Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (28 page)

There was a sound like twigs breaking.

Horley woke covered in leaves, in the dirt, his body curled up next to the old woman. He jumped to his feet, picking up his spear. The old woman, dressed in a black dress and dirty shawl, was dreaming and mumbling in her sleep. Dead hornets had become entangled in her stringy hair. She clutched a dead toad in her left hand. A smell came from her, of rot, of shit.

There was no sign of the door. The forest was silent and dark.

Horley almost drove the spear into her chest again, but she was tiny, like a bird, and defenseless, and staring down at her he could not do it.

He looked around at the trees, at the fading light. It was time to accept that there was no reason to it, no
why
. It was time to get out, one way or another.

“A pattern of heads,” he muttered to himself all the way home. “A pattern of heads.”

Horley did not remember much about the meeting with the villagers upon his return. They wanted to hear about a powerful witch who could help or curse them, some force greater than themselves. Some glint of hope through the trees, a light in the dark. He could not give it to them. He gave them the truth instead, as much as he dared, but when they asked questions could not stand the truth, either, and hinted that the witch had told him how to defeat the Third Bear.

Did it do much good? He didn’t know. He could still see winter before them. He could still see blood. And they’d brought it on themselves. That was the part he didn’t tell them. That a poor old woman with the ground for a bed and dead leaves for a blanket thought she had, through her anger, brought the Third Bear down upon them. Theeber.
Seether.

“You must leave,” he told Rebecca after the meeting. “Take a wagon. Take a mule. Load it with supplies. Don’t let yourself be seen. Take our two sons. Bring that young man who helps chop firewood for us. If you can trust him.”

Rebecca stiffened beside him. She was quiet for a very long time.

“Where will you be?” she asked.

Horley was forty-seven years old. He had lived in Grommin his entire life.

“I have one thing left to do, and then I will join you.”

“I know you will, my love.” Rebecca said, holding onto him tightly, running her hands across his body as if as blind as the old witch woman, remembering, remembering.

They both knew there was only one way Horley could be sure Rebecca and his sons made it out of the forest safely.

Horley started from the south, just up-wind from where Rebecca had set out along an old cart trail, and curled in toward the Third Bear’s home. After a long trek, Horley came to a hill that might have been a cairn made by his ancestors. A stream flowed down it and puddled at his feet. The stream was red and carried with it gristle and bits of marrow. It smelled like black pudding frying. The blood mixed with the deep green of the moss and turned it purple. Horley watched the blood ripple at the edges of his boots for a moment, and then he slowly walked up the hill.

He’d been carelessly loud for a long time as he walked through the leaves. About this time, Rebecca would be more than half-way through the woods, he knew.

In the cave, surrounded by all that Clem had seen and more, Horley disturbed Theeber at his work. Horley’s spear had long since slipped through numb fingers. He’d pulled off his helmet because it itched and because he was sweating so much. He’d had to rip his tunic and hold the cloth against his mouth.

Horley had not meant to have a conversation; he’d meant to try to kill the beast. But now that he was there, now that he
saw
, all he had left were words.

Horley’s boot crunched against half-soggy bone. Theeber didn’t flinch. Theeber already knew. Theeber kept licking the fluid out of the skull in his hairy hand.

Theeber did look a little like a bear. Horley could see that. But no bear was that tall or that wide or looked as much like a man as a beast.

The ring of heads lined every flat space in the cave, painted blue and green and yellow and red and white and black. Even in the extremity of his situation, Horley could not deny that there was something beautiful about the pattern.

“This painting,” Horley began in a thin, stretched voice. “These heads. How many do you need?”

Theeber turned its bloodshot, carious gaze on Horley, body swiveling as if made of air, not muscle and bone.

“How do you know not to be afraid?” Horley asked. Shaking. Piss running down his leg. “Is it true you come from a long way away? Are you homesick?”

Somehow, not knowing the answers to so many questions made Horley’s heart sore for the many other things he would never know, never understand.

Theeber approached. It stank of mud and offal and rain. It made a continual sound like the rumble of thunder mixed with a cat’s purr. It had paws but it had thumbs.

Horley stared up into its eyes. The two of them stood there, silent, for a long moment. Horley trying with everything he had to read some comprehension, some understanding into that face. Those eyes, oddly gentle. The muzzle wet with carrion.

