Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Read online

Yeah. Not expanding. Dropping.

  I glanced over at Doyle. He planned to survive, and I was going to take my cues from him on that even if he was a crazy kidnapping fuck.

  He was staring back at me. Waiting to see what I would do, with a big old shit-eating wrong-toothed grin on his face like he was the smartest damn conspiracy theory buff ever.

  I scrambled to my feet and turned to run, but he got to me before I could get anywhere and pinned me against a tree.

  “Too late to run now anyway,” he said. “It’ll be on us in thirty seconds max. Do your stuff.”

  “I don’t have any stuff to do, you dumb shit!”

  He looked stunned, and let go of me. Stepped back into the middle of the clearing to stare at me as if I’d let him down, not even turning over his shoulder to see the translucent but now clearly defined mass of death heading for us.

  I knew it was no use now, but I didn’t want my body to rot up on the mountain next to this jackass’s, so I pulled out my cell phone anyway. And it did have a signal. God from a machine.

  My hands were shaking and my brain was on autopilot, and I wasn’t looking down. I was looking at the thing, which I will not call an air tiger. It looked like a large, pearly amoeba with fine eyelash-hairs all over and a slight pink tinge. It made a moaning sound as it came down on Doyle, who had spread his arms in a Jesus Christ pose, I suppose to die as big a douche as he had lived, all tragic around the red-rimmed eyes. I hit a few buttons that weren’t 9-1-1.

  My voicemail started playing back. The volume was turned up all the way, the better to be heard in the noisy womb of Rosemary’s.

  The numbers seemed tiny in the woods, tiny compared to the thing on top of Doyle, but it shuddered. The moaning went up a note, the little hairs all quivered in unison. Slowly, like an elephant climbing out of a wallow, it began to rise.

  When the first message ended I frantically skipped to the next. It was twice as high as the trees when I had to start replaying from the beginning, and that’s when the clearing was flooded with light and a dozen uniformed, armed men burst from the trees.

  Two of them grabbed me, and held me up when my legs decided they were checking out. Another two tackled Doyle.

  A pony-tailed woman came up behind them with a pair of binoculars and a long rifle. She looked at the pearly thing still hovering just above us, then shook her head.

  “It’s too late,” she said to the man next to her, and he nodded. She raised the rifle, sighted, fired.

  I expected the bullet to go right through, but it made a sound like wumph, like it had hit a pillow, and exploded like a tiny firework inside the thing.

  The moaning, Jesus Christ. Like Jeanette had moaned that day dying on the dirty brown carpet. It listed towards the side it’d been shot on, then tried to right itself, tipped too far the other way, went over and belly up. And then it dissolved into the air, into the tops of the trees, barely-pink fragments snowing down. A couple of the men raised bandannas to their faces, but most of us, including the woman with the gun, just watched in silence.

  When there was nothing more to witness, they jerked Doyle to his feet and we headed back down the mountain. Someone shut down the floodlight behind us, but that was ok because the sun was coming up.

  Doyle seemed triumphant, despite the burly guy on either side of him and the cuffs on his wrists.

  “It’s too late,” he whispered at me when they shoved him into the back seat of the cop car next to me. “Now that I know how you did it, I’m going to make sure everyone knows. All along we thought it was something about the radio waves, but it turns out it’s just the voice.”

  “But . . . ” No. Let him figure it out how that couldn’t work on his own, if he was so smart. It’d only taken me a minute once I had time to think, once I wasn’t terrified for my life. In the meantime, if he wanted to believe he’d got one over on me, more power to him.

  Besides, since that couldn’t have worked, I wasn’t sure what had.

  Doyle was silent as we headed back downstate, which was a relief. But then, just as we passed out of the south boundary of Adirondack State Park, he slumped over onto me.

  “Hey!” I pushed him, and he flopped over the other way. His skin had flushed orange, and as his head jerked his tongue lolled out.

  “Crap.” The man riding shotgun looked back at us. “It touched him, huh?”

