Here Be Monsters

Periphery People



Sara Reinke

©2011

All rights reserved.

“Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there,” the man at the bar said to me, nursing a fresh two-fingers worth of Ketel vodka in a tumbler he cradled between his thick, calloused fingers.

“‘He wasn’t there again today. Oh how I wish he’d go away,’” I answered, drawing his sleepy but surprised gaze from the basin of his drink. “Antogonish by William Hughes Mearns. That’s what you were quoting right?”

He studied me for a moment as if seeing me for the first time and trying to size me up. Most of the terminal drunks who typically dragged their sorry carcasses into the tavern this time of the night amused themselves by ogling my tits or hitting me with slurred promises of unimaginable sexual pleasure. Not this guy—John was his name. His first name anyway, or at least that’s what he’d told me. I didn’t know his last one, didn’t really care.

When he said nothing, I rolled my eyes and turned away, grabbing beer mugs off a drying rack by the sink beneath the bar and mopping beads of residual water away with a hand towel. “Forget it,” I muttered. Why try to carry on an intelligent conversation—much less a literary one—with someone who’d pretty much polished off a fifth of vodka all on his own, all in less than two hours?

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Mel,” I replied. “Short for Melanie. No one calls me that except my dad.”

He’d asked me this before and I’d answered him the same. I waited to see if there was any dawn of recognition in his face at the words, wasn’t the least bit surprised when there wasn’t.

“You drink, Meg?” he asked.

He’d called me Meg every time, too.

I held up the mug in one hand, the towel in the other, gave both demonstrative little shakes. “Not while I’m on duty.”

I didn’t tell him I never drank because my old man was a drunk, and even though he’d been clean and sober for seven years now, once upon a time, he’d liked to get into the Pabst Blue Ribbon and then slap me and my mother around for shits and grins. I had never tasted alcohol. I worked in the bar so I would never forget it—the hot stink of booze on his breath—and how much I hated him still for that.

John nodded once, fingered his glass again, and tossed back the entire dollop in a solitary swallow. “That’s good,” he told me, his gaze wandering distantly toward a nearby pale water ring stained into the top of the bar. “I wish I’d never started. Maybe then they’d leave me alone.”

I glanced around the pub. It was a Tuesday, almost midnight—almost closing time. Besides John on his bar stool perch before me, the place was pretty much empty. A couple of kids with greasy hair and too many crude tattoos to have earned them anyplace but prison loafed in a far corner, shooting pool and drinking beer. They had one girl between them, a bleach blonde in a too-tight denim miniskirt who didn’t seem to mind the two-to-one odds.

Figuring what the f*ck, I had nothing better to do, I took the bait and walked back over to John. He had that cast in his eyes, a tone in his voice that my chronic drunks sometimes affect when they want to get nostalgic or wax rhapsodical.

“Maybe who would leave you alone?” I asked. Probably his family—his old lady and kids. He was wearing a wedding ring. Old ladies, kids and chronic alcoholism seldom mixed company amicably.

He looked at me. “The periphery people.”

I blinked at him, wondering if I’d heard him right. “The who?”

Still he studied me, his gaze unwavering—surprisingly steady, in fact, given the amount of booze he’d been knocking back that night.

“Periphery people,” he said again, pronouncing the words slowly, carefully, as if each was a delicate crystal vase he was trying to swaddle in newspaper before packing away in a box in the attic. “Although they’re not really people. Not like you and me. I don’t know what the hell they are.” He blinked, his eyes growing cloudy again, and he looked away. “Never mind. You can’t see them.”

Again because I had nothing better to do—and because I was actually caught off-guard by both his poem quotation and his use of a functional vocabulary word not typical of the common lexicon—I leaned comfortably across the bar. “Why can’t I see them?”

“You have to be drunk,” he replied. “Or at least I do anymore. Didn’t use to. I could see them just fine on my own when I was a kid. I think kids are more receptive to seeing them. They believe in things, you know? Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.”

“Or periphery people,” I supplied and he nodded. “The periphery of what?”

John flapped his hand, indicating the room. “Here. There. Everywhere. Everything. They’re always around, standing in the shadows. All along the edges.”

“The periphery,” I said.

“Yeah.” He lifted his glass to his lips, then realized he had no more vodka.

“So they’re here right now?” As he set the glass down, I reached for the Ketel bottle and topped him off.

“Yeah.” Nodding to me in thanks, he took a small sip, smacked his lips appreciatively and drank again.

“You said they weren’t human. What do they look like?”

He shrugged. “They’re tall. Really tall. Like seven or eight feet high. They wear cloaks, hooded cloaks. The cowls cover their heads.”

Cloaks. Cowls. Periphery and poetry. I was beginning to wonder if this guy, John, wasn’t your typical chronic drunk at all, but something more…tragic.

I made a show of glancing around, brows raised. There were plenty of shadow-draped edges and corners in the dump where I worked. Not a one of them seemed to be harboring a seven-foot-tall giant hooded man with a cowl over his face.

“You can’t see them,” he told me.

“Because I’m sober.”

