Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

by Orrin Grey

  I drop down into the hole, but I don’t touch her. She looks like she might shoot me if I did, without even knowing she was doing it.

  “What happened?” I ask instead, trying to keep my voice level while also keeping the hole in the chimney in my peripheral vision.

  “I don’t,” she says, but that’s it, then her mouth just works uselessly and no words come out.

  “It’s okay,” I say, and she shakes her head wildly, jerking her chin at the hole in the chimney.

  “It came out of there.”

  “What?” I ask, turning my gaze more fully to the hole.

  She shakes her head, like she couldn’t possibly put a name to it, and finally just says, “A monster.”

  ***

  We go back out to the cars and stand, staring up at the house. We’ve got our guns put away so that nobody driving past will call the cops on us, but they’re not far from our thoughts.

  “What was it like?” she asks, leaning on her car for support, and I know she’s talking about the exorcism. She heard about it, but not from me. She’s never asked me about it before; we’ve never really talked it over.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, truthfully. “I saw things. I know they were real, but I don’t know what they were, not really, and I can’t describe them. If I did, they wouldn’t sound like much, they wouldn’t come out right. I know that.”

  “How’d you deal with it?” she asks, and I think about the long nights when even the sleeping pills don’t help, about the fights with Maggie and about finally coming home one day and finding all her stuff gone.

  “I really didn’t,” I reply.

  She nods, chewing her lower lip. “It was big,” she finally says. “Bigger than a person. Like an ape, maybe, but it didn’t seem like it was finished. I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it or not. It seemed like a person in a bag or something, so that the shape was right, but there weren’t any details. Arms, legs, hands. No eyes. Just a mouth. A big mouth, with one big tooth like a knife right in the middle of it, nothing else.”

  She stops, and I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything. “I put two rounds in it and it went up the chimney,” she says. “Do you think... is that what a ghost is, do you think? Was that him?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what a ghost is. I don’t know anything about ghosts. But I don’t think it was him.”

  She looks down at the ground, and when she speaks it’s really soft. “I don’t think it was either.”

  ***

  We talk for a while, awkwardly, badly, about what we should do. What we’re going to do. Finally I convince her to go, that I’ll call the police, say that a client had me doing unrelated surveillance work and I saw someone going into the old house. I’ll tell them he was armed. That’ll be enough for them to send out a couple of cars. I convince her that this isn’t something we can, or should, do alone.

  She’s still in shock from whatever she saw, or I probably wouldn’t be able to convince her of any of it.

  She gets into her car and I get into mine. I pull out my cell phone and mime making the call, and she watches me through the windshield, and finally she pulls away from the curb. I watch until I can’t see her car anymore, then I click my phone shut, turn my car off, and get out.

  It’s not that I don’t think she could do what I’m going to do. She could, and maybe even better. But she shouldn’t have to. I think about all those things I thought about before, the sleepless nights and the nightmares and Maggie and all of it, and I head back into the house.

  Inside, nothing looks different. I walk around the hole in the living room floor and up to the fireplace. “I put two rounds in it and it went up the chimney.” I take a deep breath, and then I stick my arm up into the fireplace, angling my pistol and firing once, twice. Then I jump back.

  I don’t have to wait long. There’s a sound from up the chimney, a roar, then a slurping, bumping, sliding, scuffling noise, and then something comes half-falling, half-pouring out of the hearth, big and black and awful, like a sack full of wriggling tar. It pushes a stink out ahead of it, rotting weeds and hair left too long down a drain, and then it comes out mouth-first, that one huge tooth pointed straight at me like a dagger.

  I fire into the thing as it’s coming for me, and the bullets plow through it, throwing black slop at the walls, and it roars again but doesn’t stop.

  I step backward without meaning to, and there’s no floor there behind me, and I’m falling down, and the thing is coming down on me like someone throwing a stinking black tarp over me. The smell is overpowering, and when the thing touches me it leaves a cold, clammy feeling, and something else. An impression, an idea, a picture in my mind’s eye.

  I shoot past the thing this time, aiming for the photo on the wall, trying to buy some time to think. The bullet hits, punches right through the middle of the picture, erasing the doctor’s face.

  The thing makes a sound almost like a wounded dog, and it recoils back from me for a second, like it’s torn between attacking me and tending to the photo, and I take the time to scramble back to my feet.

  The thing is still stuck halfway between the floorboards and the ground, indecisive, and when it sees me moving it lets out a wheezing shriek and rushes toward me. It comes at me with that tusk in its mouth, and instead of shooting I drop my gun and grab the tooth with both hands, stopping it from jabbing into my neck and twisting, jerking, tearing it out of the black mass. There’s another horrible smell, worse than before, and then the thing shrinks up on itself like plastic cooking in a fire, and what drops from my hand is a normal human tooth.

  I stand there for a breath, then another. I look down at the tooth where it lays in the dirt, and I notice that it seems like it’s wriggling, rocking back and forth, trying to bury itself like a seed. I choke, and I want to leave, to run, but instead I drop down into the space under the floorboards and pick the tooth up with the fabric of my sleeve and drop it into my pocket.

