It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

by Kurtz, Matt; McKenzie, Shane; Strand, Jeff

  As the moonlight falls impassively down, Leonard springs forth. Before the woman can scream, Leonard has clamped his jaws together on her neck, and all she can do is gurgle, which sounds like music to Leonard’s keen hearing. In a fit of appetite and bloodlust, Leonard tears the woman’s coat apart with his mighty claws, and is surprised to find she is now dressed in a tattered, white cotton nightgown, which flutters sadly in a moist sea breeze, the sea being only a few miles away, across some freeways and gang-turf.

  Leonard releases his hold for a moment and the woman tries to run, but she gags on her own blood. It is a running gag. Then Leonard has her again.

  The tiny white yorkamanian flaps wildly at the end of its leash as Leonard bites out the throat of the blond beauty with his new teeth. The tiny white poodoodle cowers and wets itself as Leonard savages the gorgeous blonde’s body, devouring her liver and pancreas. When he has eaten his fill, Leonard turns his attention to the tiny white shitzapoo. He holds it up, dangling and choking at the end of the leash. He takes just a little bitty nip from its haunch, then releases it from the leash. The tiny doggette yelps with pain, races away across the lawn and down the street. Leonard smiles a big toothy smile. Hopefully, the bitty bite is just enough to infect it with were-ism so it becomes the smallest were-creature ever, a terrible were-terrier—which would deserve a story in its own right.

  Filled with warm, sweet, blond flesh, Leonard throws back his powerful head and howls again, a howl of power and triumph. Then he lopes down the dark street. Barking dogs in the yards of Middle West Hollywood America are silenced as he passes.

  He finds a sheltered spot in some weeds behind someone’s garage, curls up, pretends the weeds are heather, closes his powerful yellow eyes, sleeps, digests. Has vague, hungry dreams of Annabel, whom he has almost forgotten in his beastliness.

  ***

  Leonard awakens. He is lying curled up on something hard and cold. He is still in wolf form, all wolverine-like. This is good, because the transformation process is really a bummer.

  The full moon has again slipped over a horizon of West Hollywood houses.

  Another night? The same night repeated? The same night repeated?

  Did he sleep the day away? Again? Did he transform back into human, or at least vampire, Leonard, and back to wolf, all while asleep? Could this be more confusing?

  The hard stuff he is lying on proves to be a sidewalk, but a sidewalk broken and crumbling, slabs of it tilting up crazily. And there is something wrong with the horizon of houses too, above which the moon creeps. The houses are in ruins, burned and smoldering, or with smashed windows, and doors broken in.

  He is hungry again, and there seems to be a shortage of ripe, blond women. In fact, there is a shortage of people entirely. The streets, yards, desolate houses—all empty and silent. He rises and lopes away down the street, in search of ambulatory food.

  He comes to a wide boulevard, wanders down it, block after block. There are stores, strip malls, more houses, all the same: broken, ruined, empty of people.

  Suddenly he stops, listens intently. He hears distant footsteps, many of them—a crowd, a mob. And another sound, one he cannot identify: a murmuring, like a restless sea which does not rest.

  He lopes on, half-expecting to hear his mother’s voice telling him not to be crazy, to get away while he can. But evidently his mother is still sulking over his use of big words like preternatural and quiescent, and says nothing.

  After a time he sees what makes the cacophony of footsteps he has been hearing. Cacophony? Is that something preternatural? Something quiescent? His mother would love that.

  Would Superman know about cacophony, with his super brain?

  And speaking of brains, the murmuring he hears is also about brains.

  Brains, comes the murmur, brains.

  Around the corner surges an immense mob of ragged people in various stages of decomposition: clothes in tatters, eyeballs falling out, skin peeling away in maggoty slabs, crooked, broken fingers with extremely unkempt nails. They stagger relentlessly forward, rotting feet slapping, rotting arms outstretched. They advance on Leonard.

  Brains, they cry in hollow voices, give us brains.

