Read the story and check your predictions. One evening Lila wasn39;t

Read the story and check your predictions. One evening Lila wasn39;t in when Farrel came home from work at the bookstore. She had left a note on the table, under a can of tuna fish. The note said that she had gone up to the Bronx to have dinner with her mother, and probably be spending the night there. The salad in the refrigerator should be finished up before it went bad. Farrel ate the tuna fish and gave the salad to Grunewald. Grunewald was a half-grown Russian wolfhound, the colour of sour milk. He looked like a goat, and had no outside interests except shoes. Farrel was taking care of him for a girl who was away in Europe for the summer. She sent Grunewald a tape recording of her voice every week. Farrel went to a movie with a friend, and then to the West End afterwards for a beer. Then he walked home alone under a full moon, which was red and yellow. He reheated the morning coffee, played a record, read through a week-old quot;News Of The Week In Review section of the Sunday Times, and finally took Grunewald up to the roof for the night, as he always did. The dog had been accustomed to sleep in the same bed with his mistress, and the point was not negotiable. Grunewald mooed and scrabbled and butted all the way, but Farrel pushed him out among the looming chimneys and ventilators and slammed the door. Then he came downstairs and went to bed. He slept very badly. Grunewald seemed to have oone off the air perhaps it was the silence that had awakened him. Whatever the reason, he never really got back to sleep. He was lying on his back, watching a chair with his clothes on it becoming a chair again, when the wolf came in through the open window. It landed lightly in the middle of the room and stood there for a moment, breathing quickly, with its ears back. There was blood on the wolf39;s teeth and tongue, and blood on its chest. Farrel, whose true gift was for acceptance, especially in the morning, accepted the idea that there was a wolf in his bedroom and lay quite still, closing his eyes as the grim, black-lipped head swung towards him. Having once worked at a zoo, he was able to recognize the beast as a Central European subspecies: smaller and lighter-boned than in the northern timber wolf variety, lacking the thick, ruffy mane at the shoulders and having a more pointed nose and ears. His own pedantry always delighted him, even at the worst moments. Blunt ClawS-CliCking on the .linoleum, then silent on the throw rug by the bed. Something warm and slow splashed down on his shoulder, but he never moved. The wild smell of the wolf was over him, and that did frighten him at last to be in the same room with that smell and the Miro prints on the walls. Then he felt the sunlight on his eyelids, and at the same moment he heard the wolf moan softly and deeply. The sound was not repeated, but the breath on his face was suddenly sweet and smoky, dizzyingly familiar after the other. He opened his eyes and saw Lila. She was sitting naked on the edge of the bed, smiling, with her hair down. Hello, baby,quot; she said. Move over, baby. I came home.quot; Farrels gift was for acceptance. He was perfectly willing to believe that he had dreamed the wolf; to believe Lilas story of boiled chicken and bitter arguments and sleeplessness on Tremont Avenue; and to forget that her first caress had been to bite him on the shoulder, hard enough so that the blood crusting there as he got up and made breakfast might very well be his own. But he left the coffee perking and went up to the roof to get Grunewald. He found the dog sprawled in a grove of TV antennas, looking more like a goat that ever, with his throat torn out. Farrel had never actually seen an animal with its throat torn out. The coffeepot was still chuckling when he came back into the apartment, which struck him as very odd. You could have either werewolves or Pyrex nine-cup percolators in the world, but not both, surely. He told Lila, watching her face. Ula the Werewolf. Peter S. Beagle