Wear Wolf
A group of seven friends head out to the Crowhaven Woods after it has been officially cleared of its dangerous wolf population to be the first people to camp safely. It seems there is at least one danger still in the woods as they quickly find themselves the ones hunted.
(M tf wolf-like body horror)
Monty is not generally someone to be found in the outdoors. His father is a rather famed hunter, and so he has lived a life of relative luxury. Today he finds himself out in the woods helping set up tents with six friends though; Dan, Theresa, Glory, Hue, Mike, and Carl. The Crowhaven Woods marked a halfway point between their town and the next- not technically within the limits of either. Up till recently the wolf population was rather dense, so camping out was out of the question, unless you wanted to be eaten. Because they ate the game all the town's hunters needed to bring back to make a living, they were a rather large problem to the town's trade, so the mayor commissioned Monty's father, and wiped the wolves out. That is what spurred this camping trip- a sort of celebration. To be one of the first groups of people to camp in these woods that were not long ago too dangerous to be in.
The others made fun of Monty as he clearly needed help doing his part to set up camp- not at all used to doing such things. He was the only one not eager to get a fire going as soon as possible as well, because he was adorned heavily in a wolf fur cloak made from his father's kills. Everyone else was getting chilly- it is late fall and nearly all the leaves are already on the ground. Mushrooms adorn the forest floor between leaves while the rest of the plant life is smothered under them. Wolves cleared out most everything else from the forest, and now man has cleared out the wolves, so the forest is very quiet. The seven of them gathered to the fire as the sun went down and began telling spooky stories.
Once everyone started to wander from the flames and into their tents; Monty was the last to make a move. Hue looked at him as he got up himself.
"You good man? You've been looking into that fire like you are expecting something to jump out of it."
"O-o-oh, yea. Just... a little on edge. Normally those sort of spooky stories do not affect me, but tonight... I feel sort of out of it and more tired than usual, maybe that is why."
"Ah, yea. You don't usually get out, right? All the fresh air and moving around killed your energy because your body ain't used to it. Get some rest. Everybody probably going to sleep in tomorrow- don't think anyone brought an alarm clock."
When Monty took his advice and went to sleep that night he had an uncomfortable dream. He stood over a field of dead wolves, laying on the ground between trees and covering all the visible ground with blood and bodies! Monty was startled by his father patting him on the shoulder and congratulating him on the mass-murder of the beasts. Monty was dazed and shook his head- he had nothing to do with it, but his father insisted on celebrating Monty's kills. Monty then realized he was holding a long barrel rifle in his hand.
He woke up the next day at around noon. His dreams seemed a reflection of reality. His friends all pat him on the back and talk as if Monty was the one who rid the forest of the wolves and allowed campers and trade caravans to pass through. Monty had no part in it- it was entirely his father. Monty himself doesn't even know how to properly hold a gun.
Theresa was a bit on edge and getting everyone else to look around the camp because she woke to find Mike missing. The others assured her he probably woke up long before anyone else since he was the first asleep and just wandered off on a hike. Because these woods were so dangerous until just recently there are no trails to follow, so he might have gotten a bit lost.
After eating a late breakfast, Carl spoke up. "I will go on a hike myself- look for Mike."
Theresa looked even more worried. "What if you get lost too?!"
Carl pulled out a hunting knife. "I will mark the larger trees I walk past, so I have a trail to follow back."
Carl wandered off into the woods, placing the first notch in a tree from just outside visibility of the camp. He did not need to mark the trees that close together. The leaves are piled high, so his feet disappear entirely into them every time he steps down. It also made it easy to trip on the root of trees though, because he could not actually see the ground. The bare thin branches of the trees above clacked together in the wind every now and then, though the wind was gentle at ground level; mostly blocked by the tree trunks. Carl put his hands in his pockets to keep his fingertips from freezing. It is cold enough that his breath is barely visible in the air. He spotted a river and turned to walk down to the water. The river would make an easy landmark to follow. On his way down though he noticed a notch in the tree. Wait, that cannot be his... he just got here. He looked around carefully and spotted at least eight other trees around him had notches in the trunk. What the fuck? Uhhh, that made finding his way back a lot harder.
Monty woke up later to several others calling his name and quickly popped out of his tent again. "Y-yea?"
Theresa gave him a sour look. "Oh gods, you were in your tent the whole time? We thought you disappeared too!"
"N-no. I fell asleep again reading a book I brought. I have been feeling... unwell."