  As the mob approaches, Leonard rears back on his powerful hind legs, prepared to defend himself. In a blur, he rakes his talons across the front row of murmuring zombies—for zombies they are. He shreds the leading zombies, and they tear apart with a sickening stench, fall wetly to the pavement in pieces. He rakes the next in line, and the next after that, and the next, and the next. But the zombies are endless, apparently the entire population of West Hollywood. And Beverly Hills as well, for Leonard catches glimpses of the rags of rhinestone-covered sweat-suits and mink running shorts.

  Leonard rakes, and bites, and tears, and rends, and chomps, and claws, and mauls, but it is to no avail. Every zombie he dispatches is replaced by ten. He suspects Culver City is now involved. The mob of zombies surges around him like a surging torrent, and he is surrounded. They close in, pressing, pressing.

  Brains, they cry, brains.

  “Wait,” one zombie shouts. The mob halts, waiting, decomposing. Leonard stands motionless, exhausted, listening, waiting.

  “Why brains?” the zombie shouts. “We’re only saying that because we think it’s expected. I say let’s eat the whole damn thing.”

  And the mob of zombies surges forward like surging waves, and covers Leonard, raking, biting, tearing, rending, chomping, clawing, mauling. And so on. Leonard feels one of his eyes plucked from its socket, a limb or two pulled off, skin flayed, muscles devoured. He cannot believe the unbelievable pain. He begins to lose consciousness and he knows he is dying. Blackness seeps in at the edges of his awareness. He sees a distant light. He reaches out toward the light.

  And he dies.

  ***

  Leonard awakens. At first he does not know who or what he is.

  Bright golden light dazzles his eye. He squints.

  The light is the sun.

  He squints down at himself. He appears to be Leonard, the human Leonard, not a powerful wolverine-like wolf, and he is missing an arm. He cannot completely rule out being a vampire, but he feels no craving for fresh blood or tuxedos.

  He stands slowly, feeling as though he is climbing up his own bones. Both his legs are present, but great swaths of his rotten, greenish skin hang loose, and his guts gape in a couple of places. And he notes that he is seeing these things with one eye, the other being gone.

  But wait. He now has a violent craving for living meat. And for brains, no matter what the other zombies might say. In fact, a fragrant memory of smell assaults him—his grandmother frying calves’ brains with eggs in butter. His mouth tries to water but only slime comes out.

  Just then a small crowd of zombies squishes and flaps past, a block away. Leonard finds himself shuffling off to join them. As he shuffles, confusion whirls in his half-putrefied mind.

  So am I a zombie now, or what? he wonders. I must be, because didn’t I die? No, wait, how could I? Aren’t I the undead? A vampire? And was that after I was a werewolf, or before? What the hell am I? Didn’t I just step out for a little air?

  A face floats before his tottering mind, a beautiful face, and a name to go with it.

  Annabel.

  Who’s Annabel? Wait. OMG, I remember. It was a dark and stormy night. Oh, Annabel, Annabel. I remember.

  Thick tears of pus overflow Leonard’s one poor, sad eye, trundle down his mangled cheek.

  This is terrible, he sobs. It must be a dream, an awful dream.

  ***

  But Leonard is wrong. It is not a dream.

  It’s a video game.

  And now Frank switches off his Xbox. The screen goes black. He pushes back from his desk and glances out the window. Lightning slashes through the dark like Ironman through tinfoil. Rain sluices the glass. Preternaturally.

  Death and Taxes

  by A.J. Sweeney

  Martin walked home from work. It was
an act of economy, for his rent was due and he didn’t get paid until the end of the week. He worked in a small brown office, wore small brown leather shoes, and carried a small brown shoulder bag with an even smaller brown bag inside that usually held his lunch. His job involved pushing a lot of paper, but if you asked him precisely what it was he did all day he couldn’t really describe it in any succinct way. There were small columns of figures and something to do with shipping, and a lot of things that were always being misplaced, which then had to be found again.

  In a perfect world there would be no work and Martin could curl up in a ball under a big blanket and wait for it to all be over. But there was little succor forthcoming for such a man, and so Martin got up and went to work, every single day.

  Martin’s apartment was in a solid brick building on the other side of the park. It was a squat low-rise inhabited mainly by pensioners and immigrants. Tonight, as he walked into the vestibule, he saw Mrs. Fernandez getting her mail. She was in her pajamas—Mrs. Fernandez always wore her robe and slippers to get the mail, every day at six o’clock.

