The Collected Short Fiction, page 28
I never learned what she did with her life. But she never took the orders. She lived that incandescent moment with the rest of us, but she drew an entirely different lesson from it.
“You tell me those were all lies?” I say. “I believed them. I believed everything.”
“Gretchen wasn’t a lie. Our life here wasn’t a lie. It was glorious. It doesn’t need to be dressed up with exaggerations.”
I think of my own life, long for a human being, spent in cold subterranean chambers. “The Maggot isn’t a lie,” I say.
“No. He certainly is not.”
“I shouldn’t have survived. I should have died. I pushed Eddie down. Eddie should have lived.” I feel tears try to gather, but they won’t fall. I want them to. I think, somehow, I would feel better about things if they did. But I’ve been a good boy: I’ve worked too hard at killing my own grief. Now that I finally need it, there just isn’t enough anymore. The Maggot has taken too much.
“Maybe so,” Wormcake says. “But it doesn’t matter anymore.”
He gets up, approaches the windows. He pulls a cord behind the curtains and they slide open. A beautiful, kaleidoscopic light fills the room. The Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair is laid out on the mansion’s grounds beyond the window, carousels spinning, roller coaster ticking up an incline, bumper cars spitting arcs of electricity. The Ferris wheel turns over it all, throwing sparking yellow and green and red light into the sky.
I join him at the window. “I want to go down there,” I say, putting my fingers against the glass. “I want another chance.”
“It’s not for you anymore,” Wormcake says. “It’s not for me, either. It’s for them.”
He tugs at the false mouth on his skull, snapping the tethers, and tosses it to the floor. The tongue lolls like some yanked organ, and the flies cover it greedily. Maybe he believes that if he can no longer articulate his grief, he won’t feel it anymore.
And maybe he’s right.
He removes the fly-spangled meat from my hands and takes a deep bite. He offers it to me: a benediction. I recognize the kindness in it. I accept, and take a bite of my own. This is the world we’ve made. Tears flood my eyes, and he touches my cheek with his bony hand.
Then he replaces the meat onto the altar, and resumes his place on his knees beside it. He lays his head by the buzzing meat. I take the pickaxe and place the hard point of it against the skull, where all the poisons of the world have gathered, have slowed him, have weighed him to the earth. I hold the point there to fix it in my mind, and then I lift the axe over my head.
“Empty your pockets,” I say.
Below us, a gate opens, and the children pour out at a dead run. There goes the angry girl. There goes the weepy, buzz-cut kid. Arms and legs pumping, clothes flapping like banners in the wind. They’re in the middle of the pack when the monsters are released. They have a chance.
They just barely have a chance.
The Diabolist
First published in Monstrous Affections, September 2014
For many years, we knew our monster. He was a middle-aged man, prickly of temperament and reclusive of habit, but of such colorful history and exotic disposition that we forgave him these faults and regarded him with a fond indulgence. He was our upstart boy, our black sheep. He lived in a faded old mansion by the lake and left us to gossip at his scandalous life story. It was a matter of record that he had been drummed out of a prestigious university that had employed him in the southern part of the state, his increasingly eccentric theories and practices costing him his job, his reputation, and—it was whispered, and we believed it because it was too wonderful not to—the life of his own beloved wife.
Dr. Timothy Benn, metaphysical pathologist.
Theomancer.
Sometimes the sky around his house would light up after dark with whatever wicked industry kept him awake, bright reds and greens and yellows igniting the bellies of the clouds like a celestial carnival show, or like an iridescent bruise. Once he seemed to have tipped the axis of gravity, so that loose objects—pebbles in the road, dropped key rings, toddlers tossed into the air by fathers—fell toward his house instead of the ground. This only lasted a few minutes, and we responded with bemused patience. It was one of the quirks of sharing a small town with a known diabolist.
And so it was that we enjoyed the company of our resident monster and the particular glamour he afforded us, until the day he died, and you found him there.
Dearest Allison.
We didn’t know you like we knew him. Like him, you were sullen and withdrawn, but you lacked any of the outlandish characteristics that made him so charming to us. You did not puncture holes in time and space. You did not draw angels from the ether and bind them with whores’ hair. You only lived, like any awkward girl, attending ninth grade in a cloud of resentment and distrust, hiding your eyes behind your bangs and your ungainly body beneath baggy clothes and a shield of textbooks clutched to your chest. We saw you in class, sitting in the back row with your head down; we saw you weaving like an eel through hallways choked with strangers; we saw you when you came down from the mansion on pilgrimages to the grocery store, where you were as disappointingly mundane in your selections as you were in every other aspect of your life.
After school, after shopping, we’d watch you climb into your father’s car with the tinted windows, engine growling at the curb, and disappear up the hill into the mansion.
For all the attention you paid to us, you might have been moving through a world erased of people.
We loved your father, but we did not love you.
