Of Moons and Monsters

by P. T. Phronk

  Bloody let the door open a crack, then slammed it forward, conking it on Dean’s forehead. He fell onto his ass. When he saw Bloody, with all her canine shit going on, the cigarette tumbled from his mouth as he tried to scramble away. She grabbed him by the collar of his leather coat and dragged him further inside. Mike followed behind them and closed the door.

  “Quiet,” Bloody commanded as she set Dean up against the counter of the seldom-used kitchen. “You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  “Wait, Annie? Is that you?”

  He recognized her voice even though it was low and scratchy from the transformation. Somehow that made her happy even though she was mad at him, but she pushed the happiness down and concentrated on the anger, because that would be more useful right now. As she got Mike to tie Dean’s hands behind his back, she squatted in front of him and looked him up and down with her dark, canine eyes. “Oh, Dean. Dean Shaw. Dean Shaw. Your name felt so good on my tongue.”

  “What happened to you, Annie?” he asked, as if he should be concerned for her instead of for himself. The idiot.

  “Even now you seem like such a nice man. So what were you doing with a bad man like Jeffery Humber-Wilcox?”

  His face collapsed; the one visible eye in his lopsided glasses refused to look at Bloody. “Oh. This is about that.”

  “Yeah. That. Explain.”

  “It’s not as bad as … well, maybe it’s as bad as it seems. I don’t really know. Fuck! What happened to you, Annie? That’s not a costume, is it?”

  “No. But I said you’re the one doing the explaining.”

  “It was Joey Bussichio. You know, Bree’s husband? He’s been threatening the bar, threatening me. The fuck owns half this town, and if he wants to expand north of the tracks, and keep the town looking nice for his tourist traps, he needs Ducks. He sends his city hall thugs in here talking about ordinances and by-laws and fines and safety codes and—”

  Annie put a claw to his paper-thin lips. “Shh. What’s this have to do with Wilcox?”

  “You mean Neville, right? The guy you met at the bar the other night. That’s who you must be talking about, yeah? He rode into town, came in here a few nights in a row, I got to know him. At least I thought I did. And I had a few drinks with him, I think, and told him all about Bussichio. I told him all about this town. The next day I … I must’ve drunk a lot, because I couldn’t remember much, but he came back and said he had a way that I could keep the bar. If I just helped him out with a few things around town, he’d help me in return.”

  “So you helped him. You got him the shit he needed for that waterfall deal.”

  The eyebrow above the black lens of his glasses twitched. “How’d you know about that?”

  Bloody tapped his forehead with one of her claws. She had the urge to tap harder, puncture a line of holes in that thin, weathered skin of his and watch the beads of blood bubble out. But she didn’t. “Still your turn to answer questions. You told him where I was staying, didn’t you? At the lodge. You’re the only person I told about that, and you told him, and he told his friends in the river. That’s how Miriam’s mother found her, even through the fog. They could have killed Stan, you know.”

  “Fuck. Fuck! Annie, I’m so weak.” He blinked his visible eye. “Even when I knew he was up to nothing good ... when he asked where you were … when he asked for rare chemicals from my suppliers, and asked about the shaggs, and asked about what those chemicals would do in a person’s bloodstream … even then, I was weak, and I needed his help so I helped him. I’m so weak.”

  Bloody sighed, and her dog breath blew some of Dean’s fine hair over his eyes. She reached out and brushed his hair back, lingering for a moment to comb through the wispy strands like her claws were a comb.

  “Oh, my Dean,” she said, and he finally met her gaze. “I’ve wanted to get closer to you. But I couldn’t, because of this secret of mine.”

  He nodded, a hint of his beautiful smile on his beautiful face. “Yeah. And I had my secret too. We all have secrets, yeah?”

  Bloody shook her head. “The difference is, this secret is mine. All mine. But you knew yours was shared. You could have helped me, and Stan, and Linda. Your secret was everybody’s, and you kept it for yourself.”

