"I got the call two days ago. The number came up "unknown". Normally I'd let it go to voicemail, this time I answered.



"I'm not sure if that was good or bad.



"The caller said he had a story for me. He said it was going to make my career."



Well my "career" if you can call it that, stalled about a year back. I have been living day to day. I got a couple of pieces published freelance in the "local" paper. You know the one that's free, with "massage" parlor ads in the back. Yeah that's a career.

It happened again tonight. I could not avoid it. The hunger was stronger this time. I felt it slowly overwhelming me, the moon as silent witness.

At first, I tried to sleep in vain. I felt the hunger waking inside me. A warm sensation taking over my body. My thoughts ceased to be my own and my anxiety became unbearable. It seemed as if nothing would be able to satisfy me.

I went hunting under the mantle of darkness, not even the cold of night able to placate my impulses. I knew it would be a difficult task to find my prey in such low temperatures, but I continued relentlessly.

The boy sat at the edge of the forest. Across the meadow, he saw it: a fluffy white speck appearing just over the hills.

“Sheep!” cried the boy. “Sheep! Sheep!”

The forest behind him came alive with a chorus of barks and snarls. A dozen werewolves poured out; some already in wolf form, others somewhere between wolf and human. The boy was changing too, but he was running in the other direction.

The boy scrambled into the bushes. His paws became hands again (they were much better for covering his face). He heard the bloodthirsty howls as the pack descended on the sheep. He heard the sheep’s cries. The boy didn’t look. That sheep was too terrifying.

Ratchert stared into the pond, looking at his reflection. Ugly….Ugly….Ugly was all he could see. From the time he became immortal, he was cursed with a face as ugly as his monstrous soul.
In his past life, Silas Ratchert was a bounty hunter. Man, woman, child or animal mattered not to him. He was a killer for hire, until the day a beast turned upon him, slaughtered his dogs, ripped off the left side of his face and pursued him for three hours before biting him and leaving him for dead.
Silas survived to become a werewolf. But his hideous scars remained, leaving him a monster - even when in human form. For a sociopath, immortality should have been a blessing, but Ratchert’s ugliness made it a curse. He wandered the world, a lonely outcast and a monster …. until today.
Ratchert found the village of his dreams, hidden in a valley deep in a mountain pass, protected from plague and war by little more than its isolation. It could be unnoticeably ravaged, and Ratchert intended to make it his own. He would kill the adults and spare the young children – especially the young girls. These he would save so that he could one day be their king.

We stopped at the edge of the low cliff beside the bay. I took her hand and we found a seat among the weather beaten rocks. The full moon illuminated the rough water as far as we could see.



"It's beautiful," Leia whispered.



"Aye, and all the more so under the moonlight," I replied.



The walk from the festival had been longer than I had anticipated, but now that we were here it seemed worth the effort. I had met Leia only hours before at the juggler's tent, but her long red hair and enormous blue eyes had consumed my every thought. Her movements in the low cut dress left me breathless.

So this was once the lair of the infamous Beasts of Beckford. A dumpy and even normal-looking kind of place for a werewolf legend to be born, in April's opinion. Up until this very moment, she'd pictured the small house as being much more decrepit and creepy.

According to the story told by her Freshman Orientation Leader at nearby Wickaboag State College last summer, a husband and wife had decided to breed werewolves here about thirty years ago. But the experiment in animal husbandry ended in disaster. The couple had supposedly left behind a journal, and the town of Beckford, Massachusetts, had been lucky to have survived the escaped monsters. Also, a persistent rumor claimed that some of the Beasts still lurked in the surrounding area

The beam from my flashlight jumped from tree to tree as I sprinted through the forest, trying desperately to get back to the trail. Except where my light hit the trees there was only blackness, and tears swelling in my eyes obscured what little I could see.

The woods around me shifted with the almost imperceptible sound of running, betrayed only by the autumn leaves. I shot my head around in an attempt to get a look at the creatures chasing me, but it was in vain; everything around me was a dark void on this moonless night. Terrible, imagined visions of beasts and blood danced through my mind and I lost focus of the path ahead. The root of a tree, a phantom in the shadowy night, grasped my foot and I tumbled down to the hard, black earth. As I fell, I grasped onto the flashlight in my hands with what little strength was left in me. It was all that separated me from the shadows in this sinister wood.

