In Stone: A Grotesque Faerie Tale

by Jeremy Jordan King

  Every weekday at approximately 10:55 a.m., I’d bolt out of bed and head for the coffee pot to do the brewing of my morning potion. Then my roommate, Meg, and I would nestle ourselves onto our broken couch for the commencement of The View. Sure the current affairs covered on that show were skewed by bad jokes, obvious segues, failed understanding of issues, and Elizabeth’s general, mind-numbing conservatism…but we ate it up. That was also the only time that the two of us had to check in with each other.

  “I can’t believe you stayed at home for so long. Most of the world got back from vacation last week, before the New Year,” I said. “I doubt whatever you did with your family in Bayville compared to the possibilities that awaited you here.” My “New York is superior” complex was in full swing.

  “Says the boy who hates New Year’s,” she argued. “Besides, New Year’s Eve is expensive and we’re too poor to do anything really fabulous.”

  “Don’t use that word. This isn’t the Flamingo Club.”

  “Ew. I’m sorry. You only had fun because you got free drinks at your lady-friend’s bar,” she said with a restoration air. “That’s what you did, right? You went to that weird Texas joint?”

  “Yes.”

  “Naturally. Anything of note happen?”

  Obviously the prescription of her glasses was weaker than her contacts. If it were later in the day and her “eyes were in,” she’d have noticed the remainders of my injuries. Because she was one of my best friends, I debated what concoction of truths and lies I could rattle off. There could definitely be no mention of stone men. The whole hate-crime thing needed to be left out, too. I was still too embarrassed. Talking about it would just bring up all of my suppressed feelings of hatred towards the human species and intense violation of personal space. She’d feel obligated to tell every living soul about the incident, resulting in the assignment of an escort to constantly haunt my wake. Besides, if she couldn’t tell that anything was wrong with me, there was no point bringing it up.

  “No, nothing,” I said. “Oh, I did kiss some random man, though. I think he may have had Bell’s Palsy because half of his face was kind of dead. Of course that could have been the whiskey…”

  She grimaced. “Did you go home with him?”

  I grimaced. “No, sir. I got the spins and had to leave. I didn’t want to have another Charlie Incident.” Charlie was a boy I dated for a hot second after college. We got absolutely tanked one night and I threw up on him and all his earthly possessions. Mortifying. To this day I make myself feel better by telling people that he was into it. That way I don’t look like the tragic one.

  “What about Robbie? What’s going on with that handsome fellow?”

  My face went as dead as the man’s I had just described.

  “He was with his boyfriend, wasn’t he?” she asked, semi-sympathetically. “You probably shouldn’t get too hung on him.”

  “I’m not hung up.” Lies. Besides gargoyles and hate crimes, Robbie was all I could think about.

  “Do you daydream about the day he breaks up with Nick?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Do you come up with different scenarios for your first kiss?”

  “I’m going to pour hot coffee on your lap.”

  “Will you hide your love affair from your co-workers or will you hold hands while you pass mini-cheeseburgers at wedding receptions?”

  “Really. I’m going to rip your face off.”

  “You’re not angry. You love this attention.”

  She was right. I did. If I talked about liking Robbie enough, maybe a romance would manifest itself into existence. “I know, I know!” I laughed. “I like him and I feel like a crazy person because of it!”

  We shared a laugh at my misfortune before she became awkwardly silently. The only time she got like that was when she had something to say but was afraid to say it because she knew I’d bite off her head. “What?” I asked.

  “You know I hate to pry, but one of your other friends messaged me while I was at home.”

  Suddenly I was a teenage girl. People were talking about me behind my back. They knew something…no, had opinions about me that I wasn’t aware of. More than most injustices on Earth, I hate being out of the loop about issues pertaining to Jeremy King. “Who? Asher? Dan?” I was mentally murdering them both.

  “The gay one.” She smirked. “Anyway, he said that you took quite a stumble on your way home and have been acting strangely ever since.”

  “Define strangely.”

