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They say monsters aren’t born, they’re made.
But I disagree. I knew I was a monster from the day I could talk, from the day I could look upon the world with my own eyes, the day I could truly perceive my own monstrosity.
That was the difference between my sister and I - I never feared the monsters under the bed, because I understood instinctively, in my malformed, childish mind, that monsters would not attack other monsters.
***
March 16. It was my sister’s 8th birthday. I wanted to get something special just for my big sister, because that’s what people do right?
I suppose, before then, I hadn’t given very good gifts, books and small toys that my friends who lived down the street had told me would make good presents. My sister certainly hadn’t liked them that much, although our parents had instilled enough manners into us that she never said it out loud.
So I resolved that year to find something different, obtain something unique that would catch her fancy more effectively.
There was a bird carcass in our yard, left there by one of the neighborhood’s stray cats. Our parents scolded us for approaching the already rotting corpse, but the two of us would dare each other to see how close we could get before the stench and the weight of our parents’ words drove us away again. I got a glimpse of the inside, a mess of feathers and blood and the squirming white maggots that were already growing inside.
There were a few pearly white bones sticking out of the wing area, and I must confess that I found myself so horribly fascinated that I couldn’t look away.
“Hey!” my sister had shouted from across the yard. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” I had replied, stifling a nervous laugh.
Afterwards it was impossible to get the sight of the bones out of my head. My thoughts wandered to the way the dead corpse of the bird must have been structured at the most inopportune of times. I caught myself thinking about how those delicate bones must fit together to make the bird fly when we were sitting in a circle after dinner and read the Bible, when the schoolteacher was drilling us about the founding of Salem for the fifth time, when my mother was lecturing me on having sinful thoughts and being wary of the devil’s temptations.
My mother scolded me for not listening, of course, but that wasn’t anything new. I had always been the more disappointing child.
Then it hit me, and in my own childish naivete I conceived the idea that the bird’s skeleton would make a wonderful present for my sister. She had always wanted to be a scientist right? Wanted to know how things worked. So I could take apart something for her and present it as a gift.
One of my friends down the street had somehow gotten her hands on matches and thankfully, readily agreed to hand one of them over without much questioning.
It took me a few tries, the flame sparking to life and then sputtering out again, but eventually I managed to light the flame, searingly bright as it was. I remember vividly coughing at the smoke and the acrid tang it left in the air and blinking rapidly at the sudden change in light, but all the same I crouched down over the fallen bird.
The maggots squirmed under the light, and my stomach felt like it was doing the same.
I spent the entire night like that, and when the flesh had all been melted off by the fire I glued the skeleton together in a way I thought made logical sense. I was actually very proud of the way I managed not to throw up at the awful stench the bird made. And although the bones were now a little charred and no longer that pearly sheen of white, I still thought it looked magnificent.
On the morning of my sister’s birthday, I woke up bright and early with the sun. I took out the crudely put together bird skeleton that I had painstakingly spent all night gluing and presented it to my sister with my best smile and hoped that I didn’t look too nervous.
My sister, of course, took one look at what I had in my hands and recoiled in disgust.
“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded, in that haughty, unspeakably cruel manner that only eight year olds can employ. “What kind of freak are you?”
“I’m sorry,” my heartbroken, six year old self stuttered out. “I didn’t mean to-”
And that was the end of that.
***
Sometimes, I tried listening to my mother. I would sit in front of the large iron cross mounted on the mantle of our fireplace, and I would pray to God, who must’ve made me this way, to change me back, to shape me into a less disappointing child, someone who wouldn’t make father wince every time I said something that might not have constituted normal within earshot of the guests he would entertain, someone who wouldn’t make my mother cry into my father’s shoulder because look at the child, Henry, what have we ever done to deserve this.
I would sit in front of the cross and I would pray very hard.
I would say God, mother says you’re up there, and that you listen to our prayers and love us very much. And I try to love you very much, as mother says we should, but I’m afraid I don’t know how. And sometimes this makes mother very sad, and I don’t know how to fix it.
I thought then, that if there was anyone who could fix me, who could make me not me, then surely God Almighty would be able to.
And my eyes would unwittingly travel up that forbidding, iron cross, and take in the agony of Jesus Christ being nailed on the crucifix. He died for our sins because he loved us, yes? Is that what love is then?
***
One day, I realized that I was not town. In hindsight, this was probably a fairly obvious conclusion. Only those who did not belong among the members of the town could be people like me.