Even after having plenty of sleep the night before he still felt drained. He also felt like something was watching him, even isolated in his tent. A tension like something bad was going to happen but he did not know what. Carl never returned, and neither did Mike. Dan and Glory wanted to stay put- if they wander off to look they may also get lost, and the camp needs to be here still for them to find their way back to. Theresa wanted to turn tails and go back to town immediately to get help. Hue and Monty did not take sides; they would just go with whatever plan everyone else settled on. The afternoon started to wane however, and then the sun dipped. Now everyone was worried- but now was too late to make any changes. They could not go look nor return to town without the daylight. They just stoked the fire to act as a guide for the two lost campers and had themselves a dinner. No one was in the mood for scary stories that night.
Monty again did not want to move from the fireside, too afraid to move while he felt eyes on him at all times. Maybe if he just remained perfectly still whatever is watching will not see him. Eventually he had to go to sleep at risk of falling asleep while sitting up and flopping into the fire. Unlike the town, there is no lit windows or streetlights out here. The sky had a thin mat of white clouds so the stars could not be seen at night either- though you occasionally seen a pillar of blue-white light from the moon peeking through the rare gap in the clouds. The rest is black. Bare branches reach into the sky like bony fingers and clack together in the wind. Leaves constantly rustled along the ground- someone could be walking right beside you and you would not be able to tell if it was the wind or their footsteps. Occasionally a flicker from the fire would light up the surroundings enough to show a flash of white or pale grey from mushrooms on the lower part of the trees or the forest floor- making paranoid minds see the whites of an eye or the glint of barred fangs instead. The human mind is trained to recognize patterns for instinctual reasons- unfortunately this causes it to sometimes see things that are not actually there. Every time a log burned down enough to roll lower in the fire pit, the light of the flames shifted and Monty fully woke back up in paranoid fear. The movement of the wood in the fire sounds like footsteps, and the shifting light looks at first like someone's shadow playing across the outside of his tent.
When Monty finally got to sleep, it was for too short a time and he woke again in a daze- still very much in the deep of night. This time to Glory's screaming he woke. He rushed outside of the tent, the night especially cold now so he clutched the wolf fur cloak tightly. It took him too long to realize what he was even looking at. Glory curled into a ball, crying and trembling in fear and Theresa barely any better, though also trying to comfort her. Dan and Hue were just frozen in disbelief, and in this; Monty joined them. Mike and Carl returned to camp finally and were sitting by the fire- Glory was going out to pee when she seen them and as soon as she touched Mike on the shoulder he fell back limp and she realized they had not returned alive. From the back they looked fine, though on closer examination you would notice their clothes are dark and damp- sodden with congealing blood. Their skin has been removed off most of their bodies, and their internal organs are lacerated, though still present. Their clothing however was put back on over them, and their heads were untouched, which is why they at first looked fine from the back.
Hue spotted and quickly pointed out several notches in some nearby trees... no... not notches... claw marks. Dan found large paw prints in the exposed ground of the campsite, and everyone was quick to identify the paw print as being that of a wolf. Everyone looked to Monty as if he were somehow at fault for this.
Hue spoke up first. "Your old man must have missed some wolves..."
Dan furrowed his brow. "Not some... I think it is just the one. We haven't heard a damn thing, right? Wolves communicate to each other with howls and yips to coordinate attacks. We haven't heard anything- which means it isn't talking to anyone else, it's alone."
Theresa threw her hands up suddenly. "Does that really fucking matter?! Who fucking cares how many there is, we need to get the fuck out of here and back to town NOW. It killed Mike and Carl!"
Monty slowly shook his head, still trying to wrap his head around the situation himself. "That isn't a wolf... that can't be a wolf! Why would a wild animal not eat what it killed? Not to mention drag the bodies back to our camp and prop them up?! What the fuck kind of animal does THAT?!"
Glory managed to speak up through her sobbing. "Then how do you explain the claw marks, and the paw print?"
Monty had no reply for that. The nature of the body placement seemed like the work of a sadistic human psychopath, but the wounds on the bodies are claw marks not knife wounds, and a human can't leave a wolf paw print. Hue grabbed a large stick from the fire to use as a torch. They would abandon the camp and their belongings for now just to get the hell out of the forest as soon as possible and get help. Monty's father apparently needed to do another sweep of Crowhaven. The trees blocked even their torch light, so for everyone but Hue who holds it- the light would cut out entirely as he walked around trees and the pillars of light shifted. The time they are in the light prevented their eyes from adjusting to the night. Everything outside of the light was absolute black. Their chest muscles tensed so tightly from stress and fear it felt like they could hardly breathe. Glory could not stop sobbing, though the wetness on her face attracted the cold and made her cheeks sting.
