Remorse

Chapter Four: Johnny Take a Walk With Your Sister the Moon

After the initiation, most of the older Lyceans drifted away to drink and whisper among themselves, and the new arrivals were split into what Ferdinand called “study groups.” Remus barely dodged being assigned to Ferdinand’s group and ended up in one nominally led by Peter Stubbe, an elderly and rather deaf veteran of the Lyceum. Phil Craddock had to repeat everything the new recruits said by shouting in Stubbe’s ear, but as he was expected to memorize the contents of the session by heart and repeat them back to any senior Lycean who asked, Remus found the repetition useful.

Stubbe demonstrated the Lyceum’s secret handshake and secret sign – the chopping movement that Smithfield had made in the pub when he and Remus had first met. It turned out to represent fangs. He also repeated much of what Craddock had already told Remus about the Lyceum’s organization and names for its officers, all of which the recruits had to memorize; Stubbe proudly proclaimed himself to be a Lycophone, or senior member, and explained that the people who had just been through the initiation were now considered Lyscholars rather than Lycandidates.

There was also a string of passwords and countersigns to be memorized:

“Revenge...”

“... on wizards.”

“Blood...”

“... for shame.”

“Those are the passwords to get into the Great Den,” said Stubbe. “They’re top secret, so there’s another set we use in everyday life for recognizing each other. “If you’re out and about and you meet someone and you want to know if they’re one of us, you ask, ‘Are you acquainted with a Mr. Ayafof?’ That stands for ‘Are You A Friend Of Fenrir?’”

“Mr. Ayafof. Got it,” Remus repeated, remembering his first afternoon at the Sign of the Bones.

“And the answer you want to hear is ‘Yes, and I also know a Mr. Ablai.’ That means ‘A Brother Lycean Am I.’ Got that?”

The new recruits nodded.

After a long afternoon of memorizing secret signs, code words, and an incoherent and rambling narrative that Stubbe described as the Mythology of Werewolves and the Secret History of the Lyceum, the Lycophone asked if there were any questions.

“Gotta question about Fenrir,” muttered the unshaven young man who had laughed out of turn.

“Who?” Stubbe shouted, and when Craddock repeated the remark, he said, “Oh, Fenrir? He’s the leader of us all – the Lupus Maximus. You’ll not be seeing much of him – not until you’re a good deal higher up. You’ll report to Ferdinand Calabria, the Lupus Minor for your Sub-Lyconference.”

“That wasn’t my question. I was just wondering, what happened to his teeth?” The young man lit one cigarette from the end of another and tried, not very successfully, to look as if it were an idle query.

Craddock snorted and laughed harshly. “Got ‘em filed at a Muggle dentist, didn’t he? And then grew ‘em out with a spot of Densaugeo. Don’t believe any other stories he tells you, or a word he says about the Mystical Traditions of the Werewolf or what-have-you. It’s all a bunch of rot that he made up himself.”

Stubbe nodded vaguely. It was obvious that he had not caught a word of this.

Remus found this glimpse of the organization’s dynamics revealing. So Dumbledore had been partly right after all, and at least some of the Lyceans had a less-than-reverent attitude toward their leader. Good. The mention of Densaugeo troubled him, though; what wizard had agreed to help Greyback enhance his appearance, and why?

“And while we’re talking about the management, if you’ve got occasion to speak to Ferdinand, don’t ever let him catch you calling him a werewolf. He’s a versipellis” – Craddock said in a fair imitation of Calabria’s lisp – “thank you very much, and he won’t let you forget it.”

“What’s that mean?” blurted out one of the teenagers.

“It means ‘skin-changer’,” said Remus, forgetting himself. “Classical term for a werewolf.”

Craddock slapped him on the back. “Educated man, ain’t you, Roper? Careful what you say, or Fenrir’ll get to thinking you need putting in your place. He don’t take to competition.” Craddock and Stubbe wandered off to join the drinking party.

“Hell of an outfit, isn’t this?” said the unshaven young man when they had gone. He ground out his cigarette on the forest floor and immediately lit another.

