by P. T. Phronk
Harvest the land.
The scent was near. Her friend was near. Bloody could feel his presence around her as she emerged from the woods, into a foggy clearing. As the song continued around her, stuck in her head, stuck in her dream, she became confused because her friend should have been right here, but she couldn’t reach him.
Roaming the land while you … sleep.
There he was. Right beside her, whispering in her ear. She could feel him there, just at the edge of her vision, hidden by darkness and fog. It was the moose, but it had Stan’s face.
Shape shift, went the song.
Moose Stan’s lips moved gently, and she could feel his breath on her ear.
A guitar lick, and then:
Shape shift!
And it wasn’t even the song anymore, it was just Stan, with his little antlers, whispering to her. She loved him so much, and she wanted to feel his veins snap in her mouth. The fucker. The fucker. And here he was, giving her permission to give in to her anger.
So she let herself feel her anger, like he felt that bitch’s skin against his, and at the same time, she let her animal side take over. As her mind transformed, things became so much simpler, as they always did. Stan was just an animal too, she thought, and animals were stupid, but all kinds of animals could still play together.
There was so much pain as she transformed.
Come on, shape shift, Stan said, his half-moose head hovering above her.
The sun cut through the fog. She muttered along with the chunky guitars still filling her dream:
Back to the meaning,
Back to the meaning of …
LIFE!
“Come on, shape shift,” Stan said to his best friend.
Then, she did. Her all-too-motionless face caved in, deflating like an old balloon.
Paul pushed the police and paramedics away, telling them that he could handle the situation, despite their confused protests. As if Paul didn’t already have enough trouble with the county. He and Stan dragged Annie’s writhing body into Paul’s SUV. Stan hopped in the back seat with her, and Paul pulled away before anybody else could realize what was going on.
Annie continued to shrink. Stan had seen this a few times before, but it was still hard to tell if something was wrong, or if this was the normal way a woman transformed into a dog.
Her clothes got baggy as her body rearranged itself. Her face cracked with the breaking and rearranging bones, and her empty eye sockets became shallower. From the soup of blood there, a brown canine eye surfaced, then rotated to point at Stan’s face.
“Oh thank God.” Stan exhaled. “She’s got new eyes, Paul. Maybe she’ll be okay. Please be okay.”
One of her hands shot up and slapped Stan across the face. Claws were sprouting from the ends of her fingers, which left a bloody smear on his cheek.
“You fucker!” she shouted, her voice even deeper than usual.
Stan laughed. He kissed her on the forehead, leaving his lips there for a moment, where he was tickled by the hairs pushing through her receding skin.
“We can’t go home,” Stan said to Paul. “Either of our homes. Mine’s in the process of burning down, and they recognized you, so they’d find us at your place. We’re deep in this together now.”
“Yes. Together by night, right? I know a place,” Paul muttered.
As Annie turned into Bloody, Stan had an odd hope for the future. Except there was something off about how her face hadn’t quite snapped into the shape of a dog’s yet, and how she’d stopped moving again.
13. Old Haunts In A New Age
STAN’S HEART SANK AS PAUL drove out of town and turned down a familiar road. It didn’t take long to get there; it was within bicycling distance, as Stan knew well. The unsettling lodge that he, Paul, and Joey had broken into as kids emerged from the fog. It looked about the same as Stan remembered it: a stonework base, with muck-colored panelled walls holding windows that had once provided a beautiful view of the forest around them, but were now criss-crossed with wooden slabs.
“I boarded it up. Someone called in saying that the Blackwood kid had broken in and was doing drugs in there, but I don’t think he was. All I found inside was a rotten mix of different types of animal shit.”
“Always the animal shit expert,” Stan said.
Paul actually smiled a bit. “That joke’s getting old, Stan. No moose shit this time, but I did get messy with whatever it was. Took a few days to close it up. Had to appease whoever called about the drug use, or I wouldn’t hear the end of it.” He quickly added: “That’s the only reason I came here.”
