Of Moons and Monsters

by P. T. Phronk

  Stan stopped pacing. He scratched at his chest, accidentally undoing a button on his old plaid shirt. “That’s impossible.”

  “Impossible,” muttered Paul, rubbing at his stubbled face. “Dalla is the vampire you killed. Because vampires are out there. Existing.”

  “Yes, Paul, thanks for catching up,” Stan said.

  “Don’t know what’s possible or not, but it’s what I smelled,” Annie said.

  Stan flashed back to seeing the shadows in the fog that looked just like Dalla. It had been an illusion—a hallucination—but with his connection to Dalla, maybe, possibly, it was something more. He held up his right hand. He stuck up the stub of his index finger—the part that remained after Dalla chewed most of it off. “So we have Dalla, a vampire, somehow heading this way after getting a stake through the heart.”

  He held up his middle finger and pointed at it with his other shaking hand. “We have Jeffery Humber-Wilcox, known associate of werewolves, likely holding my God damn mother hostage. And when we try to follow the trail of my God damn mother’s blood,” he said, popping up his ring finger, “we’re driven away by … what?”

  “Yeah, what the hell lives in those woods?” Annie asked, looking at Paul.

  “Yeah, any suspects in town known to throw their shit at people?” Stan asked.

  Paul stood and approached the fire, staring into it. His eyes were glassy, his jaw clenched tight. He seemed to think carefully before speaking, which was an odd detail; usually he could immediately start a list of townsfolk meeting any criteria. “It was moose crap,” he muttered.

  “You know that? How do you know that?” Stan asked.

  “Because I’ve lived in this damned town long enough to identify moose crap, okay?”

  Stan snorted, trying to hold back laughter again. “Moose crap. Real useful, Paul.”

  “You know what?” Paul snapped. “Shut up, Stan. You’ve done enough damage, rolling into town. Hell, you did enough damage before you got here, calling in your little favors.” He gripped the fireplace mantle near a picture of Stan’s mom. Her lined face beamed in a shot from before she got sick, laughing among her old-lady friends.

  “Jesus, Paul, I’m sor—” Stan began.

  “Your mom needed you, Stan. I came by here three or four times a week, to make sure she was taking her medicine. Make sure she was comfortable. She’s done so much for this town. You? Not so much.”

  Stan’s apology flipped to anger. “I was working to send money. You fucking know that. And I had my own shit to deal with.”

  “She was sick for years. You were caught up in your problems that whole time? Couldn’t come and visit even once? Christ, Stan, I want to find Linda as much as you do, but maybe you should get out of town and let me handle this.”

  “She’s my mother!”

  “Come on, Stan. We all saw the blood. She was your mother.”

  Stan jerked as if he’d been slapped, spilling some coffee on his lap. He shut his eyes and tried to breathe. “Get out.”

  “You know what? I’m sorry to say it, but—”

  Stan’s pale face turned crimson. “Get out. Get your ugly fucking face out of here before I smash it.”

  Without another word, Paul pushed past Stan, gathered the plastic bag containing his shit-covered belongings, put on his boots, and slammed the back door on his way out.

  Annie put a hand on Stan’s shoulder.

  “Don’t,” he said. He took a swig from a warm bottle of beer that he’d left on the coffee table the night before.

  She left her hand there. After a moment, he relaxed, his body crumpling back into the couch. She talked softly, which made her scratchy voice even scratchier. “We don’t know. She could be alive.”

  “What if he’s right?”

  “He’s not. He’s hurt. He’s just learned that the world is a lot more evil and fucked up than he ever knew. Nobody thinks clearly after that. You didn’t either.”

  Stan let out a shaky breath. “Okay. Tomorrow, we ask around town. Somebody knows something.

  “Not we. Paul’s right about one thing—the town isn’t cool with you right now. You’re supposed to be in jail, remember? I’ll go out, try my best to find something.”

  “You sure you can do that?” he asked. Annie hardly went in public without Stan. When people talked to her, she froze up, still not used to being addressed as a person.

