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

She dove, knowing just where the lake was deep enough not to scrape her at the rocky floor. The water parted as startled catfish dashed out of her way. Fresh fish was best. That was another thing Abbie had learned that summer.

When her head popped back up above the surface, the boys were looking at each other, weighing the matter. Derek left the porch first, tugging on his tattered denim shorts, hopping on one leg in his hurry. Jack followed but left his clothes on, arms folded across his chest.

Derek splashed into the water, one polite hand concealing his privates until he was submerged. He did not swim near her, leaving a good ten yards between them. After a tentative silence, he whooped so loudly that his voice might have carried across the lake.

“Whooo- hooooo !” Derek’s face and eyes were bright, as if he’d never glimpsed the world in color before. “Awesome!”

Abbie’s stomach growled. She might have to go after those catfish. She couldn’t remember being so hungry. She felt faint.

Jack only made it as far as the shoreline, still wearing his Bermuda shorts. “Not supposed to swim in the lake in summer,” he said sullenly, his voice barely loud enough to hear. He slapped at his neck. He stood in a cloud of mosquitoes.

Derek spat, treading water. “That’s little kids, dumbass.”

“Nobody’s supposed to,” Jack said.

“How old are you, six? You don’t want to swim — fine. Don’t stand staring. It’s rude.”

Abbie felt invisible during their exchange. She almost told Jack he should follow his best judgment without pressure, but she dove into the silent brown water instead. Young adults had to make decisions for themselves, especially boys, or how would they learn to be men? That was what she and Mary Kay had always believed. Anyone who thought differently was just being politically correct. In ancient times, or in other cultures, a boy Jack’s age would already have a wife, a child of his own.

Just look at Mary Kay. Everyone had said her marriage would never work, that he’d been too young when they met. She’d been vilified and punished, and still they survived. The memory of her friend’s trial broke Abbie’s heart.

As the water massaged her gills, Abbie released her thoughts and concerns about the frivolous world beyond the water. She needed to feed, that was all. She planned to leave the boys to their bickering and swim farther out, where the fish were hiding.

But something large and pale caught her eye above her.

Jack, she realized dimly. Jack had changed his mind, swimming near the surface, his ample belly like a full moon, jiggling with his breaststroke.

That was the first moment Abbie felt a surge of fear, because she finally understood what she’d been up to — what her new body had been preparing her for. Her feet betrayed her, their webs giving her speed as she propelled toward her giant meal. Water slid across her scales.

The beautiful fireball of light above the swimmer gave her pause, a reminder of a different time, another way. The tears that had stung her in her backyard tried to burn her eyes blind, because she saw how it would happen, exactly like a dream: She would claw the boy’s belly open, and his scream would sound muffled and faraway to her ears. Derek would come to investigate, to try to rescue him from what he would be sure was a gator, but she would overpower Derek next. Her new body would even if she could not.

As Abbie swam directly beneath the swimmer, bathed in the magical light fighting to shield him, she tried to resist the overpowering scent of a meal and remember that he was a boy. Someone’s dear son. As Derek (was that the other one’s name?) had put it so memorably some time ago — perhaps while he was painting the porch, perhaps in one of her dreams — neither of them yet had been tested by life.

But it was summertime. In Graceville.

In the lake.

KERRY MUTTERED under her breath but did up her seat belt in response to the stewardess’s request. She’d flown the Atlantic more than enough times to know that the fasten-your-seat-belts sign went on a good half an hour before touchdown: One of her personal flying rituals (along with reading the safety instructions, bringing her own food, and accepting every single offer of an alcoholic drink) was to buckle up only when the spinning gray of runway was visible out of the window. There’d been three puling babies in her cabin alone, however, the plane had been full to bursting and moreover short-staffed, and she could tell that, behind her professional smile, the stewardess was close to the edge. So Kerry did what she was told. She was, after all, reasonably good at that.

Belt secured, she sat and stared at the back of the seat in front. She’d been awake throughout the eight-hour night flight, and now that it was coming to an end she felt the usual hollow tiredness, mingled with depression.

England. Bloody England.

From a few rows behind came the now-familiar sound of a baby sharing its confusion and discomfort with the world, urgent with the selfishness of the infant. Kerry realized the flight had doubtless been far, far worse for the infant’s parent, but still wished both mother and child had been checked as baggage instead. She fished in the seat pocket and retrieved the Bose headphones. They’d been outlandishly expensive, but there wasn’t much point listening to music through anything less than the best. With the buds slotted comfortably into her ears, she found the album on the iPod she’d bought on the first day of the trip and cranked the volume up high.

She smiled as the opening track crashed into her head and, eyes closed, gently rocked in her seat to the beat. She so nearly hadn’t gone, but Washington had been a lot of fun, in the end. A hell of a long way to go to watch her best friend (finally) get married — leaving Kerry as the last single girl in their crowd, cheers for that — but a good excuse to get out of the country for a week. And what a week. The small but bullish English contingent (mainly old school friends of Diane, whom Kerry hadn’t known) had done their best to have a good time in a foreign land, to show the locals that when it came to alcohol consumption, Brits were all about Shock and Awe. They’d succeeded, big-time, and Kerry still carried the vestiges of her sixth hangover in a row.

“… and there are aaaaiiiiiiii-aaiinnGELS!”

She suddenly realized she’d started singing along to the music, and opened her eyes. The man across the aisle was smiling at her. She stared at him blankly until he turned away, then jacked the volume up again and closed her eyes as the second track began.

She’d downloaded the album almost at random in a Starbucks right after buying the iPod, before she’d met anyone, before the party started. Downloaded quite a few albums, in fact, but this was the one that had stuck. Everything about the jangly guitars and raucous girly harmonies brought to mind music from thirty years ago, back when you saved your pocket money and bought the latest single by your fave band, rushing home to tear it to shreds on a cheap turntable, annoying the crap out of your parents as a bonus. Nobody had fave bands or listened-to-shreds albums these days. They had nonlinear playlists instead, and — if they were old enough, stuffed into a bookcase in a disregarded corner of the living room — a few ancient LPs (one Dire Straits, one Phil Collins, one mid-period Bowie, one syrupy Vivaldi), some Oasis or Chemical Brothers CDs (to show they were still trying to keep on top of things in the 1990s), sandwiched between doomed attempts to learn to like club music when you weren’t on drugs, and stuff they couldn’t even remember buying. Nobody hated anybody else’s choice in music anymore, either, aside from knuckle-dragging online “reviewers” who one-starred anything that hadn’t been on The X Factor. Nobody had the backbone to truly hate anything, these days: They were too busy liking — Facebooking or tweeting whatever track they were listening to, right this minute, right now. On the assumption, presumably, that all their virtual friends would give a flying fuck, that they would interpret these bleatings as a sign of character, rather than a yelp for attention in a digitized void. When everyone wears headphones, music is not sociable anymore.