There's Blood on the Moon Tonight (2 page)

Wall of shame? Remind me again, Bud.

              Aww, that’s just mom’s cute name for the pictures on my bedroom wall. 8x10 stills for the most part. From ceiling to floor they take up the whole damn wall. Some framed, most not. All from the same source. Back issues of
Famous Monsters of Filmland
. A bi-monthly periodical, for the most part, that was popular back when my dad was a creep like me. Back in the ’60’s and 70’s. The coolest thing he ever gave me was his entire collection of the magazine. Luckily I never have to sacrifice those near-mint issues for the pictures taped to my wall. Moon Mans’ sales coverless copies of
Famous Monsters
for two bucks apiece.

            
 
Moon mans?

Moon Mans, yeah. That’s my local comic book store, Doc. Anyway, my Wall of Shame has put me at odds with mom on many occasions. She just can’t understand my ghoulish obsession. Come to think of it, neither can I. Just revs my engine, if you know what I mean.

Everyone needs a hobby, Bud.

Hobby?
Heh, heh
. Sure thing, Doc. Anyway, that night, like any other, really, I found myself looking at the pictures on my wall. Sometimes it helps me to fall asleep.

            
 
Not this night, right, Bud?

             
No, Sir. Not this night. My eyes linger on a still of Lon Chaney Jr. The Wolfman, of course. Except for that hairy role, he never did quite fill his daddy’s shoes. Stare long enough and they begin to move. The subjects in the pictures, I mean. Stare hard enough and the once faded picture no longer seems inanimate at all. It glows with a three-dimensional clarity that makes me wonder if my imagination is a blessing or a curse. Vivid as it is…

Patent’s eyes glaze over as the recurrent dream once again takes him over...

I swear I can see the werewolf’s coarse hair flutter under the breeze of a long ago moon, the wet, dark eyes blinking. The moist nose twitching. Look long enough and I can actually smell its rank fur. Hear and feel the rumble of its hungry growl. As always, I avert my gaze before things can get out of hand. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I never looked away. It’s not the Wolfman I need to fear, of course. My imagination. It’s like a werewolf, too. Feed it, and it only grows stronger. Moving out of the shadows of my mind. Deprive it and it weakens, shuffling back into the sleepy depths of my id…Don’t look at me like that, Doc! I read too, you know!

All right, Bud. All right.

Now, as I was saying…

From the corner of my eye, I can plainly see the wolfman is once again no more than a torn page out of a now defunct magazine. Yet unlike most nights, this knowledge doesn’t lend me any peace. My imagination is left on High Alert. My eyes light upon a picture that never fails to give me the chills. It’s the
War of the Worlds.
The George Pal version. In this photo a bulbous headed Martian is stretching out its moist, rubbery hand…three-fingers, no less…towards a screaming damsel.  Shit, lady, I’d scream too, I think, as I seek out other less frightening images…

You know, Doc, I’ve often wondered why certain things scare some people. Spiders, snakes, you know. My friend back home, Rusty Huggins, is a perfect example. He’s got more phobias than this hospital has nut jobs!

Me? What scares
me
? Damn, that’s easy. Losing someone I love. But that’s
now
. Now that I know better. I mean, why be scared of a spider, when you’ve got a can of Raid underneath the fucking sink? If you ask me People are always scared of the wrong things. Especially when they’re little kids. When I was nine…before…you know…the thing that scared me most was Aliens. Creatures from outer space come to evict us from our planet.
War of the Worlds
scared the bejeezuz out of me back then.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! The Mummy gave me a few sleepless nights, too. There once was a very nice picture of
The Mummy
on my wall. Boris Karloff, naturally. Mom took care of that. She stripped it from its place of honor when I woke her in the middle of the night with a blood-curdling scream. Or so she claimed. Frankly, I don’t remember. She ran to my side, reeking of her nightly slathering of Noxzema, and without thinking, I told her all about my bad dream. Criminy, what a doofus I was.

I don’t believe I’ve head you mention this dream, Bud. Is it…is it like the others?

Nah, it’s not like the others, Doc. Just your typical, run-of-the-mill night terror. But sure, I’ll tell you about it. It’s my dad’s dime after all.

The mummy, its dusty wrappings trailing behind it, stalks me through the dream, and despite its stumbling gait I can’t outrun it. You know the type of dream.

The treadmill
, I say
. Yes, it’s a common nightmare.

Sure. Well, finally in desperation, I duck into my closet, see? Hiding behind the hanging clothes. Just like Jamie Lee in
Halloween
. Through the slats of the closet door I watch the mummy enter my room. I can smell the dry rot of its desiccated flesh and the over-powering scent of the ancient whatchamacallits used in the embalming process. It stands there in the soft glow of the moonlight, searching me out. It turns to face the closet, and I back up in horror when I see what’s in place of its fucking eyes. Insects jostle over one another in the lower half of those vast endless sockets; some tumble out, falling on the floor, where they skitter and squeak. I bump into a wire hanger and it jostles tellingly amongst its neighbors above me…

The mummy throws open the closet doors, and…well…that’s when I woke up screaming. Like Fay Wray when old King Kong made her acquaintance. Mom wanted to rip down
all
of my pictures, but my father talked her out of this rash course of action. After all,
he
was the one who got me into this junk in the first place.

The compromise: Down came the mummy.

I made a half-hearted protest, but to be honest I was happy to see it gone. I replaced it with a color still from The Planet of the Apes
.
Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!

Not sure, but I think that was the patient’s attempt at an impersonation. Seeing my confusion, Bud sighs and gets back to the business at hand…

As you know, Doc, I’ve been plagued by bad dreams my whole life. Even before…you know. They were just a coming attraction, though, to what my sub-conscious really had in store for me. If only I had known back then, I wouldn’t have been so fucking scared.

