The long night of old treacheries and new alliances continues, and in Collinsport, in the upper room of an after hours club, conspirators gather, in subterfuge and betrayal, as they discover now that they are merely pieces upon a game board designed upon a far grand scale than they could have imagined.
Opening: [www.youtube.com]
The entry itself did not have a foyer. It was nothing more than just a small landing at the foot of the stairs with a single, naked 100-watt bulb hanging starkly above. The old wedge stairs, turning an angle, lead upward. The worn, and well-trodden cherry steps creak and pop with their age whenever a good weight is applied. The weight of someone making their way up the very high and narrow steps of the stairway, where above, at 3:30 am, the familiar beat of the song Stayin’ Alive can be heard drifting invitingly down to the narrow entrance.
All in all there was nothing hospitable about the dirty, narrow egress from the street. It seemed at best some entryway created almost as an after thought, or worse as some horrid architectural mistake. At the turn of the century the corner building had been the Eagle Tavern, infamous for it’s rum and prostitutes, but then came the Volstead Act and with its prohibition the supposed end to that establishment’s existence. Only the owners, far more inventive than compliant rented the lower half of the building to Abbott Hardwicke, and watched the old bar’s decimation into an innocuous hardware store, while they retained possession of the second floor to supposedly serve as their residence. Thus the need for the side entry and staircase, which performed a double duty: as entry to the Randall’s home as well as to their newly fashioned speakeasy.
Of course with the ever growing bad reputation of the Randall’s, based upon not only The Eagles past transgressions with rum and prostitutes, but now with bootlegging, gambling, and the possibly of illicit drug traffic, Repeal did nothing to rehabilitate the family name. And so Mooney Randall passed it on to his son Jonathan, and Jonathan on to Howard, and Howard on to Ian, who several years ago had the misfortune of loosing the family business in a poker game. Although there had been some dispute regarding the winning hand of the woman from Providence, the mysterious Lusine Harpootian, whose rather sizeable boat, Aces over Queens had sunk Ian’s much smaller vessel of Jacks over Fives. Ian had signed over the deed. Many about the table had naturally assumed some surprising mishap would soon befall the victorious lady, only Ian Randall was the one who succumbed to a fatal overdose of alcohol and prescription pharmaceuticals.
The taciturn Armenian suggested that perhaps Mr. Randall had sought out one too many of his vices in order to console himself in his regret for having allowed his avarice to overextend, not only his better judgment, but his hand,” when Sheriff Patterson questioned her during his investigation into Randall’s “unfortunate demise.”
“That would not be the Randall I know.”
“Really? And just how well were you and he acquainted, Sheriff Patterson,” she asked as she sat turning face up one tarot card after another.
“It’s almost as if something””
“Something what?” She asked looking up as she slowly turns over The Tower.
Rather than having kept the pool tables in their various states of needed repair or outright replacement; the numerous Anheuser-Busch brightly illuminated advertisements hung without care; the coin operated poker and blackjack machines; the buzzers and bells of the electronic pinballs, Lusine Harpootian, had thrown them all out; lowered the lights; put in a stage; brought in long-limbed dancers, renamed the establishment A Quarter to Three and turned it into an after-hours strip club.
The entrance now has just been locked as A Quarter to Three, normally open until 4:30, has been closed owing to the arrival of a red-haired gentleman dressed in a tuxedo and a well-knotted bow tie. Even so, the familiar drum beat of the song Addicted to Love begins.
Robert Palmer croons over the expensive sound system.
Oddly, the girls now all seem uncannily to be mimicking the same trance like effect as those long-legged models on the famous 1985 video as they dance now for the few remaining patrons.
The bartender is counting out the receipts.
At a table near stage left Lusine Harpootian sits with three apparent customers: two men and a woman.
