Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

  Rupert just nodded. He didn’t ask why Wallace hadn’t pulled the trigger after he’d gone to the trouble of bringing a gun — why he hadn’t killed the dog, which he’d planned to do. But Wallace knew the question was in the air; something in Rupert’s nod made that clear. Wallace tried to explain it.

  The first time was just to Rupert. And he didn’t get to the nub of the matter.

  “It wasn’t just the smell,” said Wallace. “That was bad. But the dog. It was like hypnosis. Like when an owl spots a mouse. Under its nest. Where it’s got bones of other mice piled up.”

  Rupert didn’t think that made any sense, and Wallace was inclined to agree as soon as he said the words. He had the gun. All he had to do was pull the trigger. The two sat quietly for a span.

  “How’s your arm?” Rupert asked finally, and when Wallace said, “Hurts.”

  Rupert said, “We should see a doctor.”

  Wallace shut his eyes, and clutched his wounded arm jealously.

  “We should go back, anyway,” said Rupert. “Soon. Someone might find it if we just leave it there. The Webley.”

  Wallace’s eyes cracked open, and he looked at Rupert, and he said, “I can’t yet.” Rupert thought Wallace might be ready to cry. But — to his disappointment — Wallace just looked away.

  “I think that dog’s a killer,” he said. “It’s a devil.”

  The second time Wallace had cause to explain himself came middle morning. Wallace insisted that they keep resting. He had shut his eyes and was dozing — not dangerously, not like he might die — when Rupert shook his friend’s shoulder, Wallace mumbled that he just needed to rest up and ordered Rupert to keep a watch. This Rupert did. He lay on his belly so his eyes peered over the edge of the ditch, through the bramble — like barbed wire along a trench in the War, except that Rupert was watching the brick wall at the back of the White Rose station and not no-man’s land. When the gravel bit into his knees, he shifted to his side. Twice, when he judged things quiet enough, he got up and walked in small circles at the bottom of the ditch to stretch the cramps out of his legs, pinwheeling the soreness from his arm while his thoughts about Wallace and the Webley and the dog circled each other.

  Rupert was back on his belly when Nancy Waite appeared around the side of the station. The sight of her stopped his breath.

  Nancy was wearing a pale yellow dress. Her hair was combed back from her forehead, held there close to her scalp with a white ribbon. The rest fell golden and, today, unbraided down her back. She clutched a brown paper bag in front of her. She moved with great, guilty care, checking over her shoulder, peering through bushes. Rupert willed himself still, until she finally turned around and vanished around the corner of the garage.

  Rupert let his breath out. He looked back and Wallace looked up at him. His friend’s eyes were pasty, and dull, and it was clear: Wallace had no idea what Rupert had seen. Rupert himself wasn’t sure — what he’d seen, who he’d seen, if he’d seen anything at all.

  “Hey! What’re you doing in there?”

  “Wallace?”

  “Are you in there?”

  Rupert turned back. It wasn’t just Nancy; Joan Waite was beside her, standing right behind the garage, in full view. Nancy giggled as she and Joan peered through the brush. Wallace rolled onto his knees and, grunting, stood up. Joan was wearing her pink sweater and the pale blue dress. Her hair was tied back. Rupert swallowed, his mouth dry as sand.

  “Shhh!” said Wallace. He planted himself beside Rupert, and motioned with his good hand for the two to come over.

  They bent down around the shrubbery and lowered themselves into the ditch — beside Wallace, Rupert noted.

  “We saw you heading off from school,” Joan explained as she flattened out her skirts in front of her, and added: “I remembered this place.” Rupert looked at his hands, which had drawn closed into fists.

  Nancy looked at his sleeve, which was now brown with old blood.

  “Holy cow!” she said. “What’d you do?”

  “Were you fighting again?” Joan, for the first time, looked at Rupert — a little accusingly, he thought.

  “No,” said Wallace. “We — ”

  And Wallace paused, and thought about it for a few seconds, and he explained himself to the Waite sisters.

