She held the camera up and zoomed in. For maximum impact, she wanted the picture to …
Then she froze.
She zoomed in a little further.
The woman Richard was talking to was her.
They were saying:
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” Kerry said, squeezing his hand. “I’ve moved all my stuff in, haven’t I?”
“I know. I know. But …”
“I’m not going to change my mind, Richard. We should have done this years ago.”
“We should. And I’m sorry we didn’t. That was my fault. It’s just … I’m still trying to catch up. Since you decided not to go to the States for that woman’s wedding, everything’s changed. It’s … all different.”
“What kind of different? Bad different?”
Richard smiled, and it was a real one, the smile of a man who had been bored, and who’d been bad, and who’d been kind of an asshole, but who was allowing himself to believe that he could be another way, that something had happened and life didn’t have to be how it had been.
“No,” he said. “The other one.”
After they’d kissed, Kerry watched him go into his building. He looked surprised, and disconcerted, and cautiously happy, as he had for most of the last week. Just before he disappeared into the elevator, he winked. She winked back.
Then she turned to look across the busy street, at the woman who looked exactly like her, who was still holding her camera and staring at her, still openmouthed. The plane-bedraggled Kerry. The can’t-say-yes Kerry, the Kerry who seemed intent on pushing happiness beyond her own reach, the Kerry who demanded perfection from the world and was unable to understand that contentment is a matter of choice. The Kerry who’d made her own bed, by leaving enough room for someone else to slip into her place, an alternative who’d been waiting a long, long time.
Kerry hoped that other Kerry had enough clothes in her shoulder bag to last a while, because the flat she thought she was returning to had been vacated two days after she flew to America, its contents thrown away or given to charity or moved into Richard’s place in Islington. There would be changes to be made there, too, in time. Richard wasn’t perfect. He would never be. But he’d get closer. Under her guidance. With her love. Nobody gets perfect, ever. But they can get enough.
Kerry raised her hand and waved. She tried not to smile as she did so, or to feel too pleased with herself, but found it impossible. The woman on the other side of the street deserved this, after all. She ought to be happy, really. She’d wanted something different.
She’d got it now.
AND STILL YOU WONDER WHY OUR
FIRST IMPULSE IS TO KILL YOU:
An Alphabetized Faux-Manifesto transcribed,
edited, and annotated (under duress and protest)
by Gary A. Braunbeck
O then, why go through again the Fatigue of re-making the fabulous shell Of an ideal world, upon ancient runes? … (Distant voices from the sea): “Ola-eh, Ola-oh! Let us destroy, destroy!”
—F. T. MARINETTI, “Against the Hope
of Reconstruction”
[AUTHOR’S PREFATORY NOTES: Did you know that, according to Roman scholar and writer Marcus Terentius Varro (116 B.C–27 B.C.), the word monstrum was not derived, as Cicero insisted, from the verb monstro, “to show” (comparable to the English “to demonstrate”), but, rather, came from moneo: “warning.” Isn’t that interesting, and somewhat ironic in a ham-fisted sort of way, considering the circumstances under which you’re reading this? I certainly thought so. And I did not know that until I inherited this job that I neither asked for nor wanted. More on that later.
[A few other tidbits you might find useful before we get to the bulk of this. I had to argue like you wouldn’t believe to get them to agree to add the “Faux” before “Manifesto.” What they dictated to me isn’t so much a manifesto as it is a collection of (albeit deadly serious) grievances and gripes, as well as little-known or conveniently forgotten historical facts, definitions, and more than a few parables. They’d originally wanted to call this their (I kid you not) “Monsterfesto,” and I—still not appreciating the gravity of the situation—immediately laughed and said, “That is so lame!” It cost me one of my cats. They didn’t just zap him into another dimension or have some banal beastie saunter in and gobble him down in a single gulp, no; they gave him instantaneous doses of full-blown end-stage feline leukemia and AIDS and made me sit there and watch him die. It took two and a half days. He kept trying to crawl to the water bowl. They would not let me move him closer so he could at least get a cool drink. They wouldn’t even let me hold him so he could die in the arms of someone who loved him. All I could do was watch as he struggled toward the water and wheezed and then coughed up, excreted, and pissed blood, all the time looking at me with frightened, confused, and ever-yellowing eyes as he made this soft mewling sound that after about twelve hours began to sound like “… help …” to my ears. When at last Ruben finally died—that was his name, by the way, Ruben—it was in a series of sputtering little agonies punctuated by painful seizures that I thought would never end. And if you found that hard to read, imagine how I felt having to sit there and watch it happen, completely powerless to ease even an iota of his suffering.
