by Kevin Wright
“Puss? Puss, what’s up?” Tim held his bound hands up as much as he could. “I like getting freaky, but, what’s with the gnomes?”
Pussywillow said nothing; she adjusted the sash about her silky robe. She closed her eyes. The grog of her sleep was nearly gone. The sun had almost set; she could feel it, feel her strength wax as the sun slid further down, creeping, falling until it vanished.
The phone rang.
She opened her eyes and glided over to the desk and answered it before it rang twice. Fluid she was as she moved, never taking her eyes off Tim, craning her long neck as she flowed.
It made him anxious, afraid, aroused.
“Hello, good morning,” she said softly into the phone; then she listened patiently for a response. “I have one right here, but — alright, sure thing, sugar.” She hung up.
“I’m going to take a little shower,” Pussywillow said, eyes still on Tim.
“Okay…” Tim said. “If you’d untie me, I could wash your—”
“Then I’m off.” Pussywillow cut him off. “Dip your caps, but do it in the kitchen.” She raised a finger. “I don’t want stains on the rug.”
“What?” Tim said to Pussywillow as she glided away to the bathroom, her eyes finally leaving his.
She started the water and climbed in. Even with the water on full blast, she could hear Tim scream as he was dragged into the kitchen by cold iron hands.
* * * *
Fat, complacent pigeons scattered into the new night as the tipped port-a-john lid yawned open, held by a long arm from within, attired in sable silk.
From within, the Count arose as the last rays of sun evaporated. Shaking his head, he sneered at his surroundings, his emergency lair, secluded deep within a dell in Miranda Park.
Disgraceful it was for someone of his stature, his presence, his charismatic charm. To have sunk so, so very low. “The situation vill be rectified. Curses!” His tuxedo was crumpled, he noticed, smoothing it out maniacally with the palm of his hand, to little effect. It reeked of marijuana and gunpowder and little girls’ screams and … something else?
The lid of the overturned port-a-john crashed open and the Count stepped out. From within he pulled a satchel. He looked in, shaking it. “It is all there.”
An exciting night it had been, yes. Detective Winters discovering his lair and the Kyberdemon going berserk were but minor scenes, appetizers.
“Ahhhhhhhhh.” The Count revealed long yellow shards of teeth. He had seen her last night, Pussywillow! Long haired, long legged, smoothed skinned, my Sweet-tooth, flower of a daisy, Pussywillow.
“Vy don’t you love me?” He crooned over a wallet photo of her. His last photo. The others? Detective Winters would pay. He quivered but mastered the rage as he caressed the photo.
“My love … my love.”
Some time it had been. He could almost feel his heart beating again, pumping blood through his veins, almost alive. It would have been heaven. If … if only he could have spoken to her, explained to her that the love that burned within him still flared like an impacted molar every time he saw her, thought of her, made love to his dolls. If only he could have touched her, then she would see! She would know! She would feel it, too. Oh yes.
Yes.
Unrequited love?
Never.
Romeo and Juliet?
Yes.
Together … together in death.
“Vy? Vy can you not see the romance?!” He roared. She wouldn’t see him, though. She refused. She ignored. She ran away screaming in terror, “HARLOT!”
No, she had not been with him since he had sacrificed his humanity, to be with her, HER! Well, not even before that either, but the Count did not count it, perhaps for reasons of ego. She would not see him now, but he could still see her. “Oh, yes, my dear, Pussywillow.”
From deep within the shadows and crowds, he had watched her dance, had watched her dance and undulate and gyrate and swing and sway, and he had followed her, and had by chance, by kismet, by fate, found her lair.
Now he could be with her. Her Romeo and his Juliet. The last time he had found her lair … he clamped his eyes shut, trying to suppress that memory. It hurt too much.
“Two veeks,” he mumbled to himself, on the verge of acid tears, and then, “Two VEEKS!” His fangs gritted just imagining it, and those thoughts melded into last night, the club, her lair. “Those, men, those boys! Children!”
