. But she was doing Internet searches on subjects like anti-convulsive medication; I know this because I found some of her notes on Thursday night. She was preparing herself for the worst, I think.

So it must have been a big shock when Dr Passlow declared, ‘There’s no evidence of seizure activity in Toby’s brain. No lesions. Nothing untoward. The scans were perfectly clean.’

Mum blinked. Even I was startled. A clean brain? That didn’t sound like me.

‘You mean he
isn’t
epileptic?’ she asked.

‘Well . . .’ The doctor preferred not to pass judgement. ‘Let’s just say the indications aren’t there on the scans. Which aren’t conclusive. What this means is that we still don’t have a firm diagnosis.’

‘So he
could
have epilepsy. Is that it?’ said Mum.

Dr Passlow leaned back in his chair. It was a posh kind of chair, with a high back and leather upholstery, but the rest of his consulting room wasn’t very posh at all. The carpet was stained, the walls were covered with scribbles and fingermarks, and the whole place stank of old baby spew. There was a plastic crate full of toys in one corner, right underneath a photo of a happy toddler who’d had all his immunisation shots.

I couldn’t help feeling that I was in the wrong place.

‘Let me put it this way,’ Dr Passlow continued. ‘At the hospital there’s a registrar who remembers having a couple of absence seizures in the classroom when he was at high school. He didn’t mention them to anyone, and it never happened again.’ When Mum didn’t react, the doctor placed his hand on top of my file. ‘At this stage, we shouldn’t be using words like ‘epilepsy’. We should be thinking in terms of individual seizures, and taking each episode as it comes. A watching brief, in other words.’

‘That’s all?’ Mum didn’t sound impressed – at least, not to my ears. But I know her pretty well. She’s so soft-spoken that Dr Passlow might have been fooled into thinking she was only a little bit confused. ‘Isn’t there something else we should be doing?’

‘If he has another episode? Absolutely.’

Mum stiffened. ‘But he can’t afford to have another episode!’ she protested. ‘He was lucky to survive the first one!’

‘Mrs Vandevelde—’

‘If it wasn’t an epileptic fit, then what was it? What happened to him?’

‘I don’t know.’ Dr Passlow spread his hands, eyebrows raised. You’ve got to give the guy his due; a lot of doctors wouldn’t have admitted that they were stumped. They would have thrown up a screen of gobbledygook to hide behind. ‘We’ll see how things pan out,’ he proposed. ‘I doubt it was an allergic reaction, but that might be worth looking into if any other symptoms manifest themselves. Alternatively, I do know of a study being done in the us on possible links between specific erratic behaviours and certain chemical responses in adolescent males—’

‘Are you talking about drugs?’ she demanded, much to my annoyance.

‘Jeez, Mum.’ It was hard to keep calm. ‘I
didn’t take any drugs
, all right?’

‘I don’t mean drugs,’ the doctor assured us quickly, intervening before any arguments broke out. ‘I’m referring to chemical changes in the body. Elevated lactate, for instance. I was doing sabbatical work in Chicago recently, specialising in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, and a colleague there was interested in two cases similar to Toby’s, whereby a possibly physical condition had presented as a psychiatric one.’

Mum caught her breath. I nearly had a heart attack.

‘
Mental health?
’ I squawked faintly. If there’s a word you don’t want to hear sitting right in front of ‘health’, it’s ‘mental’.

Dr Passlow must have realised this, because he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Toby, I don’t think you have a psychological problem. That isn’t what I’m saying.’

Whew! I was
so
relieved. As long as I wasn’t going mad, nothing else mattered much. He could have told me that I had rabies and it would have been welcome news in comparison.

‘My point is that if you continue to experience blackouts, there are more unusual avenues that we can explore. I just don’t believe it would be particularly helpful to do so yet, because I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole event was a one-off.’ Turning back to my mother, Dr Passlow adopted a soothing tone – though his gaze did flick towards the clock on the wall. ‘Toby is a normal thirteen-year-old boy who’s had one aberrant metabolic reading,’ he observed. ‘I’d be very reluctant to panic or take extreme measures at this time. It’s contraindicated.’

The way he spoke, you could tell that he was keen to wind up our session. (His waiting room had been pretty full.) Mum, however, didn’t respond immediately. She sat for a moment, pondering, as the doctor closed my file.

‘So – so Toby doesn’t have a brain tumour?’ she said at last.

‘No.’

‘And he wasn’t drugged?’

‘Ah. Well. That I can’t tell you.’ There was something slightly detached about the way Dr Passlow answered her, as if he didn’t want to become involved in the whole teenage-drug-and-alcohol-abuse debate. ‘Drug screening isn’t an automatic procedure in casualty, plus there was no legal requirement that it be done,’ he revealed. ‘Besides which, a drug like rohypnol is very hard to detect. It leaves minimal amounts of residue.’

What could you say to that? Nothing. It was a dead end – and poor Mum had run out of steam. She looked so defeated that Dr Passlow must have felt safe enough to ask if she had any more questions. I doubt that he was expecting any.

He certainly seemed surprised when I put up my hand.

‘What happened to the kids in Illinois?’ I said, because I was genuinely interested. ‘Did they lose their memories too?’

The doctor raised his eyebrows. ‘They did, yes,’ he replied. ‘They had elevated lactate and short-term amnesia.’ For some reason he suddenly became more animated, leaning across the desk towards me. ‘As a medical practitioner, when you see an unclassified group of symptoms presenting itself over and over again, you tend to look for what we call a “case series” before jumping to conclusions,’ he explained. ‘I thought I might have identified a similar case in Australia, last year, but . . . well, I wasn’t able to follow through on that one. I’m not sure if it was an isolated incident or whether there was a pattern of repeated episodes.’

