Lycanthropus -- A Clem MacDougall Adventure, Take II

II. SLY TALBOTT'S MORNING AFTER. Sly Talbott awoke with a thundering headache inside a discarded stove crate between two trash cans in an alley not far from his apartment. He wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and his mouth tasted like the floor of a meat-packing plant. He belched up bile and realized he was about as hungry as he could remember ever having been. He stood up quickly and nearly fell back down in a heap at the wave of dizziness which passed over him. He had no idea how long he’d slept or how he happened to be lying in the alley buck naked. In a fit of modesty, he wrapped his delicate regions in the remains of a discarded booze carton, and picked his tenderfooted way gingerly back to where he’d parked the Vega. He figured he might find his pants there, for one thing, his wallet and the keys to his apartment for another. He found his pants, all right. His wallet was gone and his keys he saw in the ignition of the Vega. Which was locked. In passing, he noted a big new dent in the hood. This stinkin’ neighborhood, he thought. I gotta move outta this dump. Real low class o’ people livin’ in this stinkin’ neighborhood. Being locked out of his apartment was not a new experience for Sly Talbott. He crept around the side of the building, glanced about him carefully, slipped his pants back on – for some reason the crotch seam was almost completely torn out – and pulled down the fire escape ladder. In ten seconds he was letting himself in at the bathroom window. He flopped across the windowsill onto the floor, struggled to his feet and rummaged in the medicine cabinet until he found a bottle of aspirin among the old razor blades, stiffened corpses of toothpaste tubes and unused bottles of cologne and sticks of deodorant. He gulped four tablets, then ran water from the tap into his mouth to wash them down. His head throbbed. While he waited for the aspirin to kick in, Talbott wandered into the kitchen. He groaned at the sight of clotted Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti sauce and desiccated strands of pasta caked on top of the gas stove and on the greasy pots and pans in the sink. Fat bluebottle flies made a contented hum as they buzzed lazily over the surfaces and swarmed about the overflowing trash can in the corner by the door. Talbott was hungry as hell; for some reason the stench only made him hungrier. Funny. Joint smells like a garbage dump on a hot day, and I’m lovin’ it. Almost makes me wanna go roll in something stinky. Lookit them flies! Why should they have all the fun? He yanked open a cabinet and found a bottle of whiskey of some kind; it didn’t have a label and he’d forgotten when and where he got it. Ah, what the hell? Hooch is hooch. Any port in a storm. He pulled the cork with his teeth, spat it on the counter and took a long, meditative swallow. Then he took another. And yet another. Now the headache was releasing its grip, and he sighed with something like relief. He found a carton containing the remains of some nondescript Chinese take-out in the refrigerator, scraped off a layer of mold and shoveled it down in four big bites with a spoon he retrieved from the sink. He chased it with another snort from the bottle. Now, with another sigh of satisfaction, he lurched into the next room and flopped down on the straw-tick mattress that served him as a bed. Just before drifting off to sleep, he made a mental note to take a coat-hanger to his car, retrieve the keys and get over to MacDougall’s place. He was asleep before he could think why he wanted so badly to get over to MacDougall’s place. He dreamt of a man dancing about with his pants on fire. The dream was so vivid he could almost smell the burning flesh. As he slept, his mouth opened in a wide grin, the world’s ugliest tongue uncoiled like a serpent, and saliva trickled over the crusty pillowcase. YET MORE TO COME.