Once I had gathered myself together, I tapped on the door. Within moments, it swung open. Father Paul looked surprised to see me back so soon. He invited me in, out of the dark and the cold.
“What’s happened?” he asked, taking one look at my face. He led me up to his sitting room.
“Mum has thrown me out,” I told him.
“She found out that I’ve been coming to see you and says that she wants nothing more to do with me.”
Father Paul looked at me and said, “I think your mother is having some kind of breakdown. It hasn’t helped that I let her down, but I think a lot of it stems from how Joshua treated her.”
Hearing him mention my father, I looked straight back at him and said, “How well did you know my father?”
“Not very well,” he said, looking straight back at me. His face looked long and drawn in the flickering light from the fire. “I’ve met him once or twice.”
“When?” I jumped in.
“On the very morning your father had returned home to find your mother and his children all missing. He came to the church to ask me of your whereabouts.”
“Why did he come straight to you?” I asked, frowning. “What made him think we would be with you, or that you would know where we were?”
Father Paul broke my stare. “He had probably heard about the work I had been doing in trying to help Lycanthrope start new lives amongst the humans,” he said. “I told him I knew where you were, but I refused to tell him where.”
“Why didn’t he beat it out of you if he were such a monster?” I pushed.
“He probably knew that my brother was a Lycanthrope tracker and if he harmed me, my brother wouldn’t stop until he had been hunted down,” he tried to explain.
“But he was going to be hunted down anyway for what he was meant to have done to my mother and sisters, right?” I quizzed him.
“Your father seemed very distressed and he fled when I refused to tell him where you all were,” Father Paul told me. “I wouldn’t have told him even if he had beaten me. The safe house’s location has to be kept secret to protect those sheltering there. Besides, beating a woman and her children is one thing – attacking a Vampyrus is something completely different,” he said, looking back at me. I could see by the light of the fire that his normally grey eyes had turned black.
“What happened next?” I asked, eager to know everything.
“I discovered that racing car on the front step a few weeks later, with a note,” he explained.
“What did it say?” My heart was thumping.
“Joshua asked if I would pass the birthday present to you,” he said. “How could I not? It was your birthday. You were only nine years old. All boys, human or not, would have loved that racing car.”
I thought of that present and how guilty my mother had made me feel for taking it. I pushed those memories away.
“As I learnt more and more about Joshua from your mother,” Father Paul continued, “I placed my report to my brother, stating that we had a rogue Lycanthrope who needed to be hunted down and sent to trial before the Elders.”
I listened to what he had to say as he sat and told me the exact same tales my mother had told me over the years. When he had finished, I looked into his dead, black eyes and said, “Do you believe everything my mother has told you about my father?”
“Yes, I have to,” he said, just above a whisper and looked away again.
Father Paul offered me one of his spare bedrooms, telling me that I could stay for a week or two until my mother came back to her senses.
Then leaning in close to me and placing one hand on my shoulder, he said, “This has to remain a secret. If my brother were to find out you were here, he would cut me – denounce me as his brother.”
“But why?” I asked him. “He’s your brother.”
“He follows the Elders’ laws, as should I,”
he said. “I have sworn to give my life to the teachings of the Elders and one of those is that I help those Lycanthrope who genuinely want the curse lifted. But help is all I am meant to give them.”
“But that’s what you are doing, isn’t it?” I said.
“I mixed with your mother – fell in love with her,” he reminded me. “As you know, my elder brother didn’t approve. To stop him from going straight to the Elders, I had to promise him I would never have anything to do with your mother or any of you again.”
“So why are you helping me now?” I asked him.
Then, pulling me close, he said, “Because I love you as if you were my own son,” he said softly.
“Do you really think your brother would report you to the Elders?” I asked him, hugging him back and enjoying being held by him. It was the first time I could remember in such a long while that someone had shown me any kind of affection.
“My brother wouldn’t want to report me, but if the Elders were ever to find out that he knew what was going on but failed to report me, he would be punished, too,” he explained, gently easing me away from him and looking into my eyes.
“What would your punishment be for breaking the laws of the Elders you vowed to uphold?” I asked him.
“Execution,” he whispered, then left me alone in my room.