Well, back to that fun night in October…

I find no comfort in my monsters this evening. By the light of day, my hobby seems innocent, the monsters benign. But by the light of the moon…

A noise from the bathroom intrudes upon my thoughts. It is the
beginning
of the nightmare. I can’t make that clear enough, you understand, Doc?

It’s only the
beginning
.

Plip. Plip. PLOP.

Simple leak, right? At first I think it’s a faucet dripping in the bathroom, directly across from my bedroom. But the sound is too viscous, like oil or—

A shadow flickers across the tiled floor of the bathroom, causing me to sit up straight in bed.
A shadow that doesn’t belong in there.

My heart is hammering inside my ribs like a crazed rat flinging itself against the bars of its cage. It’s so loud it nearly blocks out the sound of the dripping…

Plip. Plip. PLOP.

The last drop is obese, more ponderous than its predecessors, swelling like a water balloon before falling free. I imagine it hitting the tile floor in slow motion, sending out hundreds of identical, tinier droplets in a concentric pattern. There’s something so foreboding about it. So freaking
ominous
. That every drop makes me want to jump right out of my skin…

A tree branch scrapes across the frosted window of the bathroom. Scaring, then relieving me all at once.

I fall back on my pillow, laughing.

The wind!
Shit on a stick!
It was just the wind!

My anxiety, though, still holds me in its sweaty grip. It returns to the subject of my missing mother.

Where on earth can she be?

If I wasn’t all alone, I wouldn’t be so damned scared. Dad is on the mainland, a cop for the Beaufort County Sheriff’s dept., and Dottie, my older sister, is spending the night with a friend. It’s not like mom to leave me by myself for so long, either. I was such a wuss back then! For a moment, I consider walking down the road to find Dottie, to tell her mom hasn’t come home yet.

I can hear her snarky response as clear as if she was in the room with me:
What do you want me to do about it, you little creepo? Hold your hand till she tucks you in?

The laughter following this is also quite clear. My sister is a heartless bitch.

Plip. Plip. PLOP.

Okay, I’ve had about enough of that!

Intending to tighten down the faucet handle, I swing my legs from underneath the covers. I reach out in the darkness and fumble around for the lamp beside my bed. Finding the pull chain, I tug it twice. Nothing.

“Stupid bulb burned out,” I grumble aloud, just to hear myself talk. Anything to break this silence.

In the bathroom, another flickering shadow.

This is how it always begins in the movies,
I think, squatting there on my bed, wondering what I should do.
First an unidentified noise, and then the lights go out…

“The lights didn’t go out,” I scold myself. “It’s a burnt out bulb, is all it is.”

My voice is a hollow husk, though, unconvinced of my own rationale. Another sound from the bathroom, louder this time. It echoes crisply off the cold tiles. A cold finger of dread spreads throughout my body. Like feathers of frost on a windowpane, it grows and grows…

Plip. Plip. PLOP.

Screw that old faucet! I’m not going in there!

I pull my unprotected legs back under the covers and hug them tight. I find a measure of security there as only a dumb little kid can. I stare into the dappled shadows of the bathroom, trying to find a harmless cause for the dank echo, to set my mind at ease.

In time, my eyes adjust to the dark. I can almost feel my pupils drinking in the available light…

The contours of the john are now more clearly defined. My facilities are shaped like a capital L, with the toilet and shower hidden from view in the corner. I can see that wall now, where it elbows into the far corner…

A large hand pops out from behind the bathroom wall and waves hello.

Plip. Plip. PLOP.

I faintly feel the warmth of urine as I piss my bed. I rub my eyes, hoping against hope that I’m imagining this thing. I stare wide-eyed into the dark, but the hand is gone.

Did I really even see it? 

The hand reemerges and moves disembodied. Up and down, like a slow-motion karate chop.

Plip. Plip. PLOP.

I know now that the dripping is somehow associated with the owner of that waving appendage. I’m not sure which is worse, either. The vile dripping or the shadowy hand. I open my mouth to scream, and then I remember…
I’m all
alone
.
No one will hear me!
No one, that is, except the intruder. I realize then that my tiny twin-sized bed, with the pee-stained X-Files sheets, won’t protect me from the…from the…
Boogeyman
.

Its identity comes to me like a gasp of frigid air.

I wonder:
What stops a Boogeyman?
I run through the files in my mind, until I find the one labeled
:
MONSTERS
!
Searching for a scrap of information that might save my life. I knew what to do in the event of a Vampire or Werewolf attack…but the Boogeyman?

            
 
Plip. Plip. PLOP.

What can a nine-year-old boy do against a monster like that? A fiend that exists only in the darkness? The very question held the answer.
The light! The light will kill it!
Or like the vampire’s loathing of a crucifix, at least keep it at bay. The overhead light in my room was sure to work! The twin 100-watt bulbs encased in the Lucite fixture overhead were bright enough to ward off a dozen boogeymen!

And then, when my mom finally did come home, her high heels clacking on the wood floor in the hallway, the Boogeyman would vaporize in an instant! The way all monsters do when your mom comes home at night…

Patient retrieves a Zippo lighter from the pocket of his army coat and begins to nervously open and close the lid.
Click, clack. Click, clack…

Such is the blind faith of a child, Doc. You know? Moms vanquish the monsters in your closets and underneath your bed. Shit. Every kid knows that.

Even the ones in your bathroom?
I ask him.
What about those, Bud? Patient looks at me with those haunted blue eyes of his. Defiance and doubt waging a war in the deep cerulean depths. Finally he scowls and snaps shut the lid of his Zippo, shoving it deep into the wrinkled recesses of his Army coat.