Dreams Underfoot

Pity The Monsters

“I was a beauty once,” the old woman said. “The neighborhood boys were forever standing outside my parents’ home, hoping for a word, a smile, a kiss, as though somehow my unearned beauty gave me an intrinsic worth that far overshadowed Emma’s cleverness with her schoolwork, or Betsy’s gift for music. It always seemed unfair to me. My value was based on an accident of birth; theirs was earned.”

The monster made no reply.

“I would have given anything to be clever or to have had some artistic ability,” the old woman added.

“Those are assets with which a body can grow old.”

She drew her tattery shawl closer, hunching her thin shoulders against the cold. Her gaze went to her companion. The monster was looking at the blank expanse of wall above her head, eyes unfocused, scars almost invisible in the dim light.

“Yes, well,” she said. “I suppose we all have our own cross to bear. At least I have good memories to go with the bad.”

The snow was coming down so thickly that visibility had already become all but impossible. The fat wet flakes whirled and spun in dervishing clouds, clogging the sidewalks and streets, snarling traffic, making the simple act of walking an epic adventure. One could be anywhere, anywhen. The familiar was suddenly strange; the city transformed. The wind and the snow made even the commonest landmarks unrecognizable.

If she hadn’t already been so bloody late, Harriet Pierson would have simply walked her mountain bike through the storm. She only lived a mile or so from the library and the trip wouldn’t have taken that long by foot. But she was late, desperately late, and being sensible had never been her forte, so there she was, pedaling like a madwoman in her highest gear, the wheels skidding and sliding for purchase on the slippery street as she biked along the narrow passageway between the curb and the crawling traffic.

The socalled waterproof boots that she’d bought on sale last week were already soaked, as were the bottoms of her jeans. Her old camel hair coat was standing up to the cold, however, and her earmuffs kept her ears warm. The same couldn’t be said for her hands and face. The wind bit straight through her thin woolen mittens, her cheeks were red with the cold, while her long, brown hair, bound up into a vague bun on the top of her head, was covered with an inch of snow that was already leaking its wet chill into her scalp.

Why did I move to this bloody country? she thought. It’s too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter ...

England looked very good right at that moment, but it hadn’t always been so. England hadn’t had Brian whom she’d met while on holiday here in Newford three years ago, Brian who’d been just as eager for her to come as she had been to emigrate, Brian who walked out on her not two months after she’d arrived and they had gotten an apartment together. She’d refused to go back. Deciding to make the best of her new homeland, she had stuck it out surprisingly well, not so much because she led such an ordered existence, as that she’d refused to run back home and have her mother tell her, ever so patronizingly,

“Well, I told you so, dear.”

She had a good job, if not a great one, a lovely little flat that was all her own, a fairly busy social life—that admittedly contained more friends than it did romantic interests—and liked everything about her new home. Except for the weather.

She turned off Yoors Street onto Kelly, navigating more by instinct than vision, and was just starting to congratulate herself on having completed her journey all in one piece, with time to spare, when a tall shape loomed suddenly up out of the whirling snow in front of her. Trying to avoid a collision, she turned the handlebars too quickly—and the wrong way.

Her front wheel hit the curb and she sailed over the handlebars, one more white airborne object defying gravity, except that unlike the lighter snowflakes with which she momentarily shared the sky, her weight brought her immediately down with a jarring impact against a heap of refuse that someone had set out in anticipation of tomorrow’s garbage pickup.

She rose spluttering snow and staggered back towards her bike, disoriented, the suddenness of her accident not yet having sunk in. She knelt beside the bike and stared with dismay at the bent wheel frame. Then she remembered what had caused her to veer in the first place.

Her gaze went to the street, but then traveled up, and up, to the face of the tall shape that stood by the curb. The man was a giant. At fiveone, Harriet wasn’t tall, and perhaps it had something to do with her low perspective, but he seemed to be at least seven feet high. And yet it wasn’t his size that brought the small gasp to her lips.

That face ...

