Writer's Block: A Family History of Violence

 

Here's an unconventional werewolf story, one of the longest in my yet-unnamed collection, which is almost at thirty-thousand words so far. Young men seem to be adrift more so now than ever. Let us hope they don't turn into monsters. 

A Family History of Violence

I was remembering when my father cut off my finger.

We were in the peach orchard on a humid day in April. A cold winter had transitioned to an unusually hot spring, and my father was behind in his pruning, as he usually was. He was up on a short ladder, cutting off the top branches of a peach tree with a pair of electric shears when I accosted him about some matter or other. I can’t remember what it was—my interests at the time were chiefly video games and girls—and I’m sure I was being particularly obnoxious, as was my wont. Fifteen is an odious age, rife with the struggles of maturation, and I had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which made it even harder. My childhood was one of constant berating and screaming, and although my father never struck me, I knew he had come close. I didn’t have any fear of pushing someone past the limit—a consequence of my disorder—and whatever my father said to me as he pruned that peach tree on that day ten years ago, it must have especially triggered an outburst. I remember walking up to the ladder, under the sparse shade of the tree, and sticking my middle finger right in his face, the tip of which brushed his nose. The eyes under his ball cap gleamed, and a twitch occurred on the right corner of his mouth, and suddenly the electric shears were closing around my middle finger and it was falling to land in the soft earth around the peach tree truck. I screamed—I remember that much—but what happened afterwards is a blur. My father did have the good sense to retrieve my finger, which was reattached at the hospital, but he left soon afterwards, my mother unable to forgive him, and I went the next ten years without seeing or speaking to him.

Now I was sitting in my car, looking across at his house, trying to gather my thoughts. Having conjured the memory of that day and the rage that it invoked, I felt as though I was ready. I took a deep breath, opened the car door, and walked across the driveway to stand in front of the door. What a nice house some voice in my head thought. Much nicer than the house mom and I lived in.

A light turned on suddenly, and the door opened, and there was my father, looking older, but mostly the same. He had the same well-manicured beard, although it was now heavily flecked with gray, and his shoulders possessed the familiar width. His eyes, which were silvery-blue, beheld me with the same dispassionate scrutiny, except they had tears forming in their corners, which threw me, for I had never witnessed my father crying. His long arms and giant hands enveloped me in an all-encompassing embrace, and I stood there silent as my father hugged me and sobbed great heaving sobs that soaked my flannel shirt. What am I supposed to do with this I thought, and then my father let me go and stood back and examined me with a warmer expression than I had ever seen on his craggy visage.

“My son,” he said simply, wiping the tears from his face. “My son.”

“Dad,” I managed, searching for the anger that I had felt only moments before.

“I’m sorry,” he said firmly. “I’m sorry for cutting your finger off. I’m sorry for leaving. I’m sorry for not being there for you. I’m not asking for your forgiveness or understanding. I just want you to know that I am sorry.”

I didn’t know what to say. In all my imaginings on how this encounter would proceed, I never fathomed that my father would be teary-eyed and remorseful. That was just not how I knew my father. The years had obviously changed him. For some reason, I thought he would stay the same.

“Come inside,” he said, beckoning, and I crossed the threshold.

…

We sat around a dinner table: my father, his wife, my half-brother, and I. His wife, a diminutive, slender woman, had remained silent when my father introduced us, and my half-brother, a seven year-old boy, had only grunted and looked at me with disinterested eyes. On the plate before me was a bloody twelve ounce t-bone steak and nothing else. They all tore into the meat with great gusto, although my half-brother looked pained to be utilizing a fork and knife and not his hands and teeth. The meat did not seem to be seasoned at all—it looked unappetizing to me, like a hunk of flesh thrown upon a plate for a beast to consume—an although I managed to bring a piece of steak close to my mouth, I could not eat it. My father, seeing my hesitancy to eat the meal, ceased his chewing and leaned back into his chair.

“What’s wrong? Is it not to your liking?” he asked.

“No, I… I just don’t eat meat,” I said, which wasn’t true.

His wife and my half-brother both stopped eating and look at me as though I were some bizarre specimen never before seen by man.

“It’s okay,” my father said, extending his right hand towards his family in a soothing gesture. “Son, I have something to ask of you. We are leaving tomorrow morning for a brief vacation in the mountains. I would ask you to come with us, but unfortunately that’s impossible. I want you to be part of this family, and I want you to give me a chance to make amends. Therefore, I ask that you stay here and watch the house and wait for us to return. Then we can start the process of making you a full member of this family.”

