“Don’t do that,” he says. “You’ll scratch up the wood. Just polished it.” If he notices the spots of blood on his formerly spotless floor he doesn’t say anything. My guess is he doesn’t notice.

“What’ll it be?” he asks.

“Whisky,” I say. “Lots of ice.”

He doesn’t comment on the request for ice even though it’s below freezing outside. He just pours in silence, a generous measure. The ice pops and cracks in the sparkling glass, protesting as the slightly-less-cold liquid is poured over it. I expect him to pry, to ask where I’m from, to eye me up and down and frown with suspicion. He does none of that.

“Four seventy,” he says, sliding the glass toward me. I raise my hand, show him the coins lying beneath it. Foreign coins, silver, crosses embossed on both surfaces.

He scoops the money into his hand, bounces it as though weighing it, drops it into the pouch at his belt. He doesn’t bat an eyelid at the alien coinage. “Let me know, you need anything else,” he says, walking back to the spot I moved him from. The old man with the drink eyes me under heavy lids for a second, then turns to the bartender and they pick up their quiet conversation as though they'd never been interrupted. Even with my hearing I can't pick out the words, just the slow, mumbling tone.

I sit and drink and take in the room from beneath the brim of my hat, eyes shifting here and there, surreptitious as I can be. I pretty quickly realise realise that nobody cares whether I’m looking. They’re all too busy talking, heads over tables, hushed voices everywhere.

This is, without a doubt, the strangest pub I’ve ever set foot in.

I take off my hat, set it on the stool beside me. I sit in silence, peering around the bar, staring at the punters, trying to get a read on them. I sip my whisky; cheap, strong, cold. It burns my throat and down into my stomach and sets my wounded side throbbing with every thud of my heart. I won’t finish it.

There’s a chunk of flesh missing where I was bitten but I still can’t bring myself to look. I’m too hot, despite the cold. I’m in too much pain. My shirt is too stuck to my skin. For now I’m content to sit and watch the ice float in my drink, listening to the unintelligible voices around the room.

The whisky is the colour of the heat in my side. My vision hinges and the world slips.

Next thing I know I’m lying on the bar. My skin is tight with gooseflesh and there’s a freezing breeze blowing in from somewhere. My shirt has vanished.

“Good,” a voice says. “You’re not dead. Now I can kill you for bleeding on my floor.”

I turn my leaden head to see the bartender standing at my side, arms crossed over his chest. His forehead is carved with deep frown lines.

“You got bitten,” he says. I want to nod but my head won’t lift from the bar. I swallow instead, run my tongue across lips that feel burned and dry.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Dog?”

I roll my head a little. I think he understands that I mean no.

“What, then?”

Not what. Who. The man with the peeling skin, hunched over the carcass of a horse slowly freezing by the side of the road. Stuffing his mouth with frozen meat, congealed blood coating his fingers. I can’t explain that, can I?

My tongue is swollen in my mouth. My throat is made of splinters.

“Man,” I say. It’s all I can manage.

“A man,” the bartender says. He drops his chin to his chest, stares at the floor while he lets out a long breath. “Can you walk?” he asks, at long last.

With help I turn so I’m sitting up on the bar. My head is heavy and my side is tight. When I look down I see that the bite has been scrubbed clean and stitched shut, the sutures small and neat. I drop my feet to the floor and stand on sagging knees, leaning against a slab of a man I haven't seen before.

My crutch and the bartender lead me down the bar, through a door in the back wall and out into the dying afternoon sun and the howling wind. A thick coat settles around my shoulders and I grunt my thanks. We stand sheltered on the back porch, looking out into a walled yard of icy earth and stunted shrubbery, drifts of frozen snow piled up against the bottom of the walls. The bartender sparks up a rollie, the hot tang of tobacco smoke cutting across my nose, acrid and strong but not enough to mask the scent of blood and infection radiating out from the sight in front of us. He offers one out to me but my stomach churns and I decline.

In the middle of the courtyard there is a cage, and inside the cage is a man. The man who bit me.

He looks even worse than he did before. I don’t know how long he’s been here; it can’t be more than an hour or so, but it’s been long enough for his skin to start turning blue, for his fingers to stiffen and turn black. Livid purple bruises mar his pale flesh. What looks like a dog bite on his shoulder is black and oozing, beginning to fester.

He turns at the sound of us arriving on the porch, leans his dying hands against the rusted bars. He shouts something, but the blood is roaring in my ears and I can’t make out the words.

“Is this him?” the bartender says, his mouth at my ear. His hand is gripping my elbow and I realise I’m leaning on the railing that rings the porch.

