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[Previous Guest Writer]   Paul Finch   [Next Guest Writer]   [Chill Factor Index]

Simon writes:

Paul Finch has lived life. And although I have little doubt that he's read a great deal I think I can safely say that he knows a good deal about life and how it is lived from sheer personal experience. Ex-policeman, ex-journalist – are there many more professions that expose you to the best and worst of humanity? Possibly these roles are the finest, if toughest, training to become a writer. Certainly Paul Finch can tell a tale that has depth and that is peopled by believable, rounded characters.

Already readers are recognizing Paul Finch as a major new talent. His stories are taut, dialogue driven pieces, trimmed of all excessive wordage that demonstrate he is a man who knows how to plot a story. And, believe me, a good plot is the backbone of a good story.

Readers of macabre fiction might have come across his work in Terror Tales, Enigmatic Tales and the disk anthology Houses At The Borderland. Also in what must be a real testament to the man's talents his short story collection The Dark Satanic (Enigmatic Press) has been reprinted three times. Paul's talents don't rest at the written word. He has recently been contracted to write for the British TV police drama The Bill for (to quote Paul) "what should be the most violent episode they've ever screened". A horror writer scripting prime time television? This is what we've been waiting for – bring on the Trojan horses!

Now, with a new, unpublished story I am proud to welcome Paul to the Nailed website with his diabolically wonderful "The Wolfman's House". Now Paul, over to you...

"That's right, Steve."

Compared to the DJ's light and airy tone, the caller sounded surlier, more intense. The DJ wasn't fazed. "Welcome to HQ3 FM, Steve Kidd – Eight 'til Late. What can we do you for, Andy?"

"I was wondering if any of your listeners could help me trace the facts behind a story my grandma used to tell me," the caller said. "Something that was supposed to have happened about thirty years ago."

"Let's hear it."

"Well ..." The caller paused for a moment, as if uncertain how to continue. "There's a disease that's quite rare, called hypertrichosis. It's a congenital disorder or something. What happens if you've got it is that ... well, your thick hair, the hair that grows on your head, grows all over your body."

"Really?" The DJ's normal phoney tone faltered. Fleetingly, his interest sounded genuine.

"Yeah. I mean ... you're completely covered, like an animal."

"Good grief ... I've never heard of that before."

"As I say ... it's quite rare."

"Is there a cure for it?"

"Well, no ..." Again the caller hesitated, as if juggling with his facts. "It's an inherited condition. Er ... there've been cases where whole families have got it, and have had to live apart from the community."

"Sounds ghoulish."

"Well yeah ... it is." He paused. "This story isn't very pleasant, I'm afraid."

"I think you'd better tell us more."

"Well ..." The caller cleared his throat. "There was a town somewhere in England, where this chap apparently lived who had hypertrichosis. It made him a bit of an outcast. People tolerated him at first, but unfortunately his being there coincided with a series of child-murders."

"Ah!" said the DJ ominously.

"Yeah," the caller agreed. "Apparently, two or three kids were cut to pieces in this wood quite nearby, and local people got the idea that because this fella looked like a monster, then it must have been him."

Steve Kidd was clearly uncomfortable with this development. "Sad fact of human nature, I suppose," he mumbled.

"Well yeah ... but there's a bizarre twist to this story as well ... at least, the way my grandma used to tell it. Apparently, this chap was murdered himself ... shot with a silver bullet. As a result of which, the child-murders stopped."

There was then a brief silence, as if the DJ was awaiting some punch line which hadn't come. "What?" he finally said. "This is supposed to be true?"

"As far as I've been told. I'm currently trying to find out where it happened."

"Well, if you don't mind me saying, Andy ... sounds like a bit of a shaggy dog story." The DJ broke up into chuckles for a moment, but then, sensing no reciprocal mirth on the other end of the line, assumed a more thoughtful tone. "But I mean, seriously ... something like that would've caused a sensation, surely?"

