Monster

by Shane Peacock

  Blood spurts out of the great surgeon and he turns to Jonathan and stares down at him, his eyes bulging.

  “You’ve shot me!”

  “Excellent observation,” says Jon. “You must be a scientist.”

  “Now, die,” says Tiger quietly.

  But he doesn’t. Instead, he suddenly seems like a new man. His yellow, burned face flushes.

  “I am filled with anger, Edgar!” he cries. “I AM FILLED WITH ANGER!” But he doesn’t look angry—he looks excited, as if an experiment is working. “I have a sense of your deceit, a deceit as wicked as anything I might do. And I am moved to action. You are to be eliminated instantly!”

  He has Jonathan’s rifle in his hands so suddenly that the four friends don’t even glimpse it happening, and in another flash he has cracked open the chamber, taken out the last bullets and flung them away. Edgar keeps his eye on one bullet. Godwin pitches the gun far into the snow too. Then the monster turns on them.

  “Brim, you were always my primary target. You will be the first to die.”

  Godwin shoves Lucy aside and swings at him, an awesome swipe of one muscular arm, with his fist intent on contact with Edgar’s temple. But at that instant someone else moves with almost the same speed.

  Tiger.

  She steps in front of her beloved and takes the blow that was intended for him. The bone in Godwin’s thick wrist strikes the top of her skull with a sickening sound and her limp body cartwheels into the ice and snow where she lies motionless.

  Edgar looks down at her, stunned. He feels sick to his stomach.

  Godwin seems even more shocked.

  “Why?” he says staring down at Tiger too. “Why would you do such a thing? That wasn’t logical; it didn’t make any sense! You will die now: your brain has moved inside your skull and collided with the bone that is there for protection, struck it more than once. It is like jelly thrown against a rock. There will be lesions, fatal injuries! This is your second brain trauma of late, you strange female, and you shall not recover!”

  Godwin turns back to Edgar. “Well,” he says, “all this means is that you will die second.”

  He raises his arm to Edgar. But now Lucy steps directly in front of him. The motion of Godwin’s arm halts and his mouth drops open but he says nothing.

  When she sees that the surgeon seems unable to act, Lucy turns to Tiger and drops to the ice near her, sobbing. “Tiger!” she cries. She puts her shaking hand onto her friend’s deathly still face, white and beautiful in the frame of her black hair, and caresses it.

  “Soul,” says Godwin under his breath and an expression of fear comes over him as he stands there with blood oozing from the wound in his chest. A tear drops from a watery yellow eye and he lets it fall into his hand and stares at it. Then he turns and runs away.

  Edgar rushes to the gun and pulls it from the snow, then lurches sideways to find the bullet he had kept his eye on. He takes it up and snaps it into the rifle.

  “Stay with them!” he shouts at Jonathan. “You’ve got your pistol. Help her! Protect them!”

  “Oh God,” he says to himself as he begins to run, “please let Tiger live.”

  27

  After a while, the creature slows and starts to walk, trudging along with his shoulders slouched, moving aimlessly, his footprints describing a winding path in the snow, blood dripping down. He turns his head every now and then to see Edgar behind him. The boy is moving slowly too, his eyes intent on the monster, his face red, brutal revenge on his mind. Tiger! There is no one like her, no one! If he can catch this thing, get close enough to it, he won’t be satisfied with killing it. He will take its life with an expanding bullet to the brain and then beat the carcass until it is a bloody pulp. Behind him, he can still hear Lucy sobbing in the distance.

  When Godwin reaches the lake, its surface a dark gray sheen, he stops and turns to face Edgar.

  Do not underestimate this creature for a second, says a voice inside Edgar. It has no soul. It is a monster. It will kill me without thinking twice.

  “Edgar,” shouts Godwin before they are close, “do not come any nearer. I learned something back there. I do not want to eliminate you anymore, but I will if I must. You do not stand a chance against me.”

  Edgar halts. He looks out over the frozen lake. An idea comes to him.

