The Wolf -Chapter V: The Room

V: The Room

1.
Adrian sat on a stool at the kitchen island, elbows on the counter supporting his head, staring down at the brown package with his name scrawled on it.
The night before he had had two dreams, one after the other, neither of them particularly pleasant. He recalled only vague impressions of the second, and though the first was fading in his mind’s eye Adrian still knew the basic gist of it.
A large building, some kind of hospital, in a snowy place in the mountains, surrounded by trees. It was long abandoned, and in the frame of the dream he had known that at some point in the past, everyone inside had been murdered. It had been empty as he approached it, some windows boarded over, police tape across the entrance.
Then he was inside, and though it had been cleaned to some extent, still there were faded stains along the walls and ceiling where blood had been splattered. And it came to him that this had never been a good place. Experiments had been performed here, on the body and on the mind, neither of which had yielded positive results.
Inside the building he found a steel room frighteningly similar to his own. It was scarred and dented, and along one wall a phrase had actually been carved into the steel: There is no difference between GENESIS and APOCALYPSE.
Thinking about this now, Adrian could not grasp the meaning of the sentence. Genesis was the beginning, and apocalypse was the ending, yes? The two were opposites.
His brain throbbed from the hangover and the headache and the now almost completely gone memory, and he had to make an effort to remember the other one.
The second dream had only been a conversation, and a short one, but it had been frightening and he had woken up with tears running down his face. He thought he remembered his mother saying something that ended in “find you,” but couldn’t entirely be sure.
Katy was still asleep when he had gotten out of bed, himself feeling unsettled and sickly from the headache that was pounding its way at the front of his skull. He had regarded her shrouded figure with more than a smile on his face, and had only barely resisted the urge to pat himself on the back. Now he sat at the counter with an empty mug sitting in front of him, the sound and smell of brewing coffee already making him feel more awake.
It had occurred to him to get out the sugar, and of course there he had set the box. Somehow it had slipped his mind, through all the talk and all the drinking, and the haze of unsavory things that followed.
But now it was on his mind. Now it was sitting right in front of him, its contents a frightening unknown.
Adrian took a small knife from the cutting block and slit the twine wrapped around the brown paper exterior. On the side, a single piece of tape held the paper in place. He cut this and removed the box.

2.
It was entirely blank, and no tape held it shut. Its wings were folded shut, and Adrian considered these for a long time.
What did he have to fear? After all, it was just a box. Probably some neighborhood thing, a prize drawing or such.
But a sick fear lay in the pit of his stomach anyway. No one would have been able to stand in front of his door and then vanish in such a way when he opened it. And further, Adrian did not know for sure that anyone in the neighborhood knew he had taken on his father’s- his adopted father’s last name.
Just open it you damned coward, the voice rang out. Adrian realized that it had not spoken a word in almost a whole day.
Adrian did not make a habit of talking back, but he was in such a good mood now that he couldn’t help but to be jovial.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” he asked.
No answer.
Adrian shrugged and dug his fingers under the flaps and made to open the box.

3.
“Good morning!” Katy exclaimed from the top of the stairs. “I smell coffeeeey!”
Adrian cursed under his breath and scrambled to hide the box, the paper, and the twine, where Katy wouldn’t get to it. He did not know why, but Adrian knew this was something she would not benefit from seeing.
By the time she reached the bottom of the stair, Adrian was pouring himself a cup. Katy turned the corner and he saw she was wearing one of his robes. A very purposefully over-exaggerated step hinted that this was very possibly all she was wearing.
She looked him up and down as she walked across the living room.
“You put on boxers.”
He didn’t know how to respond to this, and instead simply shrugged.
She walked passed him and planted a kiss on his cheek, then began opening overhead cabinets. “Where are your cups?” she asked, as if it was something she did not intend to find out for herself.
Adrian was glad the box was hidden in the cabinet under the island.
Before he could answer, Katy had already found the cups, and proceeded to pour herself a cup.
“So,” Adrian said, “you’re in a good mood.”
She nodded. “This is an awfully big robe. Were you like fat as a teenager, and just went crazy and buffed out in the past six years or something?”
“Actually,” Adrian said with a smile, “that was the old man’s robe. I don’t wear them, myself.”
Katy stopped moving entirely, and the smile that she had been wearing all morning slipped. She then regarded the robe around her as though it were a thing about to spring to life and attack her. She turned to Adrian.
“He didn’t die in this thing, did he?”
“No, but he was found in the bed we slept in last night.”
He sipped his coffee.
Katy stared at him for a few moments before shaking her head and turning to her own cup, adding the various accoutrements of flavor.
“So I don’t know if we should talk about last night or…what.” Adrian spoke with reluctance. They had been drunk, after all.
“What’s there to talk about?” Katy said without emphasis. “You’re a werewolf and we drunk-fucked on the bed your adoptive father died in. No big deal.”
Adrian raised an eyebrow. “Well, alcohol has been known to facilitate the making of decisions that one might otherwise avoid like the plague.”
She turned to him with some impatience, but tried to keep a jovial air. “What are you wanting to hear from me, exactly? ‘Well, it was fun and all, but I gotta go, I was too drunk and too horny last night to realize that you’re a creep and probably want to kill me?’ If you want honesty, fuck, I’ll be honest. I probably wouldn’t have had sex with you had it not been for the vodka, but I sure as shit don’t regret it. And egads!” she exclaimed, putting her arms around his shoulders, “You’re still cute, even without the beer goggles!”
She kissed him, and he kissed her back, and then they looked at each other with equally dumbstruck smiles on their faces.
“So stop trying to find a reason to dissect us and just be happy that we even exist,” she said, taking a seat on the stool next to Adrian.
There was silence for a few moments as they both sipped from their mugs.
“So, the whole werewolf thing,” Adrian said, again with reluctance. The word werewolf came out staggered and stretched, and felt to Adrian an awkward and alien word. “You’re okay with it?”
She gave a sarcastic laugh. “Am I okay with it?” she asked, turning to Adrian. “Boy, I don’t even know if I believe you yet.” She took a sip and turned back towards the counter, and considered this for a moment. “But as far as acceptance goes, I guess I’m more easy going than some people probly would be.”
“That’s surely a fact,” he said, stealing a glance at her revealed leg.
Katy sighed and sipped her coffee once more. The cup was almost empty.
“I think I’m going to get some clothes on and head home. Seems to me we both need some time to think.”
Adrian considered this, and felt his heart sink. “Yeah, I suppose.”
Katy turned to him with a sly smile and an eyebrow raised. “You sound disappointed.”
“I’m just…I was hoping to spend some more time with you.”
Katy stayed silent for a moment. “Well, the full moon’s not for a couple more days, right?”
Adrian raised an eyebrow. “No, it’s tonight. You... said so yourself, just yesterday.”
She shrugged. “Vodka’s a helluva drug.”
The reference going completely over his head, Adrian said, “It’s not like you couldn’t stay, though. The room’s pretty much impenetrable.”
“I figured you would want to be alone for the whole…transformation thing.”
He shrugged. “It’s not a big deal to me anymore. Just something that happens, I suppose. It’s not like you wouldn’t be safe…” He wanted to leave at that, but he had to be honest. “…but then again, I really don’t know. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a full moon with someone else in the house.”
She nodded, then sighed, put on a smile, and said, “Well, if you are lying, you’re at least keeping up a good façade.”
Adrian blinked, then crossed his arms. “You bitch, you were trying to weed me out!” he said, laughing.
Katy only touched her nose to his and leaned in for a heavy kiss, then drew him into a hug and set her head on his shoulder, rubbing her fingers hard against his back. She bit the lobe of his ear and felt his pulse quicken, then whispered in a throaty voice, “You wish I was your bitch.”
Before Adrian could grasp the shape of her words, she was already five paces away from the kitchen island, laughing like a madman.
At the same time, the wolf was laughing hysterically.
“That was fucked up!” Adrian called back at her, and she flipped him off as she turned the corner. He chuckled at this, then sat back down.
Finally, someone with a sense of humor, the voice called out from the depths. Adrian made no response but to push it as far back as he could.
The voice grumbled, and went silent once more.

4.
Adrian stood on his porch and watched Katy pull out of the driveway, waving back at her when she tipped her hand and gave him a smile. When she was out of sight, he stepped back inside, closing the door behind him.
The house was quiet, and all of a sudden felt empty. Cold. There were sounds from the outside, as there always were, but inside only the hum of the AC and refrigerator. Now that he was alone, Adrian wished he could jump into a car and follow Katy back to her place. But she had been right.
He needed to cool his jets.
And tonight was, of course, the big night, and he had yet to make preparations.
The clock on the oven read 9:40 AM. A little over nine hours until moonrise, and a little over twelve until he hit his peak of tolerance and transformed.
So it was that Adrian opened a drawer in his kitchen full of money, removed a single hundred from one of many rolls, grabbed a set of keys off the wall and left his house.
The package lingered in his mind, but it would have to wait.

