Hammers on Bone

by Cassandra Khaw

  I scowl and dig incisors through my thumb, splitting the meat. Blood drips, crystallizes, slithers along the hallway, branching outward, searching, hunting.

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  My grimace deepens. Something is trying to play with me, and I don’t like it. Out of habit, I settle fingers on my revolver, the metal cold and reassuring against my skin. I step out of the room and into the corridor, my back to the door. The walls seethe with my blood, a web of ink and rust, like overgrown vines, quaking for an answer the house will never release.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I grumble, vicious. I know how monster movies work.

  Nothing stirs. But I can smell it now, an illness permeating the air, sticky, sour, challenging. I lick my mouth, taste rot. Any regular mook would be suffocating on the fumes. Instead, the stink just makes me angry. So, I unbox myself a cigarette and ignite the tip, breathe out carcinogens by the lungful.

  Carefully, I navigate the other rooms. The storage cubby is dank, dimly lit by a single flickering bulb, and crammed with old baby things and household supplies: eight-for-two toilet rolls, rubber gloves by the dozen, cheap shampoo, dusty cans of Spam. The bathroom is dense with mold, the plumbing corrugated from years of disuse, the patina of rust so thick it flakes like dandruff on the tiles. Someone threw up in here recently, but hadn’t bothered to clean up. I don’t look behind the shower curtains. As I exit, I snatch a look at myself in the cracked mirror and the sight stops me.

  My face is older than I remember, the lines longer, more entrenched in coarse brown skin. Puckered flesh details a history in bullet wounds, knife scars, burns. Ugly but human. The eyes, though. I lean in. The sclera isn’t too different, slightly bloodshot but otherwise unremarkable. The pupils, on the other hand, are goatlike, octopoid in an ocean of scorched amber.

  “Hm.” I palm a cheek. Not a great sign.

  I turn and walk out. There isn’t much I can do, except keep that epiphany in mind. I’ve done worse to this body. It’d hold. But I have to want it to hold. Which may be harder said than done, with my bones still humming, and my veins still irradiated from transformation.

  I shudder delicately. No, there are expectations. Laws.

  A contract.

  Pushing my trepidation into a box in the back of my head, I make my way to the main bedroom. The door’s unlatched and slightly ajar. From inside, I can hear the low drone of late-night British television programming. I step in. A body lies curled on the edge of a queen-sized bed, the mountain range of hip and shoulder outlined in florescent light. Blond hair snakes across a pillow in thick, wet clumps.

  I move closer. The shape remains motionless on its side, an arm dangling over the edge.

  Closer.

  Without warning, it spasms, back thrusting upward, a motion so violent that it almost carries the figure right off the bed. But then, just as abruptly, all the fight gives out and it collapses, panting in shrill, shallow gasps.

  I stroke the hair away from its head and find a harvest of eyes, only eyes, saline-drenched, strangely languid, secured in place by ropy membrane and yards of exposed nerve, blue-green and luminous. The bird’s glazed stare is almost entirely buried beneath the alien growths. She doesn’t notice my attention, her own regard trapped by a point in the ceiling, pupils thinned from anguish.

  When she opens her mouth, I see more eyes, half-budded, blinking in the cavern of her throat.

  “I told you to run.” I sigh.

  Her nightgown, oily with stains, quivers. Beneath the thin fabric, shapes move, quickening to the sound of my voice. I make no attempt to investigate, only twitch the corner of her quilt over her limp, trembling form.

  “It hurts.” The bird.

  I look back. “Can’t help you.”

  “It hurts.” She repeats, a whimper snagged between her teeth. She rolls over, and I hear things squelch.

  “I told you to take the kids and run.”

  “I can hear it in my veins.”

  I pause.

  “Gela Vt’ yah fhma’a,” she croaks, stupidly, like a child pretending worldliness. “G’ukhyoi y’okhyoi fhokhu.”

  “Yes.” There wasn’t anything more I could say.

  She stops, judders. “It hurts so, so much.”

  “I know.”

