The Lunar Asylum

 

They say you never truly know the person sleeping in the bed beside you—that every soul keeps a skeleton, or perhaps a tomb, locked away in the closet. I used to dismiss such warnings as the cynical prattle of the bitter. After all, I met my wife, **Morgana**, through a "Looking for Love" ad in *Back Street Heroes*. We spent weeks tethered to one another via the telephone, our voices weaving a web of intimacy that felt fated. When we finally met, the connection was instant and intoxicating. Within months, we were bound in matrimony.

The marriage was a sanctuary of shared passions, save for one jagged, recurring rift. Every time the moon swelled into a bloated, luminous orb, Morgana would vanish. She would retreat to a remote, decaying manor buried deep in the desolate Scottish Highlands, disappearing for the darkest nights of the month. When I pressed her, her gaze would turn distant, her skin pale as parchment. "It is for the best, my love," she would whisper, her voice trembling like a dying candle. "There are depths to my nature you were never meant to witness."

I tried to be patient, but the mystery festered. My imagination grew infected, fueled by a sharp, corrosive jealousy. Why the silence? Was there a darker, more forbidden life she led in the shadows? I began to feel like a ghost haunting my own marriage.

When the next full moon loomed, I ceased to be the doting husband. I became the hunter. I watched her pack, offered a hollow smile as she departed, and waited for her trail to grow cold before firing up my bike. I tracked her for hundreds of miles, a silent predator following the scent of deceit, until the asphalt gave way to the jagged, fog-choked peaks of the Highlands.

The destination was not a hotel. It was a crumbling, architectural horror perched on the edge of an abyss. A rusted iron sign groaned in the wind: *Meshugger Asylum for the Abhorrent – Proprietor: Shizo Fruitcake.*

The air tasted of ozone and rot. I pushed through the heavy, iron-bound doors into a reception room that felt more like a tomb. The woman behind the desk was a patchwork monstrosity of sharp angles and pallid, stitched skin—a visage that would have sent Dr. Frankenstein screaming into the night.

"My wife," I croaked, my voice sounding foreign in the gloom. "Morgana. She is here. I have come to retrieve her."

The creature behind the desk peered over her spectacles, her eyes void of humanity. "Classified," she hissed, the word scraping like bone on stone. "There is nothing here for you but your own dissolution. Leave, or be consumed."

Before I could breathe, the shadows in the corner detached themselves. Two hulking figures emerged—monstrous, hulking things that looked like a blasphemous union of a wrestler’s frame and an animal’s hunger. They grabbed me, their grip like iron vices, and hoisted me toward the threshold. They did not speak; they merely emitted a sound, a low, guttural, wet tearing noise. *“Leave… or feed.”*

I stumbled onto the wet gravel, the weight of the dark forest pressing in on me. As I retreated to my bike, the moon reached its zenith, bathing the landscape in a sickly, spectral silver. Then, the silence was shattered by a sound that curdled my blood—a long, agonizing, inhuman howl that spoke of hunger, blood, and a terrifying transformation.

It was not the sound of a wolf. It was the sound of a woman shedding her humanity.

I sat there in the freezing dark, staring at the asylum’s looming silhouette, realizing that I had not come to save a wife. I had come to witness a predator in her lair, and the closet doors had finally swung wide open.