by P. T. Phronk
Stan squirmed in his seat. “About that. I’m here for Mom.”
“Linda is getting a lot better,” Paul said.
“I know. She was. But I need to get to her. I think something happened. Something, you know, bad. I’ve made enemies in the last few months.” Stan fought back tears. “I’m afraid she’s been hurt by one of them. I was on the phone with her last night, and heard breaking glass. A struggle. I heard … growling.”
Paul turned toward Sandford Avenue, the town’s main street, then rubbed the skin between his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Stan.”
Paul’s disappointment hurt more than the lump on his head. “I need to get to her house,” Stan said.
“I said I was bringing you in. This won’t look good,” Paul said, but already he was turning down a side street, avoiding Sandford and heading north toward Stan’s mom’s place.
“Thanks,” Stan said, barely able to find his voice.
They rode in silence. The shifting fog outside formed odd reflections on the windshield and Paul’s face. Being held captive in a car again made Stan’s heart race, yet he was so tired that his eyes drooped for a moment, and when he opened them he saw a line forming on Paul’s cheek. The line lengthened, then split in the middle, his face opening up, tendrils of flesh stretching and snapping. He turned back and laughed, but his voice was a high-pitched titter. Underneath Paul’s face was smooth white skin, an upturned nose, two pairs of fangs: Dalla. That baby-girl laugh hurt his head.
“No, no, no,” muttered Stan. It wasn’t real. No. He banged his head against the seat in front of him a few times, aggravating the tender bruise that was already there.
“You all right?” Paul asked. His face had returned to normal.
But then Stan’s mother’s house began to emerge from the fog. “No, no, no, no,” he continued to mutter, and this time the horror was not in his mind, but right there on the street where he grew up.
The front door leaned into the darkness of the house, torn off its hinges.
Stan fell out of the car when Paul opened the door for him. He stumbled up the porch steps that he, Paul, and Joey used to sit on eating popsicles in the summer. A smear of blood decorated the peeling wood in front of the door. The dark trail led off to the side, past a pair of wicker chairs.
Stan fell to his knees where the trail ended, at the side of the porch, where the railing was splintered in the middle. There, in drying blood, was a pair of paw prints.
3. Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight
THE WOMAN FORMERLY KNOWN AS Annie Armstrong coughed up a bloody wad of human hair. Hah, bloody. That’s what they called her: Bloody, short for Bloodhound, but she’d been covered in gore so many times lately that it was more of a description than a name.
The smell of rotten leaves hit her from every direction of the forest. She retched again. The hair on her head grew shorter as it absorbed into her sticky, squirming scalp. Her guts clenched, ready to push out all the extra human gunk that had to go somewhere when transforming into a small dog. She could feel her thoughts getting simpler as the cells of her brain rearranged themselves into a basic canine configuration.
Where was Stan? Stan was nice and she liked his voice. She hoped he was okay. He was in the west part of town. Past the delicious food places. Past the buildings full of people where the car went crash.
At least she’d managed to get away from all the people and stumble into the forest before anyone saw her awkward, smooshy body trying to transform itself.
A chunk tried to push its way from her stomach, but Annie swallowed it down. She closed her eyes and tried to relax. Every cell of her body wanted to change into a dog; it hurt to change, but it was a necessary hurt. It was a hump to get over before that blissful feeling of having four legs and running around in a world full of smells. But if she wasted time changing, Stan could get hurt. No time to change now. Listening to the sound of the concerned birds all around her, she took a deep breath.
The skin of her scalp stopped squirming. Her jaw popped out, along with the rest of her face, reversing its shrinkage. Her guts settled down. Her thoughts gained more miserable complexity and confusing nuance.
Before returning fully to humanity, she took a deep sniff of the world around her. This time of being halfway turned was always interesting, with both a half-canine nose and a half-human brain to interpret what it smelled. Scents hit her from every direction. The closest ones were typical forest: fallen trees, the turds of large animals, and … oh wow, squirrels!
