Marrying a Monster

by Mel Dunay

  “She wouldn’t get arrested on my say-so. But she would get gossiped about. Isn’t that be bad enough?”

  The older man glared at her without saying anything.

  “Of course, it would be even worse if I brought up all the things she does for the minister of agriculture,” Rina said. “I don’t want to go there, but I will if I have to.”

  Harish sighed. “If you insist, I’ll see what I can do for your boyfriend.”

  Tempting thought, but Rina forced herself to focus on the real emergency.

  “You don’t have to do anything for him,” She said. “He can take care of himself. No, I want your help with something else.”

  “Like what, exactly?”

  “Like warning the brides what they’re up against,” Rina retorted.

  “What did you have in mind?” Harish sounded resigned.

  “Tomorrow morning, you and my dad and I are all going to hold a meeting to explain to these girls exactly what the Mountain King is, and how it can be killed, and let them know they can either bail out or try to help kill it.”

  Harish looked dubious. “He really has you convinced that it’s necessary, hasn’t he? Don’t you understand that he’s not really a government agent, just a small time crook?”

  “I’m not just going on what he’s told me,” Rina retorted. “I’m going by what I’ve already seen. Did that drug dealer tell you why he didn’t stop us from leaving Stayout?”

  “He said he didn’t want to make trouble with the mayor’s mistress, who’d put you two up for the night.”

  “Maybe that was part of it, but it wasn’t all of it,” Rina said. “Ask him what he saw in Utiva’s yard when he was bothering us for his money. Besides the Gnosha.”

  “You expect me to believe whatever crazy hallucinations this character had?” Harish protested. “It’s pretty clear that he samples his own stuff.”

  “Utiva saw it too.”

  “What kind of a thing is this ‘it’ that Utiva and the drug dealer saw?” Harish demanded.

  “Just ask him. And then set up that meeting for tomorrow morning.” Rina said. She turned on her heel and stalked away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was a very quiet dinner time. At first the aunts had been obnoxious about what had happened to Vipin, but when Paa said that the man was a government agent, not a drug dealer, they got very quiet.

  Rina kind of wished Paa hadn’t gone there, even if it did hurt to hear the aunts badmouthing Vipin. After dinner, Rina felt tired and depressed and went to bed early.

  She dreamed of Vipin again, but she herself did not seem to be in the dream.

  Her dream-self in this dream was nothing more than a disembodied spirit. She drifted through a hospital, looking in on the sick and the maimed. She had done some volunteer work that took her to places like this, and it always upset her to see people suffering, dying.

  She drifted into one particular room, with only one patient lying on a bed. It was Vipin, his forehead and the upper part of his skull wrapped in bandages. Some fluid-sedatives perhaps-dripped from a clear plastic bag down a tube and into the needle stuck in his arm.

  His breathing was steady, but only because he wore an oxygen mask over his face, forcing air into his lungs. His eyes were open and fixed at the ceiling, and tears slowly leaked out of their outer corners. Perhaps his eyes are only watering, Rina told herself, but she didn’t believe it.

  He was grieving for something, and he couldn’t tell anyone what. Even if he could, there was no one there to tell, except her, and it had seemed like no one could tell that she was there. Unless, being an Oldblood, he could...?

  “Vipin!” It didn't even come out as a sound. She tried again, and it came out as a whisper.

  The arm with the intravenous drip was bare. she tried to touch it but her hand went through it. She tried to touch his face, but her hand went through that.

  She tried speaking again. It took as much effort as shouting, and came out as a hoarse whisper.

  “I just want you to know...”

  But as she spoke, his eyes overflowed with tears and closed, and the erratic beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor turned to the high-pitched that signaled a stopped heart: flatline.

  She screamed for the nurses to come and revive him-surely it wasn’t too late-but no sound came out of her mouth. The heart monitor screamed too, but nobody came. Nobody cared. Vipin had been left alone to die...

