Horror Tales by Harry Glum Page B

lycanthrope?
    -  A werewolf.
    Liz hugged her friend; but she did it with naturalness, as if she had been taking into account that possibility as plausible long before her old professor uttered his diagnosis.
    -  Easy, Sharon. He knows how to help you.
    -  I don´t understand anything! This is absolute nonsense!
    -  It definitely is, Ma´am. This nonsense is like any other. A complete madness: just as the one that your son changes every full moon. Do you comprehend?
    Sharon fell heavily in a near sofa and tried to recover her breath. Maybe the whole situation was just a huge and terrible nightmare.
    -  And how can you help me?
    -  You´re not going to like this... - the professor answered with utmost caution-. The lycanthropy cannot be passed on as any normal disease. It is passed down from parents to children.
    -  But that´s impossible, my husband´s completely normal! – Sharon exclaimed, bugged.
    -  I know I know... In very exceptional occasions, someone is a carrier of the gene, but does not develop it... However, his descendants...
    Sharon pressed herself close to her friend Liz´s body, who showed calm, although she also showed a deep concern.
    -  And what can we do for Pete?

    Tom walked around the table in his office, considering how he should handle that situation. He was an expert in ancestral, singular beings, beings which most of the people who populated the earth thought didn´t exist. But the old professor well knew they did exist, and he had helped to exterminate them in countless occasions.
The only salvation for your child is that you finish with the life of your husband. You will have to stick a silver knife in his heart during a full moon night – the man made a pause and took a volume out of his huge library, and he showed a marked page to Sharon-. Even though he isn´t transformed in a werewolf yet, you will be able to behold in the light of that full moon the mark of the lycanthrope: the fang of a wolf.
    After that reunion, even more encounters followed. Sharon was trying to save some time: there had to be another way out. But Tom had warned her very seriously: if the little child reached his first year old, there would be no other solution than killing him. She would have to choose between either her son´s damnation... or her husband´s murder! Only Liz could calm her down in those tragic days of unease. The worst of the nightmares, of all the dementia imaginable, had settled up in her life of fantasy.
    When her husband finally arrived from his long journey, she did not comment anything, although she looked strange, withdrawn and especially quiet. And so the days passed by, waiting for that full moon which had turned into the worst of the tortures for Sharon. Maybe little Pete wouldn´t show any kind of symptom this time...
    The very morning of the day when the first full moon would appear, with her husband at home, she received Liz as a guest.
I have brought you this, because you may need it tonight.

    Her friend handed in a beautiful and sharp silver knife, with mysterious filigree in its handle. Sharon, horrified, accepted that weapon of strange beauty, with which she would, supposedly in a few more hours, put an end to Peter´s life, the man of her life.
    The night came. She offered her husband a succulent dinner and, following the old professor´s advice, she dissolved some crumbled diazepam pills in the wine. Everything that was happening was atrocious, but she continued with the plan originally drawn up, as if there was no other choice.
    She waited until her husband fell completely asleep and went to the crib, next to her child. No sooner had the moon appeared than the transformation began... But this time it was more dreadful than ever: the body was completely covered in a coat of dark thick fur, the nails turned into powerful claws, some sharp fangs protruding from among his lips and underneath his eyelids, instead of the blue iris,