Werewolves

(To the reader:  Please review this piece when you're finished, thank you.)

A man is walking through the woods, his footsteps sough through the newly fallen snow.  He pulls his collar up a little tighter against his throat as he takes a moment to look up and make sure that he’s on the right trail.

He isn’t going far, it’s just that at twilight visual acuity decreases, and this is further complicated by the snowfall.  No tracks in front of him, just a slight down-bowing from one side of the trail to the other.  The shape of the trees are beginning to look the same, and the man turns to look back at his footprints and the same shaped trees he’d just passed.  Further down, he can see the comfort of his home, beckoning for him to come back and enjoy the fire that was tamped just moments ago, and the warm cider always in the crock by the side of the andirons.

What forces him out at this hour is a duty that he both relishes and despises.  He must go over this small hill down through the valley and halfway up the next rise to check on his neighbor.  The old woman wasn’t getting any younger, and was about as batty at they came.  Sometimes she was quite the hostess, and this is what he relished most; her offering of hot, black coffee, a piece of her county-famous banana bread, “how appropriate,” he smirked to himself and a couple of hours of lighthearted conversation with a few good-natured jabs and insults; the stuff from which friendships are made.  However, there were times that she simply wasn’t herself, and this is what he despised most.  She would appear agitated and preoccupied, mumbling low that only she could hear.  It even appeared that she wasn’t aware of his presence, which often made him wonder why he even promised to occasionally look in on her.

It really is a crap-shoot as to what her nature will be on any given night, and tonight was no different as to whether his three mile round-trip out will be rewarded with warmth or disregard.  Anyway, out he is, and he’d better get going again, especially if he doesn’t want to end up staying the night on her cold wooden floor, as he did last winter.  He has been trying to forget that fiasco ever since, so he pushes his hat down further on his head and begins traipsing towards the dual smoke columns rising from her fireplace and stove.  “A good sign” he sighs.

At the rise, before descending into the valley, the man noticed that there were no noises at all.  There were usual and normal sounds that were carried on such a quiet moment; at least the very faint snowfall of exceedingly large flakes which had made their way down through the forest canopy.  Even the accumulation of snow perched precariously and falling in a comic-like “thud” were not present in his ears.  He stopped, and looked up again; there was her cabin, but now only one column of smoke rose from the home; the chimney.  “Don’t look like there’ll be banana bread,” he thought, consoling himself on only a cup of coffee before he returned home.

The silence grew, if that is even possible.  He couldn’t hear his own footsteps.  Wait, yes he can, but there was an echo to them.  “In this weather, an echo?” he thought.  He wasn’t more than a quarter of the way down the valley side, and turned to see his footsteps resting quietly in the snow, but with a closer look, he noticed that even as close as five feet away, there was another set of tracks in his.  He walked back and bent over to see who or what had made the marks.

There was a muffled call for “help” from the direction of the old woman’s cabin.  A lightening bolt shot through his spine and forced him to stand up, and look in her direction.  She was outside, lying on her side in the snow, one arm out and the other holding her side.  She was barely visible through the twilight and snow, but for this once, he was glad she always wore those damned bright colors.

The man broke out in a run, but was immediately overcome with a sense that he was not alone, and that made the hair on the back of his neck stand straight up, screaming for attention.  The man was passed by three figures that moved with tremendous speed, but more to his consternation, they moved that fast on two legs.

“What the hell?” he said out loud.  Before he could come to a stop to assess the situation the old woman called again for help.  This time she was face down, pushing her body up out of the glacial snow.  It appeared that she was being attacked by three figures, but from this distance, the man couldn’t discern what was doing this violence to her.  He started to run again, and the three figures around the old woman seemingly vanished and were at his side in less time than it took to understand that they were actually moving towards him.

As they approached the man, this time they were on all fours.  “Wolves” he said to himself, cursing the fact that he hadn’t brought his rifle, but as soon as he said the word his attention was captured by the sickening sound of bones and ligaments re-arranging themselves, crackling into position for bipedal locomotion.  There was an extension of the back paws into long, narrow feet, and the wolf’s front paws developed into three-fingered hands, with an odd-looking forth that acted as an opposable thumb.  The experience was obviously painful, though the wolf kept silent through the entire incident.

Awestruck, but still able to control a small part of his own mind, the man glanced to see that the other two wolves were doing the same thing.  How long had he been here witnessing this?  He looked for a moment at the old woman, now laying on her back in the snow, but still moving, looking like some macabre attempt to make a snow angel.

The lead wolf was nearly a pure white, with only the tips of his hair around his face and tail were colored differently.  Somewhere between the spectrum of a  reddish-brown towards a near purple-black, or perhaps a mix of all, regardless, it gave the wolf one of the most spectacular appearances, as each hair seemed to stand out solely for the reason of making this creature the most handsome beast the man had ever seen.  While the other two wolves looked more like the common variety wolf found in these parts, they were just as amazing to see standing there.  Each wolf was easily twice the man’s height, but the lead wolf was more robust than the man himself and considerably more than simply twofold his height.

He thought he heard barking in the distance and turned his head slightly to determine where it was coming from, only to realize that he was listening to the lead wolf saying that “we have no argument with you, human, leave.”  The very nature of that voice left the man very close to pissing his pants.  Of course he’d seen on TV that some dogs can be trained to say words, hell, his buddy’s rotty could say “screw you,” but this was nothing like that, and nothing in his life ever prepared him to hear words fall from the likes of a werewolf.

