Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

  Mitchell nodded. “Delilah Franken,” he said.

  She leaned forward, wiped a greasy strand of hair from her eyes, and with shaking voice spoke slowly. “Mitchell, I don’t know what you’re doing in a place like this, but I am so glad that you’re here.”

  Mitchell didn’t know about that: she didn’t look particularly happy. She looked like she was . . .

  Concentrating.

  “Now you have to listen carefully,” said Delilah. “The people in the next apartment kidnapped me. They’re some fucking internet sex cult. I think they planned the fucking thing, for a long time . . . I don’t know, but that’s what I think. But whatever — they grabbed me from behind and knocked me out, and took me to a farmhouse somewhere north of here, and they kept me there for three days. Then they injected me with something and brought me here. I got away — I hit a lady with a lamp, and scratched this guy’s eyes, and a bunch of them just yelled and took off. One of the women locked herself in the bathroom and she didn’t seem to be coming out. But I’m afraid she might come . . .” She looked up suddenly. “Shit. Is the door locked?”

  Mitchell went over to the door. “I got to call the police,” said Delilah, and Mitchell shouted, “Okay,” as he looked through the peephole again. The hallway was empty, but the door on the opposite side stood ajar. “Where’s the phone?” said Delilah.

  Mitchell didn’t answer. He watched for a moment longer, then opened the door and stepped to the other side.

  “Oh. Never mind. I see one by the sofa,” she said.

  Mitchell shut the door behind him and crossed the hall between the two apartments. He ignored the shout of surprise that came from behind him. It was not a shout that interested him. It was, in spite of what Stefan and Mrs. Lesley Woolfe and the rest of them thought about him and his infatuation, a shout that had interested him less and less over the past few weeks.

  He stepped into the vestibule of Giorgio Piccininni’s apartment. There was a mirror hanging there. He smiled into it and he smiled back out of it. Mitchell Owens thought he could tell exactly what was inside him, just by looking.

  So Mitchell looked away from there and into the dark room in front of him. He started toward the darkest part, and as he went he whispered:

  “Trudy.”

  Fly in Your Eye

  It drifts through your vision, a detached retina on patrol. You blink, you rub your temples, you think about seeing the eye doctor real soon. But you look again, and you realize, no, you were wrong. There’s nothing remotely retinal about this thing. Six stickly legs, disco-ball eyes, a big hairy ass, brown-tinted wings stretched akimbo. Just looking through ’em makes you want to scratch.

  Crawled inside through your tear-duct while you slept. Happens one time in a hundred when a tourist goes down to that place, stays one night too many in a room where the fumigation hasn’t took. The locals have a name for those flies — translates either to Sneaky Devil Bat, or Mean Little Eye Mite, depending on which edition of the Fodor’s you got.

  Maybe given time, it’ll decompose. Surely it couldn’t be alive in there — you don’t know much about flies, but one thing you’re pretty sure about is that flies do not have the right gills for extracting oxygen from eyeball juice. The fact that it’s always in a different position when it drifts past your iris doesn’t prove anything. What you’re seeing’s an optical illusion — fly tilts this way or that, wings seem to have moved, proboscis extends a little further, sucks a bit back. Truth is, that fly’s drowned. And drowned means dead, and before long dead has got to mean decomposition. It’s only a matter of time.

  You decide to wait it out. Don’t much feel like leaving the house, so you order in some groceries. The phone’s getting awful jangly, and you pull it out of the wall. And who needs cable television when you got yourself a fly to watch?

  So garbage day comes around and you take the TV and the telephone and your hi-fi stereo set while you’re at it, and lay them all out neat as you please on the curb. They’re gone before the truck arrives, but you don’t see who took them.

  You start to wonder how big that fly in there really is. Some days, it fills your whole vision — everywhere you look, there’s the fly, looking right back. Other times, it’s a teeny little speck. If you weren’t looking, you wouldn’t even notice it was there.

  Mail comes every morning, mostly bills. But you stopped reading it, after the fly switched eyes.

  You woke up that morning, and it took you the longest time to figure out what was so unusual.

