Melvin Mettlepot Excerpt

      It was a dark and stormy...and ugly...mid-afternoon in downtown Manhattan. Melvin Mettlepot scowled into the bathroom mirror, frustrated at the lack of a reflected image. 
   He had escaped to his lavatory, seeking a temporary respite from a persistent, and vaguely human presence, currently seated across from his desk.
   Two hours earlier, the phone on his desk had clambered for attention.
   His first mistake was answering the cursed instrument. The second was acquiescing to the caller’s demands for an immediate and urgent financial consultation. The meeting had, in fact, turned out to be less of a consultation and more of a metaphorical mud wrestle with an imaginary hippo.
   All things considered, he would have preferred choking on a toad than verbally sparring with the woman who insisted on seeing him, at once, immediately, and without interruption. He’d reluctantly canceled appointments with valued clients to facilitate this...encounter.
   He gazed out the restroom’s small window, where freedom tantalized him. Lightning flashed, wind howled, and a driving rain pounded against the confining pane of glass. He could feel drops of moisture on his face, blown through the small opening at the top of the window, clean and fresh, unlike his mood. Where was a toad when you needed one?
   The visitor to his plush office had strong opinions on one particular subject (and it wasn’t the weather) which she insisted on voicing. Incessantly. Unfortunately, Melvin was an expert on that particular subject. Still, such knowledge gave him no excuse to imagine an impromptu bolt from the twenty-sixth floor of his building, and a frantic flight to freedom.
   His recess coming to an end, Melvin Mettlepot sighed sadly and turned his gaze from the rattling window. He glanced once more at the reflectionless mirror, and, against his better judgment, returned to his office.
   The woman watched him with crocodile eyes as he sat down and looked at the voluminous tax return on his desk. His visage glazed over. Every number on those hated forms was burned into his brain. He was fed up, as well as hungry. It was well past his lunchtime.
   Despite the brief interlude, the woman sitting across from him immediately resumed expressing her opinions, from both ends. At one end, she insisted that her taxes were much too high and that he, Melvin, must do something about it, immediately. She tapped a finger on the papers and glared at him. 
   Before Mettlepot could reply, his nostrils expanded. He smelled yet another foul odor that permeated the room, and he suspected that it, along with all the rest, had emanated from the back end of the woman. It wasn’t the first well-fermented methane bomb she had detonated while in his office. He began to suspect she was expunging the gas on purpose, just to annoy him.
   The CPA resembled a young man in his late thirties. He was slender, slightly less than average height, and his face was decorated with a well-sculpted mustache, neither too wide nor too thick. His eyes were black. They hadn’t always been. In his teens, Mettlepot had sported cool blue eyes. But that was a long, long time ago.
   Mettlepot sighed and immediately regretted it. He felt suffocated and constipated. The CPA tapped a pencil on his desktop, and glanced at the computer screen, which was pointed at him and not the woman. Rather than financial software, it showed a video of monkeys stealing food from tourists in some backwater hell-hole country. It was a minor yet welcome, but inadequate, distraction.
   “Are you listening to me, Mettlepot?” The woman asked again, in a voice that sounded like a cat caught in a wood chipper.
   He looked up at her. Mildred Frapworth was at the top end of wealthy and looked as if she had not missed a meal in decades. Physically, she was the poster child for butt-ugly. Her eyes were the shade of overcooked eggplant. Her face was split by a bulbous nose aching for a good honk. Her lips were much too wide for a mouth, abused, both inside and out, by a tongue that lived like an invading alien life form determined to destroy its host.
   While Mettlepot charged the woman a premium for his services, he was quickly coming to the conclusion that no amount of money was worth his association with this hideous apparition.
   She had been his client for almost a decade now. Their relationship had begun on a rather harmonious note that had been financially rewarding for both of them. However, Frapworth’s increasingly relentless determination to avoid taxes, despite the necessities of laws and regulations, caused the relationship to plummet downhill faster than a warthog on a ski slope.
   Lately, Mettlepot had been more and more determined to follow tax laws rigidly, ignoring Mildred’s creative attempts to interpret certain aspects of such regulations more liberally. Mettlepot, typically, was not averse to somewhat stretching the bounds of financial reality with a few of his clients. But his association with Frapworth had become both untenable and intolerable.
   Unfortunately, despite Melvin’s many subtle attempts to annoy the woman, she had so far declined to fire him.
   She had also become somewhat inquisitive about her accountant’s past. That was intolerable.
   Despite Mildred’s many inquiries, Melvin had not been entirely truthful regarding his history and upbringing. He had not dared disclose accurate details about his life to this pickle-faced gossip. Not that she would believe him...but there was always the odd possibility that she might pass on her suspicions to others. Someone, somewhere, might hear the fable that had grown up in her fantasy, and take it seriously. This Mettlepot could not allow, because the truth was far stranger than any fiction Frapworth might conceive with her overactive, fart-fogged imagination.
   In addition to his career as a Certified Public Account-ant, Melvin Mettlepot was also, covertly, a vampire. He was on the verge of his three-hundred and seventy-fourth birthday. This was a fact unknown to all of the one-hundred and fifty regular clients of his CPA service, the practice of which kept him occupied during daylight hours. As long as they paid their bills on time, they were safe from his nocturnal quest for warm red blood. Vampire though he might be, Mettlepot kept his private activities discreet from his daytime business.
