A Moon Over Malabar

A MOON OVER MALABAR

Many of the stories in this collection thrive on relationships and how they progress.
This one is about how not having a relationship at all transforms a person.
If you study people lacking a partner you will see that they compensate for their loneliness. This includes me when I was single. We all want to be loved. A lonesome man pretends he wants to be single or will become recluse. There are also those who manically chase partners and in the end turn into something they basically do not want to be.
The werewolf myth is originally no more than a symbol of the loner gone wrong.
Go beyond the cliche and accept the symbol of the moon as this single man's mentor.
The wolf howls at the moon because the sun does not want to listen.
This story was written in 2005.

The moon is a unblemished silver disc performing an odd waltz in the universe blessing us with dancing rays of lucid brilliance. What a swollen phrase. Sounds like pure Shakespeare. That is what it seems to us, anyway, as it shines softly above the horizon upon creatures on the soil. The haphazard element of its' rays is the end product it has on animals or the effect it had on the animal in me.
Why has the moon always had such an effect on us?
It draws the water toward its' magnetism and to-and-fro ourselves. It also attracts the animal in us and the lust that keeps our libidos alive. We crisscross between our angel and our demon and follow the devil that awakens when we howl at the moon. Is the moon at fault? No, but us loners wish we were closer. We make love by the light of the moon. That is the positive side of the coin. But we also murder by the light of the moon. That is the flip side.

As I am writing this, dusk is slowly approaching and the sun sets like a golden ball of ethylic flora. I am, or was before it happened, a writer. What I am now I don't know. I am an ex-beneficiary for the Haroldsford Gazette, who came here to research a murder case for the local press of my home town. I have become the beast since then.
What happened on the way to the cemetery one fateful night was, when I think back at it, ludicrous to say the least. Was I meant to be the beast? I don't know.
I had always wondered why I am here. If the devil created me, I know he did in favor of me doing what I am about to do tonight.
I define myself these days not by who I am, but who I am not.
I am a loner, someone women avoid. My groin awakes.

As I am sitting here, by the window in my small flat on Borough's Street 15 in this little town, the sun is setting. So I must write fast and tell you this story before I change, hoping that when glory is here someone will find these papers and make the right connections.
This cigarette-smoke over-killed hand is shaking and the fountain pen is dripping ink. My lecherous body is trembling.
I was born in one of these towns, just west of Key West in Florida. The town I now call home is far from where I was brought up. It is probably a town you never knew existed. It has four hundred inhabitants and this town, Midlandsville, Louisiana, is quite similar to it. My parents lost contact with me once I became what they described as "anti-social and sinful".

At the time of my arrival here five years ago, I had broken all connections with my old home town. My gigantic battle with my family occurred in my girlfriend's presence. I was researching the murder case of a young man who had killed his mother with an ax in a small town named Midlandsville. I begged the Haroldford Gazette to send me there as a temporary journalist, loving stories like that.
They loved the fact that I wanted to go. They couldn't stand the sight of me. The reason was that I had a short temper. My one-night-stands almost always ended with me being thrown out on my feet by some bimbo who called me everything from "swine" to " sweet, little MF". I ended up getting drunk the next night in the local bar. I just kept my job because I was bloody good at what I did.

I was an asshole, I presume. I wanted to get as far away from the possessiveness of my family as I could. My girlfriend had taken such a huge place in the lives of my parents that I had become unimportant.
So in 1976, May it was, I arrived here with one plastic bag and a bag pack, planning to stay only to research the case for the magazine as one last job to prove if I still could write.
I had nothing to return to after my fight with my folks, so all the time while I interviewed women with sad faces and school kids with cool faces and fathers with long faces about the alleged murderer and what he been like. All the time I was thinking what the fuck I was to do next. Where would I live when I returned? My family hated me and my father would certainly see to the fact that I never touched my sister again, as it was she who brought the subject of me leaving in the first place. She suggested me leaving and my boss agreed on it and I was sure that they would be happy if I didn't come back.

Three towns in this area here have the same paper that arrives every second day and I became the editor of this magazine three years ago. I came here five years ago and I started working full-time at the newspaper almost immediately.
With all that has occurred the last years, I wonder that I could've stayed sane. No one knows that I am the fiend. The correct word would be "The Swamp-Fiend" and I will explain to you what that means soon enough. How they ever could missed the countless transformations is a mystery to me and probably only due to the fact that I stay aware of my actions during the transformation as well during my life and death as a werewolf each night. I am driven by lust and feel myself kill my victims, but I can't control the murder itself. To the locals the word werewolf is blasphemy, but I have never been a man of choosing words.