“Yeah. But they’re hideous.” He shuddered, though whether from this admittance or the drink, I wasn’t sure. “Their faces are flat. There’s nothing there—no eyes, no nose. Only a mouth. Round and gaping, taking up almost the whole front side. Ringed with teeth. God, lots and lots of teeth—rows of them going backward down their throats, just like a shark.”

The color drained somewhat from his face, leaving him with a sort of putty-colored pallor. “They like to eat, you see.”

Maybe it was the unspoken body language that seemed to suggest this poor son of a bitch was really buying the snow cone machine he was selling to the Eskimos. Whatever the reason, I found myself simply staring at him. And fighting the urge to shiver.

“Eat what?” I asked, my voice uncharacteristically small.

His expression shifted, growing grim, his eyes round and earnest. He whispered one word in reply to me: “Souls.”

I’d expected him to say “human flesh.” Maybe even “brains,” or perhaps spleen, appendix, right little toe. This, however, caught me by surprise.

“Souls?” I asked.

“They latch on to the back of your head with their teeth. Then they wrap themselves around you, make you carry them around like that while they glut themselves. Sometimes they take a little. Sometimes they take a lot. Depends on how hungry they are.”

The cracked vinyl seat cover beneath his ass creaked as he shifted his weight, pivoting to glance behind them. With a nod, he pointed out the ménage-a-trois-in-situ playing pool. “You see that girl over there?”

“Yeah.”

Turning in the seat again, he leaned across the bar toward me, close enough for me to smell the vodka in his breath. “One of them’s feeding on her right now.”

I took another look, but saw only the blonde laughing, slapping away one of the guy’s hands as he tried clumsily, vainly to grope the generous outward swell of her ass.

“She looks okay to me,” I said.

“Because you can’t see it. And she can’t feel it. Not yet anyway.”

“But she will?”

John nodded. “One day, yeah. She’ll find out she has cancer. Or AIDS. Or maybe she’ll step off the curb at the wrong time and get plowed into by a bus. Or have a psychotic break and shove a seven-inch-long butcher knife through her husband’s sternum while he’s sleeping one night. But not at first. That comes later. I’ve seen it. No, at first…she’ll just be sad.”

“Sad.” I repeated this, brow raised.

“You ever feel like everything in the world’s gone wrong? Like you can’t do anything right? Like the world is nothing but a big pile of dog shit, and you’re just a smear in the fecal matter taking up space? That kind of sadness, that sort of despair—that’s what they leave you with once they’ve eaten enough of your soul. From there, it only gets worse. Because that sorrow…that unhappiness, it must smell good to them, draw them somehow. They’re always with you after that, like a pack of wolves, fighting over you, for their chance to latch onto your skull and drain you dry.”

I’ve been tending bar for a long time—for seven years, starting about the time my mother had died and my dad had first sworn on her deathbed that he’d go clean, and then had shocked the glorious ever-living shit out of me by sticking to that. I’ve heard a lot of stories, yarns woven by a lot of guys far more wasted and crazy and pathetic than John. But for some reason, I couldn’t just bob my head and cock that condescending smirk that I usually reserve for someone shitfaced and rambling. The in-one-ear-and-out-the-other look, I call it.

“They’ve fed from you, you know,” he told me pointedly.

I felt a chill steal down my spine, slithering and unnerving, like a live eel dropped down the back of my T-shirt. Managing a hoarse bark of laughter, trying my damndest to sound dubious, I said, “What?”

He nodded.

“How can you tell?”

His eyes found mine—round, sorrowful, nearly sheepish. “You knew the poem. You haven’t always been a bar maid.”

Normally, that antiquated and decidedly misogynistic term—bar maid—might have made me bristle. But this time, instead, it only sent another of those unpleasant little tremors racing down from the nape of my neck toward my ass.

“No,” I said in slow admittance. “I was a teacher. English literature. High school.”

“World civilization,” he said by way of introducing himself in ex-career fellowship. “At the university. Had tenure and everything.”

We studied each other for a long, quiet moment.

“Something happened,” he said. “Something that changed you. Maybe a moment you can’t quite put your finger on or remember, but it’s there. And in that moment, whether you knew it or not, a part of your soul was gone.”

“My mother died,” I said. “My dad’s on disability. He can’t get around. I have to be home in the daytime with him. There’s no one else who can take care of him.”

“Feels like your life’s being sucked right out of you sometimes, doesn’t it?” John asked, and when I nodded, hesitant, the corners of his mouth hooked in a brief, bitter smile. “Because it is.” A glance beyond my shoulder, split second but pointed. “There’s one behind you right now.”

I whirled, eyes wide, but saw only rows of liquor bottles and phalanxes of cocktail glasses lined up dutifully along the shelves.

“It’s not feeding,” he continued. “Not yet anyway. But it wants to. And there’s only one way to stop it.”

“How?” I asked. As ridiculous as this whole thing sounded, I couldn’t help but believe him. There was such a tremendous, sorrowful sincerity in his face, his eyes. It was as if all of the booze had been wiped from his system and he was sober again—brutally, helplessly so.

