The Monster's Corner

by Christopher Golden

  The grief in her eyes, the heartache for me, was almost more than I could bear. I turned away and saw myself glaring at me. There I was. Myself raised his fist. Myself shook it at me. Myself made stabbing motions as if he wanted to gut me.

  I knew of human mothers who brutalized the swapling children in the desperate hope that their own offspring would be returned, but I had never heard of one of our people ever harming a human charge. There was a reason Livia hated humanity. Her great-grandmother had been swapped by my great-Da. Livia had human blood in her, and fell back into savage ways.

  “It had to be done,” I said weakly. My wife was right. I was naive. I repeated old sentences, commands, and biddings too often. Strange and morbid happenings.

  Harella hissed. “And so we defile and thin our blood to save them.”

  “We thicken our blood. It’s not just for them. It’s for us as well. It’s a necessity.”

  “So the elders say. So you say.”

  “Because it’s the truth. New blood is needed to avoid dissolution from inbreeding. Consanguinity.”

  She tucked her chin in. “What’s that?”

  “It has to do with chromosomes,” I explained. “Genetic variation, deleterious alleles.”

  “What are they?”

  “Human words that haven’t been invented yet, but which are still very important.”

  “Auh! You and your talk of curved time and parallel futures and meeting yourself on the road. I think you and your Das have done what you have simply because you’ve all been crazy.”

  “A handful of my family have been crazy,” I admitted. “But only a handful. A mere pocketful.” I tried once again to make her understand. “Our people are long-lived, but there are few of us.”

  “There are too many already, and far more of the humans, and so we tilt the odds and rush toward our own destruction.”

  She was right, in her way. We were losing our grace. She was proof of that. So was I. Only someone who was thick with humanity could be called a Cruel Thief of Rosy Infants. It was why I could fence so well. The secret instructions of barbaric humanity were in my blood. My Da had more temperance and dignity than me. And his Da more than him.

  “What must I do?” I asked.

  Myself leered. Myself continued to gesture obscenely. Myself fled. I took a step after him and stopped. My wife stared at me strangely.

  “Go visit Grot,” she said. “The girl’s fate is not her fault. It’s yours. Go explain, if you can. Perhaps it will ease her burden.”

  I wasn’t the only naive one. Harella was idealistic and irrational if she thought you could ever explain people’s fate to them. How could I have understood or truly believed the word of my Da before standing in this spot where I now stood, watching myself rush up the road waving his arms in outrage?

  I trudged across the city and saw that Livia’s architect had indeed built spiring towers higher than the highest ones that had towered across the city before. What Livia must have thought when looking up at those immense, soaring strongholds.

  I scampered down the bluff precipices and over the white sands, on to the caves where colossal black grottos and fissures in the cliff walls beckoned.

  “Hello?” I called. “Hello? Is there a Grot in current residence?”

  I continued on into the twisting tunnels and cavities. It was far too dark for human eyes to see, but I managed to maneuver well enough down the various shafts, following footprints in the dust. In the distance I saw the flicker of flames.

  I called again. “Hello? Greetings?”

  “Finally,” a voice like a moan, a breathless groan, echoed from the deep stone interior.

  Approaching the light, I found myself in a cavern, more a burrow really, with a ring of stones in the center where a fire burned. Meager belongings sat clustered on the thick stalagmites being used as tabletops. Some clothing, bits of leather, pots. Hanging from the walls were nets, ropes, and spears for fishing.

  Many more tunnels connected to this hub, opening farther into the cave system. The ceiling was high with chimneystack channels.

  I thought of Livia’s majestic home on the bluff. I heard her clearly in my mind saying how she hoped the baby would smother itself on her breast. My hands clenched and unclenched as if I were holding on to something and trying hard not to let go.

  “Grot?” I called.

  The unpleasant name meant to hurt the girl also hurt me in saying it. The elders had been nits, witless nits, not to step in and do something at the first signs of the lash and the elbows. I turned and turned again. I spoke the name. The echoes of heavy breathing filled the burrow. I turned some more, looking for myself and perhaps seeking forgiveness for my mistakes.

  I turned and Grot was there in all her malignant resilience.

  She’d taken on many aspects of my kind. The angle of the chin, the radiant eye, the fiery expression. But none of the beauty. What had once been plain and blunt was now ugly with scars and welts. The nose, bent. The hair, missing in spots, perhaps torn out. The teeth, chipped. Her back, curved. The arms, well muscled but creaky from old fractures.

  Livia, Livia, where did your grace go? I wanted to follow her into the sea and drag her up from the depths.

  I put my fingers in my mouth and thought, Da, you never told me what to do when something like this happens. Your instructions were incomplete. I remain less than confident in my capacity. My parameters persist in their unquantification.

  I took my fingers from my mouth and parted my lips to speak, to introduce myself and tell her about her true parents, to explain, at least to the extent that I knew, exactly who I was and why we were both here. She slid a curved short blade from the back of her skirts and cut a rope tied to a steel piton hammered into the cave wall. A sound like a hunting bird descending fell from high above, and an iron cage dropped directly atop me.

