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Mr. Standfield

Alexandre Sébastien

    Darkness started to gather on Mansfield and for the more curious and the less fearful amongst them, some villagers sat up late each evening. They stood at their windows, peering out even though there was not much hope than to only catch a fleeting glimpse of it. By this time, in the streets which only admitted little light by the full moon, Stanley went for his usual stroll so as to satisfy an irrepressible desire. As he went on and looking tensely all around, he felt his blood throbbing in his veins as he heard the clicking of heels on the paved street in the distance. Whirling round, he rushed toward the sound where it seemed to come from and stepped into a lane hidden from sight. Licking his lips in anticipation, his eyes gleamed with excitement as they rested upon a female’s shape with her hair bouncing as she walked away. Creeping up on his prey, the feeling of an imminent successful kill brought out of some kind, the ‘Mr. Hyde’ in him, pushing ‘Jekyll’ into the background.
    Before long a piercing shriek broke out and echoed through the night until it faded away. A face with cold eyes and framed by a bushy beard, looking like a mane which could bear the resemblance to a ferocious beast had been her only sight. Grasping her mop of blond hair, he dragged her body on the ground out of sight and soon the darkness swallowed him up.
    Far away from the village, shaded from the daylight Stanley woke up after a repeated sleeplessness as memories of his bad deed came back to haunt him. The need to feed his cruel and unwilling enslavement to murder started to become less and less unbearable. He was sapped by culpability, grief and still could not stand his congenital abnormalities. Each night was almost the same ritual but it couldn’t be otherwise or he would run out of breath.
    While peace had returned to the village after a chaotic period of terror settled by a diabolic and mysterious thing who had perpetrated a number of crimes, the news of the missing girl shocked the inhabitants. He said that he would keep himself aloof from the villagers and till that day no one wouldn’t have believed in such a existence on earth. Only a few words had been mentioned by children when suddenly they caught sight of what looked like a monstrous beast while they were playing near the Sherwood forest. They had described it as a stunning and hairy human being; a great brawny brute of a man, roaring like a ferocious beast who hunted and killed wild animals with his bare hands. To the inhabitants, he had appeared, by any stretch of the imagination, as a mere fictional character made up by the kids.
    Yet it was not until the massacre had broken out that this cruel creature actually appeared to be alive. The discovery of the bodies in a shed buried beneath the forest had been a real nightmare. They were all stacked one on the top of the other like pieces of meat, and most of them were almost unrecognizable. Their faces disfigured, spattered with blood and even with some organs missing had given witness to the harshness of the blows, to the torture they had suffered. The villagers had nicknamed him, the bloodthirsty monster.
    Before such a butchery, the pathologists from a near local area in charge of the case hadn’t had any problems in establishing the cause of their death. Nevertheless for some victims, identification had been more or less hopeless but much worse was the dilemma they had faced as a result of startling discoveries which still remained a mystery. The fingerprints left and the strands of long hair taken from the corpses appeared to be completely unsual. However due to lack of medical advances, they were only able to suppose that this thing, as inconceivable as it could be, might be mingled with a human being. Very soon Mansfield had been granted emergency powers and all villagers were warned against going out in the evening. Up till now some widespread rumours of his death circulated around as poachers would appear to have seen it and yet his body remained nowhere to be find.
    Somewhere dug down in the largest depths over the grassy ground of the forest he kept his secret nest. At its far end in a largest space which served as a dinning room lay his supply of food of the previous night, and beside was the remains of his first successful killing; Mr Standfield’s body. Overpowered by so much hatred for the life he had inflicted him, which for years had never ceased to keep boiling up inside him, he finally vented his fury in a violent outburst. He felt remorse for his behaviour, although it would not remedy to his deformity; he had been condemned since his birth. He suffered from a very rare disease which was a severe hypertrichose symptom transmitted by ‘the dog-man’ as he called him. His uncurable sickness was more serious than that of his father; his pilosity was growing fast but worse than that, he was endowed with demonic forces and was haunted by an insatiable thirst. At the edge of an abyss of ignorance, an imminent threat of carnage hung over the villagers whose Stanley Standfield would give rise to the myth of the werewolf.

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