It was set in a squarish head which was itself perched on thick broad shoulders. The big nose was bent, the left eye was slightly higher than the right, the ears were like huge cauliflowers, the hairline high and square. Thick white scars crisscrossed his features, giving the impression that he’d been sewn together by some untalented seamstress who was too deep in her cups to do a proper job. An icon from an old horror movie flashed in Harriet’s mind and she found herself looking for the bolts in the man’s neck before she even knew what she was doing.

Of course they weren’t there, but the size of the man and the way he was just standing there, staring at her, made Harriet unaccountably nervous as though this really was Victor Frankenstein’s creation standing over her in the storm. She stood quickly, wanting to lessen the discrepancy of their heights. The sudden movement woke a wave of dizziness.

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” she meant to say, but the words slurred, turning to mush in her mouth and what came out was, “Redfolly shurry.”

Vertigo jellied her legs and made the street underfoot so wobbly that she couldn’t keep her balance.

The giant took a quick step towards her, huge hands outstretched, as a black wave swept over her and she pitched forward.

Bloody hell, she had time to think. I’m going all faint ....

Water bubbled merrily in the tin can that sat on the Coleman stove’s burner. The old woman leaned forward and dropped in a tea bag, then moved the can from the heat with a mittened hand.

Only two more bags left, she thought.

She held her hands out to the stove and savored the warmth. “I married for money, not love,” she told her companion. “My Henry was not a handsome man.”

The monster gaze focused and tracked down to her face.

“But I grew to love him. Not for his money, nor for the comfort of his home and the safety it offered to a young woman whose future, for all her beauty, looked to take her no further than the tenements in which she was born and bred.”

The monster made a querulous noise, no more than a grunt, but the old woman could hear the question in it. They’d been together for so long that she could read him easily, without his needing to speak.

“It was for his kindness,” she said.

Harriet woke to the cold. Shivering, she sat up to find herself in an unfamiliar room, enwrapped in a nest of blankets that carried a pungent, musty odor in their folds. The room itself appeared to be part of some abandoned building. The walls were unadorned except for their chipped paint and plaster and a cheerful bit of graffiti suggesting that the reader of it do something that Harriet didn’t think was anatomically possible.

There were no furnishings at all. The only light came from a short, fat candle which sat on the windowsill in a puddle of cooled wax. Outside, the wind howled. In the room, in the building itself, all was still. But as she cocked her head to listen, she could just faintly make out a low murmur of conversation. It appeared to be a monologue, for it was simply one voice, droning on.

She remembered her accident and the sevenfoot tall giant as though they were only something she’d experienced in a dream. The vague sense of dislocation she’d felt upon awakening had grown into a dreamy kind of muddled feeling. She was somewhat concerned over her whereabouts, but not in any sort of a pressing way. Her mind seemed to be in a fog.

Getting up, she hesitated for a moment, then wrapped one of the smelly blankets about her shoulders like a shawl against the cold and crossed the room to its one doorway. Stepping outside, she found herself in a hall as disrepaired and empty as the room she’d just quit.

The murmuring voice led her down the length of the hall into what proved to be a foyer. Leaning against the last bit of wall, there where the hallway opened up into the larger space, she studied the odd scene before her.

Seven candles sat in their wax on wooden orange crates that were arranged in a half circle around an old woman. She had her back to the wall, legs tucked up under what appeared to be a halfdozen skirts.

A ratty shawl covered her grey hair and hung down over her shoulders. Her face was a spiderweb of lines, all pinched and thin. Water steamed in a large tin can on a Coleman stove that stood on the floor in front of her. She had another, smaller tin can in her hand filled with, judging by the smell that filled the room, some kind of herbal tea. She was talking softly to no one that Harriet could see.

The old woman looked up just as Harriet was trying to decide how to approach her. The candlelight woke an odd glimmer in the woman’s eyes, a reflective quality that reminded Harriet of a cat’s gaze caught in a car’s headbeams.

“And who are you, dear?” the woman asked.

“I ... my name’s Harriet. Harriet Pierson.” She got the odd feeling that she should curtsy as she introduced herself.

“You may call me Flora,” the old woman said. “My name’s actually Anne Boddeker, but I prefer Flora.”

