I'm not a religious man...never have been, in fact. Even when I was a young boy, I found myself questioning the "facts" of religion and God. Where others saw divine intervention and the power of faith, I saw the ability in others to make people believe the most unbelievable fairy tales with the simplest of ease. The "Dr." abbreviation in front of "Dr. Zevon" should make that clear enough.

"Now, I'm far from a theologian," the scruffy man trudging through the snow alongside me said, continuing the rambling conversation he'd been speaking of since we'd left the cave, "but I've had this constant irritating voice in my head for the past few weeks that's given me all sorts of Trivial Pursuit tidbits. For instance, did you know that Jesus encountered werewolves?"

We'd been walking for nearly an hour, and - to be perfectly honest - I was so lost it wasn't funny. Jack had claimed that the hospital where I worked was in danger, but we didn't appear to be going in the right direction. I have to confess, however, that my attention wasn't spent on our journey. Instead, I'd been unable to tear my eyes off of my guide and would-be-savior. His name was Jack Russell, a man that had previously been a patient of mine at the Silver Springs Sanitarium. He'd arrived amnesiac and delirious, nearly dead from exposure, and was accused by the local Canaan County police of being responsible for a mass grave of bodies they'd found in the surrounding forest. This was corroborated by an agent of the nation's spy directive, SHIELD, who arrived to take Russell into custody. When Jack escaped, fleeing into the forest, I accompanied the agent and the local police in the search for him.

"Did you just say Jesus met werewolves?" I asked, having just then caught the remark he'd made.

"In 28 AD," Russell continued, satisfied that he finally had my attention, "ol' J.C. performed an exorcism on two werewolves that lived in a cemetery outside of Gadarenes."

"Gadarenes...?" I asked. "Where is that in relation to Biblical geography?"

"How the fuck should I know?" Russell answered without missing a beat, the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. "We're here, by the way."

Before I could ask just where "here" was, I looked to my right and saw the sign.

The Clinic of Night

An involuntary shiver moved up my spine at the realization of where we'd come. The burnt out husk of a compound had been discovered by the Jack Russell Apprehension Party the night before, and it was there that I'd discovered the journal of the Clinic's physician, a mad doctor named Elias Cobain.

"A return to the scene of the crime," Russell commented as he leisurely began to walk again, heading toward the center of the compound, "I feel like Jessica Fletcher should pop in at any time. Or maybe those kids from Scooby Doo."

"You killed everyone here," I muttered, following carefully behind him, "you killed them."

"It was for their own good, Doc," he said, stopping his trek through the thick snow, "so I could keep shit like this from happening again."

Stopping beside him, the bile rising in my throat was the first reaction to what he was referring to. Half buried in the falling snow were the bodies of the Canaan County Police force, fresh murder victims at the hands of - unbelievably - an insane werewolf.

"You were unconscious for most of the day," Russell said, his eyes fixed on the blood-stained snow, "night will be here in a few hours. I didn't want to take the time to come back here, but we had no choice. There's something here we need."

"What...what's that?" I choked out, a wave of nausea striking me as I moved my eyes across the mutilation before me.

"A silver bullet," Russell said as he again began to walk, carefully stepping over the bodies as if they were puddles on a rainy day, "the only way to kill a werewolf."

For Mature Readers Only

#10
November '05

Strange Tales Presents

Werewolf by Night

Drop the Leash
Part Four of Four

Written by Chris Munn

It was only after the events of the next night that I truly learned what happened in the hospital during my absence. Security cameras had captured things nicely, allowing at least some documentation of what occurred. What is unknown , however, is exactly how Greg Salinger escaped his cell.

Salinger had been a patient of mine for several weeks, after he'd went on a particularly bloody rampage in New York City during a riot. His psychosis was specific, to be sure...he dressed up in a leather costume and went gallivanting about town with a gun that could turn human flesh into ash. The Foolkiller, he was called, referring to the subjects of his vigilantism: he only killed people he perceived as "fools". The definition of vague, I know.

