I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)

by Tony Monchinski

  “What the fuck happened to you?” Busta asked the head and Trey was reminded of that one play did he read in high school, Hamlet by that Shakespeare motherfucker. Hamlet in the graveyard, Alas, poor Yorick, talking to the skull, I knew him well. Funny the shit that stuck with you.

  “Something wrong here.” Busta mesmerized by the head in his hands, Frankenstein on his mind. “Ya n’meen?”

  All stitched together, the hairy flesh of the lower half of the head looked like it was from some other person or animal. Yeah, animal was what it was. The upper half wasn’t nothing to write home about neither, missing its ears, one socket empty, the other eye closed.

  A voice was talking on the radio but neither man paid it any mind.

  “This,” Busta looked at Trey in the high beams, “This is a real god-damned man’s head in my hands.”

  “Maybe he got hit by a bus.”

  “No buses comin’ down this street.”

  “What you think brah?” Busta stood grinning, the head aloft. “The cover of my next album?”

  The body sat up. Trey was staring at it, speechless.

  “Oh no, brah. I didn’t just see that.”

  The arms raised, the hands touching at the neck stump.

  “Now tell me I didn’t just see that, brah.”

  The one eye left in the head he held opened, but Busta did not notice. He screamed when the mouth clamped down on his hand. Screamed and flicked his arm, trying to dislodge the head, but it wasn’t letting go.

  Words continued to fail Trey as he watched it all open-mouthed, Busta stuffing the head under his arm and trying to pull his hand free—

  The corpse pushing itself up to one knee

  —Trey watching Busta batting at the head with the champagne bottle, crying out in pain—

  The body standing, swaying unsteadily in the street

  —Busta crying out for Trey to help him Brah got-dammit, Busta whacking the head against the hood of the Benz, the head growling around his hand where it had him fast.

  Movement in Trey’s peripheral vision: the body was coming towards them, a step at a time. He dug around in his bag, finding the pistol, a little .25. Couldn’t carry much else in his man purse.

  Busta succeeded in freeing his hand, the head rolling under a parked car. He leaned against the Benz, shocked into something like sobriety, his hand bleeding freely.

  Arms raised, the body took another step towards them.

  Busta looked dubiously at the little gun in Trey’s hand. “Where’s the chopper?”

  “In the trunk.”

  “Go get it!”

  “Of the Nav.” The Lincoln that left that morning.

  “Fuck. Shoot that bitch!”

  Trey took careful aim and fired, the pistol sounding like a firecracker in the night. The body absorbed the shot and continued towards them, slowly, relentlessly. He fired again and again, crack-crack, firing until the slide locked open on an empty chamber, the body still coming. Trey took a step back, away from the thing and its groping hands, rooting about in his bag for the extra magazine he knew was in there somewhere—

  Busta circled around the body, swinging the bottle in his hand as if to keep it at bay, but the thing seemed uninterested in him

  —and Trey found the magazine, his back pressed against the Benz, the thing almost on him, Busta crying “Run, idiot, that ain’t doin’ shit!” Busta’s arm cocked back and he launched the champagne bottle. The flat bottomed bottle tumbled end-over-end, cleaving the air above the body where its head would have been if its head wasn’t just then under a car, the bottle flying on to clock Trey in his head.

  “Fuck!” Busta wanted to jet, convinced it was that Khan son of a bitch come back from the grave to get him, Khan or his ghost: what the fuck had he gotten himself into?

  The body had reached Trey and wrapped its hands around his thick neck, Trey having just righted himself after getting hit with the bottle. Trey got his own hands around the thing’s arms but couldn’t get them off him, its grip crushing his throat.

  Busta watched Trey’s dark face get darker.

  Trey went down on his knees and the body stood over him, choking him, the Jesus pendant jerking up and down on his chest.

  Mitchell Givens ran off into the night, shrieking in fear, back towards the Moses Houses.

