Blood Lite II: Overbite (4 page)

Treatment

J. A. KONRATH

“It all goes back to the time I was bitten by that werewolf.”

Dr. Booster’s pencil paused for a moment on his notepad, having only written a
W
.

“A werewolf?”

Tyler nodded. Booster appraised the teenager: pimples, lanky, hair a bit too long for the current style. The product of a well-to-do suburban couple.

“This is the reason your grades have gone down?”

“Yeah. Instead of studying at night, I roam the neighborhood, eating squirrels.”

“I see. And how do squirrels taste, Tyler?”

“They go down dry.”

Booster wrote “active imagination” on his pad.

“What makes you say you were bitten by a werewolf?”

“Because I was.”

“When did this happen?”

Tyler scratched at the pubescent hairs on his chin. “Two weeks ago. I was out at night, burying this body . . .”

“Burying a body?”

The boy nodded.

“Tyler, for therapy to work, we have to be honest with each other.”

“I’m being honest, Dr. Booster.”

Booster made his mouth into a tight line and wrote “uncooperative” on his pad.

“Fine, Tyler. Whose body were you burying?”

“It was Crazy Harold. He was a wino that hung out in the alley behind the liquor store on Kedzie.”

“And why were you burying him?”

Tyler furrowed his brow. “I had to get rid of it. I didn’t think digging a grave would be necessary. I thought they disintegrated after getting a stake in the heart.”

Booster frowned. “Crazy Harold was a vampire?”

Tyler shifted on the couch to look at him. “You knew? Shouldn’t they turn into dust when you kill them?”

Booster glanced at the diplomas on his wall and sighed.

“So you’re saying you hammered a stake into Crazy Harold—”

“It was actually a broken broom handle.”

“—and then buried him.”

“In the field behind the house. And just when I finished, that’s when the werewolf got me.”

Tyler lifted his right leg and hiked up his pants. Above the sock was a raised pink scar, squiggly like an earthworm.

“That’s the bite mark?”

Tyler nodded.

“It looks old, Tyler.”

“It healed fast.”

“Your mother told me you got that scar when you were nine years old. You fell off your bike.”

Tyler blinked, then rolled his pants leg back down.

“Mom’s full of shit.”

Booster wrote “animosity toward mother” on his pad.

“Why do you say that, Tyler? Your mother is the one who recommended therapy, isn’t she? It seems as if she wants to help.”

“She’s not my real mother. Her and Dad were replaced by aliens.”

“Aliens?”

“They killed my parents, replaced them with duplicates. They look and sound the same, but they’re actually from another planet. I caught them, once, in their bedroom.”

Booster raised an eyebrow. “Making love?”

“Contacting the mother ship. They’re planning a full-scale invasion of earth. But I thought you wanted to know about the werewolf.”

Booster pursed his lips. WWFD? He appealed to the picture of Sigmund hanging above the fireplace. The picture offered no answers.

“Tyler, with your consent, I’d like to try some hypnotherapy. Have you ever been hypnotized?”

Tyler shook his head. Booster dimmed the lights and sat alongside the couch. He held his pencil in front of Tyler’s face at eye level.

“Take a deep breath, then let it out. Focus on the pencil . . .”

It took a few minutes to bring Tyler to a state of susceptible relaxation.

“Can you hear me, Tyler?”

“Yes.”

The boy’s jaw was slack, and a thin line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth. Booster was surprised at the child’s halitosis—perhaps he had been eating squirrels after all.

“I’d like you to go back to two weeks ago. When you were burying Crazy Harold.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“It’s cold. There are a lot of rocks in the dirt, and the shovel won’t go in very far.”

Booster used his penlight to check Tyler’s pupils. Slow response. The child was under.

“What were you digging?”

“Grave. For the vampire.”

Booster frowned. He’d studied cases of patients lying under hypnosis, but had never encountered one in person.

“What about the werewolf?”

“Came out of the field. It was big, had red eyes, walked on two legs.”

“And it bit you?”

“Yeah. I thought it was going to kill me, but Runs Like Stallion saved me.”

“Runs Like Stallion?”

“He’s a ghost. He used to be a Sioux brave. The field is an old Indian burial ground.”

Booster decided he’d had enough. He wrote “treatment” in his notebook and went over to his desk, unlocking the top drawer. The metallic case practically leaped up at him. He took it over to Tyler.

“Tyler, your parents are tired of these stories.”

“My parents are dead.”