[And do you know why I was powerless to do anything? Because if I had tried to do something, they would have done the same thing to the rest of my family, one at a time, and I would have been the sole member of the audience to their excruciatingly torturous deaths, and I’ve got plenty of memories to give me nightmares for the rest of my life; have had plenty since I was a kid. Not looking to add to that particular collection, thank you very much. I don’t have much of a family left, and what family I still do have rely on government-issued food cards to buy their monthly groceries and still have to skip breakfast and eat macaroni and cheese for dinner three times a week while worrying over which utility bills can be skipped until next month, all the time praying to a God they have less and less faith actually exists that no one gets sick. So I had no choice but to watch Ruben die, and I had no choice but to accept this assignment and become their go-between.
[Here are the terms to which we finally agreed: 1) Unless I felt strongly that some clarification needed to be made, I was to transcribe everything precisely as dictated to me, more or less; any variation, even in punctuation, would result in their doing a Ruben on one of my remaining family members (this threat, though unspoken, remained the constant epilogue to every clause of our agreement); 2) If I did feel strongly that some clarification needed to be made, I had to make my argument in a courteous and respectful manner, but give them final say on whether or not it remained in the manuscript; so if in some section things seem rather abrupt or a bit helter-skelter, not my fault; 3) I had to agree to include at least three personal accounts of encounters with beings of their kind, regardless of how silly they sounded or uncomfortable they made me (or potential readers) feel; and 4) Upon reaching the end of this project, even if I still hated them for what they did to Ruben and threatened to do to what little family remains to me, I must make it sound as if I have sympathy, understanding, and compassion for them; fine by me, I can lie on paper with the best of them … just as long as I don’t have to claim any form of affection for them. They’re here, they’re not going anywhere, they don’t give a tinker’s damn if you believe in them or not (it won’t stop them from going Ruben on your ass), and … oh, yeah, by the way: They are not happy with us.
[So very not happy with us. The title of this piece should have given you a subtle hint as to the depth and breadth of their unhappiness with us.
[I would, however, completely out of context for reasons that are my own but that I hope you’ll eventually pick up on, like to paraphrase a line from the film version of The Exorcist for the benefit of my own conscience: I may mix some lies in with the truth, and truth with the lies.
[As to the matter at hand … it’s after midnight; time to le
t it all hang out.]
A
is for Abomination; it is also for Aberration, Abhorrent, Abortion, Atrocity, Awfulness, and several other words beginning with the first letter of the alphabet in many different languages, all of which—whether you can spell or pronounce them or not—amount to the same thing: Omigod, look at that ugly fuckin’ thing, somebody kill it quick! Many of these beings (which have feelings that are easily hurt, believe it or not) struggle up through Stygian depths yet to be imagined, let alone discovered, by paleoseismologists (who’d be the group to first find the traces) to get here; others cross time, space, dimensions, and take dangerous shortcuts through the multiverse in their attempts to make friendly contact. And what do they get for this? At the very least, they get called all sorts of hurtful names. One of them explained it to me in these terms: “Imagine driving way out of town to your family’s home for Christmas. You’re driving through a blizzard—we’re talking real Second Ice Age, Big Freeze stuff here, right? A drive that should have only taken thirty minutes takes you damn near three hours, but you finally get there. You’re exhausted, you’re starving, your bladder’s the size of a soccer ball, but the sight of the warm holiday lights within your family’s home makes it all worthwhile. You head up to the door, your arms filled with all these great, terrific, really killer boffo presents, and you let yourself inside, all smiles and Christmas greetings for everyone, filled with the spirit of the season—I mean, it may as well be the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life. First thing that happens—your grandmother takes one look at you, her eyes roll back in her head, and she drops dead from the terror. Then the children as one scream in horror, shit their pants, and run for the basement. Your mother grabs a carving knife the size of a machete, Dad fires up the flamethrower he’s had in the downstairs closet since his two tours in Vietnam, and your sister starts hosing the room with a TEC-9. Now, don’t you think that would put a bit of a damper on your disposition? Hmmm … ?”