The miracle began the night of his death. We imagine the scenario: He put you to bed, kissing you lightly on your forehead. You asked him a small, domestic question: about homework—or, no, about an imminent camping trip that you were excited for. He answered you noncommittally—he did not want to disappoint you, but after all there was work to be done. He walked downstairs and retired to his study, in the room overlooking the lake. He poured himself a healthy measure of single-malt Scotch and retrieved a crime novel from his bookshelf. Reclining in his easy chair, we like to think that he enjoyed some of these small pleasures for a while. Then he closed his eyes, leaned back, and quietly died, felled by the interruption of some mysterious inner function.
You came downstairs the next morning, Allison, and you found him there. Oh, how we would like to have seen your expression. To watch the tide of grief.
Instead, there is only this frustrating period of darkness in our narrative, stretching from that morning until the morning of the following day.
You did not call any of us for help.
What did you do, Allison?
Did you cry? Did you scream?
Did you think of us at all?
We find you again the next morning.
A Saturday, early. We saw your feet and your ankles poised at the top of the cellar stairs. You paused there, at the edge of this dark gulf, uncertain of yourself. A low, steady hiss emerged from somewhere below, like an unending exhalation. You’d never been allowed in your father’s laboratory before; standing there was a transgression. But after that pause, you descended with purpose, and we saw you: pale white legs, pink shorts, wrinkled black shirt, and finally your face, moonlike and frightened. You swept your hand over the light switch and threw the laboratory into flickering clarity.
Rows of shelving and workbenches filled the vast work space, each one crowded with repurposed wine boxes and milk crates, which held overstuffed three-ring binders or notebooks or jars of formaldehyde densely packed with biological misadventures. There was an aquarium empty of fish and ornament, with two severed blue eyes lolling on the bright blue gravel, tracking you as you passed; a huge telescope dominating the cellar’s far corner, its wide glass eye raised toward the closed root-cellar doors; a broken, bloody Mason jar sitting at the center of a pentagram chalked onto the floor beneath one of the workbenches; and six large double-stacked dog crates with children’s names stenciled on the outsides, all empty save one, which was home to an abandoned stuffed lion. The walls were covered with parchment bearing a strange pictographic alphabet. Hanging among them were your own endeavors, paintings your father had retained from your elementary-school days.
And then there were the small accumulations of a normal life: the desk chair with the wheels that stick; the crumpled bags of potato chips on the floor; the Minnesota Twins mug sitting beside the dormant laptop, still holding an inch of milky coffee, dirty water at the bottom of a well.
And in the back of the room, nearly hidden by the clutter, was the vat. It was huge, clear, slightly taller and wider than a refrigerator, mounted on an industrial-capacity cooling unit. It was filled with a bright green gel, which seemed faintly luminescent. A radio was affixed to the side of the vat with duct tape and twine; a spaghetti snarl of wires trailed from it to the vat’s base, where it disappeared into the side.
This was where the hiss was coming from. It sputtered as you approached. When you stood at your father’s desk, close enough to the vat to caress it, if you had wanted to, the static barked, and a voice, genderless and faint, swam up from the deeps of chaos and noise to speak to you.
“I know you,” it said.
Just briefly, your face shone with the hard light of hope.
“I know you,” I said again, willing my speech through the long black crush of empty space. “You’re the daughter.”
And you spoke to me for the first time: “Who are you?”
I never had a name, until your father gave one to me. I was a wretch, one imp among a numberless multitude of imps working in the Love Mills on the Eighty-Fourth Declension of Hell. I did not know language until I was pulled here by your father’s sorcery and learned it after hearing him speak a single word; I did not know of my own individuality until I was peeled from the shared consciousness and from my own body, to be imprisoned as a scrap of thought in this vat; and I did not know love, though my whole existence was bent to its creation, until I saw your father’s face crumple in despair when he realized that the thing he had plucked from Hell was not the one he had sought.
I knew something had happened to him, though I had no word for death. In the middle of the night I was engulfed in a falling tide of his dreams, thoughts, and memories, which came raining through the ceiling like gouts of ash, as if a volcano were expunging all the dry contents of the earth. It was a bewildering experience, vertiginous and exhilarating—like nothing I had ever known. It had not abated all night, and continued even as you came down to the cellar. I could tell immediately that you did not see it or feel it. Your father’s dead brain was geysering, filling the air with all its accumulated freight, and you had no way to apprehend it.
I suppose that could be considered a waste.
“Your father called me Claire, when I arrived,” I told you, each word spitting through static, and I watched your face make a complicated movement: it displayed a mixture of sorrow and hope, which I have learned is part of love’s vocabulary. You retreated to the desk and sat in your father’s chair.
“That’s my mother’s name,” you said.
“I know.”
When you spoke again, your voice sounded strange, as though your throat were being squeezed: “Is that who you are?”
“No.”
You were silent for a long time. The radio on my vat hissed, like rainfall or like the sound of your father’s spilling brain. You leafed through the pages of a journal he’d kept on the desk. You turned on the computer but were unable to supply the password necessary to get into it. Your search did not seem to be motivated by any real curiosity, though; you seemed stunned by something. Only partially there.
