The perfect party, seen from the outside. Joy and laughter, caught in a bottle.
I went back downstairs, and moved among the guests like a ghost at the feast. Staring into one frozen face after another. Until finally I found Julia. Embracing a man I didn’t know. She’d been here ten years, holding him close, the two of them lost in each other’s eyes.
I’d already worked out what was happening. The house wasn’t a prison, and none of these people were trapped here. They’d done this to themselves. Stopped the passing of Time at a moment of their choosing, when they were at their happiest, so they could enjoy it forever. Heaven is a place on earth. But none of that mattered to me. I hadn’t come to this house to solve a mystery, I was there to steal one of the guests. I looked at Julia for a long moment. Tall and slender, raven-haired and heart-stoppingly lovely, just as I remembered her. I’d changed, but she hadn’t. All the years I’d spent filling my life with things I didn’t care about, because I couldn’t have the one person I did care about… she’d spent here, in the arms of a tall dark stranger. Did I have the right to destroy a moment of such perfect happiness?
Of course I did. That was what I was being paid to do. I specialised in taking away the things that other people cared about. And it wasn’t as though Julia had given a damn about the happiness she took with her when she walked out on me.
I put a hand on her arm; and then stumbled backwards as she turned her head to look at me. Still smiling. I hadn’t done anything to free her; something had changed, in the house. I could feel it. Time was no longer still. Julia let go of her perfect man, and turned to face me. He turned to smile at me as well. People all around stopping drinking and dancing and laughing, and moved to surround me, cutting me off.
“Hello, Andrew,” said Julia. “We’ve been waiting for you. Oh look at you; you got old.”
“You look just the same,” I said numbly. I nodded to the man she’d been embracing so closely just a moment before. “Who’s he?”
“This is Peter. Isn’t he lovely? He makes me happy. Unlike you.”
“We were happy,” I said.
“We were always arguing. That’s what drove me away. You never really cared for me. Only for what you wanted me to be.”
“I came here to save you!”
“No you didn’t,” said Julia. “You came here to steal me. Like all the other things you wanted, but couldn’t get honestly. You’re here because Daddy sent you. Just like he sent all the others, down the years. Because he wants me to be happy. Because he’d do anything for his daughter.” She laughed softly. “Did he tell you I was trapped, and needed rescuing? I’m not the maiden in distress, sweetie; I’m the wolf in Granny’s clothing. I’m the bait in the trap.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“No. You never did; that was the problem. You never listened to me before; but you will now. This house stopped Time for all of us, so we could be happy forever. Cut free from the tyranny of Time’s progress, living constantly in the moment and savouring it. But that takes its toll on the house; so it must be fed. A living sacrifice, once a year. The destruction of one man’s happiness, so we can continue to enjoy ours. I’m glad Daddy finally found you. I wouldn’t be here, if it hadn’t been for you.”
“You loved me,” I said. “I know you did. Let me take you out of here. You could learn to love me again.”
“Love? Why should I want the complications of love, when I can be happy here with Peter, forever and ever?”
I looked desperately around me, and the party guests smiled back. People will do anything in pursuit of happiness. They put back their heads and cried out all at once, and the house answered them. A huge overpowering sound filled the room, like some great mechanism slowing down and grinding to a halt, as the house took all the years of my life, and all the years I might have had. Eating them up, like the predator it was. So Time could stop in the house again, for another year. The guests went back to what they’d been doing, and froze into place. And everyone was happy.
* * *
I’ve been here ever since. Just a bodiless presence, drifting from room to room. A ghost at the feast. Watching everyone else be happy. I don’t know where they found the house, or if it found them. Perhaps one predator can always sense another. Julia was right. I know that now. This was all my fault. Because I stole her heart instead of winning it, and tried to keep it for myself. Now my life has been stolen from me, so everyone else can be happy forever.
I try to be happy for Julia. It’s all I’ve got.