  “Nervous, anxious, generally kind of manic. Something about throwing a pan at his head.”

  Damn him. Dan. Couldn’t a person have a slight mental break without it being shared with the world? “It was a plate. It was an accident. He crept up on me. I’m going to kill him.”

  “You’re being so violent.”

  “Hyperbole. I’m angry. Have we met?”

  “Regardless, he was just giving me a heads up in case we need to call the men in white or something.” She took a sip of coffee and kept her eyes on me. “But you’re acting perfectly normal right now. Must have just been a phase.”

  Ugh. She was patronizing me. It’s supposed to be the other way around. I’d give her this one opportunity. Only because I didn’t have the energy to do otherwise. “That’s exactly what is was. You know how I get at this time of year. It’s depressing.”

  “Exactly what I said. I know how you hate to discuss feelings so we’ll push this all from our minds. I was just doing the obligatory roommate thing by inquiring.” She knighted each of my shoulders with her Bahamas souvenir mug. “I deem you mentally sound. Now, I have to take my morning constitutional.”

  She got up and waddled to the bathroom, leaving me alone to bring my boiling rage at Dan down to a simmer. How dare he go behind my back like that! Sure it was a nice gesture to be concerned for my welfare, but my mental state is my mental state. No one else’s. I couldn’t help but be pleased with myself, just below my anger, though. To Meg, I appeared relatively fine. My being around Garth must have worked. Just as I predicted!

  “False alarm!” Meg wailed as she walked back into the room. “I just need more coffee.” She took a seat just in time for a commercial break.

  “Two bodies found crushed and hidden in a Chelsea storm sewer. Today, at noon,” said Lori Stokes, local newswoman.

  That word. Chelsea. Every time it was uttered, it lit up my mind like a flare. Hearing it attached to violence was the equivalent of a punch to the gut.

  “Dear god, that’s terrible,” Meg moaned. She took a dainty sip of coffee and toasted. “Happy New Year.”

  I needed her to shut up, stop making light of the situation, and let Lori do her job. I lunged forward to absorb the rest of the Channel 7 teaser. The last shot was of the location where the corpses were found. As I feared, it was Twenty Sixth Street—my personal ground zero. Only one person could have physically done it, and that person wasn’t a person at all. Garth.

  The blood retreated from my face. I shuttered.

  “Jer, are you okay? You look positively sickly. I didn’t mean to get you all self-conscious earlier.”

  “It’s not that. Just the thought of those men in the sewer…it’s unsettling.” Even more disturbing was the knowledge that Garth did the damage. Throwing someone into an electrified rail is one thing, but pulverizing two men into burger meat was a whole other realm of disturbing.

  “It’s not nearly as bad as when those kids lit that homeless man on fire down the street. Now that was really wild. New York is rough!”

  I finished watching the show in a haze and anxiously waited for the news to announce more details. After multiple segments about recessions and store closings, I got the dish on Garth’s victims: Someone complained to the city about a smell coming from the sewer. When an official finally checked it out, two bodies were found. They had been brutally beaten—almost pulverized, until the bodies could be stuffed through the sewer grate.

  The air had been pretty fri
gid on the evening I’d walked by the scene, which probably suppressed the smell. But, that explained the gruesome stains on the sidewalk…

  *

  I’d been instructed to walk into Central Park and find Garth in the Conservatory Gardens. That uptown portion of the park rarely sees foot traffic because tourists think that Manhattan terminates at Sixtieth Street. A few brave souls sometimes venture up to the reservoir on Ninetieth Street, but then they turn around at the first sight of a black person. The thought of Harlem turns most white people whiter—fine by me because I lived on East 102nd Street, which might as well be Afghanistan to a person from the Midwest. My Central Park was positively libraric compared to the hustle and bustle of Bethesda Terrace and The Mall. I could find solace just two avenues away, past the projects and Mt. Sinai Hospital’s varying types of eyesores/architecture. However, on one issue I still sided with the tourists: nighttime = no park.

