MicroHorror

A zombie is pounding on my door. He’s big, angry and hungry and smells like the rotting flesh that his body has now become. His voodoo mistress has sent him to my hideout shack here in the abandoned sugarcane fields near the bayou.

And he is not alone. Through a crack in the panel wall I can see dozens of stiff zombies, standing waist-deep in the splintered cane rows, eyes staring but not really seeing, waiting for the feast to come. And that feast is me.

The night is dark, rainclouds obscure the harvest moon, but the zombies’ eyes shine with an unnatural glow, like the strange lights that rise from the bayou’s muck and sulfur pits. If this is not a glimpse of Hell, it’s as close as I want to get.

I know who sent them. Only one person could command a full army of the risen, decaying dead: Madame Halli, the voodoo queen of this area. We had crossed paths in the bad part of the city, where I had been forced to hide, and where she conducts her business, unholy and evil as it is. A runaway girl, Mira, whom I had met a few days before, and formed a friendship with out of necessity to keep my location a secret, was a slave of Madame Halli’s. Only fifteen, Mira was bound to Halli, traded by her own father so he could be freed of the Madame’s hold on him. Her tentacles are long and tight, and without mercy. Mira was forced to work as a prostitute, one of Halli’s many business operations.

Mira brought me food and news, sheltering me in one of the rooms she used for her customers; yesterday I gave her enough money to escape this life and Madame Halli, putting Mira on the bus myself. I must have been seen, and all things are reported to Halli in this area of the city. After evading some of her heavily scarred goon enforcers and their blood-stained machetes, I took off on the run again.

This old cane-drying shack has been my hideout ever since. Not much, but it’s protection from the elements, and it is isolated. The door is shaking on its worn hinges now as the zombie pounds relentlessly. He has his command and nothing will stop him. An eerie hum vibrates through the damp air from the zombies waiting in the cane field. They want to feed. They can smell my warm blood, coursing through my living veins.

The clouds part and a huge, full moon shines down, bathing the whole area with a cold, white illumination. Now the tables will turn.

I can feel the change coming, and the strong moonlight on me only increases it. The hair, really fur, pops out in tufts, the claws and fangs begin to poke out of my skin and gums, the ears become pointed and elongate. This is why I must constantly run and hide. I am cursed. I am a werewolf.

But for once, my curse will prove useful. As my human intelligence rapidly dissipates, I laugh through my pain as muscles stretch on my body, tearing my clothes, for I know that I will enjoy ripping all those zombies to shreds. My anger will fuel it, and I can imagine how easy it will be to claw apart the dead flesh of zombies, leaving only twitching limbs and heads floating in the bayou slime. Then back across the sugarcane fields to the city to find Madame Halli herself. I’m a wolf; I have her scent, and I can track her.

The door gives way and the zombie lumbers in; my change is nearly complete, and I slash so deeply across his stomach that he collapses in two wet pieces to the floor.

The snowmen were getting smarter. And their army grew daily.

At first, despite its strangeness, it was more of an annoyance than a serious threat. Snowmen, alone or in pairs, rolled up to people walking and accosted them, as best they could with their thin stick arms. A simple push bowled them over and left the snowman flailing on the lawn.

Eventually they discovered how to pull each other up. And they began collecting into groups of three and four, safety in numbers proving to be a good idea for snowmen too. Next they started using the brooms and shovels they were decorated with as weapons to harass people to stay indoors, keeping the citizenry isolated and barricaded against this winter enemy. At night they roamed the front yards like sentries, maintaining an ominous watch.

Later we discovered they were using the nighttime to build more snowmen. Soon snowmen wearing mittens learned how make and lob snowballs, actually ice balls, at passing cars and buses, cracking windows, and hitting any individual foolish enough to venture outside when a roving gang of them were in the neighborhood.

After a successful ice ball attack, as if in triumph, a faint, cold, wheezy sound came from the snowmen like some kind of otherworldly, demonic laughter.

Things got serious then. The town was under siege. That was when the snowmen upped the ante; they learned to use their carrot noses as knives, and throw, with amazing accuracy, their rock buttons. Top hats became boomerang weapons while brooms and shovels functioned as quarterstaffs and battleaxes, respectively.