  It was good thick metal, forged properly with hate. Spikes pointed at me like open scissors. Dependably harmful measures.

  I was trapped again.

  “You,” she said. “Cruel Thief. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “At last you’ve come.”

  “I’ve been away.”

  She moved to the bars and presented herself with the pride of ugliness. “And what have you come to do? What is it you wish to say to me?”

  The questions were too large. They were larger than I could fully carry.

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  “Did you wish to tell me about my birth? About my mother? About your duty to exchange the swaplings?”

  I nodded. There was little else to do. I flexed my hands and remembered her pinching and gnawing at my index finger, laughing with a laughter no different from Eva’s laughter, which shone upon a gloomy land.

  “So tell me,” she demanded.

  “I have nothing to tell you.”

  “Can you at least say my true name? The name I was born with before you stole me away?”

  “I’m not certain I know what it is,” I admitted. “I never heard your parents say it. But perhaps … perhaps it was Eva.”

  She mouthed the word, and the tip of a black tongue jutted and flicked itself. “Eva. No, that is not my name. Eva is not my name.”

  “Probably not.”

  “So tell me why you would hand me over to … my mother.”

  “Because you were a swapling. By definition, that is what’s done with swaplings. They are swapped.”

  She twined closer so the firelight would blaze across the ruin of her face. She said nothing. I took a breath and turned away in my little cage.

  “Occasionally there are,” I said, “unhappy occurrences.”

  “Is that all I am, an occurrence?”

  “An unhappy one. In the greater design of fate, I suppose.”

  It made her smile. It was an ugly smile but a smile nonetheless. I welcomed it.

  “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” she asked. She retrieved a whip from he
r wall of tools and weapons. She snapped it at my chest, but the bars were too small to allow the lash passage. “I’m going to beat you one thousand eight hundred and sixteen times. That’s how often I was whipped by Livia.”

  “You’ll have to lift the cage to do that.”

  “I can hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  “I will hurt you. I will boil you. I will burn you.”

  “You won’t be the first, Grot.”

  “I’ll be the worst.”

  “Yes, perhaps you will be.”

  She let loose with a cry of frustration and snapped the whip again. The lash struck the bars and fell away once, twice, again and again, her rage feeding on itself. In her rage the end of the whip actually struck her across the cheek twice, but she didn’t even notice. The cage rang loudly. Even the sound of iron was enough to bring me pain, but I forced myself to keep from wincing and showing weakness. I thought of Livia hurting this girl day by day and my anger grew. I imagined Grot out on the water in a small boat, hunting her mother with nets and spears. Diving morning after morning, hoping to find the right siren to kill.

  The ringing of the iron continued for a long time. Then a voice like the fairest song came from the cavern entrance.

  “Sister.”

  Grot seemed to know the voice although she had never heard it before. She didn’t turn to face it, but the muscles of her body locked and her hands tightened around the lash and the curved iron blade. “You return.”

  “I saw him watching me in the field today, while I was with my human family. I noted his eyes were sad and bemused, and I decided to follow. I tracked him to Limwelt, through the crowd at the hanging, and then beyond to this land. The moment I breathed the air here I remembered my life from before, when I was a baby. I remembered the swapping, and I could guess why he had come to watch me with such pain in his expression.”

  “If you could guess that much, then you must have guessed the rest. You must know what hate I hold in my heart.”

  “I suspect.”

  “And still you sought me out?”

  “I had to once I realized what had happened to you.”

  Grot wheeled, her weapons ready. She glared at Eva, the red welts swelling. “We are not sisters. We’re closer than that. You are what I should have been. What I would have been except for him.”

  “I’m as much to blame as he is. I was aware, even then, when we were newborn and traded away.”

  Grot nodded, her heavy scarred face pooled with shadow and hate. “So be it, then, you are to blame. As much as he. For an unfair trade.”

  “A necessary one,” I said, but they both ignored me.

  Grot’s powerful forearms flexed as she tightened her grasp on the blade. She approached Eva, hunkering low, almost crawling across the cave floor as a mewl escaped her. Inch by inch she covered the distance between her and her sister, her other self. Time seemed to grow playful again. It stopped and started and rushed past. I grabbed hold of the iron bars in frustration and screamed in agony.

  “You coveted my life,” Grot said, proffering the knife. “You may have what remains of it.”

  “I didn’t covet your life, sister,” Eva said, refusing the profferage. Instead she placed a hand to Grot’s cheek and softly stroked. “I didn’t steal it. We grew to follow our own courses. You were denounced and maltreated.”

  “Kill me.”

  “I’m not here for that,” Eva told her, the smile to light the world tugging at her lips. “I’ve come to bring you back home again.”

  Grot looked up, but gazing upon Eva’s beauty only hurt her worse. She averted her eyes and raised her free hand to cover her eyes. “What’s this you say?”

  “You’re coming back with me to the other side of the wall. You’re going to meet our mother and father and siblings. We have three brothers and two sisters. We’ll teach you.”

  “Teach me what?”

  “Happiness. Friendship. Love. Family.”

  “I cannot learn that. I cannot even hear that,” Grot said, tears sluicing from her eyes.

