The Humanity of Monsters Read online

  “She was fat. Really fat. But she was always on a diet. I accused her of secretly bingeing and then I caught her at it.”

  I turned to place the instruments in my autoclave.

  “Sleepwalking. She did it in her sleep. She’d eat anything. Raw bacon. Raw mince. Whole slabs of cheese.”

  People come to me because I remove the nasty taste from their mouths. I’m good at identifying the source. I can tell by the taste of them and what I see in their eyes.

  He glanced at my assistant, wanting to talk but under privilege. I said to her, “Could you check our next appointment, please?” and she nodded, understanding.

  I picked up a scalpel and held it close to his eye. “You see how sharp it is? So sharp you won’t feel it as the blade gently separates the molecules. Sometimes a small slit in the gums releases toxins or tension. You didn’t like your wife getting fat?”

  “She was disgusting. You should have seen some of the crap she ate.”

  I looked at him, squinting a little.

  “You watched her. You didn’t stop her.”

  “I could’ve taken a football team in to watch her and she wouldn’t have woken up.”

  I felt I needed a witness to his words and, knowing Dan was in the office above, I pushed the speaker phone extension to connect me to him.

  “She ate cat shit. I swear. She picked it off the plate and ate it,” the murderer said. I bent over to check the back of his tongue. The smell of vegetable waste turned my stomach.

  “What was cat shit doing on a plate?” I asked.

  He reddened a little. When I took my fingers out of his mouth he said, “I just wanted to see if she’d eat it. And she did.”

  “Is she seeking help?” I asked. I wondered what the breath of someone with a sleep disorder would smell like.

  “She’s being helped by Jesus now,” he said. He lowered his eyes. “She ate a bowlful of dishwashing powder with milk. She was still holding the spoon when I found her in the morning.”

  There was a noise behind me as Dan came into the room. I turned to see he was wearing a white coat. His hands were thrust into the pockets.

  “You didn’t think to put poisons out of reach?” Dan said. The murderer looked up.

  “Sometimes the taste of the mouth, the smell of it, comes from deep within,” I said to the murderer. I flicked his solar plexus with my forefinger and he flinched. His smile faltered. I felt courageous.

  As he left, I kissed him. I kiss all of my clients, to learn their nature from the taste of their mouths. Virgins are salty, alcoholics sweet. Addicts taste like fake orange juice, the stuff you spoon into a glass then add water.

  Dan would not let me kiss him to find out if he tasted of ash.

  “Now me,” Dan said. He stretched over and kissed the man on the mouth, holding him by the shoulders so he couldn’t get away.

  The murderer recoiled. I smiled. He wiped his mouth. Scraped his teeth over his tongue.

  “See you in six months’ time,” I said.

  I had appointments with the Pretty Girls, and Dan wanted to come with me. He stopped at the ward doorway, staring in. He seemed to fill the space, a door himself.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You wait there.”

  Inside, I thought at first Jane was smiling. Her cheeks lifted and her eyes squinted closed. But there was no smile; she scraped her tongue with her teeth. It was an action I knew quite well. Clients trying to scrape the bad taste out of their mouths. They didn’t spit or rinse, though, so the action made me feel queasy. I imagined all that buildup behind their teeth. All the scrapings off their tongue.

  The girls were in a frenzy. Jane said, “We saw the Ash Mouth Man.” But they see so few men in the ward I thought, “Any man could be the Ash Mouth Man to these girls.” I tended their mouths, tried to clear away the bad taste. They didn’t want me to go. They were jealous of me, thinking I was going to kiss the Ash Mouth Man. Jane kept talking to make me stay longer, though it took her strength away. “My grandmother was kissed by him. She always said to watch out for handsome men, ’cos their kiss could be a danger. Then she kissed him and wasted away in about five days.”

  The girls murmured to each other. Five days! That’s a record! No one ever goes down in five days.

  In the next ward there are Pretty Boys, but not so many of them. They are much quieter than the girls. They sit in their beds and close their eyes most of the day. The ward is thick, hushed. They don’t get many visitors and they don’t want me as their dentist. They didn’t like me to attend them. They bite at me as if I was trying to thrust my fingers down their throats to choke them.

