Chapter 14: An Old Side-B Song

By Allen Frost


George pushed through the crowded Lucky Note. It resembled a subway terminal at rush hour some holiday night, people standing in the rumble and haze. The Cornelius Barter Quintet was done and standing around a pillar talking with Sam Samsara—the grin spread on his face looked like a carved and painted mask. Smoke from cigarettes made a fog, everyone was talking and Symphony Sid boomed platters from big speakers. The scene was a lot like outside George realized on his maze way over to Sam. He supposed the fog was in here too, poured in through the door and windows.
Sam was handing Cornelius an ornate oblong wooden box. Japanese characters skirled around its five sides. George hated to interrupt him to tell him about the car, but it turned out he didn’t have to.
“Excuse me,” Sam added quickly, “Can you please accept this award from our government.” He held another hinged wooden box, smaller, opened to show a gold sun medal with red and white ribbon attached.
Cornelius put his hand on his head, “Wow…” he said.
All at once, the music stopped and a microphone asked, “Will the owner of the silver land yacht get it out of the alley. Or else it will be towed… By a couple of elephants if that’s what it takes…” The music cut back in.
Sam bowed, flustered, passed the musician the medal and eased away. George followed in the path Sam broke to the exit.
The announcer had the misfortune to stop the music a last time, “If you got a greyhound bus for a car, I’ve got news for you—it’s breaking the law to park in an alley.” That was all he managed before Sam reached a straight arm over the blue counter and chopped him. The monitor jolted just enough to start running the jazz again. Like a movie, everything continued as before.
George took a passing look at the man sinking with the microphone slowly below the counter. He sighed. There wasn’t much a doctor could do.
The door shoved aside to a midnight of fog. George caught up with Sam stopped at the crunched hull of his car.
“Hmmm…” Sam grunted. He ran his fingers over the crushed metal topographically. He regarded the skin of it as keenly as a detective, then reaching under the damaged, bolted panel, he pushed the shape of it smooth. He cleared his throat in a satisfied manner and said, “Okay George, let’s go.”
The moon net had trapped more sounds since they were inside the club. Now, amid the echoes of roaming souls with radios and wind sounding slightly out of tune, George felt a howl creep his spine. He wished he could have believed it was only the steam whistle on a lost train, but he knew there was something else out there.
Sam got the monster engine started and George was glad that was all he could hear. He folded his hands on his green splattered suit. At least that was funny, he thought.
“That…” Sam pointed at the Lucky Note, “was great!” Then he sent the wheels spinning. Each cobblestone drummed faster underneath as they picked up speed. “Cornelius Barter!” Sam yelled into the slipstream. “Hey George!” he yanked the wheel hard to get them onto the road.
Good thing the road’s empty, George reflected. Sometimes their way wasn’t so lucky and something would get pulverized. George would try to think of it as the law of nature, survival of the fittest. So the law of the road favored them; they were the biggest thing; a battleship on cement.
“Hey George! Start the record player!”
Below the space where the radio was constantly replaced, George pressed a button. The mahogany panel slipped downwards, cupping a turntable with a record already circling.
“Yeah!” Sam bellowed.
The needle dropped into the scratched groove.
An old Side-B song from years before materialized, when Cornelius Barter and his quartet recorded in a basement near the ocean, beautiful and sad, drums brushing, a muted trumpet, a bass bowed and a celeste. They drove the night around the car. A few minutes long and then the fog was gone. The giant car broke out of its wall to emerge magically flying on wet moonlit sand. The beach ran for miles.
The jukebox dropped down another jazz record ring. Sam mashed his shoe into the pedal and red sparks shot into the clear salt air.
For this feeling shooting on a perfect arrow of high speed with angel music pulling beyond, for finding heaven while you’re still alive, that’s why they were going. Everyday-people were long asleep by now, Sam and George were burning up like a meteor.
Green dials on the dashboard, fiery glows from the stacks cut in the cowl ahead, the car could have roared on and turned around to go back and forth until dawn. Well…gasoline would have run out by then…In any case, it doesn’t matter because there were little shipwrecked fires to avoid.
“What the--?!” The car swerved a bonfire, the left wheel hit into fireworks, another near miss, they were sliding sideways for a second, then Sam had them going okay, a couple seconds of relief, except they didn’t see the snapped ribs of the washed ashore Harry S. Keeler.
George wasn’t aware of what was happening until he could breathe a simple sentence, “What?” He was laying on his side. He could hear the slowly beating heart of the surf. Wake up, he made himself move, he dragged himself out of the flipped on side car. He dug his fingers deeply into the sand every time to pull himself further away…In case it might explode…Slow motion turned into him being able to stand and stumble.
“George!”
Daguerreotype shuffling cards settled on a single picture in three shades of dreamy color, blue and black and white. He heard a name being called. After a while he realized it was his name.
“Ahh…” he replied.
“George!” Sam waded into vision.
“Look…”
The car looked like a rocket smashed on another planet. It was skidded into a mound of pushed sand.
The merry-go-round slowed. George stopped walking. There were burning remains all around them.
Sam Samsara stood there wide as a drive-in movie screen on the beach, his gray suit reflecting all the little bonfires. He moved and they moved like fireflies against the black sky.
“You okay George?”
“Sure, sure Frances,” he grinned, “I could do this in my sleep.”
Before Sam could respond, another voice called, “Hey! Can you give me a hand?!”
George and Sam looked around themselves.
“Down here fellahs!”
There was a man’s face looking up at them. Bits of broken glass twinkled. “I’d sure like to get a hand out of this sand, Mr. Samsara.”
Sam bent down. “Oh, it’s you…” He recognized the soldier from the morning’s shoot.
“Yeah…I was out on the lightship when it blew. Guess I washed up here. Lucky thing the gulls didn’t see me buried like this, huh?” he laughed a wheeze.
Sam brushed the sand around him and dug his hands in to find shoulders. The head rolled against his shoveling hands. Sam let out a scream.
The head screamed too. Staring straight up into the stars, “Where’s the rest of me?!” it yowled.
Sam shot a terrified look at George.
George sat down. “Shhh.” He lay a hand on the head. “I’m a doctor.”
The head’s eyes rolled at George. “Yeah? So—So—Tell me then…How bad is it?”
George scooped the soldier’s head gently between his hands and lifted.

