The ceiling fan was spinning overhead when the drug's effect took hold and a yawn escaped Neil. He had been trying to remember the last page he read from the medical guide, but he felt himself slipping.

It must have been page hundred. The syndrome, what was it called again?

When the soft padding of two feet across the carpets did not trigger panic in him, he realized that he had fallen asleep, yet he was somehow awake. Wood creaked as the table was lifted off and the blood flow happily warmed his legs. The hands that helped him returned, this time holding his feet with an iron grip.

The smooth wooden floor below was cold and the footsteps progressed into silence, broken only by the person's occasional wheezes. There was an abrupt transition of wood to stone, followed by the feeling of being propped up against a wall. Metal scraped and the stone below him became wet. His captor seemed to have an extremely bad case of whooping cough, as the coughing bout that followed lasted for a full minute or two. Every breath he took in was laced with the smells of burnt bread and petroleum.

Metal creaked and he was flung away like a used rag.

A harsh brushing of fingers across his face finally woke him up from his drowsiness. The face that greeted him however, made him back away in disgust.

His companion was a rather old man, with thick matted hair crowning his forehead and eyes gleaming with madness. His breath smelled of stale food and for some very odd reason, of frankincense.

As he gasped for a lungful of air, the man frantically mumbled something in a language resembling French and shook Neil by his shoulders vigorously. Neil pushed the old man away and yelled at him,

"What do you want from me, let me be!"

The old man did not bother him further and retreated to a wall. His shaking fingers immediately traced the number of his wife and he placed it close to his ears, the static matching his pulse. When the call finally connected, the voices almost made him jump. It was Tessa alright, but she seemed to be crying. Neil's voice cracked as he said,

"Honey, it's me!"

"Tell me, tell me where he is!"

Neil stared at the rusted metal bars, as he heard his wife weep. She whispered,

"Talk to me plea. . .where is my husband?"

"Honey can you hear me?"

"What has he done to you?" She sobbed, "Why are you so silent?"

He took the phone from his ear and checked the screen. The range was at its fullest with five bars, and so was the charge.

"I'm sorry that I was late to answer. Tell me, how much is his ransom? I'll do anything. Anything. Please don't hurt–"

The call was cut abruptly. It was clear that the police had been trying to trace the kidnapper, and Neil hoped with his whole heart that they succeed.

His eyes fell on one of the walls of the cell, on which the man had been scrawling with a piece of fallen plaster. It was a mural of a farmer with a sickle, returning home after a good harvest with his wife and son, holding hands and smiling. The old man was a pretty good artist, and his age did not stop him from drawing. He licked his lips and ran a hand through his hair thinking for a while. He asked, with a voice extremely refined and deep,

"Bill was your boss?"

"If he were my boss, why would he drug me and put me in this hellhole?"

"Touché, but you did not answer my question."

"Have your brains rotted out? Who are you, where am I and what the hell is going on?"

"Patience, I will answer them once you help me get out of this so called 'hellhole'."

"I work overnight for the company, and I don't get paid for months. I help the boss; her ex shows up and tries to kill me and my friends! You should know darn well that I'd rather shoot myself than trust another one of you Rasüteans."

The man handed him a half filled jug of water. Neil grasped it and took a measured gulp. The old man looked at him hopefully.

"Now, do you want to meet your family?"

"Yes."

"Me too. I happen to have a hairpin that I found on the previous occupant of this cell, but you see, my hands shake every time I hold it. I hope your steady hand suffices for the job."

Neil straightened uncomfortably. "But I don't know how to pick a lock."

"That is alright, I will teach you, but only if you want to help a lousy beggar like me. You can either co-operate with me or let yourself be processed into Nightwalker feed."

•°*°•

"To your first question, no, I have a single brain which is mostly intact and is a bit rusty due to my age."

The old man informed him as they walked down the stone corridors.

They had managed to find a lighter in one of the dozen now empty cells that stood on either side. Using a bone, some lighter oil and a piece of cloth torn off Neil's shirt, the duo had made a primitive beacon. The old man had a slight limp, but was keeping pace with him.

"You can call me Phillipe. We are in the basement of William Gregor's mansion in a town called Rasüte, which presently functions as a hotel. Say, you mentioned ex, is your boss Levi Nathan by any chance?"

Neil was pretty irritated and curious in equal measure now about that,

"Yes she is, so what?"

"Ah, that explains the salary difficulty. Now, dear friend, I hate to say this but you are in a really bad situation."

"You don't say."

"May I continue?" the old man asked, clearly miffed by Neil's attitude.

"Sure."