5.
Adrian had never been particularly fond of driving, but it was something he had learned out of necessity. In the garage next to the house proper were stashed six very high end vehicles, all but one of them gathering dust. A blood red Mustang convertible sat apart from the others, and it was this one Adrian had learned to drive in, and this one he drove most often.
He hopped in, turned the ignition, put it into gear, and drove away.

6.
Adrian returned an hour and a half later with a backseat full of groceries. It took two trips to get them all inside, and when they were he locked the garage and went back inside.
Onto his counter he removed four pound-weighed cases of ground beef, one on top of the other. Then he removed several cans of tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, a bag of whole onions, a clove of garlic, and two small glass bottles of chili powder, one a lighter shade of red than the other.
From the cabinet next to the oven he removed a large stainless steel pot (big enough at least to hold a deer, he had thought once on first seeing it, years ago) and set it on the largest burner closest to the back. He turned a dial on the front of the oven that indicated this same burner as a dark circle amidst a set of quadruplets, the others white, and the black coil underneath the pot slowly turned red.
Now he removed a knife with a broad blade from the cutting block on the island and set it next to the cutting board. He peeled two of the onions, considered it, and peeled a third one for good measure. He chopped them down to unwieldy hunks, then took the first package of meet and tossed it into the pot.
Over the next hour he moved between the onions and the meat several times, chopping one and stirring the other. As the meat browned, he drained it of its excess grease, then took out a strainer and dumped the meat in it. Then he opened the next package of beef and tossed it into the pot. He did this with each package, crushing, browning, and draining them in succession, until the strainer was brimming with steaming beef. He did this, as opposed to tossing in all four packages of meat in at once, because he often went from the recipe’s recommended dose of two onions to three, then to four, and it had become a rarity that he did not add less than seven. This was not for the sake of flavor, because he did in fact hate onions. That was entirely the point. Even now he was welling up with tears at the chopping of them, and hence the need to stagger the chore of browning and draining the meat, so his eyes had time to refresh.
He had discovered to some surprise that onions were in fact worse for canines than chocolate was. And while he did not abide by the biological misgivings of that distant cousin –despite his preponderance for moonlit wolven transformations and unnaturally exuberant love of meat (perhaps itself a trick of personality more than biology), his body was still more or less human, at least most of the time- he had come to find that he did not like chocolate, and that the taste of onions very often made him sick.
More importantly, when these substances were introduced to his system, the voice did not speak to him. Did, in fact, little more than cower in the corner. On the days when he was even willing to admit to what he was, it seemed to Adrian that his body was something like a vehicle, and the voice was a passenger that only rode shotgun most of the time. And he believed whole-heartedly that there was only one day out of every month (perhaps two, if the lunar calendar fell at odds with the Gregorian one, but it was the same space of time nevertheless) when it could come forward and take control, and he, Adrian, would be pushed back into the dark corner that the voice had made its habitation.
Only somehow that description felt oversimple. It felt like saying gravity pushes down, or evolution is slow. While technically true, these statements did not give any credit to the actual mechanics of what was going on –they were blanket explanations used by the general population to ease them into believing that the universe was a very solid, very concrete, very understandable place, with defined rules and regulations that could not, under any circumstance, be broken.
Adrian had never been one for philosophical thought, had never had time for such things when every moment it seemed like he could have been killed –in truth the hazard had never really been there except for a handful of conflicts, this he admitted to freely, but he had been very young and very scared. But though no philosopher was he, Adrian knew that he was himself proof that the rules of the universe were more like guidelines than anything else.
And that was why he was making bad chili. Because already, though it was still a good two hours from moonrise, he could feel Luna’s pull on his body. Even whispering her name in his mind, considering the moon as a woman and not a massive hunk of rock in space, sent shivers down his spine. Adrian spent much of his life ignoring this aspect of his existence, denying it and pretending it was not there. In these hours before he would be overwhelmed with Luna’s call, and the voice would grow stronger in the back of his mind, he could feel the walls that he had been building his entire life, things that he regarded as tall, thick, and sturdy, revealed as the shallow and pale things they really were. He could see how frail his grasp on the universe was, and how small and insignificant he wished he wasn’t. And it was for this reason he was adding too many onions to the chili, for this reason he would end up dumping two full shakers of chili powder into the mix; because he did not want to spend any more time knowing these things than he had to. He wanted to wake up the next morning and devour the chili greedily, and feel its sickening embrace on his senses, and have it so fully possess his mind that he could no longer consider the truths that the previous night had granted him. He wanted to go back to his blissful and lonely life, in this empty house and friendless world.
But now, as he dumped the mountain of onions into the pot, he considered this.
Did he really?
Because he had told Katy, and for a wonder she had granted him audience. Had slept with him afterwards, for Luna’s sake. He had made the empty effort a million times before with people he had met on his occasional pilgrimage to the outside world for food, but he had never honestly expected someone to take him seriously. It was the kind of thing one did because they felt like they were supposed to, but also felt that it was an empty need. But now Katy was willing to bear the truth with him. Perhaps…would that be enough for him?
Adrian considered this for a time, but the thought was lost in the chore of cooking, for now came the most laborious part of the chili. On top of the onions he added all of the meat, then emptied the cans of diced tomatoes and tomato sauce into the pot, as well as the chili powder. He then took the whole clove of garlic, peeled it, chopped it, and added it to the mix. There was no inbred revulsion therein, but if he was going to have it be bad food he wanted it to be really bad. For good measure, he opened a bottle of beer and poured it all into the pot without taking a single sip for himself. All for the cause of forgetfulness, he thought with a smile. And a certain amount of dread. After all, in a good fourteen to sixteen hours, he would actually have to eat this slop.
At this Adrian set the burner low, enough to keep it at a slight boil all night without drying up and burning away.
Of course if he really wanted to forget he could just straight out eat the onions. That would certainly be easier than all of this rigmarole wouldn’t it? Except the transformation had a certain effect on ones’ metabolism.
Being, of course, an empty stomach like a bottomless pit.

7.
Satisfied that the food was going to be terrible, Adrian returned to the living room and sat down. He stared at the ceiling, listening to the slow boil of the chili in the kitchen, and the turning fan above him, and the whoosh of the running AC.
At this, Adrian fell asleep.

8.
Adrian did not dream.
His sleep was heavy and uninterrupted, almost comatose. The hours passed as he sat there, leading him towards the conflicts he would very soon face.
But while Adrian was without dream, the wolf’s sleep was not so calm.
He dreamed of storms and figures of great power, and by the end of it he knew too much for his mind to accept.
The wolf awoke, and so too did Adrian.

9.
Adrian’s eyes shot open. He had dozed off for only a moment, and now looked up at the ceiling with confusion. Its shade was not quite right. Looking around the living room he saw that nothing looked quite the right color.
Then Adrian realized what it was, and felt his heart sink.
The sun was beginning to set. Adrian jumped up off the couch and looked at the clock on the oven and saw that it was 6:42 PM. He only had a few hours before the shift.
And already he could feel it. The lunar sickness, coming on like a wave.
Adrian ran to the bathroom and kneeled before the toilet, holding his mouth open, breathing heavy. There was a disgusting pull from the pit of his stomach, and then his mind went blank as the contents of his stomach were forced up and out. After the water had turned a mealy, lumpy shade of brown, Adrian’s heaving produced only strings of spit. What had lasted only a few seconds felt like at least an hour, and Adrian stood as best he could. His limbs were shaking and cold.
He ran the tap and rinsed out his mouth, then turned to leave when his vision crossed. Two doors seemed to revolve around him, and then the floor came sailing up to meet his face.
Damn, it’s coming on fast this time, Adrian thought disjointedly.
As Drain waited for his eyesight to stop spinning, he tried to focus on something familiar. For a long time nothing came to mind.
Katy.
If only she was here, Adrian thought, she’d help me to the couch, she’d give me a hand. God, how could I get so lucky?
He thought about the previous night’s events, the beautiful woman who had slept with him in spite of his very abnormal sickness. Possibly even…because of it? That would not be entirely hard to believe.
Another tremor came from his stomach, and Adrian did his best to get back over the toilet. Once more he gave only brown lines of spittle, but the pain was worse this time. When his body was finally convinced there was nothing left in him to throw up, Adrian collapsed onto his back, panting and staring at the ceiling. He was visibly shaking now, and it hurt just to think.
“I hate being a werewolf,” he said, shaking his head. “I do, I do, I do.”
He lay there for almost half an hour before he trusted himself to take more than three paces from the bathroom without collapsing from exhaustion or vomiting all over the furniture.
The only benefit of the lunar sickness was its brevity. It came like a hurricane, and was gone just as fast. When Adrian’s vision and stomach settled, he stood, still trembling, and made his way to the living room.
He saw through the windows that the sun was very nearly over the horizon.

