Evolution of Love 2

The Autumn Moon’s Debt

Day 11: “Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers at night, may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” — The Wolf Man (1941)


The first frost came early that year. It bit into Mulberry Hollow like invisible teeth, crisping the grass to silver and turning the air thin and sharp.
Isaac Granger stood by his window, palms pressed to the cold sill. The church bell had just finished striking six. Smoke from the chimneys drifted through the fog like breath from a sleeping body. He loved mornings like this — quiet, unassuming, honest.
But that morning carried a sound beneath the stillness. A low thrum, deep in the chest rather than the ear — steady, rhythmic, almost alive.
He glanced toward the fence, where a blackbird perched motionless. Then, without reason, the bird whirred upward, vanishing into gray sky. Isaac’s fingers trembled.
Behind him, the kettle hissed.
He turned, poured tea, and sat by the table. Steam blurred his reflection in the cup, and for an instant, his eyes seemed to glow an unnatural gold. He blinked — and the image vanished.
Outside, the valley gleamed with frost. He noticed something new along the old boundary — violet stalks rising out of the soil, some bent, some poised upright. Wolfsbane. Strange, he thought. It hadn’t been there yesterday.
At the schoolhouse, the children were restless. They always were near year’s end, when the harvest ended and dusk came early. During arithmetic, young Clara Brewster ignored her sums and etched a crude drawing on her slate — the head of a wolf, mouth open wide, a full moon behind it.
Isaac tapped the slate lightly with a ruler. “Your sums, Clara. Not stories.”
She looked at him, pale eyes unblinking. “It’s not a story, sir. It’s you.”
He forced a smile. “What do you mean?”
“The wolf in the moon,” she said. “My grandmother says everyone has their moon. Yours is coming.”
He set her chalk aside and told her to focus, but the words stayed with him long after the bell rang.
That night, when he kneeled at his bedside, prayer felt like gravel in his mouth. The end of the verse escaped him — the one he had recited every night since boyhood. When he finally rose, an iron taste lingered at the back of his tongue.
Morning came strangely quiet. He woke to find mud caked beneath his nails and a smell on his hands like damp earth and something darker — blood, faint and old. Outside, Mrs. Barker’s sheep pen was in ruins.
Constable Merrin stopped by before noon, a stub of pipe clamped between his teeth. “Feral dogs,” he said, gazing at the fence. “But strange, this. Tracks run straight to your side field.”
Isaac swallowed. “You’re sure?”
Merrin pointed to the ground. “See for yourself.”
There they were — wide prints, heavy, deep. Not quite paw marks, not quite boot steps. In one, faintly pressed in the slush, was what resembled a human heel.
Isaac said nothing. The constable lit his pipe and trudged off into the cold.
That night, the valley dreamed uneasy dreams. Clouds smothered the stars, but the moon fought through — white and swollen. Isaac sat awake, heartbeat pulsing too fast, his reflection shifting in the windowpane.
He stepped outside. The air shimmered silver against the fields. The wolfsbane flickered in the wind, violet tongues whispering secrets.
Then came the first pain — deep and twisting, as though his bones had grown impatient with their shape. His breath stuttered, back arched, muscles rippling against his skin. He gasped, and the sound that escaped him was animal — a sound of hunger and grief intertwined.
The change came like thunder rolling through his own veins.
The world sharpened. Every noise was unbearable in its clarity — a mouse under soil, the groan of a tree settling its weight, the slam of his own heart. The scent of blood crept into his skull like music.
Underneath that monstrous sense was something worse — relief.
He ran.
Through the fields, through drifting fog, through thoughts that no longer belonged to language. The moon burned overhead.
Sometime before dawn, his mind disappeared into shadow.
When morning thawed the frost, the church was quieter than usual. On the front pew, where Isaac always sat, lay his coat. His boots rested beneath it, lined neatly side by side.
Near the steps outside, Constable Merrin found a few crimson smears that led into the woods and faded near the creek.
By noon, two farmers spotted Isaac in the upper meadow — pale, barefoot, trembling. They thought he was drunk, but when he looked up, eyes glassy and distant, they saw he wasn’t quite there.
He didn’t remember much. A broken fence. The taste of salt. The moon closing over him like a door.
Days passed. The Hollow festered with silence. Isaac stopped teaching. His mirror started lying. He’d light a candle, glance up, and the reflection would lag — eyes golden, grin stretched too wide before returning to form.
That week, Clara Brewster’s family left town. Others followed, saying the night air reeked of iron when the wind turned east.
The seventh night after the frost, Isaac took a lantern, a shovel, and his remaining sanity out to the field behind his cottage. The wolfsbane gleamed under a scab of moonlight.
He dug until his hands blistered. Beneath the roots, he felt something hollow, struck it, and brushed away dirt.
A skull.
Not of an animal. A human. Its jaw twisted, fangs where teeth should not have been.
His heart stuttered. He dropped the lantern; it rolled, flaring a thin orange line across the soil before sputtering out. In the sudden darkness, he heard breathing — low, heavy, matching his own rhythm.
He turned.
Two burning eyes stared from the black — not wide, not wild, just waiting. They looked like his.
The wind broke. The howl came — low, guttural, a sound raw enough to split the earth.
After that night, no one saw Isaac Granger again.
Merrin wrote it off as madness; the church called it divine punishment. But the sheep stopped grazing near his land, and the ground where the wolfsbane grew never lost its scent.
Each autumn, when frost returns and fog rolls low, the townsfolk stay inside. The church door stays bolted. And sometimes, if the fire dies too early, the old sound rises again — a grief-soaked howl caught somewhere between man and beast.
Then, silence.
The Hollow forgets nothing.
And the moon, when it remembers, will always come back for what it owns.