Harriet nodded absently. Under the muddle of of her thoughts, the first sharp wedge of concern was beginning to surface. She remembered taking a fall from her bike ... had she hit her head?

“What am I doing here?” she asked.

The old woman’s eyes twinkled with humor. “Now how would I know?”

“But ...” The fuzz in Harriet’s head seemed to thicken. She blinked a couple of times and then cleared her throat. “Where are we?” she tried.

“North of Gracie Street,” Flora replied, “in that part of town that, I believe, people your age refer to as Squatland. I’m afraid I don’t know the exact address. Vandals have played havoc with the street signs, as I’m sure you know, but I believe we’re not far from the corner of Flood and MacNeil where I grew up.”

Harriet’s heart sank. She was in the Tombs, an area of Newford that had once been a developer’s bright dream. The old, tired blocks of tenements, office buildings and factories were to be transformed into a yuppie paradise and work had already begun on tearing down the existing structures when a sudden lack of backing had left the developer scrambling for solvency. All that remained now of the bright dream was block upon block of abandoned buildings and rubblestrewn lots generally referred to as the Tombs. It was home to runaways, the homeless, derelicts, bikers, drug addicts and the like who squatted in its buildings.

It was also probably one of the most dangerous parts of Newford. “I ... how did I get here?” Harriet tried again.

“What do you remember?” Flora said.

“I was biking home from work,” Harriet began and then proceeded to relate what she remembered of the storm, the giant who’d loomed up so suddenly out of the snow, her accident ... “And then I suppose I must have fainted.”

She lifted a hand to her head and searched about for a tender spot, but couldn’t find a lump or a bruise.

“Did he speak to you?” Flora asked. “The ... man who startled you?”

Harriet shook her head.

“Then it was Frank. He must have brought you here.”

Harriet thought about what the old woman had just said.

“Does that mean there’s more than one of him?” she asked. She had the feeling that her memory was playing tricks on her when she tried to call up the giant’s scarred and misshapen features. She couldn’t imagine there being more than one of him.

“In a way,” Flora said.

“You’re not being very clear.”

“I’m sorry.”

But she didn’t appear to be, Harriet realized.

“So ... he, this Frank ... he’s mute?” she asked.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” Flora said. “A great big strapping lad like that.”

Harriet nodded in agreement. “But that doesn’t explain what you meant by there being more than one of him. Does he have a brother?”

“He ...” The old woman hesitated. “Perhaps you should ask him yourself”

“But you just said that he was a mute.”

“I think he’s down that hall,” Flora said, ignoring Harriet. She pointed to a doorway opposite from the one that Harriet had used to enter the foyer. “That’s usually where he goes to play.”

Harriet stood there for a long moment, just looking at the old woman. Flora, Anne, whatever her name was—she was obviously senile. That had to explain her odd manner.

Harriet lifted her gaze to look in the direction Flora had pointed. Her thoughts still felt muddy. She found standing as long as she had been was far more tiring than it should have been and her tongue felt all fuzzy.

All she wanted to do was to go home. But if this was the Tombs, then she’d need directions.

Perhaps even protection from some of the more feral characters who were said to inhabit these abandoned buildings. Unless, she thought glumly, this “Frank” was the danger himself ...

She looked back at Flora, but the old woman was ignoring her. Flora drew her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and took a sip of tea from her tin can.

Bother, Harriet thought and started across the foyer.

Halfway down the new hallway, she heard a child’s voice singing softly. She couldn’t make out the words until she’d reached the end of the hall where yet another candlelit room offered up a view of its bizarre occupant.

