The Monster Museum

by J L Bryan

  I am not home now, but in a cave lit by torches, surrounded by men in purple robes and horrific masks depicting exaggerated expressions of anger, lust, and hate, horned like animals. These are the faces of the dark gods, their worship forbidden by the priests of the cities but carried on at night, in secret, allegedly by some of the most powerful aristocrats and most celebrated sea captains.

  They have kidnapped me from the docks and brought me to this place.

  I struggle and kick, dressed in a loincloth, tied atop a long, flat boulder inside this cliffside cave. Hideous statues of the forbidden gods glare down at me from nooks and alcoves around the walls of the cave.

  A fire burns in a stone brazier nearby. One of the sorcerers—for that's what I understood them to be—uses tongs to lift a golden ring, studded with emeralds, from the fire. The ring isn't molten, but has been heated to a glow in the flames.

  The sorcerers pin my left arm down and slide the ring onto my center finger.

  I howl as the hot ring of metal scorches the base of my finger, burning through the flesh and muscle and tendon to the bone beneath.

  They tighten my bonds as I kick and scream. They seem to be chanting, calling upon the dark gods from below the earth.

  When I am tied into place so tight I cannot move, they bring out the first of the straw baskets.

  A sorcerer in a crocodile mask and metal-plated leather gloves opens the basket. The group falls silent and still as the crocodile-sorcerer draws out the creature coiled within.

  The snake in his gloved hands is thin, with black and bright emerald-green markings, its scales meant to hide among leafy trees and bark.

  The masked sorcerer holds out the little snake to me, brushing its face along my arm and my bare torso. I am a boy, not even a teenager, my skin deep brown and my body sinewy from a life of hard work aboard my father's ship.

  I pray for my father to find me now, my father and his men with their nets and knives. I pray to Melqart, god of the sea, but I have no sacrifice to offer him.

  It looks like I would be the sacrifice, instead, but not to my own beloved gods.

  The jewel-green snake shows no interest in me. It tries to wriggle free of its captor. This struggle eventually infuriates the snake, and it begins lashing at the croc-sorcerer's arms. The arms of his robe are stitched to his armored leather gloves to protect his skin against the snake's fangs and venom.

  Finally, he manages to whip the agitated snake my way, and its teeth strike my arm.

  I feel the fangs puncture me, but there is no pain after that, at least not immediately.

  The sorcerer returns the snake to its basket and closes the lid.

  I lie there sweating, knowing I've been poisoned but unable to do anything about it. I worry what they will do to me next.

  Then they bring out another basket.

  This one holds a larger, rock-colored viper with silver eyes and upward-jutting scales atop its head that make me think of a mythical dragon. With some cajoling, it is encouraged to bite me, too, sinking its long fangs deep into my thigh.

  The next snake is dark bronze and black, with a flaring hood, and I know it to be an Egyptian cobra.

  It bites me in the chest, as if to inject venom right into my heart.

  While the snake venom sinks into me, the sorcerers continue their chanting and whispering, swinging foul incense, drizzling fouler oils whose origins I do not want to guess, but they reek like the entrails of gutted fish that had lain long in the sun, crawling with flies.

  The firelit masked faces grow more distorted around me. Something booms and echoes, slower and slower, perhaps a ceremonial drum, perhaps my own dying heart.

  The venom burns and burns...

  ...then the pain is gone, and I float up, looking down on my swollen, poisoned body on the boulder. I am free, at least, of the suffering—

  Then one of the sorcerers, standing at the head of the altar clad in a strange horned-vulture mask, grabs the hand of my body below and rips the gold and emerald ring free of my finger. Much burnt flesh comes with it, but I feel nothing, suspended above my body like a cloud.

  Then the horned-vulture man slides the bloody, gore-spattered ring onto his own hand and raises it high.

  Pain returns, the pain of burning metal and serpent fangs and venom coursing through my blood.

  Then I stand before him, somehow. My body lies dead beside me on the boulder, but I have a new form, large and reptilian, my soul twisted by evil magic.

