The Monster's Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

by Ed. Christopher Golden

  He was almost too late. When he heard movement behind him he whirled, aware of a dim, reddish glow that wholly human eyes would never have registered. The bathroom door hung open, and from beyond it came the sound of something sliding across a slick surface.

  Padding silently on bare feet he slipped around the door frame, and kept to the wall as he felt his way around the circumference of the room. His camera hung with the rest of his tools. With one motion he turned, stepped forward, and brought it to his eyes. Only then did he look at what it was he had created.

  It dragged itself slowly along, tiny child arms waggling, grasping with bony fingers at the place he had been. Seams of black thread joined and divided an endless expanse of puckered flesh, opening and closing like a thousand tiny mouths. Ends of bone poked out like porcupine quills. Eyes like white-fisted tumors bulged and rolled under skin stretched tight as a bruise. A snail’s trail of dark fluid marked its path from the metal stage to the floor.

  A demon’s first steps. Laughter was Ian’s first thought; this thing, searching blindly for him, its creator, whatever purpose that drove it held deep inside its bloated depths and hidden from view. What would it do if it found him? Was this patricide? Or would it welcome him with open arms?

  His second thought was less defined. As the creature turned and sought him with some blind sense and a voice like a thousand shrieks filled his head, he centered the frame and pushed the trigger. White light painted the room like a flare. The shrieks reached a sudden raging crescendo as the newborn demon disappeared, and he had the fleeting sense of a forest of waving limbs, frozen in time. For a moment the doorway opened itself to him as through the camera’s window he glimpsed an army of impossible creatures writhing like a mound of earthworms within a tightfisted cavern of dripping stone. Then he remembered nothing, aware only of a strange feeling of loss, his own voice repeating the same phrase over and over like the words to a forgotten ritual in the sudden silence of the loft.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t know.

  Fowler waited for him in their regular booth. He looked up as Ian approached, and this time he could not hide the hunger in his eyes.

  “Jesus, you take your goddamned time,” Fowler said. His voice buzzed like a radio losing its signal. Or was it something more? The sound of a man slipping between the cracks?

  “Sorry. It won’t happen again, believe me.”

  Fowler seemed appeased by Ian’s attitude. But he paused when the leather portfolio slid across the moistened table, something in Ian’s own eyes making him uncertain. He sensed a change here, a new confidence and strength that made him curious. Then the hunger seemed to overwhelm everything else. Fowler’s fingers touched the fold, opened it. “Wait,” Ian said. “I don’t want you to look at them yet.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Trust me on this. Take the portfolio and bring it back to me later. You’ll want to be alone.”

  Fowler’s chubby hand shot out and grabbed Ian’s forearm. The grip held a little bit of desperation in it. Fowler’s fingers tightened, digging. “Ever see what the Taratcha do to a man? They’re not happy with killing you. They want you to live with the pain.”

  Ian resisted the overpowering urge to shrug off the touch the way you might shrug off a bug. “I get it.”

  “If you’re planning to cut out on me, think again. One word from me and you’re gone. Anybody you love, gone. Get that?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “You know, I didn’t take to your new look at first. But I gotta tell you, it’s an acquired taste. Keep your chin up, as they say.”

  Ian remained at the table for a long time after Fowler had gone. He did not touch the thick envelope that had been left for him. He ordered a drink, then another, gathering his courage.

  The feeling of loss had remained with him for the rest of that night and into the morning. He had seen something in the thing, as gruesome as it was. Some spark of recognition, some kind of empathy.

  The Art was the only thing he had ever truly been good at, and yet a part of him had always been ashamed. In his younger years he had frequently been asked where the darker sides of his talent came from, and when he tried in vain to answer he would often be faced with a look of pity or even guarded mistrust. What are you hiding, they seemed to be saying. His only reply was that he did not know.

  The dim light in the bar hurt his eyes. Ian walked to the empty bathroom, hit the switch, and stood in the dark, bent over the sink and holding the cool porcelain with both hands. Finally he looked up. The mirror over the sink revealed a face that burned with its own light. He looked inward through his mind’s eye and saw a sea of writhing shapes, breeding and dividing. He imagined Fowler’s trembling fingers as they slipped open the leather flap, drew out the photographs, brought them close to his face: one photo, in particular, that had trapped his newborn son.

  If you are able to photograph one, it will remain caught on film, Frost had said, until such time as you choose to look at the prints. They can get very angry at a trick like that. He imagined the explosion of flesh as his offspring, his spawn, did the work it had been born to do, erupting from the photograph and turning its rage upon Fowler, whose death would give Ian at least a chance to start anew.

  His thoughts returned to Anna, and what she had said to him the last time they had spoken. You let me know if you ever decide to let me in. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and switched it on. He didn’t know if he could survive when these two worlds collided, but he had to stop hiding. It was time to find out whether his two loves could coexist.

  It took only a moment for Anna to answer.

  SIREN SONG

  A KATE SHUGAK SHORT STORY

  by Dana Stabenow

  … the Sirens, who enchant all who come near them.

  —The Odyssey, HOMER

  5.