  Outside the kitchen’s grimy window, the sun became orangish-red with the evening’s approach. The dog part of Bloody’s brain heated up. She flashed back to tearing Wilcox’s throat out with her teeth, and imagined doing the same thing to Dean. Except she also heated up down lower, from being so close to his face, and she wanted to fuck him. Tear his clothes off and wrap herself around him while she planted kisses on his neck, increasing in their intensity until her kisses tore into him, and she sucked up every last drop of everything he had to give her.

  She leaned in close and licked her lips. The remorse in Dean’s eyes turned to fear as he seemed to realize what she was thinking. Behind her, Mike’s own animal instincts kicked in, and he reached toward them. To stop her or to help, Bloody wasn’t sure.

  She wasn’t sure of her own intentions. Maybe she would have killed him, if a familiar voice hadn’t spoken up behind her.

  “Dean? I thought I heard something. Where did you go off to?” The door to the kitchen opened. A gasp. “Annie?”

  Bloody turned around. It was Florence. Her stoic face registered shock, but only for a moment.

  As Bloody struggled to find something to say to Florence, who she’d never expected to find at Ducks, the awkward silence broke. All four of them cringed as they heard a sound echo across the town: a part-human part-wolf howl of pure rage.

  “Friend of yours?” Dean asked.

  Bloody glanced at Mike, who licked his lips nervously. “I’m guessing that’s your new best friend, Wilcox. And unluckily for us all, he’s not dead.”

  The current carried Stan close enough to the riverbank that he could grab a branch and pull himself out of the water. He kneeled in the mud and spared a moment to mourn Paul—the friend he had spent lazy summer weekends fishing with on these very banks, back when they believed monsters were only in stories.

  He spared another moment for his mother. The way Wilcox talked about her as a past acquaintance—was your mother, had a good time educating her, offered me cookies, seemed like a nice broad—sucked the remaining hope out of him. But Wilcox was a known deceiver. He couldn’t trust anything that fucker said, even if it was bad news meant to hurt Stan—especially if it was meant to hurt Stan—so a speck of hope stuck to his brain like a stray particle of glitter.

  Where to go, then? He looked at the tuft of wolf hair still clinging to his sleeve. It was confirmation of what he’d suspected since the beginning: Wilcox had transformed. According to research Bob had dug up, he’d been using wolf saliva to heal himself at least since Dalla tore his throat out, and when Bloody had repeated the performance after Stan stabbed him in that hotel bathroom, it must have pushed him over the edge. Now he was a full-on werewolf, which meant he could sniff down any prey he wanted to. Stan, Annie, and Mike were all co-conspirators in destroying his waterfall cheesecake, so they were now his prey. They’d be stronger together.

  Annie and Mike would have entered town further north, near the tracks. Stan followed the river until he reached the riverfront properties south of town that he envied as a kid. As he stole a towel from one of their yards to wrap up his bleeding hand, a horrific howl filled the forest and echoed off the buildings in town. Wilcox had awoken.

  The sun set while Stan washed his wound with a hose. When he turned the tap off, he realized it had been masking a grunting sound coming from the river.

  He approached the water and ducked behind a plastic shed. The river itself seemed to be clearing its throat. Stan pushed his glasses up and squinted to see in the fading light. A pale shape bobbed up and down out of the water, gracefully navigating the currents. No—not one shape, but several. Like a pod of dolphins, five or six shaggs were swimming toward town.

  Further upstream, there was
more movement. More boney fingers occasionally breaking the surface. And these ones carried, on their backs, the same type of water tanks that Miriam and her crew had used to leave the water and torch his mother’s house.

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” Stan muttered to himself. He quietly cut through the riverfront house’s yard and got onto the street. He’d have the advantage moving on land, so he could get downtown before Wilcox and the shaggs did. But who was he going to warn? Who would believe him?

  Annie. She came first, and her nose would lead to his mom. Robinson street headed north, past his mother’s house, so he could look for her there. If there were no signs of her, he could keep going and reach the lodge.

  The sky grew dark, and Stan realized how much he had missed the sunlight. It had energized him to finally see it, if only briefly, but his mood faded with the light. Then, a flash. From up ahead, a light strobed irregularly. As he got closer, he realized it was coming from his mom’s house.

