We love our friends the Kuha-Welters. On Saturday nights we play Dungeons and Dragons with Sam and all our nerdy friends. Sundays we come to visit and talk with Sam and Lee, and play with their kids Roland and Daphne. My partner Göran likes that they have lots of pets: four cats named Ting-a-ling, Max, Peregrin and Chloe; a corn snake named Corny; a rabbit named Zappo Bunbun; an indefinite number of guinea pigs including Ruckles, Misty, Jet, Cloud, Tiger and lots of baby guineas; and a brand new puppy named Frodo. We like to talk and paint dragon models, eat, play board games, walk to the park, and generally hang out together.

One Sunday in October while we were visiting at the Kuha-Welters', Daphne ran into the house through the front door and exclaimed, "Come look! Something is wrong with the squirrels!" Lee and I were talking, and Daphne came right up to us and starting tugging on Lee's sleeve and crying over and over, "Hey Ma! Hurry up! Come look at the squirrels! Come look at the squirrels!"

Lee said, "Stop pestering us, little girl! We're trying to talk!"

But then Göran and Roland rushed in through the front door too, and Göran said, "You guys have got to come out here!"

Roland said, "The squirrels are acting weird."

Lee and I sighed and I said, "I guess we're going to have to go look at the squirrels."

So we stepped out the front door, Daphne clutching her Ma by the hand and Roland grabbing my arm and pulling me ahead. We walked down the steps and across the lawn toward the big tree out in front. "They're in the tree!" said Roland. So we looked at the tree.

"I don't see any squirrels," said Lee.

"They were here just a second ago," said Roland.

"You should have come when I told you!" shouted Daphne.

We heard Sam yelling from the backyard by the barbeque, "Hey guys, the chicken's almost ready!"

"So what did you guys see?" I asked Göran.

We were just about to turn and head back when I saw it. Lee saw it too, the kids saw it, and Göran saw it. We all saw it at the same time and we stopped dead, just staring. The squirrel looked bloated and scrofulous. It was huge, twice the size of any normal squirrel. It had been shedding fur and there were patches on its stomach and sides where puffy white skin was showing through. Its tail wasn't very squirrel-like, long, thin and black, and bare at the end like a rat's tail. It made a kind of whiny, growling noise and had something in its mouth, its long front teeth dug into something small, fat and pink. Something bloody. Then the squirrel disappeared behind one of the larger branches.

Daphne screamed.

Lee marched closer, to the other side of the tree. Roland said, "Ma, don't go over there!"

"Is that what you saw?" I gasped. And Göran said, "No!"

Lee stomped all around the tree, staring up into the branches for another glimpse of it, whatever it was, but she never found it. It had vanished completely.

"I'm going to call Animal Control," said Lee.

"If that's not what you saw," I pressed Göran, "what did you see?"

He replied, "We saw squirrels, normal squirrels. But they were running up and down the branches and chattering like crazy, and it looked like they were fighting."

Daphne was crying. I asked her, "What's the matter?" and she said, "I think that was a baby squirrel."

"That wasn't a baby," I said.

Daphne said, "No! In it's mouth. It had a baby squirrel in its mouth."

Sam showed up and said, "The chicken's gonna get co. . ." Then he saw Daphne crying and Lee pacing around the tree, craning her neck and staring up into the branches, and Roland crying "OK! Ma! Let's get away from the tree!"

Sam said, "What's wrong?"

That was all we could talk about the rest of the evening. Lee tried calling Animal Control, but all she got was a phone menu. After listening to minutes of useless instructions and pressing button after button, she wasn't even able to talk to a real person, just got some voice mailbox where she was encouraged to leave a message. She was furious. "My children could be at risk!" she yelled edgily into the phone, just before banging down the receiver.

By the time we were ready to leave that night, it was dark out. As we walked down the back sidewalk toward the garage, I thought I saw it in the shadows, a pale, fat, fuzzy thing crouching behind the roots of the tree and then disappearing up the trunk.

So the next Sunday when we came to visit, I asked Lee, "Did you ever get through to Animal Control?"

"They didn't call back for three days!" she growled.

"What did they do?" I asked.

"Nothing!" She told us how she'd had an argument with some guy who'd eventually called back, and how she'd told them there was probably a public health risk, but they hadn't wanted to listen, etcetera, etcetera. They kept asking her if she was sure she'd seen what she'd seen. They never sent anybody to investigate. "But they'll have to believe me now," Lee said.

"What do you mean?"

Lee said, "Wait till you see this! Come with me!"

She led us into the house through the side door. Roland was in the kitchen, and when he saw us heading down into the basement, he said, "Are you gonna show John and Göran?" Lee said "Yes" and Roland said, "Can I come down too?" and Lee said "No! I told you to stay upstairs!" Daphne was in the kitchen too, and she said, "Poor Ruckles!"

