Nosferatunes
Copyright May, 2005 by John H. Baillie
The Conclusion
That strange heaviness is back …
Increasingly detached, the Mulroney Throttler tries to focus on Phoebe Hush, but finds he can’t, really …
He’s sitting motionless at his table now, not even drinking. Everyone else is leaving him alone. His eyes make a large, round, supposedly focussed attempt to glare at the woman who dumped him already tonight in record time, but his heart really isn’t in it anymore. Phoebe regards him disdainfully out of the corner of one eye, letting him know full well she is ignoring him, and goes on with her singing.
The Throttler sort of senses what is going on around him now, not really seeing the dynamics unfolding literally but knowing them all the same. Over in the corner, Only and the Godiva woman are getting very excited – Benny and Luna are still in conflict, he still resists and she still insists – Adam and Lydia still circle each other, trying to find a way in – Lou Moon and the Audrey slut just got back from somewhere, and look very disturbed – Goth Moth’s doing some crazy dance in front of the broad the waiter shot – Hanley’s still pumping the Info Junkies – completely irrelevant …
None of this matters. What does matter? What should matter …
An image comes unbidden to the Throttler’s mind. A perfect hand – a perfect female hand. A hand, lovely, white, and soft – so caressing. With painted nails – and he cannot comprehend the adjective that describes the colour of those fingernails, the image plants itself in his mind, and the word he signifies the image with spells itself out in his brain, but then his perception of the letters and the colour itself blurs, until he loses it, but he knows he had it, he knows he did.
Then the hand unzips him and grasps his erection, and starts to –
He jolts visibly in his chair, almost upsetting the table. Looks around desperately. No one is watching him except Phoebe Hush, who is still p-o’ed but now confused by his sudden distress. He checks – his pants are fine, it was just a dream, but isn’t this all just a dream, that hand wasn’t really happening to him, no one saw –
That’s good.
But a medium grade burn has now entered his breathing, growing hotter and more uncomfortable by the moment. That strange heaviness in his chest is back. He’s not getting the release he obviously needs …
His eyes resume focus, twitching from corner to corner about the room.
The only thing missing now is the voice.
I remain uncursed
Agent Only continues to describe his battle with the Pearl Wolf’s sex dogs to Joni Godiva.
“So it was me and my two pieces loaded with silver against forty-three monsters of spitting fangs and fur, all of us horny as Hades for Persephone on a spring night. My advantage is that it didn’t matter where I hit ‘em, they just went up in a psychotropic explosion of hair, howl, and a strange dusty silver fluid something like mercury, except that it evaporated completely in just a few seconds, like liquid moonlight. Their advantage was the fact there were so damn many of them. I had to keep moving every second, or I was a dead man.”
“But if they wounded you – you’d turn into one of them, wouldn’t you?”
“I took a few cuts and scratches – a lotta bruises – but no bites. None of the buggers got close enough to bite me before I plugged ‘em. Not that it wasn’t damn close on more’n a few occasions. But I’m still here, ain’t I? and no hairier’n normal. No bites. So I remain uncursed.”
Joni laughs.
“You know what I mean.” Back to the story.
“I don’t know how long the battle went on. I lost all track of time. All I remember now is the vicious snarling, the open maws and the fangs, the crazed, bloodshot glaring eyes, the claws reaching out to rip at me, the bristling, angry fur standing on end, and the sound of my guns, endlessly blazing … It was quite a scene.
“Lucky the Pearl Wolf ran out of sex dogs before I ran out of ammo. What are you wearing anyway?”
Joni’s attire, the first item she came across in the alley in her mad streak back to the bar, a bright yellow raincoat, finally registers on Agent Only’s blistered sensibilities. The fact she is breathing harder and clutching the table so hard the knuckles on her hands are turning white is not lost on him either.
He pulls the collar of her coat towards him and stares down her front. “And why is it the only thing you’re wearing?”
“A ghost got me,” she breathes huskily. “I don’t know for how long. Totally possessed. There’s weird shit going down in this club tonight.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And in my experience, you’re the weirdest shit I know.”
He could see where that logically led.
“You wanna – ?”
“You bet.”
Besides, she thinks to herself, as they scramble out of their chairs. If you don’t think the Pearl Wolf isn’t coming after you for what you’ve done before this night is over, you don’t know you’ve got nothing left to live for.
But Agent Only only looks that dumb. He keeps one eye over his shoulder at all times, as they head for the alley.
