Radley's Home for Horny Monsters

by Annabelle Hawthorne

  “To kill goblin husband,” Tink hissed, looking all around the room. She hit a hidden button on her goggles and several mechanical arms sprouted, each one with a different covered lens. Flicking them into place, she knelt by the door of the room.

  “Wait, to kill me?”

  “Possibly. This one was sniffing around like it was trying to find a place to hide. If it wanted to, it could just burn the whole house down, but they are great for assassinations.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Mike said, checking the window, but it was locked from the inside. He heard stomping above the room, followed by the sight of gray claws on the rain gutter. He opened the window up. “Abella, have you seen anything leave the house?”

  “No. I don’t know how it got in, either.” Abella leaned over the edge of the house. “If you chase it outside, I can take care of it.”

  “But where did it come from? Did it come in with the pizza girl?”

  “It was here long before that,” Naia said. “It must have come in with you earlier today.”

  “But that doesn’t...” He thought back to the spark he felt when he had taken the paperwork from Elizabeth. “Tink, check the trash downstairs.”

  “Tink go look.” The goblin grabbed a towel and dunked it in the bath. She wrung it out, then rolled it up and cracked it like a whip. “Mike stay here.”

  “Like hell I will.” Mike dunked his own towel. “I’m coming with you.”

  “You both need to be careful,” Naia said. “If it touches you, it may just immolate you to nothing but ash.”

  “Fantastic,” Mike muttered, following Tink. She walked down the hall, her eyes intent on something he couldn’t see.

  “Tracks everywhere,” Tink informed him. “Upstairs, downstairs. Elemental go in most rooms, but come back out.” As he turned to go down the stairs, Mike noticed the wardrobe at the end of the hall. He walked up t pot, then made to turn the latch.

  “No tracks there,” Tink told him, yanking on the band of his pants. “We go look downstairs.”

  Mike followed her, holding his towel ready as they stepped into the living room. They kept going into the kitchen where Tink opened up the trashcan. She reached in and pulled free what was left of the folder from Elizabeth. “Fire elemental come from here.”

  Mike didn’t have to ask how she knew. The folder was burnt. Looking into the can he saw the nest of ashes at the bottom. The elemental started as a spark, and he wondered if throwing away the offer had triggered it to burn and grow. “Okay, so what now?”

  Cecilia’s loud wail carried through the house, sending shivers up Mike’s spine. Tink covered her ears, frowning in the direction of her cries. They ran toward the noise, ending up in one of the sitting rooms in the front of the house. Cecilia stood just outside the window, her mouth stretched wide, pointing at the ceiling. Up above, Mike saw the creature standing on the ceiling, hissing in response.

  Mike and Tink walked further into the room as Cecilia drifted through the walls, her shrieks rising in volume. Mike put fingers in his ears, his eyes on the angry red lizard. It looked like it was made of lava, the air around it shimmering from the sheer heat of its skin. Its eyes blazed like fiery coals, and it hissed at Cecilia. It leapt off of the ceiling, passing straight through the banshee and colliding with the carpet. Spinning in place, leaving scorch marks on the hardwood, it spotted Mike.

  “Oh shit!” Mike yelled, raising his towel when the lizard came at him. It left a fiery trail on the floor, the hardwood burning up beneath it. It launched itself through the air, and Mike dodged out of the way, letting it collide with a piece of furniture behind him. The white sheet burned up, the chair underneath igniting. The elemental burned its way through springs and fluff, the chair burning up, but the flames remaining local. Uncertain how to proceed, Mike watched the chair from the side, squatting down to see beneath it.

  The elemental charged him, crossing the space in a second. Leaping for his face, it was knocked out of the air by the fast crack of the wet towel from Tink. The elemental missed, crashing into the table behind Mike. Mike, acting fast, unfurled his own towel and scooped up the elemental inside. It shrieked, steam rising from the towel.

  “Fuck!” Mike shouted, dropping his bundle from Hell. It was too hot to carry.

  Cecilia grabbed the wet towel with both hands, span in a circle and launched it toward the window. The glass shattered, and the elemental and towel landed in the front yard.

