The Monster's Corner

by Christopher Golden

  There’s a slurp and a pop, and then Sophie has Charlotte’s eyeball in her hand and she’s pulling and twisting because the optical nerve is still tethering the thing to Charlotte’s brain, and then, snap, the eyeball comes loose. Sophie lifts it up and holds it out to me like she’s found a particularly interesting shell, the eye soft and red, shredded nerves dangling from it, and Sophie says, “Eat it.”

  I meekly show her the Brawny. “Maybe we should clean up first?” I suggest.

  Sophie shakes her head, almost sadly, and presses her cupped hand toward me. “You’re so pale,” she says. Her fingernails are painted with purple glittery polish.

  “I’m not hungry,” I say.

  “Hand me that,” she says. “I’m going to get the other one.” She is pointing to the ceramic dish on her beside table. It’s shaped like a cupcake. The frosting part is the lid. It has a red cherry ball on top and fake rainbow sprinkles. The cupcake is where Sophie keeps her treasures: two baby teeth, the head of the small plastic boy who used to live in her dollhouse, a 1935 penny, a rock, a piece of a broken cup, a Matchbox car she found underwater in the Gulf of Mexico on vacation. I hand her the cupcake and she dumps the contents out on the floor. They bounce and skid out of sight, the teeth, the penny, the car. Sophie drops Charlotte’s eye inside the cupcake.

  “What did you think this was going to be like?” Sophie asks me.

  I don’t say anything.

  She frowns again and lifts her eyebrows. “I want us to be friends forever,” she says.

  She looks so sincere. And hurt. I have rejected her offering, that blue, blue eye. Now I feel like a monster.

  “Fine,” I say.

  I pluck the eyeball out of the cupcake and put it in my mouth and roll it around a little. It’s still warm and slippery with metallic-tasting blood. When I bite down it pops inside my mouth, releasing a sweet sugary gel that coats my tongue and slides down my throat.

  A warm light tickles down the length of my arms.

  I lick my lips.

  “See?” Sophie says. Her eyes shine and she digs the spoon into her friend’s other eye socket.

  Squish.

  My stomach churns.

  I move Sophie’s hand away and squat over Charlotte’s face and I tongue her dead eye, working it loose, sucking on it, chewing on the lid, the tiny eyelashes between my teeth, until it slips into my mouth and then, panting, I chew through the nerve fibers, slurp out the blood, and swallow. The warm fluid of her fills my mouth and runs down my throat.

  I can feel Sophie watching me, so I slip my fingers deep into Charlotte’s eye socket, hook them under the bone, and pull until I hear her skull crack. Her head changes shape as the bone gives way, less of a girl now than meat. It’s easier that way.

  I try to eat quickly. The splinter of bone, the chewy knot of her tongue, the dry hay of her hair, her flesh and fat and clothes. My mouth stings from the metal of her blood, the sharp bits of her.

  She is young and comes apart easily. Fat from muscle. Muscle from bone. Cartilage and connective tissue. Blood and spinal fluid and mucus.

  I devour her. There is nothing left. I lick her blood off the sleeping bag until Hannah Montana is dark with my saliva.

  Then I look up at Sophie. She is sitting crisscross-applesauce on the bed, her cheeks bright pink.

  I touch the bloodstain on the carpet and rub my fingers together. “This isn’t going to come out,” I say.

  The stain is only a few feet wide.

  “The bed,” I say.

  Sophie nods and gets up and moves the bedside table with the lava lamp, and then she takes the headboard and I take the footboard and we inch her bed over until the bloodstain is underneath it.

  We do not hear her mother, the smell of her wine breath obscured by death, coming up the stairs and down the hall. She knocks on the purple door and we jump.

  The doorknob jiggles.

  “Is it locked?” her mother says.

  “Just a second,” Sophie calls. We look at each other for a long moment and then Sophie says, “Go.”

  I slide under Sophie’s bed, my back on the carpet, my nose under the box spring.

  Sophie opens her bedroom door.

  “You moved your bed,” I hear Sophie’s mother say.