If I had been any other person I would’ve no doubt gone through an extraordinarily long period of contemplation coupled with sorrow, agony, whatever way it is that normal people react to when being told they might have to kill the majority to survive.
Being as I am, this cursed being, I merely wondered what I was to do now in order to continue my comfortable existence on the fringes of the trials. Salem had been content to let me watch quietly on the sidelines, observing the increasingly clever ways people deceived each other (or perhaps the increasingly stupid gambits people fell for? I couldn’t decide.), but now that I had picked a side (or rather, a side had been picked for me) I needed to chart out a plan of action.
Insane though you may call me, I had no desire to die.
***
That man approached me not even a few weeks after this little revelation. It was the start of something beautiful, something awful, something exquisite.
He was beautiful, in the same vein that the Consigliere lying sprawled in a pool of her own blood, red hair mixing with red lifeblood, was beautiful.
Too specific of an example, perhaps. But he was beautiful, in the conventional way too, I suppose, flitting green eyes and tousled brown locks.
“I’ve been…shall we say, observing you,” he said casually. “I know what you are, or rather I know what you’re not.”
He leaned in, his breath tickling the strands of hair around my ear. “I propose a mutual pact of survival. Quid pro quo if it were. Defend me in my fake claims and prevent me from being lynched, otherwise the town will find your name in my will. I’ll do the same, of course.”
Being non-town, even a relatively harmless role like Survivor or Executioner, was a dangerous thing to be, especially then. The leads the town investigatives had been trying to dig up on the Mafia had run dry, and the town was desperate to lynch anyone who wasn’t one of them to keep their majority. A single tip off and I’d be on the stand, and unlike others that the town labeled “scum” back then I had no ready fake will or allies to support my claims of innocence.
You see, I wasn’t supposed to have been non-town, wasn’t supposed to want to flay the unknown man alive and open him up, see what made him different, what made us different. Things just happened that way.
But I said nothing out loud then, merely giving a jerk of my head to affirm that I’d heard him.
***
And for a week after that, things were quiet.
Oh, more people died, but people always die in this town. So what difference did hanging the Godfather or shooting the Bodyguard make to me? I had found someone better, more interesting than any of them could ever hope to be. And besides, weren’t they supposed to go to Heaven, their souls transcending this mortal coil and leaving the rest of us here with no choice but to follow soon afterwards?
I puzzled over the conundrum of that man in my head in between attempting to come up with a credible fake claim. But it seemed obvious even back then that he was someone like me, someone who just never fit in with the town, with the sea of normalcy.
***
“You don’t act like town,” he told me one day. We were sitting in a diner, the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the windows. It made his already ridiculously pretty face look much more attractive, framed as it was with the faded pink light of a dying sun. “It’s how I knew the first time we met, and your response just confirmed it. Well, you could’ve been Mafia, but usually they’re a lot more confident and self-righteous.”
The conversation was at a low murmur, most people having already begun to pack up and hurry off to their homes before darkness fully fell over town.
“Neither do you,” I shot back. I felt that it was hardly a fair judgment to make when I had just come to terms with the fact I was not town a few weeks before he approached me.
“I act more town than you do.”
“Define ‘town’” I leaned back, gulping down another mouthful of wine. It was terribly sour, and it made my eye twitch involuntarily.
“Talking, contributing to the conversation. Being suspicious of those around you, not too quiet, not too loud. You’re far too quiet for any good town member.”
“I’ve never managed to say the right things,” I confessed to that man. “It’s what made father and mother so sad all the time, so I resolved not to say much for my own safety.”
“That’s okay,” the Serial Killer’s smile softened. “I’ll teach you. People like us have to stick together right?”
And that was the difference between me and the Serial Killer. We were both monsters; he just hid it much, much better.
***
We broke my old rosary in our haste one night. I didn’t understand the point of us pawing at each other like animals, but the Serial Killer said it was one of the only things that he had ever found to make him feel anything and I agreed to give it a try.
Of course afterwards I didn’t want to admit he was right when I did feel something.
It was one of those old rosaries with the glass beads strung on a string. We knocked it off the bedside table where I had long since forgotten it and onto the ground where several shattered irrevocably into little pieces. I hardly cared at that point. They should make rosaries out of something other than glass, if they’re going to assign such importance to it.
At that point I hadn’t set foot in a church for two years.
***
But the nights I spent with him that I liked best were the ones when he let me tag along while he did his work. I think it was his idea of a date. I certainly thought it of it like that.
He was so, so beautifully meticulous in his methods, cleaning his knives and weapons, drugging his victims, the careful hands of a surgeon opening them up and letting loose trickles of red.
