For Mature Readers Only

#4
December '02

Strange Tales Presents

Werewolf by Night

Funeral Song
Part 4

Written by Chris Munn

There's a line in a song that pretty much sums up my life. "I have been guilty of kicking myself in the teeth,"...the voice of Layne Staley, speaking from the bowels of my soul with a vengeance. From what I understand about heroin addiction, it doesn't sound that much different from my situation. Both turns a person into a different version of themself, even though mine's probably more severe. I mean yeah, heroin can kill you, but I don't think an addict is going to maul a bag lady to death with it's claws and fangs. Well...maybe Scott Weiland.

The drugs that are running through my system now can't compare to the designer fun-time narcotics that roams the party circuit. This shit is nasty, like battery acid pumping through my veins until it reachs the trash heap in my brain. Reminds me of the old James Bond movies...Sean Connery's tied up and there's this huge ass laser beam sawing through the table toward him. Of course, it moves at the speed of mollasses, giving Bond just enough time to get away and catch the bad guy. I'm tied up now, too, just like Bond, only I'm bound by chains and shackles in the dungeon of my ancestor's Romanian castle. Damn it, Q...now I wish I had that grenade-pen.

I occasionally hear the shuffling of feet going by my cell, the sound of dirty black robes dragging behind. If I'm real lucky, the cell door opens and it's back to drug city. I'm pretty sure my nose was broken after being hit by the baseball bat, but of course I'm all healed up now. I'm more or less immortal, though one could argue about ways to kill me. Silver, obviously, is a big turn-off. Run me over with a tank, I probably won't be getting up. Maybe that's why I'm still alive and captive, they just can't figure out how to kill me.

"Awake yet?" a voice thunders from the other side of the cell bars. My head careens up from the floor, a stupified look plastered across my face. It's the same guy that I saw before I was captured, the one that led the woman in on a leash. Yet another black robe covers his body, but the hood's down around his shoulders, giving me a good look at his face. Older, balding, a huge scar running across the right side of his face...something tells me that this is the person responsible for my condition.

"I dunno, ask me again in about three weeks," I quip, trying to remain strong. Standing up isn't such a good idea, since my legs give out from under me soon as I apply pressure to them.

"Let me just say, stranger," the cultist says as he unlocks the door to my cage, "you're an incredibly hard man to kill. Anyone ever tried to slit your throat before? You can't even see the scar now."

"Yeah, I'm bad ass like that," that's it, Jack, act tough...even though I think I'm gonna throw up.

"Jack - can I call you Jack? - you've wandered into something that your mind is unable to fathom. What you may have seen as a hideous crime was in actuality just a practicioning of regligious beliefs."

"How d'you know my name?" I ask from my spot on the floor.

"We're psychic," is the reply as he holds up my wallet.

"My name," he tells me as he sets down on one knee, "is Glaucon. I hail from Germany, as you can no doubt tell from my accent. Tell me something, Jack...what brought you wandering into our castle walls? What could have possessed you to trespass here?"

"Not trespassing," I manage to grunt out as the drugs in my system thoroughly kick my ass, "this is MY castle."

Glaucon chuckles a bit, clueing me in on the fact that he obviously doesn't believe my claim. As he stands up, the rage my addled mind feels begins to grow. I'm calling for the wolf, the howling beast inside that could tear this flimsy man of flesh to bloody ribbons...but nothing happens. I scream as loud as I can, but only a small whine escapes my vocal chords. I watch as his leg draws back and then careens toward my face. The side of his boot connects hard with my jaw, flipping me onto my side. I can hear the wolf's cry as it fights for release, but the drugs are inhibiting the change. The only thing that's escaping my body now is the blood pouring from my mouth, even as the tear in my inner jaw instantly begins to heal.

"I'm going to ask you again, Jack," the son of a bitch says to me as I writhe around in the dirt, "why did you come here?"

"This castle," I confess between coughs of blood, "was owned by my great great grandfather, Grigori Russoff! This castle is MINE!"

