Destroy All Monsters

by Sam J. Miller

“Sorry, girl,” I said, climbing on board. “Let’s head for the bridge.”

  As we went, she kept trying to turn. Still following Niv’s scent—and Ash’s, on him.

  “Ash is going to be okay,” I said, knowing she could hear the lie in my voice. “We’re all going to be okay.”

  A ship’s horn sounded in the distance, low and lonesome, arriving from the Spice Islands. We hurried home through streets that stunk of cinnamon.

  Three

  Ash

  The morning hallway stunk of cinnamon, which meant that autumn was here, and Dunkin’ Donuts was selling Pumpkin Spice Everything, which meant that Hudson High would be full of hot, milky beverages. The smell, I didn’t mind. What bothered me was the herd mentality. The mandatory nature of the pumpkin spice latte. The way it was a status symbol, a way to say, Look at me, I have a car and drive myself to school and I can go out of my way to Dunkin’ Donuts and get a four-dollar coffee every morning.

  Sure, it’s strange, but something that stupid could let the old darkness loose, tightening my chest and making it hard to breathe.

  Hudson High is jam-packed with terrible triggers for my depression. Seeing all those unhappy kids crowded together. Watching the hundred different ways some people just couldn’t help but make others miserable, if not with their fists then with their words, or their clothes or their too-strong perfume or their costly caffeinated beverages.

  Too many ways to end up less than.

  Another hallway trigger: Solomon. Or rather, the lack of him. Looking for him and not finding him. He didn’t come to school every day. And when he did, he didn’t always stay.

  The medication was helping me. I knew it. I felt it. I was already so much better. But the darkness was still there, a black frigid ocean I was precariously balanced above, and there was nothing like the halls of Hudson High to plunge me back in.

  So I did what I do whenever I feel that way: I took out my camera. When the world feels like too much, looking through the lens helps me break it down into manageable pieces.

  Reality is messy. Reality is horrible. My camera allows me to make something out of that chaos. Something beautiful.

  I took a couple pictures of people with their Styrofoam cups. Then I swung by the cafeteria, where they were still serving breakfast for five more minutes. I took a couple pictures of the cafeteria workers, one of whom flashed the most beautiful smile you ever saw. Then the bell for first period rang.

  “Thanks.” I waved to them, then made my way to homeroom.

  People are what inspire me, as a photographer. I’m not so into landscapes or pretty geometry or action shots. Every time I took a picture of someone, I could feel it, sense it, just out of reach—the things I needed to capture. The story I needed to tell.

  The project that would get me the hell out of Hudson.

  Outside the cafeteria, I saw a girl standing against a wall. I didn’t know her. She looked barely old enough to be in high school. Based on who she was hanging out with, I figured she was from one of the trailer parks along Joslen Boulevard. Four piercings framed her face: one on each eyebrow, one in each nostril. She was gorgeous, and sad. I raised my camera.

  There’s no noncrazy way to say this. Through the lens, I could see her damage. I saw it billow in the air around her, like clouds of black ink. I saw it scuttle across her skin: tiny shadow crabs. The longer I looked, the more I could see. Shapes appeared in the darkness behind her—the things she’d seen, the people she was afraid of.

  Shivers went up my spine. They would not stop.

  What the hell was going on?

  The girl looked up. Locked eyes with me. “Is it okay?” I asked, tapping the camera with one finger.

  She shrugged, then nodded. Did her best to smile.

  I took the picture.

  A tiny glimmer of light. I saw her, and she saw me. I was sad, but so was she.

  It was nothing, but it mattered.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Sure,” she told me.

  Shivering, I lowered the camera. My spine still tingled. I shut my eyes, hard, as if I could unsee what I’d seen.

  Just when I thought I was getting better, something else goes wrong with my brain. Something a little pill might not be able to fix.

  “Hey, Ash,” Jewel Gomez said when I joined her at her locker.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m halfway through that book. It’s so fucking—sorry—it’s so good.”