"I guess this was a small community and they were embarrassed," the caller said. "Kept as much of it to themselves as they could."

"I'm not surprised," the DJ replied, cutting the line. "I'll be honest, I've never heard it before ... still, maybe somebody out there has? Give us a call – 0121 889 9996 – if you know anything about our genuine, true-life wolfman. Thanks for that, Andy. Interesting variation of themes, as always, on Steve Kidd – Eight 'til Late..."

Andy replaced the mobile on its cradle and sat back in his swivel chair. Above his head, wind hissed on the attic roof. Before him, piles of notes were heaped on the desk, the VDU screen displayed yet another website which had failed to deliver. This one was called 'Blind Alleys – myths and menace in urban Britain'. He leaned forward and signed off ... just as Miriam came up the ladder. "So what now?" she asked from the trapdoor.

She'd obviously been listening to the radio downstairs. Andy had the same station tuned in on the old tranny he kept up here, but the volume was low as he hadn't wanted the feedback to interfere with his call. He turned it up a couple of notches, then sat back again. "Now? Well ... now we wait."

She climbed wearily up and stood beside him. "Andy, you're not serious about this?"

"It's a long shot, I admit ... but you never know."

"It just seems so morbid."

He glanced up at her. "I'm interested ... I'm allowed to have interests, aren't I?"

She shrugged. "Well it's up to you, but you'll probably be disappointed. Anyway, your dinner's ready."

He nodded. "I'll be down in a minute."

He watched her descend, knowing exactly what she was thinking ... him and his obsessions again. Apart from the fact they were more than a little macabre, they also took up so much time. It wasn't as if he made a mint from being a full-time writer as it was – he only occasionally managed to sell things, and those would be short curiosity pieces for oddball mags like Fortean Times – yet he also spent hours and hours on this 'hobby' of his. Miriam, who was a nursery teacher, and who'd been supporting them both for several years now, didn't know what he was hoping to achieve by it.

Andy laid down the pen he'd been chewing. He didn't feel especially guilty about any of this – it was his lifetime's quest after all, but he didn't want to risk losing Miriam either. With her silky blonde hair and sapphire-blue eyes, she was just about the most beautiful creature he'd ever laid eyes on – God alone knew how he'd managed to woo her in the first place. But there was much more to her than that; her background was similar to Andy's – deprived and difficult, but she was as gentle and pleasant a person as you could ever hope to meet, and intelligent with it. She made life worth living just by being there.

As Andy got up and went downstairs, he swore to make it up to her ... but they were only half way through their dinner, when something happened which again put future plans on the back-burner.

"Hello," said an uncertain voice on the radio.

"Hello Barry ... you're talking to Steve Kidd on HQ3 FM."

"It's about the ... er, wolfman story a caller was referring to earlier."

Andy glanced up from his plate. His eyes met Miriam's.

"Oh yeah ... that was a weird one." The DJ now seemed quite amused. "Andy the urban mythologist. Wonder when he's going to come and join us on our planet."

"Well ... to be honest," said Barry, who was evidently an elderly gent, but still fairly lucid, "it's not so far-fetched as you might think. I know where it happened."

"You do?"

Andy laid down his fork, but Miriam went back to her food. She continued to eat in that delicate, bird-like way of hers.

"It was in a village called Ockley, near Doncaster. It happened ... oh, I'm not entirely sure, about 1958."

"And how do you know all this ... er, Barry?"

"Well ... I was in the South Yorkshire Police from '57 to '87 ... and I remember the incident quite well. I was a young PC at the time."

Andy had now put his tray down and was rifling through the paper-rack, searching for their old road atlas. Miriam, pointedly, refused to assist.

Steve Kidd, meanwhile, was yet to be convinced. "There's a smattering of truth in it, then, is there?"

"There's more than a smattering!" Barry replied, in the excitable way of pensioners who suspect they're being humoured. "What happened was that this chap ... he did have this weird disease, and he was a bit of a recluse because of it. His entire body was covered in thick hair, even his face ... he was a bizarre fella to took at. Like something off a film."