Frank was sitting crosslegged in the middle of the room, the contents of Harriet’s purse scattered on the floor by his knees. Her purse itself had been tossed into a corner. Harriet would have backed right out of the room before Frank looked up except that she was frozen in place by the singing. The child’s voice came from Frank’s twisted lips—a high, impossibly sweet sound. It was a little girl’s voice, singing a skipping song:

Frank and Harriet, sitting in a tree KI-SS-IN-G

First comes love, then comes marriage Here comes Frank with a baby’s carriage Frank’s features seemed more monstrous than ever with that sweet child’s voice issuing from his throat. He tossed the contents of

Harriet’s wallet into the air, juggling them. Her ID, a credit card, some photos from back home, scraps of paper with addresses or phone numbers on them, paper money, her bank card ... they did a fluttering fandango as he sang, the movement of his hands oddly graceful for all the scarred squat bulk of his fingers. Her makeup, keys and loose change were lined up in rows like toy soldiers on parade in front of him. A halfburned ten dollar bill lay beside a candle on the wooden crate to his right. On the crate to his left lay a dead cat, curled up as though it was only sleeping, but the glassy dead eyes and swollen tongue that pushed open its jaws gave lie to the pretense.

Harriet felt a scream build up in her throat. She tried to back away, but bumped into the wall. The child’s voice went still and Frank looked up. Photos, paper money, paper scraps and all flittered down upon his knees. His gaze locked on hers.

For one moment, Harriet was sure it was a child’s eyes that regarded her from that ruined face. They carried a look of pure, absolute innocence, utterly at odds with the misshapen flesh and scars that surrounded them. But then they changed, gaining a feral, dark intelligence.

Frank scattered the scraps of paper and money in front of him away with a sweep of his hands.

“Mine,” he cried in a deep, booming voice. “Girl is mine!” As he lurched to his feet, Harriet fled back the way she’d come.

“The hardest thing,” the old woman said, “is watching everybody die. One by one, they all die: your parents, your friends, your family ....”

Her voice trailed off, rheumy eyes going sad. The monster merely regarded her.

“It was hardest when Julie died,” she went on after a moment. There was a hitch in her voice as she spoke her daughter’s name. “It’s not right that parents should outlive their children.” Her gaze settled on the monster’s face. “But then you’ll never know that particular pain, will you?”

The monster threw back his head and a soundless howl tore from his throat.

As Harriet ran back into the room where she’d left Flora, she saw that the old woman was gone. Her candles, the crates and stove remained. The tin can half full of tea sat warming on the edge of the stove, not quite on the lit burner.

Harried looked back down the hall where Frank’s shambling bulk stumbled towards her.

She had to get out of this place. Never mind the storm still howling outside the building, never mind the confusing maze of abandoned buildings and refusechoked streets of the Tombs. She just had to

“There you are,” a voice said from directly behind her.

Harriet heart skipped a beat. A sharp, small inadvertent squeak escaped her lips as she flung herself to one side and then backed quickly away from the shadows by the door from which the voice had come. When she realized it was only the old woman, she kept right on backing up. Whoever, whatever, Flora was, Harriet knew she wasn’t a friend.

Frank shambled into the foyer then, the queer lopsided set of his gaze fixed hungrily upon her.

Harriet’s heartbeat kicked into doubletime. Her throat went dry. The muscles of her chest tightened, squeezing her lungs so that she found it hard to breathe.

Oh god, she thought. Get out of here while you can.

But she couldn’t seem to move. Her limbs were deadened weights and she was starting to feel faint again.

“Now, now,” the old woman said. “Don’t carry on so, Samson, or you’ll frighten her to death.”

The monster obediently stopped in the doorway, but his hungry gaze never left Harriet.

“Samsamson?” Harriet asked in a weak voice.

“Oh, there’s all sorts of bits and pieces of people inside that poor ugly head,” Flora replied. “Comes from traumas he suffered as a child. He suffers from—what was it that Dr. Adams called him?

Dissociation. I think, before the accident, the doctor had documented seventeen people inside him.

Some are harmless, such as Frank and little Bessie. Others, like Samson, have an unfortunate capacity for violence when they can’t have their way.”

“Doctor?” Harriet asked. All she seemed capable of was catching a word from the woman’s explanation and repeating it as a question.

“Yes, he was institutionalized as a young boy. The odd thing is that he’s somewhat aware of all the different people living inside him. He thinks that when his father sewed him back together, he used parts of all sorts of different people to do so and those bits of alien skin and tissue took hold of his mind and borrowed parts of it for their own use.”

