by Chuck Wendig
THREE BLOCKS UP and one over, they arrive at their destination. It’s a single house with white siding, sandwiched between two sets of brown townhomes—the world’s ugliest ice cream sandwich. The siding on the house is green with striations of mold and mildew. Gutters hang, broken. Latticework under the front porch reveals gleaming eyes: cats or raccoons or possums, Cason doesn’t know.
Broken walkway stones lead to the front steps, which are themselves just cinder blocks with boards laid across them.
The wind shifts and a smell comes from the house. Something wild and gamy. Olfactory memory is strange—Cason knows it reminds him of something, but he’s not sure what. He knows he remembers it, but he can’t put his finger on the memory itself.
“Go up and knock,” Frank says.
“Whose house is this?”
“I said go up and go knock. Unless you want me to knock you on the head with the butt of this .45, pal.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Frank mimics, his voice a nasally, raspy whine. “You want in on this adventure, then you gotta knock to be let in.”
Cason hesitates, but finally walks up on the wobbly two-by-fours across the cinderblocks and steps up to the porch. Beneath the creaking wood, he hears the animals shuffle and skitter. Again that smell hits him: musky, earthy, wild.
It’s then he realizes what it reminds him of.
The primate house. At the zoo.
Sweat and fur and piss and shit. All wrapped up in a blanket of animal musk.
Cason walks up. Sees a mailbox stuffed with mail. Number on the box and a name: ARTHUR MESSING. The mail is piled up and tumbling over the edge. Junk, mostly—coupons and menus and other mailers. Some bills, by the look of it. All cascading from the box to the porch floor like a paper waterfall interrupted.
“Knock.”
Cason sighs. Lifts his hand, raps on the door.
The house shudders with approaching footsteps.
foom
foom
foom
FOOM
FOOM
The door opens.
That heady monkey smell really hits Cason now, a punch to the nose as a massive dude answers the door—giant, not like Tundu, who’s big all around, but giant in the way a cave troll is giant. Long legs, long arms, but a short torso and a head the size and shape of a small watermelon. The man’s hair is a wild thatch of brown and gray, his mouth a mess of crooked teeth, the nose a smushed piggy snout. Dirt on his cheeks, under his nails, across his yellow chompers.
The guy starts to ask “Who the hell are—”
But he doesn’t get to finish the question.
Cason’s head explodes—or at least that’s how it feels. Frank sticks the gun up over Cason’s shoulder and pulls the trigger. The gunshot is everything: noise and fury and stink, and the massive man’s head snaps back and his body topples backward like a redwood felled with dynamite. The floor shakes as he hits.
Fuck, Cason thinks. He can’t hear anything. Only the pulsating shriek in his ear. He staggers forward into the house, shoved by Frank.
Cason didn’t ask for this. Didn’t ask to be in on a murder. Bad enough what happened to his boss—but he thought today would give him context, not just another dead body to deal with.
He snaps. Yanks Frank into the house by his gun-hand. Slams him into a wall lined with ugly mural wallpaper meant to look like a pine forest—a framed painting, of a couple of deer sipping lake water in the shadow of mountains, tumbles off the wall and shatters. Frank yelps—the gun goes off again, this time the bullet whining against an old iron heating grate—Cason pulls his arm taut and kicks hard up into Frank’s solar plexus.
The freak ooomphs as Cason twists the gun out.
Then brings the flat of the gun hard against the bastard’s head.
The Cicatrix goes down—a still, unmoving, scar-flesh lump. The bag under his arm now a crumpled-up package smashed beneath his hip.
“Jesus,” Cason says, panting. In his ear: the deafening whine.
He thinks: just leave, just go—run—you were never here.
But the guy could be okay. Well—not okay. Nobody’s okay after getting shot in the head. But some people survive it, right? The head’s made of harder stuff than people realize. Bullet maybe rides the skull to the back. Or shoots a part-the-seas path through the two halves of the brain and goes clear out the back without blowing out any vital circuitry.
