Stars and Other Monsters

by P. T. Phronk

  Bob said he chose to live it. Said that nobody appreciated him enough to pay him for his skills. He was cagey whenever Stan pushed him on what those skills were, exactly.

  The life wasn’t terrible. Stan solicited handouts by day, then hung out with Bob and his crew by night. Most of them drank or injected one thing or another. Stan partook more and more as time went on. Mostly in the liquid stuff: Scope mouthwash mixed with God-knows-what-else. It made his head hurt and his brain muddled, but he had sense left to rent a safe to store the money he made.

  “One day I’ll have enough to get a place, buy some nice clothes, get to some job interviews,” he said in a drunken haze one night, sitting under the moon, just Stan, Bob, and his little dog.

  “Ya know it takes more ‘n that. Takes a miracle or a lucky break to get ya out of this life. Don’t just happen, not to people like us,” Bob had replied.

  His dog grunted, as if agreeing.

  Most nights, Bob stayed in a closet in an abandoned building, hidden enough so that the less civil bums and urban explorer hipsters couldn’t find it. He kept his stuff there: lucky charms and garbage bags that he never opened. He had what looked like a kid’s chemistry set, and sometimes when Stan went to visit, it would be bubbling by the heat of a rusty Sterno stove, with his little dog sitting on the table beside it, fascinated by the bubbles. He assumed it was booze he traded to the others, but he never saw Bob drinking any.

  Stan went to visit him there one night, but heard raised voices.

  “Fuck you then. I’ll find someone who’s willing to actually fuckin’ do something for me,” said a voice that was feminine but deep.

  The closet door swung open. Firelight and an odd mixture of smells poured out, followed by the woman in the Metallica shirt.

  “The fuck you lookin’ at?” she grunted as she passed Stan.

  He’d learned quickly not to stick his nose in situations where tempers were running high. Friends living the lifestyle had stopped living altogether for a lot less.

  Something like that must have happened to Bob. After that night, he never saw him again. Not him or the Metallica woman. He assumed they were fucking, maybe even lovers. Maybe she pressured him into something dangerous. Either way, one or both of them were probably a pile of bones somewhere, forgotten by almost everyone.

  He wished he’d stuck around just a minute longer that night he overheard the argument. After he’d heard Bob come out of his closet, asking the woman to wait, come back. Maybe Stan could’ve done something.

  He still wished he could see Bob again, just to say thanks.

  A few nights later, he found himself in an alleyway, wasted on a toxic brew. It could have even been the famous alleyway this wretched basement was impossibly wedged into at this very moment, for all he knew. He’d been sitting on a cardboard box up against a dumpster, alone, waiting for morning, when he heard a pattering of little feet.

  A rat the size of a wine bottle scurried toward him.

  In his drunken haze, he instinctively stood and kicked the rat. It hit the other side of the alley then got back on its feet, limping now.

  Bob’s dog jumped from behind the dumpster. She bounded after the rat, grabbed it between her teeth, and shook until it was dead.

  The dog ripped a few strips of flesh from the rat, then looked up at Stan. She sighed, then trotted over and dropped the corpse onto the box at Stan’s feet.

  “No thanks, dog, not that desperate. Yet.”

  The dog snorted, then grabbed the rat and trotted away.

  Stan was snapped out of his reminiscing by a wet slap from a dark corner. Bloody’s ears perked up; she’d heard it too.

  “Probably just one of the bodies,” Stan muttered. The stages of human decomposition that Dalla had recited were seared in his memory. Most of them involved expelling of gas, much of it produced by bacteria and the activity of thousands of wriggling insects. A dead body rarely sat still.

  In a way, there’s more life in a dead body than in a live one.

  Still, he grabbed the nearest weapon-like object—a human fibula (or was it tibia?)—just in case. With his worldview recently wrenched wide open, he couldn’t predict what was lurking in the dark.

  “We’ve faced death before,” he muttered to Bloody. “Remember?”