Regardless of his past actions, however, I have to admit that no one on the hospital's staff took Salinger as a serious danger. He was viewed almost with sadness; a man so crippled by his hatred and fear that he was unable to operate in society. The fight he'd had with Jack Russell earlier in the week had raised a few eyebrows, but the prompt trouncing he'd received had only made him an even more sympathetic figure.

All that is known, at this point anyway, is that he slipped out of his tie-downs late in the night while I was away with the hunting party. The security camera in the hallway of his ward showed the time at 2:35 AM when the orderly opened the door for his hourly check. Salinger snapped his neck like he was twisting the cap off a bottle, took acquisition of the young man's security keys, and promptly made his way to the guard station.

By 3:29 AM, he'd successfully subdued the remaining orderlies and had each of them tied in a line of chairs. He then injected each of them, with a slow and deliberate pace, with lethal doses of midazolam. They choked on their own tongues after only fifteen minutes of the drug in their bloodstream.

And then, at 4:19 AM, he took the keys to the cells and made his way through the hospital...letting loose every patient in the facility.

"So, what exactly am I supposed to do with this?"

Jack shot me a smirk after I asked the question, the lone silver bullet he'd retrieved from his former room at the Clinic of Night resting between my two fingers, lifted to my face for examination. "I mean, I can only imagine what you want me to do with it...but I'm not very fond of guns."

"Well, I'm gonna give you two very good reasons, Wally," Jack answered as he rested the rifle over his left shoulder. "Either a) I throw down with this werewolf that escaped my mass execution and he kills me, meaning you have to shoot him before he kills you, or b) I kill the other werewolf, but get caught up in a frenzy, meaning you have to shoot me before I kill you."

"Oh..." I answered. "Touche'."

"But, as I'm sure you probably realize," Jack countered, "I'm hoping for c) none of the above."

We remained silent from that point, as I followed closely behind Russell while we left the Clinic grounds. As we made our way through the forest, the sun slowly descending below the tree line, my mind was wandering all over the place. I was suffering from an addiction to painkillers, and it had been close to 24 hours since I'd popped my last pill. The effects were slowly starting to creep up on me, but that wasn't what my mind was concentrated on.

What Jack didn't know was that I'd done my homework when he was my patient, and that I'd learned my fair share about lycanthropy, both the psychological and mystical afflictions. According to the lore, there were two basic ways that one would become a werewolf: voluntary or involuntary. Mystic texts have given a few different procedures on how a sorcerer could become a vampire, usually revolving around a magical item or ointment. The Greeks believed that lycanthropy could be invoked by way of a "magic girdle" made of wolf skin. Obviously, potions comprised of human blood made a few appearances as well.

Now, to my eyes at least, Jack Russell was about as far as one could get from a "sorcerer". I'm not sure what one would expect of someone with that label, but I do remember reading the NOW Magazine expose on Stephen Strange a few years back that claimed the former surgeon was a "Sorcerer Supreme". Guess that means he graduated at the head of the class when he went to Hogwart's. Regardless, it seemed to me that Mr. Russell had become afflicted with his curse by way of the second method: involuntary infection of werewolfism via a bite.

But I had been wrong before.

"So," I began, shattering the silence between us, "how did this happen to you, Jack? Lycanthropy isn't exactly a common malady, after all."

Jack flashed a smile before answering. "Our doctor/patient confidentiality still intact?"

I couldn't help but return the smile. "Sure, why not?"

"It started with my ancestor Grigori Russoff," Jack started, laying out the history of his life as the light from the fading sun framed us in a halo of yellow, "who was attempting to save his wife from - yeah, get this - Dracula. Grigori's wife died, Dracula died, and the guy was making his way out of the castle when he found a young woman that the vampire had been holding hostage. Being the noble guy that he was, Grigori freed her. Unfortunately, the chick was a werewolf, and after she turned she decided to attack him. He got bit, infecting him with lycanthropy."