Chapter 13: Wolf O'Clock

By Allen Frost


Her change was occurring a lot faster than she could control. At first she thought she could shave her wrists and hands and that would hide it for a while more, but by the time she got to the bathroom at the back of the Lucky Note, the full moon was taking its fearsome effects. Frances just had time to slam the door and scream into her muffling paw.
Cornelius Barter bopped his buzzing soundtrack to the transformation as she grabbed the wall and howled. Powerful arms swung around and gripped the porcelain sink. It was so easy to tear it out of the tiles and pile it at the door.
Water broke across the room in jet sprays, flicking diamonds on the fur grown all over her. There wasn’t much left of Frances in the creature she became. Some white stocking. Her eyes were closed when she was done; she seemed to purr with the sound from the other room. Yellow eyes snapped open.
The door was being shoved. The music was pushing in loud around scrabbling hands and nightclub yells. The room was a mess of debris and waterfalls.
Frances bounded to the window, out in a leap, luffing the curtains, gone. Mid-air she writhed against the full moon pinned like a moth on its backdrop, before the fog spirited her down.
She was falling at a world that already had another life going, that didn’t know anything about her arriving.
A white half candle flickered on the dashboard in front of George. He had carefully tabbed open the can of cactus juice and was drawing it towards his mouth, really looking forward to it at last, when something like a loose turning dam turbine slammed into the long engine cowling. The crushing kerash knocked George down onto the floorboards.
Frances popped up beside the car spectrally, an outraged roar that shook the fog. She snarled and snapped in a circle. The only thing directly near was a telephone pole that she hit with enough force of her claws to slice into it like butter.
George cowered down near the foot pedals. He held his breath in and didn’t move again until he was absolutely sure that the beast—or was it raining lions?—must have moved on. Only then did he pull his crumpled legs and arms out from him, uncurling himself like a night flower, to push up onto the seat. The can of cactus juice clacked empty to his feet. The contents were all over him again. He smiled wide enough for three photographs…It was the second time Green 17 had spilled on him and saved his life.

