To satisfy Rose I attended sessions with a therapist for six months with no progress. Either I was not insane or else he could not find what was wrong with me. I never told him that I was sure I wasn’t mad or even damaged.
I began to look more closely at my grandfather’s book and my own research so far into the occult powers in Southern Europe; in my trade as an antiques dealer I often came across books on the occult. At least the book offered me the glimmer of a possibility that I might understand what had happened to Annie.
It was the description of flying snakes at the end of the book which really caught my attention. I was desperate, and my memory of the creature’s appearance could fit the description in the book. Understanding this became a passion for me, gradually overwhelming all other daily thoughts.
What I couldn’t initially understand was the description in the book of all these ‘snake like’ things as wargs. In my experience – in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and many other classical works – wargs were described as moving on four legs and looking like very large dogs – in other words, wolf-like. I researched the etymology of the word ‘Warg’ and finally found an entry that offered an explanation:
The Old English word ‘wearg’.
Mary Gerstein, in an article, has attempted to equate the Germanic word ‘warg’ with ‘werwolf, but many experts now reject this. Warg and wearg can be traced back to a root that may have meant ‘strangler’.
As soon as I saw the word ‘strangler’, I thought of ‘constrictor’ and the family of snakes called ‘constrictors’. Perhaps an eyewitness in Medieval Europe had described the serpents as constrictors or stranglers and the writer, not having seen what they were writing of described them as Wargs. But then this didn’t make sense either. The only thing that did make sense was that the writer knew the true meaning of the word ‘warg’ and that the text was copied from a much older text, perhaps from as far back as the Dark Ages. The writer’s name was Edgar de Boulon and I had tried many times to find out more about him with no success.
I didn’t even know if he knew my family or not although my grandfather had claimed he had.