Heart of Scars by Brian P. Easton

Heart of Scars by Brian P. Easton

Author:Brian P. Easton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: werewolf, werewolves, lycanthrope, permuted press, werewolf hunter
Publisher: Permuted


* * *

Rude, brassy light had turned the inside of my eyelids dusty yellow. When I couldn’t move my arm to block the intrusion, I knew something was frighteningly amiss.

Fear had started to visit me with increasing regularity. I feared pain so I took pills. I feared night-terrors so I tried not to sleep. Being afraid pissed me off—the machine which changed fear to anger was still quite functional, you see—so it was the more aggressive of the two emotions that forced me to open my eyes.

Losing my memory to Morpheus had become a predictable occurrence. I’d learned not to panic just because I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there, but when I woke to the bite of steel shackles, and a body cast of coagulated blood, those other considerations became trivial. I was lying on a sweat-soured mattress on a wooden bench that creaked when I sat up, trussed up like a pig on a spit.

The dried patina of blood cracked apart at the bend of my waist like a coat of thick black paint. My clothes were a shrink-wrapped second skin pasted to hair and flesh like gory decoupage. The back of my head sported new throbbing lumps, but there was no pain to account for the kind of wounds necessary to create the cinnamon caul in which I was wrapped.

My ankles and wrists had been fitted with manacles, held apart by cross bars wrapped in padding. The cell walls were lined with canvas pulled over humps of yellowed foam ticking that spilled from torn sections like purulent growths. The solitary window was too high on the wall to be accessible to anything but the sunlight. Other than the scent of my bloody carapace the room smelled as clinically sterile as a surgeon’s studio.

“When you think about it,” the Voice began, from the other side of the cell, “most people are no more than two or three generations from being totally forgotten.”

I could barely see him, sitting straight and proper in the shadows. The tip of one shoe extended into the trunk of light coming through the window. He folded his left leg over his right.

“It’s a sobering thought,” he said. “A person is no better than the testament they leave behind. It’s directly proportional to the duration of their memory. Even men of celebrity—inventors, patriots, etc.—become ambiguous names in census books and taxmen’s ledgers. To wit: What do you know of your great grandfathers? It’s a purely rhetorical question, but you take my meaning. One must accomplish great things to survive, if only in the thoughts of their progeny. Your epitaph will read as Keats’: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’”

“Is that your real body, Georges?” I asked, while nails of pain pushed through the crown of my head.

“Your servant,” he said, picking a stray fleck of lint from the leg of his trousers. “I’ve so looked forward to this.”

I slid to the edge of the bench as he removed my passport from its plastic sleeve.



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