The Werewolf [COMPLETE]

|13|

The chimes of the bells had brought us back to the Village Square. It was noon. It was time to vote, and today there was no easy victim, no forced volunteer, no opportune martyr. Today there was no escape, one of us would have to be sacrificed for the rest. The heavy silence, the fleeting gazes, the bowed heads; it was in everyone's mind. No one dared attract attention, anything for a moment more of anonymity, of facelessness and namelessness. The safety of the mass, it meant following, copying, imitating. If everyone acted the same, no one would draw out. If the mass rose its hand, the individual would rise its hand. It simply needed only one individual to have the entire mass rising hands. This could not be happening. This could not be allowed to happen. I had to prevent it.

"We do not have to do this!" My voice reverberated through the square, echoing loud and clear for everyone to listen. "Not again! Not ever again! We don't have to murder someone today, tonight, or even tomorrow." My eyes sought for each face in the crowd, I searched for the minority behind the majority, the individual behind the mass; this was person I had to convince. "We do not have to vote and kill, we do not have to do this! It is all in our hands. It is our decision."

"We don't choose to do this! No one does!" Raleigh Britton interjected. "But we have to do this! We have to carry this out! It's the game, Emily, it's the game that is making us do this. We don't have a choice."

"Yes, we do! We always have a choice! We just don't see it –or we prefer not to see it. It's easier not to see and to persuade ourselves that there is no choice, no alternative, that we are condemned to act this way. It's because we're afraid! We're afraid to admit that we are responsible for our actions! But who takes the gun? Who aims the gun? Who shoots the gun? We are. Not the game. We kill. We choose to kill. We are the ones playing the game. But if we stop playing, the game stops. So we just have to stop playing it."

"It doesn't work this way, Emily," Marcus intervened flatly, bored to reiterate this argument again. "You cannot escape the game. You cannot just stop playing. You've seen it yourself, we've all seen it. This truth came to the cost of Gregory's life, and should hence not be wasted. What Gregory attempted to do, not stay in the game, what you attempt to do, not play the game –it's all the same. You both tried and still try to escape the game, and we saw the sanction for such endeavour. Death. A simple and quick death. A heart attack. And if we all were to do as you suggest, Emily, if we all were to refrain ourselves from voting and killing a player; the most likely event to follow would be our subsequent death. And not just one or two of us, not just the instigators or the main culprits, the logical consequence to this rebellion would be the death of all twenty-five of us, children and adults alike."

"We don't know this. The cause for Gregory's death has not been determined yet. It could have been anything, an inadvertent shift of the steering wheel, or a frozen cog in the car engine, or a bump on the icy road, or a plain and simple moment of lethargy. Or yes, Marcus, it could also have been a heart attack that caused the thrashing of his car into the pillar. But treat this information as it is –an assumption." Marcus Shelton's eyes sparkled with intellect, his interest caught. "We do not know the reason for Gregory's death, yet we know the reason for Harold Tomlin's death, and Agnes Hudson's, and Trevor Sherwood's, and Mary Howell's. They all died from our doing, hands of men stabbed them, drowned them, smothered them and shot them. We killed them. So I prefer to rely on this undeniable truth then on an assumption, Marcus. This is how I know that if we stop playing the game, the game stops."

"Would you be ready to take the risk?" His voice was impatient, eager for an answer. His intense gaze locked with mine. "Would you be ready to risk your life and the one of every single person standing here?"