The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Three Cases of Mayhem and Mad Science

Mickey Malloy gets tangled up in three quick cases involving strange lights, freakish killers, and neighborhood gossip. These cases first appeared in a con-only zine. Because of the format, they hit hard and get to right to the point, just like Mickey. Enjoy!

Until Only Roaches Remain is available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

Content warnings: Mild swearing, alcohol use, drug use, tobacco use, death, violence.

The Case of the Cocoa Beach Mystery Light

MONDAY NIGHT, JUNE 1, 1942
ABOARD N-R-5545
ABOVE COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA

“Land this plane, now!” the Billy Club Bastard howled, clinging to the biplane's wing for dear life. The goggled pilot twisted around in his seat, scarf flapping, eyes wide and crazed, to stare at the massive man in black. Wilmer Trabble looked even nuttier aloft than he did on the ground.

“Eyes on the sky!” the Bastard yelped.

“Don't you tell me how to fly!” Trabble yelled back. He jammed a pipe wrench under the yoke to hold it steady, then began fiddling around with the rat's nest of wires that lined his cockpit. Snarls of cable were wrapped around the fuselage like overgrown ivy. Each bump of turbulence elicited sparks from its fraying connections.

“What the hell are you doing?” The Bastard shouted. He tried to haul himself up the wing, closer to the open cockpit, but Trabble leaned out and swung a clump of heavy-gauge wires at him, heavy as a mace. The softball-sized knot missed him by a mile but punched a hole in the canvas wing big enough to fit his head through.

“Let me show them! They need to see!” Trabble howled. He plugged in the last of the wires and reached for a big red button.

“Don't you press that button!” the Bastard warned him. Trabble pressed that button. Light erupted behind them like the noonday sun had just had a sheet pulled off of it.

The plane was dragging a snarled ball of Christmas lights, traffic lights, spotlights, arc lamps, and street lights. Dozen of wayward light fixtures from up and down the little beach town had been pilfered over the last couple weeks, and Trabble had wired them all in behind his sputtering biplane.

The Office had gotten reports of a bright light moving up and down the beach late at night. They figured the pilot was some Bund poseur, lighting the way for U-boats. A real Abwehr operation would be more subtle. The Bastard knew better. Trabble was not some Nazi agent, whether on the payroll or not.

No, Trabble was a loon.

As soon as the Bastard had seen the care with which the town's single traffic light had been removed, he knew he was dealing with an electrician. From there it was as easy as finding the town's only wire-monkey and searching his shop. Between the obsessive stacks of newspaper clippings about the war and the handful of empty crown-stamped pill bottles, anyone could've lost the thread. Things were crazy out in the world. Theirs were drastic times. From there, all the Bastard had to do was follow Trabble to his stashed biplane.

Sure, things hadn't gone to plan from there, but at least the Bastard knew he had the right man when he was clinging to wing of his luminous, shuddering plane.

“Now they can all see!” Trabble shouted with glee. They sure could. Folks were leaving their homes, coming outdoors to peer at the odd sight. To them, it was bright as day for the few seconds that the plane passed overhead. Trabble was whooping and laughing, delirious.

The Bastard hauled himself hand-over-hand, inching his way to the cockpit. The sight of the lit ball had seared its afterimage behind his eyelids. Little pink and purple circles danced wherever he tried to look. Trabble snatched up the yoke. He'd reached the northern limits of Cocoa Beach. The plane yawed to the right, out over the sea to come around for a southward pass.

Trabble steadied it back out and brought it in low, barely twenty feet off the ground. The late-night beachgoers screamed and ran.

“Where are you going?” Trabble shouted to them. “It's day now, you don't have to be afraid!”

The next thing Trabble knew, the Bastard's fist careened off the side of his head. The lead-weighted glove added an extra pound of powdered metal to the punch. The plane jerked to the side, sending a tremor up the cable and whipping the ball of light behind them. Sparks and broken glass rained onto the beach.

“You bring us down, or I will!” the Bastard roared. The wind carried his voice like it was an incoming hurricane. Trabble's eyes were wide. The masked man was inches from his face.