Cason kneels over the giant.
Oh, shit.
Multiple problems strike Cason as notable.
First, the bullet. It’s half-flattened against the wrinkled flesh of the man’s brow—a squashed mushroom of lead.
Second, the man’s eyes are open. And blinking. And looking at Cason.
Third, and most troubling: the man is not a man.
He’s changed.
His piggish snout is now an actual pig snout. His mouth is a thresher bar of crooked needle tusks sticking out over the top and bottom lip, criss-crossing like briar barbs. His face is a pelt of hair to match the snarl upon his head.
Yellow eyes.
Leathery flesh.
Breath that’d make a vulture choke on its own puke.
A low rumble rises in the beast-man’s chest. Cason can’t hear it but he can feel it. The creature says something—the words lost to the roar in Cason’s ears—just before the monster lifts Cason up like he’s the father and Cason’s a newborn baby.
Of course, this father doesn’t mind throwing his infant into the ceiling.
Cason slams into popcorn ceiling—then the floor rushes up to greet him and punch the air clean out of his lungs. The monster man is already up, standing over Cason.
Again he’s trying to say something—foul mouth moving, teeth gnashing together, but Cason can’t hear it.
And again the monster tosses Cason like he’s a ragdoll. Into one wall. Then the other. Then the door. Then back to the floor.
The giant beast-man—fur now bristling through his greasy gray shirt and around the margins of his baggy shorts—squats over Cason like an animal squatting over his kill. He roars words, this time words that Cason can hear as they barrel through his temporary deafness:
“—he should have never created man. Man ruins everything. Have you seen? Have you looked outside? You spread your filth everywhere you go. All that you touch is poison and sickness. Kishelemùkonk moved mountains to prove you should exist, but he was wrong. The Great Spirit was wrong!”
The monster forms a wrecking ball with both his hands and raises them high above Cason’s head—
But then pauses.
Draws a long, deep, snorting sniff.
The beast-man’s yellow eyes narrow.
“But you are not all-man, are you? You are a child of the Beast, too.”
Cason tries to say something—anything—but his words come out a breathless squeak. Then, from behind the giant, a voice.
“Hey, skunk-ape.”
The beast wheels.
Cason catches sight of Frank standing there, facing down the monster. Frank lobs something—the brown bag—toward the giant.
The giant, reflexively, catches it.
The bomb goes off.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Monster Mash
NUMB, WEARY, EYES red, ears buzzing.
A little while later, after Cason makes sure he’s not dead, Frank says the show-and-tell must continue.
They leave the hallway where the walls are cratered (in Cason-sized cavities) and worse, peppered with bits of black ichor and stuck fur and splinters of—Cason blinks, sees that it’s wood. Sees that the splinters are in his hands, too. His foot nudges something: a tiny wooden doll head. Before he can look too long, Frank is pulling him upstairs.
The smell is strong up here. Coppery, greasy. Wild, too—gamey, untamed. They pass by a bathroom which is covered in mold—not black mold or pink mold like you’d find in a shower, but green fuzzy mold. The kind you find
on an old loaf of bread. Cason staggers through the tour, not sure what he’s supposed to see or why he’s even here at all. His body hurts. Like he’s been hit by a garbage truck, then thrown into the back of said garbage truck, then crushed and pulped with the rest of the waste.
They pass a bedroom. Just a mat on the floor and some pillows. It’s like a greenhouse in there—not just because of the heat, but because the room is all tables and potted plants. Most of them huge. Red roses, red not like blood but like globs of bright paint on dark stems. Plants with leaves like floppy elephant ears. Ivy and clematis vines climbing well beyond their latticework mooring and up the walls and to the ceiling and into the vents.
And still Frank waves Cason on.
To the attic. No steps for the attic—just a pull-down ladder. Cason grits his teeth as he climbs, trying not to drive the splinters further into his palms. He uses his wrists to stabilize and hauls his body up into the dark space.
The smell. This is the dark heart of the awful smell. It hits Cason the way the monster-man hit him—his stomach shudders and he wonders if he’s going to throw up.
