Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (46 page)

She sat on the rocking chair across from the couch. Beside her, on the television, the camera focused on an obese man wearing overalls smiling triumphantly and holding aloft an angel’s severed head.

Amy shut it off.

“Do you want to know about him?” she said.

“Let’s see. He’s stupid and violent. He called my home and threatened me. He’s sleeping with my wife. What else is there to know?”

She appraised him for a moment, weighing consequences. “There’s a little more to know,” she said. “For example, he’s very kind to me. He thinks I’m beautiful.” He must have made some sort of sound then, because she said, “I know it must be very hard for you to believe, but some men still find me attractive. And that’s important to me, Brian. Can you understand that?”

He turned away from her, shielding his eyes with a hand, although without the TV on there was very little light in the room. Each breath was laced with pain.

“When I go to see him, he talks to me. Actually talks. I know he might not be very smart, according to your standards, but you’d be surprised how much he and I have to talk about. You’d be surprised how much more there is to life—to my life—than your car magazines, and your tv, and your bottles of booze.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“He’s also a very considerate lover. He paces himself. For my sake. For me. Did you
ever
do that, Brian? In all the times we made love?”

He felt tears crawling down his face. Christ. When did that start?

“I can forget things when I sleep with him. I can forget about . . . I can forget about everything. He lets me do that.”

“You cold bitch,” he rasped.

“You passive little shit,” she bit back, with a venom that surprised him. “You let it happen, do you know that? You let it all happen. Every awful thing.”

She stood abruptly and walked out the door, slamming it behind her. The force of it rattled the windows. After a while—he had no idea how long—he picked up the remote and turned the TV back on. A girl pointed to moving clouds on a map.

Eventually Dodger came by and curled up at his feet. Brian slid off the couch and lay down beside him, hugging him close. Dodger smelled the way dogs do, musky and of the earth, and he sighed with the abiding patience of his kind.

Violence filled his dreams. In them he rent bodies, spilled blood, painted the walls using severed limbs as gruesome brushes. In them he went back to the park and ate the children while the teacher looked on. Once he awoke after these dreams with blood filling his mouth; he realized he had chewed his tongue during the night. It was raw and painful for days afterward. A rage was building inside him and he could not find an outlet for it. One night Amy told him she thought she was falling in love with Tommy. He only nodded stupidly and watched her walk out the door again. That same night he kicked Dodger out of the house. He just opened the door to the night and told him to go. When he wouldn’t—trying instead to slink around his legs and go back inside—he planted his foot on the dog’s chest and physically pushed him back outside, sliding him backwards on his butt. “
Go find him
!” he yelled. “
Go find him! Go and find him!
” He shut the door and listened to Dodger whimper and scratch at it for nearly an hour. At some point he gave up and Brian fell asleep. When he awoke it was raining. He opened the door and called for him. The rain swallowed his voice.

“Oh no,” he said quietly, his voice a whimper. “Come back! I’m sorry! Please, I’m so sorry!”

When Dodger did eventually return, wet and miserable, Brian hugged him tight, buried his face in his fur, and wept for joy.

Brian liked to do his drinking alone. When he drank in public, especially at his old bar, people tried to talk to him. They saw his presence as an invitation to share sympathy, or a request for a friendly ear. It got to be too much. But tonight he made his way back there, endured the stares and the weird silence, took the beers sent his way, although he wanted none of it. What he wanted tonight was Fire Engine, and she didn’t disappoint.

Everybody knew Fire Engine, of course; if she thought you didn’t know her, she’d introduce herself to you post haste. One hand on your shoulder, the other on your thigh. Where her hands went after that depended on a quick negotiation. She was a redhead with an easy personality, and was popular with the regular clientele, including the ones that would never buy her services. She claimed to be twenty-eight but looked closer to forty. At some unfortunate juncture in her life she had contrived to lose most of her front teeth, either to decay or to someone’s balled fist; either way common wisdom held she gave the best blowjob in downtown New Orleans.