I could hear the sadness in Jack's voice as he reached the second part of his tale. "Fast forward a few hundred years, and we catch up with my dad, Gregor Russoff. My dad liked to dabble in witchcraft, and he came into possession of a book called the Darkhold. Nasty little piece of literature written by a demon at the dawn of time. His tamperings with this book unlocked the curse that had laid dormant in his family's genes since Grigori, turning him into a werewolf. He passed the curse down to me and it hit on my eighteenth birthday."

"Jack, I'm sorry..." I attempted to say, but he cut me off with another grin - this one less genuine than the one before.

"Hey, that's the abridged version," he replied, "and I've seen shit that would make your head spin. Monsters, vampires, ghosts, and every other ghoulie and beastie you can think of." He stopped his forward walk, halting me with a raise of his hand. "But I don't have time to go into it."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because there's a dead body staring at us from under that tree."

Werewolves are all around us, and none of us ever realized it.

On February 27, 1971, an encounter with a werewolf happened in the small town of Lawton , Texas . Dozens of eyewitnesses, both civilian and military, witnessed the travels of "something monstrous" through their town. The following is from a police report made by Lawton Police Officer Harry Ezell, describing one of the many eye witness statements:

He thought it was all a practical joke because the thing was perched on the railing. It looked like some monkey or ape. He thought it was a joke until it turned its head and looked at him, then jumped off its perch on the second floor railing and onto the ground 17 feet below.

Once it hit the ground, it ran from the area on all fours, running something like the man thought an ape or monkey would run. He described it as wearing only pants, which covered its leg to its knee, as if it had outgrown them. He said that it had a horribly distorted face, as if it had been in a fire. It had hair all over its face, the upper parts of its body, and the lower parts of its legs.

One man suffered a heart attack after witnessing the beast in his front yard. A group of soldiers from Ft. Still were frightened - by their own free admittance - when they saw the werewolf pass by them. The creature was seen only once after this night, reappearing on May 1, 1971 in another small town in Arkansas . 25 year old Bobby Ford moved into an old home in the town of Fouke, and five days later he had a face-to-face encounter with the creature, which he described as a "six-foot-tall, hairy monster".

We've seen the movies. The Howling ... An American Werewolf in London ... The Wolfman ... Silver Bullet ...even, God help us, Teen Wolf . If the world knew what I know now, these films would be considered not fiction, but documentaries.

But I digress...

Jack crouched down to examine the body, and I noticed that the snow was falling harder. His normally brown hair was frosted white from the snowfall, but it was if the cold didn't bother him. I was shaking in my boots, but I couldn't say for sure if it was from the cold or the grisly scene before us.

"This doesn't make any sense," Jack muttered as he brushed the snow from the dead man's corpse. He was completely naked, any sign of identification stripped from him along with his clothes. Military crew-cut hairstyle, muscular build, lantern jaw.

"How long has he been out here?" I asked.

"Judging by the lack of decay," Russell answered, "probably just a few days. But he's nearly frozen solid, so he could have been out here longer than that. This wasn't one of the cops you came out here with it, was it?"

"No," I replied. "So did he die of exposure? Kinda hard to stay alive when you're out here naked as a jaybird."

"I survived it, apparently," Jack quipped as he rolled the body onto its side. "See this?" he asked, pointing out a tattoo on the man's right shoulder. Black ink covered his skin, a portrait of an eagle. "This guy was a Marine. Maybe a SEAL."

"All the way out here?" I rambled in utter confusion. "There's no military bases in the area...how does someone like this get way out here?"

"I don't know," Jack responded, "but I don't like it."

"It's almost dark," I advised, "shouldn't we get to the hospital?"

"Yeah," Russell agreed, standing from the body with a worried look on his face, "though I can't say I'm anxious to see what's happened there."

