Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

  “Lichen,” she said, frowning. “How’d you know about lichen?”

  “Why Janie,” he said, and his grin widened some more. “If it weren’t for the lichen, you and I wouldn’t be here, having this conversation now. That’s how he gets in, Janie.” And then Mr. Swayze shut his eyes, and opened his mouth real wide. “Yum-tum,” he said, and his tongue flicked out and back, like it was a frog’s or something. He opened his eyes again, and as he did Janie had to look away. They were too bright.

  “You’re a quick study, Janie — a lot quicker than Ernie, which I wouldn’t have expected.” Mr. Swayze stepped over to her, but she still wouldn’t look at him. He put his hand under the blanket and rested it on the bare flesh of her shoulder. It was hot.

  “I wouldn’t have expected it,” said Mr. Swayze, “but I have to say, I’m glad.”

  Janie took hold of Mr. Swayze’s hand on her shoulder, tried to lift it away. “Don’t go touching me,” she said. But he wouldn’t move.

  Her stomach bent around behind itself, it felt like. Hungry! Food! And Mr. Swayze let out a breath of hot, stinking air. “The spirit’s fed me,” he said. His voice trembled, like from hunger. “It’s the wind and the sky and the cold, but oh Janie, it’s fed me. Done me well. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Let me go,” she said.

  “You know — you just can’t say yet. It’s the spirit of the land here. It’s the wind-walker — and it’s the spirit of you too, Janie. You were always close to it — but you’ve never been closer than today.” He squeezed hard on her shoulder. “This is like the property at Fenlan — another special place, Janie. You saw the drawings on the rocks, didn’t you?”

  “Like your book covers,” said Janie. She thought about the twisted horn, and the hand and the snake, and the wings of the DEAD BIRD, all there on the rock face where she’d licked the lichen away.

  “Right,” he said. “Very good. And all that, my Janie . . .” His tongue came out, and caressed the sharp tips of his front teeth. “All that’s just a yum-tum lick and a bite away.” His smile went broader, and his nose twitched, like it was catching the smell of the cooking in the other room.

  “Food,” said Janie. “You take the food from here and stomp on that blueberry patch, Mr. Swayze?”

  “Wendigo.” He whispered it like a dirty word in church. “That’s what they call me, Janie. And that old food was no good for you. It wasn’t what you needed, any more than that butter and that mustard’d do the trick. And forget about blueberries! You’re not a blueberry girl anymore, Janie. Now you come on with me to the kitchen — and eat some meat.” His eyes went all yellow with the heat in him.

  “You may be Wen-digo, but you ain’t Ernie,” she said flatly. “I don’t got to do nothing.”

  It was true, Janie thought. Because although the smell of cooked meat was all over her, although Mr. Swayze wouldn’t let go even though she told him to, although she was so Goddamned hungry she could just about gnaw off her own arm for it and would have just loved to go into the kitchen for some meat now, none of those things could compel her. Ernie was the only one who ever really could, and he was gone.

  Janie reached up and grabbed Mr. Swayze by the ear, which his big old grin had nearly reached. He stopped grinning when she twisted it and his face went like that wasp nest that time, all angry and twisted and ready to bite. She twisted it some more, and then there was some blood, and then Mr. Swayze’s hand came away from her shoulder and took hold of her arm.

  It didn’t do him any good, though. Janie felt the heat in her arm before his hand got to it. She made a fist, and there was a tearing sound, and then Mr. Swayze howled, and the last bit of bloody gristle went snap! and his ear came clean off. Mr. Swayze stumbled backward, holding onto his head and squealing like a pig.

  Without thinking, Janie pushed the ear into her mouth. It was crunchy, like a chicken knee, and it tasted a little bitter on account of the ear wax. She got it down in two gulps, and as she swallowed, her stomach stopped complaining.

  The fire went out of Mr. Swayze’s eye then, and he turned and tried to run from her, but she wasn’t going to let him go. She kicked out, and caught him in the small of the back — and when he fell, she stood over him and kicked down, like she had on the canoe. She heard the crack of another couple of ribs breaking — these ones in Mr. Swayze’s chest and not in the canoe. Her stomach didn’t give her any trouble about breaking these ribs, though, or about breaking the skin on the next kick.