Chapter 12: The Martian Conspiracy

By Allen Frost

Where the wind takes things can be a mystery, there’s invisible pockets sewn in the sky, clouds disguise dragons, or on this foggy night a white balloon carrying a bomb beneath. It had escaped the fate of the other day’s explosions when it hit an updraft and soared above the ocean a thousand feet. The wind kept it there frozen in place until nightfall. With help from the dark swivel of the planet, the ocean fog and the clouds, it quietly rejoined the panic where radio waves bounced desperate signals into the ether, a hundred terror stories per hour.
Tiny’s Garage was open late, hammering, a frantic radio keeping the little man company. The big swinging door was open on the night and let out a bright yellow-white Titanic light. The oily cement room was filled with a shiny assembly line of red Shriner cars. Tiny was halfway along the row of them banging a crumpled fender with a wooden hammer.
In a way, what happened was worthy of a prayer—that terrible bombing of the city coincided with the Memorial Day parade. Puffs of burning buildings caused the Shriners to blow their practiced figure-8 thrills. Not only them though, the whole city went haywire and needed repair. Anyway, Tiny should have counted his blessings for this sudden appearance of twenty damaged miniature cars. They carried a hundred dollars apiece. What a windfall.
He had the radio going full blast so he could be sure to hear any news while he battered and bashed at the cars. Since seeing the doc’s green blood and then his daughter with her strange hunting creatures, Tiny was waiting for the end of America as we know it. Any second it was going to happen—Tiny had seen the Martian Conspiracy!
Finally he couldn’t take it anymore, he set his hammer on beveled chrome and hurried over to the telephone that held down a stack of paperwork. He dialed the spindle and drummed his fingers impatiently.
“This is Arlo Wilbur speaking. You’re on the air.”
“Listen Arlo, you got it all wrong!”
“Is that so?”
“Yeahhh,” Tiny sneered. He cocked his head towards the radio blaring among the cars. He heard his voice broadcasting a five second delay. “Listen Arlo, you got it all wrong!” He liked the sound of it.
“Sir—Sir, you’ll have to turn down your radio,” Arlo said in the receiver.
“Yeahhh,” Tiny’s hiss squealed out of the speaker.
“Okay, okay,” Tiny barked at the telephone and he left it for a moment.
“Sir—Sir, you’ll have to turn down your radio.”
“I know! I know!” Tiny screeched as he slapped at the wooden face of the Philco, turned and raced back to the telephone. “There!” he growled and panted, “Now listen up, Arlo. I know who’s behind these bombs and it ain’t who you think.”
“Really sir?”
“Yeah.”
“Even though the Nazis have publicly taken credit for—”
“Enough of the Nazis already!”
“Sir, this isn’t the time or place for hysterics. We need to—”
“Listen Arlo. We’re up against an enemy that ain’t even human!” Tiny raged. “I’ve seen them, they’re from Mars!”
Suddenly the telephone got cold; it was like holding a curl of ice to his ear.
“It’s Martians that are doing it,” he muttered. “Did you hear me, Arlo? Martians…” he repeated.
Arlo Wilbur was gone. The phone had lost him overboard.
“Hey!” Tiny jiggled the cradle. The dial tone hummed in his ear. “Agghh!” He threw the phone down on the sliding papers and ran back to the radio. Arlo Wilbur was lecturing sternly, “—got to maintain our faculties and reason in what will surely be a very trying time for our great nation. We must continue nobly and settle for nothing less than victory. I hope this next caller—”
Tiny snapped at the switch. He grabbed his wooden hammer and swung it in his clenched fist above the radio. Only a blur of motion in the doorway stopped him from striking.
Glowing in the swirling gloam of fog stood a ghost holding a candle. Actually, it was George, holding a fifty cent flame, with a can of cactus juice in his coat pocket, but when Tiny beheld that vision he dropped the hammer. It hit him on the head and clattered to the floor.
“Oohoww!” Tiny shrieked. He rubbed the sore knot on his forehead. When he took his hands from his face, the doc had blown.