“It’s a strange one,” said Remus. “What made you decide you were joining?”

“I saw an old man die in the potion queue at St. Mungo’s. Hell, I was holding him when he died. The Healers didn’t care – they’d never even bothered to find out his name.” The young man took a drag on his cigarette and blew smoke at the treetops. “After that I reckoned I’d had enough, and I wasn’t going to play their games any more.”

“Do you think this is a better way?” Remus asked, somewhat against his better judgment.

“It evens things up, doesn’t it? They put us through hell, we do the same thing to them. How about you, what’s your story?”

“Bitten on holiday, came back to find I had no job and no friends. Where else was I going to go?”

The stranger nodded. “Story of us all.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

From what Stubbe had told him after the initiation ceremony, Remus gathered that the most effective base for a spy within the Lyceum would be the Forbidden Forest. It would raise no suspicions if he decided to move there immediately; most werewolves did, regardless of where they came from originally. The Forest extended from Hogwarts Castle to the English border. Practically impenetrable to Muggles and mysterious even to wizards, it was the only place in the country that a substantial population of half-wild men could hide. It also had, at least in Fenrir’s mind, spiritual and symbolic significance: it was sacred territory, which the Lyceans swore to defend with their blood if necessary. For the first week or two, Remus was sure that he would have to do just that. The Forest was home to countless other magical creatures, many of them hostile.

In a tiny clearing in the forest, he found a shack that had previously been inhabited by another werewolf, but was now empty. “Acromantula got him,” Phil Craddock explained laconically, “but if you shut the place up tight in the evenings, you’ll be all right.”

“I didn’t know there were any acromantulas in Britain,” said Remus.

“Go about a mile and a half up yonder and you’ll find out. But I warn you, they’ve been a mite tetchy lately.”

“Thanks, I think I’ll take your word for it.”

His new home was luxurious by werewolf standards. It had running water, though it was cold and tasted of rust, and glass in some of the windows; Remus boarded up the others and sealed the holes in the roof. He knew it would be prudent to cast a few Anti-Apparation charms on the building, but he couldn’t bear to trap himself inside this grim place. It made him feel claustrophobic and depressed. Besides, he reasoned, most of the other werewolves wouldn’t know how to Apparate, and no self-respecting Death Eater would come here.

He couldn’t help seeing a flash of black humor in the situation: after Hogwarts, this was probably the single safest place in Britain to be a member of the Order of the Phoenix. Provided one had already been bitten, of course.

Autumn came early to the Forest that year. The days grew shorter and the shadows darker. The leaves turned yellow and drifted to the ground, where they lay in great heaps until the rain reduced them to a faded mush. It was a dying season and a dying world; and yet the dark and damp places continued to breed life, of a sort. Mold flourished in the corners of his new home, and the cottony fog of breeding dementors hung over the forest floor.

Some days he ran into one of the other werewolves and attempted to chat, but they seemed suspicious of saying too much, and most of the time they were nowhere to be found. He spent days at a time pacing the floor of the hovel or watching the rain beat against the windows and wondering why he had come to this godforsaken place. He wasn’t doing any good here, and it was likely as not that he’d get himself killed in some stupid, useless way.

On sunny days he gathered what nuts and berries he could find and spread them out to dry. He knew that he should be doing his best to lay in a supply of firewood for winter, but he did not like to stray too far into the Forest. It surrounded the hut on all sides, dark and tangled, and in some obscure way he thought of it as a living creature. It reminded him of a sleeping Lethifold ready to smother its victims when it woke.

Then one frosty morning, he looked out the window and saw three unicorns nibbling at a patch of yellowed grass in his clearing.

He caught his breath and watched one of them nuzzle the silvery flank of its companion, and the third toss its mane and step proudly across the path he had worn, almost at his doorstep. They were exquisite. And they were fearless. The forest belonged to them, as much as it belonged to the monsters and Dark creatures lurking in the night.

He opened the door and stood in the thin autumn sunshine, watching the unicorns as they fed. He dared not approach closer, but they looked at him with dark liquid eyes and were not afraid.

