A-Sides

by Victor Allen

  **********

  Awakening is not precisely what it could be called. He had not been asleep. He had been dead. The memory of what had just happened was as fresh as if it had been only a moment ago. In fact, it could have been a billion years ago, or a billion times that. Where he had been, time had ceased to exist.

  He was in his bed, lying on freshly laundered, clean sheets with no tears or rips. The sun shone through his window on a happy spring morning. He got up and looked out the window, feeling as physically well as he ever had. The sun was a little different, maybe a shade brighter and more compact than he remembered, the sky a slightly off-color, as was the green of his lawn.

  It hadn’t been a dream, he knew that. What he thought had actually happened frightened him more than the memory of his own death.

  He walked into the kitchen and saw his mother and father. She was healthy and well fed, no gray in her hair. His father sat alive and well, drinking coffee, though still dressed in his light blue/ dark blue working clothes. The linoleum under Kenny’s feet was well maintained, smooth, shiny, and unfissured. He chanced a look at the window pane in the kitchen. There was no crack in its corner.

  He suppressed a shudder. He said nothing, knowing on some primary level in his mind that his consciousness had remained unscathed and intact. He was the only one who knew. They had come through the black hole, the matter and energy of a million star systems crushed to pure energy, reformed and re-imagined, belched out the other side in a million, million new universes with a billion billion new outcomes.

  Though he didn’t know it came from the Baghavad Gita, a quote he had heard before occurred to him: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

  That shudder came again and this time he let it. It seemed to clear his head and he was mostly successful in putting the thought of what had happened out of his mind, not thinking of the unnumberable new lives and fantastic new worlds that had been forged from the chaos of utter annihilation. Playing God was too heavy a burden for an eleven year old to bear.

  This was his universe, and he would live in it.

  The Chocolate Werewolf

  By

  Victor Allen

  Copyright © 2014

  All Rights Reserved

  The change started three months ago. It came suddenly, but I think my body had been building up to it since I was just a tyke. I suppose I should tell you that my name is Albert Bailey and I’m twenty-five years old, with a wife, an infant son, and carrying enough extra pounds around my middle to match my age. My wife, Joyce, is a little worried about my excess ballast, and she tried to put me on something called a “Primal diet” which, as you’ll find out later on, is really pretty funny.

  There is no history of mental illness in my family unless you want to count my great, great, great, great (I think that’s the right number of greats) granddad Lucius “Mad Red” Bailey. My family has always been filled with long livers and slow breeders. Mad Red was a pirate on the Queen Anne’s Revenge under the command of Edward Teach, the notorious Blackbeard. He (Mad Red) was the paradigm of the Robert Louis Stevenson, Errol Flynn style privateer. He sported a wooden, peg leg, bristly red beard, and an eye patch to cover the hole in his head where his left eye had been poked out by a cutlass. He had apparently been caught on the wrong side of the sheets with some North Carolina politician’s wife.

  Mad Red was tried and convicted for murder sometime during the ‘30’s of the eighteenth century. A good defense was painfully lacking since he had been caught red-handed dismembering the body of his victim, John Langley, with an ax. At his trial, he couldn’t explain his actions, insisting to the jury that “the moon got’n me eyes.” Had they existed at the time, the jury probably would have been enjoying Reese’s Pieces and Coca Cola at his very public hanging the same day, consigning him to kick up his heels in the air dance in the dead of winter in front of a cheering crowd.

  But all that was a long time ago and has nothing to do with me or what’s been happening. I don’t think.

  You see, I’m a chocolate werewolf.

  I don’t mean a Walter Mitty or Jekyll and Hyde type werewolf, but a full bore, Lon Chaney, Jr. werewolf with wet, dripping chops, pointed fangs and yellow eyes. A real hairy-palmed animal; a blood drinker, throat ripper, and lady killer. I skulk through the night, slinking behind thorn bushes and tall weeds, sniffing for my victims. There’s always that smell that gives them away. When I find them, I spring out on legs that are iron hydrants of sinew and muscle, and I set on them. They might have time to cry out once, usually in confusion rather than fear, before my jaws crush their larynx.

  That’s me by night. During the day, I’m a helluva nice guy and a chocolate junkie. Ever since I was a little nipper I’ve always had to have my daily fix of chocolate or I go nuts. Chocolate kisses, bon bons and éclairs; chocolate covered peanuts and fudge swirls, chocolate cake and ice cream. Every kind of chocolate confection you can think of, I’ll eat it and be happy about it. Even in high school I would sneak off to the soda shop, filling up on chocolate milkshakes and Mr. Goodbars before returning to school. Gave me a terrible case of zits, I’ll tell you.

  I can only believe that all the chocolate I’ve eaten over the years has caused me to... transfigure. That’s the kindest word I can use.

  You might think the first time I changed was the worst and I’ll have to admit it was pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as the next time.

  Let me tell you about it.

