Nosferatunes: Instalment Four

NOSFERATUNES!

PART FOUR

Copyright May, 2005 by John H. Baillie

Memories of Moonbeam McSwine

    Having decided once more that they will never understand women no matter how long they live, the tableful of guys turns to a discussion of the newspaper comics page as a more comprehensible medium for explaining the universe. They have had a few, not that it would really have mattered.

    Adam remembers the golden age of the comic strip quite well, when they were still big enough to actually see. “Moonbeam McSwine, gentlemen. Moonbeam McSwine … No woman anywhere at any time has ever been drawn so fine as Moonbeam McSwine. I tell you, we all once lusted for Moonbeam McSwine to arise from that coloured comics weekend supplement pig sty, dealing temptation like a deck of cards. Ah, the Star Weekly … How many of us when we were young and innocent and didn’t even really understand what was going on got our first hard-ons on a Saturday morning at the sight of a full colour Moonbeam McSwine? Though if she had come to life, a substantial number of us would still have had to run and hide, she would have been just too much to interact with in reality. But can you imagine what any man who could have stood up to her and handled the smell would have experienced?” He falls out of his chair. Benny and the Throttler haul him back onto his seat.

    But Adam’s reminiscence has stirred a dim recollection in the hazier recesses of the Mulroney Throttler’s mind. “Between what I dared to imagine … what I was led to imagine … and what was simply there in a line drawing and three or four colours … I remember the red of her lips most of all, like it was something that I wasn’t really allowed to see … or imagine.” 

    Lou Moon, being a bit younger, and having been raised on animated holograms rather than comics somewhere in the Alpha Beta Zeculi quadrant of the galaxy, has a slightly different take on the issue. “No one ever remembers those images are based on real people. So that means, on a certain level, every one of those drawings must have been real, right, subtle fields of night shaped and formed so boldly. Quick! An eraser!” He laughs.

    But suffering a temporary trivia lapse, Benny Dredful wants to know “Who did the voice for Bullwinkle? Now there was the sound of reason. Wisdom and magic lying in doing anything when you don’t have a clue, opening that door with a bomb behind it because it’s a sort of fetish with me, when every other voice telling you not to do it was too frigging loud. They had no word balloons, only voices informing their every needful gesture …”

    Agent Only agrees, as he wasn’t really paying attention, having been swept away in his own reverie and growing anxiety. Plus, he never really got past thinking of Moonbeam McSwine’s tits. “It was a time when simpler images made us happy. No real person would flee in disgust, no matter how many colours they did or didn’t use. We should take pride in what we saw that wasn’t written, and never drawn.

    “I gotta have another drink. And then I gotta go kill someone.”

But I probably won’t

    “You know what?” Joni Godiva says. “The men are always so hung up on appearances, what we really need to do is turn that against them.”

    “Oh! I’m sorry … I didn’t notice you were blonde before.”

    “S’all right. What we’ve got to do, see, is make masks? Make masks of the most gorgeous female faces you can imagine … And then we put them on, so the men can’t resist us. But here’s the catch – here’s the fun part. We poison the lips of the masks. Some venom that’s fast acting and deadly and preferably painful. Then when the men can’t resist us because of  the beautiful masks we wear, they’ll rush on us and kiss us and poison themselves! What d’you think?”

    “I’ve got a better idea,” Lydia says. “I like your masks idea, and I like the poison, but I think we really need to torture the men. So we do get masks made, but not just for ourselves. We get masks made for the men too. But here’s the catch – the men wear the masks that make them look like women, we wear the masks that’ll make us look like men. Then we get to treat them the way they usually treat us – now that’s real pain and suffering!”

    “I like masks, I think masks are pretty,” Audrey Always contributes, having finally left Hanley the Info Pusher alone. “But I wouldn’t put the masks on the men’s faces. I would put the masks of all the pretty women over the men’s penises. I think that’s a more important part of the man to keep hidden.”