None of the basement lights were on. I started to reach for the switch when Lee said, "No! Don't! It gets mad if you turn on the light."

It was quite gloomy downstairs with the basement window curtains drawn. Lee opened the walk-in closet, inside of which it was pitch black. She fumbled around for a moment and then flicked on a little night stand lamp into which she had screwed a black lightbulb. "It doesn't seem to mind ultraviolet light," Lee said. In the dim purple glow of the lamp we saw a cage sitting on the floor, with a large plywood board covering it and four cinder blocks sitting on the board over each corner of the cage.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's Ruckles," said Lee.

"The guinea pig?" asked Göran.

"Look for yourselves," said Lee.

We squatted down close to the floor. At first all I saw was a big lump. I said, "I can't see," so Lee moved the lamp down to floor level to let us see better into the cage. I gasped and instinctively jerked back. We had seen Ruckles the guinea pig before, but we barely recognized it now. It had swollen to almost twice its normal size, bloated and disfigured. It had lost most of its fur, and its pale, puffy skin and its remaining patches of white fur glowed uncannily in the ultraviolet light.

"What happened?" exclaimed Göran

"Look at its backside, there by the tail," said Lee.

We looked, and saw a huge, swollen welt. There was a bloody scab in the middle of the welt, and it looked reddish and infected.

"What the hell is that?" I asked.

"I think it's a bite," said Lee, "I think Ruckles was bitten by that squirrel."

"Poor Ruckles," said Göran. He tried to reach into the cage with his fingers to pet it.

Lee shouted, "Don't do that!"

Göran pulled his fingers back out of the cage, startled.

"He might bite you," said Lee, "He's become a meat eater."

"What?" I gasped.

"He won't eat veggies any more. No carrots, lettuce, celery, nothing. At first we thought maybe he'd lost his appetite because he was sick, but then Roland said, ‘Try feeding him hamburger.' So we tried raw hamburger. He'd sniff at it, and try eating it, but then he'd stop. So then Daphne said, ‘Maybe he'll eat one of Corny's mice.' So we put one of the mice we usually feed Corny in Ruckles' cage and he ate it."

"That's bizarre."

"It's disgusting. He gnaws the mice to death. It leaves blood everywhere."

The following Saturday, Sam called. He said, "I know we were supposed to have ‘Nerd Night' tonight, but I'm going to have to back out. Lee and the kids are really upset and I need to stay here." We asked him why, and he said, "Ruckles."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Well, Lee went down to feed him, and while she was lifting the board off the top of the cage to drop the mouse in, Ruckles leaped super fast up over the top of the cage and ran off into some corner of the basement. Lee ran upstairs, but it must have escaped somehow."

"Did it run up the stairs?"

"It couldn't have," said Sam, "we had the stairway blocked with a big piece of plywood."

"How do you know it got out?" I asked.

"Because we found it again," Sam said.

"You found it? Where?"

"We found it in the garage, in the cage with the other guineas and the rabbit. It bit Misty, Tiger and Bunbun. And . . ." Sam hesitated.

"And what? What happened?"

Sam replied, "It ate three of the baby guineas. It ate its own babies."

When we went to the Kuha-Welters for Halloween, things were much less festive than usual. Lee called the police and demanded to talk to someone who handled animal control problems. After being transferred numerous times from department to department, she was transferred to some sub-assistant of a vice-commissioner for some department of something affairs. The person who answered the call was named Terry. Terry said, "We've been getting an epidemic of these types of calls, and we can't respond to them all right now. I would suggest that for the time being you keep your children indoors. And please call the Animal Control line and leave a message with complete information about the location and nature of the last siting of rabid squirrels."

"I've already done that!" screamed Lee into the phone, slamming down the receiver.

"I guess that means the kids won't be able to go out trick-or-treating tonight," I said.

Sam asked me and Göran, "Could you guys help us with something?"

Göran said, "Of course. What is it?"

"The basement. If Ruckles escaped from the basement, it means there must be some kind of hole or crack somewhere down there that leads outdoors. If there's a hole, we should probably try to find it and block it up to keep anything from getting in."

"Um, are you sure the basement is safe?" I asked.

"We've got a couple of extra pairs of heavy duty rubber boots and rubber gloves you can borrow."

So we agreed to help out. We had dressed up for Halloween in our favorite costumes. I was a vampire, all dressed in black, with white face paint, blood red lips, and black around my eyes. Göran wore his Viking outfit, complete with a real horned helmet and a real sword he had bought at the Renaissance Festival. Sam wore a Japanese monk's costume. The three of us made a surreal appearance, donning rubber boots and rubber gloves over our costumes and then tramping down into the basement, peering behind furniture, under windows, behind the staircase. We searched for a hole in the basement for a good half hour.

"I have an idea," said Göran.

