Stars and Other Monsters

by P. T. Phronk

  Suddenly, he was no longer in the grip of the vampire. He fell a few feet, then slammed into a panel of construction scaffolding. He rolled, then tumbled toward the sidewalk.

  She caught him, then set him on his feet.

  “Oh Stanley, you must be more careful,” she said, grinning at a passer-by.

  She gripped his hand so tight he could feel bones grinding, then dragged him toward the impossible castle. They paused by the massive, iron-banded oak door.

  Stan gasped. People walked past them on the sidewalk, but when they came within a few feet of the building, they became a linear blur, then instantly appeared at the other side of the property. A man bundled in a trench coat and a ski hat, after zipping through in such a manner, stopped, shivered, then took a deep breath before going on his way.

  “So what do you say we have that cup of tea now?” asked the vampire as she held the door for him.

  Stan made a cursory attempt to escape when Dalla took a few steps ahead of him, but she was blocking the door before he could even finish turning around.

  “Naughty boy,” she said, pushing him backwards. He stumbled on his own feet and fell on his butt.

  He was in a spacious vestibule, lit by a rack of candles fastened to one wall. The vampire’s purple coat and hat hung off a rack. Stan felt madness creeping ever-closer. None of this could be real. This building had no business existing, to say nothing of the creature living inside of it.

  Those eyes appeared over him. “Get up. Follow me.”

  He snapped his eyes shut. “No. You’re using your vampirish hypnotist eyes to influence me. I won’t have it.”

  “Okay, how is this for influence? Follow me or I’ll chew off one of your ears.”

  That was tough to argue with. He hoisted himself up, then followed her into the main hallway. She led him into a drawing room filled with ornate antique furniture, lined with paintings and, in one wall, a roaring fireplace.

  “Please, sit,” she said, gesturing to a lone high-backed chair in front of the fire.

  “What are you going to do to m—”

  One of her hands gripped his Adam’s apple. He gagged and tried to pry her fingers off, but they were as solid as tongs. She pushed him into the chair. She was a blur as she grabbed something from the fireplace mantle, then circled him several times. A zzzp! sound surrounded him. It only took a moment, but he was duct-taped to the chair.

  He glared at her.

  She sighed. “I wish you didn’t force me to use … force.”

  She began to giggle, then stopped. Her head turned sideways.

  “I believe your little friend has arrived. That was fast.”

  She was gone with a whoosh of air. Stan struggled against the tape, but his arms were stuck so tightly to his sides that he couldn’t move them one bit.

  There was barking from the front vestibule. Bloody’s voice. Dalla entered with Stan’s dog held roughly by the scruff of her neck.

  “Bloodhound!” screamed Stan. He thrashed in his chair. “Don’t you fucking hurt her.”

  She tossed Bloody into the room. She landed on her feet, ran to Stan, jumped up on his lap, licked his face, then turned back to the vampire and growled.

  “You two make yourselves comfortable. I’ve got a few things to prepare, then we’ll have a sit-down and chat.” She closed the drawing room door, and Stan heard a latch click into place from the other side.

  Bloody licked Stan’s face again.

  “I’m so sorry, girl. God, I didn’t mean to fall asleep, I just wanted to rest my eyes, and now look at this mess we’re in, and are you okay? She didn’t hurt you did she? God, girl, you shouldn’t have followed me here. It’s way too dangerous.”

  He tried to take a deep breath but it was constricted by the duct tape, tight around his chest.

  “Okay. Okay, let’s find a way out of this.”

  Bloody leapt from his lap and sniffed around. Stan craned his stiff, battered neck to get a good look at the room. See if any details could help them out. There was a table in the middle with a candlestick and a bowl of wax fruit on it. Other small tables lined the walls, some of them holding knick knacks: an old copper lighter, decorative plates on little stands, porcelain cats. Hanging on the walls, paintings. Most were recognizable prints of Salvador Dali, Francisco Goya, or Andy Warhol.