Chapter 11: In Its Moon Net

By Allen Frost

Night fell on the city early. With the lightship out of the way the harbor let a blanket of thick fog pile in. It came steadily over the waves, shored stone beaches, rolled up into the leaning red armed madrona hills, crawled down and followed the roads leading to town. Cars stopped on the street, their amber lamps were no use. Something with a life of its own had invaded.
So it was a ghostly walk that Frances took to get to the Lucky Note. The fog was thick enough she could lift her feet off the ground and float for a moment. Air thick enough to swim in. She could wave her arms like a windmill and make snow-angel shapes follow in her wake. Everything was captured in its moon net. Shapes loomed and gloomed and vanished, paging in and out of the white. She heard a trolley that wasn’t there, it could have been a mile away, but the sound carried to her. Other sounds, all kinds of sounds, echoed and wandered became memories that caught and couldn’t get out. The whole haunted town had been absorbed and embalmed by a hungry creature sent from the Sargasso, the Sea of Lost Ships.
Whatever dangers of whirlpools, shark dead ends, or broken rocks may have stopped others, Frances made it through to the fragile melody of a trumpet coming from an orange window pumpkin eye cut glowing in the dark. A Cornelius Barter ballad reeled out like a blind flower seller feeling from curb to corner. He was in there spinning and she was pulled to the door of the Lucky Note.
She had not been gone for more than ten seconds when loose chips of brick shook on the road. A cobblestone rat fled behind a garbage can and soon a noise transformed into the sight of Sam Samsara’s monsooning car. It submarined to a halt in the alley. Slain fog streaked and beaded off its silver aerodynamic hull. When it shut down there was a groan of engine death, silence, then a deep breath later the sound turned up again. Cornelius Barter was singing, “Oh you crazy moon, you broke my heart.”
Sam left the car carried by the swirls of roiling cloud. George watched him go propelled and buoyed gently to the club. The door opened, a blast of jazz, then closed and George was left alone.
The open cab bristled with the atmosphere. Fog sparked on his face like some watery form of electricity. George was finally coming out of a long day’s dream and he needed a minute to gather himself. He lifted an arm, poked the radio button, focused on the little green glow of the dial.
“—broadcasting to all the ships at sea and our armed forces everywhere. Folks, before I sign off our Dos Pedros program this evening, may I remind you of this. The used fats that you’re saving up, while it’s swell that you are saving them, but remember they won’t do anybody a speck of good as long as you keep them in your icebox. Please turn them in. As soon as you have a can that’s full. Not in a glass container please. Any tin can will do. You’ll be paid in cash and receive two red points for each pound of used fats that you turn in. Thank you. And goodnight!” An orchestra swelled up into the mariachi theme song. George turned the radio off. The first clear thought he had all day bloomed in his head. A picture of a can with Green 17.

