Saturday's Storyteller: "The kitten and the raptor are actually very closely related, if you think about it."

by Belinda Roddie

"The kitten and the raptor are actually very closely related, if you think about it."

Hannah wrinkled her nose. She had hardly touched the mixed greens on her plate, the water barely making a ripple in its tall glass. "I don't see how."

I flexed my fingers as if I had claws, then chomped at thin air. I didn't really care that the elderly couple sitting across from our booth turned to stare at me once they heard the loud clicking of my teeth. I did like how it made Hannah laugh, though.

"Okay, you win, Mister Raptor. Do that raptor squeak that Alan keeps talking about."

I did. The old man coughed loudly, as if his throat clearing would put an end to the presumed nonsense. But Hannah giggled and clapped her hands.

"Bravo. I knew I had it in you."

"So what were you planning on doing after this?" I asked, returning my attention to my half-eaten burger, shreds of cheese sadly drooping from its torn sesame seed lip.

She actually seemed like she was thinking about it. I was more than happy to see her actually eat away at her massive salad, the romaine crackling against her molars as she chewed.

"That, I'm not so sure of," she replied. "But I'll have to be alone. You know that."

"It can't be that bad."

She gave me a look. "It is that bad, Greg. You know the deal we have. We're together in the day, and once it gets to six o'clock, we need to separate."

"I just don't know why the treatment hasn't been working," I groaned, exasperation scraping its way out of my throat. "Doctor Neptune said - "

"Doctor Neptune says something different every week."

"Is it really such a hassle," I snapped, "to be able to see my girlfriend later than six o'clock at night for most of the year, without this damn condition getting in the way?"

I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the old woman was waving her hand around frantically for the check. Good riddance, I thought. They could stop being so perturbed by me and Hannah. I noticed the way they stared, too. Waiting for the love of my life, sitting across from me, to growl at them or sharpen her nails on the table. I knew they knew. Word had gotten out, confidentiality or no. And things had gotten messy.

It was also the reason why Hannah and I hadn't married yet, either. I wanted to. God, I did. But as it was, she was still on the trial prescription. Doctor Neptune had had to pull a lot of strings to get the medication for her, and cheap, so she could try it out. She had to. This was too hard for her to deal with every night. It had only been occasionally before, and the early symptoms were pretty noticeable. But now it was on a schedule. It hit at a particular hour, every night, and lasted for as long as it desired. And no matter what, it left my dear Hannah very, very tired.

I didn't finish my burger because I had lost my appetite. Calling for the check would be a good call. Hannah wasn't eating, either, and I could tell that we both wanted to leave and go somewhere quiet, somewhere private, so I could kiss her and she could kiss me, and we wouldn't have to worry about an attack. Not then. Not when the sun hadn't set just yet and the stars weren't beckoning me away.

"Sometimes," I whispered in Hannah's ear as we got up from the booth, "I wish it were contagious."

She pushed her arm into my side. Her lips caught the edge of my beard, which I purposely kept trimmed and neat.

"You don't wish that," she hissed. "You really, really don't."

***

Doctor Lazarus Neptune had given Hannah's condition a very simple name: Moon Terror. It was nightmarish in every sense of the word, and the way it took form, though consistent, was always different. According to Hannah, it always had to do with anatomical changes. Whether animalistic or not, her body fought to retain a corporeality contrasting that of her own. Sometimes, it was identifiable. Other times, it was unspeakable.

Fortunately, while the illness couldn't be cured (yet), it could be contained. Doctor Neptune and I had prepared a special room in the house, known as the Calm Room, where Hannah would seal herself away when she felt the initial symptoms. Almost always, with some deviations, they included swollen hands, double vision, migraines, and a strong urge to kill.

I had only seen Hannah succumb to an attack once, and in truth, I shouldn't have. We had first met when the moon terror wasn't so severe - at night, in fact, in a very lovely little pub downtown. I was a bartender at the time, and I had prepared her her favorite drink - a White Russian, with vanilla vodka. That was before Doctor Neptune forbade her to drink, for fear that duration of the moon terror would be prolonged due to certain parts of her brain being compromised while intoxicated.

She had been like any other girl, and still was, and that she laughed, sighed, smiled, and loved. She and I had hit it off very well. We both loved cats. She didn't mind my beard. She kissed me by the small park near the lake, when the moon was hidden behind thick fog. I had agreed to meet her there again, for a second romp through the grass, as we called it. But it was that night when the terror struck, and I didn't heed the warnings.