  I nearly said it was impossible, that only my family could go traveling. But here was evidence to the contrary. Clearly Eva had the ability as well. For all I knew all of our people did, and the elders in their wisdom decided long ago to damn only one family to being cruel thieves.

  “You will learn it. I will help you. We all will. Now come. Take my hand.”

  “Is that what you have to offer?”

  “It is my first offering.”

  Grot stared at the blade for another moment, and I wondered what would happen next. Might she lunge? Might she dismember? Might she reverse the angle of the knife point and self-disembowel? The moment was ugly, the expectation too dreadful. The moment after the moment was full of relief as the knife fell from her fist unused, and she reached, inch by inch covering the distance, until she and Eva clasped hands.

  Then I watched them leave, walking down the length of the tunnel together, listening to the echoes off the cave walls as their voices took on sisterly whispers. I heard tittering and giggling. I heard joy.

  Neither thought of me still trapped in the iron cage, and I couldn’t blame them for that. Too much of their lives had already been stamped by my thumbprints. I wished them well on this new odyssey and supposed, in some fashion, I would see them again beyond the wall.

  I got to my knees and began to dig. It would take at least two days, maybe three or four, to be free again. Perhaps the earth would scrub away my sins the same way my Da hoped the river would wash away his. Harella was used to my travels and the twisting of time and probably wouldn’t come looking for me carrying a pot of hog’s head stew to ease my hunger. Myself wouldn’t show with a shovel and a compulsion to assist. Myself was waiting for me somewhere farther down the path. I was alone except for the dark secrets of my blood and duty, digging, digging, scrubbing, in preparation for freedom and, with less grace than melancholy, much more damage.

  THE SCREAMING ROOM

  by Sarah Pinborough

  IT HAD BEEN QUIET for too long. She knew that because the serpents whispered in her ears as she slept, awakening memories of when the world had been different. A time before the island, so long ago that most days she barely remembered it at all. Only in these dreams would it come back to her. She had been someone else then—a rare beauty, admired and desired by all. Men would ache for just one glance from her to them alone. Days of love and laughter and constant attention. She’d known her power and she had reveled in it. So many, many moons had passed that she barely recognized herself in the dreams. A stranger’s pale arms and slim legs and long blond hair.

  The rising sun baked away the chill of the night, and she opened her eyes and sighed. The snakes settled into coils against her scalp, their voices hushed to a gentle hiss here and there. She let one hand run in and between them, enjoying the cool scales that curled momentarily around her fingers. It wasn’t their voices that she needed to fill the endless silence. She needed a new singer. It had been an age since she’d been sung to, and she ached for the music. She stretched across the vast bed and ran her hands over her rough body. The softness had gone, replaced by sinew and thick muscle, and her skin was coarse. What magic started, salt water had finished. There was no bathing in milk and water anymore. Now she swam in the ocean’s firm grip. As the centuries passed she came to prefer it. Funny how things changed.

  Finally, she hauled herself up and rolled her head around her shoulders, easing away the last of the night’s tension. She looked down at herself and smiled. She wasn’t doing bad for a woman of her age. The snakes hissed, and she allowed herself a small laugh. She still had her sense of humor, and unlike in that land of the past that her dreams took her to, now when she had a man’s attention, she knew she had it forever.

  In the night more plaster had crumbled from the ceiling, but she ignored the dust that had settled on her sheets. When this part of the palace was ruined she would simply move to a different set of ro
oms that weren’t being destroyed by the plant life that ate its way through the cracks, or hadn’t been beaten down by the wind. There were centuries more years of living to be had from this prison fortress. Centuries more silent existence with only the occasional singer to ease her pain. Sometimes she wondered if the loneliness might drive her mad.

  The sea sent a breeze dancing through the open windows, and she pulled a silk wrap free from the arms of an old lover and wound it round herself. His arms stayed as they were, stone stretched out toward her. At some point, she was sure, there had been a dagger in his hand, but that was long gone, lost in the underground caves where she stored all the other useless weapons her lovers brought with them. She paused to look at him, something she hadn’t done in a long time, and a memory of flesh and skin and blond hair flashed behind her eyes. He had been handsome once, she recalled, even with his mouth fixed forever wide. This one had sung right up until the moment his breath had stopped. She had been fond of him, and he had sung to her for years, much longer than some of the rest. How could she have forgotten? She leaned forward and ran her tongue down his smooth face before leaving him where he stood.

  The sun was barely in the sky, and she frowned. She was not normally up so early. She peered out beyond the walls of her derelict palace and to the sparkling crystal of the ocean beyond. The snakes hissed, woken from their slumber, as her heart thumped. She hadn’t woken naturally. Something had roused her—sounds not heard for such a long, long time. Sounds that she ached to hear with every passing day. The creak of oars, the cry of voices. They were distant, but real. This time, it wasn’t her fevered imagination torturing her with a promise of company only to leave her raging in disappointment for weeks. This time there truly was a brown fleck in the blue—a boat filled with human warmth. She moaned slightly. They were coming. They always came, the beautiful brave men. Her heart raced and heat rushed to her loins. She had to hurry. The boat was still hours away, but she had preparations to make.