Christopher Golden - The Monster’s Corner - Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

“I’m not messing,” said the cherub. “Go away.”

Saint John was close enough to kill this child. He had the reach and the knives; but he merely smiled.

“Why should I leave?”

“This is our house.”

Ah. Our. A slip.

Saint John thought of the scuffle of footprints in the ash. And of fifteen missing knives.

“This is my father’s house,” Saint John said. “This is the house of God.”

“You don’t live here,” insisted the boy.

“I do.”

In truth Saint John had never been inside this particular church before, but that didn’t matter. A church was a church was a church, and he was a saint after all.

“Who’s there?” said another voice. A woman’s voice. Vague and dreamy and slurry. Saint John smiled.

“Rose …?”

There was a stirring behind the screen and the hushed whispering of many voices. More than a dozen, perhaps many more. Male and female, and all tiny except for Rose. Shadows moved behind the screen, and then Rose stepped out. She wore a choir robe that was clean and lovely in tones of purple and gold; but her face was still dirty and bloody and puffed.

“You’re real?” she asked as she stared at Saint John. “I thought I dreamed you.”

“Perhaps you have,” said Saint John, and he wondered for a moment if he, too, was dreaming, or if he was a character in this woman’s dream. “I am sometimes only a dream.”

Her face flickered with confusion. The drugs the men had given her held sway over her; however, she kept coming back to focus. Saint John knew and recognized that as the habit of someone who was often under the influence and practiced at functioning through it.

“Are these your kids?”

As she asked that, more of the cherubs came out from behind the screen. Many of them carried knives. His knives. The cherubs were tiny, the youngest in diapers, the oldest the same age as the blue-eyed boy who still pointed his knife at Saint John’s face.

Saint John counted them. Twenty-six. The firelight from outside threw their shadows against the wall, and their shadows were much larger. Did the shadows have wings? Saint John could not be sure.

“Go away!” growled the lead boy. “Or I’ll hurt you.”

“Hey,” slurred Rose, “be nice!”

“He’s one of them!”

Rose’s eyes cleared for a moment. She studied Saint John and his knives; then she shook her head. “No, kid … he isn’t. He’s the one who saved me. I prayed to God and He sent him to save me.”

The lead boy’s eyes faltered, and he flicked a glance at Rose. In that moment of inattention Saint John could have cut the child’s throat or cut the tendons of the hand holding the knife. He could have dropped one of his own knives and used his hand to pluck the knife from the boy.

He did none of those things.

Instead he waited, letting the boy figure it out and come to a decision. Allowing the boy his strength. The boy refocused on Saint John, and his eyes hardened. “Where’d they take Tommy?”

“I don’t know who Tommy is.”

“You took him. Where’d you take him?”

The other children buzzed when Tommy’s name was mentioned, and now their eyes focused on Saint John. He saw tiny fists tighten around knife handles; and the sight filled him with great love for these children. Such beautiful rage. They were ready to use those knives. How strange and wonderful that was. How rare.

How like him; like the boy he had been when whore was burned onto his back and he had first listened to the Voice and heard the song of the blade.

“I do not know anyone named Tommy,” he said. “I have never seen any of you before, except Rose, and I met her only a few minutes ago.”

“Bull!” the lead boy snapped.

“Shhh,” said Saint John. He took a half step forward, almost within the child’s striking range. “Listen to me.”

The boy’s eyes drifted down, and Saint John could see that he was assessing the new distance between them. So bright a child. When his eyes came back up, the truth was there. He knew that he was in range of Saint John’s blades and overmatched by his reach. Even so, he did not lower his knife — and it was his now. He had claimed it by right of justice, and Saint John was fine with that.

So Saint John lowered his own knives. He slid them one at a time into their thigh sheaths and stood apparently unarmed and vulnerable in front of this cherub. He saw the child’s eyes sharpen as he realized the implication of this, the threat unspoken behind the sham of vulnerability. Most adults would never see that. Only someone graced by the Sight could see that.

The boy hears the Voice, thought Saint John.

“Tell me who you are,” he said, “and tell me what happened to Tommy.”

THE LEAD BOY told the story.

They were orphans. They lived with four hundred other children at St. Mary’s Home for Children.

Mary. Ah. That name stabbed Saint John through the heart. Her name. His mother. Long gone. First victim of his father. She had tried to protect her son from the devil in their home. She had survived a hundred beatings, but not the hundred and first. A blood clot. Mary.

Mother of the savior.

Saint John already knew where this was going. He wasn’t sure he liked it, though.

The boy said that a line of buses set out from St. Mary’s two weeks ago, heading for a government shelter here in the city. There was a riot, fires. Gunshots. The driver was killed. The nuns were dragged off the bus. The boy did not possess the vocabulary or the years to understand or express what had happened to the nuns. He said that men did “bathroom stuff” to them. His eyes faltered and shifted away, but it was enough of an explanation for Saint John. He had been raped for the first time when he was younger than this boy. He knew every euphemism for it that existed in human language, and some spoken only in the language of the damned.

While the men were fighting with the nuns, this boy opened the back door of the bus and made the rest of the kids run. There had been forty-four of them on his bus. Last night there were only twenty-seven. Tommy had been playing on the steps of the church this morning, and men had come to take him away.

They heard him screaming all the way down the block and around the corner.

“Describe the men who took him,” said Saint John. The boy did. Most of them were strangers. Two of the men fit the descriptions of the Jock and the Big Man.

Rose was fighting to stay awake, but when she heard those descriptions she jerked erect. “That’s the same assholes who — ”

Saint John nodded. “Tell me where they kept you, sweet Rose.”

“Why?” she demanded. “The kid’s gone.”

“No!” yelled the lead boy. Others did, too. A few of the younger ones began to cry. “I’m gonna get him back!”

Saint John shook his head. “No,” he said. “You won’t. You’ll stay here and guard your flock.”

The boy glared at him. There was real fire in the boy’s eyes; Saint John could feel the heat on his skin. It pleased him. It was like being a stranger in a strange land and unexpectedly meeting someone from your own small and very distant town. He had not expected to see that blaze here at the curtain call of the human experience.

“Tell me your name,” said the saint.

“Peter.”

Saint John closed his eyes and sighed. He smiled and nodded to himself. When he opened his eyes, Peter was still glaring at him.

“I am going to find Tommy,” said Saint John, “and bring him back here.”

Rose snaked a hand out and grabbed his wrist. “Christ, are you nuts? They’ll fucking slaughter you. There are like ten or twelve of those assholes over there.”