Shortly after we left, to drive seemingly aimlessly around the city, rain began to fall heavily. Mighty fountains pluming skyward in vast piazzas fought back against the downpour. We stopped at a café, then when the storm stopped and the sky cleared towards the end of the afternoon, Max said, “Show you something.” On foot we turned a few corners into a big boulevard, farther along which towered, as Max pointed out, the Intercontinental Hotel.
Spaced along the steaming pavement were prostitutes in miniskirts, who proved assertive. One delicious girl, who looked no more than fifteen, already wore the scar of a Cesarean above her bared navel pierced with a gold ring. She smooched right up to me and placed her hand on my groin, brazenly massaging, and jerking her head towards a dark, deserted arcade. Max stood eyeing me, to see how I would extricate myself, which I did by backing away while wagging a reproving finger, even though I confess I’d become excited.
As we returned to the car, I said, “There’s something predatory about them.”
“Predatory, yes,” agreed Max. “Le mot juste. They’re Gypsies, hoping to prey on foreign businessmen from the Intercontinental. To the Gypsies we’re just sheep to be fleeced. In fact, security on the hotel door could send out for better from his catalog.”
Soaked dogs were lapping water.
———
The murders featured on TV by now, although the set in the flat was crap, even if we could have understood. Max brought out a litre bottle of sweet, strong, seductive, almondy Disaronno, and put on a CD of a Bulgarian pop starlet, then we proceeded to get quite drunk. I realized there was a need to match Max glass for glass. At the same time I didn’t want a hangover, nor did I want to stay up half the night.
So when had Max been in Bulgaria? This led to anecdotes about bribing police and much else, a mixture of funny and disconcerting. Then we talked about personalities on the island, or rather Max did most of the talking since he’d previously known many of those present. Idly I wondered whether he had slept with Adriana the year before. Max’s recounting became almost a non-stop monologue, which can be intimidating. He was talking at me, rather than with me. At some point sandwiches manifested themselves out of bread, ham, and mustard in the fridge. Finally I managed to finish the last of the bottle. Fingers and toes crossed for the following evening!
Fortunately, on Thursday Max didn’t take me to experience more sleaze. Instead we went to tour Ceaus?escu’s palace, about which much could be said, but I shan’t. Wonderfully, Max would be absent in the evening. Of course I could accompany him, but I pleaded a queasy stomach and headache. All that Disaronno.
At seven thirty I looked and saw a red Dacia parked outside the cottage. So I sallied forth.
Mihail Florescu, the dutiful son, looked to be in his late fifties, in cheap checked shirt and trousers, grey-haired and with a beer gut. Muscular, though. He welcomed me with delight, as did his mother, who bustled to provide some cubes of cheese and peanuts, while Mihail urged on me a big glass of orange juice. A plastic bucket chair for me. This time I’d brought a notebook. An oil lamp had been lighting the room, but now Mrs. Florescu proceeded to light the green candles as well, which produced blue flames.
“How can we help you to write?” asked Mihail, beaming. He meant “as a writer.”
“Thank you for giving me your time,” I replied. “Please accept a little compensation.” Thirty dollars. I drank juice while he disappeared the money, then began, “I’m curious about those flowers, particularly the little white bells. I hear that in this country they are associated with werewolves.”
Mihail looked blank, so I said, “Excuse me,” then mimed a transformation, which must have been successful because he rattled away to his mother, and she to him.
“Yes,” he said, “to keep away such things. My mother, all the dogs frighten her. Last winter, dog killed chicken.”
My throat and tongue felt dry, so I emptied my glass, and realised that the orange juice must have been mixed with some strong spirit, maybe home-made, for all of a sudden I came over queer.