  “You are correct, I don’t,” he shouts back. “But you are weakening and not just in the body but in that magnificent brain someone gave you. You must eliminate me. And I will tell you why: I will expose you. I promise you.”

  “That is not wise.”

  “If I get out of here alive and you are still breathing, I will tell everyone and anyone that there is a creature about on this earth, one made by the hand of another man…a monster, a FREAK that—”

  “Shut up!” cries Godwin. Edgar starts moving toward him. They are now about twenty strides apart. “If you come another step closer, I will be upon you in a flash, my hands around your neck as they were upon Professor Lear and Mr. Thorne. Do NOT tempt me! As I have told you…I now prefer to let this be.”

  Edgar stops. “But I WILL expose you,” he repeats. Then he starts walking again, but not directly toward Godwin. Instead, he moves out onto the lake. “I will expose you,” he says again, “I will expose you, I will expose you,” like a mantra, over his shoulder.

  The monster stands still for a few moments as he watches Edgar move across the thin ice of the bottomless lake, filled, thought the ship captain, with prehistoric beasts. Godwin doesn’t know what to do. Then he seems to make up his mind. His eyes narrow and he sets his mouth and he runs after Edgar, who is now far away on the hardened water, stepping gingerly.

  Five long, thunderous strides onto the ice, the surface collapses beneath Godwin’s heavy body and he vanishes with a crash under the frigid lake. The noise is like a cannon going off and Edgar actually turns toward the top of the glacier to make sure the snow is not cascading in a thundering wall toward him. Then he looks back across the ice and stands still for a moment, waiting to see Godwin surface. But he doesn’t. Edgar, whose every step on the thin ice had been made with shaking legs, drops gently onto his stomach and squirms along on the slippery surface toward the spot where the creature went under, the rifle scraping the ice as he grips it with his right hand. When he gets near, he sees that the water beneath him and the thin surface is turning red and then something appears that chills his heart.

  Godwin.

  He is several body lengths away, under the ice, struggling, his eyes filled with fear, his blood clouding around him, unable to move his arms effectively enough to break a hole so he can survive. The wretch is floating toward Edgar and soon he is directly below him and their eyes meet, in fact, for a moment their eyes are only inches apart. Edgar’s lips and the monster’s thin black ones, pulled back from his yellow teeth, are almost touching through the ice. They stare at each other for a heartbeat or two and then Godwin begins to struggle again, trying to get back to the opening in the ice. Edgar squirms closer to it and takes the rifle in both hands. In a minute the monster has propelled himself in the right direction and approaches the opening too. But at first he can’t get his head to the hole; instead he is clawing at the underside of the ice beside it, one hand splashing in the open water. But slowly, he starts to pull himself sideways and Edgar realizes that in seconds, the surgeon will have both arms in the free water and will be able to haul himself up onto the ice.

  Edgar trains the gun on the opening.

  Godwin comes out of the water like a whale breaching the surface, mouth wide open and teeth like baleen, flailing at the rifle so fast that before Edgar can fire, the monster has smacked it hard and sent it spinning in the boy’s hands. The wrong end is now facing Godwin. Edgar grips the weapon and drives the butt at his target with all his might, connecting with the huge forehead with a crack. The sound is like a sledgehammer breaking stone and the force of the blow actually knocks Edgar backward, the rifle flies from his grasp and drops into
the freezing water and disappears. Godwin’s eyes roll up in his head and he sinks under the surface again. All is quiet for a moment, dead silence in the arctic air. Edgar lies still, praying.

  But then the beast returns. He comes up from the depths in another mighty thrash, his big frame surging out of the water, blood oozing from his chest and head. In an instant he is lying on the flat surface of the ice. He has the rifle in his hands.

  “You are correct, Edgar,” he says, his yellow teeth chattering. “I must eliminate you.”

