To Be A Monster pt. 4 (written by Allison Bohac)

Cheryl rolled over onto her back, groaning, flinging one arm over her face so she wouldn’t have to look up into the bright eye of the sky. She rubbed the scrap of flannel between her fingers, felt the way the blood had made the fiber stiff and dry around the edges. Billy had on a flannel shirt last night, didn’t he? She thought it over, trying to come up with a picture in her mind. Yeah. Yeah, he did. His pajamas. Because she’d hauled him out of bed.

Right. Okay. She had this all sorted out, no problem.

She got up into a sitting position, moving slow, trying to keep anything from protesting too loudly. The muscles in her arms and thighs felt like stretched out rubber bands. A quick check, though, and she was satisfied that none of the blood on the headstones belonged to her. Her skin was smooth and whole, and just starting to turn pink on her bare shoulders from the sun. A line of red bumps, as angry and tender as a rash of poison ivy, twisted up around the inside of her left calf. It itched like a belt of mosquito bites.

So if the blood definitely wasn’t hers, it didn’t bode well for Billy. She tugged the flannel between her fingers, tried to ignore the way her hands trembled from just the effort of sitting up. Christ. What a mess.

Everything after the bird had started up its poetry slam again was one big black hole. She had grabbed for Billy, had crashed landed on the ground, and that was all. If her brother wasn’t here, then what was the next logical conclusion? Even if that was him splattered around the headstones, that still left a lot of Billy unaccounted for. She ran a dry tongue along the inside of her mouth, over her teeth and up around the gums, worked up a pool of spit, hawked and spat it onto the grass. It came out sticky, faintly pink and tasting like a mouthful of copper pennies.

She put a hand on her belly, tried to figure out if it felt fuller than usual, the kind of after Thanksgiving full. It didn’t make a lot of sense—the idea that she had, you know, eaten her brother sometime between blacking out and waking up naked in a cemetery— but it was just behind the talking bird in that department, so...

She patted her stomach, reached down to absently scratch the rash on the inside of her leg. Hey Billy, you in there?

“Wouldn’t scratch that, if I was you.”

Cheryl started, looked up and dropped her arms to cover her chest. It was like in those dreams, when you found yourself naked at school in the hallway between periods. Only she was naked in a graveyard. And covered in blood. Which was technically kind of worse, but in a weird way, kind of better, too.

She expected to see a groundskeeper, or someone arriving early to pay their respects and strangely unperturbed by the sight of a naked girl sitting on the grass. But the only living thing she saw was Taffy, crouched low on the ground some ten feet away, eyeing her, tail twitching and body tense. She was trying to remember what the cat was even doing out here in the first place when comprehension dawned.

“Oh, Jesus, was that you?” She groaned, pressed her fingers into the bridge of her nose, trying to head off the headache that was brewing back there behind her eyes. Her head hurt, sharper and more intense than she would have thought possible, almost like someone was digging their way out of her skull with a pick axe. If she wasn’t careful, she might just have herself a Scanners moment here in the graveyard and join Billy across the headstones. “No. No no no. This Dr. Doolittle shit has got to stop.”

Someone chuckled, and she didn’t bother to open her eyes to see if it was the cat. “Besides,” she said, trying to focus on something outside the pain of the headache and figuring her voice was as good a thing as any, “you’re not the talking animal I need right now. I was hoping for something with feathers and a penchant for shitting on cars.”

“You’re talking to birds?” Another chuckle, and it came out heavy, and fat, and just the fucking way it would sound if Taffy could talk. She opened one eye and the cat was staring back at her. It tilted its head to one side. “That strike you as a little…crazy?”

“Oh, trust me, it’s crossed my mind.” She got her hands under her, pushed herself off the ground. The graveyard tilted and spun, and she had to shut her eyes and pull in a few long breaths through her nose. Her stomach felt like it was sloshing around inside her, and she imagined what it would be like to throw up now, to spray little bloody Billy-chunks all over the manicured grass.

Taffy watched her slow ascent. The cat had that look on its face, that smug cat look. God, she hated cats. “Where you off too?”

“I got a bird to find.” Fuck, her leg itched. It felt like there were ants crawling around down there, under the skin. Had she stepped in poison ivy last night, during their mad run to the graveyard? She thought it over as she bent down to examine the rash. The skin was an angry red, flushed and swollen with blood, the surface bubbled into blisters all along the length of her calf. Scratching it had opened some of them up, and a thin, bright ribbon of blood ran down her ankle and along her foot.

Great.

The world kept pitching and rolling as she walked, so she must’ve been a sad sorry fucking sight, staggering through a graveyard naked and bloody and trailed by a fat housecat.

They—the two of them, cat and girl—were almost at the south wall of the cemetery, a low stone wall topped with heavy cast iron spires, and Cheryl still didn’t really have a plan. Scale the wall and make a break for home, ducking into the bushes whenever a car drove by and hoping that nobody was out early watering the roses? It looked like that was her only choice. She hoped Mom wasn’t up yet. She still needed to come up with a good story for Billy’s whereabouts, and she was just too fucking tired to figure it all out. Maybe she could just eat Mom, too. She really needed an instruction manual for this monster gig, but the bird was nowhere to be seen.

Taffy yowled, low and alert, and Cheryl looked up, startled. Someone was moving among the graves, at the crest of the hill back the way they had come. It was a girl, thin and pale with hair so blond it was the color of milk gone sour. The raven was settled on one shoulder, head bobbing as the girl walked.

Cheryl stared after them. Taffy came up by one ankle, rubbing against the bare skin there. The cat was purring, soft, more of a vibration than an actual sound.