I gripped the rifle tighter in my grasp as Jack returned us to our trek through the forest. We were relying on - believe it or not - his sense of smell to lead us back to the hospital. Apparently, his senses were superhuman even when he looked like a normal man. Regardless, I still felt lost...a tree is a tree is a tree, after all.

"Maybe it's a yeti," I blurted out.

Jack paused his steps, and I could hear how hard he was trying not to laugh. "A yeti... ?" He asked, cocking a curious eyebrow in my direction, looking back at me over his shoulder. "Maybe you oughta change your name to Patch Adams , you keep making jokes like that ."

"I'm not joking," I countered. "Reports of snow beasts... er ...monsters?...can be found in frontier journals and early newspapers. The Native American tribes have legends about it. Hell, the Canadians have four different names for it: Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Wauk-Wauk, and Saskehavis."

"Look, Doc," Jack said, placing a hand on my shoulder. I only jumped a little at the man's action. "I know you're scared, but c'mon...I think I know what I'm -"

"Or maybe it's a Wendigo?"

"-talking about."

Anything that either of us could have said was lost then, as that horrifying sound broke through the stillness of the night. Everything went into slow motion after we heard it, and it took every ounce of self-control I had not to urinate on myself. Jack's eyes widened, a scowl forming on his lips as he lifted his head to the heavens.

And the howling continued...

"It's coming from the south," Jack said, his ears perked to attention, "I think we may be too late, Doc. He's at the hospital already."

"Oh, god no," I muttered, the rifle now shaking in my hands.

"Look, what you're about to see, what I'm about to do," Jack said frantically, his hands grasped onto my shoulders to keep me from looking away, "is gonna scare the shit out of you. But listen to me - listen to me! - you have to get to the hospital with that gun. Once I'm gone, you run as hard as you fucking can behind me. You won't keep up, but you head in that direction, you're gonna make it."

"What...what are you going to do?" I asked, though I feared I already knew the answer.

Jack backed away from me, beads of sweat already starting to form on his pale brow. "I'm going to save whoever's still alive." He then threw his head back in a painful spasm, a howl of his own ripping itself from his throat. His skin began to bubble and burst as tufts of hair fought their way to the surface of his body. The nauseating sound of bone distending and stretching filled my ears, and the sounds that the poor man made as he fell to his knees into the snow...

He had doubled in size in a matter of moments, his now-elongated snout flooded with saliva as he attempted to catch his breath. Pointed ears again caught the sound of howls from the direction of the Sanitarium, and the beast lunged into the forest. It loped on all fours, a fierce growl on its lips as it wove in and out of trees.

I didn't even realize I was running after it until it finally escaped into the darkness ahead of me.

Fifteen solid minutes of running, and my lungs were about to explode in my chest. I collapsed at the driveway to the hospital, rolling onto my back in a fit of coughs and pants. Jack had been right, there was no way I could've kept up with him. But I'd made it, and that was what mattered. The gun was still in my hands, my knuckles having gone white from gripping it too fiercely.

Staggering to my feet, I made my way to the front doors. I could tell right away that things had gone wrong. The lights were off, and things were quiet...way too quiet. Had Jack been too late? Was he laying in there just as dead as my coworkers and patients? If so, what the fuck would I do with just one single silver bullet to my name?

Creeping through the darkened corridors of the hospital, I tried to remain as silent as I could. I ignored the pounding noise that my heart was making, filling my ears with the thump-thump sound that I was sure would give me away to whatever monster was laying in wait for me in the shadows. I wanted to call out for Jack, to put my fears to rest, but I knew without a doubt that I shouldn't. For all I knew, Jack was dead and I was all alone against a creature that would sooner kill me than look at me.

I'd forgotten something vitally important by this point, though. Monsters don't always come wrapped in fur and fangs...sometimes, they can look just as normal as you or I. The knife blade that pressed against my throat from the person behind me proved this point expertly.

"Well, hello, doc," Greg Salinger whispered into my ear from behind, close enough for me to feel his breath on my neck, "fancy meeting you here."