I must have passed out briefly, for mother and son were standing over me, regarding me attentively, and Mrs. Florescu was rubbing a smelly ointment onto my brow and cheeks. God, how parched I was. I croaked for a drink, although I was also feeling a mounting urge to pee. Probably Mrs. Florescu’s toilet was a dark hole, and I could hardly excuse myself to use her garden, not with her vegetables there. I tried to clench myself tight, but my body felt incoherent. Suddenly I thought of the young Gypsy prostitute with such hunger for her flesh—oh, to be able to taste her, drink her juices. Which juices exactly? To my shame, spurts of pee began to pulse into my pants uncontrollably. A restless anxiety mounted. I was quivering—and then I found myself sliding out of the plastic seat, and glad to be nearer the floor on my hands and knees. Four limbs could support me better.
———
Dog rejoiced ragingly to be let out. Dog loped over empty wasteland. Moonlit. Twitching nose, taunted and teased. So thirsty. Dogturds pungent. Potholed roadway. Lapped stale rain. Wrong liquid! Howled.
In every man: a dog. Turn man inside out, hairs bristle out all over. Dog fell over, scrambled up. Fellow dogs lay curled, muzzles resting on bums. Reek of bitch in heat far away?
The thirst! Not for dog blood. Human!
In moonlit street.
Big stick or long gun. Hairless head shone. Hairs crowded wide and black under nose, above mouth. Dried sweat, and cologne, and a fart.
Hunting for dog.
Dog hid amongst dogs. Other dogs shifted listlessly.
Dog cowered. Whimpers escaped. Dog buried muzzle in bum. Familiar fragrance of inside-oneself, comforting.
Human came.
Attack, rip with claws, grip throat with teeth so sharp! No! Dog feared bang-bang. Dog cringed among dogs. Lone eye watched.
Rattle of laughter.
Human noise: “So how do you feel now, Mr. Martin Fairfax? How does it feel?”
A camera flashed blindingly.
Head throbbing, I woke to daylight naked on that double bed beside the bench press. What a vile, terrible nightmare.
Then I saw my strewn soiled clothes, and discovered the state of my aching body.
I heard the crow of a cock. Was Max waiting patiently next door, drinking coffee?
At first I could hardly stand, weak as a decrepit old man.
Propelled by fear, I recovered some strength. Blessedly Rigby—I couldn’t bear to think of him any longer as Max—was absent.
I fled before even worse happened, wheeling my suitcase behind me to the nearest boulevard, flagging a taxi and saying, “Otopeni, v? rog,” the name of Bucharest’s airport, plus please. Of course the driver swindled me, though not grossly. And he wasn’t Madame Florescu’s son, even though paranoia whispered otherwise.
Rigby had set the trap cunningly.
Admittedly, his plan depended on such a crone as Madame Florescu living opposite his flat in such a home as she did. Although how exactly had Rigby located that particular flat? With Silviu’s help, in line with what special requirements? Rigby’s own research requirements, of which I knew nothing, yet which I’d let lure me like a bee to pollen!
Rigby must have paid the crone and her son quite a few more dollars than I did. And Silviu procured the hallucinogens, whatever those might have been? A cocktail of mandrake, henbane, LSD? Maybe some deadly nightshade and hemlock and mind-altering mushrooms thrown in?
No, how could Silviu, or Rigby, have known what to concoct? The crone must have known.
It couldn’t be, could it, that I had truly been transformed? That the crone had thought I wanted to be transformed because of my miming? I’m quite light and short—even so, how heavy a weredog would I have become?
Fortuitous, indeed, that the bloody murders took place!
I would probably have been beguiled by the crone’s cottage, even so.
What was Adriana’s part in the conspiracy, gasping and crossing herself in timely fashion?
Bitch! I thought.
Bitch seemed entirely the wrong term of abuse. Or maybe entirely the right one.
So how do you feel now, Mr. Martin Fairfax? Such vindictiveness on account of a bad review. Rigby must have leaned on the editor of the mag, or maybe he’d read that early book of mine and the character’s name stuck in his mind.
So I departed Romania with my tail, as it were, between my legs.
After I got back home and had recovered myself, I googled using automatic translation and discovered that a man had been arrested for the murders in Bucharest. The presumed perpetrator was a Turko-German drug smuggler, Günther Bey, sporting tattoos featuring samurai sword fights. Red dye used for sprays and pools of blood, I suppose.