  “Yeah,” Sophie says. She is struggling into her pajamas. I see her feet and ankles on the carpet. The striped PJ pants. Purple toenail polish. Next to her feet, on the floor, her ceramic cupcake, broken into three pieces.

  “What’s with the paper towels?” her mother asks. The roll of Brawny is on Sophie’s desk.

  “I spilled a Diet Coke,” Sophie says.

  “Remember, one square,” her mother says. “Those are expensive.” She walks over to retrieve the paper towels and her feet stop next to Sophie’s. Then her hand comes down and scoops up the shards of colorful ceramic—the colored sprinkles, the cherry—and I hear the broken cupcake drop into Sophie’s wastebasket.

  “Want me to tuck you in?” Sophie’s mother asks.

  There is a pause. “That’s okay,” Sophie says.

  “Okay,” her mother says. “But it’s late. Lights out.” The room goes dark. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” I hear Sophie’s mother say from the door. “Or any other kind of bug.”

  She starts to close the door, the room settling into darkness.

  “Mom?” Sophie asks suddenly. “Can you leave the door open a crack?”

  “Sure,” her mother says.

  The light from the hall illuminates the carpet, a slanted yellow rectangle. Sophie is quiet. I can hear her breathing. Thinking about Charlotte, a blush of pleasure runs through me in waves. My cheeks grow hot. My mouth waters. The coils of Sophie’s box spring creak inches above my nose.

  Underneath me, on the floor, the bloodstain is wet on my back, and one of Sophie’s baby teeth digs into my shoulder.

  The two of us are quiet for a long time.

  “Sometimes I think my stuffed animals are staring at me,” Sophie says finally.

  I whisper, “They are.”

  THE CRUEL THIEF OF ROSY INFANTS

  by Tom Piccirilli

  THE CRIB WAS FREE OF IRON, foxglove, open scissors, or any other protective measures or charms. On the crackling hearth a pot of hog’s head stew sat cooking, almost as an invitation. It could be a trap. Sixty years ago I’d been snared by eight waiting men prepared with clubs of ash and an iron cage. It had taken me four days to escape up the chimney.

  This, though, didn’t seem like a lure despite the human girl child lying beneath an open window, alone in the cool evening breeze.

  A remote noise upstairs caught my attention. Snarls, grunts, mewls, and caterwauls. Murder, I thought, murder and evisceration! It took another moment to realize it was the human sound of lovemaking. Coarse but full of bounce. One could play the fiddle to it, the drums, the pan pipes. My foot tapped. My nose itched. I sneaked a ladle of the stew. Then another. I’d always had a fondness for hog’s head. The doctor warned me away from it, and my wife would surely shame me. I needed a sprig of mint to camouflage my breath.

  The child in its crib grinned at me. Clear-eyed, crimson-cheeked, it gripped my index finger fiercely. I perceived no obvious weaknesses or illnesses. It had not been touched by plague. It had no fleas or worms, no ticks. Its heart rang with a solid thump within its small chest, no arrhythmia, no congestive failure. The pulse was a nice counterpoint to the cries of the mother. It would grow up able-bodied and average.

  It was what it was. It could not help being what it was. Plain and blunt. Bald, smelly, and toothless. Heavy-handed, awkward-footed, easily replaceable, utterly common. A laugh escaped its bubbling lips. It sought my finger again. Its parents were already making siblings that would look just like it.

  In this world, on this side of the wall, the human girl child would eventually grow to milk cows and goats, weave gray scratchy clothes, and then go on to bear its own ungainly offspring. It would know overwhelming love and great, sharp sorrow, b
ut it would never, except perhaps at the moment of death, achieve any grace.

  I drew back my coat and Livia’s child stared at me, her eyes alive with understanding and acceptance, golden-blond hair draping across her angled, intelligent features. She shined as all our kind shine, radiant and exquisite.

  I said, “You’re needed here, bright one.”

  She seemed to nod in understanding. She held no malice at the swapping. We do the things we do because we must do them.

  It was Livia I was worried about. She was more reluctant to let go of the child than I’d anticipated. I thought I had even seen tears glimmering in her eyes before she had turned away and hastened back to her dwelling on the bluff.