    Knuckle Biter has pulled herself together and joined the group a bit late, but a Brain Drainer is never at a loss for a few good ideas. “Oh, I don’t think you’re right yet. What we have to mask men’s penises with are masks of vaginas. Then, we’d be getting someplace.”

    There’s general somewhat drunken approval of this proposal.

    “But I think the whole idea of having to wear masks is wrong in the first place,” Luna Damsel finally decides. “I mean – look at us. We’re all good looking, gorgeous women in our own right, as we are, as who we are. We don’t have to hide anything to make us look better.”

    The women – reluctantly, and somewhat doubtful – agree.

    “But then – how would you deal with the men?” Lydia wants to know, confused. “Surely you wouldn’t take them as they are?”

    “No … no …” Luna looks very thoughtful. “What I’d like to do is strip them down to skeletons, then shrink their bones and skulls and crystallize them … Once they were all bright and shiny and indestructible and tiny, you could hang them on a bracelet … or wear them as earrings.” The look in her eyes searches very far away.

    “That’s what I’d like to do … but I probably won’t.”

    She shrugs. Ah, well.

    Crazy May actually detaches herself from her A-Pod for a moment and leans over to speak to Lydia.

    “Did you know that the Australian language Dyirbal actually has four genders, and one of them groups all nouns pertaining to women, fire, snakes, and all other dangerous things? Just a thought … “

They’d never believe we’d actually say that

    “ – so in the story, the guy has to go out and buy glass eyes for her before she’ll agree to become his bride, so she’ll see the world differently enough to accept him.”

    The women standing up and leaving has actually had enough of a sobering effect on the men that they’ve decided to try and have a serious discussion of the sexes after all. Or at least a serious discussion of the sex they’d most like to have sex with. They are so misunderstood.

    “The midnight lady has lost her cello. They don’t get it, do they? Just how attractive we do find older women?”

    “How much more we want from an older woman – “

    “ – because older women can give you so much more.”

    “Now, we are men of the world here, aren’t we? I don’t believe I’m mistaken in assuming that we’ve made a few visits to a strip joint or two between us, now am I?”

    Mutters of overwhelming grudging agreement.

    “Well, I for one am sick to death of those places, let me tell you. All those huge plastic boobs with ridges on ‘em that look like they’re going to pop if you poke ‘em too sharp –”

    “The lips! It’s those fucking lips that get me. The big collagen implanted ones, I can’t look at a girl like that without thinking someone just tried to punch her face in.”

    “It’s crap, all of it. Something they’re being sold to make them think we want it. All I want to see, is a natural, normal woman, like you would see walking around on the street any day, walking around and acting and looking perfectly normal, while stark naked.”

    Hearty cheers of agreement.

    “Now that’s sexy. But it’s a woman’s eyes, really, eh?”

    “Yeah – but not just sexy eyes – and women do have the sexiest eyes – but eyes with a spark of intelligence in them.”

    “When they don’t have all that crap plastered on all around them.”

    “Eyes that are intelligent, personable, and kind …”

    “Yeah. You do wanna see that spark there. Some indication someone’s home.” 

    “So many of them, sure they’re all made up and look good, but you sit ‘em down and it’s like trying to talk to guppies.”

    “The young ones, yeah.”

    “Just one thought going through their heads, I bet –”

    “‘How do I look?’”

    Mad laughter.

    “Nope, gentlemen, I think we’re all in agreement then that for the full unadulterated truly pleasing experience of the female that a man really wants, you just can’t do better than a woman.”

    Nods of deeply heartfelt approval.

    “But they’d never believe we’d actually say that, would they?”

    “Nah. Women! Go figure …”

All the really important women’s magazines

    There’s a dispute between the generations brewing at table three.

    “I’d rather turn into a statue before I grow old,” Audrey Always tells Lydia with a giggle.

    Lydia is appalled. “You’re crazy! Why – why would you ever consider such a thing?”