  “This your girl Neecy on K-E-A.” Two of the car doors remained ajar, the radio loud in the night. “Looks like our boy Gangsta Khan is gonna be alright, alright? Gangsta’s people are announcing he’s in stable condition and expected to make a full recovery—”

  A block away, a woman on a building’s roof watched the scene on the street through the scope of the sniper rifle she’d set on the roof’s ledge. She watched Busta Nutz run away screaming. She watched the headless body finish off the driver, the man’s body slumping lifelessly in front of the car next to his little bag. She watched the body stagger over to the curb, searching for its head.

  She keyed the radio in her hand and when she got the go-ahead she said, “Looks like Mama Coyle’s boy is on the hunt.” The woman began to break down the rifle, storing the components in its case. When she’d finished she looked back down on the street and caught sight of the body lurching away, its head in its hands.

  39.

  10:32 P.M.

  Gritz sat alone in his dining room, the table before him a mess of papers and documents, books cracked open and dog-eared. The ice cubes in his vodka glistened in the light from the fixture overhead.

  He had a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, which was one bedroom too many. The landlord was a friend of a friend, let him put down a deposit and pay by the month with no lease. Gritz thinking, when he’d rented it, things would smooth over with Cathy and he’d move back into their house in Queens. That’d been months ago. The mortgage on the house was paid off, otherwise there’d be no way he could swing it and rent this place. He’d gone for the two-bedrooms, hoping one or both of their boys would want to come and spend some time with their dad, maybe a weekend.

  That hadn’t happened either.

  He had a broad sheet newspaper spread open in front of him, Mephisto’s Manifesto printed in it. Gritz took another drink as he looked over the one section with world population statistics:

  Given:

  1350—370 million

  1804—1 billion

  1927—2 billion

  1960—3 billion

  1974—4 billion

  1987—5 billion

  Therefore:

  1999—6 billion

  2010—predicted 7 billion

  2025--???

  Yeah, okay, so what the hell was his point? Sure, this Mephisto guy lived in bizarro-land, was some kind of nut. And fuck the newspapers for printing this bullshit, ennabling the bastard. Giving him what he wanted. Cause guys like this, they always wanted an audience. Notes, letters to newspapers, it all amounted to the same thing: look at me.

  The vodka was smooth going down, and he’d put away a lot of it in the last couple hours.

  This guy, Mephisto, this guy was going to get caught one day, Gritz knew, because they almost always did get caught. And then the boys in the white lab coats and the ones with all the initials after their names could figure out what motivated him. In the meantime, the scumbag’s identity remained a mystery, and his motivations, well, who knew what they were.

  On the other hand, for Gritz, the Faust legend wasn’t that hard to grasp. A scholar wages his soul against the devil. Although Faust’s Mephistopheles was not the devil himself, just one of his workers. Mephistopheles, a guide to Dr. Faustus. This manifesto in the paper, a guide to what? The berserk speculations of a maniac?

  Therefore:

  1999—6 billion

  2010—predicted 7 billion

  2025--???

  Early 1800s a billion people on Earth, Gritz had confirmed that online. He’d read how Goethe finished a preliminary version of Faust in 1806, published it in 1808. Revised and republished it in the late 1820s. Des
igned as a closet drama, the play was never intended to be performed onstage. You were supposed to read it alone, aloud to a small group maybe.

  He skipped to another section of the Manifesto, one of the haiku, this asshole all over the place with his bullshit.

  The Noble Mule

  Inability

  to produce fertile offspring

  hallmark of species

  Doctor Faust turned to magic to find infinite knowledge. Turned to magic to find truth and made a deal with the devil. This Mephisto here and now, putting together all sorts of bullshit, probably styled himself profound.

  Perspicacity

  To stand

  on the shoulders of giants.

  Better

  to stand atop the weak

  and reach

  the

  heavens

  on a human scaffolding.

  The secondary sources on Faust were more confusing than the play itself. Gritz sipped his vodka, already drunker than fuck.

  on a human scaffolding, the line sticking with him.