  One painting caught Stan’s eyes. He wiggled his nose to push his glasses further up his face. It was a topless male figure, nearly glowing, chiaroscuro-style against a black background. He had his arms raised, his hands linked behind his head to emphasize his perfectly sculpted arms, abs, and hair-dusted chest. It took a moment for him to realize what was unusual. The guy in the painting was Damien Fox.

  He wriggled. The tape loosened slightly, but there was no way he would be able to free his arms without help.

  Bloody trotted over, her head lowered. She hadn’t found a way out.

  “Well, maybe you can get me out of this chair? You understand, girl?”

  She appeared to. She leapt onto Stan’s lap, then chewed at the duct tape. It gave way, one layer at a time, coming off in sticky scraps that Bloody had to shake out of her mouth.

  From another room came the sound of dishes rattling. The fire in front of Stan popped, and a glowing ember flew from the fireplace onto the ceramic tiling in front of it. There were dark stains there, arranged in ugly, overlapping blotches.

  “Hurry, girl,” he whispered. Madness gnawed at him.

  The fire popped again.

  “Wait. Listen.”

  The roar of the fire. Occasional pops. It was the sound they’d heard earlier that day, in the alleyway, except louder, and lower in pitch.

  His dog perked her ears up for a second, then, unimpressed, went back to work ripping at the duct tape. She chewed a good gash in it. Stan could feel it getting looser, giving way. Soon he would be able to free his arms.

  The door burst open. Bloody was wrenched from his lap, then he felt the chair being dragged backwards.

  “Oh, wouldja look at that? Almost got yourself free.” She held the growling, snapping dog up to her face. “Smart pooch you’ve got here.”

  Tiny squirts of saliva filled his mouth despite fighting it with all his will.

  The dinner table, lit by a pair of ornate candelabras, was covered in food: a bowl of fruit, two loaves of pumpernickel bread, and at Stan’s end of the table, a bowl of lettuce with a bottle of Paul Newman salad dressing. In the middle of the table, on a copper platter, was a rectangular block of meat. It was the meat that made Stan’s taste buds dance. He hadn’t had dinner yet.

  But it was the last object on the table that filled him with a nameless dread that ought to have overridden any sense of hunger. Beside the block of meat was a dog crate.

  Dalla stood beside him. “I apologize for the dim lighting. I require no light myself, and besides, the unique location of my home makes it difficult to connect to the electricity grid,” said the vampire casually, even with Bloody squealing in her hand, trying to turn to an angle at which she could tear a chunk of flesh from it.

  “If you hurt her—” began Stan, but the words felt weak.

  She tossed Bloody into the crate on the table. Stan felt tears stream down both sides of his face.

  “No need to go ape, hun. Do you not appreciate the meal I’ve prepared?”

  She leaned over and tapped his head with her finger; it felt like a stick of wood. “You,” tap, “be,” tap, “good,” tap. “You’re a smart boy, Stanley. You know you won’t leave unless I want you to.”

  He did.

  She sat down across from him, then picked up a napkin with the tips of her fingers and placed it on her lap. She wore a sleeveless red dress with a generous neckline that stopped just short of showing cleavage. The outfit was accessorized by a gold necklace and an antique brooch.

  “Oh, you go ahead, dear.”

  He glanced at the bowl of lettuce. No other vegetables, no croutons, just lettuce. Tears continued to leak from his fa
ce. His jaw hung open.

  Something fuzzy brushed up against his leg, and he began to shake uncontrollably.

  “Perhaps you think I mean to poison you. But I only want you to be comfortable as we discuss my proposal.”

  There was movement from the shadows around the table. From every direction, on the periphery of his vision, figures were slinking just outside the glow of the candles.

  “I thought you wanted to be here, Stanley. Mister Finch told me you came to call on me earlier in the day, but unfortunately it was a bad time. Mister Finch? Where are you honey?”

  A cat leapt onto her lap from under the table. It was the same dirty cat from the alleyway—the one Bloodhound had despised. She began to bark again.

  “Shhh,” said Dalla, petting the cat.

  “Shhh,” said Stan. Bloody settled into a quieter whimpering.

