Monster (29 page)

He was in a den. There was the usual furniture. Some chairs, a couch, a coffee table. A little overdecorated with knickknacks and framed photographs, but dry and inviting. Lotus sat in a recliner, reading a
Life
magazine from the 1950s.

He went to the window and looked outside. Everything was calm and sunny. No sign of the storm.

“Where is this?” he asked.

“It’s a happy place, most likely a remnant of a comforting memory,” she replied.

He surveyed the room. All around were photographs of people he didn’t know wearing clothes that placed them a few decades before he had been born. “I don’t remember any of this.”

“It’s not your happy place,” she said. “It’s just one that happened to be convenient.”

Though soaking wet, he wasn’t dripping. He tried ringing out his shirt, but the water refused to fall away from him. He didn’t even leave soggy footprints on the rug. He brushed his wet hair from his eyes and sat in a chair.

He wished for a beer, and one appeared. But it wasn’t a twist top, and he didn’t have a bottle opener. He tried wishing for one, but nothing happened. He went the manly route and tried to twist it off. The cap bit into his fingers and drew blood. More annoying, the cap didn’t come off.

“If you don’t expect it to open, it never will,” said Lotus.

Monster smashed the bottle against the end table. The table broke. The bottle didn’t.

“I get it,” he said. “This beer, cold and refreshing, is a symbol of my own personal happiness. And I can’t open it because I never expect to be happy, right? I always expect it to be just out of reach.”

“Something like that. You’re brighter than I imagined. Your exposure to the storm must’ve made you smarter.”

He tossed the beer over his shoulder. It shattered, spilling his metaphorical happiness in a puddle on the hardwood floor. “Lady, I’m stupider than ever.”

“Very good,” she said. “The wisest man knows he knows nothing.”

“Yeah, yeah. One hand clapping.” Another beer appeared on the table beside him, but he didn’t take the bait. “Why are you helping me?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Oooh, mysterious,” said Monster with every bit of sarcasm he could muster. “What now?”

“Now you wait for the storm to pass.”

“And then?”

“And then your mind rejoins with your body and you remain as ignorant as ever.”

“How long will that take?”

“In the world of flesh and blood, a few hours. Here, in this random astral scrapyard, who can say?”

He leaned back in his chair and made himself comfortable. After a few minutes of silence, he wished for something to pass the time. A television appeared, but it only played documentaries on the history of knitting. A deck of cards presented itself, but every card was the seven of spades. A game of Monopoly materialized, but it was missing the dice and the race car. He picked up one of the old magazines but found that the writing was in Japanese.

He didn’t know what was more frustrating, being bored or knowing that he was boring himself through his own subconscious expectations.

The grandfather clock by the door ticked away the moments. Its pendulum swung, but its hands didn’t move. Time didn’t move. Monster opened the front door, and the storm rattled the house’s timbers. He sat in the chair for ten minutes. He counted every tick, just to be sure. Then he opened the door and checked the storm again.

Still there, still threatening to sweep up the house in its merciless tide.

Monster decided he didn’t like astral planes, and that the collective unconscious could kiss his ass too.

For the first time, he noticed that the room had other doors. Or maybe the doors had materialized on their own. A flight of stairs appeared too.

“What’s behind those doors?” he asked. “What’s up there?” Lotus said, “I don’t know. Secrets, I suppose.”

“Whose secrets?”

“If I knew that much, I’d probably know what was behind the door.”

Monster stared out the window at the lovely spring day that he could see but not touch.

“Why did you want Judy?” he asked.

“No reason,” she replied quietly.

“Come on now. You can’t lie to me here. This place is all about information, isn’t it?”

“I’m not here to share my secrets with you. I’m merely keeping you sane and connected to the stone so that I can better locate you in the real world. I have a connection with the stone, so I could track it down in time. But while you commune with it, the resonance is stronger, so it speeds things up considerably.”

“Aha! You aren’t helping me! You’re just using me! I knew you’d slip up.”

“I didn’t let it slip. I just didn’t care if you knew. It’s not as if that knowledge will help you any. Look at you, Monster. Here you are, at one with all there is to know in the cosmos, and you’re hiding in someone else’s happy memory. If I hadn’t saved you, you’d either be swallowed by humanity’s fears or driven mad with knowledge.” She set down her magazine and picked up another. “Do yourself a favor and wait it out. This will all be over soon enough.”

He thought about arguing with her, but she wasn’t wrong.

“How long before you find me?” he asked. “In the real world?”

“A complicated question. What is the real world, after all?”

Monster realized he wasn’t cut out for this metaphysical bullshit.

“Come on,” he said. “Tell me the truth. What’s the big deal about Judy? How can she summon cryptos? What’s it matter if I know? I’m useless, aren’t I?”

“Perhaps,” she agreed. “But even fools can be dangerous. You’ve already complicated my plans. I don’t know how exactly, but—”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.” She snarled. It was very slight, but it was there. Monster laughed. “Ha! And I thought you were supposed to be so damn smart. Here we are in the repository of all knowledge in the universe. Why don’t you ask? Because you can’t! Because your connection to the stone is fading while mine is growing. Because I have the stone in the real world, and you don’t. And as long as I do, that’ll continue to happen.”

“You won’t have it long,” said Lotus softly.

“But no one else has ever bonded with the stone the way I have,” he said. “And that scares you, doesn’t it?”

She chuckled, but it was a little forced. “Don’t be absurd.”

“After hundreds of millions of years, you’re finally scared that someone is going to take your…” Monster stopped. “Hey, how do I know all this?”