  “Are you trying to get me killed?” I rasped, as I entered Conservatory Gardens and caught a glimpse of Garth. “Walking around in here in the middle of the night is like wearing a glow in the dark ‘rape me’ shirt.”

  “If I remember correctly, you were walking down a street in Chelsea when you were attacked. It looks like you made it here without a scratch. You might want to re-think what you consider to be dangerous,” he replied, proud of himself for being a smartass.

  I frowned. “Speaking of Chelsea, your…handiwork made the news today.”

  He just grunted.

  “You didn’t tell me that you killed those men.”

  “You did not ask.”

  I flailed a bit, raised my voice. “You didn’t have to do that, Garth. Jesus! You could have just…scared them…or pushed them around a bit.”

  “Do you think that is what they wanted to do to you?” He elevated his to a quiet boom. “Do you think they would have stopped beating you up after you were appropriately scared?”

  “I…don’t know.”

  “And you never will.” Garth paced, brooding. “Those men had dark hearts. If they had lived long lives and died natural deaths, they would still be guilty when judgment came. I just brought them there sooner and hopefully saved others from being…scared in the meantime.”

  Apparently I had a vigilante on my hands, and not just the knock ‘em, sock ‘em kind, either. I didn’t know what to think about that. My mind whirled. “Do you kill often?” I asked, in the same tone one might ask, “Are you new here?”

  “No!” he said. Then added, in a subdued timbre, “No. But if it is necessary to protect the innocent, I will.”

  I blew out a breath, forked shaking fingers through my hair, and kept my hand clutching the back of my neck.

  “Long ago, penalties were much harsher for crimes much smaller. Your modern justice system prevents that—”

  “Which is a good thing,” I said.

  “Sometimes. Criminals don’t always deserve another chance, especially ones who commit such hateful acts.”

  He had a point. But still…murder.

  He looked at me from inside his usual shadowy corner. I stood in the open, bathed the moon’s bright light. “Something about this is unsettlingly familiar, Jeremy.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I certainly didn’t have a history of relationships with statues.

  “I suppose that is part of why I have sought a friendship with you. You are reminiscent of…” He fell into silence. I was losing him in a difficult memory. “You remind me of my friends. My old friends.”

  Friends.

  Yeah, I remembered having those.

  I hadn’t seen my friends in a while. I couldn’t help but question my sanity level for sneaking off into the night to meet with the vigilante grotesque instead of doing normal things like go on dates with humans or drink gin and tonics on a friend’s couch while watching YouTube clips of Britney Spears. I’d even begun making up excuses to people about my whereabouts. Sometimes I’d say that I got cast in something and had rehearsal, then other times I pretended to have developed a smoking habit.

  “How many cigarettes did you have? You were gone for an hour,” Meg would ask. I’d tell her I took a walk or met a friend on the street. Looking back, that seems equally sketchy. Everyone must have thought I was crazy even without the part about the gargoyle.

  Garth laughed when I told him that. “Francis and I had a friend like that, one that we would sneak away to meet. We used to tell her stories like I do to you. It might be her that you remind me of.”

  I assumed that she was my quirky medieval equivalent. Maybe the local call girl who made midnight deals in stable stalls and alleyways. It turns out that I was wrong…the polar opposite, even. Their friend was another statue in town named Helena, and she was the most innocent thing for miles. She stood untouched in the middle of a pink marble fountain in the town square. Unlike the grotesques, Helena wasn’t a former soldier or another one of the King’s experiments. She was simply an enchanted statue, sharing the monsters’ affinity for moonlight. Garth and Francis stumbled upon her on one of their nights patrolling the city.

  Life as Guardians had become long and monotonous. Many began to forget the Great War, the King’s cruelty and even their former lives. All that existed was life as grotesques: sleeping during the day and standing sentinel at night. Garth and Francis worked tirelessly to hold on to their memories by sharing them with Helena. She had none of her own because she’d never really lived. Her thirst for everything human bordered on obsession. They were often sucked into hours and hours of describing the tiniest details of how snow is both wet and cold or what it felt like to have hair. As they schooled her on life they managed to feel just a little bit human.