  Perfect! Why not one more helping of crazy? Stan approached as discreetly as he could along expansive, featureless front lawns, and soon spotted a halo of blonde hair that lit up with every flash.

  “Bree?”

  She turned around. A Nikon D700 camera was in her hands. “Stan. What happened to you? What the hell are you doing here?”

  He tried to hide the blood-soaked towel wrapped around his hand as if she hadn’t already seen it. He sucked in his breath and willed his pounding heart to settle down. “I live here. What are you doing taking pictures of my mother’s house?”

  The smell of campfire was strong in the air. Like when he and Bree used to sit in the woods, cuddling and staring at a fire for hours. Except now, the fire pit was his mom’s house. The kitchen side was mostly gone. Gulped up by fire—another monster that Stan seemed to encounter all too often. “I’m documenting the damage,” Bree said. “For Joey. He just wants a record, of the state of the property, in case … um, in case the owner doesn’t return.”

  Stan’s nostrils flared, but the shame in Bree’s eyes spritzed some water on his internal fire. Besides, the horde of sea monsters behind him was a more pressing problem. “I don’t know why you’re doing his chores,” he said, and could tell it hurt her.

  “He’s got a meeting tonight, so he needed this done. It’s not high school anymore, Stan. Last time you were in town, we all had endless possibilities, a hundred different directions we could go. Now we’ve ended up where we ended up.”

  She was right, it wasn’t high school anymore. He couldn’t go back to his mom to regroup. Wilcox’s words gnawed at him: I had a good time educating her. “I get it. I do,” he said. “Take care of yourself, Bree. You should probably stay close to Joey tonight. I don’t have time to explain, but something is happening that even I don’t fully understand, and the town could be a dangerous place.”

  She nodded, staring at the bloody towel around Stan’s hand. “Yeah. Okay. I gotta stop at the diner, but then … Joey’s got a bunch of guns and men who know how to use them. It’ll be safe with him.”

  “Wait, Joey is involved with this? How did he … dammit, I don’t even want to know. You should go to him now. Just live, okay? Live through this. There are still other places to end up.”

  The terror in her eyes still made him want to hold her, but he tore himself away and climbed through the wall of the house. Joey holing up with weapons had reminded him of something. Luckily, it was still there, in the closet where he’d tossed it and forgotten after first arriving here: David Letterman’s sword. The same one that had chopped up Damien Fox, and Bob had grabbed from that Walmart, just in case it was needed. Maybe it was needed now.

  He headed out the back door and cut over a few blocks to make sure there were no signs of Bloody downtown. The streets were active as people closed out their work days and headed home. Stan avoided looking at anyone directly. He was already an outcast, and walking around with a bloody hand and a poorly-concealed sword, wearing damp, dirty clothes, wouldn’t make people jump to welcome him back. He trusted that Bree would stay quiet, but if someone else blabbed to Joey Bussichio that he was back, again, he had no doubt that the prick would make good on his threat to kill Stan. The town was content to ignore him, as each person seemed to be lost in their own business. Whether due to the sudden reappearance of the sun, or some unspoken fear that it would slip below the horizon and never come back, everybody had an air of distraction about them. The gaggles of housewives were less gaggly, keeping an unusual distance from each other as they picked up groceries. Three men in suits ran toward City Hall, unsuccessfully trying to hide guns strapped to their waists. Friends of Joey’s. Stan whipped around and pretended to be reading the real estate postings in a shop window.

  After they passed, Stan took a glance down Sandford Avenue, to where a bridge hopped over the river. He suppressed a scream. As soon as the sun disappeared behind the trees, spindly pale shapes emerged from the water, pouring up around the bridge. Dozens of them, moving fast.

  20. Eating The Blame

  “WHO IS COMING?” BLOODY ROARED at Florence, who was pinned against the wall. Somehow, Florence looked bored.

  “My my, Annie, what big teeth you have,” Florence said.

  It was the first joke Bloody had ever heard her make, despite living with her for a week. Bloody couldn’t help but smile at that, letting some anger float out the corners of her mouth. She took her claws off Florence’s chest, and directed her to sit in the booth beside the jukebox, with Dean.