He leaned toward me. “You have to see them.” His hand draped against mine, his skin dry and warm. “If you can see them, they’ll leave you alone.” Another fleeting, humorless smirk. “No sport in it for them then.”

As he drew back his hand, he shifted on his stool again, letting his feet fall heavily to the floor. I shook my head as if snapping out of a trance. For the first time, I realized we were alone in the bar. The trio of pool players—along with their invisible, soul-sucking new friend—had left.

“You ever see movement out of the corner of your eye?” John asked, fishing his wallet from his back pocket and dropping a pair of twenties onto the bar. His glass still had vodka in it, but he left it alone, turning with a shuffling gait for the door. “A flash of shadow, maybe, like something’s there, just beyond your field of sight—only when you turn your head, it’s gone?”

I nodded and he said, “That’s them. The periphery people.”

He started to walk away, but paused when I said, “What about you? You said something changed me—the moment where one of these things fed from me. What about your moment? What changed you?”

He looked over his shoulder at me and this time when he smiled, it was something melancholy and lonely. His lips pursed, then parted, as if he meant to speak, but then he must have thought better of it because he closed them again. Still shuffling, the palsied gait of a man far older than his years, John turned again and walked away, leaving the bar without another word.

I locked up behind him, the heavy sound of the deadbolt sliding home as I turned the key as sharp and loud as a gunshot. I tried to laugh it off, to tell myself he was just a crazy drunk, that he’d been spewing vodka-infused bullshit he wouldn’t even remember come the morning.

But then, as I started to turn away from the door to face the bar again, I thought I caught a glimpse of something reflected in the glass—a looming shadow directly behind me, standing just along the peripheral edge of my vision. With a startled gasp, my heart jackhammering in sudden, bright fear, I whirled around, pressing myself back into the door.

I was alone.

At least, to my sober eye.

There’s one behind you right now, he’d told me. It’s not feeding, not yet anyway. But it wants to.

I thought of how he’d described them—their ghoulish mouths ringed with teeth so they could latch on and hold tight. Again, I wanted to dismiss it—and him—as utter bullshit, and again, I couldn’t suppress an uneasy shiver just the same.

There’s only one way to stop it, John had told me. You have to see them.

I returned to the bar and stood beside the seat he’d only recently vacated. His last shot of Ketel remained where he’d left it, and I reached for it now, lifting the glass in hand, giving it an experimental sniff. I’d never tried vodka before; had felt neither the urge nor desire to drink myself into a stupor.

If you can see them, they’ll leave you alone. No sport in it for them then.

Bracing myself, I drew the glass to my lips, tossed my head back and swallowed. Having drained it dry, I leaned forward, poured another and downed it. Then a third. Then a fourth. And after the fifth, as my mind started to grow murky, and the shadows in every corner of the room seemed to grow elongated and sinister somehow before my eyes—becoming nearly human in shape, creeping closer to me, slowly but surely—I took a seat on the bar stool.

And waited to see.





Spider Bag



M.T. Murphy

©2011

All rights reserved.

Edited by Erin Stropes

“Are you ready to become food for the immortals, Lindsey?” he asked.

She stared at the vampire’s glistening fangs and nodded. Her friend hesitated for a moment, also regarding the protruding teeth that had suddenly appeared. Then she nodded as well.

The other vampire groaned. “Doug, did you just rip off that line from a movie?”

“I don’t know. Shut up. We’re doing a thing.” Doug knelt in front of where Lindsey sat on the couch and caressed her cheek. “Don’t mind my friend. He’s a young one.”

The other vampire fiddled with the buttons of his silk shirt and avoided looking at the woman who awaited him.

“Chad,” snapped Doug, “Susan is waiting.”

“My name is Britney,” said the woman sitting on the couch. If being called the wrong name bothered her, she hid it remarkably well with a beaming smile.

“Whatever,” Doug replied. “These women are placing their immortal souls in our hands. They have waited long enough. Let’s give them the dark gift.”

With a marked lack of enthusiasm, Chad knelt in front of Britney and placed his hand on her cheek. He was a mirror image of the other vampire, with one hand on the victim and the other hand by his side.

Both women were wearing black dresses and heavy white makeup. If they were to be transformed into vampires, they already looked the part.

“Did you wear what we instructed?” Doug asked.

Lindsey nodded breathlessly. “Yes. I’m wearing the black lacy kind.”

“And I’m wearing the same thing, only white,” Britney said.

“Good.” Doug brushed a few stray blonde hairs out of Lindsey’s face. “Close your eyes and we can begin.”

Both women did as he instructed.

The two vampires looked at each other and took identical straight razor blades out of their back pockets. They slowly positioned the blades over the women’s throats.

Doug nodded. It was time.

A thunderous knocking shattered the silence.

Lindsey and Britney jumped and looked toward the front door. Their hosts jumped as well, narrowly avoiding slicing them open prematurely.

“Holy heart attack,” cried Chad as he quickly hid the razor from view by holding it against his leg.

“I thought your brother and his wife were gone all weekend,” Doug said, palming his own razor.

“They are,” Chad replied.

The knocking sounded again, this time louder. The walls shook, and a large, ornate painting of a sad clown fell to the floor, cracking the glass of the frame.