  Over the years, Garth noticed that his friend had developed a particular fondness for Helena. Francis was somewhat of a flirt back in the village and it was nice to see those human traits begin to shine through again. Garth never developed those skills or a particular urge to prowl. He’d always been content as the sidekick. Even in the presence of such a beautiful specimen like Helena, his goblin-y appearance killed any urge to love. Francis didn’t share similar sentiments, which Garth viewed with a heavy heart, knowing his friend didn’t have a chance with something so lovely.

  Love and lust aside, they often spent evenings perched on the side of her fountain reminiscing days gone by:

  “Then there was that time you fell through the ice!” Garth laughed.

  “That was awful,” said Francis.

  “We were just walking on the ice—”

  “A bad idea to begin with.”

  “And all of the sudden he was gone. His foot fell through and sucked his whole body in with him.”

  “It was terrifying.”

  “Very scary.”

  “You laughed.”

  “Well, it was funny. Just imagine—”

  Helena wasn’t in on the joke. “The cold could have done what exactly?” she began to wonder.

  “It could have been deadly,” replied Garth.

  She gasped. “You could have died?”

  The boys briefly looked at each other. Yes, he could have. “Humans aren’t built like us. Exposure to extreme heat or cold can kill them,” Francis said.

  Helena put her hand up to find a breeze. She rubbed her fingers together. Nothing.

  “Thankfully, we were close to home,” added Garth, “We got him near a fire. He was lucky.”

  “And Garth was nice enough to wrap himself around me and keep my body warm,” Francis teased.

  “Body heat helps. And, you’re welcome for saving your life.”

  “No, no! I’m very thankful! Even if it did make me look like an effeminate.”

  “What’s that?” asked Helena.

  Francis and Garth let out a laugh. “You know, a man that…acts feminine,” Francis explained.

  “Like a woman?”

  “Yes,” he continued, and then he paused to search for an example. “Like the Prince in the palace over there.”


  “Our Prince?”

  “Yes.”

  “How so?”

  Francis regretted opening that door but he was forced to step through. “The Prince, they say, he’s…what would you call it, Garth?”

  “I’m not getting into this, Francis.”

  “Oh, come on! The Prince, well, he dresses…and acts…”

  Garth begrudgingly tried to help him. “He’s a…”

  “What would you call him?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “A deviant?” suggested Francis.

  Garth thought on it for a second and then agreed. “Yes, that sounds right. A deviant.”

  “So they say.”

  “Yes, so they say.”

  Helena was still confused. “How do you know? Have you seen the Prince?” she asked.

  The two looked back and forth, waiting for the other to speak first. “No, we haven’t,” said Garth. “Not many people have. He doesn’t go out much. From what I know, he’s quite odd.”

  For the first time, Helena looked at Garth like he was the ignorant one. “So he’s odd because he is like a woman? Does that make me odd?”

  They hurriedly backpedaled, “No, no, no. You’re supposed to be,” Francis said, tripping over words. “You’re supposed to be…womanly.”

  “I don’t think I know what that means,” she said.

  “Forget about it. It’s fine. You are just fine,” said Garth, trying to move on.

  She looked down at her perfectly carved curves and her flowing gown and wondered if that was what made her a woman. “Does that mean he loves men?” she finally asked.

  The awkwardness was suffocating. “I suppose, Helena,” said Francis, wanting to put an end to the conversation. “It doesn’t really matter.”

  “Actually, it does,” she said. “He’s being mistreated, yes?”

  Garth and Francis shook their heads.

  “And you’re laughing at him.”

  They would have turned red if they could.

  “Don’t you think that it’s wrong that he can’t be the way he is without ridicule? We should all be able to—” she was becoming upset “—act and…love any way we want. Even if it is different.” She looked at Francis for too long.