  When the horned-vulture man moves his hand, I feel myself drawn by the ring, controlled by it like a dog on a chain.

  The sorcerers have made me a monster, and a slave.

  Fragments of memories flash by, as the sorcerer sends me after his enemies, chasing them through the night—sometimes slaying peasants on farms, sometimes chasing perfumed aristocrats through the narrow, twisted alleyways of stone cities, or stalking street criminals along the docks on nights when the moon is waning and the darkness lies thick.

  I have one purpose; to kill for my master.

  Every time he summons me from the ring, every time I rise as the monster, I feel the burning of venom through my veins, as though my blood is nothing but venom.

  Then a searing white light fills everything, and a choir of voices—

  —and I awoke on the floor of the Tomb of History, gasping, the room flooded with blistering white light. Michael shouted as he roasted the apparition of Snake Man with the ghost cannon, while a powerful rendition of The Holy City by the London Philharmonic, blasted from three speakers.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Ryan helped me to my feet while a choir of voices thundered hosannahs around me.

  The Snake Man—or the boy Amil, I understood a bit better now—had vanished, driven out by our usual tactics for dangerous ghosts. Those tended to have diminishing returns, though; neither the light nor the music would be quite so shocking and disorienting to the ghost next time.

  Michael looked over to see me leaning on Ryan and scowled, just slightly.

  “Where's Polly?” Ryan shouted.

  I pointed through the open door to the tunnel, and he started toward it.

  “Wait, Ryan! You can't trust the electrical system right now. Take this.” I handed Ryan a tactical flashlight.

  We switched off the million-lumen cannon before it could start a fire in the museum, but left the music going. Snake Man didn't immediately reappear, so we got moving.

  Soon, Michael and I led the way down the winding corridor, with Ryan just behind us. Our footsteps echoed in the caves. In a few moments, the entrance was out of sight.

  We reached the wolfmannequin, then Dracula and the other identical plastic monsters. I resisted a weird urge to tell the Hook Killer that I'd found his lost hand upstairs, wrapped in snakeskin and bandaging. I doubted Ryan and Michael, with their closest family members missing, would care for much joking on my part. But that's how I deal with the constant terror, personally.

  The caves branched, and there was no clear direction for us to go.

  We stood silent for a moment, listening.

  “What now?” Ryan looked terrified. “I don't hear anything.”

  “We stick together,” I said. “We check out every cave.”

  The Leviathan cave was closest, so we went there, walking into the dragon-like mouth and onward to the Bottomless Abyss. I pointed my flashlight into the deep chasm beyond the old safety rail, and as before, I couldn't see the bottom.

  “Anton!” I shouted, sending my voice echoing throughout the underground cave network, or so I hoped. “Anton Clay! I'm down here. Come out and show yourself!”

  “Polly!” Ryan shouted.

  “Melissa!” Michael called.

  We waited and watched a moment, then kept moving. None of those names had brought a response from the caverns around us.

  The World of Weeping Water Walls yielded nothing. I took a moment to peer through the thermals, the soft blue of water flowing almost uniformly down t
he rocks.

  We kept looking, through the rainbow room and past the sad rock face of Old Man Craggy, continuing to call their names.

  Finally, a girl's voice called back: “Daddy!”

  “Polly!” Ryan said.

  All three of us followed her voice, as father and daughter called back and forth. I tensed, hoping this wasn't some ghostly trick.

  We followed the voice ahead toward one of the closed-off tunnels.

  “Do you smell smoke?” I asked as we approached.

  Michael nodded.

  Ryan bolted ahead, and Michael and I could barely keep up.

  The tunnel did grow smoky ahead, because the wooden barricade that had blocked it off had been partially burned and then ripped down. The mismatched boards and bits of plywood were smoldering like a weak campfire, giving off some reddish light and lots of smoke.

  The girl stood just beyond it, having made her way around the pile of burning debris and part of the way along the tunnel behind it. The tunnel narrowed into a corridor barely wide enough for a scrawny adult to pass.

  The image of a large bat was projected on the wall. The girl was carrying a purple Batgirl flashlight, which apparently made the Bat Signal, and she wore a dark purple and black nightdress decorated with bats.