  First you thought, maybe someone rearranged the furniture, but as you looked that didn’t seem to be the case. Then you were thinking, if not that, then maybe somebody painted the walls. But no, they were the same dirty beige as they were when you moved in here. And finally, it hit you.

  It was the fly.

  Floating there in your other eyeball — the clean eye, the empty eye, the eye that had no fly or so you’d thought — brown-tinted wings pressed back all sleek and smug against the bristly little curve of its rump. Fly moved, and that’s all it took: overnight, it changed everything.

  So you closed your eyes and thought to yourself: the mail can wait. And you kept ’em closed, covered ’em up, because that way you don’t have to look at that Goddamn fly anymore as it jumps from one eye to the other, alive and well against all reason.

  Awhile goes by. You don’t have many friends, but the few you do have come calling, wondering if you’re okay. You pretend you aren’t home, and it seems to work: they leave.

  Why don’t you go to a doctor? Somehow, you just can’t get your head around the idea that this fly’s a simple medical condition. Maybe the Fodor’s had it right — the first edition, not the new one — and this fly’s a Sneaky Devil Bat, come straight up from Hell to steal your soul. What’s a doctor going to do for that?

  You’re just about ready to go to a priest this morning when you figure it out. You jump out of bed laughing, pull the bandage off your eyes. The fly’s gone — you can tell it without even looking! It was only a matter of time.

  You fling open the curtains and watch the light stream in. Beautiful morning, isn’t it? Middle of summer, sunshiny day, birds flying through the trees. It’s a shame you can’t hear their singing, over the buzzing in your ear.

  Polyphemus’ Cave

  The horror in the sawmill wasn’t far from his mind the night he saw the giant. He’d thought about it briefly in Los Angeles, after he saw the telegram announcing his father’s death. He considered the slow swing of barn-board doors across the mill’s great black belly, each of the three times he’d had to stop to change flat tires on his brand new Ford Coupe. He thought about it again, stopped in the afternoon sun at the top of a steep slope just west of the Idaho line, to deal with his boiled-over radiator. The water steaming from under the hood made him think about how the rainwater dripped from the tackle and chains in the sawmill’s rafters as he lay face-down in damp sawdust. He retched yellow bile into the roadside dirt and started, maybe, to cry. The horror of that night was clearer in his mind then than it had been for years.

  But a hundred miles ahead when the sun had at last set, the spruce trees at the side of the road spread apart like drawing curtains and the nude giant stepped into his path. The sight of it drove The North Brothers Lumber Company and its terrible sawmill from James Thorne’s thoughts like a spurned beau.

  The giant clutched a splintered rail tie in front of him like it was a baseball bat. He glared into the Ford’s headlamps with a single eye — a great green orb flecked with yellow around a pupil wide and deep as the Idaho sky. It hovered in the middle of his skull, beneath a great curling mass of black hair. James slammed his foot on the brake pedal and the Ford’s tires bit into the road, sending stones rat-a-tating into the depths of the wheel well.

  My God , thought James. He’s big as trees.

  He leaned forward in the seat to get a better look. The giant crouched down too and leaned towards the car. A leathery lid crossed his eye as
he peered in. They studied each other in that instant. James felt as though that eye was looking through him: drawing the rest of his terror from him like sweet liquor at the bottom of a dark glass.

  Then the giant made a noise like a dog’s barking, his lips pulled back from teeth that seemed filed to points. With a swing of the rail tie, he splintered the tops of two trees on the far side of the road and disappeared again into the wood. Crickets chirped and tree limbs cracked, and James Thorne’s heart thundered in his chest.

  “He’s big as the trees.” He said it aloud, with a bit of a laugh. He wanted to say it to his pal Stephen Fletcher, a lean young black-haired colt of a boy who dressed sets back on The Devil Pirates. For the past month he’d spent many of his after-hours undressing James. Stephen was smooth and young and eager to please — and James wished Stephen were here now. But he couldn’t take his lover home. Not any more than he could admit to having him in Los Angeles.