They call him The Night-Creature. That is what is he is. He is a creature of the moon with his origins way back in time.
Randolph Jones, the town drunk no one ever listens to (except me), told me a story once in the local pub four and a half years ago that has gone from generation to generation in this town. It is the kind of story mothers tell their sons to scare them into bed and to keep their feet tucked in under the covers when they sleep. No one believes in the truth of these stories, or at least they say they don't. Unless you look into their scared eyes or your name is Randolph Jones or unless these things happen to you - then you never believe in the tales. And you feel your animal jump out with a terrible yelp.
I worked in a school in addition to my journalism, but I made myself so unpopular because of my unorthodox teaching strategies. Teaching in the open air, getting them to understand grammar by taking them to the theater and having beers with the actors and having them arrange contests in kissing.

As fate so strangely has it, it turned out that Malcolm Marvin, the chubby little tobacco-spitting accountant-type editor of the Gazette in Florida called me and said through his Bogart-voice-Tobacco-smacking that he wanted me to write about the town wolf. He hated me and felt he was a son of a bitch, but if I was willing I could stay where I was and write articles on a weekly basis for them. I needed the job, so I took the assignment.
I told Malcolm that Randolph Jones had told me about the wolf. It had a bulky maw and ate small animals.
"Werewolves like cats," he said. "It kicks down humans with its legs, knocking them unconscious and leaving small bite marks on their necks. The incubation period is one to three years, the story goes, before the victim himself turned into a wolf himself."
The strangest part of Randy's story was that the smell of cats apparently tickled his fancy. It was said that when he couldn't catch the humans, he would catch the local cat. I told Randolph to get real.

Malcolm agreed to forgive me for all my sins and blew the story up on the front page one morning when news stories were dire and scarce. The story became a hit and the magazine was even sold in Miami. So, good old Tabacca-Malc as I called him, God rest his blood ridden soul, assigned me for half a year in Midlandsville as a regular Ghost-Reporter, digging up old stories of the so-called "Swamp-Fiend" of Louisiana. I was still an asshole, but I had employment.
I was up to four packs of cigarettes that fall and the only way to stop me from turning into a cigarette myself was the local slut named Rita. She gave me a whole bag of nicotine-flavored chewing gum one day in turn for granting her a night with me. I had no idea why she favored me. My old girlfriend had called me a bed sheet once and certainly a dog or two had mistaken me for a lamppost.

Rita loved me and so we became a couple and I believe I broke her relationship record of two months and exceed it with years. She was my first victim. Killing her left me strangled by emotions. That was all yet to come.
Eventually, I was assigned back home. The ghost-stories were not popular anymore and Malcolm was suffering from lung problems. There was a new editor who had fired ten people and changed the entire outlook of the magazine.
I did return for a week to work, but my fight with the new prick of an editor, a yuppie with the fake sounding name of John Jones, had left me feeling that I needn't bother trying to rebuild a life in a town that had long since forgotten me. So, I was back in Rita's arms caressing her red flaming hair the winter of 1977.

I decided once and for all to quit stalling and decide on one place, so I quit my job in Florida and asked to be hired full-time in Louisiana. The editor thought I was nuts. The pay was not half as good as in Florida, but I told him my girlfriend was here and my teaching brought me some money. I had chosen the quiet life of a provincial journalist.
I was enjoying my new home. I had no contact with my family and I didn't care. I shared a house with Rita. I was respected and moving up. I knew where this was going: soon I would run the place and I liked that. I was a big fish in a little pond.
On the fourth of December that year of '77, Star Wars was crazing out everyone and The Buggles were whining about a radio star who got murdered by a video machine. I was on my way back from a party in Trodville. Rita was in our cute little house with the small patio, coughing like a seal and her boobs doing the boogaloo on her chest. In layman's-terms, the chick had a major case of the flu and urged me to go out and get drunk, before I too got the flu.

Still, I had insisted on walking home by the light of the moon, hoping that fresh air would "do me good", although the host, a sporty ex-baseball player I had met in a stadium, said I had to pass the cemetery to get home. He would rather not have me go by there. There were stories about that place that made even strong men cry.
I burst out into fits of laughter, almost peeing in my pants, actually thinking he joked. I saw twenty faces looking at me like an odd Warhol-version of a Norman Rockwell-painting, beer glasses and chips in hand, condoms half-opened in their pockets and hotdogs half eaten on their plates. Terror was in their faces. Bob, the host, took me aside, his girl by his side and said: "The only superstition people really believe in is the path between Trodville and Haroldsville. There is a swamp behind the cemetery. If you walk by there, walk fast."