  Stan did. After seeing that ragged dog feeding on a rat in the alleyway, he saw her a few more times, eating garbage and vermin. One cold night, while on his way to the shelter, Stan spotted the dog tearing at a garbage bag outside an Italian restaurant, chomping at the remains of leftover meatballs with a delighted expression on her sauce-covered face.

  Behind him, a man in chef’s garb approached silently with a broom raised like a golf club.

  “Hey!” shouted Stan. The dog looked up, snapped out of her food-borne reverie, then scurried away at the sight of the broom.

  “Good one, jackass,” the chef had said as Stan passed, sneering.

  The dog caught up with him further down the street. When Stan bent over to pet her, she licked his hand, then gave him a look that would have been interpreted as gratitude, had she been a person.

  “No problem, girl. Hey, you still hungry?” He shook the paper bag in his hand. “Some tourist gave me her leftover fries.”

  Stan snuck the dog into the shelter under his coat. From then on, she rarely left Stan’s side. He called her Meatball.

  Turkey Ned got his name from the wrinkly flap of skin hanging from his neck, just like a turkey’s. He looked older than he probably was, partly because of that loose skin, but mostly because he drank so much that his body and brain became shrivelled and dysfunctional.

  When Turkey Ned disappeared, all the people living the lifestyle became anxious.

  “Don’t you wonder where he went? Especially after Bob vanished just a few weeks ago,” Stan wondered, mostly to himself, one night around the fire.

  One of the others huddled around heard him. “Was nice to have around, that Ned. Didn’t say much that made sense, but he was funny to have there, you know? Like a kid. Or a dog.”

  Stan looked at Meatball, whose face was scrunched up as if she were deep in thought. Later that night, Meatball woke Stan up with a wet nose to his face. She had dragged over the tattered blanket that Turkey Ned always used.

  Meatball stamped her front paws, her butt in the air, tail wagging. She ran in a circle a few times, then started off in one direction before stopping, her tail still wagging.

  “You want me to follow you?”

  The dog sighed and took a few deliberate steps down the street. Stan followed her.

  Soon they were in Central Park. Stan reluctantly followed the dog as he fought his way through bushes and rocky terrain before emerging on the banks of The Lake.

  Turkey Ned was lying with his knees on land and his face in the water. He was decomposed pretty badly by then, but Stan recognized that turkey flap, now fuzzy and white, waving back and forth in the current.

  Turkey Ned probably went down there to try catching fish, as he’d done before, and slipped, or his broken body just finally gave out.

  It answered what happened to Ned. But Bob’s disappearance was still a mystery, and it brought up an even bigger one:

  “How did you know where Ned was, Meatball? Did you catch his scent? Like in the movies, those dogs hunters use; are you a little bloodhound?”

  The new name stuck.

  He continued testing Bloodhound’s abilities. At first it was simple tasks: hiding pieces of his own clothing somewhere in a building then seeing if the dog could sniff them out. Bloodhound didn’t seem thrilled about it, but she played along as long as she got food afterwards. Later she graduated to more advanced tasks. Once, Stan spent some of the day’s begging money to hop on a bus, then hole up under an overpass, leaving Bloodhound almost ten miles away.

  Two hours later, Bloodhound came bounding up to him with a cross look on her face.

  Of course he asked the dog to find Bob, but that’s where Bloodhound drew the lin
e. Stan returned to Bob’s closet, finding only a few dirty pieces of clothing. When he held one up for Bloodhound to sniff, she turned her back then went to lie down. Stan thought she was being lazy, but every time her former master’s name came up, Bloodhound shut down.

  She was a smart dog. She probably already knew Bob’s fate—maybe saw it happen—and some deep emotion centre in that little doggy brain told her it would only hurt to investigate.

  Or she was just lazy. Stan had to remind himself that despite her intellect, she was a dog.

  Stan’s ticket out of homelessness came in the form of an idea, and it came to him during the New York Film Festival that year. He sat in a diner, Bloody secretly on his lap under the table, feeding her bits of chicken from a shawarma and absently watching the television behind the counter. The entertainment segment of the local news listed celebrities that would be in town for the festival.

