Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (22 page)

I felt worse for Suzanne. She had been spared most of the visceral evidence of the slaughter, but those morsels she could not avoid seeing had hollowed her eyes and slackened her jaw. She had taken to Brix immediately, and had always militated against anything that caused pain to animals. There was no way to bleach out the solid and sickeningly large bloodstain on the fence, and I finally kicked out the offending planks. Looking at the hole was just as depressing.

The sheriffs were cloyed, too fat and secure in their jobs. All I had done was bring myself to their attention, which is one place no sane person wants to be. Annoyed at my cowardly waste of their time, they marked up my floor with their boots and felt up my wife with their eyes.

Things were done differently here. That was what impelled me to Dunwoody’s place, at a brisk limp.

I had not expected Ormly to answer the door; I couldn’t fathom what tasks were outside his capabilities and simply assumed he was too stupid to wipe his own ass. He filled up the doorway, immense and ugly, his face blank as a pine plank (with a knot on the flip side, I knew). He was dressed exactly as before. Perhaps he had not changed. It took a couple of long beats, but he did recognize me.

“Fur paw,” he said.

The back of my neck bristled. When Ormly’s brain changed stations, he haunted the forest, starkers, in the dead of night; what other pastimes might his damaged imagination offer him? When he spoke, I half expected him to produce one of Brix’s unaccounted-for shanks from his back pocket and gnaw on it. Then I realized what he had said:
For pa
.

“Yeah.” I tried to clear the idiocy out of my throat. “Is he home?”

“Home. Yuh.” He lurched dutifully out of the foyer, Frankenstein’s Monster in search of a battery charge.

I waited on the stoop, thinking it unwise to go where I wasn’t specifically beckoned or invited. Another urban prejudice. Wait for the protocol, go through the official motions. Put it through channels. That routine was what had won me the white-lipped holes blooming in my stomach.

Dunwoody weaved out of the stale-smelling dimness holding half a glass of peppermint schnapps. He was wearing a long-sleeved workshirt with the cuffs buttoned.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Dunwoody, but my dog was killed last night.” No reaction. He showed the same disinterest the cops had, and that brought my simmering anger a notch closer to boiling. “More to the point, he was pelted and hung on my back fence with his head scooped out and his guts spread all over the yard. The fence bordering
your
property, Mr. Dunwoody.”

“I heard him barking.” He looked down away. “Saw you kick the slats out.” His words billowed toward me in minty clouds; he was tying on a nice, out-of-focus afternoon drunk. “You said you didn’t have no pets.”

It was an accusation:
If you hadn’t lied, this would not have happened.

I felt obligated to be pissed off, but my soul wasn’t really in it. My need to know was stronger. “Sorry—but look, you mentioned wildcats coming out of the hills. Or bears. Maybe I’m no authority on wildlife feeding habits, but what happened was . . . ” I flashed on Brix’s corpse again and my voice hitched. “That was far beyond killing for food.”

“I didn’t see it.” His voice wasn’t a full slur. Not yet, but soon. “Woke me up. But I didn’t see it. I’m glad I didn’t. That part I don’t fancy, sir.” He scratched an eyebrow. “I think y’all should leave. Go.”

“You mean leave Point Pitt?”

“Move somewhere else. Don’t live here.” He took a long drag on his glass and grimaced, as though choking down cough medicine. “See what happens? This ain’t for boys like you, with your fag hairdo’s and your little Japanese cars and your satellite TV . . . aahhh, Christ . . . ”

Ormly loomed behind him, recording all the pain with oddly sad eyes, so much like a dog himself.

A cloudy tear slipped down Dunwoody’s face, but his own eyes were clear and decisive as they looked from me to the north. “Go home,” he said. “Just go home, please.” Then he shut the door in my face.

Dinner was flavorless, by rote. Suzanne had tried to nap and only gotten haggard. Jilly told me she missed Brix.

After bestowing my customary bedtime smackeroo, Jilly asked again about getting another pet
right now
. Her mom had run the same idea past me downstairs. Between them I’d finally be goaded into some reparation.

Suzanne reached for me as soon as I hit my side of the bed. She had already divested herself of clothing, and her movements were brazen and urgent. She wanted to outrun the last twenty-four hours in a steambath of good therapeutic fucking. Her nerves were rawed, and close to the surface; she climaxed with very little effort and kept me inside her for a long, comforting while. Then she kissed me very tenderly, ate two sleeping pills, and chased oblivion in another direction.

