The Monster's Corner Read online

  He couldn’t, of course, and so he would spend long hours, awake in his bed at night, thinking that he would just need to wait until I was eighteen. Three years and seven months. That was all he would have to wait, and then Neil could go be Neil on his own. Roberta didn’t want Pete around anyhow. Not really. They were just a comfortable habit now. In three years and seven months he would run away with Mason. He promised himself it would happen, and he refused to think about all the reasons why it was impossible because he knew that if he did not have me to give his life meaning, the emptiness in my wake would be unbearable. It was the one thing about me of which he was absolutely certain.

  So he sent me more messages and longer messages and asked to meet with me more often. To counter this boldness, I talked incessantly about Ryan, about how much I loved him, how much I missed him when he was not around, how we had amazing sex, how I gave him a blow job for scoring a touchdown. This stuff killed him, and I could tell it did, but he would not tell me to stop, he would not ask me what I wanted with him, he would not ask why I wanted to spend time with him. Someday he would be with me, but that was an impossibly distant future. For now, it was enough that nothing change. If I were to come on to him and kiss him and that led to sex, maybe it would be hot and exciting and amazing, but next would come guilt and drama and perhaps jail, and he didn’t want any of that. He didn’t want to cheat on his wife and he didn’t want to be the sort of person who would sleep with a fourteen-year-old girl. What he wanted was for things to be exactly the way they were, and maybe hearing about Ryan was the price he had to pay for that to happen. Maybe as long as I was in love with Ryan, and having sex with Ryan and talking about Ryan, Pete would be safe inside his insane and happy bubble.

  One day, after three beers and over the remains of pad thai, I began the next phase. “How come you never invite me over to dinner anymore?” I asked.

  He looked at me, and then away, and then at his food. Then he looked at me again. I was wearing a black summer dress with spaghetti straps, and it was less like clothing than a wrapping to conceal my nudity. Pete tried not to let it distract him and to focus on the task at hand. He had become used to regarding everything I said as a puzzle or a test, and he considered the best way to tackle this one. “I thought you and Neil weren’t friends anymore.”

  “But you and I are,” I said.

  “So, you want to have dinner at my house? With my family?”

  “Are you ashamed of me?”

  It occurred to Pete that they’d never discussed what they did as secret. They never talked about it as sneaking around. Did Mason not see it that way? Did she have no idea that adults were not supposed to do things like this? While his heart hammered with the thrill of the illicit and the daring, did she regard this as just another lunch with just another friend? He did not know. He did not fucking know, and he could not stand not knowing.

  “I just don’t know how comfortable Roberta is around ghouls,” he said.

  He was trying to keep it light, and I knew it, but I chose not to take it that way. I slammed down my beer. “Why do you want to make my life into a joke?”

  “Why do you want your life to be a joke? You are a bright, beautiful girl, so why do you need to pretend you are some kind of monster?”

  “I was honest with you from the beginning,” I said. “This is what I am. I never pretended otherwise. I am this way because of my own actions, but I don’t have a choice. You are either my friend and accept me or you aren’t and don’t. There’s no other way to see it.”

  “Mason, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Too late,” I said, finishing my beer. “I think of my friends as people who would do anything for me.”

  “I would do anything for you,” he said.

  I snorted.

  “No, really,” he said, and he was pleading now, desperate that I believe him. “I would do anything for you.”

  “Would you kill someone for me?”

  “If necessary, yes,” he said.

  “And if it weren’t necessary?” I asked.

  “This is silly,” he answered.

  “You’re right, it is silly,” I agreed. “Take me home, please.”

  We talked about it over a series of e-mails and texts. I apologized to him, told him I’d been tired and moody and on the rag, that he had done nothing wrong, but that was the moment things changed. I slowed it all down. I didn’t respond to all his messages, and when I did respond, I waited longer than usual. I would make dates for lunch and then cancel. I left him hanging.

  For Pete, these were not easy days. Things with me were not what they had been. There was no comfort to take in Roberta, who grew older and cold and remote. Neil was isolated and broken—a complete failure as a child and a monument to Pete’s complete failure as a parent. All the miseries of his life began to come back into focus, now more vivid than ever for having been briefly occulted.

  The more I withdrew, the more he thought about me, until he reached the point where he realized that he was thinking about me every moment of his day that he was not specifically thinking about something that required his attention. I was his default mode, his anger, his resentment, his confusion, his rage toward himself for his own inaction and hesitation and refusal to walk away from something so impossible and destructive. He would vacillate between confusion, hope, and despair, unable to make sense of anything I had ever done, anything I had ever said. Nothing in his life had given him the tools to sort out the mystery of Mason. His internal compass was like that of a plane lost in the Bermuda Triangle, the needle spinning endlessly, north every direction and none at all.

  In was in this period when Pete, moping and hollow, ran into Cindy at the grocery store. Maybe he might have avoided her in the past, but now he was desperate. He would take any contact with me he could manufacture, even if it was secondhand and through my mother. She was at the deli counter as he pushed his way past, and she looked away, hoping to avoid him. Normally he would have pretended not to see her pretend not to see him and wheeled his cart right on past, but not now, now when he stood to possibly learn something about me, so he put on his best smile and pushed his cart over to her.

