“John! We got, uh, something here.”
It was about seven feet tall, its turkey head swiveling side to side to survey the room, the tongue swaying uselessly below. It extended a sausage to me.
It was an accusation. Had we dealt with this thing before? I didn’t remember it, but I was bad with faces.
“You have tormented me six times. Now prepare to meat your doom!”
I have no way of knowing that it actually said “meat” instead of “meet” but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. I ran.
“John! John! We got a Situation Fifty-three here!”
The thing gave chase, its shaved-ham feet slapping the floor behind me. My candle went out. I tossed it aside. I saw a closed door to my right, so I skidded to a stop, threw it open, and flung myself in.
Linen shelves smacked me in the face and I fell back out of the closet, dazed. The meat man wrapped its cold links around my neck and lifted me up. It pinned me against the wall.
“You disappoint me. All those times we have dueled. In the desert. In the city. You thought you had vanquished me in Venice, didn’t you?”
I was so impressed by this thing’s ability to articulate words using that flapping deer tongue and a frozen turkey that I almost lost track of what it was saying.
Molly came by just then, trotting along like everything was just A-OK in Dogland.
Then she noticed some meat standing nearby and started happily chewing on a six-inch-wide tube of bologna serving as the thing’s ankle.
“AARRRRRGHHHH!!!!”
It dropped me to the floor. I scrambled to my feet and ran downstairs. The meat man followed.
At the foot of the stairs, John was waiting.
He was holding the stereo.
The monster stopped halfway down the staircase, its eyeless turkey head staring down the device in John’s hands, as if recognizing the danger.
Oh, how that Old Testament demon must have howled and shrieked at the sight of young David’s harp, seeing at work a form of ancient magic that can pierce any darkness. The walking meat horror knew what was coming, that the same power was about to be tapped.
John nodded, as if to say, “Checkmate.”
He pushed the “play” button.
Sound filled the room, a crystal melody that could lift any human heart and turn away any devil.
It was “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake.
The monster grabbed the spots on the turkey where its ears would be and fell to its knees. John wielded the stereo before him like a holy talisman, stepping up the stairs, driving the sound closer to the beast. Every inch of its fat-marbled skin and gristle writhed in agony.
“Take it!” John screamed, suddenly emboldened. “It looks like you should have taken time to
The beast grabbed its abdomen; in pain, I thought.
Instead it pried loose a canned ham and, before John could react, hurled it at the stereo, the can whizzing through the air like a Randy Johnson fastball.
Direct hit. Sparks and bits of plastic flew. The stereo tumbled out of John’s hands and fell heavily to the stairs.
Disarmed, John hopped down to the floor as the beast rose to its feet and pursued. It grabbed John by the neck. It snatched at me, but I dodged and grabbed the coffee thermos from the table. I ran back with the thermos, spun off the top and dashed the contents at the meaty arm that held John.
The meatstrocity screamed. The arm smoked and bubbled, then burst into flame. The limb then blackened and peeled off from the socket, falling to the hardwood below. John was free, falling to his knees and gasping for air.
The beast howled, collapsing to the floor meatily. With its only remaining arm, it pointed at me.
“You’ll never defeat me, Marconi! I have sealed this house with my powers. You cannot escape!”
I stopped, put my hands on my hips and strode up to it. “Marconi? As in, Doctor-slash-Father Albert Marconi? The guy who hosts
John stepped over and glared at the wounded thing. “You dumbass. Marconi is fifty years old. He has white hair. Dave and I aren’t that old combined. Your nemesis is probably off giving some seminar, standing waist-deep in a pile of his own money.”
The thing turned its turkey at me.
“Tell ya what,” I offered. “If I can get you in touch with Marconi so you two can work out your little differences, will you release us?”
“You lie!”
“Well, I can’t get him down here, but surely a being as superhumanly powerful as you can destroy him at a distance, right? Here.”
It watched me as I fished out my cell phone and dialed. After talking to a secretary, a press agent, a bodyguard, an operator, the secretary again and finally a personal assistant, I got through.
“This is Marconi. My secretary says you have some kind of a meat monster there?”
“Yeah. Hold on.”
I offered the phone to Meaty. “Do we have a deal?”
The thing stood up, hesitated, then finally nodded its turkey up and down. I held out the phone, while giving John a dark look that I hoped conveyed the fact that Plan B involved me letting the monster beat the shit out of him while I tried to escape out of a window somewhere. Fucking girl and her “ghost boyfriend.” Marconi would have seen this shit coming a mile away.
A bundle of sausage fingers took the phone from my hand.
“So!” it boomed into the receiver. “We meat again, Marconi. You thought you had vanquished me but I —”
The beast spontaneously combusted into a ball of unholy blue light. With a shriek that pierced my ears, it left our world. The lifeless meat slapped to the floor piece by piece, the cell phone clattering next to the pile.
Silence.
“Damn, he’s good,” said John. I walked over and picked up the cell phone. I put it to my ear to ask the doctor what he had done, but it was the secretary again. I switched it off. The doctor hadn’t even hung around long enough to say hello.
John made a casual hand-dusting motion. “Well. That was pretty stupid.”
I tried the front door and it opened easily. Who knows, maybe it had never been sealed. We took time to straighten up the place, not finding any Morrisons restrained or dismembered and figuring that “Shelly” was at least telling the truth when she said the real family was on vacation. The shit had vanished from the basement, but I couldn’t fix the heating duct I had messed up earlier. We packed the meat back into the freezer as best we could, with one exception.
The sun was already dissolving the night sky by the time I got home. I opened up the toolshed and set the broken boom box inside. I found an empty jar, filled it from a square can of formaldehyde and dropped the deer tongue in. I placed it on the shelf next to a stuffed monkey paw, lying lifeless with two fingers extended. I locked up and went to bed.
CHAPTER 1
