David Nickle: Monstrous Affections

“That’s sick,” gasped Judith, and meant it. She truly felt ill. “Why would you take something like that?”

“Because,” replied Mrs. Sloan, her voice growing sharp again, “I found that I could. Mr. Sloan was distracted, as you can see, and at that instant I found some of the will that he had kept from me since we met.”

“Sick,” Judith whispered. “Herman was right. We shouldn’t have come.”

When Mrs. Sloan closed the album this time, she put it back underneath the coffee table. She patted Judith’s arm with her mutilated hand and smiled. “No, no, dear. I’m happy you’re here — happier than you can know.”

Judith wanted nothing more at that moment than to get up, grab her suitcase, throw it in the car and leave. But of course she couldn’t. Herman wasn’t back yet, and she couldn’t think of leaving without him.

“If Herman’s father was doing all these things, why didn’t you just divorce him?”

“If that photograph offends you, why don’t you just get up and leave, right now?”

“Herman—”

“Herman wouldn’t like it,” Mrs. Sloan finished for her. “That’s it, isn’t it?” Judith nodded.

“He’s got you too,” continued Mrs. Sloan, “just like his father got me. But maybe it’s not too late for you.”

“I love Herman. He never did anything like… like that.”

“Of course you love him. And I love Mr. Sloan — desperately, passionately, over all reason.” The corner of Mrs. Sloan’s mouth perked up in a small, bitter grin.

“Would you like to hear how we met?”

Judith wasn’t sure she would, but she nodded anyway. “Sure.”

“I was living in Toronto with a friend at the time, had been for several years. As I recall, she was more than a friend — we were lovers.” Mrs. Sloan paused, obviously waiting for a reaction. Judith sat mute, her expression purposefully blank.

Mrs. Sloan went on: “In our circle of friends, such relationships were quite fragile. Usually they would last no longer than a few weeks. It was, so far as we knew anyway, a minor miracle that we’d managed to stay together for as long as we had.” Mrs. Sloan gave a bitter laugh. “We were very proud.”

“How did you meet Herman’s father?”

“On a train,” she said quickly. “A subway train. He didn’t even speak to me. I just felt his touch. I began packing my things that night. I can’t even remember what I told her. My friend.”

“It can’t have been like that.”

Judith started to get up, but Mrs. Sloan grabbed her, two fingers and a thumb closing like a trap around her forearm. Judith fell back down on the sofa. “Let go!”

Mrs. Sloan held tight. With her other hand she took hold of Judith’s face and pulled it around to face her.

“Don’t argue with me,” she hissed, her eyes desperately intent. “You’re wasting time. They’ll be back soon, and when they are, we won’t be able to do anything.

“ We’ll be under their spell again! ”

Something in her tone caught Judith, and instead of breaking away, of running to the car and waiting inside with the doors locked until Herman got back — instead of slapping Mrs. Sloan, as she was half-inclined to do — Judith sat still.

“Then tell me what you mean,” she said, slowly and deliberately.

Mrs. Sloan let go, and Judith watched as relief flooded across her features. “We’ll have to open the album again,” she said. “That’s the only way I can tell it.”

The pictures were placed in the order they’d been taken. The first few were close-ups of different parts of Mr. Sloan’s anatomy, always taken while he slept. They could have been pictures of Herman, and Judith saw nothing strange about them until Mrs. Sloan began pointing out the discrepancies: “Those ridges around his nipples are made of something like fingernails,” she said of one, and “the whole ear isn’t any bigger than a nickel,” she said, pointing to another grainy Polaroid. “His teeth are barely nubs on his gums, and his navel… look, it’s a slit . I measured it after I took this, and it was nearly eight inches long. Sometimes it grows longer, and I’ve seen it shrink to less than an inch on cold days.”

“I’d never noticed before,” murmured Judith, although as Mrs. Sloan pointed to more features she began to remember other things about Herman: the thick black hairs that only grew between his fingers, his black triangular toenails that never needed cutting… and where were his fingernails? Judith shivered with the realization.

Mrs. Sloan turned the page.

“Did you ever once stop to wonder what you saw in such a creature?” she asked Judith.

“Never,” Judith replied, wonderingly.

“Look,” said Mrs. Sloan, pointing at the next spread. “I took these pictures in June of 1982.”

At first they looked like nature pictures, blue-tinged photographs of some of the land around the Sloans’ house. But as Judith squinted she could make out a small figure wearing a heavy green overcoat. Its head was a little white pinprick in the middle of a farmer’s field. “Mr. Sloan,” she said, pointing.

Mrs. Sloan nodded. “He walks off in that direction every weekend. I followed him that day.”

“Followed him where?”

“About a mile and a half to the north of here,” said Mrs. Sloan, “there’s an old farm property. The Sloans must own the land — that’s the only explanation I can think of — although I’ve never been able to find the deed. Here—” she pointed at a photograph of an ancient set of fieldstone foundations, choked with weeds “—that’s where he stopped.”

The next photograph in the series showed a tiny black rectangle in the middle of the ruins. Looking more closely, Judith could tell that it was an opening into the dark of a root cellar. Mr. Sloan was bent over it, peering inside. Judith turned the page, but there were no photographs after that.

“When he went inside, I found I couldn’t take any more pictures,” said Mrs. Sloan. “I can’t explain why, but I felt a compelling terror, unlike anything I’ve ever felt in Mr. Sloan’s presence. I ran back to the house, all the way. It was as though I were being pushed.”

That’s weird . Judith was about to say it aloud, but stopped herself — in the face of Mrs. Sloan’s photo album, everything was weird. To comment on the fact seemed redundant.

“I can’t explain why I fled, but I have a theory.” Mrs. Sloan set the volume aside and stood. She walked over to the window, spread the blinds an inch, and checked the driveway as she spoke. “Herman and his father aren’t human. That much we can say for certain — they are monsters, deformed in ways that even radiation, even thalidomide couldn’t account for. They are physically repulsive; their intellects are no more developed than that of a child of four. They are weak and amoral.”

Mrs. Sloan turned, leaning against the glass. “Yet here we are, you and I. Without objective evidence—” she gestured with her good hand towards the open photo album “—we can’t even see them for what they are. If they were any nearer, or perhaps simply not distracted, we wouldn’t even be able to have this conversation. Tonight, we’ll go willingly to their beds.” At that, Mrs. Sloan visibly shuddered. “If that’s where they want us.”

Judith felt the urge to go to the car again, and again she suppressed it. Mrs. Sloan held her gaze like a cobra.

“It all suggests a power. I think it suggests talismanic power.” Here Mrs. Sloan paused, looking expectantly at Judith.

Judith wasn’t sure what “talismanic” meant, but she thought she knew what Mrs. Sloan was driving at. “You think the source of their power is in that cellar?”