“That ...” Harriet cleared her throat. “That was the ... accident?”

“Oh, it wasn’t any accident,” Flora said. “And don’t let anyone try to tell you different. His father knew exactly what he was doing when he threw him through that plate glass window.”

“But ...”

“Of course, the father was too poor to be able to afford medical attention for the boy, so he patched him up on his own.”

Harriet stared at the monstrous figure with growing horror.

“This ... none of this can be true,” she finally managed.

“It’s all documented at the institution,” Flora told her. “His father made a full confession before they locked him away. Poor Frank, though. It was too late to do anything to help him by that point, so he ended up being put away as well, for all that his only crime was the misfortune of being born the son of a lunatic.”

Harriet tore her gaze from Frank’s scarred features and turned to the old woman.

“How do you know all of this?” she asked.

“Why, I lived there as well,” Flora said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“No. No, you didn’t.”

Flora shrugged. “It’s old history. Mind you, when you get to be my age, everything’s old history.”

Harriet wanted to ask why Flora had been in the institution herself, but couldn’t find the courage to do so. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to know. But there was something she had no choice but to ask. She hugged her blanket closer around her, no longer even aware of its smell, but the chill that was in her bones didn’t come from the cold.

“What happens now?” she said.

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” Flora replied with a sly smile in her eyes that said she understood all too well.

Harriet pressed forward. “What happens to me?”

“Well, now,” Flora said. She shot the monster an affectionate look. “Frank wants to start a family.”

Harriet shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice sounding weak and ineffectual even to her own ears. “No way.”

“You don’t exactly have a say in the matter, dear. It’s not as though there’s anyone coming to rescue you—not in this storm. And even if someone did come searching, where would they look? People disappear in this city all of the time. It’s a sad, but unavoida—

ble fact in these trying times that we’ve brought upon ourselves.”

Harriet was still shaking her head.

“Oh, think of someone else for a change,” the old woman told her. “I know your type. You’re filled with your own selfimportance; the whole world revolves around you. It’s a party here, an evening of dancing there, theatre, clubs, cabaret, with never a thought for those less fortunate. What would it hurt you to give a bit of love and affection to a poor, lonely monster?”

I’ve gone all demented, Harriet thought. All of this—the monster, the lunatic calm of the old woman—none of it was real. None of it could be real.

“Do you think he likes being this way?” Flora demanded.

Her voice grew sharp and the monster shifted nervously at the tone of her anger, the way a dog might bristle, catching its master’s mood.

“It’s got nothing to do with me,” Harriet said, surprising herself that she could still find the courage to stand up for herself. “I’m not like you think I am and I had nothing to do with what happened to that—to Frank.”

“It’s got everything to do with you,” the old woman replied. “It’s got to do with caring and family and good Samaritanism and decency and long, lasting relationships.”

“You can’t force a person into something like that,” Harriet argued.

Flora sighed. “Sometimes, in these times, it’s the only way. There’s a sickness abroad in the world, child; your denial of what’s right and true is as much a cause as a symptom.”

“You’re the one that’s sick!” Harriet cried.

She bolted for the building’s front doors, praying they weren’t locked. The monster was too far away and moved too slowly to stop her. The old woman was closer and quicker, but in her panic, Harriet found the strength to fling her bodily away. She raced for the glass doors that led out of the foyer and into the storm.

The wind almost drove her back inside when she finally got a door open, but she pressed against it, through the door and out onto the street. The whirling snow, driven by the mad, capricious wind, soon stole away all sense of direction, but she didn’t dare stop. She plowed through drifts, blinded by the snow, head bent against the howling wind, determined to put as much distance between herself and what she fled.

Oh god, she thought at one point. My purse was back there. My ID. They know where I live. They can come and get me at home, or at work, anytime they want.

But mostly she fought the snow and wind. How long she fled through the blizzard, she had no way of knowing. It might have been an hour, it might have been the whole night. She was shaking with cold and fear when she stumbled to the ground one last time and couldn’t get up.

