Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (48 page)

When the Creeker became the talk of the town she asked him to take her to see it. “All my students are talking about it,” she said. “Have you seen it?”

He thought of the Polaroid. The slow-burning eyes. “Yeah.”

“And? Is it scary?” She bit her nails, grinning. She probably thought it was some pathetic artifact of rural Americana, a cousin of cow-tipping and haystack rides. “No, don’t tell me. I want to see it myself.”

Max took her to the Lowell farm that Friday. The carnival tent was fraying now that the first of the cold fronts were moving in. Mallory had been talkative as they crossed the pesticide-yellow grass, but in the presence of the Stag-Man, she approached the cage as if in a trance. She knelt down at the bars the way she did at Mass and looked soulfully, silently into the Stag-Man’s eyes. Max felt acid bubble into his throat. They were exchanging secrets and truths, he could just tell. She was in communion with the same incubus that had seduced his mother. He would have yanked her out of that deferential pose by her hair, but Mallory stood up just as he was reaching down. She stuffed her hands in her sweatshirt pockets.

“Let’s go, I want to go,” she mumbled. “I don’t feel well.”

A throng of preteens that had set up a devotional camp outside the Stag-Man’s cage leered up at them. They looked like jackals in black clothes. “Ooh, yeah,” said one of them. “Run along and hi-i-ide.” Max sharply told them to go home—trying to sound like a responsible man, even though his own father was a freak in a cage—but they sang back, “This
is
home.”

He and Mallory walked back to his truck with his arm around her shoulders. He could feel her trembling. It was a cold sort of relief to see that she was suffering instead of enraptured. She was nothing like his mother, he told himself. She was an innocent. Virtuous. Competent. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. This stuff’s no good.” He bit his lips, in guilt. Mallory shook her head absently but didn’t speak until they were in the muscular safety of the Chevrolet Colorado, barreling down Cahokia Drive, listening to Doctor Touchdown on KMKO Radio.

“I used to have an imaginary friend.”

He turned the volume down. “Huh?”

“But I don’t know if she was really imaginary. She came out at night, from the wetlands. She would tap on my window. Glowing like a gravestone. No one else saw her but I . . . saw her more and more after my sister died.” Max hadn’t known about this sister. “I think she wanted me to go away with her. She said there was a castle under the water at Napoleon Pond. Oh, God.” She slumped forward in the passenger seat as if something had punched her in the stomach. Max wondered if this was why she could not sleep facing any windows, why she slept in the pitch-black dark with the sheets over her head. “I never told anybody. But I guess seeing that thing on the farm . . . brought it all back.” She looked over at him plaintively. “You think I’m a freak, don’t you? Just say it. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”

It was a strange moment. He would dwell upon it later to try to determine what had possessed him to tell her the truth. Maybe he was shocked that a girl as presentable as Mallory could feel his bewildered shame. Maybe he thought shared alienation would deepen their bond. “I don’t think you’re a freak,” he said. “Something even stranger happened to me.”

She raised a pale brown eyebrow.

“You know that . . . thing on the farm?” She nodded. “Well, that’s my father.” He immediately exploded in terrified laughter. The sensible, screaming part of him wanted to backtrack before things got any worse—tack on a quick “Holy shit, just kidding!”—but when he opened his mouth only nonsense dribbled out. “My mother was a strange lady. She was the kind of person that chased tornadoes, you know? No jeep or cameras or nothing, she’d just head out the door and run after them. She’s dead now. Died a long time ago.”

Mallory was trying to smile. But she was waiting for that “just kidding!” and when it didn’t come—when every word that rolled down his chin was a confirmation of the wretched truth—Mallory gathered up the handles of her purse and said to take her home. She looked like she was about to jump out of the truck. “I have a lot of quizzes to grade,” she said.

He reached over, teeming with concern, but Mallory recoiled from his hand. It was as if she was saying,
No—I never touched you. I disown you. I don’t know who you even are.

The road dwindled. Her driveway was covered in fallen leaves. “Mallory,” he said, hoping to remind her of what they had been sharing for the past six months. “It doesn’t change anything.”

Mallory’s eyes widened; she was probably remembering the same six months in retrospective horror. “I can’t do this, Max.” The passenger door swung open and the cold rushed in. “I can’t do this now.”

