For some reason, this act drained him of his last drop of energy, and the sun had barely even gone down. He sat back down on the couch, switched to the SciFi Channel, and closed his eyes for just a few seconds.
A ringing sound woke Weston up. He was naked on the kitchen floor, the sun streaming in through the windows. Weston automatically smacked his lips, checking to see if he could taste anything odd. Then he got to his knees and reached for the phone on the counter.
“Mr. Smith? This is Dr. Waggoner’s office calling. Please hold for the doctor.”
Weston scratched his chest, listening to Neil Diamond singing to a chair who apparently didn’t hear him.
“Weston? This is Dr. Waggoner. How did you sleep last night?”
“Not well,” he said, noting his nude body.
“Remember to keep your appointment with the psychiatrist today. And also, it wouldn’t hurt to see a dentist as well. We got the lab report from your stool sample. It contained three molars.”
“Teeth?”
“Yes. Your teeth. There was also a shoelace, and a silver cross on a necklace. The lab is sending the cross over to my office later, in case you’d like to pick it up. It will be cleaned first, of course.”
“Doctor, I . . .”
Dr. Waggoner hung up before Weston could finish, “ . . . don’t own a silver cross.”
He got to his feet and padded over to the bathroom, opening wide for the mirror. Weston wasn’t missing any molars. Each of his teeth was in its proper place.
What the hell is going on?
His abdomen grumbled. Weston sat on the toilet and rubbed his temples, trying to make sense of any of this. How could he have swallowed teeth, or a silver cross? Why did he keep waking up naked? What was going on?
He didn’t want to look, but before he flushed he forced himself. And gasped.
At the bottom of the toilet bowl were two distinct, unmistakable objects: a gold hoop earring, and a silver tag that said ROMI.
When he stopped running around in a blind panic (which took the good part of twenty minutes), Weston forced himself to the computer and Googled “eating+disorder+neighbor.” This led him to sites about anorexia, which certainly wasn’t his problem. Next he tried “cannibal” and got hits for bad Italian horror movies and death metal rock bands. “Sleep+eating+people” produced articles about sleeping pills, and “I ate human beings” led to a YouTube video of some drunk Klan member who kept saying “I hate human beings” and apparently posted the video so wasted he misspelled the title of his own rant.
Various other word combinations produced pages about Hannibal Lector, Alfred Packer, Sawney Bean, and ultimately Hansel and Gretel.
While on the site about fairy tales, Weston clicked from the old witch who wanted to eat children to the big bad wolf who wanted to eat children. This took him to a site about the history of lycanthropy, which featured several old paintings of wolf people running off with screaming babies in their mouths. Soon Weston was looking up “clinical lycanthropy,” which was a real psychiatric term that pretty much meant “batshit crazy.”
Could I really be crazy? he thought. Do I subconsciously think I’m a werewolf?
A quick click on a lunar calendar confirmed Weston’s fears: The only time he’d had blackouts and found weird things in his poop was during the full moon.
Weston sat back, slack-jawed. He wondered if he should call someone. His parents? A doctor? The cops?
He searched his soul for remorse for eating his mean neighbor and her nasty dog, but couldn’t find any.
But he must have killed other, nicer people. Right?
Weston slipped on some shorts and attacked the Internet again, looking through back issues of the local newspaper for accounts of murders or disappearances. He found five.
The first was from yesterday. A hand and partial skeleton found near the River Walk, a popular woodsy trail in Naperville. The prints on the hand belonged to Leon Corledo. His death was attributed to the Naperville Ripper.
How could I have missed hearing about that? Weston wondered. Too much work, probably. And the fact that the news depressed him, so he avoided it. Not to mention the fact that every time he turned on his TV, his recently digested neighbor banged.
Weston read on, found that Mr. Corledo was a registered sex offender. No big loss there. Weston followed the links to articles about the Ripper’s other known victims. They included:
Waldemar Daminsky, 66, a local businessman with known ties to Polish organized crime.
Tony Rivers, 17, who was decapitated after robbing a liquor store and beating the owner unconscious.
Ginger Fitzgerald, who had recently lost custody of her daughter for locking her in a closet for a week without food or water.
And Marty Coslaw, a lawyer.
Weston felt zero guilt, and breathed a bit easier. But how many criminals and lawyers did Naperville have? Eventually, he’d run out of scumbags to eat. Then what?
He tried the search term “help for real lycanthropy” and, incredibly, got a hit. A single hit, for a website called Shapeshifters Anonymous.
Weston went to the site, and found it to be a home for werewolf jokes. After suffering through a spate of awful puns (Where do werewolves go on vacation? A Howliday Inn!), he had about given up when he noticed a tiny hotlink at the bottom of the page that read, “Real therianthropes click here.”
He knew from his lycanthropy reading that therianthropes were humans who morphed into animals. He clicked.
The page took him to another site, which had a black background and only five large cryptic words on it.
THERIANTHROPES MUST VIEW THE SOURCE
Weston stared, wondering what it meant. Which source? The source of their affliction? The source of their food?
On a whim, he Googled “view the source” and came up with a bunch of websites about HTML programming. Then he got it.
View the webpage source.
He went back to the werewolf page, opened his Internet Explorer toolbar, and under the PAGE menu clicked VIEW SOURCE. The HTML and Javascript appeared in a new window. Weston read through the computer language gobbledygook until he came to this:
&ei=xY0_R6—CZXcigGGoPmBCA”+g}return true};window.gbar ={};(function(){;var g=window.gbar,a,f,h;functionm(b,e,d){b.display=b. display==“block”?”none”:”block”;b.left=e+”px”;b.top=d+”px”}g.tg= function(b){real therianthropes call 1-800-209-7219}
Weston grabbed his phone and dialed with trembling hands.
“Therianthrope hotline, Zela speaking, may I help you?”
“I . . . uh . . . is this for real?”
“Are you a therianthrope, sir?”
“I think so. Is this really a werewolf hotline?”
“Is that what you turn into, sir? A wolf?”
“I have no idea. I black out beforehand, can’t remember anything.”
“Why do you think you’re a therianthrope, sir?”
“I’m finding, um, things, in my, uh, toilet.”
“Things like bone fragments, jewelry, eyeglasses, bits of clothing, coins, watches, and keys?”
“How did you know?”
“I’m a therianthrope myself, sir. Can I ask where you currently reside?”
“Naperville. Illinois.”
“So I’m assuming you just realized you’re the Naperville Ripper we’ve been hearing about?”
“They were all bad people,” Weston said quickly. “I’m not sure about the lawyer, but I can make assumptions.”
“We’ve been following the news. He was a defense attorney, defended child molesters. When given a choice, therianthropes usually prefer the wicked over the good. The creatures inside us find evil tastier.”