Of Moons and Monsters

by P. T. Phronk

  “How do we make it stop?” Mike asked.

  Annie shrugged. “I guess we just get rid of it. We’ll have to make sure we don’t get any in the water, so we have to be really, really—”

  Stan reached over, grabbed the whole gooey cake in both hands, and flung it at the wall. It hit with a splat, then ran down the wall, leaving a creamy trail dotted with writhing worms.

  “—careful.”

  A jolt shot through the river. It started at Tahquamenon Falls, then tumbled downriver toward town. Like a winding line of dominos, something disrupted the fog somewhere, and the rest got dragged down with it.

  The mist stopped swirling, hovering unnaturally still for a moment. Then it fell to the ground, as if it had been made of tiny crystals that suddenly realized gravity existed. A reverse wave emanated from the river, with the fog falling away on both sides.

  Suddenly, it was a mildly sunny day.

  The shaggs clawed at their beady black eyes. Their skin instantly broke out in nasty rashes. As one, they dove into the water to escape the light.

  The bloody moose that the shaggs had been trying to convince to follow them recoiled, hunching over as if the sky was something it could duck underneath. When that didn’t work, it tentatively lowered itself into the water too, letting the swift current take it away.

  With the fog gone, the man in the woods was no longer hidden. His shoulders tensed under his baggy coat, and his blue eyes simmered with anger. Jeffery Humber-Wilcox stomped toward the waterfall.

  The vampire hadn’t ever done this before. He had, of course, frequented midnight diners, watching his company wolf down greasy food. But at those diners, at that time of day, one seat was like any other. Coveting window seats was something only humans could understand.

  But now he understood, sitting at Tweed’s, where instead of staring at faux-vintage Coke ads, he could watch the world go by in the pale light of the overcast town. This was no regular fog, and he could barely feel the painful sting of the sun filtering through it.

  He could get used to this—but he never got a chance to. When the wave of tumbling fog arrived, he felt it before he saw it. Pinpricks of sunlight stabbed at him through the window. An attack from 93 million miles away. His senses also opened up; the feeling of his nearby bloodline hit him from every angle.

  Outside, a mother pushing a stroller stopped as she felt the disturbance. The fog swirling around her suddenly stopped, as if somebody had hit the pause button on a VCR. Then the mist was sucked to the Earth. The woman looked up, confused, but smiling as wretched sunlight bounced off her face and stabbed directly into his eyes.

  His disguise took the brunt of the sunlight, luckily. He could still feel his skin bubbling, though, and it wouldn’t be long before it gave off steam, revealing what he was to his new friend. He stopped caressing the stake in his pocket and reached his hand across the table.

  “I think we’re done here,” the vampire said, shaking his new friend’s hand.

  “Are you all right?” his friend asked.

  “I am well, and quite pleased with this arrangement. But I have another appointment I must attend to urgently. It was a pleasure meeting you, Mister Bussicio.”

  A moment of happiness washed over Stan when he emerged from the cave. The moose was gone, the shaggs were gone, and seeing the sun for the first time in over a week triggered some deep-down release of brain chemicals that made him forget that Paul was dead, until the blood-stained grass beside the river reminded him.

  Mike raised his face to the sky and opened his mouth, exposing his big teeth, like he could taste the sunlight. The pale pink skin stretching over his ribs as he expanded his chest made it look like something was living under there. Like the maggots in the cheesecake. Follow the worms.

  “Well, fuck me, it worked,” Annie said.

  Stan sighed. “Maybe. Let’s get a better look.” They backtracked to the reddened bank of the river. Paul’s shotgun still lay in the grass. Stan picked it up, then led them onto the path sloping up to the top of the waterfall. The view was beautiful: the snaking river sliced up the forest before arriving in town, where he could see the steeples of the tallest churches poking up over the multicolored trees.

  “Fog’s gone,” Annie said. “Now let’s get back home. I can use my, uh, detective skills, to find your mom.”

  She meant her transform-into-a-dog skills, but Mike didn’t know that.

