Dark Valentines

by Mark Onspaugh

  Montgomery didn’t answer, although his mouth gaped. It was then Moreau saw the man had been impaled with a crude spear. Wondering if the spearhead might bear some of the same aspects of those of early Man, Moreau found himself surrounded by his Beast-Men. Tiger-Man, Boar-Man, Lion-Man, Bull-Man, Tiger-Man, Alligator-Man and the Hyena-Swine. This final specimen had proven the most difficult of Moreau’s subjects, and he had considered euthanizing the thing on its last visit to The House of Pain.

  Moreau pulled his revolver from the holster, but then they were on him, dragging him from his horse and carrying him deeper into the darkening trees.

  Moreau commanded them to release him, but then the Hyena-Swine knocked him unconscious with the butt of Montgomery’s gun.

  Moreau awoke within an immense cave lit by torches. He was tied to a large wooden column.

  Everywhere he looked, eyes of red or green light regarded him.

  “I am your creator!” he roared. “You will release me at once and return Aurélie to me.”

  An aged Beast-Man approached, one cobbled together from several animals and a man. Its face was decidedly lupine, but its horns and disturbing eyes were those of a goat.

  Moreau had made this one, called Caliban, the Sayer of the Law.

  “Release me,” Moreau demanded.

  “What is The Law?” Caliban said.

  Moreau struggled, but his bonds grew tighter.

  “What is The Law?” Caliban asked again.

  “Look around you,” Moreau said, “You’re using fire, and weapons. I am your Prometheus, your God who bestows gifts!”

  “The light is for your benefit,” Caliban said. “We have no need for it.”

  “Release me,” Moreau said. “There are many men even now gathering to bring you all to The House of Pain. Those who help me will escape its agonies.”

  The Beast-Men stirred uneasily, and Moreau was sure he had won.

  Caliban looked to his left and nodded.

  M’ling stepped forward, out of the shadows.

  “He lies!” the little man screamed. “All of the men are dead – except for him!”

  The Beast-Men roared and screeched, hissed and howled.

  “Please…” Moreau began.

  Caliban stabbed a clawed finger at him. “Not to spill blood – that is The Law!”

  “Are we not Men?” the Beast-Men chorused.

  “You have broken The Law!” Caliban said. “The punishment must fit the crime!”

  “The House of Pain! The House of Pain!” the Beast-Men screamed, their refrain filled with hatred and agonies never forgotten.

  “No!” came a voice, a voice much lovelier than those of the Beast-Men.

  Aurélie stepped into the light. She was naked and her skin looked golden in the torchlight.

  “No House of Pain for Doctor Moreau,” she said. “He is our father, our benefactor… Our God.”

  She looked at him, and Moreau was sure he saw tenderness there.

  “Oh, Aurélie, how I love you! I was right, you are human!”

  “No,” she said, “you are human – I am something better.”

  The Beast-Men fed well that night, and they saved Moreau for Aurélie, which seemed only fitting.

  “Give me your heart,” she purred, and Moreau screamed.

  And Aurélie obeyed The Law – she didn’t spill his blood.

  Not… a… single… drop.

  CUPID VS DRACULA

  (Editor’s note: These events take place some two hundred years before the Count’s encounter with Santa Claus.)

  The young bride inclined her neck, and Dracula relished this last, delicious moment before feeding. The softness of her skin, the heat radiating from it, the sound of her pulse, strong and constant as a drum. Then, almost burning his cold lips on her living flesh, he savored the give of skin and then artery under his fangs, the hot torrent of Life running out of her and down his throat.

  She moaned, and Dracula wondered again whether he should keep her as one of his brides. The current three were becoming so tiresome, as they always did after a century or so. And for this one, wouldn’t such a fate be better than death, better to join the Count rather than her groom, who even now lie with his brains dashed out on the stone steps below?

  She murmured, like the cooing of a dove, and Dracula thought she might do, at least for a while. Then, she could join the dozens of others who were treated to a sunbath while he was safely tucked away in the bowels of Carfax Abbey.

  “Ahem.”

  Dracula turned, snarling. He was sure it was Van Helsing, here to try and end him yet again.

