Chapter Text
The thing is, Edwin Payne keeps many secrets.
One can never escape Hell, not truly. There’s always a hint of sulfur on one’s clothes, a permanent reminder of the very place that haunts your nightmares every time you close your eyes. However, most of that one can keep to oneself.
Sure, there will always be a creature that will be able to tear apart that mask of peacefulness, to look through all those layers of hurt to find the scars of hellfire that taint your soul with the red of the purest blood, to smell the stink of suffering you leave behind you like a trail of the past. Nevertheless, that is purely superficial, for there will never really be a physical mark that can stain your skin as an announcement of the danger you bring along with you for others to flee.
At least, that’s what Edwin thought for the first three weeks.
When the first full moon of his afterlife arose, surrounded by the hundreds of shining stars that decorated London’s November of 1989 night sky, things started to change for the young ghost. This ominous, depredatory feeling bloomed in his chest like the sprout of a dark tree, a tree of sorrow that found its roots planted in the deepest of infernal soil, right along the boiling pits of sulfur.
He remembers rushing out of the library, right into the outskirts of St. Hillarions, the phantom sensation of a thousand porcelain eyes roaming over his back making him sprint like a madman.
He remembers running through the familiar woods of his old boarding school, the place where the life of former model scholar and different-from-other-boys Edwin Payne had ended to make way for the husk of a child he had become.
He remembers how, guided by the almighty presence of the bright satelite looming over him, the body of a hellbent boy began to shift, adapting the shape of long forgotten and likely non-existing bones to the liking of an external force, tearing young skin apart, growing the saddest hints of gray fur over the ghastly tangle of limbs that could not longer be called a human being, or even the remains of one.
He remembers the howl that escaped his snout that night, and he remembers the pain that reverberated through this newfound vessel of his soul as he did. Shed of his own flesh, both as a human and as a ghost, he finally felt free. Not the kind of free that any living or dead person can experience, not the kind of free that meant being rid of the pain, but the freedom of a beast. The freedom of a hunter, the freedom of a killer that it’s not tied to survival, but to thirst.
Then, everything went quiet. Not a single owl hooted, not even the wind dared to flow through the leaves of the trees.
Edwin Payne, no longer human, no longer Edwin Payne, howled again. All the consciousness that comes with being was quiet as well, that stupid voice at the back of his head weeded out of his own mind just like the plague it was in this cruel world of eating or being eaten. Edwin knew the sensation of seventy years of being eaten by that darn spider again and again down in Hell, he knew the pain of being eaten by his classmates and everyone around him back when he was alive; perhaps, it was the time to stop being a cowardly prey, and start becoming the predator.
The next day, the boys at St Hillarions told fantastic stories of a werewolf haunting the school grounds, trying to scare each other. Nobody really believed them, because, “a werewolf here, in London? Really? Mate, do you really think I’m that much of an idiot?”. The boys were of course right, the notion of such a monster roaming regular English woods was unthinkable, even to a ghost such as himself. The remains of bloodlust impregnated in his mind spoke otherwise, though, but a ghost werewolf wouldn’t really be an issue to anybody other than himself in the foreseeable future, so, as long as he stayed far apart from other potentially damageable spirits, nobody should be harmed by the urges that this hellish reminder of his brought upon his non-life. After all, pain was a thing that Payne could endore.
No more than four days went by without him breaking his promise. On his defense, he didn’t think that the shivering, brave boy that had stood up for a stranger would be that badly hurt after his so-called friends threw him into that lake. It all happened so fast, Edwin lamented he couldn’t arrive on time to the place of the incident; even if he couldn’t have really helped that boy face off his bullies due to his own fears (weak, this newly acquired canine part of his brain supplied), he yearned to have watched the brief justice that this Charles Rowland had brought upon people that thought so poorly of others because of shallow physical characteristics (Edwin recalled that feeling, the feeling of not belonging with the people of his age because of his “tendencies”. What did he do wrong? Was he too femenine? Was it his books? It didn’t matter, in the end: he got eaten anyways). Of course it wouldn’t just end like that, this world is not nearly as benign as to let the good people win, for once, so it was Charles that ended up in that attic, slowly dying of the cold lake water and hard stones that were forced upon his delicate living body, and the perpetuators were returning to their cozy bedrooms between laughs and friendly banter.