  James set his mouth and engaged the clutch. The Ford Coupe crunched across the gravel with a noise like breaking glass. He rounded a bend, and came out in the great bowl of valley in the Coeur d’ Alene mountains. The road was still high enough that he could see the dim etchings of the familiar peaks against the night sky that surrounded Chamblay. In the valley’s middle, miles distant, James could make out a glow among the trees.

  This was new for him. When he’d left home, the Grand Coulee Dam wasn’t even half built, and the only light in Chamblay came from candle, kerosene and the sun. James smiled bitterly.

  After dark on a moonless night, Chamblay could hide in itself.

  The road carried James down a sharp slope and drew alongside the Northern Pacific line that served the town. The tracks gleamed silvery in his headlamps for an instant before he turned back parallel to the line.

  That was the line that, according to his mother’s cryptic telegram, had something significant to do with his father’s sudden and untimely death.

  “Mmm.” He smiled a little, and thought about the giant in the road again — not just the eye, but his immense, sculpted thighs, the dark beard that tumbled halfway down the broad chest . . .

  “What a thing,” he said. “What a marvellous thing. Put that in a picture, no one would believe it.”

  The giant, of course, would be the perfect thing for the pictures. Particularly pictures like The Devil Pirates. In the person of the brave and over-energetic Captain Kip Blackwell, James had battled a giant octopus, not one but two carnivorous gorillas, a host of man-eating midgets from Blood Island, and of course, several of the fearsome Devil Pirates themselves. For all that battling, Republic still wanted another batch of a dozen episodes before the serial ran its course. The giant man in the road, with the peculiar eye in the middle of his forehead, naked as the day he was born — he’d fill out four of those episodes, maybe more, all by himself.

  James thought about that — about unsheathing his rapier against a giant more than twice as tall as he — leaping across the otherwise unconvincing deck of the Crimson Monkey, dodging the blows of the giant’s papier-mâché club, slashing out theatrically with his sword to bring a dozen yards of sailcloth onto the monster’s roaring head. Perhaps, to be true to the plotline, they’d be battling over the honour of the lovely Princess Rebecca, who had disguised herself as a cabin boy back in episode three to join Kip and his crew on their frenetically eventful voyage.

  “Wouldn’t do to lose that fight,” said James, thinking for a moment of what would become of his co-star, tiny Alice Shaw, in the amorous clutches of the giant. He slowed down as he drew through the closed-down business section of Chamblay, past the Episcopalian church his parents frequented, the schoolhouse where he’d learned to read — and finally outside the old clapboard house where he’d spent the first seventeen years of his life. James smiled and shook his head: the preposterous picture of a twenty-foot-tall man mounting a five-foot-two-inch woman provided a comic, if grotesque, distraction to the matter at hand.

  He was still thinking about it — or about the giant, the magnificent giant that he might have seen or might, the more he thought of it, simply have dreamed — as he pulled his suitcase from the Ford’s trunk, let out a long sigh, and made his way up the path to his mother’s front door. The telegram that had brought him here sat folded in his jacket pocket and he made himself think of it. It was a reminder of what he ought to be feeling.

  DEAREST JIMMY STOP I HAVE TERRIBLE NEWS TO DELIVER STOP YOUR FATHER HAS BEEN KILLED IN ACCIDENT ON TRACKS STOP PLEASE COME HOME STOP ALL IS FORGIVEN I LOVE YOU STOP YOU ARE THE MAN OF THE HOUSE NOW STOP PLEASE COME STOP LOVE ALWAYS YOUR MOTHER STOP

  “Oh.”

  That was what James had said when the script girl had handed him the slip of onionskin paper from Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. He’d set his glass of water down. Read the words from the telegram once, and then again. Endured the girl’s hand on his arm, the sympathetic cooing noise she made. He gave her a smile that was meant to look strained — the smile of a grieving son, bravely facing the death of his beloved old dad.

  “Well,” he said. He unbuckled the leather belt and scabbard. He draped it over the canvas back of his chair. He walked back behind the false adobe wall of the Castillo de Diablo set. He found a spot where no one could see him. Crossed his arms. Put his hand on his forehead, and waved away a carpenter who’d stuck his head back there to see what was wrong. Then laughed, silently but deeply, until tears streamed convincingly in little brown rivers down the layers of orange pancake encrusted on his cheeks.