  If anything, she thought it might be egging her on.

  Janie kicked him once more in the head, and with that, Mr. Swayze’s neck cricked all funny and he stopped moving. For a moment, she thought about bending down and opening her mouth wide, and just finishing him that way.

  Instead, she stepped back and sealed her lips.

  Yum-tum, said her stomach as she moved over to the bookshelf. She pulled down the copy of ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD.

  Janie ran her finger along the book-cover’s feather-bumps. They were pretty good feathers. She wondered for a minute whether they might have used a real feather to make it — some complicated thing where you pressed the paper on top of the feather with a steam iron, so the real thing would be there in the book. Maybe the book people had come out here, and rubbed it off the stone up the hill.

  Janie opened up the book.

  “Pro-log-oo,” she said. “Oh. I get it. Prologue.”

  Yum-tum. There were other smells too — more exquisite in their way, coming off of Mr. Swayze’s cooling corpse by the kitchen door. Janie could imagine burying her face in that fresh meat, lapping up the blood like it was a fine liquor.

  “The — the — ” Janie concentrated on the next word. “Laughing,” she finally said, and laughed herself. “The laughing man stood on the side of the dirt road and — and . . .”

  . . . and watched the storm boil in from the west. It was going to be bad, he knew; twisters like claws from some ancient beast would scour the lands and lift the things of those lands high into the sky. The storm would ride this place — ride it, and devour it. Nothing would be left in its wake but ruin and sadness. The laughing man thought about that. It would leave the land exposed. And that would be bad for the ones who were left. Because they would be easy pickings, he knew.

  Easy pickings for It.

  Behind her, glass cracked as the wind outside grew, and flung something at the house — no doubt to get Janie’s attention. She hunched over the book — let her mind go to the words inside it, the way the wind — the Wen-digo — wanted her mind to go to it.

  Mr. Swayze’s book didn’t say it yet, but Janie had a pretty good idea what “It” was. In the book, it was more than likely that DEAD BIRD from the cover.

  Janie closed ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD and put it back on the shelf. There had been a photograph underneath the author biography at the back of the book, but it wasn’t Mr. Swayze’s. They’d taken a picture of a bearded man — hair down to his shoulders, up near to his eyes. Might have even been the funny man. Or maybe the Laughing Man? Laughing and funny: the words meant just about the same thing, as Janie thought about it.

  “Yum-tum,” she said.

  The wind outside wasn’t letting up — if anything, it was getting worse. Frothing the waters; scouring the land; exposing those that remained . . . Making them easy pickings.

  Easy pickings for Janie.

  That was just how it was going to be.

  That wind was calling to her, it was time to move on, and somehow she knew she wouldn’t be able to stay put anywhere for very long now. She ran her tongue along her sharpening teeth. Good thing she hadn’t holed that canoe, else she’d be swimming.

  Night of the Tar Baby

  A nasty breeze caught the fumes off the still-bubbling tar pot and brought them along the shortest route it could find into Shelly’s nostrils. It was the foulest thing that Shelly had ever smelled; tar fumes stank like distilled pain, a kick in the gut or a sma
ck across the ear, and they made her cough when they reached down into her lungs. At the sound she made, her brother Blaine punched her hard in the side.

  “Shut up!” he hissed. “We’re gonna get caught!”

  “You shut up!” said Shelly. It was a struggle to keep her voice from quavering — Blaine was thirteen, three years older than her, and he was starting to get his man-arm. He’d hit her harder than he knew, maybe, and her ribs ached from it.

  “Quiet, both of you.” Their dad crouched beside them, behind the highway sign that announced a new Petro-Canada service centre was coming here by October. His arms were crossed on the washbasin he’d brought with them. The trowel dangling in his hand cut through the air to emphasize what he said. “This is just what I was talking about back at the house. This is why we’re here tonight. Time to stop all the fighting.”

  “Whatever,” said Blaine. “This won’t land you back in jail, will it?”

  “This,” said Dad, “will keep all of us from jail, for the rest of our lives.”

