The monstrous, p.22
The Monstrous, page 22
Pretty soon, he started forward again, to close the gap between them.
It was inevitable that she would hear him eventually. Even a woodland filled mostly with evergreens can be a noisy place to walk. She whirled, her hair like a lashing whip, her eyes fixing on him first with fright and then with fury and, if his memory could be trusted, something he later identified as guilt.
His gaze lowered to the bundle in her arms—the wrinkled pink-gray skin that seemed to bristle with coarse dark hairs, and the conical face whose spade-like snout was clamped over her exposed breast. Surely he hadn’t imagined the little peg teeth; why else would he have wondered if they hurt? Surely he hadn’t imagined the way it seemed to sense his mother’s abrupt distress, and pulled away to open its mouth—inside, the roof was ridged and spotted—with a squall like that of a bear cub.
When the stone sitting before his mother rose with a shudder and a thick wet snort, he turned and ran.
She was all smiles the next morning. Made him his favorite breakfast—waffles and bacon. Told him what an imagination he had, that she’d only been out there with Noelle, in a small threadbare blanket, the same blanket she used to carry him out as a baby too, to nurse him within the trees so that he would learn to love nature and its bounty. Like everyone in the family.
The boy ate his waffles. He let her stroke his hair. He decided to try harder to believe.
“I guess if you take most any family that has old money coming down through the generations,” Noelle said, “the farther back you go, the more likely you are to find that so much of what they have is built on the bodies of people who got in their way.”
We were sitting on the wide, open porch along the back of the house, where we used to play as children and dream of the adventures the world held for us. It had been a long night, and the sky was beginning to lighten with pink and blue and orange, just enough dawn to make out the pair of dark rounded mounds near the treeline.
“We were never the Hearsts or the Rockefellers, not even close,” she said. “But there still were bodies.”
The last echoes of the bell had faded minutes ago, but I thought I could still hear them, pealing across the open ground and ricocheting among tree trunks.
“It started in Scotland, but not even Gran was sure how far back it actually went, or who was the first. I mean, Gran used to tell me stories about those parts, too. But not long before she died she told me that she’d made up parts of them herself, because she had to tell me something. It was easier than admitting she didn’t know. You can’t tell little kids stories without personalities in them.”
If the look on Noelle’s face some mornings had been anything to go by, there were stories you shouldn’t tell kids at all.
“So let’s call her Jenny, okay? Our great-great-great-whatever grandmother. And even though she was a good woman, she always turned a blind eye to what her father and grandfather and brothers and uncles and husband did: stealing cattle—those big shaggy Scottish cattle that look like walking carpets—and sometimes killing the rightful owners and their men when they came to get them back. Or killing other thieves who tried to take what they’d stolen first.”
Stolen fair and square, I imagined our grandmother saying. I could hear none of her voice in Noelle’s hollow recitation, my sister murmuring her way through this as if she’d waited so long it finally seemed to involve some other family. Except I still couldn’t help but think of the words that Gran might use instead, the old woman forcing herself between us even though she’d been dead for years.
“So Jenny had seen enough men in her life get hanged for murder by sheriffs, and wanted to do something about it before it reached her own sons. Only she was enough of a pragmatist to realize that she couldn’t stop them from following the same path if that’s what they meant to do. So instead of trying prevention, Jenny turned to the cleanup.”
By now, long minutes after the bell had rung its last, I could hear something heavy crashing through the still-darkened woods.
“God knows how she did it. How she managed to find them. And then how she managed to communicate with them. It’s not like they speak, you know. But when you’re looking in their eyes…you see something there that gives you the impression that some part of them is listening.” Noelle kept watch, her eyes as dead now as the daughter we’d buried. “I don’t know, maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Gran never said so, but more than once I’ve wondered if we weren’t only descended from cattle thieves and killers, but a witch, too.”
From out of the trees, where the dawn had not yet reached, they came: six dark shapes, thick and low to the ground, like boars, their round muscled shoulders and backs bouncing along with eager purpose.
“They’re called yird swine,” Noelle said. “They like to dig into graves for food. And these are ours. They’ve always been ours.”
They attacked the fresh shallow graves with snorts and squeals, sounding not quite like any hogs I’d ever heard—like if you listened closely enough to the grunting, you could make out the rudiments of voices. And they were ravenous, burrowing into the mounds and churning through earth with forelimbs that I was too far away to see, with too little light yet, but their snouts, their claws…the soil flew as though they’d been made for this and nothing else.
You can watch things that hold you rapt with fascination even as they sicken you. And so it was, here and now. Because I began to understand. They weren’t merely ours; we were theirs, too. Just as the murderous blood of our fathers ran through our veins, the milk of our mothers ran through theirs. They would demand it as part of their bargain.
“So Jenny, whatever her name really was, she went out in secret to these things, that her neighbors felt nothing but dread for. However she managed it—and I don’t think I ever want to know—she turned them into allies. Then she came home and demanded of the men left in her family that if they took another’s life, she had to know about it immediately…and that she would take care of it. At least that’s the way Gran told it. More or less.”
