The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

THE MONSTER Nina Katerli

“If only things were the way they used to be,” said Aunt Angelina, and wiped her eyes.

“The way they used to be? Thanks very much! That’s all I need. The way they used to be.’ ” Anna Lvovna could be seen choking back her tears and sniffling. “All my life I’ve lived in this apartment and cooked soup on a single burner in my own room, and I scarcely use any gas at all. And until very recently I had to go to the public baths, even though we have a bathtub right here. I was afraid to go to the toilet too often, not to mention the way my personal life ...”

“No, if only things were the way they used to be,” Aunt Angelina repeated obstinately. “I simply can’t look at him the way he is now.”

I myself had gotten used to the Monster, and even as a child had not been very much afraid of him. I was born after he moved into our apartment, so for me there was nothing unusual about coming across a shaggy creature with a single crimson eye in the middle of its forehead and a long scaly tail, whether in the hall near the bathroom or in the kitchen. But why go in for descriptions? One monster’s very much like another, and ours was no more monstrous than the next.

They say that before I was born the other tenants in our apartment had filed an application with some agency, requesting that the Monster be evicted and housed someplace else, even that he be given an apartment all to himself. But the application was rejected on the grounds that if all monsters were given individual housing, there would be nothing left for large families. The argument ran that there were too many monsters and too few apartments, and when our application was turned down, the reason given was: “Yours is not the most serious case: There has not been a single fatality or instance of grievous bodily harm."

The fact that Anna Lvovna’s husband had been turned into an aluminum saucepan for a whole month did not constitute grievous bodily harm, apparently. They say that as soon as her husband had returned to normal after having had borscht boiled in him and meat stewed in him for a month, he immediately abandoned her for another woman. Anna Lvovna was left on her own and since then has never forgiven the Monster for ruining her life. But the Monster claimed, on his honor, that he had turned Anna Lvovna’s husband into a saucepan only because the man had been sweet-talking his mistress every evening from the phone in the hall, and he would have left home in any case. That way, at least he stayed home one more month, even if he spent the time as a saucepan.

I don’t know how the story would have ended—Anna Lvovna, they say, was threatening to drop a burned-out light bulb in the Monster’s feeding dish—but at that very time the Monster set off to work as an exhibit in a long traveling exposition organized by the museum of ethnography and anthropology.

In time, the tale about Anna Lvovna’s husband came to be forgotten, but as the Monster grew older, he began to turn nasty, and gave us no peace at all.

You’d go into the bathroom and the sink and bathtub would be full of frogs and newts; or suddenly all the refrigerators would begin to howl horribly and heat up, the milk inside them would boil and the meat would roast; or else poor Anna Lvovna’s nose would erupt in a boil of amazing size that changed color with each passing day: One day it would be blue, the next day lilac, and the day after that a poisonous green color.

It should be mentioned that Aunt Angelina and the Monster were on somewhat more equable terms. If she found a tortoise in her cupboard instead of bread, she would exclaim with pleasure, “Look, a reptile! I’ll take it straight to the kindergarten for their pet corner!”

I now realize that when I was little the Monster simply couldn’t stand me because I annoyed him so much. Everything I did annoyed him: I clattered up and down the hall and I laughed too loudly and I loved peeking into his room at him. So he kept giving me tonsillitis. Not serious cases, but the kind that if you so much as laugh you lose your voice, and if you run you get sent to bed.

When I grew up, the Monster did me great harm for a time; whenever anyone called me up, he would always get to the phone before the others and hiss, “She’s not in. She’s gone out with someone else.”

I live alone now. My parents are no longer alive, I have never had a family of my own, and Aunt Angelina, with whom I share the apartment, takes care of me after a fashion, but as for the Monster ... At least he’s stopped tormenting me. Of course, if I come back late from the theater or from visiting friends, I’m bound to trip over the cat in the hall even though we’ve never had a cat. Or I’ll tear my new dress on barbed wire. But that’s nothing—mere trivialities. And recently even that kind of thing has stopped happening. Something’s gone wrong with the Monster. You wouldn’t recognize him: his eye has turned from red to a kind of dirty ginger color and his fur has gone gray; to put it in a nutshell, our Monster is getting old. He’s stopped going to work and sits for days on end in his room, just hissing occasionally and sometimes sighing. And it was only today that Aunt Angelina said she’d prefer things the way they used to be because it broke her heart to look at the Monster, and she didn’t have the energy to sweep up his scales after him.