No human was safe any longer. It was war–ironically, the ultimate Cold War. And the enemy could rebuild himself and make as many more troops as there was snow.

Snow. Right in the middle of this nightmare, it began snowing. The snowmen were getting reinforcements, and there was nothing we humans could do about it.

Then the snowmen got clever. While forcing us to stay inside, the snowmen disrupted the telephone system, disabled the electricity, and froze the town’s water supply and gas station tanks. Many melted that night in the attempt, but more snowmen were quickly created. All cell phones had been mysteriously in a dead zone since the snowmen appeared.

People starting dying, found frozen in the morning, mouths and lungs full of snow when they tried to escape. The snowmen were preparing for the final assault. The end was here, and it would be a cold one.

On Christmas Eve, a wind came up. Snowmen all over the city looked overhead at the dark sky in anticipation of new snow. Nature seemed to be supporting them. Our hope had run out.

But the next morning held a surprise. The wind turned out to be a warm one, blowing in from the west, and steadily raised the temperature. The clouds overhead were gone and bright sunlight streamed through, helping melt the ground snow and warm things up. The temperature climbed into the forties, and pandemonium erupted.

Snowmen rolled about in panic and various degrees of melting. Some had lost most of their faces, the coal eyes and carrots had dropped off, their rock mouths drooped in grotesque patterns, leaving them helpless. Many had no limbs left, the streets littered with flopping tree branches and desperately flexing mittens.

People came outside and stared, transfixed by the spectacle. In thirty minutes, the snowmen were gone, reduced to thick water, muddy ice and collapsed accessories. The reign of terror was over as quickly as it had begun.

No one ever spoke about those few frightening days, and people went on with their ordinary, everyday lives, putting the whole strange ordeal behind them, acting as though nothing unusual had ever occurred.

No one knew why it had happened, or tried to find out the reason, but silently, inside our safe, warm houses, we all wondered what would happen when next winter came. We hoped it would be a warm, dry one.

She said she was a shapeshifter, at which I laughed, attributing it to her slightly drunken state, then told her that she didn’t need to change at all, her present shape looked pretty good to me. She could have been a centerfold in any of the men’s magazines. A real knockout.

She said her name was Talbot, a funny name for a girl, but she made it work. I’m Cassidy. We had met in this dismal bar, seeking shelter from the rainstorm outside; one thing led to another, and soon we were drinking buddies, then before long, we were making out in the hallway to the restrooms.

Talbot was one hot little minky, and in a throaty voice through half-closed striking blue eyes she suggested that we continue this at her place, which wasn’t very far away. It seemed like a good idea.

We laughed as we ran through the rain, the full moon and streetlights of Portland providing just enough light to see by. Talbot suddenly turned down a dark alley, running with surprising speed and grace for someone balancing in high heels on slippery asphalt.

“I’m soaked,” she said in her little girl voice, peeling off her coat and ducking into a deep doorway designed for sheltered deliveries. I followed Talbot, noticing her thin dress was dripping wet, and that she was not wearing any underwear. Everything that counted was perfectly outlined.

“Kiss me, Cassidy,” she demanded, grabbing me with incredible strength for someone so small. Her kiss ended with a nip to my lip. Before I could react, Talbot licked the drop of blood from the cut, rolling it on her tongue.

“Let’s do it,” she cried, ripping her dress off, “right here, right now. Momma’s hungry.” She shivered in her nakedness, prancing out into the middle of the alley, in the still pouring rain, and when the clouds moved so that the moon was visible, she shook. Shook like a creature possessed. Her body changed, got larger, more muscular, hair, then fur, sprouted everywhere as her head elongated, a snout pushed out, ears shot up, fangs protruded and a howl, a werewolf howl, shattered the night’s quiet.

She turned to me, standing on her powerful hind legs, hand claws ready for my blood, muscle and guts. Of course, in the few minutes of her transformation, I hadn’t been idle. Or shocked. I’d pulled out my Azrael .666 holy revolver from its shoulder holster and flicked the safety off.

