Monster (13 page)

Much to her surprise, they seemed soothed. Probably because the crowd was eager to pretend that the walrus dog attack had never happened and to get on with their otherwise dreary lives. A few of the braver or incognizant employees and customers headed toward the diner.

Judy started the car. “Should we maybe stick around? In case the cops have any questions?”

“Are you nuts? Let’s just get out of here before we get into any more trouble.”

She glanced at the diner’s frosted windows. “Guess you’re right.”

“You’re bad luck, you know that?” said Monster on the drive back.

“It wasn’t my fault. It’s that hex that elf put on me.” She glanced at her hand, still slightly itchy, but at least the mark had vanished.

“It’s not like you weren’t a jinx before you got that. I’ve only known you two days, and I’ve been nearly eaten by a yeti, trolls, a Japanese ogre, and some Greenland walrus monster. Not to mention losing my van.”

“It’s not like it’s been all rainbows and puppy kisses for me.” She touched her bruised and cut forehead.

“If I were you, I’d wash that glyph off my face and move on. Before I ended up dead. Or worse.”

One more head injury and she’d have to use her fingers and toes to count to twenty. Her life was hard enough without the possibility of brain damage. Monster was probably right. She resented him for the advice, but she couldn’t argue.

She dropped him off at his house. “Sorry things didn’t work out like you hoped,” he said. “I don’t even know what I expected,” she replied, more to herself than him.

Monster sucked his teeth noisily to cover the awkward silence.

“Forget it. Not your fault. At least you let me come along. You didn’t have to do that. I wouldn’t have changed my statement, y’know. To the Reds. You aren’t as bad at this job as you think.”

“How would you know?”

She laughed. “I guess I wouldn’t. Not really. But all I know is that every time I’ve been around you, I’ve been nearly killed. But I haven’t actually been killed. And that’s probably thanks to you. You might be a screwup, Monster, but considering what you do for a living, you can’t be that big a screwup. Otherwise, you’d be dead by now.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me for telling the truth,” Judy said. “Guess I won’t see you around, huh?”

“Guess not.”

The conversation had ground to a halt. Monster muttered a quick “Take care,” then grabbed his bag and headed up the sidewalk and waved at her without a backwards glance.

She muttered as she lit a cigarette.

She sat in the idling car and smoked two cigarettes.

“Fuck it.”

She used her sweaty palm to wipe the glyph from her forehead. It didn’t remove it, merely obscured it, but she felt the slight disorientation as the haze settled on her mind. Or maybe that was just the concussion.

Judy stopped by a convenience store to purchase some aspirin for her aching skull. The clerk behind the counter asked her about the purple swelling and smudge on her forehead. But by then she didn’t remember much of it, and what little she did recall she didn’t believe.

What Judy believed was irrelevant to the universe. It wasn’t as if it were hiding things from her. It just didn’t care to share certain information. Judy was a tool, a linchpin in a cosmic engine. And an engineer didn’t usually bother explaining himself to the nuts and bolts. He just screwed them into place and let them do their job.

Judy was in communion with the most primal aspect of creation. She just didn’t know it. Her thoughts and desires were broadcast to the heart of the universe. But the signal was lousy, and most of those thoughts never reached their destination. And the few that did were garbled and all but unrecognizable. Judy’s will was a remote control with bad batteries trying to guide a massive universe more comfortable with pushing galaxies around than with the subtleties of daily human life.

The resulting chaos was understandable and only getting worse as the signal grew stronger every hour. Had Judy been aware of it, she might have taken more care in even her most casual thoughts. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but at least she could’ve tried.

Lotus was perfectly aware of this, though. She sat in her cozy den, staring at the strange letters scrawling across the stone tablet’s surface.

Ferdinand glanced up from her crossword puzzle. The muscle-bound woman paused in her steady, noiseless gum chewing. “I hate when she does that,” she said.

“Does what?” asked Ed, sipping her tea.

Lotus could sit there for days sometimes, looking into the stone’s depths, never moving. Both Ed and Ferdinand knew she was doing something, and they assumed it was terribly important. And that was all the thought they gave to it. It wasn’t in their nature to wonder. They just followed orders. If they’d ever tried to gaze within the stone themselves, they would’ve seen nothing worth noticing.

But Lotus saw the patterns within the patterns, the way it all tied together and how it was designed to turn out.

She also saw something was missing, an anomaly she couldn’t account for. The stone was working against her, but it wouldn’t make any difference. In only a few hours, less than an instant as Lotus measured time, she would know where to find Judy. And she would fix things, keeping everything on track despite the universe’s attempts to screw it all up.

That was her job, and after several billion years, she was quite good at it.

As Monster was getting ready for bed, Liz was getting ready for work. She had on a new red suit. It wasn’t as nice as her other one, he noted to himself, but he didn’t admit that to her.

“How was your night?”

“Don’t ask,” he said.

“Poor baby.” She gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. “Don’t wait up. I’m going for drinks after work.”

“Have fun,” he said, but she was already out the door.

Monster slipped into his pajamas. He didn’t feel that tired and decided to recline on the couch, watching some TV until the urge to drift off to bed hit him. There was nothing on. Just morning news shows, which he watched with half interest.

“Twelve dead in a subway fire,” said the stoic news reporter. “Back to you, Brad.”

“Terrible when tragedies like this strike.” Brad nodded sagely. The camera angle changed, and a goofy grin crossed his face. “Now to a story about a woman in Arizona who makes decorative art out of tinfoil!”

The morning-news segues kept everything in check. Twelve people dead, but that didn’t stop seventy-seven-year-old Anne O’Grady from making her shiny masterpieces of crumpled foil. He fell asleep on the couch.

He awoke a few hours later as something rattled around in the other room.