“About those dreadful scales I totally agree with you, Angelina Nikolayevna,” declared Anna Lvovna. “It’s disgraceful! He must be made to do an additional week of cleaning duty. Nobody should have to wipe his dirt up after him!”

At this point the conversation came to a sudden halt because the Monster’s door squeaked loudly, and a minute later there he was in the kitchen.

“Picking on me behind my back, eh?” he asked, and his eye reddened slightly. “Well, now I’m going to make you all freeze. You’ve never felt such cold!”

And the Monster began to blow so hard that his cheeks turned blue and his head started to tremble.

He blew and blew and suddenly I noticed Aunt Angelina shivering and jumping in place and knocking her legs against each other and rubbing her nose as if it had been frostbitten.

Its so cold, oh, it’s freezing!” she moaned dolefully, for some reason winking at me. Then she suddenly screeched, “What are you standing around like that for? Keep moving! Keep moving! Or else you’ll catch your death of cold! Hands on your waist! Bend your knees! One, two, three!”

I wasn’t that cold; in fact, I was even rather warm, all the more so because we were in the kitchen and all the gas burners were lit. But Aunt Angelina was winking and shouting so that I, too, put my hands on my hips and started doing knee bends.

“There you go! There you go!” shouted the Monster gleefully. “Now you’re going to dance for me!”

I scarcely had time to think before Aunt Angelina grabbed me by the hand and began leaping about in a frenzied dance. I followed her lead.

This is a nuthouse!” declared Anna Lvovna angrily and left the kitchen.

The Monster stared after her with a frightened look, then turned to Aunt Angelina as she danced and asked quietly, “Why isn’t she dancing? Why did she go away?”

She's stiff with cold!” shouted Aunt Angelina, gasping for breath but continuing to dance. “Can’t you see?”

But the Monster had already forgotten what he had been asking. Dragging his tail and leaving a trail of scales across the floor, he went over to his refrigerator and opened the door.

Where s my bone? he said in perplexity, “I remember it was here yesterday, I bought it at the store!”

“Your bone? There it is, you made soup out of it this morning, don’t you remember? shouted Aunt Angelina, stamping away, but at the same time managing to pass the Monster her own white enamel saucepan with soup in it.

“I did? Oh . . and the Monster looked uncertainly into the saucepan, “I never had a pot like this.”

“But it really is your pot, I just cleaned it up a bit, that’s all.”

“Aaargh!” he roared, “You dare touch my pot?! I forbid you to! For that both of you will . . . you will both . . . turn to stone for thirty-five minutes!”

Aunt Angelina suddenly froze the way children do when they play Statues. As fate would have it, my nose started itching and I was about to rub it with my hand when she inconspicuously but painfully jabbed me in the side, so I froze, too.

The Monster glared at us triumphantly, then grabbed the boiled chicken out of Aunt Angelina’s saucepan and ate it whole.

“A delicious bone!” he rumbled, licking his lips, and then took pity on us. “You can go now,” he said dismissively, and strode imperiously out of the kitchen, slurping soup from the top of the saucepan.

“Why did you give him your entire dinner?” I asked, when the door closed behind the Monster. “And where is his bone, anyway?”

“He didn’t have a bone!” said Aunt Angelina, “He hasn’t been to the store for a week.”

“Then what’s he looking for?”

“God knows! Maybe he forgot. Or maybe he’s just being that way to show us that everything's all right. But he doesn’t have any money, not a single kopeck, and he’s going hungry.”

“What about his pension?”

“He doesn’t have a pension! He’s an exhibition object, and ... he s been written off, dropped from the show.” Aunt Angelina lowered her voice. “It’s as if he doesn’t exist. And now I’m afraid about his room. I’m afraid he’ll be evicted. Just make sure you don’t tell Anna Lvovna.”

“I won’t breathe a word,” I said, also in a whisper.

Aunt Angelina and I began taking turns buying bones and chopped meat from the butcher and leaving them in the Monster’s refrigerator. On one occasion she left two apples and a small carton of kefir.

