Harvey was always drunk it seemed, but this time he was not even lucid enough to understand that the slick mess he stepped in on the porch could only mean trouble.
When he had left earlier this morning Harvey’s wife Nel had been playing the new video game she received in the mail last week. Now, twelve hours later, he figured he would find her in the same location, at her table at the top of the stairs, still playing. The only difference might be that at this hour she would have a scotch near her hand instead of a Bloody Mary. He didn’t understand video games, and had long since decided that he never would, so he had quit trying.
The notion that something wasn’t right hit Harvey when he opened the door to silence and looked up the staircase at Nell’s table to see blurry, frozen images of a computer screen staring back at him. Silence plus no Nel and no game on the computer, even in his less than sober state, registered as something to be wary of.
He forced his eyes to focus and was able to cut the double vision down to a single image, but couldn’t get rid of the blur. What he saw made him immediately lose control of his bladder. He could feel the warm piss running down his leg as his knees gave way and he fell to the floor on his ass with a thud. It was by far the largest wolf he had ever seen. It had rough black fur that looked wet and matted around its huge mussel, but the teeth shown white and were almost luminous. The wolf looked up at him from what appeared to be a bundle of bloody clothes and a nasty grin seemed to spread to it’s thin, black lips. It was then Harvey heard the low growl coming from deep within the beast’s chest. It seemed to build along with a second sound. A high pitched, blood curdling scream that emanated from his own mouth.
As Harvey’s gin pickled heart gave out, the last remaining brain cells, shocked back into a short lived but highly aware sobriety, registered the pressure of the wolf’s teeth as they sank into his carotid artery. They also recorded his last memory. A heavy silver chain, almost hidden, in the thick fur around the predator’s neck.