  “He told me—it was like a dream.” The story unspools in chunks and gasps, wet noises caked with pain. “He told me, he—this was supposed to be beautiful. Like being reborn. Like giving birth. Like creating life. But this is—”

  “Wrong.” I finish.

  “It hurts.”

  The impulse to do something, to undo this error of existence, rouses, bright and hot as the passage of a bullet through bone. I stare at her, feeling the body’s sympathy, its longing to assist, to fix, to help her, help her, we need to help her, help her.

  * * *

  The cry of the gun is loud as the death of stars.

  6: THE RED HOUSE

  The walls howl.

  The keening is inhuman, played by a hundred damaged throats, birthed of larynxes unbound by terrestrial biology, an ululation that goes on and on and on.

  Then, it tapers off, and I catch it, even as the walls tremble and thrash from the approach of something monstrous. A desperation, an animal pain, resonating in the fading percussions. McKinsey’s still there and he is hurting over the death of his girl.

  But that note of sapient agony isn’t enough to convince me to roll over and bare my underbelly. I snarl as the floors quake, concrete and plaster spilling in a storm. I lurch out of the boys’ room even as a pseudopod lashes free of the carpet, slamming into the spot I once occupied. I skid across the landing, extract my gun, fire.

  Bang.

  Warning shot. We both know it’ll sting, but it won’t do much more than that. Bullets don’t kill creatures like us. But the tentacle, a strip of muscle adorned with bloodshot, bulging eyes, rears at impact. Blood geysers. The creature shrieks again.

  You killed her.

  Youkilledheryoukilledheryoukilledher.

  Human anguish wraps itself about the screams, layers itself over the distorted rage, a hymn for the heartbroken, looping over and over, until it fades into a guttural wail, indistinguishable from everything else.

  Another shot.

  Bang.

  More tentacles geyser from the floorboards. There is no art to their onslaught, only violence. They slap blindly at the air, at anywhere I’ve been, growing by the heartbeat, as though quantity can replace accuracy.

  It’s a surprisingly effective tactic.

  Every time I blink, they’ve multiplied again, frothing and writhing, their fury resonating through the blood I’ve left on the walls. The house becomes indistinguishable from an intestinal tract, throbbing with polyps and wet tissue, with tendrils. They push me back, back, blocking off the stairwell and any hope of exit.

  I’m panting now. I empty the last of my rounds into whatever is closest and chuck my gun away, the pointless fucking human machine. I’d underestimated the thing. McKinsey’s stronger than I anticipated. Way stronger. Stronger than me if I stay like this. On cue, my bones crackle, eager, aching to participate in this primordial struggle. I feel epidermis begin to unravel.

  No, no, no, no.

  Not yet.

  And then—

  A single, unwavering note held in a voice of pure silver.

  It is respite, it is clean water on a clear blue day, it is beauty, it is hope. And it is ice in my veins, it is fear, it is horror, it is something impure and strange and it calls to me, to McKinsey.

  The tentacles still, riveted.

  I’m far less entranced. My eyes snake to a string dangling from what appears to be the attic door. One hard yank later and the ladder slides forward. I rush up the rungs. Bad idea, probably, but like they say: when you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s no way to go but up.

  * * *

  I blink.

  The attic is enormous, its darkness cold. Moonlight crawls corpse
-gray through a single skylight, illuminating wood and cardboard boxes stuffed with someone else’s memories. Here, at least, the air is clean. I fumble for a cigarette and sigh as I take my first breath, not quite relaxing, but relishing the lull.

  Below, that unknown voice continues to sing, beautiful and deadly as a draught of liquid mercury.

  “Daddy?”

  I jerk at the noise.

  How hadn’t I noticed? A small figure hauls itself from behind a tower of precariously stacked containers, its face chalky with terror as it waddles into the moonlight. James. He’s dressed to endure the attic, a fact that elicits a twinge of cold surprise. Someone prepared him for this.

  Wariness tightens my scowl. “James?”

  The boy scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms and smiles, slightly sad-like. In the reflected glow of everyone’s favorite satellite, a chicken scrawl of hastily drawn runes, barely language, barely coherent. A child’s pantomime of adult literature.