  We do not often shed tears, and never when doing the things we must do.

  I swapped the children, as is my duty. As it was my Da’s, and his Da’s before him, back and back until the beginning of the races, so I’d been told. My family had been in charge of doing this thing for no less than fifteen hundred years, although time is playful when traveling from one side of the wall to the other. Perhaps fifteen centuries, perhaps fifty. A long time nonetheless.

  Humanity has given us a name. We were known, each of us, in turn, as the Thief of Rosy Infants. It is not a title that fills me with joy. It is not a designation that compels strangers to hurl roses. It is not a name I want written in the great accounts of our people.

  Upon his deathbed, my Da told me, “This is a sacred and terrible responsibility we are charged with. It will likely drive you mad if you ponder it at length.” He held my face in his hands and kissed my brow. “Traveling will leave you lost in place and time, my son. Humanity will hate you. Our own people will hate you, whether you see it in their faces or not. I’m sorry you were born to me, and that I must pass this painful commitment on to you now.”

  Then he died and I buried him at the bottom of a rushing river, as was his wish, so that his great sins might be washed away. I wondered if it worked.

  The parents of the human girl child would scream when they found the swapling, cry out even louder than they were doing right now, and wail, and call for the queen’s guard, and kneel in their churches, but eventually, and without as much difficulty as they might have imagined, they would adapt. The beautiful swapling child was difficult to resist, even for the barbarous human heart.

  I made my way back to the wall with the girl tucked beneath my coat.

  On this particular journey, the wall was a wall of river stones and mortar surrounding the eastern edge of the city of Luftvillion, which was vulnerable to attack from the savage tribes of the highlands. Sometimes the wall was a different wall. Sometimes it was a wall of brick in a small chapel devoted to strange gods, or a wall of loblolly trees in the deep forest. Once I crossed over through a wall of skulls ten feet high and a hundred yards in length, built on a battlefield where riderless, armored horses wandered with gore-soaked manes.

  It was night now, and the elderly had crept from their homes to sit on their porches and smoke their pipes and knit their socks and rock in their rockers. The elderly liked to look at the evening stars. The young were making love or in the pubs drinking or planning to overthrow governments and murder those with skins and languages different from their own. The elderly had poor eyes. They waved and nodded as I passed in the glow of the gas lamps. I waved back.

  Before long I stood before a cathedral, where mass was in progress. Mass was always in progress. A tempestuous sermon rattled the stained glass windows. The stone figures of their faith stared down from the steeples and belfries, stern, commanding, yet with open arms, bodies wracked in torment so that pain and torture become appealing to humanity. I couldn’t help myself and peeked in the mail slot.

  In the aisles were weeping bodies, in some places three deep. Mostly middle-aged. The middle-aged were in the churches begging for more money and the cure for black lung and syphilis. The choir set to braying. They were high in the balcony dressed in red robes, hands clasped in prayer or reaching out for the symbols of divine entities that hung on chains from the rafters. Their mouths gaped, their eyes narrowed.

  Struck with hysteria, two altos fell from the balcony rail, hymns issuing forth until the very instant they hit the pews. The faithful spit the names of their mortgage brokers and tax collectors. They rolled around and barked like dogs. The minister beat them about the face, shoulders, and groin with his silver staff. He puffed smoke at them. He fed them biscuits and alcohol. They dropped to their knees and flopped on their faces.

  Supplication is the thing humans do better than any other thing that they do. It’s the thing they do best, besides killing.

  The child was snuggled against my belly, snoring softly as I struck out again for the cobble path. It burped, sighed, and farted. Its moment of grace remained a long way off.

  Finally I came to the eastern slope of the city and picked up my step over the viaduct as I neared the river-stone wall. The rapids bustled and churned. I crossed the bridge and watched a longboat making its way down the river. On board there was drunken revelry, hooting, the clashing of swords, and laughter.