“My brother’s going to kill me,” Chad groaned.

“Just see who’s at the door and get rid of them,” Doug said.

Chad opened the door as far as the security chain would allow and peered outside.

A man with dark, shaggy hair stood outside, sniffing the door frame and mumbling to himself. With his faded Rolling Stones shirt, leather jacket, and jeans he would have easily blended into a crowd, save for the ridiculous sideburns that dangled past the edge of his jaw line.

“Can I help you?” Chad asked as insincerely as he could manage.

“This is the place,” the man said with a hint of an Irish brogue. “It has to be. But the scent is all wrong. I don’t smell death. I only smell…” His eyes drifted away from the door frame and settled on Chad’s open mouth. “Ah, there we go. What big fangs you have.”

He shoved the door open, ripping the chain out of the wall and sending Chad tumbling to the floor.

Doug brandished his razor, but did not make a move towards the intruder. “Who the hell are you?”

“Name’s Mickey,” the man said. “But that’s not important.” He ignored the vampires and glared at the women on the couch. His already red irises took on an eerie glow. He smiled, revealing his own abnormally large canine teeth.

The two young women trembled in horror and looked helplessly at their vampire hosts. The vampires made no move to protect them.

Mickey took a step towards the couch. “Do I really need to tell you what to do next?”

Neither woman moved a muscle.

“Run,” he snarled. They scrambled to their feet and rushed toward the door.

“No,” Doug gasped. He tried to grab Lindsey’s wrist, but Mickey clamped a hand down on his throat and flung him to the couch.

The women ran out the door and did not look back. They clamored into their rusty old sedan parked on the curb and drove away, leaving the neighborhood full of young urban professionals none the wiser.

Chad found a reserve of courage and rushed at Mickey, thrusting the blade into his neck.

The shaggy stranger didn’t flinch as the metal sank into his skin.

Chad tried to push the blade in further, but Mickey grabbed his right hand, squeezed, and twisted, breaking Chad’s thumb, index, and ring fingers with a sickening crack. The young vampire barely managed to let out a yelp before Mickey tossed him onto the couch next to Doug.

He removed the blade from his neck and tossed it to the floor. “Even for vampires, you guys are really weak.”

“Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.” Chad held his injured hand and buried his face in the arm of the plush maroon couch.

“That’s right.” Doug tried to sound forceful and confident, but instead he sounded like what he was: a guy who was in over his head and knew it. “We are vampires. We may be young, but our master is old. If you lay another finger on us, you’re dead.”

Mickey slammed the front door and regarded the vampires with narrowed eyes. “Okay. If you’re vampires, what does that make me?” He smiled, again displaying the four disproportionately large, pointed canine teeth.

“A lonely vampire looking for friends?” Doug asked, with a hint of hope in his voice.

Mickey shook his head. “Not even close.”

His smile faded and he lunged for Doug, pinning him back against the couch and forcing his head to the side. He sniffed his neck. “All wrong,” he muttered, and reached over to drag Chad’s head down and smell him as well.

“What the hell is this?” he growled. Then he forced Doug’s mouth open. He grabbed the two sharp, pearly-white vampire teeth and pulled. They popped free with little resistance, revealing normal human teeth beneath.

He looked at Chad. “And you?”

Chad held his broken fingers tight against his body and voluntarily removed his own fake vampire teeth with the other hand.

Mickey stood and took a step back, looking the two men up and down. “You aren’t vampires. Eight-hundred-dollar silk shirts? Leather pants? Ten gallons of hair gel? You’re just…” He paused, searching for the right word. “You’re just stupid.”

“Please don’t kill us,” Doug blurted. He suddenly noticed he was still holding the razor.

Mickey noticed as well. “You going to use that?” He turned his head, giving both men a view of the damage caused by Chad’s razor. Only a barely noticeable scab remained.

Doug tossed the razor away without hesitation.

“I should kill you both right now for being idiots,” Mickey said, “but you have sparked my curiosity. Why are you playing dress-up, and why were you going to murder those two women?” He sat down on the coffee table in front of them and drummed his claw-tipped fingers on the wood.

“What?” Doug managed to sound shocked. “We weren’t going to kill them. We were just …” His words trailed off when Mickey’s expression grew even more sour. “Oh my god. You can tell I’m lying, can’t you.”

Mickey nodded.

Doug burst into a fit of hysterical crying. Between sobs, he blurted out a frantic explanation. “It was Hines. He promised to make us vampires, but first we had to dress up like this and bring him an offering.”

“The women?” Mickey asked.

“No…”

“Their blood?”

“No.”

“What, then? Their heads? Their skin? Their teeth?”

Doug’s gaze drifted to the floor. “No. Their underwear.”

The answer hung in the air like a two-ton flying pink elephant that no one wanted to acknowledge. Mickey’s eyes narrowed. Finally he stood with a sigh.

“Whatever. Lucy … I mean, Lucifera, the master vampire of Los Angeles, wanted me to give a message to the vampire or vampires responsible for the rash of bodies popping up lately. Are you two morons responsible for that?”