  They took another moment to admire the beautiful view. Then the wind shifted. Annie’s nose twitched.

  “Get down!” she shouted. Stan ducked, but Mike was slower. An arrow thudded into his shoulder.

  They all hit the ground, obscured by tall grass. “It’s Wilcox,” Annie said, her voice cracking. “I smell him. He’s close.”

  Stan raised his head for a moment. The grass near one tree had been matted down more than it was near others. “He’s behind that tree,” he said, pointing discretely. “You okay, Mike?”

  Mike shook his head. Blood bubbled up around the crossbow bolt embedded in the meat of his shoulder.

  “Dammit,” Stan whispered.

  Annie touched his shoulder. “I’ll take Mike and run like hell, get him help. Plus it’ll distract Wilcox. When he shows his face, you fill it with lead.”

  Stan nodded. Annie managed to focus Mike’s attention. A moment later, she wrenched him onto his feet, then took his good arm and burst away from their hiding spot. Stan stood and aimed the gun toward the tree.

  A glint of sunlight hit Stan’s eyes, off to the side. He was aiming at the wrong tree. That clever bastard. Annie’s distraction didn’t work; Wilcox’s crossbow aimed at Stan. Before he could readjust the shotgun’s aim, an arrow grazed his hand, slicing through his skin. The gun tumbled to the ground.

  Wilcox sprinted out from the woods. It was the first time Stan had actually seen him since arriving in town, and he was taken aback by Wilcox’s patchy beard and sunken eyes. His skin was so dry that it formed a layer of chalky powder all over his face. Along with a surge of red-hot anger, Stan had a distracting thought laced with pity: the guy had really let himself go.

  Stan crouched to grab the gun, but his right hand was missing a finger to begin with, and the arrow had dug a deep gash in it. The gun slipped from his grip. He tried again with the other hand, but his grip was unsteady and he could barely find the trigger.

  Wilcox took the delay to close the distance between them. His full weight knocked the breath out of Stan. He hit the ground hard. Wilcox pulled a knife from under his coat. Stan managed to get the gun between them, too horizontal to do any good.

  Behind Wilcox, Annie and Mike hesitated. “Go!” Stan shouted. They went. This was Paul sacrificing himself for everyone else all over again, but Stan had no intention of dying.

  Wilcox reeled back to get some weight behind the knife, but Stan jammed the butt of the gun into his scarred throat. He choked and recoiled long enough for Stan to wriggle away and get to his feet.

  The two men faced each other.

  “Stanley Lightfoot,” Wilcox said, shouting over the roar of the water, his lips pulled back to reveal stained teeth. “I anticipated that we’d run into each other here.”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “Oh, was Linda your mother?”

  Stan’s heart sank at the past tense. “Why? My mother, the fog, the shaggs, attacking Annie. Why go through all that just to get back at me?”

  Wilcox laughed so hard it made him cough. “Oh, Stanley. Stanley, Stanley, Stanley. You don’t even know. You still think this is about you.”

  Stan was getting tired of hearing that. “What’s it about then?”

  “It’s about killing two birds with one stone. And of these two suppositional birds, you aren’t even the one I was hunting.”

  Stan was reminded of his dream. Toucan Bob squawking for him to follow your nose as a winged demon soared overhead. He took a step back, toward the railing around the waterfall. “Explain, then. Give your supervillain speech
before you try to kill me.”

  “I’m not the villain here. I can see why you’d think that; I’ve done some bad things, I know, but it’s a bad world, and I’m just doing what I can to protect myself against the bigger bad. The Qallupilluit—which they call ‘shaggs’ here, because every backwoods wasteland needs its own language—are useful when they’re on your side. It was a quick Google search to find that there are plenty around here, which just happens to also be the home of the mother of the asshole who tried to kill me. That’s you, Stanley Lightfoot.”

  It really wasn’t about him. Stan’s mom was a bonus—just cherry on the cheesecake—to Wilcox’s war with whatever new enemy he’d made. That made all of this worse, somehow. He raised the shotgun and tried to pump it, but Wilcox was fast. He had Stan against the railing, knife to his throat, before Stan could even raise the gun.

