The Monster Man of Horror House (19 page)

Khan
hauled himself into the hatchway and filled the Engine Room with the scream so furious
it almost restarted the pistons. If I’d had a breath to lose Khan’s fury would’ve
taken it away, but as it was all I had were white-hot spiders of fear streaking
across my body at the knowledge of what was to come.

But
Khan just wobbled in the hatchway without coming for me. He was hurt and hurt
bad. He’d had to drag himself here by his front claws and it was now that I saw
his hind legs were useless. The damage I’d done
little
Khan had finally put a dent in
big
Khan’s stride. The realisation that I’d condemned this monster
to a lifetime of plundering boats with wheelchair access heartened me just a decimetre,
but it did nothing to help me directly. For even without the use of his legs,
he still had me cornered, and he had a whole nine hours stretching out in front
of him with which to extract his revenge.

Freddy’s
suffering was nothing compared to what I would know.

Khan
crashed his claws into the steel deck between us and hauled himself towards me
for the start of a very long kill.

I
backed into the corner and braced myself for the unbraceable, only to crack my
head on a diesel valve behind. The sharp pain jolted one last idea into my head
so I yanked the rubber hosepipes that connected the engines to our reserve tanks
and spun the little red wheel to spray fuel across the Engine Room. Khan saw
what I was doing and went for me before I could get the cloud ignited, forcing
me to delay the inevitable as I ran around looking for a match.

No
joy; I had not a lighter nor a match nor a bowl of Lumpati’s sweet corn Dhansak
with which to set the place ablaze and all too soon a set of black claws raked
my shoulders to send me crashing into the bulkhead.

“Mother…!”
was one half of my final sentiment, but the rest was stolen when a whoosh of
heat filled the confines thanks to one of the soldering guns on the wall
hitting the deck to toss that missing spark into the fray.

Whhhhhoooopppppppp!!!!!

I
knew I couldn’t escape this, not from a werewolf with a grudge in the blazing
engine room of a ship with its fuel tanks ablaze, my fate was sealed, but if
this was to be my curtain call, at least I’d taken Khan with me. And this
wasn’t my nobility speaking, I was just being a bad loser. Khan was going to
burn. Or possibly drown. Or maybe – if I was lucky – both.

And
I’d at least hastened my own exit from this world too. The fires burned with a ferocity
and I reeled as the skin stripped from my face. My blood boiled and bones
cracked the length and breadth of my body as I squirmed in the heat of the
inferno, but to my dismay I remained horribly lucid throughout, burning to
death and knowing every second of it.

After
an eternity of the indescribable agonies my mind started to a fog and at last I
made peace with my fears, although the pain remained, only much more intense,
tightened in the pit of my stomach like a knotted ball of cramps, the likes of
which I would’ve killed to be free of.

Khan
saw that I wasn’t quite dead and pounced to finish me off, swinging both claws
at me to ravage my carcass before I was too crispy to carve, but he didn’t
manage to land a blow. With lightning reflexes I parried his blows and even
more unbelievably grabbed a hold of his arms so that he couldn't strike me
again. I held him there as he barked at me with a furious thunder before I
realised I could understand what he was saying.

“You
will not rise to challenge me!” he was bellowing, though these weren’t his
actual words, just the underlying meanings behind his savage roars – but
I could understand them all the same. “I will destroy you!”

What
the hell!

I
was genuinely confused.

I
could understand Khan’s roars? I could hold back his colossal strength? I could
climb the winch chains when half dead with only eight fingers? I could walk on
my shattered ankle?

And
I could survive this suffocating inferno?

Of
course, the reason I could do all of these things was obvious, but it simply hadn’t
occurred to me until I saw the hand I was holding Khan's arm with. It was as immense
and as gnarled at Khan’s, grey to the skin and layered in a coat of coarse
hairs with five-inch talons at the end of each of its four remaining digits.

I
too had changed into the beast.

I
too was now one of Khan’s kind.

Khan
himself was clearly having a day to forget and my transformation to stand
square to him was clearly his worst fears realised.

“You
filthy cheese skin, you have no right to these powers. You are not worthy,” he complained,
as if this was chief in my list of concerns. “I am ten-fold your superior! I
have reigned since before you were born!”

I
have to say I’ve known Speak Your Weight machines who could insult a man better
than Khan so I roared into his face to go fuck his mother’s stink-hole –
causing Khan to blink, almost as if to say “there is such a thing as going too
far you know, old chap” – before launching him across the engine room and
into the flames.

The
powers by which I threw Khan away made me feel so tremendous and if I hadn’t stopped
myself I would’ve clattered across the room and ripped his arms from his sides,
cracking his bones and sucking the marrow from their splintered canals. But
something halted me; a voice, deep down within my shackled soul told me to
forget about Khan and worry instead about the reserve tanks and that yellow
curtain of flames which was about to lick the diesel inside.

The
time had finally come for me leave the
SS
Almayer’s Folly
.

And
leave her fast.

Khan
was still scrambling to escape the flames with his useless legs but I had no
such problems, launching myself through the hatchway as if on springs and bounding
along the corridors to burst out onto the boat deck beneath a blood red moon.
The storm had blown itself out and the glare of that great disk charged me with
a strength I could scarcely comprehend.

I’d
never before felt so alive and howled my eternal devotion to the moon’s wondrous
power but a sudden crack from below reminded me of the power 600 gallons of
diesel could unleash when cooked under extreme pressure, so I charged the stern
on all fours and took a running jump over the back of the
Folly
.
 