Chapter 10: Under A Black Umbrella

By Allen Frost


George watched the world from under a black umbrella. Its broken spokes stuck out and the wind blew the ripped waterproof cloth like petals. It was raining but Wervers was determined to keep the film rolling, setting up the next shot as soon as one was done. George had trouble with the frantic pace, instead he looked away from them, over the edge of the dock to see weeds and kelp floating in the deep green water. A patch of small fish ebbed among the piers. Rain drilled holes on the surface.
Sam was trying to fit sitting in a low rowboat tied to the dock getting wet. The camera was close to him, framing him against the vast pour of the sea. It was a cheat shot, to make him look like he had rowed a mile from shore.
“Action!” Wervers cried.
Carefully, Sam stood up. He was holding a torpedo across his arms. He turned with it and pointed the silver prop towards a target…pressed a button near his hand.
That was all supposed to happen.
Then Sam almost lost his balance as the propeller end of the torpedo whirled alive. It bucked from him like a swordfish trying to escape capture. He caught sharp blades and dropped the torpedo overboard as he clamped his hand over his wound.
“Cut!”
In the doomed quiet that followed, rain popped on the dock around the film crew. They all watched the torpedo leaving its traveling wake of bubbles out to sea. Sam stood in the middle of the small rowboat while a stream of paint-red blood cut down his white Imperial uniform.
“Ohhhh boooyyy…” drawled Wervers. Everyone else realized where the torpedo was going too…the collective sigh sounded like summer thunder five miles away.
The lightship was a sitting duck at the mouth of the harbor. For over twenty years the Harry S. Keeler had been anchored there, blinking its light in the dark and sounding a foghorn when there was nothing to see.
Wervers cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose there’s any way to bring it back…”
Nobody could answer.
“Or press self destruct?”
The torpedo was out of sight into the gentle waves. The Harry S. Keeler was celebrating its last moments of floatation.
“I guess we better get it on film anyway…” Wervers decided. “We can sell it to the newsreels if we’re lucky.”
After twenty seconds of falling rain, there was the explosion. It threw a spray of water high above the flames of the burst open vessel. It didn’t have time for a last whistle or S.O.S, it rolled over and sank quickly, leaving a swarm of burning wreckage and an ugly cloud of black lurking smoke in the background.
In the foreground, Sam got out of the rowboat unsteadily, as comical as a clown stepping over the side of a bathtub, except for the blood that ran off his elbow. “George,” he said. “I lost a finger.”

