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

B

is for Bogeyman, also Bogieman, Boogeyman, or Boogieman. Doesn’t really matter how you spell it, or what variation he takes on in whichever country where parents still use him to emotionally scar their children at as early an age as is possible, outside of a seventies disco song by KC and the Sunshine Band with a killer bass synthesizer line, he doesn’t exist. He never did. Stop using him to frighten your kids. This really sticks in their collective craw. Suck it up and be a parent and exercise well-tempered discipline like you’re supposed to, or use condoms next time, fer chrissakes. You’re supposed to be adults.

C

is for Colophon. You have been led to believe that this denotes a publisher’s mark or logotype appearing at the beginning or end of a book. It is not a mark; they are a race of parasites that came to Earth hidden within the binding of The Book of Forbidden Knowledge, the text that the Fallen Angels stole and gave to humankind during the first War in Heaven (which was technically more of a skirmish prompted by the Great Mother of all hissy fits, but that’s neither here nor there). Once The Book was entrusted to humankind — giving to it, among other things, the knowledge of Language, Music, Poetry, Art, Science, Writing, Dance, etc. — the Colophon scurried from their hiding place and began, bit by bit, to destroy the first of the Forbidden Gifts: Language. Before the Egyptian coffin beetle, before the advent of nanotechnology, before the first cancer cell ever set up shop in a sentient being’s bloodstream and began chewing away from within, the Colophon, smaller than all of the aforementioned (their initial number, which has now increased ten-million-fold, was somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and seventeen million to the two hundred and sixtieth power) have been amassing their forces for a nonstop assault to take back language from the human race. The Tower of Babel was their first truly Great Victory against us. Other victories have been smaller, but get enough scratches and you can still bleed to death. Example: Have you begun to notice how, suddenly, no one knows the difference between a contraction and a possessive? Or how quickly ink begins to fade from the pages of books? Or how, regardless of how many times you reload a page online, you keep getting more and more garbage characters? These are just a few of the Colophon’s tactics. Their ultimate goal is to erase all printed language and destroy all digital language. Armed with the totality of this knowledge, they’ll enter our brains and wipe out all traces of even the basest form of verbal and written communication. We will be left with only the most vague, nebulous wisps of memory that we were once able to exchange ideas through sounds that came out of our mouths or were represented on the page by arcane symbols. We will lose the First Gift because we were not worthy to possess it in the first place.

D

is for the Damaged Ones. [Author’s Note: One of mine.] As an eight-year-old child I awoke in the woods in the early hours of dawn, naked and shivering where they had left me after they’d finished the night before. I tried to stand but my legs were weak and my feet too slick with the blood still trickling from my backside. I crawled forward, wondering why I was covered in silver quills. They weren’t quills, but needles that had fallen from the pine tree under which they had left me. The needles had become soaked in dew, and in the first rays of dawn, the thousands of them over my body looked like quills or gray fur. I stopped crawling when it felt as if my chest were going to explode. I stopped crawling when it felt as if things were falling out of me from back there, where I could not turn my head to see the trail. I stopped crawling because there was no place to crawl to, and no one waiting there for me. I raised my head and saw a great wolf standing so close to my face I could feel its hot breath tickle my matted hair against my scalp. “Are you a werewolf?” I asked. The great wolf shrugged. “That is one name for us, I suppose.” I began to cry. “Are you going to bite me and turn me into a werewolf, too?” The great wolf shook its head. “There’s no need. You have already been transformed. You will forever be marked. You are now no longer part of the human world. You are a Damaged One. No curse, no bite, no full moon is needed to steal away your humanity. You are a monster, as are we all.” I lived through that night, and I remember well the words of the great wolf on that morning. There is no need to be bitten, no reason to be cursed. On the street, nearly every time I venture out into the world — which I try to do as little as possible — as I walk I look up and see another one of us. Our eyes meet, and we know each other like members of the same family. Our eyes flash silver. They flash loss and anger and regret. Then one of us always crosses the street. It is not yet time to acknowledge each other’s existence. There is, it seems, much more damage yet to be done. [Author’s Note: Some mornings, as I begin to shave, I think of all the anguish that I’ve brought into the lives of those who love or have loved me, and I wish for a straight razor instead of one with a disposable blade. Then the mirror flashes silver and for a moment my eyes are gone and in a blink it’s just another bright, bright, sunshiny day.]

E

is for the Elder Gods (often mistakenly referred to as “the Great Old Ones”). They’re actually not nearly as old, or as powerful, or as frightening as they’d like for you to believe. Lovecraft [Author’s Note: Or so say those dictating this to me.], it turns out, was not a good choice for a PR man. Seems old Howard, aside from having more than his share of whack-a-doodle tendencies inherited from his schizophrenic mother, was not only paranoid but something of a racist to boot. He ran to a neighbor’s house in a shuddering panic because he was convinced that he’d discovered a cluster of “Negro eggs” in the basement of his home. Thus did he begin to graft his anti-human, pro-uncaring-universe philosophy into what they told him. All of that gobbledygook in all of the so-called Mythos stories? Mostly recipes and gossip. [Author’s Note: They speak of this with a curious mix of embarrassment and rage. One of them added this: “Do you think anyone remembers that Cthulhu was an extraterrestrial and his ‘house of R’lyeh’ was a goddamn spaceship? Oh, and let’s not forget where R’lyeh was located — at the bottom of the freakin’ sea ! Now, you tell me — would you have any real primeval fear in your heart for a race of beings whose giant, bat-winged, slobbering, tentacle-faced leader — supposedly possessed of all the knowledge from pre- and post-history — didn’t have the sense to install something akin to a GPS system in his ship so he didn’t drown everyone when they landed? Yes, they’re really big. Really big. And most of them are dumber than a bag of hair. But because of Lovecraft’s misrepresenting what they said, we have to work a thousand times as hard to get your attention. His fictions are astounding models of structure, but otherwise, Howie [Author’s Note-Within-a-Note: They all call him “Howie.” Don’t ask me, I’m just doing the typing at this point.] was stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. William Hope Hodgson, though … there was a scary fucker. The House on the Borderland. Yeah — he knew something .”]

F

is for Finders of the Last Breath. They are led by a lithe female figure with the head of a black horse, its ears erect, its neck arched, vapor jetting from its nostrils; one of her followers is tall and skeletal, with fingers so long their tips brush against the ground: It hunkers down and snakes its fingers around whatever object has attracted its attention, absorbing the sound made by vibrational waves so it can trace them back to their source; other followers hop like frogs, some roll, some scuttle on rootlike filaments that are covered in flowers whose centers are the faces of blind children. Many of them are terrifying to behold, and too many have been killed as they attempt to carry out their duties: to be at the side of infants and the old who are about to die, so that their last breaths can be caught and put in jars and stored away. It is only when the Finders can carry out their duties that your infants and your old will pass in peace, and rest in peace. The Finders make their deaths painless, even majestic. But if their last breaths cannot be caught in time, the infant’s or the aged one’s death — even after the remains have been burned or buried — is never-ending, and their awareness of the horror of their fate is crystalline and without pity. You should welcome and not fear the presence of the Finders. Fear only their absence when the time comes.