“Hey, now, no need for name calling,” said her brother, Hiro. “You’ve never liked her but try to be civil. She makes me happy.”

“I’m not speaking in metaphors. She makes toads sad when she takes their croak for her spells! All those mice were using their bladders before she whisked them away into a foul concoction.”

Hiro pushed himself out of the chair, the fire in the hearth flickering across his face. “You’re acting just like Ma and Pa, telling me how to live my life. You were their favorite, they left you the house but they didn’t hand you the other end of my leash.” Hiro spat into the fire and stormed out of the room. Hannah heard the front door slam and a cold jet of air made her shiver.

She shook her head.

The fire flared for a moment and then a woman emerged out of the light. A fog of soot flowed from her clothes as she coughed. Hannah nearly overturned her chair from surprise.

“Oi, I hear what you say about me!” the woman said.

“Hiro may be head over heels in love with you, Mincy, but I know that you’re a no good witch!”

“I’m a fine witch! The only problem with being a witch is people like you who act so…witchy! Stay out of our business!”

“Stay out of my house! You were eavesdropping on a conversation between a sister and her brother. This wasn’t for other ears!”

They both froze as the front door opened.

“Hah, now he’ll see!” Hannah said, her grin fading as she turned to look at the empty air between her and the fire.

“I’m sorry that I stormed out,” Hiro said, as he came back in. Snowflakes from the blizzard glistened like jewels against his ebony hair as they melted in the firey heat.

“Mincy was just here! Right here!” Hannah said. “Look, you can see her sooty footprints!”

Hiro frowned. “I’m trying to make amends, here.”

“And I’m trying to point out that – huurp,” Hannah said, suddenly a small toad. “Hurp? Hurrrp!”

Hiro rushed to her side and picked her up.

“What happened?” Hiro asked, his worried face reflected in her bulging eyes.

“I took care of your sister,” Mincy said, re-appearing out of the fire.

“Why? How?”

“She’s right. I’m a witch. And it’s for her own good.”

“That’s not for you to-”

He was interrupted by a loud slamming noise of the door being knocked from its hinges with a battering ram.

“Everybody on the floor!” yelled an armor-clad police officer, pointing his gun at Hiro as other officers poured into the room, treading snow and ice all over the carpet.

The police swept through the house, and after they’d secured it, an officer approached Hiro.

“Are you Hiro Smith?”

“Y-yes,” Hiro answered.

“The brother of Hannah Smith?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where your sister is?”

Mincy was sitting in a chair several feet away, but he felt a sensation on his shin like someone kicking it.

“No,” Hiro answered.

“Because we have a warrant for her arrest. Tax evasion related to inheritance of your parents’ estate.”

The Moral: you’re going to be more worried about keeping a rug free of soot and ice if you still have to pay taxes on it.

This, of course, being the most common way to turn into a wolfman.

As he prowled the streets at night, looking for soft pink monkeyflesh on which to feast, he paused because he smelled something more alluring, more enticing, than even the recent visitor to a buffet that he’d been following. Which was an enticing smell indeed, because his previous prey had spilled so much sauce down his front as to marinate himself.

Tommy, in other words, smelled a wolfwoman. As he spied her, snuffling through a pile of fast food wrappers, he saw her beautiful silver hair shining in the moonlight. She obviously wasn’t a wolfwoman – she was a wolfLADY.

With a light step, Tommy approached her until he was very close, then made what he hoped was an alluring whine.

She started, turned, and tore out his throat with her powerful, crushing jaws, then went back to snuffling through the fast food containers, cursing the overwhelming scent of Tommy’s blood that blocked out everything but the odor of the mustard and pickles.

The Moral: always order a hot dog with everything and leave it next to a dumpster during a full moon.

I’d grown up watching the regular kids through their porch windows from their darkened backyards, trying my best to be silent but my stomach gurgled ceaselessly. It always made me sad, when that would happen, because then me and my family would shuffle out of the shadows and into the firelight and ruin what looked to be a perfectly good grill.

Sure, I was hungry for brains, but I was hungry for more, sometimes. Those moms and dads telling their kids about school and college and marriages and driving and all the things that the warmbloods pay attention to. It sounded nice, in a non-brain related sort of way. The moms and dads would sometimes drink too much beer and make noises like my mom and dad. Well, until my mom got her head taken off. That was pretty messy. I guess all those brains don’t do you any good if you can’t keep your head on.