"Poor bloke," the DJ put in.

"Yeah ... and he got poorer. Those murders you mentioned really happened, you see. Two of them."

Andy located Doncaster with his finger ... then Ockley. He grinned. It was only about sixty miles north, straight up the A38.

"Two little girls," Barry added. "They'd been ... well, it sounds horrible, but they'd been dismembered."

"Good Lord ..."

Andy snatched a pen from the mantelpiece and began to scribble notes on the side of the map. Despite her misgivings meanwhile, Miriam was now listening to the story with horrified fascination. The depths to which people could sink never ceased to both amaze and chill her.

"The village folk were up in arms," the caller went on, "and the rumour spread that this chap was responsible because he was ... well, as you called him, a wolfman. Folk started panicking of course, and one night, some local men – vigilantes, if you like – killed him."

"With a silver bullet?" the DJ asked.

The old man laughed at this however, albeit self-consciously. "No, no ... that bit's just embellishment. He was doing his dishes when someone fired a shotgun through the kitchen window. Killed him outright. It was a bad do, to be honest with you ... because, well the murders did stop, but it wasn't because this wolfman chap was dead. The bloke who really did them worked as a hydraulics engineer at Ockley Pit. John Frain, he was called. He got arrested about a month later. When they searched his locker at work, it was full of knives and hacksaws and whatnot. It was definitely him."

"So what happened next, Barry?"

"He was hanged. At Wakefield Prison."

"And the people who shot the other fella ... the hairy bloke?"

"Oh them ... they were never caught." Oddly, old Barry's tone was now mildly dismissive. "Like your first caller said, close-knit community and all. No-one willing to speak out."

"Well it's an astonishing story, Barry." The DJ sounded as if he was ready to wrap this issue up. "You've enlightened us all to some tune..."

"There's one more thing. A footnote, so to speak."

"Well ... go on."

"This chap's house ... it's still there."

Andy looked sharply up from his notes.

"All these years later?" said Steve Kidd, amazed.

"Yeah. It's an end-terrace near a railway line, on the western edge of Ockley village," the old man explained. "The town isn't doing so well now ... the pit closed around 1981, and there's high unemployment, drugs problems, crime and that. It's very run-down. But that house is still there. It's derelict, of course. They were never able to sell it again. I think, even though the real murderer was caught, there was a feeling of superstition about the place, you know. Not many people wanted to go there..."

As a rule, Andy and Miriam didn't tend to socialise on Friday nights, the way others did. They had a small circle of friends who they occasionally fraternised with, though these were dispersed across the country and were only usually visited as part of some pre-planned weekend away ... and as far as Miriam was aware, there was no-one they knew at all in the South Yorkshire area.

She sighed aloud as the M1 traffic seemed to thicken the closer to Sheffield they drew. "An hour tops, you said it would take," she muttered, glancing at the neon clock on the dashboard. "It's nearly nine."

"The later the better, to be honest," Andy replied distractedly, as he negotiated the glaring rivers of headlights.

"I just hope it's worth it," she said.

When he'd first suggested they come up here, she'd only agreed for two reasons ... firstly because she knew he wouldn't stop talking about it until they did, and secondly because she'd thought it might give her a chance to write some end-of-term reports. She'd brought along a pile of work-files produced by the little ones in her class, but the early December darkness had quickly rendered them unreadable. She'd have been far better sitting at home and working by lamplight, she now realised, even if the TV and a glass of wine or two had provided alternative attractions.

