by S T Joshi
“A night watchman gig,” says Larry, obviously thinking of the low pay scale. But what in hell would the Prince need human coin for, anyway? “Hard to picture.”
“Try looking in a mirror, yourself,” says the Count.
Larry blows a raspberry. “Jealous.”
It is very easy for Blank Frank to visualize the Prince, gliding through the silent, cavernous corridors in the wee hours. The museum is, after all, just one giant tomb.
Larry is fairly certain ole Fish Face—another nickname—escaped from a mad scientist in San Francisco and butterfly-stroked south, probably to wind up in bayou country. He and Larry had shared a solid mammal-to-amphibian simpatico. He and Larry had been the most physically violent of the old crew. Larry still entertains the notion of talking his scaly pal into doing a bout for pay-per-view. He has never been able to work out the logistics of a steel fishtank match, however.
“Griffin?” says the Count.
“Who can say?” Blank Frank shrugs. “He could be standing right here and we wouldn’t know it unless he started singing ‘Nuts in May.’”
“He was a misanthrope,” says Larry. “His crazy kid, too. That’s what using drugs will get you.”
This last is a veiled stab at the Count’s calling. The Count expects this from Larry, and stays venomless. The last thing he wants this evening is a conflict over the morality of substance use.
“I dream, sometimes, of those days,” says Blank Frank. “Then I see the films again. The dreams are literalized. It’s scary.”
“Before this century,” says the Count, “I never had to worry that anyone would stockpile my past.” Of the three, he is the most paranoid where personal privacy is concerned.
“You’re a romantic.” Larry will only toss an accusation like this in special company. “It was important to a lot of people that we be monsters. You can’t deny what’s nailed down there in black and white. There was a time when the world needed monsters like that.”
They each considered their current occupations, and found that they did indeed still fit into the world.
“Nobody’s gonna pester you now,” Larry presses on. “Don’t bother to revise your past—today, your past is public record, and waiting to contradict you. We did our jobs. How many people become mythologically legendary for just doing their jobs?”
“Mythologically legendary?” mimics the Count. “You’ll grow hair on your hands from using all those big words.”
“Bite this.” Larry offers the unilateral peace symbol.
“No, thank you; I’ve already dined. But I have brought something for you. For both of you.”
Blank Frank and Larry both notice the Count is now speaking as though a big Mitchell camera is grinding away, somewhere just beyond the grasp of sight. He produces a small pair of wrapped gifts, and hands them over.
Larry wastes no time ripping into his. “Weighs a ton.”
Nestled in styro popcorn is a wolf’s head—savage, streamlined, smiling. The gracile canine neck is socketed.
“It’s from the walking stick,” says the Count. “All that was left.”
“No kidding.” Larry’s voice grows small for the first time that evening. The wolf’s head seems to gain weight in his grasp. Two beats of his powerful heart later, his eyes seem a bit wet.
Blank Frank’s gift is much smaller and lighter.
“You were a conundrum,” says the Count. He enjoys playing emcee. “So many choices, yet never easy to buy for. Some soil from Transylvania? Water from Loch Ness? A chunk of some appropriate ruined castle?”
What Blank Frank unwraps is a ring. Old gold, worn smooth of its subtler filigree. A small ruby set in the grip of a talon. He holds it to the light.
“As nearly as I could discover, that ring once belonged to a man named Ernst Volmer Klumpf.”
“Whoa,” says Larry. Weird name.
Blank Frank puzzles it. He holds it toward the Count, like a lens.
“Klumpf died a long time ago,” says the Count. “Died and was buried. Then he was disinterred. Then a few of his choicer parts were recycled by a skillful surgeon of our mutual acquaintance.”
Blank Frank stops looking so blank.
“In fact, part of Ernst Volmer Klumpf is still walking around today . . . tending bar for his friends, among other things.”
The new expression on Blank Frank’s pleases the Count. The ring just barely squeezes onto the big guy’s left pinky—his smallest finger.
