The Garden (A Short Story)

In late Victorian England, anthropologist Sir Colin Scott Cross sets out to find the historical location of the Garden of Eden.An early short story by Charles Sheehan-Miles, author of the indie bestseller Republic: A Novel of America's Future.Zelf, a Welfing, a humanoid wolf, is lost in a hostile alternate universe: the world of 1935 London. Will she ever get home to First Den? But the unthinkable happens: she impresses on Zev the werewolf, standing in his wolf form gazing at her on the docks. This is book one in the Steam Submarine series. If you like Tolkien, CS Lewis, Fringe, Susanna Clarke's supernatural alternate histories, Naomi Novik, you will love this paranormal alternate history adventure. Download now and be captivated!Proloup: Reflexion of a WolfThere was no sound but for the steady murmuring of the drizzling rain pelting the submarine’s hull. In the shiny brass dashboard she caught a glimpse of her own reflexion. Bright golden eyes stared back at her, and in the shadow of her grey cape she glimpsed the grey and white fur on her muzzle and ears, and the wet black nose of a wolf.She bared her teeth at her own visual echo and growled a deeply satisfying growl.In this realm, she was the monster.If she was caught they would surely kill her, or even worse, in this strange world of vivisection and animal experimentation, she would end up in a laboratory somewhere, being prodded by sticks and pricked with needles and cut apart by knives, so that human scientists could see what it was that made her different from everything else.In her home, in her cubhood the monsters in the fairytales and stories were all humans: evil hunters with their guns and bombs and bad knights slashing and killing with swords and pikestaffs; crazed, savage, barbaric men.In the Red Riding Hood story in her world, the heroine was a wolf cub, and her grandmother was killed by a woodsman who lay in wait in Red Riding Hood’s bed for her to return, lying there inside her grandmother’s skin that had been flayed from the poor unfortunate old wolf matriarch. It was not a comforting story, and it did not end nicely, not in the version she knew. She did not like to think of the end of it - that one was not a story for cubs. But she had to admit that, despite its gruesomeness, there was a grain of truth in it.Hmph.In the Fallen Realms, she thought to herself, something is broken in the very fabric of the world - fruit and vegetables are no longer nutritious enough to sustain life - Zelf had almost died of malnutrition before she finally relented and ate meat, and only because she would not have been able to fulfil her mission if she had died.Hunting was not a pleasure for her; it was a sad necessity. She always killed her prey quickly and cleanly, and only took what she needed.