THE TALE OF BARNABY'S BANE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — the Allergic Werewolf.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

In the damp, moss-choked, cabbage-smelling heart of Sogmarsh — in the Bogmoor, a cart-ride south of Mucklecombe — where the fog hangs low and the dreams hang lower, there lived a lycanthrope named Barnaby.

Barnaby was, on paper, magnificent. He had claws like rusted ditch-hooks, eyes like burning peat-coals, and a frame broad enough to blot out a full moon. He was built, root and marrow, for the ancient and terrible traditions of night-stalking.

He had never once tasted blood. He had never even tasted a wild berry. For the moment the silver light touched his skin, the curse did not merely bring forth the beast — it brought forth the dander.

Barnaby was profoundly, catastrophically allergic to his own wolf-fur.

Every full moon, the change would take him, and his sinuses would slam shut like a heavy oak door in a draught. While other werewolves spent the night howling at the heavens and curdling the blood of distant villages, Barnaby spent his in a state of violent, undignified suspension, surviving the long hours on lukewarm vegetable broth swallowed whole — because chewing made it altogether too hard to breathe.

"I am the shadow in the — HEE-CHOO!" he would announce, the force of it laying the cattails flat against the marsh-water for forty feet in every direction.

He would set himself to stalk a wandering goose, only for his eyes to swell into two weeping, pink slits. He would draw back his lips to bare his fangs at a lonely traveller, but the tickle would seize his snout first, and out would come a series of wet, rapid-fire snorts that sounded less like a creature of the damned and more like a bagpipe being slowly sat upon. The local folk did not lock their doors on full-moon nights. They left bowls of chamomile tea on their porches, and oversized handkerchiefs, out of sheer pity.

The worst of it came one Tuesday under a perfectly round and frankly mocking moon, when the itch struck him with the force of a falling chimney. He needed to wipe his nose. He needed a rag, a cloth, a bedsheet, anything softer than the coarse marsh-grass — and out of the corner of one streaming eye he caught a blur of soft grey fluff.

A rag! his fevered mind cried. He spun and snapped at it. Missed. Spun faster. Round and round he went, a seven-foot engine of primeval destruction reduced to a self-contained hurricane, jaws snapping inches from his own rear, whimpering, "just — snort — just let me — wheeze — wipe—"

He was chasing his own tail. The frogs stopped croaking to watch. It was a deeply depressing spectacle. He danced himself dizzy straight into a ditch and landed on his back with his legs in the air, sob-sneezing at the stars, looking less like a monster than an overturned, weeping carpet.

And here is the thing that broke him, a little: a family of field-mice — creatures that should, by every rule of the food chain, have been a light snack — paddled out of their nest in an old boot. They did not run. They did not scream. Moved by a profound and agonising pity, they dragged a large dock-leaf across the mud and gently patted it against his streaming nose.

Barnaby whistled a long, shuddering note through his blocked nostrils, too exhausted to eat them and too congested to care. He was, he decided, a failure. His worst self — the great and terrible beast he was born to be — was utterly, comprehensively ruined.

Then came the autumn the iron-miners marched into Sogmarsh.

They came with axes and heavy boots and a plan to drain the bog, fell the willows, and drive out everything that lived in the muck. Barnaby, caught in the silver light atop a peat mound, looked down at them and felt the old fury rise. Now, he thought. Now I will finally be the nightmare. He reared up. He filled his vast lungs. He drew breath for a howl that would empty their bowels and salt their dreams for a generation —

— and the damp marsh air rolled up off the water and mingled, sweetly and catastrophically, with his freshly-sprouted coat.

His nostrils twitched. His ears flapped. His golden eyes crossed.

"AAAAAH — HHH — PEE-TSCHOOOO!"

The sneeze was not a sound. It was a geological event. It did not merely rattle the miners' teeth — it shook loose a great hanging shelf of sodden peat from the bluff above their heads, which came down with a single enormous, merciful SPLAT, burying the entire company to the chest and pinning them, quite harmlessly, where they stood.

Dazed, plastered head to boot in cold black muck, they looked up — at a giant, teary-eyed wolf who was, at that exact moment, trying to wipe his nose on a willow branch. Whatever courage iron-mining had given them deserted them now entirely. They tore themselves out of the mud and fled Sogmarsh, and they did not come back.

Barnaby sat down slowly in the cold ooze, gave one last small, pathetic wheeze, and — for the first time in his entire cursed life — smiled.

The flaw you pray hardest to lose may be the very thing that saves everyone's skin — your own included.