Suddenly Hue vanished and his torch fell to the ground! Everyone rushed forward to take up the torch before it lit the leaves aflame and burned the entire forest down. Hue slid off the path into a steep slope into a sunken area of the forest where rain and other moisture pooled to create a bit of a mire. The part of the path he stepped on was actually entirely made of leaves held up by low branches and roots, so when she stepped on it he fell through! Monty was quick to volunteer to go help him, since he is wearing a wolf fur cloak he can stand to be away from the flames longer before freezing. Hue did not seem particularly hurt, but he also could not immediately find a way back up- the slope he fell down is far too steep to climb back up. Because of the same branches and roots that held up the false part of the path; the torch light barely reached Hue at the bottom, only thin dots of light made it all the way down. Monty slid down deliberately and tried to be more careful but still underestimated how steep it is, and ended up hitting a root on the ground and tripping forward, getting smacked in the face on the way down with a branch.
He must have briefly been knocked out or at least dazed. For several moments he was only half conscious- hearing lots of sound but his brain was slow to realize the sounds are screaming. His eyes focused on Hue's body beside him, his guts torn out and the skin shredded off his front! His eyes are still open in terror- though the life has already left his body. Monty looked around him in terror, seeing blood splattered everywhere! He heard so much movement around him but could not identify what was the killer and what was simply the woods! The leaves on the ground and the branches clacking together- it all masks any sounds made in the forest!
"Guys, it's down here somewhere! It got Hue!"
Theresa turned to Glory and shoved her forward. "Run ahead, run toward town and do not stop!"
"Theresa, do you see a way I can climb up?!" Monty then noticed she was leaving behind Glory. "Wait, don't leave me down here with it!"
"Isn't it obvious, Monty?! You are the one it wants. Whatever it is- it wants revenge and you are the son of the hunter. It just killed Hue, even though you were right beside him, and it did not touch you? It is killing us to fuck with you, to prolong the hunt."
That is why the bodies were brought back to the camp- to make sure Monty seen them. It wants Monty dead- but it also wants him to die last, to suffer the most. Theresa did not plan on being part of a killer's plot of revenge against someone else- she sent Glory sprinting just ahead of her and then bolted after, chasing the torch light in the dark. Then Monty was left at the bottom beside the corpse of Hue in the darkness of the lower forest.
Monty's body did not want to move, terror gripped him and the cold numbed his flesh and all he wanted to do was curl into a ball and close his eyes and pray it all passed by him. But if he stopped, he would surely die. There was a mist around Hue- the heat from his exposed blood steamed in the air and hovered around his corpse like a ghostly aura. Monty felt so out of it. His vision blurred and it felt like he was fading in and out of sleep even as he trudged forward. It was so dark that it was hard to tell if his eyes were open or closed sometimes. He had a very brief sleep which did not help, and he had already been feeling unwell, now terror stricken and stressed on top of sleep deprived- he was barely conscious.
He did not even hear their screams. Monty realized he had been turned around and was walking back into the forest- but also apparently gotten further than the two women, because he found Glory on the side of the path they had been taken- claw wounds on the backs of her legs that tripped her and half her skull caved in, with her blood and brains splattered against the side of a nearby tree.
Monty heard what almost sounded like Theresa's voice on the wind and looked around for a moment trying to see her. She must have had the torch now- Glory did not, but he could not see its light anywhere. Then he felt a strong pain for a moment and backed up, seeing Theresa for a brief moment like a ghostly specter, with the torch held toward him! His shirt burned away, leaving a hole in it on his chest and scorched skin under it! He furrowed his brows and reached into the darkness where he briefly seen her and felt like something tried to shove his arm back, and then he seen a bloody Theresa drop to the ground and her torch suddenly burned out. Monty's outreaching arm was absolutely covered in fresh blood! The feeling started to creep back into his fingers as Theresa's blood warmed his flesh again. She is dead? It is like he watched her being killed almost, but did not see a killer?!
A deep, gurgly voice resonated in his thoughts so loudly it was as if someone was talking directly into his ear. "Good job my boy. You hunted them all." Monty's eyes widened as he slowly lifted his hands and seen the congealed blood under his nails- his skin felt tacky from the drying blood that had rusted as it dried to a near-black. "You skinned all the humans in the forest."
Monty was never attacked, because he is the one who killed them. Either passed out or fallen out of view- Monty was never accounted for when a kill happened. As he looked in horror at his own blood caked hands, his body was filled with pain. His skin pinched and his bones ached, it felt like something huge inside of him was trying to stretch and it was larger than his actual body. His nails started to turn charcoal grey themselves and grow thicker and longer, taking on an arched shape! The peach fuzz hair on the back of his hand started to grow thicker and bristly into a mat of fur! His chest started to grow a large triangular mat of fur under his clothing as well, and pressing into the clothing over it caused it to itch in irritation! He reached up and grabbed his shirt, tearing it open with his new claws- though they did not end in points. His pubes turned to fur as well and started to spread up to his belly button as two sets of dots appeared flanking it- vestigial nipples.