  “Abel said Daddy was coming.”

  Ice struts down the highway of my spine. “Say that again, kid?”

  “Abel said he was calling for Daddy.”

  Abel said he was calling for Daddy. The words reverberate like a warning. I had known that something was up. I’d known it from the start: that someone was playing me for a fool. But the memory of the kid’s eyes, large and full of hate, the sheer organic quality of his presence. It was him, wasn’t it? It was Abel all along. But how did it all fit together?

  “Hello again, Mr. Persons.”

  I spin about.

  Abel is standing about five feet away, arms crossed behind his back. I can see a hammer ticking in his grip, wagging like a puppy’s tail, perfectly ordinary, perfectly unmagical. Just like Abel. Just another kid, a rawboned eleven, with deep-set eyes and a mop of dark hair, skin sallow, face untouched by broken capillaries.

  “I should have known you were up to something.”

  He shakes his head slowly. “You got me all wrong, detective.”

  “Did I?”

  “I’m not trying to hurt you, Mr. Persons. I really, really am not. I definitely want our stepdad dead.”

  “And that’s the reason you lured me here? You hoping he’s allergic to gumshoes? Hoping he’d choke on my hat?”

  “No.”

  I exhale smoke rings. “What’s your game, kid?”

  He doesn’t get the chance to answer. No longer bound by whatever magic sits in Abel’s voice, McKinsey comes seeping through the attic door, slow as molasses, then rising, a bank of meat and bones and eyes, eyes, eyes.

  Slowly, it resolves into something shaped like McKinsey, naked save for the threads of fabric still caught between compressed fat. It gurgles once.

  There are so many, many eyes on the thing. They fill his mouth, unhinge his jaw, distend his cheeks with their bulk. I can see rips in the skin, oozing plasma.

  “Tekeli-li.”

  “Hello to you too, ugly.”

  Beside me, Abel fastens a double-handed grip on his hammer.

  The creature’s head rocks back further than it should, tilting, tilting until I hear McKinsey let out a moan of pure anguish.

  “Tekke-ke—” it burbles again.

  I slide in front of Abel. “Yeah.”

  “T-t-tekeli. Tekeli.” A rustle of motion, the kids vanish like cats into the shadows.

  Briefly, I think about stepping around the thing, letting McKinsey have a go at the two. I don’t like being double-crossed, especially not by children.

  But a job’s a job.

  “Heard you the first time, you fat palooka.”

  Amputated from the idea of human, it writhes and undulates inside its meat suit, testing the elasticity of mammalian epidermis. Judging from the way the flesh rips, it’s used to a better class of accommodations. The man gargles in pain. The thing hisses. I see his eyes rolling back, helpless. But I’d be damned if I give two fucks about a chump like him.

  “T-t-t-t—”

  “Fuck you too.”

  It lunges.

  Not at me. At Abel.

  The body dives to intercept before I can get up to speed as to what’s going on. I squirm around and grapple it to the ground, But it’s too late. Crack. Bone gives, and Abel wails his rage as he skitters back.

  We dance, the thing and I, shedding structure with every pivot, every turn. Human anatomy surrenders to the pragmatism of combat. Muscles unbraid, sinews lengthen, even as veins become garrote and bones blade. In minutes, we’re viscera commanded by will, flayed tissue, tendon, and teeth. Through it all, the thing keeps its human head, like a tumor in the writhing heart, McKinsey’s eyes bulging with terror.

  And I am alive as I haven’t been for decades, no longer restricted by the grammar of human flesh but free, finally.

  Free.

  Oh, I know it’ll come and bite me in the ass later, but it is hard not to exult in the moment. Even as the body fails, even as it sags under the things I make it do, molecules destabilizing as proteins tear apart under the pressure, I rejoice in the motion. Distantly, I hear a voice pounding with warning, that if I keep this up, if I keep going, there will be nothing but slop by the time we are done.

  But I am ripping into McKinsey.

  I am swallowing. He tastes rancid, sublime, steeped in pain. I am fashioning bones into more mouths, into more teeth, and bite, chew, swallow, devour.