  First, he described the dog, in such a way that Nancy made fists herself, and held them to her mouth, and even elder sister Joan gasped and looked away. He related the encounter of the day before so that Joan declared his survival a miracle. Then he got to the battle.

  “Me and the dog sized each other up. It wasn’t like before, where the dog figured it could just take me. It knew I came ready. So it kept back — in behind the railings of the porch, where I couldn’t get a clear shot.”

  “Did you shoot it?” asked Nancy, aghast. She seemed to relax when he shook his head.

  “I couldn’t get a shot. I just kept looking at it, sitting there in front of the door. And then I saw it.”

  “What’d you see?” asked Joan.

  Wallace had developed dark rings around his eyes. The effect was chilling when he opened them wide. “There was a dead man,” he said, and added — before Rupert could say anything — “I was trying to figure it out. That was the smell. Death.”

  The Waite sisters sat rapt, staring at Wallace. Joan’s lips parted and she clutched at her skirts in her lap. Nancy held her sister’s shoulder.

  “I didn’t see a dead man,” said Rupert quietly. Nancy spared him a glance; Wallace and Joan ignored him, and Wallace continued:

  “You could see his legs through the door. They were skinny. Like a skeleton’s. He was lying on the floor of the living room, where he died.”

  “Do you think the dog killed him?”

  Joan asked it softly. Wallace shrugged, and winced.

  “You should get a bandage,” said Nancy. “And go see a doctor. Maybe you got rabies.”

  “We can’t do that,” said Rupert, his voice louder than he intended. “Wallace lost the Webley when he got scared and dropped it without even shooting.”

  “I was bit!” said Wallace, and Rupert said, “. . . after you dropped the gun,” and Joan said, “That’s enough,” and they all sat quiet a moment.

  “We have to get the gun back,” said Rupert finally. “Wallace’ll get a beating if we don’t. So we’re resting up.”

  “When are you going to go?” asked Nancy.

  Rupert started to say, When Wallace is good and ready, but Wallace cut him off. “Right now,” he said. “Wanna come?”

  “We’ve only got ten minutes until recess is finished,” said Joan. But she sounded uncertain.

  “Someone might pick up the gun if we wait,” said Wallace. Silently, Rupert admitted that he was right.

  Nancy opened up the bag she was clutching, reached in, and handed Wallace a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. She gave Rupert another one. The smell of peanut butter was thick.

  “We thought you must be hungry,” explained Nancy, and Joan said, “That’s why we came.”

  “We can eat on the way,” said Wallace. Taking the sandwich in his bad hand, he used his good arm to push himself up, and stumbling barely at all, he headed along the ditch, in the direction of home, of the dog’s house.

  The Waite girls looked at one another; Rupert looked at both of them.

  “We have to get the gun,” said Rupert.

  Nancy nodded; Joan shrugged. “Might as well,” she said, and Rupert felt his heart race.

  They walked in a line down the ditch: Wallace first, the Waite sisters following, first Joan and then Nancy, hanging close. At the back, Rupert. The ditch was excellent for their purpose, running deeper as it left the town, so that by the time they were past the business section and behind houses it was almost a gully. They bent low as they passed a lady hanging sheets in her back garden. But they needn’t have; she hummed around a mouthful of clothes-pegs as though she were alone in the world. When they were past, Nancy Waite giggled, and Wa
llace shot a glare back over his shoulder.

  “Sorry, Wallace,” said Joan, drawing out his name like it was “Mother,” and laughing. Rupert laughed too, but he made a point of keeping it down.

  There came a point where the walls were nearly cliffs, huge round rocks covered in slick moss; long pools of green-slicked water spread still in the shade of bent willow trees that towered at the edge, dangled roots in the air above their heads. Somewhere in the shadows, something splashed.

  Had the Waite girls ever been down here? Rupert thought not; they both stayed quiet as they walked along this section. Because Rupert had been here before, he knew where they were: just a dozen yards from the main road to town, maybe a quarter mile from the concession road that would take him and Wallace home. Where the dog and its house were.