Andy, of course, was oblivious to all this. He gazed ahead fixedly as he drove. As always, she could imagine what was going on inside his dark, handsome head: The wondrous realisation of a fairy tale he'd been mulling over since his earliest youth; the final nailing down of a sinister myth which, among all those others he was fascinated by, had haunted his dreams the most. Miriam wondered how, in his mind's eye, her husband perceived the Ockley wolfman – an eighteenth-century figure perhaps, in a baggy blouse, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, but with paws for hands and a sleek, lupine head, richly furred and complete with pricked-up ears and a long, jutting snout? Did he watch by the light of dusty candelabra, from the upper room in some ruined manor-house, as the entire village came along the winding lane, armed with picks and hoes and blazing torches, in the style of so many Gothic horror movie peasant mobs?

It was an overly romantic image, of course, and she knew she was doing Andy an injustice attributing it to him. The truth of the matter was doubtless more tragic and mundane. Miriam didn't need to know a lot about the affliction that was hypertrichosis, to imagine the way it would be received in a primitive coal-mining community, in an era as emotionally unsophisticated as the 1950s. The fact that the wretched and probably frightened man hadn't been violently driven out before the grotesque murders had even begun, was a source of astonishment to her. She could almost hear the catcalls of children as he made his occasional but essential trips to the corner-shop, doubtless scarfed and swathed in heavy clothes; she could sense the embarrassed silences of the women, feel the aggressive stares from the men as they stumbled out of the pub together and found themselves confronting him. Almost certainly, vile objects would habitually be thrust through the letter-flap on his front door, stones would be thrown, insulting messages left by local graffiti artists. Even in those polite postwar years, when youngsters were seen and not heard, and males still opened doors for females, the wolfman would be an outcast; the unwritten rules which instantly forbade all unruly behaviour, would always be dispensed with in his case. The house he lived in, maybe paid for by social services funding and probably damp and dilapidated, would be a hermitage, a refuge rather than a home, an outer wall for a prisoner whose own densely-fleeced skin was the inner one.

It was quite dreadful to think about it in those terms, and in her heart of hearts, Miriam knew that Andy would realise this. He was an intense and driven young man, but he wasn't unsympathetic to human misery, and she expected that he'd show this when they reached their destination.

She was right.

Andy's first reaction on viewing the house was glum silence. His lip even trembled; his eyes seemed to glaze over, as if with tears. Not that it was difficult to see why. They hadn't been given an exact address to check, but there was no mistaking this grim place. As Barry the ex-policeman had said, it was an end-terrace now in a ghastly state of disrepair, and it was located at the bottom end of a rutted, unmade lane, tucked in under a railway arch, over which a now-derelict mineral line passed. Even in the icy December darkness – largely undiminished thanks to the fact that only one streetlamp remained in working order – the house was visibly lop-sided due to underground subsidence. Slates were missing from its roof, only rotted lathes showing beneath. Rusty sheets of corrugated metal blocked the long-shattered windows, while the front door had been nailed over with planks. The building's red-brick walls were streaked in bird-shit; the front garden – what there was of it – deep with briars and twisted bracken.

There was a moment's silence, then Miriam shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat. "Right, we've seen it. Can we go home now?"

Slowly, Andy shook his head. "Not yet ... we've come this far, we might as well have a proper look."

"What ... you think there's much more to see?"

He held up his camera. "I'd like to take a couple of shots."

She sniffed. "Well I hope you don't expect me to get out of the car."

He glanced round at her and shrugged. "Stay here if you want. I'll only be ten minutes or so."

"Ten minutes!" That wasn't exactly a pleasant thought.

She considered the village of Ockley and what they'd so far seen of it. 'Village' ... a good word. To people down south, 'village' meant chocolate box cottages, gardens full of blooms, thatched roofs, greens where children played. In this part of the world it was somewhat different. The 'village' they'd passed through was hemmed in by barren slag-heaps, its potholed streets desolate and bare of life. Much of the housing was abandoned; litter and glass lay everywhere; there were wrecked cars, narrow alleys filled with rubbish and overturned bins. A central monument, bearing plaques and a bronze statue of a World War One soldier, had been badly vandalised – spray-painted all over, its encircling fence ruthlessly smashed.

