In moonlit street.

Big stick or long gun. Hairless head shone. Hairs crowded wide and black under nose, above mouth. Dried sweat, and cologne, and a fart.

Hunting for dog.

Dog hid amongst dogs. Other dogs shifted listlessly.

Dog cowered. Whimpers escaped. Dog buried muzzle in bum. Familiar fragrance of inside-oneself, comforting.

Human came.

Attack, rip with claws, grip throat with teeth so sharp! No! Dog feared bang-bang. Dog cringed among dogs. Lone eye watched.

Rattle of laughter.

Human noise: “So how do you feel now, Mr. Martin Fairfax? How does it feel?”

A camera flashed blindingly.

Head throbbing, I woke to daylight naked on that double bed beside the bench press. What a vile, terrible nightmare.

Then I saw my strewn soiled clothes, and discovered the state of my aching body.

I heard the crow of a cock. Was Max waiting patiently next door, drinking coffee?

At first I could hardly stand, weak as a decrepit old man.

Propelled by fear, I recovered some strength. Blessedly Rigby-I couldn’t bear to think of him any longer as Max-was absent.

I fled before even worse happened, wheeling my suitcase behind me to the nearest boulevard, flagging a taxi and saying, “Otopeni, v? rog,” the name of Bucharest ’s airport, plus please. Of course the driver swindled me, though not grossly. And he wasn’t Madame Florescu’s son, even though paranoia whispered otherwise.

Rigby had set the trap cunningly.

Admittedly, his plan depended on such a crone as Madame Florescu living opposite his flat in such a home as she did. Although how exactly had Rigby located that particular flat? With Silviu’s help, in line with what special requirements? Rigby’s own research requirements, of which I knew nothing, yet which I’d let lure me like a bee to pollen!

Rigby must have paid the crone and her son quite a few more dollars than I did. And Silviu procured the hallucinogens, whatever those might have been? A cocktail of mandrake, henbane, LSD? Maybe some deadly nightshade and hemlock and mind-altering mushrooms thrown in?

No, how could Silviu, or Rigby, have known what to concoct? The crone must have known.

It couldn’t be, could it, that I had truly been transformed? That the crone had thought I wanted to be transformed because of my miming? I’m quite light and short-even so, how heavy a weredog would I have become?

Fortuitous, indeed, that the bloody murders took place!

I would probably have been beguiled by the crone’s cottage, even so.

What was Adriana’s part in the conspiracy, gasping and crossing herself in timely fashion?

Bitch! I thought.

Bitch seemed entirely the wrong term of abuse. Or maybe entirely the right one.

So how do you feel now, Mr. Martin Fairfax? Such vindictiveness on account of a bad review. Rigby must have leaned on the editor of the mag, or maybe he’d read that early book of mine and the character’s name stuck in his mind.

So I departed Romania with my tail, as it were, between my legs.

After I got back home and had recovered myself, I googled using automatic translation and discovered that a man had been arrested for the murders in Bucharest. The presumed perpetrator was a Turko-German drug smuggler, Günther Bey, sporting tattoos featuring samurai sword fights. Red dye used for sprays and pools of blood, I suppose.

It seemed to me that if the Turko-German’s skin bore so much pictorial blood, it was unlikely that he felt a craving to replicate this upon the skins of unfortunate women. If he emulated Japanese gangsters, those people had a code of honour, only killing rivals and enemies within the fraternity.

Ovid had found half-a-Turk to fix up for the killings. It wouldn’t do for a werewolf or weredog to be responsible. Romania was a modern country now, a member of the European Union.

So did those murders result from a crone applying a potion and a salve? Maybe her own good son, Mihail, was transformed? No, that was absurd.

Judging from the news, no more such murders happened. If I related my experiences as a short story, this should reflect badly on Rigby, though obviously I’d need to disguise his name.

I Was a Middle-Age Werewolf by Ron Goulart

Sometimes bad luck just seems to gang up on you.

Take my situation on this past June 13. Things were lousy even before I turned into a shaggy grey wolf-man for the first time.

And I’m not even talking about the fact that I was two payments behind on the mortgage of my house here on the fringes of Beverly Hills. Back in the 1920s the silent-movie lover Orlando Busino lived in this sprawling Moorish-style mansion and romanced some of the loveliest actresses of the silver screen within these very walls. In the 1960s, the immensely, and briefly, popular rock group the Ivy League Jug Band staged excessive orgies here on a fairly regular basis. Obviously the roof didn’t leak back then, nor did the pipes produce ominous keening noises in the midnight hours.

Also, I’m not alluding to my former wife, Mandy, whom you’ve no doubt heard of. She’s a bestselling author of diet books under the name of Mandine Osterwald Higby. Such titles as The Junk Food Diet and To Hell With Nutrition have been on every bestseller list in the land for endless months. Rumors in the publishing trade were that Mandy was working on a memoir to be entitled I Married an Asshole. My attorney charged me $500 to tell me she had a perfect right to do that.

I am, by the way, Tim Higby. I’m forty-one, eleven pounds overweight, and three inches too short. I make my living writing television comedies. I’m very fond of plaid shirts and was wearing one on that fateful night along with a venerable pair of khakis.

My most successful sitcom was Uncle Fred Is a Pain in the Butt, which ran from 2001 to 2003. Since then I haven’t had another hit. Finally, four months ago, I was hired as a writer on Nose Job. That’s the one about the wacky Hollywood plastic surgeon. It began plummeting in the ratings just after the first script I’d had a hand in aired. The show handler and the producers decided they need somebody younger to save Nose Job from extinction and, Lord knows, there are untold numbers of writers younger than I am in Greater Los Angeles.

So on the morning of June 13 I got an e-mail informing me I was no longer on the writing team. I’d been in the middle of writing a very funny script dealing with how this wacky Hollywood plastic surgeon misplaced the left ear of a patient.

As the day waned I was sitting in my living room, scene of many a seduction and many an orgy before my time of residence, and brooding over the fact that in addition to having to pay Mandy an enormous alimony each and every month, I was now going to be vilified in I Married an Asshole.

The cell phone, which I’d been able to keep up the payments on, played the opening notes of Thelonious Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie.”

I scratched at a sudden itch in my right palm, then picked it up. “Yeah?”

“Turn on the Gossip Channel.”

“Why, Hersh?”

It was Bernie Hersh, one of my few close friends and, even at the advanced age of forty-seven, still a very successful television writer. “Just do, old buddy. On my way out.” The call ended.

Putting down the phone, I scratched my hand yet again, and then grabbed up the remote to bring the Gossip Channel into view. There on the screen was my daughter, whose agent had christened her Mutiny Skylark last year, and then sold her to the Will Destry Channel to star in Posy Pickwick: Rock & Roll Detective.

Beth, her real first name, was sitting on a purple sofa, hands folded in her lap and looking contrite. Well, as contrite as you can look while wearing a very low-cut yellow tank top and very minimal shorts. “It seems to me,” she was saying to the stunning blonde interviewer, “that the executives at Destry, really wonderful people for the most part, Pam, have been excessive in this instance.”