  “Quick!” Mike and Tink ran outside, where Cecilia met them. The wet bundle looked like an angry steamed dumpling, rolling around in the yard as the elemental fought its way free. Mike grabbed the towel from Tink, unfolding it. “Is there a hose out here?” Mike asked.

  “Tink find.” She leapt over the railing and ran along the side of the house. Mike held up the towel like a blanket, going the long way down the front steps. Staying off to the side, he watched the elemental squeeze free, scorching a circle in the grass and growing in size.

  “Tink!” Mike cried. There was no way he was going to be able to grab it. The lizard was now the size of a large dog. It ran at him on its hind legs, letting out a high-pitched shriek. He saw Tink off to the side, wrestling with a hose that had too many kinks in it.

  A thousand pounds of stone slammed into the elemental from above and grabbed it around the neck. Flames licked at Abella’s stone skin, but the fire wasn’t hot enough to bother the gargoyle. Clutching the elemental in her talons, Abella lifted into the sky, flying over the roof and crossing over into the backyard.

  Mike and Tink ran back through the house and into the garden in time to see Abella fighting the angry elemental above the fountain.

  “Naia!” Mike shouted.

  The nymph appeared directly below Abella. She waved her hands, forming intricate patterns in the air as a wall of water formed around the fountain’s perimeter. Abella landed in the fountain, pinning the fire elemental in place as Naia made the walls crash in. The fountain steamed, the elemental desperately fighting through the waves that kept catching it and pushing it back toward the middle.

  The water in the fountain started to boil. Naia ran around the edge of the fountain, coaxing more water up from below to replenish the basin. The garden filled with steam as the elemental unleashed its magic, attempting to boil off the water and escape. Abella’s face was a mask of anger, her teeth bared at the threat beneath her as it shape shifted, an amorphous being determined to survive.

  Mike and Tink could only watch helplessly as the air became too thick with vapor to see.

  Several minutes passed, the noise dying down. A cool breeze sucked the steam away, revealing Abella crouched in the middle of the fountain, the water now gone and a tiny glowing ember trapped beneath her hand. Naia nodded at the gargoyle, and Abella crushed it with her fist, extinguishing its light. The fountain refilled, the water sizzling upon contact with the hot stone floor.

  “Holy shit,” Mike muttered.

  Abella collapsed in the fountain.

  Mike hopped in, the warm water soaking his pant legs, to help her stand. The gargoyle was covered in soot marks. She sat in the water, breathing hard.

  “That was no simple fire elemental,” she told him. “He was almost too hot for me to hold onto.”

  “She’s right,” Naia added, kneeling by Abella’s side. She ran her hands gently over the gargoyle’s skin. “Whoever summoned that creature has use of some powerful magic.”

  “We know where it came from.” Mike explained what he and Tink had found in the trashcan. “The fact that it came from the trash and didn’t just attack me when I walked in the door means something, but I have no idea what. The Society clearly wants this house, otherwise they would have just burned the place down. Ideas?”

  “I’m thinking this was partially a scouting affair,” Abella said, holding up a blistered palm. Naia summoned a stream of icy water to wash across it. “The elemental needed to see who was here first. I’m sure they have ideas, but it would be a bad idea to ju
st attack without knowing who and what. I saw it in wars all the time.”

  “You’ve been in wars?” Mike asked.

  Abella nodded. “Usually I used forts or castles as hiding places. I loved watching the people below, and nobody questions another statue on the roof of a church. I have seen my share of sieges. My guess is that they sent in the elemental to scope out the territory and then kill you if possible.”

  “If I die, that’s it. It was hard enough to find me, and as far as I know, I have zero family left anywhere.” Mike shook his head. “I almost sold the place anyway, but the will stipulated that I had to come and see it first, and could only sell when full ownership transferred, which takes a few days. I die, it’s only a matter of time before the Society gets this place, and then they get to you.”

  “Who are they?” Naia asked.

  Mike looked at Tink, who sat on the edge of the fountain. “Let’s find out.”

