The Monster's Corner Page 7

  He cocked his head to listen. The cathedral was empty and still.

  Were demons moving silently between the pews? Had demons come to take his knives?

  Saint John was suddenly very afraid.

  Could demons materialize enough to be able to like a piece of metal? Before this moment he would have been certain of the answer to that question, but now he wasn’t so sure. The knives were gone.

  Had the demons made the footprints in the ash? Were the demons here in the church, maybe preparing to hunt him with his own knives? Had the Fall of man made the demons bolder? Had it given them more power? Had it, in fact, kicked open the door between Hell and Earth?

  These were terrifying thoughts, and Saint John whirled, drawing two knives from sheaths concealed beneath the white rags that covered his thighs.

  “This is the house of God!” he yelled into the dusty shadows. “You may not be here!”

  He heard the soft sounds again. Louder this time, and more of them. A scuffle of invisible feet moving in the shadows behind the screen that separated the altar from the choir’s chancel. The sounds were stealthy, of that Saint John was certain.

  The fact of their stealthy nature injected a dose of calm into his veins. Stealth was a quality of caution, of fear. Predators are stealthy for fear of chasing off the prey they need to sustain their lives. Prey is stealthy to avoid being attacked. For both, fear was the key.

  Fear, even in a terrible predator, revealed the presence of weakness. Of vulnerability. An invulnerable demon would not fear anything.

  You are a saint, whispered the Voice inside his mind.

  A saint. He nodded to himself. A saint in a church.

  Saint John felt the fear in his heart recede. Not completely, but enough for strength to flood into his hands from the knives he held; and from his hands to his arms and the muscles in his chest, and to the furnace of his heart.

  He could feel his mouth twist in contempt. He raised his arms to his sides, the blades appearing to spark with fire as they caught stray bits of light from the fires burning beyond the broken stained glass windows.

  “I am Saint John of the Ashes,” he cried in his booming voice. “Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus … in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi!”

  A figure stepped out from behind the screen. He was dressed in filthy rags and held one of Saint John’s gleaming knives in his fist.

  “Go away!” said the figure.

  Saint John had begun to smile, but his smile faltered and then fell from his lips.

  If this was a demon, then it was a demon wearing the disguise of a cherub. The fist that was wrapped around the knife was barely large enough to encircle the handle. Its face was round-cheeked but hollow-eyed, dusted with dirt and soot, dried snot around the nostrils, tear tracks in the grime. And upon the shoulder of the T-shirt he wore was a single bloody handprint. A child’s handprint.

  The cherub pointed the knife at Saint John.

  “Go away!” he said again. His voice was small and high, but there was so much raw power in it that Saint John was almost inclined to take a backward step. But he did not.

  He asked, “Who are you to tell me to leave my father’s house?”

  The cherub’s eyes were blue and filled with a fascinating complexity of emotions. His body trembled, perhaps with hunger or with sickness from one of the plagues; or fear. Or, Saint John considered, with rage barely contained.

  This was surely no demon. He held a sanctified blade in a way that showed he understood its nature and purpose; and yet he appeared in the face and form of a child of perhaps eight. Or … seven?

  That would be exciting.

  That would be wonderful, perhaps miraculous; and Saint John was now convinced that he was in the presence of the miraculous. Or on its precipice.

  Saint John took a step forward. The cherub—or child, if it was only that—held his ground, but he raised his knife a few inches higher, pointing it at Saint John’s face and giving it a meaningful shake. He held the knife well. Not perfectly, but with instinct.

  “I’m not messing,” said the cherub. “Go away.”

  Saint John was close enough to kill this child. He had the reach and the knives; but he merely smiled.

  “Why should I leave?”

  “This is our house.”

  Ah. Our. A slip.

  Saint John thought of the scuffle of footprints in the ash. And of fifteen missing knives.

  “This is my father’s house,” Saint John said. “This is the house of God.”

  “You don’t live here,” insisted the boy.

  “I do.”

  In truth Saint John had never been inside this particular church before, but that didn’t matter. A church was a church was a church, and he was a saint after all.

  “Who’s there?” said another voice. A woman’s voice. Vague and dreamy and slurry. Saint John smiled.

  “Rose … ?”

  There was a stirring behind the screen and the hushed whispering of many voices. More than a dozen, perhaps many more. Male and female, and all tiny except for Rose. Shadows moved behind the screen, and then Rose stepped out. She wore a choir robe that was clean and lovely in tones of purple and gold; but her face was still dirty and bloody and puffed.

  “You’re real?” she asked as she stared at Saint John. “I thought I dreamed you.”

  “Perhaps you have,” said Saint John, and he wondered for a moment if he, too, was dreaming, or if he was a character in this woman’s dream. “I am sometimes only a dream.”

  Her face flickered with confusion. The drugs the men had given her held sway over her; however, she kept coming back to focus. Saint John knew and recognized that as the habit of someone who was often under the influence and practiced at functioning through it.

  “Are these your kids?”

  As she asked that, more of the cherubs came out from behind the screen. Many of them carried knives. His knives. The cherubs were tiny, the youngest in diapers, the oldest the same age as the blue-eyed boy who still pointed his knife at Saint John’s face.