  His dad was dead. Some terrible accident on the tracks. Well, wasn’t that rich. The town would probably be having a parade for Nick Thorne, his strapping, iron-jawed Paul Bunyan of a father . . . And now —

  — now, he was the man of the house.

  There was only one word for it.

  Rich.

  Three days after the telegram, in the middle of the night, James trod up the front steps to the family house. He didn’t know much more now than he did then: he’d just sent off one telegram before packing up his car and heading off. He found that he didn’t want to know more than his mother chose to reveal in that fifty-word telegram. So he just composed one of his own:

  DEAREST MOM STOP I WILL BE HOME IN THREE DAYS STOP DO NOT WORRY ABOUT THE COST OF BURIAL I WILL PAY STOP YOUR SON JAMES STOP

  There was light inside the house. He was not surprised to see that it was not electric. His father hadn’t worked a decent job since the last time the North Brothers had run their mill, and that was years ago.

  But the kerosene flame gave James an odd sort of comfort. The yellow, flickering light was proper and right for a town like Chamblay. Electricity was for New York and Los Angeles. This little place wasn’t ready for it.

  He paused to look inside. There was his mother, sitting in one of the hard, high-backed chairs. She held the black covers of the family Bible in front of her face like a fan. She heard him coming — he knew her well enough to tell that — but she pretended not to. As he watched through the window, she licked a forefinger and turned a page.

  James leaned over and rapped twice on the windowpane. His mother looked up. Widened her eyes in unconvincing delight, as though he were the last person she’d expect to see at the window on an August night some four days after the death of her husband. “Jimmy!” Her voice had a far-away sound to it through the windowpane. She shut the Bible on its marker, set it down and hurried to the front door, which she flung open with a clatter. “Oh, Jimmy!”

  James patted his mother’s back. “Hello, Mother,” he said, as she buried her face in the crook of his shoulder and moistened his shirt with tears. “Hello.”

  “Now tell me what happened,” he said, as they sat across from one another in the dining room. “What happened to Dad?”

  His mother smoothed out her print dress and looked down. “I’m sorry, hon — I guess I didn’t put too much in that telegram. Thought you might have read the newspapers. About the derailment and such.”

&nb
sp; James shook his head. “I don’t have much time for that, what with my schedule.”

  His mother smiled and patted his hand. “Well, you’ve got time to come home when I need you most. That’s a blessing.”

  “They gave me ten days,” said James. His mother’s smile faltered, so he added: “I’m sure I can arrange a little more.”

  “Oh.” The smile returned. “Well, good.”

  “Now. Was it the derailment? That — ”

  “That killed your father?” James’s mother folded her hands in front of her and fixed her eye on the Bible. “Not directly. I can’t believe you hadn’t heard of it. There was a newspaper man who came all the way from Seattle to interview me and take pictures. He said it’d play in all the Hearst papers, what with the circus angle. Biggest one since 1918, he said. I’d have written more if I’d known.”

  James frowned. “The circus angle?”

  “It was a circus train,” she said, sighing. “Twillicker and Baines Circus. Come down from Canada. Old steam engine, six rickety old freight cars and a couple of Pullmans. Wasn’t even supposed to stop here . . .”

  “Ah.” James nodded. He did remember the story now — the Twillicker and Baines wreck had come up a couple of times while he was in makeup. The circus train had derailed somewhere “up north.” There’d been a kerosene fire. Some animals had gotten loose. A lot of people had been killed. There was a number, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He shut his eyes — as much in shame as in grief. Maybe someone had said the word Chamblay in connection with the wreck. If they had, James just hadn’t made the connection between the wreck and his home. Even when his mother told him of his father’s death.

  What did that say about him?

  “There there, dear.” His mother patted his hand. “It’s been a long day’s drive for you. I see that pretty car of yours outside. You don’t want to hear about your father right now. Why don’t you get some sleep? Lots of time to talk in the morning.”