Over at the mounds, they were shoulders deep and going strong.
“Why wasn’t I supposed to know any of this?” I asked her.
“That’s just how it all came about. Having a way to get rid of the bodies…quickly, completely…it only made things worse, in a way.”
Yes. I imagined that it did. It gave our forefathers a license to kill. Made them arrogant, maybe even prolific. I could imagine sons, brothers, uncles, cousins, drunk on ale and their own impunity, battering on Jenny’s door in the middle of the night, their saddles draped with the corpses of those they’d killed on the road after some trivial insult in the taverns.
“So you—all the men in the family, I mean—weren’t supposed to know until there wasn’t any way to avoid it,” Noelle said. “Gran loved men, I know. But she didn’t have a very high opinion of your self-control.”
Over at the graves, they’d reached the bodies. Noelle snapped out of her muted trance and buried her face in her hands.
“I can’t watch it. Not this time,” she said, and the slammed door off the end of the porch was the last I would hear of her for hours.
So I stayed to do my family duty, because while Noelle hadn’t said so, I suspected that this was a vital part of the process; that they expected one of us to remain and bear witness, remembering the covenant between our species, our clans.
So I stayed, and watched as they ferociously tugged the bodies halfway from their graves, to feed on what lay helpless and exposed, then tug a little more to expose that too. I listened as their tusks ripped through skin and muscle, to the bursting of tender organs, to the grinding of their teeth on bones.
It was clear to me now, finally, Gran’s old story about our family coming over on that ship: what was really swaddled in the blankets and what they’d grown into, what they’d bred. I’d always thought we’d come because this was the land of opportunity, and maybe that’s really how my ancestors saw it…but only after they’d done things so terrible they could no longer remain on the far side of the ocean.
So because of their sins, I watched, listened, as their youngest descendant was ground into gristle.
We, too, were a part of the old bargain. Noelle hadn’t said this either, but didn’t have to. She’d been raised to believe, obviously, that there was no other way. Why else would she turn her daughter over to this? I could imagine the things our grandmother must have told her, things that Gran maybe even believed herself: You’ve seen them things dig, so don’t think you could ever get away. They got the smell of you in their noses, you know, and they was fed on the same milk that you suckled from your momma, so there’s no place you could go that they couldn’t sniff you out and dig their way to, some day.
And still, I loved her.
It all explained some things—why I had never once visited the graves of my grandparents—but called so many others into question: If my mother, after the cancer took her, had really donated her remains to science. If my father, the day he left, had truly left for the reasons he’d said, and why he hadn’t tried harder to take me with him.
And because I knew so much more now about where and what I came from, I thought about families, and the roles everyone seems to fall into: givers and takers, the feeders and the fed upon.
Turns out we were a lot more normal than I ever gave us credit for.
Tinchera Pass, Colorado, 1885
DERLE HAD FOURTEEN slugs in him by the time he made it into the trees. Six of them had splintered bone. His chest whistled when he breathed. They couldn’t stop him from smiling, though.
He pulled himself past one tree, reached ahead for another, and felt the heat of a slug as it passed by his face, leaving a suck in the air that pulled him over just enough that, for an instant, before the splinters exploded, he could see a perfect hole punched in the tree he was reaching for.
Ten paces past that tree, the slug was sizzling into the wet undergrowth, writhing like the air hurt it.
Derle picked it up, turned, threw it as hard he could down his back path, his fingers smoldering, numb.
He was dying. No two ways about it.
His left hand was the only thing holding his intestines in. They looked just like sheep guts. When they’d spread out into Derle’s lap, that was the first thing he’d thought—sheep—and then from there had stepped back into his childhood, the smells, the sounds. The way a lamb can scream, if you want it to. If you know what you’re doing.
Derle fell forward, caught himself on his right hand, stumbled forward.
It wasn’t what he’d been trying to do to the girl named Suzanne that had got everybody on the wagon train reaching for their long rifles. It was what he’d been doing to their livestock for the last two months.
Last week, the heifer had given birth to something the preacher they had along had to turn his face from.
Derle had smiled then too, but covered it with his hand.
That night, as if in answer to the birth, an angel had screamed across the sky, on fire.
Or that’s what the preacher said it was.
Derle didn’t know, had been hiding with a stray, trusting dog, sure that if that light threw his shadow on the ground, it would split him in half.
In trade for getting to live, he’d let that dog go.
It never came back.
In the trees now, bleeding out, Derle wondered what strange litter that bitch was going to throw here in a couple of months. Whether she’d know to bite through their thin skulls or not. If they’d be satisfied with just milk.
Derle didn’t think so. Not if they took after their old man.
Behind him now, the shots were farther and farther apart from each other, just so he could hear them, he knew. Just so he would know not to come back.
Derle laughed and dark, rich blood welled up, seeped down his chin. He burbled his lips in it like a child, caught himself on a tree. Shook his head at how stupid this all was.
They were just animals, right?
