Enter Black Book 2: Wolf Black
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D.P. Mendes-Kelly
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The Dare
Book 2: Wolf Black
JACK
They brought the camcorder because Connor wanted to be a legend.
Not famous. Not like actors or footballers, but known. A local myth. A name muttered behind cupped hands, passed on with reverence and disbelief.
Connor Bishop: the lad who filmed the wolf.
Jack wasn’t sure what he believed in. Ghosts, monsters, aliens—his mum said they were just ways of explaining things folk could never understand. But Connor didn’t need explanations. He needed stories. And this, he’d decided, was going to be a good one.
“We can make copies of the tape and sell them,” Connor had said that afternoon, lounging on the sofa in Jack’s bedroom. “Hundreds of copies. More! People love this stuff. Urban legends. The weirder, the better.”
Jack had looked up from his textbook. “It’s not real, though, right?”
And Connor had grinned. “Don’t matter if it’s real. Horror movies aren’t real either, but people love them.”
Now they were trudging the back path out of Hanford, past the bins behind the King’s Head and into the woods beyond. Connor carried the camcorder like it was a weapon. Jack kept glancing over his shoulder, wondering if this counted as trespassing.
The camcorder was his dad’s. Not borrowed so much as liberated from the garage shelf, where it had been gathering dust since 1983. It still had a “PROPERTY OF ST JOHN’S YOUTH THEATRE” label stuck to the side in faded black marker pen. The battery barely held a charge, and the picture came out fuzzy, but that only added to the sense of creepy realism.
None of that mattered, though. What mattered was being the ones who saw it. Who proved it. Who caught it on tape.
“The lodge is cursed, you know,” Jack said, more for something to say than because he believed it.
Connor snorted. “So’s your nan’s house.”
“It’s not just werewolves. They say there’s something wrong with the land. Like…the whole area’s gone sour.”
“You’ve been talking to that weird Sinclair bloke again?”
Jack shrugged. “He knows stuff.”
They climbed a stile that was rotten and half collapsed. The woods grew thicker beyond, the trees leaning in like gossiping old women. Frost cracked underfoot. The cold had crept in properly now. Wet, bitter, the kind that got in your bones.
Jack jammed his hands deep into his coat pockets and told himself this would be over soon. He glanced at Connor, who was whistling softly through his teeth.
Jack had known him since they were seven. There’d been a fight behind the bike sheds. Connor versus one of the Smith twins, and Jack had been the only one not cheering. Afterward, Connor had asked him if he wanted to bunk off double geography and go swimming in the reservoir.
They’d been friends ever since.
But Connor was changing. He wore his hair longer now, talked about girls like they were puzzles he was close to solving. He’d started smoking, sometimes in full view of adults, like he didn’t care what anyone thought.
He was still the same Connor, though. Just…louder. More confident.
And sometimes Jack felt like he was being dragged behind a speedboat, holding on by his fingertips.
“You think we’ll see anything?” Jack asked, trying to sound casual.
Connor didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “Dunno. Don’t care. Something’ll show up. Doesn’t have to be a real creature to get people talking.”
Connor turned away, fiddling with his rucksack. He slipped something over his head and turned around, his face covered in a horrific wolf mask.
He tilted his head to one side comically. “Join us, Jacky boy!” He growled and lurched toward Jack, laughing.
Jack pulled away, unamused. “You’re going to fake it?”
Connor gave him a sideways look. “Do you think it matters?”
Jack didn’t answer. He watched their breath curl in the cold air and thought about the stories. A man who kept wolves in the old days. A girl who went missing on a full moon and turned up weeks later with no memory and scratch marks down her back. The dog that refused to go near the woods. The boy in the year above them who swore he saw eyes watching from the treetops.
People said a lot of things about the lodge.
But none of those people had ever gone in with a camera.
Ahead, the path curved, and the trees opened slightly to reveal a clearing. The lodge sat in the middle, half eaten by ivy and fog. It looked worse than Jack remembered. Its porch sagging, the windows boarded, the roof bowed under years of silence.
“Behold,” Connor said, raising the camcorder like a knight lifting a sword. “The lair of the Wolf Man.”
Jack hesitated. The clearing felt different. Somehow charged. Too quiet, like the air had thickened. Silence pressing on your eardrums.
“Connor, mate, maybe we just do the outside, yeah? Film the door, make a howl sound, cut it together back at yours…”
Connor was already walking. “Come on. You promised.”
“I didn’t promise. I just…”
“We’re here now. Don’t bottle it.”
That was the thing. You didn’t want to be the one to back down. Not with Connor. He wasn’t cruel, exactly, but he was relentless. If you said no, he’d laugh. Take the piss for years to come. Never let you forget.
Jack followed.