  “Hello, Martin.” She stared at him with her glass eye—her real eye wandered off into the distance.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Fernandez.”

  She was a creepy old crone, but pleasant enough. From time to time she would bring Martin soup or stew she had made, and he would throw it all down the drain in the kitchen sink and bring the pot back to her, hanging it on the handle of her door in a plastic bag. Once she brought him spaghetti and meat sauce with suspicious looking sausages. He ate the spaghetti because it was in the box and it was still sealed.

  Mrs. Fernandez trembled and shook her way up the stairs. Martin was worried he’d have to offer her his arm. Instead, he just walked very slowly and awkwardly up behind her. His feet were cold and wet and he wanted to get home, but it was impossible to pass her. And so he shuffled along while she blathered on about the other old people in the building, how someone had called the city to complain about the heat, et cetera. He feigned interest and wished her goodnight, opening his door as quickly as possible.

  In his dim room he noticed an unfamiliar blinking red light. It took him a moment to register that it was the light on his answering machine. He hit play and listened to the message: “Hello, Martin. It’s Bob Jenkins. Long time no speak. Listen, I’ve got something to discuss with you. I’m going to be at the Little City Café tonight at seven-thirty and I’d love it if you could join me. Actually, I really need to see you there. It’s kind of important. Try to make it. It’s important. That’s all. It’s Bob Jenkins.”

  A cold sweat broke loose and ran amok under Martin’s shirt. It couldn’t be Bob Jenkins. He replayed the message and had to sit down, his face as white as Mrs. Fernandez’s chignon. Bob Jenkins! It was impossible. Literally, figuratively, physically—metaphysically—impossible. But a third replay confirmed what he knew all along: it really was his voice. It was indeed the voice of Bob Jenkins.

  With some difficulty, for he was badly out of shape, Martin knelt on the ground beside his bed and pulled out a box. He pulled out a newspaper clipping dated September 17th, 1994. “Banker Burned in Biz Blaze,” it read. The story below detailed how fire gutted Jimson and Sons Light Fixtures on Midwood Avenue and claimed the life of accountant Robert Jenkins who’d been visiting the office on a routine audit. The proprietor had escaped with only minor lung damage and retired comfortably, since the store had been heavily insured.

  Turning the clipping over and over as if looking for reassurance, or proof that he was somehow not insane, Martin tried to figure out what to do. Should he meet this guy? Should he meet this disembodied voice from beyond the grave? And if he did go, what should he wear? Feeling—for the first time in his life—what other people knew to be curiosity but which he couldn’t exactly understand or describe, he decided to meet the voice that claimed to belong to his dead friend. This might prove to be a more interesting than average Thursday night. Not only was it dark and stormy and filled with voices from the dead, but the Little City Café was quite trendy and he hadn’t been there before.

  Martin changed into his other pair of shoes, hoping he wouldn’t be miserable tomorrow with nothing but two wet pairs of shoes. “What’s the point of working,” he thought, “if you can still only afford two pairs of shoes?” Very wisely, he remembered his umbrella.

  ***

  Bob Jenkins was the same as ever: slender and gangly with sloping shoulders and thin, light-brown hair. He had a Midwestern, American-Gothic-in-tapered jeans look to him.

  “Where have you been all this time?” Martin said as he embraced him in an awkward hug.

  “I’ve been busy,” Bob said. “Tons of work. Mountains.”

  Martin frowned, but said nothing. He wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. Bob was behaving as though no time had passed.

  “How’s Ginny?” Bob said, sipping his Corona.

  Martin goggled. Ginny had been out of the picture for years. He realized with dismay that he’d never had another real girlfriend after her. “Fine,” he said. He assumed she probably was.

  “And how’s work?”

  “Boring.” This was true. “And you?”

  “Well, like I said, busy.”

  “Oh. Right. Seen any good movies lately?”

  “Nah. I feel like I haven’t been out of the office in about ten years.”

  Martin nearly choked on his beer at that.