  When she sat up with a start in her childhood bedroom, her cheeks were gritty with dried tears, and her eyes were sticky with half-dried ones. She shivered. “That had better not be anything that’s going to come true,” She said quietly.

  She lay back down, trying to come up with a way to get rid of the Mountain King, or at least stall it long enough for Vipin to get free and intervene. The Old Ones were vulnerable to any regular weapon, Vipin had told her, including a gun or a machete. The trick is staying alive long enough to use them.

  She knew the traditional descriptions of the Mountain King; a white-furred thing something like a man but with longer arms and a tendency to walk on all fours. Walk...or run: the story went that the Mountain King moved as quickly as a cat, in spite of its size, and was so strong that it could tear people apart....

  Rina was still brooding on this when she fell asleep. Her waking mind had not found a solution, but her dreaming mind was convinced that it had one. Even a Oldblood could not move from place to place instantaneously, and this one, according to Raki, was said to be nearly blind but to have a keen sense of smell and the hearing of a bat.

  Rina knew, which Raki did not, that bats saw by means of sonar, like the navy ships. If that was true, then they could confused it somehow. A decoy tent set up with heavily worn clothes that smelled of the brides. The women themselves perhaps rubbed in lanolin-the oil found in wool-to make them smell like sheep or goats.

  That will be unpopular, Rina thought. And what if the Mountain King had a taste for livestock...? Then again, there were no stories of it attacking livestock.

  So decoy tent, lanolin scented women hiding near by. What was in the decoy tent? They needed something that would either injure the thing or confuse its senses, preferably both. The classical tiger pit she’d read about in adventure stories, where you dug a deep hole and planted spears on the bottom, and disguised it to look like solid ground?

  But she couldn’t count on having that much manpower to hand. No, she had to focus on keeping the women alive and the Old One distracted until Vipin intervened.

  What could distract an Old One?

  Then it came to her: beehives! One of her aunts had a beekeeping business on the side, and this was the time of year when the beekeepers used smoke to put the bees to sleep and harvest the honey.

  Get someone to stash a couple of those in the tent, buried under some layers of female clothing, and then wait for the Old One to come crashing in. Let the bees do the rest.

  But...objected the more sensible part of Rina's mind...won’t the Oldblood be furious when it finally does get clear of the bees...?

  She flashed back on the boulder that Vipin had saved her and Amita from. The could try finding a boulder that was positioned just so, on a line of sight to the tent, but there would be no guarantee that it would fall reliably on the creature.

  She could push the boulder down over the edge once the Oldblood got clear of the bees. She could become a distraction, keep it away from the other women. But it will come for you then...the sensible side of her mind pointed out. Rina returned to the spears that people used in tiger pits...maybe she could get a weapon like that made....?

  It all seemed so brave and so clever, right up until the moment she woke up in the morning. She could remember her plan, and unless Vipin got free in a very timely fashion, she would have to stick to it, and hope it would buy him time to intervene.

  There was only a slight chance that she would be able to kill the thing on her own, and pretty much no chance that the other brides or any proxy grooms
would pull that off. No, she knew what she had to do.

  The hard part was finding the nerve to do it, starting with this morning, where she had to tell a group of very silly young women and their boyfriends and parents that the monsters out of the old stories they traded around the wood stoves when they were kids...those monsters were real.

  She looked in the mirror, took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She didn’t think of herself as a leader most of the time, but today she would have to be one.

  She went downstairs and forced herself to eat breakfast-the blandest, least upsetting foods she could find. She did not want to be doing this on an empty stomach. Well, she didn’t want to be doing this at all, but it would get even harder to pull off if she fainted from hunger or something.

  “You’ll do fine,” Paa said.

  She looked up. “Is it that obvious what's bothering me?”

  “Well, it’s obvious that something’s bothering you, and it’s not really hard for your Paa to guess what that might,” Paa said.

