Lock them down, lock them down in the cellar

Push them down, push them down in the cellar

Cut their heads off and turn them on the rack

Cut their tails off and burn them in a sack

Wolfpeople don't deserve to come back

Wolfpeople don't deserve to come back

Children's rhyme circa 1550 AD

ã mmw, 1999    Realaudio (only hints at CD quality...but David "Satie" Houston's score and Renee's read are excellent.) Click on the picture to start the RealAudio 56kreading!  Or MP3

  New art by Adam Miller!

The body lay on the Berkshire forest floor, frosted with round icemoon's hoary glow.

It was dying, watching, as the manwolf's fangs sliced from groin to toe.

With the wildly salivating animal standing over his body he could only think

That Shakespeare would say this beast would use his chest to take a meaty drink.

But sated in the bloodletting alone, the manwolf stared into its prey's wide eyes,

To his cornered survival state of mind, and its ironic sense that as it dies

The sight of his cabin mere yards away, secure with soft, warm light--clean,

Would illuminate his life's last scene.

But the animal knew the unnatural opposite of death would come to the little man tonight.

Then the manwolf ran into the deep woods, having indelibly marked another by icemoon's light.

With a mark so evil, spiritually delivered by a bloody, ripping fang,

To a man now branded with the sign of which only old gypsies sang.

Shaylie held the gun in both hands, afraid to aim.

It seemed heavier to wield than it should, more real, less movie tame.

All the girls had flocked to stores after them.

Shelves and cases emptied with the spreading fear of...him.

Too many caskets were going into the ground

Unvisited and un-waked because of body-parts not found.

For months already, prank surprises even by the young were forbidden.

The perceived closeness of the manhunter made the citizens’ abjectly fear-ridden.

Serial death by animal attack when the moon was full--

Made the word seem less cruel

As it echoed from tabloid medium to mouth

Across the town, east to west, north to south.

Werewolf. The very word a fear-controlling soundbite tossed.

But solemn awareness grew with the rising toll of body count lives lost.

Doubling and tripling police protection was tried

But the more police and hunters that came, the more they, too, died.

The gun was old and dull, not of blue steel, nor chrome.

Shaylie wondered where she'd hide it when she got it home.

The old Eastern European man at the swapmeet had sold her on its mystery.

Said that death to certain animals was in its history.

He said, "in the old country, it alone passed the test--

Pretty lady, you keep this loaded with these bullets, only they are best."

Such a simple barrel and trigger, it appeared barely functional, ready to explode if she used it.

That was when she saw the first gleaming silver bullet.

He said again that there were things that in the old country

People "dealt with on face, and needed no scientific rationality."

He asked only a token payment for what he promised was the answer to her fear,

And when the old man made the sign of the cross, it was clear

That the natural and right were turned around,

That order and science were sadly wanting found.

And safety and security dimmed when all was said and done

And only the naïve went out alone when icemoon began its run.

**

The haughty little man walked among his students with a conspicuous swagger.

There wasn't a person among the young and strong that he couldn't imagine in dying stagger.

Just because he was lately disconnected to the name on the faculty door,

Didn’t make him any less the overbearing classroom bore.

All he had to do now was choose, then sniff and track

The victim's scent when daylight turned to nightly black.

During the day it took all his strength to keep his eyes to the dirt

And keep his new sensations from pressing up under every skirt.

But he wouldn't in weak daylight form betray

The animal power that ruled his blood hunger at the end of day.

**

Man/devil/wolf shivered awake, naked, in a cleft of rock,

And only a demonic self-control could stave off the pleasure of remembrance's shock.

The blood covering him from his face to his feet was not his, of this he was sure.

He knew his motives for painting himself in it were animal pure.

Remembrances of the victim's eyes as he was at feast,

As he ripped gobbet upon gobbet of flesh from the terrified small human beast.

One who was so fear-consumed that it did not cry out for help, nor willingly could.

This next day that child of a human mother's womb's entrails now fed others in the wood.

He did remember the heart-pounding tower climb after the kill,

Climbing to howl his triumph with the moon's bright witness of his skill.

Uncaring of to whom or how it was done,

What scheme meant he should become an animal at the setting of the sun?

Were there more of his howling kind and would they know him as a brother?