As she sailed through the air in her killing lunge, I fired an etherblast that lit up the alley and ripped a hole the size of a cherry pie through her chest. My second shot exploded into her open jaws, virtually tearing her lupine head off. I stepped aside as the dead werewolf hit the asphalt, killed in mid-leap.

Oh, did I forget to tell you, I’m a demon slayer? Always prepared, that’s me. I could smell the werewolf on her in the bar, full moon and all, so I decided I would be her prey tonight. Turnabout is fair play, after all.

I traced the cut on my lip with my tongue; it had clotted now. Luckily, Talbot had bitten me while she was still human, so no curse of the werewolf for me.

Talbot was starting to shapeshift grotesquely back to human, so I reached into my pocket, pulled out a nugget of Heavenly Host QuickFire, broke it in half and tossed the brightly flaring pieces onto the corpse. It disintegrated the body in seconds despite the rain which was still coming down hard. Just another day at the office.

It all started with a grilled cheese sandwich. Then things went horribly wrong.

It was a bad grilled cheese sandwich that tasted like a rubber boot dipped in rotten mayo. My girlfriend, Charlotte, and I use that term loosely, as she was mainly just a “girl-right-now,” who wouldn’t be lasting much longer, in fact, had probably lasted too long already.

I spit out the bite of sandwich in my mouth and threw the rest of it across the kitchen, where it stuck to the far wall, slowly sliding its way down, leaving a greasy, sickly yellow stain.

“You bastard,” Charlotte yelled, and since things between us had deteriorated, she was quick to anger these days, and her temper was something. Something bad.

“I’m tried of your lousy cooking,” I screamed back jumping up, my chair slamming into the wall. “And it’s not just your cooking. It’s everything about you–the way you eat, walk, talk, sleep, even how you brush your teeth. It annoys me. Drives me crazy.”

“Me? What about you, you lazy, drunken excuse for a man?”

We shouted back and forth about our numerous failings for some time until I decided to play the trump card. “Well, at least I was faithful in this pitiful relationship of ours,” I seethed, knowing this was a lie, but one that would enrage her even more. I didn’t care at this point.

“You’re one to talk; you’re carrying on with Jessica, my best friend. Former best friend. And you have no idea what you’re dealing with with her–she’s a witch, so when she tires of you, or you cheat on her, revenge will be worse than you can possibly imagine.”

“I think your spelling is off, like everything else is about you. Yeah, sleeping with her was a lot better than with you.” I wasn’t sleeping with Jessica, hardly knew her, but since Charlotte was insanely jealous, and everything was coming to a head now, why not pull out all of the stops? “Jessica is one hot little package, so maybe I’ll move in with her and live with a sane woman for a change.”

Charlotte’s eyes blazed for a moment, and then she seemed to calm down, smiled weakly at me before replying, “You’re right. This relationship is over. So,” Charlotte grabbed a particularly big kitchen knife from the knife rack on the counter and swung it wildly at me, “why don’t you just die!”

Another fast slice of the knife nicked my hand, and blood starting flowing, which only further energized Charlotte, who made a grand killing arc with the knife, which I quickly avoided, but the strong sweep of the stabbing motion brought the knife right back into Charlotte’s own stomach, a deep puncture wound.

She bled to death before an ambulance could arrive. Explanations of what happened to the police, reconstruction of the crime, the angle of the knife wound, and all that, proved my innocence and “accidental suicide” was the ruling.

So it’s a week later, I’m trapped in my bedroom, hearing my bolted front door being ripped off of its hinges in single-minded fury. Charlotte was sorta correct; Jessica wasn’t actually a witch, more like a shaman, but when she heard what happened to Charlotte, she decided that I needed to pay for it.

Using her occult powers, Jessica raised Charlotte’s body, a zombie on a mission to kill me with the superhuman strengthen her resurrected body now possessed. Decaying and mouth sewn shut (part of the zombie process, I guess), I watched her stumbling down tonight’s dark street, obviously coming for her revenge.

