The monstrous, p.31
The Monstrous, page 31
Inside the station, she spots her mother crouching by the peanut butter cheese crackers. She is in profile, but the scarf hides just enough so that Chloe can’t see her eyes.
“Going to the bathroom,” she says. Her mother doesn’t turn.
She dawdles a moment in the candy aisle, running a finger across the silvery Chunky wrappers, the boxes of 10-cent Kisses along the bottom shelf. She has almost reached the bathroom when her mother says, “Need help, sweetie?”
Chloe wants to dance, turn around and race at her mother and jump into her arms. Then she does turn, and something prickly and old-cold rolls over under her ribs.
Her mother’s face, smiling softly down. Tears streaming from her blue eyes.
“No, thank you,” Chloe whispers, and shuts herself in.
The toilet has poop in it, and a mound of tissue. Chloe doesn’t actually have to go. Sinking into a huddle by the door in the ugly yellow light, she tries to hold her breath, but her chest prickles and she bursts out coughing. Crying again.
She can’t stay here, the smell is too much. But she doesn’t want to go back out. She’s terrified to think what else might have changed by the time she opens the door. Each new breath of putrid air triggers a cough, each blink fresh tears.
Run, she thinks. Sneak past the Kisses, bolt out the door, find a way to Grumpy’s.
Except that the only place to run is into the corn. In the dark. Chloe can’t imagine doing that.
And then she realizes she doesn’t want to. She already knows the safest place. The only place that hasn’t changed, that’s still hers. She needs to get back to the way-back, where the Miracle is.
She has just gotten the heavy door partway open when she hears them. Bumpy-voiced Mom, growly Dad, whispering just out of sight in the next aisle.
“You see?” her father is saying. Halfway snarling.
Her mother sobs.
“I told you.”
“You did. It’s true.”
“You dreamed it, Carol. And no wonder. I mean, those nights. When we both really thought we were going to lose him....”
“But we didn’t,” Chloe’s mother whispers, her voice seeming to twitch back and forth now. Chloe’s mother/changed-mother/Chloe’s mother.
“Because of you,” her father whispers. “Because of your unshakable hope.”
“Because of him. Because he came. Because he—”
“Because of you. You saved him, Carol. You saved your son. You do see that now. Right?”
Soft sob. Silence.
Then footsteps. Chloe pushes hard at the door, but by the time she gets out and hurries down the candy aisle after them, they are already at the pumps, arms around each other, halfway to the car. Her father goes straight to the driver’s side, dropping his cigarette to the tarmac. It is her mother who waits by the way-back doors and touches Chloe’s hair as she climbs in beside her brother.
“Is it my birthday yet?” Chloe asks, not quite looking at her mother’s eyes. She doesn’t want to see anymore. Doesn’t want to think.
She hears her mother gasp, glance at her watch. “Not yet,” she whispers. “Oh, shit, not yet.”
The door drops down, and the car starts, and up front her parents are snarling and whispering again. Chloe crouches low, curls into a ball with her knees just touching her brother’s back. If he wakes and feels that, he’ll be furious. But if she’s sleeping when he does, he won’t mind. Sleep, she commands herself. Pleads with herself. Sleep.
She dreams cold. Old-cold. Green eyes. Bird-feet hands that aren’t her hands—weren’t—aren’t—reaching for the beating-wing bird. Straw into gold, hillsides of stone. Old stone. Grasshopper-cornstalk squeezing in the window, slithering through it, crouching over her in the empty dark with its antennae brushing her face, and its husks, its dozens of husks hard and bumping against her chest, her legs. Those hands prying into the cage, reaching through the bars. Ribs. Toward the red and beating thing.
Chloe wakes to a silent car, bright sunlight. She is flat on her back, but she can feel the Miracle’s heat against her forearm. He is moving now, stretching. Out the window, there are trees overflowing with green, shading her from the brilliant blue overhead. Minnesota lake trees. Somewhere close, there’s a hum. Motorboat hum. Chloe is halfway sitting up when she hears them.
“You’ll see,” says her father, sounding tired. But only tired. And happy, almost. Sure, in the way he somehow still hasn’t learned not to be, that the worst is behind him.
