Some of the tension now broken, I felt a little better. I decided to go downstairs and ask Peter, like Micky suggested.
I went downstairs and found Peter in the kitchen, cleaning up the soup. I sat down at the table.
"Did you see Micky?" he asked. I nodded. "Good. He'll be ok, Davy, trust me," he said, and continued washing the pot.
"Pete, he stutters," I said. "Why does he do that?"
"I don't know, exactly," Peter said. "I've got a theory." He put down the pot he was washing and sat down at the table.
See, when you attacked him, the aknimal instinct told you to go for the throat. But instead of biting on it, like a mountain lion would, your human instinct told you to grab the throat with your hands...er...claws."
"But still, Pete, if I damaged the vocal cords then wouldn't he not be able to talk at all?" I asked, confused.
"That's what I would have thought, too," Peter said. "But somehow he can."
"You didn't injure them normally, Dave," I heard a voice say. It was Mike, coming in with a bag of groceries. I'd been wondering where he was. "Some how you damaged them so he can only speak a syllable at a time. Don't know how, but you did."
"Will he be like this forever or will he get worse or something?" I asked.
Peter shrugged. "Maybe he'll get better, or maybe he'll get worse, 'till he looses his voice all the way. We can't say because we'd have to see a doctor, and we can't do that."
That night, despite Mike and Peter's protests, I slept in the closet. Not on the floor, but on a cot, since they both insisted that I was NOT to sleep on the floor. The night began peaceful. The cot was comfortable, and I slept calmly, enjoying a comfortable dream about sailing on the ocean. But then the sky grew dark. I started to feel that skin-ripping pain again. I awoke in a fright.
Despite the low temperature of the closet, I started to sweat profusely. I thought wildly. I had to stop myself. I couldn't let this happen. The pain started in my stomach. Something wanted to get out, and it wanted to get out through the walls of my stomach. My skin hurt like a horrible sunburn, and my stomach began to lurch.
And the pain continued. My head ached and I sweat even more. I sat up, hunched over, and gripped my stomach in attempt to ease the pain. Every little movement hurt.
My left hand felt odd, as if it were falling asleep, but worse. I held it up and looked at it. It was covered in yellow-ish hairs already. Before my very eyes I observed my hand change shape and my nails grew into long, sharp claws. And my other hand followed. My face ripped apart as as my face changed shape. My feet followed a similar change as my hands. My arms grew longer, my legs shorter, and a tail sprouted at the end of my spinal cord (which is, at best, an indescribable feeling). I could hold out no longer against the immense pain, and opened my mouth to scream. But instead of a human scream, I heard the scream of a mountain lion.
