Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

  But the fact was, he wasn’t thinking about that. He was thinking about the Cyclops. And he wasn’t thinking about how he’d kill him, either.

  The path led him to the bank of the creek where it twisted around a cropping of rock and tree. With a trembling, he knew where he was:

  The North Brothers Lumber Company’s sawmill.

  The last time he’d seen it, the mill was up and running. The whine of the saw blade would cut across the valley as teams of horses hauled giant logs up the round-stoned creek-bank to the mill’s black and hungry mouth. Inside, men would unhitch the logs and haul them further along with complicated block and tackle. Nick Thorne would be first among them, the muscles in his thick forearms dark as mahogany, straining at the weight of the spruce and pine logs cut down from the mountain slopes all around them.

  Now the place was still as a tomb, its wooden walls and roof grey as stone.

  James swallowed. His hand was shaking as he set the baseball bat down in the pine-needles beside him, and set out across the creek shallows. The mill’s great black doors were open. Inside was dark as the mouth of a cave.

  The last time James had been inside the mill, the scent of pinesap was overpowering. Pinesap and machine oil and a bit of fear sweat.

  Now, it smelled like a slaughterhouse.

  At first, James was afraid the Cyclops had brought humans here — some of those folk Mr. Simmons had said had gone missing. But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that wasn’t so. The smell was from something else. Animal carcasses hung from chains wrapped around the rafters. He first passed a couple of shapes like big cats, their skins torn off as they hung maw-down to the sawdust-covered ground; something that might have been a boy, but James gathered to be a monkey carcass, hanging by a single, hand-shaped foot; and, what was left of the elephant. The bloody trunk brushed James’s shoulder as he passed underneath and a cathedral of ribs hung over his head. A cloud of flies that had been feeding there followed James for just a few steps then abandoned him as he left the Cyclops’s larder, and moved into the next chamber of the mill.

  James stepped around a thick post. Looked down, where the floor of the sawmill sloped from wood down to dirt. Light leaked in through the warping barn-board of the mill’s wall — reflected off a pool of oily water that had collected at its base. The Cyclops crouched by that pool — poking with an extended finger at a dark shape in the water.

  The Cyclops rumbled something indecipherable, in a deep and lazy voice. Mottled sunlight from the pond flickered across the giant’s flesh.

  The Cyclops stood high enough to brush rafters, while at his feet, the shape rolled and sank beneath the water.

  The Cyclops’s nostrils flared and he made a bellows-like huffing sound as he sniffed. He turned to face James.

  In two great steps, the Cyclops had closed the distance between them. He leaned down, so that his eye — big as James’s head — was just a few feet off.

  James gasped. This close, the Cyclops’s eye was fantastical. Colours shifted across the broad surface of its iris like oil across a sunlit pool. As for the dark in its middle, that grew and shrank as the creature focussed on James —

  — the darkness was hungry.

  The Cyclops reached around with both hands, and tucked them under James’s arms. He lifted him like he was a small child. The Cyclops muttered ancient words as he turned James from side to side — studying him like he was a doll.

  James kicked his feet back and forth in the air beneath him. He looked down: his toes were at least a dozen feet from the floor. He could barely breathe, the creature was holding him so tightly. He stared into the Cyclops’s great eye, and the Cyclops stared back.

  Memory drew from him like pus from a swollen wound.

  He felt a sob wrack across his body. The Cyclops ran a great thumb down his chest. When it settled, James gasped. The Cyclops grinned.

  James squirmed in a terrified ecstasy. The giant’s thumb was thick as a man’s thigh, but far more nimble. The feeling was primordial — it was as though it yanked him back to the night when his old friend Elmer Wolfe slept over — and had found his way into James’s bed — pressed close to him — and then the springs . . .

  . . . the bedsprings . . .

  They screamed.

  The mill was dark when Nick Thorne and Jimmy arrived there. It was in the hours before dawn — long before the morning shift would arrive. Nick pushed the boy around the side of the building, and through the great, blackened doors. It was dark inside.