He pulls open the back door, arms wide, and it’s him, her CatDad with his whisker-face, and she sits all the way up—just to revel in it, just to watch it all land—and he staggers back. Staring.
Revel? That’s what it’s doing, anyway, Chloe knows. The cold one inside her. The one moving her arms, blinking her eyes. Making her watch.
Vaguely, glancing toward her brother, Chloe wonders whether she really did figure it all out, or if the knowledge just came with the intruder. The cold one with the bird-feet hands, practically dancing down her ribs under her skin in his glee. Now she really does know. She knows how this happened. She knows when the cold one first appeared in her mother’s hospital room. Her mother, whose eyes have always been blue, it’s this other’s mother that confused her.
Anyway, she knows what the cold one promised. She knows what he got her mother to offer in exchange.
“Where is she?” Chloe’s father is murmuring, hovering right outside the way-back door and waving his hands as though trying to clear a fogged windshield, while out the side window, her mother stands rooted, hands over her mouth, shuddering and weeping. There is something almost comforting about it, about both her parents’ reaction. At least they can tell. At least she really was her. There really was a something named Chloe.
I’m right here, she wants to scream. Right here. But of course, the cold one won’t let her. He’s having way too much fun.
Her father is on his knees, now, just the way the cold one likes him. Murmuring through his tears. Through his disbelief, which isn’t really disbelief anymore. So delicious when they understand, the cold one tells her, in his inside ice-voice. When they can’t stop denying. Can’t stop pleading. Even when they already know.
So pathetic, her father looks down there. Hands going still. Head flung back in desperation. Or resignation. “Please,” he says. “What have you done with my daughter?”
JUST SHORT OF six p.m., I’m chasing sunset fifteen miles out of Coppertown. Which is the dead fucking middle of nowhere, in case you’re wondering. The road’s near empty, the tank, too, but I’m running flat out, trying to put as many miles between me and uncertain doom as possible.
At least I have a few tricks up my sleeve. The briefcase riding shotgun is full of some of the baddest mojo there is—Black Goat of a Thousand Young type shit. Shit to end the world.
See, the Old Man’s hunting. And, as luck would have it, he’s my old man. He’s dying and, consequently, doing his best to call me home. The prodigal fucking son.
The briefcase is my countermeasure. Fight fire with fire, they say.
And the whole world burns.
When you grow up with a head full of horror show and a father styling himself Lord of the Flies, this kind of shit makes sense. It seems reasonable to dabble with Old Gods, turn the sun into a bloody eyeball rolling its mean old gaze down the road. It makes sense to buy a plastic Baggie of mummified, freeze-dried baby squid—pre-calamari flash frying—and grind them fine enough to snort straight up your nose.
If the road jackknifes into the sky, if the angles of the desert go wrong, if the A/C pipes high, weird music, and your sweat turns mercury-thick, oozing oily beads born of the boneless bones of primordial beasts from before the world’s dawn—well, it’s a small price to pay. It’s better than the alternative.
I got dear old Daddy’s eyes, and he wants to make it literal. Look out from inside my skin, slough off the old, slip into the new, and reincarnate in a body with less miles on the odometer.
I say fuck that shit. So I run.
For now, the world is steady. I’m breathing harder than normal, but the sky is only oncoming twilight and not a color out of space. Scrub throws purple shadows, blurring past my windows. The powder-blue Caddy shimmies, but I’m keeping it between the lines. I’ll run ’til it burns. If I can hit the coast, I’ll be clear.
Least that’s what I tell myself.
I hit the radio’s scan, cycling decimal points of white noise. There’s a burst of static, and my heart kicks high. I slam the brakes, but even the tire-squeal as the Caddy fishtails isn’t enough to cover the wet sound caught between one station and the next. Raw meat hitting a wall. Sobbing. The buzz of flies.
Memory crowbars my skull. Light slipping through uneven boards, the just-molding scent of hay. The steady ping of blood dripping into a metal bowl. The Old Man, hair sweat tangled, eyes crimson-shot ivory. Above him, the corpse of a horse hangs head-down from rusty chains.
A warning shot across the prow.
I punch the radio into silence. Grip the wheel and roll down the window, washing desert air through the sweaty space of the car.