“No,” said Chad with a sigh of relief. Both men shook their heads.

“Lucy doesn’t care who or why you kill. I don’t either. The point is, even though you’re technically outside her lands, you’re being sloppy and making waves. And those waves are splashing over into L.A.”

“You don’t understand,” Doug said, his crying finally dying down. “Tonight was the first time we tried to do this. We’re not vampires. We want to be, but we aren’t. We haven’t killed anyone yet. It was Hines. He must be recruiting more than just us. He’s the one you want.”

“You expect me to believe that a master vampire told you to dress like clowns and kill two women not for their blood, but for their bloomers?”

“It’s true!” Doug stood, dragging Chad to his feet with him.

“I told Lucy I should just kill whoever was responsible, but she insisted I give them a chance to pack up and leave first.”

“Please, don’t kill me,” Doug pleaded. “There really is a vampire named Hines.”

“Tell you what. I have to kill one of you just on principle,” Mickey said. “The first one of you that can tell me exactly how to find this Hines character lives a bit longer. The other dies, now.”

The men’s eyes grew wide. They glanced at each other frantically.

Chad looked back at Mickey. “Wait,” he said.

Doug pushed his friend to the couch. “Go five blocks east and take a left. He’s in an old white house with lime green shutters at the end of the cul-de-sac. You can’t miss it.” By the time he finished speaking, he was out of breath. He panted and smiled, then looked down at his injured friend on the couch. “Sorry, dude.”

Chad stared at him, his eyes wide with horror.

“Thanks,” Mickey said.

He grabbed Doug’s head with both hands and wrenched it to the side. Bones broke and ligaments and tendons popped as he twisted the man’s head around so it faced backward, then let the lifeless body drop to the couch. It landed with the head cocked at an awkward angle, face pointed toward the other man.

Chad found himself looking directly into Doug’s dead eyes. He wanted to run away, but he didn’t know where to run. Instead, he voiced the only semi-coherent thought in his head. “You said the quickest with the directions got to live.”

“Huh?” Mickey stroked a sideburn as he pondered this. “I guess I did, didn’t I. Oh well. I didn’t like him.”

“And you like me?”

“Not really, but you actually tried to fight me. Idiot human vampire wannabe number one there just rolled over. I hate wimps.”

Mickey picked Doug’s corpse up with one hand and tossed it into the corner, knocking over an end table covered with tiny unicorn figurines. He sat down on the couch next to Chad and made himself comfortable. “Tell me about this so-called master vampire.”

“Are you a vampire?” the man asked.

“No. I’m something much, much worse.” Mickey nodded toward Doug’s corpse. “Would you like me to give your neck the owl treatment as well?”

Chad shook his head as quickly as his body would allow it. “What do you want to know?”

“For starters, what does Hines look like?”

“He’s unremarkable. Looks like he’s in his thirties. Tall, with small, beady eyes. They’re always darting around. Even when he’s looking at you, it’s like he’s looking over your head or through you. He’s always rubbing his hands together and grinding his teeth while he sits on his big leather sofa.” Suddenly, Chad slid to the far side of the couch and pointed at the floor near Mickey’s feet. “What the hell?”

A bulging brown spider the size of a large hand was creeping toward him.

Mickey grabbed the heavy oak coffee table. He swung it with a snarl, slamming it into the spider. He lifted it and slammed it again, then once more. The wood splintered and opened a large crack in the floor.

He lifted his makeshift swatter, revealing a messy pile of twitching legs and spider innards. Then he slammed the table on it one final time and left it there.

“Are you familiar with the term overkill?” Chad asked.

Mickey shuddered. “I hate spiders.”

“You hate spiders or you’re afraid of spiders?”

He grabbed Chad by the throat and dragged him to his feet. “Oi … you. Shut up and start walking.”

Chad took a last look at his friend’s body. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt bad leaving him in a heap on the floor.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Mickey said, “I plan to burn the place down and make it look like an accident later.”

“It really doesn’t.”

They left the house and headed east.

“If you have issues with spiders,” Chad said, “you won’t like Hines’ place.”

“Why is that?”

“I have never seen so many spiders in one place in my life. He told me it was a vampire thing. Most of them look like smaller versions of the one you just killed.”

Mickey mumbled something. It sounded profane, but Chad couldn’t understand the language.

As they walked, Chad scanned their surroundings for any chance of escape. The neighborhood was full of warm, inviting houses that looked lived in. It was late, so most of the lights were out. Still, if he screamed, maybe—

“If you’re thinking about screaming or running,” Mickey said, “understand that I’ll just rip out your throat and toss you in the bushes. I already know where to go.” He reached toward Chad’s throat with a clawed hand, but stopped just short. Then he snapped his fingers, drawing a startled yelp from the man. “Keep talking and I might not kill you when we get there. How do you even know this Hines character is a vampire? Is he unnecessarily broody and melancholy? Does he recite poetry for his pet spiders?”

Chad didn’t like the idea that his life depended on the whim of the killer before him, but it seemed unlikely he would get a better offer. “Hines has to be a vampire. He crushed a pool ball with his bare hands and climbed up the side of a building the night we met him. He told Doug to try and stab him and the knife blade bent on his chest without even breaking the skin.”