Miriam shuddered. She'd grown up in a poor district of Birmingham, but her family had been close and protective. Thanks to them, she hadn't seen much of the outside world; at least, not as a child. Up here, she imagined, after the pit was so unceremoniously closed, the family would have been the first institution discarded: fathers and grandfathers forced to seek work further afield; unmarried men following; for those left behind, unemployment reducing happy households to pits of drunkenness and despair. As the voice on the radio had said, squalor was now widespread in Ockley, crime rife.

Miriam glanced through the window into the surrounding blackness, then hurriedly climbed from the car to join Andy. He looked curiously round at her. "I'm staying with you," she said. "But let's be quick, eh?"

He nodded, then switched his torch on and pushed open the house's front gate. "I want to get inside, if I can."

"Oh ... marvellous."

"It'll be simple," he assured her.

But it didn't seem that way at first.

Despite the fact that much of the vegetation in the front garden was dead, and – thanks to a seasonal freeze – now caked in frost, it was so tangled and overgrown they had to fight their way through it. The footpath that led around the side of the building was made of concrete, but was cracked and greased over with icy moss. It was also strewn with beer-cans, which skidded alarmingly if you stood on them. The couple made their way along it only cautiously, their breaths emerging in plumes of smoke. In the shade of the overarching viaduct, it seemed even colder to Miriam there than it had out on the road. She beat her gloved hands together and fastened the top button of her overcoat. When she commented on this to her husband, however, he only grunted. She knew he didn't feel the cold quite the way she did, and in any case, he was now more interested in trying to effect actual entry, which, unexpectedly, proved to be as easy as he'd forecast.

The back door had already been prised open, the wooden boards wrenched off it. Andy stood back for a moment, staring through the aperture into total shadow. His sudden wariness quickly transferred itself to his wife. She glanced behind them into the back-garden. This too was a dead and frozen jungle, the frost glittering eerily on its myriad twigs and stalks. A spectral mist hung over it.

"Should've known some bastards would beat us to it," said the man, grudgingly.

"I very much doubt they were souvenir-hunters like you," Miriam replied.

"I don't care what they were. They've contaminated the place."

She glanced at him, almost amused. "How ... by bringing Man into the midst of Mystery?"

Andy gave her an irritated look, then shone his torch inside. It showed heaped rubble, most of it broken crockery and fallen masonry. With a sigh of disgust, he stepped over it and went in.

The interior of the house was so decrepit that it was hard to imagine anyone had lived there in its entire history; though after thirty years of steady disintegration, Miriam supposed this was inevitable. In both downstairs rooms – lounge and kitchen – boards had sprung up through fragments of carpet sodden and mildewed to a near liquid state. Most of the floors, however, were already treacherous because they were cluttered with trash – more beer-tins, plastic bags, strewn newspapers, great wads of plaster fallen from the sagging ceilings, and all smothered in rat and probably bat droppings. If this hadn't been the dead of winter, the stench would have been intolerable. The few items of furniture there were no longer recognisable; broken, overturned skeletal things, disembowelled and distorted, hung with rags and tatters of what might once have been upholstery. Even the walls had crumbled, revealing girders and the bones of corroded pipe-work, though at one point there was a smooth patch where shreds of paper still adhered. This directly faced the kitchen window, and Andy was certain he could identify the tiny pock-marks of shotgun pellets.

"I'll tell you," he said, "if I had a penknife and dug through this lot, we'd find fragments of blood-stained lead. This'll be where the poor guy was murdered."

"You don't know that," Miriam replied.

"I can take a fairly good guess. Look around ... what do you think?"

The girl could only shiver. "I think it's horrible. Andy ... how long are we going to be?"

But Andy wasn't listening. "They've even left the bullet-holes in the wall," he said with contempt. "I bet they really busted a gut investigating this killing."

"Andy," she said, more firmly. "I'd like to go home now."

He finally looked round at her. "Okay. I'll just get a shot of this."