  ***

  And that’s it. Or nearly it. I go back out to my car and call the police and tell them more or less what I told Jenny I would. I don’t bother to claim that I saw someone going in, and I don’t bother to say that he was armed. Just that I saw movement in the house, and maybe they should check it out.

  The officers they send find the bodies of the two missing kids stuffed up the chimney. There’s an investigation, of course, there has to be, and nothing I could possibly tell them would change that, so I don’t tell them much of anything.

  The only person I tell anything to is Jenny. I tell her that I’m sorry, and then I tell her what happened, and what I think happened. I tell her about what I saw when that thing touched me: Dr. Kinter, struggling with the police. A sharp blow across his mouth and a tooth knocked free of its moorings and spat into the fireplace.

  She asks me if I think he did it on purpose, if he meant for the tooth to turn into that thing, and I tell her that I don’t know. Maybe it was that, a last spell, or maybe something of his spirit still inhabited the tooth, or maybe it was something else entirely, something that we don’t and can’t and won’t ever understand.

  I tell her that I threw the tooth into the river, but I didn’t. I thought about it, but then I imagined that thing crawling up from somewhere downstream, and instead I just dropped the tooth into a glass bottle, put the cork in really tight, and left it on my mantel.

  There it sits, just a harmless tooth. I don’t think it’ll ever be anything else again. I don’t think it would ever climb out if I did throw it in the river. Whatever made it into that thing, whatever gave it that terrible impetus, I think it was at least partly the fault of that house, and I can’t help but wonder what would happen if you dug up the rest of Dr. Kinter’s bones and dragged them back there.

  Author’s Notes:

  There’s a funny story that goes along with this one: It was originally called “The Tooth,” and it was supposed to go into my first collection, Never Bet the Devil & Oth
er Warnings. Just before it went to print, though, another author, who also happened to have a collection coming out with the same publisher at the same time, released a comic book called The Tooth that was about—believe it or not—a wizard’s tooth that turned into a monster. Obviously, neither of us was familiar with the other’s story, but it was too close for my publisher’s comfort, and so “The Tooth” was pulled from the collection, and renamed “Remains” just for good measure. (I think it’s a better title anyway, so I kept it.)

  It later made an appearance in the special “lost” thirteenth issue of Strange Aeons that was available as a backer reward for the 2014 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival Kickstarter, but has otherwise remained out of print.

  The idea of using a previous supernatural experience to make a character better able to deal with their current predicament is one I really like, and I’ve toyed with it before. I think I first saw it done in Clive Barker’s “The Last Illusion,” which obviously informed my deployment of it here.

  The Labyrinth of Sleep

  Beyond the wall, the first moon has already risen. Kendrick stands still for a while, getting used to the changes to air, to gravity. He can still taste the last bitter dregs of the cigarette he stubbed out just before hooking up to the machine, can still smell the antiseptic tinge of the room he’s left behind, as a breeze perfumed by distant and unnamed glades carries it away.

  Down below him, at the bottom of the hill, is a forest of tall white trees, and beyond that the beginning of the Labyrinth. He’s been here before, maybe not right here, but near enough. He’s seen this moon before, stood under its light. He’s been in that forest, even if maybe some other part of it. He’s seen the split-headed giants that live there, the doors that they build in the ground, the men with cloven hooves and the heads of dogs, the black shapes that occasionally flit in front of the moon. All of this is familiar to him, but something about the night, this night, feels different. A smell in the air, like the ozone smell before a storm. Something.

  Maybe it’s because this trip is different. Not some hapless dreamer he’s riding in this time but another rider, another professional. McCabe, lying in a drugged coma in his hotel room. McCabe, a few milligrams of noxitol short of dead, lying there on his bed, hooked up to monitors and IVs and to the machine. McCabe, waiting somewhere in the Labyrinth for Kendrick to come in and find him, to learn why he’d gone to the needle instead of his oldest friend.

  The company is paying for the hotel room now, for the monitors, and paying Kendrick double his usual rate, but this one he’d do for free. He has to know what happened, what changed. Or, the worse answer, if nothing has, if this was always what waited at the end of McCabe’s street and he’s just been blind to it until now.

  One way or the other, he has to know, and so he starts down the hill, toward the Labyrinth.

  ***

  It probably started with the drugs, the new kinds of sleep aids to help a world full of light and motion find the time to dream. But it was the machine that ultimately did the job, that brought the wall of sleep crashing down. And what we found on the other side wasn’t what we had expected, not at all. Not a changing jungle of Freudian symbols, not personal, not subjective. An actual place, the Labyrinth and the lands that surrounded it.

  It took the machine to find it. The dreamers themselves never remembered somehow that they all went to the same place. On their trips back to consciousness the details of the dream world were lost, their minds replacing them with the minutiae of their memories and their own imaginations, the things that they remembered as their dreams. Always keyed to events in the Labyrinth, but never identical to it.

  The machine was the silver key. With it, another person, a rider, could piggyback in on the dreamer’s trip to that secret world. Not asleep, not really, and therefore not subject to the forgetfulness that true dreaming entailed.