    Audrey spreads her arms away from her body. “Look at me. I’m perfect now. Why would I ever want that to change? My Auntie Knuckle Biter has raised me since I was a baby and trained me perfectly from all the proper manuals to help her in her work. I look like I do and distract all the men. Some women too,” she adds in a lower voice, “which I think is really special. I start the process, suck a little bit of their souls right out of them when they see me and they want me and I sort of let them think that maybe they can have me but of course they really can’t. And then they’re so agitated it’s really really easy for Auntie to move in for the strike and drain their brains!”

    She giggles again. Lydia is no less appalled.

    “What do you mean, she trained you from all the right manuals, what manuals?”

    “Oh, you know – Cosmo, Cosmo for Teens, Glamor, Seventeen … all the really important women’s magazines.”

    Lydia’s sense of being appalled is now appalled. She reads a lot of those magazines herself. “So what you’re telling me is rather than grow old and have your – your perfect young body go – go soft on you, you’d rather be changed into a statue and remain looking the way you are now forever, cold and dead inside?”

    “I’m pretty certain my Aunt can arrange that,” Audrey says earnestly. “You should see who she’s working for now, and what they can do. So yes, that’s really what I want!” she concludes happily. “Because how you look is the only genuine thing that’s really important in life, isn’t it? I mean – I hear that message a thousand times in a thousand ways every day! And I’m never going to look better than I do now.”

    “But don’t you realize what you’d be missing by not growing older?” Lydia demands.

    Audrey is genuinely bemused. “What am I missing?”

    And Lydia reaches the absolute depth anyone can reach of being appalled when she realizes that after at least ten seconds or so she is not certain she has an answer to that question.

It’s just magic!

    Bob decided to become boB the Poet after working for the provincial government for twenty-five years and having them slowly appropriate his personality over that time, only to mislay it irretrievably at the first opportunity during a computer malfunction.

    So he tried to quit but they wouldn’t let him because he couldn’t prove he existed in their database. He finally just walked out, loudly announcing he was coming out of the closet no one had ever actually realized or cared that he was in, and started forcing readings of his incredibly bad poetry on anyone who didn’t walk away.

    “You gotta hear this one, you gotta hear this one, it’s just magic!” Tears of delight streaming from his eyes, he rasps loudly to the guys, momentarily aggregated at the same table having been chased away by their women. “I call it ‘I, boB’. That’s boB, not Bob, you realize, it’s important to catch the distinction, very literary, very me these days. It goes like this:

I, bOb

Crap! I got it wrong! I’ll start again – ahem!

I, boB

                Like a river rushing like water

                I lift my bright petals

                And roar at the sun!

                I am the bull, the Raging Bull

                In black and white.

                Oof! Oof! Oof! Where’s the beef?

                I am here, I am he, I am boB,

                I am gone.

                Who laughs?”

    There was a long, stunned silence, finally broken by boB himself. “God, I’m good! I’m a fucking genius, and I only started writing this shit a week ago, y’know?”

    “How come women never want talk about crazy ways of doing it as much as guys do?” Agent Only muses, summing up the general opinion of poetry held by the audience at that particular table.

    “That’s why I only sleep with men now,” boB announces.

    The guys hurry to make embarrassed apologies and rush back to the women, the war’s over.

    boB sighs, and looks around the room yearningly for something else to write a poem about, Miles’s ghostly trumpet once again causing a great emptiness to inexorably descend upon him.

    “Inspiration,” boB thinks, “I need some brilliant stroke of inspiration … a sign –”

Fully indulgent

    boB isn’t the only one drawing inspiration from Miles’s playing. The spirit that entered the club surreptitiously when the black trumpet player’s ghost first began his set decides she’s heard enough for now, having become erotically charged to a degree she had never considered to be within the realms of possibility while she was still alive. She decides to make her move on Joni Godiva now, whom she marked for the maneuver earlier in the evening.

