Hello I'm R.L. Stine. I write the Goosebumps books. You know werewolf legends haunted people's dreams for hundreds of years. Imagine: a full moon, someone beneath it, slowly turning into a ferocious wolf creature. Our parents and our grandparents love to be scared by the classic werewolf tales. And I hope you will enjoy The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. I'll see you after the show. Right now I'm going for a quick bite!
Chapter 1
We moved to Florida during Christmas vacation. A week later, I heard the frightening howls in the swamp for the first time. Night after night, the howls made me sit up in bed. I would hold my breath and wrap my arms around myself to keep from shivering. I would stare out my bedroom window at the chalk-colored full moon. And I would listen. What kind of creature makes such a cry? I would ask myself. And how close is it? Why does it sound as if it's right outside my window? The wails rose and fell like police car sirens. They weren't sad or mournful. They were menacing. Angry. They sounded to me like a warning. Stay out of the swamp. You do not belong here.
I'm getting ahead of myself. When we moved in, mom and I were inspecting the house, and we were looking at my "new" room if you could call it that. "What a great space," she said. "Bigger than your old room." I was unimpressed. It looked like no one had been in here for years, and no one was there to take care of it either. "It looks…used." "It's rustic," mom replied. "Rustic's in these days." I noticed something black on the wall. "Is that a bloodstain?" "No that's…dry rot."
Suddenly, we heard a scream! One that we knew. My sister, Emily. She came stomping out of the bathroom. "That is it," she growled. "I don't care what mom or dad say, I'm not living here!" Dad came in upstairs. "What's wrong?" My sister pointed at the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Inside was something wriggling and moving and brown. "It's just a corn snake," Dad said, picking it up. My sister made a face. "Give the snake an earring, and he'll look like your old boyfriend." Emily glared at me. I never really liked her old boyfriend, always calling me little.
"Emily," Dad said. "We live next door to a swamp, so you may have to get used to things that crawl, or slither." "Besides yourself," I said at her, smiling. "Grady," Dad said to me. "I want you and Emily to set this free in the swamp." "MOM!" Em and I protested together. "Go on, a little wildlife never hurt anybody," Mom said. "Just don't wander off to far."
The swamp was just as creepy at day time as it was at night time. Trees with slender, white trunks tilted over each other. Their flat, broad leaves appeared to form a roof, covering the swamp floor in blue shadow and the ponds probably had…well, I did not want to know what kind of predators lived there. I thought they had alligators. Emily was on the lookout from any dangerous wildlife. I know I didn't have to look far with her around. "There," I said. "That log is a good place for this little fellow to live." "Just get on with it before I lose my mind." I scoffed at my sister. "Where's your sense of adventure." I placed the snake under the log, and it slithered away from us. "Now we can go," I said.
The two of us began to walk away from the log and for home. Occasionally we'd see some wildlife. A loud whooping sound startled us. Oh, it's just a bird. "It's a crane," Emily exclaimed. She certainly looked like one. Tall and thin with a long neck and blond hair. Like Mom. Me, I got some of my looks from dad. Brown wavy hair. Dark eyes. A little chunky.
"Wait. How did we get here, again?" I asked. We looked around. Nothing looked familiar. "Was it this way," asked Emily. "No, that way," I said. No. This was not happening! We were lost! "Don't panic," I said to Emily. "I think I recognize that pond. We're in the right direction." We rushed towards the path we took, knowing there was nothing that could go wrong. "What's that?" hushed Emily. The sound of twigs snapping caught my attention. It was getting closer. We no longer walked. We ran! Right into one a man and he didn't look friendly either.
He glared at us with wild black eyes. He had long, gray-white hair, down past his shoulders, tied behind him in a loose ponytail. His face was bright red, sunburned, maybe. Or maybe red from anger. He wore a loose-fitting white T-shirt, dirt-stained and wrinkled, over heavy black trousers that bagged over his sandals. As he glared at us with those amazing black eyes, his mouth opened, revealing rows of jagged yellow teeth.
Neither one of us said a word. We just stared at him until we slowly crept by him then started running back home.
(I own nothing. Goosebumps belongs to R.L. Stine and Scholastic Inc.)