  MIKE AND TINK SAT AT the dinner table, his laptop open in front of him. Tink wore her goggles still, carefully watching everything Mike did. Even though she got the basics of navigation, he showed her how to streamline her searches, avoid leaving a trail, and not spend all his money.

  “I’ll try and walk you through this,” he informed her, clicking on a small icon in the corner of his desktop. It was designed to match his screensaver, a basic “Lake in the Mountains” photo that came with it. Prompting him for a password, he logged in to the desktop computer that was at his old apartment.

  Having more than three months left on the rent, Mike had never bothered to formally move out. Right now, a person sitting in his room would watch the desktop come to life, controlled remotely by his laptop computer. He needed something far heftier than what he had now. Even though he had parted with his hacker ways many years ago, he knew better than to simply throw away the programs he had kept. His job, after all, was website maintenance, and knowing what the bad people were using was the best way to keep his clients safe.

  He opened up a Dos command window, typing in the phrase ZeroDarkThirty.exe. Anyone digging through his directory wouldn’t even see the hidden file, but his computer rebooted itself into Dark Mode, a term he had laughingly coined one night between rounds of Counter-Strike.

  His computer began running subroutines, bouncing off of servers all over the world. Anyone trying to trace it would run into difficulty without some hacking knowledge of their own, and even then, he had ways to erase his tracks.

  He pulled up the Society’s website and looked at its members. Elizabeth was his first target, and he immediately began digging into the local records. Tink watched intently as he pulled up easy stuff like birth records, address, and then went deeper with police records, real estate sales, and anything else he could find. Every time he found a lead, he opened a new window and let his programs do their work.

  Nearly an hour passed in this manner, with him digging and creating his own file. He had Tink eat the pineapple off of one of the remaining pizza slices so that he could finish the rest, while drinking a beer from the fridge. A second hour passed, and then a third. Only darkness could be seen through the kitchen window.

  “Well, that’s that.” Mike stared at the results of his digging, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “What Mike find?” Tink asked. She had been by his side for the majority of his hunt, but had kept quiet.

  “Nothing. Which, in and of itself, is something.” Mike showed her the website for the Society. “Clearly, these bitches stink,” he said, pointing at Elizabeth and Sarah. “But the only reason we know that is because we’ve met them, right? Well, look at the other eleven members of the Society.” He pointed at the circular portraits on the website. “Statistically, I should have found something, anything, about even just one of them. A parking ticket, a court summons, anything.”

  “Mike have empty hands?”

  “Mike have empty hands. And they shouldn’t be empty.” He stared at the strange faces before him. “Other than birth records and their current addresses and such, I can’t even find pictures of them from when they were younger. It’s almost like they came out of nowhere.”

  Tink nodded to herself. “Everyone come from somewhere.”

  “Exactly.” Mike rubbed his eyes. It had been a long day. “I’m not sure where to go from here.”

  “Everything look better in daylight,” Tink informed him, her face cracking into a yawn. “Old goblin saying.”

  “That’s a human saying, too.” Mike stared at his computer. He had even hacked into the website hosting the Society, only to find that it was just a run-of-the-mill Weebly page. Nothing of interest. He changed the name on Elizabeth’s picture to Queen Cunt. Deciding that wasn’t enough, he uploaded pictures of dicks for the rest of the members’ profiles. He quickly changed the password to a string of random words, saved all changes, then logged out. Frustrated, he put his desktop back in sleep mode, severing the connection. “Why don’t you head for bed? I’ll meet you upstairs in a bit.”

  Tink nodded, pushing her goggles up. They had left circular marks around her eyes. He kissed the top of her head, then she departed, her tail swishing from side to side.

  He stopped out in the garden, where Abella swooped down from above to meet him. “Thanks for your help today,” he said, giving her a hug.

  “You’re welcome,” Abella replied, her breath tickling his ear. “Did you learn anything about the Society?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Mike said, and turned to look for Naia. She was floating in the fountain again, her bubble lights casting their shadows. “See you in the morning, Naia.”

