Ahead there are boys playing cricket on an oval, clad in white uniforms with green, baggy caps, and they wave as he crosses overhead. One boy whoops and runs in the same direction, spinning his hat in the air.
The Cape smiles and salutes.
His path takes him along a quiet country highway framed by trees with spring blossoms, a lake on the right, and gently sloping fields of wheat with the odd golden haystack to the left. It’s difficult to imagine anywhere more beautiful.
Down on the road, cruising at slower speed is a shiny burgundy-coloured jalopy without a roof. The couple on the front bench seat smile contentedly at one another as the Cape overtakes, sight unseen, only a few feet above. Their four-year-old daughter in the back, clutching a teddy bear, is more observant. She notices his passing shadow, looks heavenward, and beams. Then she’s also waving frantically.
God, he loves these people.
There’s a loud crack from somewhere nearby, followed rapidly by two more, and the noise strikes him as familiar — gunshots! — just as his cape rips. This throws out its carefully tuned aerodynamics, and before he knows it the masked man is spiralling across space, anorak awry.
Panic is pointless. He understands this.
He calms his mind, which goes some way toward smothering the nausea of the spin. What would Celsius, the winner, do in a situation like this? he asks himself.
Straight after, the Cape realizes he’s fated to follow in Fahrenheit’s footsteps — the loser’s. His tumble is hardly manageable, and there’s now an obstacle to consider: a huge roadside billboard, the only one for miles, straight ahead of this errant flight path.
Impact will occur in just seconds, no matter what manoeuvre he attempts, and at this speed there can be only one outcome.
There’s a massive face he knows all too well, plastered up there on the twenty foot by sixty foot advertisement, and he’s headed right for a big ‘O’ on the forehead.
No choice, the Cape decides quickly and fires off “Cool McCool” — to zero effect. One second before he rams the billboard, the masked man has time for one more word: “Shit.”
This is another prologue, the one I did use to commence my novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude. It was a late inclusion, since the book was supposed to open with Chapter 1 (Wolram’s wandering around the no-man’s land that is the apparent afterlife), but I felt the novel needed a swift kick to open proceedings — and grabbed a spot I liked (involving murder) later on in the story.
Swing Time
It’s swing time, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers must be cooling their heels elsewhere.
In all honesty, I can’t distinguish swing from boogie-woogie—styles my grandparents would be better equipped to judge. Though not wearing a tuxedo to match the music, I am blessed with a suave smoking jacket.
Anyhow, this jazz-inflected number continues to blare, doing seventy-eight rpm on brittle shellac, something warbled in Japanese about people having fun just by singing the zany song.
The whole package is strung together in a crackly, mono din that originates from a gramophone, housed in a lacquered wooden casket on the other side of the room.
Splayed on the floor before the music box lays a half-naked man, inert.
You’ll find me propped up on the bed. It boasts a hard, uncomfortable mattress and the quilts are awry, but who would fret, seated next to a young, exquisite geisha?
Not that she doesn’t have flaws.
This girl bears smudged makeup, a vivid red streak (blood) on one white cheek, and she’s wrapped in a twisted, half-open kimono that’s fallen off her shoulder.
I glimpse an ample amount of small, pale breast, as I reach over to light the cigarette she has pinioned between her teeth. Eyes off, you ancient rotter.
It’s damnably humid in this small, Spartan closet, and both of us are sweating. The temperature is something I doubt the fellow on the floor needs to concern himself with.
‘He’s dead?’ I pipe up, in a blustering voice that startles me.
‘As a doornail,’ the woman says, unruffled, and then she exhales a plume of smoke toward the ceiling.
‘So. What shall we do now?’
‘I have no idea about you, but I’m enjoying the song and this cigarette.’
‘You don’t mind sharing them with a man you just murdered?’
‘Well, I’d say he’s far more functional in this state.’
She places her bare feet on the corpse’s back, wriggles her toes, and then leans back to relax. There’s a smirk on her cherubic mouth.
