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

  My trusty BMW waited, a sanctuary until the scent of leather upholstery brought on new heartstabs of class guilt. It was simple to insulate oneself with the trappings of upward mobility, with things. My grand exit was marred by sloppy shifting. The closer I drew to the city the better I felt, and my deathgrip on the wheel’s racing sleeve gradually relaxed.

  Maybe our other neighbors would make themselves apparent in time. Oh bliss oh joy.

  Brix became the dog’s name by consensus. I stayed as far away from that decision as politely possible. Dad the diplomat.

  Jilly had thrilled to its reddish-brown coat, which put her in mind of “bricks,” you see. Suzanne went at tedious length about how Alsatians reacted best to monosyllabic names containing a lot of hard consonants. In a word, that was Brix—and he was already huge enough for Jilly to ride bareback. He could gallop rings around Suzanne while she jogged. He never got winded or tired. He looked great next to the fireplace. A Christmas card snapshot of our idyllic family unit would have made you barf from the cuteness: shapely, amber-haired Mom; angelic blond Jillian Heather; Brix the Faithful Canine . . . and sourpuss Dad with his corporate razor cut and incipient ulcers. We were totally nuclear.

  I didn’t bother with Dunwoody or Ormly again until the night Brix got killed.

  It was predestined that the dog’s sleeping mat would go at the foot of Jilly’s hide-a-bed. While Suzanne and I struggled patiently to indoctrinate the animal to his new name and surroundings, he’d snap to and seek Jilly the instant she called him. They were inseparable, and that was fine. The dog got a piece of Jilly’s life; Suzanne and I were fair—traded a small chunk of the personal time we’d sacrificed in order to be called Mommy and Daddy. This payoff would accrue interest, year by year, until the day our daughter walked out the door to play grownup for the rest of her life. It was a bittersweet revelation: starting right now, more and more of her would be lost to us. On the other hand, the way she flung her arms around Brix’s ruff and hugged him tight made me want to cry, too.

  Since we’d assumed residence in Point Pitt, our lives really had begun to arrange more agreeably. Our city tensions bled off. We were settling, healing. Sometimes I must be forced to drink the water I lead myself to.

  Brix quickly cultivated one peculiar regimen. At Jilly’s bedtime he’d plunk his muzzle down on the mat and play prone sentry until her breathing became deep and metered. Then he’d lope quietly out to hang with the other humans. When our lights went down, he’d pull an about-face and trot back to his post in Jilly’s room. Once or twice I heard him pacing out the size of the house in the middle of the night, and when the forest made its grizzly-bear commotions, Brix would return one or two barks of warning. He never did this while in Jilly’s room, which was considerate of him. Barks sufficed. In his canine way, he kept back the dangers of the night.

  So when he went thundering down the stairs barking loudly enough to buzz the woodwork, I woke up knowing something was not normal. Suzanne moaned and rolled over, sinking her face into the pillows. I extricated myself from the sleepy grasp of her free arm in order to punch in as Daddy the night watchman. The digital clock merrily announced 3:44 A.M. And counting.

  Point Pitt was not a place where residents bolted their doors at night, although that was one habit I was in no danger of losing, ever. Because the worst of summer still lingered, we had taken to leaving a few windows open. It wasn’t completely foolish to assume some thief might be cruising for a likely smash-and-grab spot. By the time the sheriffs (the district’s only real law enforcement) could be summoned, even an inept burglar would have ample time to rip off all the goodies in the house and come back for seconds. While this sort of social shortcoming was traditionally reserved for the big bad city, there was no telling who might start a trend, or when.

  Besides, if there were no bad guys, I might be treated to the surreal sight of a live bear consuming my rubbish.

  Downstairs a window noisily ceased existence. Breaking glass is one of the ugliest sounds there is. I picked up speed highballing down the stairs.

  I thought of the claw hammer Suzanne had been using while hanging plants in her little conservatory and hung the corner wildly, skidding to a stop and embedding a flat wedge of glass into the ball of my right foot. I howled, keeled over, and obliterated a dieffenbachia mounted in a wire tripod. The entire middle section of leaded-glass panes was blown out into the night. Pots swung crookedly in their macramé slings where Brix had leapt through.

  Somewhere in the backyard he was having it rabidly out with the interloper, scrabbling and snapping.

  Grimacing, I stumped into the kitchen and hit the backyard light switches. Nothing. The floodlamps were still lined up on the counter in their store cartons, with a Post-it note stuck to the center one, reminding me of another undone chore. Outside the fight churned and boiled and I couldn’t see a damned thing.

  My next thought was of the shotgun. I limped back to the stairs, leaving single footprints in blood on the hardwood floor. Brix had stopped barking.

  “Carl?”

  “I’m okay,” I called toward the landing. To my left was the shattered conservatory window, and the toothless black gullet of the night beyond it. “Brix! Hey, Brix! C’mon, guy! Party’s over!”

  Only one sound came in response. To this day I can’t describe it accurately. It was like the peal of tearing cellophane, amplified a thousand times, or the grating rasp a glass cutter makes. It made my teeth twinge and brought every follicle on my body to full alert.

  “Carl!” Suzanne was robed and halfway down the stairs.

  “Get me a bandage and some peroxide, would you? I’ve hacked my goddamn foot wide open. Don’t go outside. Get my tennis shoes.”

  I sat down on the second stair with a thump. When Suzanne extracted the trapezoidal chunk of glass, I nearly puked. There was a gash two inches wide, leaking blood and throbbing with each slam of my heartbeat. I thought I could feel cold air seeking tiny, exposed bones down there.

  “Jesus, Carl.” She made a face, as though I’d done this just to stir up a boring night. “Brixy whiffs a bobcat, or some fucking dog game, and you have to ruin our new floor by bleeding all over it . . . ”

  “Something turned him on enough to take out the conservatory window. Jesus Christ in a Handi-Van. Ouch! Even if it is a bobcat, those things are too bad to mess with.”

  She swept her hair back, leaving a smear of blood on her forehead. She handed over the peroxide and left my foot half taped. “You finish. Let me deal with Jilly before she freaks out.”

  “Mommy?” Jilly’s voice was tiny and sleep-clogged. She’d missed the circus. I sure hadn’t heard her roll out of the sack, but Suzanne apparently had. Mommy vibes, she’d tell me later.

  After gingerly pulling on my shoes, I stumped to the kitchen door and disordered some drawers looking for a flashlight. Upstairs, Suzanne was murmuring a soothing story about how Daddy had himself an accident and fell on his ass.

  I didn’t have to look far to find Brix. He was gutted and strewn all over the backyard. The first part I found was his left rear leg, lying in the dirt like a gruesome drumstick with a blood-slicked jag of bone jutting from it. My damaged foot stubbed it; pain shot up my ass and blasted through the top of my head. His carcass was folded backward over the east fence, belly torn lengthwise, organs ripped out. The dripping cavern in the top of his head showed me where his brain had been until ten minutes ago.

  The metallic, shrieking noise sailed down from the hills.

  And the lights were on up at Dunwoody’s place.

  When the sheriffs told me Brix’s evisceration was nothing abnormal, I almost lost it and started punching. Calling the cops had been automatic city behavior; a conditioned reaction that no longer had any real purpose. Atavistic. There hadn’t been enough of Brix left to fill a Hefty bag. What wasn’t in the bag was missing, presumed eaten. Predators, they shrugged.

  In one way I was thankful we’d only had the dog a few days. Jilly was stil
l too young to be really stunned by the loss of him, though she spent the day retreated into that horrible quiet that seizes children on the level of pure instinct. I immediately promised her another pet. Maybe that was impulsive and wrong, but I wasn’t tracking on all channels myself. It did light her face briefly up.

  I felt worse for Suzanne. She had been spared most of the visceral evidence of the slaughter, but those morsels she could not avoid seeing had hollowed her eyes and slackened her jaw. She had taken to Brix immediately, and had always militated against anything that caused pain to animals. There was no way to bleach out the solid and sickeningly large bloodstain on the fence, and I finally kicked out the offending planks. Looking at the hole was just as depressing.

  The sheriffs were cloyed, too fat and secure in their jobs. All I had done was bring myself to their attention, which is one place no sane person wants to be. Annoyed at my cowardly waste of their time, they marked up my floor with their boots and felt up my wife with their eyes.

