Blood Lite II: Overbite

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Hey, a baby!” the boy said. “You have a baby monster! Can I see?”

  “We’re trying to have a private dinner,” I began to say to the boy, but Bernice simply pushed her clothing aside to reveal Brad. Brad waved, which was just a trick she could do by rolling her stomach.

  “Brad’s what’s called a parasitic twin,” I explained. “He’s . . . he’s kind of like a decoration. For her belly.” Brad opened up his fetal mouth and a thin trickle of something tan and fecal came out. Doctors don’t know what that stuff is, but Brad’s been drooling it out for forty years now nonstop.

  “Hon,” I whispered, “cover yourself up.” Bernice gets huffy when she says I treat her like a child, and she made an elaborate show of pulling her dress back down over Brad. But that tugged down the other side of the dress, and her hump popped out.

  “Hey, is that a wombat?” the boy asked. He must watch Animal Planet ! It was just a kyphosis, of course, with a patch of teratoma that had two fingers, four teeth, and a thick loop of lower intestine. But Bernice’s body hair around there was thick enough to make it look like an animal perched on her shoulder. What do you want: her mother’s Greek.

  “It’s time to go back to your table,” I said, and the boy reluctantly left. I heard him tell his mom that the monster had an animal and a baby in her: he said the word “blob,” which I hoped Bernice didn’t hear. She didn’t: one good aspect of the eczema skin-sloughing filling up her ear canals.

  Each time the kitchen door opened, revealing a tray-bearing waitress, I said “Is this ours? Is this one for us?” Bernice tolerates my attempts at humor. Finally it was: Melani came out and propped open one of those unfoldable-leg devices they can rest a big serving tray on. What are those called? All nice restaurants have them, so someone must know what they’re called. Maybe I should ask Melani.

  Melani dashed back to the kitchen and returned with our drinks (Diet Coke, of course, for Bernice and iced tea for me), two bowls of alfredo, a sizzling shrimp scampi that looked delicious, and plate after plate of lasagna. Really: I asked them to bring the tray out. They needn’t have gone to all this trouble.

  “We had four servings of the lasagna verdi left,” Melani said, doing a good job of being composed. “Enjoy!”

  “I really wish you hadn’t plated them all,” I said, taking out the funnel pot. “It’s really not necessary. Just more dishes to wash!” I tilted one of the alfredo bowls, and creamy noodles sprinkled with green flakes exited down into the bag, landing with a loud plop. The second bowl’s contents sounded even wetter, since they splashed against even more fettuccini.

  “Ready?” I asked Bernice.

  She took off her face, then nodded. “Go!” she said, or rather grunted, since her tongue had no upper palate to make a g sound against. After her cleft-palate surgery weakened her nose and sinuses so much, the doctors just gave her a prosthetic. But it gets dirty when eating, so she snaps it off for meals. Having no upper teeth also means you can’t chew, and the lip fibroid made it easiest to just pour soft foods down her throat. She also popped out her lower bridge: the bottom teeth were cutting into her bare sinuses, so they had to go.

  I’ve gotten used to the sounds of Bernice eating, and the visuals, but it’s a little disarming to others. I hope we can get all the Alfredo down before any of it returns. I usually have to climb up onto the table at home to feed Bernice, but we’re at a nice restaurant so I make do with standing next to her.

  Starting the process, I hold the funnel pot at a tilted angle. (We don’t use the term feed bag; that’s for horses!) The alfredo begins a mudslide down the pot wall, then hits the funnel and begins to drip out a few at a time. Bernice waits patiently, mouth open wider than most any other human on the planet can be. (We’ve applied to the Guinness Book: they say it’s not a category they recognize.) She looks like Pac-Man, like a cartoon of someone with a mouth so open it would require a broken jaw.

