Elvira Gets Meddled With

With another groan of exertion, the tire iron turned and another lug nut on the flat tire bit the dust. Fred exhaled and wiped his sweaty brow. One step closer to getting a spare tire onto the jacked Mystery Machine and being on their way.

I wanted to stop driving for the night, he thought, considering the clammy fog that had only gotten thicker and more oppressive since the van had to stop. But not like this.

“You sure you don’t want any help?” Daphne asked him. At his insistence, she and Velma were still inside the Mystery Machine, safe from any wild animals that might be on the prowl. The people in the last town had warned them not to make any stops.

“I’m almost done,” Fred assured her. “But you can feel free to drive after I’m finished. I don’t want to move these arms for a week!”

“Good thinking,” Velma told him. “And when we crash, we’ll all blame her instead of you.”

“I’m a great driver!” Daphne protested. “Now you, you’re practically…” She lowered her voice. “Asian.”

“I am not!” Velma protested.

Scooby and Shaggy were also inside the Mystery Machine, not that it was at Fred’s directive. Though if their shaking made the van shake anymore, he making them get out, their fears be darned.

“I told you we should’ve stayed in the town! They were having an Oktoberfest! Instead, we had to go down some winding, creeping road in the middle of the night! Like, why?”

“Reah! Rhy?”

“I told you, we’re making up for lost time,” Fred said emphatically. “I sure am glad we exposed the Ghoul of South Graveside, but that ate up a lot of hours.”

“And there’s only so many of those in a day!” Daphne added.

“Right, Daph.”

“Suck-up,” Velma muttered under her breath.

Fred had rested enough; the burning in his muscular arms was down to dull embers. He gave the next lug nut a crank.

“Like, who goes down a road that people tell you not to stop on? Isn’t that a pretty lacking feature in a road? We should only travel where we can stop for fruit stands and hot dog carts and ice cream trucks!”

“If an ice cream truck shows up, we’ll definitely stop for it,” Fred told the team’s least daring member.

“Zoinks! Any ice cream truck out here is probably manned by a Yeti or a Wendigo or a Frost Giant!”

“Rah! Rnd rhey robably ron’t rave rny rooby racks!”

It was then that Fred heard a low, throaty growl in the darkness off to his right. Tired and weary, every nerve in his body now lit up like he’d been doused with cold water.

The growl came again, now somewhere off to his right. Fred let go of the tire iron and pushed himself up to his knees. The growl came once more, closer this time.

“Fred, get in the car!” Daphne cried.

He picked up the tire iron to use as a weapon. Paralyzing fear gripped his body as he imagined a huge Dobermann, a wolf, a German Shepherd… whatever the heck it was making that intimidating racket.

Fred climbed warily to his feet and started to edge toward the door of the van, peering intently into the misty night for any warning of attack. He was groping for the doorhandle when the wolf attacked. It sprang out of the darkness, biting down on Fred’s wrist, driving needle-sharp teeth into the arm that held the tire iron.

Fred dropped the weapon and the wolf shook its head from side to side, rending the flesh of his arm. The power of the canine’s jaws was incredible. He screamed and hit at the ferocious animal with his free hand, but the animal did not even seem phased by his attacks. Fred kicked at the wolf’s belly—it held on even as it was thrust backwards, pulling Fred down to fall heavily to the sand skirting the road. Then it let go.

In the void of feeling, the pain of his wounded arm sank into Fred. He panted hard, wondering if he was still alive, asking himself why the wolf had stopped attacking. He was just thinking that he should get into the van while he had the chance when the wolf lunged out of the darkness, sinking its teeth into Fred’s unprotected neck. Fred cried out in agony as blood poured from his rent ascot, staining the gritty sand beneath him. Incensed by the taste of blood, the wolf tore at his body with its claws, ripping his clothes and drawing pearls of red from his bare flesh.

The next thing Fred knew, he was surrounded by the gang. Daphne, Velma, even Scooby and Shaggy, they were all flailing at the wolf with any weapon they could grab from the junk inside the Mystery Machine. It growled at them, its hair bushy all around its arched body, then took off. Disappearing into the night with a sweep of its matted tail.