They crunched over the clearing. The lodge loomed ahead, just a squat shape in the mist, roof like a hunched shoulder. It wasn’t part of the original Stanwick estate but a later addition, maybe 1920s, back when the place was used for hunting parties and other toff nonsense.
Someone had lived here once. Then no one. Then maybe someone else. Squatters. Kids. Maybe something else.
“Door’s open,” Connor noted. “That’s convenient.”
“Convenient for us? Or the lurking predator or nonce?”
He raised the camcorder and began filming. “Stanwick Lodge,” he intoned in a mock-documentary voice. “Once a hunting cabin. Now the last known location of the fabled Wolf Man of Hanford.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “You sound like David Attenborough.”
Connor ignored him, stepping onto the porch. It groaned. The door hung half off its hinges, revealing a darkness that swallowed the beam of their torches.
“I hereby dedicate this documentary to the pursuit of truth,” Connor said solemnly, raising the camcorder to his face. “And to Jack, who will sadly be eaten first. Rest in pieces, my old pal.”
“Cheers.”
Together, they stepped into the lodge.
***
Inside, the air was wet and stale. A cloying damp that didn’t just sit on your clothes but got into your throat, your lungs. The torch beams bounced off the peeling walls and into corners where the wallpaper had slumped like old skin.
Jack swallowed. “Smells like a dead thing.”
Connor adjusted the camcorder on his shoulder. “Atmosphere, mate.”
They stepped through a small hallway where paint curled off the skirting boards and into a living area with a half-collapsed armchair, a broken kettle, and a newspaper that had yellowed to the color of rotten teeth.
The camcorder’s motor whirred quietly. Connor scanned the room, panning slowly, his mouth pressed into a line of concentration.
Jack stayed by the door.
He could still leave, go outside, make up an excuse. Say he needed a piss. Say he thought he saw something. But his feet wouldn’t move. The lodge was creepy and disgusting, but in a way that dared you to linger.
Connor swung the camcorder around and caught Jack in the beam. “Say something for the viewers.”
Jack squinted. “Viewers. We’re going to die in here.”
Connor laughed. “Brilliant.”
They moved through into the back room. It looked like someone had tried to sleep there at some point. There was a moldy mattress on the floor, old takeaway boxes, a row of empty Tennent’s cans arranged in a line across the mantelpiece. A painting hung crooked above it: a dog, possibly, or a wolf. It was hard to tell. The eyes were scratched out.
Jack pointed at it. “That’s not weird at all.”
Connor got a close-up.
They were halfway through filming what might have been a bloodstain on the floor when the first noise came.
A soft creak.
Jack turned. “Did you hear that?”
Connor lowered the camcorder. “Probably just the wind.”
Another creak. Heavier this time. Closer.
Jack took a step back. “Mate, I’m not being funny, but…”
Connor raised the camcorder again. “Got to film it. That’s the whole point.”
The back of Jack’s neck prickled. There was something behind the sound. Not just movement. A presence.
Something shifted upstairs. A thud. Followed by dragging.
Connor whispered, “Jesus.” The camcorder was trembling slightly in his hands.
“What if someone’s squatting?” Jack hissed. “Some old perv?”
Connor didn’t answer. He stepped toward the foot of the stairs.
The camera light caught the banister, the rotted carpet, the gaping darkness above.
The next noise didn’t come from above. It came from behind them.
A breath. Long. Wet.
Jack spun. The back door was still closed. But something was in the room with them.
Something big.
He grabbed Connor’s sleeve. “Run.”
Connor didn’t argue.
They bolted through the hall, tripping over splintered floorboards. The door slammed into the wall as they burst outside. Jack stumbled on the porch step, skidded on frost.
Behind them, something moved.
Connor didn’t look back. He aimed the camcorder over his shoulder, breath ragged, catching flashes of movement: a blur of gray, two pinpricks of light, the suggestion of fur, of teeth.
Then the camera slipped from Connor’s hand.
It landed hard, skidding across the frosted grass. It came to rest at a crooked angle, lens still open, red light blinking.
It kept recording, grainy footage filling the viewfinder.
For a moment, only the wind.
Then, a shape. Out of focus. Lean-limbed. Barefoot.
The sound was strange, deliberate, almost curious. Like whatever it was didn’t need to chase them. It knew it had time.
The figure approached slowly, and though the image fractured into lines of static, the camcorder caught glimpses: long arms swinging loosely at its sides, shoulders hunched forward, head low like a predator deciding whether to pounce.
A faint growl. Except not quite. There was something off about the sound. Too regular. Too clipped.
The feet passed the camera. The lens caught claws. Not false ones, not plastic. Curved. Dark. Real.
A voice, rasping, breathy. “Leeeave…”
Then a hand entered the frame. Thin, inhuman, fingers too long. It reached for the camera.
The screen stuttered. The audio crackled into a high whine. Then, a final judder of static.
Cut to black.