  Edgar runs. Any concern about crashing through the ice has fled in the terror that now seizes him. He sprints with all he has and in fifteen or twenty strides is off the ice. He keeps anticipating the sound of the bullet whizzing through the air. It will be a strange ending: to be killed by the rifle that Alfred Thorne made, the one that destroyed the vampire, the one that was meant to eliminate Percy Godwin.

  But no shot comes. Then Edgar realizes that Godwin won’t be concerned with firing the rifle at first. He simply will be trying to get his heavy body off the ice without crashing through it again. So, Edgar turns up his speed. He isn’t sure where to run.

  Certainly not back toward his friends. If he does, Godwin would kill them all. This may be a chance to lead the monster away. But he knows that is likely useless too, for as long as the creature has strength, it will seek out the others once it is done with him and brutally murder any who are still alive. It makes him sob and he tries not to picture it as he runs. He can’t give up. He thinks of his father too, of his admonition not to be afraid.

  But that doesn’t seem to matter now. He is about to go to his death, the ending of his short time of consciousness on earth. He imagines the mechanism of the ingenious rifle put into action by the great surgeon behind him and the amazing exploding and expanding bullet that the wonderful scientific mind of Alfred Thorne had conceived flying through the air unlike any bird of the skies, anything that God has ever been able to fashion, striking the back of his very own skull and its hot metal imploding inside him, opening up his head like a melon shattered by an axe, exploding his brain, his mind! Or does your mind live on? What will it feel like?

  But then he sees something that gives him a glimmer of hope. The flat area they are on will come to an end in about another fifty strides and beyond that the mountain falls steeply downward and a glacier grips its surface: a spectacular and dangerous ice-and-snow toboggan run that seems to go on for nearly a mile.

  As Edgar reaches it, he glances over his shoulder and sees Godwin gaining on him.

  Edgar leaps.

  28

  He makes sure to land on his back and spreads his arms out at his sides to use as rudders. But they are immediately useless, for the speed he quickly reaches is mind-bending. It is the sort of speed that a character might move at in one of H.G. Wells’s fantastic stories. He is being fired like a cannonball almost straight downward. In the distance he sees the rocky shore and the gray water of the Arctic Ocean.

  He can’t look back but imagines that Godwin will be nearing the top of the glacier soon and then standing there looking down, quickly spotting his prey, then leaping onto the ice and allowing himself to be hurtled earthward. It is a scientific fact that the much heavier Godwin will move much faster on this nearly perpendicular glacier. In moments, Edgar will be caught! The monster will hit him from behind like a rocket and carry him at nearly terminal velocity down this slide and into the mountainside, or perhaps the sea, his big hands around Edgar’s throat. Edgar is also terrified that he may at any second smash into a protrusion in the glacier and be obliterated. He has no way of steering away and a collision with any of them will shatter his bones or break his skull wide open and leave him a rag doll spinning in this wicked descent. And if he survives all the way to the bottom, there will be no means to arrest his meteoric fall.

  He has nothing to lose, so with a great effort of will, he pulls his arms into his sides and makes his resistance to the wind almost negligible. This too is a scientific fact—he will now move at an even greater speed! He becomes an arrow flying down the mountain. He is moving faster than a locomotive, faster than any human invention can make a human being move. He is also wildly out of control.

  He cries out as he shoots downward, bellowing for his father, his mother, Annabel, and finally for Alfred Thorne. But he knows only God can help him now.

  He tucks his chin into his chest and looks at where he is going, squinting out through blasted watering eyes. The wind makes a whizzing sound, and there are loud thumps and his own groans as he collides with little bumps. It smells like iron and water, and there’s a growing hint of salt in the air. Down below in the distance he sees white turn to gray with patches of green and then there is the dark gray sea beyond. As he bounces and bangs along, he glimpses something else—it’s out on the water and floating aimlessly toward the shore…the whaling ship? That doesn’t make any sense…

  In seconds, it seems, he is approaching the end of the glacier, still moving at rocket speed. He knows for certain now that if he meets the hard ground beyond it at this velocity, he will surely die, and even if he lives, he will be so grievously wounded that he will not be able to function.

