Valium.

Windigo.

Diazepam, as the drug is usually referred to during clinical use and-slash-or theoretical pharmaceutical procedures, is one of the greatest - hrm, how should I put this? - misunderstood drugs of the modern psychological age. Commonly, the small pill is used to treat anxiety, and even more recently implemented to help recovering alcoholics.

Savage. Cannibalistic. Wolf-like.

Diazepam is habit forming. You can become physically and psychologically dependent on the medication. Do not take more than the prescribed amount of medication or take it for longer than is directed by your doctor. Withdrawal effects may occur if diazepam is stopped suddenly after several weeks of continuous use. Your doctor may recommend a gradual reduction in dose.

The Algonquin Indians were the first to speak of such a creature, forming the legends of the beast in their deeply rooted mythology. The were-being was once a brave warrior who, after a fierce battle, partook in the flesh of his deceased enemies. In other words...he ate them. He evidently found a taste for people meat, taking every opportunity to indulge, despite the horrific reactions from his fellow warriors. The "Master of All Life" punished the warrior for this, transforming him physically into the monster he had become mentally. The windigo was driven into the northern forests, the craving for human flesh his only concern.

I knew the warnings. I knew what could happen. Unfortunately, I paid them no heed. I'm hopelessly addicted now, although I had fought it for the few months before Lawrence's arrival.

In modern times, the legend of the windigo is looked upon as an allegory. The eating of flesh, in most cultures, is considered a sinful, evil act. The myth was created in order to put fear into the nation's heart, in order to keep cannibalism in low numbers. It was a control factor.

After the event with Salinger, Lawrence had to be restrained. He screamed at the top of his lungs for the rest of the night, demanding his pound of flesh from the other patient that had attacked him. Lawrence, too, was now on Diazepam. Doped out of his fucking skull, with enough of the drug in him to kill a normal man. Somehow, he still maintained consciousness. A stupor of one, but consciousness none the less.

I came across the myth in my research, believe it or not. It makes me laugh now, calling it a "myth" when I damn well know the truth. There was no need for the story to be the control factor. The windigo itself was the control.

I, however, knew my limits. I never took more than my body needed to sustain the addiction. I was a doctor, after all.

In the asylum, that was Lawrence. My dear, delusional werewolf. The control factor in a palace of the disturbed.

It's still a problem though.

Lawrence was a problem.

My problem.

My problem.

My addiction.

My windigo.

For Mature Readers Only

#8
September '03

Strange Tales Presents

Werewolf by Night

Drop the Leash
Part Two of Four

Written by Chris Munn

"Twenty-seven. All mutilated beyond recognition."

"That's just...that's, I mean...just...wow," were the only words I could choke out to Sheriff Kaplan's statements. I was a bit stunned, a little high from the half-dozen pills I'd ingested over the night, and half unconscious from exhaustion. I think he was a little frustrated with me.

"Look, Walter," Kaplan said, "you couldn't even tell when one body ended and the next began. It was a fucking roast beef sandwich in that pit." Kaplan was scratching the back of his neck as he spoke, making that stupid white cowboy hat of his tilt down onto his forehead. Here was the man that was supposed to be protecting this little forest community, and he came off looking like an extra from Bonanza.

"I'm sorry, Steve, I'm just kinda out of it right now...rough night on the produce line and all."

"S'alright, Doc," he replied, his face keeping that "grim n' gritty" exterior that he tried so hard to maintain, "but I gotta speak with him. Now."

"Sure thing," I said as I turned out of my office, heading down the hall with the Sheriff right behind, "but I gotta warn you. He may not be too lucid, we had an episode out of him last night, had to dope him up pretty good."

"Still, can't hurt to try."

"Another thing," I remembered it right when we got to the patient's door, halting me in my tracks, "when you brought him here, you didn't take his prints, right?"

"Right, the bastard had done chewed his fuckin' fingertips off or some shit. Sure as hell pissed off our forensic guys, that's for sure."

"Prepare for a rather strange surprise then," I said with a grim smile, pushing open the door to the room with the back of my heel.

"About time you fuckers got here," Lawrence said with a grin the size of the Grand Canyon, "I could smell the dried blood on the cop as soon as he pulled into the parking lot."

"Thought you said he was doped up," Steve whispered to me as we entered the room, obviously a little confused.

"I can take a shit-load more than what they gave me, Steve," Lawrence interrupted. I'm sure my expression was giving him exactly the reaction he was looking for. I think he enjoyed making everybody else feel stupid.

"How the hell do you know my name, boy?" Kaplan demanded, shaking his hairy knuckles in Lawrence's restrained direction. I decided to just take a seat in the far corner of the room and watch things unfold.