Was he truly the only one, or were there really others?

Hadn't God given him dominion over the rest of the world's creatures?

A moon triggered set of super-human features?

Now in the land of men, there reigns a king of a different kind

With an animal's frame of mind.

Immortal with one exception,

Death can come only through decapitation or purest silver laceration.

In this rural American town, they feel the beast's presence until the five-mile post.

Getting closer in, the true hunter's nostrils itch, as ice crystal bloodstains the victim host.

**

It wouldn't do for someone of his tenure

To violate the university's trust with those so many years his junior.

But it was his favorite game to follow a student's scent from a classroom seat

For hours, from the classroom to teeming university street.

Finally meeting up with his victim in the latest full moon hour,

And drilling starkest fear into the rest with his savage singing from the tower.

At the too familiar sound, the populace knew better than if they'd heard it on TV

There was another loss, and no end to the mad-animal's murdering spree.

Until he chose student Shaylie's natural perfume's scent

And followed it for hours wherever she went.

The bounty hunters followed infrared tracks but he deftly used the nose's eye

To read a path that until now only a four-legged creature could spy.

Shaylie had overstayed, substituting for a friend's tutoring chore

And dearly regretted the darkening sky as she ran warily doorway to door.

Shaylie kept her hand in her purse

Knowing the gun and knowing the seller's fear of some superstitious curse.

She knew it wasn't superstition killed the victims though

And she was more than aware of her tracks behind her in the snow.

But her killer was an hour away

Waiting, not following, at Shaylie's home by a scent she'd left yesterday.

Timid Shaylie would have shot at anyone

Too afraid to run despite her lack of faith in the ancient gun.

Because it was shoot or in full fright freeze

At a twilight shadow that didn't answer her identification pleas.

It was within a half block of her house, a half block around

That the beast chose as its feeding ground.

No hunters followed her home all the way.

A rumor of a fresh kill further out drew their focus away.

Shaylie looked from snow-mound to the fir bushes to any hiding place.

She didn’t see the beast until she turned and caught its howl full face.

And again the beast stared into a victim’s deer frozen eyes

Enjoying the moment, until Shaylie brought herself back from the fear, the surprise.

In slow motion split second terror, she turned half to run,

Half to seek the gun.

With a lightning lunge, the man-beast missed the hot-blooded throat,

And could only catch her breast in a clamping jaw, teeth razor-slicing through her coat.

And knocked both of them flying apart,

The wolf’s claws getting scant icy purchase for another lunging start.

Blood spurting and bursting with fear, Shaylie pulled the pistol from its stow,

And waveringly shot at what her hammering heart said was foe, KILL FOE.

The sting of the silver in the bullet made him leap, airborne, above the road.

He'd been shot before but never even slowed.

But this was not the same.

He loosed a squealing yelp with the exploding pain

As he twisted and turned in the air,

Flailing just millimeters from Shaylie's hair.

The shock was on him and through him like a knife.

And in another instant he knew this would cost him his life.

He bounced off the pavement, and in panic retreat ran high up a tree like it was a ladder--

It was a shock of an onset of death that made the man in the beast all the madder.

He was dying and howling in earsplitting rage complete...

Still climbing to further height by inhuman clawed feet.

The sound of the shot drew many hunters running to the place,

But too late to claim any participation except witness in the case.

Shaylie was locked in a weapon pointing shock and stun,

Her arm still extended, frozen, not wavering, not even knowing she'd used the gun

Let alone hit her target's body mid-leap,

Fully expecting to indulge its bloodlust and the inviting flesh to reap.

The pain screamed from the beast atop the tree.

And the hunters uselessly shot more bullets to end the town's misery.

But only one bullet truly killed the beast,

And it came from a wise old man, not cowed in the least.

And it came from a young woman scared out of her mind,

But protected from the monster's plans for her kind.

And when the howler finally gave out with its last scream and fell to the ground,

Nothing like a wolf, with no lingering mark of the beast ever found.

That is, on the pale, blood-drained, little professor.

But Shaylie looked in the icemoon’s light where her clothes were tore,

At the fully healed, pentagonal scar and felt the muscular fire

Seal out the cold, and seal in the flesh craving desire.

The End

ã MMW January, 1999, 2003