Temporary Monsters
Ian Rogers
Temporary Monsters
Ian Rogers
copyright 2009-1012 Ian Rogers // Burning Effigy Press
All Rights Reserved.
https://www.burningeffigy.com
Temporary Monsters, by horror scribe Ian Rogers, was first published in 2009 by Burning Effigy Press. We have decided to release this story free online to introduce more readers to detective Felix Renn and the supernatural dimension known as The Black Lands.
Temporary Monsters has spawned a number of sequels, including The Ash Angels, Black-Eyed Kids and The Brick. All of which are included upcoming collection, SuperNOIRtural Tales, which is being released in November 2012. For information that book, please visit https://burningeffigy.com And to learn more about The Black Lands, click on over to theblacklands.com.
Temporary Monsters
Chapter 1
The waiter got killed before he could drop off the bill.
I happened to be looking toward the back of the restaurant and saw him coming: a tall smooth-faced man in a black vest, carrying a slip of paper on a small plastic tray, winding his way through the maze of tables. Gel didn’t have a lot of space, and although it tried to make the most of what it had, there were simply too many tables for so small a room. All through lunch I kept waiting for one of the waiters to trip and deposit someone’s order in their lap. It was something to do while I waited for Sandra to stop talking.
Presently she said, “It’s just not enough, Felix.”
I sipped my coffee and muttered, “It never is.”
“You’re not even listening to me,” she said, using that petulant tone I didn’t miss at all.
“I’m listening, Dee. I just don’t care.”
She fell silent. I didn’t need to look at her to know she was pissed. I could feel her eyes burning a hole in the side of my head. Not because of what I’d said, but because of what I’d called her. I plead ignorance on that one. The divorce lawyers never told me I was supposed to relinquish the nickname along with the house key.
Sandra heaved a big sigh. “Would you at least look at me when I’m talking to you? I hate it when you zone out like this.”
I turned and looked across the table at her – Sandra Clifton Renn, although she’d probably be dropping the “Renn” in the not-too-distant future. She didn’t need it for me or for her work. Not anymore. She was on the downslope of her acting career, and she knew it. Her last sitcom effort, Not Tested on Animals, had been cancelled a month ago, after only three episodes aired. The network said it was dumping it because of low ratings. I knew the feeling.
“I’m listening,” I told her. “You said it isn’t enough. I know. I’ve heard this bit before.”
“You hear, Felix, but you don’t “listen.”
I took out my wallet as the waiter approached. At the table next to ours, a young guy stared at an untouched tuna melt. He was alone, but that wasn’t unusual. Gel was one of the few restaurants in downtown Toronto where you could dine alone and not look like a dateless loser. It was a hangout for actors, both successful and struggling. I thought the kid looked familiar, but I couldn’t make the connection. Early twenties, black feathered shoulder-length hair, white Oxford shirt, dark slacks. He had probably done a pilot that never got picked up. He had that kind of look, the one that said, You might remember who I was, if I ever did anything memorable.
And then he did.
As the waiter was placing the bill on our table, the kid suddenly leaped out of his chair and looped his arm around the waiter’s neck. His other arm encircled the waiter’s waist, pulling him back into a tight embrace. The kid pivoted them both around, like a couple performing a clumsy dance manoeuvre, and I saw something that made me drop my wallet and my jaw.
The kid had fangs.
I only saw them for a split second before he sank them into the side of the waiter’s panic-taut neck.
A surreal couple of seconds followed. Everyone in the restaurant kept eating and talking as if nothing unusual was happening. Then the waiter reached out with one flailing hand, grabbed onto our tablecloth, and pulled it away like an amateur magician. Everything on the table – our plates, cutlery, my glass of water, Sandra’s glass of white wine – went crashing to the floor.
Then, as if this was his cue, the waiter began to scream.
The other diners started turning around. They looked on silently as the kid whipped his head back in a spray of blood, a chunk of the waiter’s neck clenched between his teeth. Then they started screaming, too.
The kid fastened his mouth over the spouting wound and began to drink. The waiter was lying rigidly in the kid’s arms, his legs sticking straight out, his hand still clutching the tablecloth.
Most of the diners went running for the door. They didn’t have the waiters’ skill of manoeuvring around the tables, and a few people tripped, fell, and were trampled by those herding behind them. A few remained seated and continued to watch. Their eyes had the glossy sheen of people in severe shock. Sandra’s eyes were the same. She was sitting stock-still in her chair, making a sound somewhere between a scream and a gasp. “Guh. Guh. Guh.”
“Yeah, guh,” I muttered, and stood up.