Click. Darkness banished by a bare bulb hanging from a brown wire.
Cason throws up. Head turned aside. Eyes closed because he doesn’t want to see.
Frank just nods. “I figured you’d wanna see that.”
FLASHES OF THE attic: blood and bones and pelts and child’s toys piled in heaping, steaming mounds; abattoir, slaughterhouse, feeding ground, bear cave.
Cason sits in the beast-man’s kitchen, picking splinters from his hands with his teeth. It’s hard work, because his hands are slick with his blood—and the blood of the beast-man who disintegrated before his eyes in an exhalation of fur and red mist.
He spits each splinter onto the dirty tablecloth. Trying not to throw up each time he does it. But it gives him something to do. Something to think about other than—
Well.
Frank steps into the kitchen, his freakish near-lipless grin calling to mind a cackling skeleton one might put outside the house for Halloween.
He tosses something onto the table:
A charred wooden head of a little girl doll. Yarn hair. Triangle eyes and smiling mouth forming the face, with no nose to speak of. The doll head hits the table, rolls to the edge, then goes over onto the floor.
“I have no idea what the fuck is going on,” Cason says. He bites on another splinter, spits it onto the table. Still dozens more to go. “Time to start telling. The showing part is over. Because, I have to tell you, Frank, whatever you just showed me didn’t help me understand the situation any better, you feel me?”
Frank chuckles. “Ehhh-yeah, now that I think about it, I guess maybe that didn’t really answer all your questions.”
“It didn’t answer any of them. And now I’ve got about a hundred more.”
Frank sits on the edge of a cracked formica counter. “We just killed a monster.”
“What kind of monster?”
“Kind that eats raccoons and possums. And stray cats and lost dogs. And... once in a while, a little kid or three.” Frank shrugs like it’s no big deal. Snaps his fingers, slaps them on his knee in a jerky drum-beat. “The, ahh, this area was once settled by some Indians. Lenni-Lenape. They venerated this spirit, this creature called ‘Meesink’ who was said to keep the balance between the world of man and the world of nature. All the stories and paintings have him looking like a big, y’know, a Bigfoot—which, as you can see, turned out pretty goddamn accurate.”
Cason’s head spins. His entire reality does. “Is this real? Is this a real thing? Am I just... dead? Sick? High on something?”
“It’s the real deal, dude.”
“Monsters are real.”
“Not just monsters.”
Cason’s eyes narrow. “What else?”
“The gods.”
“Gods. Plural. Not God.”
“He’s real, too. He’s just one among many.”
Cason stands. Almost falls. “You know what? I’m outta here.”
Frank hops down, stands in Cason’s way.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow your roll, stud. How do you think this whole thing works? You think your wife and kid want to murder you because that’s just how they feel? Or you think it’s because someone’s pulling their strings? It’s time to open your eyes—really open them, now—and look around. There’s magic in this life, and it ain’t ours to play with. It’s theirs. The gods are the ones with all the tricks. We’re just their playthings. They’re the kid with the magnifying glass and we’re the burning ants.”
Gods. Monsters. Impossible. And yet—not really, not at all. Women with wings, man-boys with unholy magnetism, and that little business about his wife and son burning alive in a car but now, miraculously, being alive as if it never happened.
His legs almost give out, but Frank steadies him.
“But they have a saying,” Frank continues. “The ants weigh more than the elephants. You know that saying?”
The smallest head shake. No.
“The ants weigh more than the elephants. Doesn’t seem true, because a teeny tiny ant is just a squirming black bug in a big-ass elephant’s butthole. But that’s not what the saying says, the saying says ants and elephants, plural. Because all the ants together weigh more than all the elephants together. And that’s how we are. Gods and man. We don’t outweigh them one to one, but together, boy. There’s a lot more of us than them.”
The questions—his mind is like a bucket that just overturned and now he can’t stop the questions. “Who are they? How did they get here? Why me?”