  “You want to lie with men, boy?” Nick cuffed his son hard enough to send him to the ground. “You like that, do you?”

  Jimmy heard himself whimper — and hated himself for making so weak a noise. He was covered in sawdust. Face-down on the ground. His father smelled of liquor and sweat. “I’ll show you what it’s like . . .”

  Jimmy tried to press himself into the ground — as though he could escape that way, by enveloping himself in wood shavings. But there was no escape. His father’s hand, thick and callused from working a lifetime in the sawmill, pushed hard between his legs, pushed his nuts up hard into his abdomen. He gave a cry that sounded to him like a squeak.

  “That’s what it’s like, queerboy.” His father grunted, took back his hand, and undid his trousers.

  “That’s what it’s like, queerboy.” The Cyclops brought James close to his face. He opened his great mouth, and a tongue came out, thick as a marlin and rough like a towel — touched James’s middle, taking a taste of him. The Cyclops huffed, and smiled and lowered James to his own middle. Now James was staring straight into another, smaller eye. James felt his feet touch the ground, and the giant’s hand pushed him, guided him forward.

  James rubbed his face against the shaft of the giant’s penis. It was wide as a drum, and the leathery flesh trembled as he caressed it. The Cyclops moaned. The hand stroked James’s back. It wasn’t squeezing him anymore. But James knew it held him there as surely as were it a fist clenched around him. Shaking with fear and lust, and tears streaming down his cheek, he raised his own arms and embraced the immense shaft.

  The memory kept coming. The vivid, awful memory of his father, the heroic Nick Thorne, buggering him for what seemed to be an hour on the floor of this place. To teach him a lesson, he’d said. The old man had rolled him over before he was done. Demanded . . .

  . . . demanded . . .

  There had been a sharp crack! sound before he could do anything else, and his father had fallen down, clutching his skull. A man with a baseball bat was standing behind him. First ordering him off the property — telling him he was trespassing. Saying something about being an “agent of the mill.” Showing a little eye-shaped Pinkertons badge on his chest. Then, seeing Jimmy half-naked in the sawdust, shutting his mouth. The baseball bat came up again, and down again. That was when Jimmy had said it:

  “Stop killing him! He’s my Dad!”

  “Sweet Jesus,” said the man from Pinkertons.

  “Sweet Jesus,” said the Cyclops.

  James looked up. The Cyclops moved his hand from his shoulder, let him step back.

  “Shit and hell.” Not a dozen feet off, the grey-haired man from Pinkertons stood, blood in his beard and his shotgun raised, along with a fresh troop of detectives. “It’s a monster, boys. Kill it.”

  The Cyclops let James go, and turned his great eye to face his attackers. James sat down in the wet sawdust and finally felt the tears — hot and salty and honest — streaming down his cheeks. They weren’t the tears of mourning. Those, James realized, would never, ever come. The roar and light of gunfire and screams filled the cavernous mill. James was nearly deaf from it, weeping in the dark, when the Cyclops turned his gaze back to him.

  Now why, wondered James as he gazed up into the Cyclops’s encompassing eye, would anyone stick a spear into that?

  James dropped two polished nickels on his father’s waxy eyelids. Gunshots echoed through the valley, as another wave of detectives assaulted the sawmi
ll, and James thought about old Nick Thorne’s death: fighting his way through the flames — looking everywhere but up — before he was plucked into the sky and flung down again, amid the screams of his fellows.

  James stepped back and put his arms over his mother’s shoulders. He tried to ignore the stares of the other mourners. He was a mess. He’d come directly here to the Chamblay Cemetery from the sawmill. His shirt and trousers were stained and torn from the night spent in the crook of the Cyclops’s arms, amid the heaps of dead men left over from the first Pinkertons assault. His chin was dark with morning beard. It was quite scandalous — showing up such a dishevelled mess at his father’s burial. He supposed he would have to get used to that when he went back to Hollywood. There would be quite a lot of scandal then. Republic would more than likely, as Stephen had put it, cut him loose once it all came out.

