The April Editor's Pick Writer is Michael Pendragon

Please feel free to email Michael at: michaelmaleficapendragon@gmail.com

FISH-EYED PETE
by Michael Pendragon

The girl was pretty hot. Tall, raven-haired, husky voiced, all the requisite curves in their proper places.  She even had a sexy name: Veronica. She was walking down Broadway, just above Times Square, when I first spotted her; which you have to admit is hardly the type of setting for a ghost. I was walking in the opposite direction and our eyes met in a smile as we passed.

Now, there are moments in every man’s life when the smallest action can set off a string of events that will change its course forever. Most of us get stuck in a rut of daily/weekly/monthly/yearly patterns and can end up just going through the motions for decades. 

But if we take the initiative to act on one of those moments, we can suddenly set our comfortable little world spiraling off in new and uncharted directions. Which is precisely what happened to me when I spun around on my heel, caught up to her, tipped my hat, and hit her with the cheesiest pickup line that popped into my head: “I’ve heard of angels over Broadway, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen one walking down it.”

Fortunately she took the bait, cocking her eyebrow in an impudent manner and struggling hard to hold back a grin. Twenty minutes later and we were sharing a lunch at one of the swankier, upper end eateries in the theater district. 

That is, we were sharing a conversation over my lunch, as I was the only one eating. Not that I didn’t do my God’s honest best to tempt her with the most impressively priced menu suggestions. She eventually compromised by allowing me to buy her a drink, although as far as I could see, it’s sole purpose was to provide her with a prop to keep her hands busy while we talked.

Our conversation was almost as one-sided as our lunch. I gave her a slightly inflated rundown of my bio: Max Baxter, thirty-something, fitness instructor at one of the nearby health and racquet clubs. She looked to be suitably impressed. Naturally, I offered her a special reduced rate membership which she thanked me for before she politely declined.

“Do you think I need to work on my figure?” she teased with more than a hint of mockery in her tone.  There’s nothing like a woman with self-confidence about her looks to get under a fella’s skin in a big way. I mean, when a girl’s a knockout and knows it—and, more importantly, knows that she’s knocking you out with every little nuance and gesture—well, it does things to a guy. And when you combine that with her general air of mystery, you’ve cooked up one enticing little dish.

But if she seemed a bit mysterious at lunch, the real mystery began just after we’d exchanged numbers and promised to get together that Friday night. For as I paused to watch her walk away, I noticed a strange little man lurking in the shadows cast by the cornice of a long-bricked up door. 

At first I just thought him odd—in that flabby, little weirdo kinda way. He was garbed in the requisite weirdo raincoat, after all. And the creepy way he stared at Veronica as she crossed in front of him, and after she’d passed and walked away, seemed to back up my pervert theory pretty well. It was only after our mutual lust object had disappeared into the crowd that he fixed his attention on me.

I gotta say he wasn’t very prepossessing at first. Short, squat and bearded, he might have been the demented cousin of one of the seven dwarfs (Happy, Sleepy, Dopey, Doc, and Pervy). Only his hair was a little too long and poofy and boasted a good deal more strawberry-blonde than gray.

But the oddest thing of all was that there was something downright fishy about him. Perhaps it was the way his large round eyeglasses perched atop the stubbiest bump of a nose this side of Munchkinland, but the more I looked at him, the more he stared looking like a fish.

It was only after he flashed his haddock eyes at me as a warning sign, that I felt the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention, and my skin, quite literally, begin to crawl. Funny thing was that I could have easily taken him in a fight. I was practically twice his size and at least ten times more fit.  Unless he had some secret goblin-fish-troll-man superpowers I was unaware of. Nevertheless, I breathed a sigh of relief when he hobbled off back to his hole, or cardboard box, or whatever it was that evil city-dwelling garden gnomes used for their lair these days.

By the time Friday rolled around, I gave myself a nice, big, metaphorical pat on the back for having had the balls to approach such a beautiful goddess; and an even bigger one for having landed her. And, I’d forgotten all about "Fish-Eyed Pete," as I’d dubbed the creepy little voyeur from the doorway.

But Fish-Eyed Pete was not about to stay forgotten. Not by a damn site. He seemed to be connected to Veronica in some strange, stalker-like way; insofar as he would inevitably turn up out of nowhere whenever she was around. 

His first appearance was during our first date that Friday night.

I’d met up with Veronica in Central Park, where we wined and dined at Tavern on the Green. Afterwards, we caught a performance of Tchaikovsky's “Romeo and Juliet” ballet at Lincoln Center.  Pretty upscale stuff for a guy on a fitness instructor’s salary to be swingin’, but when you’ve got a chance at a girl as hot as this, it pays to play the big shot for as long as your savings account holds out. 

Then too, I could afford to take her to the priciest five-star restaurants, because she never ordered anything but a drink. And even though she only held the drink, it almost never went to waste because she’d usually end up pouring it into my glass. 

Needless to say, her extreme-Spartan diet always got me wondering if she ever ate at all, or even drank anything either. But after the first few dates I started to accept it as a matter of course—one of the little eccentricities that made her who she was. From then on in, I rarely gave the matter any thought.