“No, Tyler. They aren’t dead. They care about you. That’s why they brought you to me.”

Booster opened the case. The gnerlock blinked its three eyes and crawled into Booster’s hand. It would enter Tyler’s mouth and burrow up into his brain, taking over his body. Tyler was a tad bit young, and the gnerlock would be cramped living in the boy’s skull, but psychiatry wasn’t a perfect science.

“Soon, it will all be better. You’ll have no more worries. You’re going to be a host, Tyler, for the new dominant species on this planet. Are you scared?”

“No.”

“Open your mouth, Tyler.”

Tyler stretched his mouth wide. Wider than humanly possible. And Booster was alarmed to see it was crammed with sharp teeth.

The gnerlock nesting in the doctor’s brain popped out through his neck after the wolf decapitated the host body. Its eleven legs beelined for the door, antennae waving hysterically, telepathically cursing that quack, Freud.

Halfway there, a ghostly moccasin came down on the alien’s oblong head, smashing it into the carpeting.

Runs Like Stallion gave the wolf a thumbs-up, but Tyler was already leaping out the window, vulpine eyes locked on a juicy squirrel in the grass below.

Dead Clown Séance

CHRISTOPHER WELCH

Clem’s mobile home was strewn with shadows. The sole luminescence came from four candles centered on the table. The flames stretched upward as their amber brightness reflected off the clowns’ pasty faces.

Clem, Toodles, Oswald Osgood, and Beeps held hands, forming a circle around the tapers. The poof-ball at the peak of Clem’s conical hat was almost invisible in the surrounding darkness. Toodles tilted her head back so her frizzy green hair would not catch the flames. Oswald’s tramp clothing and hobo makeup made him appear more frightened than he felt. Beeps had placed his bicycle horn on the table within easy reach.

Oswald wanted to say
If Lon Chaney had seen us by candlelight first, he might have altered his famous comment about clowns in moonlight
, but he kept that thought to himself.

Clem was a tad apprehensive about conducting another séance. Last time, his neighbor Andrei filed a noise complaint with the neighborhood association. Clem took a deep breath. He began the séance.

“We call you, spirits of the dead,” Clem concentrated his mind’s eye. “We call to the departed souls from this mortal world. Come now. Come!”

The flames swayed as a mysterious breeze developed inside the blackened mobile home.

“Are you there, Mr. Flonkers? Come to us. Come to us now!”

The flames lapped as the mystic wind escalated. The house trailer wobbled. Shadows trembled around the four clowns. Loose debris fluttered about as the wind intensified—bits of cellophane, used Post-it notes, Slurpee receipts from 7-Eleven, hamburger wrappers. Clowns love hamburgers. And Slurpees.

“Come, Mr. Flonkers! Come to us!” they shouted in unison over the supernatural gale, except for Beeps, who honked his horn.

Beep-Beep.

The wind died quickly as pale smoke rose from the burning wicks. The smoke twisted into shapes, the shapes curled into a form, and the form became a figure. Above the candles, floating in a vaporous cloak, the ghost they summoned manifested itself.

Mr. Flonkers wore a maroon bowler hat with a daisy in the band and an oversized scarlet ascot. He had pinpricks of white light in otherwise hollow eyes. His countenance was jovial with a red-painted grin and skull-white face.

“Who calls me?” Mr. Flonkers’s voice reverberated as if it emanated from the bottom of a well.

“We need your help.”

“Toodles, dear, is that you?” Mr. Flonkers asked.

“Yes, it is. Nice to see you again.”

Mr. Flonkers removed his hat in greeting. “Likewise.”

The spirit assessed her green frizz, her emerald eye shadow that matched her lipstick, and her white face. She wore a jade-and-black checkered unitard over her lithe body. “You’re as beautiful as I remember.”

Beep-Beep.

Mr. Flonkers moved towards Beeps. The vapor twisted with his movement. “You’re here too, my loquacious friend?”

Beep-Beep.

“Oswald as well?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“How did you summon me from the Big Top in the Sky?”

“That’s my doing,” Clem said.

The spirit turned and the smoke curled once more.

“Clem, my boy!” Mr. Flonkers said with affection. “Four of the finest apprentices of the Mr. Flonkers Clown Alley, present and accounted for. Again, how did you summon me?”

“My gypsy heritage,” Clem said. “My clairvoyant parents were fortune-tellers and psychic readers in the circus. I never turned professional, much to my parents’ dismay. After numerous arguments about my career choice, I ran away from home and joined the other part of the circus. My clairvoyance is still active, though.”

