The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

“The end of the week? How the hell am I supposed to — ”

The envelope appeared as if from nowhere. It looked thick tonight; a good ten grand, if his eyes served him right. More than enough to put him back to work. At least for now.

“All right,” Ian said. “End of the week.”

Fowler hadn’t always been that way. Ian remembered a slimmer version, eager for nothing more than his next square meal. But he catered to a very eccentric group of customers, and their money was a powerful drug. And they were insatiable. If the eyes were windows to the soul, then Fowler had been blinded long ago. It would not be long before he crossed over completely and became like those he chose to serve.

Back at his studio apartment, Ian searched for his muse among the shadows that lined his walls. He had cleared most of the central space for his work. He had kept only a bed and two ragged chairs in one corner, and installed a slightly concave sheet-metal stage with a drain in the middle of the room.

The floor he kept bare and polished in case of spatters. The large, two-story-high warehouse windows let in plenty of light when he wanted it. But for the most part he kept the monstrous blinds drawn, preferring to work by candlelight, or the dark.

One of his two walk-in freezers still held a few loose ends, but nothing spoke to him as he stood within the drifting mist. It wouldn’t do to throw something together with spare parts. He had something in mind, but he needed to gather the right materials.

He stopped first at Anna’s place. She lived in a brownstone overlooking the river, and the stench of industrial waste wafted up through closed windows and doors and into kitchens and bedrooms and clung to the clothes hanging in closets. But tonight the air was clear, and Anna answered his knock in nothing but a nightshirt and the black silk underwear he’d bought her for her birthday three weeks before.

“Want a drink?” she asked him as he followed her smooth, bare legs into the kitchen. “I was just going to mix up something fun.”

“I’ll take anything wet.”

She took ice from the freezer, threw tequila and a sweet mix into a shaker, and poured liquid over misted glass. He heard a soft pop as an ice cube cracked, and took a sip through slightly tender lips.

“Business?”

“You don’t want to know.”

She shrugged. “You’re busy. My sister’s in town next week. Will you be too busy for that?” She leaned back against the counter. A slight arch in her spine outlined her nipples against the fabric of her shirt. He took a long, slow look, from blood-painted toes and shapely calves past round hips and tapered waist, up to a face that held a full Spanish mouth and almond-coffee eyes.

“God, you’re something. How did I get so lucky?”

“I’m not all that much. And don’t try to change the subject.”

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I’m a frog and you’re a princess.” He took another mouthful and held it, set the glass on the counter, and pulled her shirt up to her shoulders. She shivered as he held an ice cube in his cheek and bent his head to trace a breast with his tongue, blowing frigid air gently across puckered flesh.

Later they lay in darkness across tangled sheets. Ian’s sweat trickled down into the hollow of his throat. The air smelled of sex. His lungs burned with every breath.

Anna twisted a strand of hair in long, slender fingers. “I saw ants in the kitchen today,” she said. “They were marching in a line from somewhere under the fridge, up and over the counter, and carrying some dried rice from a bowl I’d left out last night. Two of them started fighting, so I squished the bigger one with my thumb. And you know what the other one did? He grabbed the dead one by the head and dragged it back down to the floor and out of sight.”

“That’s gross.”

“I know.” She sighed. “I kept wondering what he was going to do with the body. Do they eat each other or something?”

“Knock it off, will you?”

“What are we doing, Ian? We’ve been seeing each other for three months now. I really like you. But you shut me out. I bring up something like my sister coming for a visit and you just fuck me to shut me up.”

“It isn’t like that at all.”

“You have secrets. Where were you tonight? I called your place, the place I’ve never even seen. I don’t want to stalk you. But you’re taking this mystery man thing too far. Maybe I’ll lose interest.” She slid a sweat-slick leg out from under his and wriggled up on one elbow to stare at him.

“It was nothing. I sold some more pictures, that’s all.”

“Really?” She hunched a little closer. “That’s great. Can I see them?”

“Nothing to see. They’re just environmental shots, boring stuff.” He stood in the dark and put on his shirt and pants. You wouldn’t understand. What an understatement. “Why don’t you make a lunch date with your sister and let me know the time? Call me tomorrow.”

Hours later he drove back across town, cemetery dirt clinging to his clothes and his new materials safely packed away in the rear of his van. He wondered how he slipped so easily between two worlds. A starving artist given an offer he couldn’t refuse? But it had been more than that. Years ago he had held several shows in little galleries in New York, mostly mixed-media exhibitions staged by old college friends, Warhol-style trash reshaped and resold, recycled. He had never had Warhol’s vision, and the public knew it. His true tendencies were darker and more disturbing.

Time after time they turned him away with little or no money in his pocket, and after a while even those few friends who remained stopped lending him space. For several months he wandered, mired in depression and faced with the failure of his life’s dream. He never doubted he had talent (or not for long, anyway), but it remained frustratingly coy. It spent less and less of its time with him, and he began to wonder if the struggle was worth it.

He took up work in a meat market, carving up legs of beef and lamb. There he met Fowler. Fowler introduced him to another world that existed between the seams of light and behind every dark alley and shadow. Fowler’s clients were the eyes staring at you from the depths of your closet. They were the chill winds lurking at automobile accidents and behind the gaze of serial killers and madmen. Ian didn’t think Fowler had understood what he was getting into at the time, any more than Ian had understood himself. But soon it was too late.

He took the old freight elevator from the back lot and lugged his stinking, soggy cargo through quiet corridors. He had to make several trips. It was late, and the building was all but deserted anyway; he had seen to that soon after he had moved in, renting the space around him whenever something opened up.

Once inside he lit several thick candles and began to pace the floor, seeking that elusive well of creativity. This would be his masterpiece. It would have to be entirely new. And it had to be raw. He would create something born from the butcher’s block, an assembly of everything foul and bloody the mind could imagine. They would be astonished, amazed, excited to a frenzy of lust. And they would pay with the almighty dollar.

Ian slipped his tools from their place on the wall. This section of the huge room resembled a medieval torture chamber, a look he had purposely cultivated for mood. Unfinished brick ran dark with water stains; edges of bone- scraping steel winked and smiled from hooks. Stravinsky’s Mavra playing softly in the background, he crouched on the giant metal basin and separated the limbs of the two recently buried corpses, a child and its mother, with blade and saw. He paid careful attention to the areas less preserved from lying in particular positions. Slime and clotted blood quickly covered his hands. He did not wear his gloves, for this would be a creation close to his heart, an intimate relation.

After he finished with them he went to his freezer for more parts. His mind danced with imaginative multiple-headed creatures, three legs and no eyes, muscle and bone outside of skin. But these were only previews of the climax of his talent. A kind of frenzy overtook him. He had the answer floating about in his head, not to hide the manipulations of the flesh, but to showcase them, emphasize every unnatural joint and union.

For this he took a coroner’s needle and thick black thread, working with slippery skin and mating it to bone. A woman’s breast became a truncated child’s limb, a fingerless hand punching its way through exposed ribs. Eyes without lids glared upward through a membrane of stomach lining. A layer of teeth planted themselves amid a pucker of flesh. Ian sliced and hammered holes, brought flesh together and ripped it apart with a violence he had previously held in check. Layer built upon layer, both intricate and roughly sculpted visions of death.