Wilber Strake, one of the two men sitting at the table, (a disreputable PI normally working in and around Woonsocket, Rhode Island), dressed in a very cheap, brown polyester suit, with an old worn fedora pushed forward as if to shield his eyes, leans forward in his chair. Rather than waiting for the man in the fashionable evening wear with his too perfectly knotted bow tie to begin the admonishment he has no doubt been sent from Providence to deliver, Strake has decided to take the opportunity to set the record straight as to who is responsible for this ill-advised effort to which he had been assigned. He reaches now to pull a cigarette out of the crush-proof box siting atop the table next to his sweating drink, and clicks open his Zippo, “Not to put too small a point on things, Alison,” he flicks the striking wheel, creating a flash of blue sparks, as well as a pale blue flame, “But, you’ve been here quite a while,” lighting the cigarette with a squint against the smoke curling upward into his eye, “And yet, I see you still have not recovered the missing item.”
He snaps the Zippo shut.
Alison Drew looks lazily across the table at him, “I do not see that you have had any better success.”
‘Yeah, well doll, I ain’t no f**king vampire.” Each word is curled with the exhalation of smoke.
“Yes, Mr. Strake. You are not.”
“You see Mr. B how it is?” Strake, taking another drag off the cigarette turns to other man sitting at the table.
Mr. B sitting as silent as the grave has not said a word since sitting down and ordering the White Russian, which he has yet to touch. He appears far too innocuous behind with that rather boyish face, but Strake knows he’s “ god only knows how old he is. He is up from Providence – driven all night. And like that rider of a pale horse in the Bible’s apocalypse he is usually known to bring Hell with him. Strake has met the man only twice and yet he’s well aware of why he’s garnered the nickname The Horseman. Of course, just what his real name is Strake is uncertain, aware that in Providence and occasionally Woonsocket he has been know by various names: Barlow and Bishop, Bannister and Blake, Bixby, Bicknell, Bradbury, Bosworth, and Barnard. Tonight he is Burroughs.
“Something the matter Auntie H?” Mr. Burroughs breaking his silence asks Lusine Harpootian.
The attractive, blue-haired, Lusine Harpootlian looks across the table at him, “Not at all.”
“I hope you don’t in any way feel my arrival is intended as some commentary upon your organization, Auntie. Providence thinks very highly of you.”
“Now I ask you Mr. B, however could I feel anything other than gratification in knowing just how much Providence thinks of me,” The Armenian accent becoming more prominent.
“I am merely here as a representative of Providence, in order to get a progress report, or, the lack there of.”
“Which is quite understandable, Mr. Burroughs.” Lusine Harpootian says as she places her hands one atop the other languidly on the table, “It has been several weeks now since the arrival of, shall we say, your emissaries from Providence.”
“Three days over a month to be precise. And, so you can see Providence has its concerns.”
“And justifiably so.” Madam Harpootian agrees, “Although Mr. Burroughs, in all candor, I must admit to a certain mystification. I mean,” a hand goes to her chest, “Seeing as how you have been so forth coming in revealing Providence’s admiration of my organization, which, as you say, they seem to hold in such high regard,” She continues with a vulpine smile, and a thickening of her accent, as her hand lowers to the table, “So, I would hope you can see now the roots of my mystification. For I cannot help but think there would have been no need for you to have had to make this very long trip, all the way up to Collinsport, in search of some signs of progress, had Providence, in thinking so highly of my organization, first turned their thoughts toward me, before deciding upon commissioning their erstwhile endeavors . . . to reclaim the item . . . to this collection of members from the Isle of Misfit Toys.”
Mr. Strake feels the flush along the back of his neck and he angrily flicks ashes into the black plastic ashtray, “Misfit?”
But he does not have to opportunity to complete his protest in having been referred to as a Misfit Toy as Lusine Harpootian cuts him a quick and icy glare: “Mr. Strake, at the moment, as you can readily see, I am conversing with Mr. Burroughs.”
The boyish looking Mr. B lifts his hands, with his palms outward, “Auntie H, if I may? I would like to suggest that perhaps you should perceive this in a much less negative connotation. For you see, Providence at the time didn’t want to inconvenience you with such . . . a trivial matter.”