Edwin knew, deep in his long dead heart, that a lantern would not help much to reduce the boy’s hurt or distress. However, the very small and very human part of him that remained after decades of getting detached of his own humanity, after reading all there was available to him in that stupid school about ghosts, vengeful spirits and the like, reminded him that a single kind person with a lantern could have changed his whole fate, back in 1916. So, he climbed up the stairs of that attic, an old oil lantern in hand, and, with what little humanity remained in that husk of a person, went on to meet the very boy that would change his afterlife forever.
He never once regretted that decision, never. Charles was, without a doubt, the best thing that had ever happened to the monster Edwin Payne. His joyous laugh, his beautiful smile that seemed to light up every room he passed, everything about Charles Rowland was the epitome of human kindness, an ode to all the good that was spread between the sorrow of life and death. Edwin didn’t know what he did to deserve Charles, what he did to make him want to stay by his side even after being offered the quiet blue light of Lady Death. After all, he was just Edwin; strange, unsettling Edwin, the boy that had spent seventy three years in hell, the Mary Anne that couldn’t leave his dormitory without a book, the monster, the werewolf that terrorized the most naive of St Hillarions’ students.
He couldn’t bring himself to say this to Charles, of course. How would this beautiful, kind boy react to the revelation that he had chosen a crooked monster over the tranquility of paradise?
So, of course, he made his best effort to keep it hidden.
Then their story progressed. They fled that old attic, they fled the reckless school that had ended both of their hopes to grow up, and they ran together towards the future. After a more throughout search within the various occult libraries of Central London, and some recreational reading of multiple Agatha Christie classics, they decided upon opening their own detective agency, to help other ghosts across the country move onto their peaceful afterlives while running from their own. And if Edwin disappeared during three nights every month, claiming to need a little space (as if he needed any space away from Charles at all), well; that was his own secret to keep. After all, even if Charles could bring himself to accept Edwin’s …ahem… condition, Edwin couldn’t risk his friend like that. What if his primal urges to harm ended up hurting Charles?
He wasn’t sure if he could control this form of himself.
So, without his friend noticing, he gathered crucial books regarding lycanthropy, read countless words on the magical properties of his claws and fangs, and slowly got to harvest some of the most intricate knowledge of his curse. All said, it wasn’t a lot.
See, here’s the thing: Edwin was, somehow, not even a regular lycanthrope. Instead of a werewolf, the creature he became because of his condition would be more accurately classified as a “werehound”, as he had discovered. Even though the concept of his curse was fairly similar to what people think to be a werewolf, there were enough crucial divergences for it to be considered a completely different illness.
For starters, the snout of a regular lycanthrope would be longer rather than broader, like Edwin’s, and, although werewolves could still harm spirits thanks to their inherent magical origins, a werehound’s claws were directly made of iron; that’s why it felt like his very skin was being peeled off of his bones every time he transformed, it wasn’t just mental after all. A werehound, as its name states, adopts some of the taxonomical characteristics not of a wolf, but a hellhound’s. Shorter fur, slightly bigger body, a split, pointed tail, and, most importantly, the supernatural ability to spit fire (he regrets the way he found out that fact; that night, he almost burnt a whole forest down).
After dwelling on it for far too much (“It’s been two years, Edwin!”, he tells himself for the eleventh time, somewhere between 1991 and 1992. He and Charles have already found a decent office for their detective agency, and the cards that represent their first cases are neatly put in their “Solved Cases” drawer’s space reserved only for them. Hell, they have even battled their first poltergeist! Why can’t he get over this minuscule nuisance already?), he accepts that this part of himself isn’t something worth mentioning. Sure, it’s annoying to have to go out of his way every month to protect his little secret, but, at the same time, he is assuring that Charles, magnificent Charles, will never get hurt because of it, will never realice that Edwin is a monster, will never run off in order to pursue a better afterlife.
It is a way to protect them both, after all.
So, Charles doesn’t know about this, and preferably never will.
Until, of course, the Case of the Miserable Ghost Town comes along.
Such an accurate name.
So, indeed, Edwin Payne does keep many secrets.