And then she was gone. He had wanted to marry her. He had visualized himself walking into her parents’ house in the old part of Lincoln, all brick walls and roundabouts and leafy trees, and introducing himself to her father the banker. “
My name is Max,”
he would have said, and there would have been no doubt.

He started dreaming about hurting Mallory. He didn’t enjoy these dreams, but they satisfied the same ache in his belly that years earlier made him want to shake his mother until her head popped off. The Stag-Man was there too, watching and waiting, and after the floor swallowed Mallory’s ruined body, the Stag-Man would remain: bright and powerful and merciless. A fire in the woods, an old whispered force. Sometimes the Stag-Man called him “son.” Sometimes Max would curl around the creature’s feet because in the dark the Stag-Man was all there was to the world. With its crown of antlers it looked like some wise and wizened tree. And sometimes when Max woke up he would go to the bathroom mirror and rub his forehead to see if his own velvet-covered antlers were growing in.

Tom Lowell had cut the entrance fee in half. Word had spread of the Creeker’s negative side effects—
nausea, heartburn, indigestion—
and now the farmer stood alone in the middle of his driveway, hands on his hips, watching for vehicles on Cahokia Drive. “You think it makes ’em feel better to think this stuff doesn’t exist?” he asked Max, cocking his head, chicken-like. “Hey, isn’t this your third time?” Like the Stag-Man was some ride at Worlds of Fun.

Three drunks in Husker windbreakers were tossing peanut shells at the Stag-Man. They were giving themselves points for contact: five for the body, ten for the head. They did not deign to speak to it even in the way they spoke to their dogs, even though the body they shot at was just a taller, stronger version of their own. Max felt a pang of defensive anger and shame, but the Stag-Man seemed to be smiling back at them. Not that its deer mouth could grin, but its eyes were gleeful.

Max crept up to the cage. It was filthy, and swarming with bronze cockroaches. He sensed the Stag-Man watching him and his legs wobbled—the last two times he’d been in the tent he’d been able to hold steady, but not now. Moving his center of gravity closer to the earth quelled a little bit of nausea, but still he had to ask the question. “Do you know me?”

A peanut shell hit the back of his head. “That’s ten for me!” shouted one drunk; “Get out of the way!” said another. Max hissed at them and did not move. Instead he eased his hands between the bars, gingerly laying them on the floor of the cage. A cockroach ran over his empty ring finger and down his sleeve, but the Stag-Man was silent. Max swallowed. Of course it didn’t know him from Adam—God knew how many women from Cripple Creek had gone running into its forest on summer nights. He took out his wallet, and a small secret photo he kept behind his ID. A woman with coiffed black hair and a red Christmas sweater gazed up and out with gorgeous cat-eyes. She was a little drunk but still healthy then, surrounded by cheap tinsel. “This is my mother. Twenty-seven years ago, you . . . ”

The Stag-Man looked at the photo and curled its lips back, showing its teeth. Those teeth were pointed. Max shuddered, and one of the drunks started to retch. At first the man spat bile and beer, but upon reaching into the back of his throat, began to pull out a long and thin industrial wire.

Max should have gotten fired that week—not that he would have cared—because he couldn’t focus on his paperwork. The window behind his desk let in too much light and too much landscape. Cripple Creek seemed filled with broken pre-war churches and painted-over signs: the skeletons of older towns. No matter where he went—the Kwik Shop, the liquor store—these battered, ghostly layers peeked through the concrete he walked upon. “You remember that lady Chastity Dawes?”

Kevin glanced at him over the crest of a golden taco. Max had tried to bring up the chupacabra, but Kevin would always pretend to be choking on something or getting a phone call. “The one that gave birth to a deer?”

“Yeah. Whatever happened to her? I know the Gordons own the nursery now.”

“She killed herself, man. Well, ‘died of exposure.’ But when you ditch your car off Highway 2 in the middle of a snow storm so you can go walking through a corn field, I don’t know how you call it anything else.” Kevin shrugged. “I guess once you’ve given birth to a monster, what the fuck else are you going to do?”

Max tried to picture those cornfields. They were a grim sight in winter—the stalks either pale and withered or draped with silent, crushing snow. “Isn’t that right by Digby Forest?”

“Hell if I know. I haven’t been
there
since elementary school.”