  Phantom Redemption was playing over in Jersey next weekend. He’d called Cath, left a message on her machine. She hadn’t called him back yet. Gritz imagined she was busy, what with the boys.

  When Goethe’s Mephistopheles first appeared to Faust in the doctor’s study, he told him I am part of the part that once was everything. Part of the part that was everything once. Part of the darkness which gave birth to light/That haughty light which envies mother night...Gritz thought of space, out there, above and around him, empty and cold. His mind was all over the place.

  What was interesting to him, and something Gritz’d had no knowledge of before attending the lecture he’d gone to, was Goethe’s fascination with vampires. Okay, maybe two poems out of however many didn’t constitute a fascination. But Gritz thought it fascinating that Goethe was writing about vampires almost a century before Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

  There was the Bride of Corinth for one.

  Young guy arrives in Corinth looking to marry the daughter of a friend of his father’s. Becomes apparent something’s not kosher with his betrothed right off the bat: she’s wearing a veil, has very white hands, moves in a glide, and only visits him at night. By stanza twenty-four she’s confronting her own mother in front of the guy, accusing her, It contents not thee/To have driven me/An untimely shroud of death to wear? Goethe’s bride telling her mother from out my coffin’s prison-bounds/By a wond’rous fate I’m forced to rove. Tells her mother to open her grave for her and the guy, That the flames may give the lovers rest!

  Gritz thought he got most of that one, though the translation left a little something to be desired. It was another poem, Goethe’s Skeleton Dance, which confused him. It’s midnight in a church graveyard. The graves open and the warder is left to wonder at the shrouded men and women who come out of them. The dead take off their grave clothes—And as no person thought about modesty there, Gritz smiled at that part, They flung off their garments, and stripped themselves bare—and they dance. The warder’s watching all this, apparently unobserved or the dead don’t care, Gritz couldn’t tell. The warder takes one of the death shrouds that’s been cast aside and hides behind the church portal, which Gritz figured meant the church door.

  When the dead grow tired of their fun, they put their clothes back on and return to their graves.

  Except one.

  The one whose shroud the warder has taken.

  The skeleton can’t find its clothes, can’t get back in the ground. It starts to climb where the warder is hiding, reaching out to for the garment. The warder’s thinking it’s all over for him when the sky turns dun and the skeleton crumbles to pieces.

  Gritz pushed the Manifesto aside, amid The Bride of Corinth and the Skeleton Dance, a mess of papers and documents. As far as he could tell, whoever this nut job was had nothing in common with Goethe’s villain other than a name.

  But it couldn’t be just a coincidence. Faust’s play had some kind of significance to this schmuck. The question was, what was the significance? Gritz felt it was right there staring at him, in the Manifesto, the poems, the secondaries, the play itself. Staring at him and he just couldn’t see it yet. But it would come to him, it would click. Thing was not to tear his hair out waiting for it to happen.

  He’d put a photographed lithograph of Mephistopheles on his wall, Mephistopheles flying overhead, a winged demon. Naked and taloned, looked like angel wings. Gritz sat back in his chair, one arm crossed over his stomach, a hand on his jaw. He stared at the lithograph, wondering. The city of Wittenberg beneath the beast. Eugene Delacroix had painted it in 1828. Gritz wondered if the drawing went along with the revised Faust.

  Restless, he leaned forward and picked up a copy of an article he’d been meaning to read. Concerning the Changes in the Completed Part I (1808) as Compared with the Earlier Versions of Goethe’s Faust. By an A.B. Faust from Cornell University—how funny was that, the name. Published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology back in 1939. People made careers of reading and writing things like this.

  Gritz couldn’t imagine.

  He sipped his vodka, laying the article aside, atop the others he hadn’t read yet.

  The hell was he doing spending his nights pouring over this stuff anyway? It was driving him mad. The Yankees had swept the Padres in four straight games and he’d barely watched the series. Even tonight, he should be out celebrating someplace. But his mind kept coming back to these murders, to this Manifesto.

  Better

  to stand atop the weak

  and reach

  the

  heavens

  on a human scaffolding.

