The monstrous, p.13
The Monstrous, page 13
Don’t fight them, Mom whispered. And don’t run. Just let them do what they need to do.
What are they? I asked.
I don’t know. Maybe the men know. They ride her body up to the surface of the ocean, and now they’re waiting for her babies to be born.
Babies? I asked.
She has eggs, hundreds of female eggs, and when they hatch, they’ll be waiting for the girls.
To eat them? I said.
No, Mom said. To spawn.
From beside me, a high-pitched scream. I saw a girl break free and start to run, and then we all screamed, the thin sounds bouncing back and forth across the wall. I punched my mother in the stomach and pushed her away. We all ran, we ran as fast as we could across the soft slow sands back to the cages and it didn’t make any difference, none of us were fast enough and none of us were strong and something grabbed my hair and flipped me up high in the air like one of my auntie’s dolls. I came down flat on my back, and it was on me in a flash, soft squishy skin and sucking mouth and the smell. And it was hammering into me, with its huge hard lumpy thing that hurt so much I cried and threw up, and it licked my face and stuck its flappy tongue in my mouth and I threw up some more and choked and it just wouldn’t stop pounding against me and I felt my right wrist snap under its grip, and the sudden pain made everything bright and calm and clear. I lay still, and the creature fucked me over and over and I looked up at the iron sky and waited for the sun to break over the wall.
And after a while it stopped, and rolled off me, shuddering and flopping like a giant fish. I lay on the sands with my legs open, mouth open, watching it die. All around me, girls and women were fighting and screaming, the grunts and groans filling the air, the smell of rancid water and vomit and semen and chum. Everyone sobbed. I sat up, slowly. Every muscle in my body hurt, every bone felt broken or bruised. Already half of the creatures were dying or dead. Some were fighting viciously over girls, tearing off each other’s limbs with thick claws and lantern-jawed teeth. I didn’t know where my mother was, but I didn’t want to look. Next to me, a girl lay half buried in the sand. I recognized her from the Dunes. Her head was caved in, the dead creature’s thing still resting in the broken nest of teeth spilling out of her mouth.
I would have thrown up again, but I was completely empty inside.
Behind me, the cages started to clatter. I turned around, keeping my head low. Large knives were falling onto the tops of the cages, some of them bouncing onto the sands. Long sharp butcher knives and machetes. Nets followed, huge fishing nets slithering down like punctured balloons. I stared up at the wall. In the growing light, I could see some of the men hurling the knives down the long curve of stone. The rest of them stood at the railing, writing notes in books, talking to the observers, staring down at us through telescopes and binoculars. And then I saw. Most of the men had their penises out. They were masturbating. They were watching us, watching their wives and their daughters scream and break apart and die on the beach just like that giantess, and they were masturbating through the metal rails as if it were the most exciting thing in the world.
I felt a hand on my foot, and I whipped my leg back, swallowing my scream. My mother, crawling past me. Grab a knife and a net, she said. We have to harvest the eggs. I watched her move past me, blood on her broken nose, blood trickling between her legs. My arm is broken, I said. Then use your other arm. She threw a machete at me, and it landed against my legs, slicing open my skin. I glared at her, but she just walked past. I followed her, limping, tears running down my face. That’s for the punch in the stomach, she finally said.
When does the dancing start? I said.
Don’t start that shit with me, she replied. She didn’t look back, only kept walking toward the giantess. The other older women were limping and crawling to the cages, grabbing knives, helping the younger girls get up, heading down to the large stomach. Some of them were walking around, sticking their knives into the creatures that weren’t quite dead. Some of them stuck them into the girls.
My mother walked down to the woman’s neck. Her breath was so shallow now, she was almost gone. She wasn’t moving at all. I stopped in front of her eyes. I’d never seen such large eyes in my life, and the colors—I can’t describe them. Like no colors on earth, and the colors moved and shifted like strands of jewels dancing in starry waters. I think she saw me. I’ll never know. She gave a shudder, and one long sigh, and then I could tell she wasn’t staring at me or anything else on the beach anymore.