Frank chuckles. “The easy answer? They were pushed. The longer, crazier answer is—”
His already bulging bug-eyes seem to go wider as the skin around them pulls back—Frank’s look of perpetual surprise is suddenly magnified.
“Someone’s here,” Frank says.
A knock at the door.
Not a friendly knock, either. Wham wham wham wham.
The hairs on Cason’s neck stand. Arms, too. Straight and tall like soldiers.
“One of them,” Frank says. “How the fuck—” He hurries over to the window over the sink, pulls back a filmy curtain, quickly lets it fall back in place. “We gotta go.”
“I want to see,” Cason says, moving toward the sink.
Frank stands in his way. “No time. We have to go.”
“Move.”
“Case, the longer we wait—”
Frank’s not a big man. Cason shoves him aside.
And then he sees. The window overlooks the porch. It takes a second to click, but the wild hair gives it away. It’s the woman from the woods: the one bound in golden chains. The one with wings—wings that are, at present, nowhere to be seen.
Someone else is there, too—
The other person takes a step back.
Alison.
Alison.
Her eyes, empty. Mouth slack, with saliva moistening her lips. Her head has this gentle swaying, like a boat on the ocean lost to the waves. She’s holding a gun. A gun he bought her to defend herself—at the time she was working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the telemetry unit (he remembers the way she answered the phone there: Alison Cole, 2B Telemetry), and she sometimes walked a long way to work and he wanted her to have a gun. She never took it. Never used it. And now here she is with it.
Suddenly, a feeling in his mind—different from when he was around E. but the same, too. Like an invasion. Like someone cupping his consciousness in a pair of cold hands. Probing. Looking for something.
“Alison,” he says. He has to get to her. Save her from this.
He turns.
There stands Frank. Gun in one hand, a steak knife in the other, with a silverware drawer open behind him. The gun is leveled at Cason’s head.
“Don’t,” Frank says. “You can’t help her. Not today.”
“That’s my wife.”
“Trust me, I know. And I get it; I do. But th
is isn’t the day.” Frank takes the hand with the knife and pulls down on the collar of his filthy white t-shirt. Turning it into a v-neck before finally the fabric starts to rip.
A symbol reveals itself. A symbol in scar tissue. Three lines crossing one another, forming a kind of asterisk. Smaller symbols at the six points, dead-ending each line: they look almost like letters (N, M, U), but they’re not quite.
“I gotta carve this into your chest,” Frank says.
“Fuck you. I want my wife.”
“And you’ll get her back. With my help. Not by running off half-cocked.”
Outside, more knocking: wham wham wham. A voice calling:
“I know you’re in there. Your wife and I would like to talk to you.”
The invisible hands cupping Cason’s mind start to squeeze. The urge rises in him, hot and white, to go to the front door. To kneel there. To let his wife put that gun into his mouth so that he may embrace oblivion.
Frank seethes: “She’s in your head already.” He smacks Cason across the face—not with the gun, but with the back of his gun-hand.
Reaction. Cason has Frank’s hand in his own. One twist and the man yelps: the gun drops into Cason’s hand. “I’m not letting you carve that into my chest.”
Frank’s eyes dart around the room. Sees a cup of pens and markers next to a dented toaster and a pile of fraying napkins littered with mouse turds. “Then we’ll do something more temporary.”
HE’S THERE, AND then he’s gone.
Psyche stands on the decrepit porch, feeling tight and tense and unclean, and one second she feels Cason’s mind in the house like a mouse in a maze, and then there’s the light of pain and he’s gone. Not fading like a ghost, but rather as if he was never there in the first place. How dearly, deeply disappointing.
She searches, of course. She pulls Alison along—not by her hand, but by a leash wound around the woman’s mind—and stalks around the outside of the house. The alleys between this house and the row-homes. Past barrels filled with rainwater and thousands of mosquito larvae twisting in the murk. To the house’s back door, long boarded up, beneath eaves thick with wasp combs. No one. Nothing. No trace of human life.