The look on Glaucon's face tells me that the answer I gave was far from the one he was expecting. He staggers backwards out of the cell, muttering something about "the lineage" and "man of the moon." After a moment of shock, he starts yelling out names. I catch a few of them, even through the cultist's thick accent...Glover, Heinrich, and Slavonlic. Nice American names, probably grew up in Brooklyn during the seventies. Yeah, and I'm a biker with a flaming skull for a head.

Two of the men rush into the cell, arms flailing about wildly as they hoist me up to a standing position. There they remain, considering I couldn't stand up now if my life depended on it. Actually, in this case, my life probably does depend on it. The third guy enters with Glaucon, hypodermic needle in hand, letting me know that drug time's here yet again. Somehow, driven by nothing more than fright and pure meanness, my legs fly into the air. Luckily, both feet connect with their targets, sending Glaucon and needle-boy on a collision course with the ground. My momentum sending me backward, the two guys holding me up automatically come with to a crashing stop against the stone wall. With the last bit of energy I can bring forth, I yank on the chain shackles. The guy on my right laughs, knowing I don't have the strength to break free...but that's not what I'm going for.

I shoot another kick, this time to the groin, at the guy on my left. Before even I realize it, I've made my way down to him, the chains from my shackles wrapped around his neck. The guy on my right immediately backs off, realizing that with a twist of my arm I can pop his buddy's head right off his shoulders. As he takes a flanking position beside Glaucon and needle-boy, I decide it's my turn to call a few shots.

"Lemme outta here!" I bellow, this not being my finest moment and all.

"Or what, Jack," Glaucon, the smug bastard, asks with a calming gaze, "you'll kill him?"

"You bet'cher ass I'll kill him!" The guy's still squirming around on top of me, trying to get a grip on something. A few yanks on my hair is all he manages until I squeeze a little on the chain.

"I'm sorry, Heinrich," the cult leader says, a look of sadness in his eyes as needle-boy hands him a pistol, "I truly am."

The bullet pierces the center of my boy's chest cavity, blowing bits of spinal cord all over my black shirt. I half expect the bullet to keep going through me, though it luckily stops somewhere before, lodged in the fragmented bone that used to be Heinrich's back. I drop my hold on the chains as my hostage takes his last breath. My only gambit has failed, a point Glaucon's two remaining henchmen make clear with their repeated kicks to my torso. After being beaten into submission, I can only barely feel the needle slide into the vein in my arm...darkness following immediately after.

Okay, you know the story, right? The one about how when you die, your entire life flashes before your eyes in the split second it takes for your heart to beat one last time? Sure you have, everyone has. But I, like most people, never believed it. I mean, it's all just theory, right? People that have so-called "near death experiences" undergo stress so great that their mind gives up the ghost and releases all the chemical energy it has stored in one brief flash, believing that it's about to die right along with their body.

Well, the strangest thing seems to be happening.

I know, well at least I hope, I'm not dying. Drugged into a stupor, yes...but still alive. The images, though, started almost as soon as I blacked out, and I really can't explain them. Sure, I could always chalk them up as being hallucinations, but that doesn't seem quite right. The scenes play out to me, like the near death experiences I mentioned before. There's just one problem...these aren't from my life.

I can hear the wolves howling at the moon as I make my approach to the castle. I'm outside now, looking at the looming stone monstrosity in front of me. The castle is different, not the wreck that it was, almost in perfect condition. My clothing's different, old school European wear, the same type my Dad liked to dress in when I was a kid. I'm not real sure what I'm doing, but something tells me that I'm on a mission of sorts. The wooden stake in my hand clues me in on what that mission is.

I'm offered no resistence as I make my way into the castle itself, surprising considering who I'm going up against and all. The hall is covered in mirrors, reflecting back at me a face that's not mine. My first guess was Dad, but it's not his face either. A relative, perhaps an ancestor...Grigori Russoff.

Before I know it, my legs have carried me down into the basement dungeon. My eyes dart across the cages, and I half expect to see my drooling ass still lying there. This is obviously the past, though...a hallucination brought on by the sedatives. Or not.