It seemed to me that if the Turko-German’s skin bore so much pictorial blood, it was unlikely that he felt a craving to replicate this upon the skins of unfortunate women. If he emulated Japanese gangsters, those people had a code of honour, only killing rivals and enemies within the fraternity.
Ovid had found half-a-Turk to fix up for the killings. It wouldn’t do for a werewolf or weredog to be responsible. Romania was a modern country now, a member of the European Union.
So did those murders result from a crone applying a potion and a salve? Maybe her own good son, Mihail, was transformed? No, that was absurd.
Judging from the news, no more such murders happened. If I related my experiences as a short story, this should reflect badly on Rigby, though obviously I’d need to disguise his name.
I Was a Middle-Age Werewolf
RON GOULART
Sometimes bad luck just seems to gang up on you.
Take my situation on this past June 13. Things were lousy even before I turned into a shaggy grey wolf-man for the first time.
And I’m not even talking about the fact that I was two payments behind on the mortgage of my house here on the fringes of Beverly Hills. Back in the 1920s the silent-movie lover Orlando Busino lived in this sprawling Moorish-style mansion and romanced some of the loveliest actresses of the silver screen within these very walls. In the 1960s, the immensely, and briefly, popular rock group the Ivy League Jug Band staged excessive orgies here on a fairly regular basis. Obviously the roof didn’t leak back then, nor did the pipes produce ominous keening noises in the midnight hours.
Also, I’m not alluding to my former wife, Mandy, whom you’ve no doubt heard of. She’s a bestselling author of diet books under the name of Mandine Osterwald Higby. Such titles as The Junk Food Diet and To Hell With Nutrition have been on every bestseller list in the land for endless months. Rumors in the publishing trade were that Mandy was working on a memoir to be entitled I Married an Asshole. My attorney charged me $500 to tell me she had a perfect right to do that.
I am, by the way, Tim Higby. I’m forty-one, eleven pounds overweight, and three inches too short. I make my living writing television comedies. I’m very fond of plaid shirts and was wearing one on that fateful night along with a venerable pair of khakis.
My most successful sitcom was Uncle Fred Is a Pain in the Butt, which ran from 2001 to 2003. Since then I haven’t had another hit. Finally, four months ago, I was hired as a writer on Nose Job. That’s the one about the wacky Hollywood plastic surgeon. It began plummeting in the ratings just after the first script I’d had a hand in aired. The show handler and the producers decided they need somebody younger to save Nose Job from extinction and, Lord knows, there are untold numbers of writers younger than I am in Greater Los Angeles.
So on the morning of June 13 I got an e-mail informing me I was no longer on the writing team. I’d been in the middle of writing a very funny script dealing with how this wacky Hollywood plastic surgeon misplaced the left ear of a patient.
As the day waned I was sitting in my living room, scene of many a seduction and many an orgy before my time of residence, and brooding over the fact that in addition to having to pay Mandy an enormous alimony each and every month, I was now going to be vilified in I Married an Asshole.
The cell phone, which I’d been able to keep up the payments on, played the opening notes of Thelonious Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie.”
I scratched at a sudden itch in my right palm, then picked it up. “Yeah?”
“Turn on the Gossip Channel.”
“Why, Hersh?”
It was Bernie Hersh, one of my few close friends and, even at the advanced age of forty-seven, still a very successful television writer. “Just do, old buddy. On my way out.” The call ended.
Putting down the phone, I scratched my hand yet again, and then grabbed up the remote to bring the Gossip Channel into view. There on the screen was my daughter, whose agent had christened her Mutiny Skylark last year, and then sold her to the Will Destry Channel to star in Posy Pickwick: Rock & Roll Detective.
Beth, her real first name, was sitting on a purple sofa, hands folded in her lap and looking contrite. Well, as contrite as you can look while wearing a very low-cut yellow tank top and very minimal shorts. “It seems to me,” she was saying to the stunning blonde interviewer, “that the executives at Destry, really wonderful people for the most part, Pam, have been excessive in this instance.”