I shivered. The ten beers were pushing my bladder and the numbness in my crotch after my infidelity was remaining. The cemetery was ominous and I could only make out the shadows of the stones. All the time I thought of Bob and his words of moonlight and swamps.
When I fell over I knew that I had broken something. The face that emerged out from behind the cemetery gates looked as if it belonged to a very large athlete. The face looked familiar and seemed to remind me of someone I had met in a stadium. I was relieved to see that it smiled until I saw that the face was hairy and it walked on all fours.
The jerk that followed knocked me unconscious and I woke up ten miles east in the largest hospital in the county, everything bandaged except my little toe. Bob was standing with Mandy, the cutie he was seeing, next to my hospital bed and my first reaction was to smile. It was nice to glance up at something that was so beautiful. Rita was pretty, but Mandy was even cuter. The sting in my leg told me what had happened. I had torn a muscle and broken a leg.

Bob told me that they had found me a quarter to four that night, mumbling about a beast. Bob had been in the vicinity and quickly called Mandy from a phone booth to come and help him get me to the hospital. Of course, it was only later I realized that Bob never meant to take me there. It should've occurred to me that he could've called the ambulance right away.
Rita arrived and was still coughing, although her eyes looked like Spaniel's eyes in her desolation and sympathy. I gave her a kiss in spite of her energetic condition.
Oh, yes. There was a priest. He asked some questions about what I had seen. I had never seen him before. He was not a local. He was carrying holy water.
I spoke to him in soft tones and he read to me from the bible and I asked him why. He did not respond. He spoke in supple prose about the local priest being sick and a certain Mr. Jones having asked him to come to the hospital to check how he was. The bite marks were examined and the priest even shivered as he casually tried to spray some water on it, before I sent him away with a growl.

The editor that I worked for died a week after I was released from hospital. He was run over by a truck after his car came to a standstill on the highway. I was chosen as his successor, because we actually were only ten people working in the office. I was the most active one of all, in spite of my condition. That will probably tell you what a lively bunch we were. I conducted my work with a limp and complained loudly when I had to go to the bathroom.
The funeral was sad and Mrs. Ex-Editor fell on the floor and tried to pull Mr. Ex-Editor out of the coffin. She was dragged away screaming.
My family called the publication. They knew a doctor that could fix my bite marks. They thought that I had been bitten by a dog.
That was nice for me to know, because I actually wanted to come home. I did go home and I stayed there for a month, but soon enough I got into a screaming battle with my girlfriend. I jumped into my van and left them all, never to return. It turned out that the organization of the magazine had functioned badly the weeks I had been gone. The colleagues were happy to have me back.

The marks on my neck remained and I did not know what I had seen. I thought little of it at first, but the nightmares left me in cold sweat. I was chased by something large and hairy and I would wake up with the moon in my face disturbing my senses.
My mood swings grew more irritating. I could be high as a kite and low as a cavernous truck. I was up to four packs and I coughed all the time. My flat was small and I was unhappy.
On December 1st 1978 I miraculously stopped smoking all together and my mood swings disappeared. Rita had broken up with me finally a week before and when she saw me in a store she wondered what the hell had happened to a man whom she had seen waving his fists about spraying ashes over the carpet. I became completely serene. I was an angel. Until that New-Years-Eve.
I only realized later that I was in the eye of the storm, what the werewolves call the midsummer night effect. It is what werewolves experience before the transform for the first time.

I was in Bob's house again. Having drunk coke all night, I had ended up speaking to the town bore. He was a librarian named Todd Markham who always turned up for every party smiling and dipping crackers in yogurt the entire evening.
Todd, the perfect librarian, told me an old legend in very distinguished language. Early 18th century French settlers in Louisiana found themselves bore by local custom and sought an alternative to established religion. Soon, they met by the full moon and did, as it was told, "ungodly things". Unfortunately, the settlers were found out and abolished from society.
Soon very ostracized, they were told to live by the swamp outside town and never to come back into town. They tried to enter the next municipality, but were shut out from there as well. As revenge, they formed a moon-cult, gathering round the swamp by moonlight and eventually had a tradition of throwing their dead into the swamp as burial. Their leader was apparently a very large misplaced Celt named Sean O'Swayne and he named this entire area that was now Midlandsville, the Moon Land of Malabar, the land of the evil tavern. Malabar was the county people's name for the cult. It was derived from the words that were spoken about the sect's burying rituals of lowering their dead into a swamp by the way of strapping them on a bar or a rod.

