Werewolf Murders Terrify Village!

Lesser Edale isn’t the sort of place where murders tend to happen. The tiny village has an inn, a general store, a small church, a veterinary surgery and a police station (only between the hours of 9am to 5pm, thank you very much), surrounded by the requisite farms. If there’s any crime at all, it’s more likely to be sheep rustling or illicit poaching. Certainly not murders by a werewolf?!

A letter was sent into The Scoop three months ago, after locals George Osgood and Lydia Perkins were killed in a frenzied “werewolf” attack on the first full moon of this year. Fellow resident Harold Short was also attacked but survived.

Vicar Jeremy Stratton, of Edale Parish Church, claimed to have seen a “6ft black dog with burning red eyes”, but the claim had never been substantiated by anyone else. However, during the attack on Harold Short, local police officer Constable Tumwell shot at, and scared off, what looked to be a big dog.

Suspicion fell onto the Vane family, owners of Plum Castle, for no reason other than daughter Ophelia Vane turned 21 on the night of the first murder, and son Lawrence was seen fleeing from the location of the crime. Small communities are nothing if not suspicious.

And yet, during my time there, I didn’t manage to shed much light on the matter. Yes, I came across some increasingly strange material – family curses linking the Strattons and the Vanes, for one – but that didn’t necessarily mean that werewolves were on the prowl … or did it?

The Friday night of my visit saw me locked up in a cell next to the werewolf in question! No clue as to who it could be behind the fur but after a hair-raising escape, I was able to recover the book with instructions on werewolf curses. At the time of writing, there was no answer as to whether or not the unlucky individual was cured but one thing’s for sure – I won’t be so quick to doubt village suspicion again.