James Enge - The Wolf Age

The werewolf fell in a ball, snarling, and snapped at his legs. Morlock smashed the disintegrating frame down on the werewolf; it yelped, finally fleeing from repeated blows. Morlock shook loose a few fragments and then stood forth triumphantly with a club in each hand.

The werewolf, slinking around the far side of the cell, looked from the uneven clubs in Morlock's hands to the fragments of the cot on the cell floor.

Possibly it was thinking about the disadvantages of wolf form. Morlock tossed one club in the air and flickered his fingers before he caught it again. Nimbleness and clubs: they weren't much, perhaps, against the werewolf's advantages. But maybe the beast didn't know that. He moved slowly, stalkingly, toward the werewolf.

The werewolf backed away slowly, around the edge of the room. Morlock followed it, watching for an opportunity to strike. He was also thinking about the beast, its size, and the energy with which it moved. Whenever it had last eaten, it must be growing hungry. As it grew hungrier, it would grow desperate. But it would also grow weaker. Perhaps his strategy should be a waiting game.

The werewolf was now again by the fragments of the cot. One of them was smoldering slightly; Morlock had been wounded slightly, and the blood, falling on the wood, had set it afire.

The werewolf sniffed the smoldering wood, then looked narrowly at Morlock. It extended its blunt snout and sniffed again. Its teeth bared in a wordless snarl, and it darted forward to attack.

Morlock struck, even more savagely than before, with his makeshift clubs, but this time the beast was not deterred. Still, the blows had some effect: it had been aiming at his throat, but it ended up ripping into his left leg.

Morlock pounded on the narrow snout as steaming fiery blood squirted out from between its teeth. The clubs broke over the beast's head; it whined with pain but did not retreat. Morlock took a sharpish end of one of the broken clubs and stabbed it into the werewolf's right eye. He pushed the wooden stake savagely, with all his strength, hoping to strike into the beast's brain.

It fled, sobbing strangely, with its lips firmly shut, with the wood still dangling from its bleeding eye socket. Then, as it paused by the wooden fragments of Morlock's cot, it spat deliberately on them. The blood it had drawn from Morlock's wound set them aflame. Then it darted across the room and spat the rest of its mouthful of blood on the other cot, which took fire and began to burn-slowly at first, then with increasing strength.

Morlock watched gloomily as his potential armory went up in flames kindled by his own blood. His nimbleness was now very much in doubt, due to the leg wound, and his materials for making new weapons were vanishing as he watched. But the worst thing about all this was the deliberate intelligence the werewolf had shown. He had thought of it as a beast, but it was not merely a beast. In fact, it seemed more like a person now than it had when still in man form.

He sat with his back against the cell wall and watched his enemy. It didn't seem disposed to attack, so Morlock tore strips from his shirt to bandage his leg wound. It was a terrible wound, and if it festered it might kill him …but only if he lived through this night.

The werewolf itself was hardly in better shape. It shook its head frantically and clawed at its eye, finally dislodging the bloody chunk of sharp wood. Then it crept forward to the middle of the room, toward the wedge of moonlight falling on the cell floor. It kept its one eye warily on Morlock as it moved, but it seemed intent on entering the moonlight.

Morlock didn't understand this, but he did understand that anything the werewolf wanted was bad for him. He stood and brandished his remaining club. He closed one eye deliberately and opened it: a warning to the beast that it could lose its other eye.

The werewolf snarled and continued to inch forward.

Morlock thought the beast had understood his threat and was disregarding it. If so, it was even more important that the werewolf not rest in the moonlight. It had transformed there: did moonlight hasten the beast's power to recuperate and heal? It seemed likely.

Morlock dropped his club and jumped for the window. His left hand caught the bars' iron sill, and with his right he slammed over the wooden shutter. There was a latch on the shutter and he set it. The only light in the cell now came from the smoldering flames set by Morlock's blood. The werewolf howled in fury and disappointment.

Morlock dropped back down to the cell floor, and a wave of pain darkened his vision as the fall jarred his wounded leg. Sound and smell warned him before sight that the werewolf was attacking again. He lashed out desperately with his fists, by luck battering the blunt snout aside before its teeth fixed on his throat.

Its jaws clamped down on his right upper arm. Morlock saw that the wounded eye was already healing: the orb was whole again, if sightlessly white. The healthy eye met his, and the werewolf seemed to grin at him around the blood bubbling out of Morlock's wound. Morlock clutched at the werewolf's eye with his left hand, digging deep into the socket with two fingers. The werewolf gave a muffled shriek, a strangely human sound from the lupine mouth, and fled, one eyeball dangling by a thick gleaming nerve from the empty socket.

Morlock stood with his back to the wall beneath the window and wearily tore more strips from his shirt for bandages. He did so with a sense of futility. In every encounter where the werewolf hurt him, it came closer to killing him. He could hurt it, but he could never kill it. The absence of moonlight might slow its healing, but would not stop it. And now it didn't even need to attack; it could sit and wait for him to pass out from blood loss or weariness.

If only he could kill it. But he had no silver and no wolfbane. How else could you kill a werewolf.?

The wounded beast sidled through the red smoky shadows of the cell. It issued a harsh, rasping sound like a cough.

Morlock thoughtfully twisted the bandage in his hands. He let the blood fall unregarded to the stone floor. A thought was forming in his mind.

Everything that lived, everything that had physical life, had to breathe. That was why the werewolf was coughing from the smoke.

Keeping one eye on the lurking beast, Morlock stooped down and pulled the leather laces from his shoes. When he had made them he had leeched the phlogiston from them so that they wouldn't burn; he tested their strength now with his fingers, and he liked what he felt. He patiently spliced the laces together. It took a little time to do properly and his time was running out, but there was no point in trying this without doing it right. When the laces were one, he grabbed a stray length of nonburning wood from the floor and, being careful not to drip blood on it, broke it in half. He knotted one end of each lace to a piece of wood, and presently he had a serviceable garrote.

Now to make a chance to use it. The beast was wounded in both eyes, but it could still smell and hear; he would have to distract it somehow so that he could attack it from behind.

Morlock carefully placed the garrote on the floor far away from any fires. Then he loitered casually toward one of the burning cots-it was the other one, the one Morlock had not broken up. By now the fire had spread over the length of the thing and it was burning merrily.

The werewolf was on the far side of the cell, distractedly and somewhat dismayedly swinging its loose eyeball on its nerve.

Morlock picked up the burning cot and threw it at the wall above the werewolf. As soon as the cot struck the wall, he dodged across the cell to seize his garrote and then jumped upon the werewolf's back as it emerged snarling from the curtain of hot gleeds and bloody smoke. He wrapped the cord around the half-blind beast's neck and began to twist.