Brian used to be amused by that kind of talk. Although he’d never had an interest in her he’d certainly enjoyed listening to her sales pitch; she’d become a sort of bar pet, and the unselfconscious way she went about her life was both endearing and appalling. Her lack of teeth was too perfect, and too ridiculous. Now, however, the information had acquired a new kind of value to him. He pressed his gaze onto her until she finally felt it and looked back. She smiled coquettishly, with gruesome effect. He told the bartender to send her a drink.

“You sure? She ain’t gonna leave you alone all night.”

“Fuck yeah, I’m sure.”

All night didn’t concern him. What concerned him were the next ten minutes, which was what he figured ten dollars would buy him. After the necessary negotiations and bullshit they left the bar together, trailing catcalls; she took his hand and led him around back, into the alley.

The smell of rotting garbage came at him like an attack, like a pillowcase thrown over his head. She steered him into the alley’s dark mouth, with its grime-smeared pavement and furtive skittering sounds, and its dumpster so stuffed with straining garbage bags that it looked like some fearsome monster choking on its dinner. “Now you know I’m a lady,” she said, “but sometimes you just got to make do with what’s available.”

That she could laugh at herself this way touched Brian, and he felt a wash of sympathy for her. He considered what it would be like to run away with her, to rescue her from the wet pull of her life; to save her.

She unzipped his pants and pulled his dick out. “There we go, honey, that’s what I’m talking about. Ain’t you something?”

After a couple of minutes she released him and stood up. He tucked himself back in and zipped his pants, afraid to make eye contact with her.

“Maybe you just had too much to drink,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“It ain’t nothing.”

“I know it isn’t,” he said harshly.

When she made no move to leave, he said, “Will you just get the fuck away from me? Please?”

Her voice lost its sympathy. “Honey, I still got to get paid.”

He opened his wallet and fished out a ten dollar bill. She plucked it from his fingers and walked out of the alley, back toward the bar. “Don’t get all bent out of shape about it,” she called. “Shit happens, you know?”

He slid down the wall until his ass hit the ground. He brought his hand to his mouth and choked out a sob, his eyes squeezed shut. He banged his head once against the brick wall behind him and then thought better of it. Down here the stench was a steaming blanket, almost soothing in its awfulness. He felt like he deserved to be there, that it was right that he should sleep in shit and grime. He listened to the gentle ticking of the roaches in the dark. He wondered if Toby was in a place like this.

Something glinted further down the alley.

He strained to see it. It was too bright to be merely a reflection.

It moved.

“Son of a—” he said, and pushed himself to his feet.

It lay mostly hidden; it had pulled some stray garbage bags atop itself in an effort to remain concealed, but its dim luminescence worked against it. Brian loped over to it, wrenched the bags away; its clawed hands clutched at them and tore them open, spilling a clatter of beer and liquor bottles all over the ground. They caromed with hollow music through the alley, coming at last to silent rest, until all Brian could hear was the thin, high-pitched noise the creature made through the tiny O-shaped orifice he supposed passed for a mouth. Its eyes were black little stones. The creature—
angel
, he thought,
they’re calling these things angels
—was tall and thin, abundantly male, and it shed a thin light that illuminated exactly nothing around it.
If you put some clothes on it
, Brian thought,
hide its face, gave it some gloves, it might pass for a human.

Exposed, it held up a long-fingered hand, as if to ward him off. It had clearly been hurt: its legs looked badly broken, and it breathed in short, shallow gasps. A dark bruise spread like a mold over the right side of its chest.

“Look at you, huh? You’re all messed up.” He felt a strange glee as he said this; he could not justify the feeling and quickly buried it. “Yeah, yeah, somebody worked you over pretty good.”

It managed to roll onto its belly and it scrabbled along the pavement in a pathetic attempt at escape. It loosed that thin, reedy cry. Calling for help? Begging for its life?