I let the question linger for just a moment before agreeing to his offer. The truth was that I didn’t want to stay in this strange house with this strange family, but I was currently in hiding, and I didn’t think that law enforcement would look here, in the far away mountains, and I had no money and no where else to go.

…

That night I had a strange dream. I was running in a forest next to a beautiful young woman. We hurtled the fallen trees and moss-covered stones with ease. Suddenly she took the lead, and I had a panicked sensation that she would break away and leave me. She ran faster and faster, her legs like the fleeting limbs of a deer, and so I dropped down on my hands and pursed four-footed, closing the distance. Our chase took on a manic energy—there was the sense that it was a life and death matter as our hearts beat faster, in rhythm with our footfalls. I was just about to make the leap and pull her down into the soft bed of the forest when I woke up.

The room was pitch black, the curtains tightly drawn. I sat in bed for a moment, frozen like a spotted animal. Something was scratching on my door.

I didn’t move nor scarcely breathe. I don’t know why—it had to be a dog—but I had seen no animal in the house, and some instinct of self-preservation told me not to make a sound. It whined then, a haunting cry akin to a child’s moan with a bestial undertone, and I shrank beneath the covers, my eyes fixated on the door. After a while I heard something pad down the hallway, back toward wherever they kept the creature, and I got up and locked the door. It was then when I noticed the white light of the moon shining through my curtains, its pale luminescence holy in the middle of the night. An itchiness grew on my skin, as though my flesh were a coat that I must shed, and although a mad urge to throw open the window and flee into the moonlight threatened to seize me, I got back in bed and spent several hours restlessly turning about, my ears primed for any sound.

In the morning I awoke groggy and tired-eyed, but to my surprise my father and his family were already packed and ready to leave on their vacation. He placed the keys in my hand, patted my shoulder, and bid me farewell. As they drove down the street, I stood there, confused. Everything had happened so quickly, and I’d had no time to react. The strangeness of the night had me searching the house for a dog, but I found nothing. There was an odd bone in my half-brother’s room, a large femur with deep scratches worn into its yellowed exterior, but I chalked it up to a science project or some odd curiosity on his part. A deep fatigue settled in, and I went into the back yard and lay in a hammock that stretched between two oak trees and tried to fall asleep.

It was a fairly cool summer day. I had found a couple beers in my father’s refrigerator and helped myself to them. The chirping of birds and rustling of squirrels eased the disquiet inside of me as the warm comfort of drink overtook my brain. What I had done could be thought about later—it was not important, nothing was. The yard was well-maintained, the grass green and precisely chopped. I stretched a hand out and felt the earth. Sleep was about to come when I saw her in the next lot over.

She had long blonde hair and tanned skin, and she was wearing a swim top and a pair of ripped jean shorts. With one strong pull, the lawn mower rumbled to life, and the quiet of my repose abruptly ended. I lay in the hammock like a sleeping lion, hand still trailing the grass, one eye opened as I watched. She looked familiar, almost like the girl in my dream. Dream girl—she did look like someone conjured up in an adolescent fantasy, one that I might have had only a couple years ago. Sedate and passive, I thought about my generation and how we were slowly letting ourselves become extinct like pandas in a zoo who wouldn’t breed because the conditions weren’t right and Jupiter wasn’t quite at its zenith. What would she do if I went over to the fence and waved? Would she run inside, wary of the leering pervert next door? Would she come and speak with me? Or would she simply dismiss me with a wave and continue her mowing? I felt like I had to do something. My agency had vanished the moment I had entered my father’s house.

She saw me and the mower died, shaking me from my reverie. I stirred, and the beer spilled a bit onto the grass. She was now leaning over the fence, hair billowing downward, and I just sat there for a second like an idiot, unsure how to move.

“Hey,” she said.

“What’s up?” I replied, gesturing with my beer for some odd reason.

“You got another one of those?” she asked.

I looked down and noticed the six pack I had brought outside.

“Sure but it’s probably not cold anymore,” I explained.

I flung it at her like we were at a frat house, and she caught it with her right hand in one smooth motion. She tapped the top with her index finger, popped the table, and took a long swig.

“I’m Lois,” she said, wiping a bit of foam from the side of her mouth.