I once fell in a pool and sank to the bottom. It was just before dawn, and nobody noticed. I watched the sun come up. It hurt a little, but the water shielded me from the worst of it. For hours I watched the light filtering down through the swirling water, saw the leaves floating on the surface, observed the turbulence as my dinner thrashed on the surface until I finally wandered into the shallow end.

There’s less of us, these days. Maybe I’d be happy if I were them, but now I’m sad. I’m always hungry, hungrier than I’ve ever been before. My dad’s gone now, too. Burned up in a flaming attack. I’ve been in the woods lately, and I’ll only find some scraps every few months. It’s getting cold and I can’t really move so great.

Boredom, for the first time, has replaced hunger. It’s cold and hard to move my limbs, so I’ll just sit and watch the birds and the deer until the sun is high enough in the sky to warm me up.

The last good meal I had was these guys in suits. They drove up in their sleek car, down the abandoned lane. I wondered why they were so deep in the woods, and then I saw them take a fourth man out of the trunk, his hands and feet tied with rope, and shoot him in the head. That made me mad. I shuffled towards them. They started shooting at me, but my hands and legs were unfettered and it’s a lot harder to shoot something that doesn’t want to be shot. To be sure, they put a few bullets in me, but they were nice and warm and felt good in my muscles after the chill of the previous evening. Soon my mouth was full of brains and my belly hung low and pendulous.

The one with the greasy hair tasted bad. I only took a handful of brains from him.

I’ve seen the first snowflakes, and my vision begins to fix itself. I’m trying to freeze solid in a good spot. I can still see during the winter, but I get very bored, so I try to find an animal path. The deer are fun to watch.

The Moral: if Smoky the Bear wants to save his precious forests, maybe he should start telling his bear friends to eat the zombies.

“You couldn’t lay out a corpse, even with the help of your rum-ruined uncles,” Birschon countered.

McKinley’s eyes opened wide and bobbed in the ocean of ale swimming behind them. His beard quivered, shaking flecks of frothy ale from it like a dog that had escaped from its bath. Hands clenched around his mug of courage, McKinley stood and pressed his stomach against Birschon’s elbow as Birschon kept his gaze lowered into his ale.

“You’re a newcomer to this town, so I’ll let you retract that remark. Lowell, remember what happened at the last country fair?”

“They were picking Hunter’s teeth out of the grass for weeks!” shouted one of the men who were eager for a fight to break the monotony of the evening.

“Hunter hated limes and a stiff breeze would’ve finished what scurvy started,” Birschon said. “Sit down, friend, you’ll not get anywhere with me.”

A rumble began in McKinley’s stomach, jiggling it against Birschon’s arm, and the rumble traveled upwards like a volcano until a tremendous belch knocked Birschon’s hat to the ground.

“My mam made that for me before I left home, and I’d expect you to treat it with respect,” Birschon said as he bent down to pick it up.

“I’ll fetch another for you when I see her,” McKinley said with a grin.

“I’m afraid it’s a one-way trip to where she is now,” Birschon said, putting his hat on his head and carrying the stool that he’d been sitting on with him as he rose. He smashed McKinley beneath the chin with the edge of the seat and McKinley flew through the air and into the crowd. A brawl began.

Above the din rose a high-pitched scream, unusual for the boisterous grunts typical of the bar. The tempest slowed to a few gentle zephyrs as Birschon dove between the men towards the source of the exclamation. There, on the ground, was someone’s head and their headless corpse, still swinging. The eyes on the head blinked, noticed what had happened, and then the body collapsed.

“A spy from the necromancers!” Birschon said, “I’d heard there was one in town. They always send the fresh corpses. There’s no better way to find ‘em then to get ‘em in a brawl, they always lose their heads!”

The Moral: up to ninety percent of tavern patrons are lousy stereotypes of tavern patrons

In a flash, Hragbrell had seized his spiked hammer and began to think about skulls, holes in skulls, relieving cranial pressure and generally bashing things on their most skyward part.

A small, shabby figure came crashing out of the forest. It tripped on a root and pitched forward into the fire. It’s robes caught and it began to run in circles. Hragbrell didn’t feel like performing any rescues that evening, but he also didn’t feel like talking to anybody, and people loved a show. So Hragbrell seized the flaming person around the ankles, dug his own heels into the ground, and spun until the wind blew out the flames. Hragbrell then dropped the figure on the ground and menaced it with his spiked hammer.

“Wut yoz wan?” Hragbrell asked the robed figure.

“Please! Help me!”

“Wy?” Hragbrell asked. “Wut yuz nam?”

“Josephine!” the figure yelled.

Hragbrell squinted. Beneath the layer of ash, dirt and scratches received from thorny forest flora, he realized that he was talking to a woman.