  I am alive.

  The thing that was, is McKinsey screams and reciprocates, but I have the advantage of experience. If the thing is rage, I am a small blade in the correct place, the perfect time.

  My being swims with the pleasure of the feast.

  More.

  My maws close over meat and bile.

  Then, something in the corner of my eye moves unexpectedly, and I make the mistake of dropping my guard. The thing doesn’t. It strikes. I feel hooks saw through my lungs, a thousand perforations, spreading the tissue, stretching it until there is pain and only pain, as I gasp my way between one breath and the next. I crash into a wall.

  The thing howls and howls, loud as eternities.

  “Shit.” I pull at myself, try to find purchase. Anything. Something. But there’s no room, no—

  “James! Now!”

  A net explodes, thumbtacks and sharp wire. Then the kid follows, leaping through the air, hammer held up high. He lands. Brings the iron down on his stepdad’s skull.

  Crack.

  Brain dribbles.

  Crack.

  The thing screams.

  Crack.

  * * *

  “Kid.”

  We stand in silence for a while. Just above eye level, his brother stirs and peeps over the edge of an alcove, round little face bright as a candle flame.

  “Yeah?” the kid says at last.

  I look down. The thing that was their stepfather is meat now, pulped lymph and dangling muscle, a low moaning as it tries to reassemble, tendons slurping along the walls. I bring a heel down on a lump of liver, grind it against the wood floor. There are so many questions growing in me, but I don’t voice any of them. Instead, I say: “Like I was saying, I don’t think you were playing it straight with me.”

  The kid has the gall to look embarrassed. He kicks his feet, like he was caught skipping classes. “No . . .”

  “Uh-huh.” I mop my brow, then slide a cigarette from its case. “I suppose you figured I wouldn’t take the case if you told me you wanted me to be bait.”

  “Yeah.”

  I spit teeth on the floor. Despite everything, it’s hard not to smile. “You’ve got a lot of guts, kid.”

  He says nothing, stares at the mess on the floor. Blood oozes black and claret around my feet.

  “So, here’s my question: why me?”

  “Because they needed the gift of a Dead One’s blood.”

  My pulse speeds up.

  “Dead One.” I repeat. Dead One. I had heard that term before. I hadn’t thought to wonder then, towed under by the tide of violent memories.
But now? I make a mental note to check in on a certain waitress.

  Abel nods. “Yes.”

  “I was meant to be a sacrifice.”

  His eyes flicker, darting sidelong. James inches up to us and settles against his brother’s lean frame, fingers digging into the older boy’s coat. “Not . . . like that.”

  He pauses, cocks his head to one side, before diving into exposition. “There had to be blood. Not death.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they said so.” Abel spits out a cracked tooth, his face already swelling, impacted cheekbone already bruising.

  “And in exchange?”

  “They’ll keep us safe.”

  “How?”

  He sighs, a strangely adult sound. “I made a bargain.”

  “With what?”

  The kid doesn’t answer. Not exactly. Instead, he extends his tongue, reveals a country of sigils delicately etched onto the red muscle. I don’t recognize the language, but their greasy luminance is familiar, a memory of lightless water and the life beneath.

  “I made a bargain,” Abel repeats, stiff, tongue sliding back into place, jaw tense.

  I bob my head slowly. Not all of us wear our demons on our sleeves. “Fair enough.”

  He nods. And we stand there, just for a while, in the quiet, soaking in Croydon’s muffled struggles, their stepdad’s remains still warbling in delicate agony.

  I should tell them about their mom. But pettiness, or maybe the body’s sense of compassion, a spongy ache nesting in my sternum, keeps my trap shut.

  “Anyway,” I declare, lighting a smoke as I turn to walk away. “I’ll be back in five minutes, in case anyone wants to try some funny business.”

  Neither of the boys move. It’s not until I’ve clicked the door shut that I hear tiny feet scrabbling over wood, hear the steady rhythm of hammers on bone.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  * * *

  I don’t remember who said it, but there’s an author out there who once wrote that we don’t need to kill our children’s monsters. Instead, what we need to do is show them that they can be killed.