“Yes, of course,” Trabble stammered. His leaned the yoke forward.

“Wait, I meant land!” the Bastard said. The plane's nose pitched downward. The Bastard punched Trabble one more time for good measure, then let go. He fell past the fuselage, toward the rushing sand not ten feet below. For half an arrogant second, he let himself think he was in the clear.

The blazing ball of stolen lights rushed up and hit him like a meteor. His body wrapped around it, slack with shock. If not for his padded armor and leather coat, the broken glass would’ve sliced him up like an Easter ham. The trailing cables went taut when he hit and the blinding lights went out.

Trabble tried to pull up out of the dive, but the impact and weight were too much. The brittle biplane snapped right in half, losing its entire tail. The Bastard hit the sand and rolled. The rest of the plane plowed into a dune a couple hundred yards away.

When he realized he was alive, the Bastard stood, slowly. Nothing was broken. He was draped in wires like he'd just been drug out of a seaweed patch. He untangled himself and meandered over to the crumpled remains of the plane. Its pilot was laid out on the white sand, staring upward. The Bastard glowered over him, a black abyss blocking the stars.

“I don't like the dark,” Trabble whimpered. The Bastard fished a set of handcuffs out of his pocket.

“Nobody does,” he agreed.

The Case of the Baton Rouge Rougarou

THURSDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 12, 1942
THE ADLESTROPP APARTMENTS, GARDERE
EAST BATON ROUGE, LOUSIANA

“I knew it wasn't an animal,” Mickey Malloy wheezed. He slammed the door shut and leaned his full weight against it. The shrieking man caught up to them an instant later and bowled into it. The door bounced inward, but held.

“Hey, I believed you,” Agent Ray Leddy grunted. He snatched up a chair from the filthy living room and jammed it under the doorknob.

“Rougarou my ass,” Mick muttered. The consulting folklorist had struck out on this one. The thing slicing local gangsters to ribbons was just a guy, not some Cajun werewolf.

“What's that?” Leddy yelled. The man outside was howling so loud that they had to shout just to hear each other. A heavy metal thunk shook the door. He was using his claws.

“Nothing!” Mick snapped as he patted himself down. He hadn't lost any of his gear. Good. That would make this easier. He looked around the small apartment. Furniture was thrown this way and that, the carpet stank, the ceiling had a brown topographical map of water damage imprinted on it, and the wallpaper was so heavy with black mold that it was falling right off the wall. “This place should be condemned.”

“It is!” a thin pale man hissed. He unfolded himself from a pile of old clothing, wearing nothing but torn pants and a belt around his arm. He shivered, twisted like old barbed wire. His needles were spread out on the floor behind him. He held a rusty little knife in a trembling hand, ready to defend them.

Leddy yelped and scrambled for his pistol.

“Hold off!” Mick snapped.

“Get out!” the junkie barked. Mick turned toward him, standing to his full height. He towered over the smaller man like a cliff face. He withered under Mick's glare and pressed himself into the corner.

“You got this?” Mick asked Leddy. Another full body impact shook the door in its frame and splintered a hairline crack along its edge.

“Not for long!” Leddy yelled.

“I'll be quick,” Mick said. He picked his way between ruined furniture and jostled the window. The lock was broken off but the frame was painted shut. He recognized that move. The squatter must've been reading his mind when he shrugged and croaked:

“Landlords.”

“Hey lanky, how long you been here?” Mick asked him.

“Three months.”

“You see that guy come and go?”

“Every night, from the basement, soon as the sun's down.”

“Every night?” Leddy grunted.

“Only night,” the squatter replied.

“Huh,” Mick muttered. The killer slammed into the door again. Mick and Leddy had happened upon him down there. He'd been wearing welder's goggles, even in the dead of night. His hands were encased in metal gloves that had to weigh five pounds each, with claws the size of butcher knives welded on. His wild shock of white hair and the poorly-scrawled tattoos running up and down his pale, anemic arms completed the look. And he hadn't stopped screaming yet, not during the chase up the stairs, not during his kicking, chopping, body-slamming assault on the apartment door. Mick thought he'd need some tea and honey soon for his poor voicebox.