"It was my super werewolf-senses, donut boy." I could see Steve's face getting redder and redder as Lawrence spoke. I had to fight to keep from laughing, the drugs in my system making me a little too giddy for the situation.

"Look fucker, I don't think you got any reason to be laughing this up." Oh yeah, Steve was upset. "We just pulled your fucking victims out of a ten-foot hole in the woods."

"Man, you really have no idea," Lawrence muttered, the grin finally disappearing from his face. He was right. We had no idea what was going on, though Steve was pretty damn sure at the time.

"Wait a minute..." the Sheriff rambled, making his way over to the patient's bed. I watched as he took Lawrence's hand in his, examining the man's fingers. Shit was about to hit the proverbial fan. "You've got fingerprints!"

"No shit," the patient said with a snap of his jaw, a biting motion toward the policeman's face. Kaplan didn't like that very much, and his reaction make me jump from my seat.

*SNAP!*

Lawrence gasped, holding back a yelp as the Sheriff cradled the man's now broken finger in his large hand. "That feel good? Don't smart off again, boy."

"Steve! What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I shouted, pulling him away from the bed. "That's my patient, and I can't allow you to abuse him like that."

"That fucker massacred twenty-seven people, Doc!"

"I don't care! This is my hospital, and you will respect my rules. Criminal or not, he's still under my care."

"You tell him, man," Lawrence grunted out, his finger twitching at an uneven interval.

"I'm gonna get someone in here to take those prints, boy!" Steve shouted as I pushed him out the door. "You're fucked now!"

As Kaplan and I made our way out the door, I managed a backward glance at Lawrence. The wolf-grin had returned, his eyes motioning down to the broken appendage. My eyes followed his down as I closed the door, my final sight that of his finger snapping back into place. He was nice enough to give a little wave though the restraints with the miraculously healed hand as I pulled the door together.

"You can undo the restraints, Zevon. I'm calmer now, the hysterics are through."

I just kind of smiled as I scribbled a few notes on my clipboard. Greg Salinger, the Foolkiller, was yet again attempting to convince me of his sanity...though this time, there actually was a change. His attitude. His demeanor. The wild, hysterical lunatic that I'd come to care about had seemed to have left the metaphorical building.

"Look Greg, you've tried everyday for the past three weeks - like clockwork - to convince me that you're ready to be released. Now, judging by the same answer I give every day, just what do you think my answer's going to be today?"

"I'm serious, Walter," he said, a cold look to his eyes, "the episode last night, with the newcomer, it snapped me back into sanity. My thoughts are clear, my life has purpose again..."

"Greg, we've talked about this. Your 'purpose' isn't exactly the healthiest of goals. I've been trying to help you for almost a month now, why should I suddenly believe that a fight in the recreation room cured your homicidal tendencies?"

"You're a fool, Doctor Zevon," he said, a stern bitterness coming through in his tone, "I look forward to putting you out of your misery."

Normally, Greg's threats passed right through me. He'd threatened to kill me a dozen times over, and never once did I ever feel in danger. That time, however, it was different. Chills ran up my spine and a cold sweat started to break out on my face. It wasn't the man's words that caused my reaction, instead it was his attitude. Seemingly gone was the raving madman that had become sort of the in-joke of the hospital. He was calculated again...he'd become what he was before his incarceration.

"What's the matter, Walter? No glib remarks?" he asked in a taunting voice. "No orderlies to rush in and pump me full of mood suppressors? Go pop another pill, Doctor...maybe it'll numb you for what's to come?"

"I don't have to sit here and take your threats, Mr. Salinger," I said with the strongest voice I could muster. "You seem to forget that I control your life here. I can keep you in that bed for as long as I see fit, and nobody will ever care." Strong words, a counter-threat. Unfortunately, the words couldn't hide my body. My hands were shaking. Sweat beaded down my forehead. The Foolkiller just smiled.

"If you don't let me out, the beast man will kill us all."

"Enough with the threats!" I yelled, standing from my chair in an angry rush of excitement.

"That's not a threat...that's a guarantee."

Following the routine afternoon rounds of the ward, I'd managed to retire back to my office. Steve was bringing in someone to take Lawrence's fingerprints later that night, after the clean up at the forest site was finished. It almost staggered me to think about it...could our newest patient truly have been responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven people? It was true that he had exhibited signs of schizophrenia, perhaps a bi-polar disorder of some sort. The incident with Salinger from the night before had showed that Lawrence was exhibiting violent tendencies, though.