Larry, to avoid choking up, decides to make noise. Showing off, he vaults the bartop and draws his own refill. “This calls for a toast.” He hoists his beer high, slopping the head. “To dead friends. Meaning us.”
The Count pops several capsules from an ornate tin and washes them down with the last of his Gangbang. Blank Frank murders his Blind Hermit.
“Don’t even think of the bill,” says Blank Frank, who knows of the Count’s habit of paying for everything. The Count smiles and nods graciously. In his mind, the critical thing is to keep the tab straight. Blank Frank pats the Count on the shoulder, hale and brotherly, since Larry is out of reach. The Count dislikes physical contact but permits this because it is, after all, Blank Frank.
“Shit man, we could make our own comeback sequel, with all the talent in this room,” Larry says. “Maybe hook up with some of those new guys. Do a monster rally.”
It could happen. They all look significantly at each other. A brief stink of guilt, of culpability, like a sneaky fart in a dimly lit chamber.
Make that dimly-lit torture dungeon, thinks Blank Frank, who never forgets the importance of staying in character.
Blank Frank thinks about sequels. About how studios had once jerked their marionette strings, compelling them to come lurching back for more, again and again, adding monsters when the brew ran weak, until they had all been bled dry of revenue potential and dumped at a bus stop to commence the long deathwatch that had made them nostalgia.
It was like living death, in its way.
And these gatherings, year upon year, had become sequels in their own right.
The realization is depressing. It sort of breaks the back of the evening for Blank Frank. He stands friendly and remains as chatty as he ever gets. But the emotion has soured.
Larry chugs so much that he has grown a touch bombed. The Count’s chemicals intermix and buzz; he seems to sink into the depths of his coat, his chin ever-closer to the butt of the gun he carries. Larry drinks deep, then howls. The Count plugs one ear with a finger on his free hand. “I wish he wouldn’t do that,” he says in a proscenium-arch sotto voce that indicates his annoyance is mostly token.
When Larry tries to hurdle the bar again, moving exaggeratedly as he almost always does, he manages to plant his big wrestler’s elbow right into the glass on Blank Frank’s framed movie poster. It dents inward with a sharp crack, cobwebbing into a snap puzzle of fracture curves. Larry swears, instantly chagrined. Then, lamely, he offers to pay for the damage.
The Count, not unexpectedly, counter-offers to buy the poster, now that it’s damaged.
Blank Frank shakes his massive square head at both of his friends. So many years, among them. “It’s just glass. I can replace it. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
The thought that he has done this before depresses him further. He sees the reflection of his face, divided into staggered components in the broken glass, and past that, the lurid illustration. Him then. Him now.
Blank Frank touches his face as though it is someone else’s. His fingernails have always been black. Now they are merely fashionable.
Larry remains embarrassed about the accidental damage and the Count begins spot-checking his Rolex every five minutes or so, as though he is pressing the envelope on an urgent appointment. Something has spoiled the whole mood of their reunion, and Blank Frank is angry that he can’t quite pinpoint the cause. When he is angry, his temper froths quickly.
The Count is the first to rise. Decorum is all. Larry tries one more time to apol
ogize. Blank Frank stays cordial, but is overpowered by the sudden strong need to get them the hell out of Un/Dead.
The Count bows stiffly. His limo manifests precisely on schedule. Larry gives Blank Frank a hug. His arms can reach all the way ’round.
“Au revoir,” says the Count.
“Stay dangerous,” says Larry.
Blank Frank closes and locks the service door. He monitors, via the tiny security window, the silent, gliding departure of the Count’s limousine, the fading of Larry’s spangles into the night.
Still half an hour till opening. The action at Un/Dead doesn’t really crank until midnight anyway, so there’s very little chance that some bystander will get hurt.
Blank Frank bumps up the volume and taps his club boot. A eulogy with a beat. He loves Larry and the Count in his massive, broad, uncompromisingly loyal way, and hopes they will understand his actions. He hopes that his two closest friends are perceptive enough, in the years to come, to know that he is not crazy.
