My Patients Are All Mythical Monsters

0011 - Heavy Metal Guest

Victor turned the lock. The mechanism clicked, a sound that seemed far too loud in the sudden silence of the house. He hesitated, his hand hovering over the brass knob. Behind him, Fenrir had stopped chewing. The only sound was the low hum of the refrigerator.

"We're open," he whispered again, mostly to convince himself.

He pulled the door inward.

The fog outside was a solid wall of grey, swirling against the threshold like a living thing trying to force its way in. The silhouette stood there, framed by the porch light. She was shorter than he expected. Broader. And she was trembling.

"Help," she whispered. Her voice was brittle, like dry leaves skittering on pavement. "I... I fell."

She took a step forward.

The footstep landed with the weight of a pile driver. The entire hallway vibrated. Dust drifted down from the crown molding, settling on the polished wood like snow.

Victor blinked. He looked at her boots. They were covered in mud, but beneath the grime, they looked... grey. Thick. Heavy.

"Come in," Victor said, stepping back. "Quickly."

She stumbled. It wasn't the clumsy trip of a nervous human. It was the heavy, grinding lurch of a tectonic plate shifting. Her center of gravity was all wrong - too dense, too top-heavy. She pitched forward, her arms flailing like falling pillars.

"Whoa!" Victor instinctively reached out to catch her.

It was a mistake.

His hands gripped her arms through the thick trench coat. He expected the weight of a human woman, maybe a bit heavy with the coat. What he felt was solid, immovable mass. It was like trying to catch a falling tombstone.

Momentum betrayed him. He didn't slow her fall; gravity simply declared him irrelevant.

The impact was less of a fall and more of a demolition. The floorboards didn't just break; they exploded. Victor was thrown backward by the sheer kinetic force, sliding across the polished wood until his back slammed against the wall.

Dust billowed up in a choking cloud. Where he had been standing a second ago, there was now a jagged crater. The woman hadn't landed on the floor. She had gone through it, embedding herself halfway into the subflooring.

Victor gasped, checking his ribs. Intact. If he hadn't been thrown clear, he would have been paste.

The woman groaned from the center of the debris. She shifted - another earth-shaking grind of stone against broken timber - and curled into a ball.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I'm so sorry. I'm just... so heavy."

Victor wheezed, trying to reinflate his lungs. He looked at his hands. They were numb. Freezing. A deep, biting chill radiated from his palms, heavy and dense like granite in winter. A ringing sound filled his ears, high and sharp, like a chisel striking stone. It pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat - a metallic, relentless cadence.

He knew that sound. It wasn't tinnitus. It was the Gnosis. The ancestral headache kicking in to tell him exactly what kind of monster was currently crushing his hallway floor.

"Intruder!"

Fenrir rounded the corner from the kitchen, his claws scrambling for traction on the hardwood. He skidded to a halt, hackles raised, a low growl rumbling in his chest. His eyes burned with blue fire.

He sniffed the air. Once. Twice.

The growl died instantly. He wrinkled his nose.

"Pigeons," Fenrir said, his voice dripping with disdain. "And old rain. And... bird poop."

The woman on the floor froze. She pulled the collar of her trench coat up, trying to hide her face. "Don't look at me," she whimpered.

"It is a statue," Fenrir announced. He walked closer, sniffing the hem of her coat. "Why is the garden ornament inside? It smells like the outside."

"Fenrir, back off," Victor managed to say, pushing himself up to a sitting position. His ribs ached. "She's a patient."

"She is a rock," Fenrir argued. "Rocks belong in the garden. Or on the roof. Not on the wood."

The woman flinched at the word roof. She tried to push herself up. Her hands pressed against the floor.

The oak plank beneath her right hand snapped like a dry twig. The sharp report echoed in the quiet house. She froze, terrified to move.

"It's okay," Victor said, his voice steady despite the pain in his chest. He shifted his position, careful not to put weight on his own bruised ribs. "We treat... heavy cases. But you need to take off the coat. It's dragging you down."

"I can't," she whispered. "I'm... hideous."

"I have a giant wolf in my kitchen and a slime living in my doormat," Victor said. He rubbed his temples, trying to massage away the sound of the chisel. "Hideous is relative. Take off the coat."

She hesitated. Then, slowly, she sat up. The floor groaned again. She undid the buttons with trembling, grey fingers. She shrugged the heavy wool off her shoulders.

Victor didn't gasp. He had practiced his poker face in the mirror for three years.

Under the coat, she was grey. All grey. Her skin was the texture of weathered sandstone, pitted and rough. Patches of green moss clung to her collarbone and the hollow of her throat. Her "clothes" - a flowing tunic - defied logic. The folds of drapery didn't rustle; they ground against each other. They were carved directly into her body, rigid stone mimicking soft fabric.

She wasn't wearing a gargoyle costume. She was the architecture.

"A Gargouille," Victor murmured. The word tasted like dust.

"I fell," she said, her eyes - solid white marble without pupils - fixed on the floor. "I was on the North Tower. The wind was... I just... fell."

Victor looked at the floor. Splintered wood. Mud. Gravel. A fine layer of stone dust where she had landed.

"You are making a mess," Fenrir observed. "The Mat will be upset."

