Then it stood up into the light.
It was meant to be a night fishing trip on the Galena River, just over the Wisconsin line. Then someone slammed the car trunk on the rods and snapped all the tips off. With their girlfriends busy, the five friends decided instead to drive down to Council Hill, Illinois, to find an old farmhouse in the woods that local legend says is haunted. None of them had been there before.
They left around ten under a full moon and got lost before finding the road in. At the end of it, a metal bar across a bridge blocked cars, so they walked the last mile into the woods. The night already felt strange. It was unusually cold for late July in Wisconsin. On one side of the road the fields were full of fireflies, and on the side toward the house there wasn't a single one. They felt tired and short of breath. Phone and flashlight batteries drained fast. They heard howls and screams in the distance but put those down to coyotes. Rabbits and other small animals ran past them, all heading away from the house.
For the last 150 yards they felt watched from a thick tangle of brush on their left. To get a view of the house, they scrambled up a steep gravel embankment onto a railway bridge. Four of them stayed there, admiring the house in the moonlight, while the teller walked about a hundred yards along the tracks to see where they went.
Up ahead, a shadow moved around a railway signal light and blocked it out for a few seconds. Still not frightened, the teller crept about ten steps closer. Something was crouched on the embankment beside the tracks. It stood up with a sound like knuckles cracking into a microphone and stepped into the light.
It was six or seven feet tall and grey. It had wide, heavily muscled shoulders and a thick ruff of fur around the neck, somewhere between a lion's mane and the rest of its coat. The head looked exactly like a wolf's, in proportion, with glowing white eyes, a small brow ridge and teeth showing at the sides of its mouth. The upper arms were short and the forearms freakishly long. The huge hands ended in black claws. The lower legs bent backward like a dog's. It took three steps and broke into a hunched trot, arms dangling limp and longer than its lower legs.
The teller screamed at the others to run. Three of them fled back along the tracks. The teller and one friend plunged down the embankment into the brush. At the old railway underpass a light suddenly appeared, floating toward them and stopping a few feet away, with no voices and no engine. When the teller crept through to look, there was nothing for three hundred yards.
They found the others by their shouts. One friend was ashen. The youngest was in shock, staring blankly and muttering "werewolf" over and over. They ducked under the bar on the bridge, piled into the car and drove out screaming, the teller's hands shaking on the wheel. None of them ever went back.