Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters

by Barker, Clive; Golden, Christopher; Lansdale, Joe R. ; McCammon, Robert; Mieville, China; Priest, Cherie; Sarrantonio, Al; Schow, David; Langan, John; Tremblay, Paul

  You had to lean out a bit, but you could also see the Pacific from the balcony rail of our new upstairs bedroom, framed between two gargantuan California pines at least eighty years old. Suzanne fell for the house as soon as we toured it under the wing of the realtor. Our three-year-old, Jilly, squealed “Cave!” and jumped up and down in place, in hyperactive circles of little kid astonishment. Hard to believe, that this cavernous place was ours, that we weren’t visiting a higher social class and would soon have to go home. This was home, and we were in love . . . goofy as that may sound.

  I did not fall in love with the idea that all the decent movies, restaurants, and other urban diversions were still up in San Francisco. Gatewood boasted a single grease-griddle coffee shop that opened two hours before my morning alarm razzed and went dark promptly at five—up here, dinner was obviously a meal eaten at home, with family. Nearby was a mom-and-pop grocery that locked up at 9:00 P.M. Several miles away, in Dos Piedras, was an all-nighter where you could get chips and beer and bread and milk.

  It sure wasn’t the city. As a town, it wasn’t vast enough to merit a stoplight. Point Pitt was no more than a rustic clot of well-built older homes tucked into a mountainside, with an ocean view. Voilà—bedroom community. Any encapsulation made it sound like a travel-folder wet dream, or an ideal environment in which to raise a child. I suspect my shrink knew this. He fomented this conspiracy, with my doctor, to get me away from my beloved city for the sake of my not-so beloved ulcers.

  I became a commuter. The drive was usually soothing, contemplative. I calmed my gut by chugging a lot of milk from the all-night market. We popped for cable TV—sixty channels. We adjusted fast.

  It was required that I buy a barn-shaped rural mailbox. Suzanne jazzed it up with our name in stick-on weatherproof lettering: TASKE. The first Sunday after we moved in, I bolted it to the gang post by the feeder road, next to the boxes of our nearest neighbors. The hillside lots were widely separated by distance and altitude, fences and weald. There was much privacy to be had here. The good life, I guessed.

  When a long shadow fell across the gang post from behind, I looked up at Creighton Dunwoody for the first time. His box read MR. & MRS. C. DUNWOODY. He had the sun behind him; I was on my knees, wrestling with a screwdriver. It just wouldn’t have played for me to say, You have me at a disadvantage, sir, so I gave him something else sparkling, like, “Uh . . . hello?”

  He squinted at my shiny white mailbox, next to his rusty steel one. It had a large, ancient dent in the top. “You’re Taske?” He pronounced it like passkey; it was a mistake I’d endured since the first grade.

  I gently corrected him. “Carl Taske, right.” I stood and shifted, foot-to-foot, the essence of nervous schmuckdom, and finally stuck out my hand. Carl Taske, alien being, here.

  I almost thought he was going to ignore it when he leaned forward and clasped it emotionlessly. “Dunwoody. You’re in Meyer Olson’s old house. Good house.” He was taller than me, a gaunt farmer type. His skin was stretched over his bones in that brownly weathered way that makes thirty look like fifty, and fifty like a hundred and ten. Like a good neighbor coasting through meaningless chat, I was about to inquire as to the fate of Meyer Olson when Dunwoody cut in, point-blank, “You got any kids?”

  “My daughter Jill’s the only one so far.” And Jilly had been well-planned. I couldn’t help thinking of farm families with fourteen kids, like litters.

  He chewed on that a bit. His attention seemed to stray. This was country speed, not city rush, but I felt like jumping in and filling the dead space. It wouldn’t do to appear pushy. I might have to do this a lot with the hayseed set from now on.

  “Any pets?” he said.

  “Not today.” A partial lie. Suzanne had found an orphaned Alsatian at the animal shelter and was making the drive to collect it the next day.

  “Any guns in your house?”

  “Don’t believe in guns.” I shook my head and kept my eyes on his. The languid, directional focus of his questions made my guard pop up automatically. This was starting to sound like more than the standard greenhorn feel-up.

  “That’s good. That you don’t.” We traded idiotic, uncomfortable smiles.

  In my new master bedroom there were his and hers closets. A zippered case in the back of mine held a twelve-gauge Remington pumpgun loaded with five three-inch Nitro Mag shells. My father had taught me that this was the only way to avoid killing yourself accidentally with an “unloaded” gun, and Suzanne was giving me hell about it now that Jilly was walking around by herself. It was none of Dunwoody’s business, anyway.

  “How old’s your girl?”

  “Three, this past May.”

  “She’s not a baby anymore, then.”

  “Well, technically, no.” I smiled again and it hurt my face. The sun was waning and the sky had gone mauve. Everything seemed to glow in the brief starkness of twilight gray.

  Dunwoody nodded as though I’d given the correct answers on a geography test. “That’s good. That you have your little girl.” He was about to add something else when his gaze tilted past my shoulder.

  I turned around and saw nothing. Then I caught a wink of reflected gold light. Looking more intently, I could see what looked to be a pretty large cat, cradled in the crotch of a towering eucalyptus tree uphill in the distance. Its eyes tossed back the sunset as it watched us.

  Dunwoody was off, walking quickly up the slope without further comment. Maybe he had to feed the cat. “I guess I’ll see . . . you later,” I said to his back. I doubt if he heard me. His house stood in shadow off a sharp switchback in the road. A wandering, deeply-etched dirt path wound up to the front porch.

  Not exactly rudeness. Not the city brand, at least.

  The moon emerged to hang full and orange on the horizon, like an ebbing sun. High in its arc it shrank to a hard silver coin, its white brilliance filtering down through the treetops and shimmering on the sea-ripple. Suzanne hopped from bed and strode naked to the balcony, moving out through the French doors. Moonbeams made foliage patterns on her skin; the cool nighttime breeze buffeted her hair, in a gentle contest.

  Her thin summer nightgown was tangled up in my feet, beneath the sheets. We’d dispensed with it about midnight. The one advantage to becoming a homeowner I’d never anticipated was the nude perfection of Suzanne on the balcony. She was a blue silhouette, weight on one foot and shoulders tilted in an unconsciously classical pose. After bearing Jilly and dropping the surplus weight of pregnancy, her ass and pelvis had resolved into a lascivious fullness that I could not keep my hands away from for long.

  We fancied ourselves progressive parents, and Jilly had been installed in our living room from the first. We kept our single bedroom to ourselves. On hair triggers for the vaguest noise of infant distress, Mommy and Daddy were then besieged with the usual wee-hour fire drills and some spectacular demonstrations of eliminatory functions. Marital spats over the baby came and went like paper cuts; that was normal, too. Pain that might spoil a whole day, but was not permanent. Jilly’s crib was swapped for a loveseat that opened into a single bed. And now she did not require constant surveillance, and was happily ensconced in her first private, real-life room.

  Recently, Suzanne had shed all self-consciousness about sex, becoming adventurous again. There was no birth control to fret over. That was a hitch we still didn’t discuss too often, because of the quiet pain involved—the permanent kind.

  “Carl, come here and look.” She spoke in a rapid hush, having spied something odd. “Hurry up!”

  I padded out to embrace her from behind, nuzzling into the bouquet of her hair, then looking past her shoulder.

  A big man was meandering slowly up the road. The nearest streetlamp was more than a block away, and we saw him as he passed through its pool of light, down by the junction with the coast highway. He was large and fleshy and fat and as naked as we were.

  I pulled Suzanne back two paces, into the darkness of the bedroom. The balcony was amply
private. Neither of us wanted to be caught peeking.

  He seemed to grow as he got closer, until he was enormous. He was bald, with sloping mountain shoulders and vast pizza-dough pilings of flesh pulled into pendant bags by gravity. His knotted boxer’s brow hid his eyes in shadow, as his pale belly hung to obscure his sex, except for a faint smudge of pubic hair. The load had bowed his knees inward, and his lumpen thighs jiggled as he ponderously hauled up one leg to drop in front of the other. We heard his bare feet slapping the pavement. His tits swam to and fro.

  “There’s something wrong with him,” I whispered. Before Suzanne could give me a shot in the ribs for being a smartass, I added, “No—something else. Look at him. Closely.”

  We hurried across to the bedroom’s south window so we could follow his progress past the mailboxes in front of the house. He was staring up into the sky us he walked, and his chin was wet. He was drooling. His arms hung dead dumb at his sides as he gazed upward, turning his head slowly one way, then another, as though trying to record distant stars through faulty receiving equipment.

  “He’s like a great big baby.” Suzanne was aghast.

  “That’s what I was thinking.” I recalled Jilly, when she was only a month out of the womb. The slack, stunned expression of the man below reminded me of the way a baby stares at a crib trinket—one that glitters, or revolves, or otherwise captures the eye of a being who is seeing this world for the first time.

  “Maybe he’s retarded.”

  A shudder wormed its way up my backbone but I successfully hid it. “Maybe he’s a local boy they let run loose at night, y’know, like putting out the cat.”

  “Yeeugh, don’t say that.” She backed against me and my hands enfolded her, crossing to cup her breasts. Her body was alive with goosebumps; her nipples condensed to solid little nubs. She relaxed her head into the hollow of my shoulder and locked her arms behind me. Thus entangled, we watched the naked pilgrim drift up the street and beyond the light. My hands did their bit and she purred, closing her eyes. Her gorgeous rump settled in. “Hm. I seem to be riding the rail again,” she said, and chuckled.

  She loved having her breasts kneaded, and we didn’t lapse into the dialogue I’d expected. The one about how her bosom could be a little bit larger, didn’t I think so? (What I thought was that every woman I’d ever known had memorized this routine, like a mantra. Suzanne played it back every six weeks or so.) Nor did she lapse into the post-sex melancholy she sometimes suffered when she thought of the other thing, the painful one.

  Eighteen months after Jilly was born, Suzanne’s doctor discovered ovarian cysts. Three, medium-sized, successfully removed. The consensus was that Jilly would be our only child, and Suzanne believed only children were maladjusted. While there was regret that our power of choice had been excised, Suzanne still held out hope for a happy accident someday. I was more pragmatic, or maybe more selfish. I wasn’t sure I wanted more than one child, and in a sense this metabolic happenstance had neatly relieved me of the responsibility of the vasectomy I’d been contemplating. I was hung up on getting my virility surgically removed in an operation that was, to me, a one-way gamble with no guarantees. Frightening. I prefer guarantees—hard-line, black-and-white, duly notarized. A hot tip from a realtor on a sheer steal of a house had more to do with reality than the caprices of a body that turns traitor and hampers your emotional life.

  And when Suzanne’s tumors were a bad memory, a plague of superstitions followed. For several months she was convinced that I considered her leprous, sexually unclean. From her late mother she had assimilated the irrational fear that says once doctors slice into your body with a scalpel, it’s only a matter of borrowed time before the Big D comes pounding at the drawbridge.

  The whole topic was a tightly twined nest of vipers neither of us cared to trespass upon anymore. God, how she could bounce back.

  Passion cranked up its heat, and she shimmied around so we were face-to-face. The way we fit together in embrace was comfortingly safe. Her hand filled and fondled, and I got a loving squeeze below. “This gets enough of a workout,” she slyly opined. Then she patted my waistline. “But we need to exert this. When we get the dog, you can go out running with it, like me.”

  It was depressingly true. Bucking a desk chair had caused a thickening I did not appreciate. “Too much competition, I muttered. I was afraid to challenge the ulcerations eating my stomach wall too soon. She was in much better physical shape than me. Those excuses served, for now. Her legs were short, well-proportioned, and athletic. Her calves were solid and sleek. Another turn-on.

  “Mmm.” Her hands slid up, around, and all over. “In that case, come back to bed. I’ve got a new taste sensation I know you’re just dying to try.”

  The following morning, I met the huge bald man.

  He was wearing a circus-tent-sized denim coverall, gum-soled work boots, and an old cotton shirt, blazing white and yellowed at the armpits. He was busily rummaging in Dunwoody’s mailbox.

  I played it straight, clearing my throat too loudly and standing by.

  He started, looking up and yanking his hand out of the box. His head narrowed at the hat-brim line and bulged up and out in the back, as though his skull had been bound in infancy, ritually deformed. His tiny black eyes settled on me and a wide grin split his face. Too wide.

  “G’morn,” he said with a voice like a foghorn. My skin contracted. I got the feeling he was sniffing me from afar. His lips continued meaningless movements while he stared.

  “Ormly!”