Stan recalled the last time they were here, just before Joey went off to military school. Stan refused to come back with Paul alone. Don’t you hear that? There are voices, coming from out there, Paul had said, and he’d had that blank expression on his face. It wasn’t the first time he got like that; he could’ve been the one on drugs, the way he zoned out when they came to the lodge.
Even as curious kids, they never figured out what this place was, but there were hints. The square and compass of a Masonic symbol were visible in the stonework, and other odd markings of dots and lines were carved into the woodwork of the peaked roofs. A toppled sign out front still read Lycan Society in faded paint. That seemed appropriate; Stan had a real-life lycan half-transformed in his lap. Her breathing was shallow, but at least she had eyes again.
“We can get in over here,” Paul said, waving at a plywood panel on the side of the building.
“I thought you boarded it up.”
“There’s a place to get in and out.”
Stan attempted to drag Bloody from the car as soon as it stopped. “You left a place to get in and out?”
“I come here to think,” Paul said.
Picturing him alone out here, sitting in the darkened lodge, listening to the voices in the woods, creeped Stan out, so he let it go. Paul helped drag Bloody into the lodge. The inside wasn’t much better than the outside. The car’s headlights managed to punch through some holes in the boarded up windows, illuminating what had once been a dining area, judging by the chairs and tables nearby. As Stan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a bar, tapestries on the walls, and—
And a horned animal, charging right at him. He squealed and curled into a ball. He instinctively positioned the ball between the charging creature and Bloody.
Hooves pounded the wooden floor as the animal attacked. But then Paul was rushing to him, it was his feet clomping, and he put a hand on Stan’s shoulder. “It’s okay. Stan, it’s okay. It’s fake. Taxidermy.”
Stan poked his head from under his trembling arms. The deer was in the same place it was when they entered. Its glassy eyes were dead, but they did look pretty aggressive. He let out a wheeze of relief.
His face felt hot and prickly. “I guess I’m a little high-strung.”
Bloody coughed up some brown liquid onto the floor.
“We’re all a little damaged, aren’t we?” Paul said. He patted Stan’s shoulder, then helped him up. Together, they hefted Bloody onto a moldering couch in a fireplace-centered lobby near the front door. Paul lit the fire, explaining that he’d cleaned out the chimney, brought in some wood, and made sure the fireplace worked. For when he came to sit here. Alone.
A wail carried through the boarded-up windows, from the darkness outside. Fuck; Stan had almost forgotten about the kidnapped thing in the back of Paul's SUV.
He brushed hair away from Bloody’s face, where her skin was alive, undulating as if it were trying to reach some final form but failing. She looked so strange, with her human face all wrinkled, tiny, patched with hair, the nose darkened like a dog’s. “I don’t want to leave her,” Stan said.
Paul put a hand on his shoulder. “Help me get the shagg out of the car, then we’ll help her.”
Bloody stirred. Stan nearly recoiled from the oddity of tiny canine eyes blinking in her half-human face. She cleared her throat. “Dudes, I’m fine. Do your thing.”
<
br /> The thing wailed as they dragged it from the car and into the lodge. Except it wasn’t really a wail, but the combined sound of its voice and the steamy squeal of water being forced through its gas mask too quickly. It was the same sound Stan had heard in the woods when they’d been attacked.
“Quiet, or I’ll have to whack you again,” Paul said, but it didn’t stop, so he whacked it again, and it was silent until they got inside and down a creaky staircase.
Furry creatures skittered away from the beam of Paul’s flashlight. The lodge’s basement had been used for many purposes; it held a bath, cupboards, sinks, couches, a shelf full of board games, and towers of cardboard boxes.
Stan pointed to a pipe running vertically through the room. “We could tie it up to that.”
“Her,” Paul said.
“Huh?” Stan’s voice sounded slow, dumb.
Paul pointed at the creature. “You said ‘it.’ But she’s a her.”