No, no time to get excited. She inhaled again. Slightly further away she recognized the scent map of the town, with its delicious blossoms from cooking meat, and less delicious-smelling puffs from people in various states of cleanliness. Further away was Stan. But why couldn’t she tell exactly which direction he was in?
Further still, past more forest, she smelled something less familiar. She couldn’t identify things she hadn’t smelled before, but this wasn’t entirely unknown. It smelled a bit like the awful creature, the bad lady, the one who put her in a cage and hurt Stan. Except it wasn’t exactly the same type of thing. It was damp, musty, the distant stink muffled and hidden.
She got in another sniff before her nose poked out with a pop. That man was out there. The bad man. But he was in a … gap. Smells from every direction were faded, foggy, but when she tried to focus on the man, Wilcox, she couldn’t even get a whiff. It was like the shadow of a moth in a lamp, flitting around in every direction at once.
When she inhaled next, all that came in was pine and mud from the forest floor right below her feet. She could barely even tell which direction it came from. She stared down at her pale palm with its five fleshy appendages poking out, then formed a fist.
“This is what I wanted,” she reminded herself. Her old friend and enemy (frienemy, the tabloids could call him), Bob, he’d tried to cure her of this transformation bullshit but done and gotten her stuck as a dog instead. To his credit, he summoned her across time and space to give her the injection that let her be human again, but she still constantly felt the need to change nagging at the back of her mind.
Time to go. Annie clomped along on two awkward legs, barely enjoying the traipse through the woods. When buildings started showing themselves through the trees and the fog, she headed to the most run-down looking ones. Yellowish streaks ran down the white siding of the houses, as if they were sweating. But the lawns were well-kept and there were trucks in the driveways.
Annie looked down at herself. Dammit, her new Pantera shirt was covered in blood. At least it was black, and the white lettering actually looked pretty rad in red. If she kept her distance, anybody who saw her probably wouldn’t think nothing of it. If anybody got close, though, she’d probably have to introduce herself as Bloody.
The faded sign said “Ducks Bar.” Annie wondered how many ducks were inside. She liked ducks.
“You okay there?” a voice asked from the gloom of the entryway to the bar. She’d been caught staring again. Nobody noticed when she stared at stuff as a dog, but a person stares at the same thing for just one minute and people freak out.
Oh wait, maybe he was asking if she was okay because of the blood.
“Miss?”
She shook her head. “Nope, nope. I mean—nothing’s wrong. I’m okay.”
A man emerged from the entryway. A knit cap sat crooked on his head, as if he’d tossed it in the air and let it land loosely on his bed of feathery salt-and-pepper hair. His small, circular glasses were tinted black in one lens and tinted red in the other. He flicked a cigarette to the ground as he stepped forward to crush it, then flipped a pack of smokes from the pocket of his black button-up shirt.
“You look like you could use a smoke,” he said, holding the pack out to Annie.
She hadn’t smoked in years, since dogs can’t smoke. No fingers. But maybe it would help her body calm down and slow the ache to change. She plucked a cigarette from the pack, let him light it for her, then stepped back and stared at him.
“You
sure you’re good?” he asked.
She nodded.
The eye behind the red lens squinted. “I’m Dean. Dean Shaw. I’d shake your hand, but you don’t look like the hand-shaking type.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re new here,” he said without a hint of question in his tone. “Do you at least do introductions?”
Don’t say Bloody, don’t say Bloody, she thought. “I’m … Annie,” she said. She tried to smile, showing a few of her front teeth to him.
He smirked. “Annie. Welcome to Newbury, the moose capital of the U.S.A. I don’t know if you been trampled by one or what, but you look like you could use a rest. They don’t let me let people smoke inside anymore, because of the bylaws.” He looked across a set of train tracks, toward the center of town. “But we can drink. Come in, have one on me.”
She felt her face getting hot, which usually meant she was on the edge of transforming, but this time meant she was blushing. “You’re a nice man,” she said. “I like drinks. But I can’t, not right now. I’m in a hurry.”