THE SOCIETY OF THE MONSTERHOOD
by
PAUL TREMBLAY
AN EXPLANATION FOR THE READER
You do not speak the languages of our city, certainly not of our neighborhood. You don’t because you don’t want to. You are as purposefully deaf as you are blind and have been so for so long no one remembers it being any different. This isn’t that kind of story.
Nah, fuck that, every story is that kind of story. I want you to know that we know. You may have difficulty understanding the actions of The Society of the Monsterhood, and those difficulties are all yours.
THEY USED TO BE THE NOT-SO-FANTASTIC FOUR
They are our neighbors. They live in the same tenement buildings stacked and leaning against each other like the empty pizza boxes all piled up in that Greek place on Norton Street. They are four of our children; three girls, one boy. Every school-day morning a little white van, a lame school crest with some bullshit Latin motto stenciled on the side in red and black, tiptoes in and picks them up at the corner of North Prospect and Downey. 5:30 AM; too late for trouble, too early for everyone else. When the van picks them up, the sky is dark and metal grates are still pulled down over our storefronts like drawbridges on castles. Like those shoppes with their radioactive orange chips, shit-filled spongey-ass snack cakes, corn syrup sodas, and the cheap (capital chee) beer and wine in boxes (a fine vintage for boxing) are our treasures, our lost arks of the covenant.
Look at them in their school uniforms; the girls in blue and green plaid skirts, regimented hems at the kneecaps, blue socks covering up the rest of their legs, white button-down shirts, blue blazers; the boy in too-skinny khaki pants graffitied with stray pencil slashes, the same blue blazer, green tie fastidiously tied, dark hair plastered to his forehead. The van drops them back at the same corner at 6 PM normally, sometimes as late as 8 PM if they are participating in extracurriculars, which they call their “dontwantas,” as in their don’t-want-to-come-homes. Two of them play sports (even if they aren’t very good at them) and one of them is in the drama club (fucking drama club, right?) and the fourth doesn’t do anything but read. They are now two months into their freshman year at their K through 12 private school with a tuition more than most of us take home in one year. They won the life-lottery back in fifth grade and go to Our Lady of the Saint Suburb Day School for free. Some of us are happy for them and support them and we are in their ears reminding them of the opportunity they’re being given, to not blow it, to not let what everyone (both at their school and here back home) calls them, says to them, does to them, keep them from graduating and getting the hot fuck out of here. Some of us think that hand-picking four kids and only four kids from the neighborhood is bullshit, a slap in the already battered face, a reminder of the exclusion practiced on us unwashed masses every day. Some of us take it out on those four kids. It’s not fair and we’re not proud of it, but it’s something we have to do, are moved to do, as though there is no other way. Kids their age, and the younger ones too, and yeah, the older teens, the dropouts, and sure, the adults who hate them for having the chance they never had, we all make it hard for them. We treat them like traitors; the worst kind of enemy. We say the worst things to them. We sabotage. We punch and kick and steal and cut up their shit.
When they started seventh grade they called themselves the Not-So-Fantastic Four, (one of them reads comics—typical, yeah?) a lame-ass lifeline of self-deprecation that didn’t do shit for t
hem. If anything, that bogus nickname made things worse for them, made it sound like they thought they were separate from us, not of us, that they were better than us and they deserved their free education and by proxy, none of us deserved it but them four. So yeah, that nickname thing didn’t work out so well for them.
And then they changed their name this year, freshman year. Everything changed this year.
WHAT THEY TOLD US
Early September, and the four of them were starting to look not like shitty-ass kids but gangly, meta-morphin’ teenagers; and like all teens they were bigger, louder, stronger, smarter and stupider at the same time, and more dangerous. But how dangerous can you be in that Catholic school uniform, yeah? Still they were now old enough, and more importantly, big enough (attitude, street smarts only get one so far; size matters in these situations) to take out their frustrations on the younger kids who’d follow them around and taunt them (no need to recount exactly what was said; we all heard it when they said it and only some of us would try and make them stop saying it).
