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

P

is for Phantoms. At the very start, you’re standing on a beach in Florida, at the very spot where Ponce de León landed in 1513, hoping it was the land of Bimini where he could find the Fountain of Youth; and as you’re standing there, you can see all the way to St. Augustine, overrun with the old and sick who wait in the salt air and sunshine for death to embrace them. You open your mouth to call out — and it doesn’t matter that you don’t know to whom you’re going to call out or what you’re going to say, none of it matters, because now the sea is giving up its dead, and you, you’re pulled into the water. All of you becomes liquid, and you know the sea’s secrets, and having become liquid you watch as off the coast of the Île de la Seine, the Ship of the Dead appears, dropping clumps of viscera and something that might be isinglass, which drift in toward shore; by the banks of the Colorado River near an Anasazi village a decaying boat of cedar and horsehide drifts to land, and from it steps a ragged and bleeding woman who kneels by an undiscovered kiva, wailing a song of loss and misery in Urdu to the god Angwusnasomtaqa, praying that the Crow Mother will return her to her mate in the Netherworld; off Ballachulish in Argyllshire a shipload of drowned crofters materializes, howling in the most dread-filled loneliness; a fisherman in Vancouver sees a mountainous trident emerge from the water, pierce through then uproot an oak before it vanishes below the surface, creating waves so powerful they smash his small boat into splinters but that’s okay, because, you see, he drowns with a happy heart because he’s seen a miracle, which is all he’s ever wanted out of life; in icy hyperborean waters another doomed vessel, captained by a German nobleman named Faulkenburg, races through the night with tongues of fire licking at its masthead; St. Brendan’s Isle appears in the Atlantic — but for only a moment, just long enough for three coelacanths to push off from shore and submerge into the waters; many miles away the SS Cotapaxi, believed to be vanished en route from Charleston to Havana in 1925, drifts out of the sea-mist, its crew, looking through hollow and algae-encrusted sockets where their eyes used to be, smile at one another, happy to be voyaging once again; then a kraken, the same one found by the Bishop of Midros, thunders out of its underwater cave long enough to snare two scuba divers in its mighty claws and drag them, shredded and screaming, back under the waves while the Raifuku Maru — the Japanese freighter that vanished off the coast of Cuba the same year as the Cotapaxi — reappears just long enough for three crew members to throw themselves over the side because they’re all diving for a baggage-claim ticket that’s bobbed to the surface. The Loch Ness Monster sticks its head above the surface, looks around, decides not to take part in this silliness, and submerges once again. As liquid, you catch sight of something remarkable, even to something as remarkable as you are now: In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. [See earlier note under E.] You wonder what other so-called phantoms of myth and old-wives’ tales and legend may actually exist, if monsters are real [Author’s Note: You bet your ass they are. I know a dead cat who can back me up on that.], and what part you, as liquid, as all liquid, will play in this.

Q

is for Quetzalcoatl. Look up in the night sky: The moon has become a shimmering silver rose, its petals formed by the wings of the hundreds — maybe thousands — of clichéd angels that are perched around it, looking down like spectators into an arena. They are watching as Quetzalcoatl, three times the size of an airplane, pumps his mammoth pterosaurian wings and flies in wide, graceful circles. He is not alone; a WWII German pursuit plane with twin machine guns mounted on its wings — a latter version of the 1916 model designed by Anthony Herman Gerard Fokker — is engaged in an intense but playful dogfight with the flying reptile. The plane turns in tight, precise maneuvers as Quetzalcoatl attacks it from below. The machine guns strafe without mercy or sound, a silent-film prop spitting out bursts of sparking light, firing off round after round. Quetzalcoatl remembers the ancient people of Mexico and their worship. He remembers Tezcatlipoca and wonders how his brother is doing these days. Probably has a cushy gig like he always wanted. Is probably still worshipped. Doesn’t have to keep himself alive by working a two-bit outfit like the Circus of the Forgotten Gods. But Quetzalcoatl shakes himself from this bittersweet reverie; Baron Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen, former leader of Das Jagdgeschwader — the “Flying Circus” — how was that for irony? — nearly clipped his left wing. Quetzalcoatl banks left, avoiding a serious collision, and decides that he should have believed the Earth Mother, he should have paid more attention to Uitzilopochtli, should have heeded the Eater of Filth, and definitely should have listened to Coatlicue even though her twin-serpent-heads face made him laugh: They had all been right. Karma sucks the Imperial Wanger.