It started with a text - "Have to cancel - not feeling well." I still went to the park, and she tried calling me several times. My phone was set to vibrate, and I was mentally floating too high off the ground at that point to bother with it. I strolled to that part with the crescent light at my back, the intimidating silhouette of Orion above my head. I did not know that Hannah, still there, was not the Hannah I knew or had grown to learn about yet.

What I first saw was simple enough - a shadow. It lingered briefly, but it was very much feminine by nature, and it was convulsing. When the shrieks started, I saw that very shadow metamorphose into something I could identify by eye. The catamount screamed. The black panther grew from where the shadow once was, and its gaze belonged to that of a human. It kept wailing at me, as if warning me, but I could not pull away. I knew it was different from any other animal I'd seen, and I was drawn to it, in my curiosity and in my fear.

But the terror did not stop there for her. It never did. It never fell to one thing. It never maintained simple dimensions. What I saw, for lack of a better description, was like a fever. I could not explain it in layman's terms, because it wasn't just in what I saw. It was in what burned in my fingers, what pulsed behind my pupils, what dried my mouth and froze me in the grass where I stood, like it was trying to root me. The colors were not of a natural spectrum. The shapes, more than phantasmagorical. And for each minute of it, there were the plaintive cries.

"I didn't want you to see me like this!"

Monster was not a word to use. Nightmare was not a word to use. What was a bizarre spectacle, pulled far away from the rest of the city, could have killed me. Had I come sooner, that shadow would have been a dragon, and it would have had the capacity to skin me alive. But as it was, I maintained my distance, until the terrifying shapes subsided and the shadow returned. A shadow of a girl in the fetal position, shoulders shaking with crying.

I don't know how much longer it took, but her regression to her human form was not gradual. It was very sudden - one moment, the shadow, the next, the flesh. I took her into my arms, held her, cradled her, kissed her, as she told me that this never used to be so bad. That it never used to last this long.

"It's getting worse, Greg," she wept. "It's getting worse."

She told me to leave. I wouldn't. I built the Calm Room. I got Doctor Neptune to try everything. The shots. The MRIs. I had known stories of the moon terror before, but with different names. In Mongolia, an epidemic of the moon terror was known as the Wrath. In France, a "fever strain." Either it never happened more than once, or it tore the person apart. Hannah, from what I knew, was a rare case of an individual who had it chronically.

I never spoke of the moon terror to my family or my friends. They began to question why they saw Hannah less and less. I told them she was sick, and she was. The Calm Room became her bedroom, while I worked at the same pub as the manager instead of the lonely bartender. I wanted to be plagued with it, to suffer through it, for the sake of understanding.

But you didn't wish that, Gregory. You really, really didn't.

***

I came back from work at one o'clock at night, and I did not hear a sound from the Calm Room. It was one o'clock at night; perhaps she had been given a brief reprieve, and the attack had not endured for so long. I went to the kitchen to prepare myself a snack. I was famished, and the night had been hot and busy. Too many complaints about the lamb stew.

As I prepared a sandwich, my eyes shifted to the locked cabinet above my head. I noticed the half-empty bottle of Kahlua there, and the bottle of vanilla vodka. Hardly touched. There had to be lowfat milk in the refrigerator. In my addled, heat-riddled brain, I figured I could make myself a White Russian. To remember the day we met.

Three years without a drink when you worked at a bar came back with a fury. By the time I had mixed the White Russian and drank a quarter of it, I was already buzzed. I sat down at the kitchen counter and sipped, staring momentarily at the bottle of medication, the lid popped off, beside me. Hannah's trial medicine.

Maybe I shouldn't have made the joke about the raptor. The moon terror picked up on conversations and memories and stored there as if in an inventory. Like a subconscience scrambling non-sequiturs to make dreams, the terror worked cunningly to provide a new and horrid experience for Hannah. It was never the same, save for the shadows. I picked up a loose tablet and let it roll around in my hands.

I heard the squeak from the Calm Room.

"You've been practicing?" I called out.

No answer. I grew worried. I got up and left my unfinished White Russian behind. I pressed my hand against the door and listened.

"Hannah?"

The raptor squeaked again. Any other time, it would have been cute. But not tonight.

"Hannah, I'm coming in."

I opened the door to see a shadow on the wall. It was not of a woman. It was a stooped little thing, a gross menagerie of our imaginations on the wall. It remained hunched as its head pivoted. It squeaked again.

The terror had given her claws.

This week's prompt was provided by Arden Kilzer.