She needed help, fast and thought of young, handsome Dr James Kildaredevil, the local vet who wore a white Stetson, cowboy boots, a pair of six-irons, who had a horse named Trigger, and who the tabloids said the Network would tap him soon for a new medical paranormal show on cable TV called Rats, Bats, and Witches Hats. Oh, she could be a nurse or even a witch. But which?
Why not both? So witchy to nurse a demon!
The perfect distraction while doing something worthwhile like defanging her vampire hamster she had light-heartedly called Vlad, as in Vlad the Impaler. But there was only so much she could do there, observing Vlad the vampire hamster, sleeping with its paws up in its little coffin that she made for him out of matchboxes.
How much time did she have before the undead hamster would turn into a bat, escape its cage, and once more stalk its victims in the night? The headlines of the nation’s tabloids would once more scream out with wild-eyed terror: vampire hamsters, bats, and rats run wild in the streets looking for fresh meat. Stay indoors. You never know what could crawl into your underwear.
So the young, handsome doctor soon to be a millionaire, at least, with residuals, is what her libido and bank account ordered. Who was she to oppose lust and greed? After all, she was a Harlequin girl.
She immediately went to the VET MANSION at the LA city centre. It was the stage set of the 1948 American horror-comedy film Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Because of Universal-Internationals’ love of animals like bats and wolves, the film featuring Dracula making a brief appearance as a bat before the Wolfman leapt up and grabbed him-it in midair, the mansion was donated to the National Veterinary Association.
It now housed the office of veterinarian Dr James Kildaredevil. On the ground floor, Dr James Kildaredevil could hear the eerie croaking echoing off the terrarium with its piddling ponds. He suspected the big batrachian was no more than a few inches away. Determining which direction was the problem. The sound was of grievous throat croaking, its description almost as bad as the sound itself. But he couldn’t quite pinpoint its location.
The frog’s croaking echoed again, and he moved to the terrarium’s south. He’d go an inch and if there were no indicators of the frog, he’d try north. Trial and error…the scientific method.
Ribbet, ribbet, ribbet, CROAK, the deadly game of cat and mouse, man and frog, continued.
Kildaredevil pulled out his cell phone and opened an app he’d designed to track wild frogs. Ribbet, he thought he heard. But he was wrong. There were no webbed footprints or bits of mangled flies, their bellies ripped over by a flying tongue. Nothing. Nothing but the moribund silence of a normally busy afternoon now grown ghastly quiet. Payback time.
His white rubber-soled Doc Martin sneakers squished a dead fly. The corpses were gathering. Piling up. An insidious question was lying in suggestive ambush, waiting for the second coming of Frogenstein. He must find that frog, only a few millimetres away.