  “It was settled on him for . . . ” I didn’t know for sure, though, although later by playing my messages and timing them I figured it must have been a solid five minutes.

  They pulled over and dragged Doyle out to lie on the pine needles on the shoulder of the road. Another car stopped and emitted the pony-tailed woman.

  “She says it was on him for awhile,” the man said, and jerked his chin at me.

  “Poor thing. No wonder it was so bad off.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. You know there’s nothing we can do.” Doyle was in the foaming stage, and they both looked down at him with a combination of pity and disgust. “For anyone concerned.”

  I walked back to the car and didn’t look at Doyle again. No one tried to stop me.

  They gave me more of their so-called anti-PTSD drugs, but I don’t think those work like they’re supposed to on me. Maybe it’s all the booze in my system. I pretended to forget it all, though.

  The hardest part was getting Ginger to forgive me for ignoring her creepdar and screwing us both. She’d been beat up pretty bad by Doyle’s confederate who jumped her in the bathroom, but Sonovia spotted something wrong when I left with Doyle and went to investigate. The police got things put together pretty quickly, since Doyle had used the same credit card for everything from his Greyhound ticket to his fleabag hostel bed, the same card he’d left behind when he took me out of Rosemary’s without paying our tab. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out.

  Yeah, I’m sorry. Not that funny.

  I erased all the messages. I told Ginger I’d been a schmuck and an asshole and I bought her dinner at Momofuku. We still live together, and she still drinks with me, although not every night now that she has a new job. But she’ll definitely notice if I don’t come home. Just so you know. In case you’re one of Doyle’s “us.”

  But I doubt you are. I doubt you’ll even remember this conversation tomorrow, since you’ve been pacing me all night. But if you do, maybe you’ll be able to figure out everything Doyle mistakenly thought he knew and I never did grasp. Maybe it’ll click in your brain, even though it keeps buzzing in circles in mine.

  IT CAME AND WE COULD NOT STOP IT

  What makes a monster monstrous may be less a matter of any distinguishing physical feature and more a matter of certain intangible qualities. Chief among these would have to be its persistence, its relentless pursuit of whatever its goal. That goal likely entails some threat to us, either direct or incidental, and the monster likely combines its single-mindedness with a capacity to endure whatever attacks we hurl at it. If the monster can be defeated, it will be by an artifact or invention whose uniqueness only underscores the creature’s singularity.

  This iteration of the monster narrative seems the polar opposite of the power fantasy that animates so many stories of the fantastic. Here, what is on display is not omnipotence, but fatal vulnerability. The particulars of what we are liable to may change with the given story, as the narratives gathered in this second section demonstrate. Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” presents a monster of unbridled male aggression, while David J. Schow’s “Not from Around Here” joins a monster of more general sexual excess with a concern for suburban alienation. Cherie Priest and Jeff VanderMeer focus on monsters for whom our bodies are little more than raw material to be used for their own, strange arts. Norman Partridge’s “The Hollow Man” expands on this idea, giving us a creature whose amusement lies in making us its puppets, while Al Sarrontonio’s “The Ropy Thing” addresses the perils of infatuation.

  Whatever their surface differences, however, these stories are united b
y a sense, an anxiety, about the recalcitrance of the world, about those aspects of our existence over which we have no control, against which we struggle in vain. And underneath that plenitude lurks a common fact, that of our own, inevitable end. Asking himself whether he understands death, Mark Petrie, the boy-hero of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), thinks, “Sure. That was when the monsters got you.” The stories in this section of Creatures bear him out.

  Rawhead Rex

  Clive Barker

  Of all the conquering armies that had tramped the streets of Zeal down the centuries, it was finally the mild tread of the Sunday tripper that brought the village to its knees. It had suffered Roman legions, and the Norman conquest, it had survived the agonies of Civil War, all without losing its identity to the occupying forces. But after centuries of boot and blade it was to be the tourists—the new barbarians—that bested Zeal, their weapons courtesy and hard cash.