    Joni, like the other women at their shared table, is caught by surprise by the men’s sudden and complete capitulation in the Gender War. The males have come running back, Lou Moon for Audrey but with a dirty look for Knuckle Biter, Adam for Lydia, and even Benny Dredful for Luna – having obviously not overheard what the observer woman was so recently suggesting.

    But the Mulroney Throttler just sits down silently at their table, not making any effort to connect with any of them, and his eyes have an increasingly paranoid, disassociated look to them, as if he is contemplating some great inner hatred and wondering how best to express it in irresistible action. And Agent Only has – Agent Only has disappeared? Joni looks around. He’s just sliding out the back, with a drawn gun, and with an awfully fearful look of complete apprehension on his face. Joni panics – where’s Hanley?

    -- across the room chatting with Crazy May and some of the other Junkies. Why is Only heading for the alley then? She gets up to follow.

    The spirit places itself precisely in Joni Godiva’s path, so the agent will have to walk through her and take her onto her soul like a heavy mist draping her body as a particularly sensitive second skin.

    Joni walks into the spirit – Miles’s trumpet is suddenly much louder, mellowing form and emotion so insinuatingly – Joni shudders, and stumbles, and when she looks up again she does not see light as she always had before. Light is suddenly on fire, too bright, and grainy, confining … Suffocating her. She needs to breathe again, her entire body needs to breathe …

    She falls against the wall, pulling at her throat, panting, a sudden rush of heat flushing down from her breasts through her torso into her groin.

    She tumbles out the back door of the club, into the alley, and begins to lose her clothing one piece at a time, until she can breathe in this incredible burning light once more. This does not happen until she is completely naked, reaching up to let down her hair, her elegant breasts raising to a suddenly ice blue sky, narrowly framed by the menacing rectangles of the decrepit buildings looming over her. She stares at the grimy black back walls of the alley, oozing slime, dazed and wondering desperately what has possessed her and how to maximize the pleasure she knows she is about to fully indulge in. She hears a gentle whinny.

    Nuzzling her from behind is a huge, pure white ghost stallion. The spirit within Joni goes taut with excitement at the thought of galloping bareback with that horse between her naked thighs again …

Send me a sign

    So hot to find true inspiration he can’t bear it, boB the Poet creeps out of the bar into the back alley until he finds a spot against a stinking wall not too far from the dumpster, where a single electric light fries the night in a square wire cage. He slumps down and pulls out his pad and pen. And now to write!

            “Last seen beneath blonde moonlight

            running the green broadsoul

            we wore only words

            as we rode proud horses

            to temptation and beyond.

            No one dared speak

            as each image we wrote

            bared only what we chose,

            never what truly mattered.

            “Let them use their imaginations!”

            we cried as we stripped to ride

            and to rob and to ravage,

            to write our energy beneath the stars

            on this Lady Godiva Night,

            when we strew no garment in protest,

            only in faith we can fashion

            each other and the world.”

These words appear as flaming spectral graffiti on the wall across the alley from where boB sits. He’s so intent on staring at the blank piece of paper on his knees that he doesn’t see them. They fade, completely disappearing from view.

    boB wishes he’d taken a hit from Hanley the Info Pusher before he came out. There’s nothing in his head except the need to express himself and a blank sheet in front of him reflecting back that need emptily. He’s more than blocked, he’s cemented shut – strain as he will nothing’s coming out either end of his body or soul.

    He stands up and screams at Heaven in agonizing frustration.

    “SEND ME A SIGN!”

    At that exact moment, Joni Godiva, silent as a silver whisper, plummets by him on an enormous wish-conjured, ghostly white stallion, pale mane flying in the night air over shadowed eyes, and Joni herself is buck naked, her long blonde hair blowing back in an unnatural breeze, revealing all.

    This, he notices. 

