Here Be Monsters - an Anthology of Monster Tales (8 page)

Her own perception was perhaps stronger than the Witch’s but it was triggered by emotion, rather than will, and her instinct had been to hide it from the beautiful woman she had to kill.

Her list was nearing completion. She didn’t want to count, just move on to the next target, research and execute, but she was very aware of the refrigerated chamber where the Doctor kept the remains of his subjects.

For future examination. For secrecy. For Lux to never forget. Each one of them had possessed a weakness; each had to die in the right way. Some methods were cleaner than others. Eyes of the seer, skin of the witch, spine of the wall-crawler, heart of the beast, voice of the enchanter… A long list.

*****

The Machine was a nest of glass tubing. Pipettes, alembics, distillation chambers, retorts, cooling domes and refining filters, like something out of a museum. At the end that connected to the subject, the technology became high end medical equipment, all polished steel, pure porcelain and sterile needles.

It was a mind-boggling contraption of science spanning five centuries. No need to wait for a lightning bolt, though. The Doctor had devised a less capricious catalyst.

But Lux had been its last subject. Or, rather, the last surviving one.

The labyrinthine instrument slept in a long-abandoned room, gathering what little dust made its way though the air filters down here. In the beginning, building it in the farthest corner had been a necessary inconvenience, so the screams would not be heard. Lux remembered the screams.

The others, the ones that stopped so abruptly.

And her own. Over and over.

She didn’t tell him about her nightmares anymore, so he assumed they were gone. Forgotten. He thought she was transparent to him, a simple lab rat. However, she had thoughts, when he wasn’t looking, and she kept secrets. Truths. Memories.

She had never been fully awake inside the machine. There was hypnosis, those bright oscillating trinkets, and the bitter juices poured into her mouth.

Her memories were in her dreams. For years, she fought to shut them out, but now Lux listened to them, dove into the remembered agony and examined every detail her five-year-old subconscious had retained by binding it to horrors.

Her examination of the machine, aided by research of science old and new, had reached an intriguing conclusion. The contraption was quite whole, if slightly disassembled, but the linchpin was missing. There was a hollow space in the glassy entrails, where a key component had been removed. All she could guess about it was its size (not big) and that it was equipped with at least four connection points, where four now sadly gaping rubber tubes linked it to the system. It was the catalyst.

*****

No colour on his craggy cheeks, no feeling to his stony fingers. Dead hair, faded blond, clinging to his cracked scalp. Fingernails turned into glass.

Dead, he would give away too many secrets. This body could not be recovered. He must be allowed to live long years, until every part of him had petrified, and no tests were possible.

In the meantime, he had free reign of the dream world.

He lay on a bed, covered by sheets he couldn’t feel. Tubes went in and out of his shell, keeping his insides alive. Acute scleroderma, it said on his chart.

The bed was reinforced, and double sized. His body had gained weight and density with petrification. The nurses needed a mechanical crane to move him.

They opened the curtains every day. Perhaps sun was not such a good idea.

Brain activity was inexplicable, off the charts, an unpredictable flurry of thought and emotion in a perennial electrical storm inside his skull.

They didn’t know what was going on inside his head, but Lux did. He was living a hundred lives.

She wore skirts and pretty shoes, put on pink lipstick, became the sweetest of volunteers at the hospital where his family had stored him. They had stopped visiting, because life goes on and why spend time caring for an unresponsive rock?

It wasn’t too long before she became his regular companion. Nobody else wanted to. When she fell asleep in the room, the nurses laughed it off.

“You are not the first one,” they said, “he must give off sleepy vibes.”

He did. It was one of his abilities, and now he wanted company. (Come play with me). There were many books in the room, old super hero comics brought from his bedroom at home, from his old life when he was a real boy and not a thing to be found under a bridge.

Lux read them to him, then went out and bought new ones. Superpowers and saving the world. Secret identities. Endless violence. Some made her laugh, probably for the wrong reasons. She wondered where her character would fit in, if she was one of those paper girls in sex-fantasy clothes.

The Dreamer’s file was far from specific. He had been a wild card, developed in unpredictable ways and, when his condition deteriorated, the Doctor lost all contact. He seemed to have been an out-patient, which she didn’t understand, but he was only sixteen then, and in his family’s care. Somehow, all of the Doctor’s subjects had found a way to escape the project before his results were conclusive. Except for the Beast, but he, the first one, had remained stable after a few weeks. He was different. Older than the others. Also, dead before his first treatment.

The dead remain static, the living adapt and grow. Even more so if they are children, like the Dreamer. Like her.

Lux had been reading for a while, a dimpled smile dancing on her lips for the nurses when they came and went, like clockwork, to refill his supplies and check his vitals.

They were reading a new comic today. It was about the king of dreams and his little sister, a young girl who was Death. The ward fell silent, a temple of comatose sleep punctuated by the mechanical bleeps monitoring beating hearts.

