Sinister Sentiments (2 page)

My cheeks felt warmer now that I was dry.

“She said you were handsome,” I said with a chuckle.

The Maybe Man laughed back, waving a hand at me.

“I suppose that appealed to you.”

It didn’t sound like a question, so I sat and waited. The Maybe Man drummed his long fingers on the table, where they danced like white flames in the sharp lamplight. After a moment, most of his fingers stopped moving, leaving only the index finger on his right hand, which he suddenly pointed at me. His small teeth were bright as he gave me a huge smile.

“I have it,” he said with evident glee. “How about a fake painting at the National Gallery? You can expose a forgery ring worth millions.”

My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to grab his hands and plead my thanks to him, but I refrained. He didn’t look like the sort of man you could touch, if indeed he was a man at all.

“That’s amazing,” I sighed, relief washing over me. “Is it true though?”

“It will be, by the time you get there tomorrow,” he promised me. “Just show up and let events take their course.”

I nodded, my mouth open and unwilling to close. I was in a stupor, bowled over by the heat of his cunning smile and the light bursting in his black eyes. They were supernovas now, small but unfathomably deep. He had power. Soon I would too.

“What do I have to do?” I asked, leaning forward so far that I almost fell out of my seat. My hands gripped the edge of the table for balance.

“Nothing much,” the Maybe Man answered. “You simply have to recommend my services to another person in need within the next six months.”

I almost laughed out loud.

“That’s it?” I said.

“That’s it.”

I rubbed my palms together for one small moment, then held out my hand. I watched it waiting there, trembling in the spotlight over the tacky table.

“I’m in,” I prompted, “you’ve got a deal.”

The Maybe Man rose from his chair, his height exaggerated by the shadow he cast on the aquarium wall behind him. The fish in the tank shot out of his shape, searching for light.

“That’s not how we seal it,” he said.

My smile fell away, but I sat and waited, my useless hand sinking slowly into my lap. Two sharp breaths befell my lips before he thrust his hand out and grabbed my forehead. A surge of pain ripped through me where his fingertips connected with my temples and I fell from the chair, writhing with white hot agony. Even after he had broken the contact, I shook in a ball on the coral coloured carpet, my lips foaming and my heart hammering out a violent rhythm.

“I’m sorry about that,” the Maybe Man said somewhere above me. “It’s the only way.”

When the pain died, all I felt was heat. Wild heat ran riot under my skin, attacking me in waves like I was enveloped by a capsizing sun. I stumbled around until I was up on my feet, my fractured gaze fixing sharply on the water in the aquarium tank. Though my skin raged with a fire I couldn’t put out, the sight of the water reduced my frantic sensation to a lower level of torment. I turned just a little to face the Maybe Man, keeping the water in the corner of my eye.

“What have you done to me?” I demanded.

“I have given you that which will attract what you seek,” he explained. “A little of my energy, to make things
happen
for you.”

I gritted my teeth, sweat beading on my brow.

“How long will it last?” I asked.

“Six months,” he answered. I felt the panic rising in my chest again. “Less if you make the recommendation about me before then.”

I swallowed, words clawing up my windpipe like lava over stone.

“And if I don’t make the recommendation?” I added.

The Maybe Man grinned, his eyes aglow.

“Then you burn. You burn until there’s nothing left of you.”

“
I’ll die
?” I asked, my eyes wide and painfully dry. I focused hard on the aquarium again, absorbing the tempting blue of the illuminated water, wanting so desperately to smash the wall and have it wash over me.

“I’m afraid so,” the Maybe Man answered, “but I think six months is more than enough time for you to seek out another desperate soul. Then you’ll have everything you desired and you’ll never see me again.”

“Why?” I said, snapping my head back to look into his obsidian eyes. “Why the fire? Why the burning?
Why
is the deal set like this?”

He grinned at me again; his triumph made my heart blister.

“It’s my punishment,” he explained. “What you feel now is a fraction of what I am bound to experience in this little world of yours. Handing out a share here and there in exchange for my
happenings
… you could say it eases my burden.”