  Things were done differently here. That was what impelled me to Dunwoody’s place, at a brisk limp.

  I had not expected Ormly to answer the door; I couldn’t fathom what tasks were outside his capabilities and simply assumed he was too stupid to wipe his own ass. He filled up the doorway, immense and ugly, his face blank as a pine plank (with a knot on the flip side, I knew). He was dressed exactly as before. Perhaps he had not changed. It took a couple of long beats, but he did recognize me.

  “Fur paw,” he said.

  The back of my neck bristled. When Ormly’s brain changed stations, he haunted the forest, starkers, in the dead of night; what other pastimes might his damaged imagination offer him? When he spoke, I half expected him to produce one of Brix’s unaccounted-for shanks from his back pocket and gnaw on it. Then I realized what he had said: For pa.

  “Yeah.” I tried to clear the idiocy out of my throat. “Is he home?”

  “Home. Yuh.” He lurched dutifully out of the foyer, Frankenstein’s Monster in search of a battery charge.

  I waited on the stoop, thinking it unwise to go where I wasn’t specifically beckoned or invited. Another urban prejudice. Wait for the protocol, go through the official motions. Put it through channels. That routine was what had won me the white-lipped holes blooming in my stomach.

  Dunwoody weaved out of the stale-smelling dimness holding half a glass of peppermint schnapps. He was wearing a long-sleeved workshirt with the cuffs buttoned.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Dunwoody, but my dog was killed last night.” No reaction. He showed the same disinterest the cops had, and that brought my simmering anger a notch closer to boiling. “More to the point, he was pelted and hung on my back fence with his head scooped out and his guts spread all over the yard. The fence bordering your property, Mr. Dunwoody.”

  “I heard him barking.” He looked down away. “Saw you kick the slats out.” His words billowed toward me in minty clouds; he was tying on a nice, out-of-focus afternoon drunk. “You said you didn’t have no pets.”

  It was an accusation: If you hadn’t lied, this would not have happened.

  I felt obligated to be pissed off, but my soul wasn’t really in it. My need to know was stronger. “Sorry—but look, you mentioned wildcats coming out of the hills. Or bears. Maybe I’m no authority on wildlife feeding habits, but what happened was . . . ” I flashed on Brix’s corpse again and my voice hitched. “That was far beyond killing for food.”

  “I didn’t see it.” His voice wasn’t a full slur. Not yet, but soon. “Woke me up. But I didn’t see it. I’m glad I didn’t. That part I don’t fancy, sir.” He scratched an eyebrow. “I think y’all should leave. Go.”

  “You mean leave Point Pitt?”

  “Move somewhere else. Don’t live here.” He took a long drag on his glass and grimaced, as though choking down cough medicine. “See what happens? This ain’t for boys like you, with your fag hairdo’s and your little Japanese cars and your satellite TV . . . aahhh, Christ . . . ”

  Ormly loomed behind him, recording all the pain with oddly sad eyes, so much like a dog himself.

  A cloudy tear slipped down Dunwoody’s face, but his own eyes were clear and decisive as they looked from me to the north. “Go home,” he said. “Just go home, please.” Then he shut the door in my face.

  Dinner was flavorless, by rote. Suzanne had tried to nap and only gotten haggard. Jilly told me she missed Brix.

  After bestowing my customary bedtime smackeroo, Jilly asked again about getting another pet right now. Her mom had run the same idea past me downstairs. Between them I’d finally be goaded into some reparation.

  Suzanne reached for me as soon as I hit my side of the bed. She had already divested herself of clothing, and her movements were brazen and urgent. She wanted to outrun the last twenty-four hours in a steambath of good therapeutic fucking. Her nerves were rawed, and close to the surface; she climaxed with very little effort and kept me inside her for a long, comforting while. Then she kissed me very tenderly, ate two sleeping pills, and chased oblivion in another direction.

  My foot felt as if I had stomped on a sharpened pencil. I hobbled to the bathroom, pretending I was Chester in Gunsmoke. The dressing was yellowed from drainage and shadowed with dry brown blood. It gave off a carrion odor. I took my time washing and swabbing and winding on new gauze. I was still pleasantly numb everywhere else.