  It became a fad, a drug, an industry. In the waking world, there were dream parlors in every mall, where you could hook into someone’s sleeping mind and take a ride to the Labyrinth. But most people were nothing more than tourists in the dreamlands, children stumbling along the turns of the Labyrinth. Kendrick and McCabe, they were professionals.

  Or they had been, before McCabe tried to make himself sleep forever.

  ***

  The walls of the Labyrinth are always black. Basalt, or something that can pass for it, the dreamland equivalent. They always rise up too high to scale, too high to jump. Once you’re in the Labyrinth, you’re in it, submerged, blind to anything except the next corner, and then the next.

  Countless efforts have been made to map it. Kendrick has never known a professional who didn’t have at least one in-progress map tacked up somewhere. But no one has ever managed. You can’t see the Labyrinth from anywhere except the top of the hill, near the wall, and from there it all looks the same, and once you’re in it, well…

  There are landmarks. Some have been seen by more than one person. He and McCabe had compared their lists late one night. They’d both seen the fountain choked with moss. They’d both seen the doorway in the middle of the courtyard, the ground on the other side of it darker than on this side, but neither of them had been brave or stupid enough to step through. Kendrick had once seen a river, miles down, that cut a roaring chasm through the midst of the Labyrinth. McCabe claimed to have found a building that looked like an abandoned mosque, with no one inside but an altar set in the back with some kind of mummy in an alcove behind it, one he couldn’t quite make out without getting closer than he suddenly found himself wanting to.

  Some people say that the Labyrinth changes, and certainly Kendrick has never known two pros whose maps ever really lined up. Most people have an opinion on the subject, once they’ve put a few beers in themselves at the end of the day, but Kendrick never really thought about it before. To him, the Labyrinth was what it was. It was always there, on the other side of the wall, and it was always the same, really. Even if the paths changed, its nature never did, and that was enough for him.

  ***

  He stands at one of the gates to the Labyrinth. All the gates he’s ever seen looked identical. No horn or ivory, just unadorned clefts in the sides of the Labyrinth. Others have tried to mark them, he knows, but the markings were always gone when they came back. Either that, or no one has ever gone to the same gate twice.

  It should be impossible, what he’s doing. Going into a place that can’t be mapped, to find someone who’s been lost there already. It should be, but it never is. Something’s different about the dreamers, maybe, or about the pros. Something in how they approach the Labyrinth, or in how it approaches them, but he’s never gone in after a dreamer, never once, and not found them.

  It isn’t by any conscious art that he does it, though, at the same time, he knows it’s not something everyone can do. He walks the Labyrinth as blind as if he were a dreamer himself. No one really knows how the professionals do it, the dream hounds, the oneiroi, as some in the industry have tried to dub them, though the name never stuck. Kendrick has his theories, all the pros do. To him, it’s all in the thinking. Dreamers don’t think while they’re in the Labyrinth, not really. They can’t. They’re caught up in the black, forgetful rivers of sleep. But the riders, those who follow them in, can think, and, by thinking, by keeping their minds on their quarry, they can track them down. Whether that’s by changing the turnings of the Labyrinth itself, or simply by knowing which way to turn their own steps, Kendrick doesn’t know, and has never bothered to care.

  Though time has no meaning here, still he knows that this is the longest he’s ever been under. Out of the corners of his eyes, he sees what might be landmarks down curving paths, but already his feet are carrying him in another direction. He wonders how much time has passed out there in the waking world. It could be hours, minutes, days. They were prepared before he went under. IVs to feed and hydrate him, so that he could stay down no matter how long it took.

  How long will they let him stay? How l
ong before they pull the plug, before they decide that this errand is costing more than it’s worth? He wills himself to hurry.

  There are things that live in the Labyrinth. He’s always known it. Not the giants or the dog-headed men or any of the other things that live outside. These are different, he knows, even though he’s never seen them. He hears them sometimes, their hopping, shuffling gait just on the other side of a wall, just a few turns away. Sometimes in the waking world he tries to picture them, to imagine them as he goes about his day. He always sees them as pale, eyeless things, adapted to a life lived deep underground, though, of course, the Labyrinth is always open to the perpetual twilight of the dreamlands’ sky.

  When he’s here, in the Labyrinth, he tries not to think of them at all, because he believes that thinking here has power. Even now, as he hears them behind him, he tries to think only of putting the next foot in front of him, then the next. Of going faster, not of why. Even when they sound like they are right behind him, just around the next turn, not even that far. That if he turned his head he would see them, see them at last as they are and not as he imagines. Even then he keeps his eyes forward, keeps his thoughts only on McCabe, McCabe, McCabe.

  And then he turns a corner and he’s somewhere he’s never been before. Normally in the Labyrinth he can’t say that, not with certainty. Most of it looks the same, excepting the occasional landmarks. But this is something else entirely. More than a landmark. This is the landmark. He knows it without even having to look around, knows even before his mind has processed what he’s seen, knows with the faultless logic that is sometimes the province of the dreamlands, that this is the center of the Labyrinth.