Come on. My mother, standing in a river of blood, her machete and half her body red and wet. You killed her, I said.
She was dying anyway. She comes here to give birth on the beach and die, that’s what her kind does.
And she gives birth to us? That’s how we were born?
Mom nodded. That’s right. We don’t give birth to girls. We’re not allowed. And this thing, she pointed to the body, only gives birth to females. So, I got you here, and my mother got me here, when we came out of the ocean in someone like this, many years ago.
But Dad said we’d be coming back with a boy, remember? That you were going to have a boy.
Mom pointed to one of the creatures. That’s what he does. That’s what he’s good for, every time. Next year, we’re both giving birth, and we can keep them if they’re boys.
In the distance, the women let out a shout. They had split open the stomach with their machetes, and masses of blood and placenta were spilling across the beach. Inside the thick gore, round objects, no larger than beach balls, rolled and spun.
But Mommy. I was starting to cry. I didn’t understand what she was saying, what she meant. I placed my broken hand against my stomach. I’m pregnant? What happens if I’m pregnant with a girl? What happens to the girl babies if we’re only allowed to have boys? And Mom let out this long sigh like I was just SO stupid, and gave me a funny, tight grin, and said, What makes you think your brother and your dog are the only bodies buried in the backyard? And she walked away from me toward the eggs, dragging her empty net.
I walked back up to the woman’s outstretched hand, and stood there for the longest time, my five small fingertips against the massive whorls of her rough skin, thinking about all the smooth flat rocks I sat on and skipped across in our backyard, and all the times when I was really little and Mom wore those pretty loose-fitting dresses and how instead of hugging her, she would only let me hold her hand. And then the sun broke through the grey clouds, and it was really low in the sky, and everything just lit up so lovely and bright, all the black sand and the steaming red mounds of organs and the white hills of flesh everywhere and the woman’s beautiful dimming eyes. Wide rivers of shit and afterbirth and viscera, blossoming into dark clouds as they slid under the waters. And those eggs being packed into the nets and dragged up to the empty cages, those gross pink sacs that we, that I, were stealing out of the dead giantess, that a bunch of strangers would be mothers to for the rest of their lives. Just like all the women on the beach. Just like me. And all the seawater and semen running down my purpling legs, and now the walls opened up and men in hazmat suits came out with giant axes and bone saws and ran toward the body, and wet shards of the dead giantess spurted into the bright morning sky and the seagulls went joyfully insane.
And I looked up at the sunlit wall, all those black-suited men and boys staring and talking about the other women and me, still making their little observations and notes, still with their cocks in their hands, laughing and staring down. And this was the beach I was born on, the beautiful beach of my childhood, and everywhere I looked, there was nothing but grime and foam and ugliness and death.
And that was the end of summer.
The Dunes, August 29th
Anyway. Yeah, so. Family reunion.
I don’t know what happened to all the parts of the giantess’s body. More men came, and carted everything away, and then they worked nonstop on dismantling the wall. It’ll be shipped off to some other town that needs it next. We’ll be driving back to Tacoma in a couple of days. And then school starts, which is just so weird to think about that I can’t even. Funny, though, how all the boys I could never find all summer long or who were never interested have suddenly shown up, hanging around the cottages of me and the other girls, totally paying attention, totally competing for us, making sure we don’t forget them when we’re gone. Even the man who pretends to be my father looks at me strange when the woman who calls herself my mother isn’t around, although I stare him down so hard he knows he’d never fucking dare. I don’t know, now that everyone knows I’m pregnant, maybe they think I’ll be a good wife, a good mom to what they hope will be their son. Yeah, everyone wants a good catch. Or maybe they’re just pretending. Maybe they’re keeping track of me like they were on the wall. Maybe they’re afraid of what I’ll do to them if their backs are turned, what I’ll do to them like the wave of a hard ocean storm.
