Authors: Tim Curran
The glassy silver-red eyes were human…or nearly…but the nose was a snout, the mouth hanging open and revealing a dentition of spike-like canine teeth and incisors that looked like they were designed to tear out throats and bring down prey.
Even the ears were pointed and laid back flat against the skull. Strands of silver-white hair fell over the blood-splattered face …
7
Megga felt her whole body go tense as a pain that was sharp and cutting seemed to slice through her brain. In a purely s
ubjective sense, it felt like a steel wedge had split her skull open and some great hammer was driving it deeper and deeper into her gray matter.
She gasped.
Her knees went weak.
And up inside her head, in that ever-widening, ever-splitting fissure, she felt something cold and invasive like a slow-oozing, chill jelly
seep into her mind. It was something dark, something horrible, living or semi-living, a monstrous
other
that sank its needle-like teeth right into the meat of her brain.
It had a voice:
YOU,
it said.
YOU, WE RECOGNIZE YOU, WE KNOW YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE PART OF US.
She wanted to thrash her head violently side to side and tell that voice, that invading
other
, that no, no, no, she wasn’t part of whatever it was and whatever tenebrous, envenomed evil it represented. But her mouth would not speak and her mind would not think and that was because…
because
it was a lie, a great, stinking, bald-faced lie and she knew it. God, how she knew it. The thing crawling through her psyche was the mind of the wolf-woman. In its death throes, it was throwing out feelers, casting for scent, searching for safe harbor and it found it quite instinctively in Megga.
And that was because Megga had been suckling the
swollen breast of the dark side since she was a schoolgirl.
But now that some creeping malevolence from the dark side had found her, called to her, recognized her as its
own, and slithered into her head uninvited…all the morbid flirting and teasing and adolescent dark fantasy left a bitter taste in her mouth.
One that made her want to gag on the bile of her own soul.
No, no, no…leave me alone…please just go away…I don’t want this…
At that moment—bare seconds into it—it felt like something snapped in her brain. Like that thing had
grabbed her free will and cracked it wide open like a walnut.
This i
s exactly what you wanted, you silly little twat. You’ve been begging for it your whole life and now you’re getting it. The bait has drawn US in and we’ll never, ever let you go now. Like calls to like.
No.
This could not be.
She would not accept the possibility.
Her mind was overburdened, stressed, pushed beyond all acceptable limits by what she had seen tonight. Couple that with a highly-excitable, highly-imaginative, downright neurotic personality poisoned by a mordant death obsession, and hallucinations of the worst order weren’t really too surprising.
Yet…even in her denial…she could feel that
thing
inside her head. It was weakening some because it was dying, but its intellect, its will was still dominant and quite possibly strong enough to squash her like a green-juiced insect.
YOU BELONG TO US, LITTLE GIRL.
No!
NO!
NO! NO! NO!
Get the fuck out of my head! Get out! Get out! Leave me be!
But it wasn’t going to leave her be. It had made contact, it had uplinked, it had planted its dark and festering seed deep in the shivering marrow of her brain and already that seed was bearing flower, bursting with midnight-black, coiling rootlets and petals of cemetery lace.
She could not deny it.
It showed her the agony of refusal and defiance, igniting a neural firestorm of agony in her brain, a sizzling white-hot electrical discharge that made her nerve endings blaze with such heat and fury and dizzying pain that she not only wanted to scream, she needed to scream. As the agony thundered inside her, her voice shrieked with madness and despair, echoing through the hollows of her skull but never quite reaching her lips, which were pressed in a trembling pink line.
And for a moment there, just one terrifying, nightmarish moment, the world disappeared from view, blotted out by the rising, consuming blackness of the thing that had invaded her, the thing whose dominating, discarnate mind was like a black expanding thunder cloud throwing out white, jagged bolts of sheer kinetic energy.
GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HEAD!
And then…yes, Megga could see again. The world swam back into view and it was a harsh, cold, and unforgiving world of blowing snow, bone-deep chill, and an ever-circling darkness pressing in from all sides as she stared down at the freakshow wreckage of the wolf-woman spread over the snowy pavement. She saw it. She smelled it. It filled her head with a slaughterhouse musk, making her reel and shiver with a weird, hypnopompic vertigo inspired by the still-trembling roadkill smear right before her, an anatomical waste heap sinking into its own toxic red sludge.
The thing was dying, oh yes, to be certain it was.
But even as its lights winked out one by one, even though it was beyond the point now of
regenerating its flesh, it still reached out to her, gripping her mind with tenacious fingers.
US.
PART OF US.
YOU BELONG TO US.
And then, just as surely as it had filled her head, it drained away and there was nothing but a cool white buzzing in her head. Megga blinked and then blinked again. It was delirium. It was stress and the onset of neurosis, that’s all it was. Good God, she’d been half out of her mind for years, a dark little fallen angel drowning in the whirlpool of her own angst and morbidity, feeding on the gravy train of pop culture horror…so was it really any surprise?
Was it really?
8
Snap out of it.
Wenda opened her eyes
.
For a moment there, i
t was like her mind had been sucked into some surreal, completely subjective black hole, a blank and evil universe where there was only her and the hideous remains of the wolf-woman…or whatever in the Christ she was.
She had completely zoned and she had no idea why. Looking over at Megga, she had a pretty good idea she was not the only one.
There’s a power to this thing and you felt it.
As Morris put the light on it, it jerked, the jaws opening wide with a bloody froth of bile. It snapped its teeth, it glared at them with a black hatred that was vast and bottomless. It made growling and snapping sounds, fingers scraping in the snow with hooked black talons.