"Louisa!" I shout as I break into a run toward the last cell in the room. There, chained to the floor in all her nakedness, is my great-great grandmother. She's covered in blood, cuts and bruises adorning her body, but that doesn't stop the look of hope that drapes her face as I unlock the cage. Her arms wrap around my neck as the now unlocked chains fall away, and the two of us turn to make a hasty retreat. We don't get very far.

"Russoff," The heavily European accented voice calls out, "I expected you sooner." My eyes expand with fear when I see the face connected to the voice. Dracula, lord of the vampires.

We are so boned.

"Mr. Russell."

The kick to my jaw snaps me back to reality, jarring me out of the dream I had been experiencing. I almost prefer the dream, at least thereI had a fighting chance.

"Mr. Russell? Are you with us?"

Another kick to the face only serves to make me mad. My teeth slide down the wall, attached by streams of hot blood and cold sweat. Glaucon's smiling face is all I see through the pain and delirium, a face I'd like to rip off with a swipe of claw. The wolf is still buried, though, smothered deep within the bowels of my drug induced mental state.

"Jack, we seem to have come to a crossroads," the bastard tells me as he lights up a cigarette. The smoke billows around the shitty lighting system, framing him in a halo of black lunged beauty. "We know who you are now...Jacob Russoff, ancestor to the great Grigori Russoff. A criminal back in the states, right? Killed a great deal of people back in New York a few years back, if I'm not mistaken?"

"I didn't kill anybody," I mutter.

"I'm not here to judge you, don't worry. You're important to us, more so than you can ever imagine. Which is why you're still alive."

"Kill me," I say, still in mutter mode.

"I respect you, Jack. Well, not you specifically, seeing as how watching you squirm across the floor just makes me want to vomit. But I do respect your lineage. You're everything we want to be, Rossoff. Man's inner beast brought to life, uninhibited by the constrains of moral fabrication."

"Sick...motherfuck."

"So we're gonna keep you around for a while, until we figure out what to do with you. Consider yourself the family dog."

"Hey," I manage to stutter out, "one...last thing."

"What's that, dog?"

"Can I get...a drag...off that smoke?"

The third kick to the face hits me hard, with it both breaking my jaw and causing my head to smack against the stone wall behind me. The darkness takes over again, but not before one last thought races through my mind.

Glaucon is one dead son of a bitch.

"You shouldn't have come here, Jacob. You're only going to get yourself killed...or worse."

"I don't want to hear it, Dad."

I know I'm unconscious. This isn't real, another state of hallucination due to the repeated blows to the head. But it's still a little startling, given the current events.

I'm still in the cell, but the chains are completely gone. My jaw's healed up...in fact, I feel in perfect health, despite the severe beatings I've recieved. I can't feel the drugs gunning their way through my body anymore, either. To be honest though, I could probably handle all of this a lot better if it weren't for the other big faux-pas the dream's throwing at me.

My father.

Standing in front of me.

Speaking to me...as if he's alive.

"This is all my fault, Jacob. I'm so sorry."

"Damn straight this is all your fault!" True, I'm yelling at a dead man, but things have been so weird so far that I'm just kind of going with the flow. "And my name's not Jacob, it's Jack. I gave up your name when you abandoned us."

"I couldn't help it."

"Sure you couldn't," I reply as I pull a pack of (imaginary) cigarettes from my pocket and proceed to light up, "just like I can't help being chained up in a castle dungeon while Euro-trash cult freaks kick the living shit out of me."

"I know I should have told you I was alive, Jaco...Jack. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. You were happy, living your own life...who was I to interrupt that with another reminder of the curse I placed on you?"

"You were my FUCKING DAD, that's who!" I scream, a puff of half-inhaled smoke exiting my mouth in a rush of air. "So what did you do while I was in LA? I spent my twenties being hunted like a dog by my fucking step-dad. What was so important that you couldn't drop in to at least say you were alive?"

"I was writing a book."

"A fucking BOOK?" Okay, this dream isn't cool anymore. Chain me back up, please.