B
is for Bogeyman, also Bogieman, Boogeyman, or Boogieman. Doesn’t really matter how you spell it, or what variation he takes on in whichever country where parents still use him to emotionally scar their children at as early an age as is possible, outside of a seventies disco song by KC and the Sunshine Band with a killer bass synthesizer line, he doesn’t exist. He never did. Stop using him to frighten your kids. This really sticks in their collective craw. Suck it up and be a parent and exercise well-tempered discipline like you’re supposed to, or use condoms next time, fer chrissakes. You’re supposed to be adults.
C
is for Colophon. You have been led to believe that this denotes a publisher’s mark or logotype appearing at the beginning or end of a book. It is not a mark; they are a race of parasites that came to Earth hidden within the binding of The Book of Forbidden Knowledge, the text that the Fallen Angels stole and gave to humankind during the first War in Heaven (which was technically more of a skirmish prompted by the Great Mother of all hissy fits, but that’s neither here nor there). Once The Book was entrusted to humankind—giving to it, among other things, the knowledge of Language, Music, Poetry, Art, Science, Writing, Dance, etc.—the Colophon scurried from their hiding place and began, bit by bit, to destroy the first of the Forbidden Gifts: Language. Before the Egyptian coffin beetle, before the advent of nanotechnology, before the first cancer cell ever set up shop in a sentient being’s bloodstream and began chewing away from within, the Colophon, smaller than all of the aforementioned (their initial number, which has now increased ten-million-fold, was somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and seventeen million to the two hundred and sixtieth power) have been amassing their forces for a nonstop assault to take back language from the human race. The Tower of Babel was their first truly Great Victory against us. Other victories have been smaller, but get enough scratches and you can still bleed to death. Example: Have you begun to notice how, suddenly, no one knows the difference between a contraction and a possessive? Or how quickly ink begins to fade from the pages of books? Or how, regardless of how many times you reload a page online, you keep getting more and more garbage characters? These are just a few of the Colophon’s tactics. Their ultimate goal is to erase all printed language and destroy all digital language. Armed with the totality of this knowledge, they’ll enter our brains and wipe out all traces of even the basest form of verbal and written communication. We will be left with only the most vague, nebulous wisps of memory that we were once able to exchange ideas through sounds that came out of our mouths or were represented on the page by arcane symbols. We will lose the First Gift because we were not worthy to possess it in the first place.