She had hurt Bob, the Count, more than perhaps words can say. Rage frothed at his mouth, heaving, foaming rage that only a deranged, psychopathic, ex-dentist turned vampire could possess. His very arms shook as he thought of it now, thought of those men laying their hands upon her body, thought of gnashing-gnawing into their intestines and bathing in their blood, wearing them. “I should have seen her!”
“But no!” She could not see him like that, trammelled, unkempt, without his hair-care products.
“Damn you, Vinters.” He reached into his knapsack and removed the can of spray hair then smiled up at the night. “Tonight, oh, tonight, my sweet, sweet Juliet.”
* * * *
Dinner at the Mayor’s had been going splendidly. Just some minor-minor glitches.
“Oh, oh yes, dear, yes, Sunshine. You’re very cor-cor-correct. I’m so stupid … so stupid. He is still moving,” the Mayor, James Perry the Third, said, laughing to his guests and picking up the lobster by the tail. “HOO! Hot!” he cried dropping it on the table. It twitched considerably in its death throes and knocked over some wine.
“Oh my!” he laughed, glancing sidewise at his wife.
She was not laughing.
The guests laughed, though, disgusted and embarrassed as they were for him. James Perry the Third whisked the lobster, wrapped in a napkin, past the two cooks and waiters, into the kitchen, but he could still hear the conversation in the dining hall.
“Honestly,” commented Denise, the mayor’s benevolent and wise wife, “I don’t know why you can’t just whack them over the head? Wouldn’t it be so much kinder than boiling them? It’s so cruel.”
“What is the main course, Denise?” inquired the Police Chief’s wife, Doris, a peach.
“Baby veal,” James announced, stepping from the kitchen, a platter in hand, heaping with steaming breaded cutlets. James enjoyed serving his guests; he believed it made him appear more magnanimous, or at least, that’s what his wife told him, so he did it and shut up, even though inevitably he dropped half the things he served.
In the middle of the table, he placed the platter, drawing his dangling tie out from its midst. “Ooh, sorry.” He flipped it over his shoulder and moved round to the head of the table, taking in his twelve distinguished guests, the cream of Colton Falls’ society. Not one, except perhaps the Chief, had worked an honest or hard day’s work in their life, and it shone upon them as divinity itself.
“James, fix your tie,” Denise said.
He did.
“So, Chief,” asked Milroy Farnsworth, director of the Colton Falls opera house; he looked like the director of an opera house. “What’s all this ya-ya about last night at the Gin Dingo?”
“Oh, there’s no ya-ya,” The Chief smiled.
“I heard there was a shootout?” Milroy Farnsworth made little pistols with his hands and shot some of the guests.
“Just a little gang dispute.” The Chief wiped his mouth. “The club downstairs. A couple were seriously hurt. That’s all, though. Everything’s fine.”
“Really?” Mrs. Farnsworth raised a delectable eyebrow her husband’s way. “I heard half the building was gone.”
“No, no,” the Chief said. “The owner is remodeling.”
“I own half of that building,” said Gregory Hauser Junior looking up.
“Oh, did you say Gin Dingo?” the Chief asked. “That was a gas main explosion. Half the building is gone. Hundreds dead and wounded. Hope it’s not your half. Would you please pass the carrots?”
“Hmmm, well, it was about time to spruce
it up,” Mrs. Farnsworth said. “Not that I would go down there, mind you. Not that area, even for that restaurant. I do hear it’s sooo trendy, though.”
“You never come down off Bradford Hill, you snob,” Mr. Farnsworth chided, a well-manicured hand on his chest.
“Is there a need to?” Mrs. Farnsworth asked. “I don’t like downtown, it’s … it’s yucky. All those poor people and the homeless, just moping around. Reminds me of ‘Cats.’ And I don’t think I’m a snob, it’s just that I know I’m better than those people. Honestly,” she continued, now addressing the Chief, “isn’t there some place you could take them all? I’m not saying mistreat them or anything too harsh, but, just lock them all away, somewhere, someplace safe, somewhere you don’t have to look at them. Or smell them. Or have them ask you for money or food.”