The four of them told those little kids (and their not-so-little insults) that they had a new name and no one was going to fuck with them anymore. Then they told those kids they had a new name because they found a monster. They said that on their first day of high school they were waiting for the van in the morning and it was late and the empty 9 bus came blasting through the square and one of them, the tall one, the one who will be beautiful someday to someone, saw it hanging off the rear of the bus, curled up and around the bumper. When the 9 turned the corner that thing fell off and rolled across the street and into the side of the Brazilian market, denting the brick wall. (There is a dent in the wall, down at its base, close to where brick meets sidewalk. No one else knows why that dent is there; or no one else can prove they know why. We check it every day.) One of them said it was a like a giant sloth with arms long as fire hoses. One of them said it had spaghetti-long white hair, like some inner-city Yeti, but that wasn’t quite right and didn’t explain how it moved like it was made of something other than thick bones. One of them said its fur wasn’t really fur and looked more like filaments, tendrils, thin tentacles that were alive and could move and pick up anything it wanted, and she said it wasn’t white either; dingy, dirty, slightly changing color to match the sidewalk. The four of them weren’t scared so they went to it, and it was just lying there making noises none of them could really describe (though each tried describing and it made less sense than their group attempt at physical description) and without saying a word to each other they helped it up, and when it stood, it was massive, taller than the market, which put it over ten feet. You know, they weren’t ever clear on whether or not they actually touched it; they said “helped it up” but didn’t detail how they helped it, and they never said what touching it felt like, not from a lack of our asking. Anyway, they directed the fucking thing into that little u-shaped, dead-end alley behind the market and Mr. Chef’s and the Dollar Store with dumpsters and trash bags and tied-up corrugated boxes that never get recycled and rats the size of dogs. They said they built it a nest, a home, and they visit it each morning before school to make sure it’s okay and they can talk to it without having to talk and one of them always sneaks out at night too, to make sure it’s okay, keep it company, feed it. They said if anyone gives them anymore shit about going to school where they go to school, they’ll feed their asses to the monster.
And they said they had a new name; they’re The Society of the Monsterhood now, which is a dumb-ass name, yeah. Drama geek came up with it. One of them said (as an afterthought, because the story was more weird than threatening at this point) the monster was big, mean, and always hungry.
K.G.: WHAT WE KNOW AND DON’T KNOW HAPPENED TO HIM
K. G. was a big-ass fifteen-year-old, mustache and muscles and attitude. He went to school two, maybe three days a week. He wasn’t all that coordinated but he was strong, could take a punch and then give more than he got. The kids said his temper wasn’t a temper, it was who he was. He also liked to sing to himself when he didn’t think anyone was paying attention to him. He wasn’t a very good singer. His dad worked third shift at the electrical plant and while I don’t like saying ill of the ill, his mom didn’t come home sometimes. A lot of times. K. G. didn’t come home all the time either, which was why when he went missing, no one thought it was a big deal for a day or two. Or three.
We know that he called big-time bullshit on the Society’s monster story when his little brother came home crying with it, or a version of it. None of us really believed the Society’s story and we ignored it. If we didn’t ignore it, it was more like we were waiting to see what the repercussions of the story and new group name would be. K. G. was such a repercussion. The morning after the unveiling of the Society, K. G. didn’t go to school and he sat at the corner all afternoon and into the early evening, waiting for the white school van to drop the Society off, which it did eventually, and like a sigh of exhaustion. Those four got off with their heads down, not looking at anyone or anything, like playing hide-and-seek with a baby, like if they didn’t look then you couldn’t see them. How could we not see them? We always saw them.