Her eyes light up with amusement, “From what I understand of the matter Mr. B, Providence allowed the item to be taken in the first place. And so, one can only surmise that its arrival, here in Collinsport, was far less the act of some random theft, as it has been purported to be, but, rather as the part of some over all grander strategy, which would indicate that whatever the intention was . . . Mr. B. It was anything but a mere triviality.”
“Well, foresight is sometimes revealed in hindsight to have been far less clear.”
“Circumstances having changed either for the better.” She agrees.
“Or the worse.” Mr. B is candid.
Auntie H nods. “And so that brings us back to the Island of Misfit Toys.”
“Yes. It does.”
Strake, having been referred now twice as a Misfit Toy can no longer remain silent, “Look Barlow!”
“Burroughs.”
“Burroughs. To start with . . . this was never just any ordinary smash and grab. Not with the restrictions, the guidelines, imposed by Providence from the start.”
“That sounds rather defensive Mr. Strake.” Mr. B replies.
“Really?” Strake pushes back his fedora, “You, here at 3:30 in the AM does not exactly instill one with confidence.”
“A month and three days hasn’t exactly instilled an over abundance of assurances either.”
Mr. Strake suddenly sits forward and stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray, grinding the embers into the inch of harden ash and nicotine caked upon the bottom of the black plastic. “Well, I got a reputation to maintain, Mr. B. And so you can go back to Providence and you can tell the Metropolitan that whatever the grand intent, this ill-conceived little expedition was fairly well doomed from the start. I mean Doc Sabine? What the hell is he even here for? He’s been of absolutely zero f**king help. Which leads me to suspect that Sabine wasn’t really a part of this assignment to begin with. “ Strake absently removes another cigarette and snaps open his Zippo, “In fact I don’t even know where the hell he is half the time, much less whatever the f**k he’s doing,” He flicks the striker wheel and lights the cigarette, with a flare of red embers in the pale blue flame; then, he quickly snaps the Zippo shut, “And this . . . this leech, who was just only turned, is not exactly what Jimi would have consider calling experienced “ I mean, she’s mostly been draining half the broads in this town.”
“It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.” Mr. B says emotionlessly.
Auntie H turns a slow look now over to Alison Drew. The young woman’s pale face made all the more so by the dark makeup she is wearing. “Miss Drew, I do hope you remember our discussion regarding discretion and in particular the rules concerning my hospitality.”
“Of course.” Alison says in a soft melodic voice, at first seemingly distracted and not at all interested in the complications of the conversation as she languidly turns her hypnotic glance from the brunette dancing nearest the table in order now to read Auntie H’s expression, which is indecipherable to begin with. “Why? Have you had any complaints? I did give you my word. And so have I not always been on my best behavior, whenever I am here, not only out of respect for you, but also out of gratitude for you allowing me to find a haven here after all the trouble with that Massachusetts librarian.”
Mr. B looks down at his drink and says nothing, certain that Providence will want a report about the too meddlesome librarian.
Strake flicks ash into the ashtray, “As for tools? Well Mister B, as I look at it, I was sent up here without any tools at all in my Craftsman’s box. But, even if I had arrived with the biggest f**king tool box you’d ever seen, there’s still the matter of the f**king constraint Providence imposed.” And Strake points the red embers of his cigarette straight at Mr. B, “Providence is the one who said that in no uncertain terms that we were not to do anything that would piss off the Collins bitch, which hasn’t made anything easier.”
“There is my dear, the customary tip.” Auntie H reminds Alison, whose really paying very little attention, as she’s got that far away look now in her eyes. It’s the constant craving, Strake is more than well aware with the newly turned, well most of them anyway, were at first just like a bad heroin addict looking for a quick fix, a blood junkie strung out and on the prowl. But with Alison, he had to admit she had it mostly under control, which, of course, Strake was not about to ever commend her for since he didn’t like Leeches. They weren’t human, not any more.