My foot felt as if I had stomped on a sharpened pencil. I hobbled to the bathroom, pretending I was Chester in
Gunsmoke
. The dressing was yellowed from drainage and shadowed with dry brown blood. It gave off a carrion odor. I took my time washing and swabbing and winding on new gauze. I was still pleasantly numb everywhere else.

There was a low thrumming, like that of a large truck idling on the street outside. I felt it before I actually heard it. I checked the window across from the bathroom door, but there was nothing, not even Ormly making his uniformless predawn rounds. With my Bay City paranoid’s devotion to ritual, I hobbled downstairs and jiggled all the locked doors. The boarded-up plant nook was secure. I sneaked a couple of slugs of milk straight from the carton. Ulcer maintenance.

Jilly’s room was on the far side of the bathroom. When I peeked stealthily in, the vibrational noise got noticeably louder.

Triplechecking everything constantly was as much a habit of new parenthood as security insecurity. Jilly was wound up in her Sesame Street sheets. I decided to shut the window, which was curtained, but half-open.

The sheet-shape was grotesque enough to suggest that Jilly’s entire platoon of stuffed animals was bunking with her tonight. I’d tucked in Wile E. Coyote myself. No more Brix. My throat started to close up with self pity. I crept closer to plant a sleeptime kiss on Jilly’s temple—another parental privilege, so Suzanne told me. Jilly’s hair was just beginning to shade closer to the coloring of my own.

The low, fluttering noise was coming from beneath her sheets. And something smelled bad in the room. Perhaps she had soiled herself in sleep.

Hunched into Jilly’s back was a mass of oily black fur as big as she was. At first my brain rang with a replay of Brix’s horrifying inside-out death. The thing spooning with my daughter had one fat paw draped over her sleeping shoulder, and was alive. And purring.

I had the sheet peeled halfway down to reveal more of it when it twisted around and bit me on the wrist.

I took one panicked backward step, jerking sway. Jilly’s plush brontosaurus was feet-up on the floor; I stumbled over it, savaging my injured foot and crashing, sprawl-assed, down on Brix’s rug, which smelled doggish and was dusted with his red hair. I had to get up, fast, tear the thing from her back, get the shotgun, to—

I tried to chock my good leg under me and could not. Both had gone thick and unresponsively numb. Then, shockingly, warmth spread at my crotch as my belly was seized by a sudden and powerful orgasm. My arms became as stupid as my legs. Then even my neck muscles lost it, and my forehead thunked into Brix’s rug. And I came again.

And again.

Within seconds it was like receiving a thorough professional battering. I was having one orgasm for every three beats of my heart. My useless legs twitched. Saliva ran from the corner of my mouth to pool in my ear; even my vocal cords were iced into nonfunction. And while I lay curled up on the floor, coming and shuddering and coming, the creature that had been in bed with my daughter climbed down to watch.

Its eyes were bronze coins, reflecting candlefire. I thought of the thing I had seen monitoring me from the tree on my first day as a Point Pitt resident.

It was bigger than a bobcat, stockier, low-slung. The fur or hair was backswept, spiky-stiff and glistening, as though heavily lubricated. Thick legs sprouted out from the body rather than down, making its carriage ground-gripping and reptilian. I heard hard leather pads scuff the floor as it neared, saw hooked claws, hooded in pink ligatures, close in on my face.

It was still purring. The head was a cat’s, all golden eyes and pointed felt ears, but the snout was elongated into a canine coffin shape. The chatoyant pupils were X-shaped, deep-glowing crosscuts in the iris of each eye, and they widened like opening wounds to drink me in. It yawned. Less than a foot from my face I saw two bent needle fangs, backed by triangular, sharkish teeth in double rows. Its breath was worse than the stink of the congealed bandage I had stripped from my foot.

One galvanic sexual climax after another wrenched my insides apart. I was dry-coming; about to ejaculate blood. The creature dipped its head to lick some spittle from my cheek. Its tongue was sandpapery.

I had to kill it, bludgeon its monster skull to mush, blast it again and again until its carcass could hold no more shot. I orgasmed again. I could barely breathe.

