The Wereowl

God, what had happened to her brother Tom, she thought; his eyes were enormous, round and glaring.

 

“You’ve got to go, Jennifer”, he told her, sitting hunched up on the couch, “You’ve got to get out of the house now. I was scratched by something on the way home from the party yesterday and it did something to me”.

 

“Something”, asked Jennifer becoming frightened for her brother, “What do you mean? What scratched you?”.

 

“When I was crossing the common, coming back from Chris’s 18^th birthday party, last night”, he said, “I heard this noise from behind me like a kind of whooshing sound; like beating wings but it was really loud, not like a birds then, when I looked up, I saw this thing in the sky following me like a man with wings”.

 

“What?”, asked Jennifer, totally stunned but not sure whether her brother was playing some sort of trick on her to wind her up. Maybe he was wearing some kind of make up; maybe those weren’t his real eyes and pretty soon one of his mates would pop up from somewhere laughing.

 

“But it wasn’t a man”, he went on, deadly serious and even sobbing, something shed never seen him do before, not even when mum and dad had died, “It had eyes like headlights, like yellow headlights and feet, or maybe they were hands, like birds; like a birds feet with claws. I know it sounds ridiculous; that’s why I didn’t tell you earlier. I thought I must have imagined the whole thing; I tried to forget about it but now somethings happening to me”.

 

She looked down at his hands and she almost had a heart attack.

 

Her brothers hands and his fingers had changed; they were like…like talons; hooked round like birds talons.

 

She got up from the couch, instinctively, and backed away from him but then she looked at his back.

 

“Oh my god, Tom”, she said, covering her mouth with her hands in shock and shaking.

 

It was true what he was saying; there was something; two things; bulging out from under the back of his pullover, stuffed under there like..like wings.

 

“What…what are you turning into”, she asked, shaking her head, horrified but frozen and numb like when she had a nightmare.

 

“I think…hoo”, he said, “I think it’s an owl…hoo”.

 

She shook her head again, more slowly this time.

 

“Well what should I do? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”, she said, desperately wanting to help her brother.

 

“No just”, he said, getting angry, “Just go. Just run away and don’t come back”.

 

He shoved her away with a hand that had already become a full blown claw.

 

“Don’t you, hoo. Don’t you fucking understand?”, he said, “I’m becoming a, hoo, I’m becoming a monster. If you stay, I might, I might kill you. Go now, please, quick before I change completely”.

 

Jennifer could feel her common sense starting to kick in as she looked at his face and saw that his nose had started to shrink away to nothing while his upper and lower lips were becoming curved and hard like an owls jaws.

 

Then, suddenly, she was not thinking anymore, she was running instinctively towards the living room door, grabbing the handle, twisting it, struggling, throwing the door open; stopping in the hall to grab down her jacket from the coat rack and knocking it down on the floor.

 

Screw putting it on, she thought, she’d do that when she was outside.

 

Then she was struggling with the latch and the front door knob with her jacket in one hand; money falling out of her jacket pockets and she could hear her brother like something not human, screeching from the living room.

 

“Oh god”, she said, starting to panic and cry, heaving the front door open  and diving through it; running down the front steps into the cold evening air, hearing a neighbour’s dog starting to bark as she ran up her front path towards the gate, “Oh god”.

 

Then she was out of the gate, she heard it clattering, and running down the pavement; her heart pounding in her chest, her breathing heavy; the sound of her clogs clacking on the pavement as she ran, the only other sound she could hear.

 

Then, suddenly, there was another sharp screech from the direction of the house and then a sound like glass smashing like something bursting through her living room window but she didn’t dare turn round to look, she just kept running past some trees down towards the end of the street.

 

“If I can just make it to the end of the street”, she thought, “To where there’s people walking and traffic, I’ll be safe”

 

But then she heard something else; a loud swatting or swooshing sound and it was getting louder and louder until it was all she could hear except her own screaming.

 

And then she saw it, reflected in the front windscreen of a parked car; something with large flapping wings and…what had her brother said? Eyes like headlights.

 

“But wait a minute”, she thought, shaking her head, “It’s not a monster, it's my brother, it’s Tom”.

 

She turned round and looked at it directly, gazed into its enormous glaring yellow eyes and was frozen with terror.

 

“Tom. Please. Please. Don’t. I’m your sister”, she pleaded.

 

“Who? Who? Who?”, asked the thing, putting out its claws and swooping down towards her.