‘That’s better. Who needs a footstool?’
PART 2: ROY & SUZIE
Just so we’re straight, Roy Scherer is a smidgeon me. And not. Straight enough?
The guy is far more gung-ho and proactive in diabolical situations, ones in which I’d probably curl up in a corner and cry. We share a certain amount of cynicism, though he takes his to extremes, and I’m a lot nicer than Roy. I like to think I am, anyway.
Where we meet is in a lack of love for zombies.
I don’t know what it is, but I never managed a soft spot for brain-eating fiends lurching about above ground. When it came to horror, I much prefer my terrifying aliens — The Thing from Another World still gets to me — and vampires, so long as these babies are free of the vices of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer.
Which is one of the reasons that I approached the zombie genre when Nigel Bird and Chris Rhatigan invited me early on in 2012 to pen my first published “horror” story for their anthology Pulp Ink 2.
At the time I was researching the great Peter Lorre, an idea I had for a character that is part homage in my novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude —which I was writing at the time — and otherwise because Lorre reminds me of a Polish mate of mine, Mateusz Sikora, an artist with whom I started a record label (IF?) years ago.
Lorre, for me, is one of the highlights in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, and he rocks his brief scenes in Casablanca.
Understandably there is a fair amount of cross-pollination between this story and One Hundred Years, but wasn’t I talking up zombies?
In retrospect, the yarn is a cop out. The solitary zombie in my Pulp Ink 2 story ends up not being a zombie at all, but someone suffering from Lazarus syndrome — actually a real enigma; look it up on Wikipedia.
For the story I decided to conjure up two new characters, the hard-bitten, grouchy Roy Scherer I’ve already mentioned, and his younger, bookish-yet-dizzy partner in supermundane investigations, Suzie Miller.
They came out of some recess of my brain that’d lapped up odd-couple interaction from the likes of, well, The Odd Couple, along with the ‘70s Rock Hudson/Susan Saint James vehicle McMillan & Wife (I even pinched their real birth-names for the characters — shhh) and more obvious recent telly offerings Moonlighting and Remington Steele. I’d be remiss not to add that the champagne bubbles of The Thin Man are tossed about in there as well.
Obviously Roy and Suzie clicked for me—straight after the Pulp Ink 2 story, I wrote two others (and a prequel) featuring the bickering, constantly irritated duo. I’m thinking more.
Lazarus Slept
“A zombie. I hate zombies.”
I leaned back against the barn wall. This job was going to be the death of me. The job, or my partner, Suzie, and I use the term in its loosest sense.
“Actually, I don’t think he qualifies as a zombie, per se.”
There she was, on tiptoes, right in my ear. Why on earth she had to tag along, I never understood. I operated better alone — her old man knew that. Why couldn’t this blonde busybody get the message? I glanced at her. “What?”
“More a relative of Lazarus, you know? The guy that was reanimated by Jesus Christ.”
“No, I don’t know. Are you going to give me another diatribe in the middle of a scene?”
“Well, I think it’s important in our business to be accurate. If we went around claiming succubae were incubae, or silver bullets stopped vampires, well, we
wouldn’t be in business all that long, y’know?”
“Our business? My business.”
“Er — who pays the bills, Roy?”
I could feel the acid steeping in my gut. The stuff was brewing down there in oak barrels aplenty. “Not now, okay? Timing.” I pushed both index fingers in my ears.
It was right then that our new playmate Lazarus decided to round the corner, so I unplugged, settled my Smith & Wesson Model 10 in the crook of the guy’s neck, and fired off a single shot. I didn’t want to waste bullets — no need to be further still in Suzie’s clutching debt. The man reeled backwards and lay on the ground, inert.
“Too easy. Lazarus didn’t rise twice, did he?”
“Don’t think so. Then again, I’ve never actually read the book, I just heard about it.”