“I only wish it were that easy, Mrs. Farnsworth.”
“Call me Kitty.”
“Kitty,” continued the Chief, grinning to himself and adjusting his tie, “the mayor and I have discussed this very problem ourselves. We’ve come up with some ideas to cut down on this and many of the other unsightly problems one finds in urban areas. This veal is splendid, Mrs. Perry.”
“Well, Chief,” Denise said proudly, “I did supervise and monitor the help the whole time they were preparing it. Made sure they cooked it just right. I can’t take all the credit myself, though. The butcher assured me the baby cows were housed in the smallest possible enclosures to limit any form of exercise or physical exertion.”
“Really? I had no idea,” said Dorothy Muffin, wife of the very influential Milton Muffin.
“Oh, yes,” continued Denise, “the butcher also said they massage the baby cows every day to keep them soft and yummy. I wish I were a baby cow! They have it so easy. Just lie around all day waiting for the masseuse. Pass the butter, James?”
“I wonder if they have cable television?” James asked, and the whole table laughed again. He was so funny. He paused in his laughter and looked up in surprise through the great hall door and into the foyer. Someone was at the front door.
“I wonder who that could be?”
Dinner had been going splendidly. Just a few minor-minor glitches, and then a werewolf burst in and ate Mrs. Farnsworth’s head.
Chapter 36.
“THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME,” Peter said to himself, glancing down the hall one way and then the other and then back the other way again. As far as the eye could see, red doors ran parallel on either side of the hall. A dim bulb every forty feet or so provided what light there was in the bowels of the apartment building. Which one?
Walking slowly down the hall, his footsteps were silent on the thick carpet. All the doors were identical. There were no names on them. Like a fucking vampire’s going to put a name on her door.
“They’re probably all fucking vampires,” he said and then immediately wished he hadn’t. He glanced at his watch and realized he wasn’t wearing it anymore, realized he didn’t need it anymore.
The sun was already down; it was night, officially. He could feel it. His stomach rumbled, and he realized how hungry he was, how much he needed to eat. He needed to eat. He needed to — Peter’s wandering mind shot back into focus when he heard the first scream. The gun was out and in his hand before the scream subsided. A man’s voice. Definitely a man’s voice. Dad?
Across the dull blue carpet, he strode with purpose. God damn it! Finally, he laid out in a full sprint. Within seconds, all that stood between him and the screams was a red door.
Crash! His shoulder met the door. Audibly, it cracked, the door, not his shoulder, but did not break. Peter launched a leg at it, but it whipped open suddenly as he did so. Momentum pulled him in, off balance, and he landed flat on his back, surrounded.
Slitted yellow eyes from beneath floppy red hats, nailed through flesh and into bone, glared down at him with hate and chittering-mad-hunger. They descended.
“Ahhhh! Motherfu—!”
The gun was up — a steel claw thicket ripped into him from all around, sinking into his flesh, biting, piercing bone.
Peter kicked and punched, a crack of thunder then, boom, he unloaded the gun.
Dead.
Boom!
Dead.
“Shit!”
He fought his way up.
Boom!
There were many, though, swarming like ants, and they latched onto him, ripping him, bearing him back to the floor. Their weight crushed his chest, pinned his arms, his legs.
Like a maniac Peter swung and tore one arm free, fighting, writhing as teeth chewed into his flesh.
He screamed.
* * * *
The Mayor’s front doors and the guards to go with them were torn open.
Detective Winters stepped through the twisted metal doors and into the foyer of the house just as sirens started blaring in the distance. Police, they would be here in less than a minute.
Detective Winters wasted no time.
A Tommy gun slung over his shoulder and in hand, he stepped softly and quickly, scanning his way through the house.
Lord Brudnoy had been here.
Was still here.
Detective Winters could smell him, the reek of lycanthropic sewer madness crackled like a charged fever in the air. Within his coat, he checked the ducted-taped silver collar and chain, a slim hope, a fat chance.
A rhythmic pounding reverberated through the house every few seconds, the west wing. Detective Winters glanced up at the security cameras in the living room. There had been cameras outside. He moved on.