Now zombie-Charlotte knocks the bedroom door off its hinges, and I blast both barrels of my shotgun directly at her head. Half of it grins back at me through a sewn-shut mouth, and I start screaming like hell as she grabs my tongue and eyeballs, and jerks them out. Then in agony and silent blackness, I feel her slowly ripping me limb from limb.

I think it was Mark Twain who said San Francisco was a natural home for ghosts, with the fog and all. He was sorta right about that. When I arrived the city was blanketed with the thickest fog I have ever encountered. Maybe this demon knew I was coming. But I had no choice. Delphi (on high) had given me the call. Simple as that.

I took a room in an old North Beach hotel and waited. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long. In my line of work, the client comes to you, one way or the other.

The phone rang and woke me up. I mumbled “Hello, this is Cassidy,” and heard an unholy voice rasp “Come find me, dickhead,” before the line went dead.

Game on, I guess. I checked my equipment and went out into the pea-soup fog. It was wet and cold, a typical San Francisco day in October.

I didn’t know what this hellspawn looked like, but it sounded like a he. I imagined he would know me by sight. Or he would if I didn’t have a little pouch of “glamour dust” to give me an advantage.

I walked down through North Beach’s Italian section, passing the few people who ventured out in this fog, but after all, they lived here so were used to it. I could feel the demon was close, but all of these people were fellow humans, blissfully unaware of what was hiding among them.

The vibes got stronger as I reached Broadway and Chinatown. The demon was here somewhere, but what form had he taken to blend in with humanity?

Something drew me into the City Lights Bookstore, at the corner of Broadway and Columbus Avenue. Yeah, he was in here, somewhere. Not that big a store, but crowded at this hour of the day as a good escape from the chilly fog. No one stood out to me, but I could sense his presence. Carefully I checked out everyone in the bookstore, as I pretended to be browsing.

Something about this one guy drew my attention though. He looked… familiar, like I should recognize him. On a whim, I went upstairs and found a book that could help me. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The dust jacket had a photo of the author. The same guy whom I saw downstairs. Jack Kerouac. This demon just made his big mistake, choosing the form of someone dead for 40 years, and well known enough to stand out like a sore thumb to anyone who studies modern literature. Like me.

“Jack” was leaving the bookstore when I came downstairs. He was probably overdue for his fix. I followed him out into the fog and down the street, until he ducked quickly into a narrow Chinatown alley.

The fog had settled in the alley, but I heard a muffled cry coming from deep within it. Rushing forward, I saw the demon had dropped his Kerouac appearance and stood as his hideous self, holding a frightened Chinese woman aloft, preparing to bite her head off and drink the blood he needed to remain on this earthly plane.

He looked me up and down, laughing like a thunderclap. “So, little girl, maybe I do you after I snack on this old hag?” he growled.

I guess the “glamour dust” make me appear as a young, attractive girl to him. Well, this “little girl” had a big gun in her “dress.” I pulled my Azrael .666 holy revolver out of my jacket and fired it squarely between his monstrous eyes.

The etherblast from it blew off the top of his head, driving his sharp horns in the alley’s walls as holy light ricocheted off the bricks and ripped all through his collapsing form.

The Chinese lady landed comfortably on a stack of vegetables, blissfully unconscious.

Time to call in the clean-up crew, although I think Delphi is already on that. She knows everything before it happens.

The saying is “when it rains, it pours,” and although it’s meant figuratively, now it is literally true. It has rained here in Kansas every day for a month and all day long, making one soupy, drippy mess out of the environment and civilization. What’s left of it.
 
Did I mention it was acid rain? No, not the kind you are probably thinking of, that hard rain full of acidic sulfur and nitrogen compounds, but a real acid rain. LSD. Mixed with the drizzle and pounding us, along with most of the rest of the US, daily. God knows where it came from, or how it is even possible.
 
Of course the problem is keeping it from dosing you, and that isn’t easy. Sure, you can keep your mouth shut and wear a surgical mask, but it can ooze through exposed skin in time, so you have to be covered head to toe in a makeshift bio-suit if you need to go out in it. And since the rain never stops, that becomes a necessity.
 