It’s not enough.
Next time it won’t be the horse, it’ll be the drifter. It’ll be filth-streaked flesh and barbed-wire binding, like the vines on the Hanged Man tarot card. It’ll be the man’s cock, painfully swollen, his eyes rolling wide, his lips silently pleading.
It’ll be my father’s hand, extended into a shaft of sunlight, holding a straight razor. Waiting.
Fuck.
Concentrate.
Breathe.
I ease the car back onto the road. An animal skitters through the sweep of headlights. To my jangled nerves, it looks like a hunched man. It pauses, eyes luminous, tongue lolling, and grins.
Fuck.
I flip open the briefcase, abandoning caution, and brush the blacker than black idol within.
Oiled wood, stone, whatever the fuck it is, it’s cold. Even so, it burns; tacky strings of flesh pull from my hand as I jerk away. Lightning arcs between my bones. I expect sizzling drops of blue-white fire when I try to shake the sensation free.
The sky rolls over. The moon opens an eye, which is also a mouth, and howls. The sun’s cooling corpse is a bloody eyeball slipping the horizon. Rotting corpse gods fuck against the sunset and carrion young drop from between their scabbed thighs.
But my Old Man still grins—teeth to stars to eternity.
Then something squiggles. And doesn’t it just snap up the grinning man-beast and swallow it whole?
Cosmic distance. I’m flayed bloody and my brain’s in a fucking canister screaming between cold, sharp stars.
And for a minute, the curtain tears, and I see.
Everything goes dark. There’s no road, no Old Man. Nothing but vast deep.
I let out a shaky breath, ease back on the accelerator, snap the briefcase closed.
Score one for the Old Ones.
I keep the window down, sucking in desert night. Check the gas gauge—a sliver to empty. I risk the radio and catch a smattering of twangy country-western. It’ll do.
There was no horse. No razor. No bowl catching blood.
There’s just the desert night, and the horror pressed to the skin of the world. Better the devil you don’t know than the devil you do.
I hope it’ll be enough.
But the thing about power is it likes straight lines, the path of least resistance—from sky to tree, from father to son.
The country song fades. Silence trickles in, thick and over-sweet. I nudge the dial and nearly jump out of my skin. A voice ghosts from the static hiss-pop.
“…where he makes us go when we’re bad.”
Ice down my spine. I stomp the gas instead of the brake. The car lurches, shimmy dancing, spitting gravel.
Because I can see it. The shed. Little Sister—eyes big as the Old Man leads her into the dark, taking the punishment meant for me. Meat smacks the wall. Flies buzz. Sister sobs.
Shit. I slam the brakes. Door open, I bring up the gas-station burrito eaten cold miles back.
Shaking, I wipe my mouth. Desert insects sing. My clothes feel soaked-through wet; my pulse hammers, refusing to cool. I glance at the briefcase, but stop before touching it.
Some fisherman out of Providence sold it to me, Innsmouth look and all. Friend of a friend of the fucker who sold me the dime bag of freeze-dried squid on the pier.
Those squid were amateur night compared to this, just an endless walk down spiraling ice stairs into the dark and half-glimpsed shadows embedded in the walls.
This thing, this idol, is what lay at the bottom.
Dry-slick, but rotten to the core. How much can I take before I crack and go ha-ha loop-de-loo around the bend? On the plus side, if I end up a gibbering mass, I’m no good to the Old Man. Last resort, I guess.
I grit my teeth, trying sheer force of will. The Old Goat’s kid can be stubborn, too.
Back on the road, careful-slow. The wash of headlights illumes Sister, dress stained dark, flies where her eyes should be, Daddy dearest standing behind her: See what you’ve done?
Instead of swerving, I power through. Sister and the Old Goat shred like moon-torn mist.
“Nice try, Old Man,” I shout. “I never had a sister.”
I hope to fuck it’s true.
Now that my skull’s been pried wide, Daddy dearest can pour whatever he wants inside. Still, a hole opens below my ribs, dropping my heart. This doesn’t feel like a lie. I know Sister’s braids, scabbed knees, jam-stained smile. Her love.
Silent picture-show memories spool across the night, pin-pricked by grub-pale stars. A black and white image of me at six: The Old Man puts out a cigarette, midway between my wrist and elbow.