  Outside, Dan waited, staring in.

  “Do you find those girls attractive?” I said.

  “Of course not. They’re too skinny. They’re sick. I like healthy women. Strong women. That’s why I like you so much. You have the self-esteem to let me care for you. Not many women have that.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No. I really like helpless women,” he said. But he smiled.

  He smelt good to me, clean, with a light flowery aftershave which could seem feminine on another man. He was tall and broad; strong. I watched him lift a car to retrieve a paper I’d rolled onto while parking.

  “I could have moved the car,” I said, laughing at him.

  “No fun in that,” he said. He picked me up and carried me indoors.

  I quite enjoyed the sense of subjugation. I’d been strong all my life, sorting myself to school when my parents were too busy to care. I could not remember being carried by anyone, and the sensation was a comfort.

  Dan introduced me to life outside. Before I met him, I rarely saw daylight; too busy for a frivolous thing like the sun. Home, transport, work, transport, home, all before dawn and after dusk. Dan forced me to go out into the open. He said, “Your skin glows outdoors. Your hair moves in the breeze. You couldn’t be more beautiful.” So we walked. I really didn’t like being out. It seemed like time wasting.

  He picked me up from the surgery one sunny Friday and took my hand. “Come for a picnic,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  In my doorway, a stick man was slumped.

  “It’s the man who killed his wife,” I whispered.

  The man raised his arm weakly. “Dentist,” he rattled. “Dentist, wait!”

  “What happened to you? Are you sleepwalking now?” I asked.

  “I can’t eat. Everything I bite into tastes of ash. I can’t eat. I’m starving.” He lisped, and I could see that many of his white teeth had fallen out.

  “What did you do to me?” he whispered. He fell to his knees. Dan and I stepped around him and walked on. Dan took my hand, carrying a basket full of food between us. It banged against my legs, bruising my shins. We walked to a park and everywhere we went girls jumped at him. He kissed back, shrugging at me as if to say, “Who cares?” I watched them.

  “Why do it? Just tell them to go away,” I said. They annoyed me, those silly little girls.

  “I can’t help it. I try not to kiss them but the temptation is too strong. They’re always coming after me.”

  I had seen this.

  “Why? I know you’re a beautiful looking man, but why do they forget any manners or pride to kiss you?”

  I knew this was one of his secrets. One of the things he’d rather I didn’t know.

  “I don’t know, my love. The way I smell? They like my smell.”

  I looked at him sidelong. “Why did you kiss him? That murderer. Why?”

  Dan said nothing. I thought about how well he understood me. The meals he cooked, the massages he gave. The way he didn’t flinch from the job I did.

  So I didn’t confront him. I let his silence sit. But I knew his face at the Pretty Girls ward. I could still feel him fucking me in the car, pulling over into a car park and taking me,
after we left the Pretty Girls.

  “God, I want to kiss you,” he said.

  I could smell him, the ash fire warmth of him and I could feel my stomach shrinking. I thought of my favourite cake, its colour leached out and its flavour making my eyes water.

  “Kissing isn’t everything. We can live without kissing,” I said.

  “Maybe you can,” he said, and he leant forward, his eyes wide, the white parts smudgy, grey. He grabbed my shoulders. I usually loved his strength, the size of him, but I pulled away.

  “I don’t want to kiss you,” I said. I tucked my head under his arm and buried my face into his side. The warm fluffy wool of his jumper tickled my nose and I smothered a sneeze.

  “Bless you,” he said. He held my chin and lifted my face up. He leant towards me.

  He was insistent.

  It was a shock, even though I’d expected it. His tongue was fat and seemed to fill my cheeks, the roof of my mouth. My stomach roiled and I tried to pull away but his strong hands held my shoulders ’til he was done with his kiss.

  Then he let me go.

  I fell backward, one step, my heels wobbling but keeping me standing. I wiped my mouth. He winked at me and leant forward. His breath smelt sweet, like pineapple juice. His eyes were blue, clear and honest. You’d trust him if you didn’t know.

  The taste of ash filled my mouth.