“Field trip,” said Max. He remembered his own school-sponsored foray into Digby Forest—or rather, he remembered being terrified that he would see the Stag-Man. He was so frightened, so attuned to any blur of movement and any sound of breaking twigs, that he learned nothing at all about Nebraska’s native forests. And here Chastity Dawes had gone running
toward
this doom, just like his mother sinking in the bathtub. At the time he had thought,
Is this world so bad?
but maybe they were onto something. “She was going on a field trip.”

“What?” The taco muffled Kevin’s words. “You know, Beecham, sometimes you freak me out.” He kept talking, but Max was looking out the window. Clouds had swooped in from the south in violent formation, armies of fists against armies of hammers. Something was on its way. Judging by the speed of his heartbeat, it was probably his fate.

Tom Lowell and his daughter Caridee were found murdered in their living room on Tuesday the 20th. Tom on the couch, Caridee on the floor, the television broadcasting an episode of the soap opera
Coming Up Roses
. To say murdered was to put it kindly: they had been disemboweled. The Creeker was gone, its cage bent open like a soup can. Relief washed over Cripple Creek, because people assumed that the malformed beast that shared their name had gone back to Digby Forest. They were duly sorry about Caridee, but at least nobody would have to see that damn thing again. Max alone knew that it was still in town, hiding in collapsed barns and hobbled school buses, and he lay awake at night waiting for it to come crawling through his window. The thought still made his skin crawl, but it was oddly reassuring to feel that he still belonged to someone, something. It was nice to know that he was still someone’s son.

At Cabela’s, he looked at the Deer Head Mounts. There was a whole wall of them, right beside the Buffalo Mounts and European Mounts. Some had shoulders, some only necks. The replicas were cheaper, but the originals looked at Max with soft and sad fraternal recognition. They were kin to the Stag-Man, his father—only smaller, with fair and innocent faces. They did not look like monsters spat out of hell. They looked like the deer that the Deer Crossing signs warned of, the deer that lived in the narrow strips of woodland between the farms and the roads. He briefly imagined the heads of all the world’s beasts mounted upon a giant fortress wall. His own head was among them, bolted to a wooden slab.

The sales clerk was rambling statistics. “That rack’s a 17-pointer, with a 30-inch spread. Came off an early season northern whitetail . . . ”

“Can you take the skin off?” Max asked.

The sales clerk looked shocked. “No . . . but we’ve got deer skin rugs.”

They had grizzly skin rugs too, as well as wolf skin rugs and cougar skin rugs and muskox skin rugs and child-sized lynx and badger and beaver skin rugs. All had heads attached to their flat and floppy puppet bodies. Unlike the snarling predators—still fighting even in this state of preserved death—the buck’s mouth was stitched closed. “It’s got a canvas backing. Professionally taxidermied.”

“I’ll take it,” Max said.

That evening he sat on the couch and wrapped himself with the deer skin rug. The buck’s head sat upon his own—he had to slouch to keep it from falling down his back. His new skin was so suffocatingly warm that he turned off the heater. Then he exhaled, trying to feel comfortable. He dug his nails into the hide and imagined it to be his own. What were the odds, he wondered, of having been born into a human body? Maybe it was the wrong one. Maybe he should have been a ruminant all along, just like Chastity Dawes’ fawn.

A door opened—judging by the hard slap of metal on wood, it was the screen door in the kitchen. He looked up. The Stag-Man, bloody-mouthed, stood in the doorway. Its antlers were scraping the ceiling. At first it was just breathing, staring; then it came gliding forward, never raising its hooves off the fake wood-paneled floor.

“Father,” mumbled Max, hoping that it would see him in his deer form. The Stag-Man did look into the false glass eyes of the dead buck, but quickly lowered its gaze to Max’s real eyes, all hazel and watery and bursting with nerves. That gaze reached right inside his head and rummaged around. Within this visual stranglehold the house changed and decomposed. Filth rose to the surface. He saw his mother creeping down the stairs out of the corner of his eye. Neither she nor his father saw each other. Her bloated lips called his name. After ten seconds, Max had to look away.

The Stag-Man hovered above him, sniffing deeply, then withdrew with a grunt. It paused at the doorway. It was waiting, Max realized. It grunted again and Max got to his feet. They were sharing a floor now, father and son. It was like sharing an earth.