  He tries to brace himself but realizes that the glacier is scooped out at its foot in a huge concave area like a bowl of milk. But it isn’t filled with soft snow as he hoped. It too is hard and icy. He shoots down into the bottom of the bowl and then climbs the other side, slowing down. He puts his arms to the side and arrests his momentum even more. But he is still moving fast when he exits the far side of the bowl and ascends beyond it into the sky. For a few moments he is airborne. It is like absolutely nothing—there is no smell, no sound, no sight, and he has no feelings about it. It is a perfect moment before death and all his fears evaporate and he has the sense that he is safe, in heaven, held gently in God’s hand, no small human concerns or desires or false knowledge besetting him. He is flying.

  He reaches the apex of his flight.

  Then he begins to fall.

  —

  Edgar hits the ground with a heavy thud. Miraculously, his landing pad is green and mossy. All the air is immediately forced from his lungs and he cannot breathe. He rolls over, gasping, feeling like this is the end, but now his father’s words come to him clearly—do not be afraid—and he calms his brain, and his lungs, and slowly starts to breathe.

  He lies there for a few moments before he tries to move his legs and then his arms. He sits up. He staggers to his feet. For an instant, he has an overwhelming sense of how wonderful it is to be alive and feels like hugging himself. But then he remembers.

  Edgar turns toward the glacier and looks up it. Halfway down, a big black object is hurtling his way. And far up above it, standing at the top, as if trying to decide what to do, he sees two figures—one tall, the other slight and shorter. The tall one is holding something in its arms.

  Edgar has no time to think, let alone look. He turns and runs as fast as he can. He races over the tundra, up and down little hills, the sea still out of sight. Then the whaling vessel comes into view. But it doesn’t look right. It appears to be tilted and there is no activity on the deck, no one in the crow’s nest, nothing. It is drifting toward the shore.

  Edgar runs with everything he has, and by the time he nears the edge of the water, the boat is just a few feet from land. He stops and turns to see the top of Godwin’s flat head bouncing up and down on the far side of a hill. The creature has made it down the glacier in a flash!

  The little ship is listing, tilting sideways as if offering the deck to Edgar, and the shore here is rocky and high. He thinks he can make the leap onto it.

  He jumps but loses his footing when he lands and crashes to the boards. He tries to get to his feet but slips and falls again. He looks down. The deck is slippery with blood. But there is no blubber, no pieces of a giant of the sea anywhere on the boat. And he can’t spot a single member of the crew. It doesn’t make sense. Then, as the little ship fl
oats the last few feet and strikes the rocky shore, he falls again. When he gets to his feet a second time, he looks back toward land and sees Godwin coming up over the last hill. He stops when he gets there. He has spotted Edgar. The monster stands still and stares at his prey. His chest is now caked with red, his forehead black with a bruise. He drops the rifle: he doesn’t need it now. There is a look of resignation on his hideous yellow face. Finally, he will eliminate Edgar Brim. He begins to walk toward the ship.

  Edgar is frantic. He looks beyond the creature and sees Lucy in the distance, staggering toward the monster, her brother behind her, carrying Tiger’s limp body. They are more than twice the distance Godwin is from the boat.

  Edgar realizes that his only resources are here on the ship and his eyes dart around the deck. The scene almost turns his stomach. There is not just blood splattered everywhere, but now he sees severed limbs and digits and even a head. He recognizes that the face belongs to the big sailor, his eyes still open in terror, no sign of the ravenous leers he had given Tiger and Lucy. Then Edgar spots two human feet on the deck sticking out from the other side of the big hoist, still in their boots, toes pointed up toward the heavens, the cuffs of thick blue trousers hanging over their tongues. Edgar runs toward the feet, and the legs attached to those boots grow longer until he sees the trunk, then the pea-coat and the arms, and finally the neck and the head. Edgar almost leaps upon him.