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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| *Moon* Day 12: “Beware the moon, David.” — Jack, An American Werewolf in London (1981) The wind slithered across the Yorkshire moors, threading through bent fences and hollow stones like a living creature. The earth was slick with fog, silver and endless, swallowing every boundary between land and sky. It was a place built for secrets, a place where sound carried too far and silence carried more. David Price hadn’t seen these hills since the night his brother died. Forty years had passed, but the memory still clung like cold breath to glass. He had built a life elsewhere—gray office walls, polite neighbors, two failed marriages—but the moor had followed him anyway. It waited behind dreams, just beyond the thin veil of city noise. And then the letter came. It arrived on a cold morning in a plain mailbox near Bromley. No sender. No stamp. The handwriting slow, uneven: Beware the moon, David. The letters bled into the paper, the way ink does when written by a trembling hand. He almost threw it out but couldn’t. The faint scent of moss and damp soil curled from it—exactly the smell the moor exhaled the night Jack’s laughter turned into screams. He drove north before he knew why. Rain hammered the windshield. By the time he reached East Proctor, twilight had already dissolved into mist. The village looked smaller now, hunched against time. Stone houses leaned close together, shutters barred. Nothing moved except smoke writhing from a chimney. And in the middle of it all, like a scar that refused to heal, stood The Slaughtered Lamb. The pub door creaked as he entered. The same scent met him—ale, peat, and something underneath, something metallic. Two old men turned from the fire to stare. The barkeep froze mid‑wipe with a glass in her hand, her face pale against the amber glow. “We’re closed,” she said. But David just nodded and sat down. He placed the letter on the counter. Her eyes flicked toward it, and a hush settled heavy as dust. She read in silence, then snatched it and fed it to the fire. Red wax melted first, then paper, then the words themselves, curling into black. “You never should have come back,” she whispered. Her voice was rough, the kind built from whispering prayers that never helped. “You people warned me once,” he said. “You talked about a curse. About something hunting the moors.” “That something never stopped.” Her eyes darted toward the windows. “And when the bloodline circles back, it wakes again.” A sound flinched through the air outside—half wind, half low growl. Every face in the room stiffened. The barkeep’s hand trembled around the glass. “Stay off the moor tonight,” she said. “I have to see it,” David replied. “He’s out there. I feel it.” The woman’s lips thinned into a prayer. “Then you’re already lost.” The night breathed cold and wet. The fog followed him like a thought he couldn’t shake. His flashlight beam dissolved after three feet, pale and useless. He hadn’t been here since that night—the night Jack joked about wolves and full moons, and laughter turned to panic and red. That laughter had never stopped echoing. The old church rose through the haze, broken and tilting. Its gate hung open, a rusted jaw. David stepped through. Here the air was heavier, as if grief had its own gravity. He called out once. “Jack?” At first, there was nothing. Then movement—a figure stepped from the fog. Not quite solid. Not quite gone. Jack looked young still. The same red jacket, the same grin caught between charm and mischief. But the skin hung loose on his jaw. The throat showed a seam of torn flesh. “You came back,” Jack said softly. “Took you long enough.” David shivered. “You can’t be real.” “Oh, I’m real enough. Enough to remember.” Jack moved closer. The fog parted just enough for David to see the old wounds still wet, still refusing to heal. His brother’s eyes held a weary kindness laced with blame. “It never ended, you know,” Jack murmured. “The curse—our blood carries it. You hear it sometimes in your bones, don’t you? The hum under the skin when the moon rises?” David felt it then—the pulse, deep and unnatural, like the ground breathing through him. He pressed his hands against his chest. “No…” Jack tilted his head. “You killed one beast. But not the one inside you.” The clouds thinned, spilling moonlight down like silver fire. Pain tore through David’s spine—sharp, liquid, unstoppable. His vision doubled. His fingers curled wrong. Nails blackened, teeth lengthened, his body folding itself into a shape that had slept too long. Jack stepped back, sorrow flickering across his fading features. “Fight it,” he begged. But David was already gone to another kind of hunger. The howl that rose that night shook the stones loose from the church walls. Every living thing on the moor heard it, and something older answered back. By dawn, the fog thinned. The village woke to silence and the smell of iron on the wind. The barkeep stood outside the pub, her eyes bloodshot. She had heard that sound her entire life. Her grandmother had called it “the remembering.” Two farmhands found the body first, lying by the riverbank. David Price. Torn but strangely serene. Beside him were the faint marks of claws—and a message written into the mud: The moon remembers. The barkeep knelt beside him, whispered a line from the prayer her mother taught her long ago, then rose and called for the constable. But before she returned to the road, a growl murmured from the hedgerow. It sounded closer this time. She didn’t look back. That same night, a boy in the village couldn’t sleep. He pressed his face to the frosted window, staring at the moor gleaming under moonlight. His breath clouded the glass. He thought he saw something move—something tall, running with strange grace, its shadow a man for only a heartbeat before falling to all fours. He blinked once. The figure was gone. From the distance came another howl—long, beautiful, ruined. It rolled through the fields, past the broken church, through the sleeping cottages. And somewhere in that sound was something else. A laugh. The wind shifted. The moor exhaled. And the moon, patient and perfect, watched without pity. It had seen this before. It would see it again. Because the moon remembers. |
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