CHAPTER ELEVEN

Monster Mash

 

NUMB, WEARY, EYES red, ears buzzing.

A little while later, after Cason makes sure he’s not dead, Frank says the show-and-tell must continue.

They leave the hallway where the walls are cratered (in Cason-sized cavities) and worse, peppered with bits of black ichor and stuck fur and splinters of—Cason blinks, sees that it’s wood. Sees that the splinters are in his hands, too. His foot nudges something: a tiny wooden doll head. Before he can look too long, Frank is pulling him upstairs.

The smell is strong up here. Coppery, greasy. Wild, too—gamey, untamed. They pass by a bathroom which is covered in mold—not black mold or pink mold like you’d find in a shower, but green fuzzy mold. The kind you find on an old loaf of bread. Cason staggers through the tour, not sure what he’s supposed to see or why he’s even here at all. His body hurts. Like he’s been hit by a garbage truck, then thrown into the back of said garbage truck, then crushed and pulped with the rest of the waste.

They pass a bedroom. Just a mat on the floor and some pillows. It’s like a greenhouse in there—not just because of the heat, but because the room is all tables and potted plants. Most of them huge. Red roses, red not like blood but like globs of bright paint on dark stems. Plants with leaves like floppy elephant ears. Ivy and clematis vines climbing well beyond their latticework mooring and up the walls and to the ceiling and into the vents.

And still Frank waves Cason on.

To the attic. No steps for the attic—just a pull-down ladder. Cason grits his teeth as he climbs, trying not to drive the splinters further into his palms. He uses his wrists to stabilize and hauls his body up into the dark space.

The smell. This is the dark heart of the awful smell. It hits Cason the way the monster-man hit him—his stomach shudders and he wonders if he’s going to throw up.

Click. Darkness banished by a bare bulb hanging from a brown wire.

Cason throws up. Head turned aside. Eyes closed because he doesn’t want to see.

Frank just nods. “I figured you’d wanna see that.”

 

 

FLASHES OF THE attic: blood and bones and pelts and child’s toys piled in heaping, steaming mounds; abattoir, slaughterhouse, feeding ground, bear cave.

Cason sits in the beast-man’s kitchen, picking splinters from his hands with his teeth. It’s hard work, because his hands are slick with his blood—and the blood of the beast-man who disintegrated before his eyes in an exhalation of fur and red mist.

He spits each splinter onto the dirty tablecloth. Trying not to throw up each time he does it. But it gives him something to do. Something to think about other than—

Well.

Frank steps into the kitchen, his freakish near-lipless grin calling to mind a cackling skeleton one might put outside the house for Halloween.

He tosses something onto the table:

A charred wooden head of a little girl doll. Yarn hair. Triangle eyes and smiling mouth forming the face, with no nose to speak of. The doll head hits the table, rolls to the edge, then goes over onto the floor.

“I have no idea what the fuck is going on,” Cason says. He bites on another splinter, spits it onto the table. Still dozens more to go. “Time to start telling. The showing part is over. Because, I have to tell you, Frank, whatever you just showed me didn’t help me understand the situation any better, you feel me?”

Frank chuckles. “Ehhh-yeah, now that I think about it, I guess maybe that didn’t really answer all your questions.”

“It didn’t answer any of them. And now I’ve got about a hundred more.”

Frank sits on the edge of a cracked formica counter. “We just killed a monster.”

“What kind of monster?”

“Kind that eats raccoons and possums. And stray cats and lost dogs. And... once in a while, a little kid or three.” Frank shrugs like it’s no big deal. Snaps his fingers, slaps them on his knee in a jerky drum-beat. “The, ahh, this area was once settled by some Indians. Lenni-Lenape. They venerated this spirit, this creature called ‘Meesink’ who was said to keep the balance between the world of man and the world of nature. All the stories and paintings have him looking like a big, y’know, a Bigfoot—which, as you can see, turned out pretty goddamn accurate.”

Cason’s head spins. His entire reality does. “Is this real? Is this a real thing? Am I just... dead? Sick? High on something?”

“It’s the real deal, dude.”

“Monsters are real.”

“Not just monsters.”

Cason’s eyes narrow. “What else?”

“The gods.”

“Gods. Plural. Not God.”

“He’s real, too. He’s just one among many.”

Cason stands. Almost falls. “You know what? I’m outta here.”

Frank hops down, stands in Cason’s way.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow your roll, stud. How do you think this whole thing works? You think your wife and kid want to murder you because that’s just how they feel? Or you think it’s because someone’s pulling their strings? It’s time to open your eyes—really open them, now—and look around. There’s magic in this life, and it ain’t ours to play with. It’s theirs. The gods are the ones with all the tricks. We’re just their playthings. They’re the kid with the magnifying glass and we’re the burning ants.”

Gods. Monsters. Impossible. And yet—not really, not at all. Women with wings, man-boys with unholy magnetism, and that little business about his wife and son burning alive in a car but now, miraculously, being alive as if it never happened.

His legs almost give out, but Frank steadies him.

“But they have a saying,” Frank continues. “The ants weigh more than the elephants. You know that saying?”

The smallest head shake. No.

“The ants weigh more than the elephants. Doesn’t seem true, because a teeny tiny ant is just a squirming black bug in a big-ass elephant’s butthole. But that’s not what the saying says, the saying says ants and elephants, plural. Because all the ants together weigh more than all the elephants together. And that’s how we are. Gods and man. We don’t outweigh them one to one, but together, boy. There’s a lot more of us than them.”