  Her brother Ronan stood beside her in his rabbit-dotted pajamas, which were just about too small for him.

  “Penny?” Ryan asked, slowing down. “I told you to stay upstairs with your brother.”

  “But Polly needs help,” Penny said.

  “And I'm going to help her.”

  “You weren't even looking in the right place.” Penny pointed toward the narrow tunnel she'd been walking down. “She's this way.”

  “How do you know?” Ryan asked.

  “I know. She's back there with the evil one.” Penny swung her pointing figure to Michael. “Your sister.”

  “What?” Ryan looked from Penny to us. “That freckled girl? What does she have to do with this?”

  “She's possessed,” I said. “I believe the spirit possessing her wanted the Phoenician ring. Because the ring gives its wearer control over the Snake Man ghost.”

  “The...Cursed Ring of Phoenicia?” Ryan asked, sounding incredulous. “It's real?”

  “More real than we ever thought,” I said. “But the Snake Man—Amil—he wanted Polly to have the ring. That's why he keeps wanting her to come down here. He wants her to be the one who owns him.”

  “Why?” Ryan asked, looking into the darkness ahead.

  “Because he likes her best,” Penny said, with a frown. “I don't get it, either.”

  “What ghost is possessing your sister?” Ryan asked Michael.

  “We don't have time for this,” I said.

  “Okay,” Ryan said. “Penny, take your brother back upstairs—”

  “No,” Penny said. “You can't find her without me.”

  “Penny...” Ryan began, then hesitated. He looked at me. “Look, sometimes they seem to have a...connection, but I don't know—”

  “That's right,” Penny said. “You don't know where she is. She's that way, and she's moving away. Fast!” Penny turned and ran up the hall.

  “Penny, wait!” I said. “Wait for us.”

  We all went together. I sort of understood what Penny meant; my twin cousins occasionally shared an uncanny connection, too.

  When the tunnel widened, we rearranged, so I was in the front with Michael, Ryan was in back, and the two kids walked in the middle. I unrolled a thick ball of string to mark our path.

  Penny directed us through one tight, twisting cave after another; she was an interesting mix of being frightened and shivering yet confident in her ability to track down her identical twin.

  Ronan was tight-lipped and pale, and clutched his father's hand like he was drowning.

  As we went on, seemingly deeper and into colder caves, I worried whether we'd been wrong to trust so much in Penelope's intuition.

  Then she spoke up:

  “Close your eyes, Ronan,” she whispered behind me. “It gets scary ahead.”

  I tensed as we rounded the next turn.

  She was right—something lay across the path.

  The body was skeletal, the skin long decayed away. A little mud had accumulated against one side of it, beginning a burial process that might have taken thousands of years to complete, drip by drip from the moisture leaking down from above.

  The widened chamber in which the corpse lay was also much colder than the passage we'd just left, and I felt my skin crawling.

  “Everyone stay still. And quiet.” I drew up my thermal goggles and stepped toward the body. It lay across our path, so there was no way ahead besides moving it or stepping over it.

  A dense haze of cold blue hung in the frigid air above the skeleton, maybe an entity, or more than one, because it filled the chamber from wall to wall like icy fog.

  I considered the only name I had for a person connected to this case who'd gone missing.

  “Georgina,” I said. “Georgina Charrington. Is that you?”

  The floating pool of cold above the body churned and seemed to grow agitated.

  A clearer shape formed near the front of it, the head abnormally tall, like Leydan's striped stove pipe hat.

  “What's that?” Penny whispered. “Daddy, what is that?”

  I lowered my thermals. I could see the weak apparition hovering over the body, paler and thin. His head looked strangely elongated, until I realized the upper half was in the shape of a stove pipe hat.

  “I think it's your uncle, Leydan,” I said to Ryan.

  “Which one?” Ryan whispered, his eyes on the faint apparition. “The ghost or the skeleton?”

  “There's a ghost?” Ronan cried out, his face pressed against his father's side. “And a skeleton?”