  From his experience, it was easier talking to people than reading stuff like these secondaries. Cornell’s A.B. Faust was long dead by now, no doubt. Who’d Gritz know that might be able to answer some questions for him? And questions about what anyway? That was part of the problem. What was Gritz going to say, look, there’s this matter—police business—it’s got something to do with a dead German Romantic poet, some kind of tie to him, maybe, or one of his plays.

  The connection was tenuous at best. For all Gritz knew, the killer was creative with his choice of names and that was it. Goethe’s connection to the murders was flimsy, like Gritz’s whole involvement in this. It was police business. He wouldn’t be lying about that, if that was what he told somebody, but it was police business he was—at best—only tangentially involved with.

  Captain Rose got wind of what he was occupying himself with, Gritz’s connection would be severed.

  In the meantime he had over a dozen dead bodies and no answers. That was his case. That was his job.

  That professor from the lecture, he’d be interesting to talk to. Gritz wondered how he’d go about tracking the guy down. He had the flier somewhere. Could find the guy online, find out where he taught.

  The phone rang and Gritz sat up straight in his chair, not expecting it. Who’d be calling him here this time of night? He picked the receiver up before it could ring a second time, thinking it was Cathy or one of the boys, hoping…

  “Hello.”

  “Hiya, detective.”

  He recognized the voice.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Actually, I’m calling about something we can do for you.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “You’re not working Sunday.” Stating it like he knew it for a fact. “Meet us Saturday night, downtown near City Hall, next ta the park.”

  “What for?”

  “Take a shooftee with me mates and I.”

  “A what?”

  “You want answers detective. We’ll provide them. Have a good night then.”

  The man calling disconnected.

  Gritz was left with the phone in his hand, looking at the receiver. This whole thing was so…odd. He hung up the phone and picked up his drink. When he finished it he’d turn in, think how to track down that doctor the next day.

&n
bsp; 40.

  11:37 P.M.

  “What you all niggas up to?”

  Terrance Watkins and his buddy Marquis were sitting on one of the few remaining benches in the quad when Ronald led Red Fred over to them in the dark, Ronald gripping Fred’s wrist in one hand, a joint in his other. Marquis had spoken.

  “Fred’s trippin’ yo. Move over.” Terry and Marquis scooched over, making enough room for Ronald to sit his fat ass down. Fred sat next to the bench, his head lolling back in his hoodie, a vacant look in his eyes.

  Marquis reached across and waved a hand in front of Fred’s face. It took a second to draw Fred’s attention. He smiled a dopey grin.

  “Trippin’ on what yo?” Terry asked.

  “This smoke Juan rolled.”

  “What’s in that shit, yo?” Marquis scrunched his nose up at the stench the joint gave off.

  “Heaven.”

  “Let me see that bone here yo.” Ronald handed it over to Marquis, who eyed the joint suspiciously before taking a hit.

  “I don’t know,” Marquis remarked dubiously as he exhaled. “I don’t feel nothin’.” He handed the joint to his boy Torell.

  “Wait till it hit you,” Ronald promised. “Hey, any you niggas got something to eat? I’m hungry.”

  “Yo,” Terry exhaled. Like Marquis, he wasn’t feeling anything either. “You heard Luke got jumped again.”

  “Yeah,” Ronald yawned. “I ain’t even seen Marquis or Yure. Them niggas must be hiding out or something.”

  “Something ain’t right,” noted Marquis.

  The joint made its rounds, Fred too high to smoke any further, Fred giggling to himself.

  “He in his own world, ain’t he?” Marquis was leaning forward to consider Fred sitting there. When he sat back he felt it. This shit was on. “Whoa. Now we talkin’.”

  Terry inhaled deep and held it. His momma caught him out here smoking this weed, she’d call him out in front of his friends, make him come home. But how was she gonna do that, his momma working at the nursing home tonight. DeAndre at home, probably up in his room reading one of his books. Terry let the smoke out of his lungs, and suddenly he wasn’t thinking about his momma or brother.