“We need you to leave. We need you to go somewhere else. Please.”

Horley could see Hasghat’s door in the forest in front of him. It was opening in a swirl of dead leaves. A light was coming from inside of it. A light from very, very far away.

Theeber held Horley against his chest. Horley could hear the beating of its mighty heart, loud as the world. Rebecca and his sons would be almost past the forest by now.

Seether tore Horley’s head from his body. Let the rest crumple to the dirt floor.

Horley’s body lay there for a good long while.

Winter came—as brutal as it had ever been—and the Third Bear continued in its work. With Horley gone, the villagers became ever more listless. Some few disappeared into the forest and were never heard from again. Others feared the forest so much that they ate berries and branches at the outskirts of their homes and never hunted wild game. Their supplies gave out. Their skin became ever more pale and they stopped washing themselves. They believed the words of madmen and adopted strange customs. They stopped wearing clothes. They would have relations in the street. At some point, they lost sight of reason entirely and sacrificed virgins to the Third Bear, who took them as willingly as anyone else. They took to mutilating their bodies, thinking that this is what the third bear wanted them to do. Some few in whom reason persisted had to be held down and mutilated by others. A few cannibalized those who froze to death, and others who had not died almost wished they had. No relief came. The baron never brought his men.

Spring came, finally, and the streams unthawed. The birds returned, the trees regained their leaves, and the frogs began to sing their mating songs. In the deep forest, an old wooden door lay half-buried in moss and dirt, leading nowhere, all light fading from it. On an overgrown hill, there lay an empty cave with nothing but a few old bones scattered across the dirt floor.

The Third Bear had finished its pattern and moved on, but for the remaining villagers he would always be there.

IT CAME FOR US

Monsters aren’t always indiscriminate. For every juggernaut that tornadoes across the page, leaving a body count in the double-digits, there is another creature that takes more care in choosing its victims, and while the eventual tally of its murders may approach or even exceed that of its less selective cousin, every death is a step on the way to its eventual goal: us. Perhaps the beast has fallen in love with us. Perhaps we have trespassed against it in ways intentional or accidental. Perhaps it has recognized in us a threat to itself that must be addressed. Whatever the cause, the monster’s notice has settled on us, and it will not rest until it has us. It is as if that secret, narcissistic sense we have as children, that the world revolves around us—which we are supposed to outgrow but never leaves us completely—is being validated in the most horrible of fashions. Yet whatever dark thrill such attention might bring, it must be qualified by our fear at the end result of this attention, as well as by some measure of guilt over its damage to those around us.

So in this third section, Kelly Link’s “Monster” gives us the monster as the terrible protector we longed for as children, without ever considering what the cost of such a guardian might be. In comparison, the mysterious entities at work in Genevieve Valentine’s “Keep Calm and Carillon” appear more benevolent, except for the rather odd task they require of the people they’ve saved from certain death, which rapidly moves from amusing in the direction of disturbing. The father in Robert McCammon’s “The Deep End” wages a very personal campaign against the water-beast that took his son from him; the sea serpent in F. Brett Cox’s “The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang” portends another kind of conflict. In “Blood Makes Noise” and “The Machine Is Perfect, the Engineer Is Nobody,” Gemma Files and Brett Alexander Savory, respectively, write of monsters that seem to know more about their intended victims than the victims do, themselves. Laird Barron’s “Proboscis” confronts us with monsters content to dwell amongst us unnoticed, until one of us sees more than he should.

The protagonists of all these stories share a kind of election. However terrible it might be, they have been chosen, singled out for a glimpse of the world’s hidden engines. The monster that threatens our flesh threatens our understanding, too, its fractured outrage tearing vents in the life we thought we knew.

Monster
Kelly Link

No one in Bungalow 6 wanted to go camping. It was raining, which meant that you had to wear garbage bags over your backpacks and around the sleeping bags, and even that wouldn’t help. The sleeping bags would still get wet. Some of the wet sleeping bags would then smell like pee, and the tents already smelled like mildew, and even if they got the tents up, water would collect on the ground cloths. There would be three boys to a tent, and only the boy in the middle would stay dry. The other two would inevitably end squashed up against the sides of the tent, and wherever you touched the nylon walls of the tent, water would come through from the outside.