“Like Superman’s girlfriend?” I asked.

She squinted her eyes and stuck her tongue out.

“This is the part where you tell me your name,” she explained.

“Alex,” I said.

“I’ve never seen you before, Alex. Are you the prodigal son?”

“Yeah, actually. I’m house-sitting for my father who I haven’t seen or spoken to since I was fourteen,” I admitted.

“Really? That’s fucked up.”

She put her hand to her mouth suddenly, but I shook my head.

“It is,” I said. “You call them like you see them, huh?”

“I just finished my first year of college and I feel like I’m a citizen of the world,” she said. “I literally know everything. Seriously. Ask me anything.”

“Why did you stop mowing and come talk to me?” I asked.

“You looked approachable and you had beer. This is a dry house,” she said, nodding toward her home.

“You want to come over and have another one?” I offered.

“Woah, buddy, we just met. I’m kind of in the middle of something if you didn’t notice. I’ll keep that offer in mind, though. Me and a couple of friends are going out tonight. You could show up if you want.”

“Where?” I asked, trying to mask my enthusiasm.

“McCallister’s. It’s a little dive bar about half a mile from here alongside the highway. They don’t card,” she said.

“What time?” I asked.

“Eight-thirty,” she said. “Are you twenty-one?”

“Twenty-four,” I said.

“Oh you’re ancient,” she said. “Well, I got a yard to mow. Thanks for the beer. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

I’d never really had a conversation with a woman that had went as easily as this one had. Maybe it was because I’d been without a phone or a computer for a while. It was so easy to hide behind the white glow of the screen rather than face someone in real life, or at least that’s what I had thought. There was a lot that I had been wrong about.

I killed time by exploring my father’s house in my slightly inebriated haze. It was a normal, boring dwelling—pastoral scenes on the walls, a recliner in the living room—and it was difficult to get a sense of who they were as a family. I went back to my half-brother’s room to look around for any more bones, but I only found a couple Lego sets and a few old video games. My father’s bedroom was similarly unrevealing, containing only a dresser, a half-filled closet, and a plain bathroom devoid of any interesting concoctions. The basement was the only room that remained unexplored. I caught a peculiar scent as I walked past it, the sticky-sweet stench of decay, and I noticed that the door was cracked slightly. As I opened it, darkness swallowed the light. I actually took a step backward and staggered, blinking, before looking down at it once more. The steps were wooden and peeling, leading down into an abyssal gloom, and a draft wafted upward, carrying more of that poisonous reek. I slammed the door, falling against it, strangely breathless. Something was down there, something haunting and terrible, and I wasn’t ready to find it yet. Immediately I thought of death and whether there was a body in that horrid cellar. A corpse didn’t reconcile with what I had seen of this family and their house. I didn’t think that my father could kill somebody or steal a dead body—but I hadn’t seen my father in a decade and didn’t really know him anymore.

Eight-thirty came quicker than I thought it would. All of a sudden I was in the dive bar, ordering a beer, and the previous hours were absent, vanished from my memory. This phenomena had occurred a few times in my life—the first occurrence being after my father cut off my finger—and it never really alarmed me for some inexplicable reason. It was as though I was a passenger through time, and I had taken the train and all the events in-between were the lands blurring together through the window. I had never talked about these strange jumps, but I knew that they weren’t normal. Perhaps I didn’t desire an explanation for fear of a lethal diagnosis. Anyway, I was a little startled but I sipped my beer and looked around for Lois.

“My love is a faint, fair thing,” I whispered, the words summoned from my lips.

“What’s that?” asked the bartender.

“Something my dad said to me when I was a child,” I told him. “A poem. My dad wrote poetry. I remember that.”

“Huh,” said the bartender. “You want another one?”

“Keep them coming,” I said.

There was a headache brewing in the back of my neck. I’d been drinking all day, preparing for the night, perhaps, or just trying to avoid thinking about my problems. When she appeared at my side, it felt like she’d always been there, like a voice inside my head.

“You came,” said Lois.

“Yeah,” I said, cracking a smile and wondering if my eyes were wobbling out of my head.

“My friends are over there,” she said, pointing to two girls at a table staring at their phones.

“Should we meet them?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You seem like you might have over done it,” she said.

“This?” I said, gesturing to my beer. “I probably have. I admit it. There’s too much sadness in life.”

“That’s not the killer pickup line you think it is,” said Lois.