The purple colour

    Goth Moth abruptly and loudly goes berserk, deciding it is absolutely necessary for the well being of all involved that she must gather every item coloured purple in the room, deck the corpse of Kirsten Brandi Marinara with them, and then perform a sacrificial insect dance around her to save the dead girl’s slowly departing soul. She’s probably right …

    First the giant insect girl jumps onto the stage and grabs one end of the mauvest of the scarves the Evil Sneed is wearing tonight. Before anyone knows what she is doing, she gives the scarf an almighty yank that buzzes the Sneed around like a wildly out of control spinning top as it unravels off from around his neck. He ends up on one knee, the pupils in his eyes still rotating, utterly dizzy and dazed.

    Doesn’t miss a note. The Ptrio plays on.

    Goth Moth dives for Luna Damsel, who, being an observer, sees her coming. Wisely anticipating what is about to happen, Luna already has the purple plastic bracelet she’s been wearing on her left wrist off and is handing it over. Goth Moth swoops away. Luna smiles at Benny, and shows him she still has the silvery charm bracelet she wears on her right wrist, with its oddly shaped crystal dangly things hanging from it. He nods, then leans in for a closer look. “Hey! Are those skull earrings you’re wearing? Cool.”

    Goth Moth lifts the violet handkerchief from the Mulroney Throttler’s suit jacket pocket as she lunges by him heading for Crazy May. This one is more of a battle. Crazy May is wearing a horrible purple tie-dyed sort of kaftan top, and Goth Moth really has to wrestle to get it off her. Luckily May actually thought to put on a bra tonight. She whoops and shrieks hysterically over the Goth Moth’s incessant mad insect clattering, until the top rips off with a mighty tear. “Hey!” Crazy May yells, as the Goth Moth runs off with her prize. Mordecai mollifies May with another complementary cocktail. May grins, and, unconcerned, goes back to her A-Pod. Touchy Forceful, also plugged in and sitting at the same table, is so intent on his notes, he misses the whole thing.

    Goth Moth stops beside Hanley the Info Pusher and stares angrily into his eyes, searching for something. He tries to back away, shaking in fear, but there’s no room …

    Goth Moth decides not. “Luggy frou,” she mutters, and runs off towards Kirsten’s pretty little corpse. Hanley lets out an enormous breath, sinking relieved down to squat on the floor.

    Lou Moon has just been about to proposition Audrey Always when the Goth Moth started her rampage. He watches, mesmerized, with his hand raised, one finger out, as the frenetic bug girl tears about the room. Goth Moth runs by Lou and Audrey now, intent on Kirsten, suddenly realizes something, does a complete three hundred sixty degree spin on one foot and rushes back to them. She grabs them each by an arm, chattering incoherently at them, and propels them across the bar room past the stage and into the short hallway leading to the room off the right violating all sense of time and space that so few of Nosferatunes’ patrons actually know about.

    “Sogo!” Goth Moth gives a final yell as she pushes the two of them off their feet down the hall. “Nowating pritty ded Kirztin! Moth on deeway! Holdon hed, tehee, too late! Sole nennyday – “

Derailing boB’s creative rivers

    Before the Evil Sneed’s eyes can stop spinning, boB the Poet barges aggressively back into the bar, demanding everyone’s attention be now focussed on him. He proclaims that his vision has given him a new mastery over his art. “I shall write words of unparalleled power and majesty, inspired by my new naked muse, seething with sexual energy and vitality!” he declares, after a short, excited recap of what he has just seen outside in the alley.

    Benny Dredful is doubtful. “Let me get this straight … You think you saw some raunchy hooker on a white horse go galloping by you out in the dark, and now you’re so all het-up you’re our new Leonard Cohen?”

    “She was a sign! A sign from the Gods of Art! She was a personal sign to me that from now on, I am going to flourish in my particular art!”

    Lydia is outright contemptuous. “boB –” but she’s still too well-mannered not to get his name right – “you’re a short, fat, balding homosexual ex-civil servant with a drinking problem. What do you care about naked blonde women?”

    boB stands speechless. But not for long.