It ceased tasting me and the hideous eyes sparked alive, hot yellow now. It padded back to the bed and leaped silently up. Jilly remained limp. I didn’t even know if she was already dead or not.

It looked, to make sure I could see. Then it settled in, gripping Jilly’s shoulders from above with its claws and licking her hair. It opened its mouth. Cartilage cracked softly as its jawbones separated, and the elastic black lips stretched taut to engulf the top of her head.

It sensed how much I hated it. Hate glittered back at me from those molten gash-eyes—my own hate, absorbed, made primal and total, and sent back to me.

Of hate, it knew.

My traitorous body continued its knifing spasms, and tears of pain blurred the view that I was incapable of commanding my eyelids to block out. The lips wormed forward, side-to-side, the slanted teeth seating, then pulling backward. The mouth elongated to full bore and the eyes fixed in a forward stare, glazed as though intoxicated by this meal.

With a mindless alien malice, it looked like it was smiling.

Blackness sucked me down before I could hear the abrasive, porcelain sound of those teeth grinding together, meeting at last through the pale flesh of my little girl’s throat.

Moonlight delineated the window in blue-white.

I tried to sit up and rub my face. I was sweat-soaked, and lacquered in scales of dry semen. My balls were crushed grapes. Half my mind tried to wheedle me back into unconsciousness, begging to flee from what it had recorded. The less craven half had kicked me until I awoke, feeling like a frayed net loaded with broken bones, unable to stand or walk. I crawled on my belly to Jilly’s bed. Lowering groans slipped from my throat.

I’ve seen snakes eat their prey. I didn’t have to see what was left in Jilly’s bed to know what had happened. But to get my legs back, and finish the work begun this night, I forced myself to look.

I took it all in without even a gasp. Only the drapes whispered furtively together, unable to remain still or quiet.

So much blood, blackening the Sesame Street sheets. Her tiny outthrust hand was speckled with it, and cold to the touch. Her pillow was a saturated dark sponge.

I slumped and vomited into my own lap. Nothing much came up as my guts were rent, the sore muscles pulling themselves to tatters. My hand went out and skidded into something like warm gelatin next to the bedpost.

It was the skin of our visitor, piled there like an enormous scalp, greasy black spines rooted in an opaque membrane. It reminded me of Brix’s empty pelt. Here was the broad, flat sheath of the back; here, the sleeve of each leg. The reversed tissue was coated with a kind of thick, veined afterbirth that smelled like shit and rotten hamburger. My stomach clenched at the hot stink, and the pain almost put me under again. I swallowed a surge of bile and held.

It was slippery, as heavy as a waterlogged throw rug when I dragged it out of the room.

I knew there was a handful of speed and painkillers waiting for me in the bathroom. I filled the basin from the cold tap and immersed my head. I stared into the clean white gorge of the toilet and decided not to heave.

Suzanne was still safe in the depths of drugged sleep, where there are no true nightmares. On wobbly wino’s feet I locked the balcony doors. The bedroom door had a two-way skeleton-key lock that could be engaged from the outside.

My Levi’s jacket and shoes were downstairs on the sofa. And the shotgun was where it had been patiently waiting since the day we moved in.

Dunwoody’s house was just up the hill.

My shoulder stung as the Remington’s recoil pad kicked it, and the works on Dunwoody’s back door, mostly shit, blew away to floating wood chaff and fused shrapnel. The door skewed open on its upper hinge, and the inside knob rebounded from the kitchen wall with a clacking cueball noise. It spun madly in place until its energy was used up. The echo of the blast returned softly from the hills.

Two rooms down a narrow hallway, Dunwoody sat watching a black-and-white television that displayed only test-pattern hairs, The screen bounced rectangles of light off his wire-rim glasses and made his old-fashioned undershirt glow blue in the darkness. He turned to look at the intruder stepping through the hanging wreckage of his back door, his gaze settling with resigned indifference on the twelve-gauge in my hand. He sighed.

My right wrist was throbbing as though fractured; mean red coronas of inflammation had blossomed around the twin punctures there, and I didn’t know how many more shots it could stand before breaking. The smell of dry puke swam richly through my head, chased by the fetor of my prize. My eyes were pinpricks; the black capsules were doing their dirty work in the solvents of my stomach. It was the dope as much as the backwash of nausea that made me giddy—dark, toxic waves slopping up on a polluted beach, then receding.