by James Coplin

Created on: December 19, 2009

As you drove along Monroe Street there became a point where the small tidy working class houses gave way to decay and abandonment. The cracked sidewalks, the broken street lights and litter blown against the sagging chain links lapped past like a blighted river, the majority of the buildings there heavily boarded and festooned with Keep Out and No Trespassing signs.

Perhaps a dozen blocks down an abandon apartment building sat crumbling in the moonlight, broken windows staring with sightless eyes at empty streets. Until just a few days ago it had been the secret of a few elderly winos and one or two seriously deranged crack heads. Assorted trash lay in the hallways and urine stained mattresses remained sprawled in the doorless rooms. Yet they were all gone now, the winos and the crazies. Their stuff, such as it was, remained but they had disappeared and there was puzzlement and talk among their street acquaintances just what might have become of them.

Yet the place was not unoccupied. Down in the cellar, tucked behind the rusting furnace and almost swallowed in a mass of debris, was a small room. Once it had been the storage place for bins and shovels necessary for coal heat. Now the wooden door hung drunkenly off one hinge revealing a dark hole that gaped like a cave.

There was no light at all in that cellar. The windows were bricked solid and even the thin illumination of moonlight stopped just short of the bottom stair. Yet if you had descended those steps to stand in the dark and silence, you would have felt as much as heard the breath within that hole or the tiniest shifting of weight against the powdery cement.

Michael was in that hole and he had just made a kill.

He had tried so very hard not to do so and certainly hadn't intended to make a total transformation. The thing that lived inside him, the soul that had enveloped his own like the white of an egg, was always padding around in there constantly whining to be freed. Michael and it had lived so long together that they had come to an accommodation. Michael was the Master, the owner of the body and the more cognisant, reasoning brain. Yet the other prowled close beneath the surface, always watchful and eager to emerge.

Sometimes, like tonight, it slipped the leash altogether. 

Michael had not been hunting that evening - not like he had been when he cleaned his new dwellings out of the human vermin he had discovered inhabiting it. For that he had whistled up his wolf spirit familiar

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