    “Always a catch!” he explodes. “There’s always a catch! You people can’t just let me enjoy my visions, no no, you can’t bear to see me break out of my shell and actually write something that isn’t entirely garbage for once, oh no, you have to point out the one little detail that invalidates the entire experience! Derailing my creative rivers –”

    “A detail like mixed metaphors, f’rinstance?” Luna wants to know.

    “Mordecai! Bring me a drink! Twelve of ‘em! Bourbon, on the rocks!”

    boB collapses in a chair, physically and aesthetically deflated.

    Poets having hallucinations in and around Nosferatunes is not news. The Info Junkies haven’t even glanced up from their A-Pods.

    Unnoticed however, Joni Godiva slinks back into the club, wearing a bright yellow raincoat that is slightly too large for her, and nothing else. She sits down, looking sheepish. Lydia notices her a few moments later.

    “Why aren’t you wearing any shoes? What’s happened to your shoes?”

    “Do you believe in ghosts?”

    Lydia sighs. “I’m afraid that I’m going to have to before this evening is over.”

    “Trust me. They’re real.”

    “How do you know?”

    “Because I know now that you haven’t really lived until you’ve felt the ghost of a dead white horse galloping between your naked thighs. And if you really hadn’t been living before that … Well, then. You might as well have been the ghost.”

    “ … I know exactly what you mean.”

Doing it in the Mysterian position

    Luckily, once again Lou Moon’s training kicks in, and as he and Audrey Always tumble to the floor outside the doorway to the Nosferatunes interspatial/interdimensional interface room, after having been shoved there by the Goth Moth, Lou ends up on top.

    “Well. Hel-loo-o there …”

    Audrey giggles. “You were aiming for this all along, weren’t you?”

    “You could say so. Although my original plan of attack didn’t include anything quite so forceful.”

    “Ooo – you’re attacking me. Should I scream?”

    “Depends. How do you feel about being attacked?”

    She giggles again. “I’m enjoying it, actually. Which isn’t right. Just between you and me …” She pulls his head down by the collar of his shirt and whispers in his ear. “I’m not supposed to really do it. But I do.” More giggles.

    “Well, there does seem to be a private room here …”

    “I didn’t know there was.”

    “Me neither …” For a moment, this thought disturbs him. Then Audrey inhales quite deeply, and the pressure of her breasts against his chest disturbs him even more. “C’mon – let’s get off the floor at least.”

    He helps her up, and they take a step, hand in hand, towards the black doorway of the time and space bending room.

    But they freeze – before entering.

    There is a long, hanging moment of silence …

    “Do you feel that?” Lou wonders quietly, not taking his eyes off the doorway. Beside him, Audrey shivers.

    “Yes … It’s … There’s another controlling force here.”

    “There has been from the start. I felt it as soon as I walked in the door and saw that damned picture of the vampire.”

    Audrey’s shaking almost uncontrollably now. “Hold me … this is … that vampire and more.”

    Lou clutches Audrey to him. Light slowly takes shape in the room beyond the doorway …

    In the shadow of the trenchcoat, we question the suspicion in the silence, the doubt in the innocent face, the lust in the pleasant regard, and the empty admiration of the lecherous leer.

    In the gleam of the hatband are reflected all the stages of man –

    and more shapely yet, of woman – 

    neither of whom can be trusted.

She is as tall as he is, in the slatted light beaming through the venetians. Her strange little blackbird hat, perched on her perfectly intimidating black hair, with the dotted black veil like spiders climbing down a web almost but not quite covering her face down to just above her amazingly red lips, all give the illusion that she might, in fact, be taller. Her dress is red, of course, scarlet, as she slowly drops her fur to the floor … The slit up her left thigh reveals a particularly incongruous, yet still highly arousing bright aquamarine garter, holding up the black mesh silk nylon over the tautly rippling neon white flesh. She doesn’t even need to speak his name – he’s known her his entire life – knows the consequences – knows that she has fully, uninhibitedly, decided to embrace those consequences. Forever …

    Step forward with one sharp stiletto heel beneath a crimson sheet, and a black silk nylon with a line down the back of the most perfect calf in all creation.