  “Then why are you stealing tar, not paying for it down at the hardware?”

  “Got to be filched,” said Dad. “That’s part of the magic.”

  “Whatever.” Blaine rolled his eyes.

  It was pretty clear that Blaine didn’t buy any of this — and Shelly knew she should probably defer to her brother’s judgement. After all, the last time their dad had been home for any length of time, Shelly was just five years old; Blaine, at eight, had known their father that much longer — lived through five more years of Dad’s promises and schemes, aftermaths of his barroom fights and late-night visits from angry OPP patrolmen; Lord knew how many three-day benders with his former buddy Mark Hollins; and maybe one or two more solemn pledges to improve himself, and turn all their lives around.

  Maybe Mom was right, and Dad was just full of shit.

  Dad started down from the sign, and into the midst of the construction site. The workers had laid foundations for the garage in a huge cinderblock rectangle; there were more bricks stacked over by the trees, along with some lumber, and there was a yellow digging machine that Dad figured was to hollow out a place for the big tanks underneath the pumps.

  But Dad didn’t care about the digging machine, or where the tanks would go or anything else. He was after the tar pot, which had been left simmering through the night. Dad figured they had about half an hour from the time the work crew left, to the time the night watchman arrived — and that would be plenty of time to do what they needed to do.

  Dad set the basin down beside the tar pot, making the bent-up twigs and wire rattle.

  “Get the turpentine ready,” he said. “Blaine, you listening?”

  “I’m listening.” Blaine reached into his pack, and pulled out the shoebox-sized tin of turpentine they’d brought along. “It’s here,” he said.

  “All right.” Dad set the trowel down a moment and rubbed his hands together. He reached into the breast pocket of his jean jacket, and pulled out a little brown plastic bottle Shelly recognized as one of Mom’s old painkiller prescriptions. He pushed on the safety lid, twisted it open, and held it over the pot. After a couple of seconds, something thick and white like condensed milk dripped out, made a long, snotty line between bottle and pot. Dad held it there until the last was poured out, then threw the empty bottle behind him.

  “Shelly,” he said, “hand me the skeleton.”

  “Don’t call it that,” said Shelly quietly.

  “That’s what it is,” said Dad, sounding puzzled. “But I won’t call it that. Just give it to me careful.”

  Shelly reached down and lifted the thing from the basin. It wasn’t more than two feet long — bigger than a newborn, to be sure; but not so big she should be scared of it. She shouldn’t be scared; but when a still-green twig bent like an arm flopped against Shelly’s knee as she lifted it, she nearly dropped the thing. Dad was right — this was a skeleton, and it was crazy to call it anything else. When she handed the skeleton off to Dad, she was trembling.

  “I hate this,” she said.

  “I know.” Dad smiled down at her with what seemed like real love — but it didn’t make her feel better. He cradled the little wooden skeleton with nearly as much affection as he lowered it to the stinking tar.

  “This is going to help us all,” he said, as he dipped it head-first into the boiling tar. “Everything’s better from now on.”

  “Dad?” said Shelly as they worked. “What do we need a tar baby for anyway?”

  Dad was watching the tar. “You remember what I told you about Mr. Baldwin, don’t you, honey?”

  Shelly remembered the story, all right; Dad had told it his first night back, while everyone sat around the kitchen table not looking at each other and picking at their food.

  Mr. Baldwin was Dad’s prison buddy — his cell-mate for years. And Mr. Baldwin swore by his tar baby; a little man he kept under his bunk.

  Mr. Baldwin’s tar baby was made from a pot on the roof of the pen’s south wing when it was under construction back in the 1970s and Mr. Baldwin had drawn work duty there. According to Dad, Mr. Baldwin was a puny fellow, more like a boy than a man in those days, and although Dad wouldn’t say why, small size and smooth skin was always a problem in a jail house. “Particularly when you’re like Mr. Baldwin, and won’t stand for nothing,” he said.

  Mr. Baldwin had explained how he’d made the tar baby when he and Dad were cell-mates for a few months before Dad’s release, and Dad had paid close attention. After all, Dad explained — Mr. Baldwin was still alive after all these years, and although he wasn’t any bigger, and his skin wasn’t smooth anymore, it wasn’t scarred much either. Mr. Baldwin said he’d never been forced to do anything he didn’t care for, and over time since that day on the roof when the tar baby got born, everyone got to calling him Mister.