Not crazy, and certainly not a monster.
While the music plays, he fetches two economy-sized plastic bottles of lantern kerosene, which he ploshes liberally around the bar, saturating the old wood trim. Arsonists call such flammable liquids “accelerator.”
In the scripts, it was always an overturned lantern, or a flung torch from a mob of villagers, that touched off the conclusive inferno. Mansions, mad labs, even stone fortresses not only burned, but blew up, eliminating all phyla of menacing monsters until they were needed anew.
Dark threads snake through the tiny warrior braid at the base of Blank Frank’s skull. All those Blind Hermits, don’t you know.
The purple electricity arcs to meet his finger and trails after it loyally. He unplugs the plasma globe and cradles it beneath one giant forearm.
The movie poster, he leaves hanging in its violated frame.
He snaps the sulphur match with a black thumbnail. Ignition craters and blackens the head, eating it with a sharp hiss. Un/Dead’s PA throbs to the bass line of “D.O.A.” Phosphorus tinges the unmoving air. The match fires orange to yellow to steady blue-white. Its flamepoint reflects from Blank Frank’s large black pupils. He can see himself, as if by candlelight, fragmented by broken picture glass. The past. In his grasp is the plasma globe, unblemished, pristine, awaiting a new charge of energy. The future.
He recalls his past experiences with fire, all of them. Burn down the monster. He drops the match into the thin pool of accelerator glistening on the bartop and the flame grows, quietly.
By striking the match, he has just purchased a feeling, as the Count would no doubt observe.
The Monster blunderingly topples a rack of beakers, a modern-day sorcerer’s brew of flammables and caustics . . .
Never has he precipitated the end on purpose. Never, except in the first sequel. We belong dead. He was making a point.
The movie poster stays behind, in its smashed frame. That will be the price paid. Sacrifice something valuable.
More convincing, that way. He is staying dangerous.
Good.
And Blank Frank does, in fact, feel better.
Light springs, hard reddish-white now, behind him as he makes his exit and locks the door of Un/Dead. The night is cool by contrast, near foggy. Condensation mists the plasma globe as he strolls away, pausing once beneath a streetlamp to appreciate the ring on his little finger. He doesn’t need to eat, to sleep.
Uninjured by the cataclysm, the Monster stumbles, grunting, away from the village and into the forest . . .
But this time, thinks Blank Frank, the old Monster knows where he’s going.
He’ll miss Michelle and the rest of the club staff. But he must move on, because he is not like them. He has all the time he’ll ever need, and friends who will be around forever . . .
Un/Dead blazes. The night swallows him.
Blank Frank likes the power.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Joyce Carol Oates was born in Millerport, New York, in 1938. She received a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. In 1962 she married Raymond J. Smith, settling in Detroit. There she wrote the novel them (1969), a searing study of the race riots plaguing the city. Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada; from 1978 onward, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University, where she is now the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. Oates, one of the most prolific of contemporary American writers, has received many awards for her work, including the National Book Award and the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature.
The supernatural has been a pervasive theme in much of Oates’s work as novelist and short story writer. A series of four novels, Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), and My Heart Laid Bare (1998), applies the Gothic mode to American history and culture. Bellefleur features seven generations of grotesque characters, including a vampire, a mad scientist, and a mass murderer, dwelling in a haunted mansion. Much of Oates’s horror work is nonsupernatural, as in the novel Black Water (1992), the short novel Beasts (2001), and the novel The Tattooed Girl (2003).
Oates has also utilized supernatural horror in many of her short stories. Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) contains the highest proportion of horror tales, but several of her other collections include one or more specimens. Oates has compiled the anthology American Gothic Tales (1996), the introduction to which elucidates her theory of supernatural writing. She has also edited Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (1997).
“Demon,” a short story first published in the small-press chapbook Demon and Other Tales (1996), is a gripping and ambiguous horror tale in which the supernatural may or may not come into play.