They made him feel safe and sure and at peace, for the first time since he’d come to the Forest. Not that there was any real peace in these times, but the next best thing was fighting to protect the innocent.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The feeling of peace lasted until the day before the full moon.

Rudolph Smithfield stopped by in the morning; Remus wasn’t exactly sure how he’d known where to find him, but there he was. “Hello, John. How are you settling in?” he asked.

“All right,” said Remus, and then remembered to add, “But I’m waiting to see some action.”

“You’ll see it today,” Smithfield promised. “They’ve got a regular Lyconference planned for this afternoon, and they say Fenrir’s going to speak. You don’t want to miss this one. Great Den, mid-afternoon. It’s a couple of hours’ walk from here, so you’ll want to get a move on.”

“Right. You go ahead, I’ll be along in a bit,” said Remus, who had no intention of traveling through the Forest by any method other than Apparation. He went upstairs and tucked the small flask of Wolfsbane potion that he’d bought in Knockturn Alley at the beginning of the week under his robes. There wasn’t enough of it and it was poorly brewed, but that didn’t bear thinking about now.

Unfortunately, Smithfield insisted upon accompanying him, so he had to walk after all. Stumbling through brush and squelching through mud wouldn’t have been so bad by itself, but Smithfield told stories of previous full moons all the way.

“One time in the last war – now those were some good times, wizards on the run everywhere – the Dark Lord gave us a whole family down south. Mixed blood, you know. Woman a Muggle and she couldn’t run, and the father wouldn’t leave the kids – that were a feast. Both of ‘em fat as butter. And the kids – boys got carried away and tore one of ‘em to pieces, tender young flesh is the best meat there is, weren’t nothing left but the little hands, ‘cos those are bony. But the other two are ours to this day, and some of the best scholars the Lyceum ever had ... What’s the matter, John? You’re not looking hungry, so much.”

“Touch of flu,” Remus muttered through gritted teeth.

Smithfield laughed. “The hell you say! Well, it may turn your stomach now, but you’ll be as hungry for it as the rest of us in time. You’ll see.”

They reached the Great Den a little after midday. There were already a number of thin, dirty men and a few women there, laughing raucously and drinking, but the noise stopped when Fenrir Greyback arrived. Greyback gave another long, rambling lecture, this one about the Noble Art of Revenge, but at last came to the point.

“Brother Lyceans,” he announced, surveying the ragged band of werewolves who stood before him, “I have been in touch with the Dark Lord, and he has an enemy he wants us to take care of – one of his own followers who double-crossed him. Now, you know as well as I do that I’m always happy to do a favor for a friend, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a traitor. Tonight we’re going hunting.”

One of his own followers who double-crossed him. He thought of little Reg Black, temperamental and impulsive and not much more than a kid when he died. And for a moment, caught between fear and a mad wild hope, he thought of Peter.

Remus looked around at his fellows in the dim light of the Great Den. Some were leaning forward eagerly; a number looked merely numb, as if blood-lust had long since palled for them and all that remained was a vague desire to gather what scraps of revenge they could. One man, standing far back in the shadows, looked cynical. He seemed familiar, and after a moment’s thought, Remus was able to identify him as Phil Craddock.

“We’re going to station ourselves about a mile from his house about an hour before moonrise,” Fenrir continued, “and one of the Dark Lord’s people – a woman that he’s hooked up with – will lure him out of the house for a walk and lead him to us. When we transform, she Disapparates. After that, you just let your instincts take over, and we’ll have a feast by moonlight. Any questions?”

“Yeah,” said Craddock, over the cheers of the other werewolves. “Can’t the Death Eaters do their own dirty work?”

“Son,” said Stubbe, “we ain’t here to have a debatin’ society meetin’, we’re here to hate wizards.”

“Sounds to me like we’re goin’ at it backwards, and the wizards have got us in their pockets.”

Ferdinand Calabria looked at Craddock and frowned. Two of the men who had been pointed out to Remus as members of the punishment squad made growling sounds in their throats and took a step closer.