  Being around Jewel made me curse more than normal, because she never ever said even the mildest swear word.

  “Isn’t it!! I’m so glad people don’t actually know the day they’re going to die. Can you imagine?”

  I remembered when Jewel came to Hudson High in ninth grade. All anyone knew about her was that she was super-Christian. So much so that she made people nervous. I’d assumed because of her religion that she’d be homophobic or something, but she was actually the sweetest thing on Earth. To everyone. Which just made people even more nervous around her.

  Everyone but me. We both loved books and movies, and loved talking about them—but on a deeper level than most people did.

  A voice from behind us cheered, “Hey, ladies.”

  “Hey, Sheffield,” I said, without turning around, because no one else in school was ever that happy about anything. And because my heart hadn’t slowed down, and my spine still shivered.

  “Where are your blue baseball caps?”

  “Oh shit,” I said as insincerely as I could. “Did I forget mine again?”

  During baseball and football seasons, pretty much everyone wore a blue baseball cap. It was to show support for the team, they said, although really it was because if you didn’t wear one, you were likely to get bullied, yelled at, or otherwise interrogated by a slick, smiling button-nosed jock who looked like he was already planning his presidential campaign.

  “You know you make people uncomfortable,” he said. “When you don’t wear one. Like you think you’re better than us.”

  “That sounds like an ‘other people’ problem, rather than a ‘me’ problem,” I said.

  Sheffield scoffed. “Later, Ash. Jewel, may the Lord bless and keep you.”

  Sheffield shuffled off. Jewel and I rolled our eyes, and headed in opposite directions to get to our homerooms.

  Someone ran past me, sobbing.

  And then the hallway erupted. Talking, pointing, laughing. I could feel the gossip move through the air like a thunderclap. Phones were passed around. A photo, sent to a bunch of people, each of whom passed it on to a bunch more. Someone shoved it in front of me, without asking if I wanted to see it. And, like an idiot, I looked.

  Six swastikas, spray-painted onto the side of Judy Saperstein’s house.

  The bell rang, but the crowd barely budged. Everyone had something to say on the subject, and they were all saying it at the same time. Most of them were angry, afraid, pissed off—but more than a few people seemed to find it hilarious.

  I went to the window and tried to catch my breath. Outside I saw the same old boring landscape as always: the sloping soccer fields, Hudson’s rotted city sprawl, the mountains across the river beyond.

  But then I raised the camera to my eye, and looked again. I saw the dark fog, the billowing black clouds. The longer I looked, the more they took on shape. Became something real. Something terrifying. Buildings rose up into the sky. Shapes flew through the air, flapping wings too big to belong to birds.

  Another city. The one that Solomon saw, where monsters walk harmlessly through the streets beside hordes of delicious humans.

  The city where I, supposedly, was a princess.

  Except it couldn’t be. Because that city wasn’t real. It was all in Solomon’s mind.

  “No,” I whispered. The shivering in my spine had become so pronounced I could feel my fingers shaking.

  This can’t be real.

  This can’t be happening to me.

  People say Solomon is suffering from a serious mental illness,
the kind that will inevitably lead to his inability to function as an independent human in the world.

  It’s because of his other world. His delusions.

  But if he sees this—and now I’m seeing it—maybe I’m sick too. Sick with something more serious than depression.

  And then the thought came like a whisper into my mind.

  The treehouse.

  Back when Solomon and I were twelve, something happened in that treehouse in his stepfather’s backyard. Something neither one of us could remember. I ended up in the hospital, with a crack in my skull around my left eye. And Solomon was never the same.

  So what if whatever happened to Solomon and me was making us both go crazy?

  What if we were both destined to break down, further and further, until there was nothing left?

  Because neither of us knew what happened.

  And you can’t fight a monster you can’t see.

  Four

  Solomon

  “Good morning,” Radha said, when I came out of my room. A cup of hot, sweet milk tea waited for me on the table.