The sight of it trying to flee from him catalyzed some deep predatory impulse, and he pressed his foot onto the angel’s ankle, holding it easily in place. “No you don’t.” He hooked the thing beneath its shoulders and lifted it from the ground; it was astonishingly light. It mewled weakly at him. “Shut up, I’m trying to help you.” He adjusted it in his arms so that he held it like a lover, or a fainted woman. He carried it back to his car, listening for the sound of the barroom door opening behind him, of laughter or a challenge chasing him down the sidewalk. But the door stayed shut. He walked in silence.

Amy was awake when he got home, silhouetted in the doorway. Brian pulled the angel from the passenger seat, cradled it against his chest. He watched her face alter subtly, watched as some dark hope crawled across it like an insect, and he squashed it before it could do any real harm.

“It’s not him,” he said. “It’s something else.”

She stood away from the door and let him come in.

Dodger, who had been dozing in the hallway, lurched to his feet with a sliding and skittering of claws and growled fiercely at it, his lips curled away from his teeth.

“Get away, you,” Brian said. He eased past him, bearing his load down the hall.

He laid it in Toby’s bed. Together he and Amy stood over it, watching as it stared back at them with dark flat eyes, its body twisting away from them as if it could fold itself into another place altogether. Its fingers plucked at the train-spangled bed sheets, wrapping them around its nakedness. Amy leaned over and helped to tuck she sheets around it.

“He’s hurt,” she said.

“I know. I guess a lot of them are found that way.”

“Should we call somebody?”

“You want camera crews in here? Fuck no.”

“Well. He’s really hurt. We need to do something.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. We can at least clean him up, I guess.”

Amy sat on the mattress beside it; it stared at her with its expressionless face. Brian couldn’t tell if there were thoughts passing behind those eyes, or just a series of brute reflex arcs. After a moment it reached out with one long dark fingernail and brushed her arm. She jumped as though shocked.

“Jesus! Be careful,” said Brian.

“What if it’s him?”

“What?” It took him a moment to understand her. “Oh my god. Amy. It’s not him, okay? It’s
not him
.”

“But what if it is?”

“It’s
not
. We’ve seen them on the news, okay? It’s a, it’s a
thing
.”

“You shouldn’t call it an ‘it.’ ”

“
How do I know what the fuck to call it
?”

She touched her fingers to its cheek. It pressed its face into them, making some small sound.

“Why did you leave me?” she said. “You were everything I had.”

Brian swooned beneath a tide of vertigo. Something was moving inside him, something too large to stay where it was. “It’s an angel,” he said. “Nothing more. Just an angel. It’s probably going to die on us, since that’s what they seem to do.” He put his hand against the wall until the dizziness passed. It was replaced by a low, percolating anger. “Instead of thinking of it as Toby, why don’t you ask it where Toby
is
? Why don’t you make it explain to us why it happened?”

She looked at him. “It happened because you let it,” she said.

Dodger asked to be let outside. Brian opened the door for him to let him run around the front yard. There was a leash law here, but Dodger was well known by the neighbors and generally tolerated. He walked out of the house with considerably less than his usual enthusiasm. He lifted his leg desultorily against a shrub, then walked down to the road and followed the sidewalk further into the neighborhood. He did not come back.

Over the next few days it put its hooks into them, and drew them in tight. They found it difficult to leave it alone. Its flesh seemed to pump out some kind of soporific, like an invisible spoor, and it was better than the booze—better than anything they’d previously known. Its pull seemed to grow stronger as the days passed. For Amy, especially. She stopped going out, and for all practical purposes moved into Toby’s room with it. When Brian joined her in there, she seemed to barely tolerate his presence. If he sat beside it she watched him with naked trepidation, as though she feared he might damage it somehow.

It was not, he realized, an unfounded fear. Something inside him became turbulent in its presence, something he couldn’t identify but which sparked flashes of violent thought, of the kind he had not had since just after Toby vanished. This feeling came in sharp relief to the easy lethargy the angel normally inspired, and he was reminded of a time when he was younger, sniffing heroin laced with cocaine. So he did not object to Amy’s efforts at excluding him.

Finally, though, her vigilance slipped. He went into the bathroom and found her sleeping on the toilet, her robe hiked up around her waist, her head resting against the sink. He left her there and crept into the angel’s room.