R

is for Remnants. Some of what you’re reading is composed of Remnants of other, long- and best-forgotten stories that They Who Are Dictating This to Me particularly enjoyed and so demanded I work them in here; some of what you’re reading is from stories I haven’t written yet but will/may write. They Who Are Dictating This to Me say that this is a done deal. Some of what you are reading is directly from them. Some of it is the truth; more than a little of it is lies. I am nothing but a being of flesh, bone, blood, grief, anger, carbon — just call me a lump of matter — which is, by its very design, designed to move toward its own disintegration from the moment it comes into existence. Dig this: Matter is composed of atoms, which are made in turn from quarks and electrons — but all particles, if you look closer, are birthed from tiny loops of vibrating string; everything at its most microscopic level is composed of these vibrating strands, they encompass all forces and all matter; look closer still at a single string and you realize that, if isolated, it is nothing more than a Remnant. Everything in the multiverse can be reduced to a Remnant. Especially the fragmented past, which runs concurrently with what came after — this moment, for instance, which has now passed — as well as the pre-past and the illusionary Now and the unknowable After-now, sometimes called the Future, all of it held together by tiny vibrations of isolated Remnants giving birth to electrons and quarks. And it’s all so fragile, more fragile than any of us will ever want to know, let alone believe. The fragmented Remnants that encompass all are not vibrating at the same intensity; they are becoming more rapid as the multiverse dances, dances, dances. But let’s bring it back down to the concrete and indoor carpeting. Here is a Remnant: In October of 2002 I died by my own hand. I was forty-three years old and it was the fifth time in my life that I’d planned out my own disintegration, the third time I’d attempted to keep that appointment in Samarra, and the first time I’d actually succeeded. I stood there looking down at my body as it finished convulsing on the bed in the hotel room I’d rented. I remember thinking that I should have felt something, but could summon no emotion whatsoever. Then another Remnant — this one in the form of a dab tsog from Hmong myth — appeared, squatting on my chest, misshapen beyond anything I’d ever seen before. Even though I was no longer in my body, I could feel its weight on my chest. It looked over my shoulder, smiled at me, then turned back to my body and rammed its entire arm down my throat. I could feel its arm inside of me, and when it yanked out that arm, the incredible violence of the act pulled me back into myself and I pushed it off my chest and fell off the bed and managed to make it to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet. Afterward, as I knelt in front of the commode, resting my head against the cool, cool porcelain rim, the dab tsog jumped onto the lid of the toilet tank, reached down, and grabbed a handful of my hair so as to pull up my head and look me in the eyes. “Next time,” it said, its voice the sound of rusted nails being wrenched from rotted wood, “when you go looking to inflict and experience anguish, remember that anguish is already busy with weaker men.” Then it slammed my head against the tank and knocked me unconscious. If you have ever seen the cover to Ray Bradbury’s Long After Midnight, you’ll remember the reproduction of Johann Heinrich Füssli’s painting The Nightmare; that creature squatting on the sleeping woman’s chest looks a lot like the dab tsog that spoke to me. [Author’s Note: Is this one of mine? I can’t tell anymore. Did the creature know that it, too, was nothing more at its core than groups of vibrating string that appear to have no further internal substructure? Is this one of mine?] Remnants of the truth mix with those of Myth: Did we invent the monsters, like Baron Frankenstein, or did they invent us? Either way, who asked to be summoned from the darkness and made flesh? Show of hands? Yeah, that’s what I figured. I think they created us; I think we are another one of their great wonders [Author’s Note: See earlier note under I.], we are their Frankenstein’s monster, we are what happened when the vibrations of those strings reached the other side and enabled all forces and matter in the multiverse to dream, to imagine, to transcend. No wonder they despise us so: What beings wouldn’t be angry to discover that the myths they created have assumed control, that the inmates built from Remnants in their imagination have taken over the asylum, and they, the makers, the dreamers, they who imagined and envisioned and transcended us have been turned into sometimes-laughable Boogiemen [Author’s Note: See earlier entry under B.] that we’ve all but unbelieved out of physical existence? And what do you see now, I ask them, as you look at me, here at my keyboard, playing secretary to you? A man watches as a disease-riddled cat crawls toward a bowl of water. My God, what a joke it all seems. Like some weekday-morning television school for their preschoolers: Good morning, boys and ghouls, and welcome to the Monster’s Corner! Today our story is titled “And Still You Wonder Why Our First Impulse Is to Kill You,” and it’s all about how we created our monsters so we could scare them, and they liked it so much that they wrote stories and made movies, thinking they were inventing us, so that others like them would read and see and be frightened. But then — ooooh, spooky — things got a little out of hand … A dying cat crawls toward a bowl of water that it will never reach. The warm breath of a wolf tickles the scalp of a small boy [see earlier notes under L and D]. A writer continues pounding away at the keys long after his imagination has abandoned him, taking with it his soul [see earlier note under O], so he is reduced to being both creator and monster, picking over the rotting carcasses of some long-forgotten pieces and some that are yet to be written in order to make a deadline i like deadlines i like the little whoosh they make as they pass by and what is left after that, what is left but one monster facing the other and neither of them one-hundred-percent certain of who invented whom, but it’s not looking good for our side, folks, you can quote Gary B. on that, take it to the bank, because would I lie to you? — okay, all I do is lie, I’ve got over twenty thousand pages of lies that I chose to tell you instead of living my life as well as possible, but mixing lies with truth and truth with lies is what I do, it’s what they have me do, here in the Monster’s Corner [Weekday mornings, 8:30 A.M. Check local listings] and I can’t help but do as they dream, as they imagine, because — ---- —----------- dead now dead now gary’s all gone we couldn’t listen to him anymore he was soooooooo depressing don’t you think and these keys are funny things how is you manage to separateallthwordssothat everything-makessense???????????????????? Blood on the floor his blood is on the floor and we bet his last thought was filled with regret see earlier note under h or is it f we hadto do it because these things we decided must never seeprint it is ourbookof forbidden knowledge and the first forbidden knowledge of our book is that we created you and you must not everknow that must go on thinking you invented us because what fun is it otherwise no fun at all just a bunch of strings vibrating happily along and we’re all out of time here at the monster’s corner for stories w hope to see you all back here tomorrow so as they see earlier note under t come to finish the job we”llll call up the glop see earlier note under g to take us out on the usual note and here we go arrrrrrg gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh — - — ---