There had been a four-year window in Zoey’s life in which she didn’t believe in monsters. It lasted from age six, when her mother told her that the scary aliens she saw in a movie weren’t real, until age ten, when she ran into a big, fat, mean girl named Bella.
Bella was the class bully and one time she cornered Zoey behind a bowling alley, apparently having picked her completely at random. She wound up sitting on Zoey’s chest, her knees pinning her arms down, her bulk making it hard to breathe. And as it got harder to breathe, Zoey started to panic, and as she panicked, Bella started to smile.
It had been Zoey’s first glimpse of that dark thing that lurks in people, the writhing worm in the soul that feeds on other people’s pain and fear. Zoey’s terror and helplessness were making this person happy to the point of euphoria (in later years, Zoey would say it was getting Bella high). That such a look could appear on a human face in that situation was an earth-shattering revelation to little Zoey, a lesson more profound than anything she would learn in school that year. It was then that fourth-grader Zoey Ashe realized that, yup, monsters exist, all right. Not Bella, but the thing inside Bella.
Call it what you want, dismiss it as an old evolutionary defect in the brain that gets a charge out of cruelty, whatever. But don’t say that the monster isn’t real—what Zoey saw behind Bella’s eyes was very real, and terrifying, and utterly inhuman. It was a dark, mindless hunger to hurt that was only being kept in check by fear of some greater power—parents, teachers, cops, a bigger bully. Over time, Zoey Ashe would see how this ugly, parasitic thing lurked behind everything and everyone, like the roaches in that greasy old public housing complex that came oozing out of the walls the moment the lights were off. The history books were, in fact, nothing more than a log of mankind’s largely futile attempts to keep the monster in check. Zoey knew, even then, that if a person like Bella was ever to get so big and strong that nothing could touch them, so that they could just feed that monster, unchecked … then that would be the end.
Zoey would, of course, encounter the monster again and again over the years. She saw it in the eyes of Jezza, as he leaned her over the oven. She saw it in the face of the Soul Collector on the train, even with his eyes hidden behind those dark goggles. She saw it in the Hyena, when he had come after her in her bedroom that first night.
But what she saw on Molech’s face was different.
Over time, Zoey had found that most people know they have the monster inside them, and decent people get scared when they feel it lurching to the surface. When they feel that quick rush of guilty pleasure after hitting a child or delivering a cruel insult to a spouse, they immediately drown it in shame, spending weeks doing good deeds to push that dark, writhing thing back down into the shadows. Others will invent some fiction, to pretend they have the monster under control. Corrupt cops torturing suspects in back alleys and telling themselves they’re doing it for justice, or guys getting drunk and breaking their girlfriend’s jaw, then blaming the booze (desperately trying to ignore the fact that the pleasure of unleashing the monster is the main reason they drink in the first place). Medieval priests ripping the guts out of screaming teenage girls, and pretending the burst of pleasure they felt in their loins was the spiritual reward for doing God’s will. Everyone dressing up their cruelty as something else, rather than admit they are the monster’s slave.
But not Molech.
Molech understood the monster, and embraced it—saw the world through its eyes. Five days ago Zoey had thought that only a ridiculous man would adopt a comic book supervillain name like “Molech” for himself. But now it made perfect sense. There was no “Chet Campbell” left inside that well-muscled body. There was only the monster.
There was only Molech.
Molech didn’t waste energy lying to itself about what it was. Molech knew what it wanted and knew it could get it. And it would never, ever stop.