I nod, swallow hard. I don’t trust my voice to work, though I need it to.

“Cage?” I ask. What I want to ask is where they found him – which I don’t know – and why they’ve locked him up – which I do, but they don’t know that I know that and I don't want to have to explain. I want to ask why he bit me, though I know the answer to that too. Still, I’m playing a part here, and I want to play it properly. But cage is the only word my lips will form, so it’s all I say.

“Come inside,” the bartender says, tugging on my elbow to turn me away from the cage and the cold. “I’ll tell you.”

“We’ve been looking for him,” he says, sliding another glass of whisky across the bar. No ice this time. I’ve managed to put my shirt back on with some difficulty, but despite the cold outside and the thinness of my clothes I still feel warm The thought of drinking more whisky makes my stomach clench tight, a hard cramp that causes me to wince. I still want ice, though. I scoop a cube out of the amber liquid, setting it on my tongue and pressing it firm against the roof of my mouth so that the cold settles into my blood.

The bartender frowns at that, the shade of a question crossing his face before it disappears, but I don't care. I can feel the fire in my thoughts cooling, feel numbness gripping the sides of my head. I keep pressing the cube into my soft palette, letting it melt while the bartender talks.

“Three weeks we’ve been after him,” he says, and I nod. “Longer than that, really, but it’s three weeks since we’ve known it was a man we were after.”

That’s always the way. They build it in their heads, ascribe things to the person they’ve pinned it on even when there’s no real link. It happens every time, and it always works in my favour.

“Stuff started turning up dead. Wild animals – birds, squirrels, the like – strewn across the middle of the road. A couple of dogs went, then a horse. We thought it was wolves come down off the hills, having to hunt further afield, what with this extra-long winter we’re having.

“Then the first girl got taken. Susie Bannigan. Her dad said he heard the glass smash, then screams. By the time he got into her room all he saw was her feet vanishing out the window. By the time he got outside she was ripped open, tip-to-toe, all her insides missing and the thing what done it vanishing into the fields.”

“What did it?” I ask. I know the answer, know the whole story, but he’s paused in the telling and I know he wants me to ask.

“Wasn’t no wolf,” he says, thinking he’s being cryptic. “Her dad said it was big, bigger than a man, and covered in fur like an animal. It ripped her open like a beast as well. It moved like a man, though. Went running off across the fields on two legs.”

He shakes his head as though he doesn’t expect me to believe him – a well-practiced part of his story, there’s no doubt about it – then continues.

“Another two girls went after the first one. Same thing happened. Then Old Man Grant was found the same way just a week ago, gutted in his fields while he was bringing the sheep in. Broad daylight, that must’ve happened. Nobody saw it, though. Only person who’s seen it is Bannigan.”

I gob another cube of ice, not making eye contact with him, letting his words mingle with the images in my head. Of shadows, and darkness, and hunger. Of glass shattering, and the smell of prey on the wind. The taste of fear.

“We got him about an hour before you came in,” he says, when I don’t say anything. “Little Ronnie caught him sleeping behind the church, covered in blood, raving about how bright the snow is or some bollocks like that.” He gestures to Little Ronnie, the slab who supported me outside, who nods in acknowledgement.

“Why the cage?” I ask. I won’t ask how they know it’s him. I don’t want to sow that doubt in their heads.

“Best place to keep it,” the bartender says. Not him. It. “Until somebody comes down from the city to deal with him, at any rate. There’s no lawman around here, lad.”

“He’ll be dead before anybody gets here,” I say, my words thick around the ice. Water spills over my bottom lip, drools down onto my chest. I wipe it away with the back of my gloved hand.

“Aye,” he says, topping up my drink. “I reckon he will.”

I’m given a room above the pub, just a bed and a sink, but it’s more than enough. I’m asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

In my sleep I glide down darkened roads, my passage masked by howling winds and a blanket of snow. My night is fear and chaos. The man in the cage rears in front of me for a timeless moment, not biting this time but being bitten. His fear floods my nose and his taste fills my jaws. Then he falls, and I move on.

My night is the hunt. There is no rest. I wake with aching muscles and the taste of blood in my mouth, and as I wash in the basin the small mirror above it shows me that my beard is darker than usual. My gums are a deep red, and my smile is particularly feral today. The changes will be gone by midday, I know, but still I worry that somebody will notice. I always do.

I need not worry. As I head downstairs I hear the sound of pots and pans being slammed around the small kitchen that lurks in the room behind the bar. The bartender – I only now realise that he must own the place – is already up, preparing breakfast in a barely contained rage.