  Florence sighed. “I suspected there was something peculiar with you,” she said. “To answer your question, it is the Qallupilluit who are coming. Also known as iso onna, or, locally, shaggs. Monsters, like you. Peaceful, long-lived monsters.”

  “Um, just a sec. Guys, sorry to interrupt,” stammered Mike, who was keeping watch out of a polished spot in the grimy window. “They don’t look very peaceful right now.”

  Through the fog of the window, Bloody could only see spindly pale shapes against the black of night, ambling past the window like bobbing ghosts. Then there was a crash, a tinkling of glass, and the black of night became orange. Flames. The vintage record display in the Vinyl Days music store across the street was no more.

  Bloody felt a pang of fear on behalf of all those records inside, though going up in flames was a pretty metal way to die. Which reminded her of the cardboard cutout of the lizard creature, also standing in that record shop, dying at the hands of the things it mocked.

  “We need to board up the windows,” Bloody said. Dean had taken his sunglasses off, and his eyes were puffy in a way that made Bloody’s eyes water too. She let him out of the booth to find a way to secure the place.

  “We feed them,” Florence continued, looking less bored now. “We leave meat and blood out on the back porch at night and it’s gone by morning. Me and Paul do it a few times a week.”

  Bloody nearly dropped the chair she was carrying to put in front of the door. Florence didn’t know that Paul was gone. Dead, at the hands of the creatures they were such good friends with. But now was not the time to tell her. She let Florence continue.

  “So they trusted us, I think. We never said much to them. It was an unspoken alliance … finding buckets of animal blood is not easy for them, but it is no problem for us. In return, they keep to themselves.”

  “They’re not keeping to themselves now,” Mike said as he nailed a piece of a wooden crate to the window frame, blocking out the increasingly flickery orange light outside.

  “They did. For years. Decades. And when that man came into town—”

  “Wilcox,” Bloody growled.

  “He said his name was Neville. He was able to talk with the shaggs, organize them in a way nobody had before.” She paused for a moment, statue-still, not bothering to stand up to help them block the doors and windows. “I’m sick, as I’m sure Paul told you. Cancer. Just like Linda, just like a lot of folks who have lived here all of our lives, drinking the water downriver from whatever Joey Bu
ssichio is dumping in the river from that old mill. The Neville man—is Wilcox his last name?—well, he approached some of the other ladies in town about trading skills with the shaggs. We give them more freedom. Maybe some blood—our own blood, which they like better—and they give us some of theirs in return.”

  Mike turned to her. “You made a deal to become a shagg.”

  Florence nodded. A smile creeped across her face. “And some of the ladies were quite sure that it would happen soon. Neville arranged a deal and told us about it at the church a few nights ago. I just stopped here for some liquid courage first, and then … that commotion outside … it must be him. It must be happening now.”

  Bloody growled. “That ain’t all that’s happening, Florence. Look, I wish you could live forever too, but I have a feeling you’ve been duped.” With her brain partially dog-shaped, Bloody was having trouble fitting it all together. Wilcox made friends with the shaggs. He got Dean’s help to create the waterfall fog so that they could come out in the daytime without becoming fried calamari. He got them to promise eternal life to the Tupperware Cult and the penguiny church ladies and other people—her eyes watered as she recalled having them popped like bubbles outside of that church—and then … what? Why was Wilcox orchestrating this takeover of the town? And how did Stan and his mom fit in? This bullshit puzzle was missing its biggest turd.

  One of the bar’s windows shattered. Mike recoiled from the board he was nailing. Cold air rushed into the room, and with it, scents from every direction. The mossy smell of the shaggs was right there, but behind that, Bloody was hit by a whiff of Stan. He was close—alive, moving, out there in the collapsing town.

  A shagg peered in through the broken window. Mike whacked him with the board in his hands, making him pull away, but then there was shouting, and more of them approached the bar. Some carried axes, shovels, and other tool-weapons that could easily be stolen from a back-yard shed.

  “We can’t stay here. We’re safer running,” Bloody said. Was she saying it because it was true or because Stan was out there?