The New World

*All characters are 18+*

The group of men had left the road behind, and were now wandering through the undergrowth of a thick black forest. They had left behind their horses, and their carts and their fire, and they felt small and inconsequential in the primeval darkness of the Romanian forests.

Fourteen of the fifteen men were natives, they were led by the best huntsman in the land. If it had been any other then Gareth One-Eye, many of the guides never would have dared to go on this foolish deadly hunt.

The fifteenth man was sorely out of place. An Englishman, and a city man, he looked lost in his fine coat and kid gloves. He carried a narrow tube of what looked like wood, with pale bands going up and down the sides. In his other hand he carried a small leather case which contained ten darts made of light wood and tufted with bright feathers.

Where Gareth calmed the thirteen guides, the city man made them nervous. He blundered clumsily through the thick undergrowth, stepped on every twig, cursed the loudest when the thorns scratched his clothing. His presence was terrifying, considering what they stalked. Gareth and the guides knew how easily the hunter could become the hunted, an idea that the city man couldn't seem to comprehend.

Gareth One-eye went up to the city man during a quick breather. The man was exhausted and taking a swig from a small metal flask. He protested loudly when Gareth knocked the flask away.

"Shut up." He said coldly. "You are a very stupid man. The only reason I am doing this at all is for the money, and I cannot let you put us in danger because you wont shut your mouth."

The man sat there, tight-lipped and furious.

"We are close to the beasts, they are vulnerable now. They have young, and wounded. You need to have your wits about you if you want one alive. You better hope that your heathen toy will work."

With that, Gareth turned and whispered curt instructions to the men in Romanian. The men sheathed their sharpened hunting knives, and picked up their crossbows. Each one looked terrified and aggressive and hungry for action.

Even the city man, who only had a bamboo dart gun and a handful of tipped darts, felt the excitement.

---

Her name was Agnes, and she was the Alpha. She was a short stocky woman with cropped dark hair and golden eyes. She had managed to hold her pack together, and keep them alive and healthy for fifteen years, but now she was afraid.

There was no moon in a sky crusted with stars. Thirty ragged shivering individuals, not including babies and children under ten, were huddling near two small smoky fires. A baby briefly squalled before a young woman shushed her and offered her breast. The pack had fallen on hard times. The hunters were getting smarter and more relentless. The prey was scarce, and half a dozen had died from a brief outbreak of typhoid.

Agnes got up and walked restlessly. A young man, young enough to be a child still, coughed wretchedly and Agnes put a hand on his bony white shoulder. The young man had wandered in a bare month ago, filthy, starved, and thorn-scratched. He had been babbling deliriously in a language that she recognized as French. He had become a bit of a pet among the pack, and he had been getting better, but by the sound of that hacking cough he was getting worse.

They had sick, and injured and young, and the smell of men was on the wind. When the arrows hissed from the trees the pack was terrified and dismayed, but no one was surprised.

It was utter carnage, and it only lasted a few minutes. Men came screaming battle cries from the trees, shooting their crossbows at everyone, man, woman, and child. The pack was unarmed and helpless and naked but for a few cloaks and animal skins. Within minutes two dozen corpses were lying prone, bleeding into the earth.

Agnes made it, with four men, two women, and a twelve year old girl with a sobbing babe in her arms.

---

The city man was furious. No one had listened to him, or even understood him. They went and shot every living specimen; they even sent arrows through the necks and chests of children and babies. He hadn't even gotten to use the exotic blowgun he had commissioned from Borneo. He was sulking on an overgrown root when Gareth One-eye came over.

"Professor, two of the beasts... they are still alive."

Charles Roderick eagerly leapt to his feet and ran over to where thirteen men warily surrounded two figures. He instantly knew that the man would not live. He had an arrow in his neck and another in his stomach. He was dead, his body just needed to catch up. The other however, the other was a boy with red hair and glassy eyes. He was crying and struggling and babbling weakly in French. The thick splintery shaft of a crossbow bolt jutted from his thigh.

"This one will do."

One of the guides hit the boy over the head with a bag half-filled with sand and the boy went limp.