Another glance at the aquarium, and I understood his need to meet only in the rain. I understood his calm and stillness when the freezing water lapped at his skin. The themed room here gave me ample opportunity to calm my own head, it was necessary for me to understand his bargain; his choice of room was far from random. Shirley’s nightly trips to the Ice Bar came back to me with a sickening new perspective. Would she be free now? Had her burning ended in the moment mine began?

“So the sooner I find you someone else to give a share to, the sooner this goes away?”

“Precisely,” the Maybe Man answered.

I burst from the hotel room without a backward glance, not daring to face the compacted space of the elevator to get downstairs. Instead I raced down the stairwell, feeling the rush of cool wind resistance for the briefest moment before it ended too soon. The Chinese woman at the front desk spoke to me, but I caught only a syllable or two before I was out of the doors and back into the storm. The fire receded to only occupy my heart as the icy water sank into my suit.

For the first time in my life, I relished the sideways rain.

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.” – Aldous Huxley

Being Frank

My two grey-green thumbs looked like oversized slugs trying to mate as they twiddled out of my control. Nerves coursed like wildfire in every vein of my gigantic frame, eventually finding their outlet in the bolts that protruded from either side of my neck. I raised a fumbling hand to one of the bolts, finding it hot to the touch. It was never a good sign when my bolts were hot. They tended to spark when I was nervy.

In the opposite corner of the waiting room, there sat a strange young boy. At first I thought the teen was a hunchback, but I soon realised his position was only due to the fact that he was typing away avidly on one of those smartphone things. He was spotty and thin, perhaps only seventeen, but the badge at his hip clearly had the words
Monster Representation: Social Media Division
inscribed on it. He worked in this place. It was likely that his job actively involved staring at that stupid screen all day.

I didn’t understand this new world of technology. In my day, you could do a lot more damage with a good old fashioned rampage than you ever could with an embarrassing viral video or a hacked account and, though I’d tried a few times over the years to become current, I just wasn’t cut out for that kind of game. You can’t teach an old monster new tricks. I rubbed my bolts again in irritation, but suddenly recoiled with a shout.

“Damn it!”

A blast of static electricity shot from the blazing metal straight into my fingers. Nerd Boy didn’t even spare me a glance, but this was how I came to be sucking on my hand like a baby when Meredith opened the door. She looked at me from the archway of her frosted-glass office, offering that kind, patronising smile I had seen her wear so many times before. I knew that she wiped it off with her lipstick at the end of every day, probably supping wine in her comfy home and laughing at the gaggle of poor suckers like me that had passed through her doors that day.

“Frank,” she drawled in that over-kind way. “So great to see you. Why don’t you step right in?”

It wasn’t really a question, because there was no way I’d be waiting in her fluorescent little room at the top of a high-rise if I didn’t have to sit in the chair before her massive, sleek desk. I got to my feet, wobbling a little on standing as I always did, then stepped across the room. The floor vibrated as I walked, slow but strong, towards Meredith. By the time I reached her, she had retreated into her little glass den, leaving the door to hit me before I could catch it in time. Slow reactions weren’t a bonus feature any more for guys like me.

“Have a seat sweetheart,” Meredith cooed.

I did, slamming my over-wide body into her tiny plastic chair. I heard it start to crack beneath me.
Sweetheart.
It was like she didn’t know me at all, even though she’d been my agent for the last twenty years. Meredith settled on the other side of her desk, her makeup cracking around the crows’ feet at her eyes when she smiled. Her blonde hair was cut short in a style too young for her, but her girlish figure was pulling off the rest of her power woman look pretty well. I was two feet taller than her when we stood face to face, yet somehow her presence behind the big black desk made me feel small.

“So Frank,” she began in that drawl again. “How did those birthday parties go that I got for you? The pay was good, right?”

The pay was barely enough to make rent, but it had let my wife take a couple of nights off to visit her mother. That had me in the good books back at the castle, but out in the world, the parties were leaving me cold.

“Can I be honest with you?” I said.

“Honey,” Meredith replied, looking at me under her plucked brows. “You know I’m your friend, don’t you?”

I held back the sigh that would have made the glass reverberate.