Corpses in the dining room, five. Guests. Dinner jackets and dresses.
Corpses in the kitchen, three. One waiter, two guards.
Dinner at the mayors? No thank you.
Corpse in the hallway. Guest.
Corpses in the smoking parlor. One guest. One waiter.
The pounding was getting closer, or rather, he was closing in on the pounding.
Sirens wailed and blue lights flickered in the windows as police cruisers screeched to a halt outside.
Detective Winters stopped.
The pounding, the thick, thwack, thwack, thwack, of flesh on metal was in the next room. The floors and walls shook. Paintings dropped, shattering, and furniture shimmied and tangoed across the hardwood floors. The clomp of feet in the foyer announced the arrival of the police.
Detective Winters stepped through the door and into the mayor’s bedroom. “Brudnoy!” he yelled, Tommy-gun trained on the mountain of muscle and grizzled fur.
Lord Brudnoy bolted around and growled, insanity sizzling in each yellow wolf eye. Blood matted the fur on his head and nose, dripping from beneath his chin. White feathers, from masticated bed and pillows, wafted through the air like a blizzard, sticking to the wall, the ceiling, the werewolf. Past the wolf was a dented steel vault door that would not have looked out of place in a bank. Blood and long strands of hair stuck to it. Long claw marks slid from top to bottom.
“Brudnoy,” Detective Winters said, “pull yourself together. We need to talk.”
Lord Brudnoy, his head low as he turned and slunk forward, lips curled, snarling, eyes sparking in recognition, uttered one word, “Pork-chop.” His paws thumped heavy on the thick carpet.
“Is the MAYOR in there?” Detective Winters pointed at the vault door. “MAYOR JAMES PERRY?”
Skidding dead to a halt, tearing tracks in the carpet, the werewolf stopped, and something less tenuous than sanity snapped in his eyes as he turned once more to the vault door, “Perry!” he roared as he hurled himself. The crash of his head ramming the vault door shook the house to its foundation.
Detective Winters steadied himself in the doorway as a ceiling fan fell.
Throwing back his head, slavering silvery strands of long cobweb spit high in the air, Lord Brudnoy let out a howl that shook the very earth.
Detective Winters clutched his ears as windows shattered in the bedroom, in the den, the kitchen. The thwack of meat on steel resumed.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Seconds later, three police officers edged into the smoking parlor, guns drawn.
Detective Winters inserted ear plugs.
They saw him.
“Don’t move, Winters! You’re under arrest!” One officer pointed a pistol. “Gun on the floor, Winters, and raise your hands above your head! You have the right to remain silent.”
“Officer,” Detective Winters stepped from the doorway, revealing the scene within, “I am the least of your worries.” Detective Winters pointed with his thumb, hitch-hiker style. “Your employer and boss, at present, are in that vault.”
“Holy Shit!”
“What the hell is that?”
“Are you packing silver?” Detective Winters asked, his back to the wall.
“Uh, no.”
“Then get the hell out of here,” Detective Winters said. “He is almost through.”
Lord Brudnoy dented the vault door concave with one mighty charge then worried his claws screeching behind the door. The vault door screeched like Godzilla as it was mangled outward, slowly, inevitably, rolling down like a sardine can. Frantic cries from within the vault were barely audible.
“Help us!”
“Take my wife!”
“Lord Jesus!”
“Her! Not me!”
“Operations! Operations! This is car eighteen on scene at the mayor’s,” one of the officers cried into the mike at his shoulder. “We need backup, we need — we’ve got a wolf over here, a big fucking wolf!” He pointed at one of his partners. “Reynolds, go get the shotgun!”
Reynolds bolted.
His partner glanced enviously at his fleeing form. Outside, more police cars screeched up.
Detective Winters grimaced.
* * * *
A dozen scenarios flickered through Kade Valentine’s mind as, slid down the hallway, red doors as far as the eye could see. He stepped to the door, the door the gunfire had come from, a hundred outcomes augmented by thousands of variables all scintillating through his mind, and then it went blank.
