Beautiful Monster

Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster

“What purpose is there in these ridiculous monsters, in this deformed comeliness, and comely deformity . . .?”
—Bernard of Clairvaux

She woke up all tits and screaming.
On her quivering bosom were two small wounds about vampire bite-width apart. She screamed again, then realized she could stop screaming.
“My God, are you all right?” her governess swept in, wearing a thin, concerned nightgown and holding a lamp.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I dreamt that a man in a dark cape flew into my room and bit me, here.”
“But there’s the bite!” her governess cooed, swooping down and peering at the bite from about an inch away. “It must hurt terribly!”
“It’s fine,” she laughed, with a demure jiggle. “I told you, I only dreamt it.”
“We have to hunt it down!” said the governess, springing erect. “We’ll get fire, and crosses, and garlic!”
“No, no, don’t be so stupid!” she cried. “Don’t you understand that it was purely a dream?”
“But there are the bite marks!” moaned the governess, stiltedly, peering closely at them again. “How could it be only a dream?”
“Because,” she said, as if explaining to a child, “in the dream, the bite left no mark.”

“Doctor!” she cried, running down the yard towards him. He turned, his key in the lock of his car, and took off his hat.
“I am not a doctor,” he greeted her.
“Oh, you!” she said, touching his arm with unwarranted familiarity. “Listen, I really must talk with you about my condition.”
“Of course,” he said. “Hop in!”
They drove for a while down winding roads. They were not heading towards his office, but that was fine; he was not a doctor.
“So, what seems to be the trouble?” he asked her, lighting a cigarette.
“Oh, I’ve been having these terrible dreams,” she said.
“And you remember them?” he asked, exhaling and filling the car with mystifying smoke.
“Oh, yes, like they were ever so real.”
“Oh, thank God,” he said, and drove on.

III

It was getting worse. The fog hung so thick over the hills that he could hardly see the path. He took his watch out of his pocket, opened and closed it, without remembering to mark the time in between.
He tripped and fell face first in the road. A thistle growing by the roadside just by his face was wrapped in a fog like cobwebs or cotton candy, seeming less to cling to it than to exude from it.
“Young man, do you need a lift?”
He looked up and a carriage stood there, wrapped in entirely too much fog. A hand from within shoved open the door and fog rolled out like an unfurling carpet.
“My god!” he said, once inside the carriage. “This fog’s almost thicker in here than it is outside!”
“Well, that is the way.” said the jovial coachman, hardly visible from a foot’s distance. “After all, this is where fog is made.”
“Where? These hills?”
“No, the coach, of course. Wherever secrets are to be veiled, doom portended, despair perspired, I get the order and I go at once.”
Perspired? He thought. That’s clearly the wrong preposition.
“But surely there’s fog too many places at once in the world.”
“Oh no, no. In truth there’s only ever one fog. But where I’ve passed through, it has a way of lingering.”
He opened his pocketwatch, thinking he might be late. Its face was only an opaque circle of fog, too thick to see the numbers or the hands.

He woke up all tits and screaming.
“I dreamt I was a man,” he said, a man. He pressed the covers to his gelatinous bosom. There were two pinpricks there, but they were strictly immaterial to the present situation.
“It was a dream,” said his governess, standing between two burning braziers. She spoke in a voice rich and deep, like a pit full of gold. “To restore your manhood, you must find the phallus of Christopher Lee, and burn it over this brazier. The smoke will permeate your insides, and then your outsides will change.”
“But—” he squinted. “ Aren’t you Christopher Lee?”
“No,” said the governess. The long dark hallway extolled his voice. “He is only voice-acting me. To find him you must search far and wide, and long, and deep, and broad, and tall, and other inapplicable dimensions.”
“But—”
“Christopher Lee is not here,” the governess insisted. She ran a tremulous hand through her white beard. Her eyes were moist with fear, and opened slightly too wide. God’s love but his voice was deep.

“Why have we gone to the circus?”
“I would like to reiterate, I am not a doctor.”
She glanced up and looked directly into the crotch of a trapeze artist doing something unspeakable to the air. She looked back down hastily at the doctor. She could not understand how he was eating cotton candy and smoking his cigarette at the same time.
She looked at the bearded woman and the cleanshaven man, and felt a tremor of wonder and revulsion.
“How on earth does he get his face so smooth and shiny?” she asked. “In your medical opinion?”
“Hmm,” he said, looking over where the cleanshaven man was passionately kissing the bearded woman. “It looks like he bathes each morning in a shower of blinding fire.”
“Oh my!” she gasped. “Why on earth does he do that?”
“Well,” he said, exhaling into his cotton candy, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire; and where there’s fire, you might as well bathe in it. But then, I am not a doctor.”