"Greg," I said as softly as I could, my rifle held to my side to show him that I meant him no harm, "you have to listen to me. There's a...a monster...in the hospital. This gun has only one bullet, to kill it before it kills us."

"I'm the only monster here, Dr. Zevon," the Foolkiller answered, his scalpel pressing deeper into the flesh of my throat.

"I wouldn't go that far," a deep, gravelly voice said from the end of the pitch dark hall. I recognized it immediately and my thoughts were filled with hope - hope that the person would be my ticket to survival. It wasn't Jack, he was still missing...this person was possibly better.

SHIELD agent Gerald Sobieski stepped in front of a window, illuminating himself in the moonlight that shone through the wire mesh. He stood completely nude, his muscular form covered in blood and sweat. Held by the neck was the last living member of the hospital's staff - Evelyn Ankers, the nurse that had only the day before threatened to turn me in for my drug addiction. Somehow, things had suddenly gone from bad to worse.

"I don't know how you slipped away from me back at the Clinic, Doctor," Sobieski said, "but you should've stayed out in the snow. I probably would have forgotten about you if you hadn't come back here."

"Who are you?" Salinger asked from his position behind me, the knife blade still stuck against my throat.

"I'm sure as fuck not an agent of SHIELD," he answered with a laugh, "though I apparently had all of you fooled fairly easily. Bum-fuck county cops don't know their asses from a hole in the ground."

"The body we found," I stated, the pieces of the puzzle finally beginning to come together, "that was Sobieski. He followed Russell all the way to the Clinic of Night..."

"And when I survived ol' Jack's attempt at genocide," the murderer said, "I met up with the supposed super-spy and killed him. Took his clothes, his badge, his gun...hiding in plain sight, one might say. Color me surprised when Russell was found and brought here. He saved your whole fucking town from a werewolf feeding frenzy, and you locked him up in a loony bin. Now that's karma if I ever fucking saw it."

I shifted my eyes down to look at Evelyn, who was struggling to free herself from her attacker's grasp. Our eyes locked, and I knew - she blamed me for this, for reasons I can't even fathom. Such hate in her eyes, burning through me like a hot poker. "Let her go," I demanded, not noticing that Salinger's scalpel had relaxed and fell from my throat. "Let her go and take me."

"You want the bitch," the werewolf said with a smile, "then you can have her."

He heaved his arm forward, tossing Evelyn the length of the hallway like she weighed nothing. I clumsily attempted to catch her, only to find myself knocked backward by the force of her momentum. The Foolkiller was running past me as I fell, his knife at the ready as he advanced on the one person in the building more dangerous than he.

"Only a fool would believe your story," Greg said as he stabbed the scalpel deep into the killer's stomach, "and the Foolkiller shall not suffer you to live."

"Give me a break," the man I'd known as Sobieski commented as he threw his fist in a wide arc, catching the back of his knuckles against Salinger's jaw. The strength of the wolfman's blow spun the Foolkiller like a top, knocking him unconscious before he hit the ground.

"You jumped the gun and killed my prey," Sobieski said as he crouched down over the unconscious Salinger, "and I don't like eating cold meat."

The monster threw back his head and howled, his body wracked by the same transformation I'd witnessed Russell undergo previously. A moment or two passed, and the man had been replaced by a beast, covered head to toe in fur. His elongated snout foamed with saliva - he was rabid, mad from the disease that had afflicted him. He was the product of Dr. Elias Cobain and his experiments, driven insane by a life he'd now embraced as a murderer of men.

It was then that the window beside him exploded in glass and wire, caused by the large body that jumped through it into the hallway. It was Russell, himself a werewolf, attempting to rescue me from the creature he'd failed to kill a month before. I watched from my spot on the floor, Evelyn shaking and crying as she clutched onto my clothes, and I was frozen. The gun was still in my hands, but I didn't have the courage to do what needed to be done. I only had one bullet, after all, and the wolves were nearly identical. What if I'd shot Russell by mistake?