The waiter’s spastic twitches slowed down, then stopped. The kid unclamped his mouth and licked the film of blood off his lips. He lowered his arms and the waiter dropped limply to the floor. He surveyed the room with the glazed eyes of one who has just enjoyed an exquisite meal.
I reached instinctively for my gun, then remembered I wasn’t wearing it. One shouldn’t come armed to lunch with one’s ex-wife. I think Confucius said that.
I looked around for something I could use as a weapon. The kid was looking around, too, but for something else. He found it and whipped out his arm, grabbing hold of one of the patrons still sitting in stunned surprise. In a flash of movement that was almost too fast to track, his head tilted to the side and darted forward at a deadly, questing angle. The woman’s eyes flew open and she began to howl.
It was all happening too fast. In moments of extreme panic things were supposed to move in slow motion. But not now, not here. I felt like I was having one of those nightmares where you’re completely powerless to do anything except stand and watch. I looked over my shoulder at the early afternoon sunlight pouring in through the wide front window.
It didn’t make any sense. No, it was more than that. It was impossible. The kid should have been dust in the wind. Maybe we didn’t know as much about them as we thought we did.
I decided to worry about all that later on. I reached around, picked up my chair, and advanced on the kid.
He didn’t take any notice of me. He was hunched over the woman, as if he had swept her off her feet for a kiss, except his mouth was clamped on her neck instead of her lips. His eyes were rolled back in his head like a shark’s and his mouth was making horrible slurping sounds. I raised the chair high and brought it down on his arched back. It shattered and the kid went on drinking.
I grabbed the kid’s arm. It was rail-thin but felt strong as an iron bar. I tried to pull him off the girl and he flicked me away like a bothersome insect. It was a brusque, offhand gesture, but it sent me flying across the restaurant. I landed next to a table occupied by another lone diner, a grizzled old man dressed in black with a white collar around his neck. I stood up shakily, gripping his shoulder for support.
“Little help, Father?”
The old man shook his head frantically. “I... I’m not a real priest,” he stammered. “I just play one on TV.”
“Right.”
As I resumed my search for a weapon, a heavyset man with a ponytail clipped my shoulder and sent me spinning to the ground. From this new vantag
e point, I spied the broken leg of my chair. I picked it up, then picked myself up. I touched the pad of my thumb to the splintered tip of the chair leg. It would do.
I moved stealthily behind the kid, but I needn’t have bothered. He was as lost in the hunger-bliss with the woman as he had been with the waiter. The lower half of his face was awash in blood. It dripped off his chin in a lurid stream. His eyes had turned a dark, eldritch red. It was like staring through the isinglass portal of a blast furnace.
Being married to an actress for seven years, I found we had unconsciously taken on certain types of movie-cliché behaviour. Sandra, for example, had become a professional door-slammer. At the conclusion of particularly scathing arguments – which became more frequent as our marriage sank progressively deeper into the toilet – she would leave the room in a flourish, punctuating her exit by slamming the door, some door, any door. One time, when we were fighting outside on the patio, she stormed back into the house through the sliding glass door, which was very heavy and near-impossible to slam. So she threw a chair through it instead.
My own movie-cliché habit was the witty final remark. Famous last words, they’re sometimes called. Before Sandra would make her inevitable door-slamming exit, I would call after her with some fiery retort such as, “Nice talking to you, sweet pea!” or “I see those anger management classes are helping!” Not exactly David Mamet dialogue, I know, but then I’m a private eye, not a writer.
Standing over the kid with the broken chair leg, I couldn’t think of anything clever to say. “Here’s your dessert!” came to me later on, but at that moment my mind was as empty as my chequing account. So I just raised my improvised stake and brought it down on a spot between the kid’s straining shoulder blades. I drove down with all the strength that fear and adrenalin had given me. The chair leg went into the kid’s back with a horrible, meaty punching sound. It came out his chest in an eruption of blood that sprayed the unmoving body of the woman in his arms. The kid immediately dropped her and made frantic, scrabbling attempts at pulling the stake out, but he couldn’t reach it. In a panic, he tripped over the prone foot of the dead waiter and went stumbling backward. He landed flat on his back, and the stake exploded out of his chest in a volcanic gush of blood. His arms and legs quivered madly, and for a moment he looked like a giant insect that had been pinned alive to a piece of corkboard. Then his movements stilled and he lay as motionless as his victims.
I went over and stood by Sandra. She rose shakily, leaning on me for support.
“I see you still know how to show a girl a good time,” she said in an eerily calm voice. Then she doubled over and heaved up her lunch. I turned away, and a moment later I heard the tock-tock of Sandra’s heels as she left the restaurant.
I waited for the door slam, but it never came.