  I had just taken a shower and as I finished I caught a glimpse of my stark naked body in the mirror. It looked the same, pale and pasty, an unflattering set of man boobs (what my dad called “moobs”) beginning to take hold. But I felt a hot, primal instinct overtake my mind. The closest I’ve ever come to being lost in the wilderness was when I got off the trail at the North Carolina state zoo in Asheboro, but an animal imperative to hunt clawed its way from that deep place inside where modern man has coffined it like a malformed child. The desire burned through me like a flame. A totally new, unexpected, and -I have to admit- pleasant lust for blood surged in my belly and limbs, swelling my torso until I had the strength of twenty.

  What was the pain to me as I saw my chest bubble and expand, the doughy, corpse-white skin darkening and sprouting coarse, shiny hair? Incredible pain was my constant lover as my spine straightened with wracking grindings and snaps, forcing me down on all fours. The flab on my belly constricted into sleek bundles of muscle tissue like drawn cables of the strongest iron. No more moobs!

  My ears lengthened and short tufts of hair erupted from their pointed tips. My eyes changed from uninteresting brown to lustrous yellow, fluorescent and merciless.

  My nose wrenched from my face in a crunching explosion of facial bone. It lengthened into a muzzle from which I saw my small, canine teeth elongate from ineffectual points to tapered sabers that could rend at will. My face changed from that of a puling man to that of a hungry wolf.

  Sister to the sun, the moon shone down from the winter night sky, seeming to intensify my urge to hunt and feed. I crept down the hallway on newly padded feet and peered into my bedroom. My wife was asleep, one arm curled under her chin, her dark hair spilling off the bed like an anthracite waterfall. I padded closer. The muscles in my legs quivered with black anticipation. Saliva welled in my throat until I was nearly choking.

  Then I heard something.

  A pitiful cry came from the next room. My hackles rose into a ridge on my back. The physical craving to feed was like an immutable mandate. A low growl rumbled in my throat, almost like a purr.

  I loped down the hallway to my son’s room. My shoulders swaggered and brushed the walls. My head swung to and fro. I lolled my tongue out and licked my muzzle. Drool spotted the floor in black sunbursts. I imagined what it must look like as I swung my massive head around the door jamb, Pit Bull teeth bared, snout wrinkled, gold eyes glowing in the darkness.

  I reared up on my hind legs and stared into my son’s crib. Joseph Bailey, named
after his uncle. His eyes were open and they stared back into mine, not scared, but interested. He reached up a chubby hand and smiled his toothless grin.

  I don’t know how long I stayed like that before some feeble remnant of affection allowed me to turn away from my son and steal out of the house.

  But the hunger was still there. I lifted my muzzle in the air, sniffing, catching, for the first time, that smell that I would come to know so well. I couldn’t describe it then or now. It was like a beacon or trail, and I followed it. The moonlight lit my way and spun ghostly shadows on the dead grass as I made my way to a modestly affluent home set off by itself. I heard a woman’s laughter, counterpointed by a deeper male reply. There was whirring and splashing.

  On an outdoor deck, seen through a screening thicket of bushes, a man and a woman frolicked in a hot tub. Steam rose from the hot water into the frigid night. Two wine glasses sat on a table next to the hot tub. With unerring accuracy, I knew that smell came from the woman. I crouched, in full attack mode, hearing the wind sing a mournful melody through the night.

  Too late the woman sensed some danger and when she turned to look I had already leaped through the privacy hedge and was on the deck in three, loping strides.

  Her male companion was slower to react, whether from alcohol or a feeling of invincibility, I’ll never know. I do remember the unhappy union of fright and bewilderment on his face as I leaped onto the deck surrounding the hot tub.

  I could see from my vantage point above her that she wore only the bottom half of a white bikini. Then her unblemished throat was between my teeth before she could rise. She beat wildly against my neck, but the blows might as well have been the beating of a moth’s wings. Her pinned up hair came loose and whipped through the air as I shook my head violently. The muscles in my haunches bunched as my claws dug into the wood of the neck, leaving deep, squealing marks. The sounds of snarling, splashing, and crunching bone shattered the night. Her trachea came loose with a wet, tearing sound as I dragged her from the hot tub.

  Blood from her mangled arteries spread through the hot tub like a cloud chamber, turning water to wine, yet her male companion remained inert, blubbering and wide-eyed, chained to his spot with fear. Even in my primal state and blood lust I felt contempt for the man, but he was not my concern at the moment. He didn’t have that smell.

  The small table next to the hot tub was knocked over in our struggles, sending the wine glasses crashing, and a scattering of small coins falling on the patio. The woman’s hands flopped limply on the ground and her feet kicked once. We became a shadow in the night.

  I ate quickly, in case the man were somehow to galvanize himself to action, finally having an appreciation for the phrase wolfing it down. But the man seemed to be in shock, unable to move even if he had had to save himself.

  A few minutes later I left her rapidly cooling body and silent testimony to an ultimate horror: two broken wine glasses and a few silver coins winking in the calumnious light of the moon.