Blood was flying from the feral battle that was unfolding in front of my eyes, claws and teeth digging into furred flesh with such gruesomeness that I couldn't watch - yet couldn't look away, either. Finally, the bigger of the two wolves grabbed the other by the midsection and lifted him into the air. The smaller wolf - who I assumed to be Russell - hovered in the air for several long seconds before being thrown to the floor with enough force that I felt the impact at the end of the hall.

Taking advantage of his opponent's momentary disadvantage, the Sobieski wolf turned his attention toward Evelyn and I. With only a few long strides, the lycanthrope made his way down the hall and pounced for us. I pushed Evelyn behind me as forcefully as I could, taking the brunt of the animal's attack with my own body. My flesh was torn and ripped by the creature's nails and teeth, my screams making him attack with even more ferocity. I was going to die, I knew it as my vision began to blur. The gun was gone from my hand, knocked away by the impact of the werewolf's body. Where was Russell when I needed him?

"OFF!" Jack's voice, gruff and vicious, yelled as he pulled on the other wolf's shoulders, tossing him back down toward the hall. Russell stood ready for his opponent to attack yet again, but I could tell that my friend was on his last legs. His hind legs were shaky, and he was beginning to sway back and forth. The battle had been rough on him, and I knew that he would not survive another attack by the insane werewolf that had already started loping his way back down the hall toward us. Where was the gun?

The gunshot echoed like a cannon through the dark hallway, and Sobieski fell in a heap only a few feet in front of us. He coughed and choked as his body reverted to his normal human form, the silver bullet dissolving his insides like acid. He was dead a moment later, and when I looked at Jack - himself now a badly hurt normal man again - he met my look of confusion with one of his own.

"The fool turned his back on me," Greg Salinger said from the other end of the hall, the still-smoking rifle resting in his hands.

Neither Jack nor I offered up any protest as the Foolkiller dropped the gun and ran out the doors behind him. Even had we wanted to stop him, both of us were too badly wounded to attempt it. Russell turned toward me and sighed. "I'm sorry, Walter," he said, "I'm so sorry..."

Evelyn and I have yet to hear from Jack since the events of that night, after he disappeared into the snow-covered forests to find his way back to his home. He said he still needed answers to the questions Dr. Cobain had raised during his stay at the Clinic of Night, but I cannot even attempt to fathom what could have happened to the young man during his time there.

A month has passed since the massacre at the Silver State Sanitarium, and Evelyn and I have been in hiding ever since. Only we know what truly happened there, and we both know that no one would ever believe the truth. We are outcasts, shut off from the world because of what we now know.

But the truth of the world has to be told, which is why I have documented the events here in my journal. A month has passed, and now I know the reasons behind Jack's sorrowful apology to me after the death of the poor, insane werewolf that had caused so much misery.

"Walter?"

I hear Evelyn's voice through the closed door to the bedroom, her fingers rapping softly against the wood. She has been so good to me over the past few weeks, the two of us growing ever closer due to our shared tragedy.

But I cannot forget that she was willing to turn me in for my addiction - willing to ruin to my career over such a small and trivial crime. She thinks I trust her, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.

The moon has risen into the sky, and I already feel myself being overtaken by the change. The wounds caused by "Sobieski" passed along his curse to me, making me a part of the monstrous world I had unwittingly entered. Tomorrow, I will kill myself because of what I have become.

"Walter? Is everything okay?" she asks through the door.

I smile as my mind submerges under the animal instincts the wolf. Tomorrow, I will kill myself...but tonight, Evelyn Ankers will know that her betrayal has left me with vengeance in my heart.

I howl as loudly as I can. The beast is free...God help my immortal soul.

Next Issue: We're back with Jack in the driver's seat as we hit the prelude to the next story-arc! Guided by the ghost of his dead father, Jack Russell has been told that everything he knows about his family's curse is a lie...and now, he's found proof!