‘Why not?’ asked Mum, before I could say anything. The doctor immediately shifted his attention to her.

‘It was a Community Services case,’ he explained. ‘The boy was being badly treated at home as a result of this symptom cluster – apparently the parents had very primitive religious beliefs.’ Dr Passlow pulled the kind of face you normally pull when you bite into a rotten apple. ‘He was removed and placed into residential care, but he ran away and no one’s seen him since. I only wish I’d had a chance to monitor his progress, because everything was pointing towards a clinical profile similar to the ones in Illinois.’

He’d been rattling on with mounting enthusiasm, but something about my mother’s pursed lips suddenly pulled him up short.

‘Not that this has anything to do with you,’ he told me. ‘I wouldn’t even
begin
to make assumptions about your case, right now.’

‘But if something else happens . . .’ Mum began, before trailing off.

‘If something else happens, I might put a call through to my colleague in Chicago. With your permission,’ the doctor agreed, finishing Mum’s sentence for her. He then rose, thrusting out his hand for her to shake. ‘In the meantime, you should get on with your lives and not worry too much. This clean scan is
good
news. It’s the sort of thing I
like
to see.’

And that was the end of my appointment. What a flop. Once again, Mum and I came away from a medical consultation with no clear answers; we
still
didn’t know what had happened on Monday night. I was so disappointed that I couldn’t eat all of my lunch afterwards. I guess I’d been counting on a diagnosis so that I didn’t have to worry about Reuben’s dire warnings anymore.

As for Mum, she was already talking about a second opinion. ‘I don’t like that man,’ she complained, over coffee and lasagna. ‘He’s too ambitious. Doctors like him are only interested in making a name for themselves. They don’t care about their patients; all they care about is getting research funds and publishing articles in
The Lancet
.’ She peered at me across the red plastic tablecloth. ‘Do
you
want to get involved in some obscure American clinical study?’

‘No.’

‘No. I’m not surprised.’ After chewing her way through a mouthful of pasta, she added, ‘I’ll get another referral. I’ll find someone who doesn’t go on and on about case files. You can’t trust a doctor who calls people “cases”.’ She patted my hand. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out, I promise.’

Once we’d finished eating, Mum paid the bill. Then she dropped me at Amin’s house on her way back to work. I can’t say I was all that keen to visit Amin; we’d had a bit of a disagreement the previous afternoon, because neither he nor Fergus had been able to stop talking about Reuben (even though I’d asked them very nicely if they could please just give it a rest for five minutes). After insisting that I repeat every single thing that Reuben had told me, they’d launched into an endless discussion about how we should deal with him in the future – completely ignoring the fact that I wanted to change the subject. I suppose I can’t blame them. Amin had been really scared and Fergus had been really excited, and it wasn’t as if we had much else to talk about. Besides, as Fergus had so rightly remarked, ‘Just because you ignore something doesn’t mean it’ll disappear.’ In the heat of the moment he’d accused me of being a scaredy-cat
and
a bossy-boots, not to mention a spoilsport.

Though we’d calmed down over a shared bowl of popcorn and a dvd of
X-Men
, I still wasn’t looking forward to spending Friday afternoon squabbling with Fergus – who was bound to be at Amin’s place, since he had nowhere else to go. But when I considered the alternatives, I realised that they were even bleaker. I could watch tv by myself, or play computer games by myself, or practise dance-steps by myself. And I knew that if I did any of these things, I’d be moping and fretting the whole time.

So I agreed to visit Amin – and it was the right thing to do. Because when I finally reached the Kairouz house, I discovered that he and Fergus had already lost interest in the whole topic of werewolves. Reuben was old news, by then; much more intriguing was the microwave oven that Fergus had found sitting by the road in a heap of junk that someone had put out for collection. Fergus hadn’t expected that the microwave would actually
work
. He’d lugged it all the way to Amin’s house because he’d wanted to dismantle it, in case the problem was just a loose wire. According to Fergus, if the magnetron and the capacitor and the hv diode were still functional, we could maybe follow the instructions he’d discovered on a website and create ball lightning.

It turned out, however, that the microwave did work. It had probably been thrown away because the clock was faulty, though there might have been other problems as well: a leaky seal, perhaps, or a broken glass plate. But we didn’t need fancy things like clocks or glass plates – not to run an experiment. All we needed was an electrical socket and a bunch of interesting things to zap.

We found the perfect socket in Amin’s garage, well away from ‘the swarm’ (as Amin likes to call his family). Here we watched the effects of microwaves on various things: a bar of soap; coins in a pyrex dish; a light bulb resting in a third of a cup of water. Fergus wanted to follow another Internet recommendation – namely, petrol in a metal dog bowl – but Amin and I were reluctant. For one thing, Amin didn’t have a big enough yard or a long enough extension cord. For another, I’ve always drawn the line at messing around with petrol. You can really screw up with petrol; I know this for a fact. ‘Once bitten, twice shy’ is what I always say.

We were still arguing when my mobile phone rang.

‘Hello?’ Since I was fully expecting Mum to reply, I nearly dropped the phone when a voice said, ‘
Toby? It’s Father Ramon
.’

The shock must have shown in my face, because Fergus mouthed, ‘Who is it?’

‘
I’m calling you because I felt you probably wouldn’t want to talk to Reuben,
’ the priest went on. ‘
I don’t think he handled things very well, yesterday; I’m afraid he tends to lose his temper. It’s something he has a problem with
. . .’ As I remained speechless, he added, ‘
Hello? Are you there?
’

‘How – how did you get my number?’ I managed to croak.

‘
From Reuben,
’ the priest replied.
‘
You called him, remember? You left your number on his phone.
’