Chapter 9: The 4 Agnews

By Allen Frost


She still had connections. Don Benny paid her to walk his dogs everyday. She made a living that way. Later in the morning, she took his three greyhounds for a walk to the park. The straining end of the leash kept them from running away. Her dog Agnew tried to keep pace with them, but Don Benny’s dogs were all retired racers. Frances was still tired from the full moon effects. “Agnews!” she called, getting louder, “Agnews! Agnews! Stop!”
Finally, all three of them halted instantly. The greyhounds turned their puppet like heads to stare big black watery eyes at her.
“What’s got into you Agnews?”
Her old Agnew panted to her side rustily.
“The park’s not going anywhere…” She took a breath. “Just take it easy.”
They started again and before long they were running again. Frances held the shrouds of the dog sail. The park appeared like a green island beyond the meridian.
Once they passed over the cement curb onto the cobblestones into the leafy shade of it, the three Agnews caught her by surprise with a quick rip that took the leash out of her hand. They bolted gone across the lawn. She couldn’t hope to match their speed in her long skirt and this daylight. A hundred yards away she saw a rhododendron lash as they whipped into its cover.
“Ohhh Agnew…” she sat down on a bench. Agnew lay in the slatted shade underneath. Agnew was a gift from Don Benny—when he found out she was still alive, and heard her heroic rescue of Agnew from the candy store blaze, he gave her the dog. That was kind of him, but more than he could bear; he bought three more dogs to replace his old friend. She rubbed her sore calves. “They’re probably after a rabbit. I’m not going running after them right away.” She slipped off her shoes and socks. The grass felt good and instantly she remembered last night. Fast pieces of it flew at her like jagged glass, someplace she had been before, fragments of a dream, parts of a whole she couldn’t piece together…Why did it always have to disappear when she woke up?
She stood up and splashed into the cut grass. “Come on Agnew, I guess we better go now.”
There was a man running a kite with his daughter. They got it going into the air in blue swoops back and forth. Frances looked away at her shoes in her hand. It still hurt to think about her father. Don Benny got out of that same burning room but not him…Don Benny told her all he left behind in there was fire and smoke.
“Agnews!” she called. The sky replied with the roaring pass of a Flying Wing on patrol. If they weren’t always looking for war, maybe they wouldn’t find one, she thought. She squinted her eyes at its silver knife shape glinting sun. It was quickly gone, leaving a charcoal trail in the cloudless sky. “Agnews!” she repeated.
The Agnews weren’t in the undergrowth. The brush and flowers turned back into field on the other side. “Agnew, can you track them?” Frances asked her companion. She pointed her finger beyond. “Where’d they go, boy?”
Agnew crept gingerly through the last of the shrubs. He was camouflaged by a cover of burs, torn leaves and brambles. He’d been through a lot in the past year, seven years for a dog, and the baleful look he gave Frances told her that in spades. She scratched him, “I know…”
A gust of wind came rushing across the new field like an ocean wave and with it came a faint cry of, “Help!”
“What’s that?” She heard the yell again.
Even Agnew creaked to his four feet.
More breeze poured off the crown of maple trees towards them. Milkweed pollen loosed gauze made her sneeze. It was a long minute running over the field to the tall stand of arbor. “Look!” Frances yelled back to Agnew.
The Agnews were bunched at a trunk, staring up into the leaves at the thing they had treed. The leash wrapped around them so tightly it bunched them together making the Agnews resemble one dog with three heads. They snapped and wheezed at whatever was up there in the leaves.
“Help!” the voice piped down. “Get it away from me Frances. Please!”
She thought she knew that wretched voice, but he was well hidden.
“What it that thing!? Did you bring it from Mars?”
“Is that you, Tiny?”
“Yes it’s me. Listen Frances, I’m sorry I took a shot at your dad. We got a code, you know. Nobody deserts!”
“My father? What are you talking about?”
The three Agnews were joined by her leafy Agnew who huffed his paws up against the trunk and snapped at the little foot positioned on a limb.
“Aiieee!” Tiny shrieked. “Call your monsters back!”
She almost told him they were only dogs, but she paused instead. “First tell me what you know.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll talk. What choice do I have? I’ll give with it…It took me a long time to find him. I had to know if he was still alive. I put the pieces together. A guy like that knows too much. I’m sorry to say this Frances, but it’s the business we’re in. He turned the cops on to us when he found a new supply. The doc traded us for a connection straight from the source then he thought he’d drop out of sight. Savvy?”
“No.”
“I finally found him and I plugged him. But I didn’t plan on him being from outer space. A Martian stool pigeon.”
She wanted to say something about that, but she didn’t dare. What was her father’s plan?
“Not til I saw that green blood spilled out of him did I know…” His shift in the tree caused the leaves to rustle and branches clack. The dogs shifted below. “When I saw that green blood I panicked. I didn’t know what I was up against. Now I do. I know you Martians have got rockets and monsters and advanced technology and robot armies. Look, can’t we make a truce, you can forget it all and get back in your rocket and go back to Mars? I don’t want to start an interplanetary war.”
Frances stood and listened without saying a word.
His voice floated a sigh down from the tree, “I don’t know if I killed him or not. I doubt it. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. There…That’s it…If you want to shoot me with a raygun and feed me to your monsters, go ahead. But I promise, if you let me go, I promise he’s off the hit list. We don’t know him from now on.”
Frances paused again while she thought about the possibility. Her father bleeding green? That couldn’t be? He must be okay, somewhere in the city. The dogs whined again. She crept closer and took the leash. “Alright Tiny. It’s a deal. I’ll take the monsters back. Give me a minute or two to get away, then you can come down.”
“Thanks Frances…”
She tugged the Agnews, “Let’s go,” and they all followed along in the deep swerving weeds, retracing the path they had sawed getting there.