He still has one silver bullet left …
Assuming that last phrase was part of the general enquiry
Benny Dredful knows full well he isn’t in a dive like Nosferatunes tonight only to try to score with a mystery femme like Luna Damsel, and what’s more he knows Rollo Shindy knows that too – Benny is perfectly aware there are certain expectations he is supposed to meet. He’s been neglecting his real job something dreadful – and it’s past time he made at least a token effort to reestablish his responsibilities. But he has also established that there is someone else in this bar that probably knows a good deal more than he does.
Benny finally loses Luna for a moment and scans the room. Where’d he go? Establishing shot. Hmmm. What’s got him so agitated all of a sudden, Benny wonders. He sidles up to Lou Moon, now standing back on his own again. “So what’s the story on this Alien Info, anyway, you should know, you’re a dick, aren’t you?”
“I’ll assume that last phrase was part of the general enquiry. Yeah, I’m Lou Moon, the Lou Moon for Sector Thirty-Two Planet Terra, one of the Lou Moon Intergalactic Fraternity of Hotel Detectives, Inc., surprise, eh? Earth among its many other uses is actually also part of a famous trans-galaxy hotel chain, although we’re not so much a hotel as a lodge really, patrons like to come here for the fishing.
“We’re all called Lou Moon, everyone who works for the Fraternity, even the women, creates a strong feeling of family oneness. So as you’ve probably guessed by now my name isn’t really Lou Moon, just like yours isn’t really Benny Dredful – settle down, I’m a dick, I know these things.
“I was sold to the Fraternity at a very early age by my parents, and went into space for training in the Alpha Beta Zeculi Quadrant. Could have gone anywhere in the universe after I graduated, but I always wanted to come back home and work on Earth.
“Why? I get laid a lot.
“At the moment I’m here to shut down an unauthorized broadcast from a source other than the truly extraterrestrial – yeah, that’s right, that is a genuine Alien Implant in Hanley’s skull and that is a genuine Alien transmission all right, but those aren’t extraterrestrials sending those signals. Those are – “
His cell phone goes off. “Shit!”
He’s fast – Lou draws and actually gets off a shot of his own before Mordecai drops his tray and starts blasting at him.
“Everybody down!”
The patrons dive for cover as Moon and the waiter erupt in an all-out fire fight, guns blazing, bullets flying and ricocheting every which way.
Lou tips a table over and uses it for cover while he digs the cell phone out of his jacket pocket with his left hand, firing continuously with his right. He tosses the cell phone still ringing onto the stage – he’d always meant to change that damn embarrassing Cher ringtone anyway. Mordecai ignores Moon for the moment and goes for the phone, his primary target, blasting it to smithereens with one perfectly placed shot. This is all the diversion Lou needs – he pounces behind Mordecai, chops him across the back of the neck and drops him, unconscious. That’s it, the fight’s over.
“Knuckle Biter!” Moon growls, furious. “Must’ve turned my phone back on when we were groping each other. I’ll kill that Brain Draining bitch!” – but in fact, he’s the only one with a gun who ends up not shooting Knuckle Biter shortly. He dashes off.
Too bad, Benny thinks. I almost got the real goods there.
Who’s rocking the boat?
Luna taps Benny on the shoulder. She is very upset that he tried to lose her. Benny wants to snap at her to leave him alone, but can’t when he sees the sadness in her eyes. It’s not just that he’s gone off to talk to someone without her. It’s that they’re just not connecting.
Luna and Benny drift back to Adam and Lydia, none of them realizing how the four of them are silently drawing together in their unbearable disappointment with each other.
Benny looks at Adam – Lydia looks at Luna – everyone sees and recognizes themselves, which does not improve their mood. Someone has to lighten the scene.
“You know how a dream has its own logical time flow? If a scene should happen next, then it just does, whether it’s a logical consequence of the scene before it or not. Yet somehow, in the end a coherent story is always told, even though it practically never has a sense of closure? Well, who’s deciding what scene comes next? The mind or the body? What consciousness is forcing the issue, because there’s always two of you in the dream, isn’t there? There’s the you that’s experiencing the dream, the sensuous you as it were, that participates in the action and the activity of the dream. You know, the you right there in the picture actually feeling the sensations of the dream, like getting horny or flying. And then there’s the other you, the one one step removed, the Observer, that knows this is a dream and is just watching what happens in it even though in that first sense you are in it. And sometimes those two consciousnesses blend, so the Observer feels like he or she’s the one that’s actually flying, or the sensuous you stops and thinks ‘This is just a dream – not really happening.’ So who’s really making the decisions about what scene should happen next?