  “I’ll do it to find Linda.”

  “Thanks, girl. I mean, Annie. Thanks, Annie.”

  She smiled her work-in-progress human smile, and it made him feel better. His eyelids grew heavier. After a few minutes of silence, with the fireplace warming his face, Stan toppled into sleep. He was half-aware that his head was resting on Annie’s shoulder, but her sweater felt nice.

  His body didn’t move, even as the wailing in the woods made its way into his dreams, and he imagined himself being torn apart by Dalla, while his old friend Bob watched.

  6. And Don't Forget To Give Me Back My Black T-Shirt

  STAN WAS ASLEEP AND DROOLING on the couch before Annie had even finished getting ready to go. She kissed him on the forehead before she left.

  Playing detective wasn’t really her thing, so she had no idea where to start. But it was past noon, hunger was poking at her belly again, and she only knew of one place that served food. Tweed’s Café had a chunk out of its facade and one of its windows boarded up, but the neon sign still flashed OPEN. A stencil in an intact window read BEST BURGERS IN THE U.P. It was as good a place to start as any, especially if they had the best burgers.

  She felt awkward wearing Linda’s coat. Stan’s mom was tiny in a way Annie had never been, so the coat wouldn’t do up all the way. But it had Linda’s scent, and the perfume on the collar smelled good.

  The burgers sizzling inside Tweed’s smelled even better. Annie let the jingling door swing closed behind her. Faces turned to see who had come in. A group of men in suits who sat at a table near the front looked at Annie as if she smelled like shit. When she got near a table of blonde ladies taking boxes out of bags, they fell silent, and the way they stared at her, Annie could almost hear screeches of you can’t sit here, freak! It was her high school cafeteria all over again.

  So she passed them all and hopped onto one of the red stools lining the counter jutting from the back wall. The waitress walked out from the kitchen, and Annie watched, licking her lips, breathing heavily.

  “Can I … help you?” the waitress asked.

  She looked uncomfortable. Annie wondered if she was being weird again. She stared at the waitress, trying to figure out how to not be weird.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Oh! Yup, you can help me. I’d like one of the best hamburgers in the U.P., please.” She took some crumpled money out of her pocket, placed it on the counter in front of her, and patted it.

  The waitress breathed out from her nose and took out a notepad. “Bacon?”

  “Bacon!” Annie said.

  “Cheese?”

  “Cheese!”

  “Onions?”

  “No to onions!”

  “Fries?”

  She’d forgotten about fries! “Fries!” she shouted. Some other people in the diner looked up.

  The waitress’s face relaxed. She had the same expression that people did when they first met Bloody and realized that she didn’t bite. “Burger with bacon and cheese, no onions, side of fries, best in the Upper Peninsula, coming right up.”

  Annie’s mouth watered. She almost found herself panting and staring again, so she distracted herself by spinning around on the stool.

  On her first spin, she got a better look at the diner. She was the only one sitting at the island counter at the back, but plenty of people sat at the plushy vinyl blue booths around the edges and the tables in the middle. Their pale faces all looked extra pink from the red neon light that lined the ceiling. Was this town 100% white people?

  On her next spin, she noticed a blonde lady near the front, her face unpleasant
ly animated as she gestured at the boarded-up window and pointed a cell phone at a guy in coveralls like it was a gun.

  Annie paused and sniffed at the air. She could smell her burger! It wouldn’t be long.

  She spun again, and found herself face to face with Dean Shaw.

  “I thought I recognized your voice,” he said.

  “Oh!” Annie said. “I didn’t smell you there.”

  “Mind if I sit?” he asked, but he already had his plate of food with him, so he must have really wanted to sit with her. She shrugged and nodded at the same time, which he took as permission and grabbed the stool beside her. She stared at his club sandwich, with nice crispy bacon sticking out from where he’d already taken a bite.

  Dean tilted his head in the direction of the blonde woman. “Bree Bussichio,” he said. “I think I mentioned her when we ran into each other yesterday. Her husband owns the joint. She keeps threatening to call him if that poor guy doesn’t fix her window for half his usual price.”

