Here Be Monsters - an Anthology of Monster Tales (16 page)

A blast of heat hit him from behind. It felt like someone had poured gasoline on a barbecue, then dropped in a pack of lit matches. The spiders felt it too. They rushed for the shadows, clearing a path to the door. Despite Mickey’s warning,
Chad
looked back.

He immediately regretted it.

Where Mickey had been a moment earlier, there stood a great black
thing
. It was easily seven feet tall and covered in fur from its pointed ears to its clawed feet. Two glowing red eyes stared at
Chad
.

“Why must you humans always be reminded to run?” the thing snarled.

Chad
turned back to the door and rushed forward like he was sprinting through the gates of hell. The spiders were staying away. Three more steps and he would break outside to freedom.

His foot bumped into something heavy and he tripped,
 
slamming face first into the closed door. He tried to shake off the dizziness and pain in his head. Looking toward his foot, he saw what had tripped him. One of the cat-sized spiders was sitting on his foot. It began crawling up his leg. He kicked at the spider and tried to drag himself forward, but the other spiders returned out of the shadows and enveloped his hands.

Chad
wanted to scream but he was afraid they would take the opportunity to crawl down his throat. He closed his eyes and tried to block out the horrible sensation of ten thousand tiny feet pouring over his body.

The monster that had introduced itself as Mickey watched the swarm take down the hapless human. He couldn’t count all the brown spiders that covered his body. At first the man struggled and tried to throw them off, but after a few seconds he grew still, from the sheer weight of their numbers or possibly a heart attack. The fancy silk shirt disappeared under the sea of spiders.

The monster shrugged. It didn’t really matter.
Chad
had been only human, after all.

He took a step toward the inner door. The spiders regrouped and blocked his path with a mass of shuffling bodies and scurrying legs.

He leaned down and growled. The sound was deep and grating, like a bear and a tiger arguing over a meal. The spiders recognized the presence of something far scarier than themselves and ran back to the shadows.

The beast ducked through the doorway and stepped into the room. With a very unmonsterlike gesture, he batted at his pointed ears to make sure he hadn’t picked up an unwanted hitchhiker or ten.

Hines was sitting on a brown leather couch in the center of the room. He was exactly as the two men had described him: tall and completely unremarkable.
 

“Are you the one who’s been bullying my little friends out there?” he asked.

Mickey glanced around the room. To his relief, there were no spiders to be seen. “Aye. You Hines?”

“I am Hines, the master vampire.”

“Liar, liar, panties on fire. You’re no more vampire than I am.”

“Fair enough,” Hines said. “I have killed many vampires, but I’ve never seen one that could transform into a beast such as yourself. What are you?”

“Werewolf,” Mickey replied. “Not many of us left, but we believe in quality not quantity when it comes to, you know, killing and general badness.”

“Interesting. You remind me of a type of demon I saw in my youth. We were warned to stay away from them. But you have so much human in you that I doubt the warning would apply to a half-demon such as yourself.”

Mickey shrugged. “Whatever. I have a message for you.”

“Do tell,” Hines said.

“Lucifera, master of
Los Angeles
, wanted me to cordially invite you to get the hell out of town.”

Hines rose slowly to his feet, still milking the master vampire angle. “Oh really? And why is that?”

“Because your underwear collectors are leaving bodies all over the damn place and causing us headaches.”

The man’s expression grew dark. “Filthy humans. They just can’t wait to share everyone’s business with the world.”

Mickey yawned, displaying his sharp, jagged canine teeth. “Sorry. Long day. I’m assuming we’re about to fight, which means you’re about to die. So, I have to ask, what’s up with the underwear thing?”

Instead of answering, Hines held his arms out wide. His face stretched as two banana-sized pink fangs unfolded from his mouth. His body grew longer. For a second, he looked the werewolf in the eye. Then his two eyes split into eight, scattering across his face. His own red silk shirt tore as four appendages shot out from his body. The new limbs turned light brown and quickly surpassed his arms and legs in length. His other limbs grew in proportion and he fell forward, landing on eight legs.

Mickey took a step back. Hines was now identical to the massive brown spider he had killed earlier and the crawling masses in the front room. The only difference was that Hines was the size of a compact car.

“Are you afraid?” the spider asked. Venom dripped from its massive fangs with each word.

“No,” the werewolf replied. It was a lie and they both knew it.

Hines nimbly leapt around the room, snapping his jaws. He lunged at the werewolf.

Mickey rushed out of the way of the playful strikes, doing his best to avoid the monster entirely. He was fairly certain he had little to fear from the spider, but he couldn’t get over the feeling that such a beast was just plain…icky.

 
The spider struck again and Mickey moved too slowly to get out of the way. The thing’s fangs dug into his thigh. He roared in pain.

“How is your fear now, little werewolf?” Hines asked. “I suspect you are ready to run away and hide before I bite you again.”

The pain in Mickey’s leg was excruciating. He wondered how his leg could both go numb and be in such agony at the same time.
 

“You know,” Mickey said, “that actually wasn’t as bad as I imagined it.” Another lie.