“Parlor tricks,” grumbled Mickey.

“You don’t understand. He also showed us his fangs.” Chad shook his head, wishing he could forget the image.

“I have fangs. What’s the big deal?”

“Not like Hines’ fangs. He opened his mouth and it stretched out like rubber. These two dripping fangs flipped down. They were the size of bananas.”

“That settles it. I don’t know what your buddy Hines is, but he’s not a vampire. Vampire fangs don’t resemble any fruit I’ve ever seen, nor are they retractable. Sometimes a bloodsucker will mess with your head so you don’t notice the fangs, but they’re always there.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence. It seemed to Chad that there were more spiders out than he had ever noticed before. It felt like they were watching them as they walked. It was paranoia. It had to be. Mickey was almost as frightening as Hines, but every time they passed a spider, big or small, Chad could see him cringe.

When they arrived at the house, it hardly seemed fit for the lair of a master vampire. It was nearly identical to the other forty-three red brick garden homes on the street. Mickey pushed Chad forward toward the door. “Open it,” he said.

“Why me?”

Mickey pointed at the top of the door. Five black widows with bodies the size of grapes patrolled a thick web over the threshold. “Because I don’t want to touch it.”

Chad watched the black things crawl slowly around their web. He didn’t know much about spiders, but he knew black widows were not the most poisonous variety. They paid him little mind, so he tried the doorknob. The door opened without a hitch, no key required.

Mickey shoved Chad through, then hustled through himself, slamming the door quickly.

They both surveyed the interior. Webs covered every wall and surface. A single lamp illuminated the room.

Chad felt a light tickling sensation in his hair. “Please tell me that’s you,” he said.

Mickey’s hand collided with the top of his head.

Chad was about to complain, but the muffled sound of something hitting the floor stopped him.

“You’re welcome,” Mickey said.

A brown spider, nearly as big as the one from earlier, flipped itself back upright and scurried away.

In the stillness that followed its departure, Chad became aware of a faint buzzing coming from deep within the house. At first it sounded as though someone had left a faucet on in a distant sink, but after a few moments it had grown in intensity until it sounded like stady rain on the roof.

“Is it raining?” Mickey asked.

“Seems it never rains in southern California,” Chad replied with a weak smile.

“I should kill you just for that.”

“Not a Hammond fan?”

Mickey growled and shoved Chad forward. “Keep walking.”

Chad took two steps, but stopped when the shadows began to crawl.

An army of brown spiders flowed into the room from cracks in the ceiling and holes in baseboards. The patter of their feet grew louder in the darkness as they lined the edge of the room. Most were about the size of a human hand, but a few of the things were as large as cats.

Mickey shuddered.

“Can I run away now?” asked Chad.

“In a minute. Where is Hines?”

“Through that open door on the other side of the room.”

“The one with all the webs and black widows?”

“That’s the one,” Chad replied.

“Figures.”

Mickey brushed past Chad and moved toward the open door. The spiders began to close in on both of them, their numbers covering every visible inch of the floor.

Mickey took off his leather jacket. “Turn around and face the exit. When they scatter, I suggest you run. No matter what happens, do not look at me. You look at me and you’ll wish I’d let the spiders get you.”

Chad did as he was instructed. “I believe you,” he said. The front door was only ten steps away—six if he ran.

A blast of heat hit him from behind. It felt like someone had poured gasoline on a barbecue, then dropped in a pack of lit matches. The spiders felt it too. They rushed for the shadows, clearing a path to the door. Despite Mickey’s warning, Chad looked back.

He immediately regretted it.

Where Mickey had been a moment earlier, there stood a great black thing. It was easily seven feet tall and covered in fur from its pointed ears to its clawed feet. Two glowing red eyes stared at Chad.

“Why must you humans always be reminded to run?” the thing snarled.

Chad turned back to the door and rushed forward like he was sprinting through the gates of hell. The spiders were staying away. Three more steps and he would break outside to freedom.

His foot bumped into something heavy and he tripped, slamming face first into the closed door. He tried to shake off the dizziness and pain in his head. Looking toward his foot, he saw what had tripped him. One of the cat-sized spiders was sitting on his foot. It began crawling up his leg. He kicked at the spider and tried to drag himself forward, but the other spiders returned out of the shadows and enveloped his hands.

Chad wanted to scream but he was afraid they would take the opportunity to crawl down his throat. He closed his eyes and tried to block out the horrible sensation of ten thousand tiny feet pouring over his body.

The monster that had introduced itself as Mickey watched the swarm take down the hapless human. He couldn’t count all the brown spiders that covered his body. At first the man struggled and tried to throw them off, but after a few seconds he grew still, from the sheer weight of their numbers or possibly a heart attack. The fancy silk shirt disappeared under the sea of spiders.

The monster shrugged. It didn’t really matter. Chad had been only human, after all.

He took a step toward the inner door. The spiders regrouped and blocked his path with a mass of shuffling bodies and scurrying legs.