  “I’m not going to say, don’t be worried, because this is the kind of situation where you are fully justified in being worried. But you shouldn’t doubt yourself.”

  Rina smiled. “I’m just glad that you and Maa were willing to believe what I told you. It must have seemed like a crazy story.”

  “You’re our daughter,” Maa said. “We can tell when you’re lying, we’d be able to tell if you had gone crazy, and since you’re not lying and not crazy, you’re mostly likely telling the truth.”

  “I love you too,” Rina hugged them both in turn, then started towards the front door.

  “There’s no rush,” Paa said. “The meeting with the other brides isn’t for another hour or so.”

  “I know,” Rina said. “I need to pay a visit to the jail first.”

  “Here,” Maa handed her two tiffins, one covered in scratched red enamel and the other made of plain tin.

  “The red one is for the Gnosha-they might not know what to feed him over at the jail. The plain one is for Vipin.”

  The constable only grudgingly let her see them. He had not yet radioed down to Rivertown and Summertown to check their credentials; he said he wanted to finish writing up his report first.

  The town jail did not have a cell big enough for a Gnosha, and Zekull could not stand fully erect in the room they had found for him. He claimed that it was not a problem, and seemed genuinely grateful for the food.

  Vipin was pleased to see the food, even more pleased to see Rina, and not so pleased when she told him about her plan. But he was unable to come up with anything better, so he focused on discussing the terrain of the meadow and the rock face above it, and advising Rina on how best to use it. Then she changed the subject.

  “Do you believe in dreams, Vipin?” she asked, and described all the dreams she’d had pertaining to him since the start of their adventures.

  She stammered quite a bit over the one where he drove the Old One away and then picked her up. He laughed nervously and flushed to a reddish-bronze, which did not make it easier for her to tell him these things.

  He became more somber when she described the one in the hospital.

  “We still don’t fully understand what the smokeflowers do,” He said gently. “It is possible that the pollen count is affecting your dreams somehow.”

  “Like giving me prophetic ones?”

  He stared at the floor, as if whatever he needed to say was written down there.

  “Not so much that. It might be giving you more memorable dreams full of things that you normally bury deep. That dream in the goat shed, might be your fear of being ‘sacrificed’ in the ritual, based on the stories you had heard as a child.”

  “Why did I include you though?”

  “I was the only ally you had at that point. Your dreaming mind hoped I could help, especially since I was already interested in the local customs and rituals.”

  “Why did the Old One in my dream have orange eyes like Bhana?”

  “A detail you heard in a folk tale as a child, perhaps.”

  “What about the other dreams?” She asked. “Like the first one. That was a freaky coincidence, the similarity between your pose there and what you did to lure Bhana to you in Stayout.”

  “It was,” He allowed.

  “But many men in our culture think that any woman without a male protector is fair game. Women, in turn often have to work on the assumption that any strange man is guilty until proven innocent.”

  “I’m not sure that I follow your logic,” Rina said.

  “It is not surprising that your dreaming mind would choose to present a strange man it found...interesting,” He hesitated over the word, “As being vulnerable and not a threat.”

  “So the later dreams are me coming to terms with the fact that there is something out there and we-the two of us-might be facing it down,” Rina said.

  “But,” She added. “That one dream with the hospital...that was upsetting, and I can’t make sense of it."

  He stretched his hand through the bars of his cell, and Rina took it.

  “It’s kind of you to be afraid for me, but you should not be.” He said. “I am...not that easy to kill.”

  He paused and seemed to hesitate before going on. “I said that it was probably not prophetic dreams you were having. But I suppose that one could have been showing you the past.”

  “Had you ever been in a situation like that?” Rina squeezed his hand more tightly.

  “I have,” he said. “I had a brain tumor that my healing powers didn’t seem to work on. The doctors said my chances were not good, but I wanted them to try anyway.”

  “Was this while you were dating that one woman you told us about?”

