ME & THE MONSTER

FREAKS

Ronald E. Mellketh was a saint.

Literally.

He’d boast about it to anyone who’d listen, who weren’t that too many people, mainly because of the small negligible fact that he was dead. He’d been very dead for five years and he wasn’t enjoying himself one little bit.

He wasn’t sure why he’d become a saint, as a matter of fact. Okay, he was an angel, which after all looked good on your C.V. There was no point trying to deny it. And he’d always prided himself on being a selfless person, true. Maybe it was the miracle stuff that got people’s attention. The country had been going through a rough patch of draughts and economic crisis, he remembered. He’d stood staring out of the window one morning, while Agnes moaned that they were broke. He’d waved a hand at her, all casual-like, and said: “My dear, don’t you worry about a thing. I promise things will look up. You have my word.” Then he’d clutched a hand to his chest, startled. His heart had always given him trouble. He’d toppled over himself and he hadn’t got up again.

Well.

Not quite as himself, anyway.

It was rather irritating, being dead, to tell you the truth. Most people looked through you and talked through you and some even had the goddamn nerve to walk through you too. Being dead didn’t mean you had no feelings, you know. People were so bloody inconsiderate sometimes.

On the bright side, things had perked up, just as he’d promised, hence the saint title. But it was so boring nowadays. There wasn’t anything you could do, really. The novelty of walking through walls and turning up at séances while old ladies paled wore off after a day or two. He couldn’t even do some good, old-fashioned haunting, as he’d never had an enemy in his life, what with being a full-time saint and everything.

In a nutshell, it was overrated, this whole dead thing.

The doorbell rang.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he grumbled.

A waft of lemon cologne accompanied his every step. Beneath it curled the smell of something rank. He nudged the door open with his elbow; his left arm ended in a stump above the wrist.

On the doorstep, hands in pockets, very much alive, stood his eldest nephew, in that elegantly indolent manner of his. He was wearing a crisp white shirt and jeans. He raised blue eyes at Ronald and grinned.

“Hey, Uncle. How are you doing?”

Ronald clasped him on the shoulder.

“M’boy, you made it!”

The young man shook his black hair out of his eyes.

“I wouldn’t miss your late B-day for the world.” He lifted the bag in his grasp for Ronald to see, a mischievous expression bursting across his face. “And I’ve brought presents.”

Ronald was beaming. This nephew of his always had the same effect on him.

“For me?”

The younger man chuckled at his eagerness. “For all four of you.”

“You’re too good to us, lad. Too good. Now get inside, get inside; your brother is bursting to see you.”

His nephew scrubbed his shoes clean on the doormat, stepped over the threshold and clicked the heavy oak door shut.

The man’s name was Kal. He was twenty-two, slender, golden-smiled. Also, he was an angel, and a demon-hunter. He looked as though he had everything in the world at the reach of his fingertips.

Except he didn’t.

Not really.

Not at all.

First of all, he had no money. Well, all right, he did, but he wasn’t as comfortably off as he would’ve liked. Second, he had no parents: both his angel father and his human mother had been murdered by demons a decade ago. And last, he had no peace of mind, and he hadn’t had any of it for the last ten years. Oh, and he had no conscience, or a strange conscience of sorts. All four of the gifts for his family had been skilfully and lovingly stolen the day before.

***

I was beginning to suspect that inviting Ben over for the night had been a mistake. We’d had dinner at a fancy Mexican restaurant, then shared a whole bottle of wine between us. I blamed the latter for my sudden enthusiasm for having him stay the night.

It didn’t seem such a good idea now that its effects were wearing off.

“Ow, Rae, don’t poke your elbow into my thigh, it hurts.”

“Sorry. But you quit pulling at my hair or holding my head like that. It’s horrible, I feel like I’m about to choke.”

“Okay, I won’t. Don’t want you puking all over me, thanks.”

Definitely a mistake.

***

“They look stunning, darling,” Agnes Mellketh cooed. She arranged the flowers into a vase by the kitchen window. “Orchids. My favourites. So thoughtful of you, Kal. Must have cost a fortune.”

He squeezed her plump hand. The purple polish on her nails was chipping off.

“My pleasure, Auntie. Thanks for having me over.”

“My boy, don’t be silly. You’re always welcome here,” Ronald said. He sank a Californian maki roll in soya sauce. A sluglike brown tongue poked out of his mouth and ran over the food. He shook his head. “Can’t even bloody taste them properly anymore. Just the memory of it. Bah. Don’t die, any of you, y’hear me?”

“You spoil Dad so, Kal,” teenage Cassandra sniffed. “Gourmet sushi? Really? Couldn’t you have got him something more – edifying?”