“You’re feeding me second-hand yarns? So much for accuracy. Jeez.” I stepped slowly over to the body. Even in the crap half-light, just before dawn, I could see it was twitching. “Fuckit. He’s not dead.”
“Oh, Christ!”
“Will you stop bringing him into it?”
“All right, all right. What should we do? Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart just in case?”
“He’s not Bela Lugosi. What is this fixation with vampires?”
The man groaned down there on the ground, and then slowly sat up, clutching his throat, and placing his wobbly head between his knees. I considered popping off another round, but then decided otherwise. Suzie and I stood awkwardly, waiting for something.
“You all right, mister?” Suzie finally asked.
“Look what you did to my neck,” the man cried out between splayed legs. I was impressed he could talk at all. Definitely wasn’t a zombie. “You…you bungled it! You and your stupid attempt to kill me!”
Suzie shifted from one sneaker to another. “Not me,” my rock-solid partner assured him.
“Coward,” I muttered.
She frowned over the rim of her bookish glasses, but the expression had little room to stand on such a damnably young face. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble? I stick my neck out for nobody. Sorry, no offence.”
“None taken,” Lazarus said in a rasping treble.
“That’s right, blame me.” I blew out loudly. “Look, sorry, but we’re here because we got a job to do, a client to make happy.”
“Who—?”
“Well, now, that wouldn’t be very professional, handing out names like speeding tickets. Anyway, this client of ours — who’ll stay nameless — reported a fiend mutilating his flock. Local police reckoned it was a feral dog or cat, but said farmer suspected otherwise, and then he spotted someone on two legs. Given it’s the middle of the night and you just stuffed your face with some defenceless lamb, we’d be excused for thinking you were the culprit.” The speech was a longer one than I usually made. It exhausted me.
At that, Lazarus cried.
Yes, he bawled. Suzie and I looked at one another. Aside from his blubbering there was an ungainly silence. The girl handed him a tissue, but I broke the peace first.
“Well, this is comical. What now?”
“Apologize?” my partner asked. Of course.
“Apologize?”
“You could try. I’m not sure I can stand much more of this. It’s all a bit pathetic, really.”
“The devil, you say? I’m not going to apologize — don’t you remember why we’re here and what this guy just did? You’re the stickler for professionalism. What do we tell our client? ‘We found your bogeyman, and we shot the bastard, but then he sobbed a lot, we had a change of mind, and we kissed and made up’?”
“Well, that’s a no-brainer. Who’s going to hire people who sympathize with their cases?”
Lazarus held up his hand. “Will you two be quiet? You’re giving me a splitting headache, and I’m already in enough pain.”
“Sorry, I haven’t domesticated her yet.”
“Fat chance.” The girl crossed her arms and looked away.
“Who are you people?”
On cue, like she’d been desperately awaiting the invitation, Suzie’s body unravelled and she handed him the baby blue business card. “Scherer and Miller, Investigators of the Paranormal and Supermundane,” she said by rote.
Lazarus looked up. It was tough to mark his age — late fifties? — before he died. His face was a bloated, partially fermented stew that looked to me a lot like dead actor Peter Lorre, but put that down to too many late nights with a bottle of rye and a fistful of American International flicks for company.
“Who’s Scherer?” he inquired, in goddamned polite fashion.
“That would be me,” I said.
“So you’re Miller?”
“Er, no. That would be —was — my dad. I’m Suzie”
Lazarus leaned over and vomited up a pool of gunk, most of it blood, but I also spotted bits and pieces of sheep.
“You do know raw lamb is prone to parasites?” Suzie admonished him. “You ought to be more careful.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help myself,” Lazarus bawled. He was blubbering again, a grown ghoul shedding tears. This was ridiculous.
“Well, next time. Just for the record, are you craving brains?” Suzie pushed the frames back up her maddeningly cute button nose, and then conjured up a pad and pencil. “I want to be sure we’re dealing here with Lazarus syndrome, or if it’s localized zombiefication.”