  It was ideally suited for the invasion. Forty miles southeast of London, amongst the orchards and hopfields of the Kentish Weald, it was far enough from the city to make the trip an adventure, yet close enough to beat a quick retreat if the weather turned foul. Every weekend between May and October Zeal was a watering hole for parched Londoners. They would swarm through the village on each Saturday that promised sun, bringing their dogs, their plastic balls, their litters of children, and their children’s litter, disgorging them in bawling hordes on to the village green, then returning to “The Tall Man” to compare traffic stories over glasses of warm beer.

  For their part the Zealots weren’t unduly distressed by the Sunday trippers; at least they didn’t spill blood. But their very lack of aggression made the invasion all the more insidious.

  Gradually these city-weary people began to work a gentle but permanent change on the village. Many of them set their hearts on a home in the country; they were charmed by stone cottages set amongst churning oaks, they were enchanted by doves in the churchyard yews. Even the air, they’d say as they inhaled deeply, even the air smells fresher here. It smells of England.

  At first a few, then many, began to make bids for the empty barns and deserted houses that littered Zeal and its outskirts. They could be seen every fine weekend, standing in the nettles and rubble, planning how to have a kitchen extension built, and where to install the jacuzzi. And although many of them, once back in the comfort of Kilburn or St John’s Wood, chose to stay there, every year one or two of them would strike a reasonable bargain with one of the villagers, and buy themselves an acre of the good life.

  So, as the years passed and the natives of Zeal were picked off by old age, the civil savages took over in their stead. The occupation was subtle, but the change was plain to the knowing eye. It was there in the newspapers the Post Office began to stock—what native of Zeal had ever purchased a copy of “Harpers and Queen” magazine, or leafed through “The Times Literary Supplement”? It was there, that change, in the bright new cars that clogged the one narrow street, laughingly called the High Road, that was Zeal’s backbone. It was there too in the buzz of gossip at “The Tall Man,” a sure sign that the affairs of the foreigners had become fit subject for debate and mockery.

  Indeed, as time went by the invaders found a yet more permanent place in the heart of Zeal, as the perennial demons of their hectic lives, Cancer and Heart Disease, took their toll, following their victims even into this newfound land. Like the Romans before them, like the Normans, like all invaders, the commuters made their profoundest mark upon this usurped turf not by building on it, but by being buried under it.

  It was clammy the middle of that September; Zeal’s last September.

  Thomas Garrow, the only son of the late Thomas Garrow, was sweating up a healthy thirst as he dug in the corner of the Three Acre Field. There’d been a violent rainstorm the previous day, Thursday, and the earth was sodden. Clearing the ground for sowing next year hadn’t been the easy job Thomas thought it’d be, but he’d sworn blind he’d have the field finished by the end of the week. It was heavy labour, clearing stones, and sorting out the detritus of out-of-date machinery his father, lazy bastard, had left to rust where it lay. Must have been some good years, Thomas thought, some pretty fine damn years, that his father could afford to let good machinery waste away. Come to think of it, that he could have afforded to leave the best part of three acres unploughed; good healthy soil too. This was the Garden of England after all: land was money. Leaving three acres fallow was a luxury nobody could afford in these straitened times. But Jesus, it was hard work: the kind of work his father had put him to in his youth, and he’d hated with a vengeance ever since.

  Still, it had to be done.

  And the day had begun well. The tractor was healthier after its overhaul, and the morning sky was rife with gulls, across from the coast for a meal of freshly turned worms. They’d kept him raucous company as he worked, their insolence and their short tempers always entertaining. But then, when he came back to the field after a liquid lunch in “The Tall Man,” things began to go wrong. The engine started to cut out for one, the same problem that he’d just spent £200 having seen to; and then, when he’d only been back at work a few minutes, he’d found the stone.

  It was an unspectacular lump of stuff: poking out of the soil perhaps a foot, its visible diameter a few inches short of a yard, its surface smooth and bare. No lichen even; just a few grooves in its face that might have once been words. A love letter perhaps, a “Kilroy was here” more likely, a date and a name likeliest of all. Whatever it had once been, monument or milestone, it was in the way now. He’d have to dig it up, or next year he’d lose a good three yards of ploughable land. There was no way a plough could skirt around a boulder that size.