“Where is your father?” I asked you.
You sighed, as if I’d said something tedious. “He’s dead.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding suddenly where the tide of dream flakes were coming from. “Is that why you’re upset?”
“I’m not upset.” You looked at me, as if you thought I should have a response to that. But I didn’t know how to answer you, Allison. I envied your detachment. I was cast adrift from my brethren, isolated for the first time. I had never known loneliness. It caused me a grievous pain.
Pain, too, was something new.
How do your kind live like this? How do you not wish to extinguish yourselves from the cold misery of it? How do you know each other at all?
“So, you’re something Dad conjured up? Like a demon or something?”
“I’m not a demon. I’m an imp. I’m a laborer in the Love Mills.”
“What are those?” You didn’t look at me as you asked these questions. Instead you walked slowly around the lab, tracing your finger across the pictographs or stopping to study one of your own early finger paintings.
“I don’t know how to answer that in a way you can understand.”
“Wow, you sound just like Dad.”
You did not sound as though that were a good thing.
“I want to go home,” I said, hoping to turn this conversation along a more productive course.
You stopped at the dog cages with the children’s names. “What did he do down here? I mean, I know he, like . . . summoned devils or whatever.” You turned to look at me. “Is that what he did?”
“I don’t know what he did before I arrived. I know that he was not pleased to see me though.”
“You were an accident?”
“Yes.”
You nodded and returned to his desk. You opened a manila envelope and a stack of photographs spilled out. They were of your mother. They were casual and unposed. Your father looked at them often. Sometimes they brought him to tears. Sometimes they made him angry. I couldn’t understand how the same images could provoke such opposed reactions, and I was curious to see how you responded. You stared at them for a long time, too, but your expression did not change.
You put them down and said, “My dad’s body is still upstairs. I haven’t called anybody. I guess that’s messed up.”
“Is it?”
“It’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to cry too.”
“Why?”
You shrugged. “Because he’s my dad.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“I’m a monster I guess.”
I didn’t understand this. It seemed unimportant, so I returned to my own concern. “I want to go home, Allison. I want my body back. I’m lonely here.”
“Well, you can’t,” you said. “I don’t know how to send you home. You’re just going to have to suck it up.”
“That’s unacceptable.”
You stood, calmly and with such poise, and approached the vat. This time you did put your hand on it, and though I should not have been able to, I felt the heat of your blood, the warmth of human proximity. I did not know what it meant, but it stunned me into silence.
“You were meant to be Mom, did you know that? He was trying to bring back Mom.”
I had nothing to say to that. I remembered his horrified reaction the night he pulled me here and discovered what I really am. My first glimpse of love’s face.
“I’m going upstairs,” you said, turning away from me.
I felt a wild and fearful longing. “Don’t leave me here,” I said, my voice lost in the crackle of the radio.
You just kept walking. You turned off the lights as you ascended and left me there, the green light from my vat and my strange liquid form throwing shadows into the dark air. I had never been alone like this. I began to understand that it would last forever.
Finally, you came down to us. The day was overcast and windy; you descended the long road into town, your hair, for once, not obscuring your face but trailing behind you like a dark and unfurled flag. Maybe this unprecedented event should have been enough to let us know that something had gone wrong. But we were creatures caught in our own routine. We were unsuspicious and ignorant. It’s hard to know a miracle for what it is until it finally occludes the world with its beauty.
You went to the café in our local bookstore and bought a coffee, ignoring the clerk’s open stare as you gave her your order. Her name was Tina; she was a senior, three years ahead of you in school and bound for the very university that had driven your father out years ago. Her younger sister was in your computer science class, so she was privy to all the latest gossip and rumor surrounding you. She leaned forward a fraction and sniffed the air, to see if it was true that you didn’t bathe, that you stank of body odor. She couldn’t smell anything but assumed that this was because the jacket you were wearing obscured it. When she took your money, she was careful not to let her fingers touch yours, and she dropped the change onto the counter rather than put it into your hand.
Did you notice these minor insults?
Tina was so close to leaving our town. If your father had lived only another six or seven months, she would have missed out on everything.
You waited out Tina’s shift, and then Joey came in. He saw you sitting there, and he felt a mixture of fear, anger, and excitement. He remembered going to the Devil’s Willow with you earlier in the year, making out with you and wanting to go further but being told no. He remembers the humiliation he felt, the thwarted urge, and remembers too the fear of what people would say if they found out he’d tried to score with the town freak. He hadn’t spoken to you or even looked at you since. Your sudden presence there scared him and excited him all over again.
You ignored Tina’s hostile stare as she walked away. When Joey was alone behind the counter, you approached him.
“Meet me there tonight,” you said.
Something inside him twisted. He was afraid you were setting him up. Someone like you—an ugly girl, an unwanted girl—had no right. “What are you talking about, skank?” he said.
“You know what I’m talking about. Just be there tonight.”
