The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

from the tips of those earthy toes to the tops of their beautiful heads.

This one was no different. His dark eyes told it all. Pain and confusion. She’d seen it before — they thought that while their flesh was still soft and warm, and they breathed the same air as they had before, that somehow they could escape from the frozen state. Only when their feet turned gray and solid did they truly appreciate the journey they were on. The songs always got clearer after that.

She loved the songs.

Somewhere out in the sunlight, the sailors would be preparing their ship to leave. Their hero had been gone too long, and none would want to come up to her palace after him. She pulled the sword free from his hand and let it drop to the floor; her cheek rubbed against the fingers in its place. She sighed. It had been so long since she’d had a man’s touch. Her own thick arms wrapped around his torso, and she carried him out of the gloom and up to the bright chamber nearest her bedroom. The snakes slid across his skin, absorbing the smell and taste of his fear. His song filled her palace and she was damp with desire. So much time alone. As she set him down in the center of the vast room, she smiled almost coquettishly from beneath the nest of serpents that hung over one eye. He had nothing to fear from her now. His song grew stronger.

It was funny how things changed. Once, way back in the beginning, when this was a new life for her, she had called this place the screaming room. She had tried to cut the snakes from her head and had rubbed her body against the rough walls, wanting her skin to be pale and smooth again. The snakes had grown back and her skin had healed by the time the first visitor came to her island. She’d been so happy — that hadn’t changed over the centuries — for some company. She’d thought they’d come to save her.

She’d smiled at him, and then the song had started. It had torn her apart, that song, the thing that was happening to him. Back then, after trying everything to make him whole again, she’d cut out his tongue to silence his noise, to shut him up, to make it stop. She’d locked him away and hoped that whatever was happening it would be quicker. Year after year, she would check on him, hoping and praying that it would just be over, until eventually that day came.

Once he was stone, however, she’d found that she missed the company. She’d liked knowing he was there, and that she wasn’t alone. By the fourth visitor to her shores, she’d come to love the songs they sang her. It wasn’t screaming at all. It was love poetry from a suitor held in her thrall.

She no longer worried whether the loneliness and the snakes were driving her mad. Now she loved the changes in the singers’ songs and bodies as the stone claimed them inch by inch. Some days she would simply sit and brush her fingers over the places where the cold hardness met with the warm, perfect skin. She would lean in and lick along the line.

All this was to come.

She left him alone for a while to settle into his new surroundings and changed into her silkiest robes, those that when the light caught them would turn sheer and allow her lover’s eyes to see right through to her shape beneath. Along her neck, she dabbed perfumes she’d made from the weeds and plants on the rocks, and she fashioned the calm snakes into perfect rings against her scalp. She waited for evening to fall. She wasn’t impatient. She was used to waiting.

Nonononoithurtstoomuchiwanttogohomeidon’tcareaboutthegirlsurelytheyllcomeformeshescomingba ckthemonsterandshestouchingmeicantstopscreamingijustwantodiepleaseletmedieicanttakethis….

She knew he was watching her as she lit the candles around the room until they were both bathed in a soft yellow glow. It was flattering lighting, but he didn’t need it. She wondered if she’d ever had such a suitor. He was more than handsome. He was charismatic. Women would have fallen at his feet, and when he had grown older he could have led an army into certain death and they would have gone willingly. Not now, though. Not anymore. There was no growing old for him — just years and years of her love and the changing to come. Years of his song.

She danced as he screamed, using his voice as her lute. She swayed and sashayed before him and then, when the flirtation was complete, she wound herself around his still body. She ran her hands over him, gently at first, but as the wine and the lust took her, she groped him roughly, the snakes running over his face, nipping and biting, wanting to taste what they could of him. She dipped her dank tongue into his sweet mouth and was sure she could see her own lust reflected in his glassy eyes. He wanted her — it was just like the old days, the ones she tried so hard to forget and remember, when she was young and lithe and beautiful.

She poured wine into his open mouth and licked the overspill away.

The night was long and full of love, and when dawn broke she left him to the cool morning air. They had so much time ahead of them, and the brief separation would only make their hunger for each other greater. He sang to her as she slept, and as she slept she was smiling. Her dreams were of love and parties and beauty and of days so long gone by. His song was her lullaby and she let it wrap around her and keep her safe. The loneliness was gone and she was loved again. There would be no more silence, not for years and years and years.

WICKED BE by Heather Graham

I HAVE SPENT MY LIFE trying hard to keep to the shadows, actually, to foster a few of the pagan traits that supposedly belong to my kind, or the modern “Wiccan” mantra, should I say.

“An ye harm none, do what ye will.”

Of course, dear friends, you must remember that this is a mantra created by man, or woman, or both — and that like all religious creeds, it can be tempered, twisted, and horrifically modified by man, or woman. But, you see, I’ve been around a while. I’ve learned that most of the time, whatever God or gods a man chooses to believe in, it all tends to be pretty good until the hand of man gets in there to decide what the hand of God was meant to be doing.

Take the Inquisition. All that torture and pain in the name of God! I never understood it, and frankly, neither did most God-fearing men and women I knew. Because, come on, witchcraft? Seriously, a man’s cow died because a woman looked at it with the evil eye? And, oh, please, really? Dancing naked in the forest with the devil?

But, as I’ve said, I’ve spent my life trying hard to keep to the shadows. There was many a case of justice gone far awry that I saw, but mostly, I was forced to keep my head down. Because here’s the truth of it — think about it. Had those heretics so woefully tortured during the Inquisition had any powers whatsoever, they’d have given their tormentors the evil eye, and saved themselves. No, sadly, most of the time it’s man — or woman, in the cases of so-called witchcraft — who is maligned for color, creed, or choice of belief, and there is nothing of power beneath fragile flesh within them, and that’s the way it is. Therefore, they are tortured, and they die, and that’s that.

Some say the real persecution of witches began as early as Roman times, and that was certainly true, though the Romans saw witches as “black” or “white,” practicing goodness or evil. In the Bible, Lilith was a succubus, and other evil abominations rose. But, of course, none of these things really had anything to do with the Pagan religion of the Scots and Irish back in the day; it was man who decided to mingle a worship of the land and the elements with all the man-made demons of the religions to come. A true “witch” craze began with the Malleus Maleficarum in 1486, made all the more widespread because of the “modern” invention of the printing press. It had the power of the Church behind it, too — Malleus included the pope’s treatise approving the persecution of witches, Summis desiderantes affectibus (“Desiring with Supreme Ardor,” no joke), as a preface. The pope might have been a good man. I didn’t know him. But his blessing on the persecutions certainly had nothing to do with the purity of any kind of a God! Yet I digress.

I’ve frankly always wondered what makes any creature beneath God’s eyes assume himself — or herself! — superior to others. But in the 1600s, remember, we were dealing with the Divine Right of Kings, etcetera and so on. Besides, I’ve been around a while now, and man’s inhumanity to man has never ceased to amaze me.

So, as I’ve said, in the interest of self-preservation, I’ve always maintained a low profile!

I love my homeland — Scotland — but as time went on, things began getting a little uncomfortable there. It was James — sad, tragic boy, really. I mean, let’s face it, much as I wanted to like his mother, Queen Mary of Scotland, she was ruled by her heart and no wisdom, and James grew up with a lot of old men teaching him the ways of religion; then he went to Denmark, and he was convinced witches existed, and so on and so on, and he