Kal rolled his eyes at his cousin, good-naturedly.

“You weren’t half quick to try the designer jacket on, though,” he said. “That’s not very, ah, edifying.”

Cassandra blushed and glowered at him in a decidedly un-angellike way.

“Hand!” Ronald bellowed all of a sudden, making them start. “Get back here this minute!”

Something was scuttling fast over the polka-dotted tablecloth. It knocked the soya bottle over in the process. Maybe you could have mistaken it for an enormous spider. Well, if it weren’t for the veins that protruded under the skin. Or the talonlike nails that curved at the end of it, darkened with five years’ grime. It was laden with rings and bracelets that jingled with the motion.

Ronald Mellketh lunged forward across the table and seized the hand.

“For god’s sake,” he snapped, and held it upside down, so that the long fingers dangled in mid-air. “Now let go of Kal’s ring.” The thing writhed in his grasp. “And Mrs Heevey’s wedding band, and the neighbour’s bracelets. All of it, mind. I swear I’ll chop every phalange off if you continue with this idiotic behaviour. I don’t mind, I can’t feel a thing anymore.”

He shook it more forcefully. An assortment of jewellery clattered down on top of the sushi tray.

“There you go, Kal. Sorry. It loves nicking bright stuff off people, Hand does.” Ronald sighed and addressed the spider of decayed flesh and bone again. “You make me ashamed. Yes, ashamed. I sure as anything never stole a thing in my life with you. Just because I’m dead now and you’re no longer attached to my body doesn’t mean you ought to act like a common thief, see. Run along now, and don’t disturb us again. I think there might be a rat or two left in the attic if you’re feeling peckish. No, the cat’s out of the question; we’re much too fond of it. Yes, that’s my final answer. Now go.”

The tendons on the hand’s surface tautened. Then it scurried over their plates, down the table and vanished from sight.

“Incorrigible, that thing is,” Ronald said, shaking his head. He looked up to find Kal staring at him. “What? I thought you’d seen it before? Now don’t look so shocked, my boy.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it a couple of times,” Kal said. “But it gives me the creeps still. I mean, it used to be your own hand, Uncle. It’s sort of weird.”

“Nonsense,” Ronald said, in brisk tones. “Yes, it used to be my left hand, back when I was alive. Got severed off. Now it’s running about the house. So what? Odder things are happening every day.”

He broke off and looked down the table. “Hand, I’m feeding you to Arthur Rabber’s German Shepherd if you don’t behave, I’m warning you!”

***

I hissed and slapped Ben’s hand off my cheek.

“Quit doing that, Ben,” I whispered from underneath him. “You know I’m – that I have – "

He looked at me. “A scar?”

I felt a burning surge of shame, as I always did when the subject came up. Years of bullying at school had worn my confidence down. Weirdo, they’d called me. Witch, loner. It didn’t help that I’d been a naturally shy kid. I didn’t make friends easily, and squashed down by their alternating mocking cruelty and blatant ignoring, it turned me into a silent, anxious teenager.

No one would sit next to me in class willingly, and if they did, they’d perch on the farthest edge of the chair, as though being scarred were an infectious disease. There was no one I could gossip and giggle and exchange notes with during lessons. No one I could link my arm through and share crisps with at break time. No one I could invite over for sleepovers. The loneliness was vast, sharp as the brightest glass, hollow as hunger. It made my bones ache. It sucked the life from me, little by little, day after day.

You bring out the monster inside me, my bullies would say.

It does things to you, being bullied, you know. Crumbles you. Changes you into someone bitter and scared, into a half-person who never dares speak up.

My classmates would also mutter about Mum. “She has people over at theirs every night,” they’d snigger. “She – you know – entertains them.”

Somehow they’d got hold of this information, but what they were driving at was far from the truth. There again, what really went on at home every now and again, when we were going through a rough patch and needed every extra pound that could come in, wouldn’t have set their minds at ease either.

That’s the thing about humans, you see. Despite what they might believe, they need no demonic influence to be infinitely cruel. They manage on their own extremely well indeed. However, deep down in my heart, I knew who was really to blame for the bullying, for turning me into a ghost version of myself.

The angels’. They’d marked me that night on that wet street, and they’d ruined everything.

Sometimes I’d lock myself in the toilet and force myself to stare at my face in the mirror. I’d trace the snake-like outline of the long white scar that began under my right eye, ran down the cheek and ended near the corner of my mouth. You bring out the monster inside me. I stared at it, and hated it, and sometimes I hated myself. I was so self-conscious about the scar I couldn’t even leave the house without covering it with a thick layer of makeup.