   For all intents, Mettlepot appeared to be nothing more than a proper, middle-aged, rather mousy businessman. He wanted to keep it that way.
   Truth be told, and notwithstanding his undead condition, he was a much better accountant than he was a vampire. His almost four hundred years of unlife had taught him patience and discretion. Over the many decades, Mettlepot had learned one thing: Difficult clients eventually died, while he did not.
   In the case of Mildred Frapworth, however, his patience had long ago faded. He figured it would solve multiple problems simply by emptying the woman of her life’s blood. However, Mettlepot did not want to take any chances. The undead existence of a vampire in the modern world came with its own significant challenges and pitfalls. A small miscalculation on his part might very well turn a satisfying meal into an unwanted companion in an unending lifeless existence. 
   Melvin had long ago determined that there were things in the world worse than a periodic need to suck the blood from a living host. Careening Mildred Frapworth and her gaseous emissions into the realm of the undead was one of them.
   His attempts to imagine the woman existing forever in the same universe as he, neither alive nor dead, caused Melvin to shudder. Hungry as he was, blood could wait.
   “Pay attention to me, Mettlepot. Are you going to take care of this tax discrepancy, or not?” the woman shrieked, still tapping the papers with a bony tentacle. She had a lisp due to gaps in her teeth and an overbite. This caused her to spit when she spoke. Reflecting that some things were beyond even the moral ineptitude of a vampire CPA, Melvin removed his spectacles and carefully wiped them clean of Mildred’s semi-liquid contribution to his dour mood.
   He looked up just in time to have his eyeballs similarly coated in the steaming shellac as Mildred complained loudly about high taxes on her capital gains. She hiccoughed and giggled, then opened her mouth to apologize. Which would, undoubtedly, launch another fluid attack on Melvin’s visual acuity. He hastily returned the spectacles to his face in an attempt to initiate an impromptu although inadequate barrier.
   “Madam,” he said cautiously, “your investments have made you independently wealthy. To whatever extent that you owe, or do not owe, taxes is, in my opinion, irrelevant. Erring on the side of caution will ensure that the authorities refrain from troubling you, legally. Such remuneration to federal tax collectors is a small price to pay, again in my professional opinion. You shan’t miss any meals.” He spoke with a measured and dignified British accent.
   Despite their decade-long association, Mettlepot began to sincerely wish that she would, at last, fire him for his irreverent attitude and intractable adherence to tax law. He smiled at the woman, hoping for the angry response that would, ideally, end in her supercilious departure.
   Mildred smiled back, exposing a set of teeth that caused Melvin to remind himself that the T-Rex had been extinct for millions of years. Her nostrils flared, resembling hangars for twin space shuttles. It appeared, from Melvin’s view-point, that an alien “little green man” squat and misshapen, had already taken up residence in one of the hangars. “I simply hate taxes,” she said, sincerely. “I just hate them.” As a punctuation to her sentence, she leaned forward and applied yet another coat of salivary shellac to Melvin’s lenses.
   Like an insane thrill-seeker ascending Mt. Everest, Mildred pushed the thick-lensed spectacles up her face from where they had slid down a greasy and dangerous slope, to perch, suicidally, at the end of her massive nose.
   “I believe,” Melvin said primly, “that we have said all that needs to be said on the subject. Unless, of course, you choose to seek a second opinion, an action that I heartedly recommend.” He smiled and waited, expectantly, for the outburst that would, hopefully, end their association.
   Mildred smiled once again, and stuck out a hand. “There is no need to seek a second opinion...Melvin. I firmly trust your expertise. You’re right, of course, as usual. Much as I dislike funding government incompetence, I will, as always, defer to your considered guidance.” 
   Melvin assumed that the cracked and leathery tentacles in front of him were proffered for the purpose of thanking him. He grasped the hand gingerly, yet strongly enough to pull both himself and the woman to their feet. He intended to direct her toward the exit. Once he had gotten her through that barrier, he could quickly close and lock the door to his office suites. He would at last be safe!
   However, this turned out to be a tactical error. Mildred, rising purposefully, lurched toward Melvin, clearly faking a loss of balance in order to legitimize a surreptitious embrace. As her lips puckered, the green alien in the proboscitory hanger made a mad dash for freedom. Melvin, realizing his own avenues of escape were rapidly closing, wondered what kind of chunks a vampire might be induced to hurl.
   Seeing his entire 374 years of unlife flash past in an instant, Melvin saw no way to avoid being enveloped by Mildred’s questing lips, protruding teeth, steaming drool, and eyeglasses (which were once again making a mad dash for a world’s ski jump record). Horrified, he gazed into the approaching algae-blue pools of her eyes, like twin sewer treatment ponds.
   He took the only possible course of action left open to him. He screeched in fear, then turned into a bat and flew out a half-open window, pushing his way through a double vent.
   While fleeing through the rain and wind, Mettlepot railed at himself. Never before had he disclosed his secret to another human. He wondered what dire consequences might confront him now, as he cast no reflection, had no heartbeat, and could not be killed except through extraordinary circumstances. He would not be in immediate danger, unless, of course, Frapworth kept a wooden stake or silver bullet in her giant dusty handbag. Nevertheless, his cushy unlife existence was in immediate danger.
   Would she notify the authorities? Would they believe her? It was not idle speculation on his part. That damned genetic misfit might easily ruin everything he had worked centuries to build. He screeched into the storm as lightning flashed nearby.