D
is for the Damaged Ones. [Author’s Note: One of mine.] As an eight-year-old child I awoke in the woods in the early hours of dawn, naked and shivering where they had left me after they’d finished the night before. I tried to stand but my legs were weak and my feet too slick with the blood still trickling from my backside. I crawled forward, wondering why I was covered in silver quills. They weren’t quills, but needles that had fallen from the pine tree under which they had left me. The needles had become soaked in dew, and in the first rays of dawn, the thousands of them over my body looked like quills or gray fur. I stopped crawling when it felt as if my chest were going to explode. I stopped crawling when it felt as if things were falling out of me from back there, where I could not turn my head to see the trail. I stopped crawling because there was no place to crawl to, and no one waiting there for me. I raised my head and saw a great wolf standing so close to my face I could feel its hot breath tickle my matted hair against my scalp. “Are you a werewolf?” I asked. The great wolf shrugged. “That is one name for us, I suppose.” I began to cry. “Are you going to bite me and turn me into a werewolf, too?” The great wolf shook its head. “There’s no need. You have already been transformed. You will forever be marked. You are now no longer part of the human world. You are a Damaged One. No curse, no bite, no full moon is needed to steal away your humanity. You are a monster, as are we all.” I lived through that night, and I remember well the words of the great wolf on that morning. There is no need to be bitten, no reason to be cursed. On the street, nearly every time I venture out into the world—which I try to do as little as possible—as I walk I look up and see another one of us. Our eyes meet, and we know each other like members of the same family. Our eyes flash silver. They flash loss and anger and regret. Then one of us always crosses the street. It is not yet time to acknowledge each other’s existence. There is, it seems, much more damage yet to be done. [Author’s Note: Some mornings, as I begin to shave, I think of all the anguish that I’ve brought into the lives of those who love or have loved me, and I wish for a straight razor instead of one with a disposable blade. Then the mirror flashes silver and for a moment my eyes are gone and in a blink it’s just another bright, bright, sunshiny day.]
E
is for the Elder Gods (often mistakenly referred to as “the Great Old Ones”). They’re actually not nearly as old, or as powerful, or as frightening as they’d like for you to believe. Lovecraft [Author’s Note: Or so say those dictating this to me.], it turns out, was not a good choice for a PR man. Seems old Howard, aside from having more than his share of whack-a-doodle tendencies inherited from his schizophrenic mother, was not only paranoid but something of a racist to boot. He ran to a neighbor’s house in a shuddering panic because he was convinced that he’d discovered a cluster of “Negro eggs” in the basement of his home. Thus did he begin to graft his anti-human, pro-uncaring-universe philosophy into what they told him. All of that gobbledygook in all of the so-called Mythos stories? Mostly recipes and gossip. [Author’s Note: They speak of this with a curious mix of embarrassment and rage. One of them added this: “Do you think anyone remembers that Cthulhu was an extraterrestrial and his ‘house of R’lyeh’ was a goddamn spaceship? Oh, and let’s not forget where R’lyeh was located—at the bottom of the freakin’ sea! Now, you tell me—would you have an
y real primeval fear in your heart for a race of beings whose giant, bat-winged, slobbering, tentacle-faced leader—supposedly possessed of all the knowledge from pre- and post-history—didn’t have the sense to install something akin to a GPS system in his ship so he didn’t drown everyone when they landed? Yes, they’re really big. Really big. And most of them are dumber than a bag of hair. But because of Lovecraft’s misrepresenting what they said, we have to work a thousand times as hard to get your attention. His fictions are astounding models of structure, but otherwise, Howie [Author’s Note-Within-a-Note: They all call him “Howie.” Don’t ask me, I’m just doing the typing at this point.] was stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. William Hope Hodgson, though … there was a scary fucker. The House on the Borderland. Yeah—he knew something .”]
F
is for Finders of the Last Breath. They are led by a lithe female figure with the head of a black horse, its ears erect, its neck arched, vapor jetting from its nostrils; one of her followers is tall and skeletal, with fingers so long their tips brush against the ground: It hunkers down and snakes its fingers around whatever object has attracted its attention, absorbing the sound made by vibrational waves so it can trace them back to their source; other followers hop like frogs, some roll, some scuttle on rootlike filaments that are covered in flowers whose centers are the faces of blind children. Many of them are terrifying to behold, and too many have been killed as they attempt to carry out their duties: to be at the side of infants and the old who are about to die, so that their last breaths can be caught and put in jars and stored away. It is only when the Finders can carry out their duties that your infants and your old will pass in peace, and rest in peace. The Finders make their deaths painless, even majestic. But if their last breaths cannot be caught in time, the infant’s or the aged one’s death—even after the remains have been burned or buried—is never-ending, and their awareness of the horror of their fate is crystalline and without pity. You should welcome and not fear the presence of the Finders. Fear only their absence when the time comes.
The Monster's Corner Page 28