Rubbing his sore neck, he noted his new color: golden. He didn’t have to check in his book for that. When he was golden, he became invisible when his eyes were shut. There was no way to control it. Every time he blinked, he’d vanish for an instant.

There was a clatter, as if the medicine cabinet was being emptied onto the floor.

Still drowsy, Monster rose from the couch and checked the noise.

“Liz, is that you?”

A low growl issued from the bathroom. Monster stopped.

A goat stuck its head into the hallway. The crypto turned its eyes toward Monster and bleated, then stepped into view. It had a goat’s head but a humanoid body, naked and hairless. It wasn’t very big, only about four feet tall, but its squat frame was powerfully built.

Monster kept his cool. “Where did you come from, little fella?”

The goat monster launched itself forward, ramming its horns into Monster’s gut and knocking the breath from him. He fell to the floor, gasping.

The goat grumbled as Monster vanished before its eyes.

“You little bastard.”

Groaning, Monster stood. The goat creature charged forward.

Monster turned to one side and took a glancing blow to his ribs. The goat hopped onto the couch and bleated, baring its teeth.

Monster clutched his aching side. “Look, you little shit. Don’t make me hurt you.”

The goat shifted its weight back and forth in an unfriendly manner. Monster closed his eyes. The goat grumbled. He heard it sniffing for him.

He didn’t know where this thing had come from, how it had gotten into his house. He wasn’t sure what it was. He’d never seen one of these short, goat-headed beasts before. Monster had been handling cryptos for years now, and it was rare for him to run across unfamiliar specimens. But it seemed to be happening more and more lately.

This one didn’t seem that dangerous, but his ribs were aching and he hadn’t caught his breath yet. Having no familiarity, he couldn’t be sure how to handle it. Some cryptos could be scared by a show of force. Others were provoked to attack. It was trying to sniff him out, but he didn’t know if that was because it was aggressive or scared. Probably both. He tried to put himself in the goat’s place, finding itself in a strange environment, confronted by a large, potentially hostile animal. It was probably just panicked.

He opened his eyes again. Just a little squint, which made him semi-visible. The goat was glaring at him. It clicked its long, pointed teeth together with a staccato clicking, but it didn’t attack.

“I don’t want to hurt you, little guy,” said Monster, as softly as possible.

The goat bleated softly. It twisted its head to one side, nostrils flaring, teeth chattering.

“Can’t we be friends?”

The creature’s ears fell flat. It squared its shoulders. Its legs tightened to spring.

Monster shut his eyes, and the goat started sniffing.

He ran through his choices. There was an annoying creature in his house, and he was unprepared to deal with it. He could feel his way through the living room to the front door, then lock the thing inside. Then he could call for backup and have the city send someone to pick it up. It’d be the smartest thing to do.

He wasn’t about to do that.

The goat thing was irritating but not tremendously dangerous so far. As a professional, he should be able to handle this without any help. If he called the CCRS for assistance, he’d end up catching hell from the other freelancers for months. Worst of all, somebody else would get the collection fee, and if this thing was rare, it had to be worth something. He wasn’t sure the world needed angry, naked goat-headed beasts, but if the Preservation Foundation was willing to protect the greater prickly sluggoth and the farting drake, then this goat thing was probably deemed worth saving.

The goat’s suspicious snorts drew closer. It apparently didn’t have a great sense of smell, but it knew he was still here. And it wasn’t happy about it.

Monster decided locking it in the house wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Then he could come up with a plan to catch it. He tried to remember where he’d thrown his work satchel with his identification guide, rune dictionary, and a few writing tools. And Chester, his paper body folded into a neat, sleeping square.

Monster made his way by memory to the other side of the room, away from the goat. He moved slowly so as not to attract its attention. He banged his shins against a potted fern. He’d forgotten about the damn plant. Liz had just gotten it a week ago. She was obsessed with plants. Specifically, trying to keep them alive. Her demonic nature made them all wither beneath her touch. Even a cactus that a florist had branded unkillable had fallen to her care. But she hadn’t given up yet.

The goat leaped across the room and attacked Liz’s latest leafy victim. Bleating and clicking, the goat wrestled with the fern, throwing fronds in the air. The distraction allowed Monster to open his eyes and scan the room. His satchel was by the front door. The goat stood between him and his goal.

It perked up, chewing a mouthful of fern. Monster shut his eyes, but the goat had worked itself into a frenzy. It jumped and managed to grab him. It blindly butted and bit at its invisible opponent. Fangs sank into Monster’s shoulder, and he screamed.

The goat was stronger than it looked, and now that it had him, it wasn’t keen on letting go. Monster spun around the room, locked in combat. He grabbed the thing by one of its horns, keeping its snapping teeth at bay. The goat growled, spraying Monster’s face with sticky saliva. Monster tripped over the couch, tumbled backwards across the cushions. He wrestled with the thing for a minute. He was stronger than it, but it had a hell of a grip.

Monster reached out with his free hand for something to use. His hand fell on a pillow, one of those useless down pillows Liz insisted on keeping on the couch. The kind that cost way too much and constantly had to be moved around when you sat because they just got in the way.

He shoved it in the goat’s face. The creature ripped it to pieces in two bites. White down went everywhere, much of it in Monster’s nose and mouth. The goat hacked and snorted. Its grip loosened and he pushed it away, rolled off the couch, and grabbed the first heavy thing he saw: the potted fern. Sneezing, he swung it down on the goat’s head. The pot shattered. Soil and fluff went everywhere. The goat, protected by its horns and thick skull, barely noticed.

Both Monster and the goat spent another minute sneezing and coughing. Dirt, fronds, and fuzz hovered in the air like a chunky fog. Blinded by all the dust in his eyes, Monster attempted to navigate his way to the front door again. He tripped over the coffee table, which he was certain should’ve been a few more inches to the right.