“C’mon. I won’t even ask where you came from, or what’s on your shirt. Promise.”
She tried to laugh. It came out more like a bark. Hrrf hrrf hrrf! “Thank you. Thanks. For being so nice. You’re nice. Can I come back later? What do you people call that? A … a rain check?”
He smiled, making nice lines in his papery face. “Think so. A rain check it is.”
She nodded, then began to stomp away, up the street.
“Oh, Annie?” he said, following behind her. She stopped and turned back. “You might want to avoid this street, Sandford. There was an accident at the diner up there, Tweed’s. Still lots of people milling about. You’re probably not in the mood to run into more people, yeah?”
Years of running around with Stan as a team of paparazzi had prepared Annie to spot an opportunity to gather information when it presented itself. “Crash, huh? Who crashed?” she asked.
“Some loser. Stan Lightfoot. He used to live here. Left in shame, from what I heard, but I heard it from one of the Bussichios, so it’s about as reliable as a moose’s fart.”
At least the rumors that had travelled up the street hadn’t placed Annie in the car. She’d stumbled out the door and behind the diner before anyone saw her. She grunted, trying to act nonchalant. “Stan Lightfoot. Psh! Must be a real loser.”
Dean shrugged. “Never really knew him. His mom was good to the town. Used to come here for lunch after council meetings. Heard she got sick.”
“Sad. Poor Stan’s mom. Well, I’ll avoid the area.”
“Right. Hope you find what you’re here for. See you when it stops raining?”
Annie scrunched up her face and looked up, where the sky was grayish, but no rain was coming out of it. “Huh?”
“Rain check?” Dean said, grinning.
“Oh. Right.” She tried to smile again, stepped backwards, almost stumbled, then did a bit of a wave before turning around and stomping away. Her face felt hot again.
She headed toward Stan, getting off the main street as soon as she could. Sick, Dean had said about Stan’s mom, not missing, or dead, or found ripped into a thousand tiny pieces. It had only been a dozen hours since Stan heard his mom was in trouble, but if that Dean guy who owned the bar hadn’t heard anything yet, whatever happened wasn’t public knowledge. Finding out what did happen would require some digging. Annie liked digging.
Stan had tears in his eyes. Annie didn’t want to let him go when he hugged her and babbled about how glad he was that she was okay. But there was work to do. When Stan led her past a porch covered in blood that she could smell even with her human nose, and a door that had been torn from its hinges, she could see why he was crying.
Stepping into Stan’s mother’s house was like stepping back in time. The shag carpet and flowery wallpaper were out of the 70s. Wood paneling covered every surface. In the living room, she spotted a row of framed photos over a stone fireplace.
There was Stan in half the pictures, growing from a dorky kid into an awkward teenager with glasses and hair way too big for his face. Annie giggled at a picture of him grinning while he pulled a giant Polaroid camera out of box under a Christmas tree.
“Look how little you were!” she said, unable to keep herself from laughing.
“Oh, fuck off,” Stan said, but he cracked a smile as he wiped another tear from his eye.
“Can we focus?” asked a man sitting on the puffy brown couch. Paul looked pretty much how she’d pictured him from Stan’s descriptions, except older.
“Yeah, yeah,” Stan said as he sat down. “Paul, this is, um, let’s call her Annie.”
“Which is my name,” Annie said.
Paul’s squinty eyes narrowed. “Annie, you’re covered in blood.”
She exchanged a glance with Stan, who shook his head subtly. Being Stan’s dog, she’d learned how to communicate in subtle twitches and jerks. That head-shake meant Paul didn’t know what she was. “From the accident.”
“So you were in the car too. I imagine it’s your blood they’re finding all over the seat right now. Great. Another thing to cover up,” Paul said.
Stan exhaled. “So you’re going to help us, then.”
“Hell, Stan, of course I’m gonna help you. My career probably won’t survive it, but it was already on its death bed.”
Stan winced.