“Cast out like the stars and scattered across the sky,” I replied.

“What?”

“It twinkles when I remember how I held you in my arms, a little breathing life.”

“What is that?” she asked.

“Part of a poem my dad used to recite. I’m just now remember it. I jumped through time to get here and now it’s trying to pull me back.”

“Jumped through time, eh? That’s pretty impressive. You’re like Dr. Who.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Do you want to dance?”

“What?”

She took my hand and pulled me off of the stool, and we danced on the floor, rather strangely, feet mixing together, for I couldn’t keep rhythm, and she kept laughing when I stumbled. I couldn’t even tell you what the music was—something old, with a ragged beat dug up from the days of the dinosaurs. We were the only ones in the bar dancing, but Lois wasn’t embarrassed, though her friends shook their heads and buried themselves in their phones. In the end we were both in a booth together, and we had drinks, and she talked and said things to me that I listened to but all I remember is the joy that I felt, the rich feeling of blood pumping through my veins, the thrill of having another person there to be with, if only for that moment. I met her friends yet I cannot recall their names, and we eventually left the bar to drive back to Lois’s neighborhood, where we prowled the streets, stuffing leaves into people’s mailboxes, shoving trashcans until the cops were called and we escaped into my father’s backyard, where we hid. I woke up in the morning with the sun beating down upon my face, tangled in the hammock, a hangover raging in my skull, that feeling of joy faint, yet still lingering in my aching body.

There was a conversation I’d had with Lois, deep in the night, that I kept trying to piece together in my post-partying malaise. We were sitting together in the booth, and I had told her why I had left to find my father, with all the false bravado I could muster.

“I’m on the run, you know,” I had said.

“Really? From the FBI?”

“I hope not. I lost my head in a bar not too different from this one.”

“Did you kill a man?” she asked, clearly in jest.

“I hit him. He said something to me—something stupid, I can’t remember—and I just hit him, and he fell backwards and I saw his head hit a chair, and it was at that instant that everything slowed down. My actions became real, what I had just done—and I kept staring at all the blood trickling from the back of his skull to pool on the bar room floor, and I panicked and left. I got in my car and drove across five states to get to my father’s house. I did what he did when he cut off my finger. I ran. I think on some level I felt like I was truly his son now, because we had something in common. A history of violence.”

What really bothered me was that I couldn’t recall her reaction. Had she told me that I wasn’t a bad person, that it hadn’t been my fault? Had she laughed it off? Had she even been listening?

In the house the basement beckoned with that horribly irresistible smell. What had initially reeked of festering carrion now recalled savory foreign food, the strangeness of its scent promising delicious new flavors. Still, I resisted going down there. To do so would be an irrevocable action, and I’d already done too many of those as of late. So I sat down in front of the television and stared at a blank screen and waited for some purpose to find me.

I had always felt as though life were a waiting game. A chosen few started playing immediately, instantly grasping the rules and so they proceeded, driven, ascending from level to level until they found they had not really understood what game they were playing. The rest of us waited around, either for someone to explain the rules or to tell us that we were really doing. It was like we were wandering in a dark forest, nothing to guide oneself besides blind intuition. I was thinking of a forest with towering pine trees and sparse undergrowth when suddenly I was there, breathing the cool mountain air. I heard howls and yips but instead of being afraid, I was driven toward the sounds, for they were familiar and welcoming to my ears. As I walked, I came upon an open space, and I saw them, my father’s family, naked amongst the rocks. Coloring a boulder was the red splash of blood, and the three of them danced, if you could call it that, a strange loping thrashing of limbs, and I saw that they were also covered in red. My father saw me then, his eyes amber, and he waved his hands toward me to come hither, but then I saw his teeth and how they resembled the fangs of wolves, and I turned and ran from them, fleeing into the forest.

I blinked my eyes to find myself on the couch still, staring at a television that had turned itself on. There was an ad for an erection drug featuring a young woman talking about how her husband had difficulty staying hard until he had become a consumer of said brand. I watched it with a vapid disinterest, not hearing the words emitting from her artificially plump lips. What she was telling me was that I was inadequate and not even capable of my biological purpose without the aid of pharmaceutical drugs.

“What the fuck am I doing?” I asked.

The dreams, the time jumps, Lois, my father’s house—I had the strong sense that I should leave and go elsewhere, but there was nowhere else to go, and I felt as impotent as the television said I was. I took a beer from the refrigerator, went back outside, and sat down on the ground as the sun beat down upon me.