“Ray, I think I got an idea. You have a flashlight?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course, what kind of amateur goes on an investigation without a flashlight?” Leddy said.

“Okay, let's not throw generalizations around willy-nilly,” Mick said. “Can I borrow yours or what?”'

Leddy sighed and unclipped it from his belt. Mick caught it out of the air.

“What are we doing, Malloy?” Leddy grunted.

“I think I got all the pieces,” Mick replied. He reached inside his trench coat and grabbed his club. It was an old chair leg, sturdy and worn. It was scratched, dented, and cut up, but it still had heft and a good grip. It felt real, unlike any of the rest of his night. He was usually the one beating up on killers and pushers, not saving them.

The F.B.I. had come in when the Baton Rouge authorities hadn't dug up any leads on whatever was leaving local lowlifes shredded like cabbage. When they figured it was some weird critter, who else would they call but the Office. And, like every other critter call south of the Mason-Dixon, that turd rolled straight downhill to Mickey.

Imagine his surprise when, yet again, it's just some weirdo stalking small-town toughs and not an alien or a vampire.

“Typical,” Mick muttered.

Mick pulled up his mask and let himself go. He was the same person no matter what he did, he knew that. But the mask helped him, it was a physical reminder and division between what he wanted to do and what he had to do. Mickey Malloy's weapons were questions and analysis. It was the Billy Club Bastard who carried the chair leg, who was the terror.

The Bastard strode past the squatter and motioned Leddy out of the way. The F.B.I. agent didn't argue. On the other side of the door, the clawed man's fury had not dissipated. The thunk, thunk, thunk, of metal into wood meant he'd changed his strategy. He wasn't trying to knock the door down anymore, he was going to chop his way through. It wouldn't take much longer.

The Bastard took a deep breath and timed the Baton Rouge Rougarou's chops. Pure fury couldn't sustain him much longer. He was breathing heavy and his howls had lost some of their steam. The Bastard grunted, waited for the instant a claw hit, then ripped the door open. The Rougarou was on his heels, reeling his gleaming blades back.

The club went first. The Rougarou lashed out but the Bastard batted his claws aside. His heavy gloves weighed on his stick-thin arms like anchors. The Bastard's fist struck like lightning. The Rougarou stumbled backward. His claws sliced through the wallpaper and plaster as he struggled to regain his balance. The Bastard surged after him.

“What the hell,” the Rougarou grunted. He caught himself in time for the Bastard to reach him again.

“Pucker up!” the Bastard snarled. He got one more hit in. The Rougarou's purple-black lenses shattered on his face. He snarled and scraped the broken glass and blood away.

“Stay out of my way!” the Rougarou shrieked. His eyes were pinched damn-near shut. The Bastard smirked behind his mask. The bleeding killer screamed: “Don't try to stop me!”

“Who's trying?” the Bastard growled. His voice was so low it seemed to quake up from the floor. The Rougarou howled and pounced at him, claws first. The Bastard dropped his club and whipped out Leddy's flashlight like a quickdraw cowboy, blasting him right in the corneas with white light. The Rougarou hissed and cowered away, covering his face with his gauntlets.

“Okay, pal,” the Bastard snapped. The Rougarou scuttled away, trying to keep out of the flashlight beam. The Bastard advanced on him: “Don't make me chase you.”

“Why would you help them?” the Rougarou hissed, squinting and trying to block the light. The Bastard did not have an answer for that. Every man that the Rougarou had carved up had been worse than the last, and the first had been a goddamn piece of work. The clawed killer was still blinded when his heel caught the top stair. He took the fall hard. His head skipped off each step, and when he hit the landing he went limp.

“He dead?” Leddy asked, peeking over the Bastard's shoulder. The Bastard slipped off his bandanna. The stink of the old building washed over him, humid and moldy. In August, Baton Rouge might as well have been perched on the shore of that River Styx it was so damn hot.

“I don't know, Ray,” Mick groaned. He leaned against the slashed-up wall and mopped his forehead down. “Tell you what: you Bureau boys give me enough weird ones to take home. Y'all can have this one.”