The
waters rushed up to greet me and all at once I was submerged in their icy
depths, but the cold didn't bother, nor did the thought of what lurked within
these waves; I just swept my limbs through the currents and resurfaced thirty
yards from the ship.

“A
curse on you!” Khan barked at me though the shattered porthole in the side of
the
Folly
. “A curse to follow you from
this day forth, to sit upon your house and tarnish your…”

Unfortunately
I never got to hear the rest of it for at that moment the fuel tanks ignited
and the
Folly
disappeared behind a
blinding flash of light.

Where
once there had been a complete boat, all that remained were two burning ends, and
all that had sat between them rained back down to splash the waters one last
time before joining the
Sumatran Wind
at the bottom of the sea.
 

Which
just left me, all alone in the dark, with not so much as a life vest to cling
to.

I
may have been an inhuman beast of colossal savagery but I still had a mortal
soul. I was still afraid of death and all that the devil held in store for me
so I struck out for shore, swimming due west with a strength that didn’t falter
–

–
for eight long hours.

By
the time the sun peaked over the horizon, I was standing in a mangrove swamp,
shaking salt water from my coat and eating the arse out of a turtle I’d caught flapping
in the surf. Nothing had, nor ever has, tasted as good as that stinking ripe
reptile and I stripped her to the shell, beak, flippers and all, before
slinking off into the jungle to find a tree under which I could rest for a much
needed sleep.

I
was alive.

I
was on land.

And
soon I would be human again.

Now
I just had to get home.

Chapter 5:

Opinion is
divided

“Oh what, so you’re a fucking werewolf now, are you?” Tommy hawed, looking
around my basement in pantomime amusement and snorting derisively. “What a load
a’ bullshit!”

“I
wish it were, kid, I really do. But Khan had it right and I have been carrying
this curse for almost fifty years now,” I shrugged, blowing on the faded embers
of my tobacco and supping on the flavours this released.
 

“What,
so you like, change at night then, when there’s a full moon, an’ all that like?”
Barry asked, his eyes so wide they should've dropped from his sockets by rights
and rolled underneath the sofa to look up at me from the floor agog.

“Sometimes,”
I told him. “Not often these days I’ll admit. It fades with age, but in the
right conditions, when the moon is at its fullest and the blood is pumping, then
yes I do become the beast.”

“Well
I ain’t seen you about,” Farny reckoned.

“And
just as well you haven’t,” I assured him. “I don’t leave this house when I transform,
I lock myself in the basement and wait out the night ripping at the walls. I’ve
built this prison well, to withstand a lot of abuse – and noise,” I
reminded them, “because if I ever got out, God help all those that crossed my
path.”

I
let that one hang in the air, like the silvery grey plumes from my old shag,
before nodding in the direction of the basement door and the fresh lacerations
which it adorned.

“What,
you did those when you were a werewolf?” Ginger said, his face a collage of
horror and fascination. And acne.

I
nodded, a stern, yet approving look of a man confirming a secret.

“Did
he fuck!” Tommy countered. “He probably did them getting this sofa down here.”

“Those
aren’t sofa leg scratches, sonny,” I reassured him. “Go and take a butcher’s if
you like.”

Tommy
narrowed his eyes contemptuously and refused to rise, as if by doing so would
somehow admit his gullibility. But Barry and Ginger on the other hand had no
such qualms and were over there in a flash, tracing their fingers along the parallel
three foot long scars that ran the length of the reinforced steel plating and
reporting back that they did indeed appear to have been made by something other
than furniture (that said, Tommy had been right about one thing, my sofa had
been a right vicious bastard to get down here).

“There’s
only three scratches to this one,” Ginger observed, picking out a particularly
long set of lines that ran from right to left.

“And
there are only three fingers on this here hand,” I explained, holding up my
right hand for them all to see.

Barry,
Ginger and even Farny all gasped at the sight, but Tommy just rolled his eyes.

“Is
that where Khan shot you in the gunfight?” Barry asked.

“It
is. It never grew back, not even when I change. Khan had that much of me at
least.”

“This
is such bullshit!” Tommy squealed, unable to stand it any longer. “He probably
did that at work or picking his nose or something.”

“But
the scratches…” Ginger pointed.

“He’s
planned this, don’t you see. He did them himself and he’s trying to shit us up.
He’s just a stinking scarecrow with a load of old bullshit stories, that’s
all.” But Tommy didn’t have the ears of the basement, which is understandable really.
I was offering these boys serial killers and werewolves while all Tommy was
offering them was a liar. And what self-respecting twelve-year-old didn’t want
to believe in werewolves?

“He
said it himself,” Tommy continued to rally when he saw he wasn’t winning the argument,
“he was a hundred miles out to sea with no idea where he was, but somehow he
just manages to swim back to
facking
shore, just like that. It’s all bullshit.”

“You’re
right,” I confirmed. “I was a hundred miles off shore with no idea where I was
– at least I was when I was human. But as the beast, I have senses a
bloodhound can only dream about. It’s why we go on such rampages, you know, the
smell of the meat drives us insane with hunger. But it also meant I could smell
land from many miles away, so I knew which way to swim. That first morning I
made it to a small island, the first of a chain of uninhabited islands that
straddled the East Sea so I was all right. Then, I spent the next two nights in
the water swimming from island to island until I eventually reached the
mainland, just south of Dà Nang.”

“Where’s
Dà Nang?” Ginger asked.

“It’s
in Vietnam,” I educated them.

“You
know, like in the films,” Farny outlined further.

“Er,
yeah, that’s it,” I kind of agreed. “Only this weren’t no film, it was a real
war, with soldiers and casualties and terrible battles. Awful it was.”