  A gleek of saliva from her glands squirts out, then two more. The first noodles hit her mouth, and she slams her jaws closed on them like a bear trap. The sound, I’m a bit chagrined to say, is halfway between gutting a fish and breaking wind. I pour some more down her mouth, and she eagerly swallows it. At home we call it “feeding the baby bird.” This way food doesn’t lodge in any of the carved-out cavities that line her throat. She can do it by herself, of course, but due to some binocular troubles she can’t aim well enough to hit her mouth too often. I don’t mind doing this, though, if it gives her some dignity.

  Still, sometimes a hank of food will make its way into her sinus cavity, which I can see from this upward angle. Bernice snorts once, twice, then spits out the chunk of food as best she can into her hand. It’s yellowish-green now, from the protective layers that coat the sinus. She pops it back into her mouth two seconds later: five-second rule!

  We’re halfway through the alfredo when someone across the room vomits. Darn it! This always happens. And, of course, once one person vomits that makes a second person vomit, and then a third. And then Bernice feels bad so she gets up to go over and apologize. But she’s got a sensitive stomach, and when she sees people getting sick, she’s got the same gag reflex as everyone else. And up comes the alfredo, right onto the floor. And, since she leaned over rather fast to upchuck, her dress hiked itself up over her back, exposing her bottom.

  Bernice’s bottom is not her best feature. She’s a large woman, and large people have certain hygiene issues that people blessed with speedy metabolisms don’t have. She just can’t reach back there, people! Don’t expect every last bit of everything to be scrubbed clean! Plus, she had an asymmetrical cyst that the doctors said was benign but still weighed twenty-three pounds and hung off a delicate part of her. (This also made it impossible for her to wear regular, or any, undergarments.) She turned around to retrieve her dress, and had to turn around two or three times to catch it with her right flipper.

  There also was a smell, or rather a series of them. I prefer not to linger on the subject of smells.

  “I think we’ll just wrap up the rest in a doggie bag, thanks,” I told Melani. Two minutes later Bernice and I left, a brisk evening breeze dancing her trail of dandruff around like delicate little white leaves. They didn’t charge us for Bernice’s chair, which was nice of them. But maybe they didn’t notice. Well, it needed upholstering anyway: her spastic colon only helped that process along.

  Back in the car, Bernice took out her talkbook, and pointed to the picture of a house. She raised a suggestive eyebrow at me. Well, where the eyebrow would be if not for the ringworm. I shook my head. “You knew the deal, Bernice. I have to drop you back off at your place. We can’t go to my house tonight.”

  She was sulky on the way home, but she has to face facts. I can’t be at her beck and call all the time. I’m a married man, and she knew that when she started dating me. I’m not in a position to leave my wife right yet. When the time is right, I am positively dumping her ugly ass for Bernice. Not yet, though. Until then, we’ll have our nights on the town, just the two of us.

  Treatment

  J. A. KONRATH

  “It all goes back to the time I was bitten by that werewolf.”

  Dr. Booster’s pencil paused for a moment on his notepad, having only written a W.

  “A werewolf?”

  Tyler nodded. Booster appraised the teenager: pimples, lanky, hair a bit too long for the current style. The product of a well-to-do suburban couple.

  “This is the reason your grades have gone down?”

  “Yeah. Instead of studying at night, I roam the neighborhood, eating squirrels.”

  “I see. And how do squirrels taste, Tyler?”

  “They go down dry.”

  Booster wrote “active imagination” on his pad.

  “What makes you say you were bitten by a werewolf?”

  “Because I was.”

  “When did this happen?”

  Tyler scratched at the pubescent hairs on his chin. “Two weeks ago. I was out at nig
ht, burying this body . . .”

  “Burying a body?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Tyler, for therapy to work, we have to be honest with each other.”

  “I’m being honest, Dr. Booster.”

  Booster made his mouth into a tight line and wrote “uncooperative” on his pad.

  “Fine, Tyler. Whose body were you burying?”

  “It was Crazy Harold. He was a wino that hung out in the alley behind the liquor store on Kedzie.”

  “And why were you burying him?”

  Tyler furrowed his brow. “I had to get rid of it. I didn’t think digging a grave would be necessary. I thought they disintegrated after getting a stake in the heart.”

