Kill Monster

by Sean Doolittle

  ‘Mamio!’ she cried, scrambling to her knees. ‘What are you doing? How have you come so far in the cold?’

  ‘Te avel angla tute.’ The old woman spat on the ground, slashing a line through the air in front of her with the long, yellowed fingernails of one knobby hand.

  Then she hissed out an incantation that made Anabet’s blood run cold.

  Silas yelped like a puppy and dropped the Shepherd Stone, which now glowed, mysteriously, like a coal from the fire. The old choxani pulled up her headscarf like an executioner’s hood, retreating from view so quickly that she might not have been there at all.

  Anabet’s heart raced. She knew she should follow.

  But she couldn’t seem to move. A dizziness overtook her. Her limbs felt spent of all strength.

  Silas spoke with a trembling voice. ‘I fear I haven’t the courage to ask you what she spoke just then.’

  ‘It is so,’ she whispered.

  And when they looked down at their hands and saw that they’d healed, she knew in her heart that it was.

  The thaw came. The Roma broke camp and moved on. Anabet stayed, and the world became green again.

  Once again, Silas had ruined everything.

  But Anabet, somehow, convinced the poor bumbling wretch she’d married – for that was how they saw themselves, as husband and wife, even though they’d conducted no further ceremony beyond that late-winter day in the cave – that despite their extraordinary tribulations, they truly had been blessed.

  She taught him lessons without teaching: in her manner, in her presence, in her faithful, abiding love. In her seemingly unquenchable wonder at life all around them. She harbored a particular affinity for the abolitionists, his Anabet, and a special empathy for the American Negro. This she owed to over the centuries of enslavement her own people still endured, back in her homeland, even as the plantations here thrived. To understand her sentiments, Silas had only to think of the Israelites in Egypt before Moses returned.

  Together they followed, with great interest, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s adultery trial back in New York. It was a sensational case that seemed to enrapture the country’s attention even as it tore the gun-running preacher’s own family asunder. Letters from Rabbi Loew, of course, had stopped coming long before this time. Silas knew, though no word ever reached him, that the old rabbi – his caretaker, his mentor, his own choxani – lived no more.

  Silas wept.

  And carried on.

  The old woman’s curse had, among other things, left Anabet barren. Or so they’d come to believe. And then came a spring that showed them differently. In late September of that year – on the same day the notorious James brothers robbed the ticket office at Kansas City’s booming Industrial Exposition of $978 and a few odd coins – she bore him a son.

  She would have been well into her thirty-sixth year by then. But years had already ceased to mean the same to Anabet as they meant to others, including Silas himself. They named the boy Abraham. After Silas’s true father, the father of the Jews; after the assassinated American President, whom Anabet so admired.

  They called him Abe.

  And they watched him grow. They watched him grow like the new Union Depot, near the stockyards – the largest building west of New York, which always made Silas think fondly of home. They watched him grow like the railroads that replaced the great paddle steamers that had, once upon a time, brought Silas here. They watched him grow like the trees along the muddy river, no longer harvested as boiler fuel. They watched him grow into a man fit to carry more water than his foolish, doddering father ever could.

  If only, as Silas wished often – often, and until his last breath – he and his darling Anabet could have grown old together.

  Let your duty be my duty. Let your burdens be mine.

  The old woman had been known for her faith in all manner of wards and spells. Blessings for every occasion. Retributions as varied as life itself. The new world called them superstitions; the old world knew better than to tempt fate with disbelief. For Anabet, they were, simply, her mamio – as much a part of the old woman who’d raised her as wrinkled skin and crooked bones. But to the extent of her knowledge, the old woman had never before issued the curse she considered direst among them all:

  Immortality.

  Let your duty be my duty. Let your burdens be mine.

  Anabet’s own words to Silas, pressing their wounds together that day in the cave.

  And her mamio’s unthinkable words in return: It is so.

  And so it happened that the moment Silas passed, his blood forever fused with Anabet’s own.