  Nothing else happened, though. I took a sip of water and it tasted fresh, clean. A look of disappointment flickered on his face before he concealed it. I thought, You like it. You like turning women that way.

  I said, “Have you heard of the myth the Pretty Girls have? About the Ash Mouth Man?”

  I could see him visibly lifting, growing. Feeling legendary. His cheeks reddened. His face was so expressive I knew what he meant without hearing a word. I couldn’t bear to lose him but I could not allow him to make any more Pretty Girls.

  I waited ’til he was fast asleep that night, lying back, mouth open. I sat him forward so he wouldn’t choke, took up my scalpel, and with one perfect move I lifted his tongue and cut it out of his mouth.

  the bread we eat in dreams

  catherynne m. valente

  In a sea of long grass and tiny yellow blueberry flowers some ways off of Route 1, just about halfway between Cobscook Bay and Passamaquoddy Bay, the town of Sauve-Majeure puts up its back against the Bald Moose Mountains. It’s not a big place—looks a little like some big, old cannon shot a load of houses and half-finished streets at the foothills and left them where they fell. The sun gets here first out of just about anywhere in the country, turning all the windows bloody-orange and filling up a thousand lobster cages with shadows.

  Further up into the hills, outside the village but not so far that the post doesn’t come regular as rain, you’ll find a house all by itself in the middle of a tangly field of good red potatoes and green oats. The house is a snug little hall-and-parlor number with a moss-clotted roof and a couple of hundred years of whitewash on the stones. Sweet William and vervain and crimson beebalm wend out of the window-jambs, the door-hinges, the chimney blocks. There’s carrots in the kitchen garden, some onions, a basil plant that may or may not come back next year.

  You wouldn’t know it to look at the place, but a demon lives here.

  The rusted-out mailbox hangs on a couple of splinters and a single valiant, ancient bolt, its red flag at perpetual half-mast. Maybe there’s mail to go out, and maybe there isn’t. The demon’s name is Gemegishkirihallat, but the mailbox reads: Agnes G. and that seems respectable enough to the mailman, who always has to check to see if that red flag means business, even though in all his considerable experience working for the postal service, it never has. The demon is neither male nor female—that’s not how things work where it came from. But when it passed through the black door it came out Agnes on the other side. She’s stuck with she now, and after five hundred years, give or take, she’s just about used to it.

  The demon arrived before the town. She fell out of a red oak in the primeval forest that would eventually turn into Schism Street and Memorial Square into a white howl of snow and frozen sea-spray. She was naked, her body branded with four-spoked seals, wheels of banishment, and the seven psalms of hell. Her hair burnt off and she had no fingernails or toenails. The hair grew back—black, naturally—and the 16th century offered a range of options for completely covering female skin from chin to heel, black-burnt with the diamond trident-brand of Amdusias or not.

  The fingernails never came in. It’s not something many people ever had occasion to notice.

  The ice and lightning lasted for a month after she came; the moon got big and small again while the demon walked around the coves. Her footsteps marked the boundaries of the town to come, her heels boiling the snow, her breath full of thunder. When she hungered, which she did, often, for her appetites had never been small, she put her head back in the frigid, whipping storm and howled the primordial syllable that signified stag. Even through the squall and scream of the white air, one would always come, his delicate legs picking through the drifts, his antlers dripping icicles.

  She ate her stags whole in the dark, crunching the antlers in her teeth.

  Once, she called a pod of seals up out of the sea and slept on the frozen beach, their grey mottled bodies all around her. The heat of her warmed them, and they warmed her. In the morning the sand beneath them ran liquid and hot, the seals cooked and smoking.

  The demon built that house with her own hands. Still naked come spring, as she saw no particular reason not to be, she put her ear to the mud and listened for echoes. The sizzling blood of the earth moved beneath her in crosshatch patterns, and on her hands and knees she followed them until she found what she wanted. Hell is a lot like a bad neighbor: it occupies the space just next to earth, not quite on top of it or underneath it, just to the side, on the margins. And Hell drops its chestnuts over the fence with relish. Agnes was looking for the place on earth that shared a cherry tree and a water line with the house of Gemegishkirihallat in Hell. When she found it, she spoke to the trees in proto-Akkadian and they understood her; they fell and sheared themselves of needles and branches. Grasses dried in a moment and thatched themselves, eager to please her. With the heat of her hands she blanched sand into glass for her windows; she demanded the hills give her iron and clay for her oven, she growled at the ground to give her snap peas and onions.