“Those birthday gigs were a nightmare,” I began, the grunt audible in my tone. “I mean, who wants Frankenstein for their party at that age? These kids aren’t scared of anything anymore. They were blindfolded and pinning
a tail
on me. What’s that even about?”

Meredith rolled her eyes, like she knew what I meant. She was humouring me, little more, but she was also giving me the green light to keep ranting, and I went for it.

“You know what they wanted me to do?” I said, my huge hands curling in frustration. “They wanted me to shout ‘It’s alive!’. That’s not even my line Meredith! That’s the doctor’s line. I’m pretty sure the little slugs hadn’t even
seen
my movies!”

“A gig’s a gig, sugar,” Meredith said with a shrug. “I’m sorry, but you’ll be lucky to get anything but birthdays ‘til Halloween comes around.”

I felt the stitches in my head crease as my brow began to frown.

“Well, what about that Silver Screen thing you were talking about?” I pressed. “The black tie event?”

Meredith screwed up her rosy mouth, cocking her head to one side for a moment.

“Well… They took Drac for that.”

“Of course they freaking did,” I groused, leaning back in my chair. The plastic gave another ominous creak.

“Now Frank,” Meredith added with a motherly look. “Drac’s going to wear a tux a lot better than you, big fella. I’m not even sure we’d have had one to fit you. And you know how fashion goes these days. Vampires are in right now.”

It seemed to me that vampires were always in. Bela Lugosi had put Drac on the map back in the thirties, and then every decade after him had busted their butts trying to reinvent the wheel, giving him appearance fees and royalties everywhere he went. This new generation were the worst of the lot, turning the blood-drenched undead into sparkling sex objects and getting Drac the biggest bookings at weird and wild events. When Boris Karloff put me out there eighty years ago, I thought Drac and I were both going to do big things. But apparently this world still wasn’t big enough for the both of us, no matter how rapidly the population expanded.

“Hey don’t look at me like that,” Meredith said, like she was perking up a five-year-old at nursery school. “I got your missus some good gigs when the whole Corpse Bride thing was popular.”

“She’s not a corpse bride,” I grumbled. “Corpse Bride’s a zombie flick.”

“But she took the job and you two had a great second honeymoon in Vegas,” Meredith bit back. “You could learn a lot from your wife’s humility.”

“Monsters aren’t supposed to have humility,” I retorted, folding my arms. “We’re supposed to smash up the joint and do whatever the hell we like. Then we do something intrinsically human, get redeemed for our sins and tragically die, leaving the audience in love with us forever.”

Meredith waggled an annoying, manicured finger at me.

“We’ve moved on a little from that plot line nowadays, hon.”

“So what you’re saying is I’m still on the party circuit,” I huffed, desperate to change the track of the disastrous conversation. “Great. Sign me up to be a piñata again. Cash is cash, right?”

“Right…” Meredith mused.

She paused for a long moment that made the hairs on my thick green arms start to stand. The black ones on the left went up faster than the blonde ones on the right. Sometimes I really wished I’d been built with matching parts. I watched my agent intently, feeling my usually hooded brow lift in anticipation as I saw her pick up a pen. She chewed the end of it as she flicked a few pages in her diary. It was clear to me that her eyes weren’t actually reading anything on them.

“The thing is,” she began again, “I’ve got nothing for you this month.”

“Nothing?” I asked.

Meredith nodded. My stomach leapt up my gullet and threatened to choke me.

“But there’s never been just… nothing,” I said.

“Well, now there is.”

In my younger days, I might have picked up her stupid shiny desk and thrown it through the poncy frosted glass that she used to separate herself from lesser beings in the waiting room. Even in middle age, I would have slammed my huge fist on the table and let her precious knick-knacks rattle off and smash to the floor. Now I sat motionless, blank black eyes staring at her, but not really seeing her any more. Had the time really come?

“It’s just that you’re not current,” Meredith said. For the first time, I found a note of contrition in her voice, like she was genuinely sad for me. “You’re old hat now, not even retro enough for pop culture. You know the same thing happened to the Mummy once Brendan Fraser went in a new direction.”

She let out a long sigh, setting her pen down and closing her diary.

“The fact is: nobody cares about monsters anymore.”