“They’ve just dumped you from Posy Pickwick, which, as of this week, is the top-rated YA show in the world.”
“Except in Brazil,” said my redheaded daughter, crossing her legs. “I do believe, in all modesty, Pam, and not to detract from the wonderful contribution of the entire Posy team and all the wonderful kids who act on my show with me, that this nearly universal international success is pretty much due to me.”
“Sure thing, Mutiny. But the statement that Will Destry, Jr., released to the media just hours ago, states that you’re being severed from the show for ‘conduct unbecoming of a teenager and knocking over Charlie Chicken.’ ”
My daughter sighed. “I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit, you know, that I’m a little wild at times,” she said, uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “I’m still not sure how I managed to drive my new SUV into that wonderful statue of Will Destry’s most famous animated cartoon character. It makes me, you know, really sad, Pam.”
My left side was commencing to itch. I scratched it.
“You also drove your Jaguar into the front window of the New Trocadero on the Strip last month, Mutiny,” reminded Pam.
Beth held up her hand. “Let’s get our facts straight, Pam,” she said as she recrossed her legs. “I drove my Mercedes through the Troc window to avoid hitting a sweet little old lady tourist who’d fallen down in the crosswalk. My Jaguar I was using when I drove over Harlan Ellison’s foot in the parking lot of Mexicali Rose’s Hot Tamale Café, which was a very popular hangout for three weeks last March.”
I realized I was still holding the remote. Setting it down on the coffee table, I scratched my right hand with my left and then my left with my right. “What have I got now? Some rare skin disease?”
“Excuse my being so personal,” said Pam, leaning a bit forward. “But don’t you feel it’s time to stop your madcap ways, Mutiny?”
My enormously successful—until today—daughter began to sob quietly. Wiggling on the purple sofa, she tugged a petite pink hanky from a slit pocket of her crimson shorts. She dabbed at her eyes, sniffling. “As you and the majority of my wonderful fans around the world know, Pam, I’m the product of a broken home. I just know that if my parents got together again, it would work wonders for my overall deportment.”
“Wonderful.” I snatched up the remote to thumb the off button. Beth vanished.
The itch was spreading. I scratched at my right side, my left knee, my left buttock, and, as best I could, my upper back. “Jesus, maybe I’ve contracted some strange, highly dangerous Asian plague from eating Chinese imports.”
When I stood up, I felt extremely woozy. When I sat down again my entire skeleton didn’t feel right. I started to perspire, and as I wiped my itching palm across my forehead, I began to experience severe stomach cramps.
Two things awakened me. One was the door chimes playing the first few bars of “ ’RoundMidnight”and the other was a loud animal howling.
“Nova Botsford,” I recalled.
Nova is the Associate Producer of that very successful new sitcom, Dump Truck. That’s the one about the wacky Hollywood garbage man. A handsome woman of forty-five or thereabouts, she’s been described by those who’ve worked with her as impossible, tyrannical, sadistic, offensive, and meanminded. For some reason, though, Nova and I have always gotten along, and when she heard I’d been tossed off Nose Job, she phoned to tell me she was dropping by that night to talk to me. I figured maybe she could get me on the Dump Truck writing staff. I’d already made a few notes on some pretty funny garbage gags.
My legs were still a bit wobbly, but the itching had subsided. Maybe I’d suffered from a speeded-up version of some kind of one-day flu.
En route to the front door, I stopped at a wall mirror to check my appearance.
“Holy Christ,” I observed, “haven’t I undergone enough crap for one day?”
Apparently not. Looking back at me from the mirror was a furry-faced wolf-man. I knew it was me because of the plaid shirt.
“No wonder I was itchy.” The fur had been starting to emerge just before I passed out.
Unbuttoning a couple of buttons of my shirt, I determined that my chest was covered with grey fur, too. So were my legs, I found after bending to pull up a trouser leg.
Full Moon City Page 19