  Booster frowned. “Crazy Harold was a vampire?”

  Tyler shifted on the couch to look at him. “You knew? Shouldn’t they turn into dust when you kill them?”

  Booster glanced at the diplomas on his wall and sighed.

  “So you’re saying you hammered a stake into Crazy Harold—”

  “It was actually a broken broom handle.”

  “—and then buried him.”

  “In the field behind the house. And just when I finished, that’s when the werewolf got me.”

  Tyler lifted his right leg and hiked up his pants. Above the sock was a raised pink scar, squiggly like an earthworm.

  “That’s the bite mark?”

  Tyler nodded.

  “It looks old, Tyler.”

  “It healed fast.”

  “Your mother told me you got that scar when you were nine years old. You fell off your bike.”

  Tyler blinked, then rolled his pants leg back down.

  “Mom’s full of shit.”

  Booster wrote “animosity toward mother” on his pad.

  “Why do you say that, Tyler? Your mother is the one who recommended therapy, isn’t she? It seems as if she wants to help.”

  “She’s not my real mother. Her and Dad were replaced by aliens.”

  “Aliens?”

  “They killed my parents, replaced them with duplicates. They look and sound the same, but they’re actually from another planet. I caught them, once, in their bedroom.”

  Booster raised an eyebrow. “Making love?”

  “Contacting the mother ship. They’re planning a full-scale invasion of earth. But I thought you wanted to know about the werewolf.”

  Booster pursed his lips. WWFD? He appealed to the picture of Sigmund hanging above the fireplace. The picture offered no answers.

  “Tyler, with your consent, I’d like to try some hypnotherapy. Have you ever been hypnotized?”

  Tyler shook his head. Booster dimmed the lights and sat alongside the couch. He held his pencil in front of Tyler’s face at eye level.

  “Take a deep breath, then let it out. Focus on the pencil . . .”

  It took a few minutes to bring Tyler to a state of susceptible relaxation.

  “Can you hear me, Tyler?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy’s jaw was slack, and a thin line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth. Booster was surprised at the child’s halitosis—perhaps he had been eating squirrels after all.

  “I’d like you to go back to two weeks ago. When you were burying Crazy Harold.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “It’s cold. There are a lot of rocks in the dirt, and the shovel won’t go in very far.”

  Booster used his penlight to check Tyler’s pupils. Slow response. The child was under.

  “What were you digging?”

  “Grave. For the vampire.”

  Booster frowned. He’d studied cases of patients lying under hypnosis, but had never encountered one in person.

  “What about the werewolf?”

  “Came out of the field. It was big, had red eyes, walked on two legs.”

  “And it bit you?”

  “Yeah. I thought it was going to kill me, but Runs Like Stallion saved me.”

  “Runs Like Stallion?”

  “He’s a ghost. He used to be a Sioux brave. The field is an old Indian burial ground.”

  Booster decided he’d had enough. He wrote “treatment” in his notebook and went over to his desk, unlocking the top drawer. The metallic case practically leaped up at him. He took it over to Tyler.

  “Tyler, your parents are tired of these stories.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “No, Tyler. They aren’t dead. They care about you. That’s why they brought you to me.”

  Booster opened the case. The gnerlock blinked its three eyes and crawled into Booster’s hand. It would enter Tyler’s mouth and burrow up into his brain, taking over his body. Tyler was a tad bit young, and the gnerlock would be cramped living in the boy’s skull, but psychiatry wasn’t a perfect science.

  “Soon, it will all be better. You’ll have no more worries. You’re going to be a host, Tyler, for the new dominant species on this planet. Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “Open your mouth, Tyler.”

  Tyler stretched his mouth wide. Wider than humanly possible. And Booster was alarmed to see it was crammed with sharp teeth.

  The gnerlock nesting in the doctor’s brain popped out through his neck after the wolf decapitated the host body. Its eleven legs beelined for the door, antennae waving hysterically, telepathically cursing that quack, Freud.

  Halfway there, a ghostly moccasin came down on the alien’s oblong head, smashing it into the carpeting.