“Yuz a girl,” Hragbrell said. He frowned.

Josephine nodded.

“But yuz clohhz ar on,” Hragbrell said, who rarely spent time indoors, and only then because he usually didn’t have enough gold to pay the women to go outside. They always complained about ticks, but Hragbrell argued that at least when you were outside, you expected bugs to crawl on your bottom. He rarely got anywhere with that answer. “I gues yoz lern noo stuf each day.”

Something crashed in the forest.

“I escaped my master! And now he’s trying to kill me!”

“Yuz master? I had a master. I trepanned him and took his hammer,” Hragbrell said, smiling. His teeth were black, but not from rot. Rot was a thing of the past for Hragbrell’s teeth – he’d had his pearly whites replaced with cast iron. “I’ll help!”

From the forest came a black cloud that obscured the stars and blew out the campfire.

“Tuk me tu ours tu lite the fire!” Hragbrell yelled in a tone that had often prevented him from needing to fight at all. Many tailors could tell when Hragbrell was in town from all the new trousers that were ordered.

The smoke didn’t seem to even be moved by his breath, let alone his rage. It swirled around them like coal dust but darker. After a moment, Josephine stood up. Sadness had replaced the fear in her eyes. She walked up to a confused Hragbrell, who looked like he was about to start swinging his spiked hammer at the smoke.

“He chose to protect me. He’ll work,” Josephine said.

The smoke cleared, leaving nothing but a small campfire burning next to the woods.

When Hragbrell woke up, he was inside of a small stone chamber. Torches burned on the walls. At the end of the chamber was an enormous door. Harp music played from an unknown source, making him wince. The only music he liked was the clank of steel on steel or, better yet, steel on bones and squishy soft bits of people who hadn’t been smart enough to hire him before their enemy had.

Josephine stood nearby, her head bowed.

“Wat yoz do tu me?”

“I’m sorry. I lied. I didn’t run away. I had to help my master find someone with a heart of gold.” She dropped her eyes. “I thought he’d accepted me as an apprentice because I was talented. Turns out he accepted me as an apprentice because nobody with a heart of gold would reveal that fact to a shapeless evil from beyond the edges of the universe. I guess I look innocent.”

Josephine put on a tough face. “But I’m not! I’m evil, through and through! You look like you’ve killed your share of men, but I’ve killed thousands! Millions! I’ve torched villages, burned monasteries, led brave and courageous men and women down paths of cowardice that led to their own private tragedies!” She gestured at herself. “But my master didn’t care about any of that. He wanted an innocent-looking girl.”

The smoke entered the room. Josephine pointed to the door.

“He commands that you open it.”

“Noz,” Hragbrell said.

“Your death will be quicker that way,” Josephine said.

“He shud open it himself,” Hragbrell said.

“He can’t. Only somebody with a heart of gold can open it. So it is written on the door.”

“Wy?”

“Because what lies beyond that door is an enigmatic artifact of pure evil. It casts the target to a realm of unimaginable torment and binds them their so thoroughly that they cannot even choose to leave, for it makes the prisoner regard it as justice that they suffer. Priests of Valena the Fertile locked it away behind a gate that is paradoxical. It can only be opened by somebody with a heart of gold, because somebody with a heart of gold would never consider using it,” Josephine said.

“Oks,” Hragbrell said. He walked up to the door, grabbed the silver handle, and tugged it open. The hinges whispered as the door swung out to reveal an alcove. The harp music grew louder. Hragbrell cringed. Laid upon a white marble table was a sceptre. It was as black as Hragbrell’s teeth, and apparently made out of the same material as it was cool to the touch and roughly surfaced. The head had been forged into a lattice, and imprisoned within the lattice was a pale blue gem.

“The Mace of Juporgin,” Josephine whispered. She stepped towards Hragbrell, and the smoke floated towards him, as he stepped out from the alcove. “Hand it over.”

“Noz,” Hragbrell said. He thrust it into the center of the smoke, which began to swirl and was sucked into the gem.

Josephine stood nearby, horrified.

“Now yuz free!”

“How’d you do that? The Mace of Juporgin can only be used by somebody with a heart of gold!” Josephine wailed.

“I haf hart of gold, iz tru. I pult it outta the chest of a dragin,” Hragbrell said.

The Moral: whenever devoting yourself to a prophecy, do research to confirm that the writer wasn’t a jackass.

“Mayor, a city worker recovered this from the sewers while they were drilling through a hairball in the Barber District,” said the police commissioner, handing a three-ring binder across the mahogany table. The mayor fiddled with a phallic letter opener as he took the binder.