In all fairness, I can’t rightly say that Fish-Eyed Pete followed us to the ballet that night. On the contrary, you might even say that in a sense, we’d followed him. 

It turned out that he was a member of the orchestra, playing what I’m relatively certain was a cello. I don’t know why I mentioned him to Ronnie (having already adopted the familiar term of address); I guess I just thought it would make for some interesting conversation in between scenes. 

Big mistake. The minute I pointed him out, a look of sheer terror swept across her face, and she insisted that we leave at the end of the act.

Once we were out in the fresh night air, she quickly pooh-poohed the entire incident as a result of her having been tired from an especially busy week. I was tempted to ask her exactly what she did to earn a living, but promptly decided against it. Ending a first date in the middle of a classic ballet is never a good sign, and I wasn't about to push whatever luck I might have left.

“You’re tired because you didn’t have anything for dinner,” I kidded her. “How about a little something for dessert? I know this quiet little spot where they make the most incredible Napoleons…”

I did my best to hide the panic rising in my eyes when she declined. Was our date going to end early?

But she must have picked up on it, because she quickly invited me back to her place, and my hopes soared. That night I held her luscious, cool body in my arms.

*****

But there were disturbing things centered around Fish-Eyed Pete and the mysterious connection he had to Veronica, for no matter how far out of the way we’d choose to go on our dates, that evil dwarf would somehow manage to be there too.  

He turned up at the bowling alley in Greenwich Village, at the movie theater in Canarsie, and on the beach at Fire Island (lurking beside the clam bar in his raincoat). That little toad was really starting to creep me out. And one night, as we walked down Second Avenue to my place, the sad-happy music of a cello accompanied us all the way to my door.

Though Veronica seemed to be creeped out even more, she still refused to acknowledge that Fish-Eyed Pete was the cause. In fact, she’d even go so far as to deny that it was the same dwarf. 

“No, no,” she’d laugh in a phony sort of way, “the dwarf we saw at Bowlmor was a good half a foot taller.” Or, “The dwarf at the botanical gardens only had a mustache and goatee.” 

But she wasn’t fooling me. Two dwarves sporting a head like a haddock would be rare enough for Ripley’s, but seven little fishheads in seemingly identical raincoats…what are the odds of that?

So I started to put together a new theory. Ol’ Fish-Eye had something on her. The question was what? 

She still hadn’t told me much about her past. Although, every once in a while, she’d drop a hint or two about “the old country,” which I took to mean Russia, or Czechoslovakia, or one of those Eastern European places. Sometimes I could even detect the faint trace of a Russian accent when she spoke. I figured Pete was from “the old country” too. Rumpelstiltskin, leprechauns, hobgoblins, trolls…all of them stem from one place in Europe or another. 

A Rumpelstiltskin deal seemed like the best bet. He’d done something for her—killed someone for her?—and now he wanted her to pay up. Or maybe she had paid him off, but he was blackmailing her. Maybe they’d worked in some international drug ring, or trafficked in white slavery. Veronica sure seemed like she was harboring a (very) dark secret or seven.

Still, as fantastic as my theories often got, I ruled out the possibility that they had been lovers. Beautiful women just don't go out with fish.

Turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark. But I didn't find that out until later…until it was too late. 

For the time being, I made up my mind to do away with the little nuisance. You see, I getting pretty serious about Veronica; marriage thoughts and stuff—and I didn't relish the idea of going into that sort of thing with a black cloud hanging over our heads. Plus, it bothered me that he might have known something about her that I didn’t. I know, it’s hard to imagine anyone being jealous over a four foot tall guy who looks like a fish, but there it was. Love can do strange things to a man.

Days passed. And I was at an impasse. “Pete” only showed up when Veronica and I were together, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to snuff him in front of her. It got to the point where he was rarely out of my thoughts. His death had become my obsession. 

I had become some psycho-Walter Mitty—killing him over and over again in my thoughts, and with every sort of weapon imaginable. But most of the time I settled on a knife. So much so that I ended up buying myself one: a six-and-a-half inch lockblade.

In my dreams, he’d stare at me with those dead-fish eyes, while the faraway song of his cello wailed its soul-piercing banshee cry...again and again and again; so eventually his death became inevitable. It was merely a matter of where and when. But the inevitable happened a helluva lot sooner than one would think.

We had just finished a late dinner at my favorite Indian restaurant—that is, I had finished dining, as she still refused to eat—and were strolling leisurely down Ninth when he appeared. We had been waiting at a traffic light when he crossed from the opposite side and brazenly took his place beside Veronica.

I’d like to say that I felt the blood in her hand turn cold, but her hands always had this unnatural chill about them. She did appear to squeeze my hand a little tighter, and she started across the street a second before the light had finished changing.

Fish-Eyed Pete stepped off the curb in perfect time with her. It was almost as though it were a choreographed ritual that had played itself out many a time before. 

I had never seen him quite so close to him before, and he was far more repugnant than I had ever dared to imagine. His face, such parts of it that weren’t obscured by his hair, was covered with dry, flaky patches of skin that looked for all the world like fish scales. I even think I saw a set of gills peeking out from underneath his beard. But the worst thing was the sickening, fishy smell—like the fish market down at South Street, only multiplied by ten.