The Case of the Hellmouth ‘Neath Maddie Hobart’s House

SUNDAY NIGHT, JUNE 28, 1942
THE WIDOW HOBART'S PROPERTY
CARVER, NORTH CAROLINA

“So, what do we got? Satanists?” the Billy Club Bastard said as he cuffed up the last of the red-cloaked men. He smoothed out the fabric on the man's back to better show off the strange coat-of-arms quartered with a snake, a mushroom, a spider, and a toad.

“I am not familiar with this invocation,” Official Second Trivaldus Epoch said. He rubbed his glasses on his coat and leaned in, studying the emblem closer. He was thin and young, with long hair and a dangling medallion emblazoned with a tangle of triangles.

The Bastard huffed. He'd just beaten the sass out of four masked men, and Epoch's only job was to determine which duke of Hell they claimed to serve. He slumped back and pulled his bandanna down. Unmasked, he was simply Mickey Malloy: tired, sore, and sleepy. He'd driven up the long way from Atlanta to investigate weird lights in a lady's basement and ended up in an all-out brawl.

“Come on, Chris,” Mick groaned. “Call the big man.”

“Don't call me that,” Epoch muttered. He didn't often get any field work, but this one kind of fell into his lap. Office reports regarding Devil worship were few and far between. He had to earn that 'consultant occultist' paycheck somehow. “I'm here as a representative of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Use my O.T.O. name, please.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure thing. Don't stall,” Mick grunted.

“Mister Crowley is a busy man,” Epoch murmured. “I'm only sixth degree, you know.”

“And he's eleventh, you told me,” Mick said. “But he gave you his personal telephone number, didn't he?”

“He did.”

“He wants you to call him. A lowly sixth, entrusted with an eleventh's confidence...”

“Yeah, okay, you're right, I'm doing it,” Epoch said to himself more than anyone else. He cradled the large device's headset with his neck and flipped through his notebook until he found the phone number. When the operator picked up, he read it off. He was nearly bouncing up and down. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered: “It's ringing.”

Mick could hear someone pick up on the order end.

“Mister, er, Grand Master, sir? This is Initiate of the Sixth Degree Christopher, er, Trivaldus Epoch, sir,” the young official stammered. “Yes, sir, we met at the London temple last year. What am I... um...”

Epoch looks over his clothing, settling on his pants.

“Uh, khakis. Yes, sir. I am aware it is quite late in Torquay, sir. But I needed to ask... Well, you said any time, sir.”

Mick rolled his eyes and held out his hand. Epoch gulped, saying:

“Sir, one of my associates had a few questions for you regarding an investigation. Here he is.”

Mick took up the handset and got straight to business.

“Aleister Crowley, right? Formerly 'the most evil man in Europe?'” he asked.

“None other, my good man, though somehow, the jerries have managed to come up with worse,” a middle-aged British man said, speaking slowly and slurring his words. If Mick didn't know any better, he'd've thought the magick man high.

“I got a weird one here, and I need your brand of expertise,” Mick said.

“And to whom am I speaking?” Crowley purred.

“Mickey Malloy, lead weird-stomper,” Mick replied.

“Ah, Mister Malloy, I am humbled that you trust me with your true name. So, you've encountered the utterly unexplainable and need insight into the greater mysteries,” Crowley slushed.

“Na, I actually see that every day,” Mick replied. “What I got is some loons in red robes, coming and going out of a glowing red root cellar, and the neighbors claiming the Devil's at play.”

“Red robes, you say?” Crowley asked. Epoch was leaning in real close to listen and blurted:

“Yes, sir, red as sacrificial blood.”

“Are they inscribed with any runes, alchemical formulae, or mystical equations?” Crowley asked.

“No, sir, not anything Thelemic, or hieroglyphics, or runic, or Cyrillic, or anything I recognize,” Epoch explained, so loud and excited that Mick leaned away. “I am a sixth-degree practitioner, sir, I've read the books.”

“You have read a selection of works, initiate,” Crowley snapped. Epoch looked like he'd been whacked with the evening paper. “Understanding and rote memorization are vastly different states of being.”