  “This was after. My illness was an interruption in a long, slow investigation I was working on, and I wanted to live so that I could finish it.”

  “Was your family...there for you?” Rina suspected the answer was ‘no,’ but she wanted to know why.

  “My parents had already passed away. My brother was still in the Army at that time, deployed to the Borderlands. I didn’t tell him about this health problem until afterward, and he got pretty angry with me for a while.”

  “So the agency paid for your operation?”

  “I’d saved up enough money to take care of it,” Vipin said quickly, and Rina understood without him telling her: the agency had refused to pay.

  “Did your Oldblood ancestry make the surgery complicated at all?” Rina asked.

  He shrugged.

  “The anesthetics didn’t work quite as well as they should have, I was later told. The actual surgery was a success in that they got the tumor out.”

  “...But?”

  “It was a failure in that the brain had been too badly damaged to continue. From there, things happened much as your dreaming mind imagined it, although your imagination left out the catheter.”

  “For which I’m sure we’re both grateful,” Rina retorted.

  Then the full meaning of what he was saying came home to her. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that you flatlined?”

  He shrugged.

  “I remember the pain, and wishing it would stop, and the beeping in the background. I think I opened my eyes and noticed the time on the clock.”

  “Then the pain got worse, I closed my eyes, the beeping stopped and the machine started screaming, but that sound faded away. Then the beeping started up again. I opened my eyes, and the time was two hours later, and I had a massive headache instead of the pain from the surgery.”

  “How could you tell the difference?”

  “How can you tell the difference between a bruised ankle and a broken ankle, without looking? This felt...less damaging.”

  “What happened then?”

  Anyway, eventually the nurses came back, discovered I was still alive, which they hadn’t expected, and called in the doctor. After some x-rays and other tests, the doctors decided they must have overestimated the dama
ge the tumor and surgery had done to my brain, because the alternative was to believe that my brain had regenerated itself.”

  Vipin smiled, but it was a very dry smile.

  “They also decided that the heart monitor was not working properly, because it had recorded me as having had no pulse for nearly two hours.”

  “They left you alone to die,” Rina said, with an anger that shocked even her.

  “They left you alone to die. The agency, the doctors, the nurses...And you wonder why random people’s subconscious minds immediately recognize you as a sad and lonely man?” She asked.

  “No, actually, I hadn’t wondered,” He answered. “I know I am not a cheerful person to be around.”

  “And yet you laugh and joke easily enough, and your smile could make women faint at your feet if you wanted them to.”

  He blushed.

  “That is kind of you to say...” He began, but she raised her free hand to his lips and shushed him.

  “There’s nothing kind about it,” She said firmly. “I find you attractive, I think you’re fundamentally a kind and decent man who’s had some tough luck, and although I don’t know if that’s love, I think it’s a good prelude to love.”

  Her fingers felt his mouth shape itself into a kiss, and then he reached up and took that hand in his own.

  “Thank you,” He said.

  “From you I will take whatever you are willing to give. But that is not the point of the story I told you. The point is that you shouldn’t worry about me. My body can heal itself from a lot of things that would kill humans or even other Oldbloods.”

  “I’ll worry about you if I want to,” She pouted.

  “But I have to talk to the brides in thirty minutes, and I won’t let the worry panic me or slow me down. I need me to be someone I can count on for this,” She joked nervously. “If I’m going to get through this in one piece.”

  “I like the way you think,” Vipin said. “Good luck.”

  The meeting had been set for mid-morning, at the shrine of the Mountain King with the bulbous dome that Rina could see from the upper story of her parents’ home.

  A fringe archaeologist had been up there once and swore up and down that it was older than the main temple. Then he got into a shouting match on tv with an older, more established archaeologist who pointed out that the shrine’s architectural style was much newer than that of the main temple to the Creator, which was so ancient that it had no roof, and had religious hymns carved into the walls in the oldest forms of writing anyone knew off.