  From the darkness in the periphery of the room, dozens of eyes glowed with reflected candlelight—tiny orbs with slits for irises.

  After a minute of sitting in silence, Dalla sighed. Instantly, she had stood up, traversed the length of the table, and was squeezing Stan’s chin. She used a fork to scoop lettuce into Stan’s mouth, then grabbed the bottle of dressing, wrenched his head back, and poured it over his face. He was forced to chew it down.

  It tasted like lettuce and bland dressing.

  She was back in her chair, daintily arranging the napkin again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just really want you to enjoy this meal.”

  Stan sobbed quietly as he scooped the rest of the lettuce into his mouth. Bubbles of snot popped from his nostrils.

  “Why don’t you just get it over with,” he said when he was done. “Just put us on the table and chop us up and make us part of your meal. If there is any humanity left in you, then start with me. Why are you drawing this out?”

  “I’m rather insulted that you would presume to know my intentions, Stanley.”

  He heard the cats in the darkness shifting restlessly, purring, licking their tiny lips.

  Dalla cut off a slice of the meat in the middle of the table. She held it for Stan to take; he did so, because he had to. He shook so badly he was barely able to place the plate down in front of him. The vampire sliced a smaller piece that she dropped into Bloody’s crate, then a thick cut for herself. The meat looked like ground beef, pink in the middle but cooked around the edges, and topped with a layer of red. If he didn’t suspect differently, he would have assumed it was meatloaf, not unlike the kind his mother used to make.

  She leaned forward on her elbows, staring at him, beaming.

  The fork bobbed in his hand as he brought a chunk to his mouth. He closed his eyes and chewed.

  It was delicious. Oh dear God, it was delicious. That creeping madness returned, buzzing at the edge of his mind. But he swallowed, then took another bite.

  The vampire began to eat, holding the fork lightly, taking tiny bites and wiping her mouth with the napkin after each. The chunk in Bloody’s cage came plopping out onto the table from between the bars.

  Knowing what it was could drive him mad, but not knowing was an even greater trauma. He made his living off of knowing what he shouldn’t, then selling it to people with the same sick desire.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  She swallowed, wiped her mouth, then leaned forward. “I am so glad you asked. It’s wereloaf.”

  He nearly spit out his food. “Wereloaf?”

  “Meatloaf in which the meat is werewolf.”

  Stan was overtaken by a fit of hysterical giggles. “Those—you mean—those exist too?”

  She gave him a tight-lipped smile like she was talking to a child. “Yes, honey. Some of the best meat you’ll ever taste. Your timing was impeccable, actually. I’m afraid wereloaf doesn’t keep well; come morning, it just won’t taste the same.”

  His stomach clenched. Suddenly he realized that what he was eating was as vile as he had feared. He spit out a chunk, but most of the slice was already gone from his plate.

  He froze, bracing himself for the vampire to force him to clear his plate. Bloody’s whining intensified.

  Dalla groaned. “You don’t have to finish it. I am not very good with recipes, I know. I must apologize for being so forceful with you Stanley, but it’s just that, you’ve been so very uncooperative, and it has been a long while since I’ve interacted with a human in person. All I want to do is have a chat with you. I hope you can excuse my impoliteness.”

  Tricks. She was lifting up his hopes of surviving the night so that his inevitable end would be that much worse.

  She wiped the corners of her mouth, then addressed him with those wide, cold eyes, shining even in the dim candlelight like those of the cats circling in the darkness around them.

  “I have a proposal for you,” she said.

  He listened as she talked. His hands came to his face. He rubbed his temples, which broke out in beads of sweat. Bloody shook in the crate.

  In some ways, it would have been better if she had chopped Stan and his dog up with a meat cleaver. Sliced them into chunks, put them on the table beside the pretty bowls of fruit, then gobbled them up raw. At least it would have been over.

  The worst part was that, when presented with a proposal from a god, one has no choice but to accept.

  7. Hazy Flashback

  GIVEN THE ASSORTMENT OF KNICK-knacks strewn about the rest of the mansion, the presence of disquieting, decrepit mannequins in the basement was not unexpected. They were, however, some of the least creepy objects in the room.