  “Goodnight, lover,” Naia said, rolling on her side and winking at him.

  He walked inside, stopping in the front entryway to stare at the empty spot where the clock had been. That was going to be a puzzle for some other time, he thought to himself, before stepping onto the porch.

  Cecilia was on the swing, her legs tucked up beneath her. Her head turned, empty white eyes appraising Mike where he stood. She patted the seat next to her, her spooky hair drifting as if she sat in a vortex of wind.

  Mike walked over and took the seat next to her. “Thanks for all your help tonight. If not for you, I may have died.”

  Cecilia smiled. “That would be one way for us to spend some alone time together.”

  “I’m not ready for that kind of commitment,” Mike replied.

  Cecilia grinned, her eyes crinkling along the edges. “You are so different from those who came before,” she said. “With the others, it was different. They were here, but largely distant. Emily spent time with me, but I could feel it, that tension in the way she spoke, how she sat next to me like I had a disease she might catch. It’s hard sitting with death, contemplating its infinite nature, wondering when it will come for you in your sleep. My kind were never well loved, but we were respected.” She leaned her head on Mike’s shoulder, and his skin tingled at the chill in her touch. “I suffer from a special kind of loneliness. I wasn’t ready to walk you to your final resting place just yet.”

  Mike shrugged. “Is it weird that I was more worried about what was going to happen to the others? I mean, I wasn’t keen on dying in a fire, but I kept thinking about what would happen to Naia, Abella, and especially Tink.”

  “Did you worry about me?” Cecilia asked. The Irish lilt in her voice was suddenly softer.

  “Should I? I mean, I don’t know enough about banshees to even guess at what could possibly happen to you. I imagine that whoever took this house, you would sit out here on your swing, content to watch the sun set.”

  “A week ago, it wouldn’t have even mattered. Ever since I came here, I sat on this porch, watching the house and waiting to take its owner to the afterlife. I haven’t expected any more, or any less, but it beats the alternative of wandering the countryside, lost and alone, wailing out of self-pity. Still, even though I was mean to you, you made the effort. Emily would have done the same, but it was nearly a decade before she could even look me
in the face, or be comfortable around me, for that matter.” Cecilia shifted, her hair tickling Mike’s nose. “Yet here you sit. You treat me like a person, not a lost soul. You touch me without flinching away-even now, I can feel the warmth of your body against mine. That is something nobody has ever done for me.”

  “Part of that is Naia,” Mike explained. “She did this thing where she took a piece of my soul and gave me a piece of hers. It was to bind me to the house, make me feel obligated to help. I don’t want to take credit for something she did.”

  “That’s where you are wrong,” Cecilia said, running her fingers across the top of his. “Everyone who has lived here has been given the nymph’s gift, but you are different than they were. There’s a part of you that has been broken, damaged in such a way that you don’t fit in anywhere else. You’re a mismatched puzzle piece-someone put you in the box, but you make a crooked fit.” She waved her hand at the house. “This place is a crooked puzzle piece in the fabric of the universe. Even if a piece is found that fits here, the edges will never line up quite right.

  “Your edges are crooked. I imagine it’s what Naia saw in you. You don’t fit in with the rest of the universe like you do here. You’ve already seen things that most men never will, experienced sensations beyond what any human should. Naia’s magic may have snared you, but the person you are is what makes you special.”

  Mike shrugged, unsure what to say. “I’m just trying to do right by the monsters here. Now that I know that there are people out there who want this place, people willing to sic a fire lizard on me, I feel more determined than ever to make it work.”

  Cecilia snuggled closer. His chest itched as she drew away his body heat. He wasn’t cold-his whole body tingled like he was building up a massive charge. He could smell her perfume, a soft floral scent with a hint of cinnamon.

  “Mike?” Cecilia said softly.

  “What’s up?”

  Cecilia moved away from him, sitting so that he could see her better. Up close, her sightless eyes were like pearls, fixing him with an intensity that rooted him on the spot. Her hair fanned out around her, floating ethereally around her head. “I think... maybe you should be worried about me.”