  She’d been at his bedside, holding the stone against his weakening hand, when the light finally left his sunken, wrinkle-bound eyes. Where for decades the rabbi’s unhallowed clay remained cold to Anabet’s touch, even through the heat of the sultriest Missouri summer, now the stone became like a part of her flesh, as warm as the skin of her own palm. Its markings glowed briefly, like flaring embers. Just as they had on that day in the cave, so many long years before. The peculiar smell of it lingered no more in her nose.

  Let your duty be my duty. Let your burdens be mine.

  And Anabet, at last, truly understood.

  An old man’s foolish magic had bound the water carrier to the Shepherd Stone; an old woman’s vengeful magic had bound Anabet to the water carrier. Even in that moment, she somehow felt the deeper truth of this in her soul: the curse would remain hers until the duty she’d sworn to this detested outsider had been fulfilled.

  And then her Silas was gone.

  It happened again, just two cruelly brief years later, when their beautiful son Abraham died – cut down by racking, wasting consumption even as he entered his prime. Anabet was not permitted at his bedside; still, her crippled heart knew exactly the moment her only child passed. She knew because the markings on the stone once again flared like embers. Then, as quickly as they’d illuminated, they faded back to crude scratchings. In a false rock commissioned by arrogant men. Now forever warm in her hand.

  So faded the last of Anabet’s joy.

  Without it, she marveled at how inescapably bitter the irony of it all now seemed.

  For the outlaw marauder William Wolcott hadn’t needed a soulless assassin from the East after all; the West had taken care of that unsavory matter for all parties concerned. Indeed, the man they’d called Bloody Bill had been dead since the very spring her familiya had traveled on. Shot through the liver at a poker game in Atchison, Kansas. By a fur trader named Jacques Degarmo.

  And what did it matter, anyway? An entirely new William, this one named Quantrill, had already taken Wolcott’s place by then. The newspapers had given away his repugnant nav gajikano to Bloody Bill Anderson, yet the next William in line. Together, this pair – along with the James brothers and the rest of Quantrill’s so-called Raiders – spilled more Jayhawker blood on their way to Kentucky than Bloody Bill Wolcott had dreamed in his bloodiest dream.

  Her Silas was gone. Her Abraham was gone. Reverend Beecher, Rabbi Loew: gone and gone. Even the river itself had abandoned its prior course. Their creature, their precious golem, was lost to the ages.

  But Anabet lived on.

  vi. Dingir

  They gave her boy to the ground on a windy day in late November, after the leaves had fallen, but before the first winter snow. Abraham’s young wife, Ilsa, stood silent behind her veil, a protective arm hooked around Levi, their heartbroken nine-year-old son. Anabet’s grandson.

  Anabet, who had not aged a day in the past forty years, did not approach them. She resisted the urge of her straining heart to pull little Levi into her embrace. Ilsa – who detested Anabet every bit as deeply as the old choxani woman had feared a gaje in her tent – had forbidden her from their home after Abraham took ill.

  But now there was no Abraham. Only a box near a hole in the earth. A new rabbi, just in on the train, who’d never met the body the box contained. A group of people standing in the cold like bla
ck crows in a field, waiting to eat hardboiled eggs and lentil stew.

  And Anabet. Still younger in body than the one they’d all gathered here to mourn.

  Ilsa did not acknowledge her presence. Nor did she release Levi from her side. The boy’s mother would never, Anabet understood that day, knowingly allow him to accept the stone that was his birthright. Ilsa Wasserman rejected and dismissed the exasperating superstitions of her family-by-marriage.

  Paradoxically, she clung to superstitions of her own. It was Ilsa’s belief that Anabet – this aberrant Gypsy interloper among them – represented a dybbuk, or an agent of the shedim, or some other manner of devil in human form. She resented the Roma blood that flowed in her Levi, just as she abhorred the peculiar teachings of duty and station that Silas and Abraham had already begun passing along to the boy – already preparing him to accept the understanding that one day this river would unleash hell. Sooner or later, a crate would disintegrate. An unholy creature would drag itself ashore, hunting for blood. And only a water carrier would be able to stop it.

