Once upon a working week there was a mother who lived in a small, country village with her two daughters, Meredith and Annabel. The mother was a good, hardworking woman who had lived in the village for the whole of her life. However, with two hungry children to feed in difficult financial times, she was unable to make enough money for the three of them to live comfortably. Eventually she had no choice but to move to the city where industry and profit were concepts more powerful than gods. Meredith and Annabel were upset to be leaving their home, but they were also very excited. They’d heard that the city was a wonderland of buildings whose roofs scraped holes in the sky and punctured the stars. But the mother was not so sure. Secretly, she felt that if not for the well-being of her daughters, she would never have left the house in the country, for she had heard rumours of the nightmare beasts that stalked the city upon nightfall and crept into the rooms of children to devour them…or worse.

On the day of the move, the mother was able to see the city for the first time. It was as if she had tripped and fallen down a rabbit hole, tumbling down into a fantasy land where the reality she had known was distorted by a mirror-house monstrosity. Their new home was in a block of flats. They climbed a long, dingy staircase because the only lift looked so old that the mother did not trust it not to break and trap them inside. On each floor there were two doors on each side of the hall, each which led to a flat. When they opened their door, Annabel and Meredith were delighted with this new world and they asked their mother: ‘Oh mother! Do you think that we could reach the clouds if we leaned out of the window far enough?’ But the mother was quite alarmed and scolded her daughters: ‘Under no circumstances are you to lean out of the window, for if you fall you will surely touch the clouds in Heaven!’

On the second day after they had moved, there was a knock on the door. Annabel and Meredith looked up in surprise from where they were playing. ‘I wonder who that could be,’ Meredith said. ‘We don’t know anybody here.’ The mother was not expecting company, but she did not want to appear rude and so she opened the door. However, as soon as she had done so, she found that she could not move, so gripped with fear was she. Standing in the threshold was a large, grey wolf that stood on its hind legs like a man. It was wearing a neat black suit with a crisp, white shirt and a silk tie. When it saw her, it drew back its lips into a terrible grin filled with the longest, sharpest teeth that the mother had ever seen. She stared in horror as the beast began to speak in a snarling, growling voice.

‘Good day,’ it said, and a thread of drool hung from its lip. ‘Please excuse my late welcome but I was away when you arrived. I live in the flat next door and thought that I should greet my new neighbour.’ Its eyes were cunning, and the mother knew at once that it was a monster of the sort she had been warned about. She stepped back in fear, but Annabel and Meredith, unaware of the danger, ran forwards to see their new neighbour. The wolf turned its gaze upon them and tried again its crude imitation of a human smile. ‘My, what beautiful children you have!’ it exclaimed and it bent its huge head full of glistening teeth towards them. ‘You are like beautiful marzipan dolls with sugar-spun dresses and caramel tresses,’ it told them, and its belly rumbled.

But now the terror that the mother felt swelled up inside her like a balloon and pressed against her insides until she felt that it would surely rip her apart. Quickly, she said to the wolf: ‘I am sorry but it is time for our lunch,’ and although he tried to hide the hunger in his eyes, he could not.

‘My apologies,’ said the wolf. ‘I did not realise that I had come at an inconvenient time. Perhaps I will return in a few days and see you and your beautiful daughters again.’ And as soon as he had gone, the mother shut the door quickly and locked it to make sure that he could not get back in.

Later that night, as the mother tucked her children into bed, she spoke to them sternly about the wolf: ‘When I am out of the house you must lock the door and if he comes knocking you must be quiet and pretend that you are not home. You are not to speak to him and you must not go near him unless I am with you.’ And the two girls promised that they would.

The children kept their promise for a week, until one day when the mother was climbing the stairs after a day of work, she heard them talking and laughing above her. She ran up the stairs as fast as she could and saw them standing in the hallway talking with the wolf. The beast looked up at her and grinned its unnatural grin. ‘Hello, neighbour,’ it greeted her in its growling, snarling voice. ‘I was returning home when I came across these two beautiful marzipan dolls with sugar-spun dresses and caramel tresses. Are they yours?’ The children laughed and the woman felt the balloon inside her grow. She hastily picked up her children and took them into their home before it choked her.

‘Why did you break your promise?’ she asked angrily. They looked at her in surprise for they had quite forgotten the promise they had made. That night when they were in bed, the mother sat by the window, bathed in the strange, neon light of the city with the longest, sharpest knife she could find resting on her lap. For although she could not keep the wolf from the door, she could keep him from reaching her daughters’ beds.

For two weeks after that night, Meredith and Annabel kept their promise. One evening, as she was preparing supper, the mother found that she did not have enough food. She told her daughters that she would be back soon and left the flat in order to buy more. Once she returned, she reached the door only for her heart to stop as she found it wide open. She rushed inside and called her daughters’ names but there was no reply. She did not know what to do, until she heard faint, familiar laughter from the flat next door. Slowly, she stepped into the hallway and saw that the wolf’s door was ajar and from behind it she could hear her daughters laughing and playing and not thinking at all about the promise that they had made. Inside the mother’s body, the balloon burst with a silent, violent pop.

Meredith and Annabel had been playing quite contentedly in the wolf’s flat when their mother opened the door, and now they remembered, too late. ‘Oh Mother!’ they cried. ‘Forgive us! We had forgotten our promise!’ But their mother took them by their hands without a word and led them back into their home.

‘My poor children, you do not understand the danger that you are in,’ she told them in a low but steady voice. ‘You were foolish and the wolf nearly devoured you. But now I understand that there is only one way that I can make sure the wolf will not harm my beautiful children.’ And she sounded so odd and looked at them so strangely that her daughters were almost scared.

‘But Mother,’ asked Meredith, ‘Why are you crying?’

Her mother smiled, and it seemed to the children that she was not smiling at all, but baring her teeth. ‘Am I?’ she asked, as if she had not felt her own tears. ‘No matter, you will be safe soon. Shush now, my children, and know that I love you.’

She reached for the longest, sharpest knife that sat on the windowsill.

‘I love you,’ she said.

***

A little while later, the mother sat slumped on the floor. She was smiling, but her whole body trembled. She resembled a string-cut puppet; a mannequin with painted-on features, left in the slaughterhouse. She was speaking a sleep-talker’s tongue, half drowned in wakefulness. ‘Marzipan dolls,’ she was murmuring. ‘Marzipan. Ha! What a liar! Oh wolf, you were wrong: children are never as sweet as they look. Only a mother could tell you that.’ Something red and not at all sweet spilled from her mouth as she spoke, but she made no move to wipe it; there was no point as her hands were as red as her breath.

A knock on the door made her peer up through the blur, and she heard a voice call through the wood, ‘Oh neighbour! I apologise if your children were told to stay in their home, but they were so hungry and lonely. I only thought that maybe I could feed them until you returned -’

A head peered around the door and the voice stopped abruptly. The mother frowned for she heard no trace of a snarl or a growl. ‘Aha,’ she slurred, ‘Wolf! I have won! For which place is safer for children from monsters than inside the very body that gave them life?’ As the wolf sank to the ground and retched at the sight of her children, the mother choked back a sob. And in the dim, crimson light of the sunset, just for a second, she thought that he looked almost like a man.