The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

You are a saint, whispered the Voice inside his mind.

A saint. He nodded to himself. A saint in a church.

Saint John felt the fear in his heart recede. Not completely, but enough for strength to flood into his hands from the knives he held; and from his hands to his arms and the muscles in his chest, and to the furnace of his heart.

He could feel his mouth twist in contempt. He raised his arms to his sides, the blades appearing to spark with fire as they caught stray bits of light from the fires burning beyond the broken stained glass windows.

“I am Saint John of the Ashes,” he cried in his booming voice. “Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus … in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi!”

A figure stepped out from behind the screen. He was dressed in filthy rags and held one of Saint John’s gleaming knives in his fist.

“Go away!” said the figure.

Saint John had begun to smile, but his smile faltered and then fell from his lips.

If this was a demon, then it was a demon wearing the disguise of a cherub. The fist that was wrapped around the knife was barely large enough to encircle the handle. Its face was round-cheeked but hollow-eyed, dusted with dirt and soot, dried snot around the nostrils, tear tracks in the grime. And upon the shoulder of the T- shirt he wore was a single bloody handprint. A child’s handprint.

The cherub pointed the knife at Saint John.

“Go away!” he said again. His voice was small and high, but there was so much raw power in it that Saint John was almost inclined to take a backward step. But he did not.

He asked, “Who are you to tell me to leave my father’s house?”

The cherub’s eyes were blue and filled with a fascinating complexity of emotions. His body trembled, perhaps with hunger or with sickness from one of the plagues; or fear. Or, Saint John considered, with rage barely contained.

This was surely no demon. He held a sanctified blade in a way that showed he understood its nature and purpose; and yet he appeared in the face and form of a child of perhaps eight. Or … seven?

That would be exciting.

That would be wonderful, perhaps miraculous; and Saint John was now convinced that he was in the presence of the miraculous. Or on its precipice.

Saint John took a step forward. The cherub — or child, if it was only that — held his ground, but he raised his knife a few inches higher, pointing it at Saint John’s face and giving it a meaningful shake. He held the knife well. Not perfectly, but with instinct.

“I’m not messing,” said the cherub. “Go away.”

Saint John was close enough to kill this child. He had the reach and the knives; but he merely smiled.

“Why should I leave?”

“This is our house.”

Ah. Our. A slip.

Saint John thought of the scuffle of footprints in the ash. And of fifteen missing knives.

“This is my father’s house,” Saint John said. “This is the house of God.”

“You don’t live here,” insisted the boy.

“I do.”

In truth Saint John had never been inside this particular church before, but that didn’t matter. A church was a church was a church, and he was a saint after all.

“Who’s there?” said another voice. A woman’s voice. Vague and dreamy and slurry. Saint John smiled.

“Rose …?”

There was a stirring behind the screen and the hushed whispering of many voices. More than a dozen, perhaps many more. Male and female, and all tiny except for Rose. Shadows moved behind the screen, and then Rose stepped out. She wore a choir robe that was clean and lovely in tones of purple and gold; but her face was still dirty and bloody and puffed.

“You’re real?” she asked as she stared at Saint John. “I thought I dreamed you.”

“Perhaps you have,” said Saint John, and he wondered for a moment if he, too, was dreaming, or if he was a character in this woman’s dream. “I am sometimes only a dream.”

Her face flickered with confusion. The drugs the men had given her held sway over her; however, she kept coming back to focus. Saint John knew and recognized that as the habit of someone who was often under the influence and practiced at functioning through it.

“Are these your kids?”

As she asked that, more of the cherubs came out from behind the screen. Many of them carried knives. His knives. The cherubs were tiny, the youngest in diapers, the oldest the same age as the blue-eyed boy who still pointed his knife at Saint John’s face.

Saint John counted them. Twenty-six. The firelight from outside threw their shadows against the wall, and their shadows were much larger. Did the shadows have wings? Saint John could not be sure.

“Go away!” growled the lead boy. “Or I’ll hurt you.”

“Hey,” slurred Rose, “be nice!”

“He’s one of them!”

Rose’s eyes cleared for a moment. She studied Saint John and his knives; then she shook her head. “No, kid … he isn’t. He’s the one who saved me. I prayed to God and He sent him to save me.”

The lead boy’s eyes faltered, and he flicked a glance at Rose. In that moment of inattention Saint John could have cut the child’s throat or cut the tendons of the hand holding the knife. He could have dropped one of his own knives and used his hand to pluck the knife from the boy.

He did none of those things.

Instead he waited, letting the boy figure it out and come to a decision. Allowing the boy his strength. The boy refocused on Saint John, and his eyes hardened. “Where’d they take Tommy?”

“I don’t know who Tommy is.”

“You took him. Where’d you take him?”

The other children buzzed when Tommy’s name was mentioned, and now their eyes focused on Saint John. He saw tiny fists tighten around knife handles; and the sight filled him with great love for these children. Such beautiful rage. They were ready to use those knives. How strange and wonderful that was. How rare.

How like him; like the boy he had been when whore was burned onto his back and he had first listened to the Voice and heard the song of the blade.

“I do not know anyone named Tommy,” he said. “I have never seen any of you before, except Rose, and I met her only a few minutes ago.”

“Bull!” the lead boy snapped.

“Shhh,” said Saint John. He took a half step forward, almost within the child’s striking range. “Listen to me.”

The boy’s eyes drifted down, and Saint John could see that he was assessing the new distance between them. So bright a child. When his eyes came back up, the truth was there. He knew that he was in range of Saint John’s blades and overmatched by his reach. Even so, he did not lower his knife — and it was his now. He had claimed it by right of justice, and Saint John was fine with that.

So Saint John lowered his own knives. He slid them one at a time into their thigh sheaths and stood apparently unarmed and vulnerable in front of this cherub. He saw the child’s eyes sharpen as he realized the implication of this, the threat unspoken behind the sham of vulnerability. Most adults would never see that. Only someone graced by the Sight could see that.

The boy hears the Voice, thought Saint John.

“Tell me who you are,” he said, “and tell me what happened to Tommy.”

6.

THE LEAD BOY told the story.

They were orphans. They lived with four hundred other children at St. Mary’s Home for Children.

Mary. Ah. That name stabbed Saint John through the heart. Her name. His mother.