I know if I cry Sister will get the punishment. That’s how he breaks us. Sometimes we’re strong. Sometimes.
Six-year-old me bites my lip, holds tears on dark lashes, doesn’t let them fall. The smell of burned flesh reaches my nose.
When Sister peeks around Daddy’s elbow, I’m not quick enough to hide my pain. Her hand goes in his, small delicacy against calloused horn.
“It’s okay.” The first bit for me, and the second for him. “It was my fault.”
She leads him out the screen door, down the crooked path to the shed at the bottom of the garden. I don’t follow. I should. I curl on the kitchen floor, six-year-old body rocked hollow by sobs. I press hands to my ears, squeeze bruised-damp lids shut, and pretend I don’t hear the sounds coming from outside.
Sobbing. Flies. A wet sound like blood.
I rub the spot between wrist and elbow—a small circle, shiny and purple-pink, the color of seashells.
“Fuck.”
I have to stop. I can’t stop.
Even with the idol beside me, the Old Man is under my skin.
“Come home, and I’ll make it stop.” The words buzz through my skull. Maybe my bad mojo isn’t bad enough.
Every time I step up my game he steps up his. I shoot up Innsmouth water courtesy of a needle between my toes, and he sends the rotting carcass of a horse to chase me into the briny deep. I snort powdered squidlings in a dingy motel, and after the ice shadows fade, I wake with flies crawling between my bones and my skin.
Maybe there’s nowhere far enough to run.
Twilight deepens, scatter-shotting the wide night with stars. An exit sign promises gas and food. I pull off; nothing left to lose.
A lone diner shines neon. A gas station squats half a mile down the road. Scorpions clack in the dark of cactus shadows; the moon slings low, slouching over the horizon, all pale gold and bruised, rotted fruit. Right now, the idol isn’t doing shit. In his death throes, the Old Man is strong.
Another memory freezes me. The scraggly-haired drifter in his roughed-up army jacket, the shadow of buzzards crossing over him. Me sweating in the bucket seat, praying my father won’t stop.
The Old Man rolls down the window. “Where you headed, son?”
The bum lowers his hand-lettered sign—Sharpie on cardboard: Homeless Vet. Will Work For Food. Godbless.
“As far as you’re going, mister.”
“Hop in.” The Old Man pats my knee, a parody of fatherly affection. The touch keeps me from saying a goddamn word. The faint stink of old alcohol bleeding through the bum’s skin fills the car. My father glances in the rearview mirror.
“You got a name, son?” Fingers dig into my leg, keeping my terror stitched inside.
“Joshua, sir.”
“Well, Joshua, you’re lucky we came along. Me and my boy here, we’ll take you all the way.”
And we did.
Shaking, I slink into the diner, smelling burnt coffee and cherry pie.
The beefy man behind the counter gives me the stink-eye; I don’t blame him. I look like a strung-out junkie of the worst kind and then some. I dig crumpled bills from my pocket, showing I can pay. He grunts, jerking his thumb toward a booth way in the back.
I fork up cherry pie, red like blood. A waitress brings coffee. There are stains on her pink uniform. She cocks a hip and flashes a smile. Her whole stance is puppet-like, as though the Old Man wants me to see him make her dance.
“Get you anything else, sugar?”
I want to tell her to run. Instead, I put an involuntary hand on the table so she can see I’m not wearing a ring.
Fuck.
Wouldn’t Daddy just love it if I made him a spare on my way home? Her fingers brush my arm. I watch her ass sway in her pink cotton-nylon blend uniform. She wields the coffeepot—a weapon against the dust-devil refugees washed up on her neon-lit shore.
Suddenly, I know there’s a motel two miles down the road. I know her name is Sally; there’s a run in her stockings that goes all the way up, and she isn’t wearing anything underneath. Palms sweat on the table; I lick lips gone dry. That bare ring finger shines like a beacon, and my cock stirs despite my best intentions.
Here’s the kicker: I’m a virgin. Pure as the fucking driven snow.
The son of the Fly-Lord doesn’t get the luxury of love, or even consensual, mutually pleasurable relations. Humans are potential breeding grounds, nothing more.