“Oh, of course.” Alison languidly agrees.
Mr. B looks from the hot end of the pointing cigarette now to Strake.
“And this whack-job who has the scroll, she’s . . . well, I don’t know what she is, but she’s too damn close to Nicole Collins . . . “
“Samantha Brook.” Alison interjects, “Her name is Samantha Brook.”
“Oh look, she decides to join the conversation. Perhaps now that you’re up to date with the situation, you might use those powers of yours to locate her.”
“Locate her?” Mr. B asks.
“Yeah, well.”
“Miss Brook got herself arrested.” Alison informs Mr. B, who turns his cold emotionless stare upon her.
“But then, she escaped,” Strake says as he squints against the smoke of a long drag off his cigarette, “And, so she’s been missing.”
“Missing?” Mr. B’s countenance almost expresses a frown.
“Let’s just say at the moment she appears to have been misplaced,” Lusine Harpootian adds as way of alleviating Mr. B’s growing concern. “Perhaps it would be better Mr. Strake if you were to allow Mr. Burroughs to just tell us what it is that Providence has sent him here to say?”
Mr. Burroughs, his boyish face, makes his reply seem even more menacing, “What the Metropolitan is looking for is a resolution to this matter. He wants the scroll back. He wants you Auntie to see that this all is brought to a quick and satisfactory conclusion.”
“And the toys?” She asks
“To be used as you see fit.” Mr. B replies.
She smiles sardonically. “Then I would say it is time to go to church.”
“Church?” Strake looks over at her, smoke escaping from his lips.
“Church?” Mr. B echoes Strake.
“In my experience Mr. B, a Jewish girl dealing with the supernatural. . . “
“You mean Alison’s Reverend’s church, Trask’s?” Strake leans forward to stub out his half-smoked cigarette with an ever-growing irritation. Has Harpootian been holding back on him?
“Particularly a nice mentally disturbed Jewish girl, she’s going to want to seek out the protection of someplace she believes to be safe, a sanctuary, if you will, some place she thinks of as holy.” Auntie H says, “And that would certainly not be the Reverend Trask’s house of worship.”
“Then what other kind of a church would even let someone like her walk right in, the broad’s nuts and she damn well looks it.”
“Yes, I am sure she does, she did throw rather a scare at the Happy Burger.” Auntie H agrees.
Mr. B looks at Lusine Harpootian, “Happy Burger?”
And Strake now knows that she has had him under surveillance, and a damn good one as he had not even suspected it, the question though was she doing in on her own or at the behest of Providence? Smoke curling up from the spent cigarette in the small black plastic ashtray wafts lazily across the table. Behind Burroughs, the girl working the pole is slithering downward and Strake’s beginning to look at things from an entirely difference perspective, their sending him to Maine, when he’s always worked Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Woonsocket, Providence, Ipswich, Arkham, Boston, Kingsport, those were his territories. Collinsport? He doesn’t know for s**t.
And then for support they had given him some recently turned leach and an old back-room doctor, Sabine. This whole f**king thing’s a set-up!
So this is how it was to be? The way they were going to send the message?
Assigning him a mission certain to fail?
Sending in Mr. B?
When had The Metropolitan lost confidence in him? Why?
He’s done everything that’s ever been asked of him, no matter how foul or perverse. No questions asked.
And now this?
Godda**ed Sabine and the leech!
But then he was more than well aware he was no one to blame but himself, after all he should have gotten the bitch at the Happy Burger. How she gave him the slip he still couldn’t fathom, unless the Shrewsbury bitch, who had pulled a gun on the crazy broad to begin with had somehow doubled backed and picked her up, and now had her somewhere squirreled way.
He looks over at Auntie H: “Well I guess that means me, since little Miss Bloodsucker over there doesn’t go to church.”
Alison’s eyes narrow, as she has grown tired of this tedious conversation and even more with Strake’s endless complaints, “No, you just sit there and suck on the nicotine, Mr. Strake. I will find Brook; and then I will find the scroll.”