---

Matteo woke up in near-darkness. He was naked and cold and alone, crammed in a tiny crate that was shifting back and forth on the back of a cart. Other crates jostled near him, making the air inside stuffy and unbreathable. Matteo moaned softly, wracked with pain and claustrophobia. For a few moments all he could do was pant weakly for air as he tried not to suffocate.

Cold air whistled into the crate from three long cracks between splintery boards. The chinks were about half an inch thick and a foot tall. He crawled to them, his wounded leg throbbing thickly. He could see the road receding behind the cart.

Matteo had been born a French peasant. He had lived his entire life dirt-poor living with a gaggle of brothers and sisters that were always hungry. A lone wolf the size of a horse had savaged him one year ago, and he had felt the changes ripping through him. He had run when his own family saw him change and had attacked him, stabbing his cowering body with pitchforks and the sharp hoe. After the change had receded he had crawled back, bleeding and crying and so frightened of what he had become. They had attacked him and tried to kill him.

After months of wandering through the forest and eating what he could catch and scrounge and steal, he had found a family. They had loved him and cared for him. They had nursed him back to health and he had slept during the day in the giant warm huddle of sleeping bodies. Now his family was dead or fled, and he was trapped in a splintery straw-lined crate.

Matteo cried and nervously paced the tiny parameters of his prison. He had never felt so trapped, so panicky. He hated the small space, hated it and was so desperate that he threw his scrawny white body against the boards. His matted red hair covered his eyes. After exhausting himself, he curled up on the meager pad of straw, shivering and moaning softly.

---

It was nearly a hundred years before Ivan Pavlov would conduct his famous experiment with canines and classical conditioning, but Charles Roderick knew how to train a dog not to bark. His goal (written in a neat copperplate in his notebooks) stated that he wished only to make the subject permissible and obedient. What he would do in real life, was to cow the young injured boy into submission.

Using force, if need be.

When the two supply carts stopped, the small expedition didn't even get off the road. The road was a tiny winding mud trail that often broke axels and wheels on the carts. They had already replaced two broken wheels, one axel, and had had to kill a horse with a shattered foreleg. The carts merely were settled at the side of the road and the animals tied to the sides with small piles of fodder and buckets of water from a nearby stream.

The woods made the men uneasy, so the entire setup was to make a pocket of firelight and humanity. The animals and the cart made a thin veneer to protect them from the darkness beyond. Two men stood watch at all times with their crossbows while the rest slept and ate.

The men hated that one of the beasts was with them. Sure, it was in a cage, but cages could be broken. The beasts were easy enough to kill when vulnerable, but nothing was more destructive than one during a witching (full) moon. So when the city man prepared for his encounter with the beast, the men subtly moved so they were near the cart, curious and anxious with their crossbows ready.

Two men moved aside the other crates. The cage looked like a crate, but it had heavy bands of reinforced iron that surrounded it like wire around a haybale. The bolts that kept the cage door closed were locked, and as thick as a man's wrist.

The two men opened the door and everyone leaned in to watch.

Matteo woke up, and saw the group of savage frightened faces. He was small and weak and he had a deep wound on his thigh that oozed slow red streams. Straw filled his matted red hair. The city man stood in front of him, immaculate in his gray silk coat and vest and black kid gloves.

Matteo knew Norman French. He knew a handful of German and Romanian both, and he knew a few broken words of English.

"Please." The boy mewled, looking at all of the hateful faces. "Please...no."

Roderick moved with catlike speed to take his left hand from behind his back. In his hand he held a long thin metal poker with the end shaped in a dull point with a second prong sticking perpendicular to the point. The entire L-shaped tip was a dull maroon color with heat. The point jabbed under Matteo's shortribs with a sizzle of burning flesh and a tormented shriek of pain.

"NO!" Roderick snarled. "No talking! Bad!"

He jabbed the boy two more times. When he withdrew the poker the men looked curiously into the cage, half expecting the beast to leap out with fangs bared. But all they saw was a shadowy huddle of pale limbs. All they saw was the trembling little heap that moaned and sobbed in wordless cries. Charles Roderick was taming the beast.