“Problem?” I ask, taking a seat.

“He’s gone,” he says, throwing bacon and sausages into a pan. My stomach churns at the smell; I want red meat, thick bloody steaks, not fatty pig.

I don’t react. He’ll tell me without my needing to ask. I watch him cook, waiting.

“Eat,” he says, putting a plate in front of me. I cut a slice from a sausage, shovel it into my mouth and chew. Slowly. He frowns at me but doesn’t say anything. He’s got other things on his mind.

He eats, eyes down on his plate, thoughts a roiling rage that I imagine I can hear. I keep cutting slices from the pig on my plate, shoving the food round, making it look like I've been eating even though nothing crosses my lips.

When he's done he leads me outside, back to the courtyard and the cage.

“Gone,” he says, pointing at the bars, but I've already seen what he wants to show me. The bars have been torn away, leaving a hole big enough for the man to escape. Blood coats the snow, though fresh fall has already started to cover it. The ground has been churned up in his escape; it’s impossible to tell how much help he had. Still, he’s trackable.

“He’ll be long gone by now,” the bartender says, when I suggest this, but that’s fine by me. His focus is on the ground rather than the broken cage, and while I’m still here that’s where I want it.

In my head I see whirling images, of iron bending and breaking beneath me, of the flood of fear seeping out through the bars. I taste blood again, and I can’t help staring at what the innkeeper hasn’t noticed; the bars. The bars that have been bent in toward the centre of the cage. Like something broke in, not out.

The men inspect my side, marvel over the speed of my healing. I try and put it down to the bartender’s skill with a needle, but I can see in their frowns that they don’t believe me. The bartender’s face darkens more every time he looks at me, and the men whisper to each other about me when they think I can't hear.

My glove deposits more silver on the bar, and I make my exit.

The weather today is better – crisp, but not cold – and I remove my hat and gloves as I leave town. My hands are pasty and white, paler even than the rest of my body. As I walk I begin to pick the blood from under my nails, as I should have done this morning.

“Stranger,” a voice calls as I reach the outskirts of town, where brick and worked stone falls away and the rugged land takes over once again. I turn to see the innkeeper coming down the road behind me, high above me on an elderly mare. Little Ronnie is with him, and another man who I haven’t seen. He’s even bigger than Ronnie, and for a second I marvel at his inhuman size.

I don’t speak, just wait.

He stops a few yards from me, staring me down with a closed face while the other two men flank him. Finally, he speaks.

“Never did catch your name,” he says.

“Yours neither,” I say, smiling up at him and trying not to squint as the low sun catches my eye.

“Ain't important now,” he says. He looks to the man on his left, then turns back to me. “This is Susie Bannigan’s father,” he says. His gaze is hard, like he’s trying to pin me to the ground with his eyes.

“A pleasure,” I say, touching my forehead with a cold hand. Bannigan doesn’t say anything. I don’t know whether to say I’m sorry for his loss, so I don’t.

“You know something,” the bartender says, at long last. I simply shrug.

“How could I know anything?” I ask, but my words sound hollow even to me.

He flicks his wrist and something arcs through the air toward me, glinting in the sunlight. I catch it without thinking. Pain flares in my hand, but I don’t drop it. I can already smell what's happening.

I watch the bartender, who stares at my hand as black smoke begins to rise from my clenched fist. Little Ronnie cracks his knuckles, eyeing the bartender as though waiting for some kind of signal.

“What are you?” the bartender says, and again I shrug.

“Leaving,” I say, grinning. My gums will have settled down now, but I know there will still be something feral-looking about me for a day or two. The smell of cooking flesh fills the air as my hand continues to burn.

“We don’t want to see you around here again,” he says. “You come back and it’ll be you in that cage.”

I nod, though I’m sure he’s taken another look at the cage and realised that it wasn’t the man inside who caused the damage.

He turns his horse and gives it his heel, and in a moment he’s vanished over the crest of the road with Little Susie in tow. Bannigan stays put for a moment, hand stroking the butt of the shotgun lying across the saddle of his mare. I can’t help wondering what he’ll do, and I stare at him through the hazy air above my hand.

“Her name was Susie,” he says. “Remember that.”

He turns and follows the others, and I’m left alone. With a grimace I open my hand and peel the silver coin away from where it's started to fuse to my skin. Where I held it the skin is a mess of charred black flesh and angry blisters.

I let the coin fall to the ground and pull on my gloves, and once again I leave a town after only a few weeks of being there. Once again I begin my journey south – to the next town, and the people there, who won’t suspect a thing until I’ve already left, and will still remember me when I’m long gone.