Monster (28 page)

“You go straight back to…” Monster slouched. “Oh, hell.”

Chester stuck his head into the room. “Something is going on in here.”

“Something is going on out here,” said Monster.

Liz sucked in a deep breath and spit a fireball. Monster ducked, avoiding getting his head blown off. Standing over him, her cheeks bulged as she prepared to spit again. Monster flared, throwing off her aim. The fireball exploded a few inches to his left, singeing his arm.

“Stop being a jerk.” She covered her eyes. “You’re just making this harder on both of us.”

Monster crawled across the floor, keeping his head down as Liz spit a barrage of flame in the direction of his glow.

“Can’t we talk about this?” he asked. “I can change.”

“Gary said you’d try to talk me out of it, but that I have to be strong. For my sake.”

He crawled in a serpentine pattern, thwarting her attempts to draw a bead as flames burst all around him. His throat tightened. It was a miracle she hadn’t blasted him yet.

Liz’s burning hand seized his ankle. The heat scorched his socks and blistered his skin. His concentration broke, along with his glow.

“You don’t have to do this!” he said. “I’ll release you from our contract, if you really want it so bad.”

“Oh, I know I don’t have to do it,” she said with a grin.

“But I want to do it. Gary agrees that it’ll be good for my self-esteem.”

Monster kicked wildly with his free leg. His foot caught her square in the face, and she fell back, letting him go. He scrambled away, but a fireball exploded in the carpet ahead of him, stopping his flight. He rolled over onto his back. He searched around for something to defend himself with. His hands fell in potting soil and smoldering carpet scraps.

“You don’t want to do this, baby,” he said. “This is a mistake.”

Liz sighed. “Maybe we had some good times. But things change. If you were being honest with yourself, you’d realize that this is best for the both of us.” She shrugged. “Okay, maybe not you, but I have to do this. For me. If you really cared, you’d stop making this so difficult. It’s not like I don’t feel bad about this. But I think it’s the only way to be sure I’ve moved past our relationship. That way, when Gary and I start our contract, it’ll be—”

“Wait a minute. A contract with Gary? He’s not a demon?” Liz winced. “Uh… well, no.”

“I thought you worked with him.”

“I do. He works in the mail room. He’s human.” She shrugged. “Affirmative action.”

“You’re not going back to the Pits!”

“Sure, I am,” she said. “For a few days at least, until Gary and I hammer out the details.”

Monster sat up. “So living with me isn’t worse than the Pits.”

“Don’t be absurd. Of course not.”

“So if it wasn’t for”—he scowled as he spat out the name—“if it wasn’t for Gary, you wouldn’t be breaking up with me,” he said. “Admit it.”

“Okay, I admit it. Does that make you feel better?”

He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. Their relationship had its low points, but he’d gotten used to having her around.

“This is it?” he asked. “This is how it ends? Just like that?”

“I guess so. You know, Monster, I don’t want you to think this is all about you. You’re not such a bad guy. A bit of a loser—”

“Well, you can be a bit of a bitch.”

The tips of her long black hair turned bright red. He edged toward the stone. If it truly was the most powerful object in the universe, maybe it would save his ass again. It’d already done it once.

Liz cooled. “I’ll give you that, Monster, because there’s no point in fighting at this stage.”

Chester opened the bedroom door and dared to stick his head into the room. “Are you through with your… talk? Because there’s something you probably want to see going on in here.”

“In a minute,” said Monster. “Listen, Liz. There’s nobody to blame here. We had a few laughs, had some good times. But I think you’re right. It’s time to call it quits. If you want to end it and move in with this new asshole—”

“Gary. His name is Gary.”

“Sorry.” He held up his hands. “If you want to move in with… Gary, then go right ahead. That’s cool with me. And I’m happy for you and… Gary. Really, I am.”

She smiled. “Thanks, Monster. That’s awfully big of you.”

“Yeah, well… there’s no reason we can’t be civil about this.”

“You weren’t such a bad guy either. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” Liz cracked her knuckles. “I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.”

“You’re still going to kill me? But I thought we were parting on good terms.”

“Oh, we are, but I’m still kind of mad that you never did the dishes.”

“But you never asked me to.”

Liz said, “I shouldn’t have had to.”

She exhaled a cone of fire. Monster shielded himself with the stone. It absorbed the flames, becoming bright white.

The stone spat the flame back at Liz. It funneled down her throat. Her crimson skin turned a dull copper. Glowing fire spread in a spider-web pattern under her skin. Her inflammable hair sizzled and burned away at the tips, and her eyes burst from their sockets, replaced by orbs of seething flames.

She put her hands on her hips and scowled. “Monster, you always were a blessed son of a—”

Liz exploded in a shower of ash and bones.

He stood, wiping the ashes from his face and hair. He covered his mouth, trying not to breathe in too much of the soot.

“Sorry, baby.” He nudged her cracked and blackened skull with his toe. “I don’t do dishes.”

It was a bittersweet moment. Liz hadn’t been a great girlfriend, but she’d been the best he’d ever had.

Chester threw open the bedroom door and came running out. Intense light poured from the other room, but Monster didn’t have trouble seeing. It must’ve been the stone. If it could repel hellfire and bend the laws of space, it probably didn’t have any problem protecting his eyes from bright lights.

Chester ducked behind Monster. “I think you screwed up somewhere.”

Monster moved toward the light.

“Shouldn’t we be heading the other way?” asked Chester.

“It’s okay,” said Monster. “Nothing can hurt me while I have the stone.”

Chester stayed back, but Monster entered the bedroom.

Judy hovered in the air. She was still asleep, snoring louder than ever. He looked away from her radiant naked body, but then he remembered that he’d just killed his girlfriend, so it wasn’t a problem anymore. Her nudity wasn’t what drew his attention anyway.

