I call.....

Universal monster in a coffee shop


He heard the sound of a train arriving at Llanwelly station but continued to drink his coffee, sipping away knowing it wasn‘t the one to carry him home.

The station coffee shop was crowded with commuters talking about their day and having a hot drink on this cold misty evening before boarding their separate trains and heading their own ways. Larry Talbot was one of them.

He took a sip of his hot drink and looked at his long walking stick decorated with a wolf. He’d only bought it to use to break the ice with a girl in the village called Gwen. She told him it represented a werewolf. A few others did so too and some even recited a poem to him, which he couldn’t remember, about becoming a wolf when the autumn moon is bright.

Leaving the village behind now, his memories of his time there were a little hazy, he wondered if the trip had been worth it. His own father had battered him with the stick now at his side and he had been pronounced dead, he had no idea why they had done that. Obviously he was still alive; he presumed they must have wanted him out of the village quite desperately.

It was quite a tight knit community and outsiders weren’t too well looked upon. Once he bought the cane, it seemed he was treated even colder. Now, sitting in the station waiting for his train, his memory was hazy, the girl Gwen didn’t want to know him and his own father had beaten him, not what would usually be called successful.

No, the trip hadn’t been worth it.

He took another sip of his coffee; his teeth hit the rim of the mug with a clank. It hurt him and he thought it must have chipped the tooth. He ran his tongue across his teeth to check and they felt unusually sharp. He lifted his hand so he could feel with his finger and noticed a course brown hair growing quite swiftly on the back of it. He could actually see it growing.

He stood, wanting to go to the bathroom to check himself out in the mirror, look at his teeth and see if there was hair on his face like it was on his hands. As he slid back his chair, he heard a scream from a lady standing next to him.

He turned so he could ask her what was wrong but she was running, looking back at him over her shoulder, panic on her face and her eyes open wide in terror.

Larry tried to call out, ask her what was wrong. When he opened his mouth to shout his voice didn’t emerge, instead a loud inhuman howl echoed through the station. It echoed out of the coffee shop and out onto the platform creating station-wide panic.

The howls had been heard often lately, usually being followed by disappearances and the discovery of dead bodies in and around Llanwelly.

Seeing the panic others where feeling, anger built up inside Larry. He let out another howl, the animal inside him coming to the surface burying the man deep inside his own body. Hair sprouted from the rest of his body. His arms, legs and back changed shape, arched so he was on all fours. His nose and mouth extended and became a snout, teeth protruded from his now doglike jaws, drooling as he looked around the coffee shop at his potential prey.

Torn clothes still clinging to the body of the now wolf, he sprung away from the table where he was sitting, sending the chair tumbling across the room but not nudging the table and spilling the coffee. He jumped across the room, landing on the back of a man with an umbrella and bowler hat who was struggling to open the door to exit the coffee shop in panic.

The wolf’s teeth sunk into the neck of the man, blood splashing against the glass door and running down like thick red water.

The wolf shook its head with man’s neck still in its jaws, spraying the other people who were screaming and trying to get out in sheer panic in the man’s blood. The man was then flung aside, tossed into the service counter where staff where ducking, hiding behind out of the site of the monster.

The wolf’s eyes looked for its next victim… it didn’t have far to look. The woman who had first screamed was still screaming, trying to push through the crowd to escape onto the platform. The jaws of the wolf fit perfectly, right over her head, biting it off whole.

There was another, a man pushing women out of the way, trying to break the glass in the door with a chair… the wolf hit him in the back, face first onto the glass staining it with blood from his face with the strength of the impact.

Larry Talbot sat on his chair in the station coffee shop. He took a sip of his now lukewarm coffee. His clothes were tattered and his hands, body and face were covered in blood. At least now it was peaceful and quiet while he drank.

He finished his coffee as he heard the sound of a train coming up the rails; he knew that this time it was his. He stepped over torn bodies and separated limbs, climbed through the broken glass of the coffee shop door onto the platform. Cane in hand, he waited for the train to stop.