The Demon of Montreal

by A. Michael Schwarz

  Where is this goddamned thing?

  Her fingers searched empty space. Dewey was getting into it, unzipping himself. Find it, find it, find it!

  A hand clamped down over her mouth, something warm and rigid pressed between her legs. He was going for it. Her fingers worked the terrain, slipping about between the hollow space she’d made in the mattress. Panic surged.

  Find it!

  She’d been searching to high, the object had burrowed deeper.

  Dewey screamed. A look of betrayal was it? Stunned surprise? Her aim held true once more. The glistening tangle of broken glass spilled a fount of blood from his carotid artery, drenching his lily white uniform shirt.

  Hot blood spurted onto her face like a squirt gun. Blood gushed. She let go of the implement, leaving it impaled there like some morbid art deco piece.

  “Fucking bitch!”

  She slid back, groping sheets and pillow. Dewey reeled clawing at his neck. She slipped out from under him, and fell off the bed.

  Now…run like hell!

  * * * *

  The creature pounded against the sewers, railing against the stone that had been its womb for so many years. The time had come, but the eyes, it needed two more eyes before it could be birthed.

  Simon paced before the clock in his study. The sprockets had stopped. He needed one more sacrifice. Just one more, but Abby hadn’t come back, no totem to guide him to his next victim.

  The inorganic scent was rife in the air. He could detect it everywhere now. His purpose would soon be fulfilled—but he needed one more…He stopped. Waited. Something called to him. Yes, a murmur on the wind. Something still lingered out there… a calling card.

  * * * *

  Abby’s chest would burst if she ran another step. She stopped, hands on knees panting and dizzy. The street lamp overhead accentuated her gored smock. Her numb toes were covered in her own blood.

  Where was she? She heard sirens.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  He walked, guided by the very magic that had created him. His darkness enveloped him, hid him from the world of men. The caller was near now, he could feel it.

  He turned down a residential street. A street lamp flickered, went out. He stopped and turned, and stood before porch steps.

  The Summoner sat, staring. He said nothing, only waited. The Summoner stood. He could smell her perfume, cloying and sweet. Her hair flowed in unnatural curls; he could still sense the heat of the cosmetic tool that had been applied to create the effect.

  “So it’s true then, is it?”

  “What?” he said.

  “That you really do come.” She held out a thin strip of paper, now nearly a piece of lint.

  “Yes. Wait…” He opened a hand to her.

  “Where’s my sister?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Don’t fuck with me. You know damn well what I’m asking.” The Summoner stepped closer so that he could see her.

  He fell to his knees before her, tears hissing on his dark countenance. “Did you really believe you could trick me?” he said. “That I would not know you? That I would mistake you for your twin? My love, I could never mistake you. In all my agony and doubt, of this, I am certain.” He wept, not for her trick, but for the outcome he knew must follow.

  She knelt before him. Placed a hand on his cheek. “My dear Simon…” she began and broke off.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Please Abby, I can’t.”

  Tears soaked her face. She wiped at them. “It’s the only way,” she said and then took his hand and yanked it to her chest. His chill burned like dry ice. He brought his gaze to hers. “Do it!” she commanded. “Quickly and without mercy. Goddamn it Simon, do it! Do it now!”

  He took her into him, arms about her lithe and fragile frame, so close to him. He crushed her.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The beast had broken an arch of stone in the high ceiling. The first dilation of the birth canal. Rubble littered the floor. Dust clung to its clammy skin. When Simon approached, the babe had nearly scooped him up too, it so violently yanked the body from him. In multi-jointed fingers it pinned the corpse by the neck and plucked out the eyes.

  Trailing glistening strings, it held them above the skin of its face where the defunct lips of long-dead men opened like hungry pores to accept the jewels. In a mushy slurp the spongy membrane grafted them in. The monster blinked, all thousand eyes now opening and closing in unison, as if for the first time its rhythm had been righted.

  Simon dropped to knees before the beast and from his lips let escape a wale of utter anguish. He could not cry because his tears sizzled and evaporated as quickly as they leaked from his eye sockets. “Oh God, why have you done this to me?” Over and over again he screamed this one unanswerable question as thick blood pooled at his knees from the monster’s jowls, as the stomach mouth of the thing opened to its spiky teeth, quaking and jerking Abby’s torso like a gnarled and blood drenched doll.

  It paused, the drooling jaws hovering over the lifeless body that lay at its feet. Command of the organism had transferred into the great mouth. Simon wept bitterly as the beast flattened itself against the floor, pelvis pressed flush over the corpse. Simon’s screams echoed throughout the great tunnel caverns as the creature took such lurid liberties with the body of his beloved until finally the creature vaulted in some kind of peristaltic thrust leaving a black stain where the girl had been.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The monster’s lusty hunger had only been piqued. The slippery tongue poked from the deep crevice of its gut lips and licked a wide arc. Gobbets of slime drooled like stalactites. The torso began lurching obscenely. Simon crept back. The creature hungered, the mouth sought food.