  But the Waites lived in town — on Ruggles Street, in a red brick house that climbed up two storeys with awnings painted white — on the other side of town. They were going into strange territory. Rupert’s territory. Wallace’s. They didn’t become talkative until the trees spread, and they came back into the hot light of morning.

  Nancy slowed, so she and Rupert walked side by side. “There’s not a dead body there, is there?” She asked the question as they climbed up a slide of sharp gravel, around a steel culvert and onto the concession road. Rupert’s breath was hot and dry in his throat; he had a hard time getting out what should have been a simple answer.

  “I — I didn’t see one,” he said, then — afraid if he said no, Wallace made that up, she and Joan would just leave them and go back to school — added: “But there could have been.”

  “Wallace wouldn’t lie.”

  She reached the top just before him, and skipped off to join her sister, who was walking beside Wallace now. A scent, of soap and sweat and something else, lingered in his nostrils. Rupert crested the top and ran to catch up with the three of them.

  “It’s not far now,” said Wallace, and that at least was true.

  But they dawdled, so it took longer than it should have to reach the house where the dog lived. By the time they got to the top of the driveway, there was no getting around it: they were all four truant now.

  Joan peered at the house. It was still, and very bright now that the sun was high. The front door was a rectangle of perfect black.

  “It looks like nobody lives there,” she said. “It looks abandoned.”

  “We should just get the gun,” said Rupert. “You remember where you dropped it?”

  Wallace pointed in a general way to the left of the house. “Over there.”

  “Where was the body?” asked Nancy.

  “Inside.”

  Rupert studied the yard. A breeze came up, carrying a sweet smell of fresh hay from somewhere beyond this place. It tickled the high grass. “I saw it fall,” said Rupert finally. He headed up the driveway a few steps and pointed to a spot. “Maybe here.”

  “What about the dog?”

  The question barely registered; Rupert couldn’t even say who asked it. As he moved closer to the house, it seemed as though he were moving in his own quiet world — as though he were following a thread of raw instinct, some part of his mind that didn’t think in words or even pictures, but just compelled. He almost could have closed his eyes as he stepped off the driveway into the grass, and kept on his course. Eyes open, eyes closed: the memory of the gun tumbling through the air just here, just so — landing in this place, not that or that — was just as vivid one way or the other.

  Just as true — true as any other memory, like the silk touch of golden skin in the early, cool hours of a late-August Sunday . . .

  . . . the hard impact of fist in gut . . .

  . . . the hot memory of accusation . . .

  . . . the trajectory of a gun, set loose from sweat-slicked hand — through sky —

  — to dirt.

  The gun lay nested in the grass at his feet. Rupert let his breath out and bent down — behind him, someone said: “You found it?” — and wrapped his fingers around the barrel. He lifted it first, like a hammer or an axe, then took the handle in his other hand — wonderingly put his finger through the trigger guard — and turned around.

  The three of them stood close together — Wallace next to Joan, who held his arm. Nancy, clutching Joan’s skirt hem. The gun was heavy, and big for his hands — but finally, words returned to him, and he thought:

  I could almost hit him. Miss the sisters. But hit him. Almost.

  “I’ve got it,” said Rupert, and lifted the gun above his head. Wallace nodded, and held out his hand: “Give it here.”

  Rupert took a breath, and looked at Wallace. “Not yet,” he said.

  Wallace looked back at Rupert. “What do you mean? Come on.”

  Rupert shook his head. “You said there was a body in there,” he said. “I want to see.” He beckoned with the gun and turned away from them, to face the house.

  “What about the dog?” said a Waite sister — which one, Rupert could not say. He took hold of the gun by its stock, holding it in both hands and climbed the steps to the porch.

  The house consumed Rupert.

  That was how it looked to Wallace, watching from the property’s edge with the Waite sisters at his side. The brilliant morning sunlight shone off the roof of the house, making dark shade under the eaves of the porch. Rupert stepped beneath them, and he faded in shadow. One step further, and he vanished into the black.

  “What about the dog?” said Joan Waite.

