"You foam up at the mouth and try to bite everyone! I read it in a book. And you can't drink water, and--"
"Susan, not at the table." Phaedra spooned a helping of carrots onto her daughter's plate; one missed and rolled onto the tablecloth. She muttered something under her breath and went to pick it up, but Susan had already caught it with her napkin.
"That doesn't happen to people anyway," Lucretia said around a mouthful of roast. "Just dogs and foxes and things." At eleven, Lucy knew everything there was to know, and she delighted in every opportunity to remind her younger siblings of this. Susan had the decency to look deeply disappointed.
"It doesn't?"
John eyed his family from the head of the table and cleared his throat. His insistance on order in his house wasn't excessive; breakfast was to be on the table every morning at seven and dinner every evening at six-thirty, and no one was to be too morbid while he attempted to make his way through whatever his wife decided to present him with. "Why are we talking about rabies again?"
Phaedra set the bowl of carrots down and found her seat. "Remus had his last shot today."
"Oh, that's good!" Remus, the youngest of the three, looked up briefly, then back down at his dinner. He was nearly finished already. "How did that go, then?"
"It hurt." The boy seemed to be talking through his teeth.
"Well, good. That's how you know a shot's working." John took a bite of the roast and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment. She put some sort of weird spice in it, he could taste it. "So it's, what, three weeks?"
"Four. The treatment was five shots over twenty-eight days." Pheadra prodded at her own plate. "This one didn't seem to be so bad. He didn't want to eat after the others. Remus, would you like some more?"
Remus nodded, and Pheadra stood to serve him again. "Well, if they ever catch that thing, we'll find out if he actually needed to go through all that, won't we?" John chuckled. "Not a good chance of that around here, unfortunately."
"You have to cut up a dog's brain to see it has rabies," Susan chimed in. "And its spine--"
"Auugh!" Lucy made a horrible face. "Shut up!"
John reached for another roll and buttered it curtly. "Daresay it deserves it. Gave us all a bad fright. But I'd really rather not hear about it while I'm eating, Susie."
"Sorry."
A sudden clatter rang out from the childen's side of the table. Remus looked up sharply at the starled faces of his family and muttered an apology; he picked up his fork from where it had fallen against his plate.
"The vaccine numbed his arm a little," Phaedra said quickly.
"Hrm," John said. He tried a carrot; he did not find it particularly to his liking. "They really ought come up with something more effecient than this five shot spread. They don't treat anything else like that, do they? They're robbing desperate people--"
Remus dropped the fork again. This time it fell to the floor.
He was clutching at his chest with one hand and staring at the table blankly. His eyes looked bloodshot. Now that he really had everyone's attention, he convulsed, his shoulders hunching forward sharply.
John frowned. "Remus? Are you sick?"
Remus made a noise like he was trying to answer, but it came out as a stunted yelp.
"He's having a fit!" Lucy cried.
Phaedra stared at her son from across the table as though mesmerized, but she snapped out of it when Remus spasmed again and fell out of his chair with a choked scream. "Remus! John!"
John was already on his feet. Remus was wailing now; the girls both watched him with horrified expressions, forks forgotten halfway to their mouths. As John rounded the table, Susan abruptly leapt to her feet and shoved her chair back nearly into her sister, staring down at her brother with terror.
By the time John got around the chairs, it was over. Remus's cries had faded to pained breathing, but when John reached him--
He was gone.
John stared dumbfounded at the sprawl of Remus's clothing, twisted and bunched up into an unlikely pose on the rug. He picked up the chair at which the boy had been seated and moved it away so he could kneel beside the abandoned garments.
He glanced back over his shoulder; Phaedra stood just behind him, a hand over her mouth. She didn't seem to have anything useful to offer, so he looked back down at where his son should have been.
The sweater twitched. Both girls shrieked again, but only briefly, and all four of them leaned over the pile of umber wool. It moved again, then bulged on one side.
"To hell with this," John muttered. He grasped the sweater by the sleeve.
"John, no--"
One hard shake dumped the occupant of the sweater on to the floor, where it tumbled over its back and nearly tripped over its own feet.
It was a dog.