---

Three more days and nights of slow stressful travel. Three more incidents with the poker. For two nights, Matteo weakly pleaded in French and German and Romanian. Every time the poor boy spoke Roderick jabbed him and left weeping burns on his pale skin. On the third night, Matteo was too weak and scared to speak. He hadn't had a drop of water or a crumb of food for three days and the straw under his cramped legs was wet and filthy and he was going crazy from lack of movement.

Roderick waited for him to speak, even prompted him to speak, but the fragile beast had learned his lesson. He was rewarded with food and water and a quick raking out of the filthy straw.

Matteo became an animal in that crate. Nothing to do but sleep and cry and nurse his aching healing leg. Every night after his 'conditioning' the crate was covered with heavy black blankets that nearly suffocated him and prevented the tiniest ray of moonlight from touching his skin.

After a week of monotony, Roderick left the fourteen guides and took his cargo onto a ship that would take him to London. The voyage would skim across the shore, stopping often for trade and it would take four weeks.

During those four weeks, the terrible purgatory of Matteo's cage became hell. Roderick had always had a cruel streak. As a child he had pulled the legs off ants and set cat's tails on fire and stabbed at worms with pins to watch them squirm. When he was twelve, he had fed an old dog a ball of compressed bread with shards of broken glass in it and watched the poor stray die a terrible death as it cried and vomited blood and ran in feeble circles.

He told himself that it was further conditioning, but he knew better, and he didn't put it down in his notebooks. Every day, sometimes twice a day he would go into the stinking lightless cargo hold and open up the crate. He was not nearly as good at cleaning the cage as his guides had been, so Matteo would always be cowering in the back, scrabbling his legs in the filthy straw, mewling weakly with fear and misery. He would use the poker and jab the crying broken boy until he shrieked in agony.

He had no sexual desire for the broken little bundle of limbs in his crate, but he left each session of 'conditioning' with a raging hard-on from the abuse.

---

The weak sunlight burned Matteo's yellow eyes. The cold clear air seared his lungs and his nose, and he coughed in weak spasms. The cold air burned his spongy invalid's skin. He was kneeling on the dirty cobblestones in an ally of the University of London. Two assistants had carried his crate out and had now taken out its cargo.

Matteo trembled like a wet puppy. He was cowed and afraid and at the same time the sensation of being out of the cage was exhilarating, even if his limbs were too weak and cramped to stand. He cried out with shock and pain when one of the assistants wrinkled his nose and dumped a pail of cold water over the filthy scrawny little teenager. The assistant scrubbed his body with a cloth and Matteo's body was seized with powerful cramps while he moaned and struggled weakly.

The assistants dragged him inside to a room that Charles Roderick had prepared himself. The room had once been a greenhouse, and the ceiling windows had all been covered from the inside with heavy black blankets. One of the blankets had a rope dangling from it. Roderick was a theatrical man, and his plan was to pull away a swatch of the blankets to expose the moonlight.

In the center of the room, sitting on a large pedestal was a very large cage. The cage was many times bigger than the tiny crate Matteo had been cramped in. It had a wooden floor and thick metal bars that were reinforced with crosshatching metal bars. The wooden floor had a thin layer of fresh straw on it.

The assistant threw the young boy into the cage and Matteo used the free space to slowly stretch out his cramped body. He felt terribly naked and exposed on the pedestal. It was a measure of how badly he had been abused when Roderick covered the cage with a black cloth and Matteo felt relieved.

---

Roderick had a reputation at the college, and it wasn't a good one. Several Professors had shown up, and a few of them had brought their wives. Charles Roderick had imagined this to be a serious event, where everyone would wait for the beast to be unveiled on the edge of their seats, but instead he got something close to a party.

Several of the young Professors had brought card games and liquor. These men of science (and their wives) were huddled in small groups, laughing and talking and playing games and passing around flasks or bottles. By the time his small silver pocket-watch said ten o clock, no one was sitting in the benches, ready for his speech. Roderick was grinding his teeth softly as he stood on a smaller pedestal near the cage.

"Gentlemen, please." His tone was quiet and pleasant, but inside he was furious. He felt the sudden desire to have a bit of 'conditioning' with the beast; that would make him feel better.