    The theme music swells, unbearable in the cool heat of black and white delight.

    The detective writhes in envy knowing this case is not really his, she has her own agenda, those eyes are not really hers, they were stolen from some wild animal, as was the tawny curve of her back and the gloved hand reaching out to clutch

                                                 -- the last of

his ethics.

There was no longer any reason to discuss the merits or details of the case, only the thought of how fast can I undress the other, and what should I rush to take off, and what should I linger to leave on. The drawer slides out, the bourbon pours, one glass. “On the rocks?” he asks casually. “Always,” she breathily replies. Drinking from the same mouth, liquid swirling from her tongue around his, each daring the other to be the first to swallow. “This is the most powerful love potion in the world.” Touching her tongue lightly to his ear and then lowering his head to between her silky nylon thighs.

drapes black and dark purple drifting with malicious intent in a breeze blowing nowhere but on that specific window, occasional spears of light illuminating one gasping body mounted dynamically upon another.

The night was a bridge of sighs reaching from one lung to another’s heart.

He shovels a carload of last doubts into one huge container and buries it in the back of an abandoned construction site, beneath seven feet of cement. At last he feels secure – 

    -- only to have his heart torn up and out his throat as she rears up, the she wolf unleashed and naked, smiling knowingly to drag him into the one mystery he can never solve – 

Where does your passion end and mine begin, she growls in his ear, then slashes his chest

beneath nails painted the colour of alien blood.

The doorway again fades to black …

    Lou and Audrey look at each other.

    “That wasn’t –”

    “No, it couldn’t –”

    “It felt like –”

    “But it wasn’t –”

    “ – us.”

    They think about that.

    “It wasn’t, really, it wasn’t …”

    “No, actually … I …”

    “What?”

    “ … Never mind.”

    They stare back at the blackness for awhile.

    “Maybe we better not –”

    “Yeah I think you got something there –”

    “Another time?”

    “Sure.”

    “But not –”

    “No, not here.”

    … Just what future or past did I catch a glimpse of then? And whose was it?

Not your average lycanthrope

    Shortly thereafter the werewolf cycle began. To Lou Moon’s complete surprise on viewing the origin, the woman had willingly and willfully succumbed to the curse, but then he imagined she had always been finely attuned to the moon. Having stolen another woman’s lover the curse of fang and claw inexorably set its sleek hooded mark upon her. “Sleep with a man who is not righteously your mate and you will turn into the wolf.” It wasn’t entirely Max’s idea … 

    But she was not your average lycanthrope. No, she was sleek, she was black, she moved horizontal to the night with glossy green eyes large enough to lose a thousand souls within, and she only made her transformation when the moon did not shine, until the form became permanently set upon her.

    Then she would slide from shadow to shadow seeking young men in the deep end of puberty to satisfy her blood lust, but there was a twist – 

    She was a beast of such passion that any young man who caught even a glimpse of her flitting from one deeper darkness to another, noting the curve of her hipline, the fullness of her breasts, and the lust in her fireshot eyes, immediately dropped to all fours howling out his pain, proclaiming her the mother of all wolves. Overcome by his lust for her, he became one of her pack, always following, never overtaking, one of an evergrowing army of sex dogs threatening to explode upon an unsuspecting populace in unrequited yearning and rage.

    The authorities recognized an untenable situation rapidly steaming to a breaking point. A sperminator was called for, preferably an outsider – Canadians just don’t do this sort of thing – someone from the U.S. of A. for instance, with a license to pack a rod and a light lunch as Nash the Slash once observed, who may or may not have his own masters’ agenda for all they cared, so long as he come amply stocked with silver bullets.

    Enter: Agent Only.

How the Goth Moth came to be

    One night, as the Pearl Wolf prowled in the darkness down McMillan Avenue, a very short block away a young female moth got trapped inside a neon flame on Corydon, just as three horny young bucks caught sight of Pearl Wolf’s eyes and sleek, sinuous black-furred body.