Some people on the still-functioning late night radio stations (TV towers shorted out the first week, and the link to communications satellites must be blocked by the heavy, omnipresent clouds so cell phones and computers are out) think it’s aliens. Softening us up for an alien invasion.
 
Not a new idea and not an unexpected one either, given how trippy everyone’s mind is. The conspiracy nuts on the radio say that aliens from some distant world have picked Earth for harvesting (whatever that means) and seeded the artificially created clouds with LSD, inundating us with it, so we are tripping and hallucinating most of the time and couldn’t mount a defense if our lives depended on it, which, to the conspiracy nuts, it does. First the US, then the rest of the countries in descending order of viable military threat. The radio stations will let anyone ramble on as they need to fill the long hours from dusk to dawn, and the DJs are high as kites too.
 
The other day I thought I saw a tall, seven-foot maybe, dark green alien with enormous black eyes and jagged mouth full of delicate fangs skulking around the little park at the end of our block. But it was, no doubt, an LSD hallucination fueled by the fantasies of those dosed dimwits on the radio. Aliens roaming around in the middle of Kansas. I’m losing it.
 
Of course, this acid rain would be an effective strategy; disorient the enemy so completely they couldn’t what is real and what isn’t. Then just round up the helpless civilians and, maybe, I dunno, eat them with those numerous and wicked fangs that I imagined seeing. Now I sound as crazy as those acid casualties on the radio.

Wait, something is finally happening to that massive cloudbank overhead. Dark shapes, round, saucer-like, hundreds, maybe thousands of them are floating down. No, not floating–flying; they’re vehicles, some kind of airplane or… spacecraft. The first few are landing already. I can see their metal tripod legs extending and pushing into the soggy ground. Hatchways are opening and tall green creatures are exiting in military formation. And it has finally stopped raining.
 
Wow, if I didn’t think this was just another LSD hallucination, I would be scared shitless right now.

Kyle and Mindy liked it when Grandpa came over. He told the best bedtime stories. Although Kyle was now at the age where he doubted the logic in some of Grandpa’s wild tales.

“So you both tucked in nice and comfy?” Grandpa asked, sitting down in the old rocking chair.

“Yes,” said Mindy.

“Tell us a scary story, Grandpa. One with a spooky monster,” Kyle requested. Those were his favorite when Grandpa didn’t go too far off the deep end.

“Well, now…” Grandpa rocked for a bit and thought. “Have you ever heard about the Bone Shatterer?”

“No,” the kids said in unison, and Mindy pulled the covers up to her chin.

“Oh, he’s a terrible monster, he is. Lives in bogs and swamps, like here in Louisiana. He’s just a skeleton, all covered with leaves, vines and gunk from the swamps, so he looks kinda like a swamp-resurrected man.”

“A dirty man,” Mindy piped up.

“Except his skull head is completely clean and deathly white, with a ring of hellfire dancing across the top. That’s what gives him life and his fiendish power.”

“What’s that?” Kyle was drawn in despite his cynicism.

Grandpa stopped rocking. “The Bone Shatterer searches for bad people, people who hurt other people, who cheat and lie and steal. And who kill.” Grandpa leaned close to the children. “And when he finds them, he clutches hold of their arms in his steely grip and he shakes them. Shakes them hard.”

“And then what happens?”

“He keeps on a-shaking ’em, so hard and so fast, that their bones shatter into pieces, then smaller fragments, then into nothing more than bone dust. Afterwards he carries off the limp bag of flesh that was once human and drops it into a deep part of the swamp, where it sinks out of sight forever.” Grandpa’s eyes glittered with a strange fire. “And their soul goes to eternal punishment. That the Bone Shatterer’s job–to send those who belong in hell down there.”

“Golly,” breathed Mindy, her eyes wide.

“Ah, that’s impossible. How could anything be strong enough to shatter bones through flesh by just shaking?” Kyle challenged.

“It’s a demon power, so it doesn’t follow the laws of nature. Strange things come out of the swamp.”

“But don’t the people fight back or try to escape by running away?”

Grandpa sat back in his chair. “Oh, they try, alright. But you see, the Bone Shatterer fixes ’em with a horrible stare that paralyzes them, that bright hellfire burning in those empty eye sockets. They’re helpless to do anything but feel their bones crumble to dust in his grip.”