I sat in the office for hours, again scouring over old Internet articles that matched Lawrence's particular affliction. In 1997, two men known as the Cobra and the Butcher went on a serial killing spree in Karachi. Their modus operandi involved a slashing of their victims, and due to their mode of travel being motorcycles, were dubbed the "Werewolves on Wheels". They were finally apprehended after the brutal deaths of 37 Pakistani Shiite Muslims.

The time seemed to fly by, luckily passing quickly due to the combination of Vicadin and Valium that I'd managed to procure from the med. supply. An eclipse in 1848 unexplainably turned the moon a blood-red color, prompting an epidemic of "werewolf" sightings. Twenty-plus years earlier, a man named Antoine Leger was tried and convicted of werewolf crimes and sentenced to an insane asylum. Leger had brutally murdered a young girl in the early 19th century, afterwards drinking her blood and eating her heart. The thought crossed my mind, that our Lawrence could have been possessed of the same maladaptive psychosis as Leger. My search focused itself on the crimes of Antoine, the similarities too striking to ignore outright. Remarkably, I quickly discovered that no matter how obscure a topic, the Internet will give you answers. After another half-hour of searching, I came across the transcript of Leger's trial.

Judge: But what did you want to do with this little girl?
Leger: Eat her up, your Honour.
Judge: And why did you drink her blood?
Leger: I was thirsty, your Honour.

Antoine, obviously, wasn't as secretive about his crimes as Lawrence had been about his. That was, of course, assuming he truly did the murders of which he was accused.

"Dr. Zevon? Are you in here?"

I swiveled in my chair, the beams of light coming from the door lighting up my office like a beacon. In the doorway stood Nurse Ankers...Evelyn, the 5'7'' blonde that was the object of my desires every day at the ward. Normally, she carried a jubilant smile across her face. Her face was expressionless as she closed the door behind her, plunging the room back into darkness. The light from my computer monitor bathed her features in a pale blue, giving her an angel-esque light. Doesn't sound like I was hung up on her, eh?

"Evelyn, is something wrong?" I asked, standing from my desk chair. Before I could start walking forward, her hands shot up, a sign that she obviously wanted me to keep my distance.

"Walter, I...I saw you, earlier," she spoke softly, "I saw you steal some meds out of the lockup."

"You...you must be mistaken, Evelyn. What possible reason could I - "

"Don't, Walter, just...don't. I knew you had a problem, but I didn't know just how bad it had become. I'm gonna have to turn you into the hospital's revue board, I can't just keep letting you do this to yourself."

"What? Look, Evelyn, there's been a misunderstanding!"

"Sheriff Kaplan called. He said he'd be here in about half an hour with the fingerprint guy. Oh, and Lawrence has been asking for you," she stated before turning to quickly leave the room. I just kind of fell backwards, luckily landing in my chair and not the floor.

What was I going to do?

"So...how old are you, Doctor?" Lawrence asked, his long blonde hair a tangled mess, like the nest of some rodent. He'd calmed down considerably, actually attempting to have a decent conversation instead of the oblique phrases and secretive double entendres that had previously saturated his dialogues. In this state, he almost seemed like a normal guy.

"I'm 38."

"Humph, I'd have guessed older," he remarked, wiggling his fingers through the restraints that were strapped across his wrists. The finger that Steve had snapped like a dry twig showed no sign of damage, just like the man's fingerprints the day before. "You got any kids?"

"No, I'm unmarried."

"Ah, smart man. I'm not married either...managed to successfully dodge that bullet. I did come up looking for someone, though...a woman."

"So your memories are returning?" I asked, hoping to get some kind of clue as the man's identity.

"Yeah, in bits and pieces, kind of a hodgepodge right now."

"Do you remember your name?"

"No, not yet. I'm hoping that'll come back to me pretty soon, though. As a name, 'Lawrence' sucks ass."

"So who's this woman you came looking for?" I asked, prodding more and more into the man's reemerging past.

"I don't remember her name, but I remember what she was like. She was a wolf in sheep's clothing...she stole my seed and ran off with the product. She was a succubus."

"A Lilith..." I remarked, and off-the-cuff comment that just happened to slip from my mouth. From where, I couldn't tell you.

"What do you mean?" Lawrence asked, still keeping the pleasant demeanor he'd been expressing throughout the conversation.

"Well, in Jewish religious history, Lilith was a fallen angel who was Adam's wife before God created Eve. The incubus and succubus were demons, the offspring of Adam's sexual intercourse with Lilith."

"Well, and all this time I thought that was just a story about masturbation," Lawrence laughed.

"Did you find her?"

"I don't know...and that's what bothers me the most."