I saw Lois in the next yard, lying on a chaise, wearing a pair of shorts and a cropped top. She seemed to be asleep despite the sun. Before I knew what I was doing, I had hopped the fence. Somehow I’d kept my beer in hand.

Looming over her, she seemed the most exquisite thing. I knew that she was a person but it was hard to see her as such. It was more proper to view her as an idea or a transcendent process, or even as a possession. She was something I didn’t have, something that would make me whole and fill the gaping void that grew inside my heart. These were dangerous thoughts, and I hated them, but still I stared over her. With an odd confidence I reached out a hand to touch her as though I were about to fondle a forbidden idol. It was at that moment that her eyes opened, and she saw me, and I saw the confusion and fear on her face.

“What?” she asked.

The word hovered in the air like a vulture. I didn’t know what to say or do. I don’t know if I fell or lunged, but suddenly I was on top over her, and she was yelling and pushing at me, and then I was on the ground again, and Lois had run into her house. Beer drenched the ground, and I leapt over the fence and staggered across the yard to hide in my father’s house like a clumsy predator that had botched its attack.

…

It was late in the evening when I climbed down into the basement. The floor was dirt and the air was musty and cold, and I couldn’t find a light switch. The flashlight that I’d discovered in a pantry produced poor illumination, and every step that I took was slow and ponderous. I noticed a lot of hair on the floor as though something had shed down here, shrugging off its coat in great clumps. The smell lost its allure in the crypt-like gloom, and when I finally discovered its source, I had to pull my shirt over my nose to keep from retching. There, in the center of the room, was a small altar, and an animal’s corpse lay upon it. The rictus of its death grin revealed long canine teeth, but the body was elongated, with almost man-like limbs. Indeed, one forelimb ended in a hand rather than a paw, and on one of the gnarled fingers I noticed a wedding ring. There was a huge cavity in the center of its body, a hollow where the organs had been removed and something placed inside. I leaned closer and reached into the creature and removed a little Lego man, a pirate armed with a plastic cutlass.

“What the fuck are you doing in there?” I asked the darkness.

Upstairs I heard a door open. I scrambled up the basement steps and managed to shut the door just as my father walked in. He looked haggard, huge shadows hanging beneath his eyes like black pits, and he measured me with a coldness that he’d lack upon our reunion.

“Son,” he said simply.

“Father,” I retorted.

“What have you been doing?” he asked.

“Not much,” I admitted. “I met the neighbor.”

“Who?”

“Lois. The girl next door.”

He didn’t say anything—he just kept looking at me as though his eyes could bore through my skull and read the contents of my mind.

“How was your trip?” I asked as my stepmother and half-brother walked inside.

“It accomplished its purpose,” he said.

His wife had retreated down the hall without sparing a glance at me, but my half-brother linger for a moment in the entryway. There was a long wound that spanned the length of his right forearm that looked as though it were put there by a knife.

“I’m tired, son,” my father said. “I need to go and lie down.”

“I’ve been waiting a decade to talk to you, but yeah, sure, go lie down. I can wait some more.”

My father stared at me with barely veiled malice. Instinctively, I moved my hands closer to my body. Then the tension released, and he looked old and deflated. Without a word, he turned and headed down the hallway to his room.

I went to my half-brother’s room and knocked. The door opened slowly by itself, and there he was, sitting on his bed, the gnawed bone in his lap.

“Hey,” I said, entering the room and sitting down next to him.

“Hey,” he replied, his gaze so similar to my father’s that it seemed as though I were speaking to a younger, smaller version of him.

“Did you get that from the animal downstairs?” I asked.

He didn’t reply; he just kept stroking the bone with one finger, pausing on the indentations and rough spots.

“What did you do on vacation?” I asked.

“We went to the woods,” he replied stiffly.

“What did you do there? Hike?”

“Dad says we have to let it out sometimes or else we’ll hurt someone.”

“Let what out? A dog?”

“What we have inside us. The thing that makes us different.”

“Let me ask you something. Did dad hurt you? Did he cut your arm?” I asked.

“He didn’t mean to. Sometime stuff just happens,” said my half-brother. “You don’t get it yet. Dad says you’re a late bloomer.”

“A late bloomer? I’m twenty-four. How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Dad cut my finger off once,” I said. “This one.”