“I see.” The ghost nodded.

“We summoned you, sir, for a specific reason. We need help, and as our mentor—our
departed
mentor—you’re uniquely qualified to help.”

Beep-Beep.

“What’s the situation?”

“Do you recall Otis Oddbody?” Clem asked.

“Of course,” Mr. Flonkers said. “I worked with him in the early days, before he formed his own alley.”

“Tragedy has struck the Oddbody Alley, and that tragedy has mutated into an unspeakable horror.”

“What do you mean?”

“Show him,” Oswald said.

“Look into my mind’s eye.”

Mr. Flonkers’s pinprick white pupils gazed into Clem’s eyes as Clem opened a wider psychic connection with the spirit. Mr. Flonkers watched everything unfold in Clem’s clairvoyant mind as if he were sitting in a cinema.

“This is what I saw two months ago.”

All twelve professional and apprentice members of the Otis Oddbody Clown Alley—Poco, Mooch, Cindy Candy, Big Galoot, Joey Jelly, Smarty Artie, Ms. Pinkyfoot, Choo-Choo, Poundfool, Midge the Dwarf, Benny Buzzy, and Sir Donald Dollarshort, Esq.—saw Otis’s neon yellow and purple-polka-dot 1968 Volkswagen Beetle pull up to the tent.

“Road trip!” Otis yelled from the driver’s seat.

The twelve clowns loaded themselves in the same rehearsed formation they’d often performed under the Big Top. Their opening bit was to have Otis drive to the Center Ring, and then all thirteen, including Otis, exited the car one at a time—flopping, tripping, somersaulting and cartwheeling; Poco even came out on stilts, wearing a gray top hat, coattails, and oversized bow tie—to much audience laughter and amazement.

Otis explained their destination on the way.

“We’re going to the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin,” he said. “That’s where the five original Ringling brothers started everything. From there, we’re going to Milwaukee and we’re marching in the Great Circus Parade.”

The pronouncement was met with cheers and applause.

“But we’re taking a side trip before the parade,” Otis said. “This is a personal pilgrimage. We’re going to visit Uncle Uther, who lives in Bark Creek. It’s a small town in rural Jefferson County west of Milwaukee. Uncle Uther performed for eighty years, and now he’s in assisted living at an old clowns’ home. I first saw him when my father took me to a Shriner’s Circus forty years ago and his performance inspired me to become a clown. He had this hysterical bit with a handshake buzzer. I saw him perform many times, and that bit
always
cracked me up. I want to pay my respects in person, clown to clown.”

The museum was fun for everyone and surprisingly educational to the younger apprentices. After spending the day in Baraboo, Otis drove them toward Bark Creek.

The July twilight gave way to the silvery darkness of a full Buck Moon. The lunar light cut through the thick leaves of low-hanging maples, burr oaks, willows, and hickories that canopied the back roads of Jefferson County.

At midnight, Benny Buzzy passed around the kazoos. Midge the Dwarf and Ms. Pinkyfoot got high-pitched piccolo kazoos. Big Galoot and Poundfool got deeper-sounding bass kazoos. Poundfool played a mean bass.

“I’m like the Geezer Butler of kazoo players, y’know,” Poundfool often said.

They played a remarkably accurate—albeit buzzing—version of “Entrance of the Gladiators” as the VW motored along Riverbank Road next to the Bark River.

Otis was driving too fast and did not have time to swerve from the deadly obstacle left in the narrow lane. He put his hands up and screamed.

The front tire hit the banana peel head-on. The Bug spun wildly, flipped once, twice, bounced off an oak, slid down the embankment, and splashed into the river. The car sank under the surface of moon-glimmering ripples as the kazoo music turned into gurgles.

“How tragic,” Mr. Flonkers said, swirling in the smoke.

“Yes, but that’s not the worst part,” Toodles said.

“What’s worse than thirteen dead clowns?”

Beep-Beep.

“Well, yes,
fourteen
would be worse.”

“Do you feel their presence, Mr. Flonkers?” Oswald asked.

Mr. Flonkers paused. The ghost swayed in sync with the flames. The mobile home was eerily quiet as the clowns waited.

“No, they’re not here in the afterlife,” he said after a moment. “How can that be?”

“That’s the worst part,” Clem said. “Look into my mind’s eye again to watch what transpired one month later.”