  Annie looked over. “That’s Bree?” she said. “I can’t believe he dated a girl named after cheese.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Never mind. Um, how’s the club sandwich here?”

  He looked down. “Oh. It is what it is. I come here sometimes, grab a bite after the lunch rush. Gotta see how the competition is doing, yeah?” Oh yeah, he owned the bar down the street, Ducks Bar.

  Before digging into his sandwich, he took off his knit cap and put it on the counter. His dark hair had little patches of gray in it, and it looked so fine and feathery that she wanted to run her human hands through it and see how it felt.

  Bree’s voice rose in volume until it was loud enough for everybody to hear. “Fine, just fix it, but he’ll hear about it!” she said, still pointing that phone at the handyman. “We’re not paying for this anyway. It was Stan Lightfoot who broke the window, you know. He’s back in town.”

  Annie watched Dean’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed. “That lady seems like a bit of a cunt,” she said.

  Dean nearly spit up his sandwich. “Christ, Annie, I’ve only talked to you a few minutes and you’ve managed to surprise me. Surprise is in short supply in this town. I dig it.”

  Her face felt hot again. She was relieved when the waitress swung through the door carrying a plate stacked with a burger and fries, then set it down. “Oh my, thank you. Thank you thank you thank you,” Annie said.

  “Think nothin’ of it, honey,” said the waitress, smiling. Her smile flattened when she saw Dean. “Dean,” she said.

  Dean nodded back. After the waitress had turned away, he leaned close and spoke quietly. “She used to work for me. Didn’t end well.”

  “Why not?” Annie mumbled through a mouthful of burger.

  “She was more interested in her side business than in working for me. There are a lot of them here. They sell Amway, Scentsy, Tupperware, some sex toy subscription service. Multi-level marketing schemes, yeah? You’d be surprised how much this town’s economy relies on starting a business to sell useless junk to people, convincing them to sell junk too, then using the profits to buy more useless junk from those same people.”

  “Is that how economy works?” Annie asked through her burger.

  “Hell if I know. But it passes the time for them. Look, there’s a group at the booth back there.”

  Annie swallowed her burger and grabbed a handful of fries before spinning around on her stool. She munched away as she watched the waitress chat with the group of blonde women whose table was piled high with variously colored boxes. One of them demonstrated a multi-piece blender-looking thing and poked at the waitress’s slightly-curved belly. She pointed at the blender, then waved her hand in front of her own caved-in midriff. Bunch of skinny bitches trying to transform each other. Annie finished her fries, then turned back to Dean.

  “So you’re saying this town runs on bullshit,” she said.

  Dean’s smile made the wrinkles beside his multicolored sunglasses deepen. “Only in town for a day and you got it figured out.”

  They ate their meals in silence for a while. The burger was delicious, but probably not the best in this whole part of the state. There was probably a McDonald’s around, and those burgers were way better.

  “Anybody that sells something other than bullshit, then?” she asked.

  Dean nodded. “Yeah. My bar. Remember your raincheck? You’re supposed to come by for a drink.”

  “I only drank this early in the day when I was homeless.”

  “Come on, you can’t say things like that then not have a drink with me to explain.”

  “Later, how about,” she said. “I meant, like, a store that sells good stuff. My favorite shirt is covered in blood and I stole this coat from an old lady.”

  Dean put his knit cap loosely on top of that feathery hair of his. “I have a policy not to ask questions when people say insane shit like that, but I won’t stop trying to get you drunk enough that you’ll tell me more. First, let me show you some parts of Newbury that are relatively free of bullshit.”

  7. New Moon Rising

  IT OCCURRED TO STAN THAT he hadn’t thoroughly searched the house for clues. With Annie out scouring the town, and no way to help her due to his self-imposed house arrest, it was as good a time as any.