“Because there’s always certainty in a dream. Whatever does happen next, no matter how illogical by normal standards, it’s always right for that dream. Even if it’s totally surprising, as if a third mind’s intruding in there somewhere introducing some completely random factors into the mix. So who is really directing things? The Observer who can only watch, the sensuous you who can actually take action, or some random third influence?”
“It could be all three – “
“You’re right – “
“It has to be at least the first two – “
“Right – “
“So let’s all put our heads together, here in this club under that – that vampire’s glare, that particular outside influence, and see what happens.”
“That might just be the right answer.”
Dance of the seventh tee towel
Filled with a new resolve they are determined to overwhelm the despair they feel with each other, so the two couples try to find new approaches. Benny and Luna leave the table, pursuing their own course. Adam and Lydia remain, staring at each other, willing the other to come up with the key to what should be their logical conclusion, the one thought that will remove all the remaining insurmountable and undeniable barriers …
Adam grins.
“How can you think there’s nothing left between us when I’ll never forget the night you did the tee towel dance?” he says, and even she smiles as they are irresistibly drawn back into such a powerful scene –
Years ago, the two of them were doing dishes to Anita Baker on the tape deck, him washing, her drying, with a very small and thin white tee towel. And she took it by the two top corners and started sashaying its wispiness across her front with elegant twists of her wrists in time to the music. She looked up and saw his eyes following the towel’s movements as it waved back and forth in front of her crotch. And she needed that look in his eyes, so she knew what to do.
Without a word she darted away to her bedroom, leaving him confused with the dishes. She came back wearing only her skimpiest pair of pure white panties and she danced for him, with the tee towel, always giving him a full view of her jiggling breasts, but yanking the towel this way then that just below her waist, hinting at the delights behind. Then she held the towel carefully in place with one hand and with the other she somehow managed to get her panties down and kicked away. Then she really gave him a show.
And they spent the rest of that evening in bed, daring each other to do the other in wilder and wilder ways, and that brings them crashing back to the present.
“Why couldn’t we have a night like that again?” he pleads with her earnestly. “There’s no reason not to.”
Her mood plummets. “Yes there is a reason.” She is deadly certain.
“What? Why?”
“Why? Because I’d need a damned beach towel tonight, not a tee towel, that’s why.”
He isn’t quick enough to say that doesn’t matter, that would never matter, I just want you. But even if he had been, that wouldn’t matter. She wants, she needs, she still needs that old look in his eyes again.
The shadow of your beauty
Benny Dredful and Luna Damsel retreat to different sides of the room, and go back to observing each other, and only each other, but now with a difference. In the rising gloom they think at each other, observing the other’s reaction to those thoughts very carefully.
Sensing the tension, Miles and the boys build a quiet refrain into an almost unbearable aching crescendo, ending with a particularly tragic violin solo …
Benny: The planets cease their rotation in a deeper blood lust smile. The scintilla of
the night cannot be measured –
Luna: Why end the story here? One look – one touch. The heart stops.
Benny: The vision changes, the prey who carries no candle dies in moments such as
these, while your black eyes devour me. Drawing a last nightmare in your
arms, residing only in your dark eyes, fire frosts over when gazed upon.
Luna: There are places on your body that welcome my role as hunter – speak to
me of so much more than body on body, catch me, hook me, hold me in
thrall, any and all resistance to a quiet longing shatters in a sun whose
flame is suddenly ice.
Benny: The shadow of your beauty is the tender caress honing the dagger’s edge,
for the release that you offer cuts deepest with a single glance.
Luna: Becoming the beauty of the shadow, exposing one breast, I plunge for your
heart; on flame with the red glow of yearning --
Benny: -- you revive a fuller delight, red satin swirling outwards to engulf us both.
You are not the goddess of Death --
Luna: -- but of all love and beauty.
They look away from each other, both too aroused for words.
“Gettin’ the Hell Outta Here”
Musical interlude.