“All this meat’s very bad for him! It can ruin his digestion,” she said. “I wanted to buy him a big bottle of kefir but he always immediately bolts any food he has, so I bought a carton instead.”

“He’s bound to throw out the apples,” I said.

“We’ll see. Maybe he won’t realize. Lately his eyesight’s been getting poor,” and at that moment Aunt Angelina looked around at the door; Anna Lvovna was just coming into the kitchen.

“It makes me laugh just to look at the two of you,” she declared. “All this undercover charity—do you think I’m blind? Such pretense—what a show! And for whom! If he was human, it would be one thing, but he s not, he s just vermin. “You should feel sorry for him; after all, he’s old,” I said.

“My dear, pity’s not a feeling you should brag about, pity’s humiliating. And in this case,” she said as she put her coffeepot on the stove, “in this case, pity doesn’t enter into it. It was one thing when he was making himself useful in his ... in his freak show; we could put up with him then, but not now. Animals should live in the wild."

The Monster had crept into the kitchen so softly that we didn’t even know he was there. He now stood in the doorway and his eye was as ruddy as it had been in the first flush of youth.

“So, I'm an animal, am I?” he said slowly and slumped onto a stool. “I’ll show you."

His breathing was heavy and irregular, the sparse gray fur on his head and neck stood on end.

“I’ll show you. . . .Your. . .legs. . .will. . .give way. . .beneath you! . . . Yeah! . . . You will . . . all . . . fall ... on the floor . . . and then . . . One, two, three ... All fall down!”

Aunt Angelina and I collapsed simultaneously. Anna Lvovna remained standing, leaning against the edge of the stove, and grinned, staring the Monster straight in the eye.

“And you?” said the Monster. “What about you? This doesn’t mean you, I suppose? Fall down, I tell you!”

“Give me one good reason why I should,” she said, scowling.

“Because I’ve put a spell on you, that’s why.”

“Oh, you slay me,” said Anna Lvovna, going right up to him. “What have we here, a magician? All you know how to do is leave your scales all over the floor and help yourself to everyone else’s food! You’re just trash and you’re due for the dump! Just garbage. You’ve been written off!”

“Written off?” repeated the Monster in a whisper. “Who’s been written off? Me? Written off? Not true, not true! I can do anything! Look at them! They fell down!”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Anna Lvovna burst out laughing. “They’re just pretending. They’re sorry for you, see. You’ve been written off. You’ve lost your job. I’ve been to the museum myself and I’ve seen the directive with my own eyes.”

“No!” The Monster leapt up from the stool and rushed from the door to the stove, thrashing his mangy tail across the floor. “I’ll show you. I’ll turn you into a rat! A rat! Now!”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” was Anna Lvovna’s only reply, and suddenly she stamped on the Monster’s tail with all her might.

The Monster screamed. One after another great tears streamed from his eye, which immediately turned pale blue and dimmed. Aunt Angelina and I jumped up from the floor.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Let him go! An old man. Don’t be so cruel to him!”

“A rat! a rat!” hissed the Monster, forgetting himself, and he poked Anna Lvovna in the shoulder with a dark and crooked finger. “One! Two! Three!”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” sniggered Anna Lvovna.

But now Aunt Angelina and I began to shout. “A rat! A rat!” we screamed. “You’re a rotten rat! Vermin! One! Two! Three!”

Suddenly Anna Lvovna was gone.

She had just been laughing in our faces, her shoulders shaking in her white blouse, when suddenly she was no more. She had totally disappeared, as if she had never existed.

The kitchen suddenly fell silent. Something live jabbed against my foot and immediately leapt away to the wall. I screeched and jumped onto the stool.

A large gray rat shot across the kitchen and scuttled under Anna Lvovna’s table. The Monster was whimpering softly, his face turned toward the wall.

“See,” said Aunt Angelina, “you did it. Don’t cry. Now let’s go and have some soup. ”

“It’s you who did it, not me. And it’s true, you know; I have been written off. There has been a directive.”

“What do we care about directives,” said Aunt Angelina, carefully stroking the Monster’s fur. “Don’t you be afraid of anybody. And if anybody touches you I’ll give him . . . I’ll give him ants.”

“And so will I,” I said. “Okay?”

The Monster didn’t reply. Slumped against the wall, he dozed off, shutting his eye and wrapping his thin hairless tail around his legs.