  “Cindy, hi. It’s Pete. Neil’s father.”

  She met his false smile with one of her own. “Of course. How are you? How’s Neil?”

  “Oh, we’re good.” Pete was already tiring of the small talk, feeling it gum up his brain. “How’s Mason?”

  Cindy stared at him. “Oh, you know.”

  “No, I don’t. How is she?”

  “You know how it is with kids their age. It’s a challenge. Especially Mason. She just hasn’t been the same since her father.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know anything about this. Her father—died?”

  Cindy nodded, and her eyes were moist. Pete wanted to get the hell out of there. He hated making this woman cry, but he also felt certain he was on the verge of something important. “That’s when it all started, you know, with her look and everything. They were never close, but I was out of town when it happened. I wished she’d called the police right away or called me or something. But she didn’t. That’s what happened to her, you know.”

  “What happened to her?” Pete demanded. He didn’t raise his voice, but he could feel himself getting intense.

  “She was alone with the body too long and she tried—” Cindy turned away.

  “She tried what?”

  Cindy shook her head. “It was hard. That’s all I meant. Don’t tell her I told you about her father, but if it comes up, please don’t let her think I told you more.” She pushed her cart away.

  Pete stared after her, resisting the urge to chase her, to make her tell him what she did not want to say because Pete thought he knew. He was certain he knew what I had tried to do with my father’s body. What I had done with it. Pete thought he knew, and he was right.

  After leaving him in this state for almost a month, I called him. “Hey, Pete.”

  �
��Hi, Mason.” He tried to sound neutral, not bitter and delighted and angry and hopeful. It was just after noon on a weekday, and I heard the slur in his voice. He’d been drinking. On his own. Every day he waited for me to call or text or e-mail, and some of those days he drank.

  “It’s so good to hear your voice,” I said. “I’ve missed you so much!”

  He didn’t want to say it. “I miss you, too.” He said it anyhow.

  “How have you been?”

  “Okay,” he said. “You?”

  “So busy, but listen, I need some help. Do you think you could help me? I need you to give me a ride tonight.”

  Hope. Yes, there was anger and hesitation and fear and confusion, but more than anything else, hope, and he was full of willingness to forgive me for everything—for teasing him and misleading him and telling him about my sex life with my sixteen-year-old boyfriend—if only I would be his friend again and let him do me a favor. “A ride where?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. Can you pick me at my house at about eleven? I’ll be waiting outside.”

  “Listen, Mason, I don’t think I can do that. It’s, I don’t know, crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is, that’s why. What would I tell Roberta?”

  “Tell her you are doing me a favor,” I said. “She has met me.”

  This was precisely the sort of thing that left him so utterly rudderless, and he needed a moment to formulate a reply. “What about your mother?” he asked. “Can’t she take you?”

  “My mother. Please,” I said, which both ended that line of inquiry and provided absolutely no information.

  There was a prolonged silence and then, finally, “I’ll be there.”

  Where I wanted to go was the cemetery, the Jewish cemetery, because Jews did not embalm their bodies. I told him where and I told him why, and he drove me. He tried to make conversation, to keep things light, to ask what I was up to, but I was not in the mood for talking. He even asked me about Ryan in the hopes of rousing me out of my stupor, but it was of no use. “Mason, what is going on?” he asked at last.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “Then let’s go out to eat,” he said, excited. There would be food and drink and we would have a little too much and I would touch his arm when I talked and he would feel light and giddy and young and full of potential and he would forget how unhappy he was.

  “Not that kind of hungry. I need to eat real food. There was a funeral today. There’ll be something fresh.”

  “Mason,” he began.

  “I told you,” I said. “I told you the first time we met what I was. I know you didn’t want to listen, you didn’t want to believe, but it is part of who I am, and I have to eat. If I don’t, I will die. Is that what you want?”

  “Let me take you home,” he said, putting a hand on my arm, daring to initiate touching for the first time, to thrill at the feel of my skin, of my warm flesh, of the roundness of my arm. He loved me. He really did. “You need some sleep, and you’ll be fine.”

  I jerked away from his grip. “Are you my friend or aren’t you?”

  “You know I am,” he said.

  “Then come with me. Help me, and if you want, you can join me.”

  “Join you?”

  “Take my hand. You can be like I am.”

  He stared at me. “Are you quoting Blue Oyster Cult?”

  “I’m alluding to Blue Oyster Cult,” I said. “It’s not the same thing. But I am also offering us a way to be together.”

  “Why me?” he said. “Why did you choose me?”

  We all have our blind spots and our weaknesses, and this was mine. This was the question to which I’d never formulated a response, and I should have known it was coming. I should have seen it as inevitable, but I slipped up, and now I had to think on my feet. I could not hesitate. I could not appear to be fabricating something, and so I told him the truth. “I saw you at school, picking up Neil, and you were what I wanted. I knew you were. You were like a perfectly ripe piece of fruit ready for picking. And so I picked you. Now you are mine, if you want to be.”