Mindy pulled the covers over her head. “Ah, that’s too unreal to make sense–“ Kyle started.

“What do you mean, ‘unreal?’ You believe a radioactive spider’s bite can give a teenager powers,” Grandpa muttered.

“Yeah, but–”

“Okay, that’s enough. Just be sure you’re a good boy and girl, and you’ll never have to worry about the Bone Shatterer looking for you. Good night, you two. Sleep tight.”

“I believe the story, Grandpa,” Mindy said from under the covers.

Kyle gave up, and Grandpa clicked off the bedroom light.

Grandpa went downstairs and outside, back into an old weathered shack under the cypress trees. “Too unreal to make sense,” he mumbled to himself. With a mystical flourish, he pulled off his flesh and hung it on a hook in the wall. It looked like an odd, creepy Halloween costume, a human suit to wear, complete with eyes and hair.

The hellfire ignited over his head and blazed in his empty eye sockets. He had justice to dispense tonight, some people who needed to feel the sharp agony of his touch.

And then he would put Grandpa’s flesh back on and see if his tenth-generation grandchildren were sleeping peacefully, and be sure that Mindy was covered up against the chill night air.

After about a month, Mal’s girlfriend decided to move out. Patti was not the first girl to leave Mal and his house. He understood. His house, old and haunted, had been the site of a brutal murder-suicide back in the 1950s, some fifty years ago. It made all the papers back then, being the goriest crime to ever happen in the small town of River Fall. Eventually the town moved on to other news, but the tragedy in the house remained.

Mal often heard odd noises in the night and occasionally found things moved around in the kitchen where the deaths had occurred. He sometimes felt spirits there, but they didn’t bother him, so he didn’t bother them. Mal was the kind of person who didn’t think too deeply or worry about things; he took things as they came and was perfectly content to let others call the shots. He did have some strange dreams where ghosts told him stuff, asked him to do something, but he couldn’t remember what it was when he awoke.

He would miss Patti though; Mal had loaded the old Smith & Wesson .45 that he had found hidden under a kitchen floor panel with the two bullets that someone (or something) had left conveniently on the kitchen table. Oh well, there was always his next roommate.

Victor was always afraid of the monster in his closet, which is why his abusive and drunk father often locked him in there as punishment, laughing at the boy’s desperate cries to be let out. Victor could feel the monster’s hot breath and smell his stink, and Victor tried to take up as little room as possible, hugging against the worn door as hard as possible, making himself as flat and tiny as he could. Victor didn’t know exactly where the monster was in the closet, but it wasn’t that large an area, so he wasn’t taking any chances.

Eventually, after Victor had been locked in the closet dozens of times, he began talking to the monster and became friends of a sort with it. No one had ever talked to him before, the monster said, so he had a lot to say. He told Victor that his name was Norff, and that he had lived in various closets in this apartment house on the west side of downtown Manhattan since it was built some 90 years ago. His cousin lived under the bed in an apartment on the fifth floor, in a four-year-old girl’s bedroom.

Norff said that he consumed fear, which was strong in children, particularly children terrified of the dark, monsters and being locked away. He had never had a friend, since everyone was either afraid of him or didn’t believe that he existed. Others’ fear filled him up, Norff said, made him strong and savage, which was fitting for a hideous monster, if indeed he was hideous since it was pitch black in the closet.

Victor didn’t mind being locked in the closet now, in fact he preferred it to being with his violent and mean father, and his mother, who was gone most of the time, since she too was afraid of her husband. Norff was nice to him, and told him great fanciful stories about his monster life and the things he had done in his very long life. Victor told him about the outside world and what he did at school, and what life was like with his awful parents.

One particular night, when Victor’s father was really out of control, threatening to cut Victor’s ears off and stuff them in his disrespectful mouth, Victor ran into the closet and slammed the door shut. His enraged father threw the door open, bellowing for Victor to come out, and when he didn’t, the father reached angrily into the darkness amid the hanging coats. Norff pulled him all the way in and then turned Victor’s father completely inside out, a gooey, dripping mass of muscles, veins, nerves, organs and fluids which he casually tossed back outside the closet door. Victor’s father wriggled horribly on the floor for a few minutes, convulsed violently a couple of times, and then stopped.

