After everyone left my Manhattan penthouse, Kerrin kept chattering. I was too boozed to catch on, so he repeated. "Gotta keep your name before the public. You’re going to move into a haunted, New Orleans’ mansion. But only for a month." He poured me into bed, insisting, "Gotta have a gimmick."
I responded with a drunken, unintelligible grunt, which Kerrin took to mean agreement.
And so it was that the next morning, at an ungodly hour, this annoying man dragged me out of bed, forced me into clothes, and hustled me to the airport. We carried no luggage as all our needs had been sent on ahead.
A crowd of paparazzi lay in wait, their flashes blinding me, while passersby chanted joyously. "KING OF THE WEREWOLVES! KING OF THE WEREWOLVES!"
More proof that Kerrin’s gimmick of my pretending to morph into a werewolf on stage had been an outstanding success. Michael Jackson might have been the King of Pop, but there was no denying that I, Growler, was the one and only King of the Werewolves.
More paparazzi met us as we deplaning at the Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans. How do they keep finding us? I asked myself. Ah, yes, it was because Kerrin kept releasing my intinerary.
"Publicity! Publicity!" he insisted.
When we reached the haunted mansion, it was already the dead of night, and a mist was rising. I scampered inside and made a futile search for the booze and coke.
"Nada," Kerrin announced. "When you relate your ghostly experiences in this house, you’ll be more believable if clean and sober." Then, ignoring my curses, he flung himself, full length, onto the couch. In seconds, his snores filled the room.
I snarled, "Don’t you dare crap out while I’m talking to you!" No response.
Enraged that there was nothing to occupy me, I thought to make a tour of this damned house and take it out on the damned ghosts. Wending my bleary way through the first-floor rooms, with their antique furniture and dusty draperies, I came to a hall of mirrors. Oh, sweet, I thought, able to view myself from every side at once. A perfect rehearsal place.
Fascinated with my many images, I did a rock-stomp routine before the mirrored walls with their ornate gilt frames, when suddenly, it seemed as if something dark had flashed across one of the mirrors. I froze in place and waited.
There it was again! Behind me. The reflection of someone in that mirror. And it was not my image.
It soon became clear that the room on the other side was not a true reflection of the one in which I stood and it boasted only candlelight. With horror, I realized some guy was moving about. He wore clothes of a kind I’d only seen in old movies. And his hair was long. As I watched, he crept right up to the barrier and pressed both palms against the other side of the mirror. To my relief, he could not cross over.
He gave me a tight-lipped smile and held out one hand, inviting me into his room. As I stumbled back from the mirror, he snarled in disappointment, opening his mouth to reveal fangs.
Stampeding back through the house, I shouted "Kerrrrrin!"
In response to my shaking him, Kerrin finally muttered, "You’re drunk." Then he rolled over.
When morning came, I tried to fill him in, without success.
"Hallucinations," he snorted. "This is why you need to get sober."
And we left it at that.
When night came again, I pushed to go to a Creole restaurant, but when we stepped outside, the fog had gotten thicker.
"I’m not driving in this and neither are you," was Kerrin’s ill-tempered response.
After gobbling down a few hastily contrived sandwiches, I invited him to watch me rehearse in the mirrored hall. Perhaps if he saw that guy behind the mirror with his own eyes . . . But Kerrin threw himself on the couch, repeating his prior performance. So I went by myself. I’m six foot three and work out so I don’t scare easily, except maybe for something like this.
At first, all the mirrors seemed normal, but after I’d been stomping for a few minutes, that guy appeared in the same mirror. He gestured me to come closer. His anger of the previous night seemed forgotten.
Hey! I‘m a boozer and a junkie, but I’m not nuts!
As I began backpedaling, away from the mirror, that creepy guy reached out his hands. But this time . . . this time . . . one passed through the glass. Then one of his feet stepped into the hall. The vampire was coming for me!
Panic gripped me and I would have been a goner, but then I thought of this being the end of the Growler. And right then and there, it came to me. I crouched, and hunched, and snarled, doing my morph routine. I made him believe by making myself believe. And when I howled, that vampire shrank back into his own room.
Taking no chances, I grabbed a statue and pounded the mirror into a million pieces. Then, adrenaline pumping, I ran out the front door.
The fog was evaporating and I found myself on the brink of a canal as a gondola passed by. There was a bronze plaque at my feet. It read:
Once the home of Count Barbarigo, the infamous 14th century Venetian vampyre.
I shouted into the night, "Being sober sucks!"
Then I pulled out my cell and speed-dialed the long-suffering Kerrin.
"Holy crap! Grab our passports! I think we’re in Venice!"
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2013: The Zombies Take Manhattan
Spellbound: A Tale of Magic, Mystery & Murder
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
LOUISE ANN BARTON
This celebrated local author has four charming books on the Pine Barrens, and a number of short-story collections, and novels. As a master storyteller from a family of Cherokee master storytellers, she is an award-winning poet and lecturer, with an MA and a Master Gardener's Certification, and has taught college classes.
Her works include Web pages, newspaper articles, novels, short stories, poetry, plays, children's stories, educational materials, and has edited musical CD inserts.
She also belongs to the Gatherers Institute Writers’ Workshop, The Jersey Shore Writers' Guild, and most of those held in the Ocean County Library System in southern New Jersey. She founded The Prose & Poetry Writers’ Guild and has produced, directed, and performed in a number of off-Broadway plays (drama, Shakespeare, and musicals), has read original poetry and short stories in coffee houses, and moonlighted as a magician, a musician, a tarot reader, and an off-Broadway performer.
After a lifetime as a native New Yorker, she retired to the haunted Pine Barrens with her faithful feline companion. You may join the author at https://www.louisebartonsbooks.blogspot.com, which provides links to web sites for her other books.
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