  It may as well come out. Because he couldn’t go back to the cage of lies he’d made for himself in Hollywood — to being Captain Kip Blackwell of the Seven Seas — any more than Clarissa the Oracle could go back to the trapeze now that the horror of her own tiny soul was drunk dry, or than Clayton O’Connor could trick the rubes into thinking he were a true strongman, or than Sam Twillicker could live another day once the Cyclops had sucked his soul right from him.

  But he would have to take this one step at a time. His mother looked at him with wet, uncomprehending eyes. “What happened to you?” she whispered.

  “Quite a lot,” said James as Mr. Simmons’ shaking hands closed the lid of his father’s casket, and his sons prepared to lower the old man into the space they’d carved for him in the earth. James felt himself shaking too, around the great, empty space in him where the sawmill had crouched all these years.

  “I’ll tell you all of it this afternoon,” he said.

  The Webley

  Wallace Gleason walked alone that day.

  Some days past, he and Rupert Storey had fought a hot, angry storm of a battle that ended in tears and blood. Wallace had come out on top; for at the end, it was he standing, fists clenched at his side, eye-whites standing out like flecks of ivory against his tanned, dusty flesh. His best friend Rupert was on the ground, red ribbons of snot strung down his chin and into the dirt. Rupert bled; Rupert cried. Wallace did neither.

  The dog hunkered low in the grass. And it took note of Wallace walking past the quiet, broken-down shacks that every so often emerged from the woods along this stretch of road.

  It was a stretch that one time might have had some life to it. When the Evers Brothers sawmill was up and running, the little houses were full of men and their wives and their children, come to Fenlan to make a good wage. A dog would take note of no one boy more than any other. But this was 1933. The passages of boys were few and far between these days.

  Wallace thought he took the road slow and victorious, more man now than ever before. But the dog thought differently. It had not seen Wallace’s prowess in the sand pit, what a beating he had been able to inflict upon his foe. The dog only saw the boy, unsmiling, head down, shuffling along the route that he had taken many times in the company of his best friend Rupert.

  The dog launched itself.

  It was a big boy of a dog, a German shepherd. Maybe some wolf in it. Wallace was not much bigger. When the dog bounded across the overgrown lawn of its house, snarling, barking — Wallace screamed.

  The dog reared up on its hind legs, its front paws on Wallace’s shoulders. Their eyes locked. Wallace dropped his grammar textbook. He stepped back and fell, and scrambled up before the dog could set upon him.

  The dog gave only a short chase. It bounded after Wallace as he bolted along the dirt road to the crossing where it met the main road into town. There he stopped, barking twice more, as Wallace ran off to his school, alone, his grammar text left fanned open in the road by the dog’s house.

  It was only when the boy was out of sight that the dog turned back.

  Rupert Storey walked alone too, and had each morning since his ignoble defeat at the hands of his best friend Wallace.

  On his own, the trip to school went quicker. Having some brothers meant fewer chores. No longer waiting around at Wallace’s house each morning this past week meant Rupert had arrived at school fully a quarter hour earlier.

  Wallace found him, leaned against the tall maple tree at the back of the schoolyard. Rupert was keeping an eye on the Waite sisters, themselves engrossed in a game of hopscotch with some others in the Grade Four section of their class . . . none half as beautiful as those two: Joan Waite, at twelve, a year older than Rupert — dark hair falling in curls to her shoulders, framing her wide Waite face, cheekbones that came up in the shape of a heart. Nancy, a year Rupert’s junior, somehow born with straw-blonde hair, grown to the middle of her back and braided into a long plait. She had the same upturned nose, though, the same heart-face, the same golden freckles, as her sister.

  They all played on, not one noting Rupert’s steady gaze. Rupert turned that gaze on Wallace.

  “What?” he said.

  “You can come to dinner tonight,” said Wallace.

  “Who says I even want to?” said Rupert.