“But I understand...” Epoch whispered. He sat back, stunned.

“Hey, Al, focus here,” Mick said, taking back over for his silenced colleague. “Let me tell you what we got, you tell me what you think.”

Mick explained the whole situation. The call from Maddie Hobart's neighbor that Tremblay had intercepted. 'Her husband fell ill and passed unexpectedly,' 'innumerable strange men visiting in the night,' 'blood-red robes,' 'crimson glow from the root cellar.' He told him about the fight, how none of the four men he'd taken on could really scrap worth a lick. He described the heraldry on each of their outfits.

“It is familiar to me,” Crowley slurred. “Tell me of their masks. You said they were masked.”

Mick flipped over the goon he was leaning on. The man's hood covered his whole face. Mick peeled it back. He found an industrial-grade gas mask beneath. A pale, sweaty white man was staring back at him, his eyes bouncing from side-to-side, pupils wide as silver dollars. He was beyond toasted; it was no wonder he wouldn't talk.

“It's a respirator mask,” Mick said.

“I see,” Crowley purred. “Quite interesting, though hardly conclusive. Oftentimes, a gas mask can be used to counter the vapors and brimstones of the outer planes. Which begs the question: what is in the root cellar?”

Mick followed his blue flashlight beam down the stairs. The air was earthy, like a fresh grave, and the light pervasive. Every surface looked painted in blood. He took each step slowly, as if some demon awaited him, then chuckled when he reached the bottom. It was not some portal to Hell giving off the red glow, but a series of daisy-chained lamps.

“What do you see?” Crowley asked. His signal crackled in the basement.

“Mushrooms,” Mick answered. “Hundreds of them.”

Maddie Hobart's basement was chock full of trays of little white mushrooms. Their caps were no wider than his smallest fingernail. They looked soft as newly fallen snow. Some had droplets glistened scarlet atop them like grisly dew.

“Do not touch them,” Crowley warned. “Take not another breath! Leave immediately.”

The warlock began chanting on the line. Mick didn't know what was happening, but he didn't want to find out the hard way. He hustled up the steps and sucked in a lungful of fresh air.

“Are you intact, Mister Malloy?” Crowley asked when his chant was done.

“Yeah, I think so,” Mick wheezed.

“My ward of protection saved your life,” Crowley said.

“Sure, yeah,” Mick said. “So what the Hell am I looking at here?”

“No, Mister Malloy, this is not the work of the infernal, but of the carnal,” Crowley answered. “You have found a Banewright.”

“A what?”

“A creator of substances most creative,” Crowley said. “I had contracted their services when I've desired an intoxicant more... substantive than my usual diversions. But their specialities trend toward the more... fatal. I'd thought their activities restricted to England, but they are an old family, of course they would have an outpost across the pond.”

“A family?”

“Yes, an old line, descendants of the Church of England's poison-crafters. Those who will brew a bespoke venom for any occasion, at a high price. I surmise that your Missus Hobart found her late husband too long-lived and her methods dispatching him caught the Banewrights' eye. Perhaps they came to her for the use of her dark, dank cellar to farm her fungal foulness.”

“So all those mushrooms are, what, deadly?” Mick asked.

“They could be,” Crowley said with a yawn. “But what would I know? It is four hours past midnight, and my blood is thin with heroin. Have a pleasant evening, Mister Malloy.”

“Thin with what?” Mick asked. He can't have heard that right.

“I bid you good evening, sir!” Aleister Crowley snapped and hung up with a click. Mick looked at the phone, looked at the glow coming from the open cellar door, looked at the gaggle of bound, doped-up mushroom farmers, then at the other official who was waiting with bated breath.

“Well?” Epoch asked.

“Looks like we got a poisoner,” Mick grunted. “Might have to arrest the little old lady upstairs for murder-for-hire or something.”

“Oh, yeah, great,” Epoch said. “But what about the Grand Master? Did he say anything about me?”

Mick sighed and mopped his face down with his bandanna, saying:

“Just get the truck, Trivaldus.”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Bruce Connors.