  “It’s got to be there,” said Wallace, and Nancy said, “I don’t hear anything.”

  The house was indeed silent. Wallace thought this strange. There should be barking and shouting — a gunshot, maybe, as Rupert tried to shoot the thing coming at him in the dark sitting room, up from the cellar . . .

  What was Rupert getting up to in there? Wallace held his hurt arm close to him. He thought about the other door . . . across the hall from his room at the house . . .

  Rupert had stepped through that one too, just as sure of himself.

  “That house looks haunted,” said Nancy, finally.

  “Is there really a body?” asked Joan.

  “Wallace saw it,” said Nancy.

  “I saw it,” said Wallace, but he didn’t look at either of them as he spoke. Wallace had not seen a body when he looked through the door of that house — not then, not the day before either. He thought he might have seen something. But as he thought about it, the thing he saw twisted and bent into all sorts of things.

  “Rupert’s really brave,” said Nancy, “to go in there by himself.”

  “Not that brave,” said Wallace.

  “He fought you,” said Joan. “Even though you’re stronger.”

  Wallace looked at both of them now — first Joan, then Nancy — and he tried to make a fist using his hurt arm, but the fingers wouldn’t close. Joan had a little smile; Nancy was shading her eyes with her hands as she peered at the quiet house.

  “He touches girls when they’re sleeping,” Wallace said. “How brave is that?”

  Nancy’s hand came down and she looked at Wallace. Joan’s smile broadened and she laughed, and her voice went high. “He what?” she asked.

  “That’s why we fought.”

  “Who — ”

  “My sister.”

  “Helen?”

  “She’s really pretty.”

  “Helen.”

  “When?”

  “Last Saturday of the summer,” said Wallace. “I let him sleep over at my house. We talked about stuff and went to sleep. And in the middle of the night — when he thinks I’m asleep — he gets up from the floor and sneaks out the door into the hall. So I followed him. He went across the hall to my sister’s room. And that’s where I found him.”

  “Touching her?” Joan’s voice stayed high, but her smile turned into a grimace, and Nancy said: “Ewww!”

  “Yeah,” said Wallace. “She was sleeping. He put his hands all over her leg. All up and down. Wh
ile she slept.” Wallace paused, and looked at each Waite girl in turn.

  “He likes you two, you know. Can’t decide which one he likes best.”

  “Eww!” said Joan, and Nancy’s eyes went wide.

  “Rupert Storey ain’t brave.” Wallace winced, and pushed, and his swollen fingers closed into a fist.

  “He’s just a degenerate. He had it coming.”

  Rupert pinched his nose, but it didn’t do much good. The stench in here was foul enough to taste: of piss and shit, and something sweet, and of smoke.

  It was dark. The windows in the front room had blinds drawn down, and they glowed a sick yellow with the sunlight. There were three things that could have been the dog — a body — but as Rupert’s eyes adjusted, he fathomed that none of them were, that he was pointing the Webley at a rocking chair on its side . . . a barrel . . . a stuffed sitting chair, now bleeding its straw onto the floor.

  And there was a sound. Of breathing.

  Rupert uncovered his nose and lifted the Webley with both hands. The breathing was slow and wheezing. There was no rhythm to it; each breath was its own task. As Rupert moved further into the house, it seemed to grow louder, as if the house itself were a great lung drawing those unsteady breaths. Like Rupert was a bone, caught in its throat.

  There were two rooms at the back of the house — a door on either side of a woodstove. The first was filled with rags and a broken bed frame. A pane of its window was broken, but the glass wasn’t cleared. A cloud of flies tickled against Rupert’s face, and drove him back. He let them. The breathing was quieter in this room. The cause of it was in the second room if anywhere.

  If the dog was anywhere in here, that’s where he would be.

  And as for Wallace’s dead body —

  The door was half-open. Rupert stepped around the woodstove, and pushed it the rest of the way. This room was darker still. There was a bed underneath the window. Someone was in it.

  Rupert stumbled — the floor here was wet with something — and he gagged. The smell here was terrible — it was like stepping inside a shallow privy.