  THE WITNESS TESTIFIED in a calm, level voice, responding fully to the defense attorney’s questions but making deliberate, unhurried eye contact with the jury. Each jury member would meet her eyes briefly and then swivel their heads to look at the three defendants. The woman in the witness chair could have been any one of them, twenty years on.

  The defendants were Pauline, Laura, and Linda Akulurak, ages sixteen, fifteen, and twelve, respectively. They were on trial for murder in the first degree, for the killing of their pimp, Dupré Thomas Jefferson, age twenty-eight, aka Da Prez, aka John Smith a time or two. He’d had a record going back to the age of nine, beginning in grade school in Los Angeles and migrating up the west coast of North America with him through Portland and Seattle and, lastly, Anchorage. He’d been tall and handsome, with a good deal of charm he had put to use in running a stable of prostitutes.

  Jefferson dead was not quite as handsome as Jefferson alive, as the bullet that had taken his life had entered the back of his head at close range and had blown off the top of his skull. He had been asleep in his own bed at the time. The murder weapon was a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson, found next to the body with one round fired. The method had the hallmarks of a gang hit, but the prints of all three defendants had been found on the weapon, along with the prints of the deceased. The defendants’ hands had been tested for gunshot residue, with inconclusive results.

  The prosecution had rested the day before with an air of relief. The defense had recalled the investigating officer that morning, extracting without difficulty more evidence over time of many of Jefferson’s—the defense here coughed deprecatingly—family in the house at McKinley and Alder, as well as evidence of many more sets of smudged and partial prints not belonging to the defendants on the weapon. By the time the defense had excused the officer, opportunity had been extended to fifteen people, or more, if you included Da Prez’s friends, which were few, rivals, which were many, and enemies, which were legion.

  The defendants followed the officer to the stand. Pauline, the eldest, was a knockout, smooth brown skin over high flat cheekbones, tilted almond eyes a deep, velvety brown, thick black hai
r that hung to her waist in a smooth, shining cape. She wore a dark blue shirtwaist dress with a button-down collar and long sleeves, sheer stockings, black flats, small gold hoop earrings, and the merest touch of mascara. The jury, nine of them men, watched the top button of her dress with unblinking fascination.

  Laura, the middle child, wore a sequined jean jacket over a Justin Bieber T-shirt, a short pink skirt, black-and-white striped tights reminiscent of the Cat in the Hat, and yellow patent leather wedges with four-inch cork heels. Her black hair, as long and lustrous as her older sister’s, was caught up in a ponytail at the side of her head with a large powder blue plastic flower on the clasp, and she wore hot pink glitter polish on her fingernails. This time, the nine men on the jury wore indulgent smiles. For that matter, so did the three women.

  Linda, the baby, favored J. Crew, a polar bear tee over cargo pants and a pair of hot pink canvas high-tops with hot pink lights in the heels that blinked hotly and pinkly with every step. Her hair, as thick and as black as her sisters’, was cut in a Dutch boy, with a line of bangs falling into her eyes. A Barbie doll dressed to match was clutched in one arm. This time, all twelve members of the jury looked angry, and they weren’t alone. The rumble of sympathetic outrage from the packed courtroom had the judge raising his gavel to a menacing angle until it subsided.

  Pauline’s testimony was unemotional, factual, almost dry, but by now everyone knew how many times she had told their story, and if anything the lack of feeling engendered more pity rather than less. When the defense attorney asked her why she and her sisters had run away to Anchorage, she told him, sparing no detail of the sexual abuse visited on all three of them by their stepfather. When the defense attorney asked her why they had turned to prostitution, she said, “Why should we give it away for free? We had enough of that at home.” When the defense attorney asked her if she or her sisters had killed Da Prez, she said, “He was nice to us. We were warm and dry, and we had clean clothes. He watched out for us. Why would we kill him?”

  Laura tossed her ponytail a lot. When the defense attorney asked her if she’d killed Da Prez, she said in what looked like honest indignation, “No! He was nice to us. He took us to the movies.” Tears welled up in the big brown eyes she turned on the judge. “You’re not going to let them send us back to him, are you?” The judge very nearly betrayed himself by putting out a comforting hand, and pulled it back just in time.

  Linda spoke steadfastly to her Barbie doll. When the defense attorney asked her in the gentlest possible voice why she and her sisters had moved in with Jefferson, she said simply, “We were hungry. And it was cold outside.” When asked if she or her sisters had shot him, she only shook her head, her little girl hands smoothing Barbie’s blond curls.

  The last witness for the defense was the woman testifying now, a Native Alaskan like the defendants, and from their own place, an enormous wilderness north and east of Anchorage, a place of isolated villages, few roads, and a population vastly outnumbered by the resident wildlife. Yes, she knew the girls’ family. Yes, she knew the girls’ parents. She told of the girls’ father, drowned while fishing in Alaganik Bay six years before, and of their mother, dead in childbirth three years before. Yes, she knew the girls’ stepfather, in whose custody the three girls had spent the two and a half years prior to running away, and related a litany of offenses in a list longer than the Domesday Book. When asked why such a person remained in charge of minor children, she made such an obvious effort not to cast an accusing look at the judge that everyone looked at him anyway. His expression was not reminiscent of pride in his profession.

