Fan Fiction ❯ I Am A Monster ❯ I Am A Monster ( One-Shot )

Monster

By Randoman

 

Monster.

 

Monster they cry. Monster they call me.

 

Misshapen I am: swollen and bruised, beaten until black and blue fade into black and blue again. Matted hair and dirty features.

 

Monster they call me

 

My voice sounds as gravel, and I bring more fear in speaking than my visage does. My eyes appear as coals, deep and dark.

 

I am a Monster.

 

There are Monsters, and then there are monsters. I've seen them; they prey on the innocent, the rich upon the poor, the cruel against the weak: bad men upon unfortunate women. And little is ever done. Business as usual, they say.

 

I live in an old building on the outskirts of town. I had always been here, as long as I can remember. I may have been born here. I remember (or perhaps I imagine) dirt clad peasants screaming at the sight of me, and I remember a woman yesterday screaming when my shadow came across her path. I don't think much has changed---perhaps I remember forever, or perhaps I've only blocked it out. I know I remember the monsters. I see them; they are the first to see me. I make them afraid for some other reason, perhaps because I've watched them, and I never forget.

 

When I need to eat, I go search through gardens and trash to find what I can on the outskirts of town at night. The refuse searches through the refuse to find something to fuel his miserable existence. Most nights they ignore me, and I ignore them. This was not one of those nights. I knew the monster well. I often saw his children crying in my building; a hidden haunt that was safe. No one ever came around my building. I always left them alone. They had been hurt enough. They looked fearfully at everything: the few feral dogs that did come around, the shadows that flickered behind every doorway. I heard them crying, I knew their pain, too. It was this night that I met the monster behind that pain.

 

He had a son, perhaps seven or eight years old…time passed so easily to me, it's hard to judge. The boy cried a lot; his mother was afraid to get involved, and the father kept yelling, screaming, screaming, beating him. He put the boy in the basement once. I had broken the window for him after hearing him scream and cry, but he didn't see me. Today he was yelling at the boy to stop crying and act like a man, act like him, but the boy didn't, and he put the boy's hand on the stove. The boy just kept screaming and screaming---it sounded like forever. I could smell his burning flesh from the garden. I wanted to get involved, but I couldn't. There was nothing I could do.

 

My legs moved on their own, however, and before I knew it, I was at the window, staring in. I could see them clearly. The father stopped just long enough to look out at the window, and what he must have seen was a reflection unlike one that would come from a mirror. He seemed to recognize this horrific vision in himself, but only as a thought, he was surprised to find it represented physically, and then I was gone. It fazed him, but while he stopped with the boy, I knew he wasn't done. He threw the boy down the stairs to the basement---he didn't know the boy could get out. Then he went up the stairs.

 

The girl was maybe fourteen or fifteen. He'd never molested her. She yelled out her pain to the walls in my building, so I knew, but I thought maybe he wanted to. Now he just beat her---the wife was too afraid to get involved. He beat her, too.

 

The girl was small, but she knew he was coming. She tried to climb out the window onto the garage. He grabbed her and pulled her back in. He wasn't mad at her, just hate-filled and in search of an outlet; one thing he could control. I heard her screaming. The neighbors were too far away to hear a thing, I was the only one who knew, but I couldn't do anything. I was a Monster; he was a monster, too.

 

He threw her in the basement. She was crying and bleeding when she came out the window, I didn't know what he'd done to her; I didn't want to know. I never forget. The kids were safer now, now that they'd climbed out the boiler room window, one by one. Probably heading to my building to heal---that's what they usually did. I followed them.

 

People pay little attention to what they don't want to know, no matter how big it is, or perhaps I was only a shadow, people had forever feared shadows. I had used them as a way to move: in one and out another. The kids made it fine, no one wants to pay attention to them either, but I did, for all it mattered. They both had favourite spots. The girl always took to the stairs, as high as they would go, jumping up the broken stairs to the seventh floor of my eleven-story building. The boy stayed down on the 2nd floor. It had caved in so no one could get in there unless they were as small as he was. He sat and cried---no one would tell him to stop.

 

The room said nothing. She screamed at the walls, but they said nothing, either. There was darkness for a long time, or a short time, I don't know. Then there came headlights: his car. He came looking for them, heard the crying, reached in the hole and dragged the boy out, jumped the stairs when he heard the screaming. He hit them, he hurt them: he never stopped, not even in this place, where he had no power. Here, the power was mine; This was my place. This. Was. My. Place.

 

He pulled them down and threw them in the back of the car; he screamed at them, told them what was going to happen when they got home. Then he turned the car on, and the headlights slowly turned to the exit, and then the car stopped. Everything stopped.

 

`M…Monster' A stuttering voice broke the silence.

 

`You… are a monster.' The same voice again, and recognition recognized in his eyes again, just like all of them. The voice like gravel came a third time, repeating, `You are a monster. You will not take them.' That recognition stayed; there was nothing else in his eyes.

 

`Wh- What is that, a fucking bear?!' He was in denial, and needed a way out. Panic overrode everything and he gunned the motor towards me. I didn't try and get out of the way. I didn't move at all, and the car hit me.

 

I buckled, but I stood, they were just more bruises on this body. I had enough. I never forgot; I never healed---neither would his children, so I reached through the glass of the windshield, the broken glass meaning nothing to my broken body. They didn't seem afraid of me as I picked them up, one in each hand, and removed them from the car. I told them to go home, and they ran to my building. I meant their home, they ran to mine. I hoped they didn't watch me. The father sat behind the wheel, frozen in fear as I decimated his car and reacted to nothing while I took his children, his targets, from him as easily as he broke them.

 

`Re…retch…..retribution.' The word was spat out coldly; it tasted bad on my tongue, I choked on the sounds. Then, deliberately and slowly, not because it fazed me, but because this was new, I picked up the car by its front and I hurled its entire frame hundreds of yards away, into the wreckage that surrounded my building.

 

`Go home.' I said again. This was not the place for them---it was harsh. Their home should be safer now. I didn't know if he was dead. I didn't care. He was a monster. They left, saying nothing, not angry, not scared, but thankful. Tired, I returned to my home as well, both hiding in the shadow, and in my building.

 

Days later, a mob came again, with him at the front, the father was there again, in my building now. The mob had guns and flashlights, or pitchforks and torches---I couldn't tell which. The word monster was issued with great hatred, anger, or fear.

 

Usually fear.

 

Monster they call me, I am a Monster. They were monsters. I did what I had always done in the past, and slipped into the shadows. People will ignore what they don't want to face, no matter how big it is. They couldn't find me, and they left. I waited several days, too, and then I went to see the father's house. The shadows were enough to take me there. He had beaten them again: his wife was in the hospital, lying as to why. His children were in their rooms, afraid, or asleep in their only respite. I went into his room, the shadows in his closet were big enough. I looked over his sleeping form, picked him up, and went back into the shadow.

 

And then I left him there, in the shadow, somewhere between his closet and reality, and the place where all Monsters are, I left him there. I made my way to the children's rooms. She was asleep, but as I moved to open the boy's closet and escape into the shadow there, he opened his eyes.

 

`Are you a boogeyman?' he said it calmly, quietly.

 

After a long time, I shook my head silently, but said nothing.

 

`Are you a monster?' he asked again, quietly, not fearing me in the least.

 

I paused for a moment, considering, then finally, I spoke. `No. He was a monster.'

 

He seemed satisfied with that, and the closet shadow beckoned to me, and I was gone as though I never was there, and so was his father.

 

`He was a monster.'