On that evening, after dinner, Mrs. MacElroy spooned the last bit of Mulligatawny into a tupperware container and placed it in the fridge. It was this that kept Jason awake past midnight. He was not particularly hungry, but he and his wife were entertaining house guests for the weekend. The Fitzsimmons. And what if one of them awoke early to finish the leftover soup?
Jason crept down stairs, leaving the house dark so as not to rouse anyone. On the ground level he navigated the parlor by memory. On the other side was a door to the kitchen. The light of a full moon made the trip easier, casting furniture as long shadows across the floor.
He breezed past a sofa and coffee table, his bare feet finding a rug near the door to the kitchen. It lie in the one pitch black corner of the parlor. A few steps more and he would be there. Except...
He stopped and sniffed the air. Something was burning. He turned away from the kitchen and glanced back into the parlor. The room was vivid by daylight, but under the illumination of the full moon, it stood in grayscale. Silent and foreboding.
And by the windowsill, a thin column of smoke flittered through the moonbeams. Jason squinted at this, but he could not see the source. Strange. So, so strange.
And odder still, from the darkness, a clearing of a throat. "Kheck-hummph."
"Hello?" Jason called out. And then he saw a reddish glow of embers move through the air as if a wand were waved. It glowed brighter for a moment and then its intensity receded.
Jason fumbled for the light switch, which was near the door to the kitchen. It was one of those round, dimmer switches. Jason let the lights on low at first, but as the figure with him in the parlor took shape, he quickly spun the brightness to full strength.
There, at the mantle, was a werewolf in a smoking jacket. It had a cohiba wedged between two gnarly fingers. The wolfman's backhands were covered in orange hair and its long, claw-like fingernails were black. Like an animal's.
"Geez!" said Jason as the werewolf squinted back at him.
Now this was the flat-faced kind of werewolf and not the slobbering, long-muzzled variety. Its coif was neatly combed back into a ducktail. Its nose was round and black. And it had an underbite with a pair of fangs peaking up between puffy, burgundy lips. It also wore striped, mod-era trousers and a bottle green smoking jacket which Jason knew was his own because a gold "JM" was embroidered on the side pocket. An extremely odd coincidence if the werewolf had the same initials.
"Max?" asked Jason, taking a stab that the werewolf was none other than one of his house guests, Max Fitzsimmons.
The werewolf bent its knees and curled its hands. It threw its head back, baying ferociously before lumbering toward Jason with thrashing arms.
Jason found himself momentarily paralyzed, but his motor skills remanifested in the nick of time as the blitzing wolfman chased him about the parlor.
Jason might have found this all very comical were it not so terrifying what with the growls and lashing claws. The parlor furniture was all that stood between Jason MacElroy and the sure fate of being torn to pieces. The wolfman overturned these obstacles as if dollhouse fittings, snapping a chair or two to pieces like fire kindling.
Jason circled back around to the fireplace, scrambling for the firepoker. He was relieved to finally have a weapon in hand, but in the split second it took to grab the wrought-iron spear, the wolfman lunged on top of him.
Luckily, Jason wedged the poker between them. The werewolf's reddish-brown eyes pierced his very soul as the beast snarled and snapped at him with a gaping, jagged-toothed mouth.
And yet, those muddy red eyes had something familiar in them. A glint which Jason recalled seeing earlier in the evening when Mrs. MacElroy announced she would put the rest of the Mulligatawny in the refrigerator as it was perhaps even better the next day. Max Fitzsimmons had been lapping up the last remnants of his own serving with a slice of naan. Her words stopped him abruptly and Jason could see him grinding his molars as if forcing himself not to demand seconds.
"Max!" Jason tried again. Perhaps he could reason with the thing.
But the wolfman crinkled its nose and howled. Its hot breath cascaded him in the earthy, dark leather scent of the cohiba. And past that, Jason smelled other things. A glass of sherry. Unmistakably so. And the tang of blood. Metallic and maybe a little sweet.
The werewolf's superior strength was evident and Jason knew he had to take some kind of evasive maneuver to avoid adding his own blood to the creature's breath. So Jason kicked the wolfman square between the legs. It howled in pain and rolled off its would-be victim. Quickly, Jason clubbed the werewolf in the side of the head with the poker, then scrambled to his feet.