  The jury wasn’t out for fifteen minutes, and they came back in with a unanimous verdict of not guilty. The courtroom burst into applause. A smile spread across the judge’s face. He didn’t bother gaveling them into silence.

  DFYS swept down onto the girls and enfolded them in a warm, bureaucratic embrace. The press snapped photos and updated their blogs on their smartphones. The president of a local bank posed with the girls and a very large check, which represented the donations of thousands of Alaskans, alerted to the plight of the orphans by continuous and excruciatingly detailed news coverage, including graphic details, sociological commentary, and many heartwarming photographs of the girls in their new foster home with loving and thoroughly vetted foster parents, in their new schools, and guest-judging the largest cabbage at the last Alaska State Fair.

  Unnoticed, their character witness slid through the crowd to the door, where a husky-wolf mix with ears big enough to cast their own Bat-Signal waited. Next to the dog was the prosecuting attorney.

  The closing doors dimmed but did not obliterate the joyous noise inside the courtroom.

  “Well, Kate?” said the big man with the red hair and the food-spotted tie.

  “Well what, Brendan?” she said.

  He looked at the double doors that led into the courtroom. “Justice done?”

  For a man who had just lost a major trial in the first segment of every television news show that evening, he looked remarkably pleased with himself.

  4.

  “WHAT A CIRCUS,” Kate said. It was difficult to make herself heard over the din. “Who leaked?”

  “I don’t know,” Brendan said, his face grim. He led the way through the horde of journalists, Kate following in his wake, speaking no further word until they were safe behind the door of his office. They sat and regarded each other glumly. “We’ll have to try them now,” he said.

  Kate could not hide her dismay. “Even the twelve-year-old?”

  “Come on, Kate. Maybe even especially the twelve-year-old. The NRA has everyone in Juneau by the balls, and you know their tagline as well as I do. Guns don’t kill people, people do. The Brady Law didn’t change that, it just ratcheted up the decibel level. They fixed it so we have to try almost anyone of almost any age who uses a firearm in the commission of a crime, and this is murder.”

  She thought, but didn’t say, that there was a dedicated lack of enthusiasm to the prosecution’s entire case. Nevertheless, Brendan was right. The district attorney’s office was now firmly caught between the Scylla of public opinion and the Charybdis of political necessity, and they were going to have to trim their sails very ably indeed not to end up drowned in one or eaten alive by the other.

  3.

  “BELIEVE IT OR NOT, he wasn’t that bad a guy,” Brendan said. “We hauled him in a couple of times for assaults on johns who beat up on his girls. He protected them, avenged them when he couldn’t, fed them, kept them in clean clothes, even had a GP check them out once a month. Signed the older ones up with Family Planning, if you can believe that. Paid for their abortions at a legitimate clinic. Bought condoms by the case at Costco and taught his girls how to use them.”

  “Even the twelve-year-old?” Kate said.

  Brendan raised a hand, palm out. “I know, and you’re right. I’m just saying. Da Prez wasn’t the worst pimp on the street, not by a long shot.”

  She couldn’t argue with him. Over the past year too many Alaska Native girls, runaways from abusive family situations in Bush villages, said abuse almost invariably fueled by alcohol, had wound up on the street in Anchorage. On average, one in three of them was recruited into prostitution, and once they had been groomed, most pimps regarded them strictly as a cash-producing asset all too easily replaced by the next kid off the plane.

  Brendan sighed. “The kids land in Anchorage, and they’re cold and they’re hungry and they’re lonely, and they’re hanging out at the Dimond Mall begging for change, and somebody rolls up in a Hummer and promises them the moon. Hard to turn that down.”

  The FBI’s Anchorage office had recently taken a task force into the Bush to warn the elders of the trend. “They came to Niniltna,” Kate said. “The whole village turned out at the gym for their presentation.”

  “It’s not like people in the villages haven’t noticed their children have been disappearing.” Brendan’s mouth twisted. “And it’s not like most o
f them don’t know why.” He looked up. “You know the Akuluraks?”

  “Knew of them,” she said. “Obviously didn’t know enough.”

  “Come on, Kate. You can’t be there for everyone.”

  Her bleak expression was answer enough.

  2.

  “THEY’RE FROM NINILTNA?” Brendan snatched up the phone. “Get Jim Chopin at the Niniltna trooper post for me, pronto.”

  1.

  THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD HOUSE was ranch style, built on a slab with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Green patches of moss grew on the roof, but the blue paint on the siding was only just beginning to peel, and the grass was freshly mowed.

  Inside, the fixtures and furniture were worn but clean. The living room had a large flat-screen television and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with DVDs, including every Disney film since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There were X-Men and World of Warcraft posters on the walls, a small Lucite box full of makeup on the coffee table, and a Barbie doll on the footrest of a recliner, her blond hair spilling over the edge. There were shoes and boots in a pile by the front door and coats, hats, and mittens tossed on chairs. Doors could be glimpsed down a hallway. Behind one of the doors someone was snoring.