"The Mat," Victor repeated. He looked at the kitchen door. An idea formed. A terrible, wonderful idea.

"MAT!" Victor yelled. "FRONT AND CENTER!"

Silence.

"I know you can hear me!" Victor shouted. "Get in here or I feed you to the dog!"

A wet, sliding sound came from the kitchen. The Slime - now shaped like a flat, grey rectangle - slithered into the hallway. It moved reluctantly, leaving a faint trail of dampness. It stopped a few feet away, rippling with anxiety.

Then it saw the Gargoyle.

The Slime turned pale white. It flattened itself even further, trying to become two-dimensional.

Rock beats Scissors. Rock definitely beats Slime.

"Clean up the gravel," Victor commanded, pointing to the debris around the Gargoyle.

The Slime hesitated. It looked at the massive stone woman. It looked at the sharp pieces of oak.

"Now," Victor added.

Fenrir took a step forward, jaws snapping.

The Slime surged into action. It rushed forward, wrapping itself around the splinters and the gravel. It scrubbed the floor with frantic energy, polishing the wood until it shone, terrified of being stepped on by the living statue.

The Gargoyle watched this with wide, marble eyes. "Is... is that a Shoggoth?"

"It's an intern," Victor said. "He's working off a debt."

"So," Victor said, shifting to a more comfortable position on the floor. He didn't bother offering her a chair. There was an antique wooden chair next to the coat rack, but he looked at her hips - solid stone - and then at the chair's spindly legs. No.

"You fell," Victor continued. "From the North Tower. That's... the Cathedral?"

She nodded. Grind~. The sound of stone on stone. "Yes. St. Jude's."

"Did someone push you?"

"No." She picked at a patch of moss on her arm. "I... I looked down."

Victor paused. The chisel in his head struck a dissonant chord. "You looked down. You're a gargoyle. Your job is to look down. You're a watcher."

"I know!" she wailed. A tear leaked from her eye. Thick, grey slurry dripped down her cheek, landing on the floor with a heavy plop. No water, just wet dust. "But it's so high. And the people are so small. And the wind... it pulls at you. I just... I got dizzy."

Victor stared at her. "You have vertigo."

"Yes."

"You're a gargoyle with vertigo."

"Acrophobia," she corrected, sniffing. "I looked it up."

"Right. Acrophobia." Victor rubbed his face. "And because you were dizzy..."

"I let go," she whispered. "I was holding the gutter. And I just... let go. I fell six stories. I landed in a dumpster. It hurt."

"I bet it did," Victor said. He glanced at the dumpster-shaped dent she would have left. "And now?"

"I can't go back," she said, her voice rising in panic. "I can't climb up there. And I can't fly - physics doesn't work that way. Stone doesn't generate lift. The tourists think we fly, but we just... fall with style. And if I go back... the Bishop... he'll chip me. He'll turn me into gravel for the driveway."

She looked at Victor, her marble eyes desperate. "Please. I heard you help monsters. I can pay. I have... I have a loose brick. It's gold."

She reached into her pocket - a carved fold in her hip - and pulled out a gold ingot. It was old, stamped with a cross, and covered in bird lime. She held it out.

Victor looked at the gold. He looked at the hole in his floor. He looked at the debt counter in his head.

"We accept gold," Victor said.

"You can stay," Victor said. "For treatment. Exposure therapy. We start low. Ground floor."

"Thank you," she sobbed. "Thank you."

"But," Victor added, "we have a logistical problem."

He looked at the stairs. They were old wood.

"You can't go upstairs," Victor said. "You'll go through the steps. You can't sit on the furniture. You can't... honestly, you can't really move around too much."

"I can sit still," she promised. "I'm good at sitting still. I sat still for three hundred years."

"Good," Victor said. "You can sleep in the foyer. On the... well, on the foundation. It's the strongest part of the house."

"She is blocking the path to the kitchen," Fenrir complained. "I have to walk around her to get ham."

"Deal with it," Victor said. He grabbed the edge of the console table to pull himself up.

A loud, sharp noise came from above. Not the ceiling itself, but the connection where the walls met the plaster.

Victor froze. They all looked up.

The doorframe to the kitchen groaned and shifted an inch to the left. Then, a spiderweb fracture appeared in the plaster of the ceiling, directly above the Gargoyle's head. The massive weight on the floor joists was pulling the vertical studs inward, dragging the roof down with them.

Dust rained down on her mossy hair.

"Um," the Gargoyle said. "Is that normal?"

"No," Victor said slowly.

The house groaned. A deep, structural groan that vibrated through the soles of Victor's shoes. The frame itself was twisting. The Blackwood Manor was old, built of seasoned oak, but it was not a Gothic Cathedral. It was designed to hold people, not a half-ton of living architectural granite.

"I think," Victor whispered, staring at the widening c***k, "I think I broke the house."

The c***k spread. It ran down the wall, tearing the wallpaper.

"Or," Fenrir suggested, tilting his head, "the house is trying to eat her."

"No," Victor said. "It's physics. Just... nobody move."

He stood there, listening to the house settle around the massive weight of his new patient, and wondered if his insurance covered "crushed by gravity."

Probably not.