He leaned down and growled. The sound was deep and grating, like a bear and a tiger arguing over a meal. The spiders recognized the presence of something far scarier than themselves and ran back to the shadows.

The beast ducked through the doorway and stepped into the room. With a very unmonsterlike gesture, he batted at his pointed ears to make sure he hadn’t picked up an unwanted hitchhiker or ten.

Hines was sitting on a brown leather couch in the center of the room. He was exactly as the two men had described him: tall and completely unremarkable.

“Are you the one who’s been bullying my little friends out there?” he asked.

Mickey glanced around the room. To his relief, there were no spiders to be seen. “Aye. You Hines?”

“I am Hines, the master vampire.”

“Liar, liar, panties on fire. You’re no more vampire than I am.”

“Fair enough,” Hines said. “I have killed many vampires, but I’ve never seen one that could transform into a beast such as yourself. What are you?”

“Werewolf,” Mickey replied. “Not many of us left, but we believe in quality not quantity when it comes to, you know, killing and general badness.”

“Interesting. You remind me of a type of demon I saw in my youth. We were warned to stay away from them. But you have so much human in you that I doubt the warning would apply to a half-demon such as yourself.”

Mickey shrugged. “Whatever. I have a message for you.”

“Do tell,” Hines said.

“Lucifera, master of Los Angeles, wanted me to cordially invite you to get the hell out of town.”

Hines rose slowly to his feet, still milking the master vampire angle. “Oh really? And why is that?”

“Because your underwear collectors are leaving bodies all over the damn place and causing us headaches.”

The man’s expression grew dark. “Filthy humans. They just can’t wait to share everyone’s business with the world.”

Mickey yawned, displaying his sharp, jagged canine teeth. “Sorry. Long day. I’m assuming we’re about to fight, which means you’re about to die. So, I have to ask, what’s up with the underwear thing?”

Instead of answering, Hines held his arms out wide. His face stretched as two banana-sized pink fangs unfolded from his mouth. His body grew longer. For a second, he looked the werewolf in the eye. Then his two eyes split into eight, scattering across his face. His own red silk shirt tore as four appendages shot out from his body. The new limbs turned light brown and quickly surpassed his arms and legs in length. His other limbs grew in proportion and he fell forward, landing on eight legs.

Mickey took a step back. Hines was now identical to the massive brown spider he had killed earlier and the crawling masses in the front room. The only difference was that Hines was the size of a compact car.

“Are you afraid?” the spider asked. Venom dripped from its massive fangs with each word.

“No,” the werewolf replied. It was a lie and they both knew it.

Hines nimbly leapt around the room, snapping his jaws. He lunged at the werewolf.

Mickey rushed out of the way of the playful strikes, doing his best to avoid the monster entirely. He was fairly certain he had little to fear from the spider, but he couldn’t get over the feeling that such a beast was just plain…icky.

The spider struck again and Mickey moved too slowly to get out of the way. The thing’s fangs dug into his thigh. He roared in pain.

“How is your fear now, little werewolf?” Hines asked. “I suspect you are ready to run away and hide before I bite you again.”

The pain in Mickey’s leg was excruciating. He wondered how his leg could both go numb and be in such agony at the same time.

“You know,” Mickey said, “that actually wasn’t as bad as I imagined it.” Another lie.

The spider laughed. “On second thought, you are rather large. I may have to bite you a few times to make sure you don’t wiggle. Then I will fill you full of venom and make a nice soup of your insides.”

Mickey was quite fond of soup—but being made into soup, not so much.

Hines leapt to the wall, then propelled his massive body toward Mickey’s head.

The werewolf tried to dodge, but his right leg was dead. He fell backward. Hines’s fangs just missed his snout as his jaws snapped shut.

Mickey landed with a thud and the arachnid scrambled on top of him, using its weight to hold him down before again striking at his face.

Mickey grabbed the fangs, stopping them just short of his eyes. Venom dripped, burning the skin of his cheek where it landed.

Hines bucked and shuffled with his legs, but could not break free from the werewolf’s grasp.

Mickey tugged on the fangs and Hines moved to the left. He pulled them to the right and the spider followed that way as well.

“Stop that,” it said.

The werewolf saw something new in two of the eight beady eyes in front of him: fear.

He pulled outward on the fangs with all his might, like he was trying to break a giant wishbone. The fang in his left hand ripped free from the spider’s head.

Hines screamed.

“Wait, stop! Time out!” he cried.

“Time out?” Mickey’s own fear of the arachnid was diminishing by the second. He kept his grip on the remaining fang and tossed the other away. He grasped the edge of the spider’s head with his other hand. “Tell you what: I’m still curious about the underwear thing. Humor me.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you. Let go.”

“No way, snaggletooth.”

The spider sighed. “Very well. I come from another dimension where spiders rule. Humans do not even exist. I was a prince of that realm. Years ago, I stumbled through a door at the time you call All Hallows Eve and found myself here. I learned to take on the appearance of a human to more easily live among them.”

Mickey waited for the end of the story, but the spider said nothing else.

“Does that explain about the underwear thing?” Mickey asked. He shook the spider’s head violently from side to side and spoke for the beast: “No, Mickey, that doesn’t explain anything at all. I think you should rip off my other fang so people call me Hinesy no-teeth.”