It was true. The human-looking creatures, the ones like Drac and the Wolf Man, could pass for sexy, athletic, emotional: all the things that modern humans wanted in their villains. I wasn’t pretty or clever. I was a stumbling, over-strong fool who grunted his lines and had his wife laboratory-built because no-one else in their right mind would have married him.

“I understand,” I said, feeling utterly hollow.

As I tried to rise from my chair, the plastic finally gave out. I smashed hard into the carpet, the throb of pain shooting quickly from the base of my spine straight into my bolts. I heaved and guffawed to get to my clumsy feet, trying desperately to disentangle myself from the plastic shards still caught around my hips. All I could do was thank my maker that the flesh in my cheeks was too dead to flush with embarrassment. Once I was half decent again, I just about managed a glance at Meredith under my overhanging brow.

“Thanks anyway,” I mumbled.

“I’ll call you if something comes up, sweetheart,” she said, moving to get the door.

My head was still hanging low as I came out of her office, until the sight of a perfectly shined pair of shoes caught my view. In their shape I saw my huge green head, even larger from the reflective distortion, and the weight of my old-hat ugliness finally settled in my heart. The shiny shoes tapped impatiently.

“Iz ziz thing yourz?”

The Eastern-European accent forced my head to swing upwards. Count Dracula stood in all his glory before me, spiffed up in a frilly white shirt and sharp black suit. His velvet cape put my faded brown jacket to shame and his face was pristine as porcelain, dark eyes framed by long lashes and arched brows. The good-looking scumbag was watching me with that expression that told me he thought I was slow and clueless, as usual.

“Earth to Frank,” he said. “
Iz ziz thing yourz
?”

He was pointing to my left. I turned, surprised to see a weird little creature sitting in the chair where I’d been waiting before Meredith called me in. He was brown in colour but there was a greenish tinge to him, not unlike my own. He looked like a dog that had been put together from parts of other dogs: one ear was a different size and shape to the other and his paws were all different shades of brown and black. When he saw me, the little mutt wagged his tufty tail, which was held on by thick black stitches. I ran a hand over the stitches on my own wrist.

“He’s not mine,” I said, hoping I was right.

The little creature looked over to the corner, where I was surprised to see the nerdy teen still firmly seated. As before, his eyes were trained hard on his phone, fingers tapping away like the whole world’s welfare depended on him alone. It was of no interest to him whatsoever to see Count Dracula and Frankenstein trading barbs before him. I concluded that I was right about kids not knowing what real monsters were any more.

“Oh
hi
!” Meredith cried happily. She slipped out of her office doorway and went to the dog, patting his little messed up face. “Aren’t you a clever boy?” She turned back to Drac and I with a smile. “This is Weenie. He’s seeking representation, aren’t you cutie? Go right on in and I’ll get the bookings for you to take back to your master.”

The little dog leapt off the chair and landed unsteadily. He wobbled for a moment, then started towards the office, stopping to sniff my feet before he passed me by. Meredith followed him and closed her frosted glass door behind her, leaving me, Drac and the ignorant nerd alone in the waiting area. The moment I chose to look at the vampire’s face, I already wished I hadn’t. He was holding his blood-red lips tight shut as a blast of air tried to force its way through them. His slim shoulders shook violently.

Then, inevitably, the dam of ridicule burst open.

“You’re kidding me!” He guffawed, his eyes watering from the pressure of his laughter. “I knew you vere having a rough time, Frank, but a dog? You’re being replaced by a dog! Ahahahaha!”

That stupid laugh made my bolts burn. It was somewhere in the region of the “Blah, Blah!” noise that Drac made whenever people wanted him to perform on demand. It was an awful sound; at least my grisly moans were still disturbing and spine-chilling, like a monster’s should be. The Count was all about the laughs and the smooth moves these days; he too, it seemed, had forgotten to be scary once in a while. He stopped chuckling eventually, wiping his dark lashes and holding up one impossibly pale palm.

“I’m zorry, I’m zorry,” he choked. He didn’t sound remotely apologetic. “I zhouldn’t laugh. I mean, who knows? Maybe a Frankenstein dog vill put you back on the map too? You could ride his coattailz. Azzuming zombie dogz wear coattailz, of courze.”