Besides, someone in Bungalow 4 had seen a monster in the woods. Bungalow 4 had been telling stories ever since they got back. It was a no-win situation for Bungalow 6. If Bungalow 6 didn’t see the monster, Bungalow 4 would keep the upper hand that fate had dealt them. If Bungalow 6 did see a monster—but who wanted to see a monster, even if it meant that you got to tell everyone about it? Not anyone in Bungalow 6, except for James Lorbick, who thought that monsters were awesome. But James Lorbick was a geek and he had a condition that made his feet smell terrible. That was another thing about camping. Someone would have to share a tent with James Lorbick and his smelly feet.

And even if Bungalow 6 did see the monster, well, Bungalow 4 had seen it first, so there was nothing special about that, seeing a monster after Bungalow 4 went and saw it first. And maybe Bungalow 4 had pissed off that monster. Maybe that monster was just waiting for more kids to show up at the Honor Lookout where all the pine trees leaned backwards in a circle around the bald hump of the hill in a way that made you feel dizzy when you lay around the fire at night and looked up at them.

“There wasn’t any monster,” Bryan Jones said, “and anyway if there was a monster, I bet it ran away when it saw Bungalow 4.” Everybody nodded. What Bryan Jones said made sense. Everybody knew that the kids in Bungalow 4 were so mean that they had made their counselor cry like a girl. The Bungalow 4 counselor was a twenty-year-old college student named Eric who had terrible acne and wrote poems about the local girls who worked in the kitchen and how their breasts looked lonely but also beautiful, like melted ice cream. The kids in Bungalow 4 had found the poetry and read it out loud at morning assembly in front of everybody, including some of the kitchen girls.

Bungalow 4 had sprayed a bat with insect spray and then set fire to it and almost burned down the whole bungalow.

And there were worse stories about Bungalow 4.

Everyone said that the kids in Bungalow 4 were so mean that their parents sent them off to camp just so they wouldn’t have to see them for a few weeks.

“I heard that the monster had big black wings,” Colin Simpson said. “Like a vampire. It flapped around and it had these long fingernails.”

“I heard it had lots of teeth.”

“I heard it bit Barnhard.”

“I heard he tasted so bad that the monster puked after it bit him.”

“I saw Barnhard last night at dinner,” Colin Simpson’s twin brother said. Or maybe it was Colin Simpson who said that and the kid who was talking about flapping and fingernails was the other twin. Everybody had a hard time telling them apart. “He had a Band-Aid on the inside of his arm. He looked kind of weird. Kind of pale.”

“Guys,” their counselor said. “Hey guys. Enough talk. Let’s pack up and get going.” The Bungalow 6 counselor was named Terence, but he was pretty cool. All of the kitchen girls hung around Bungalow 4 to talk to Terence, even though he was already going out with a girl from Ohio who was six-foot-two and played basketball. Sometimes before he turned out the lights, Terence would read them letters that the girl from Ohio had written. There was a picture over Terence’s camp bed of this girl sitting on an elephant in Thailand. The girl’s name was Darlene. Nobody knew the elephant’s name.

“We can’t just sit here all day,” Terence said. “Chop chop.”

Everyone started complaining.

“I know it’s raining,” Terence said. “But there are only three more days of camp left and if we want our overnight badges, this is our last chance. Besides it could stop raining. And not that you should care, but everyone in Bungalow 4 will say that you got scared and that’s why you didn’t want to go. And I don’t want to everyone to think that Bungalow 6 is afraid of some stupid Bungalow 4 story about some stupid monster.”

It didn’t stop raining. Bungalow 4 didn’t exactly hike; they waded. They splashed. They slid down hills. The rain came down in clammy, cold, sticky sheets. One of the Simpson twins put his foot down at the bottom of a trail and the mud went up all the way to his knee and pulled his tennis shoe right off with a loud sucking noise. So they had to stop while Terence lay down in the mud and stuck his arm down, fishing for the Simpson twin’s shoe.

Bryan Jones stood next to Terence and held out his shirt so the rain wouldn’t fall in Terence’s ear. Bryan Jones was from North Carolina. He was a big tall kid with a friendly face, who liked paint guns and pulling down his pants and mooning people and putting hot sauce on toothbrushes.