  But if they’d succeeded in planting the seed in Levi, it would not be sprouting today, or any day soon to come. Nor did such teachings tell the complete story anymore. The Shepherd Stone had warmed for another, after all. So Anabet left their adjacent graves the same way she’d arrived: alone.

  Until a voice at her elbow said, ‘Such a pity.’

  She looked to see the rabbi from the ceremony matching her step. He wasn’t a young man, nor yet was he old; his voice carried no particular dialect Anabet could discern. He wore a fur hat with his four-cornered shawl that made him look silly, if warm.

  ‘Oh?’ she said, unable to temper herself. ‘Were you acquainted with the deceased?’

  ‘Alas,’ the rabbi said. ‘Rabbi Mandelbaum would have preferred to officiate the ceremony as planned, of course. I tried to do my best in his place.’

  Anabet sighed. ‘Thank you. You did just fine.’

  ‘That’s kind of you to say.’

  ‘Where is your temple?’

  The rabbi chuckled and waved a hand. ‘Oh, I’m not particularly religious. Though I am a believer.’

  Anabet stopped. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘You can call me a friend.’

  ‘Where were you ordained, Rabbi Friend?’

  ‘I suppose that depends what you mean by ordained.’

  She felt a hot bite in her chest, then. All at once, the day seemed to become too bright for her eyes. Her fingers began to tremble inside her gloves.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ she demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘So many questions. How did you know our good Abraham, if I may ask one in return?’

  Anabet stood mute. She disregarded the curious looks from the other mourners as they passed. Anger and confusion tied her tongue. After a long moment, she said, ‘He was family.’

  ‘I see. Then it must not be true.’

  ‘What mustn’t?’

  ‘What they say about grief.’

  ‘And what do they say of it?’

  ‘That it ages a person.’ The rabbi who was not a rabbi gave a sly wink. ‘You must tell me your secret, Anabet.’

  Harrow.

  That was what the man called himself. He didn’t reveal where he’d come from, nor the destination to which he’d return. He shared no first name. Only Harrow.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘What does what mean?’

  ‘Your name.’

  He seemed amused by the question. ‘I have no earthly idea. Why do you ask?’

  Anabet went with him to the Hotel Savoy, near the depot, where he’d arranged a room for the duration of his stay. Though she and Silas had delighted in observing the construction of such a marvelous establishment so near their humble home, something about its opulence, on the day of her son’s funeral, offended her.

  But she joined Harrow there just the same. They shared a table in the new west wing, which now featured a grill and dining room. She and this man from nowhere who didn’t even know his own name.

  ‘The Order of …’

  ‘Dingir,’ Harrow said. ‘That name I can tell you about.’

  And tell her he did, uninvited, carrying on around impolite mouthfuls of his dinner. He spoke of a dubious-sounding faction in which he and Silas’s mentor, the old rabbi back East, had once shared a fraternity. He explained his Order’s mission as stewards of the mortal realm, a kind of self-appointed vanguard against otherworldly harm.

  ‘Silas never spoke of you.’

  ‘Don’t take it as a betrayal. The water carrier was unaware. Rabbi Loew kept his own counsel, it must be acknowledged. Even after he was banished, the rebellious old fool.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We wouldn’t be a very good secret order if we went around talking about ourselves, now, would we?’

  ‘I mean, why was Loew banished?’

  ‘We drive the monsters out, my dear. We don’t invite them in. Rabbi Loew abandoned an extraordinarily sacred oath when he elected to meddle with the infinite.’ Harrow sawed himself another piece of bloody meat. ‘Are you sure I can’t order you a plate? They do know how to fix a steer in this town of yours, let’s give credit where it’s due.’

  Even if she could have eaten a bite, Anabet wouldn’t have broken bread with this riddling Sphinx across the table from her. And she’d lost what little patience she’d brought along. ‘Why are you talking to me now?’