Only two or three of the very young Professors even listened to him. After having to ask the loud crowd several times to calm down and sit Roderick was livid and barely controlling his temper. The last to sit was a large blonde man with a weak chin and a heavy blonde beard. His name was Professor Solstrom, and he had brought his mistress. The pretty young woman was getting more looks then Roderick.

"Gentlemen, I have brought you all here to today to show you a specimen from a branch of zoology that has gone severely neglected for the last hundred years or so. The branch that I like to call Somatics, though I have not officially named them. These are animals that pretend to be human. The closest animal to my branch of study that has even been acknowledged is the mountain gorilla that was recently found in darkest Africa.

Roderick scowled as his audience burst into giggles. "Do you have anything to say, Solstrom?"

Solstrom was laughing so hard tears were falling down his cheeks. "Do you mean that you have dragged us all down here to show us some urchin in a costume? What is in that box? A stuffed mermaid? A satyr perhaps!" He roared with laughter, and others joined in. Roderick had to shout to be heard.

"I have seen what you describe! I have seen humanoids that live in the water, with the lower bodies of giant water snakes, and I have seen creatures that pretend to be human and are burned by the light of day and subsist on human blood, and I have seen creatures in the high mountains with wings, and others with elongated lower legs and horns like goats!"

His rant quieted them, for he was livid. His eyes were blazing and he was screaming at them. A few of the people in the audience were even beginning to be frightened, and Solstrom took a large gulp from his flask.

"This is the first creature I have caught. It is a creature that plagues Romania, and while many of us thought that it was a legend, there it is an all-too-real threat! The radiation from the moonlight gives this creature the power to turn into a gigantic wolf. For three days during the new moon it cannot change, and for three days during the full moon, even with the slightest exposure it cannot help but change. I even plan on going to the new world in a few months to study them, for there they are supposed to have many of these creatures. I have dubbed this creature, Homo Lycanthropes!"

He had been so angry that he had forgotten his original plan. He knew that the little beast looked wretched and pitiful, so he had planed to pull the moonlight-window first and then remove the black curtain from the cage. He paid the price for this mistake.

The black curtain swirled away from the cage and a gasp rose up, but not of horror or fear, but of pity and anger. The plump round-faced wife of a botanist rose up with her hands clasped between her breasts and she cried out, "Oh you poor thing!"

Matteo was doing his best to look even weaker and sicker then he already was, but really, he didn't even need to bother. He was so starved that his ribs and jutted from his pale body. His upper body was covered with a series of small burns, some old and puckered, some fresh and oozing. He had a half-healed wound on his thigh and his lower legs were covered with red sores from how filthy his cage had been. He cringed in one corner of the cage, trying to cover his weak body with his hands.

The Professors and their wives stood up in a barrage of humanity. A young burly professor had found a hammer somewhere and was going to smash the lock. Solstrom was talking loudly on how men of false science like this needed to be evicted from the University. Roderick felt his plan falling to shambles around him and he desperately tried to calm them down.

The burly professor merely pushed him roughly out of the way. The botanist's wife was at the cage, trying to soothe the young man, trying to learn his name. Matteo was afraid and confused and he didn't understand what anyone was saying, but they were furious with Roderick and for the first time in nearly two months, the ragged boy was daring to hope. Hope shone in his dark honey-colored eyes.

Roderick heard the clang of the burly man's hammer on the lock and he saw his career smashing down around his ears. He got up and ran to the rope which dangled from the window. His hair hung in crazed disarray around his ears as he shouted.

"All of you GET BACK!"

He tugged on the rope and a swatch of curtain fell away, bathing the cage in a ray of silvery moonlight. Matteo cried out with anguish.

---

The changes went fast, he tried to make them go faster as he writhed in the cage. All of the onlookers thought he was having some sort of seizure and the burly professor hit the lock hard enough to break it.

Matteo's spine elongated with a painful creak and he moaned as his internal organs started to shift around inside of him. His ribcage extended into a narrow shape like the hull of a canoe. Reddish fur began to sprout from every part of his body and he cried out in agony as his skull elongated into a pointed wolf shape.