  I hugged her. My landlady, my auntie. My foster mother. My friend.

  Immense and unstoppable.

  She’d taken me in four years ago, when Ash had fallen sick and her mother, the queen, had kicked me out of the Palace. Traumatic at the time, but in some ways it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  “Sit,” Radha said.

  “Can’t. I need to get going.”

  “You need to sit.”

  I sat. I sipped my tea as fast as I could, and watched the Underbridge come awake. The shantytown beneath Dragon Pagoda Bridge was at its quietest now, before the night shift workers trudged home and the day shift ones marched out. The wind was right, so we got the breeze from the river instead of the swamps to the north. I kissed Radha on the cheek, then crossed the square to the shower stalls.

  Shacks were piled ten stories high, dilapidated but stable on their scaffolding. Narrow streets and alleys and garden plots ran between them. Everyone paid a tiny bit into a common fund every month, to pay for repairs and maintenance and security. And feed for the monsters, of course, who slept in a big pen to ensure they didn’t get hold of someone’s chickens.

  That’s how it was. Poor people knew that all they had was each other.

  Migrants had been living under the bridge for decades when the police started cracking down—arresting people for trespassing, burning shacks when people refused to get out. To her credit, and everyone’s surprise, the queen had intervened. Granted royal permission to live under the bridge to anyone who wanted to. Ordered the cops to stop messing with people. Which pissed the cops off immeasurably.

  Ten years later, we’re still here. Five thousand of us. It’s overcrowded and everyone is always up in your business and sometimes it smells bad, but I love it. Walking back, fresh and clean and hungry, I looked up in time to see a pod of sky whales heading east. Their massive tails shattered clouds with each swing.

  “Connor still asleep?” I asked, when I got back.

  “Enjoy it while it lasts,” she said, and chuckled.

  I debated waking him up, before I headed for the Clarion’s office. Radha’s six-year-old son had entirely too much energy, and was way too much work, but I adored him. He was smarter than most kids twice his age—and he was a prodigy with his abilities, able to control fire from the age of four, while most othersiders don’t come into their abilities until they hit puberty.

  Or, in my case, later. Or possibly never.

  There is magic in me. I feel it all through my arms and legs, shivering in my stomach, burning in my brain. But when I try to access it—I freak out. Sometimes it’s like a seizure, other times I black out. Sometimes I start smashing stuff up.

  But it’s there. I’ve always known it’s there. I’ve also known I need to keep it a secret, in a city that hates my kind so much.

  I opened the door to the room we shared and watched Connor sleep.

  I loved him—but sometimes, in my darkest, most self-pitying moments, I couldn’t help but envy him. Sure, he was dirt-poor like me, but he had a mother and he’d grown up surrounded by people who loved him. They’d valued him, nurtured him, encouraged him. The light in his deep brown eyes had never dimmed. Spend thirty seconds with Connor and you could see that the fire he could summon was part of his very soul.

  Someone ran past the window, sobbing. Someone else laughed.

  And then the shouting started.

  “Stay here,” I told Radha. I grabbed my camera and ran outside. Random jerks routinely came around the Underbridge, looking to beat up on some othersiders. They tended to regret it pretty quickly and run like hell. But hopefully I could get off a couple of good photos for my editor, Cass, first.

  A crowd had gathered in the dusty alley, so thick I couldn’t get anywhere near the action. I could see what was happening, though. These were not random jerks. These people were together. They were organized.

  They all wore ultramarine armbands. I don’t know why that worried me so much. Maybe it was the idea that someone, somewhere, had sewed them. That these people were part of something bigger.

  My feet slid into horse stance, one of the few things I remembered from the self-defense classes that Ash’s trainer let me sit in on. My hands made fists. I may not have known yet what my ability was, but I would fight with all of my regular human strength before I let anything happen to Radha and Connor.

  An armbanded man walked right up to me.