  There was a low thrumming, like that of a large truck idling on the street outside. I felt it before I actually heard it. I checked the window across from the bathroom door, but there was nothing, not even Ormly making his uniformless predawn rounds. With my Bay City paranoid’s devotion to ritual, I hobbled downstairs and jiggled all the locked doors. The boarded-up plant nook was secure. I sneaked a couple of slugs of milk straight from the carton. Ulcer maintenance.

  Jilly’s room was on the far side of the bathroom. When I peeked stealthily in, the vibrational noise got noticeably louder.

  Triplechecking everything constantly was as much a habit of new parenthood as security insecurity. Jilly was wound up in her Sesame Street sheets. I decided to shut the window, which was curtained, but half-open.

  The sheet-shape was grotesque enough to suggest that Jilly’s entire platoon of stuffed animals was bunking with her tonight. I’d tucked in Wile E. Coyote myself. No more Brix. My throat started to close up with self pity. I crept closer to plant a sleeptime kiss on Jilly’s temple—another parental privilege, so Suzanne told me. Jilly’s hair was just beginning to shade closer to the coloring of my own.

  The low, fluttering noise was coming from beneath her sheets. And something smelled bad in the room. Perhaps she had soiled herself in sleep.

  Hunched into Jilly’s back was a mass of oily black fur as big as she was. At first my brain rang with a replay of Brix’s horrifying inside-out death. The thing spooning with my daughter had one fat paw draped over her sleeping shoulder, and was alive. And purring.

  I had the sheet peeled halfway down to reveal more of it when it twisted around and bit me on the wrist.

  I took one panicked backward step, jerking sway. Jilly’s plush brontosaurus was feet-up on the floor; I stumbled over it, savaging my injured foot and crashing, sprawl-assed, down on Brix’s rug, which smelled doggish and was dusted with his red hair. I had to get up, fast, tear the thing from her back, get the shotgun, to—

  I tried to chock my good leg under me and could not. Both had gone thick and unresponsively numb. Then, shockingly, warmth spread at my crotch as my belly was seized by a sudden and powerful orgasm. My arms became as stupid as my legs. Then even my neck muscles lost it, and my forehead thunked into Brix’s rug. And I came again.

  And again.

  Within seconds it was like receiving a thorough professional battering. I was having one orgasm for every three beats of my heart. My useless legs twitched. Saliva ran from the corner of my mouth to pool in my ear; even my vocal cords were iced into nonfunction. And while I lay curled up on the floor, coming
and shuddering and coming, the creature that had been in bed with my daughter climbed down to watch.

  Its eyes were bronze coins, reflecting candlefire. I thought of the thing I had seen monitoring me from the tree on my first day as a Point Pitt resident.

  It was bigger than a bobcat, stockier, low-slung. The fur or hair was backswept, spiky-stiff and glistening, as though heavily lubricated. Thick legs sprouted out from the body rather than down, making its carriage ground-gripping and reptilian. I heard hard leather pads scuff the floor as it neared, saw hooked claws, hooded in pink ligatures, close in on my face.

  It was still purring. The head was a cat’s, all golden eyes and pointed felt ears, but the snout was elongated into a canine coffin shape. The chatoyant pupils were X-shaped, deep-glowing crosscuts in the iris of each eye, and they widened like opening wounds to drink me in. It yawned. Less than a foot from my face I saw two bent needle fangs, backed by triangular, sharkish teeth in double rows. Its breath was worse than the stink of the congealed bandage I had stripped from my foot.

  One galvanic sexual climax after another wrenched my insides apart. I was dry-coming; about to ejaculate blood. The creature dipped its head to lick some spittle from my cheek. Its tongue was sandpapery.

  I had to kill it, bludgeon its monster skull to mush, blast it again and again until its carcass could hold no more shot. I orgasmed again. I could barely breathe.

  It ceased tasting me and the hideous eyes sparked alive, hot yellow now. It padded back to the bed and leaped silently up. Jilly remained limp. I didn’t even know if she was already dead or not.

  It looked, to make sure I could see. Then it settled in, gripping Jilly’s shoulders from above with its claws and licking her hair. It opened its mouth. Cartilage cracked softly as its jawbones separated, and the elastic black lips stretched taut to engulf the top of her head.