Sometimes he’d sit on top of James Lorbick’s head and fart, but everybody knew it was just Bryan being funny, except for James Lorbick. James Lorbick hated Bryan even more than he hated the kids in Bungalow 4. Sometimes James pretended that Bryan Jones’s parents died in some weird accident while camp was still going on and that no one knew what to say to Bryan and so they avoided him until James came up to Bryan and said exactly the right thing and made Bryan feel better, although of course he wouldn’t really feel better, he’d just appreciate what James had said to him, whatever it was that James had said. And of course then Bryan would feel bad about sitting on James’s head all those times. And then they’d be friends. Everybody wanted to be friends with Bryan Jones, even James Lorbick.

The first thing that Terence pulled up out of the mud wasn’t the Simpson twin’s shoe. It was long and round and knobby. When Terence knocked it against the ground, some of the mud slid off.

“Hey. Wow,” James Lorbick said. “That looks like a bone.”

Everybody stood in the rain and looked at the bone.

“What is that?”

“Is it human?”

“Maybe it’s a dinosaur,” James Lorbick said. “Like a fossil.”

“Probably a cow bone,” Terence said. He poked the bone back in the mud and fished around until it got stuck in something that turned out to be the lost shoe. The Simpson twin took the shoe as if he didn’t really want it back. He turned it upside down and mud oozed out like lonely, melting soft-squeeze ice cream.

Half of Terence was now covered in mud, although at least, thanks to Bryan Jones, he didn’t have water in his ear. He held the dubious bone as if he was going to toss it off in the bushes, but then he stopped and looked at it again. He put it in the pocket of his rain jacket instead. Half of it stuck out. It didn’t look like a cow bone.

By the time they got to Honor Lookout, the rain had stopped. “See?” Terence said. “I told you.” He said it as if now they were fine. Now everything would be fine. Water plopped off the needles of the pitiful pine trees that leaned eternally away from the campground on Honor Lookout.

Bungalow 6 gathered wood that would be too wet to use for a fire. They unpacked their tents and tent poles, and tent pegs, which descended into the sucking mud and disappeared forever. They laid out their tents on top of ground cloths on top of the sucking, quivering, nearly-animate mud. It was like putting a tent up over chocolate pudding. The floor of the tents sank below the level of the mud when they crawled inside. It was hard to imagine sleeping in the tents. You might just keep on sinking.

“Hey,” Bryan Jones said, “look out! Snowball fight!” He lobbed a brown mudball which hit James just under the chin and splashed up on James’s glasses. Then everyone was throwing mudballs, even Terence. James Lorbick even threw one. There was nothing else to do.

When they got hungry, they ate cold hot dogs for lunch while the mud dried and cracked and fell off their arms and legs and faces. They ate graham crackers with marshmallows and chocolate squares and Terence even toasted the marshmallows with a cigarette lighter for anyone who wanted. Since they couldn’t make a fire, they made mud sculptures instead. Terence sculpted an elephant and a girl on top. The elephant even looked like an elephant. But then one of the Simpson twins sculpted an atom bomb and dropped it on Terence’s elephant and Terence’s girlfriend.

“That’s okay,” Terence said. “That’s cool.” But it wasn’t cool. He went and sat on a muddy rock and looked at his bone.

The twins had made a whole stockpile of atom bombs out of mud. They decided to make a whole city with walls and buildings and everything. Some of the other kids from Bungalow 6 helped with the city so that the twins could bomb the city before it got too dark.

Bryan Jones had put mud in his hair and twisted it up in muddy spikes. There was mud in his eyebrows. He looked like an idiot, but that didn’t matter, because he was Bryan Jones and anything that Bryan Jones did wasn’t stupid. It was cool. “Hey man,” he said to James. “Come and see what I stole off the clothes line at camp.”

James Lorbick was muddy and tired and maybe his feet did smell bad, but he was smarter than most of the kids in Bungalow 6. “Why?” he asked.

“Just come on,” Bryan said. “I don’t want anyone else to see this yet.”

“Okay,” James said.

It was a dress. It had big blue flowers on it and James Lorbick got a bad feeling.