"There is something wrong with the bar adoring cult."
"Il ya quelque chose de mal avec la barre de culte d'adoration."
The entire cult became the Malabar Cult.
When the hefty chap died, his followers mourned him terribly and in two days the prophecy he had proclaimed on his deathbed was fulfilled. He rose from the swamp that May as a Swamp-Fiend in order to kill those who had made them recluse and proclaimed that for all time Swamp-Fiends would follow them until two adversaries met to fight the combat. He became the Celtic wolf leading the settlers.
He told me Randolph, the main Fiendologist in town, often went to the Swamp by day to check if large stones were there rolled by the wayside. Todd asked me if I knew why and I told him that Randy had told me why before our brawl in 1976.
I left a little bewildered about Todd's story about the May moon over Malabar. I thought of Randolph Jones' father, who, like him had been a recluse drunk and how anyone who tried to uncover the story died or got ridiculed.

As I passed the cemetery, the moon spread its' light over the famous swamp. So this was where it all happened. Full of awe I entered the cemetery by the light of the moon and stood looking down at the swamp beyond it, wondering what had created such a cult. Suddenly, it was as if a knife was stuck through my forehead. I looked up at the moon with a bent back and a force grabbed my hair and made me look. The moon seemed to laugh at me.
My bowels felt as if they were switching places with my lungs. I bent over, first signs of transformation being nosebleed, feeling my teeth pop out of my skull and my eyes roll upwards. My belly danced and my hair grew. Toenails curved and nostrils flared. The moon was in agony and the large creature that came my way was breathing heavily as I threw his body against the tree. I broke its' neck, eating its' flesh and throwing it down. First afterwards, I realized who I had killed: Bob. It had not been a coincidence that he had found me that night. He had only been so quick in finding me, because he had attacked me. Obviously battling with his own attack, he had chosen to call his fiancee instead of the hospital.

All that was in the past. I was now the Swamp-Fiend, having killed the ruling wolf in Malabar.
I rushed through the forest that night and came through the foliage up to a small cute house with a patio. There was a woman there with big honkers combing her red hair, who would soon die. I felt the animalistic glory of soon devouring her heart. That evening I felt the presence of Sean O'Swayne and fell asleep with the words "there's a moon over Malabar tonight" on my lips, knowing two more had joined the swamp inhabitants below.
Waking up by the swamp that next morning, I found red hair floating next to a baseball cap in the swamp. I woke up naked and freezing, bathed in the lake nearby to wash the blood off and walked up to the small side-room of the church in order to find the gardener in the bathroom, washing his face.
I stole his blue uniform hanging on a hook nearby and somehow managed to come back to my flat without too many people seeing me. Only my landlady Mrs. Zelda Richards was there, who with her dyed hair and thick glasses only saw someone if he came running up close onto her face. My flat was remote and not many people came into that street, ten side streets away from Main Street.

When I heard that two people were missing that day, I smiled. I knew. I could get my own back without getting caught.
The next twelve months was a piece of cake. I knew that I would transform every midnight full moon, so I unclothed and waited. When the crime was performed, I made sure my clothes were somewhere where I easily could put them on again. Humans were a feast, eating cats were also equal fun.
Now there was a man who needed to relieve himself of his sexual frustration. And reports of the brutal Louisiana-murders once again circled the country. I wrote the stories for the magazine about them and tried not to enter too much inside info. When people told me how awful it was, I nodded and agreed. But when I turned my back I sniggered. I was the killer.
Remember Randolph Jones, the town drunk? On the morning of the 3rd of October 1979, Randolph Jones returned to town clean and no one knew how to react to him in his new get up. He had a suit on and was carrying a briefcase.
The post office had given him his old job back and he looked like he had decided something in his own mind.

Ever since our talk in the bar, a place I called the evil tavern or mal avec la barre, he had been skeptical of me. He disliked my cynical attitude and my disbelief in his stories.
Nobody knew where he had been and how he had become so strong and good looking, but he had received a new power that had rejuvenated his combat strength. His father, who lived out of town, had made it a quest to uncover the Swamp-Fiend and it seemed whoever tried to kill the fiend became the laughingstock of town. Now, he would strike back. And it scared me.
For the last three months I have tried to kill him, without success. But this night, the moon will be out and I know that Randy has bought shovels and axes in Carter's Steel 'n Iron off Main Street. I bribed the bimbo to tell me about it. When I gave her an extra kiss and asked her if there was anything else, she said he had a very odd looking cloth bag with him and it had looked like something limp and stiff was in it, like a body of an animal, and she shivered at the thought. He had also blabbered something about "stones by a swamp".