  The trigger squeezed, firing the gun uselessly into the air before Stan dropped it, sending it clattering through the railing and into the natural mist of the waterfall. He managed to grab Wilcox’s wrists to prevent the knife from slicing through his throat.

  Wilcox was stronger than Stan. This wouldn’t last long.

  “I don’t even need to kill you,” Wilcox said.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Stan shouted before he had a chance to think about it.

  “If it makes you feel better, the thing with your mom, it wasn’t personal,” Wilcox said, spit flying from his lips. “Linda seemed like a real nice broad. I had a good time educating her. She offered me forgiveness and homemade cookies before I sliced her up.”

  Stan held onto the surge of anger, channeled it into strength. His hands clamped on Wilcox’s wrists so hard he could feel bones shift. Then he kicked off with enough force to lift them both up, over the railing, and tumbling head-over-foot toward the rocks at the bottom of the falls.

  19. The Consequences Of Falling

  A SHOTGUN BLAST WENT OFF, further confusing birds who were seeing sunlight for the first time in weeks. Annie watched them scatter from the trees.

  “Should, uh, should we go back?” Mike asked, wincing as he clutched around the arrow in his shoulder.

  Annie hesitated, but shook her head. She took a deep, difficult breath. “Either Wilcox is full of holes or Stan is already dead. There’s nothing we can do, and we need to get your shoulder fixed before you run out of blood.”

  They trudged through the forest, moving quicker than before, thanks to the sun granting them the ability to see more than a few feet ahead. Soon, they arrived at a small pond, where ice sparkled around still water. It would have to do. Annie pulled a square of flower-printed fabric from her pocket.

  “What’s that?” Mike asked.

  Annie sighed. “Fuck, man, listen, I don’t expect you to stick around after this. I need to do something. Something that’s not … usual. Unusual, I’d say. I came here to find Stan’s mom, and that’s what I’m going to do. If we find Stan later, I’ll heroically reunite them.” Her voice cracked. “If we don’t, it means Wilcox is still alive, and he’ll be running back to Linda to make sure we don’t find her. But we need to. Find her, I mean. Quick.”

  Mike nodded, stamping his feet in place nervously. “I’m good, yes, it’s okay, I’ll help Linda.”

  “Fine. But you should look away. Don’t try to help me, no matter what happens. And you can leave at any time, okay? Just turn your back and leave and call 911. It wouldn’t be the first time, and I won’t be offended or nothing.”

  She placed her shoulder bag and the square of fabric by the side of the pond, then started removing her clothes. Mike blushed and turned away. Annie stepped into the water. It was freezing, but it would be cleaner this way. She relaxed and let go of all her human baggage, letting her body do its thing.

  At the point when she was blowing ropes of blood out of her nose as it rearranged itself, but before the part when her eyes liquefied and rolled down her face, she glanced up. She didn’t blame Mike for staring, but she didn’t expect the expression on his face. Instead of horror, he gawked at her in awe. Jealousy, even.

  Claws replaced her fingernails. New canine eyes bubbled up from inside her face and found the right place in her skull. Hair pushed its way through her skin. One strand got stuck on a tough patch and formed the worst kind of ingrown hair.

  Her brain wriggled until it reached that damaged place where Wilcox had scooped it out, and that allowed her to hold back from transforming further. Shivering, she squeezed the ingrown hair until pus shot into the water. The relief was better than popping pimples as a teenager. Her skin smoothed and healed as she washed herself off, then got dressed again.

  Mike caught himself staring and turned away.

  “It’s okay, I’d be gawking at the freak show too,” Annie said. Mike looked different through her canine eyes; the flush of his skin was harder to pick out with less ability to distinguish colors. Another way that being a dog—or at least half-dog—was simpler.

  “Ain’t that, I just … I never imagined a person and an animal could … yeah.”

  “Yeah, I feel ya. Anyways.”

