Mistress of the Werewolf

(*Disclaimer: This narrative is a fictional account. Any similarity of the characters or situations to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

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Listen now, dear reader, as I relate a tale of dark intent and foul consequence. It is in part a true tale, this story of the urban werewolf and his unhappy victim, though this werewolf himself might object to my version of the truth of it. For this werewolf has no idea that he is one.

It may be said that the werewolf is, like all men, a creature torn between the forces of good and evil within him. Even if this werewolf doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as good or evil.

But ill will exists, and a man’s selfish intentions can lead to ruin, the ruin of himself or of others. And is that ruin not an evil thing indeed?

Remember that our werewolf lives most of his life as an ordinary man. He does not dwell in darkness, except within the sometime and far more terrifying darkness that lies within him. The werewolf intimately knows the innermost darkness which lies in all human beings.

But can the mixed-up heart of the man-werewolf really be so dark, so foul, so inhuman?

Listen now to my tale, and decide for yourself..

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The werewolf stretching at his ease on the modest brown couch looked up from his newspaper at the intrusive sound of a honking horn coming from the street. It was broad daylight on a bright, cool, winter Saturday morning, and the very wide, entirely glass window of his living room afforded him a marvelous view of the urban avenue in front of his town house.

The sun looked warmly and cozily settled in a near-perfectly cloudless swath of celestial blue. The werewolf mainly noticed the patch of grey clouds in the distant sky. He blinked a few times, listening for the honking sound to cease in a state of tense irritation that didn’t quite reach his face. His face was a blank. Always a blank. And deliberately so.

It was a man’s face. There was at present no sign of the werewolf within, not even in the barest twitch of his curling, dark blonde eyelashes or in the tranquil-seeming pools of his stone blue eyes.

Then, a twitch.

The werewolf spied a familiar figure passing by on the other side of the street. Enter one young woman, perhaps nothing much or special on the surface, her dewy-faced animation and fresh young heart ripe for anybody’s bludgeoning.

The girl was dressed in a navy pea-coat and was swinging her arms in time to hidden music.

He knew Angela. The mere sight of her stirred up the emotional settlement buried at the bottom of his heart until his tenuous feelings grew muddled and grey.

Angela. Her intrusion into his life had once felt as though lightening had spewed out of a clear blue sky to the ground, striking him with a chaotic and nonsensical madness and burning desire for her which he couldn’t exorcise. An electric fever had claimed him, spinning irrational visions, fantasies, desires, and frenzy through his ordinarily perfectly ordered mind. He hadn’t realized that the madness was also the first sensation of happiness he had ever really known, for it had soon been replaced by a torturous yearning. Yet at long last, he had mastered his feelings and banished them forever. For he had thought never to see Angela again. How now did this chance sighting of her affect him?

As he looked at her, he felt again all of the damage that Angela’s mere existence had done him; he knew that he had never been the same since he met her, despite superficial appearances. He still felt the scars within his toughened heart.

Their strange history went back several years. Angela and he had gone to the same university, and two years ago, she had answered an advertisement for a subletter to take a room in a townhouse where the werewolf lived with three other men, whom he sometimes called his friends.