  Thomas was surprised that the damn thing had been left in the field for so long without anyone bothering to remove it. But then it was a long spell since the Three Acre Field had been planted: certainly not in his thirty-six years. And maybe, now he came to think of it, not in his father’s lifetime either. For some reason (if he’d ever known the reason he’d forgotten it) this stretch of Garrow land had been left fallow for a good many seasons, maybe even for generations. In fact there was a suspicion tickling the back of his skull that someone, probably his father, had said no crop would ever grow in that particular spot. But that was plain nonsense. If anything plant life, albeit nettles and convolvulus, grew thicker and ranker in this forsaken three acres than in any other plot in the district. So there was no reason on earth why hops shouldn’t flourish here. Maybe even an orchard: though that took more patience and love than Thomas suspected he possessed. Whatever he chose to plant, it would surely spring up from such rich ground with a rare enthusiasm, and he’d have reclaimed three acres of good land to bolster his shaky finances.

  If he could just dig out that bloody stone.

  He’d half thought of hiring in one of the earth movers from the building site at the North End of the village, just to haul itself across here and get its mechanical jaws working on the problem. Have the stone out and away in two seconds flat. But his pride resisted the idea of running for help at the first sign of a blister. The job was too small anyhow. He’d dig it out himself, the way his father would have done. That’s what he’d decided. Now, two and a half hours later, he was regretting his haste.

  The ripening warmth of the afternoon had soured in that time, and the air, without much of a breeze to stir it around, had become stifling. Over from the Downs came a stuttering roll of thunder, and Thomas could feel the static crawling at the nape of his neck, making the short hairs there stand up. The sky above the field was empty now: the gulls, too fickle to hang around once the fun was over, had taken some salt-smelling thermal.

  Even the earth, that had given up a sweet-sharp flavour as the blades turned it that morning, now smelt joyless; and as he dug the black soil out from around the stone his mind returned helplessly to the putrefaction that made it so very rich. His thoughts circled vacuously on the countless little deaths on
every spadeful of soil he dug. This wasn’t the way he was used to thinking, and the morbidity of it distressed him. He stopped for a moment, leaning on his spade, and regretting the fourth pint of Guinness he’d downed at lunch. That was normally a harmless enough ration, but today it swilled around in his belly, he could hear it, as dark as the soil on his spade, working up a scum of stomach acid and half-digested food.

  Think of something else, he told himself, or you’ll get to puking. To take his mind off his belly, he looked at the field. It was nothing out of the ordinary; just a rough square of land bounded by an untrimmed hawthorn hedge. One or two dead animals lying in the shadow of the hawthorn: a starling; something else, too far gone to be recognisable. There was a sense of absence, but that wasn’t so unusual. It would soon be autumn, and the summer had been too long, too hot for comfort.

  Looking up higher than the hedge he watched the mongol-headed cloud discharge a flicker of lightning to the hills. What had been the brightness of the afternoon was now pressed into a thin line of blue at the horizon. Rain soon, he thought, and the thought was welcome. Cool rain; perhaps a downpour like the previous day. Maybe this time it would clear the air good and proper.

  Thomas stared back down at the unyielding stone, and struck it with his spade. A tiny arc of white flame flew off. He cursed, loudly and inventively: the stone, himself, the field. The stone just sat there in the moat he’d dug around it, defying him. He’d almost run out of options: the earth around the thing had been dug out two feet down; he’d hammered stakes under it, chained it and then got the tractor going to haul it out. No joy. Obviously he’d have to dig the moat deeper, drive the stakes further down. He wasn’t going to let the damn thing beat him.

  Grunting his determination he set to digging again. A fleck of rain hit the back of his hand, but he scarcely noticed it. He knew by experience that labour like this took singularity of purpose: head down, ignore all distractions. He made his mind blank. There was just the earth, the spade, the stone and his body.