  Runs Like Stallion gave the wolf a thumbs-up, but Tyler was already leaping out the window, vulpine eyes locked on a juicy squirrel in the grass below.

  Dead Clown Séance

  CHRISTOPHER WELCH

  Clem’s mobile home was strewn with shadows. The sole luminescence came from four candles centered on the table. The flames stretched upward as their amber brightness reflected off the clowns’ pasty faces.

  Clem, Toodles, Oswald Osgood, and Beeps held hands, forming a circle around the tapers. The poof-ball at the peak of Clem’s conical hat was almost invisible in the surrounding darkness. Toodles tilted her head back so her frizzy green hair would not catch the flames. Oswald’s tramp clothing and hobo makeup made him appear more frightened than he felt. Beeps had placed his bicycle horn on the table within easy reach.

  Oswald wanted to say If Lon Chaney had seen us by candlelight first, he might have altered his famous comment about clowns in moonlight, but he kept that thought to himself.

  Clem was a tad apprehensive about conducting another séance. Last time, his neighbor Andrei filed a noise complaint with the neighborhood association. Clem took a deep breath. He began the séance.

  “We call you, spirits of the dead,” Clem concentrated his mind’s eye. “We call to the departed souls from this mortal world. Come now. Come!”

  The flames swayed as a mysterious breeze developed inside the blackened mobile home.

  “Are you there, Mr. Flonkers? Come to us. Come to us now!”

  The flames lapped as the mystic wind escalated. The house trailer wobbled. Shadows trembled around the four clowns. Loose debris fluttered about as the wind intensified—bits of cellophane, used Post-it notes, Slurpee receipts from 7-Eleven, hamburger wrappers. Clowns love hamburgers. And Slurpees.

  “Come, Mr. Flonkers! Come to us!” they shouted in unison over the supernatural gale, except for Beeps, who honked his horn.

  Beep-Beep.

  The wind died quickly as pale smoke rose from the burning wicks. The smoke twisted into shapes, the shapes curled into a form, and the form became a figure. Above the candles, floating in a vaporous cloak, the ghost they summoned manifested itself.

  Mr. Flonkers wore a maroon bowler hat with a daisy in the band and an oversized scarlet ascot. He had pinpricks of white light in otherwise hollow eyes. His countenance was jovial with a red-painted grin and skull-white face.

  “Who calls me?” Mr. Flonkers’s voice reverberated as if it emanated f
rom the bottom of a well.

  “We need your help.”

  “Toodles, dear, is that you?” Mr. Flonkers asked.

  “Yes, it is. Nice to see you again.”

  Mr. Flonkers removed his hat in greeting. “Likewise.”

  The spirit assessed her green frizz, her emerald eye shadow that matched her lipstick, and her white face. She wore a jade-and-black checkered unitard over her lithe body. “You’re as beautiful as I remember.”

  Beep-Beep.

  Mr. Flonkers moved towards Beeps. The vapor twisted with his movement. “You’re here too, my loquacious friend?”

  Beep-Beep.

  “Oswald as well?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “How did you summon me from the Big Top in the Sky?”

  “That’s my doing,” Clem said.

  The spirit turned and the smoke curled once more.

  “Clem, my boy!” Mr. Flonkers said with affection. “Four of the finest apprentices of the Mr. Flonkers Clown Alley, present and accounted for. Again, how did you summon me?”

  “My gypsy heritage,” Clem said. “My clairvoyant parents were fortune-tellers and psychic readers in the circus. I never turned professional, much to my parents’ dismay. After numerous arguments about my career choice, I ran away from home and joined the other part of the circus. My clairvoyance is still active, though.”

  “I see.” The ghost nodded.

  “We summoned you, sir, for a specific reason. We need help, and as our mentor—our departed mentor—you’re uniquely qualified to help.”

  Beep-Beep.

  “What’s the situation?”

  “Do you recall Otis Oddbody?” Clem asked.

  “Of course,” Mr. Flonkers said. “I worked with him in the early days, before he formed his own alley.”