Victor coaxed Norff out of the closet, and Norff didn’t look so bad after all. He seemed to get more normal looking the longer he stayed out in the light. He showered, shaved, put on aftershave and some of Victor’s father’s clothes, and in a couple of days no one in Manhattan gave him a second glance. Even Victor’s mother thought Norff was an improvement and decided to stay home more. He became Victor’s new father and both enjoyed much better lives.

“So how is your uncle doing?”

Mike shrugged. “About the same. Still believes he’s a…”

“Werewolf?” Gerry offered, looking away so he wouldn’t embarrass Mike any more than he already was.

“Yeah.”

Mike’s Uncle Leo was locked away in the Siodmak Asylum. People with wild and sometimes dangerous delusions were confined there and hopefully cured in time. It was the best treatment available in 1958.

Uncle Leo was found, naked, bloody and unconscious, next to a dead dog on County Road 6 at daybreak a month ago. He told the police he was a werewolf and had killed the dog in his werewolf form, which, of course, had reversed at dawn. The dog had been ripped apart. Police figured he used heavy-duty hunting knives. So Leo was committed to Siodmak.

“It’s too bad. I always liked your Uncle Leo, he was a good guy.”

Mike’s temper flared. “He’ll be all right, he’ll get cured, get his sanity back, and he will be fine again.” The two teenagers sat on the secluded cliff, overlooking Ankers River down below. The location was used as a lover’s lane by the small New England town’s high school population. It was a wet October so the river was high. Fog drifted around the banks.

Gerry stood up, stretched and kicked at a rock. “I heard Leo has a pentagram on his skin.”

Mike tossed a rock down into the river. “I think he cut it into himself, as, you know, proof that he was a…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Are you going to go visit him?”

“I have already.”

“How does he seem?”

“Totally convinced that he is a werewolf. And fearful of the next full moon; you know how the ‘curse’ works.” Mike leaned back on the weathered, and damp, picnic table. “He’s afraid he’ll escape and hurt somebody.”

“If he can escape Siodmak, he is a werewolf.” Mike shot Gerry an injured look, and Gerry added, “Sorry; I was just kidding, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Mike shook his head. “I know. It’s just… difficult. Kids snickering behind my back at school. Making werewolf faces and gestures from their cars. Especially that Ralph B., and his snooty girlfriend, Maria. They’re the worst. The ringleaders. God, how I hate them.” Mike got emphatic then. “Leo’s not a werewolf; he just had a nervous breakdown. That’s all. It happens to a lot of people.”

It got colder as the sun dipped lower in the sky. “We better head back home,” Gerry said, “be night soon.”

“Yeah,” Mike said sarcastically, “a full moon. And we know what that means.”

Mike’s phone woke him up. His alarm clock read 1:05. “Hello,” he mumbled.

“Mike? It’s Gerry. Have you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Your uncle. Let me start at the beginning. A rainstorm blew through town around midnight, I guess, and the electricity went out. Power at Siodmak shut down. The door locks were opened and several people escaped, including Leo.”

“Why would he do that?” Mike sat up on the edge of the bed, “he wanted to be confined tonight.”

“Maybe he did, but… Listen, police were checking lover’s lane tonight and found the mangled bodies of Ralph and Maria. It’s all over the police band.” Gerry listened to police calls on his ham radio set.

“Holy crap,” Mike replied, “who would do that to–”

Gerry interrupted, “Did you tell your uncle how much you hated them?”

“Yeah, during my last visit with him.” Mike collected his thoughts. “Wait a minute, are you saying that Uncle Leo really is…”

“A werewolf? Yes. His room at Siodmak was ripped apart too, everything shredded, apparently before the electricity opened the door, and he went on the hunt.”

Mike walked to his window and opened it. “That’s crazy.”

From somewhere out near the Ankers River, Mike heard a wolf howl cut through the night.