  Upstairs was like a time capsule. Stan’s room was nearly as he’d left it: posters of 90s grunge bands covering the walls, a small desk for school work, books (he’d probably read The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes ten times), and a twin bed. He hadn’t used the room much after starting the phase of his life when he spent all his free time with Bree, sleeping in the little house she bought on the edge of town after escaping her father. After that relationship went south, Stan fled east to New York for another horrible phase. Entering the room felt like stepping back two lifetimes.

  Nostalgia could wait. The layer of dust over everything told him that his old room wouldn’t hold any clues about his mom’s disappearance just a few days ago.

  He moved on to his mom’s room. It was less dusty, but equally unchanged. The flowery drapes over the windows were the same as ever; the way they filtered the afternoon light must have had some unique property, because a wave of memories hit Stan as soon as he entered.

  Suddenly, it was a quarter-century ago. In that tinted morning light, Stan’s mom held him as he bawled, her arms wrapping him in warmth that made him feel safe. He could never shake the image out of his mind, though—all those dead geese—the ones he’d tracked down after following an odd trail of feathers in the woods. Perhaps it was his first encounter with … well, not with death itself, but with senseless death. Unexplained death.

  Fast forward. Paul’s words, last night: “she was your mother.”

  He took a shaky breath and circled the room. She’d neatly made the bed. On top, a half-full basket of laundry sat, with the other half folded beside it. The details revealed no sign of a struggle up here. If she was interrupted, it was by something that could wait long enough to finish folding one more pair of sweatpants. That must have been when she’d come downstairs to answer Stan’s phone call.

  Her oxygen machine lay in one corner. She’d been telling Stan how much better she felt when they talked on the phone. Indeed, the machine was tucked behind a pile of books, suggesting that she didn’t plan on rolling it out very often. It was Bloody’s healing saliva that helped her get better, though she thought it was just an experimental herbal remedy. Stan smiled. Fuck Paul; Mom would have already been dead without Stan’s help.

  His smile fell away when he realized that part of him was falling into the same trap as Paul. He expected to find her dead.

  “Need more clues, need more details,” he muttered to himself.

  He wandered outside, past the overturned table near the front entrance, past the doormat speckled with blood, past the shotgun Paul had forgotten in the foyer, past the door torn from its hinges, and onto the damaged porch. The blood was difficult to look at, knowi
ng it was his mother's—his own, in a way. If he were a vampire, he could track their shared blood. But he was only a damn human, so he'd have to rely on old-fashioned clues.

  Most of the blood was splashed around canine footprints. Maybe an animal had come around after blood had been spilled and tracked the prints around, but given the things Stan had seen lately, there were other options. The animal was the prime suspect. He scraped flakes of blood into a plastic bag, to add to the freezer beside the other samples.

  He finished scraping a toe from the paw print, then paused. He looked back toward the door, where the toe had been pointing. It made no sense: if the wolf had entered the house, hurt his mom, then dragged her away, the footprints would be pointing away from the house.

  There were smears of blood on the porch, but most of them were connected to the paw prints. Large splotches were absent. The only blood with a connection to a human was in a handful of fingerprints on a splintered pole in the porch’s railing.

  He thought of how Bloody would always leave little red footprints around the house right after she transformed into a dog.

  Stan closed his eyes to picture what happened, like a quirky detective in a TV show. Whatever had broken down the door to take his mom had already been covered in blood. There had been a struggle inside, but no further injuries. The struggle continued outside, where Mom had grabbed onto the railing in one final attempt to escape.

  He pressed his fingers to his mother's fingerprints, matching her grip, minus his missing index finger. It wasn't much to go on, but it was hope. She was alive when she left. She could still be alive. She had to be.

  And if she was alive, she could be found. Stan knew of only one person besides himself and Bloody who could reliably get lost people back. He had set up an elaborate plot just to get his dog back, after all. Bob. Now known as Morgan.

  The phone rang only once before going to voicemail. "You've reached Maury Island Security Services. Morgan is unavailable to take yer call right now, but leave a number and he'll getcha back." It was obviously Bob’s voice, but what the hell was Maury Island Security Services?