by Hot Ice(lit)
In the climb most of my clothes had been shredded. I tore what little remained, and revealed to myself that I was a complete lycanthrope, with fur everywhere.
Looking back down at Mose in the fishing smack, I knew I was walking a tightrope between man and beast doing what I had to do tonight. What I had to do was ensure that the bloodlust didn't overcome my humanity.
From the remnants of my trench coat, I pulled my folded up hat from the pocket. Good ol' medicine hat'll keep the bogey man inside from running totally amok! Leastways, I sure hoped so.
Using my teeth to hold the hat band, I tied it around my right arm.
Then, my meagre preparations completed, I looked around to get my bearings. Stalking off, stealthily, wolf-like, half-shadowed, I sought out my prey.
Monro showed up very quickly, with a rifle in his hands. 'Looking for me, wolf-man?'
I stared up at him. 'Where are all your gunsels now, Monro?'
'Below decks, asleep. Seems like Malsum knows I'm finished - don't know how you did it, you hairy wolf-shamus, but the finale is just me and you.'
Monro stared down at me, his face working, a tragic mixture of pain and relief, shadowed with an almost fanatical will to kill me before he too died.
'Seems like, Malsum thinks we're Hero-Twins, Wolf, me and you. Like in all the best Red Indian legends. Malsum won't intervene. We've got to settle it between ourselves.'
Unbidden, the snarl from my lips startled even me. With spread fingers I gestured for him to come forward. 'That's the way I like it, Monro, face to face, hand to hand, down and dirty. Think you can take me?'
Monro sneered. 'Oh, Gran'mama, what big teeth, you've got!'
'All the better to tear your heart out with!'
I launched myself forward, but as I slammed into Monro it was like hitting the side of the superstructure. I skittered to a halt, my wolf pads slipping on the metal rivets of the deck, my wolf claws seeking purchase and not getting any.
Then it was my turn to experience the fear I'd seen so often in others. Before my eyes, Monro began to change. His head was shunted forward on his shoulders, which were ballooning up with muscle, bone and sinew. Bones gnashed within his frame, as new strength, unholy strength, flowed into him. His face lengthened into a snout, his eyes sank into deep sockets like pits of smoking hell.
I could do nothing, except cringe to the deck, curred by a transformation I'd only ever experienced from the inside before. When it was all over, Monro towered before me, transformed into a gigantic were-bear.
I was taken somewhat aback.
Monro growled in a voice that sounded like it came from the centre of the earth: 'How do you like them apples?'
I tried not to look worried. 'I'm gonna tear your heart out, Monro, and stick it down your throat. You're gonna die, choking on your own hatred.'
'Dream on, fur-ball,' growled Monro as he lashed out with his claws.
I tried to dodge, but the railing got in the way. The claws scoured along my arm, tearing the hat band from my arm. 'Shit!! That hurt!'
I ducked away to where the hat band was flung into a spatter of blood, my blood. I retrieved the hat band. 'This hat band means a lot to me, Monro, things like continuity.'
Monro sniffed at his claws. 'I smell magic - that's from a medicine hat!' I turned and loped away down a gangway, hoping for an open section of deck. I knew I had to get into the open where my speed and agility would make some sort of difference to his colossal strength and overwhelming weight.
I came to a gangplank that led up onto a loading derrick. I knew that if he could get me cornered, I'd be a goner. His claws, magically enhanced and on a par with my own magicked-up lycanthropy, would shred me into wolf-confetti and blow me away on the wind.
I could hear Monro lumbering behind me. Even without my wolf-heightened senses I could have heard him. Then, when he called after me, I knew stealth was the last thing on his mind:
'What are you running for, fur-ball. Can'tcha stand a little competition in the fur 'n' fangs department, eh?'
I ignored him and ran on. Out of the darkness loomed a chain-link fence, a demarcation to keep seamen from standing under dangerous loads. Monro sounded close behind me.
He had me boxed in. If he could get to grips with me in this confined area, it would be all over in two, maybe three good swipes of his powerful claws,
I turned, ran along the fence, and then using my momentum, bounced against the chain-links and dived straight for Monro's throat. I wasn't aiming to tackle him head-on. I was hoping if I could take him by surprise, I could be past his teeth and claws before he had time to attack.
The bestial growl that signalled my attack almost unnerved me - and it was coming from deep in my chest!
Bloodlust rode over my brain and reflexes. What had been a feint on my part was subverted by the animal side of my nature. My blood was up and my claws were unblooded tonight.
No longer!
I paused long enough to grab Monro by the thick ruff of fur about his throat. Monro was big enough for me to hold on, brace my hind-legs against his chest and use my free claw to slash his muzzle to ribbons in a flurry of frenzied blows. Blood flew everywhere, in black fountains of arterial beauty.
The unexpectedness of my attack caught Monro unawares. He reared up in surprise, anger flickering through his voice, as he steadied himself against my onslaught, preparing to give a reply in kind. And then his position came home to us both. His huge hind-paws scrabbled vainly for purchase on the metal edge of the derrick's platform.
We locked gazes for a second as gravity took over and finished my attack for me.
I laughed, wolf-like and jubilant, and straightened my hind-legs and added my weight to his fall as I jumped clear. The fall was maybe twenty feet. By the time I got down there, he might still be winded enough for me to rip his throat out. Go for the throat, and then the heart.