Indeed, her black bikini covered small breasts, and the tight black pants lacked a manly bulge. Stan felt a pang of guilt for hardly thinking about whether the shagg was a guy or a girl. The dark blood running from its—no, her—head further underscored that although she wasn’t completely human, she did bleed like one.
“Let’s get her tied up,” Stan said.
“She would tear that pipe right out from the floor.”
“Ropes then?”
“Doubt there are ropes thick enough to hold one of them.”
Stan held back a comment about Paul’s useless facts. He just stared at the blood running from the shagg’s head as she took ragged breaths behind her mask. The blood was so dark that it looked black in the flashlight’s pale beam. He remembered when Dalla had demonstrated the sharpness of her fangs on Stan’s finger, when he still had one. How his red human blood had mixed with her maroon blood, streaking together.
“What about silver?” he asked.
“Okay, my turn: huh?” Paul said, mocking Stan’s voice.
“Silver burns vampires. This … woman, her blood is dark like a vampire’s. You say she’s strong like one too. Maybe she’s got the same kryptonite.”
Paul shrugged. They searched the basement until they found a few more flashlights, rope, string, and in the cupboards, some ancient, tarnished silverware. Stan held the unconscious shagg while Paul tied her up with the rope. Her breathing became increasingly scratchy; it sounded like a vacuum cleaner picking up bits of sand.
“She doesn’t sound so good,” Stan said.
Paul tapped the gas mask on her face. He followed the tube coming out of it down around her chest, to the canister strapped to her back with belts. “They live in the lake. This tank is full of water. I don’t think they can breathe without water.”
“Well, that gives us something else to work with,” Stan said, proud of figuring out how to subdue this thing, but still dragged down by guilt. They tried to kill me, he kept telling himself. After he finished tying her hands behind her, they hauled her into the basement’s claw-foot bathtub. Paul unstrapped the tank from her back and removed her mask. Her lips were paper-pale, soft and chewed up like those of a corpse left too long in water—a sight that Stan was, unfortunately, familiar with.
She smacked her lips, revealing needly fangs among more traditional teeth.
Her eyes flicked open. She let out a sandpapery scream and jolted up.
Stan thrust a spoon onto the wound on her forehead. Immediately, her skin hissed and bubbled around the silver. She slammed back into the tub, her eyes wild with fear.
“Please,” she whispered.
Paul patted her pale shoulder. “Stay still. We don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
Stan quickly tied more rope around the tub as the shagg whimpered. He strung silverware to the rope, forming a cage lined with forks, spoons, knives, and one lobster cracker that may not have actually been made of silver, but did have some symbolic value.
The shagg convulsed. Her eyes rolled back in her head as her chest rose and fell in an unnatural, random rhythm.
Paul tried the faucet. Luckily, the plumbing still worked. Rusty brown water poured into the tub, soon covering the shagg’s face. She let it into her lungs—if it was even lungs she breathed with—and inhaled deeply. Her milky eyes rolled forward and she faced Stan and Paul from under the cold water.
A deep voice spoke from the top of the stairs. “Guys? What the hell is going on down there?” Bloody asked.
The shagg’s gaze flicked back and forth between Stan, Paul, and the silverware collection, as if she was sizing them all up. Or maybe just pleading for her life. What the hell was going on?
“Nothing,” Stan said. A rat shuffled in the corner of the room. He thought of the time that he and Bloody had been locked in Dalla’s basement with her horrible cats. How he’d hated the vampire for what she did. For what she was.
As he grabbed the shagg’s water tank and mask to hide upstairs and leave her breathing dirty water in a silver cage in the dark, Stan kind of hated himself for what he had become.
14. Other People's Mothers
IT FELT SO GOOD TO be slathered in Bloody’s saliva.
Stan sat on the couch as she stood over him, spitting in her hand then rubbing it on his wounds. When Bloody was only Stan’s pet, she’d lick his injuries, and he’d let her, chalking it up to a dog being a dog. Then he’d explained away his oddly rapid healing as good genetics. It turned out the healing was one good thing he didn’t get from his mother; whatever mojo allowed Bloody’s body to reshape itself between human and dog also made its way into her spit, reshaping any flesh it touched into brand new flesh.
