Read City Under the Moon for Free Online

he took his wireless keyboard and mouse to the bed and bumped up the font size on his Opera web browser.
    He was currently administrating six websites. One of them wasn’t live yet; he’d been hard at work creating content to launch modernwitchcraftandmagick.com by February first. Another, truthabouttheblairwitch.com, he’d all but abandoned. He usually only got about ten messages a day from his Lovecraft shrine, but his Magic: The Gathering site’s forum could get up to a thousand posts per day. The others fell somewhere in between. Tonight there had been a little spike on one of his less-traveled pages, ofwolvesandmen.com.
    Of Wolves and Men was his master’s thesis on lycanthropy , the transformation of man into wolf. Unlike his other sites, it was distinctly non-interactive. There were no forums, no feedback button; his contact information was listed only for solicitors of his web design services. He didn’t want to hear from the Twilight girls who kept pictures of Jacob on their hope chests (although it was a blessing that they’d finally stolen the thunder from the Buffy fans who claimed to be wiccans because they knew how to light candles). He’d spent time in the faux-werewolf “community” and become familiar with the “scene,” which existed primarily in competing forums and YouTube videos. He’d played their “misunderstood by society” game for a while, even commissioning his own dentures from a well-respected fangsmith. But at the end of the day, those people weren’t interested in the truth; they’d just latched onto a clique that’d given them an opportunity to shun society back for their own perceived social excommunication. Lon wasn’t looking to lycanthropy for something precious to call his own.
    Not that he’d deny his passions. He was a fan of many things: collectible card games, vintage sci-fi, massively multiplayer role-playing games, the women of seventies-era sci-fi television; the fantasy writings of Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Robert Jordan, and master J.R.R. Tolkien; the artworks of Bernie Wrightson, Frank Frazetta, and H.R. Giger; music of articulated spite; all things Lord of the Rings; and much more. He lived to indulge in fandom, and unlike the pussies at school, he wasn’t afraid to let his passions show.
    But his interest in the occult—in lycanthropy specifically—wasn’t a matter of fandom. Even a modicum of research would result in far too much evidence for any educated mind to deny the truth.
    No, the truth (if such a concept could be removed from abstracts and primal fears) is that preternatural lurkers are all around us. Hiding in the mist, scratching in the dark, flirting with our subconscious... But their dark magicks became hidden eons ago. Those “in the know”—interesting that they called themselves Illuminati —forged a dark pact with the Devil ( perhaps, but not necessarily specifically, the Biblical interpretation of such a beast), shrouding corporeal manifestations of evil in alternate planes of existence, thus obscuring the truth so that normal folk might sleep peacefully. But, alas, the human imagination would not be thoroughly repressed, and so our creative minds had invented bastardized versions of the demons persisting in our nightmares, and proliferated them throughout popular culture.
    Every society in the history of the world has concocted its own legend of a human shapeshifter! Coincidence? Please!
    But everything was about to change. The Internet was a new tool, one that could never have been imagined by the silent monks, banished priests, and outcast lepers—those purged from society in order to keep the secret of the dark pact. Righteous warriors, speakers of the dark truths, would band together through new information networks, sharing their intelligence in virtual secret cabals, restoring to mankind the lost knowledge we so desperately need.
    Diddle-eee! Diddle-iddle-dee-dee-do-dee-dee!
    Diddle-eee!