    The three young men struck up quite a howl, before dropping to all fours and sprouting spiky tufted hair and other obscene growths. They loped off after their new goddess, to join her always expanding Pearl Wolfpack – little knowing how soon after she would sacrifice them all to Agent Only.

    But their howl had set off a harmonic vibration mixing with the resonance of the neon flame at the subatomic string level, which altered the awareness of the insect trapped within the light so for one moment only, she fully understood her control of quantum reality, and she could make her choice which probability field she could collapse for herself, altering her molecular makeup to become whatever she chose.

    Obviously without giving it much thought, the moth became a giant human girl, seven feet tall, solid and long in her body like a steel tube. Her wings wrapped around her to drape her in a gauzy, dusty long black dress; gloves without fingers rose to her elbows; nails on her hands and toes appeared naturally shining beetle-back black, and her new face sprouted large, black-ringed penetrating insect eyes, but without the facets, and a surprisingly attractive perfectly turned up little nose and moue lips, bright red and a perfect invitation to a kiss. Her hair fell straight to her shoulders like a helmet, iridescently green, blue, black or violet-indigo depending how the light shone upon it.

    And there she was, the perfect girl for the ought-zeroes, the Goth Moth, all her insect instincts meshed with a nineteen year old girl’s predatory avarice to blindly devour style without substance, though she was known to have a short temper. Any other young female overheard saying repeatedly how she liked to “do the Corydon Crawl” within the Goth Moth’s vicinity would always be found as a strangely mutilated corpse in the parking lot of the Balmoral Hotel the next morning.

    Somehow she never quite got a grip on the language.

So the frenzy begins

    “You’ve got the stink of death on you,” Joni Godiva tells a breathless Agent Only with some disgust as he drops down beside her back in Nosferatunes, looking disheveled, drenched, and generally tattered and torn. He gasps for air for a few moments before replying.

    “Fuck you, too.”

    “What were you doing? I saw you leave,” she demands.

    “Sperminating. What I was paid to do. With silver bullets.”

    The stunned look wasn’t leaving his face very quickly. The job had obviously taken more out of him than he had been expecting.

    “Silver bullets. You went after the sex dogs then.”

    “It was me or them, baby … me or them …”

    Joni’s contempt grows. “Mindless beasts. Just animals. No honour in a kill like that. You merely slaughtered them. Not their fault they were what they were.”

    “Hey! Those mindless beasts were getting ready to blow. Somebody had to protect the real innocents of this fair city.”

    She laughs. “What do you know about innocence?”

    Agent Only had stared into the Wolf’s eyes on every side of him tonight. “Not much anymore …” he mutters.

    “I suppose you want to tell me all about it.”

    She did her best to sound cool and diffident, but they both knew she couldn’t wait to hear. She might disapprove of the victims, but the thought of that much killing couldn’t help but get her hot. Especially that sort of killing.

    Agent Only lowers his voice with a foul gleam in his eye. He’d been praying this would be the pay off.

    “Well, you know what I had to do, of course. To get their attention.” He gulps. “I had to view the Mother Wolf herself, but not turn into one of the pack in the process. That’s why they sent me. I’ve already had the kind of vast sexual experience that makes the allure of the Pearl Wolf resistible.”

    Actually, they’d calculated the Pearl Wolf would find him too old and annoying to bother with.

    Until he got her attention.

    All Agent Only really knew was that when he’d looked into her eyes there had been a laughter there to go with the wildness that had made him very uneasy. “So when she passed, I held my ground, didn’t drop to all fours, didn’t go all hairy, didn’t go running after her. Got a helluva hard on though. So when the pack caught up a few minutes later they could see quite plainly I might say that they were suddenly up against some pretty impressive stiff competition for the Pearl Wolf’s attention. And they couldn’t bear that. From that moment on, it was kill or killed between them and me, no quarter given on either side. So the frenzy began.”

to be concluded ...

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