K. G. didn’t even wait for them to get off the van. He started yelling and threatening and he punched the van in its side before it pulled out into traffic. He dented a panel, swear to God. There is a dent in the panel and it looks like the dent in a soda can and the dent in the Brazilian market. We don’t know if there’s some sort of coincidence or connection there, like there’s a special power to the Society’s story, like the act of telling it makes things fit, but after, we always talked about K. G. denting the van first like this was where it really started, that the dent was where the monster came from. The van limped away and the rest of us were either laughing or shaking our heads as K. G. yelled at the Society some more and knocked book bags off their shoulders and kicked their feet into each other as they tried to ignore him and walk away, and then he had his thick arm around the boy (who had gotten bigger, but not K. G. big, not even close), squeezing him tight, sneaking in quick gut punches and one oops-my-fault-didn’t-mean-it-but-I-did-mean-it head butt. That abuse, it all happened in the short trip from the corner past the dented market to the alley. They stopped at the alley, stood there like acolytes, and stared into it. We don’t know if K. G. saw anything. He didn’t say. The Society told him to meet them there, same spot, later that night. They told him to come alone. Maybe because he saw it, saw something, sensed something, or maybe it was such a fucked-up weird unexpected request that sounded like a threat (he had to be thinking did the four of them think they could jump me in the alley and take me?) so he must not have known what to do or say right then because K. G. only said, “All right,” and he let them walk away while he still stood there in front of the alley and not in it.
Some of us saw K. G. walk home after that and some of us saw him milling around the streets. Some of us saw him with friends getting a burrito at the Taqueria and some of us saw him by himself stalking the corner at the Brazilian market that night. I saw him feeling that dent in the wall. I did. No one saw him go into the alley. No one saw him come out. No one from our neighborhood has seen him since. Sure, there are some of us who say that he got in trouble and couldn’t get out (so many different kinds of trouble to choose from, you know?) or that he ran away because so many of our teens and kids run away or go missing (monsters or no monsters). Some of us say he’s living in another part of the city with his cousins. There’s almost anything that could’ve happened to him.
This is what we know: No one has seen him.
WHAT THEY SAID HAPPENED TO K.G.
The Society said that they didn’t do anything. They only met him in the alley that night and watched him with the monster. They said that K. G. walked over to the monster of his own accord (their own words) and he kept saying, “What is it?” and first he got close but not too close; he didn’t want to touch it, make contact. If he wasn’t full-on afraid, to
his credit, he had the proper sense of awe. Then he started acting tough, saying it was nothing but a sick dog, or a couple of sick dogs, and he pushed all the kids away from him. The drama geek bounced off the back wall of Mr. Chef and she later showed us a scab on the back of her head from the bouncing. The Society said it was all over once he did that and there was nothing they could do to protect him, save him. There was no turning back. They said he had his chance. The monster filled the alley and grabbed K. G. with two monster hands at the end of two monster arms and it pulled him into its mouth. Its mouth was open wider than a freeway and took up more than half its body, then its whole body; it became all mouth. And teeth. There were teeth, they said. Big, jagged triangles that dripped saliva and digestive juices. They told everyone that the monster ate K. G., and that the eating wasn’t clean, wasn’t a sit-down restaurant eating. It was messy. It tore him apart, literally. Biting and pulling him into twitching, quivering pieces. They said it was the worst thing you could ever see. The Society said they were forced to read Beowulf at school and what happened to K. G. was way worse than what Grendel ever did. They said they named their monster Grendel too, and the alley was now Grendel’s Den, (too-smart-for-their-own-good assholes always naming everything, right?). The Society said they don’t want to see it do what it did to K. G. ever again, so please do not pick on us anymore.
WHAT WE FOUND
Nothing.
After K. G. was missing for a fourth day, a whole bunch of us went into the alley and couldn’t find anything other than what was supposed to be in an alley. No evidence of a nest, never mind a Grendel’s Den. No signs of a great struggle. Certainly no blood or spit-up bones and clothes and sneakers, no ooze or ick that would be expected leave-behinds from a ravenous monster. And no monster. It was an alley damp with garbage and stink, and it rumbled and echoed with the buses, trucks, and cars that needed new mufflers. Just an alley, right? But it wasn’t just an alley. Something had happened there. We could sense it. There was the unease of the aftermath, aftereffects, afterimages of violence. It’s like a presence and the lack of a presence at the same time; the feeling you get when you stare at a broken window, you know? We had that feeling and that’s all we had, and we argued about it and then we got angry because, come on now, the monster was bullshit.
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