  Saint John counted them. Twenty-six. The firelight from outside threw their shadows against the wall, and their shadows were much larger. Did the shadows have wings? Saint John could not be sure.

  “Go away!” growled the lead boy. “Or I’ll hurt you.”

  “Hey,” slurred Rose, “be nice!”

  “He’s one of them!”

  Rose’s eyes cleared for a moment. She studied Saint John and his knives; then she shook her head. “No, kid … he isn’t. He’s the one who saved me. I prayed to God and He sent him to save me.”

  The lead boy’s eyes faltered, and he flicked a glance at Rose. In that moment of inattention Saint John could have cut the child’s throat or cut the tendons of the hand holding the knife. He could have dropped one of his own knives and used his hand to pluck the knife from the boy.

  He did none of those things.

  Instead he waited, letting the boy figure it out and come to a decision. Allowing the boy his strength. The boy refocused on Saint John, and his eyes hardened. “Where’d they take Tommy?”

  “I don’t know who Tommy is.”

  “You took him. Where’d you take him?”

  The other children buzzed when Tommy’s name was mentioned, and now their eyes focused on Saint John. He saw tiny fists tighten around knife handles; and the sight filled him with great love for these children. Such beautiful rage. They were ready to use those knives. How strange and wonderful that was. How rare.

  How like him; like the boy he had been when whore was burned onto his back and he had first listened to the Voice and heard the song of the blade.

  “I do not know anyone named Tommy,” he said. “I have never seen any of you before, except Rose, and I met her only a few minutes ago.”

  “Bull!” the lead boy snapped.

  “Shhh,” said Saint John. He took a half step forward, almost within the child’s striking range. “Listen to me.”

&n
bsp; The boy’s eyes drifted down, and Saint John could see that he was assessing the new distance between them. So bright a child. When his eyes came back up, the truth was there. He knew that he was in range of Saint John’s blades and overmatched by his reach. Even so, he did not lower his knife—and it was his now. He had claimed it by right of justice, and Saint John was fine with that.

  So Saint John lowered his own knives. He slid them one at a time into their thigh sheaths and stood apparently unarmed and vulnerable in front of this cherub. He saw the child’s eyes sharpen as he realized the implication of this, the threat unspoken behind the sham of vulnerability. Most adults would never see that. Only someone graced by the Sight could see that.

  The boy hears the Voice, thought Saint John.

  “Tell me who you are,” he said, “and tell me what happened to Tommy.”

  6.

  THE LEAD BOY told the story.

  They were orphans. They lived with four hundred other children at St. Mary’s Home for Children.

  Mary. Ah. That name stabbed Saint John through the heart. Her name. His mother. Long gone. First victim of his father. She had tried to protect her son from the devil in their home. She had survived a hundred beatings, but not the hundred and first. A blood clot. Mary.

  Mother of the savior.

  Saint John already knew where this was going. He wasn’t sure he liked it, though.

  The boy said that a line of buses set out from St. Mary’s two weeks ago, heading for a government shelter here in the city. There was a riot, fires. Gunshots. The driver was killed. The nuns were dragged off the bus. The boy did not possess the vocabulary or the years to understand or express what had happened to the nuns. He said that men did “bathroom stuff” to them. His eyes faltered and shifted away, but it was enough of an explanation for Saint John. He had been raped for the first time when he was younger than this boy. He knew every euphemism for it that existed in human language, and some spoken only in the language of the damned.

  While the men were fighting with the nuns, this boy opened the back door of the bus and made the rest of the kids run. There had been forty-four of them on his bus. Last night there were only twenty-seven. Tommy had been playing on the steps of the church this morning, and men had come to take him away.

  They heard him screaming all the way down the block and around the corner.

  “Describe the men who took him,” said Saint John. The boy did. Most of them were strangers. Two of the men fit the descriptions of the Jock and the Big Man.

  Rose was fighting to stay awake, but when she heard those descriptions she jerked erect. “That’s the same assholes who—”

  Saint John nodded. “Tell me where they kept you, sweet Rose.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “The kid’s gone.”

  “No!” yelled the lead boy. Others did, too. A few of the younger ones began to cry. “I’m gonna get him back!”

  Saint John shook his head. “No,” he said. “You won’t. You’ll stay here and guard your flock.”

  The boy glared at him. There was real fire in the boy’s eyes; Saint John could feel the heat on his skin. It pleased him. It was like being a stranger in a strange land and unexpectedly meeting someone from your own small and very distant town. He had not expected to see that blaze here at the curtain call of the human experience.

  “Tell me your name,” said the saint.

  “Peter.”

  Saint John closed his eyes and sighed. He smiled and nodded to himself. When he opened his eyes, Peter was still glaring at him.

  “I am going to find Tommy,” said Saint John, “and bring him back here.”

  Rose snaked a hand out and grabbed his wrist. “Christ, are you nuts? They’ll fucking slaughter you. There are like ten or twelve of those assholes over there.”

  Saint John said nothing, and his smile did not waiver.

  Rose finally told him where the gang lived and where they “played.” Saint John nodded. To Peter he said, “Stay here. Stay silent. Stay hidden.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “No. I can only tell you how to stay alive.”