“Must be strange day, to make the dead get up for a stroll,” was all he said, but Cheryl didn’t wait around to ask him what he meant, didn’t stop to question what she was seeing. She was already running, the grass cool and sharp against the soles of her feet, shouting, “Gwen!”

The girl didn’t stop, and didn’t turn around. She was heading north, toward the gates of the cemetery and the funeral home that sat just inside them, an old two-story colonial house with the kind of big wraparound porch you associated with bed and breakfasts. Cheryl saw the wind pick up Gwen’s fine hair, lift it away from her neck and shoulders. The night they’d kissed—in Gwen’s parents’ basement, for the first time and the last time—Cheryl had put her hands on that neck, felt the shift of Gwen’s collarbone under the skin, fragile as a bird’s bones.

When Gwen had shoved her back, her nose wrinkled and mouth twisted up angry, they’d had a fight, the kind that started with shouting and arm waving and ended with the two of them getting royally, stupidly wasted. Gwen, too small to hold the Cointreau well, had passed out on the couch, and Cheryl had gone around the room, with the world spinning just as bad as it was now, picking up her stuff and hurling into a duffle bag. She’d finished off the Cointreau and switched to the Skyy, the only other thing her aunt kept in the cabinet below the bar. Eventually, she’d collapsed in her uncle’s chair and slipped into a weird, heavy sleep herself.

She’d woken sometime in the early morning, maybe only an hour later, maybe as little as a half an hour. Gwen, passed out on her back with her head titled up to show the pale line of her neck, was making a strange, burbling sound, mouth open, her body twitching like someone experiencing a low grade seizure. Cheryl could smell it all the way across the room; the sharp, sour tang of puke.

She remembered thinking, very clearly, before she drifted back into the oppressive dark of a drunk sleep, Let her. She deserves it.

Gwen seemed impossibly far ahead of her, even though she was walking and Cheryl was running as best as her wonky vision would let her. Everything was shuddering in and out of focus, like one of those indie art films shot with a handheld camera. She caught her foot on the edge of a plaque set into the grass and went down like the dumb blond in a horror movie breaking a heel while running from the serial killer. She scattered the memorial that had been propped up on the grave, the dried up stems of flowers and one sad, scruffy teddy bear that smelled like mold and wet stuffing.

She landed on her elbows, but it was her leg that suddenly flared up, the pain lighting up along the length of the rash like a fuse set on fire. She twisted around to look. The skin was bubbling like a pot of water coming to boil. Underneath the blisters, the muscle was ballooning up, distending, stretching the skin tight across it. Where she had scratched the skin open, something was pushing its way through. She saw thin, dark feelers emerge, waving gently, questing in the air like the heads of earthworms pulled suddenly from the ground.

This wasn’t what she had imagined at all. It fucking hurt, spreading now up her legs and she could feel something inside her writhing around, grinding against the bones of her ribcage and hips. Her stomach bloated, filled out, and the arm she was supporting herself with gave way and left her sprawled on the grass. She could feel her heart beating in her chest, but the rhythm was off, heavy and erratic and not the steady beat she had taken for granted all her life.

And then Gwen was there, leaning down to look at her, her long pale hair curtaining her face. The raven was there, making a low chuckle in its throat, and Taffy, too, twining around Gwen’s legs.

Cheryl found she couldn’t look Gwen in the face, so she focused on the raven instead. “You—this—this isn’t what I fucking wanted! I did exactly what you, you asked for! I killed my brother for you!”

“And ate him, too,” Taffy said mildly. “But that doesn’t trouble your conscience none, does it?” And it grinned the smug cat grin again.

There was a succession of cracks and her ribs gave way, chest collapsing as the support went. Cheryl found she didn’t even have the breath to scream, though she wanted to, more than she’d ever wanted anything. Her vision blurred, went dark around the edges. Please, let me pass right the fuck out. Please.

Gwen reached out, put a hand on the concave slope of her chest. She was smiling. If there was any pressure from the dead girl’s hand, Cheryl couldn’t feel it over the pain. She noticed for the first time that even now, five months dead, Gwen still smelled like the puke that had killed her.

Cheryl twisted as her spine popped, bent her backwards. “Please, Gwen—I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry--“

But it was the raven who answered her. “Gwen’s not kindly disposed toward you these days.”

It was getting harder to breathe. Lying the way she was, Cheryl could see the feelers extending from the split edges of her skin, over a foot long now and squirming across the grass. She reached out and grabbed one and yanked on it, trying to tear it out. It was soft, and stretched under the pressure. She felt it pull hard at something deep inside her leg, and the pain came on like a flash of summer lightning. She dropped it with a cry, and it snaked away from her.

“This isn’t what I wanted! I wanted to be a werewolf, you assfucking shit!” she howled.

The raven rustled its feathers, settling back on Gwen’s shoulder. “As I recall,” it said, “you asked to be a monster. I think you’ll find, child, that there are many kinds of monster in the world.”

Gwen’s eyes flicked away from her, to something behind Cheryl’s head. Cheryl let her head fall back to follow her gaze, tried to ignore the fact that her neck shouldn’t be able to crane that way.

On the porch of the funeral home, a small group of people had gathered. The men wore suits, the women dresses and skirts in somber colors. One small girl with honey-colored pigtails clutched her mother’s arm. Their cars lined the driveway by the cemetery entrance, parked in neat rows.

They were, all of them, staring out into the cemetery at the twisted, twitching thing on the grass, wide-eyed and with the blood drained from their faces.