And Wenda thought:
It looks like like like—
9
“A fucking werewolf,” Mole said.
Werewolf, werewolf, werewolf.
Megga heard the words and why, yes, of course, that’s what this thing was. A simple, positively medieval term that seemed to have very little place in the modern world…but oh how descriptive it was on this black and blowing night.
Werewolf. Fucking shapeshifter…skinwalker.
Megga was breathless, absolutely breathless. It was cold and the snow was blowing into her face, pinching her cheeks with very icy fingers. But that was nothing. That was fucking pedestrian compared to what she was feeling in the aftermath of her (hallucination) little mind-trip, for lack of a better word. She felt…well,
airless
inside like a deflated balloon or a can of Fix-A-Flat that had been emptied into a tire.
“Are you all right?” Wenda said to her, picking up on it as she always picked up on such things.
Megga ignored her because she simply had to. There was no way she could lie, so avoidance was the best strategy. “I always knew there were such things.”
“It would seem there is relevance in the tales of old wives,” Doc put in.
Doc…God, but Megga loved Doc. How he put things and the way his voice sounded…she admired how his mouth and brain always seemed to be so perfectly wired together in a dynamic fusion. Always so cool. Cool?
No, man, that dude is fucking ice, baby, ice, ice, ice.
He just had a way about him. She stared at him and had a perfectly crazy idea that she loved him. Oh, she’d always had a thing for older men, especially intellectual sages. Guys her own age bored her with their whining, angst, and narrow world views and if there was going to be any whining, angst, or narrowness in a relationship then it was going to be coming from her end, thank you very much. She loved Doc’s voice. It was the voice she would have liked to hear reading her a bedtime story when she was a little girl—
The Witches
by Roald Dahl was her favorite—or whispering hot-blooded desires into her ear as a woman. She saw him by candlelight and she was on top of him, riding him hard, devouring him with the heat between her legs and—
Holy shit, what was that about?
Her mind was flying in all directions at the same time. She wasn’t even making sense to herself. That hallucination—she was telling herself it had been nothing more—was still weirding her out, all kinds of things crawling out of her subconscious.
One of them was this
:
She was nine-years old and the mad dog was after her.
For years, the memory haunted her, a cruel incursion into her dreams, and now she was living it again…the horror, the pain, the sheer terror of it all. The dog came out of the vacant lot, a big hulking black lab whose shaggy coat was threadbare, patches of open flesh set with scars and pustulant wounds. Its eyes were pink and runny, its left ear torn off, its jaws foaming and fanged.
Megga backed away from it.
Had she just kept going, it might have ignored her in its suffering which was immense and total. Instead, she stopped right there on the sidewalk where the thorny weeds thrust up through the cracks. She froze up in a dizzying moment of paralytic fear…and screamed.
It came from the terrified core of her being: sharp, shrill, and godawful LOUD.
The tone of it pierced the lab’s ears, slicing through its diseased brain and echoing endlessly with volume, bouncing around in its skull with painful reverberations that at first made it whimper then howl with absolute, atavistic rage…a sound that was eerie, hurting, and nightmarish.
What happened then was a given.
Before Megga could hope to flee, the beast—for it surely was that, not a dog but a diabolical hell-hound with glowing eyes and white-slavering jaws—came charging out at her with almost hallucinogenic speed, a primeval blur, a savage missile of bunching muscle, bared fangs, and bad attitude driven by a raging, cutting agony in its dying brain.
At the last moment, just before the beast hit her, she hoped beyond hope that it would run right past her, but it did not. Its movements were clumsy and confused,
but it located the sound of the shrilling noise and hit it. Megga went down. The convulsive weight of the beast pinned her to the sidewalk as its wild, flaying claws tore at her, its teeth snapping at her, foul ropes of saliva spraying in her face.
She fought against the beast, pounding and pummeling it with her fists, clawing at its oily hide with her nails.
But this only enraged it.
It seized
her right calf in its bloody jaws.
Nine-year old Megga
was screaming and fighting, kicking out with her left leg while pain threaded through her right in hot waves. The dog just wasn’t biting her…it was chewing, tearing, rending. Her pantleg was shredded, her calf muscle punctured as those teeth came down again and again and again.
Then running feet and a voice booming: “GET OFF MY DAUGHTER, YOU MANGY FUCKING MUTT!”
The lab released her calf and turned on this latest intruder, who screamed and shouted, driving burning blades of pain deeper and deeper into the dog’s brain. It had no choice: it attacked. The man who came at it had no fear. A dog was a dog was a dog and he would fucking kick it to death for touching his daughter, he’d shoot its guts out. But then…yes, he saw the foaming jaws, the slimy snot-ribbons of contaminated saliva swinging back and forth as it charged and he called out: “MAD DOG! MAD DOG! MAD GODDAMN DOG!”
The beast got within striking distance and leaped.
As it did, the man brought up his gun, a 12-gauge pump, and fired. The sound of it was like thunder and to the dog it was an axe that split its head open…which wasn’t too far from the truth because the buckshot hit it straight on, macerating its muzzle and blowing its head apart into a red-gray-pink shrapnel of bone matter, spinning teeth, and splashing brain jelly.
The beast was literally dead before its carcass thumped to the sidewalk.
Later…was it that day or the next?...Megga was barely conscious, lying in a hospital bed, hearing a doctor’s cool, calm voice saying, “I’m sorry, honey, but the dog was rabid. We don’t want you getting like that, now do we?” And as a nurse and her father held her down, the first of many needles was inserted into her belly.