I didn’t fit in anywhere. At home I wasn’t bad enough, at school I wasn’t good enough, cool enough, pretty enough.

I was a freak.

***

“It’s heart-wrenching, isn’t it, to think of all the starving people in the world,” Cassandra declared, looking pointedly at Kal’s steaming plate, piled high with potatoes and meat.

“Absolutely.” Kal wolfed down another chunk of roast beef. Oh God, she was wearing The Face. He steeled himself. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

She glared at him in stony silence.

“What do you want me to do about it, Cass?” he said.

Cassandra flung her thin hands into the air. “I don’t know!” she said. “You’re an angel, aren’t you, same as us all? Perhaps seek the Greater Good? Rings any bells?”

Kal could feel a giant headache starting at the back of his skull.

“Look, Cass, I get what you’re trying to say,” he told her.

His eyes met Nate’s – blue like his own – and he shot him a small, sly smile. Cass was too much to handle sometimes, his brother had once confessed. Nate smiled back and returned to poring over his Star Wars comic, engrossed. It was his favourite, and Kal had managed to find the vintage collector’s edition, much to his brother’s glee.

“I do my best, okay?” It wasn’t true, though. It had been a long time since he’d been totally truthful with anyone, come to think about it. “But it really beats me why starving myself would help anyone in the first place, to be honest.”

There. He’d been truthful for once. That was a start, wasn’t it? He dipped a square of wholemeal bread into a pool of sauce. Man, that was some lunch.

There was a suspiciously loud silence. He glanced up at his family. Uh-oh. Wrong thing to say. The four people at the kitchen table were all now wearing The Face.

Shit.

***

“Rae, don’t move, will you, I just keep slipping off you.”

“Look, I’m not a doll, you know. I can’t help moving. Let’s just go to sleep, yeah?”

“Oh, don’t be like that. Come on. Just a few minutes more, come on.”

***

“My dear, it’s the intention that counts,” Agnes said, her gentle voice matching the tones she used on the abused women and the abandoned children she worked with. She’d been a social worker for almost twenty years and was excellent at it. It was impossible not to be soothed by Agnes. “The intention of sacrifice and selflessness and empathy. I think it would do you good to starve for a few days, just like Cass is doing, see how it goes. Does wonders for the spirit, doesn’t it, Cass? Cleanses the soul and removes all the calories, born from a life of luxury, all the petty worries. Besides, you get such awfully glamorous cheekbones.”

“I’m good, Auntie,” Kal said, the epitome of politeness.

Did he dare eat the remaining piece of soggy bread on his plate? Meanwhile, Cassandra took a tight-lipped, zero-calorie sip of tap water.

“Sounds like a ball, being a martyr and all, but not like my kind of thing, really. Thanks for the offer, though. I’ll bear it in mind,” he added.

“Your brother is going to volunteer at the homeless shelter next week, aren’t you, Nathaniel?” Ronald said, licking a grubby finger.

Nathaniel Mellketh nodded and finished eating quietly. He’d been wordless throughout the entire meal. He conjured to mind the image of a prepubescent scrawny mouse.

“Excellent, kid,” Ronald said. “Excellent. You’ll do us proud.”

Ronald noticed the boy’s eyes flickering towards him. Turning scarlet, he fastened his woollen jacket shut, blocking from sight the glimpse of spleen, darkened and rotting, at the left corner of his see-through abdomen.

“No staring,” he snarled. “Mind your manners, Nate. Give your uncle some privacy, for God’s sake.”

“Sorry, Uncle,” the boy murmured.

Nate was twelve years old, the same age Kal had been when his parents – when they’d been – when it happened – and his aunt and uncle had welcomed them into their home and lovingly raised them along with Cassandra as if they were their own children too. Nate had been a toddler at the time, and had been living with them ever since, while Kal had left for university when he turned eighteen.

Nate sat at the family table with his head bowed, his blond hair dishevelled. His thin shoulders were hunched over his plate, like he’d lost everything and he now had nothing whatsoever left.

Which wasn’t true.

Not really.

Not at all.

First, he had a quick-witted mind. He wanted to be an inventor or a scientist; whenever he could he’d shut himself in his aunt’s garden shed and carry out all sorts of experiments on assorted bits and pieces of machinery he came across at. Second, he had a generous nature that made it effortless to like him. And last, he had an older brother who loved him more than anything else in the world.

Kal would kill every remaining demon walking the face of Earth with his bare hands before he let Nate suffer at their hands. He swore it to all the gods he’d so long ago lost faith in. He owed it to Nate. He owed it to his parents. And he owed it to himself.

It wasn’t a threat, though. Kal Mellketh made no threats.

It was a promise.