• • •

There are no streetlamps on the rural roads of Jefferson County, but the full Sturgeon Moon draped its brightness over the homesteads, farms, orchards, and groves like luminescent silk.

Nobody was near Riverbank Road to witness the Volkswagen Beetle drive out of the river and over the bank. Nobody was close enough to hear the still night disrupted by a macabre kazoo orchestra playing the well-known circus theme. Nobody saw the car patrol the country lanes like a spider on asphalt webs.

At first.

The Lowenbacher family was driving home after an evening game—“cap night”—at Miller Park. Alex wore his Brewers hat backward as he drove the Ford Focus. Beside him, his wife Kristine had taken hers off for the ride home. In the backseat, Timmy and little sister Courtney proudly wore their caps. Timmy still wore his mitt.

“What’s that noise?” Kristine asked.

“I know,” Courtney chirped. “It’s circus bees!”

“There’s no such thing as circus bees,” Timmy said. His tone carried the annoyed condescension inherent to all big brothers.

“It’s coming from the car behind us,” Alex said. “Some bozo’s tailgating us.”

As soon as Alex spoke the tailgating car sped up and passed the Ford on the left. It was a Beetle; it cut back in front and sped ahead. A hand stuck out of the driver’s window and waved something.

“Is that a banana peel?” Kristine asked.

The hand dropped the peel onto the road and it tumbled into the Ford’s path. Alex tried to swerve but the front tire hit the banana peel and he lost control of the car. The Focus spun out, flipped onto its passenger side, skidded into the gravel berm, and careened into a tree with a shattering crunch. Miraculously, the impact made the car roll back onto its wheels.

“Is everyone okay? Can you get out?” Alex yelled over the cries of his family. He lumbered out of the car and reached for his wife. She climbed over the gearshift and out through the driver’s door. Timmy assisted Courtney out through his door. She was crying, and so was he, but he tried to be brave for his little sister.

The family huddled in the road, sobbing and hugging, checking for major injuries, praising seat belts and air bags, when the Beetle’s headlights landed on them.

The Lowenbachers watched the car stop thirty yards away from their group hug. The buzzing music stopped. The doors opened. The first one out was the driver.

Otis Oddbody wore a black derby over crimpled yellow hair, a horizontally-striped black-and-white shirt, and red suspenders attached to red pantaloons that were tucked into oversized black shoes. On his left suspender was a sunflower blossom. His mimelike face was white except for black lipstick and small black triangles on his cheeks and brows. His eye sockets were hollow except for an eerie red-orange light. He approached the Lowenbachers as the other clowns poured out. The same hellish light pulsed from all their eyes.

The horrified family watched as the horde of ghastly clowns exited the car executing their flopping, tripping, somersaulting, and cartwheeling without missing a step—unless missing a step was required for the bit.

“Stilts,” Timmy whispered between sobs. “That one in the gray tuxedo actually got out of the car
wearing stilts
.”

Dread slithered down each of their spines as the menacing congregation of clowns closed in around the family.

“You should be laughing,” Otis said, his voice sounding as if it originated from a mine shaft. “Why aren’t you laughing? Didn’t you like our gag?”

The family cried louder.

“I said laugh! We are professionals and we know when something is funny or not. The Oddbody Alley is absolutely hysterical, I tell you!
Hysterical !
”

The clowns hooted and guffawed as their eyes blazed even brighter occult fire. They all laughed, except Otis.

“Go away!” Courtney screamed.

“Are you going to laugh or not?” Otis pointed to the ruined Ford. “Don’t you get it?
Don’t you get it?
”

“
No!
” Alex and Kristine yelled together, squeezing their shuddering children.

Otis snapped his fingers and the clowns were upon them.

Clem stopped the vision. “I can’t watch that awful moment again.”

“What did they do?” Mr. Flonkers asked.

“Cindy Candy, Smarty Artie, Choo-Choo, and Poundfool are experts at twisting balloons into animal shapes,” Oswald said.

“So?”

“Imagine what they’d do to arms and legs,” Toodles said.

“Oh.” Mr. Flonkers lowered his head, trying not to visualize the gruesomeness. He failed. “Odd body, indeed.”

“But what are they?” Toodles asked. “Are they ghosts, zombies, or what?”

Mr. Flonkers hovered in thought for a moment.

“They’re manifested revenants, spirits made material, echoes of human woe and uncompleted goals,” he said. “They’re the curse left behind as a by-product of jovial souls taken from the mortal world by stark tragedy. These clowns neither walk among the living nor the dead. They’ve become un—”