A solid knock on the wooden door behind me broke the peaceful air that had arisen between Lawrence and I, and after a second I excused myself to see who needed me. Sheriff Kaplan stood on the other side, a deputy on his right side and a plain-clothes guy with a fingerprinting kit cupped under his arm. "Let's take a walk, Walter." Steve said as he placed his hand on my shoulder. As I left the room, the deputy and the forensics guy took my place, the door shutting behind them.

"My office okay with you?" I asked, leading Steve down the hallway. I wasn't comfortable leaving the patient alone with the police, but I could handle it as long as Steve wasn't there to beat the poor man into submission.

"Walter, we've managed to examine a few of the bodies we pulled out of the forest yesterday. In each one, there was a common element: bullets made out of pure silver."

"Silver?" I asked, closing the door to my office behind us. Steve took a seat as I made my way around my desk.

"We ran a ballistics screen. Pure silver, shot from a 38 Super, manufactured by a custom design company called Wolf Bullets. One bullet per corpse...our boy knows how to shoot, that's for damn sure."

"Any way to get a list on all people that ordered that type of bullet from the company?" I asked, applying my own tiny detective skills to the situation.

"Yeah, we're still waiting for the company to call us back. We're not gonna need it here in a minute, though, once Gary and Jimbo get those prints."

"Steve, I've had a conversation with Lawrence, and...and I don't think he did it."

"Are you fuckin' crazy, Walter? This guy's a pure blood psycho if I've ever met one!"

"Um, Steve, when have you ever met a 'pure blood psycho'? Last I heard, this place wasn't too high on the national murder ratio."

Before Kaplan could answer, the office door cracked open, just enough for Nurse Ankers to stick her head through. "Dr. Zevon? There's somebody here to see you and Sheriff Kaplan. He says it's about the murders in the woods."

Steve and I shot each other a bewildered look before I motioned for Evelyn to let the stranger in. The man that entered my office was huge, built bigger than most body builders I'd seen on ESPN2. His black suit was covered by a long, leather coat that extended down to his ankles, giving him a very Matrix look. Before I could ask his name, a badge was flipped down for our inspection.

"Gerald Sobieski," Kaplan read aloud, "Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage and Logistics Directorate? What the fuck does that even mean?"

"He's an agent of SHIELD," I muttered, confused beyond all belief, "what exactly does a spy organization have to do with a mass murder, Agent Sobieski?"

"We have reason to believe," Sobieski responded, his voice as deep as an underwater chasm, "that your suspect is a man we've been tracking for over five years."

"What did this man do?" I continued to question, not sure what to think. I'd never met an honest to God spy before.

"The suspect, one Jack Russell, is wanted for a series of murders back in New York City. SHIELD was called in due to the extremely strange and violent manner in which the victims died, and an eye witness description of Russell, seen leaving right after the murders. He went into hiding right after, but his name was spotted on a few flight manifests about a week ago, from Romania to New York and then New York to here."

"Okay, I'm still confused...why again did they call SHIELD and not, say, Mulder and Scully?" Kaplan asked, the asshole attitude just exuding from his body like a pheromone.

"I'll fill you in if I deem it necessary," the agent replied, turning back toward my office door, "and if you don't mind, I'd like to see your patient now."

"Look, I think I need to see some kind of warrant or something before I just let you go traipsing in there to interview my suspect," Kaplan said, following Sobieski down the hallway. Before I could voice my agreement, a piercing howl broke the silence of the hospital, stopping all three of us in our tracks.

The SHIELD agent tore into a run down the tile-floored hall, but was too little, too late. From my vantage point, behind both the other men, I bore witness to a shocking event. Deputy Jimbo flew through the oak door of the patient's room, collapsing the plaster wall on the other side of the hallway. The howls continued as the three of us made our way slowly down the hall, both Sobieski and Kaplan advancing with their pistols drawn. Another loud crash was heard as we rounded the corner into the room.

The bed was ripped to shreds, with Gary the forensics guy collapsed in a pool of his own blood. He was still alive, gasping for air in panicked, rushed breaths. The window behind the bed, along with most of the wall, had been punched out, as if somebody had driven a car through it. I stood in shock, my thoughts racing a mile a minute.

"Looks like your suspect's on the loose, Sheriff," Sobieski remarked as he looked out the hole in the wall. The snow was coming down hard, the product of the nasty Colorado winter.

Lawrence, not surprisingly, was nowhere to be found.

My windigo had escaped into the blizzard...god save whoever he came across.

Next Issue: Jack's on the run...but from what? The snow's gonna turn red when Sheriff Kaplan, Dr. Zevon, and Agent Sobieski go on the hunt for a slightly deranged lycanthrope!