  Now, I’m pretty tall, and muscular, so people tended to assume I knew how to fight. What frightened me was the confidence on his face. Like he’d marched right into a lion’s den and didn’t believe the lions could hurt him. It enraged me.

  “You lost?” I asked him.

  “I’m exactly where I need to be,” he said. “It’s you who aren’t supposed to be here. You aren’t supposed to be anywhere. You’re an abomination. All of you.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You really believe that?”

  “We haven’t forgotten the Night of Red Diamonds,” he hissed.

  “Neither have we.”

  Just a few years back, the simmering tension between people with magic and people without it boiled over. A big bloody brawl in the streets; each side said the other was to blame. And whatever the real story was, at the end of the night there was a whole lot of blood and a whole lot of broken glass in the street. Glittering like red diamonds.

  That was when street gangs started targeting us. Othersider businesses were burned down. People began calling on the queen to make our magic illegal, or to drive us out of Darkside altogether.

  “There will be a reckoning,” he whispered, stepping closer.

  A rock struck him, in the head. Not too big, and not too hard. He knelt there, his face reddening, one hand holding himself up and the other clenched into the tightest fist I’d ever seen. I dropped to my knees, to be eye level with him, to capture the chaos in the background, the blurry crowd and the flames, and took a photograph.

  He stood up, breathing heavy. Ran off. I remained on my knees. My friend Shoshana waved, from the window of a shack across the way. She held her hand out in front of her, and rocks rose up into the air, waiting for the next jerk who came along looking for trouble.

  It wasn’t long before we had the armbands in retreat.

  I glanced down at my camera. What I had captured—if it came out— It was powerful. The best picture I’d ever taken. Cass would be proud.

  I headed for the dinosaur paddock.

  “Come on, girl,” I said, when I got to Maraud, and kissed the smooth pebbled texture of her purple skin.

  The streets smelled like patchouli oil and cigarette smoke. On my way out, for the first time I saw the graffiti. An ultramarine silhouette, life-size, on one of the pillars that held up the bridge. A man, broad-shouldered, legs apart, hands clasped behind his back.

  Spray-painted underneath: “He Is the Answer.”


  But who was “he”?

  And if he was the answer, what the hell was the question?

  Five

  Ash

  I shut the door behind me as carefully as I could, which wasn’t carefully enough, because a whole pack of crazed dogs came pouring down the stairs, barking like wild animals. Cass’s house smelled like patchouli incense and cigarette smoke, and was so bright it seemed like her whole ceiling was made of glass.

  “It’s you,” she said from the top of stairs. “I thought maybe it was a serial killer.”

  “Then you should lock your doors,” I said.

  Cass shrugged. “You don’t have to pay off your debts if you’re murdered. Or worry about really anything anymore.”

  If a serial killer did come, they’d have very little resistance from her dogs, who were excitedly rubbing their faces against my legs and jumping up to lick my face.

  “Come upstairs if and when you succeed in fighting them off,” Cass called, and turned to go. She wore a long black hooded gown, something I am sure sold for thousands of dollars and was gifted to her for free. Cass treated it with utter carelessness, as evidenced by the stains on the wrists from her photo chemicals.

  I didn’t know why I’d come. It wasn’t like Cass could help me through the trauma of suddenly being able to see another world. Or, worse, suddenly discovering that I was way more messed up in the head than I had previously believed.

  But if there was anywhere I could go to get out from under the weight of all that, to feel better about humanity, to feel less helpless about swastika graffiti and Solomon’s madness, it was here.

  Once upon a time, and for many years, Cass had been the editor in chief of Strut magazine, which for most of the seventies made Vogue look like Highlights. The most artistic and innovative photography; the most edgy-looking and diverse models. Vogue didn’t put a Black woman on the cover until 1974, but in 1972, Strut did a whole issue featuring exclusively Black models and designers. Every photographer and designer and model and celebrity were dying to be in its pages, but Cass had the final call, and if she didn’t think you were It, she couldn’t be convinced by fame or love or money.