Agent Only and Joni Godiva return to the barroom just in time to see Phoebe Hush jump down off the stage and to hear the ghost of Miles Davis and the boys start to jam on a Gully Bechet instrumental original, “Gettin’ the Hell Outta Here”, and even though there’s next to no room between the tables, the lights dim and everyone gets up to dance, encountering secret partners in the sinuous shadows and never knowing for certain who they’re with or not, or just quite what they are doing with that person; there’s something about improvisational jazz that just leads to this sort of thing.
Gully and the boys lay down the melody line until Miles gets the hang of it, and then he breaks into one of his trademark muted trumpet solos, playing the sun slowly up into the sky over a black and rusted metal bridge, soothing the tattered edges of every urban soul light can still be cast upon, and discovering the beauty that can still be located even in the deepest horror.
Then Davis Jade takes over on guitar, putting that gypsy twist on the passion that irresistibly infects the lower extremities right down to the feet, so there must be movement, there must be movement. It settles wriggling in the men’s hips and shaking the women’s shoulders – more than one pouty kiss gets hurled across the lessening divide between the dancing bodies.
And then the Sneed steps forward in his own tragically dramatic ethereal flow, and the violin moves the dancers from the waist up as hearts beat faster and flying, breasts tauten, mouths open and breathing gets more intense and meaningful as each little hit of oxygen bursts in the blood cells. Everyone is ready to explode when the vision halts, there is a momentary, expectant pause, and in slides Gully with his bass …
And ultimately this is his song, his creation, and he’s not really sharing but he is playing and that deep, deep line he lays down drives right down the back through the whole body, tying up every other sensation until absolutely every dancer could not possibly be more aware of themselves as a perfect and complete individual capable of so much more than they ever dreamed they really were …
And then – the whole band ties ‘er up, back to the melody. Even though the guys have strayed continents away from where they started, Miles steps back up and lays down that single perfect note that picks up the song exactly where they left it.
The lights come up and everyone settles back into what they were doing or feeling before, but all are thinking: that was cool, let’s do that again sometime.
Cornered at a round table in the middle of the room
Knuckle Biter the Brain Drainer deftly dodges Lou Moon who is now entirely too hostile towards her for her to make anything more from him, and corners Hanley the Info Pusher paradoxically at the table in the very centre of the club, from where he is broadcasting his Alien Info to all the heavy Users who have come to love him so much tonight. She grabs his shirtfront and starts talking.
“You don’t understand how impossible it is to love when you have so many conflicting personalities inside you. That’s why I go with Audrey, always, these days. She totally loves. She only gives. And I only take. It’s like a drug, you know. You know. Have to have. Convinced that last hit of emptiness with just a hint of something special in it proves the next hit will have it all, all the triumph. Then I get my good hit for good. I stay in epiphany forever. Worked for Church, worked for State, worked for Business, sucking what each wanted out of people, leaving only what’s easiest to manipulate behind. Took so much good out of people. But it doesn’t mix, you know, doesn’t combine into something better. Should. It should, but it doesn’t.”
Hanley stares at her, very anxious about the fact she’s making these revelations to him. He never likes receiving Info of any kind himself. “W-who are you working for tonight?” he stutters.
“The Aliens. The others, really – they’re not really Aliens. And for myself. The others want weird shit taken out of you, just leaving nightmares behind. I got a whiff of real Alien essence when I tried to suck Moon. I want more. I think that’s the answer. I think that’s my big hit, my final ecstasy. Can’t live other people’s experiences. Maybe I can die someone else’s death. Not supposed to, but I want your Implant. I’m supposed to take you down, drive you mad, but I promise I won’t do that. I want your Implant instead. Then I can die from happiness. Do you believe me?”
“But the Implant’s where my Info line comes through …”
“Time you got out of the Info game, Hanley. Junk will kill you. If the nine other killers besides me in this club tonight don’t do you first. Trust me. My way’s best for everyone.”
Hanley stares into her demanding eyes, but sees so many other gazes reflected back at him he can’t begin to know what to think. And then he doesn’t have to.
Touchy Forceful jumps onto a different table, starts yelling for everybody’s attention, and all hell breaks loose.
Moment of crisis
Suddenly, out of the blue, Touchy Forceful jumps onto his table and demands everyone’s attention.
“People! People! You have to listen to me, People! I’ve figured it out. I’ve deciphered the message. I know when and where the Aliens are going to Invade the Earth!”
This is met by a shocked hush.
“I’m shocked,” Phoebe says. “I thought all that Alien Info stuff was bullshit.”