  It wailed and screeched incoherently. It beat its great deformed hands against the rocky womb walls. Simon worried it might destroy itself, but stood powerless to do anything. Its legs jerked like a dead man kicking. Stone cracked in branching tendrils. Blocks tumbled in claps of dusty gravel. The Thing mined for freedom.

  The first draught of night air poured in through the burgeoning aperture and with it something else. At last Simon understood. That nearly indictable scent, the one he had sampled but never identified, hung rife in the air now. Not quite rotten, not quite organic.

  The beast raved in wild frenzy. The dinner aroma drove it to madness.

  * * * *

  Simon watched the monster extricate from the tunnel. How clean it left the stone, that brick-like uterus of its infancy. Despite the beast having gestated there for over a century, no excrement stained the masonry, a testimony to the efficiency of its feeding. Once out, he heard the trudging footsteps of its lumbering gait on the Montreal boulevards.

  The gathering scent burned in Simon’s nostrils. He felt nothing save for the loss of the love he’d sacrificed. All those deaths and only one he truly mourned. He allowed a breeze to catch and snatch the medical bracelet from his fingertips, the last totem of lost love. The wind carried it up and out to the cold streets beyond.

  He returned to his rooms, having no energy to follow the creature. The tunnels seemed useless now. His study sat a dusty chamber with dead rats adorning. He sat pensive on the iron chair before the great clock that no longer ticked as if all of time had frozen.

  An anomalous sensation nagged him, a fleeting ebb of his energy followed by the weighty press of eyelid. He wondered casually if a part of him were still human after all because for the first time in one hundred and sixty three years, Simon Kadoza slept. And dreamt. He saw afresh through the eyes he’d sacrificed so long ago. The eyes of his only child.

  Part Four

  The Ultimate Service

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Thousand-Eyed Thing tottered clumsily as any newborn, its legs unused, its gait awkward. It possessed,
in the bodies that composed it, enough accumulated knowledge to carry out its one mission.

  The creature did not think as a man thinks, nor as any animal, for both expressions were inadequate to the task at hand. A man, in his wisdom and complex thought would surely find reasonable excuse to deter from the fated undertaking. An animal, expressly lacking such and defined by the environment, would also run from the lurking menace.

  The Thousand-Eyed Thing could do neither, having no faculty for self-preservation and, as an aggregate life form, caring very little for any central consciousness. It had been made, built for a single task only. It would be satisfied only in its fulfillment.

  This did not mean it did not feel pain. Quite the reverse. It experienced physical, but more so, mental pain. Every second spent from fulfilling its goal grieved it madly.

  It did not notice the environment. It did not notice the screaming, flailing populace that fled from its very sight. It was this hideous visage that protected it during its journey, for not even the police could bear to tear their gaze from the spectacle of ugliness long enough to fire a single smoking shot. It walked unmolested over the streets and byways, the lawns and shrubbery.

  It felt the hunger throughout its entire corpus. At the pit of it, in its terrible stomach, a deep hunger drove it mad, an unbearable and an atavistic need to feed.

  Not just any meal would sate, for only one food choice would gratify. It searched for it now, led on by the inorganic odor that hung rife and pregnant in the air, but beyond the senses of men.

  It crossed through the polished Old Town to the banks of the gushing Saint Lawrence River. Here it stopped on a thin shored edge of the island called Montreal. The sputtering lips of its drooling gut-mouth parted, the skin pulling back to expose the mangled and bleeding gums. It screeched a baleful yawp to the world.

  * * * *

  Simon looked down at the churning river and heard the rumbling yelp of his creation. It seemed he stared out from a pair of the thing’s eyes, taking in all that the infant saw. To what end? he wondered as he snoozed, dreaming the monster’s vision. How will my purpose be made manifest?

  * * * *

  The Thing heard its own scream across the boiling river, but it did not hear as a man hears. It heard the resonance of sound, the sonic vibration. The return echoic pitch informed that the object of its search existed here, at these axial coordinates.

  Its stomach jaws champed nervously. The thing hunted its feast, as all creatures must, but it must also see it first that the chase might begin. Each eye blinked in unison and focused on one spacial coordinate—a single spot above the churning and ever flowing stream.

  The Thing brought each separate eye to view the one spot. Each focus joined the next until all gazed unblinking at one exact and otherwise invisible pinpoint. The pinpoint festered there beneath the unrelenting stare and grew. The veil of illusion that blinded the world like an elaborate and ever-changing mural, melted away.

  Slowly, bit by bit, atom by atom, the façade of the World disintegrated around the Thing. Truth laid bare beyond falsity. No longer did it stand before a dark and raging river on the edge of a North American city. No longer did it exist in the space-time of men. The Thing swam in a boundless void where there exists no time and a chaotic space, a plane of primal causes and primal effects.

  Stretched out before it in all directions and yet none, lay the leviathan composed of lumps and sodden protuberances, squashed together in ill fit and unnatural connection. A skein of slippery membranes spurted congealed inorganics from puckering blowholes. Groping tentacles spread out fan-like, drooling. Clods of curling gray matter oozed from distended orifices, spiraling and sliding from the greasy surface of its flanks. Tittering and fleshy polyps grew on horny stems, opened petal-like and squirted.