I showed him the finger, a ring-like scar clearly visible.

“Yeah dad told me about that. He said that he shouldn’t have run away, but he didn’t want you to turn out like him. He’s not making the same mistake with me.”

“I think he is,” I said, my hands forming into fists. “This isn’t right. I have to confront him.”

“What are you going to do?” asked my half-brother, suddenly looking scared.

“Men like dad get away with too much. They give us their legacy of violence, and then they run away, leaving us damaged and scared and unable to make sense of the world.

“Don’t hurt him,” said my half-brother, dropping his bone. “Dad said you hurt somebody and that’s why you came back to him.”

“What is that thing in the basement?” I asked.

“You look like you’re about to hurt somebody. I won’t let you hurt him!”

My half-brother’s eyes flashed and he grasped my forearm and sunk his teeth into my flesh. I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go and kept his jaws latched on me like a mad beast. With my free hand I grabbed the bone, and hit him across the back with it hard. He snarled, his mouth full of blood, his teeth elongated and gleaming, but he released me and scrambled out of the room on all fours, growling down the hallway like a wolf chased away from a kill.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, clutching my arm. There was chunk of flesh missing from it, and blood dripped down from my wound to puddle on the floor.

The howling echoed through the house as I staggered from my room. The hallway swam like a rotating collidescope, and my thoughts tumbled with my steps. What am I? How much do you want her? Am I my father’s son?

My father emerged from a room, his face a dark mask of fury. Standing ahead of me, he seemed to gain in size and presence, so much so that I stopped my progression and stood where I was, unsure of whether or not I should continue. My finger ached; the blood dripped from my forearm onto the carpet, but I made no move.

“You still don’t understand,” he said, his words quiet as a threat. “I thought that maybe you’d changed, that you’d come into your birthright, but here you are, limping down my hallway like a wounded deer, maimed by a boy not even half your size.”

“What do you want from me?” I yelled.

“You have to stop running way from monsters,” he said, his voice rising. “You can’t be afraid of your father or your half-brother. You can’t be scared of yourself. I was, Alex. I was scared like you once. Right after I cut off your finger. But now I know that you can’t ignore your true nature. We are violent beasts, my son. We are not your average men who lumber around with swollen guts and atrophied testicles. I cannot work for another man who is my inferior. I will not abide a society that has coddled us and transformed our bestial instincts into those of the domesticated swine. I am the man of ancient Greece, King Lycaon, inquistor of the gods. Unlike them, I am not afraid to dine on human flesh.”

“What is that in the basement?” I asked.

My father did not respond. I watched as his jaws stretched, the gumline raw and pink as a snout pushed out from somewhere deep inside his being. He shook his head and the dark hair spread across his bare skin as he tore and pulled at his clothes, falling to all fours. In the back of the house, two howls reverberated through the hallway, their unearthly cries mingling in foul harmony. It took only a few moments for my father to shed his human skin, and then he stood before me, breathing heavily, a four-legged beast with the head of a wolf, eyes inflamed, angry, and seeking blood.

His words had not their desired effect, for I saw only a monster in the hallway, not a liberated masculine presence. My own teeth became visible as my lip curled and I snarled. I stopped clutching my arm and raised my fists. My birthright was a severed finger, a half-brother with scars, and a step-mother that never spoke? My inheritance was that man in the bar room, lying on the floor, bleeding? Was it Lois restrained as I took what I wanted while she turned away in terror?

The monster leapt into the air, but I dodged forward at the last second, deftly sliding beneath his leap. Before he could turn his bulk around in the hallway, I was on top of him, my arm sliding beneath his throat. With all of my strength, I pulled upward, choking his thick neck as he tried to throw me off. His growls and snarls came out as feeble gasps, and I buried my face in his thick hair, tears wetting the coarse fur.

“Father,” I cried, as I felt his resistance weaken. “I reject my birthright or whatever it is you’ve given me. I will not be the man that you were or the monster you have become.”

Suddenly my father collapsed, and I was lying on top of a middle-aged man, my arm dangling loosely around his throat.

Behind me were my step-mother and half-brother. They had a look about them that was wolfish, but it faded as they stared at their patriarch defeated. I looked at my wound and saw that it had stopped bleeding.

“You’ll be like him soon,” said my step-brother, pointing at my arm.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, walking past them.

I left their house and got into my car and drove off into the night.