  ‘Given the unfortunate circumstance of Abraham’s passing,’ Harrow said as he chewed, ‘and the relative youth of his successor, the Order felt a limited measure of exposure would be … judicious. Hence, an emissary.’ He raised his linen, dabbing the glistening juices from the edges of his beard. ‘That would be me. Given what I observed of Ilsa and the boy during the service, I’d say it’s a good job I’m here. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘The benefit escapes me.’

  He produced a folded handbill and offered it over. The bulletin announced a date that coming December, when Buffalo Bill Cody and his traveling Wild West Show would be returning to town. She and Silas themselves had attended in ’86 – long after Anabet had resigned herself to posing in public as a daughter instead of a wife – to witness Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter, plying her trade on stage.

  ‘As you peruse the new featured attractions,’ Harrow said, ‘does anything catch your eye?’

  AND INTRODUCING HENRIETTA MIDDLETON! this latest flyer proclaimed. The World’s Most Dangerous Grandmother with Kitchen Cutlery in Her Hand – Observe Her Thrilling Feats of Deadly Derring-Do!

  Anabet shoved the handbill back across the table. ‘No.’

  ‘Poor old dear,’ Harrow observed on her behalf. ‘Born in a brothel. A prostitute for a mother, a murderer for a father … is it any wonder?’

  ‘Is what any wonder?’

  ‘That she’d end splitting apples in a glorified sideshow. And at her age! It borders on undignified, don’t you think?’

  ‘Am I to know who you’re talking about?’

  ‘Henrietta Middleton,’ Harrow said, tapping the flyer with a finger. ‘William Wolcott’s only known child. Illegitimate, of course. It’s all part of her stage patter. But we’ve confirmed her extraction.’

  ‘You mean her blood.’

  Harrow seemed pleased with her. ‘Precisely so.’

  Anabet didn’t know how else this man expected her to respond to this news. She didn’t know how he expected her to feel. Or what she was meant to say. Or why he’d come here to tell her these things.

  But of course none of that was true. He expected her to feel grief. She was meant to say nothing. And he’d come here for the stone.

  ‘That’s quite a trick,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps the Order should start its own show.’

  ‘Trick?’

  ‘Naming with any kind of certainty the father of a prostitute’s child.’

  ‘The poor thing. After her first paying customer had his way with her, she left the pr
ofession.’

  ‘That sounds like a gift, then.’

  ‘As does everlasting life.’ Harrow refolded the flyer and returned it to his pocket. ‘But enough about the past. Shall we examine the dessert cart while we discuss our future?’

  CREATURE

  NINETEEN

  When she’d finished speaking, Anabeth sat quietly, looking from Ben to Charley to Wasserman and back.

  ‘It’s a lot to take in. I know.’

  Ben didn’t know what to think, let alone say. She’d been right, obviously: on any normal day, he’d have discounted every word of her outlandish story. But after squaring off against an impervious animated mudball with glowing green eyes and superterrestrial strength, disbelief was beginning to seem like a waste of time.

  ‘So you work for the Order.’

  ‘I like to think of it as more of a partnership, but yes,’ she said. ‘The Order has resources. They’ve helped me in ways I wouldn’t have been able to help myself, over the years. They’ve helped my family in ways I could not. Secretly, yes. But they’ve lived up to the recruitment posters, so to speak.’ A shrug. ‘When called upon, I’ve helped them in return. Being death-proof turns out to be something of an asset in this line of work.’

  Charley said, ‘You really can’t die?’

  ‘Not until the creature does.’ Her smile seemed to come from somewhere distant. ‘And people say life is short.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘How do I know what?’

  ‘That you’ll … you know. After.’

  ‘You mean die? Preferably at home, in bed, during a comfortable sleep? After finally experiencing for myself what old age is actually supposed to feel like?’

  Charley blushed, dropped his eyes.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d be able to explain.’ Abe tapped her heart. Then her stomach. ‘It’s a down-here kind of knowing, if you know what I mean.’ She tapped her noggin. ‘Not so much up here.’