by Victor Allen
**********
The drive to work was simple and scenic, but I got no enjoyment from the stark, winter landscape, the time of year when the earth sheds its courting plumage and prepares for the bare essentials of life, like an animal.
I thought of poor Lon Chaney, Jr. in Curse of the Werewolf, doomed to live always in a netherworld between man and beast when the moon was full. Then I thought of poor Albert Bailey, destined to live in that same world for reasons yet unknown to him. Lon Chaney, Jr. only had to act the part. I had to live it.
What should I do? Suicide was out of the question. I had no assurance that I would change again and, as I have said, I rather enjoyed the feeling of power. I unwrapped a chocolate bar and began to munch. The familiar, honey-sweet taste settled in like an old lover. Some doctors had said that chocolate had a mysterious effect on some glands, those tireless little powerhouses that produced polysyllabic compounds that were as mysterious as magic. Could all the chocolate I had eaten over the years have caused such a monstrous change? The idea was ridiculous. There were millions of chocolate junkies in the world and nary a werewolf nor even a case of fatal biting among any of them.
I had a bad moment when a name was supplied with my victim. At the top of the hour news on my local radio station, the story of a wolf attack on Mavis Parker aired. She had been found dead, her throat ripped out after having been dragged away from her hot tub. There were signs of a struggle and many short gray hairs had been found stuck in the blood around her throat. Traces of wolf saliva would almost certainly be found by the pathologist who performed the autopsy.
There was little doubt the marauding animal was the big, bad wolf. There was even a witness. Foster Lewis (not her husband, by the way. He had apparently been caught on the adulterous side of the fence) had told police how he had heroically tried to save Mavis, struggling to stave off the mighty beast with his bare hands, finally embellishing the story by mentioning how he had barely gotten away with his own life. I laughed out loud. Any minor injuries he had probably came from clambering out of the hot tub to get away. The news didn’t speculate on how such a relatively rare creature as a wolf could have found its way into a fairly modern suburban area or why it would attack a human once there.
I could have told them.