Oh now this was really too much . . . they send Barlow, Burroughs, whatever the hell is his name is, up to Collinsport and she just suddenly wakes the f**k up and decides she’s going to get off her undead dyke ass, “Well, Hallelujah! Let’s all get out our hymn books. Seems all we had to do was mention f**king church and she has an epiphany. Honey, I don’t know how to break this to you but you see that is what you were sent here to do.”
“Just be sure to leave her alive Alison.” Auntie H says with an all too knowing look.
Alison sighs resignedly, “I will do my best,”
“Might I suggest you do a bit better than that?” Mr. B’s soft-spoken voice cares with it a more than discernable hint of menace.
“We would not want annoy Miss Collins,” Mr. Strake says leaning forward to slowly turn his glass atop the table, one half turn. “Isn’t that right Mr. B.”
“Providence has deemed that so, yes.”
“Yes, so it has. But if you wouldn’t mind, Mr. B, seeing has how we’re all just a collection of Misfit Toys, and as such, relegated to being kept out of the loop on whatever the f**k’s going on, “ He turns the glass the remaining half circle, “Could you, as a courtesy, satisfy my curiosity and answer why?”
“Why you are a Misfit Toy? Or, why you are being held out of the loop?”
“Why Nicole Collins is apparently so f**king important.” He lifts his glass but does not yet take a drink, waiting.
“Because Mr. Strake she is the Wizard’s Daughter.” Lucine Harpootian explains before Mr. B can answer.
The red-haired gentleman in the expensive tuxedo casts a surprisingly rare glance of admiration across the table at the attractive, blue-haired Auntie H. He understands now Providence’s assessment. “Yes, and she has been ordained by the Darkness.”
Strake’s brow furrows, this whole assignment has become even more bewildering . . .
“Wizard’s daughter?” Alison asks, “Which Wizard?”
“That is the least of your concerns.” Auntie H tells her.
“I am sorry, but Nicole Collins is my concern.” Alison says her voice now slipping into the compelling threat of the vampire.
Stupid undead dyke.
“Look honey, I am sorry to have to be the one to be the bearer of the bad news. But someone has to tell you. Collins is not the one who turned you. For all your wishing, it ain’t going to make it so.” Strake tells her, even as he is trying to figure out the angles; what all of this really about, seeing as how HE was now involved. Someone rather powerful, someone who had long been infected with the vampire alien virus had been the one to turn her, that’s why she had made the transition so well. Was it possible that HE planned Alison’s turning?
He takes now the drink he has been so long contemplating: Christ things always went side-ways whenever HE was involved. “Hope in this case is not alive dear, I checked, Collins was in Collinsport that night and so, she is not the one.”
“But Doc Sabine.”
“Sabine is lying.”
“Why?”
“Ask him, or perhaps that new Reverend friend of yours.” He certainly was not averse to taking the leech down with him.
“Reverend?” Mr. B looks back to Alison.
“The Reverend Trask.” Strake tells him.
“Trask? We know Trask.” Mr. B said not elaborating on just whom we were.
“Sabine told me he was a member of the Collinsport Ghost Society and as such he could help me prove that Nicole Collins was the one turned me.”
“I see and where is Sabine now?” Mr. B asked.
“I haven’t seen him in at least a week.” Alison told him, growing more vexed with the Strake’s contention that Nicole Collins had not returned to Providence with the intention of seeking her out and, in the midnight hour, turning her.
She didn’t like Strake and Strake didn’t like here and this was just one more attempt of his to disillusion her, even that hypocrite Trask had confirmed Sabine’s recounting of the events on that night, which was mostly lost to her in the horrible pain and anguish of her transformation as she lay unable to move, to scream, in a foul, blue dumpster as her body was biologically reconfigured, reinvented, regenerated.
“Doctor Sabine, you say he directed you to this Reverend Trask?” Mr. B asks.