“No! Don’t!” the thing shrieked. “As I said, I am a prince in the spider world. I found that I preferred to wear the ceremonial undergarments of a female spider under my armor. If my mother the queen had found out about this practice, she would have eaten my head on the spot.”

Mickey pondered the thought of an even bigger spider biting this one’s head off and immediately wished he hadn’t. “Go on,” he said.

“After I arrived here, I learned that human males and females wore differing undergarments. I found that I preferred the female human undergarments, but I was saddened to discover that this practice, while not a death sentence, was not widely accepted here either. I also discovered that humans had a fascination with vampires, though as a whole they do not believe in their existence. I decided to make them work for me and obtain the undergarments I desired before I fed on them. That way, I did not have to endure the ridicule they invariably pushed upon me whenever I would enter one of their undergarment retail establishments.”

The werewolf now saw something else in those eight beady eyes: pain.

He considered ripping off the remaining fang, just to be safe, but a tiny shred of sympathy wormed its way into his head. Mickey hated the wormy sympathy feeling. It never led to anything good.

“When I was a kid…a human kid,” Mickey said, “I had a little rag doll that looked like me. My mother knitted it for me when I was a baby. I carried that thing everywhere. I was still carrying it around when I turned seven years old. The other kids made fun of me until I cried, so I put it away.”

“What are you getting at?” Hines asked.

“I can kind of relate,” Mickey said.

The spider erupted into laughter. “Wait. I don’t see the correlation. You carried around a mottled old toy when you were far past the age to know better? Was there something wrong with you? I may wear women’s under things, but a seven-year-old acting like a baby is rather pathetic.”

“I just realized something,” Mickey said.

“What is that?” Hines asked. “Do you miss your dollie?” He broke into raucous laughter again.

“I realized why I hate spiders.”

“Do tell.”

Mickey jabbed his massive talons into the soft flesh between the spider’s head and its body.

“No! Stop that!” Hines cried.

Mickey dug his foot into the opening and pulled on the thing’s head with both hands. With a wet ripping sound, the head, along with two of the legs, tore free from the body. The other six legs danced for a moment, then curled up against the bulbous body.

Mickey tossed the lifeless head to the floor and pushed the body to the side.

“Spiders are arseholes.”

He stood and placed his weight on his bitten leg. It hurt, but he could move it again. He limped out of the room and headed for the door. Webs still covered the room, but all of the spiders were gone.

He picked up his leather jacket from the floor, quite relieved to find it also arachnid-free.

The front door was open. He distinctly remembered it being closed before he entered the other room. The spot where the human’s body should have been was also oddly vacant. Could the man have gotten out? Had the spiders eaten every bit of him, including the silly silk shirt? Mickey didn’t really care, but the possibility seemed highly unlikely.

He ducked through the front door, cringing as the tips of his ears brushed through the now unoccupied black widow spider webs.

“You’re a werewolf, aren’t you?”

The man’s voice took Mickey by surprise. Chad was sitting in the grass in front of the house, looking disheveled and sporting a dark bruise on his forehead, but otherwise no worse for wear.

“I mean, you look the way I figure a werewolf would look if they were real, which, apparently, they are. I mean you are.” Chad let out a laugh tinged with madness.

Mickey dropped the jacket and stretched the fingers of his right hand, displaying his massive claws. “Idiot human vampire wannabe number two? I thought the spiders got you.”

“Me too. It’s Chad, actually. They buried me with their bodies and scratched my neck. I don’t know what they did, but not one of them bit me.” He looked up into Mickey’s eyes. “I guess you have to kill me now, huh? It’s okay. I’m not really keen on living after that. Every time I blink I see them, hear them, feel them all over me.”

The werewolf was less afraid of spiders than he had been when the night began, but he didn’t care to imagine the horrors this man had been through. “I’ll make it quick.”

Chad stared blankly into space. “Great. Thanks.”

He reached for the man’s throat. A quick rip and he’d be dead in seconds.

A sound stopped him. It was almost imperceptible, but it was there.

It sounded like millions of tiny beings trying to gnaw their way out of something.

Chad coughed. A tiny, bloody silk spider egg landed on the ground. The man didn’t notice it, but the werewolf did. It was likely one of thousands.

Mickey stepped back and retrieved the jacket. “I have decided not to kill you,” he said. “Best of luck.”

“Yeah,” Chad said. “Lucky me. I wonder why my head and insides hurt like they’re on fire.” He blinked, then fixed his eyes on a spot in the grass as a bright red trail of blood started to trickle from his nose. “Maybe I should go to a hospital. First, though, I’m going to sit here for a very long time.”

“You do that,” Mickey replied.

Sticking to the shadows, he walked away from Chad the unwitting spider bag and retrieved a torn notebook page from his jacket pocket. He scratched through the name “Hines” with a claw and moved on to the second name on the paper: Donovan.

He considered taking care of the next item on his list immediately but decided to put it off until the following day. The way the night had gone, Donovan would probably turn out to be a giant squid.

Mickey hated squid.