Someday.
CLUTCH HAS KILLED somebody recently. This goes without saying. For as long as Clutch can remember, he has always killed somebody “recently.” If not within the last few hours, then certainly within the last few days. He may have gone as long as a couple of weeks without, from time to time, when circumstances conspired against him. But never as long as a month, no, not for living memory.
Of course, Clutch has never had much of a memory. All the events of his violent life pass before him like dream images, fading into the past almost as soon as the screams people make at the sight of him are reduced by his misshapen hands to gurgled death rattles, fading to silence. He has never had any real sense of time, and almost no understanding beyond the direction of his next step, the scent of the next living thing he must throttle. But in that part of his mind that works, he still knows that his last kill was not long ago. His hands are still sticky with blood and his nostrils still tangy with the smell of voiding bowels and his general simmering rage is mostly sated, so it just stands to reason, that’s all.
He has no immediate needs of that sort to satisfy.
Life, or whatever it is he has, is good.
But he is hungry.
It is a cold night beneath pinprick stars and he has emerged from a cross-country hike through a stand of pines to a two-lane road that looks like every other strip of featureless blacktop he has ever wandered.
The unusual sense that he has been here before leaves him unsurprised when he recognizes the sight up ahead, a low silver building hemorrhaging electric light into the surrounding darkness; he feels that he has returned to some place he knows. When he steps off the road and onto gravel, his disfigured expression resolves into something that could almost be called a smile.
Clutch lurches through the double doors, and into the vestibule with the gumball dispensers and the cardboard display with slots where quarters can be inserted for a charity benefiting a sad-eyed child on crutches. It seems strange but right for the door on the other side of the vestibule, leading to the diner interior, to be scaled to his dimensions: a novelty, he’s always possessed an awkward shape and monstrous bulk that makes breaking down doors somewhat more natural than opening them. He’s also oddly gratified that the dining room he finds past that inner door is also scaled for him, with booths he could actually fit into if he wanted, and stools that seem just the right size to sit on, and not crush.
It’s not a busy night. Two of the booths and one of the stools are occupied by creatures that make no sense to him, things that are as alien to him as he has long been to the world. One is mostly scales and teeth; the other is mostly slime and structures that would remind a human being of hypodermic needles. They pay him no mind and Clutch grants them the same courtesy.
The man behind the counter is just as odd, in that he does seem to be a man but unlike most men is tall enough to look Clutch in the eye. That is unheard of in a world where the tallest men only stand as tall as Clutch’s ribs, but this place’s defiance of the way things usually are seems universal, and so it is no surprise when the steaming mug that man sets on the counter before him is also sized for him, complete with a handle capable of accommodating his massive fingers.
Clutch takes a sip. It is not coffee. He has never had coffee, as far as he remembers, but he knows this is not coffee. It is not blood, either—that, he has had—but it is alive, not just the product of life. It swirls of its own volition, and seems to protest being consumed. It is good.
The counter man says, “Want the usual?”
Clutch has no idea what his usual is but decides it’s good to have one.
He sips some more, feeling a rare peace coming over him, the peace that comes with belonging, even if only for the duration of a rare meal consumed in a welcoming place. To be sure, the stool proves awkward. He has never been quite symmetrical, and even when he adjusts himself his left arm rests easily on the counter while the right dangles almost all the way to the checkerboard-pattern floor. He is aware of how unclean he is, how stained he has become with blood and other things. When he shifts his left arm away from his cup, the countertop is left covered with a viscous rainbow sheen. The counter man, fussing with other things, does not seem to mind, and that, too, brings a sense of unfamiliar peace.