  The television showed a limo pulling up in front of a red carpet. Before the door even opened, cameras, dozens of them, flashed like strobe lights. When Brad Pitt stepped out, the flashing intensified so much that it may as well have been a wall of light.

  “Rumors of Pitt’s romantic attachment to Angelina Jolie are swirling, but the couple continues to refuse comment, and have yet to be photographed in public together.”

  When the idea hit him, time seemed to slow down. He could count the individual flashes of the paparazzi cameras.

  “Girl,” he said to his dog, “if you could just get a whiff of Brad Pitt …”

  The next morning, he emptied his storage locker. He had saved enough for two months’ rent. He found a bachelor apartment, paid for a month, then spent the rest on a crappy computer and a good camera.

  “And you remember Pitt’s damn bodyguard,” he said to Bloody. “Thought he was going to kill me, ‘til he saw you. Big guy like that afraid of dogs; could be the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Bloody shifted in Stan’s lap. Her heart beat had slowed to a more reasonable rate.

  Until something shifted; the sound came from the same corner as last time.

  Stan tightened his grip on the leg bone.

  Wet smacking emanated from the corner, outside the range of the candle burning on the wall. A sound like somebody ripping a wet T-shirt in half. Then chewing, slow and rhythmic, punctuated by labored gulping.

  “Who’s there?”

  Had there been something else sharing the basement with them all night? Another vampire set to feed when it woke? Maybe more than one. Maybe Dalla kept a whole harem of lesser man-servants locked down here.

  He took an apple from the fruit bowl, wrapped a few napkins around it, then used the candle to light it on fire. He tossed the flaming bolus into the corner.

  The abomination that emerged was worse than anything Stan’s overactive imagination could cook up.

  8. Whisked Away

  BY THE LIGHT OF THE flaming apple, Stan saw a torso splayed open, ribs poking from torn skin. The rest of the body—the arms, the legs, the head—was nowhere to be seen.

  The abomination lifted its head over the edge of the ribcage. It must have sensed the heat of the flame, because holes full of lumpy scabs took the place of eyes. The thing had been a cat once. Its triangular feline ears stiffened at the sound of Stan’s gasp, and when it leapt out of the torso, it moved like any other kitty.

  Yet it was the biggest cat Stan had ever seen, with fat bunched up in wrinkles and rolls at its belly. Its pudginess was particularly noticeable because it had no hair. Its skin was slick with layers of filth. Gore surrounded its mouth; maggots wriggled in the folds of its face.

  The blind thing hissed. Bloody barked. The thing turned toward the sound, then stalked forward, its ears back, its lips pulled into a sneer. Stan asked Bloody to be quiet, but she was shaking with rage.

  The thing’s teeth were spikes poking at crooked angles. Its overgrown claws clinked on the concrete floor.

  “Bloody! Quiet!” shouted Stan. Now that it was closer, he could see that the thing was much bigger than his dog.

  Behind him, a mewing. Some other blasphemy against nature was slinking in the dark.

  Stan grabbed the leg bone in one hand, Bloody in the other, hoping she wouldn’t lose control and bite him. He stood. The hairless horror continued stalking forward. Behind him, he heard a sound like footsteps in a boggy marsh. Something else moaned off to his right.

  He’d been afraid for Bloody’s safety. Now he was afraid for his own.

  Details, details. He’d spotted a cage in one corner. Maybe he could put Bloody in there, keep her safe. Come to think of it, the cage was big enough to hold both of them.

  But there was already a creature coming from that corner.

  He’d have to stay and fight.

  He braced himself for horror from every side, but then the door at the top of the stairs flung open. Dalla was silhouetted by candlelight that poured into the basement, revealing two more bloated feline freaks that were nearly upon Stan and Bloody.

  They stopped in their tracks, sat, and faced the vampire. The blind cat-thing twitched its nose to take in her scent.

  Dalla floated down the stairs, her toes only lightly touching each step. “Aww, look at all my pets, just hangin’ around.”

  The cat-things approached her, purring, their tails waving happily. She gave each one a pat on the head, then ducked to kiss the blind one on the nose. She stood and flicked a maggot off of the corner of her mouth.