We quickened our pace in an attempt to out-distance him, but his stubby little legs broke into a spirited trot. I reached into my jacket pocket with my free hand, and let my fingers wrap themselves reassuringly around the handle of my knife. 

Ronnie and I didn't say a word to one another. We didn’t need to. Whatever her secret was, there was no longer any need to pretend. Pete was matching our pace step for step (well, more like three steps for every one of ours, but you get the idea), forcing a confrontation. 

That confrontation came as we turned down a side street; out of the lights and away from the small queue of fellow pedestrians who were still on the streets at this hour. We’d only gotten about two doors down when I felt Ronnie jerked to an abrupt stop. That disgusting little creature had grabbed hold of her arm and was actually trying to wrench her away from me.

I lunged forward and socked him in the face with my fist. The resultant “thud” was sickeningly hollow. I felt like I had punched a wet sponge, with my knuckles sinking a good three inches into his squishy flesh. But even with this “cushioning,” to break the force of my blow, it still packed enough power to send him reeling backward into a row of “recyclable” garbage cans. Ronnie flung her arms tight about my waist and hung on for dear life.

“Let's go!” she urged me. “Let’s get out of here…now!”

I had no intention of letting this nightmarish farce go on any longer. That little troll had given me the chance I’d been waiting for. 

The only reason he was still breathing the same air as me (assuming that gilled, fish-men breathe the same air), was that I was dying to know why he’d been stalking us. And, perhaps even more pressingly, I was desperate to find out what Ronnie’s secret was. 

“All right, Fish-Face,” I snarled, wrapping my left arm tightly about Veronica’s shoulders and shielding her face against my chest, while grabbing Fish-Eye’s collar with my right. “You’ve got exactly one minute to tell me why you’ve been following us for the past two months, and you better make it good—or I’ll filet your ass on the spot.”

“She’s mine!” the hideous little munchkin hissed. “I brought her back. Now she belongs to me.”

So that’s it, I thought. He’d paid for her fare from “the old country” and she ditched him the second she got off the plane. 

“Mail order bride?” I asked with more than a hint of a sneer. 

“You know nothing,” the wretched creature spat back, then started addressing Veronica. “Come with me! Come with me now, or else you’ll pay the consequences.”

“You’ve got nothing on her, Scumbag,” I shot back at him. “Not anymore.” I drew her even closer to my breast. She was mine, and I wasn’t about to let some pint-sized little freak come between us.

“I’ve got more on her than you can even begin to conceive of,” he spewed back at me with venom. “Hand her over, or I swear to you that this night she shall die.”

This sort of behavior was simply not to be tolerated. In less than a heartbeat, I flicked open my knife and gutted the foul-smelling monstrosity like a catfish.

Poor Ronnie, I thought to myself, as she let out a muffled scream. I wish she hadn’t had to have seen this. Then, as Pete’s guts splattered on the city street, Veronica’s body went mercifully limp within my arms.

“It’s okay, Baby,” I murmured to Veronica while gently trying to rouse my sleeping beauty from her faint. “The evil monster isn’t going to bother us anymore.”

Fish-Eyed Pete fell to his knees, spat out a wad of the blackest colored blood I’ve ever seen, and shrieked, “You fool! She’s been dead the entire time you’ve known her. I’ve brought her back. Me! Without me, you’ve lost her to us both.”

He lay on the street and I knew he was dying. I murdered for love.

Some things you just know, and this was one of them. Call it intuition, or a sixth sense or something—kind of like the way a dog can sense fear or smell cancer. I guess maybe there’s something about the spark of life that we can see; we may not recognize it as a spark because we’ve grown used to seeing it all the time and in so many faces that we just expect it to be there. But when it isn’t there, Pow! It only takes a second for you to know it.

Ronnie wasn’t coming to. There was something a little too limp about the way her body draped across my arm. Suddenly Pete’s final words came rushing back to me with the force of a sucker punch to the stomach. I quickly tilted back her head and gazed upon her—only to see her eyes wide open but devoid of sight—forever frozen in the same glassy, lifeless stare as those of Fish-Eyed Pete.

Michael Pendragon is an American writer, poet, editor, and publisher currently residing in upstate New York. He is best known for having published a pair of literary magazines: Penny Dreadful: Tales & Poems of Fantastic Terror and Songs of Innocence & Experience (1996-2005). 

His published works include: Much of Madness, a novel; Into the Night, collected poetic works (1980-2010); Night Magick, a verse drama; and five short story collections: Nightscapes, Nocturne, Night Things, The Dead, and Beyond the Veil.

His writings have appeared in The Romantics Quarterly, The Dream Zone, Masque Noir, Event Horizon, Frisson, Terror Tales, Nasty Piece of Work, Morbid Curiosity, Edgar: Digested Verse, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Enigmatic Tales; were recently featured in Sanitarium, Dark Gothic Resurrected, Disturbed Digest, Danse Macabre, and 69 Flavors of Paranoia.