“No!” Touchy asserts. “I’ve worked it out very, very carefully, slowly deciphering the code of their language.” He consults a crumpled piece of paper with many scribblings-out upon it. “I know I have this figured out now. The Aliens are going to Invade in less than fifteen minutes from now, and they are going to make their landing in …” Reads very carefully and deliberately from his piece of paper. “The Freep Ark Zone. Yes, you heard me right. The Freep Ark Zone. Now – now don’t panic, People, don’t panic. I know this is really terrible news, but I got it first, and at the same time I think it might mean salvation for a small group of capable individuals such as ourselves.
“Now – obviously the term Freep Ark means the Aliens do not have hostile intentions towards the Freeps, whoever they might be. They have an Ark ready for the Freeps, in the Ark Zone, the Freep Ark Zone. So this is what I propose we do. We’re all Info Junkies here, dammit, if anybody can do this, we can! In the very little time we have left to us, we must expertly search the way only we Junkies can the vast amount of Info we have available to us, to discover just what exactly Freeps are, and what they look like. This is very important. Once we have discovered this, we must disguise ourselves as Freeps and make our way to the Freep Ark Zone –”
Lou Moon grabs the crumpled piece of paper out of Touchy’s hands. “Lemme see that.”
“ – If we can manage to do this, instead of suffering certain destruction in the Alien Invasion, the Aliens will offer us salvation and escape from the war-torn planet of our birth by mistaking us for Freeps and carrying us to safety in the Freep Ark –”
“It’s not the Freep Ark Zone, you incredible idiot,” Lou points out. “It’s the Free Park Zone.”
Touchy is stunned. He cannot speak.
“Where’s the Free Park Zone?” Audrey asks.
“Last three stalls on the left, right against the building,” Mordecai answers, passing by rubbing his neck.
“Wha-aaa-a!?!”
The death of Hanley the Info Pusher
And this is how we killed Hanley the Info Pusher apparently and not for real but I saw what I saw, as observed by Benny Dredful – not my real name.
We were at that point where Touchy Forceful had made a total botch of things but had assured us that the Aliens were going to Invade any moment, and according to Mordecai, they’d be landing in the parking lot out back of the bar. So Touchy yelled for everyone to plug their A-Pods receiving the Alien bandwidth into the Ptolemy Ptrio’s sound system so we could follow what the Invaders were doing – as if any of us actually understood what they were supposedly broadcasting. So all the Info Junkies rushed to hook their A-Pods into the band’s sound board, and suddenly the transmission coming through Hanley’s Implant blasted out too loud, too clear, throughout the room, a screaming quick-paced Alien angry gibberish making us all cringe. Hanley most of all, in the centre of the room, covering up fast because he always hates using his own Junk.
It was the perfect moment of complete distraction – we all decided to make our moves at once – it was time to put an end to things. I drew my knife, Luna Damsel primed her poison syringe, and Lou Moon, Agent Only and Joni Godiva each drew their gun. But the Alien noise brought tears of pain even to our assassins’ eyes. We couldn’t see to attack, flailing blindly …
Knuckle Biter the Brain Drainer jumped Hanley in that moment – just as a second voice being broadcast from God knows where began to override the Alien transmission. Knuckle Biter clamped onto the back of Hanley’s neck like a remora and began to suck just as the new voice became clear as Brian Mulroney’s, mellifluously proclaiming some crap about what a beautiful land Canada is and arrogantly ignoring any real issues as usual, no wonder he was the most hated man in the country since Hitler –
Then it all happened so quickly – I caught only glimpses.
I froze – and I think because I did, so did Luna Damsel. Knuckle Biter sucked out Hanley’s Implant and pirouetted away from him, too close to the Mulroney Throttler, already pissed because Phoebe Hush had dumped him and now going into his death trance … And since Knuckle Biter had just swallowed Hanley’s Implant and she was a Brain Drainer, her features started to take on Hanley’s appearance – all this happening just as the rest of us sort of got our senses together. Just in time to see the Mulroney Throttler grab Knuckle Biter by the throat as she was the closest person to him, and do what he does best. But just to cover for the poor bugger and keep him out of prison, and also because they thought they were shooting Hanley the Info Pusher, not Knuckle Biter, Joni Godiva and Agent Only both plugged the Brain Drainer more than a few times. Only Lou Moon held his fire, some deeper instinct twigging him onto things not being quite as they appeared to be. As Godiva and Only shot Knuckle Biter, her murder will be “official”, and therefore not investigated. Agent Only used his last silver bullet in the process and didn’t realize it, which would rapidly prove to be a fatal oversight.