"Levi Nathan used to be married to Bill Grey, or Will Gregor, once upon a time. Levi exposed him for his little research ventures, got him kicked out of his own company and took over. You presently work in her company, I believe."

Neil's head filled with more doubts now. He understood what the man was getting at, and why Ms. Nathan had refused to accompany them here. But that wasn't what bothered him,

"How do you know all this about him?" Neil asked, carefully treading across the broken floor.

"I was his butler. I've been taking care of that boy since his mother died in an animal attack."

"Like the grizzly attacks."

The old man looked at him, studying his eyes carefully. His brows furrowed and a bead of sweat rolled down his cheek.

"Hmm. . ."

"There was a creature at the old Gregor factory, which I presume belongs to either Mr. Gregor or his nephew, like a–"

"Werewolf?"

Neil stared at him, trying to process the information being thrown at him. He wondered whether the entire city had been drugged by some secret organization since WWI to be seeing werewolves.

"I'll explain it to you, only if you give me his phone in return," The man said, breathing hard.

Neil nodded; the phone was of no use to him and he wondered why the man needed it.

The device firmly held in his hand, he asked,

"Have you heard anything closely resembling the word werewolf?"

Neil scratched his head in thought.

"Garwalf maybe."

"That is a very old term, it's the ancestor of the word werewolf. Bill's mother had died in a grizzly attack. Turf war I suppose; her sweet peas were crossing into its territory. He was twelve when that happened and his father was serving as a medic in the First World War."

"Oy, stop lying. Bill can't possibly be that old. He doesn't look a day over thirty."

"You saw a werewolf, Haufer. Werewolves should not be possible either," Phil said with a tone of finality.

"So Bill's an immortal vampire," Neil joked to ease the conversation, before he tripped over a dislocated brick and fell down.

"I know that you are skeptical," Phil said, helping him up.

"But you did ask for information and gave me the phone; so whether you accept my words or not is none of my concern."

Neil said, "So he got into sorcery, and ended up making himself immortal? I got heavy vibes from the runes on those lanterns."

"Bio-chemical alchemy actually, boy," Phil corrected him, lips puckering as if he had bit a particularly sour lemon.

"Sorcery to me, Phil." Neil shrugged.

"Look little twat, alchemy was the predecessor to modern day chemistry. Sure it's been insulted for trying to turn lead into gold, but if it weren't for it, you wouldn't have had several of your reactants."

Neil decided to interrupt.

"You're an alchemist too?"

"Used to be. Not anymore."

"So er. . . have you succeeded in making gold from lead?"

"Why don't you ask your scientist friends at C.E.R.N? Didn't they try to remove nucleons from mercury to turn it into gold? And when we try to do it, we're called stupid."

"Hey man, chill," Neil said, patting his shoulder.

"You know what you are capable of, right? Why do you need to prove it to the world?"

The cells grew larger and the corridor grew less stuffed with dust as they progressed. None of them were occupied yet, but several of them had bottles and test tube racks on desks and tubes. Most of them had chairs with leather restraints. Some of them had HELP scrawled in chicken scratch across the walls.

HElp

PlEasE SAvE mE

BeAsT! I hAtE YoU

roT iN HeLl

No MoRE, iT huRts!

RyE DaMe, RyE DaMe,
WhEre ArE yOu,
ChiLD of SorRow,
MaID oF RuE.

"Phil, what's all this?" Neil asked, the beacon in his hand shaking as the messages grew more and more violent; some even written in blood.

The old man stopped before the poem and read it out. He sighed, and said,

"Once upon a time, there lived a boy im South Africa. He worked in a silver mine, where he was happy and merry. He'd get food three times a day, he was allowed to sleep in the mine at night and had lots of friends like him.

All he had to do was dig for silver, day in and day out. But as the days passed, the boy developed sores in his palms and digging hurt. He was whipped when he tried to tell the contractor.

One day, the boy found a chunk of gold while digging. He put it in his shorts and went to back to work. That night, he was beaten for not mining enough silver.

The boy, knowing that he still had the gold to live off, ran away the same week."

Neil was shocked into silence.

The old man continued, "If you hadn't found that piece of gold, you would've been stuck in that mine. But Neil, not everyone is lucky to find hope like you did. Bill was one of them. He could save neither them, nor himself from his father."

The beacon was swung to highlight each phrase on the wall.

"In his desperation, he tried everything, even turning to his father's trade. Unfortunately, most of them gave in to their torture. The messages are all that remains. The boy shattered in the aftermath."

Neil asked, voice quivering, "What exactly did old Doctor Gregor do to them?"

"Lewis Willow-White. British POW. Nightwalker serum infused with garwalf blood over a period of four months. You saw him the other day didn't you?"