  Chains hung from the walls, attached to thick shackles. Ropes looped around steel rungs set in the floor. Still clamped in some of these instruments, and strewn across the room, were body parts. It was difficult to find a place to rest without sitting on somebody’s severed arm, or a pile of intestines, or some other unidentifiable mass. The best Stan could do was hunker on a patch of concrete with his back against a wooden crate covered in dried blood, covering his nose to try blocking the smell. Dalla had insisted he take a bowl of fruit down with him, but there was no way he’d be able to eat it.

  The ground was cold and chalky under his hands. Bloodhound hopped onto his lap. When Stan held her, he could faintly hear her little dog heart beating like a machine gun.

  “It’ll be okay. We’ve been in tight situations before, huh? And we always found our way out, right?”

  Indeed they had. It was almost five years ago when Stan had met Bloody, in a situation not much better than their current predicament. He had fallen on tough times, and not just in the sense that he would often complain about now—broke, lonely, unable to afford heat—but in the sense that he didn’t even have a place to heat, unless a trash fire in a parking lot counted.

  He came to New York on a whim, after a girl—Bree, that shallow bitch—dumped him without warning nor explanation. In that town in Michigan, everyone knew and loved Bree, and when he couldn’t stand the sneering questions any more, he jetted to a place as different from small-town Michigan as he could imagine at the time.

  Knowing full well that most dreams of fame and fortune splattered as soon as they hit New York’s concrete surface, he still entertained visions of fighting his way to the top. Maybe having some spare cash to send back to his poor, broken mom.

  He had to start out small. The call center job paid well enough to share a two bedroom apartment with three Yugoslavian immigrants. But the managers didn’t appreciate people asking questions, and at the first hint of inquiry into the legality of the long hours, or questioning the necessity of restricting all contact with the outside world, or wondering out loud why people came and went so quickly around there, he was the one being escorted out.

  There was no money for rent at the end of the month. He had no friends within 300 miles and no way to get home, so Stan was officially homeless.

  At first he sat silently with a baseball cap held out in front of him, but hunger drove the shyness out of him quickly. He discovered that
having a story netted more cash; people were more willing to pay an unlucky sod who had lost his wallet and needed one more dollar for the bus than an able-bodied young man too lazy to find a job. Sticking to the tourist areas meant a person never heard the story twice, leaving little reason to question it.

  The first true friends he made in the city were the long-homeless. The one he met first was the one most people new to the streets met first. He went by Bob. Sometimes Rob, and sometimes Hank, but mostly he was Bob: the typical shaggy bum, all greasy gray hair hanging in knotted cords, a coat made more of patches than coat, and garbage bags always looped around one arm. He wore chains weighed down with crosses and charms, and thick boots. Putrid breath. Nicest guy anyone could hope to meet on the streets at night, though.

  Stan met him on a bench in Central Park. It was summer then, so it was still warm enough to sleep out in the open. Stan was deep asleep when he was awoken by a poke to his back.

  Bob took a few steps back when Stan bolted upright.

  “Sorry,” Bob had said. “Wasn’t sure if you was drunk, dead, or one’ve us. Ya don’t look drunk or dead, so I guess you’re one of us. Must be new since I never seen you before.”

  Stan asked them who they were, and Bob told him about the life he led, living off the land, where to find company, and shelter when the weather got bad or the streets got violent. Stan noticed the dog at his feet. Cute little thing: a mutt with the eyes of a pug, but scruffy gray hair and tiny teeth arranged in an underbite.

  Bob told him about a shelter where he could grab lunch the next day. Stan found Bob at a table there, chatting intensely with a chunky twenty-something girl in a Metallica T-shirt (one of the few homeless women he ever saw), and an ancient man with a floppy neck. As they ate, Bob gave Stan the lay of the land and introduced him to the others. Most of them were mentally or physically incapacitated: victims of misfortune thrust upon them at birth or sometime later. Others, like Bob, Stan, and the Metallica woman, were in good health, but still living the lifestyle for one reason or another.