She lay there, a delicious sense of warmth enveloping her. All she had to do was let go, she realized.

Just let go and she could drift away into that dark, warm place that beckoned to her. She rolled over on her side and stared up into the white sky. Snow immediately filmed her face. She rubbed it away with her hand, already halffrozen with the cold.

She was ready to let go. She was ready to just give up the struggle, because she was only so strong and she’d given it her all, hadn’t she? She

A tall dark figure loomed up suddenly, towering over her. Snow blurred her sight so that it was only a shape, an outline, against the white.

No, she pleaded. Don’t take me back. I’d rather die than go back. As the figure bent down beside her, she found the strength to beat at it with her frozen hands.

“Easy now,” a kind voice said, blocking her weak blows. “We’ll get you out of here.”

She stopped trying to fight. It wasn’t the monster, but a policeman. Somehow, in her aimless flight, she’d wandered out of the Tombs.

“What are you doing out here?” the policeman said.

Monster, she wanted to say. There’s a monster. It attacked me. But all that came out from her frozen lips was, “Muh ... tacked me ...”

“First we’ll get you out of this weather,” he told her, “then we’ll deal with the man who assaulted you.”

The hours that followed passed in a blur. She was in a hospital, being treated for frostbite. A detective interviewed her, calmly, patiently sifting through her mumbled replies for a description of what had happened to her, and then finally she was left alone.

At one point she came out of her dozing state and thought she saw two policeman standing at the end of her bed. She wasn’t sure if they were actually present or not, but like Agatha Christie characters, gathered at the denouement of one of the great mystery writer’s stories, their conversation conveniently filled in some details concerning her captors of which she hadn’t been aware.

“Maybe it was before your time,” one of the policemen was saying, “but that description she gave fits.”

“No, I remember,” the other replied. “They were residents in the Zeb’s criminal ward and Cross killed their shrink during a power failure.”

The first officer nodded. “I don’t know which of them was worse: Cross with that monstrous face, or Boddeker.”

“Poisoned her whole family, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, but I remember seeing what Cross did to the shrink—just about tore the poor bastard in two.”

“I heard that it was Boddeker who put him up to it. The poor geek doesn’t have a mind of his own.”

Vaguely, as though observing the action from a vast distance, Harriet could sense the first officer looking in her direction.

“She’s lucky she’s still alive,” he added, looking back at his companion.

In the days that followed, researching old newspapers at the library, Harriet found out that all that the two men had said, or that she’d dreamed they had said, was true, but she couldn’t absorb any of it at the moment. For now she just drifted away once more, entering a troubled sleep that was plagued with dreams of ghosts and monsters. The latter wore masks to hide the horror inside them, and they were the worst of all.

She woke much later, desperately needing to pee. It was still dark in her room. Outside she could hear the wind howling.

She fumbled her way into the bathroom and did her business, then stared into the mirror after she’d flushed. There was barely enough light for the mirror to show her reflection. What looked back at her from the glass was a ghostly face that she almost didn’t recognize.

“Monsters,” she said softly, not sure if what she felt was pity or fear, not sure if she recognized one in herself, or if it was just the old woman’s lunatic calm still pointing an accusing finger.

She stared at that spectral reflection for a very long time before she finally went back to bed.

“We’ll find you another,” the old woman said.

Her tea had gone cold but she was too tired to relight the stove and make herself another cup. Her hand were folded on her lap, her gaze fixed on the tin can of cold water that still sat on the stove. A film of ice was forming on the water.

“You’ll see,” she added. “We’ll find another, but this time we’ll put her together ourselves, just the way your father did with you. We’ll take a bit from one and a bit from another and we’ll make you the perfect mate, just see if we don’t. I always was a fair hand with a needle and thread, you know—a necessary quality for a wife in my time. Of course everything’s different now, everything’s changed.

Sometimes I wonder why we bother to go on ....”

The monster stared out the window to where the snow still fell, quietly now, the blizzard having moved on, leaving only this calm memory of its storm winds in its wake. He gave no indication that he was listening to the old woman, but she went on talking all the same.