  The rest of their conversation passed surprisingly smoothly, aided by a few Coronas. Martin eventually confessed that he was no longer seeing Ginny, Bob confessed that his workaholic ways were keeping him from really finding the right girl, and they both admired the ass on the female bartender, knowing they would never in their lives get any closer to an ass like that than some high resolution porn. It occurred to Martin that Bob had died before the advent of internet pornography, and he felt sorry for him. At no point could he bring himself to ask Bob what had really happened in that fire, or approach the subject of him possibly being dead.

  At the end of the evening, Bob said, “Walk me home, Martin. I don’t live far.”

  Usually such a request from another man would strike Martin as strange, but he was a little buzzed and admittedly happy to have his friend back. He was also curious—there was that feeling again!—to see where Bob was living. Bob led Martin past the park, down Fifth Street, and through the great Neo-Gothic arch of Trinity Cemetery. They walked through the whimsically-named lots—Pasture Place, Eternity Avenue—and stopped in front of a minimalist, grey marble slab simply engraved with: ROBERT JENKINS 1969 – 1994.

  Martin stood there wondering, mainly, how Bob succeeded in getting in and out of the grave without disturbing the topsoil, when his friend turned to him, gently grabbed him by the shoulders, and said, “Martin, listen to me. You and I have been friends for years, right?”

  Martin nodded mutely, unsure where this was going.

  “So you won’t take this the wrong way, but…I have to tell you something you probably don’t want to her.”

  Visions of death danced before Martin’s eyes. So this was it—this was the meaning of the visit from beyond the grave. It was a portent of his own death. The great big duvet in the sky was calling him home and he would never worry again. So this was the end of him! Tears of joy and self-pity sprang simultaneously to his ducts.

  Bob pressed an envelope into Martin’s hands.

  Martin opened it slowly, cautiously. “Dear Mister Macdonald. We are writing to inform you that there are inconsistencies on your tax return for the year ending 1994, and that we have performed an audit. You owe an additional $3,437.26—” Martin looked up in disbelief. The letter was signed “Robert Jenkins, Claims Adjuster, Internal Revenue Service.”

  “What?” Martin bellowed this part. His face was aubergine.

  “I’m sorry. I was waiting for the right time to tell you.”

  “But…but…”

  “We don’t get to choose our cases, if it mak
es you feel any better.”

  “No, it doesn’t! How could you do this?”

  “I went over your return again and again. There are inconsistencies, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t have to listen to you! You’re dead!”

  “That may be true, but work is work and it has to get done by somebody.”

  “This is insane! I’m getting out of here.”

  Martin attempted to run for it, but tripped over a votive wreath. Bob was on him in a second. He pinned Martin to the ground. Martin struggled, grunted, and shoved the dead man off him. He grabbed his umbrella and drove the pointy end of it right through Bob’s heart, impaling him atop his own grave.

  “You can’t kill me, you know,” Bob said quietly. “I didn’t want to do this, but I’m afraid you have no choice. Either you bring me a check, or you’ll have to call our toll-free service number and set up a payment plan. I’m sorry, my friend.” Bob turned his head and wept. “You can’t fight us, Martin. You know you can’t.”

  Martin staggered away from the cemetery. Moonlight threw eerie shadows over the graves, but these weren’t half as frightening as the specter of the heretofore-unknown debt. It was half past midnight when he let himself in through his front door. How could this have happened? He couldn’t make sense of it. His head whirled and he wished he kept Scotch around the house. That would have been a good, manly, reassuring thing to do. The image of Bob’s distraught face haunted him.

  Martin looked at the bill his dead friend had given him. This had to be some kind of hoax. It was impossible. The toll-free number was written on the bottom of the bill. He picked up the phone and called it, punching in his social security number when prompted. “You currently have a balance of $3,437.26 on your account,” said the disembodied automated voice.

  He still couldn’t believe it. One careless mistake he hadn’t even known he committed, coming to haunt him now. It was appalling. Even more appalling was the fact that he couldn’t have paid it if he’d wanted to. He simply didn’t have it. Sure, he could set up a payment plan—then what? He’d have to put it on his credit cards. That meant more debt, endless payments, maybe bankruptcy, which, as everyone knew, was a fate worse than death.