It was all a bunch of fuss and frenzy after that. Fred was too numb to remember most of it. Shaggy actually managed to keep his head and bravely, if unhelpfully, jabbed a hockey stick out at the darkness in an attempt to fend off the wolf’s return. Velma bandaged him up with the first aid kit, which took care of the blood loss.

Daphne volunteered for a transfusion; she was O negative, universal donor. Velma said it didn’t look like that was necessary yet, but they did need to get him to a doctor.

There was a large house with blazing lights for windows in the distance. They could limp there in the Mystery Machine, extending no mercy to their transmission, and call a doctor.

Daphne drove, her foot barely putting a dent in the gas pedal. Keeping the speed down both to go easy on the flat tire and to not jostle Fred too much. Finally, they were at the house. There was a gate cutting off the stone fence from the driveway, but the bars were mangled if not missing. It would be easy for someone as slender as Daphne to slip through.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, and left the others to tend to Fred, although he didn’t seem to need much more care. Mostly they just worried at him, like if a watched pot never boiled, then a watched Fred wouldn’t start bleeding again.

Her face grim with determination, Daphne made her way through the bent gate and trudged up the road to the lonely manor waiting for her at the top of the hill it perched on. Then she froze: the overcast skies cleared for a moment and let down yellow moonlight, giving her a better look at the manor than she’d gotten all night. What had been just an assortment of black shapes, an outline of starlessness in the night, drank in the moon’s illumination to show itself to her.

It, like every manor Daphne had been to since leaving home, looked distinctly sinister. Cupolas and cornices and cross gables all spiked outwards, upwards, like the whole house had claws. It looked like the kind of place where the butler was seven feet tall with a hunchback.

Daphne heard a howl in the distance and recalled there’d already been one animal attack tonight. This was not a case where the devil she knew beat the devil she didn’t know. She stumbled up the path, her high heels catching in the cracked stones that were meant to be steps. Daphne groaned, not wanting to chance the murky ground.

She wore tight-fitting designer jeans with her go-go boots—trying to get Fred to notice her—and she didn’t want to slip and get them muddy. She thought she should’ve stuck with her usual dress, purple being her color, but she didn’t want any muck on her bare skin either. Not even on her boots!

Daphne reached the crest of the hill, her chest rising and falling under her pink top as she caught her breath. The entrance to the house was a portico half the size of the building’s face, with stone statues of mythological creatures flanking the stoop leading up to a set of double doors. No glass inserts: the whole thing was a big hunk of wood, with iron bands wrapping around it like something out of a King Arthur movie. Knockers, each as wide around as a basketball hoop, were studded in the door, very nearly out of reach. And Daphne was tall for a woman!

She stood on her tip toes, grasping a knocker and pumping it against the massive door. Daphne reminded herself that things could be worse. It could be raining. There could’ve been no house instead of one that was less than ten minutes’ drive away. The house could’ve been done up in a minimalist style with several different shades of taupe for decoration…

A door viewer opened up. Through it, Daphne could see a rusting iron grille, sparking in the moonlight, but only darkness beyond it. She stared into the darkness on the other side of the peephole and a pair of eyes opened, bright blue, set in heavily mascaraced skin… almost purple inside the dark house. Didn’t this chick pay her electric bills?

“You the pizza guy? I ordered extra salami and it doesn’t look like you have it, but looks can be deceiving…” The voice was feminine, dark and sultry, surprising Daphne. She would’ve expected anyone in this house to talk like Peter Lorre.

Daphne felt the eyes going over her lush figure, taking inventory of every aspect of how she looked. Of course, it was another woman, so she didn’t mind an appraisal that would’ve been rakish coming from a man. It still put her off her explanatory spiel. As did the fact that she’d been so worried coming uphill, so convinced there couldn’t possibly be someone benevolent inside the house, that she really hadn’t thought of how to explain the situation.

“Our car broke down, my friends and I—Fred was changing it and a wolf attacked him. We wrapped him up, you know, bandages, but we still need to call a doctor…”

The woman came closer to the door viewer. Daphne saw an exquisitely featured face, then a sizzling smile that was shot through with eroticism. “Be my guest. I’m not one of those people who mind having her space entered.”