  He stared at me, daring to hope that what I said was true, that I could somehow make him something else, that he could walk away from his life and have a reason, a necessity, to become something else. Even if it meant becoming a monster, was it worth it? Was becoming something unspeakable too high a price to pay for becoming something new? Pete had already had a taste of what it would be like to live outside the realm of the acceptable, he had desired the forbidden, he had flirted with becoming an outcast, and all of those things had seemed wonderful and welcoming and sweet, and that was why he followed me into the graveyard.

  I stared at him hard, daring him to turn away from me. “You said you’d do anything for me. You said that. Did you mean it?”

  He nodded.

  “Then it’s time to show me.”

  Of all the things he did that night, following me inside was the hardest. To enter a graveyard at night was a thing so strange, so against every instinct, that it made the rest that much easier. We trudged across the vast expanse of markers and monuments. The air was warm and pleasant, and the half-moon provided us with just enough light. Somewhere in the far distance, the cemetery’s lone security guard sat in his little room, watching his little television, oblivious to our trespass.

  I’d scouted ahead, so I knew where to find the fresh grave with its loose soil and the shovel sticking out like a toothpick in a plate of hors d’oeuvres.

  “Dig,” I told him.

  He stared at me. “You want me to dig up a grave? Why?”

  I smiled. “Because you want to know what’s at the bottom. You’ve always wanted to know, haven’t you? What do I want with you? What am I after? There’s only one way to find out.”

  He looked at me, unable to believe he was here, in this graveyard, truly considering something so insane as digging up a dead body. “You could simply tell me,” he said.

  I shook my head, sympathetically, not at all unkindly. “No,” I said. “That’s not how it works. There’s only one way to find out. You can dig, or you can never know.”

  That was why he picked up the shovel and thrust the blade into the loose soil. That was why he worked with calm, steady, untiring effort while I sat on a nearby gravestone and painted my fingernails black.

  When the grave was dug and the coffin was open, it was his turn to watch, and he did watch. He looked on while I ate. I did not need to remove my clothes, but I did that for him, to give him something to consider, to ponder, to enjoy while I engaged in an activity that he must at first find revolting, and later find something else entirely. And when I’d had my fill, I took the shovel and removed the top of the corpse’s skull and handed him a beautiful cut of the freshly dead and yeasty-smelling brain. I stood before him naked, my breasts streaked with dirt and blood, holding the flesh out to him like a supplicant making an offering to her god, and he took it and bit into it and his knees became weak.

  “Wow,” he said, dropping down onto the grass as he chewed thoughtfully. “It’s amazing. I can—I know what she was feeling, I know what she thought, how she made sense of things. I know what it was to be her.”

  I stood there and looked at him and smiled. “I know,” I said, “that’s how it works. You just know.”

  I watched. I watched him know what it was like to be that deep inside someone’s head, to understand a stranger’s life with intimate certainty. I looked at him and smiled, and wiped my mouth with the back of my naked arm. Pete had been amusing, and he’d been useful, but I could see it might get tiring soon enough. And when it did, well, something might happen to Pete, and then it would be time for me to find out what he’d been thinking all this time …

  SAINT JOHN

  By Jonathan Maberry

  1.

  SAINT JOHN WALKED through cinders that fell like slow rain, and he found twenty-seven angels hiding behind the altar of a burning cathedral.

 
2.

  AN HOUR BEFORE that he found a crushed and soiled rose.

  He stole a wheelbarrow from a hardware store and filled it with the weapons he had collected since the plague began and wheeled it to the cathedral. Saint John sang songs in his head while he worked. He did not sing them aloud, of course. God had told him years ago to sing all of his songs of praise in the temple inside his head. He left the barrow by the curb and walked up the stone stairs. The door was ajar, the lock chopped clumsily out of the wood by an axe.

  There was an explosion behind the far row of buildings, and Saint John turned and stood on the top step as golden embers fell. He tilted his head face upward, eyes closed, tongue out, smiling as he waited for a piece of ash to find him. When it did he pulled it in with the tip of his tongue and savored it. The strongest flavor was the uninspired taste of charcoal that had to melt before he could enjoy the other tastes. Ghosts of flavors. There was sweetness there, like meat. A sharpness like ammonia. The tang of acid sourness. He did not know what this ash had been. Something alive, that much was certain, but that could be as true of a tree as of a dog, a pigeon, or the postman. He wished that he could discern which, but a learned palate was an acquired thing, its subtle perceptions honed through practice, observation, consideration, and repetition. Saint John did not believe that he would have the time to sample and catalogue the many flavors and combinations of flavors of this apocalyptic feast. The fires would not last as long as his appetites.

  Pity.

  There was an explosion off to his left. He cocked his head and replayed the boom in his memory and then listened to the echoes as they banged off the building that surrounded the stone library. He smiled faintly. This was something he knew well. The blast was ordinary, not military ordnance. Probably a car gas tank rupturing from superheated gases as the vehicle burned. Semtex or C-4 each had its own unique blast signature, much like the calibers of bullets, weights of loads, and makes of guns. Each possessed a unique voice that whispered its secrets to him.