"What?" asked Sam.

Göran said, "Ruckles is the one who knows where the hole is. Maybe we should let Ruckles show us."

"You're kidding, right?" I scoffed.

"No," insisted Göran, "I mean it. We should bring Ruckles down here, and let him loose, and then watch to see where he goes."

"Right," said Sam, "but even if your idea is right, then Ruckles will be on the loose again. We don't want that."

"I bet Ruckles will just go straight to the guinea cage in the garage, just like he did last time. When he does, we'll capture him again, but this time we'll know where the hole in the basement is," said Göran.

We continued to search. But after another half hour of searching, and after working up a sweat moving the washer and drier, we still had discovered nothing. Göran's idea started to sound more reasonable.

"Well," sighed Sam finally, "Maybe it will work."

Lee made Roland and Daphne go upstairs into Daphne's bedroom and close the door. "I don't want to go up there alone!" cried Daphne. But Lee made them go anyway.

"Don't open this door until I tell you it's OK!" said Lee.

Since Ruckles was sensitive to light, we turned off all the lights in the house, except down in the basement where we screwed the ultraviolet light into the ceiling fixture and turned it on. Lee put on her own rubber boots and gloves, and was going to wait outside the garage, to cover up the guinea cage as soon as Ruckles jumped into it. We made sure to put Jet and Cloud and the surviving baby guineas in a different pen where Ruckles couldn't get at them. Bunbun, Misty, and Tiger were already locked in cages of their own, because after being bit by Ruckles they had started to change.

Getting Ruckles into the basement was no easy task. He was in a nasty mood, and growled and snapped at us whenever we got near his cage. He was still hideously swollen and had lost even more fur. He was almost all pale, puffy skin now. His eyes were bloodshot and his teeth seemed to have grown larger, sharper and yellower since the last time we'd seen him. The sight of him almost made us rethink our plan completely. Nobody wanted to try picking him up. But then the thought of something like Ruckles sneaking into the house through the basement in the middle of the night was so disturbing that we decided we had to find and plug up the hole at all costs.

"Let's just carry the whole damn cage downstairs," I said.

So that's what we did, though it was terrifying to do, because the cage was so big all three of us had to carry it at the same time, and Ruckles was shrieking like a guinea banshee, gnashing its teeth at us through the bars, and running back and forth, almost causing us to drop it twice. But we finally made it down into the basement. In the ultraviolet light, my face paint was glowing eerily and the white robe Sam wore looked ghostly.

"You look scary, man," Sam said.

We blocked off the staircase with the big piece of plywood Sam and Lee had been using as a makeshift gate, fortifying it by leaning a couple of cinder blocks against it. And then with great trepidation we eased Ruckles' cage onto its side and opened the lid.

We expected Ruckles to go racing out of the cage, but it didn't. It just waddled out, sniffing and looking around it in all directions. It turned around to look at us once with evil, jaundiced eyes, and then turned away and limped across the floor toward the closet.

"I swear we searched every inch of that closet," hissed Sam, "There's no way it can get out through there!"

The closet door was open only by a few inches. Ruckles pushed his nose into the crack and shoved the door open just wide enough to heave his bulk through it, disappearing into the closet.

"Quick!" I said, "We better not let him escape without seeing how he gets out."

So we crept toward the closet door and as carefully as possible, so as not to startle Ruckles, opened it all the way up.

"What is that in the corner?" Göran said.

"It's too dark," Sam said.

"Is that a hole?" I gasped.

"That's impossible," said Sam, "There was no hole there before."

Suddenly something leapt out of the darkness. Sam fell to the floor. There was something about the size of a dog on his chest and face and he was screaming and flailing his arms at it. There was a squishing sound when I kicked its sallow, bloated body. It turned a long, bloody snout up toward me and stared for a split second out of dull, yellow eyes. Then with lightning speed it struck at me, latching onto my boot with long, viper-like fangs. I screamed and kicked as hard as I could until it suddenly released my boot and then bolted away. It leaped over the plywood barrier and clumped up the stairs. We heard it clawing at the side door and then, to our horror, heard the door click open followed by the slamming of the screen, and then silence. It was gone.

Sam was still lying on the ground with his hands clutched to his face.

"What the hell was that?" I asked, still trembling.

"It looked like a giant rat," said Göran.

We helped Sam up.

"Look at my face," said Sam, "Is it bleeding? Did it bite me?"

He lowered his hands and we saw a terrible, bloody gouge on his left cheek. It was already starting to swell into a baseball sized welt.

I sat down on the couch. My boot looked like it had been slashed with razor blades. With shaking hands I removed the boot. The white sock underneath had a stain that looked black in the ultraviolet light. I already knew what I would find as I peeled it off: two pencil-thick bite wounds toward the bottom of my calf, just above my ankle.