She watched in silence as he photographed the gun damage ... assuming that was what it was. Even then, though, he wasn't entirely satisfied. "Look Mir," he added, "I could do with having a quick glance upstairs as well."

"You are joking?"

"No ... I mean, while we're actually here."

"Andy ... this place is falling apart. You're likely to drop straight through. You'll be killed."

"I won't," he replied in his best encouraging tone. "Look ... it'll not take a minute."

She shook her head, bewildered, as he sloped out from the kitchen to the foot of the steep and rickety stairway. They'd already peered up it once, and had found themselves gazing through black rafters to the stars themselves. "Just be careful," she said quietly.

"I will," he replied. Then she heard him clumping slowly up.

As he'd taken the torch with him, Miriam was now plunged into complete darkness. She shuddered and pulled her coat tighter. The vague outlines of the room seemed to meld and slither around her; despite the numbing cold, a sickly odour of decay was growing. She wondered if closing her eyes would make it all go away. It wouldn't, of course, but she tried anyway. "You'll encounter many bad situations in your life," her mother had once told her. "The only way to deal with them is to meet them face-to-face. Hiding will not help you." Wise words perhaps, but had her mother ever envisaged a situation like this ... stuck in the middle of the night in a wolfman's house? Not that it was really so bad, Miriam supposed. It was dirty, ugly ... but it wasn't evil. The wolfman was no longer here, and even if he was, he'd been a sad figure rather than a frightening one. As happened so often, the monster was most dangerous when he was imaginary rather than real.

And that was when she heard movement somewhere in the room ... rustling, furtive movement.

Miriam's eyes snapped open, but for several seconds the blackness was all-engulfing. Still the movement continued, but she couldn't tell where. Spears of ice now went through her, transfixing her to the floor. She knew instinctively that it wasn't Andy ... Andy would be talking, blundering about freely...

"Who ... who are you?" she tried to whisper, but she couldn't manage even that, let alone call out for help. Her mouth was suddenly dry as wood. She could hear her own heart beating.

Still the movement persisted, and now Miriam fancied she could see something ... a tall, tattered shape framed on the faint oblong of moonlight that was the back door. More to the point, that shape was approaching her ... ever so slowly, its feet shuffling through the debris.

"Wh ... who are ..." she tried to say again, and the shape tensed. It knew she'd spotted it!

Miriam wanted to scream, to flee for her life, but there was no hope. Her bulging eyes were now better attuned to the darkness, and she realised she could see more of the intruder ... that he was man-like but thin, that his clothes were old and shabby and hung on him like a loose skin. She also realised she could smell him – the odour was stale and repulsive, like sweat, vomit, faeces...

And then she was almost blinded, for the intruder struck a match.

Miriam stumbled backwards with a muffled yelp, clapping a hand to her eyes.

"Woa, sweetie ... woa!" came a low but guttural voice. "Jesus ... you really are a sweetie."

Through her fingers, Miriam saw a terrifying apparition encroach – once a man maybe, but now reduced to something considerably less. Lean he might have been, even emaciated, but he moved with a predator's gliding grace. The hands he reached towards her were wizened and bony, but heavily knotted and covered with tattoos, their fingernails chewed and crusted in filth. His face was grizzled beyond its years, but monstrously feral, his teeth yellow and broken into jagged blades. The eyes under his lank mat of hair were beady but burning.

"Keep away," she stammered, staggering back further.

"Lost, are you?" he wondered, grinning all the more.

"Look ... I know I'm not supposed to be here ... "

"Who gives a shit about that?" he replied, and though Miriam darted for the nearest door, he jumped quickly into her path. "Woa ... where you running to, hey?" His grin had become rictal, insane. "Nowhere to escape to from here. Believe me, I've tried." He advanced again, and she retreated until she was up against the wall. He was now almost within touching distance, but to Miriam's dismay, before he did anything else, he dipped a hand into the pocket of his mouldy old Parka and drew out a long, dirty syringe. "There is this, of course," he added.