“I can’t say that he directed me, no, it was more a suggestion. He said that if I wanted collaboration about the events of that night then I should go and see Trask, but, he knew nothing more than what Sabine had already told me.”
“Isn’t that amazing.” Strake shook his head, “It really is too bad that the myth of Sire goes the way of daylight rings, and shiny, sparkly glimmers and auras, and other crazy ass s**t they’ve come up with to sell these popularizing leech fantasies.”
“I do so hate to interrupt this rather fascinating discussion about vampric transformation, but can we not get back to the business at hand. The Brook woman. I strongly advise it best that you handle this sordid situation with care.” Auntie H says, “For whichever way it goes, she posses a danger. You harm her, and Collins will come for you; and, if you involve yourself with Collins, then you will have to deal with a murderous Miss Brook.”
“And by involve,” Strake says and pulls out another cigarette even though he is aware he had just put one out, this whole sordid mess, and that is what it was, sordid: lesbian vampires, crazy women out of Detroit, undead unrequited love, or, even worse unrequited lust of the dead. And Alison was filled to the brim with desires whose name was Nicole Collins. “She means if you try to f**k her, which, as we all know, is want you want to do.”
Alison’s smile is wicked, “Oh, you can rest assured, Mr. Strake, given the opportunity I most certainly shall.”
“Don’t let her charm deceive you, the woman has a bad heritage. If she were not undead, by now, she would be . . . even far more dangerous.” Mr. Burroughs says as his hand slowly moves for the first time toward the White Russian.
“She is a protégé of his.” Lusine Harpootlin offers as she looks at Alison.
“His?” She asks.
“The Haunter of the Darkness.” Strake says placing the filtered cigarette he had been rolling between his thumb and forefinger to his lips. “Blessed be his name.”
Mr. B nods, “So it is rumored in Providence. It is said that HE speaks with her.”
Strake snaps his Zippo closed.
“It may be wise to move your coffin.” Lusine Harpootlina contemplates, “Strake, you should keep an eye on her, especially during the day. Collins has the same disadvantages, but we are not at all aware of whether or not she avails herself of the services of others. Principally, to what assistances her ex-girl friend Sam Evans may provide, upon her own, seeing as how she’s also a member of the Collinsport Ghost Society. “
“Who knows, she’s got her own secret longing,” Strake flicks ashes atop the remains of the cigarettes he has extinguished in the plastic astray, “Who can understand the perversion of a woman’s frigidity melting away to the frigid touch of the leech, which happens even before the mesmerism of the mind f**k.” The cold hand. The warm heart. There was a reason they called down these vile, viral monsters from the stars.
The blue-haired proprietress of A Quarter to Three disregards Strake’s vampire bigotry, for the moment: “Alison, I shall have Synique go and prepare a place for you.”
“Speaking of which, if it wouldn’t be too much of a bother, could the lovely young lady accompany me during my rest. I do promise to return her . . . healthy.”
Lusine Harpootlian snaps her fingers and motions to the attractive brunette dancing nearest the table, “Synique, come here.”
Synique nods and smiles at Alison, “Yes, Auntie.”
Alison arises and steps over to the dancer, “I do grow lonely during the day. Would you be so kind as to join me?” She says offering the lovely brunette her hand. “Wherein, if I may, my lips shall travel along your cheek, in kisses; and we shall spend the day in long whispers.”
“Certainly Miss Alison, if—if that is alright with Auntie.”
Lusine Harpootlian waves at the two of them, “Go and get thee to thou rest.”
Wilbur Strake takes a long drink and then places his glass down, carefully, and flicks ashes once, twice, thrice into the plastic ashtray as he contemplates them in the coffin together, writhing. He needs another drink. He glances back toward the bar. He takes notice of the only other remaining customer sitting in a back booth.
He looks at Auntie H. “If I may impose, for a moment, Auntie; and ask, just who the f**k’s the well-dressed gent in the back booth?”
She smiles wickedly.
Cue Music End of Episode