“What, they found some fuckin’ kid’s fuckin’ school papers and you’re all shitting bricks?” the mayor asked as he fiddled with one of the many phallic letter openers that littered his desktop.

“Open it,” said the police commissioner.

The mayor opened it. Each page had been soaking in sewer water. The ink had smeared in places, running together with the brown coastlines and mountain ranges left behind when a page is dried after soaking in effluvia. The edges were tattered with the teeth marks of rats. The letters were written in a careful, elegant script, gradually descending into a rough chickenscratch.

This is what it said:

“I was sent here by the Census Bureau to cover the uneducated, sweaty hordes in the southern portion of the city. They were crammed together tighter than the insects that inhabited their buildings. They possessed air conditioning units that were universally broken. At each door I’d hear the strains of the lowest common denominator television blaring, then the sound of uncouth voices yelling. Inevitably they’d come stomping to the door, frowning around the doorjambs, in their stained tanktops or threadbare housecoats. If I was lucky, they’d be wearing fetid slippers. If I wasn’t, their hooked toenails would click against the broken linoleum on the floor.

I didn’t come away from university with a degree in rhetoric to talk with people who could barely form a sentence without some sort of barnyard euphemism, despite their relatives having infested this district for decades. Or at least I assumed decades, from the ingrained decay that collected around them like the layer of dust in an abandoned tomb. Only time could produce that.

I would always arrive at lunch time, or supper time, or dinner time. God, these people were always eating. And the most disgusting things. I learned from one sturdily obese man, named Milton Edgar Luchmann, what ingredients went into what he called ‘trailer park Porterhouse.’ One stick of margarine, left out for an hour to soften, mixed with a cup of dry cat food. He pressed the mixture against his gums without removing the gummy brown chaw from his mouth as we talked and I gathered information on his employment (self-employed), his family geneaology (two parts racial slur, one part religious), and the other residents of the apartment (at least six others called this place home, and all of them were in prison).

Milton was my last stop in the building, and my last stop for the day. It had taken longer than I had expected and the sun had already set by time I folded up the census form and bid Milton a good night. He implored me to stay.

‘It ain’t safe for a fella outside, not in this neighborhood, not at night.’

I assured him that I had learned plenty of self-defense manuevers at university. He eyed me dubiously and watched me as I walked down the stairs, where I felt the real danger was. I swear that even the termites that had caused their instability kept off of them.

I walked outside and tried to breathe deep enough to use the air to rinse the smell of trailer park Porterhouse out of my sinuses and lungs. I felt light-headed and disoriented, and didn’t notice anything was amiss until I felt hands grab my ankles and yank my feet out from beneath me.

One moment I was standing, the next my vision flashed white as my head collided with the concrete sidewalk. I saw the census forms and papers fluttering in the in the orange light of the sodium lamp on the corner. I still hadn’t seen my attacker, but I saw my savior. Milton emerged from the apartment building with a kitchen knife.

‘What’d I tell you?’ he said. He leapt towards my feet and grunted as he stabbed. His belly jiggled angrily with each stab. Regaining my senses, I sat up as quick as I could and fought the waves of nausea crashing over my tender skull.

I’ll never forget what I saw. A human, or I should say humanoid, trying to flee from Milton. He’d grabbed it around the neck. It had the appearance of an egg held up to a powerful light. You could see every vein running beneath its translucent skin. Its eyes were blue, whitish orbs, and it had rotting lips that peeled back to reveal teeth like that of a cat, except much larger, longer and sharper. They were for rending flesh.

Flesh that would’ve been mine, filling its jaws, if it wasn’t for Milton and his kitchen knife. He filleted the horror and sent it skittering back into the sewers.

‘I warned ya,’ Milton said, pulling me to my feet.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘We call em the drainmen, because they come out of the drains. None of us live in the basements round here anymore, used to be popular to dodge the leaky roofs, but it’s better to have some drops falling on your head than having spindly fingers reaching out of a sink to grab you while you’re doing some dishes.’”

“That’s it? Some fool’s delusions?” the mayor said, dropping the binder into the trash. “That’s why you’re all stinking up my fucking office?”

“We’ve lost the Barber District. The hairball was all that blocked these…drainmen.”

“What do you mean, lost?”

“It’s gone. The workers, the residents…”

“Send in more cops!”

“The SWAT teams were dragged into the sewers,” the police commissioner said, “and my men and women more afraid of the drainmen than they are of you or me.”

The Moral: don’t flush monster’s eggs into the municipal sewer system.