  I felt along the stones looking for a crack large enough to bring the human baby through the wall. It always took extra time because, small as the rosy infant was, it was still larger than me, in its own fashion, when traveling between. I held the swapling tightly and put my back to the polished stones. As I passed through I thought of something else my Da had told me. “You’ll experience mysterious and morbid happenings. Not only within the confines of the human world but within yourself. Prepare for damage.”

  My wife, Harella, stood waiting for me on the other side, as she sometimes did when I went visiting. She was so beautiful that I almost had to cover my eyes for a moment. My time beyond the wall sometimes affected me for a bit. A deep melancholy filled my heart, which is a thing that happens to us, but doesn’t happen often. I felt muddled.

  She put a hand to my face and I nearly bowed before her luminescence. Her lips brushed mine, her twining arms so powerful I was swept up as if by the wind of an encroaching storm. I shut my eyes and began to hum.

  “You smell of hog’s head!” she cried. “The doctor said, no more hog’s head.”

  I knew I should have had a sprig of mint after the hog’s head ladling.

  “The doctor,” I said, “is a nit.”

  “The doctor is the doctor and knows the ways of doctoring. When he tells you no more hog’s head, then no more hog’s head it shall be. And no salt, paprika, cinnamon, mead, oregano, ground chuck, fried pickles, processed veal, four-day-old lumpfish—”

  “How can oregano possibly inflict evil upon my innards?” I asked.

  “I am not the doctor and neither are you.”

  The human girl child, which already stank, began to stink exponentially. It was doing the thing that humans do too often. The birds in our trees stopped singing. The animals on nearby farms began to buck horns and chase their tails and go into labor.

  The child reached for my finger again and brought the tip to its gnawing maw.

  “I must bring the swapped child to Livia,” I said. “It’s hungry. I should hurry.”

  Harella said nothing, which, so far as my wife was concerned, meant she was saying a thing and saying it loudly.

  So loudly that my own tongue was compelled to speak the words. “I fear there will be trouble with Livia.”

  “I fear that your fear is a reasonable one,” she said.

  “I saw tears this morning.”

  “She is more sensitive than most, full of even deeper graces.”

  It was the truth, and an overwhelming one at that. There was a painful tug at my heart. I looked my wife in the eye and saw depths and light and sadness that shook me. I asked the question that had to be asked.

  “Do you think she will harm the baby?”

  Harella said, “She is one of great resolve and implacability.”

  This was a cautious way for my wife to explain that yes, indeed, she
believed Livia might very well harm the human child she would have to care for now, to raise as her own to become one of us.

  “We’ll watch her closely.”

  The human girl child began to cry then. I held it up. It reached for my nose and gave it a good squeeze. I smiled and it smiled back. I extended it to Harella for no reason I could understand. I knew she would not want to touch it.

  “It’s a bald and beastly thing,” she said, retreating a step.

  “It was probably admired by its family and neighbors.”

  “They are blind.”

  “They know how to love as much as we do.”

  “Not quite as much, and without any virtue or purity.”

  “With some,” I said.

  I carried the child to Livia’s home, down the paths through the heart of our city, along the canals on the River Solitude, under which my Da is buried. She had no husband but was paramour to a married architect who was attempting to decipher a way to build spires beyond the highest spires, which were considered by many to be too high already. He had previously tried to bring his vision to fruition, drilling deep into the earth to pour millions of metric tons of concrete foundations. It caused a minor volcanic eruption that toppled the theology wing of the Grand Museum.

  The baby hiccupped and giggled as I walked with her in my arms. I tossed her in the air a few times, and she clapped her small hands. The cool air of night brought out rosy circles on her cheeks that burned in the moonlight.

  Livia’s home was out on the bluff, high above the white beaches. Far below, seashells glittered while out in the waves the sirens rose from the deep and crooned to the shipmasters and crewmen passing from port to port. They saw me on the road and sang my name. They walked upon the waves and danced in my honor. Their song grew more powerful. The baby tightened its grip upon me in terror.

  In the doorway Livia stood waiting with a mottled face. With her arms wrapped around herself she grasped the fringes of her thistledown robe so firmly that she had shredded the fabric. Her lips curled and stayed in motion, twisting, contorting. Words began and died. I wagered that the architect had not yet left his wife.