David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

Now the place was still as a tomb, its wooden walls and roof grey as stone.

James swallowed. His hand was shaking as he set the baseball bat down in the pine-needles beside him, and set out across the creek shallows. The mill’s great black doors were open. Inside was dark as the mouth of a cave.

The last time James had been inside the mill, the scent of pinesap was overpowering. Pinesap and machine oil and a bit of fear sweat.

Now, it smelled like a slaughterhouse.

At first, James was afraid the Cyclops had brought humans here — some of those folk Mr. Simmons had said had gone missing. But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that wasn’t so. The smell was from something else. Animal carcasses hung from chains wrapped around the rafters. He first passed a couple of shapes like big cats, their skins torn off as they hung maw-down to the sawdust-covered ground; something that might have been a boy, but James gathered to be a monkey carcass, hanging by a single, hand-shaped foot; and, what was left of the elephant. The bloody trunk brushed James’s shoulder as he passed underneath and a cathedral of ribs hung over his head. A cloud of flies that had been feeding there followed James for just a few steps then abandoned him as he left the Cyclops’s larder, and moved into the next chamber of the mill.

James stepped around a thick post. Looked down, where the floor of the sawmill sloped from wood down to dirt. Light leaked in through the warping barn-board of the mill’s wall — reflected off a pool of oily water that had collected at its base. The Cyclops crouched by that pool — poking with an extended finger at a dark shape in the water.

The Cyclops rumbled something indecipherable, in a deep and lazy voice. Mottled sunlight from the pond flickered across the giant’s flesh.

The Cyclops stood high enough to brush rafters, while at his feet, the shape rolled and sank beneath the water.

The Cyclops’s nostrils flared and he made a bellows-like huffing sound as he sniffed. He turned to face James.

In two great steps, the Cyclops had closed the distance between them. He leaned down, so that his eye — big as James’s head — was just a few feet off.

James gasped. This close, the Cyclops’s eye was fantastical. Colours shifted across the broad surface of its iris like oil across a sunlit pool. As for the dark in its middle, that grew and shrank as the creature focussed on James—

— the darkness was hungry.

The Cyclops reached around with both hands, and tucked them under James’s arms. He lifted him like he was a small child. The Cyclops muttered ancient words as he turned James from side to side — studying him like he was a doll.

James kicked his feet back and forth in the air beneath him. He looked down: his toes were at least a dozen feet from the floor. He could barely breathe, the creature was holding him so tightly. He stared into the Cyclops’s great eye, and the Cyclops stared back.

Memory drew from him like pus from a swollen wound.

He felt a sob wrack across his body. The Cyclops ran a great thumb down his chest. When it settled, James gasped. The Cyclops grinned.

James squirmed in a terrified ecstasy. The giant’s thumb was thick as a man’s thigh, but far more nimble. The feeling was primordial — it was as though it yanked him back to the night when his old friend Elmer Wolfe slept over — and had found his way into James’s bed — pressed close to him — and then the springs…

…the bedsprings…

They screamed.

The mill was dark when Nick Thorne and Jimmy arrived there. It was in the hours before dawn — long before the morning shift would arrive. Nick pushed the boy around the side of the building, and through the great, blackened doors. It was dark inside.

“You want to lie with men, boy?” Nick cuffed his son hard enough to send him to the ground. “You like that, do you?”

Jimmy heard himself whimper — and hated himself for making so weak a noise. He was covered in sawdust. Face-down on the ground. His father smelled of liquor and sweat. “I’ll show you what it’s like…”

Jimmy tried to press himself into the ground — as though he could escape that way, by enveloping himself in wood shavings. But there was no escape. His father’s hand, thick and callused from working a lifetime in the sawmill, pushed hard between his legs, pushed his nuts up hard into his abdomen. He gave a cry that sounded to him like a squeak.

“That’s what it’s like, queerboy.” His father grunted, took back his hand, and undid his trousers.

“ That’s what it’s like, queerboy .” The Cyclops brought James close to his face. He opened his great mouth, and a tongue came out, thick as a marlin and rough like a towel — touched James’s middle, taking a taste of him. The Cyclops huffed, and smiled and lowered James to his own middle. Now James was staring straight into another, smaller eye. James felt his feet touch the ground, and the giant’s hand pushed him, guided him forward.

James rubbed his face against the shaft of the giant’s penis. It was wide as a drum, and the leathery flesh trembled as he caressed it. The Cyclops moaned. The hand stroked James’s back. It wasn’t squeezing him anymore. But James knew it held him there as surely as were it a fist clenched around him. Shaking with fear and lust, and tears streaming down his cheek, he raised his own arms and embraced the immense shaft.

The memory kept coming. The vivid, awful memory of his father, the heroic Nick Thorne, buggering him for what seemed to be an hour on the floor of this place. To teach him a lesson, he’d said. The old man had rolled him over before he was done. Demanded…

…demanded…

There had been a sharp crack! sound before he could do anything else, and his father had fallen down, clutching his skull. A man with a baseball bat was standing behind him. First ordering him off the property — telling him he was trespassing. Saying something about being an “agent of the mill.” Showing a little eye-shaped Pinkertons badge on his chest. Then, seeing Jimmy half-naked in the sawdust, shutting his mouth. The baseball bat came up again, and down again. That was when Jimmy had said it:

“Stop killing him! He’s my Dad!”

“Sweet Jesus,” said the man from Pinkertons.

“ Sweet Jesus ,” said the Cyclops.

James looked up. The Cyclops moved his hand from his shoulder, let him step back.

“Shit and hell.” Not a dozen feet off, the grey-haired man from Pinkertons stood, blood in his beard and his shotgun raised, along with a fresh troop of detectives. “It’s a monster, boys. Kill it.”

The Cyclops let James go, and turned his great eye to face his attackers. James sat down in the wet sawdust and finally felt the tears — hot and salty and honest — streaming down his cheeks. They weren’t the tears of mourning. Those, James realized, would never, ever come. The roar and light of gunfire and screams filled the cavernous mill. James was nearly deaf from it, weeping in the dark, when the Cyclops turned his gaze back to him.

Now why, wondered James as he gazed up into the Cyclops’s encompassing eye, would anyone stick a spear into that?

James dropped two polished nickels on his father’s waxy eyelids. Gunshots echoed through the valley, as another wave of detectives assaulted the sawmill, and James thought about old Nick Thorne’s death: fighting his way through the flames — looking everywhere but up — before he was plucked into the sky and flung down again, amid the screams of his fellows.

James stepped back and put his arms over his mother’s shoulders. He tried to ignore the stares of the other mourners. He was a mess. He’d come directly here to the Chamblay Cemetery from the sawmill. His shirt and trousers were stained and torn from the night spent in the crook of the Cyclops’s arms, amid the heaps of dead men left over from the first Pinkertons assault. His chin was dark with morning beard. It was quite scandalous — showing up such a dishevelled mess at his father’s burial. He supposed he would have to get used to that when he went back to Hollywood. There would be quite a lot of scandal then. Republic would more than likely, as Stephen had put it, cut him loose once it all came out.