“Why did you steal a dress?” he said.

Bryan shrugged. He was smiling as if the whole idea of a dress made him happy. It was a big, happy, contagious smile, but James Lorbick didn’t smile back. “Because it will be funny,” Bryan said. “Put it on and we’ll go show everybody.”

“No way,” James said. He folded his muddy arms over his muddy chest to show he was serious.

“I dare you,” Bryan said. “Come on, James, before everybody comes over here and sees it. Everybody will laugh.”

“I know they will,” James said. “No.”

“Look, I’d put it on, I swear, but it wouldn’t fit me. No way would it fit. So you’ve got to do it. Just do it, James.”

“No,” James said.

James Lorbick wasn’t sure why his parents had sent him off to camp in North Carolina. He hadn’t wanted to go. It wasn’t as if there weren’t trees in Chicago. It wasn’t as if James didn’t have friends in Chicago. Camp just seemed to be one of those things parents could make you do, like violin lessons, or karate, except that camp lasted a whole month. Plus, he was supposed to be thankful about it, like his parents had done him a big favor. Camp cost money.

So he made leather wallets in arts and crafts, and went swimming every other day, even though the lake smelled funny and the swim instructor was kind of weird and liked to make the campers stand on the high diving board with their eyes closed. Then he’d creep up and push them into the water. Not that you didn’t know he was creeping up. You could feel the board wobbling.

He didn’t make friends. But that wasn’t true, exactly. He was friendly, but nobody in Bungalow 6 was friendly back. Sometimes right after Terence turned out the lights, someone would say, “James, oh, James, your hair looked really excellent today” or “James, James Lorbick, I wish I were as good at archery as you” or “James, will you let me borrow your water canteen tomorrow?” and then everyone would laugh while James pretended to be asleep, until Terence would flick on the lights and say, “Leave James alone—go to sleep or I’ll give everyone five demerits.”

James Lorbick knew it could have been worse. He could have been in Bungalow 4 instead of Bungalow 6.

At least the dress wasn’t muddy. Bryan let him keep his jeans and T-shirt on. “Let me do your hair,” Bryan said. He picked up a handful of mud pushed it around on James’s head until James had sticky mud hair just like Bryan’s.

“Come on,” Bryan said.

“Why do I have to do this?” James asked. He held his hands out to the side so that he wouldn’t have to touch the dress. He looked ridiculous. He felt worse than ridiculous. He felt so terrible that he didn’t even care anymore that he was wearing the dress.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Bryan said. He sounded like he thought it was a big joke, which it was. “I didn’t make you do it, James.”

One of the Simpson twins was running around, dropping atom bombs on the sagging, wrinkled tents. He skidded to a stop in front of Bryan and James. “Why are you wearing a dress?” the Simpson twin said. “Hey, James is wearing a dress!”

Bryan gave James a shove. Not hard, but he left a muddy handprint on the dress. “Come on,” he said. “Pretend that you’re a zombie. Like you’re a kitchen girl zombie who’s come back to eat the brains of everybody from Bungalow 6, because you’re still angry about that time we had the rice pudding fight with Bungalow 4 out on the porch of the dining room. Like you just crawled out of the mud. I’ll be a zombie too. Let’s go chase people.”

“Okay,” James Lorbick said. The terrible feeling went away at the thought of being a zombie. Suddenly the flowered dress seemed magical to him. It gave him the strength of a zombie, only faster. He staggered with Bryan along toward the rest of Bungalow 6, holding out his arms. Kids said things like, “Hey, look at James! James is wearing a DRESS!” as if they were making fun of him, but then they got the idea. They realized that James and Bryan were zombies and they ran away. Even Terence.

After a while, everybody had become a zombie. So they went for a swim. Everybody except for James Lorbick, because when he started to take off the dress, Bryan Jones stopped him. Bryan said, “No, wait. Keep it on. I dare you to wear that dress until we get back to camp tomorrow. I dare you. We’ll show up at breakfast and say that we saw a monster and it’s chasing us, and then you come in the dining room and it will be awesome. You look completely spooky with that dress and all the mud.”

“I’ll get my sleeping bag all muddy,” James said. “I don’t want to sleep in a dress. It’s dumb.”

Everybody in the lake began to yell things.