10.
In the darkening light of evening, Adrian felt a tingling spread across his limbs. A species of revered filled his mind, as it always did, starting from that dark corner of his mind that the voice called home. It was in this haze that he had the sensation of his fingertips growing longer. In truth they had not changed a bit, at least not physically. Adrian had come to think of this as some kind of empathetical presage of the actual transformation, a ghost of the future growing from his own body. Less than two hours now before the coming of the change, even sooner if he gave in to his growing urge to go outside and look at the moon. Direct contact sped the process, acted as a boon for the shift. On a clear night in the winter (for in winter the air was clearer, purer somehow), what was now a slow, flirtatious progression towards the violent change would have been little more than a quake across his muscles and an overwhelming sensation of weightlessness, and then all else would fall into dark. Those things he still felt -would feel, as the night progressed- but their progression was slow and very nearly painful. He wished very badly he could just run outside and have it be done with, but he did not trust himself to get back to the room in time. Even looking through a window he might be held her glammer -aye, her, naked Luna, as beautiful against the blackened abyss as ever she was, loathe though was he to admit it- just a second too long. And then what? Would his wolven form, controlled by the voice, be smart enough to leave the house? Adrian thought it very likely. And the end result of that could only lead in a very few directions, none of them particularly desirable.
He returned to the couch in the living room, trying to settle his nerves, not yet wanting to restrain himself to the stink of the Room. The stink and the horror, and the bad memories. And the awful, awful truth. The very plainest truth in the universe.
Adrian was hiding from himself.
Himself, and the voice.
The wolf.
Oh Gods, what a mess he had made of his life! How he longed for the night to pass so that he may return to his blissful self deception. This world of truth and acceptance, where the wolf now occupied not just a far, dusty corner in the back of his consciousness but a whole full half of Adrian’s mind, was far too much. For now they had reached the twilight of their transformation, when that human mind that held the body true all but one day out of the month was pushed aside by that which was fought tooth and nail every hour of every day. He could feel his control lessen, and it was a sickening feeling, like his hands were slipping away from the steering wheel and there was nothing he could do about it.
Though a clout and a glutton for a good mean-spirited joke, the wolf never hounded him during the change (excuse the pun). It was, he knew, a very stressful experience. And a thought leaked through from the wolf’s mind into Adrian’s; it was sacred. What for Adrian was a torture on the grandest scale was for creatures such as the wolf a religious experience. A communion with the Gods, though there be no wine, no bread, no feigning symbols; why should there be, when they took for themselves true blood, and true flesh? Why cross themselves or wear the siguls of the Gods when they themselves were the very embodiment of their will? It was for this they worshipped, and how they did howl their praise to the moon.
To Luna, of the sky.
And yes, there were more werewolves in this world than just he. That he could ever convince himself that it were otherwise seemed now an indication of his childish naïveté. Many days he felt their pull, felt their thoughts encroaching upon his own, but the wolf himself took the brunt of this impact. Adrian felt only echoes of what was going on in the wolf’s mind, and that was probably for the good.
And another thought came to him, one filled with terror and truth. Were they not coming for him? Even now, were the wolves of the world turning their gaze towards his lonely home, making plans and readying themselves for- for what? Attack?
Adrian thought it very likely.
And did it not also seem reasonable that they had already stopped by? That maybe they were watching just outside his window even now?
No, not quite so much. But they knew where he was, yes, that much was obvious. But they were not here now.
And at this Adrian felt a screaming pain in the pit of his stomach that signaled a single thought in his mind.
It’s time.

11.
Adrian stumbled his way towards the hallway, images of forests and full moons flooding over his mind. It came to him that he might not make it this time, had sat marinating in the sensations of the coming shift for just a few minutes too long. But then, ever since he had had this room he would think that just before the shift. He focused on getting there, trying not to worry.
He pressed the button next to the faded and door and shouted, “Open!”
No reaction for several seconds, and Adrian again pressed the button. “Open! Open, Gods damn you, open!”
For another sickening minute the door stayed closed, and as Adrian heard the first of many cracks along his spine as the actual physical transformation began the door finally clicked open. He threw himself inside and was overwhelmed with the scent of sweat and blood of years, with the sight of his obsessive fear of himself.
He lay on the floor clinging at his stomach, pain now stretching across his entire body, when he heard the door shut and lock behind him.
Adrian felt his grip on his body slipping, already shunted with tunnel vision, but even amidst the confusion of thoughts and instincts that came with the trading of conscious control of the physical being, Adrian knew something wasn’t right. He turned his head with great effort, and for a few moments he did not understand what he was seeing. Because he had always been alone in this place, during this time, and his understanding of form was dissolving into baser things, but he recognized the face of the woman now trapped in the Room with him, even as it was stretching into an expression of fear.
“Oh…oh my god,” Katy said, now leaning back against the door that she had shut behind her.
Adrian felt his heart snap in two, and he screamed in agony. He reached stuck his fingers into the grooves of a deep gash in the steel and pulled himself to his feet, then, clutching at his sides, ran across the room to the casing where another panel was held.
Pressing the button he screamed, “OPEN!” But his voice was deeper now, and the voicing came out as more of a howling growl, and the door stayed shut.
“Why?!” Adrian yelled, doing his best to articulate his words in the face of his fading humanity. He wanted to say more, wanted to scream at her, wanted to vindicate her for being so stupid, because he had warned her hadn’t he, he had told her what he was and that she COULD NOT watch, COULD NOT be present at this time, and already he could feel the blood lust spreading like a sickness across his thoughts, already the knowing that in his wolven state this beautiful, trusting creature would be to him no more than food, and the wolf would revel in the stretching sinew and the snapping of bones, and the pained screams she would give before finally dying in a pool of her own blood, organs strewn about her like candy from a piñata, all being jealously eaten by the monstrous thing he had become.
“I…I just…” she said, trembling and stuttering. Shrinking into the corner as Adrian’s body snapped and popped and changed, as his face grew longer and more lupine, as a layer of grayish-blue fur spread across his skin, as his feet lengthened and became digitigrades, as a tail sprouted from the base of his spine, as his eyes turned a horrible shade of red. Her words left her and she fell to her knees, unable to look away from the werewolf that now looked at her with a hungry eye.
The wolf stood straight and tall, fully formed and fully aware, then gazed down at Katy and let out a vicious, angry howl.

12.
The old man steps back through the door, his smile as wide as it ever was. Behind him, a man with light brown skin carries a tray of food and a collapsible table under his arm. This he unfolds with the flip of a single hand, then sets the tray on it. He asks the old man if that will be all, and he nods, and the servant leaves, shutting the door behind him.
On the tray is an assortment of breakfast foods that, to any other person, would be more or less unastounding. But to Adrian, who has for the last three years subsisted entirely on the things he could kill and scavenge, it is a feast. An omelet of sausage and cheese, buttermilk biscuits with gravy, bacon still wet with grease, and freshly squeezed orange juice. The smell of it is enough to make Adrian weep, and when the old man offers him a plate, he does not hesitate for even a second. He takes a biscuit with one hand and a chunk of the omelet with the other and takes gigantic bites out of them. His taste buds alight with sensation and he cannot help but let out a moan of pleasure at the taste of the stuff. He scarfs down his food greedily, and the old man watches with mild surprise and amusement. When at last Adrian downs the orange juice, he lays back and lets out a contented sigh.
“I take it you liked the food,” the old man says without much question.
“You have no idea,” Adrian says, then laughs.
“It occurs to me I hadn’t told you my name,” the old man says. “Louis Genedy Quist.”
He holds out his hand, and Adrian sits up and takes it gladly. “Adrian.”
Louis turns his head, “Just Adrian?”
Adrian nods. The name he once had has long since passed out of his life, and he wants nothing more than to leave it behind.
The old man does not prod further, and simply nods.

13.
Over the next few weeks, Adrian’s leg heals, and he is let out of his room. The house is larger than any he has ever known, not a single room smaller than the whole of the cabin he once shared with his mother. He becomes acquainted with the servants, all of them very nice but only a few approving of his presence at their home. It takes him some time to get used to the rules of manners that these people have served by their entire lives, but he does get the hang of them.
Through their conversations, Adrian learns much about Louis Genedy, and comes to find that he is a very well travelled man. He has spent at least a month in almost every country in the world, or so he claims, and has found very few places better than here. This is the home he grew up in, the home his grandfather grew up in, back and back and back to the days when people were only first arriving in America. And so it comes to the time when Adrian can no longer claim that his leg is keeping him here, and he says to Louis that he does not want to overstay his welcome.
Over the next two days, the old man asks if Adrian would like to stay here. The question is met with some confusion, but without think Adrian says yes.
And then the voice calls back from the depths to remind him of a certain monthly problem that will almost certainly destroy this newfound friendship. Adrian pushes it back, but knows this is true.
So it is that only a week before the full moon, Adrian pulls Louis aside for a very personal conversation.