The spider laughed. “On second thought, you are rather large. I may have to bite you a few times to make sure you don’t wiggle. Then I will fill you full of venom and make a nice soup of your insides.”

Mickey was quite fond of soup—but being made into soup, not so much.

Hines leapt to the wall, then propelled his massive body toward Mickey’s head.

The werewolf tried to dodge, but his right leg was dead. He fell backward. Hines’s fangs just missed his snout as his jaws snapped shut.

Mickey landed with a thud and the arachnid scrambled on top of him, using its weight to hold him down before again striking at his face.

Mickey grabbed the fangs, stopping them just short of his eyes. Venom dripped, burning the skin of his cheek where it landed.

Hines bucked and shuffled with his legs, but could not break free from the werewolf’s grasp.

Mickey tugged on the fangs and Hines moved to the left. He pulled them to the right and the spider followed that way as well.

“Stop that,” it said.

The werewolf saw something new in two of the eight beady eyes in front of him: fear.

He pulled outward on the fangs with all his might, like he was trying to break a giant wishbone. The fang in his left hand ripped free from the spider’s head.

Hines screamed.

“Wait, stop! Time out!” he cried.

“Time out?” Mickey’s own fear of the arachnid was diminishing by the second. He kept his grip on the remaining fang and tossed the other away. He grasped the edge of the spider’s head with his other hand. “Tell you what: I’m still curious about the underwear thing. Humor me.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you. Let go.”

“No way, snaggletooth.”

The spider sighed. “Very well. I come from another dimension where spiders rule. Humans do not even exist. I was a prince of that realm. Years ago, I stumbled through a door at the time you call All Hallows Eve and found myself here. I learned to take on the appearance of a human to more easily live among them.”

Mickey waited for the end of the story, but the spider said nothing else.

“Does that explain about the underwear thing?” Mickey asked. He shook the spider’s head violently from side to side and spoke for the beast: “No, Mickey, that doesn’t explain anything at all. I think you should rip off my other fang so people call me Hinesy no-teeth.”

“No! Don’t!” the thing shrieked. “As I said, I am a prince in the spider world. I found that I preferred to wear the ceremonial undergarments of a female spider under my armor. If my mother the queen had found out about this practice, she would have eaten my head on the spot.”

Mickey pondered the thought of an even bigger spider biting this one’s head off and immediately wished he hadn’t. “Go on,” he said.

“After I arrived here, I learned that human males and females wore differing undergarments. I found that I preferred the female human undergarments, but I was saddened to discover that this practice, while not a death sentence, was not widely accepted here either. I also discovered that humans had a fascination with vampires, though as a whole they do not believe in their existence. I decided to make them work for me and obtain the undergarments I desired before I fed on them. That way, I did not have to endure the ridicule they invariably pushed upon me whenever I would enter one of their undergarment retail establishments.”

The werewolf now saw something else in those eight beady eyes: pain.

He considered ripping off the remaining fang, just to be safe, but a tiny shred of sympathy wormed its way into his head. Mickey hated the wormy sympathy feeling. It never led to anything good.

“When I was a kid…a human kid,” Mickey said, “I had a little rag doll that looked like me. My mother knitted it for me when I was a baby. I carried that thing everywhere. I was still carrying it around when I turned seven years old. The other kids made fun of me until I cried, so I put it away.”

“What are you getting at?” Hines asked.

“I can kind of relate,” Mickey said.

The spider erupted into laughter. “Wait. I don’t see the correlation. You carried around a mottled old toy when you were far past the age to know better? Was there something wrong with you? I may wear women’s under things, but a seven-year-old acting like a baby is rather pathetic.”

“I just realized something,” Mickey said.

“What is that?” Hines asked. “Do you miss your dollie?” He broke into raucous laughter again.

“I realized why I hate spiders.”

“Do tell.”

Mickey jabbed his massive talons into the soft flesh between the spider’s head and its body.

“No! Stop that!” Hines cried.

Mickey dug his foot into the opening and pulled on the thing’s head with both hands. With a wet ripping sound, the head, along with two of the legs, tore free from the body. The other six legs danced for a moment, then curled up against the bulbous body.

Mickey tossed the lifeless head to the floor and pushed the body to the side.

“Spiders are arseholes.”

He stood and placed his weight on his bitten leg. It hurt, but he could move it again. He limped out of the room and headed for the door. Webs still covered the room, but all of the spiders were gone.

He picked up his leather jacket from the floor, quite relieved to find it also arachnid-free.

The front door was open. He distinctly remembered it being closed before he entered the other room. The spot where the human’s body should have been was also oddly vacant. Could the man have gotten out? Had the spiders eaten every bit of him, including the silly silk shirt? Mickey didn’t really care, but the possibility seemed highly unlikely.

He ducked through the front door, cringing as the tips of his ears brushed through the now unoccupied black widow spider webs.

“You’re a werewolf, aren’t you?”

The man’s voice took Mickey by surprise.
Chad
was sitting in the grass in front of the house, looking disheveled and sporting a dark bruise on his forehead, but otherwise no worse for wear.

“I mean, you look the way I figure a werewolf would look if they were real, which, apparently, they are. I mean you are.”
Chad
let out a laugh tinged with madness.