  Instead, he was greeted with the sight of a cherub fluttering overhead. But unlike those rosy cheeked angels he had seen in church as a youth, this one was armed with bow and arrow.

  Dracula did not doubt his senses. He had lived over four hundred years and had seen many strange things.

  “Ahem,” the creature said again, its voice that of a surly child. “Just what do you think you are doing?”

  “I am dining on this beautiful girl,” Dracula said, matter-of-factly. “And I don’t recall inviting you here for dinner.”

  “These lovers were under my charge,” the cherub said, “and my protection.”

  “Well, one is dead and the other nearly so. In my opinion, you have proven yourself a most unworthy guardian.”

  “What?”

  “I am saying you’ve done a terrible job. You may take the groom, he is of no use to me. Now begone, I have no use for flying boys in diapers.”

  “Mortal!” the cherub shrieked, “You…”

  “Ah, ah,” Dracula said, waggling a finger as he delicately wiped his bloodstained lips with a lace handkerchief, “I am immortal, winged baby.” He thought a moment and snapped his fingers. “You are Cupid!”

  “I am.”

  Dracula smiled. “I should have realized it was you immediately. But then I have so much to remember. It’s such a long time, four hundred years…”

  “Try over two thousand.”

  “Really? Hmm. I suppose we shall have to compare notes in another sixteen hundred years.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to let this continue, do you?”

  “I don’t see how you are equipped to do anything about it,” Dracula said. “If I remember my lessons, you make people fall in love. I am incapable of love, and so your arrows will have no effect on me.”

  Cupid frowned, his child-like brow furrowed in anger. “One wooden arrow…”

  “Ah,” Dracula waggled his finger again, a gesture Cupid was beginning to hate. “You are not a killer, little baby, you are a lover. Now, unless you want to join the bats in my belfry, please go away, I need to finish making this girl my bride.”

  Cupid shot an arrow at Dracula, just for spite, and it bounced off the Count and clanged to the floor. The metal heart that formed its tip was bent.

  Dracula smiled, and turned his back on him.

  Cupid fumed and pouted, and none of the gods could cheer him. He refused to listen to Apollo play the lyre and did not go to visit Venus, his mother. He became so sullen that even his aim was off, resulting in several embarrassing obsessions and one marriage that is still cited in history books as the oddest union of the 1800’s.

  One day, as Cupid sourly watched his latest mishap - a man mooning over a duck - his great-uncle Pluto came to visit him from the Underworld. Pluto rarely left the Stygian kingdom because his feet and hands burned everything they touched and his only garment was a coat of screaming souls – not something that gets you a lot of return invites.

  Pluto sat on a park bench, which immediately burst into flames. Several people ran off screaming and the flowers in the vicinity began to wither and die. As the bench crumbled, he moved to a stone one covered in graffiti.

  “How are you, nephew?” Pluto asked, his voice actually a pleasing baritone.

  “You know how I am,” Cupid said sullenly.

  “Yes, your mother ca
me to visit and told me all about your troubles.”

  Cupid turned on his great-uncle. For a being who looked like a chubby toddler, his glower was quite forbidding, and even the screaming souls that made up Pluto’s overcoat whimpered and quieted.

  “It’s your fault, you know,” he said to Pluto accusingly.

  “Mine?”

  “Count Dracula – Vlad Tepes – he’s one of your subjects, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a free agent,” Pluto explained. “Oh, he’ll roast like anyone else once he’s dispatched. Until then, he’s an arrogant little leech. He even said he was more wicked than me – me!”

  Cupid shook his head and turned away. Pluto patted him on the shoulder. A mortal would have been consumed in Hellfire, but Cupid just tanned.

  “Cupey, Cupey…” Pluto coaxed.

  “Don’t call me that,” Cupid said, “It’s bad enough I have to go through life wearing Pampers.”

  “The thing is,” Pluto went on, “is that you and I are family. Even if Dracula were my subject, you’d come first.”

