The chair fit snugly around his lounging frame. Each warp and weft of the synthetic fabric obeyed his seat, which quite deliberately crushed its stuffing into a matching form. A wisp of milky whiteness wafted around his hand as he missed once, then looking down from the hardcover in his hand he looped a finger through the cup's crook and sipped loudly. He never used to drink decaf, but sleep evaded him recently. Restlessness yielded to nightmares, and the sweats grew worse and worse. He hoped, as he sucked down the rancid beverage, that tonight would be different.

He first noticed it when he grabbed the cup, and now every turn of the page seared in his knuckles. He shifted, wiped his brow, and continued reading.

"With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the--"

Another twinge. He flattened his trousers and began again.

"With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the--"

The hair on his face began to itch. Still, he persisted.

"With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two."

Just then it erupted within him. He flailed about violently, the book impaled now to the viscous claws protruding from his claw-like fingers. The itch was all over him, and streaks of blood stained his clothes as he desperately scratched. Hair now began bursting from every follicle on his contorted body. A hellacious growl echoed down the hallway and out an open window near the front of the house, where it was met by a chorus of tormented wails and howls. As his transformation completed he bolted through the wall of his study, breaching the wall of the house. A kennel of beasts greets him there and instinctively they take off together into the bright white light of the full moon night.