  The leviathan called itself the Taninim.

  If the Thing had been a man, it would have felt a sexual lust to mate with the floral genitalia of the Taninim, causing a rupture of offspring to pour forth and infest the Earth. Not as corporal beings, but as ethereal leaches, feasting in the minds of the human progeny, growing fat where plump Pineal glands used to reside in a by-gone species. Man.

  These hybrid children, mothered by the Taninim, would grow up bent on perverting Man’s justice and brotherhood beyond all hope of repair. In this way, the Taninim sought to subvert the human race and destroy all moral conscience.

  The leviathan drew power from the collective consciousness of ill-intentioned men, the sadist and the rapist and others. Even now, as the Thing stood before it, gazing at it with its every eye, the leviathan found foot holds here and there, in the material world, with its many and festering tentacles. Even at this very moment, the leviathan sought out men who would lay with it and season its hungry and dripping sex.

  Presidents, statesmen, men of the cloth, the Taninim sought hosts for its spirit-seed. Decayed Pineal glands of weak men in powerful positions where it could deposit its viral genome and thus control the fate of the world. Doppelganger faces of those infected men grew like mushrooms in the flanks of the Taninim so that their identities might never be forgotten.

  The Thousand-Eyed Thing waded with knobby knees through the gulf of nothing and latched onto the undulating flagella of the Taninim. Swaying in the void while anchored to the unholy creature, the Thing shoved its stomach forward in mock coitus.

  Sensing the promise of sexual satiation from the newcomer, the leviathan spread a meaty vulva-flower that twitched and mewed and glistened. Lust inducing pheromones showered the Thing and the slick vulva pulsated.

  The Thing, having no organs for such purposes, could not fall victim to the leviathan’s beguiling ways and therefore felt nothing in the presence of the malignant sprawl, save for hunger. To the Thing, the leviathan was that and nothing more: a feast to gorge upon.

  Down came the belly teeth as the Thing sated upon the meal it so greedily desired. The leviathan squealed in the void and shook like a deep-sea anemone sustaining attack. Try as it might, the leviathan could not shake the Thing. It was not prepared to fend off an assault of this nature.

  When men came to it at last, not seeing it for what it was, hidden as it was behind a colorful mosaic of the world, the leviathan had already won and no further battles were waged, just mating and the further stroking of decadence.

  Not so for the Thing who chomped down again and again, eating its way through the outer flanks and brain matter pudding to the great dead and beatless heart at the center.

  * * * *

  Thing moved slowly now through its feast. It could feel the heavy pain of its gluttony, but still it wanted more. It continued, sometimes sleeping, sometimes gnawing until, it slurped down the last slimy appendage.

  Its eyes began to close then, one by one, as it lay in the shapeless void, resting from its binge, knowing now that its life would end. A good life it had been too with all goals fulfilled.

  * * * *

  As the nine hundredth and ninety eighth eye closed, Simon stared out into the empty blackness beyond. Two more eyes to shut down and then…then all would be finished. He could still hear the intermittent beating of the Thing’s heart until at last, he could hear it no longer. As he closed the first two eyes ever given to his unnatural child, he felt warmed by the single thought—that heart had belonged to a saint.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Simon woke from his slumber. He knew it happened just as he had dreamt it, witnessed it, but not all the pieces had fallen into place just yet. He left the solitude of his underground chamber uncertain if he would ever return. He walked down the rain-glistening streets of Old Montreal. A few people milled about, those who had not heard that an eighteen foot Frankensteinian monstrosity had been traipsing through the boulevards.

  Of course, for those who had, what could they say or do? Report it? The thought brought the first smile Simon had exper
ienced in a very long while. Things did seem different now. A certain onus suddenly gone.

  He walked past the markets and through the neighborhoods until he reached the pier, the very place the monster had breached the veil. No monster sat here though, rupture-bellied and constipated. Instead, a sight both horrific and calming.

  Scores of bodies lingered on the banks of the great Saint Lawrence River, tugged one by one, even as he watched, into the river tide until each had been drawn under. He walked among them, remembering each face of those he’d slain, the elderly, the young, the good and the evil. All those who’d died in the name of the beast. He did not find one among them. He did not find his precious Abby.

  An hour, maybe more passed, before all the dead of those who had created the monster had been ferried away never to be seen again.

  Part Five

  The End

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Simon Kadoza stood in the frosty wind of midday. To those about, he must have looked like a blur of shadow, for still no eyes fell on him or recognized his presence. Except one. Only one. He walked on the banks of that wonderful rushing river that both nourished and isolated his home of a century and a half.

  Ahead, under a bridge archway stood another shadow. Of course, to Simon, this darkness appeared as a beacon of light and as he drew nearer, his eye sockets misted and he wept.

  She slipped into his arms, a perfect fit to his embrace.

  He felt foolish, crying like a child, but could neither help nor stop it. After several moments he asked the question, “How did you do it?”

  She smiled. Looked thoughtful and said, “When we were together in that…thing, all of us, we could each feel the other. We could commune with each other. In there, squirming about and driving it all was Merlin. And you know, he told me something. He said this was his final gift…to you.”