  “The ghost,” I said. “The body is Georgina Charrington. Who he killed.”

  Leydan's form moved closer to me, still mostly indistinct. His face became much clearer, though, showing an extreme expression of anger at my accusation.

  “Oh, I know,” I said. “She tried to kill you first, right? She sent her handyman Davey to do it. I met him earlier tonight—he stabbed me.” I pointed to my shoulder. “So Davey tried to kill you. You already knew about the ring, so you grabbed it, summoned Amil, and had him fight back for you. Amil cut Davey up. Then Davey staggered down the trail and collapsed somewhere along the way. Is that right?”

  Leydan's face looked less angry now, though I wouldn't say happy or friendly. A little closer to blank and corpse-like. Which was reasonable enough, I supposed.

  “But after you got away with that, you decided to get some nice, cold revenge on Georgina. Only this time Amil dragged her body down here.” I pointed at the skeleton on the floor. “Is that about right? Did I cover everything?”

  “No.” The new voice was bolder, harsher, but definitely female.

  Two more apparitions emerged ahead of us, as if condensing from the same cloud of cold as Leydan, blocking the tunnel more fully. They were like icy mirages, colorless, but definitely right in our way. These were the two I'd seen in the museum previously, until they'd been chased away by Amil in his Snake Man form. One of them was definitely Bawden. I'd gotten to know that particular sleazy dead guy in much more up close and personal way than I'd wanted.

  “We need to get moving,” Ryan said, moving closer to the apparitions. I gestured for him to stay back, though, and he stopped, his small son clinging to him with eyes still squeezed closed.

  “Polly's getting so far away,” Penny said, touching her stomach and wincing. “I almost can't feel her anymore.”

  “Is she hurt?” Ryan asked.

  “I don't know!” Penny cried.

  “Stay back, Bawden,” I said, raising a flashlight at him.

  He was already moving, though, at lightning speed, blinking from one place to the next, his knife out and ready to slash.

  Michael darted in front of me, startling me a littl
e, blocking me from Bawden's attack.

  “No!” I shouted, but it was all in motion. I wouldn't be able to protect Michael, to stop the ghostly blade from stabbing through him.

  The heavy, masculine grunt of pain echoed through the cave, followed by a howl of pain.

  It wasn't Michael, though.

  The ghost of Bawden had pounced on the ghost of Leydan, and now hacked into him.

  Leydan howled, his apparition growing momentarily clearer as Bawden's knife rammed into his chest. It made me think of the invisible flash of electromagnetic radiation that organisms supposedly emit at the moment of death.

  Then Leydan toppled and sprawled across the floor, clutching his chest. He fell still and faded from view.

  “I get it,” I said, looking at Georgina's triumphant smirk. Bawden stood as unmoving as a statue, as ghosts sometimes will when they have no immediate purpose, and he still held the knife where he'd stabbed Leydan.

  “We crawled back,” Georgina said, her voice a deep hiss. “It took so long...but we came back for him.”

  “Leydan didn't really die of a heart attack in the museum,” I said. “That was the two of you, getting revenge for your deaths. You came back from the grave to kill him. That's why Bawden's ghost has suddenly gotten active lately, wandering down the trail he took the night he died. The night the Snake Man killed him.”

  “Dad, I want to go back,” Ronan whimpered.

  Ryan whispered, calming him.

  “So the three of you are stuck together in a kind of circle of murder,” I said. “I'd love to stick around and help work out the drama, but we have to get by you and find this man's daughter.” I eyed the knife in Bawden's hand. “So...let us by. Please.”

  “We're no longer trapped!” Georgina crowed, her face wrinkled, her eyes and pupils white. “He's lost control of the Snake Man...and now we can kill him again...” She reached out and summoned Leydan's apparition, as if from the ether. The pale image of the old man barely had time to gasp before Bawden stabbed him in the heart again. “...and again, and again...” Georgina said, as Bawden's ghost stabbed the old man's ghost repeatedly.

  “Stop him!” Ryan shouted, apparently upset by the sight of his dead relative's multiple stabbings. “He's already dead, just leave him.”