The heating is on and the moon is out. I have just returned from the bimbo's flat and she thanked me with some wine from her cabinet. I am naked once again and waiting, fountain-pen in hand and anticipation in soul. Now I feel my bowel turn as steps slowly emerge up the open stairwell to my remote flat. I look out once again into the open field, moonshine bright, calm outside although the agony is immense.
I know exactly what to do. I succeeded Bob as the Swamp-Fiend. I do not want to be overcome by Randy, but if that is the case, I will be ready to kill him and throw him in the swamp like the others if nothing else. But the joy of seeing Randy become one of us would be great. This is an age-old war between settlers and wolves, Frenchmen and Celts and I am only another link in the chain.

I have heard about other Swamp-Fiends and if I survive tonight, I will be ready to leave this place in order to find them. As I sit here, I am thinking of the months May and December. I arrived in May and the birth of the first Swamp-Fiend was in May. I decided to stay here in December. The next December I got bitten. The following year I was transformed. With this one I might be turning this story around to what Sean O'Swayne talked of as the two foes joining. May is the birth. December is the puberty. The year is divided in twain.
I will throw stones. That is what we do when we defend ourselves against beings stronger than us.
Wait, the door is opening. I see a shovel. My adversary is here. I must go. My nose is bleeding. I am horny once again. For blood. The old drunk is emerging.

Article from the Haroldsford Gazette, January 22nd, 1982:

MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE SHAKE THE SOUTH

By John Jones, Editor-in-Chief

A story that has left the cities of Haroldsford, Florida and Midlandsville, Louisiana bewildered and confused was unearthed on Tuesday morning by way of mail to the Gazette. Apparently, on the 29th of April old documents were found in a locked drawer of an old desk in the small town of Midlandsville, Louisiana.
Although there is only one name on the sheet, it is obvious the documents were written by a certain Richard Brown who used to work as a journalist for the Haroldsford Gazette in the years 1975 to 1977, before eventually becoming a local Louisiana editor in 1978.
Mr. Brown, a personal friend of the current Editor, was a known chain-smoking womanizer and his disappearance on the 23rd of December 1981 was a mystery to everyone. According to reports, a rehabilitated post-office-worker named Randolph Jones was seen walking into Mr. Brown's building that evening before both of them disappeared never to be seen again. A fountain pen and a shovel were found on the forenamed desk after the almost blind landlady, a Mrs. Zelda Richards had heard screams coming from the apartment of Mr. Brown.
When the police arrived at the apartment there was broken glass shattered all across the flat and into the open area of a field behind the house. The two men had leaped out of the window shortly before the police arrived.
Unclear, however, were the origin of the cat hair that were found all over the apartment.

Article for the Jules County Journal, Page 3, May 3rd 1989

OLD STORY EMERGES FROM THE MURKY SHADOWS

By Madeleine O'Swayne, Assistant Editor

After two men mysteriously disappeared in the beginning of this decade, their fate continues to baffle the minds of locals. They were involved in a werewolf myth that had people accusing them of satanic murders. Known as adversaries to the citizens, their disappearance was a sign to many that the eloped and turned into a killer duo.
The two men have not been found and stories are circling as to what actually happened on that fateful night. The two men were known adversaries and were known for never speaking with each other since having a brawl in a bar in 1976. The most incredible story of all is a story no one can believe. A story both men researched, the one privately his entire life, the other since the fall of 1976 for the Haroldsford Gazette.
Its origins lies in the early settlement of Midland, Louisiana, where a French moon cult was banned from town because of bacchanal feasts of heathen eroticism. Apparently, their Celtic leader returned from the dead in order to avenge himself and become the so-called Swamp-Fiend. As the story goes, the Swamp-Fiend must kill forever until two adversaries, one wolf and one non-wolf, meet and end the fight by both becoming wolves or both turning good.

Clear is that the disappearances of people in the area have occurred for years and is blamed on the packs of stray wolves. Obvious is also that the National Enquirer issued several articles on the recluse couple of Swamp-Fiends seen in other parts of the land. The author of this article is more inclined to believe the police, who seem to be sure the two men met in 1981 in order to talk things out before the police arrived and then became conspirators on a criminal journey.
The cat-hair, the broken glass and the disappearance are all part of a story whose mystery never will be solved.

From the National Enquirer, May 5th, 2001:

THE RETURN OF THE FIEND

The Swamp-Fiend has returned. Now in droves and it is crossing the borders into Canada. Citizens of Washington have sighted as many as twenty running under the full moon up into northern territories.
It has been a long journey. Our magazine has followed these wolves since 1981, when reported murders escalated occurring in southern states and then spreading into New Mexico, Oregon and Nevada in 1984. By the end of the eighties there were reported killings in California and now we have a total of 3000 dead in Washington State. Where do the wolves strike next?