  Peter scowled. “You’re gonna get killed. You’re gonna leave us like the nuns did and the driver did.”

  Saint John could feel the weight of the knives hidden in his clothes. He said, “Doubt me now, Peter. Believe me when I return.”

  And he left.

  7.

  THERE WERE SIXTEEN MEN at the hotel that had been converted into a lair for rabid dogs. Sixteen men on three floors.

  Saint John drew his knives and went in among them.

  Sixteen men were not enough.

  The skinny junkie was one of them. He was on the third floor, sleeping in a bed with a woman who was handcuffed to the metal bed frame. Her skin was covered with cigarette burns. Saint John revealed great secrets to the little junkie. And to the others. For some of them it was very fast—a blur of silver and then red surprise. For a few it was a fight, and there were two Saint John might have admired under other circumstances. But not here and not now.

  Saint John painted the walls with them. He opened doorways for them and sent them through into new experiences. He took the longest with the two men who were in the room with Tommy. They were the last ones he found. So sad for them that circumstance gave Saint John time to share so many of his secrets. The boy was unconscious throughout, and that was good; though Saint John wished that Peter could have been here to serve as witness. That child, of all of them, would probably understand and appreciate the purity of it all.

  Saint John left the adult captives with keys and weapons and an open door. He set a fire in the flesh of the dead men and on the beds where the women and this body had been. As he walked away the building ignited into a towering mass of yellow flames.

  Saint John carried Tommy in his arms. Halfway to the church the child’s eyes opened. He beat at the saint with feeble fists.

  “N—no …” the boy whimpered.

  “No,” agreed Saint John. “And never again.”

  The boy realized that he was wrapped in a clean blanket, and when he looked into Saint John’s eyes he began to cry. He tried to speak but could manage no further words. In truth there was no lexicon of such experiences that was fit for human tongues. Saint John knew that from those days with his own father and those vile, grunting men. The look the saint shared with the boy was eloquent enough.

  Saint John bent and whispered to him. “It was a dream, Tommy, but that dream is over. Peter and your other friends are waiting.”

  When he reached the square where the cathedral sat, Saint John saw that the fire on the roof had failed to take hold. The tiles smoldered, but the church would not burn. Not tonight.

  The fire of the burning hotel lit the night, and as he walked, Saint John could see the other cherubs—the angels—and the dusty Rose standing in the doorway of the church, surrounded by the arch of caved saints, and every face was turned toward him.

  Peter broke from the others and ran down the steps and across the street. He was crying, but he still held his knife, and he held it well. With power and love. Saint John approved of both.

  Rose came, too; wobbling and unsteady, but with passion. Her face glowed with a strange light, and she reached out to take Tommy from Saint John. Her brow was wrinkled with confusion.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  There was no way to explain it to her. Not now. She would understand in time, or she would not.

  Rose turned, shaking her head, and carried Tommy toward the church as the other angels flocked around her.

  It left Saint John and Peter standing in the middle of the street. They watched the others until they vanished into the shadows, then turned and watched the glow of fire in the sky. Finally they turned to face each other. Peter slowly held out the knife, handle first, toward Saint John.

  Saint John was covered with blood from head to toes. He had a few bruises and cuts on his face and hands. He sank down into a s
quat and studied the boy.

  “No,” he said, pushing the offered knife back. “It looks good in your hand.”

  The boy nodded. “You didn’t answer the lady,” he said. “She asked you why you went and got Tommy.”

  “No,” Saint John agreed. “Do you need me to explain it to you?”

  Peter looked down at the knife and at the blood on Saint John’s face, and then met his eyes. The moment stretched around them as embers fell from the sky. In the distance there were screams and the rattle of automatic gunfire.

  “No,” said Peter. Saint John knew that this boy might even have tried to get Tommy back himself. He would have died, of course, and they both knew it. Peter was still too young. But he would have tried very well, in ways the men in that building would not have expected. The boy would not have died alone.

  Saint John nodded his unspoken approval.

  They smiled at each other. Together they crossed the street and mounted the stairs and stood on the top step, watching the city die. There were fires in a dozen places.

  “It’s pretty,” said Peter.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Saint John.

  The boy considered. He nodded.

  The golden embers floated down around them.

  RUE

  by Lauren Groff

  THE GIRLS SLIP IN AT NIGHT. I see the ravages in the morning, the bald patches in the tansy, the yarrow mowed in swaths. Vervain and pennyroyal, feverfew and sage, ginger, lemon balm, parsley. A tincture or tisane of any of these, and the white bellies of the girls stay smooth, scrubbed from inside out. It is true: Secretly I planned my gardens for these girls. After the Ministers seized the country and remade it in God’s name, I could be hanged in the gibbets for my garden; I could be laser-flayed for the powers of my plants. But the girls only talk between themselves, and steal, and in any case they are too quick for me. They watch my house for movement, or listen for the slide and drag of my bad leg. When I know they are there, I stand and clump over to the door as quietly as I can. But in the sudden crack of light that falls into the garden, a girl is always leaping, a white doe, over my stone fence.