Peggy Powler & The Puddledown Incident.

[ABNARTY]

Peggy Powler thanked Phineas Stappen for his request to stay at his little home, but declined the offer citing she needed
some time to mull over what he'd related back at the tavern and during their walk back to his cottage. Standing at the
gate of Stappen's tidy picturesque abode, the little Witch watched the man who'd felt the cold evil of Accam Dey and lived
to tell about it, shamble down his neatly-raked gravelled garden path and close the door behind him.

Accam Dey was in the ground, the beaten body buried alongside his head and those who had surreptitiously interred the
malevolent creature were sworn to secrecy never to tell where the wolf was hidden. Almost forty years ago and never a
hint that Accam Dey had risen from the dead.

The night was fully developed now and turning towards Puddledown's Meeting Hall, Peggy wondered if somewhere in the
small populace, a future victim was already tossing in their troubled sleep with a dream of a lupine-shaped shadow silently
lumbering towards them. What Stappen had said indicated that whatever the beast was, it hadn't roamed far away from its
feeding ground.

Peggy shook her head and got back to thinking about the current elusive raider that carefully -and deliberately, browsed
the menu of Puddledown.
...................................................

After the Liddle girl had gone missing, the town had quietly braced itself for more attacks and ignoring Edmund Munday's
request for hesitancy, an appeal went out to lure the best hunters to come and take care of the situation. The Elders of
Puddledown agreed to provide a small amount of numma to pay the man who dispatched the killer of little children and
cows, but a body needed to be provided to collect the meagre bounty.

A week after the motley bunch of crossbow-carrying chancers arrived, a horse was mauled in the very lane Peggy was
walking down tonight. The wandering Witch eyed the hitching-rail that Phineas had pointed to during his recital of the
sporadic bloody forays of the mysterious wolf and thought again that the design of the wolf's interaction was too daring
for the average predator.

With these bounty-hunters scouring the lands around Puddledown, the residents continued with their daily chores and
waited for a large corpse of a mutilated beast to be strung up outside of The Stag's Head tavern. Days turned into weeks
and as some of the less-zealous trappers walked away from the pursuit, Puddledownions whispered over suppers that the
furry enemy was smarter than the stalkers.

When the ripped-up body of Father Carrington was found in the graveyard of St. Luke's church, reality struck home and the
community and Elders that had perceived a danger that outweighed anything they'd appreciated in the past. St. Luke's was
in the centre of Puddledown and that meant the daring wolf held no fear of being in a confined less-escapable situation.

As the priest's simple casket was being lowered into a hole of his own cemetery, Francis Proctor was snatched from his
task of baling hay in the field at the rear of the church. The small congregation at the funeral heard his cries and ran to help
the forty year-old who was renowned for not having truck with the religion that Father Carrington observed.

Proctor was dead, his throat was ripped out. In an open field with eight piles of straw and wooden fencing surrounding the
pasture, no spoor gave away the monster's route of departure. It would be another day before one of the embarrassed hunters
provided a possible reason for this assumed vanishing and his suggestion would send shivers through those who had looked
on the body of the cantankerous unmarried farmer.

A large heap of corn-stalks nearest the back of the meadow had a large space where something had been hiding inside. Many
snorted at the idea that the murderous culprit had been watching the shocked villagers as they'd come across the latest victim,
but with an assurance from another of the trackers -Mitch Tanner, 'something' had made that hole in the pile of hay.

The die had been cast and there was no turning back from what was going on. A large killer had chosen Puddledown as its
dining table and now all the residents could do was wait and watch for the next seating. Three nights later and in a barn that
the hunters use to rest-up after their failed halieutics, there was an attack so ferocious that the only survivor was a teenager
who'd managed to climb into the eaves of the outbuilding as the creature caused ruin amongst the ones who had sought to
kill it.

Clutching a gnarled roof-support, Chester Connor watched in horror as a wolf that was high as a man's chest savaged the five
hunters that had remained to earn the reward. When Puddledown's Blacksmith -Elijah Cox and Phineas Stappen had eventually
coaxed the trembling young man down from his roosting-spot, the carnage that they had come across after wondering why the
hunters hadn't shown, was to be explained.

Walter Dawson's drunken comment in the tavern had been correct, the wolf was big and as Chester stuttered out his testimony,
the appetite that the first sufferer of the Beast of Wheatland County had also mentioned was in line with what the juvenile wannabe
-hunter had offered. Except, the hunger hadn't been for food. Connor's account displayed a craving for killing more that sustenance
and as the wide-eyed lad stammered his story out, that was the first time Phineas had considered sending a message to someone
who knew about evil.

Awesomeness!!!

I really like what's going on. Thanks for writing it.