Wyatt Pruitt couldn't imagine why Sheriff Belote and his deputy were sloshing around in a Wachapreague marsh and he hoped they wouldn't notice him. He crouched down low in his boat but they saw him just the same.
"Wyatt Pruitt!" the sheriff growled. "What are you doing out here this late of a evening?"
"I'm checking my minnow pots."
"We're hunting a werewolf!" Freddy Potts, the deputy, said.
"Shut up, Freddy!" Sheriff Belote said. "Don't be talking stupid."
"But you said-"

Night fell over Linden , California like a carelessly tossed blanket. The moon rose, full and unblinking, from behind the leafless branches of winter oaks on the black spine of the eastern ridge. Because the moon had also been full the night before, or at least full enough, Sheriff Jack Harmon was now a believer. He was holed up in the gun store with a few dozen of the town's survivors.


From his window at the store front, Jack could see what was left of his deputy, Carl, in the street. The moonlight revealed a black puddle and some limbs. Carl's face gaped at the starry night sky, no longer connected to his torso, which had probably been dragged off.


In a few moments the howlings began, as they had the night before. There was some barking, but mostly there was a kind of night crooning that intimidated the prey as it was meant to.


"Larry," said Jack, "Tom, get up here by the window with me."


"Right, Sheriff," said Larry. "C'mon, Tom."

Wyatt Pruitt couldn't imagine why Sheriff Belote and his
deputy were sloshing around in a Wachapreague marsh and he
hoped they wouldn't notice him. He crouched down low in
his boat but they saw him just the same.
"Wyatt Pruitt!" the sheriff growled. "What are you
doing out here this late of a evening?"
"I'm checking my minnow pots."
"We're hunting a werewolf!" Freddy Potts, the deputy,
said.
"Shut up, Freddy!" Sheriff Belote said. "Don't be
talking stupid."
"But you said-"

It was a dream. She was aware of the dream and completely unable to alter its narrative no matter how she tried. A mother and her three little girls were dancing and singing and skipping through warm summer woods. They gathered wild flowers for a garland to decorate the shrine to the Virgin Mary buried deep in the woods. They were having such fun together that they lost track of time and on the journey homeward the woods grew dark with night’s silent approach. As they skipped and giggled down the hill, nearly home, she noticed the forest had gone silent. The girls had stopped chattering and ran back to her as if they had become aware of something coming, a storm? The something - great and savage and dark exploded from the darkness. The dream always ended in the same way with her awake, shrieking, covered in sweat, then sobbing until dawn. She had grown used to not sleeping.

"Extraordinary," the doctor says as he studies the young couple across from him: a bright-eyed man and a wild-haired woman. In her lap, the woman cuddles a slobbering infant.

"Is there a cure?" the young man asks. "There must be a treatment."

The doctor scans his notes before replying, "To be honest, I was under the impression that a person could not develop clinical lycanthropy until her reason centers matured. In other words, infants cannot have clinical lycanthropy."

"It's not clinical lycanthropy," the woman insists. "Every full moon, our daughter turns into a wolf puppy; teeth and fur and all."

"She's got to be the cutest little werewolf ever," the man adds, "but she's starting to cut her first teeth and, well, this could get dangerous if we don't do something right now."

The soldiers had tracked down their assassins all night long. The climate was really cool out there, the snow-capped alpine peaks of Rila range surrounded them and they began being affected by weariness. But the target was so near…

Their headquarter had had news of such bloody crimes in Kyustendil Oblast (region) three days ago, so a specialist team had been put immediately at work to find the ones responsibles of the killing. In Sapareva Banya,southwestern Bulgaria, the members of two entire families had been assassinated, except one: the younger lady that had disappeared, probably kidnapped for some unknown reason.

This contest is about werewolves. In any context, at any time, good or bad.
Remember they travel in packs and howl at the moon. Not unlike your neighbors.
Or perhaps they are your neighbors!

Contest closes August 15th 2010
1000 words or less

As always, have fun with this idea!