Golden lines of power spiraled and whirled all over her body. They slipped off her skin and floated around her. The revelation rune spell beneath lifted off the paper and orbited her. This was rune magic way beyond his community college education.

The golden runes joined with the revelation spell. The stone trembled violently in Monster’s grip. His hands sizzled. There wasn’t any pain, but he tried to drop it. The stone was stuck in his hand. Strange letters carved themselves into the tablet. They held his gaze, filling his mind with information.

Monster knew.

He knew… everything, and that was a lot to know. Too much. He didn’t so much lose his mind then as close up shop and go running, screaming, into the dark and welcoming alleyways of his unconscious.

The storm brewed overhead—a maelstrom of colors and shapes, ancient secrets written in the dark clouds.

Monster stood on an expanse of dusty, cracked earth. There was nothing else around him. Not a tree, bush, or rock. Just the rumbling storm above and the ground beneath.

A drop of rain struck Monster in the eye, and he knew that the universe began on a Tuesday. Another drop fell on his shoulder, and he realized that the most recent beer he had drunk had three atoms that had passed through the bladder of Confucius. A bigger drop splattered on his neck. He knew the name of every pharaoh of ancient Egypt.

The light sprinkle of information continued. Most of the rain passed right through him, sizzling away on the dry earth. But a few drops, here and there, fell into Monster, filling his head with trivia without rhyme or reason. The history of a single hydrogen molecule, the flight pattern of migrating geese, Nero’s exact height and weight, Bashō’s six least-popular haiku poems, the current record r the number of angels dancing on the head of a needle, and the true inventor of the cotton gin.

It was overwhelming. And the storm was only beginning. Lightning crackled in its dark interior. Thunder rumbled, and every distant boom carried hints of knowledge that would drive Monster mad. He scanned the landscape for some form of shelter.

A yawning black cave appeared behind him. He wasn’t surprised by it. He was too eager to get out of the rain. He stepped into the edge of it. A rocky overhang sheltered him from the increasing downpour.

“I wouldn’t go in there, if I were you,” said Lotus as she stepped into view. She stood in the middle of the downpour but remained dry.

“How did you get here?”

“I’ve been here from the beginning.”

He edged away from her.

“I’m not your enemy here, Monster. The only thing you have to fear here is… fear itself. A bit corny, I know, but very true. And that’s all you’ll find in there.”

He looked into the cave’s inky darkness, an impenetrable void. A cold wind blasted out, but instead of pushing him away, it yanked him into it. He fell shrieking into the abyss.

Lotus seized him, pulling from the edge. She set him down on solid ground and offered him an umbrella.

“Use this. The symbolism is rather blunt, but that will probably work in your favor, given your rather limited imagination.”

He opened the umbrella. He glanced over his shoulder, back at the cave. Something was breathing in there.

“Ignore it,” she said. “It’s only the assembled fears of the collective unconscious. No one has the power to conquer them, so unless you want to be devoured by them, you’re better off pretending they’re not there. Of course, that feeds them too, but there’s no way around that.”

“Where are we?” Monster asked. “It’s difficult to explain. You are not exactly in the stone, not exactly in your own mind, not exactly in the collective unconscious. You’re in a temporary astral landscape cobbled together from bits of all three.”

The wind picked up. The rain fell harder.

“I suppose we’ll have to find some cover if we’re to keep you from going mad until the storm passes.”

The clouds formed shapes older than Monster’s universe. He glimpsed secrets of other places that made no sense in the reality he understood. Realms where gravity worked in reverse, where life-forms reproduced by traveling through time to have sex with their future selves. Realities composed of lonely, singular intelligences who passed eternity humming and wishing they had thumbs to twiddle. All manner of possibilities, most of them colossal failures as universes went, falling into various forms of terminal entropy within a few billion years.

“You should stop looking up there,” said Lotus. “You can’t handle it.”

He lowered his eyes to the ground.

“We’ll have to find shelter.” She pointed to a house in the distance. “That should work. A mind can only take so much, and that umbrella won’t protect you when the heart of the storm hits.”

A burning ball of hail landed at Monster’s feet.

“I’d hurry if I were you,” said Lotus, disappearing like a ghost.

He ran for the house as lightning bolts and miniature meteorites exploded around him. A shard sliced him across the cheek, and Monster learned that Elvis’s downfall was engineered by vampires, that a dairy farm in Iowa had several superintelligent cows plotting the overthrow of the human race, and the mathematical equation for cold fusion, which he forgot almost immediately.

The storm grew worse the next few steps. His umbrella burst into flame. He was drenched in knowledge, flooded in bits and pieces of information. It passed through his mind without taking hold, eroding his own knowledge like a rushing flood against crumbling soil.

He was getting stupider, and if he didn’t get inside, he’d probably forget his own name.

The sky opened up and revealed the Big Secret. Not the meaning of life, something not even the ancient and all-knowing stone knew, but something almost as important and twice as unknowable. Something that, had Monster glimpsed it for even a moment, would’ve reduced him to a quivering, gibbering mass. Fortunately, he kept his head down and his eyes shut. He didn’t open them until he ran into the house, cracking his head on its door. His eyes still closed, Monster threw open the door and rushed inside and out of the rain.

The ground rumbled. A tsunami of facts and data raged around the house. The force of the storm rattled the entire structure, threatening to tear it to pieces and sweep it away. The house couldn’t hold out long.

“Shut the door,” said Lotus.

He did. Instantly, the storm died down. The house became quiet.

Monster cracked the door. The house trembled and groaned under the storm’s fury. He quickly shut it again, and the storm faded.