It had helped his mother heal when he mailed her vials of the stuff mixed into creams and teas. Not that it did her much good against a man who presumably had the same capabilities. Stan told Bloody and Paul about his theory that Wilcox was a werewolf, which they’d accepted, though Bloody refused to say whether or not he displayed any wolf-like properties when he attacked her.
“It tingles,” Stan said, giggling deliriously as she rubbed her pungent spit into the bruises around his eyes with the soft palms of her hands, which she had to use to avoid cutting him with the claws on her fingers.
“How did you get the shit beat out of you, anyway?”
Stan’s face turned red. “Bree’s husband.”
Bloody barked a humorless laugh. “Of course.”
“Look, I’m not proud of what happened with Bree. I don’t even like her … not anymore. The past just kinda took over the present for a second there.”
“Yeah Stan, real relatable. Why, just yesterday, I had a really strong memory and suddenly the waiter at Chilis was inside of me.”
Stan giggled harder. “Oh, fuck off. You know what I mean.”
Bloody sighed. “Not really, but never mind. Karma’s already popped you in the nose.”
“He told me to leave town or he’d kill me. I guess the shaggs trashing Mom’s house will convince him I’m gone, but I can’t really leave Newbury. Not for a while.”
“I’ll handle it,” Bloody said. “I’ve got a few leads.”
Stan took her hand before she rubbed more saliva onto him. He gazed into her canine eyes, thinking of all the times that he’d cuddled with Bloody, her little doggy heart beating fast as he held her to his chest. “Be careful,” he said. “I feel like this is going to get even worse. Karma doesn’t always find the right people to sucker-punch.”
“Then it’s not really karma, is it?”
“You know what I mean.”
She rubbed his aching face with the remaining spit on her palm. “I know. I’m scared as fuck.”
“Oh, girl, me too. I’m terrified.”
They both laughed uneasily. Bloody wiped her hands on her jeans, then pulled Stan forward so his face rested on her chest. She ran her claws through his hair. “Don’t you worry,” she said, her voice nothing more than a husky whisper. “We’ll get through this, bud.”
Annie? Bloody? Even in her
own mind, she couldn’t quite tell where she fit right now. The fact that she was even reflecting on it meant she was partially human, because usually when she was a dog, she cared more about meat and pissing than self-reflection. That was the nice thing about it. Yet as her nose twitched, she sensed not only things in the lodge—rats, mildew, some creature tied up in the basement—but vague hints of faraway thing. Things she could only sniff when she was a dog. Plus, with her dog eyes, she could only see herself in muddy shades of yellow and blue as she stared in the mirror behind the bar in the lodge’s dining room.
“Look at me!” she said to Stan. Paul was outside, moving his car and cleaning up the mess from her transformation. “I’m a wolf man.”
“Technically more dog than wolf, and all woman,” Stan said.
“I’m a half-breed. I’m Jo-Jo the dog-faced dog boy. Girl. Lady.” She opened her mouth and ran her tongue along her teeth, half of which were canine, half human. She poked at patches of hair along her jawline. “I’m the bearded lady!”
“Personally, I think the look suits you.”
“At least my boots still fit.”
“Just don’t try putting on gloves.”
She turned to him. “If I’m stuck like this, I’m blaming you for bringing me to this buttfuck of a town.”
Stan ran his finger along the edge of an antique axe that he’d found mounted above the fireplace. “Blame who you want, but I’m blaming the man who gouged your eyes out.”
Bloody’s facial expression veered toward the animal side. She nodded.
Stan tested out the axe, swinging it through the air, remembering that he’d left David Letterman’s sword at his mom’s house when he was forced out. “We’ll kill him. Again.”
Cold air rushed in as Paul squeezed through the boarded-up door. “Who are we killing now?” he asked.
“Wilcox,” Bloody growled.