  She explained how her saliva could heal. The arrow in his shoulder was more of a bolt, with no barbs to keep it in, so it slid out easily, but bled like a motherfucker. The spit fixed that up quick. By the time her mouth was dry, the wound looked like it had been healing for a few days. It’d have to do for now.

  Next, she grabbed the patch of fabric and gave it a whiff. Linda’s scent filled her wet, half-canine nose. She’d never even met Linda, but it was nice to smell her again.

  She inhaled a deep breath of the crisp air. There were the familiar scents of the world, coming from every which direction. She could smell the path of the moose who had passed by here, mixed with the fishy smell of shaggs and the earthy smell of vampire blood. Those scents were one and the same around here, though, weren’t they? Shaggs were really just fucked up fish-vampires. Cursed to stay out of the air, too, not just the sun. Sucked to be them.

  And there it was: Linda’s scent! Coming from the direction of town. Figures; she was probably right there the whole time.

  Another familiar smell hit her.

  “Something’s wrong?” Mike asked, studying her face.

  A sinking feeling tugged at her stomach. Part of it was the pang of hunger that always crippled her after a transformation. But that scent also gave her worried butterflies. She shook it off.

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said. She hoped it was probably nothing. But that achingly familiar scent, it might have been something.

  The water turned red. Stan kept himself from diving into a jagged underwater rock using his bleeding hand. His wrist bent back further than it should have, but it kept his brains from joining the muck at the bottom of the river. The current flipped him over. He kicked off of something hard, reaching for the surface, but it had become unclear which way was up, so he only reached through more water.

  The water was less brown the further he was dragged from the waterfall, but it was still red. Too red to have all come from the gash in his hand. But losing oxygen was more important than losing blood right now. Through the crimson haze and bubbles of the crashing water, he spotted the riverbed. Flipping again, he aimed his legs at the rapidly passing rocks, then kicked.

  Sweet, sweet air filled his lungs, laced with the natural mist of the rapids. The current threatened to drag him back under, but Linda had taken him to swimming lessons at the school when he was a kid, and some of it must have stuck with him.

  He couldn’t feel any particularly painful body parts except for his hand, which didn’t mean much when his whole body was numbed by the cold, but the trail of red water led further downriver, and it didn’t seem to intersect with Stan as he paddled. That was good. Wilcox must have bounced harder and further down the river.

  Thrashing toward the shore only seemed to drag Stan back to the middle of the rapids. The river curved slightly, toward town, and there was Wilcox. He’d become a jumbled fl
otsam of leather coat, bearded face, and some unidentifiable body part covered in red flesh centered around what might have been the white of bone, bobbing up and down in the current.

  Stan didn’t let that satisfy him; Wilcox had appeared pretty dead twice before, yet here he was, fucking with Stan’s life again. He bit down against the cold and the pain as he kicked toward Wilcox, occasionally getting sucked under and swallowing a mouthful of mineral-tasting water. Within grabbing distance, Stan reached out, but a whirlpool wrenched him away at the last moment.

  The river carried him away, but he had managed to grab something; his fist clenched around a wet clump of fresh wolf fur.

  As she got closer to town, Bloody realized that she could smell where Linda had been, but she could not smell Linda herself. There was another trick, another fucking block, in the way.

  But she could pick up that other scent loud and clear. If Stan had done his job and murdered the hell out of Wilcox, then there was still some time left to find Linda. Even if Wilcox was alive, it would take him time to get back to town. So she headed toward that other scent. She headed along the railroad tracks toward Ducks Bar.

  She asked Mike to stay around the corner as she approached the back of the cracked stucco building. Dean’s cigarette-and-whisky essence drifted around the cracks of the old door as she listened at it, and smelled at it. She waited, thinking about whether or not there was a word like “listened” except for scent. How could she describe sitting around, smelling the air, waiting for something to happen? Maybe there wasn’t a word like that; she did it so much that if there was, it would have entered her vocabulary by now.

  Dean’s scent spiked in strength, then she heard the familiar swish of a cigarette sliding from its package. She could almost see him approaching the door, hunching over to stick the smoke in his mouth as he headed out back.