student papers. Not my favorite way to spend a Friday night, but at least if I got them out of the way, I could enjoy the rest of the weekend. I polished the last one off by eleven, finished the data entry into the departmental grading system a little before midnight, and went to bed.
But not, alas, to sleep. The moon was still almost a week from full, but it shone straight through my window, and when I finally got up to pull the shade down and block it out, I realized even that wouldn't help my insomnia.
I went back out to the kitchen and opened Professor Wilmarth's grimoire again. I felt a curious reluctance to touch the stained leather cover, and my stomach turned slightly at the faint smell of sulfur.
I remembered that the archaic name for sulfur was brimstone. Maybe I should have photocopied the relevant pages after all and made Tom take the nasty thing away.
Nonsense. I made myself turn to the werewolf spell, and as so often happens, I got caught up in the project. I looked up after what I thought was only a few minutes of reading and realized that day was breaking.
Just as well. I had to look up a few things in the university library.
By Saturday evening, I was pretty sure I'd puzzled out the werewolf spell. In fact, I'd puzzled out nearly all the spells in the book, some of them a lot more useful sounding.
Mixing up the powder needed for the werewolf spell would be challenging, since most of the ingredients weren't FDA approved. I'd figured out that djinn's eggs were mandrake roots. The devil's trumpet was datura, or jimson weed. And I was reasonably sure that when the werewolf spell called for "the haire of the beast," it wasn't some archaic equivalent of "hair of the dog." It meant real wolf hair.
The herbs were bad enough, but grinding up wolf hair and eating it? Yuck.
Tom could probably dig up a wolf pelt somewhere, but what if hair from a dead wolf didn't work? Worse, what if it turned him into a dead wolf at moonrise?
Not that I necessarily believed the spell would work. At least half the herbs needed for the powder were strong hallucinogens. A few sprinkles of the stuff and you wouldn't need to be a werewolf to howl at the moon.
Too many sprinkles would kill you. And annoying as he could be, I didn't really want Tom dead.
Phil, now.
Okay, it was a crazy idea, but I decided to take Phil as my guinea pig. I'd use a nonlethal dose of the various toxins, so if the spell didn't work, the powder would give him only a few stomach cramps, and I could tell Tom I told you so.
And if it did work, it wouldn't be Tom hauled in by Animal Control and maybe waking up in a cage.
Sunday afternoon I gathered my ingredients. Most of them I had to get from a pair of ex-students who'd dropped out during the sixties and now ran a highly unconventional herb farm out in the mountains twenty miles from town.
Sunday evening I mixed the powder and baked it into some brownies - one of Phil's favorites as well as Tom's. Mixed up a few other useful-sounding concoctions from the grimoire while I was at it. If the werewolf spell worked, I'd give some of them a try.
Once the brownies had cooled, I wrapped them up in some paper with jolly Santa Clauses all over it and attached a gift tag that said, "Merry Christmas, Professor Phil!" I made the dots over the i's into hearts. He'd probably think some lovestruck coed had left them on his porch in the middle of the night.
When I got back from my late-night delivery, I cleaned up all my herbs and tools and hid them in Mrs. Grogan's garage. In her late husband's fishing box, which hadn't been opened in a decade.
I kept the radio on nonstop for the next few days, so I'd hear right away if the campus station reported a popular young medieval history professor succumbing to food poisoning. But all I heard was the usual endless carol marathon.
Christmas Day arrived, and with it the full moon. Though moonrise wasn't until 4:52 P.M. I'd checked. The hours crawled by.
At least I had some distraction. I'd invited Tom for dinner. I fixed the traditional spread - turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, the works. I was hoping Tom would be too focused on