Taking everything into account though, it was probably best they’d caught him before he had a chance to take Suzanne any farther than he already had. The designs he had on her involved acts he hadn’t even been able to subject the sheep of his childhood to, just because they weren’t built right. If they’d caught him in the middle of that—of her—then....
Derle collected the blood from his chin, flung it down to the ground. If they’d caught him with Suzanne, it wouldn’t have been enough just to put him down. Instead, they’d have got the preacher man involved, probably. The end result would have been the same, probably—Derle, dead—but it would have taken a sight longer. They’d have stretched him first. Maybe taken the skin off in strips. Done stuff to his eyes.
No, this was better.
This way, he could die without anybody watching.
All he had to do now was find a good place, wait it out.
Derle shook his head again, rubbed his eye with his bloody hand—a mistake—and turned his head as much as he still could, spying for a place to rot, a place to get his bones good and bleached. Because that was what really mattered. He’d thought about it a lot already, going up and down Goodnight’s trail these last four years. He needed some place in the sun, so he’d dry out, and so the birds could find him, deliver him to the sky mouthful by mouthful.
He got hard, thinking about that—the birds, sitting on him with their sharp feet, digging into his chest cavity with their perfect beaks, the muscles on the backs of their necks bunching—but then, when he lowered his hand, there was just blood in his pants, and he didn’t know what he was feeling.
He stumbled on, feeling his way, finally fell out into the clearing he’d always known was waiting for him.
It was the creek bed of the creek everybody’d been counting on two days back, the creek whose absence they were probably blaming Derle for now as well.
This one wasn’t on him, though.
He shook his head no, that this wasn’t on him at all.
This was God’s fault.
Dead center in the creek, buried deep in what had been mud, was the angel. It wasn’t on fire anymore, was the color of ash now. Just a shoulder-high knob of speckled grey rock. The water had cooled it, Derle knew, but had steamed off doing it. He could tell because there were fish and turtles rotting all over the place. Fish and turtles the raccoons hadn’t touched.
It made the rock interesting.
Maybe it was an angel, he told himself, or a demon, just tucked into a ball, its chin between its knees, wings folded all around it.
Derle nodded to himself, licked his lip again—more blood—and took a step towards it, fell face first into the rocky creek bed. What teeth he still had in front cracked off at the gumline, then night sifted down all around him and he dreamed, and in his dream he was risen, standing where he’d just fallen, and, instead of running back the way he’d come, he was watching the rock, unable to look away.
It was trying to catch fire again. There was no water to douse it anymore. Except—it was like at the blacksmith’s shop, if he had the big grindwheel spinning. Sparks. They were popping off the surface of the rock in…in regular patterns. Like writing.
Derle looked all around to be sure nobody was around to see that he couldn’t make these words out. If these marks were even letters.
Soon enough the sparks were gone, and the whole rock was smoking, smoldering, popping, baking the creek bed’s fine silt of sand into a shell.
Derle cocked his head over.
It was an egg, he figured. Had to be. Because this was how it worked after you died, or when you were dying: something had to come collect you, pull you to where you belonged. Like he’d wanted with the birds. Only—he knew this now, should have known all along—Derle was a special case, was the one who’d figured out how to leave his seed inside an animal so that it took.
The preacher man had been right: for him, they’d sent an angel. All it had to do was shake off the rock it had traveled in and stand to its full height, the ram’s horns on its head curving back along its skull, its cloven hooves shiny and hard. It would be the child Derle could have fathered, given enough time, and enough sheep.
It was all a man could hope for, really. To leave a legacy.
Derle spit a long string of blood, and looked past the rock, into a pair of green eyes. It was a doe, watching him.
“Mama,” Derle said to it, blacking out a little on his feet, and thought he was getting hard again but knew too he could never catch this doe, or talk her in. Not smelling of blood like he did. The next time he blinked, she disappeared, then, a moment later, there were twelve eyes, sixteen.
They’d all come to watch.
Derle lowered his head, understood.
It’s not every day a man like him passes over.
Nine lunging steps later, he was at the rock, falling into it. The letters were still hot; one of them burned into his cheek. Derle offered his palms as well, and then his other cheek. It kept him awake, made him breathe faster.
He wasn’t dreaming, he knew that now. Dying maybe, but not dead yet.
The slugs from the rifle had just taken his body.
There was more to him than that, though. There always had been. It was why his grandmother had had to lock him in the basement all those years. Why he could never stay in one place for more than a week or two. Why cats stared at him.
Derle narrowed his eyes, breathed two times, then nodded, reached as high up onto the rock as he could, fixing his fingers into one of the letter marks. His fingertip smoked and sizzled but he held on, started climbing, and then, unable to stand anymore once he was on top, he just held himself up with his palms, started shivering, heard more than felt one of the lead slugs plunk from his chest, clatter onto the rock. It didn’t roll away like it should have but clung at an impossible angle, standing up on its mushroom nose. And then another, and another, until all eight of the slugs still in Derle had been pulled out, some completing the line they’d been trying to push through him, some coming back out the same hole, trailing muscle.