Now she knew who'd visited this place before them, who probably visited it on a nightly basis, scattering beer-tins and even worse items. She imagined discarded needles littered around her trainer-clad feet. The horror of that was almost choking, but no more so than the horror of the needle he was now waving in front of her eyes ... right in front of them.

"Happy to share if you like," he said. "For a fee."

"Oh ... God," she stuttered. "Please ... please go away."

"You're very pretty, I have to say," he mumbled, running a knuckle down her cheek. His breathing became hoarse. "Very, verrrry pretty ..." And then his voice changed ... cracked almost, as if with shock. "Hey ... hey, what the fuck is this?"

"Please ..." Miriam repeated.

The man yanked his hand back and took a step away. He was now glaring at her with undisguised disgust. "What are you then, a fucking freak?" he demanded. "You come from a fucking circus or ..."

But the words died on his lips when he suddenly spotted Andy in the hall doorway, watching in cold silence. The syringe fell harmlessly from the man's hand. He moved unsteadily backwards, and almost tripped. The strength was flowing out of him, as the terror flowed in.

"Oh Jesus!" he squawked. "Oh my God ..."

He turned to run, but Andy was much quicker and in two strides had crossed the room, grabbing the man by his coat and flinging him against the wall with such force that his head split open, spraying blood over the rusty pipes.

"Andy!" Miriam screamed, but her husband was too enraged to listen.

The man gibbered and squealed, and clawed helplessly as Andy dragged him back to his feet and hurled him across the room again, this time into the remains of the sink, where shards of broken metal sliced flesh and bone alike. Shrieks of agony rent the air, but Andy moved speedily in to silence them. A single mighty blow from the torch shattered both the bulb and the wounded man's jaw. The screams became gargled, semi-conscious moans. The second blow, however – delivered with yet greater force, and a wet, sickening crunch – halted even those. For a moment there was hardly a sound ... just a slow, steady dripping, then a dull clatter as some weighty object slid to the floor.

Andy turned to look at Miriam, now clearly visible in the moonlight, gazing at him with shock but also relief that he hadn't been hurt himself. "Is ... is he dead?" she finally breathed.

There was no need to check ... the heavy-duty torch was now a mass of wires and scrap-metal in Andy's hand. "Almost certainly," he said.

"Oh ... oh my God! What are we going to do?"

"Well I'm not going to shed any tears over him, if that's what you mean." Andy sauntered casually to the back door. "Doubt anyone else will either."

"But Andy ... you've killed him!"

He shrugged. "Appropriate, considering where we are ... don't you think?"

Miriam couldn't believe what she was hearing. "He was just an addict ..."

"Yeah," Andy replied in a voice suddenly thick with anger. "Happy to profane not just himself with his filthy habit, but this shrine as well."

"Shrine?"

"Well it ought to be," he said, kicking his way outside. "A shrine to the destructive power of bigotry and intolerance!"

"Oh Andy," was all she could say as she helplessly followed him. She'd heard all this before ... she knew it gnawed at him, tortured him. But she'd never imagined he would some day respond like this.

"Anyway!" he added, walking around the house to the car. "The bastard deserved it! He called you a freak, for Christ's sake!"

"To him, I am," she said, gently touching her cheek, where a soft down of dusky gold was now bristling in a twelve o'clock shadow.

"Not to me." Andy unlocked the car. "At least, you wouldn't be ... if you stopped this shaving lark."

"How can I go to work if I don't shave?" she asked.

He shook his head. As always, he had no answer to this question. It was easy for him to retain his natural form; home-based and working as a freelance writer via the Net, he rarely came into contact with people who didn't already know him. The thick pelt of glossy black fur which now covered him head to toe, had thus reached a stage of fullness and magnificence almost unmatched even in the secretive world of hypertrichosis.

"The sooner we accept what we are, Miriam, the happier we'll be," was all he could say. He glanced back once at the wolfman's house. "And the prouder."