He bolted into the kitchen, letting the door swing closed behind him. But it was not a door with a latch -- a fact which Jason had little time to lament as, on the other side, he heard snarls and the scraping of black toenails across the parlor's hardwood floor.
Jason braced himself against the door, which he figured would probably be futile. But what else could he do?
The wolfman hit the door with breakneck velocity. Jason was surprised by his own ability to keep the beast from entering the kitchen with him. Perhaps his adrenaline had given him super strength like those mothers he'd heard about who lifted cars up off of their children.
But the adrenaline would not last and he knew it. The werewolf stuck its arm through a small opening, flailing it about, trying to scratch at Jason. The angle was not in the creature's favor.
Jason's eyes flitted back and forth, scanning the kitchen for something to save him. But what? The firepoker had already proved ill effective.
And then, he saw it. The cooking pot in which Mrs. MacElroy had prepared the night's Mulligatawny was still sitting on the stove top. And out of it rested the handle of an expensive ladle which Jason had purchased as part of a cooking set two Christmases ago. He'd searched weeks for the set which he eventually found at William Sonoma. A selling point for these utensils had been that the alloy with which they were cast contained fragments of actual silver.
The wolfman's arm disappeared back through the opening in the doorway. Jason heard its toenails scraping again against the hardwood as though the werewolf was backing up for another battering of the door.
This was Jason's chance. In a few steps he was to the stove. He grabbed the silver ladle handle just as the werewolf burst through the kitchen door.
But the creature careened headlong into the cooking island. It obviously expected Jason to be barricading the door still and it left a sizable dent in the aluminum side of the island.
Jason did not waste a precious second. As the wolfman sat up, a bit dazed by his collision, MacElroy clubbed it over the head with the blunt end of the ladle. The creature growled and swung its arms.
Surprised by the silver's ineffectiveness, Jason clubbed the werewolf again. And again. But the beating only seemed to make the wolfman madder.
This was when Jason noticed a thin film of Mulligatawny coated the ladle halfway up the handle. It must have been enough of a barrier to prevent direct contact between the silver and the werewolf.
The wolfman stood up, howling again before crouching on its haunches for one more strike. But this gave Jason enough time to switch the ladle around so that when the werewolf pounced, Jason thrust the silver handle into its chest.
In this one, intense moment, time seemed to stop. Silence between the adversaries interrupted only by a soft whimper. The guttural noises of a dying creature whose wind was taken away. Its jaw swung back and forth as though trying to speak. Perhaps to question. Or to plead.
Then the creature collapsed onto the kitchen tile. Jason stood above it, gazing with wonder at how impossibly lifeless it now was in light of its hyperactivity only moments ago.
And then, like a television dissolve, the wolfman's features vanished, supplanted by a fair-haird man of thirty-four, still strangely owning of baby fat on his cheeks.
It was whom Jason suspected. Max Fitzsimmons.
"Oh Max..." Jason shook his head.
Max opened his eyes weakly. Jason knelt down next to him.
"Max, why... Why did you --"
Max reached up, grabbing a fistful of Jason's pajama lapel.
"I didn't want to get the smell of smoke on my fur." said Max. "I hope you understand."
And with that Max's hand fell to the tile. Jason swallowed with difficulty. He stood back up and smoothed down his pajamas.
It was then that Jason noticed an opened tupperware container sitting on the counter near the fridge. Setting the ladle down on the cooking island, he walked over to it.
The lid sat to the side, sort of tossed away carelessly. There were claw marks on the fridge door and etched into the plastic sides of the tupperware container. A long strand of orange hair clung to the inner lip. Jason looked inside finding only a bit of chewed chicken gristle sitting in a shallow pool of broth.
The Mulligatawny had been eaten.
Jason looked again at Max Fitzsimmons lying lifelessly on the floor. He wasn't sure if the silver ladle had issued a fatal blow to the werewolf. But, when the morning sun rose, he would insist that his house guests leave. For they had overstayed their welcome.
Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/488817/a_werewolf_by_the_mantle...