I didn’t have any clean underwear or clothes, so Father Paul lent me some of his. I looked odd in his black garments. It wasn’t as if I were planning on going out and I kind of liked wearing all black. Being away from my mother, I was able to step back from the situation I had endured at home. In doing so, I began to feel this overwhelming feeling of confusion. I realised that I knew very little about myself and who I really was. I only knew what I had been told about by my mother, and what I had heard played heavily on my mind. She was also a mystery to me. The problem was, I had no way of substantiating anything that my mother had ever told me. I knew nothing about my father’s side of the family. My mother had told me that both his parents had died.
Although I was very happy to be staying with Father Paul, and I loved the father-son relationship that we shared, I began to feel very lost within myself. My sleep was often troubled with nightmares, filled with the disturbing images my mother had rooted there. I would often sit in front of my bathroom mirror and scrutinise my face. I would look at it from different angles, tilting the mirror from left to right, up and down, to see if in any way I resembled my father, my mother, brother or sisters. At times I believed I saw similarities, and on others, none at all. I would often draw self-portraits and slightly manipulate the curve of my mouth, the shape of my eyes, and the length of my nose. I could let my imagination run wild and I started painting pictures of myself as anything I wanted. I became obsessed with knowing what was inside of me, so I did drawings of me with my flesh peeled back so I could see underneath. I drew myself as monsters, as a Vampyrus, and then a wolf. This fascinated me, and the idea of being able to metamorphose into another person captured my imagination.
Over those few weeks I spent hiding out at Father Paul’s, I continued to be obsessed with the notion of being able to manipulate my appearance so I no longer had to be the confused and self-doubting Jack. I could be whoever – whatever – I wanted to be.
However much I tried to change my outward appearance, in my self-portraits, I still felt completely bewildered inside. My upbringing, with all its lies and deceit, the sneaking around and the pretense, had finally taken its toll. I felt very much as if I had been raised in something not dissimilar to a cult environment. I felt totally brainwashed and confused, and the more I attempted to reprogramme myself, the more confused I became inside.
It was during this period that I thought a lot about my real father. As the days passed, I found myself thinking about him and Father Paul. I could hear myself over and over again asking if he believed what my mother had said was true. I remembered how I had lied to him some years ago about my dad – telling him that he had beaten me when he never had. I became ever more consumed with guilt. What if it had all been lies about my father, like I suspected? If it had, it meant a massive injustice had taken place. He had missed out on raising his own children.
Somewhere, deep inside, I began to feel responsible for this and I began to become consumed with guilt. My guilt was twofold. I felt guilty for lying to Father Paul, and I felt guilty that if I truly suspected an injustice had taken place, shouldn’t I do something to put it right?
My guilt began to disturb my sleep and I started to suffer with more gruesome nightmares.
Every night, I would have this reoccurring nightmare about Father Paul. In this dream he was laid out dead on a stone slab in a mortuary that looked as if it were from the 1800s. It was filthy, and archaic surgical tools lay abandoned and bloody on nearby workbenches. He was always zipped shut in a see-through plastic body bag, and I could see him inside. As I slowly moved closer, the bag slowly began to mist up as he started to breathe in and out. I could hear a hideous rasping sound coming from his throat as he desperately tried to suck in mouthfuls of air. As I looked down at him, I would become consumed with panic, realising he wasn’t truly dead, but still alive and suffocating inside the plastic bag. In a frenzy, I would try to unfasten it and set him free. I just couldn’t get it open. He would stare out at me from beneath the plastic, his eyes pleading with me to save him. He would attempt to say something to me, but however hard he tried, as soon as he opened his mouth, he would suck in a mouthful of the body bag, muffling whatever it was he was trying to tell me. It was like he had a secret he wanted to pass before me – something he didn’t want to carry into death with him.
I would wake, sweating and gasping for breath. My throat was dry and sore, unable to make a sound myself, as if my own voice had been taken from me. Even though it was Father Paul I was dreaming of, it was my dad that I just couldn’t stop thinking about. So it was with a nervous excitement rushing through my entire being that I decided I would try and find him. The first place I would look would be our home in the caves on the other side of the fountain. What would I do? Go up to the front door and just knock? Would he even recognise me? The last time I had seen him, I was an eight-year-old boy. I was now fourteen and turning into a man. I was tall and gangly for my age and I had already started to sprout hair over my chin and cheeks. I wasn’t that fresh-faced little boy anymore.