“I’m just saying. If this Dark Lord of yours takes over, I reckon he won’t have much use for us. Filthy half-breeds, don’t they call us? Tainted blood.”

Fenrir laughed. “You’re a clever one, aren’t you, Craddock? Got the idea you know more than I do, haven’t you?”

Craddock looked down at his shoes and muttered an apology.

“No need to look so shamefaced, brother, but you might give your old teacher a bit more credit. You’re damn right that the Dark Lord won’t have much use for us. That’s why we’re going to make sure we’re the ones who end up using him. An enemy of the Ministry and a stable wizarding society is a friend of ours, get it?”

“Got it,” said Craddock with a grin that might have been genuine. “Thanks for the answer, Lupus Maximus.”

Greyback smiled, showing off his elongated and pointed eyeteeth. Ferdinand, however, did not seem entirely mollified. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you tonight, Craddock. And you, Roper, this is your first chance to show us what kind of Lycean you are. I want you at the front of the pack.”

The meeting broke into small groups, and the werewolves passed dirty bottles of homemade liquor among themselves. Remus took advantage of the opportunity to take a discreet swallow of the Wolfsbane potion, and almost immediately wished he hadn’t. It was poor-quality stuff, and he had to fight waves of nausea every time he took a dose, sometimes unsuccessfully. On the other hand, he thought he’d kept enough of it down to give him a little control, assuming the brewer knew his business at all. The fact that he hadn’t had the full dosage worried him, but he’d be in worse trouble if he ended up being violently sick in front of the others.

He struggled through the alcohol fumes and the crush of unwashed bodies to the mouth of the den. He was in desperate need of fresh air, and he had an idea of owling Dumbledore if he could give his companions the slip for a moment.

Just before he reached the edge of the crowd, he looked back and saw Ferdinand Calabria watching him with keen and narrowed eyes. Quickly, he turned and muttered something about how he was looking forward to the night’s work to the man next to him, as if he had always been intending to greet a friend. The man was, in fact, a perfect stranger, but he was half-drunk and in an affable mood. “‘Ave a sip o’ Pinewine, mate. Me own ‘ome brew.”

Remus accepted the drink – the Pinewine smelled suspiciously like turpentine, but the burning in his throat braced him a little and made him feel that he could get through the night – and did his best to make small talk with his new acquaintance. All the while, he was aware that Ferdinand’s eyes never left him.

 

                                                            *          *          *

He knew he was in trouble as soon as the moon rose. It seemed to swell to the size of a dinner plate as the pain set his skin on fire and tore howl after howl from his throat, despite his best efforts to keep silent. He lay on the ground shuddering and struggling to gain control of a mind half human, half bestial.

The other werewolves were coming out of the woods. Their eyes glowed yellow in the moonlight.

The lumpy-looking woman who accompanied the man they were stalking Disapparated with an obscene-sounding giggle, and their target stood alone in the center of the clearing, frozen with terror. It wasn’t Peter. He was a man of middle years, with close-cropped hair and three days’ growth of stubble. In a brief flash of clarity, Remus thought that he must not be one of Voldemort’s inner circle, for he had never seen the face before, not even in one of the tattered photographs from the first war that circulated at the Order meetings.

As he and the others circled closer, he forgot about trying to identify the man before him, forgot to think of him as an individual at all. Only the smell of human sweat and the hunger for blood mattered now.

The fur at the back of his neck stood on end and prickled. He growled.

The other werewolves surged forward, engulfing him in a great mass of fur and bone and snapping jaws, pushing him forward with him. He watched as one of the pack seized the man’s leg in his teeth, and two others locked onto his arms. A jet of blood from an open vein spurted out onto the forest floor. They were pulling flesh from bone.

The next few moments seemed to happen in slow motion. The man’s screams were drowned out by the deranged howls of the pack, but the moonlight fell on his contorted face and revealed his agony. Some part of Remus’ mind was saying Mercy, and another part was saying Kill, kill, kill, and he didn’t know which of them made him leap at the man’s throat and tear it open.

And then the metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth and blotted out sanity.