  But of course he did want to. Mrs. Gleason put on a fine spread for Wallace, his father the Captain and sister Helen — each night, not just Sundays. Rupert could sit by Helen, he reasoned, and not even talk to Wallace if Wallace didn’t apologize with more than a dinner invitation. So when Wallace asked him if he did want to, Rupert said, “Sure, I guess.” And at the end of day, he waited around until Wallace got out of detention for leaving his grammar text, and the two of them headed back together, on a longer route than usual, to the Gleason farm.

  Wallace did say he was sorry but took his sweet time, finally mumbling it as they started up the long drive to the farmhouse. The scope of the apology didn’t exactly cover the sins involved.

  “Sorry your lip got cut. I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”

  But Rupert figured it for as good as he’d get. “All right,” he said. “It wasn’t bad as that.”

  Wallace half-grinned then and almost undid it. “You cried like a little baby,” he said.

  But when Rupert pushed him, starting something all over again, Wallace put his hands up. “No fighting today, brother. Today, we got to stick together.”

  “All right.” Rupert let his hands dangle at his sides. They trudged up the drive to the house and climbed up on the porch. The Captain was there, sitting on an old cane chair, sipping well-water from a tin ladle. One suspender dangled off his shoulder; his white shirt was stained with sweat, which beaded on his sunburned forehead. Seeing Rupert, he lifted the ladle to him as if in a toast.

  “Good afternoon, Captain Gleason,” said Rupert.

  “Afternoon, Lieutenant Storey. Corporal Gleason.” The Captain winked and finished the ladle of water. He dipped it into the bucket beside his chair and offered it to the boys. It had been a hot walk; Wallace took it and gulped down half of it, and Rupert grabbed it away and finished it.

  “Can Rupert stay for supper?” asked Wallace when they handed the ladle back.

  “Can Rupert stay for supper? I don’t know. Depends on whether our Helen’s up to fending off the attentions of her young suitor tonight.”

  Wallace glared, Rupert blushed, and the Captain laughed. “You’re always welcome at our table, Rupert.” He sniffed the air and said to Wallace: “Your mother’s roasting pork tonight. With apple. Ought to be plenty.” Then back to Rupert: “Go on inside. Say hello to Mrs. Gleason. Keep your hands to yourself with my daughter. Think you can say Grace?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I think so too. Now scoot.”

  They went inside and through the sitting room. Rupert always liked spending time here. Captain Gleason had become a captain serving with the Perth County Fusiliers in the Great War. It was a rare ascent, so said the Captain, to go from enlisted man to officer in the course of a war. For the Gleason farm, it brought prizes: a decommissioned German Max
im gun, mounted in the corner; and a helmet from a Hun, a bullet hole in it right at the crown, hung on the wall beside family photographs. By the west-facing window perched a small metal sculpture of an angel, polished black, which Rupert and Wallace understood had been lifted from the bombed-out ruins of a French church, brought back as hidden booty in a soldier’s duffel.

  Rupert went through there to the kitchen, where he found Mrs. Gleason and Helen, tending supper on the woodstove. Helen was a woman of fifteen — black hair cut to her shoulders — a small mouth with full red lips — brown eyes that laughed . . .

  Skin like silk, like gold.

  She and the Waite sisters . . . they were in the same league, as far as beauty went. Rupert put his hands in his pockets and said hello.

  There was some fussing. Rupert was unsure about whether the Captain and Mrs. Gleason knew about the battle between him and their son last week in any particulars. But Mrs. Gleason at least must have intuited that something had been wrong, she being so relieved now that things seemed right. Helen, smile plastered on her face, asked Rupert some questions — mostly about how his brothers were keeping, and he answered as best he could. He would have kept talking ’til dinner was served, but Wallace motioned him back to the sitting room so he excused himself and left the women to their work.

  “I got something to show you,” said Wallace. He beckoned Rupert over to a dark cherry-wood cabinet, on top of which was a case with medals and decorations that Captain Gleason had earned, all arranged on a bed of red velvet. He pulled open the top drawer, which was as high as their chests. He looked around apprehensively, then lifted it out.

  It was a holster of dark, oiled leather, with straps wrapped tight around it. Wallace held it in both hands like it was treasure, which, Rupert supposed, was exactly what it was.