He looked again at his friend in the snow, now clutching for the skies, but instead of the normal gaudy colors she habitually wore, she apparently had taken her orange jacket off and was now covered in a light gray parka.  Was that a parka?  She seemed to be cold, or at least shivering uncontrollably by a force unseen, a force within.

“Human!  Return to your home now, and swear you tell no one what you have seen here, and I promise that we will never face each other again” growled the werewolf.

“What have you done to her?” demanded the man.

“This is none of your concern, human” spoke the werewolf.  “Her crimes against us are her crimes alone.  There is no reason to involve you, unless you would like to be drawn in.”  The eyes of the werewolf were dark and trenchant.  The man tried to comprehend what he’d just seen, heard and now again, seeing.  “What the hell color is that?” he thought half out-loud, half to himself.  The lead wolf’s eyes seemed to shimmer with obvious intelligence, but more amazingly, when the wolf spoke, the intensity with which he spoke was punctuated with a color change of his eyes.  Not a complete color change, but more of a brightening or darkening of hues.  But the man still could not put a label on the color of the wolf’s eyes.  The other two, again, just seemed to be a lesser form of the regular wolves found in the area; nothing compared to this god that was standing before the man.

Suddenly, a howling cry for mercy came from the direction of the old woman’s cabin.  The man started to run towards his friend.  The three werewolves appeared to simply step in his way, when in reality, they had covered nearly ten feet with merely a thought.  “Return to your home, human.  This does not concern you or your kind” stated the lead wolf.  With a surprising gesture of compassion, the lead wolf, and his magnificent coloring, placed his hand on the man’s back and with great tenderness turned the man back to the path he had taken.

“The old woman, your friend, once performed both a great kindness and a great harm upon us.  We are simply repaying the, uhm, favor if you will.”  With his back turned slightly towards the man, he could see the magnificent coloring was a stripe down the back of the werewolf.  “In the end, human, it will either be your safe return home, protected by my clansmen, or your death by my clansmen.”  This statement brought about a strange sound; that of thin lips smacking in anticipation of a meal.  The lip-smacking came from the two werewolves behind the white wolf.

Again, the screams of the old woman pierced the silence of the moment.  “It is part of the process, human, that sweet agony that causes us to transform to our most human form.”

Not fully grasping the fact that he was about to speak back to a mythical figure, but the man asked “I thought you only changed at the full moon.” 

The sounds of three werewolves laughing completely caught the man off guard.  Not that he was listening to werewolves laughing, but the sound; no yips or howls, but a guttural, choking sound.  The man thought at first they were gagging on something.  Something in the back of his mind reminded him that dogs weren’t supposed to be given chicken bones, and wondered for a half a second if these wolves hadn’t eaten the old woman’s chickens.

“Human, only the boldest appear under a full moon, all of us can stay in our lupine form as long as we wish, living the centuries in and out without any detection.  However, some take on a human-like form, as you see before you now.  But the most desperate of us, those who cannot come to grips with who they are, evoke a power that is difficult to control, and that is to become Homo lupinus erectus.  For this ability, one pays a tremendous price.  They must protect the clan at all costs, and in time, they must forgo their centuries of life for a single lifetime.

“Your friend there has been living on borrowed time, so to speak.  You see, human, for each year that she defies the will of the deeply seated rules of the Earth and the clan, what you may call magick, one of us dies.  I have lost too many of my clan, and have sought the old woman for centuries.  She has been forced to return to her four-legged self.”

Never noticing while the handsome wolf was speaking, the man slowly became aware during the pause that the arm of the lead wolf was around his neck outside of his jacket.  With his hand now resting inside his jacket, the werewolf was now gently raking his chest with claw-like finger nails that were increasingly working their way up to his neck.  With a grotesquely formed thumb making relaxed contact with the back of the man’s neck, it appeared that the white werewolf was suddenly aware of his extremities, though they did seem to have a mind of their own. 

Again, the choking sound as the lead werewolf chuckled and said “you have nothing to fear human.  Who in your world would believe such stories as these?  We are not cold blooded killers as other beasties.  We prefer to think of ourselves as the more refined and elegant of monsters.  But if it will make you comfortable …” he removed his arm from the man.

This time, there was the same deafening silence that existed immediately before the man’s world was turned into some “X-File” episode.  The three werewolves were off and at the woman’s side before the man could even focus his eyes.  When he finally was able to center his vision on where the old woman had suffered, there was nothing human left.  She began to turn over on to four legs and let out a howl that informed everyone she was no longer human.  Then she simply laid down and died.

Three wolves were next to her, and took up the howl where she had left off.  They looked in the direction of the man, and in his head the man heard “Go home, human.  It is finished.”  It was the voice of the splendid white wolf, in the head of the man.  Or was it in his left ear, as he felt a slight zephyr pass him on the left. 

He turned to look.  Nothing.  He turned back to the cabin of the old woman, and there was nothing there, except her cabin.  The body of the old wolf was gone, and no more wolves of any kind nearby.

The man turned around, his footsteps sough through the new-fallen snow.  There were no footprints of any kind in front of him, but he had travelled this trail hundreds of times now for the last 200 and some-odd years, and thankful that the Clan Leader of all the Werewolves wouldn’t know an Immortal if he apparently was standing next to one.

© 2008 Elizabeth Bathory