The questions—his mind is like a bucket that just overturned and now he can’t stop the questions. “Who are they? How did they get here? Why me?”

Frank chuckles. “The easy answer? They were pushed. The longer, crazier answer is—”

His already bulging bug-eyes seem to go wider as the skin around them pulls back—Frank’s look of perpetual surprise is suddenly magnified.

“Someone’s here,” Frank says.

A knock at the door.

Not a friendly knock, either. Wham wham wham wham.

The hairs on Cason’s neck stand. Arms, too. Straight and tall like soldiers.

“One of them,” Frank says. “How the fuck—” He hurries over to the window over the sink, pulls back a filmy curtain, quickly lets it fall back in place. “We gotta go.”

“I want to see,” Cason says, moving toward the sink.

Frank stands in his way. “No time. We have to go.”

“Move.”

“Case, the longer we wait—”

Frank’s not a big man. Cason shoves him aside.

And then he sees. The window overlooks the porch. It takes a second to click, but the wild hair gives it away. It’s the woman from the woods: the one bound in golden chains. The one with wings—wings that are, at present, nowhere to be seen.

Someone else is there, too—

The other person takes a step back.

Alison.

Alison.

Her eyes, empty. Mouth slack, with saliva moistening her lips. Her head has this gentle swaying, like a boat on the ocean lost to the waves. She’s holding a gun. A gun he bought her to defend herself—at the time she was working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the telemetry unit (he remembers the way she answered the phone there: Alison Cole, 2B Telemetry), and she sometimes walked a long way to work and he wanted her to have a gun. She never took it. Never used it. And now here she is with it.

Suddenly, a feeling in his mind—different from when he was around E. but the same, too. Like an invasion. Like someone cupping his consciousness in a pair of cold hands. Probing. Looking for something.

“Alison,” he says. He has to get to her. Save her from this.

He turns.

There stands Frank. Gun in one hand, a steak knife in the other, with a silverware drawer open behind him. The gun is leveled at Cason’s head.

“Don’t,” Frank says. “You can’t help her. Not today.”

“That’s my wife.”

“Trust me, I know. And I get it; I do. But this isn’t the day.” Frank takes the hand with the knife and pulls down on the collar of his filthy white t-shirt. Turning it into a v-neck before finally the fabric starts to rip.

A symbol reveals itself. A symbol in scar tissue. Three lines crossing one another, forming a kind of asterisk. Smaller symbols at the six points, dead-ending each line: they look almost like letters (N, M, U), but they’re not quite.

“I gotta carve this into your chest,” Frank says.

“Fuck you. I want my wife.”

“And you’ll get her back. With my help. Not by running off half-cocked.”

Outside, more knocking: wham wham wham. A voice calling:

“I know you’re in there. Your wife and I would like to talk to you.”

The invisible hands cupping Cason’s mind start to squeeze. The urge rises in him, hot and white, to go to the front door. To kneel there. To let his wife put that gun into his mouth so that he may embrace oblivion.

Frank seethes: “She’s in your head already.” He smacks Cason across the face—not with the gun, but with the back of his gun-hand.

Reaction. Cason has Frank’s hand in his own. One twist and the man yelps: the gun drops into Cason’s hand. “I’m not letting you carve that into my chest.”

Frank’s eyes dart around the room. Sees a cup of pens and markers next to a dented toaster and a pile of fraying napkins littered with mouse turds. “Then we’ll do something more temporary.”

 

 

HE’S THERE, AND then he’s gone.

Psyche stands on the decrepit porch, feeling tight and tense and unclean, and one second she feels Cason’s mind in the house like a mouse in a maze, and then there’s the light of pain and he’s gone. Not fading like a ghost, but rather as if he was never there in the first place. How dearly, deeply disappointing.

She searches, of course. She pulls Alison along—not by her hand, but by a leash wound around the woman’s mind—and stalks around the outside of the house. The alleys between this house and the row-homes. Past barrels filled with rainwater and thousands of mosquito larvae twisting in the murk. To the house’s back door, long boarded up, beneath eaves thick with wasp combs. No one. Nothing. No trace of human life.

Worse, she can’t feel him at all. It took her a while to find him at first—she had to probe the holes in Alison’s mind, creating an image out of negative space, the Cason Cole-shaped cut-out in her memories, an elegant act of psychic surgery with the fingerprints of Psyche’s husband all over them (incurring in her no small swell of pride). Once she had him, she had him, and it was time to hunt. But now: nothing. Gone again. As if he never existed.

She goes inside the house, of course—no stone left unturned and all that. She finds the splintery wooden dolls in the walls. She sees and smells the residue of the creature that lived here: some foul skunk-ape from the local pantheon, nobody of any consequence, but worryingly dead just the same. She finds the plants. The bones. The blood. The mold. A wild-man with a wild-house, all wildly out of control. Ugh. So unpleasant.

It takes her far too long to find the passageway.

It’s more cellar than basement—dirt floor instead of concrete, rock walls. A great many bugs. Cockroaches and crickets and pill-bugs. Spiders, too—thin-bodied, diaphanous spiders with long, wispy limbs hiding in the nooks and crannies.

Behind a water heater is a hole.

She smells Cole’s scent: his blood, his sweat. His fear and uncertainty.

But there’s someone else, too. The smell of blistery skin. Lotion and eyedrops. Fear, too—but more overpowering is the hatred lurking there. It’s a smell she knows. One she hasn’t caught scent of in quite a while, now. Decades.

The smells are fading. The breath from the tunnel is old, stale, carries only meager strands of scent. Still. It’s what they have, and the hunt must go on.