  Some years later, a little Penobscot girl got lost in the woods while her tribe was making their long return from the warmer south. She did not know how to tell her father what she’d seen when she found him again, having never seen a house like the place the demon had built, with a patch of absurd English garden and a stone well and roses coming in bloody and thick. She only knew it was wrong somehow, that it belonged to someone, that it made her feel like digging a hole in the dirt and hiding in it forever.

  The demon looked out of the window when the child came. Her hair had grown so long by then it brushed her ankles. She put out a lump of raw, red, bleeding meat for the girl. Gemegishkirihallat had always been an excellent host. Before he marked her flesh with his trident, Amdusias had loved to eat her salted bread, dipping his great long unicorn’s horn into her black honey to drink.

  The child didn’t want it, but that didn’t bother Agnes. Everybody has a choice. That’s the whole point.

  Sauve-Majeure belongs to its demon. She called the town to herself, on account of being a creature of profound order. A demon cannot function alone. If they could, banishment would be no hurt. A demon craves company, their own peculiar camaraderie. Agnes was a wolf abandoned by her pack. She could not help how she sniffed and howled for her litter-mates, nor how that howl became a magnetic pull for the sort of human who also loves order, everything in its place, all souls accounted for, everyone blessed and punished according to strict and immutable laws.

  The first settlers were mostly French, bande
d together with whatever stray Puritans they’d picked up along the way north. Those Puritans would spice the Gallic stew of upper Maine for years, causing no end of trouble to Agnes, who, to be fair, was a witch and a succubus and everything else they ever called her, but that’s no excuse for being such poor neighbors, when you think about it.

  The demon waited. She waited for Martin le Clerq and Melchior Pelerin to raise their barns and houses, for Remy Mommacque to breed his dainty little cow to William Chudderley’s barrel of a bull, for John Cabot to hear disputes in his rough parlor. She waited for Hubert Sazarin to send for both money and a pair of smooth brown stones from Sauve-Majeure Abbey back home in Gironde, and use them to lay out the foundations of what he dreamed would be the Cathedral of St. Geraud and St. Adelard, the grandest edifice north of Boston. She waited for Thomas Dryland to get drunk on Magdeleine Loliot’s first and darkest beer, then march over to the Sazarin manse and knock him round the ears for flaunting his Papist devilry in the face of good honest folk. She waited for Dryland to take up a collection amongst the Protestant minority and, along with John Cabot and Quentin Pole, raised the frame of the Free Meeting House just across what would eventually be called Schism Street, glaring down the infant Cathedral, and pressed Quentin’s serious young son Lamentation into service as pastor. She waited, most importantly, for little Crespine Moutonnet to be born, the first child of Sauve-Majeure. (Named by Sazarin, stubbornly called Help-on-High by the congregation at the Free Meeting House up until Renewal Pole was shot over the whole business by Henri Sazarin in 1890, at which point it was generally agreed to let the matter drop and the county take the naming of the place—which they did, once Sazarin had quietly and handsomely paid the registrar the weight of his eldest daughter in coin, wool, beef, and blueberries.) She waited for the Dryland twins, Reformation and Revelation, for Madame le Clerq to bear her five boys, for Goodwife Wadham to deliver her redoubtable seven daughters and single stillborn son. She waited for Mathelin Minouflet to bring his gentle wife over the sea from Cluny—she arrived already, and embarrassingly, pregnant, since she had by then been separated from her good husband for five years. Mathelin would have beaten her soundly, but upon discovering that his brother had the fault of it, having assumed Mathelin dead and the responsibility of poor Charlotte his own, tightened his belt and hoped it would be a son. The demon waited for enough children to be born and grow up, for enough village to spring up, for enough order to assert itself that she could walk among them and be merely one of the growing, noisy lot of new young folk fighting over Schism Street and trading grey, damp wool for hard, new potatoes.