Now everyone thought Hanley was dead except for Lou Moon and me, as we both caught a glimpse of the ghosts of Miles Davis and Galloping Gertie hustling the real, unconscious Hanley out of the club. And if he’s got any brains left at all after what Knuckle Biter did to him, Hanley’ll get right out of the Info Pushing business.
Since the carrier of the Implant was now dead, the broadcast stopped, and there a corpse lay in the sudden silence, in a pool of blood, throttled, shot, and with Alien Technology in its throat completing the illusion that it was Hanley lying there … and that should just about satisfy everyone, even Knuckle Biter herself.
I know what I saw.
Never to be seen again
After Hanley the Info Pusher was apparently murdered in cold blood from a number of different directions at once, the chaos and excitement really began. As the screaming panic started, the lights came crashing down plunging the room into almost total darkness. Adam, Lydia, Benny and Luna found each other and tried to run for it, hand in hand. Rearing back from a sudden vision of an eyes-bulging, madly chittering menacing Goth Moth, they found themselves in the short, dark hallway containing the doorway to the interspatial, interdimensional, interchronal room.
An internal silence allowed them to halt before the doorway, sensing the significance of what lies within.
By having resolved to take control of their dream, they realize now that together the four of them might be able to break down the barriers separating at least two of them. There is no discussion. Adam and Lydia are the obvious choice. The quartet works together to cross the realities storming in the apparently empty room, and with a last grateful look back to Benny and Luna, Adam and Lydia, still clasping hands tightly, step within.
This is their last, their only chance.
Two visions of reality suddenly mix, cutting through timelines of an unknown geometry, nothing even vaguely resembling parallel and then I was alone, Adam had time to think, on the beach at midnight. And across the small boat harbour, I can see one light shining in a cottage window on the black promontory, through shadowy trees. And being young and able in this stage of the dream, I shed my shirt, my shoes and socks and clad only in dreams I wade out chest high in the pleasantly cool dark water. The harbour is perfectly calm, not a ripple on the surface, as I begin to breast stroke silently out across the way to that cabin with the light shining, the only sound more of a sensation, my arms moving water – a beautiful, perfect moment of vitality and sensation.
It’s a long swim, but I manage without effort and arrive on the other side of the harbour – I climb the wood-chipped promontory to the cabin, twigs crackling comfortably beneath the bare skin of my feet. Inside, I find her alone, in a room with one oil lamp burning, waiting, she never realized, all this time for me.
And now a second and a third dream cross lines of intersection and she is not the brightly smiling young girl of memory with laughing blue eyes and all the energy and willingness she thinks she’ll ever need, but a woman of fifty, still with the long, lovely brown hair hanging halfway down her back. She turns away from me, saying “Nobody wants me.”
I go to her and say “You don’t get it, do you? You are beyond time, always a beautiful woman.” I undo her top from behind, sliding my cool, still damp hands over her warm skin. I feel her gasp. “And you have a wonderful body.”
Then she does get it, and she turns to me saying “Then do something about it.”
And we do for the rest of the night. And the next morning, before dawn, we go down together, naked, every age we’ll ever be, to the water and we walk into the harbour until our bodies are completely concealed.
Then, smiling once at each other, we grasp hands and plunge our heads beneath the lake –
Neither of us ever to be seen again.
The Pearl Wolf attacks
As soon as Knuckle Biter’s heart beats its last, all information to her brain is shut off by the slicing drop of a warm black guillotine, and the Implant stops transmitting. A deadly silence falls over the room. Then the lights go out, except for the hazy gray spot on Max Schreck in the middle of the scene, now seeming eerily to float forward …
“The Aliens!” Crazy May screams. “The Aliens have landed!”
There’s a lot of confused yelling and wild rushing about, heightened to a fever pitch when a black shadow lithesomely leaps in front of Max, silhouetted against the poster. It’s the Pearl Wolf, come for what she wants. All the women and a few of the men scream.
The Pearl Wolf turns sideways and arches her incredible back, her silhouette showing the amazing curve of her hips and her round, rolling sleek black breasts. All the men scream and the women cry “Hey!”
Pearl Wolf turns her face into the spotlight, her eyes like two unnaturally flat pale green discs. Everyone screams, and those with guns start to fire, but it’s too late for Agent Only. He used his last silver bullet on Knuckle Biter, and the rest of the killers only have normal rounds.