“What the hell does it matter? Ever since I woke up in that awful, awful morgue, somehow alive again, I’ve been ravenous, craving meat, hungry, desperate, mad, frantic—”
One more point-blank thirty-eight special, this time in his left eye, killed that appetite. “My, my, my! Such a lot of guts around town and so few brains.”
“Ew,” Suzie said.
“I think we can mark down this case as closed.”
“My dad would’ve been more prudent about it.”
“Your old man’s dead.”
“Even so, you don’t think that was bit gung-ho? Maybe we could’ve helped out the poor man, y’know?”
“We’re not in the business of helping these spooks. Count your blessings — at least we didn’t have to waste any silverware. Can we go back to the office now? I’m dying for something to eat.”
The title of Adam’s Ribs was oddly inspired by a childhood memory from one episode of M*A*S*H (according to Wikipedia it’s the eleventh in the third season, and fifty-ninth overall) in which Hawkeye is craving ribs from a restaurant of the same name back in Chicago.
I don’t know what this has to do with vampires, the theme of the story, but I guess it was a six-degrees-of-separation moment: vampire, stake, point at ribcage, clutch for something interesting as a title from the recesses of the rancid brain, conjure up M*A*S*H. Et voilà.
This one was put together in 2012 for Andrew Hudson’s horror-related anthology Somewhere in the Shadows, and was the second outing for Roy & Suzie.
Adam’s Ribs
Now for the messy part, the part where I usually end up with splinters or a blister from gripping the bugger too hard.
I placed the stake on the chest just so, where the heart’s supposed to be. In the early days I used to bring an anatomy diagram with me, just to make sure I got it right. You really don’t want to get it wrong. These spooks wake up grumpy, and they’re likely to take out their crankiness on the nearest bystander — that’s right, you with the silly wooden tent peg in your hand.
Having positioned the thing, I lifted up the mallet, prepared to strike, and—
“Wait! Wait a moment!”
—Missed the stake completely. I heard a couple of ribs break instead. Shit.
Suzie stuck her head into my point of view, between me and the corpse with the busted-up bones. “Are you one hundred percent positive this guy is a vampire?” she asked me in that cloying, up-and-down tone of hers that drives me to distraction. It’s like conversing with a verbal yoyo.
“Suzie, move. Now. No time for safety ch
ecks.”
“Well, I don’t know, I think we ought to create the time, y’know, just to be sure? Lawsuits and all. We don’t want to do this, and then find out after that we nailed the wrong man. Cadaver. Vampire…er — you know what I mean.”
“I do. And I think we can skip the litmus test, thanks to you.”
“Really?” The giddy girl actually looked happy. “Why?”
A pair of hands rounded her neck from behind, and started to squeeze — hard. Something I’d dreamed about doing over the past six months. Suzie’s glasses fell to the floor as she went in the other direction, up in the air. She was gasping, wheezing, and still trying to talk. God, shut up.
For dramatic effect, the ghoul lifted her further — which was when Suzie gripped the chandelier.
That’s the problem with vampires.
They live so long they get grand notions about themselves, move from holes in the ground into crypts with marble slabs, and on into houses, and then — if they live a few centuries like this boy — migrate up to mansions with crystal chandeliers stuck to the ceiling.
The same very thing Suzie was hanging onto now for dear life, frustrating the vampire, since he was still holding her aloft and couldn’t exactly lob her across the room when she had a half-decent grip on something.
Meanwhile, he looked straight down at me with my stick, a wide-open space between us inviting another go at his heart.
Not such a bright boy, this one. He should’ve just let the girl go. Instead, he stood there with his hands in the air, his mouth wide open with surprise. I should’ve guessed this’d be an easy round — the vampire dressed in duds from the ‘80s, he still owned a CD collection, and I could imagine he indulged in moonwalking across dance floors in front of horrified clubbers.
“Roy!” I heard Suzie shout.
Damn — I thought the vampire was still arresting her vocal cords. “You can hold her tighter,” I hissed at the ghoul in a low voice. “Help me out here.”