He was dry now. All that information, that metaphorical rain, had soaked into his skin. And unlike the downpour, it’d worked its way into his mind without overwhelming him, without his even realizing it. And the balance of knowledge gained exceeded the amount lost. He couldn’t remember his phone number, but he did know that the omniverse was a series of fifty dimensional spheres and that they rested upon one another like a bunch of rubber balls in an infinitely large box.

Almost all of it was useless information. Like knowing the exact temperature on Mars. Somebody might benefit from it, but not him. His problems were more immediate than the nature of reality itself.

He sat and pondered. What did he need to know? The stone could tell him anything, but if he didn’t make a conscious effort to choose what he learned, he was going to learn too much and too little at the same time. He was only mortal. His mind could only hold so much, needed time to assimilate whatever fell into it. The universe was filled with secrets, and he understood now that one of the biggest was that no one needed to know them all.

This was a realm of imagination and symbolism. He needed to think in those terms.

He picked up the beer and stared at it. He focused on the positive. His demon girlfriend had tried to kill him but hadn’t succeeded. He was a free man now. His house was ruined, but really, it wasn’t his house. The lease had been in Liz’s name. He was broke, but so what? He wasn’t dead yet. He was one with the universe, and he had managed not to go insane in the process. Overall, things were actually looking up.

The cap fell off the bottle.

“Take that, collective unconscious.”

Monster took an experimental sip of the beverage. It wasn’t as cold as he liked, and it was a little flat. But he wasn’t expecting miracles. He finished the beer and approached one of the doors at random. There were no markings on it, so he had no clue what lurked behind it. Secrets. His secrets.

He touched the handle. A clap of thunder rattled the house. It was his fear. He got that now. Fear of knowing and fear of not knowing.

“You don’t want to go in there,” said Lotus. “You won’t be able to handle it.”

He glanced back at her, and he glimpsed the fear in her eyes. She was afraid too. Afraid of what was behind the door. Afraid of what he’d learn.

She stood. “You won’t be able to handle it.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Monster chugged the last of his beer and tossed the bottle aside. “But maybe not.”

A crackle of electricity ran through him as he opened the door leading to his innermost mysteries and entered the darkness within.

Monster lacked imagination. So the anthropomorphic personification of the universe appeared as a miniature sun orbited by a tiny earth. The sun wore sunglasses, even though that made absolutely no sense to Monster.

He shielded his eyes. “Hello?”

The sun glanced down at him. A giant smile spread across its bright yellow face. Monster braced himself for the divine wisdom.

“Judy.”

“What about her?”

“Judy,” repeated the sun in its slow, neutral cadence.

“Yeah?”

The sun frowned.

“Judy.”

“I got that, but what—”

The sun darkened in frustration.

“I know you’re trying to tell me something,” said Monster, “but I don’t get it. I don’t understand.”

The sun snarled as it struggled to express itself. Monster decided the universe was an idiot. It would certainly explain a lot of things.

“Help. Judy.”

“Okay.”

The universe sneered at him.

“What? You want me to help Judy. I figured that out. Am I allowed to ask why?”

The sun beamed a bright light down on Monster, and a series of images flooded into him as the universe tried to answer his question in relatable terms. He didn’t get most of it, but he gleaned enough, filtered through his subconscious and offered up in the form of spontaneous knowledge.

There was a plan, all right. A cosmic struggle reaching the endgame. Judy was a central part of it, the most important piece in the game.

“Really?” he asked incredulously, thinking the universe was playing a joke on him.

The sun nodded.

Monster would’ve been okay with that except for his own part in this. He was part of the cosmic plan too. A random pawn, an unknown variable thrown in at the very last minute. One chance encounter in a supermarket with some yetis and another with some trolls in an apartment had put him on this path. Dumb luck had made him Judy’s guardian. The universe hadn’t given a damn about him before that, and it didn’t even bother lying to him about it. Just as it didn’t bother lying to him about his chances of survival.

“Really?” he asked. “That’s it? That’s what this is all about?”

The universe laughed in a lighthearted, childish way. With a hand of cosmic flame it reached down and patted Monster on the head.

It changed him.

“Help. Judy.”

Then the world fell out beneath him.

Chester tried to wake Monster. First by shouting at him. Then by shaking him. But physical contact disrupted Chester’s paper body. The sink effect had become part of Monster himself, and that could’ve meant any number of things, all of them bad. A human body was too fragile to exist like that outside of a few seconds, but the only effect seemed to be that Monster changed color every few seconds.

Chester tossed a throw pillow at Monster. Then a magazine. Then the twenty-five-pound rune dictionary. It bounced off Monster without any effect, not even causing him to sway.

Out of ideas, Chester sat and waited. Five hours later, Monster remained locked in his trance. The only movement at all was a subtle twitch of his eyes.

Judy stirred, sitting up. “Christ, what the hell did I do last night?”

“Judy, you’re awake. That’s a relief.”

She put her hands to her head and retched. The painful dry heave reminded Chester how grateful he was not to be a biological entity.

She tried to stand but failed. Chester helped her with her second attempt. She could only manage to get halfway up and had to sit on the bed.

“Why am I naked?”

“There’s a logical explanation, Miss Hines.”

“Forget it. Not the first time I went on a bender and woke up naked in a weird place. Although it is the first time I’ve ever met a paper man.”

“We’ve met before,” said Chester. “Several times. Nothing untoward happened, I promise. We were just checking your body for marks.” He scooped her shirt off the floor and handed it to her.