The vestibule door opens, admitting a new patron with a gray profile and grayer suit, who would be easy to mistake for what the world sees as normal until after he hangs up his coat, revealing that at least half of him is a jagged landscape of ribs that protrude from his flesh like daggers. Impaled on a number of those ribs like pinned butterflies, the severed heads of recently murdered human beings dangle ribbons of ragged flesh still fresh enough to drip. Though their skulls are pierced in places that compromise whatever gray matter still exists inside, their eyes still roll, their lips still grimace, and their mouths still struggle to scream.
Clutch, who for as long as he can remember has never understood the concept of names and came up with his own only because it’s what he remembers doing most, stirs as he realizes that he knows what this newcomer calls himself: a name that is also a reflection of his favorite activity.
Pierce takes the next stool over and accepts a mug from the proprietor. “Man. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
Clutch moans incoherently.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s good work, but there’s a sameness to it after a while. I keep wishing I could take a break from it, get away from the grind, see a place for longer than it takes to do a proper cull. Not that I’d want to be on the other side, but you know how it is.”
Clutch, who doesn’t know how anything is, raaars, trailing off into a whine when he recognizes that rarest of all sensations for him: empathy.
Pierce sips from his mug, then lights a cig and blows out smoke, though the smoke emerges from his lips before he puts the filter to his mouth. “Hey, Mack!”
The counter man returns from the grill, slinging a rag over his shoulder. “What?”
“Wanna hear a great one I heard on the road?”
The counter man winces. “Not if it’s bad as the last one.”
“No, no, this one’s good. I need you, anyway, because my pal here’s never been all that talented at jokes that required audience participation.”
“Okay,” the counter man says. “Shoot.”
“Knock, Knock.”
The counter man replies in a cynical monotone. “Who’s th—ohmigod ohmigod no no no, what is that thing, somebody help me, help!!!!!”
“Damn,” Pierce says. “You know it already.”
“Known it forever,” the counter man says, without heat. “That chestnut’s older than Cthulhu’s childhood nanny. Want me to heat that up for you?”
“Not necessary,” says Pierce, dipping an index finger into his mug, bringing it to a boil.
The counter man returns with Clutch’s usual. It’s alive, though terrible things have been done to it to make that a very unhappy and unfortunate condition. The gaze the meal directs at the being about to dine is not afraid, but eager—finding the only form of hope available to it in the promise of its own imminent extinction. Clutch snarls at it and rips off a chunk of meat, the wrong chunk to give the meal what it wants.
Its cries are too faint to inhibit conversation, which allows Pierce, stirring his beverage, to move on: “Anyway, it just gets to be a bit much, that’s all. I did a school bus, a few days ago. Not kids. You know that’s where I draw the line. I never do kids. I don’t judge the guys who do, but hell, we all have our preferences. The bus is carrying twenty-three septuagenarian church ladies on their way back from some outing or another, singing hymns as they head home in the dark. I get them broken down on some old country road, and circle them for eight hours, tearing down trees and sticking to the shadows, so they only get fleeting glimpses of what’s come for them. I kept chanting that they’d be dead by dawn. They were, of course, but you wouldn’t believe how much of that I had to go through before one of them finally came out and waved her Bible in my face, which was of course the dramatic first kill I wanted. Hours, man. Just to get corpse one. Hours.” He shakes his head, and sips from his cup, washing down the burning cigarette. “In my day, people used to have the courage of their convictions.”
One of the creatures in the booths, the one Clutch noticed before, whose maw is studded with shapes like hypodermic needles, feels encouraged to speak up. “Oi know what you mean. Oi went after this one nutter living in a garret, should have been a straight go from me going ooga-booga to his mind shattering like a dropped glass. It looked real promising at first; he had the walls covered wif newspaper clippings, and old books wif sketches that didn’t even come close to capturing what Oi really look like. You know what the mugger did when Oi came in through the crack in the wall? Took out his bloody iPhone, he did, to get a picture of me for his Facebook friends. Oi was gobsmacked. ’Course, Oi ate his brains anyway, but it wasn’t exactly the most filling meal Oi ever had.”