14.
“Louis,” Adrian begins, not knowing how to say what he needs to say, “there is something I need to tell you.”
The old man looks at him and smiles, as he always does, and leads the two of them away towards a patio table with a vast umbrella, and pulls up two lawn chairs. He sits, then motions for Adrian to sit as well. The wind is blowing sporadically, and the sky is dotted with streaks of clouds, and on the Western horizon there is a very tall thunderhead that sends chills up Adrian’s spine for reasons he does not yet understand. He cannot yet hear the thunder, but he sees the light crackling underneath its surface. It is, of course, coming their way.
“Go ahead, shoot,” the old man says. His incorrigible joviality seeps into everything he says, and while this man’s happiness is something Adrian has come to admire, he can’t help but admit that it is at times grating.
“If I’m going to stay here then there are some…some things you need to know. Secrets that I…want to keep, but can’t.”
The old man nods, his smile wavering just the slightest bit, his eyes dancing with curiosity. “Go on.”
Adrian sighs, settling his vision on the Eastern horizon, away from the forest and away from the storm, and away from the strong gaze of Louis Genedy.
“I can only imagine the questions you’ve asked yourself about me, and for a wonder you have put voice to a very few of them. You said a few days ago that I seem more like a kid than a nineteen year old, and I think I can explain that, because it makes sense. You know I’ve lived alone in the woods for three years, but you don’t know why.”
A fearful hesitation has crept into Adrian’s voice, and the old man picks up on it right away.
“If you don’ feel comfort’ble then you don’t hafta say anythin’.” Louis says this with sympathy and worry. Adrian wishes he could oblige.
“No,” Adrian says. “You don’t understand. If it were…anything else, I would just keep my mouth shut. But after everything you’ve done for me, I have to tell you so that you can…” he thinks about this for a moment, then continues with a pained smile, “so you can throw me out or keep me, whichever works best.”
The old man takes a breath, then says, “You best get to your point, son. Any more dancin’ round the subject and you’ll lose yer nerve.”
Adrian nods. His heart is beating up in his throat, and he feels like a fool. He wishes he could just say never mind, and run back into the woods, but he’s beyond that now. Going back there feels entirely wrong, especially after having come upon such a nice man in the most unlikely of places. He’ll be damned if a bit of stage fright is going to keep him from this place.
“I…” Adrian starts, but he finds the last words are heavy and clumsy, and now that he has lost the ability to wring out a few more seconds without putting voice to those words he doesn’t want to at all. Finally he forces them past his lips, eyes clenched shut.
“I’m a werewolf,” he says.
There is a long period of silence where the old man just stares at him, not even seeming to breathe, and Adrian can’t stand to look at him. The expression of disappointment he must be wearing, the anger that this kid would lie to him so after all he had done for him, Adrian almost just gets up and walks away without another word, knowing that he can’t be accepted in this world by one such as him.
“Well, shit,” the old man says, and Adrian looks at him. He is smiling as wide as ever, and he looks to be on the verge of hysterical laughter. “I was wondrin’ when you’d let that one out! God damn son, I thought you weren’t never gonna face up to me ‘bout it.”
Adrian blinks, not knowing how to react to this last. He can think only to say, “What?”
“You don’t know shit about me, Adrian, and tha’s best.” He pronounces Adrian’s name Adrin, “But lemme just say, the shit I done, the places I been, I wouldn’t be half’a man I am if I couldn’ spot a werewolf on first glance.”
Adrian shakes his head. “How…?”
The old man laughs. “It’s in your stature! The way you walk, the way you talk, even the way you look at the world. You ain’t got the eyes of a human, Adrian.”
“Why didn’t you-”
“Because I might’a scared you off, tha’s why.”
Adrian thinks about this, and knows it’s true.
“Alright then,” Adrian says. “So. That’s settled then.”
The old man laughs and nods. Adrian breaks a smile himself, though he is very honestly light-headed, not yet having grasped the weight of what this man has told him.
Adrian says, “So…the full moon is next week.”
Louis nods.
“And…do you not see the problem?”
He laughs again, then says, “Follow me.”

15.
“Open,” the old man says, and the door swings open almost immediately.
There is a carpet on the floor, a bed in the corner, a ceiling fan, wallpaper, and even a fake window with simulated light behind the curtains. It appears to Adrian a normal room, but why the voice-lock?
“Underneath the pleasantries,” the old man says, “it is plate steel. Thick enough to withstand a tank shell.”
Adrian walks around the room, feeling of the walls. And yes, he can tell that they are made of a much sterner stuff than the rest of this house. But now he needs to know-
“Why do you have this room?”
The old man says, “’Cause I was told to.”
Adrian shakes his head, “By whom?”
Louis Genedy Quist smiles wide, the smile of a confident man about to drop a bombshell.
“Why, my boy,” he says through his smile, “you did.”

16.
Adrian opened his eyes.
He did not remember himself, for a time. Did not remember his where or his when, only that he was awake. Only that this room was once more hospitable, its ‘pleasantries’ as the old man had called them systematically destroyed by the raging wolf. For a very long time they had been replaced on a consistent basis, but that of course had stopped with the old man’s death.
Just another reminder of how far he had fallen.
Adrian’s stomach rumbled, and he brightened somewhat at the thought of food outside the room. He knew it would be disgusting, yes, of course, but it was sure as hell better than nothing.
Adrian pulled himself up, his muscles aching and his arms abnormally sore, then noticed the tatters of his clothes and cursed himself for not having stripped down before going into the room. The oldest lessons were always-
Why was there blood on the wall?
Adrian stared at this with mild surprise and confusion. Surely, with every full moon in passing he had left a certain amount of blood behind him from the constant scratching and pounding at the walls, but so much? Alarm bells were going off in his mind. The fog was receding from his memory, slowly but surely, and he didn’t know why he should be so scared by the sight of it, except…
Except in the faded hallway of memory he heard fearful stuttering. He heard a quiet, mousy voice saying, almost in a whisper, “Oh my god…”
Was that…?
Was that Katy’s voice?
But why should he remember her voice, when…
“Oh God…” Adrian said. It was then that he noticed the bits of hair and flesh strewn about in the blood, and the pieces of bone on the floor. He slipped to his knees and rubbed his hands against the wall, feeling the coagulated blood ooze between his fingers. He did not want to turn around, he did not want to see what remained of the only woman to ever accept him for who he was, he did not want to have that last piece of his hopeful life torn away from him by his very own damned self.
Adrian slammed his fists against the wall, fighting his urge to turn around with a scream, fighting his damnation with every bit of himself.
He ran his hands through his hair and curled forward, weeping now, not entirely conscious of the fact that he was wiping her blood all over himself, because admitting to that even now would drive him fully insane, of this he was entirely sure.
And then an anger pooled up in Adrian’s heart.
And for the first time in his life, he entered the realm of the wolf’s habitation.

17.
Adrian strode across the abyss towards a single couch, where a young man in a white vest lay back, snoring loudly. Next to him this couch was a small table, on top of which was a desk lap, a glass of water, and a book.
With every step Adrian’s face contorted with rage, tears of anger streaming down his face, hands balled up into fists, fingernails biting into the skin of his palms.
In one fluid motion he grabbed the wolf by the neck and lifted him up, then threw him aside. He voiced a cry of surprise in mid air, then landed on his back. He looked up at Adrian, confused.
“What the fuck-”
Adrian grabbed both sides of the collar of his vest and threw him back towards the couch, which toppled over. Now the wolf got dizzily to his feet, holding out a hand to Adrian, the other rubbing his head.
“Okay, hold on just a second, what the hell are you doing here? HOW the hell are you here?”
Adrian threw a punch at the wolf’s cheek, then grabbed him before he could fall. Adrian screamed into his face. “YOU KILLED HER!”
“I…what?”
Adrian punched him again, “You killed her you fucking monster!”
“Can you just calm down a secon-”
Another punch, and Adrian let the wolf fall to the ground. “You tore her limb from limb, didn’t you?! You bastard!”
Adrian made to throttle him once more, but the wolf yelled, “STOP!”
And then Adrian was on the other side of a plastic wall (the couch and table, he noticed, were on the wolf’s side of the wall), and the wolf stood holding his head like a man with a bad hangover.
“Okay, let’s just calm the fuck down right now.”
Adrian beat his hands against the wall, “I’ll kill you!” he screamed. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
The wolf shook his head, confused, “You can’t kill me, that’d be killing yourself.” Adrian voiced another threat, which the wolf interrupted with a shout, “OKAY, ALRIGHT, I GET THE FUCKING PICTURE. I’m over here trying to understand how you are even here, and you’re over there screaming bloody fucking murder! God damn dude, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Stop playing games with me!”
The wolf pointed to his bloodshot eyes, “Does this look like a game to you? Now, please, slowly explain to me what it is that has set your ass on fire.”
Adrian, pacing along the side of the wall, yelled out, “She’s dead!”
“Who?”
“KATY!”
“What?” The wolf shook his head, “I don’t even…what?”
Adrian, what’s wrong?
The wolf nodded his head and pointed up. “There, see? Jumpin at fuckin shadows.” He said this shaking his head, walking back over to the couch.
“What the hell are you-”
And then the darkness was yanked away, and suddenly-

