Black Leather Required

by David J. Schow

  "Cool," Larry says of the Count's crucifix.

  "Aren't you wearing a touch as well?" The Count points at Larry's skull earring. "Or is it the light?"

  Larry's fingers touch the silver. "Yeah. Guilty. Guess we haven't had to fret that movieland spunk for quite apiece, now."

  "I had fun." Blank Frank exhibits his tat. "It was good."

  "Goood," Larry and the Count say together, funning their friend.

  All three envision the tiny plane in growly flight, circling a black and white world, forever.

  "How long have you had that?" Larry is already on his second mug, foaming at the mouth.

  Blank Frank's pupils widen, filling with his skin illustration. He does not remember.

  "At least forty years ago," says the Count. "They'd changed the logo by the time he'd committed to getting the tattoo."

  "Maybe that was why I did it." Blank Frank is still a bit lost. He touches the tattoo as though it will lead to a swirl dissolve and an expository flashback.

  "Hey, we saved that fuckin studio from bankruptcy." Larry bristles. "Us and A&C."

  "They were shown the door, too." To this day, the Count is understandably piqued about the copyright snafu involving the use of his image. He sees his face everywhere, and does not rate compensation. This abrades his business instinct for the jugular. He understands too well why there must be a Real Wolf Man. "Bud and Lou and you and me and the big guy all went out with the dishwater of the Second World War."

  "I was at Lou's funeral," says Larry. "You were lurking in the Carpathians." He turned to Blank Frank. "And you didn't even know about it."

  "I loved Lou," says Blank Frank. "Did I ever tell you the story of how I popped him by accident on the set of–"

  "Yes." The Count and Larry speak in unison. This breaks the tension of remembrance tainted by the unfeeling court intrigue of studios. Recall the people, not the things.

  Blank Frank tries to remember some of the others. He returns to the bar to rinse his glass. The plasma globe zizzes and snaps calmly, a manmade tempest inside clear glass.

  "I heard ole Ace got himself a job at the Museum of Natural History." Larry refers to Ace Bandage; he has nicknames like this for everybody.

  "The Prince," the Count corrects, "still guards the Princess. She's on display in the Egyptology section. The Prince cut a deal with museum security. He prowls the graveyard shift; guards the bone rooms. They've got him on a diet of synthetic of tana leaves. It calmed him down. Like methadone."

  "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 fish tank 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 bar top 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 hookup 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 apologize. 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 by-ally. 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 bar top 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, or 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.

  Author's Note:

  This story might be considered a thematic bookend to another flight of fancy titled "Monster Movies." It is one of the stories I read during my 1991 Halloween lecture tour, at Vassar, among other places. Craig Spector read the part of the Count and John Skipp read the character of Larry. You had to be there.

  Where the Heart Was

  Victor Jacks ambled through the back door to ruin their lives on Thursday. Which was a pain, since Victor had been pronounced dead the previous Saturday.

  "Stubborn sumbitch." Renny reached under the bed for the ball bat. He was on hands and knees, forced to paw around until it finally came out with dust balls and hair kitties chasing it. Renny, who was allergic to animal dander, sneezed ear-poppingly. This trebled his rage.

  Renny's life was one that Victor's back-from-the-dead encore was designed to ruin. Barb's was the other. Just now she was backed into a corner, shrieking like an ingénue in a fifty-year-old horror film. Unlike those World War II heroines, she was naked. Renny still had his socks on. Apart from his Timex, he was garbless, but for the baseball bat. This, he refused to wield in the name of mere modesty.

  Victor looked a bit shaggy, having been deceased for the better part of the work week. His shoulder blades, butt and legs down to the heels were blue-black with dependent lividity. His eyes were so crusty that one was welded shut. His hair was lank and wild, the most alive thing about him; his skin tone hung somewhere between catgut and bottled pig's knuckle.

  He crackled as he moved. That would be rigor.

  He had obviously been walking for some time. At each of his joints the dry flesh had split into gummy wounds with chafed and elevated flaps. The distance from the morgue to Barb's bedroom was about twelve pedestrian miles.

  Provided, that is, Victor had come here directly, afte
r sitting up on his slab and deciding to ruin their lives, Renny thought. And that pissed him off even more.

  Renny's next explosive sneeze spoiled his aim. He wiped his nose with his forearm. Barb kept screaming, totally out of character for her, and Renny wished in a mean flash that she would either faint or die.

  Enough.

  At the crack point it was the batting that mattered, not the invective. The bulb end of the bat smashed Victor's dead left ear deep into the dead left hemisphere of his dead brain. Victor wobbled and missed his zombie grab for Renny. He didn't have a chance.

  Renny was foaming and lunatic, swinging and connecting, swinging and connecting, making pulp. It was what he had ached to do to Victor all along. What he had fantasized about doing to Victor just last week, when Victor was still alive. His yelling finally drowned out Barb, who was still shrunken fetally into her corner, her eyes seeking the deep retreat of trauma.

  Renny's eyes were pink with rage. Flecks of froth dotted the corners of his mouth. He kept bashing away with the bat, pausing only to sneeze and wipe. Victor put up as good a fight as a dead person could, which is to say, not much.

  While the Renny on the outside was cussing and bludgeoning, the Renny on the inside was smirking about several things. Number one–zombie movies. In the movies, reanimated corpses boogied back from the dead with all kinds of strength and powers. What a bagload. Cadavers had all the tensile strength of twice-cooked pasta. Even in the movies, you could put them down with a headshot. What threat, where?