Lux walked across a dilapidated manor house, long abandoned, the gold leaf peeling from the rotting wall paper, intricate mouldings on the ceiling slowly turning to dust and beautiful tiled floors covered in dirt.

The white marble chimney was open like a door, gaping in a phantasmagorical green glow, the passageway into the bowels of the house.

She descended iron winding stairs until she began to feel dizzy.

Someone turned on the lights.

She was in the white sterile corridors of the complex. As she walked under the glaring lights there were sounds, voices, cries from the innumerable doors, but she walked straight ahead, never slowing down. She knew how it worked.

The machine was waiting for her, a beautiful beast of polished glass and mirrored steel. It pulsated, it breathed heavily, rubber tubing extended like yellow tendrils to pull her towards the chair. She closed her eyes, willing the dripping tentacles away from her skin.

“So, this is where you hide.”

The boy was sitting on the chair, his face young and clear of disease.

“Why are you hiding in my dream, girl?”

“I’m not. This is my dream.”

He began to stand up and she took two quick steps back. His body was covered in bandages, right to the tip of each finger. He looked around, thoughtfully.

“Perhaps it is.”

He opened the door, the one behind the machine that shouldn’t be there, and left, his red cape billowing in the wind.

Lux followed him, anxious to leave the throbbing glass thing behind. The Dreamer’s world reminded her of the comic books she had become so fond of lately.

It was built in bold colours, sharp corners and deep, contrasting shadows.

Every sound made an echo.

The boy had pulled up the hood of his purple cloak, a new costume, but his fingers were still bandaged when he motioned for her to follow.

They walked a fantastic cityscape of vertiginous angles until she stopped.

“No. Here.”

He didn’t seem put off by her boldness.

“As you wish.”

They were sitting at a long dinner table, a fairytale banquet between them.

“Shall we talk, little sister?”

“I am not your sister.”

He played with a silver napkin holder, two snakes biting each other’s tails.

“We are all brothers and sisters, all we who lay inside the machine. One house, one heart, one soul? No, no souls,” he seemed to be thinking out loud now. “We have no souls. He took them. He made us…more, and we pay the price.”

He nibbled on a delicate cake, sugar flowers on marzipan stems. They were too bright and colourful, uncomfortable to look at.

“Why are you here, little sister?”

“I came to see you. There aren’t many of us left.”

“Did you kill them?”

She looked up, startled. The scope of his power was unpredictable too. He might be connected to all of them, feeling them go out like candles, one by one. But he changed the subject.

“I see your dreams. I see his dreams too. You have ideas, and he doesn’t know,” he smiled a wicked, sugary smile. “What will he do when he finds out?”

“He won’t.”

“No, I suppose he won’t. Because you are very good at hiding. He made you that way.” He offered her a blue biscuit butterfly. “He doesn’t know that either.” She didn’t reply, so he went on.
 
“ Show me what’s in your heart, sister. Your heart’s desires. Are they dark and pure?”

“Yes” she looked at him, and wondered how much he really knew, and if he could be saved, “but you know that. You’ve seen my dreams.”

He changed gears again.

“You used to cry every night in your cage. I listened.”

“I don’t cry.”

“No,” he crumbled a sugar daisy into sticky dust. “You don’t need to anymore. You kill,” his smile was desperately wide. “But you are not going to kill me. I am dead to the world, a thing in a dream.”

“You are alive.”

“Only in here. If you were going to kill me, I’d be dead already,” he blew up his floppy fringe, feigned indifference.

“That’s true. You will die of your illness.”

“It’s not an illness. It’s my power. Did you know that I volunteered? He didn’t take me, like the others. I wanted it, I wanted to be….”

A super hero.

He wanted to be a super hero.

The walls melted into dark branches and their dinner table was in a forest clearing. Every tree was twisted and every shadow had yellow malevolent eyes.

He looked around, surprised.

“You dream of this?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where are we?”

“Outside the house.”

“I see. The world. Yes, I suppose it is like this. I don’t miss it, you know?”

She just looked at him.

“I don’t,” for the first time, a defensive chink on his voice. “I don’t miss it,” he murmured into a teacup.

“What’s there?” he pointed behind her. A path had opened and a merry light could be seen through the branches. Lux knew there would be a house at the end of the path.

“Nothing,”

“Is this it?” he was up and moving already. She tried to grab him but the beautifully inked cloak slipped like rain through her fingers.

“No! Don’t go there!”

She was running after him now, but it was like fighting thick mud. She couldn’t catch up, “NO!”

The golden glow flickering in the window was a Sleeping Beauty nightlight. The bedroom had white and blue wall paper and it smelled of plasticine and baby shampoo.

Lux stopped fighting thin air.

Helpless, she watched the Dreamer peeping into her long-ago bedroom. His previous giddiness had turned into clenched teeth and frozen limbs. A familiar voice, faint echoes through the walls, was reading her a story.

“No,” she sobbed, her voice breaking into a croak, her throat suddenly dry.

So much pity and horror in the dreamer’s eyes.

“He is your father.”

“No.”

“He did this to his own child.”