But the moonlight shone on the end of Monro's fall. It wasn't the deck. It was the hook of the derrick crane. Monro slammed into the chain, his ungainly limbs threshing in slow-motion as he tried in vain to stop his fall.
My human sensibilities strained to turn away, but my wolf, in animal fascination, thought otherwise. It had no imagination. It couldn't imagine the hook piercing Monro's solar plexus and tearing upwards through the rib-cage, filleting him like a herring. It had to see all that for itself, and even then it felt only a bestial exultation that the danger was over. There was no real triumph that an enemy had been defeated. It wasn't interested in gloating. Its only need was to survive.
It was left to me to witness how the hook gouged up through most of Monro's were-changed corpse. The momentum was spent and when the hook reached Monro's jaw, spraying blood and spittle, I knew it was almost over.
My wolf was gone. No moon draws it forth. Only the fear. The need to protect me, the man who gives it flesh, the flesh it warps into its own lupine mysteries.
But with the wolf gone, I could think more clearly. Malsum had inhabited Monro's carcass. With Monro destroyed, Malsum would be free to rove abroad and seek out a new host. I knew I had to tear his heart out, perform the ceremony, otherwise Malsum would be loose once again.
I leaped out from my vantage and strove to tear Monro down. My claws, shrinking as if in post-coital detumescence, just missed snagging Monro's bear toes.
As I landed on the deck, a shudder ran through the vessel. Lightning stalked across the waves. I knew that Mose's charges were going off early. I just hoped that Mose had the sense to free the fishing smack before the Vidor pulled him back below the waves for another date with Davy Jones' Locker.
The deck was already at an angle, by the time I realized I had to get more height in order to reach Monro at the end of his grisly gibbet. Another explosion wracked the hull. This time debris was flung upwards and rained down around us in a shower of sparks.
I knew I had to get to Monro. If he died now - unshriven, then all this planning and enterprise, all this pain and sacrifice would be fo
r nothing. We'd be back right where we had started.
Yet another explosion went off. I had to cling to the derrick as more debris hissed and whizzed about me. A storm of shrapnel
The deck was canted over a good 45 degrees by now. Monro was hanging limply from the derrick, looking for all the world like a piece of bait on the end of a fishing line. Even the way the derrick was locked in position, made it look as if Monro was being offered to the sea like a worm on a hook.
The Vidor began to sideslip, and it suddenly seemed that Monro's toes were about to dip into the water. Blood from his body flowed down, and as the body twirled on the chain it turned enough so that I could see that his heart and lungs were exposed. And even then, Monro still had one last surprise for me. His heart was still beating. Weakly, it was true, and gushing blood with every beat, but still - beating. At some level, Monro was live with only seconds to go before Malsum was freed from his flesh and anxious for another host.
'I gotta reach Monrowwwrrrr!'
The fear within me jumped up a whole octave. The wolf was back, and he was in a frenzy of fear.
'Aaarroooo!'
That howl! It was all animal. Malsum was winning - the beast in me was winning, submerging my humanity.
And then something out in the sea broke through the waters. Seeing it through the beast's eyes, I wasn't sure what I was viewing - at first. At first I thought it was some sort of submarine earthquake. I thought a mountain top was slowly emerging from the sea. Then the wolf howled again, this time in triumph - and that was when I had humanity enough to recognise the awesome creature.
It was Siitna, the Eskimo Mother-Goddess, come to claim her errant son. It was built along the lines of a killer-whale, but a killer-whale that dwarfed the Vidor, a grotesque killer-whale with female features. She rose up in a vast mountain of blubber and foam. I knew she was big enough to swallow the Vidor whole if necessary. I glanced about and saw the fishing smack some distance off, bobbing like a child's toy sail boat in the waves created by Siitna's arrival.
Despite the rumble of the vast waters, I could hear Mose as he danced in jubilation on the deck. 'I don't believe it! The Summoning worked!'
The Vidor was righting itself, tossed and thrown around in the maelstrom. There was nothing else I could do. I jumped at the top of a wave and hurled myself into the sea, striking out for the fishing smack.
The waves tossed me about like a wood chip. At one point I was fetched bodily out of the water by the force of waves crashing headlong against each other. I strained for a purchase in a world gone suddenly mad. And Siitna was still rising. She rose until she blotted out the full moon, and then she coiled down on herself and I knew that the Vidor would be written from the shipping registry, lost at sea.
Her descent was just as toilsome and suspenseful as her arrival. One moment the Vidor was still there, beneath her open maw, and the next her head had closed about it. The sea quailed at her descent. It was as if the world tilted and the sea was roaring off the edge. Mose's boat was tossed closer to me, and a line cast from the desk fell over my shoulders, and I still had the strength to cling on and ride it out.
* * * * *
When I came to I was lying on the deck of the fishing smack. Mose had thrown a blanket over me. I looked underneath the blanket. No fur. I glanced at my hand. No claws. Maybe the wolf had gone - back to the spirit world, back to the Happy Hunting Ground.
Mose saw my movement and smiled the smile of a man close to exhaustion.
'Monro is finished and Malsum is at the bottom of the sea. A good night's work.'
'Can we go home now?'
* * * * *
Epilogue
My talons came back a few weeks later. So I got myself a new medicine hat. Mose says he's got a new case for me to get my teeth into - and my talons - I used to be a Private Investigator, but I'm all right noaaaoooo-oooowwwwwwww!
The End
