Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > Blooding Night > Status Update

She felt like a puppet on a string. She was not in charge of her destiny. From the moment she and the other girls got here, they were worked deftly by unseen hands. Things like chance and coincidence never entered into it; everything was carefully orchestrated. Even the ending of this horrible night was a foregone conclusion. The climax of this nightmare had already been scripted.

It hissed and snapped at her, long ribbons of drool hanging from its mouth. Yvonne held the bone above her head, ready to strike. The creature moved around her with a distinctly inhuman hobbling motion. It sprouted mangy tufts of hair like dry straw, bones protruding from its hide in yellow staffs and rungs. It looked, if anything, like a woman that had died in the process of becoming a wolf.

Slowly, gathering herself, Chloe approached the cabin. The door was a simple plank affair, but it looked sturdy as if it could hold back an army. Even in the wan moonlight, she could see the great scratches running down its face. At the sight of them, something inside her flinched. Look at them! This is a warning! This is the last one you’ll get!

Yvonne, deeply in shock, covered in filth and slime, her lips forming words that came out as a dry rasping, began to crawl toward the opening of the cave. And it was then, as her sanity dangled from one rusting hinge, that she heard the sound of something dragging itself from the charnel depths of the cave.

The woods were alive in a million ways and she was part of it, not separate from it. Her senses were focused, acute, from hearing to taste to smell to touch, amplified, sharpened to a lethal cutting edge. Stimuli came from every direction and she instantly processed it, understood it, and used it, rising up on her hind feet and howling into the night.

She stumbled to the door, pulled the heavy bolt aside and threw the door open. And framed in it, stood a monster, this one a man, the father of the brood. He was huge and shaggy, his fur encrusted with dried blood and grease. His eyes glowed with evil sentience, his slavering jaws widening to tear out her throat. The Big Bad Wolf had come home.

Whimpering, Chloe moved forward out of the muck and into tangled yellow grasses that crunched under her step. The ground beneath them was soft and spongy. She was easy to track because she made so much noise, but she knew that it really didn’t matter. They were wolves. Maybe they walked upright like men, but they were still wolves and they would scent her wherever she went.

In her mind, she kept hearing the old man’s voice. I don’t want your scent mingling with mine. Not tonight. Not on Blooding Night. Blooding night. What did that mean? What was it? And maybe she was better off not knowing. She would find out soon enough because Blooding Night would be tonight and already the shadows were growing long.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a coward. That’s all you are.” “Yes, you’re probably right,” he admitted, taking up the shotgun and leveling it at her. “Now get…they’ll be coming and I don’t want your scent mingling with mine. Not tonight. Not on Blooding Night.” Her eyes filled with tears, her overall impression of the human race deeper in the cellar than usual, she ran flat out into the trees.

Yvonne screamed because the horror inside her needed to be vented. It came out in a high, shrilling noise that reverberated through the woods, working up the pack that trailed her into a cacophony of roaring and howling. Yvonne, nearly out of her mind, broke into a run, seeking the trees and the shelter they offered.