"After I sent you, Lissa, and your mother to America, I took a trip to a place called Wundagore Mountain. I'm sure you've heard of it by now, it was where I took the Darkhold to be destroyed after it...after it changed me. I spent three years of my life in that place, protected by the Knights of the ancient mountain, perfecting spells I had created in congruence with the Book of Sins. I discovered things about us, Jack. Things about our family."

"Then how did that nutcase that bought your estate wind up with it? Package deal with the deceased-werewolf-rich guy's castle?"

"That's not the point of what I'm telling you, Jack. Listen to me, in my work I discovered a CURE. It's all written down in the book I wrote, complete with transcriptions from the Darkhold itself. The price, however, was too high for me to use the cure on myself."

"You mean...you had a cure to this curse? The disease that's kept me from living a normal fucking life, and you KEPT it from me?"

"I did it,"

Oh, this better be good.

"I did it because I love you, son."

"I want him awake for this."

I'm brought back to my reality as smelling salts assail my senses. Those things suck, especially to one with senses as heightened as mine. The chains that bind me are tighter than they work, effectively keeping me from making any kind of movement. Glaucon's standing at the door, that shit-eating grin still smeared across his face. He waves his fingers around, I guess as a signal to Needle-boy, who comes running in. The needle slides into my arm once again, the sedative burning a path through my veins. Needle-boy beats feat soon as he's done, almost as if he's afraid of what's about to go down. I guess I should be afraid too, but all I can concentrate on are the crooked teeth underneath Glaucon's fractured smile.

"Do you know who we are, Jack?" he asks as yet another cigarette flares up in his mouth. I think he's doing it to punish me.

"Not...the slightest clue," I repond as I watch the smoke faintly rise from the ashen end of his cancer stick. MMMM...caaaaancccer.

"The Cult of Nature's Atrocities, Jack. We have members all over the world, our largest sect being in a place you know very well, Los Angeles. Our founder and leader has been around for a very long time...we're very proud of our heritage."

"Fuck...your...heritage." I strain out as I struggle vainly against the chains.

"And now, Jack? Now, you get to become part of that heritage." His fingers snap on cue with the last word, and a girl appears at his side almost instantaneously. The black robe she's wearing falls the floor, revealing her naked, nubile form. It takes me a second, but through my drug addled mind I finally place where I've seen her. She's the girl I saw on the alter before I got caught, the one involved in the beastiality scene.

Before I know it, she's got my pants pulled off and my dick in her mouth. It takes her a few minutes of sucking to get me hard...I could never trip out on drugs and keep a stiff one for some reason, don't know how those ravers do it. When I finally get to the point of full erection, I'm mounted like a horse. I'd be enjoying this if it weren't for Glaucon's fucking smile beaming over her shoulder straight into my brain.

I scream as she fucks me like a wild animal...like the wolf she went to town with a few nights ago. Her long, black ponytail bounces up and down as she screams along with me. If I'm not mistaken, her screams resemble closer to howls.

I can actually feel her getting off way before me, but that doesn't stop her...barely makes her flinch. Her juices flow down me as I finally reach my point of climax, load blowing as deep into her as it could possibly go. After an extremely brief moment of prime afterglow, two of the cultists rush into the cage and pry my organ out of her. My head's swirling in dizziness, from both the exertion and the drugs. Glaucon's smile is even bigger now, if that's possible.

"Welcome to the fold, Jack," he says as he closes and locks the cage, "we'll be killing you shortly."

"Hey, got...a question," I manage as he turns to walk away. His smile's gone by the time he turns back to me. "What's...the date?"

"December 14," he replies before walking away.

Now the smile's beaming across MY face, 'cause I know something he doesn't. The three nights of the full moon starts tonight...and no amount of drugs will be able to keep the wolf down once that hits.

Next Issue: The Cult of Nature's Atrocities is in for a rude surprise when the full moon hits, but will Jack be able to leave the castle in once piece? You've been waiting for it since the end of the first issue...full on werewolf carnage as only Ultimate Marvel can bring you (MV1 what?)!