18.
And suddenly Adrian was looking up at the concerned face of a beautiful woman.
He almost didn’t understand what he was looking at, when she said, “Are you okay?”
Adrian stuttered for a moment, tears running down his face. He leaned forward and kissed her, then drew her into a tremendous bear hug.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, weeping.
She spoke with a fearful stutter in her own voice, “For a while there, I thought I was too.”
They lay there for several moments, until finally Adrian broke away. He looked at his hands, and the walls, and to Katy. She was entirely unharmed.
“Where…?”
She said, “You wouldn’t come within three feet of me. You practically ripped your own head off trying to keep yourself away.”
Adrian shook his head, mouth agape. “But…but I wasn’t there, Katy. It was all him…”
“The voice?” she asked.
“The wolf. It’s almost like going to sleep for me, and he takes control. Katy, I couldn’t have been fighting him, I wasn’t even there.”
“Adrian…” she said as they sat in each other’s arms. “Right after you changed back, you spoke to me. Or…he spoke through you.”
“But that’s impossible-”
“No, Adrian, listen to me,” Katy said, her breath wavering. “It wasn’t your voice, not exactly. It was deeper.”
Adrian was shaking his head. He didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to believe it, but already he was catching the shape of things to come, it scared him a great deal.
She put a hand to his cheek and forced him to look at her.
“You- He said that he didn’t want to hurt me. Because I’m…a harbinger of change. Because through me-”
Because through her, the wolf echoed.
“-you might be able to accept him.”
-you might be able to accept me.
There was a long pause as Adrian ran these words through his head. All of it was a mess of confusion, and now his stomach rumbled even louder than before.
“Adrian?” Katy asked.
He looked at her. “What?”
“Can we get the fuck out of this room?”
Adrian looked around and realized that it was quite the nightmarish spectacle, with more than a few new scars and dents, and more blood splashed on the one side than Adrian thought he even had in him. And it occurred to him that she had been sitting there, watching him, this fearful force that was doing the physically impossible on so many levels, not sure if she was going to live through the night. He felt her trembling even now, and he had no doubt she would have nightmares about this night for the rest of her life.
“Yeah…” Adrian said, pushing himself up. He realized the skin of his hands was torn and bloody, his knuckles and fingertips bruised and worn to the bone. He couldn’t yet feel this particular pain, but knew it would be come very soon. He sighed, “Thank God I heal fast.”
He pulled Katy to her feet and they walked, supporting each other, to the panel on the wall. Adrian pressed the button and said, “Open,” and after a long pause (the years, it seemed, had worn on this thing’s processor), it did.

The Wolf -Chapter IV: The Last Time

IV: The Last Time

1.
As the sun sank over the horizon, darkness swallowing the world, Adrian and Katy sat in the living room of his house, and were silent.
Adrian wrung his hands, disappointment battling cautious optimism in his heart.
“So,” Katy said, glancing out the window. “You’ve told other people?”
“A few, yeah.”
“And you just…let them go?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Adrian said.
She looked at him as though he had asked a stupid question. “They could tell someone.”
“And? Who would believe them? What I am is a punchline to a bad joke.”
“Well what if there are others like you out there?” She asked. “I mean, hypothetically speaking.”
He sighed. “It’s come across my mind a few times, I suppose. Guess I always hated it so much that meeting another person like me…it’s never been something I was interested in, I suppose.” Adrian rubbed his head and glanced up at Katy. “Even still, how would I go about finding others like me? If I asked some random nobody on the street if they were a werewolf, they’d look at me like I was crazy. It’s like looking for someone who thinks like you do; you can never be entirely sure unless you get in their head.”
A pause. “I guess so.”
Silence again.
“You could always show me,” she said cautiously. “The full moon’s only one day away.”
“No,” Adrian said. “That isn’t possible. When I shift, it isn’t me. It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t think-”
Says you.
“-it just does. I’d pass out telling you to run one night, then wake up the next morning to a pile of bones and organs.” He said this so matter-of-factly that Katy shivered.
Another silence. “So…basically, I just have to take your word for it.”
He sighed. “More or less.”
She nodded as if taking all the information under deep consideration, then asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Uhh, end of the hall on the right side.”
Katy stood and took a few awkward steps away, then turned around and said, “I noticed you don’t have a TV in here.”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “What’s there to watch?”
She nodded the same way as before and went to the bathroom.
The door locked with an audible click.

2.
Adrian sat alone, glancing around the room, his heart rate slowing. His frustration at her reluctance to believe was curbed by her willingness to listen. He realized that he had not expected to come this far, and now that he was here he didn’t know what to do next.
Yes, you do.
The voice had not spoken up in some time, and Adrian was almost surprised.
“Really now?” Adrian asked silently, “And what is that?”
Perspective.
Adrian considered this for a moment, then nodded. Sometimes he pushed the voice back, most times he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t there (it laughing at him all the while), but there was no denying it had saved his life on several occasions. Perhaps this was one of those times.

3.
When Katy returned from the bathroom, Adrian had already taken some objects from the wall, set them on the center table, and sat back down. She opened her mouth to speak, but Adrian held up his hand.
“I can’t convince you that I’m telling the truth,” he said. “The best I have is my own certainty. My memories of the life I’ve lived. All I can do is tell you what happened and how, and hope that you don’t hear any lie in my voice.”
She sat down and sipped her water. After a long moment of consideration, she spoke.
“Alright then.”

4.
Adrian holds the knife loose in his right hand. Its handle is warm and familiar and tailored to suit his needs, its blade worn but sharp. In his right is a thick branch whittled down to a point. It has been carefully made, but not without taking into consideration the likelihood that it will only be used once. His thumb rubs against the butt of his knife, the blade pointing outward. He is not walking so much as flowing; his forward motion is fluid, each step silent and equal as can be managed in the underbrush of the forest.
He remembers a distant time when he had no reason to hunt, before the fire took his mother and his life. He had spent a long time asking himself how it happened, how it could have happened, when she had always been so careful. But time passed and answers did not come, and he was left to fend for himself whether he had closure or not.
A voice had spoken to him three years ago –he reckoned it was three years, because three winters had passed since then- and told him to go the city. And at the time those had been reasonable words. It was a goal, and having such a thing went a long way towards keeping you alive. Were it so simple.
At first the voice had been soft and mostly kept silent. Suggestions came to him in moments of doubt, some of which were taken and others ignored. But each full moon gave it resonance, and Adrian realized after several months that it was the mind accompanying that voice which took over his body when the moon was full. Each morning after such a night he woke in pain and misery just as he had the first time, but as the years went on he learned ways to bear it. His body grew accustomed to the change, and he had grown very strong because of it.
But Adrian feared the moon. In the weeks leading up to a full night, he would look up at the stars and curse the waxing orb for making him endure such pain. When the night would come he tried to hide from it, but there was no hiding; he did not need to see the moon to know it was full, and even still didn’t need to know the moon was full to shift. There was no escaping its grasp, and Adrian hated that surety. And despite the voice being a giver of good advice, its association with the moon made him hate it all the more.
So it was that as Adrian had approached the outskirts of the city, led by the mingling scents of human life, he turned back. The voice protested, but could do nothing, and Adrian had only smiled. He reasoned that he would only hurt people if he went into the city. This was a place of civilization and humanity; Adrian was neither.
And so the voice grew cold, resentful, and sarcastic. Adrian pushed it back, and there came a time when it would go weeks without saying anything at all. But always on the week of the full moon, it laughed. For all the control Adrian had of his own body, his own life, there was one thing he could not control, and that was the domain of the voice. The wolf rode high on his misery, and often made sure to leave Adrian hanging from trees or in deep trenches when his time was done.
Adrian hates the voice, and he hates the moon, and he hates his mother for dying, and his blood for making life so complicated; he is beginning to think that, deep down, he hates everything.
But now he is hunting. Now he is stalking a wounded deer; he does not know how the animal has come upon the hole in its leg, but he does not care. Adrian is hungry, and several miles back, in a hollow tree, a fire waits to cook fresh meat. He can practically taste it.
He sees it through the underbrush and is blessed to have not been seen; even with his silence, animals often sensed his presence, even the wounded ones. This one must be bad off. He considers holding off on the hunt and just following it until it dies, but he shakes the thought away. He is hungry now.
There has to be a clear line of progression from where he stands to where the animal is going to be. His path must be known or else it could very easily get away, hurt though it might be. He waits for the opportunity to present itself, and as the deer stops in its path to sniff the earth, it does exactly that.
Adrian makes a mad dash towards the animal, meaning to jump off a fallen log and throw his makeshift spear through the deer’s side and pin it to the ground, or take it down long enough for him to get close and slit its throat. But then there is a loud explosion, and pain erupts in Adrian’s body, and his leg gives out. The sound rolls out over the hills, and now Adrian hears footsteps coming his way. Suddenly his heart has jumped into his throat, and all his conceptions of the world are falling apart. His leg is screaming in white hot pain, his thoughts melting and dripping away at its intensity, and for a moment he can only lay on the ground and hold his leg and try his damnedest not to scream.
He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what to do, and that is more frightening than anything he has ever experienced.
The deer is long gone, it has limped away into the forest, and now Adrian is the wounded animal, and he wonders if now he is the hunted, and those footsteps are the signs of a hungry man. Whatever made that explosion is coming for him now, and Adrian knows that he has to run.
He checks his leg and feels his stomach drop to see a bleeding hole on one side and a bleeding hole on the other. He was shot straight through, and he wonders if it might have severed his bone, but wherever it did go it hurts more than anything he has ever felt. He stands, to the best of his ability, pushing off most his weight on his uninjured leg, and makes to run, but pain explodes across his lower half, and he stumbles and catches himself on a tree.
Through the chaos and panic in his mind, the voice speaks in a slow, deliberate voice.
You don’t have time to run. You need to go up.
Adrian does not think about it. He does not weigh the pros and the cons, because he knows that the voice is absolutely right. He does the best he can with his one good leg and pulls himself up the tree, as high as he can go, already feeling cold in a way that is painful and sickening. He is panting from the exertion, but the steps are near enough now to hear and so he makes himself stop. His leg is hanging limp from his side, blood running down the trunk of the tree, and his chest is heaving, and his brain is hurting, and he does not understand what has happened. Within the space of a single moment the entire world has changed, the tables have been turned against him, and now he is sitting in a tree, his arms hurting to just to keep him in place, and he is screaming in his mind, but he dare not give it voice, and he can only hope that whatever comes out looking for that deer does not see the blood running down the tree, and look up to find Adrian instead.
A man in a bright orange vest steps out into the clearing, holding a long, slender, metal thing, and though Adrian does not know what it is, he can tell from the way the man is holding it that it is not a tool of peace.
He looks around, and for a time that feels like eternity but can really only be just a few seconds, Adrian is sure that this man will turn his head and look up, see Adrian, smile, and point that thing at him, and then Adrian will be shot through again, only this time it will be a killing blow, and he’ll fall from the tree, hit some branches on the way down, and land on the earth with a dull and unastounding thump, and maybe for a few moments he will feel the earth beneath his face as his eyes lose their ability to see, and the man in the orange vest will drag him away and chop him up, and in a few days he will be nothing more than a pile of bones and shit left to rot in the forest. No more voices, no more full moons, no more fires or hunting or doing much of anything at all. That will be the story of him.
But the man in the orange vest simply utters a curse under his breath, and moves forward in the direction of the deer. Let him have it, Adrian thinks, and at that he almost laughs.