  “It was a good time, when I was in with Mr. Baldwin,” Dad said, eyes focused far away and voice gone wistful. “No threats, no fights — nothing bad, nothing harmful. Men were respectful. The tar baby taught everyone a lesson.”

  “Sounds boring,” said Blaine, watching the tar boil and bubble, the brambly skeleton now vanished beneath its surface.

  “Hush,” said Dad. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, boy.” He leaned forward, peering through the thick fumes into the pot. “We need a tar baby, little girl, because your brother thinks peacefulness and respect are boring.”

  Shelly still didn’t understand why Dad wanted a tar baby now that he was outside of jail, but she figured it was better not to press the point. Dad was concentrating.

  “Is it done?” she asked instead.

  “I think so. Lord, I wish Mr. Baldwin were here now. He’d know for sure.”

  “Maybe we should wait,” said Shelly.

  Dad thought about this, and shook his head. “No. It’s time now. Blaine?” Without looking up, Dad held his hand out. Blaine rolled his eyes at Shelly, and hefted the can of turpentine. Dad took it, unscrewed the top and held it over the pot.

  “Hold your nose,” said Dad. He mumbled a verse about hair and salt and lizards, and began to pour. The turpentine in the hot tar made an awful dark vapour where it etched out the tar baby from the rest of it, and even though Shelly’s nose was held tight, she could taste it on her tongue and feel it in her eyes as it rose up around them and blotted out the dim light of the evening. She shut her eyes against it, sealed her lips, but it was still around her; she felt it sticking to her like the tar it’d come from, and the substance of it stayed on her even when the smoke cleared and Dad, arms tar-black to the elbow and grinning like a little boy, pronounced them done for the night.

  “Come on,” said Blaine. “Get up off the ground, stupid, and let’s go.”

  Shelly flinched back — expecting another punch maybe. But Blaine stood against the darkening sky with Dad, his hands tucked safely into his armpits.

  “Before the cops come,” said Blaine.

  Mom was watching an old episo
de of Frasier on TV when they got back, and when Dad came through the door after Shelly and Blaine, she glared at him like he was trespassing. In a way, he was. This was, strictly speaking, Mom’s house; she’d inherited it from her own mother, free and clear back before Shelly’d been born. The house was miles outside town, on an ugly flat scratch of land where the grass grew too high and you saw the neighbours by the smoke from their woodstoves in the winter. But it was theirs, free and clear.

  Mom called it their haven; for without the security of a paid-off house in a jurisdiction where the taxes were low, who knew where their awful circumstances would take them? She couldn’t work anymore, not since the accident at the restaurant three years back where she’d bunged her knee; a mortgage or even regular rent on a place like this would ruin them. She couldn’t carry it on worker’s comp alone.

  “Keep that thing in the shed,” she said, as Dad brought the basin inside. Mom probably wouldn’t have sounded angry to anyone but Shelly, and maybe Blaine.

  If Dad understood her tone, he didn’t let on. “Won’t do in the shed,” he said. “Got to be here, or there wasn’t any point.”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “There wasn’t any point. You got that right.” She picked up the remote from the side of the couch and pointed at the TV. Frasier’s dad and the little dog vanished, and the room darkened a bit. With a grunt, Mom shifted her feet from the couch to the floor, and lifted herself on her cane. It was no mean feat; Mom had gotten heavy since she’d taken off work. “You going to catch a rabbit with that?” she asked.

  Dad didn’t get it, and Mom laughed unkindly.

  “Mom’s talking about Bre’r Rabbit,” said Shelly, trying to help. “From Song of the South.” She’d seen the movie over at her friend’s house at Thanksgiving, and there was a tar baby in it. Bre’r Fox had used it to catch Bre’r Rabbit — and it’d nearly worked.

  “Jail didn’t teach you much, did it now?” she said.

  Dad sucked in his breath, like he was about to say something — and he looked down at the basin in his arms.