“Sorry,” Paul said. “Not a great metaphor when your mom’s sick. Linda was recovering, though. I came in to check on her every few days. She was doing good, before, well, whatever happened yesterday. What was in that medicine you were sending her?”
Annie licked her lips. She hadn’t enjoyed spitting into a jar for hours at a time, but whatever was in her saliva was able to heal better than any regular medicine. Being a were-dog did have its perks.
“It was … experimental,” Stan said.
Paul squinted even harder, skepticism distorting his face. He and Stan talked about how to proceed. Stan insisted that the police couldn’t get involved in finding his mom. Paul said he’d help however he could. Blah blah blah. Annie felt her attention drifting. Her skin felt bubbly again. Her half-transformation earlier hadn’t relieved the itch, and the cigarette from that Dean guy only distracted her for a few minutes.
She rocked back and forth in her chair. She scratched at her arms. She could only pay attention to snippets of the conversation.
Forensic experts could help.
I already have an idea about who did this.
You’re holding something back.
You don’t want to know what we’ve been through.
Already a darkness in the woods.
Annie cleared her throat. “Shut the crap up for a second, both of you.”
Stan’s jaw dropped. Annie didn’t talk much, so it must have been strange for her to interrupt. But she knew what to do.
“I know what to do,” she said. “I was in the woods on my way here, and I smelled my way around. Smelled some interesting things, I did. Like, there’s a shitload of mooses around here.”
“It is the moose capital of America,” Paul muttered.
“Yeah, I heard. Because I was over at Ducks Bar too, talking with the guy who runs it.”
“Shaw,” Paul said.
“Yeah. And he told me—sorry Stan, but he told me that the town won’t be too happy to have you back.”
“I’ve been getting that feeling,” Stan said, slumping into the couch.
Annie continued. “You’re not welcome here. But they like your mom. And they don’t know she’s missing, or at least, he didn’t. Someone around here might. So here’s what we need to do: we need to stay separated. Your mom can’t have been taken far, and people around here must have seen something. They’ll tell me about it. They won’t tell you.”
“Right. So we stay apart. Just like when we got that ass shot of Britney Spears on the rooftop,” Stan said.
“We stay apart, or we only go out together at night.
”
“Apart by day, together at night. It’s a start to a plan,” Stan said. It was nice to hear him agree with her.
“Oh yeah, back to the smells in the woods—”
“You mean you saw something?” Stan asked, flicking his gaze to Paul.
Annie frowned. “No, I smelled something. If Paul is gonna help, he needs to know.”
“I’d say so. This doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. You’ve been keeping something from me,” Paul said.
Stan shook his head and fiddled with his glasses, like he always did when he was anxious. “No. No, no. Look what knowing about, you know, all this, has done to us.”
“All this? Done to us? Maybe you have the privilege of getting away from it, but ‘all this’ is not done to me, Stan. It is me.” She felt her face getting hot, this time because of anger, but also because teeth and a snout were itching to form inside her face.
Stan wouldn’t make eye contact. “Paul can’t come back from seeing that.”
“Guys, know what? Talking about me like I’m not in the room doesn’t make it so I can’t hear you,” Paul said. “You’ve already outed yourselves with your quibblin’. I know you’re hiding some secret. That’s something I can’t come back from. Besides, I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, Stan, but this town is full of secrets. I doubt you’ll surprise me.”
Annie laughed. “Come outside. I’ll show you.”
Stan didn’t stop her when she got up and led Paul out the back door. She looked around; the woods surrounding the town spread out behind Linda’s house. The neighbors’ lawns spread out to either side.
Stan caught up behind them, carrying a large blanket. “Let’s get behind the trees, so nobody sees.”
They trudged through the forest, each tree a pole poking up into a sea of fog. When they came upon a tiny stream where the underbrush was sparse, the row of houses behind them was lost in layers of mist.
A drop of blood trickled from Annie’s nose.
“Whoa now, are you all right?” Paul asked.
“I will be soon. I won’t be able to talk, so let me tell you what I smelled last time this almost happened. It wasn’t just mooses.”