His skin was pulled painfully tight as his limbs started to grow longer! His hands deformed and stretched and fat deposits stole mass from his body and formed bubbles on his palm and the ends of each digit- creating a paw pad. His feet underwent the same process, shredding the ends of his socks and as his ankles popped out and arose from his boots on their own, he slipped his footwear off entirely. Neither his feet or hands looked human, but they also did not completely turn to paws. He had no dewclaws- his thumbs were still very much thumbs, but were now too far from his fingers to really have much of a use. All five toes remained lined up in the front, rather than the big toe regressing at all. Fresh blood dripped from his own skin at the base of the newly grown claws from their rapid growth, but the claws grew thick enough to block the flow by the time they stopped. The tops of his feet, his forearms, and his shins grew mats of fur as well and then as he hunched over and his torso grew a bit longer, he grew a patch on his back as well.
Monty kept moaning 'no' over and over as the voice in his head continued to congratulate him and successfully killing his own friends. He remembered the dream he had the other night only now it was the bodies of everyone in town littering the ground instead of the body of wolves. His spine grew much longer, giving his neck extra length, his midriff became longer causing him to hunch over since his torso had less support, and finally even his tail bone extended; though only just so. Long fur grew off his tail- but it never fully developed so it was rather short, though bushy. Even his genitals shifted again his will! His penis seemed to retreat entirely into itself causing the foreskin to swallow it and thicken, darken, and then fur spread out over it. His balls were consumed in fur, and he felt a pulsing ache in them, but then a gentle pleasure, and with each pulse it hurt less and felt more pleasure.
"No more human sperm, we don't need those. All the humans will be dead soon anyway. The only thing you will be able to fuck are wolves."
It felt like the head of his penis was being sucked in by some strange internal force, but at the same time the urethra did not relent, and remained as far as it already was even as the end of the penis dipped inward. At the same time the pressure reversed at the base, making it feel like it was ballooning out and turning stone-hard! When the very tip of his penis was once again visible at the opening of his former foreskin he seen the red point of a canine phallus! The glans of his penis were still vaguely human though- just wider than long now. Like the rest of his changes; his body became inhuman but could also not entirely go wolf either, so it ended up as some malformed in-between. Even his ears became pointed and furry, but were still firmly affixed to the sides of the head, unable to pivot or move around like an actual wolf.
Monty fell to all fours and his groans of pain and panic started to sound distorted and gurgly as his vocal chords deformed and the vengeful spirit possessed them as well. His face started to push forward and flecks of glowing yellow started to appear in his iris, slowly overtaking their natural green. He cried out in pain from a feeling like someone scraping down the inside of his nose! The cartilage in his nose shortened as calcium bled into it and converted it to be more actual bone. His entire face stung and stretched so painfully tight, and he realized with shock that his head actually isn't growing. Only his skull is. His teeth turning to large fangs became exposed to the open air as his mouth could no longer contain them, then the skull grew still bigger. Blood started to ooze out the corners of his mouth and smear across the fangs as they emerged forcefully. The skull is becoming too long for the unchanged face to contain, pushing further and further out of the stretched mouth! His nose finally gave up the ghost and popped free of the bone, causing it to twack back and fall somewhat limp on the face- the cartilage remained inside the bridge of the nose but the bone was now elsewhere, so it sort of just sat loose on the face, not actually attached to anything. The actual nose on the skull emerged from the top of the mouth! More and more stretched out, smeared with copper toned blood before the wolf let out a sort of roar, and then a pleased howl of triumph! In opening its bone mouth, it stretched the flesh mouth beyond its capabilities and tore Monty's face open across the sides, exposing even more fangs through the ripped open cheeks!
His eyes now golden yellow and glowing brightly in the dark. The eyes were possessed of a rather vacant look of surprise- the expression caught between Monty's terror and the wolf's giddy joy. Even when it walked on two legs it hunched forward- mixing human and wolf traits together resulted in its limbs being freakishly long- and because the skin did not stretch well, they are very bony looking. Monty is still fully conscious, but has no control of his body, or even voice. He has no way to communicate that he is still trapped inside the monster, forced to witness its actions.
"Now I will wear your pelt." The wolf looked back toward town. Now that he had Monty's body, he also has his knowledge on where to find his father. "Now I hunt."