DEMON
emon-child. Kicked in the womb so his mother doubled over in pain. Nursing tugged and tore at her young breasts. Wailed through the night. Puked, shat. Refused to eat. No he was loving, mad with love. Of Mama. (Though fearful of Da.) Curling burrowing pushing his head into Mama’s arms, against Mama’s warm fleshy body. Starving for love, food. Starving for what he could not know yet to name: God’s grace, salvation.
Sign of Satan: flamey-red ugly-pimply birthmark snake-shaped. On his underjaw, coiled below his ear. Almost you can’t see it. A little boy he’s teased by neighbor girls, hulking, big girls with titties and laughing-wet eyes. Demon! demon! Lookit, sign of the demon!
Those years passing in a fever-dream. Or maybe never passed. Mama prayed over him, hugged and slapped. Shook his skinny shoulders so his head flew. The minister prayed over him Deliver us from evil and he was good, he was delivered from evil. Except at school his eyes misting over, couldn’t see the blackboard. Sullen and nasty-mouthed the teacher called him. Not like the other children.
If not like the other children, then like who? what?
Those years. As in a stalled city bus, exhaust pouring out the rear. The stink of it everywhere. Your hair, eyes. Clothes. Same view through the same fly-specked windows. Year after year the battered-tin diner, the vacant lot high with weeds and rubble and the path worn through it slantwise where children ran shouting above the river. Broken pavement littered like confetti from a parade long past.
Or maybe it was the edge of something vast, infinite. You could never come to the end of. Wavering and blinding in blasts of light. Desert, maybe. Red Desert where demons dance, swirl in the hot winds. Never seen a desert except pictures, a name on a map. And in his head.
Demon-child they whispered of him. But no, he was loving, mad with love. Too small, too short. Stunted legs. His head too big for his spindly shoulders. His strange waxy-pale moon-shaped face, almond eyes beautiful in shadowed sockets, small wet mouth perpetually sucking inward. As if to keep the bad words, words of filth and damnation, safely inside.
The sign of Satan coiled on his underjaw began to fade. Like his adolescent skin eruptions. Blood drawn gradually back into tissue, capillaries.
N
ot a demon-child but a pure good anxious loving child someone betrayed by squeezing him from her womb before he was ready.
Not a demon-child but for years he rode wild thunderous razor-hooved black stallions by night and by day. Furious galloping on sidewalks, in asphalt playgrounds. Through the school corridors trampling all in his way. Furious tearing hooves, froth-flecked nostrils, bared teeth. God’s wrath, the black stallion rearing, whinnying. I destroy all in my path. Beware!
Not a demon-child but he’d torched the school, rows of stores, woodframe houses in the neighborhood. How many times the smelly bed where Mama and Da hid from him. And no one knew.
This January morning bright and windy and he’s staring at the face floating in a mirror. Dirty mirror in a public lavatory, Trailways Bus Station. Where at last the demon has been released. For it is the New Year. The shifting of the earth’s axis. For to be away from what is familiar, like walking on a sharp-slanted floor, allows something other in. Or the something other has been inside you all along and until now you do not know.
In his right eyeball a speck of dirt? dust? blood?
Scared, he knows right away. Knows even before he sees: sign of Satan. In the yellowish-white of his eyeball. Not the coiled little snake but the five-sided star: pentagram.
He knows, he’s been warned. Five-sided star: pentagram.
It’s there, in his eye. Tries to rub it out with his fist.
Backs away terrified and gagging and he’s running out of the fluorescent-bright lavatory and through the bus station where eyes trail after him curious, bemused, pitying, annoyed. He’s a familiar sight here though no one knows his name. Runs home, about three miles. His mother knows there’s trouble, has he lied about taking his medicine? hiding the pill under his tongue? Yes but God knows you can’t oversee every minute with one like him. Yes but your love wears thin like the lead backing of a cheap mirror corroding the glass. Yes but you have prayed, you have prayed and prayed and cursed the words echoing not upward to God but downward as in an empty well.