  “How are you my babies?” she said in cooing baby-talk. The cat-things purred as they rubbed their filth all over her legs. “I know, I know, I wish I could stay with you too, but my new pals and I gotta bug out.”

  She twitched her finger in a come hither gesture, then turned around to float back up the steps. Stan followed behind her. She was likely to kill him at any moment, but, somehow, that was preferable to spending another minute in the basement.

  She whistled We’re Off to See the Wizard as she packed her stuff. After filling one suitcase with clothes (including several strange, frilly hats), she stuffed another full of shoes. A canvas grocery bag got filled with a hodgepodge of items: a shirt, a box containing a plastic doll, an 8 x 10 photograph, a coffee table book, and a poster that she carefully pulled from her bedroom wall and rolled up.

  Stan sat, watching, handcuffed to the dresser. Bloody was back in the dog crate, placed alongside the luggage. The vampire’s bedroom was a bizarre juxtaposition of styles. On one side of the style spectrum were antique oil lamps, an ugly ruffled bedspread, and brown-and-yellow flower-patterned wallpaper. On the other, old issues of teen celebrity gossip magazines, a plush cat on the bed, and, covering most of the wallpaper, posters of movies, bands, and bigger-than-life-sized celebrity heads.

  Most of the movie posters had DAMIEN FOX above the title.

  “Oh, isn’t this just so exciting?” she said, sitting on her clothing suitcase so she could close it. Puffs of dust rose up from the bedspread on either side. The sheets were covered in a layer of it.

  “Uh huh, gonna be a real blast.”

  “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, Stanley.”

  She effortlessly picked up all of the luggage, then left the room. Stan considered making a break for it. He could easily lift the leg of the dresser to free the handcuffs from it. But there would be no chance of escape; she was too fast, and besides, he wouldn’t be surprised if all the locks of her house required keys to get out.

  She came back up, then tipped the dresser with one finger, enough for Stan to free himself.

  “Don’t forget to bring your pooch,” she said.

  She had to dig a key out of her purse to unlock the back door. She raised an eyebrow at him when he grunted smugly.

  Her new car looked almost identical to her old one, the convertible Beetle that had flipped three times before bowling over David Letterman and his mistress. She clicked her key fob—the one beside the Damien Fox bauble—to unlock the trunk, where she put the luggage. Then she folde
d the driver’s side seat forward, took Bloody’s crate from Stan, placed it in the back seat, and fastened a seatbelt around the crate to keep it from shifting.

  There was something intensely human about the actions of loading up a car, and it made Stan feel sick to his stomach to see Dalla performing them.

  She got behind the steering wheel and didn’t put her seatbelt on; why would she? Stan sighed, then got into the passenger side. Dalla bounced up and down in her seat.

  “Oh, Stanley, we got off to a bad start, but I think this road trip will really bring us closer together.”

  “Until you eat me.”

  She raised her eyebrows in thought, nodded. “Until I eat you.”

  As they pulled out of a courtyard, she whistled On the Road Again. The headlights briefly illuminated the dumpster that her cat, Mister Finch, had been sitting on when Stan and Bloody had come to assassinate her. In a narrow alley. Now there was a whole mansion there.

  She pulled out halfway onto the street. A cyclist on the sidewalk headed straight for Stan’s side of the car.

  “Watch ou—” he began, but the cyclist disappeared, a blur passed through them both, then he was a few feet from the other side of the car.

  The vampire giggled as she pulled onto the street. She drove half a block, then pulled over.

  “You’re going to want to see this,” she said. She penetrated him with those eyes. “Stanley Lightfoot, I hereby uninvite you from my abode.”

  There was no pop, no crash, no sense of movement whatsoever, but when Stan turned around, the vampire’s mansion was no longer there.

  “But set your peepers on this,” she said as she reached over to flip down the sun visor with a little vanity mirror in it.

  He looked at himself, sweaty and pale, glasses smudged with crud. “What the hell are you … oh.”

  The mansion was there again. He turned around. Gone. He looked through the mirror. There.

  “Impressive, huh? Learned to do that all by myself.”