  Creighton Dunwoody was hustling down the path from his house. The hillside was steep enough to put his cellar floor above the level of our roof. He wore an undershirt and had a towel draped around his neck; he had obviously interrupted his morning shave to come out and yell. Drooping suspenders danced around his legs as he mountaineered down the path.

  Ormly cringed at the sound of his name, but did not move. Birds twittered away the morning, and he grinned hugely at their music.

  For one frozen moment we faced off, a triangle with Ormly at the mailboxes. I thought of the three-way showdown at the climax of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  Dunwoody stopped to scope us out, made his decision with a grunt, and resumed his brisk oldster’s stride toward me. He realized the burden of explanation was his, and he motioned me to approach the mailboxes. His mouth was a tight moue of anger or embarrassment. Maybe disgust. But he bulled it through.

  “Mister Taske. This here’s Ormly. My boy.” He nodded from him to me and back again. “Ormly. Mister Taske is from the city. You should shake his hand.”

  Dunwoody’s presence did not make it any easier to move into Ormly’s range. Without the workboots he would still be a foot taller than I was. I watched as his brain obediently motivated his hand toward me. It was like burying my own hand in a catcher’s mitt. He was still grinning.

  The social amenities executed, Dunwoody said, “You get on back up the house now. Mail ain’t till later.”

  Ormly minded. I’ve seen more raw intelligence in the eyes of goldfish. As he clumped home, I saw a puckered fist of scar tissue nested behind his left ear. It was a baseball-sized hemisphere, deeply fissured and bone white. A big bite of brains was missing there. Maybe his pituitary gland had been damaged as part of the deal.

  Dundy batted shut the lid to his mailbox; it made a hollow chunk sound. “S’okay,” he said. “Ormly’s not right in the head.”

  I was suddenly embarrassed for the older man.

  “Sometimes he gets out. He’s peaceful, though. He has peace. Ain’t nothing to be afraid of.”

  I took a chance and mentioned what I’d seen last night. His eyes darted up to lock onto mine for the first time.

  “And what were you doin’ up that time of night anyhow, Mister Taske?” That almost colonial mistrust of newcomers was back.

  “I woke up. Thought I heard something crashing around in the woods.” The lie slipped smoothly out. So far, I’d aimed more lies at Dunwoody t
han truth. It was stupid for me to stand there in my C&R three-piece, calfhide attaché case in hand, judging his standards of honesty.

  “This ain’t the city. Animals come down from the hills to forage. Make sure your garbage can lids are locked down or you’ll have a mess to clean up.”

  I caught a comic picture of opening the kitchen door late at night and saying howdy-do to a grizzly bear. Not funny. Nearly forty yards up the hill, I watched Ormly duck the front door lintel and vanish inside. Dunwoody’s house cried out for new paint. It was as decrepit as his mailbox.

  Dunwoody marked my expression. “Ormly’s all I got left. My little girl, Sarah, died a long time ago. The crib death. Primmy—that’s my wife; her name was Primrose—is dead, too. She just didn’t take to these parts . . . ” His voice trailed off.

  I felt like the shallow, yuppie city slicker I was. I wanted to say something healing, something that would diminish the gap between me and this old rustic. He was tough as a scrub bristle. His T-shirt was frayed but clean. There was shaving lather drying on his face, and he had lost a wife, a daughter, and from what I’d seen, ninety percent of a son. I wanted to say something. But then I saw his bare arms, and the blood drained from my face in a flood.

  He didn’t notice, or didn’t care.

  I checked my watch, in an artificial, diversionary move Dunwoody saw right through. It was a Cartier tank watch. I felt myself sinking deeper.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Uh-no.” I shot my cuff to hide the watch, which had turned ostentatious and loud.

  “Why do you folks want to live here?” There it was: bald hostility, countrified, but still as potent as snake venom. I tried to puzzle out some politic response to this when he continued. “I mean, why live here when it makes you so late for everything?” His eyes went to my shirtsleeve, which concealed my overpriced watch.

  He shrugged and turned toward his house with no leave takings, as before. All I could register in my brain were his arms. From the wrists to where they met his undershirt, Dunwoody’s arms were seeded with more tiny puncture marks than you would have found on two hundred junkies up in the Mission district. Thousands and thousands of scarred holes.