  “Thanks,” Cupid said. He spotted an elderly man and an elderly woman about to cross paths. He aimed carefully. The woman was struck dead-on, but he missed the old man and hit an elm tree. The woman began cooing and hugging the tree. The old man gave her a wide berth and sadly walked on.

  “Shit,” said Cupid.

  “You’re letting this vampire get to you,” Pluto said reproachfully.

  “And what would you do? How would you like it if someone interfered with your work, maybe put cheery music and free lemonade out for the Damned?”

  Several of the lost souls in Pluto’s coat licked their chapped lips.

  “I wouldn’t like it, but I wouldn’t mope, either.”

  “Thanks, great advice. I think Persephone is calling you.”

  “She’s with her mother for six months, you know that – six months of football, pizza, buffalo wings and action flicks for the Plutster.”

  “So go eat your junk food and leave me in peace, Uncle.”

  “Cupey, you have to get in this guy’s head. Figure out what would really jack him up and then tighten the screws.”

  “I thought about making him fall in love with the sun, but I’m not allowed to kill anyone,” Cupid complained. “Besides, Helios got cranky the last time I shot him.”

  “You’re a bright boy, Cupid, you’ll figure it out.” Pluto descended to the Underworld just as the stone bench under him collapsed.

  Cupid thought and thought. He considered Dracula’s arrogance, and his hubris, and his pride. He thought about his stupid fangy face, and how much he’d like to have his uncle Heracles rearrange it with his demi-Olympian fists.

  His face… his stupid, obnoxious face…

  And then, for the first time in months, Cupid smiled.

  Dracula was fluffing the pillows of his new coffin when Cupid appeared in his secret lair.

  “Look, Renfield, it’s the God of Incontinence.”

  Renfield laughed until he was wheezing.

  Cupid merely smiled, and took out an arrow.

  Unlike his usual weaponry, this arrow had a black heart.

  “Going to kill me, little baby?” Dracula laughed.

  “Nope, can’t do that… And this won’t last forever. The spell is a good one, but not everlasting… Still, it should last a good two hundred years, which will provide me and mine with plenty of amusement.”

  Cupid fired, and Dracula moved so fast he was a blur. When he stopped, the arrow was waiting for him, and plunged into his heart.

  Renfield gasped, and the entire world seemed to fall silent.

  Then the Count chuckled. “I feel nothing, you misguided moppet!”

  “It takes two arrows, you Transylvanian twit,” chided the God of Love as he nocked another black-hearted arrow.

  “And who is your target? Renfield? I could never love such a cockroach!”

  Renfield actually teared up over this, but paled when Cupid aimed at him.

  “Renfield has suffered enough,” Cupid said, “and he is another lover you spoiled. Did you know he had a girl waiting for him the night he came to Carfax Abbey?”

  “I couldn’t care…” Dracula began, but then Cupid was turning and firing. The second bolt lodged near the Count’s cold and cruel heart.

  The Count laughed again, pulling both arrows from his chest. “I still feel nothing – what am I supposed to do, love myself? I already do, you dimwitted denevér, you foolish fledermaus.”

  “Wait for it,” Cupid said, consulting a large pocket watch he pulled from his didy.

  Dracula suddenly adopted a moonstruck and sappy smile.

  “Congratulations,” Cupid said, “you are now in love. And, like any lover, you will want to gaze upon your beloved for hours upon end…”

  At this, Dracula looked stricken. He ran from the cellar, Renfield hot on his heels.

  And Cupid laughed and laughed, as Dracula began a frantic, two-hundred year search for a reflection he would never be able to see.

  SUITE FOR COLD HEARTS AND FLUTES OF BONE

  Flit was a ghoul.

  Not in the metaphorical sense, mind you. No, he was a creature who liked to dig up graves and consume dead flesh. Fresh dead, long dead, jerky-like strips on dried bones, it didn’t matter, Flit liked them all.

  People hated and feared him, so he tried to keep his existence a secret.

  No one knew where Flit came from, not even Flit himself. No one could tell you if he had once been human or had hatched or had sprung fully formed from the forehead of his father or mother.

  Even his name was suspect, a random sound he decided was pleasing to his misshapen ears.