5.
The next few days are a blur of pain and sickness, at the end of which Adrian wakes to find himself in a comfortable bed, looking up at a white ceiling, where a fan is making its motions.
He tries to recall how he got here, but nothing comes. He remembers only a storm, and thunder so loud he could feel it in his teeth, and running as fast as he could away from it despite the hole in his leg.
And he remembers the voice saying something to him, but any more than that and Adrian begins to ache. He is warm, and he can’t remember the last time he was in a bed, or in a house, but still his leg is throbbing and his body is shaking and it hurts just trying to remember.
And then there is a sound to the left of him that Adrian does not at first recognize as an opening door, and for the first time he sees the old man.
Who, despite everything, is smiling.

6.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he says, his voice thick and brazened.
Adrian does not laugh. He has made a point of avoiding people for the past three years, and the last one he saw put a hole in his leg. Without thinking, he pulls the covers up to his nose.
The old man’s toothy grin widens. “How old are you, son?”
Adrian slants his eyes and considers the question. He remembers language as well as he ever did, conversations have taken place over the years with himself and with the voice, but it has still been a long time since he has engaged in conversation with another physically present person.
The question hangs in the air like a baited hook, and somewhere deep down Adrian understands that this man will wait all night if he has to for an answer.
Finally he says, peeking out from under the blankets just the slightest bit, “Nineteen.”
The old man nods his head, then pulls up a chair and sits down across from him.
“So, this is how it is,” he says in a tone of grave seriousness, though Adrian can’t tell to look at that smile. “I found you on my prop’ty bleedin’, shiv’rin’, delusional, and very nearly dead. I could’a called the cops, but I gathered from the looks’a ya’ that you picked up roots a while back.” He looks at Adrian as though he just asked a question.
“Three years,” Adrian admits.
The old man nods once more. “I would’a put it at five m’self, but close enough for gov’ment work. So where you been livin’, son?”
Adrian doesn’t know what to say. Out in the woods, feeding off deer and squirrels and rats, sleeping in trees and holes in the ground, engaged in a perpetual self-argument as to whether or not to breach the invisible border to civilized society? This is a man who looks to have lived in extravagance for quite some time (though he does have a rugged edge that eases Adrian’s mind just the slightest), and the question of where is a difficult enough one to answer without considering the elephant in the living room, a certain particularly furry and agile and bloodthirsty elephant who is considered by most a thing of fiction.
Adrian looks at the old man with wide, begging eyes, and he seems to glean some understanding.
“Not on the streets, then,” he says, now stroking his beard. “Guess ‘at makes you a wild boy, I s’pose. Must’a had a whole lotta luck. I have some friends couple miles west’a here, big huntin’ folks, and they say the huntin’ round here’s not s’good.”
More than luck, the voice says. Adrian shakes his head to push it back.
The old man takes this as a silent agreement.
“I hafta’ say, you are a lucky kid. Any’a the other folks ‘round here would’a turned you out in a heartbeat.”
Adrian shifts in his bed and squints as pain shoots up his lower half.
“Careful!” the old man says, leaning forward, concern showing on his face. “You got y’self in some shit, son. Shot with a pretty heavy rifle, and you bein’ out in all this wet without even puttin’ on a tourniquet sure as hell didn’t make it better. You’re lucky I was a medic back in the war. Had to fix wounded soldiers all the time, and conditions like yours was standard back then. But just ‘cause I know how to fix a shot through leg don’t make you fixed. It’ll be damn near a miracle if you don’t have a limp when all this is through.”
When speaking of his war days, even in passing, the old man loses some of his accent.
There is a moment of awkward silence, and Adrian looks at the wall on his left.
Up there are pictures of various age; children posed in their Sunday best, colorless with eyes of eerie resonance. A single face, round and almost always smiling, is constant throughout, and Adrian soon understands that this is his as-of-yet unnamed benefactor. The pictures become more casual as they bleed into color, with college snapshots and portraits of vast green landscapes capped with snowy mountains, families happily at play as parents look on in silent pride and sadness. And while all of these have been artfully grouped and spaced, one is set off from the others, almost an after thought; A widely smiling man, an equally joyful woman with slender hips and curly dark hair, and a pair of children, the boy’s face a mirror of his father’s, the girl holding one arm with the other and looking like getting her picture taken with her family was the worst thing in the world. At this last, Adrian points.
“Your family?”
The old man swallows and nods, his grin fading. “Yuh, that’d be them.”
“What happened to them?” Adrian asks. He looks at the old man with hard eyes, trying to keep him from asking “What do you mean?” because they both know exactly what he means
“Oh, not a whole lot, I s’pose. Ala –thas my wife, ‘ere- she divorced me ‘bout a month after ‘at picture was taken.” He says this in the dry tone of a man who has rehearsed it many times to many people, and adds this last much as the picture had probably been added to the wall for the sake of posterity. “Took the kids with her.”
Now it is Adrian’s turn to nod, though he does not entirely understand. He feels a fool for it, but he has to ask.
“What’s ‘diforced?’”
The old man straightens at this, looks at Adrian with confusion and a slowly dawning grin. “Are you serious?”
Adrian only blinks, not sure what to say.
The old man bursts into laughter so suddenly that Adrian jumps, and he finds himself reaching for his knife once more –though this time it is simply instinct, rather than genuine fear. The old man slaps his knee and rocks back and forth, screaming his laughter to the ceiling. When the gale subsides, he wipes a tear from his eye and says, “Boy, I don’ think’ere’s any man could tell you.”
Adrian nods once more, still oblivious. It is not a matter of great importance, anyway.
The old man watches Adrian’s utter lack of reaction with growing confusion.
“You really ain’t been around much, have you?” he says more as a statement to himself than anything.
Adrian gives voice to the question that has actually been bothering him, not without some discomfort. His voice is still scratchy, and his thoughts are muggy from pain and confusion.
“What do you want from me?”
The old man considers this for a few moments before saying, “I haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe,” mehbee, his drawl annunciates, “all I want’s ta save ya life and letcha get on yer way. Ain’t gonna make you repay me, leastways.” He grinned. “Not that you’d have much ta give me, in any case. I can tell you got some secrets, and thas just fine. I got plenty’a secrets m’self.”
He takes in a breath as if to say more, but closes his mouth. He nods some more, then stands up.
“I’ma go downstairs and grab me some food, you’re welcome to some if y’want.”
At this Adrian nods vehemently, considering his rumbling stomach, and the fact that he had missed his last meal, and that was the whole reason he was here now. At least, so far as he understands.
Somewhere deep down, he feels that there was more to the days that had passed than just delirium, but he can plunge no further than that.
The voice remains silent, but Adrian thinks it knows exactly what happened.