Your God, but she’s more than her material, isn’t she? What is she doing, after all, but lying there on the velvet couch in her sheerness and looking with languid lashes languidly? But her slightest movement and you know she’s tingling all over, that however much life she holds she can feel every drop of it. She wears that transparent dress so well it seems ridiculous to wear anything else, so well you realize that concealing nakedness is the opposite of what clothes were for—not a thousand years ago, or a million, but before the Fall. Before, or behind, or above, or other inapplicable directions.
She keeps moving her hips as if grinding against some invisible person, or maybe just the air. Or as if the stimulation of erogenous zones is something she’s transcended, and all the essence of sex is focused in the movement, the gyration, the intoxicating action of it. You know that she loves what she does, could mate with anything and nothing, coupling with her Eternal self in a translapsarian fuckfest.
You know if she sucked out your essence at least she would enjoy it; if she took your life at least someone would be using it. She would be drunk on you, and you would be nothing but her drunkness, coursing through her as she went wild over your body, writhing on perpetual sexfire, your death the least footnote to her incredible life.
Her back is in love with that couch, her skin is in love with that dress, her lips are in love with her lips. She looks around the room, hunting a man or woman or child or ghost or concept to irrevocably own. She doesn’t see what you see—armoire, bookshelf, dollhouse; shadows inscribed with names—but all of them pulsing red with irrefusable existence. Her eyes are wild with a fever as she glances, back and forth, sighing like a slow hiss “oh God, I’m going to fuck that lamp.”

VII

She woke up all tits and screaming. There were two bite marks, or possibly scratches, on her neck. The governess was at her side immediately, clutching her hand.
“What’s wrong?”
“I dreamt there was a cat in here with me.”
The governess glanced over at the dresser, where her cat sat contentedly, licking at his paw.
“There is… your cat, miss,” she offered.
“No, you don’t understand. I dreamed there was a big, gray cat.”
The governess looked back at the cat, who was charcoal gray and the size of a well-fed raccoon. His eyes glowed with the souls of a thousand birds and rodents.
“Your cat… does happen to be a bit on the large and—”
“Don’t you understand,” she cried, tits quivering with misconstrued fury, “that that’s strictly immaterial to the present situation?”

VIII

“We all advanced in curiosity and horror;
me rather in silence,
the rest with various ejaculations of terror.”
Either Joseph Sheridan le Fanu or an erring typesetter assembled these words in this order.

Be grateful for everything.

The entire hallway was wrapped in cobwebs, as if a thousand thousands of spiders had died and lived there. He thought one shape vaguely was a grandfather clock, but it was too thickly covered to be sure.
His candle flickered across the infinitely complex surfaces. The windows on his right were tall ovals, reminding him of how the house had appeared from the outside like the mournful face of an owl. A dark shape was fluttering outside, and he felt compelled to go over and open the window.
“No, you fool!” shouted the master of the house. “These are bat windows!”
But it was too late. In rushed the bats through the breeched pane.
“Good God!” he cried. “They aren’t even real bats! Why, this one’s just a bird with bat parts taped on.”
It was a pathetic sight, the small screech-owl hopping awkwardly around on the floor, thrown off balance by the bat ears crudely taped to its head.
“Aha!” smuglied the red-faced constable, wiping something off his hands. “Now there’s an owl that is exactly what it seems!”

She was still not sure why they had come to the circus, or whether anyone would go to it intentionally. To her right a performer in a robe of sequined nothing put cotton candy in her mouth and breathed out a plume of fire.
“Good God!” she exclaimed, grabbing the doctor’s arm.
“Oh, do you believe in Him?” he asked, not a doctor.
“Who, God?”
“Yes—well, the good one.”
“Hmm,” she empondered, “well I know I believe in Him at church, but at the circus I really can’t say. What’s your opinion, as a man of science?”
“Well, medically speaking,” he said, “I think you can probably believe in either no gods, or a minimum of two—one who created everything and is evil, and one who’s omniscient and loving and all but powerless.”
“Oh,” she cried, “how helpless he must feel!”
“Mm, yes. Both of them, probably. Oh, look, the elephant is coming!”
In that moment he spoke like a small excited boy and hardly sounded like a doctor at all. Around the corner approached the huge elephant, prodded onward by a man with a sharpened stake.
Though she shrank back from the ugly beast, he opened his arms wide and walked toward it. She looked at the elephant’s huge face and all of a sudden saw a long lifetime of abuse and coercion written in its wrinkled skin, and she cowered still more. There was too much size and power and pain crumpled into it all.
It stopped in front of the doctor and lowered its head towards him in greeting. He took its head in both hands and kissed it between its small, sad eyes.

“Ah!” he ejaculated fondly. “Beautiful monster!”