Pearl Wolf singles out and pounces exactly on Only in the panicky crowd in the darkness. He lets out the loudest scream of all, as her warm growling voice rumbles out beneath the frenzy, indicating how pleased she is with what she’s going to do next.
And there in the darkness, in the dream, that moment comes in the nightmare when we always struggle to wake up before the heart stops in horror and all dreaming is ended forever. The fear and the panic are overwhelming, everyone left alive is shrieking in agonizing psychic horror, hearts thundering arythmically out of control. We are falling faster, faster, and we can’t wake up –
The growling stops. The rest is silence.
For Agent Only.
Mordecai relights the front left candle. Again, illumination rises over the room. Everyone stares apprehensively at the spot where they knew the Wolf and the killer had been, just moments before; everyone’s breath coming in short anxious gasps as they try to subdue their fear – but there is nothing left for them to see. Only the memory of horror and the knowledge that one day, in their own dream, the fall will not stop for them either.
The band begins to play.
The Jazz Waltz
The music is Shostakovitch’s Jazz Waltz.
Those who are left, now Knuckle Biter, Hanley, Agent Only, Pearl Wolf, Adam and Lydia are gone, begin to clear away the tables, to create a full dance floor. Everyone pairs up, including the band, but the music continues, now piped in by unseen ghosts of musicians past.
The main characters take turns dancing in solo pairs in the spotlight: the Mulroney Throttler and the Goth Moth, Lou Moon and Joni Godiva, boB the Poet and Gully Bechet, Davis Jade and Phoebe Hush, the Evil Sneed and Luna Damsel, Benny Dredful and Audrey Always, Touchy Forceful and Crazy May.
Then everyone begins to exchange partners, switching back and forth so quickly men end up with men and women with women until eventually Benny Dredful and Luna Damsel are forced to actually waltz with each other, not just watch the other dance with another. This is a significant breakthrough in their relationship and may lead who knows where? Benny finds it to be a surprisingly tender moment … Luna knew it all along.
For awhile they lose track of what is happening. Finally, Benny, Luna and Lou Moon realize they have to get out of the bar as soon as they can, because the dream is ending. The three of ‘em cut for the alley through the back door, leaving Gully Bechet the odd man out on the dance floor. He does not mind, and takes his huge stand-up bass for a partner, performing more and more extravagant swirls and steps, almost smiling in his private joy.
Other characters are simply not there anymore, one by one, until only Gully is left, dancing silently to his own private bass line, alone with Mordecai. Mordecai goes to the small table on the front left where the candle is burning. With a single puff, he blows it out.
The music goes silent, and the scene fades back to black, as the giant poster of Max Schreck is illuminated in all its menacing glory for one threatening moment,
and then …
goes out.
The Joker rides out
Moon, Damsel, and Dredful rush out into the alley.
There’s nothing left to see. Pearl Wolf has gone, taking Agent Only in her passing.
“She seemed vaguely familiar, but I still gotta ask, what the hell was that about?” Moon wants to know.
Damsel’s about to reply when they hear the sound – rapid, galloping horse hooves on the concrete, coming nearer, growing louder every moment. They turn to look.
The ghostly white stallion charges by, ridden like the wind by his beautiful nude blonde mistress. But the naked blonde has a passenger this trip. Just struggling out of the last sleeve of his shirt, boB the Poet rides behind the nude blonde, naked himself already from the waist down and now – completely, as his shirt tears loose and blows back to them.
He’s staring over his shoulder at their amazed expressions, grinning like a demented satyr.
“Up, up and a-wa-a-a-y!” he shouts.
The vision disappears down the alley.
Lou, Luna, and Benny stand frozen, staring after.
“I’ll say it again – what the hell was that?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Luna assures Lou. “That’s just Joni Godiva, letting off some long-repressed steam. It’s better than having her running around killing people. boB’s just along for the ride, obviously.”
“Joni?” Benny questions.
“Yes?” Joni answers, stepping out of the club door behind them, still wearing her yellow raincoat.
They look at her. Then as one, they turn and look back down the alley.
“boB?”
budda bing budda boom
wake up now.
“The images of the invaded mind
Being as monsters in the dreams
Of your most brief enchanted headful,
Suppose a miracle of confusion”
John Crowe Ransom, Prelude to an Evening
Happy Halloween!