7.
Adrian shifted uncomfortably in his chair. A silence had descended upon the room once more, and Katy sat across from him still, twirling her empty cup in her hand, mulling over the story.
She looked up at him and asked, “So how did you go from being that kid to…” she motioned her cup at Adrian.
“Well, he brought up some food and we kept talking. I think he liked me because I never had much to say, and was pretty much as naïve as they came, and I liked him because he had so much to say about so many different things. It was a good five days before I was well enough to get out on my own again, and by that time I’d gotten so used to our conversations that the prospect of going back and living on my own just seemed boring. And unnecessary.”
Another pause.
“That’s incredibly serendipitous.”
Adrian smiled. “I bet you’ve used that word more times tonight than you have in your entire life.”
She laughed and nodded, went to take a drink, then slumped in disappointment. She looked up at Adrian with playful eyes and a raised eyebrow.
“You, uh…” She licked the corner of her mouth. “You want to break out something a littler harder?”
Adrian was taken aback.
“Are you comfortable with-”
“I have no idea what to think about this whole werewolf thing,” she said bluntly, holding up her hands. “Either you’re crazy or you’re joking with me, or you’re telling the truth, and that… I don’t even know how to go about understanding that right now. But despite all that, I really like you. You’re a damn good story teller if nothing else, and I haven’t met anyone like you before. And I am fucking thirsty, and I get the feeling if this keeps on, water isn’t going to do me any good. So bring on the heavy stuff, and if it gets too awkward I’ve got a can of pepper spray in my pocket.”
At this Adrian shrugged, got up, and went to the phone. He picked it up and shouldered it, hand positioned at the buttons to dial.
“Pick your poison,” he said with a sly smile.

8.
Nine hours and two bottles of vodka later, Adrian panted from his side of the bed. He thought over the night’s events, a muddled and confused tangle of conversation, flirtation, alcohol, and sex, and then looked over at Katy, arms behind her head, chest bare.
“What was that about pepper spray?”
She laughed uproariously at this, then rolled on top of him and kissed him.
“God…” Adrian said.
“What?”
“I have no idea how we got here.”
She smiled and kissed him again. “Who gives a shit?”
Adrian shrugged, and Katy rolled back to the other side of the bed. Turned towards Adrian, she put an arm across his chest and sighed.
“This has been a fucked up night,” she said.
Adrian smiled. “I agree.”
The ceiling fan turned above them, the light dim. There was a low hum from its engine which made Adrian content.
He wasn’t sure how long they had been silent, himself drifting slowly into sleep. There were thoughts in his head, but they were like the jagged edges of a shattered mirror, producing many angled and disparate representations of the same basic reflection. Somewhere there was coherence, but he could not find it, and did not care to at this point in time.
A few words spoken in a low voice brought him out of his haze, and Adrian asked, “What?”
“I said, ‘I’ve missed sharing a bed with someone.’ It’s been a while.”
Adrian nodded. “I understand,” he said, and truly meant it. His eyes began to flutter closed once more, his bed and the woman next to him and the unbelievable warmth underneath the blankets just too damned comfortable altogether for him to stay awake for long.
“I don’t get it,” she said, not aware that Adrian was almost too far away to hear. She spoke her next words with hesitation, almost as if tasting them, weighing them for their truth “I think I might actually believe you.”
Her fingers traced the faded lines of several scars on his chest. They were scattered sparsely all across his body.
“What is it like living alone?” she asked.
Adrian’s now slow, rhythmic breathing should have told her that he was fast asleep, but she was herself in a daze, one not helped in the slightest by the alcohol she had taken in during the course of the night.
And though he was asleep, he spoke an answer to Katy’s question. After this his hand ran through her hair, and her worries were swept away by a moment of physical sensation, and she fell asleep. She would only barely recall the words in the morning that would follow, might forget them entirely as time went on, but in any case she would never know that it was not Adrian who spoke to her that night. She had been too drunk and too tired to notice that his voice had been much deeper and much more clear than it should have been, especially considering the amount of vodka in his system.
The wolf spoke through Adrian with a great deal of sadness in his heart.
“It is the most horrible thing you could possibly imagine.”

The Wolf -Chapter III: South Peak COMPLETE

III: South Peak

1.
Mary Lindell stared out from behind her desk at the falling snow outside the glass double doors. She hated the cold, and the winter, and the place. South Peak, as far as she was concerned, was hell frozen over.
She had to wonder how, exactly, she had come to be here. Not even a year ago she was bussing tables to pay for college, and now her years of higher education in the field of sociology and psychology had paid off with a desk job.
The irony was, of course, that she was the front desk secretary of a mental institution.
And of course, it had only been two years. The stress, it turned out, had been too much for her, not to mention the student loans, and she’d dropped out.
It was Mackey that had got her here, Mackey who had called her just days after she’d put in an application. “Mary!” he had said. “Mary, we could use somebody like you, with your experience! We have an opening, and it’ll pay three times what you’re getting now! You must come work for us!”
Hadn’t that sounded nice? Three times her current paycheck, how on earth could she resist? Except her current paycheck hadn’t been much, so of course the new one didn’t need to be much more; and now she was stuck in the lobby of a mental institution, taking calls all through the night, and when she’d commented on how odd it was for a secretary to work over nights, Mackey had stated simply, “The crazy house tends to draw the crazies.”
And the truth of it was she did get more calls than she would rationally expect during the late hours of the night. Of course she never talked to anyone; she stated where they were calling to and asked how she could help, and they almost always replied that they needed to talk to someone, and then she would connect them. So it was generally a very boring job, a very brainless job, and one that could easily be done by a machine. So, insofar as that was concerned, she was at least a little bit grateful that she even had a job at all.
The clock hung just above the double doors ticked to 4 o’clock in the AM, and Mary stood up. Break time, she thought, though why she needed a break from sitting down was a question she would never be able to answer.

2.
Outside, Mary regarded the falling snow with distaste, but bore it long enough to smoke a cigarette.
She looked across the parking lot, the scattered street lights catching on the snow and causing the world to look brighter than it ought by rights should. Everywhere beyond the immediate vicinity of the South Peak Mental Institution was forest, and though this was a recently built facility (or rebuilt, she had heard some stories, though she remembered no specifics), the area around it was prosaic at best. The main road was paved, but the few others that led to God knew where else were composed only of scattered rocks and dirt. This was hick country, and boy did Mary know it.
The parking lot itself was beginning to look just as white as everywhere else, but in a couple hours it would be plowed up before it got a chance to melt and ice over. Two whole floors of the building were dedicated to sane residents, and maintenance crews were almost always on call. Resident floor cleaners, resident snow plow drivers, resident secretaries; the only people who didn’t live there, it seemed, were the doctors and the psychiatrists; the people who did the work that the place was known for. But, she knew little of standard procedure in regards to insane asylums, or mental facilities, or crazy houses, whatever you wanted to call them; either way, she just pegged it on being remote and left it at that. As far out as this place was (the nearest town, Alcudda, had a population of 562, and was forty miles away), the parking lot managed to fill up every day. Now, however, only a few vehicles remained in the “designated resident parking area." The rest was empty.
Except, she noticed, at the far end of the lot, close to where the main road opened up to the facility. There a dark colored jeep was idling, and though the lights were on in the cabin, Mary was too far away to tell what the person on the inside was doing.
But there was at least one person in there, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that he (no woman would ever idle their car in the parking lot of a mental institution, if Mary knew anything it was that) was looking right at her. A chill ran down her spine, and she dearly wanted to go back inside, but her cigarette was only half done, and God knew when she’d get a chance to run back into town to pick up another pack.
This she told herself, not consciously aware that she was blocking out memory of the coin-op cigarette dispenser in the resident lounge, which she visited every day. So it was for many of the non-crazies who resided at South Peak; a haze had fallen over them, though they had yet to notice it.
This was, of course, to the benefit of certain individuals with much larger paychecks than Mary.
“The crazy house tends to draw the crazies,” Mary told herself as she dropped the butt of her cigarette on the ground, crushing it beneath her heel. How time flies, she thought. Only a moment ago it seemed she had been worried about wasting a cigarette. Only a moment ago it had been just half burned, and since then she could not have taken more than a single puff, but sure as the clothes on her back it lay on the ground but a filter, the last of its embers choking in the cold, drowning in it, and she had her hand on the door, ready to make way for the body guiding it to go back inside.
Just as Mary made to return to her desk and her boring job, her eyes glanced upward. The snow was coming down as hard as it ever could, and would surely only get worse through the night; but somehow there was a break in the clouds, and she would not have noticed it except that, showing through them was the moon, so close to being full that she almost would have said that it was. But her first response was, “Two days.”
She didn’t understand how she could know that, had never cared much to know the specifics of the lunar calendar (did not, in fact, know that there was such a thing), but by the time she was back inside the slip of the moon had left her mind entirely, and she recalled only stepping out and smoking a cig and stepping back in.
The idling jeep and the two-days-away full moon may as well have never been there at all, and this was for the best. Because this was not the first time that she had seen that idling jeep, nor would it be the last, though that time was certainly coming; in fact, it was only two days away.

3.
Two hours later, slumped in her chair, Mary was startled awake by a ringing phone. For a moment she stared at the console as though it were an alien thing, not entirely sure what it was for, and then it all came flooding back to her.
She composed herself and lifted the phone off the hook.
“Hello, this is South Peak Mental Facility, how may I direct your call?”
No answer for a few seconds.
“Hello?”
Finally a cough, and then, “Yes, hello, sorry. I wish to set up an appointment with one of your residents.”
“Please hold.”
Mary pressed a button on the console, with a white slip next to it labeled GERALD MACKEY. The line went dead, and Mary hung up the phone.
She set her head on the table, and did not make any attempt to pretend not to be sleeping.