  Flit stood five and a half feet when he stood straight, but was better at running hunched over, like Igor in the Frankenstein movies. Flit was pale and also hairless, which was very adaptive for a creature that did a lot of burrowing. He had large, powerful hands with thick, blunt nails. His face looked something like a bat’s, his nose flattened with large nostrils (the better to sniff out your corpse, my dear) and large, dark eyes like a lemur.

  When searching for food, Flit preferred to work naked. Clothes tended to get dirty and he didn’t have access to a washer and dryer. His apparel was stolen from clotheslines and drop-off boxes for local charities. Currently, his wardrobe consisted of jeans, work boots, argyle socks, a plaid shirt, a light jacket and a battered fedora he had snatched from an old man asleep at a bus stop.

  In his clothes, Flit could make his way from cemetery to cemetery, usually returning before dawn to whatever crypt or mausoleum he was nesting in at the moment.

  Whatever time was not spent searching for food was spent in looking at the stars (Flit quite liked a star-filled sky) and whittling flutes out of bones too old to be tasty. Flit was not very good at playing the flute, but he was excellent at crafting them, even with his seemingly clumsy hands. Sometimes he would carve elaborate designs in them, creating scrimshaw in human ivory.

  Sally Meyers had been a human girl, not so long ago. She had gone to high school and footballs games, gotten fairly good grades and planned to major in French and foreign relations. She hoped to work at the American Embassy in France.

  Sally was very pretty, with hair a fiery red like a cardinal, and hazel eyes. She had a light spray of freckles over her pert nose and a figure that was neither skinny nor voluptuous. She sometimes wore glasses (when it was too windy for contacts) and inspired lust and romance in jock and geek alike. She was smart, feisty and able to tell a joke without forgetting the punch line. She could throw a football quite far and was even better at baseball. When she died, she had a large scab on her right knee from sliding into home and two puncture wounds on her neck, hidden in the hair at the back of her neck, which was broken.

  Sally had been camping with her folks and had gone for a stroll to look at the stars. Unfortunately, a vampire in the area had seen her, her hot, teenage blood
like a bright lantern to his thermal vision.

  Contrary to some popular notions, vampires prefer not to sire new vampires. They don’t want the competition, and they are always fearful some new recruit will expose them all through some misadventure. So they prefer to drain their victims, and then hide the evidence in a fire or at the bottom of some body of water.

  This vampire, whose name was Chet, hadn’t fed for several days, and hunger clouded his judgment. He jumped Sally as she was heading back to camp and was unable to keep her quiet. Her parents came running and Chet panicked, broke her neck and ran.

  A manhunt was organized for Sally’s killer, but he was never found.

  Sally was embalmed and laid to rest, with some of Chet’s vampiric saliva doing its work in her somnolent form.

  Sally was interred at Mayfield Cemetery, which was one of the cemeteries on Flit’s route. That night, he had a yen for the freshly dead, and the scent of embalming fluid, graveyard dirt and the starched linens of Sally’s coffin were all like the aromas of a favorite restaurant to you or me.

  Checking that the cemetery was empty, Flit carefully removed squares of sod and then began to dig. Once he was finished feeding, he would pack some in his overnight bag for later and carefully return the grave to its pre-Flit appearance.

  Meanwhile, Sally was just waking up and realizing she was in a coffin. She assumed she had been buried alive and was just about to scream when she heard the sounds of her coffin being unlocked. Tears in her eyes, she was ready for the sight of her parents or a kindly doctor, or perhaps Donny Sievert, who played varsity football and was the president of the Ink & Quill Club.

  Instead, the lid swung up to reveal Flit in all his ghoulish glory, his toothy mouth crisscrossed with ribbons of drool.

  Sally screamed and Flit screamed in surprise. Ghouls can eat all manner of dead flesh, whether embalmed or diseased, decomposed or infested, but living flesh is poisonous to them, and even a finger’s worth may kill the unwary corpse-nosher.

  Flit thought a trap had been laid for him, and that any moment armed men would descend with nets and guns to kill him, stuff him and put him on display in a natural history museum under very strong lights, where people would point, stare and laugh at him for eternity.