Rather, it was a puppy. Grey and densely furred, it looked as baffled with the sudden fact of its existance as anyone else in the room. It sniffed at the sweater and then the rug, then turned in place warily, watching the people surrounding it. John had just enough time to notice its blue eyes.
And then he was too busy noticing the lips drawing back from the teeth and the whining growl beginning to emerge from its chest. It was difficult to be afraid of something so small, but given the circumstances, smacking the dog with the sweater was the best idea he could come up with.
The little dog grabbed the sweater in its teeth as though they were playing tug-of-war and jerked its head back. The knit yarn stretched and snapped, and the puppy jumped back with its chunk of unraveling cloth.
"Get away from him!" Phaedra grabbed John by the wrist and pulled him nearly off balance. "Don't touch him!"
The growling turned to barking once the puppy had gotten rid of its mouthful of wool, but there was something very wrong with the sound of it. It sounded half-crazed. It whirled and snapped at John again, and this time John grabbed a chair and fended it off the way a lion tamer provokes a beast. The little thing bit furiously -- desperately -- at the legs, snarling all the while.
Lucretia and Susan both stood frozen by the wall. As John watched, Lucy slowly reached over, grasped her little sister's hand, and began to quietly make her way to the door. The insane puppy noticed, too; it barked loudly and made a clumsy lunge towards them. John grabbed the opening. Tossing the chair aside, he came down on the dog like a raptor and seized it by the scruff.
Phaedra became positively hysterical, screaming at him to put it down and get away from it, but he'd had just about enough of this. The mad puppy put up a terrific struggle as he lifted it off its feet, but the cellar door out in the hall was only a few good strides from the dining room. He flung it down the stairs, and the snarling became startled yelps.
John shut the door forcefully and locked it, and for a moment, all was silent.
Then the howling began.
---
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?" The allegation was ridiculous, but he couldn't help but make it; there was no one else to blame.
"I didn't do anything--"
"Why have you turned my son into a dog?" Anger made it easier somehow. John made a conscious effort to draw up more of it. "Sorry, were they all too normal for you? This family is too boring for someone of your spectacular calibur?"
"I didn't do it!"
"Was it rabies?"
John and Phaedra stopped and looked down at Susan, and Lucretia frozen behind her, her hands on her sister's shoulders. "What does rabies do to people?" Susan asked, her little voice terrified. "Nobody ever said."
Pheadra cleared her throat. "Lucy, Susan, go to bed."
"But Remus--"
"Go to bed." She drew her sleeve across her eyes. "Mummy and Daddy... need to talk. Remus will be all right."
It was her Serious Voice, and both girls shrank back obediantly and slunk towards the stairs. All the while, the horrible noises from the cellar continued in sharp clusters of barks and howls.
Once he'd heard at least one door close upstairs, John turned back to his wife.
She took a deep breath and reached up to brush the wisps of hair away from her face. He suddenly hated her. Loathed her, and every glittering, magical thing she had brought into his life. Strangely, this realization calmed him greatly and allowed him to gentle his tone. "Listen, if you... tried to help, and made some sort of mistake..."
"I didn't." Her lovely face was streaked with tears, but she met his eyes with eerie steadiness. "You told me not to, so I didn't." The corner of her mouth twitched. "After I'd stopped the bleeding, anyway."
"And the doctors were suspicious enough about that! They thought I'd waited a week before bringing him to the hospital!" She winced; he'd spared her that detail before, but now he wanted to shove every breach of normalcy into her face and demand her shame. "Don't think I've forgotten that whole affair with the peppers, Phaedra, if you did something after he got hurt that somehow turned him into a dog, you--"
"Stop calling him a dog!" She said it as though she wanted to scream it, but she was already crying again. "That isn't a dog! Are you blind?"
"Well, pardon me, what would you call it?"
She pressed her palms over her eyes for a long moment before she spoke again. "A wolf. That was a wolf, John."
The silence between them then was almost impossible to think in with the racket going on below them.
"There's no such thing." Even as he spoke, he had no idea why he was even bothering to say it. "Phaedra, there's no such thing as werewolves."
The expression on her face said that he may as well have professed a lack of faith in the moon.
"Of course there is," she said slowly.
The howling from the cellar continued.