4.
At first, he did not hear the phone ring.
Gerald Mackey sat in a rolling chair twice as large as himself (a thing he felt asserted his authority), staring out the window at the falling snow. It had seemed to him that worlds were passing before his eyes, stars being born, living, and dying out, hundreds of thousands of years ticking away like seconds. His thoughts were in dark places, considering the things that he and his associates had done, and would do over the coming months. Perhaps even years, if all went according to plan.
It was not a moral dilemma, of course, that was keeping him up. It was the complicated nature of the acts themselves, the high probability of failure.
The possibility that he would be caught. Yes, that pretty much summed it up.
And then it occurred to him that there was a consistent noise in the background, and he turned towards the phone. An outside call was ringing, and though he had no evidence to back it up, he knew it was someone whose voice he did not want to hear.
After it rang three times, he considered that missing the call altogether might be worse, so he picked it up.
“Hello, this is Gerald Mackey,” he said, clearing his throat. He didn’t ask how he could help the caller; it was long past midnight, and anyone who would call at such times knew exactly what they wanted.
“Hello, Gerald.” A smooth, familiar voice. “I take it you know who this is.”
“Of course,” he coughed, breaking a sweat. “Yes, of course I know who you are. How could I forget?”
“Don’t talk to me in that dismissive tone. You can’t play off your fear no matter how hard you try, so stop. I can practically smell your sweat.”
“What do you want?” Gerald asked without much enthusiasm.
“I want to see him.”
Gerald scratched his head. “Who?”
“You know who!”
He flinched. “I don’t! I honestly don’t, Abraham, so please don’t yell at me!”
Silence. Then, “How is it you remember my name, but not who I brought you?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed, rubbing his face. “I’m just having a hard time remembering, that’s all.”
“You know, Gerald, I think maybe your experiments are affecting the wrong person.” He could practically see the smug smile on Abraham’s face.
“You have no idea what you are talking about. Now tell me who you want to see or leave me alone, I have business to attend to.”
A lie, of course, and both of them knew it, but it cut to the point nevertheless.
“Dade Williams.”
Spoken with the slightest hesitation. And hearing it, Gerald knew why.
Suddenly it came flowing back to him. Abraham had been an early financer of the facility, one of a handful of private investors along with several small organizations and one very large one. However, Abe’s contributions had been minimal, instead promising that he knew someone of the sort that Gerald was looking for.
Someone important, in other words.
And that person had been Dade Williams. Who now lay asleep in room 77A, alone on the entire block because all the other tenants had nearly gone insane from the nightmares they had around him. And the voices they heard, and the things that they claimed to see crawling around their rooms; the list of phenomena went on and on, but none of it could be proven because it had been personal and perceived. But Gerald, and his associates, had known exactly what happened and exactly how to fix it; move the tenants elsewhere.
Dade’s medication, so-called, could not be aborted. It was vital the experiments-
“Gerald? Why has your breathing quickened? You do know of whom I speak, correct?”
“Yes,” Gerald said quickly, “Yes godsdamnit I know who you’re talking about.”
Gods? Godsdamnit? Where had that come from?
“So then, when may I see him?”
“I can’t. You know I can’t. You know the people I work for, the people I report to, and I can’t let you see him. Can’t let you talk to him, and hell, even saying his name reeks of broken protocol.”
An impatient sigh. “Doctor, I think you’re making excuses.”
“It doesn’t matter what I say, my word is final!”
Silence.
For a long time, only breathing on the other end.
And then, “Alright. That’s fine. When the time comes,” he spoke confidently, “you’ll know I tried to go about this the legal way.”
The line went dead.
A chill ran down Gerald’s spine as he hung up the phone.

5.
He did not realize until someone knocked at his door that he was crying. Very likely had been for some time. But why? Gerald had been sitting at the window, watching the snow fall, and he had gotten a call. But by the time he picked it up, the other party had hung up –that was right, wasn’t it?
Yes, of course it was.
Gerald Mackey wiped the tears from his cheeks and called out, “Yes, come in!”
The door cracked open, but no one entered the room.
He stared for a moment, not comprehending, then said, “Come in if you’re coming in, or for God’s sake shut the damn door!”
Footsteps, slow and deliberate, leading away from the door.
It must be that damned secretary, Gerald thought. He had wanted to hire someone profoundly stupid so that they would not ask questions about the general goings-on at South Peak, especially considering most of them were unusual for such a facility and many of them were against the law. In Mary Lindell he had gotten his money’s worth, and she certainly was not the brightest bulb. She answered a mean phone, but when it came to talking to people in person, she was as shy as they came.
Gerald did not for a moment consider that the footfalls were too heavy for someone like Mary.
He stood up from his chair and his legs protested. How long had he been sitting there? It seemed to him only a few hours, but on nights like this, one never really knew. Time went by so fast when you weren’t paying attention.
The carpet felt warm beneath his feet, and Gerald realized he was not wearing shoes. How could that be? Thinking perhaps he had kicked them off while working, Gerald checked under his desk, but there was nothing. He shook his head and dismissed it entirely.
As he reached the door, Gerald found himself thinking about how nice it would be to run around outside under the moon, then stopped and told himself that it was an utterly ridiculous notion. He considered why he would think such a thing, gave up, and continued-
The lights went black and suddenly his brain was screaming in his hands and there was darkness surrounding all and there was a high whisper in the air-
HIGH AND FREE ACROSS THE SEA A PIRATE’S PIRATE SHIP ARE WE
-and it constantly repeated itself over and over, the succession forcing Mackey’s fingers into his frontal lobes, and he thought he could hear popping as his eyes left his head for greener pastures.
-toward the door. He stopped. A headache was coming on, and he wanted very much to lie down. Gerald coughed, wiped blood away from his lips (thinking it only mucus), and tried to push the door closed. He noticed, however, the corner of a box jamming it.
It was a small thing, wrapped in brown paper and tied together with twine, and scrawled in black ink across the top was a name he did not recognize
(Adrian Quist)
but he picked it up anyway, and held it in his arms as though it were a thing from another world. And distantly he thought, This thing isn’t really here. It is a fragment, like everything else, a discarded memory or a thought-
An image flashed before his eyes of a foggy glass door and a black silhouette across it, and when it vanished the package was gone and he was standing outside of his office, face against the faux oak door, a line of drool running down its surface and pooling on the floor.
Gerald’s hands were shaking, though he knew not why. He had been walking down the hallway, to go back to his room and back to sleep, and had decided to get a little bit of extra work done. Exhaustion was all it was. He fell asleep opening the door, that was what had happened.
Only there was a name on the edge of his mind, and like a child cringing away from thunder (Adrian Quist) it made his heart race to even consider it. Somewhere there was a person who bore that name, and that person was marked and hashed and important, as only certain kinds of people can be-
I WANT YOU TO LET ME GO, a scream in his head, and Gerald’s legs crumbled beneath him.
THEY’RE COMING FOR ME NOW AND YOU KNOW IT EVEN IF YOU DON’T WANT TO, YOU CAN’T HIDE ME HERE FOREVER AND NOW I AM GOING TO DRIVE YOU MAD UNLESS YOU LET ME GO.
“I can’t!” Gerald screamed at the ceiling. “I can’t, I won’t, I refuse! This is all just a bad dream! This all just-”

6.
Locked in room 77A, Dade Williams was not smiling, but felt better than normal all the same. He was confused and scared, had been for such a large amount of time that he did could not distinctly say how long it was, and his mind was so drowned in drugs that he was no longer sure just where and when he was, but all the same he knew some things that felt like they should be optimistic.
He knew that he had been left sitting for so long that his affects were finally spreading to those who thought themselves immune.
He knew that somewhere a man was driving himself crazy with his own demons, and that this man deserved every second of it. Would bear three times as much before it was over, if Dade was given the opportunity to make it so.
And he knew that his time here was growing short. He felt it beneath the universe somewhere, ticking away as only the God Machine could. And at this last he would have smiled most, if his mind were right enough to understand the concept of smiling.
Under his breath, Dade sung, “High and free, across the sea, a pirate’s pirate ship are we.”
Two days, he thought. Just two more days.

7.
Gerald screamed and fell out of his chair.
He lay there for a few moments, entirely uncomprehending what had just run through his mind. The snow was still coming down, but it was daytime now, and he realized that he had slept through an entire night’s worth of paperwork.
He did not exactly remember the phone call, nor did he remember the specifics of the thing one could loosely call a dream, because that was just a word Gerald threw around to make himself feel better. One thing he did know, and quite vividly, was that he was angry. He felt a fool for not having noticed it sooner, and thinking back he knew that it had been around for some time. The haze of mental instability brought on by a certain individual with very malicious thoughts.
Now Gerald was angry, and he knew exactly who to blame, and had several ideas of how to make him pay.
And Dade Williams was damn well going to pay for his insubordination.
If Gerald Mackey knew anything, it was that.