You might think that Serial Killers are always messy about their kills, just unadulterated stabbing of the victim, but no, he was always so careful. I think that’s why they never caught him.
I finally got to see what the human heart looked like as it struggled to hang on to the last vestiges of life.
That was when he was the most beautiful, just the two of us under the ghostly light of the moon, red painting our hands and faces and adrenaline thrumming through our veins. When I kissed him for the first time, I could still taste the Doctor’s blood.
***
There were the more “obvious” dates too, like when he would attempt to dance with me. I stepped on his toes deliberately more times than not and made sure he knew the difference.
The Serial Killer still seemed to enjoy it, though.
I didn’t like it when we pretended to be normal. We had to pretend to be normal everyday for the town, why bother in private?
***
“I’m a murderer. A Serial Killer,” he said to me one night. He was turned away from me, so I didn’t bother attempting to read his expression in the darkness.
“I know.”
What else was there to say, really? What did he hope to gain by stating such an obvious fact?
“You were going to be one of my victims,” he said, after another period of long, drawn out silence. “The world gets so loud sometimes, and then only the sight of blood can quiet it down.”
Now I really had no idea where he was trying to go.
“Can we really help the way we are born?” I instead replied, eyes turned skyward. “Go to sleep. It’s really too late to be entertaining your philosophical conversations.”
***
And then, the day came. All good things must come to an end, and the Serial Killer was imprisoned by our wonderful Jailor, may he rest in peace, yadda, yadda.
Somehow, through some skill of the tongue that he possessed that I have still yet to learn, he managed to talk his way down from the stand.
I knew full well that the town would hang him tomorrow. He barely managed to scrape by for a day, with his claim of being a Retributionist who had unluckily been chosen to be interrogated on the night that the Serial Killer stabbed the Jailor.
I knew better. And by morning, the rest of the town would too. They would hang him from the stand, and the coarse rope of the noose would suffocate him and snap his neck, like it has done for so many others before him. Perhaps, I thought then, ruefully to myself, I would finally be able to see what a man like him would look like, when he was strung up on a rope, clawing for breath and begging for his pathetic life as all men do.
And then, I realized, only if I let it happen that way.
I wasn’t finished puzzling out the layout of his mind yet, and I found that the idea of once again being the only freak amongst a sea of ordinary little people repulsed me.
I was reminded again of what I stood to lose when I saw him that night. He was crying. Fat, ugly, human tears.
“Since this is the last time I see you…” he choked out, as if he already possessed a rope around his neck. “I’m removing your name from my will of course.”
I should’ve been disgusted, to know that the Serial Killer in reality was just the same as all of the other townspeople.
But I embraced him, as I had seen father embrace mother all those years ago, and it felt good. Very good. Some sort of spark fizzled to life for just a second in this cold heart of mine.
“It won’t be,” I promised him, “It won’t be.”
So I resolved to find a way to save him from the stand.
Of course, that was easier said than done, but I had yet to bother attempting to discover what parameters my role fit under.
I had no spells at my disposal, no ability to bring back the dead and thus validate his claims. In the history of Salem, no one had ever been safe from the gallows. No matter how many evasive maneuvers the Transporter made or layers of protection Pestilence built, they all died the same, clawing in vain as the rope strangled the life out of them.
I would change that.
I don’t think I slept at all that night, occupied as I was with a way to stop what seemed the inevitable in this town.
The Serial Killer asked, almost begged me to slip into bed with him, just one more night, all he needed was one more night and he would die happy.
The moon was dipping low under the night sky. We were running out of time.
“Your blood,” I said at last, “can I have some?”
He readily handed it over. The sight of the knife against his skin really did make me want to reconsider his offer, but it was nothing a few minutes of cold water could not fix.
I took the knife, uncaring of the way his blood smeared against my skin and did the same with my own blood.
The innocuous red liquid in the vials really didn’t look that much different, but men still bleed the same I suppose. “Cheers,” I said, handing him one vial and downing mine in one gulp.
“Now I’ll always carry a part of you with me, and you the same.”
That was the way we stayed until the sun came up, and we walked into the town square together, ready to face the world (or what was left of it anyway).
And the town, of course, was merciless. Many of their number had fallen to his blade, they wanted him dead; they wanted justice. They should’ve known better; there is no justice to be found in this town.
And he stood there, unmoving, order in a sea of chaos. He shouted that he was a Retributionist, that there had been a mistake, but by now we all knew that he was guilty.
Hands started dragging him towards the stand.
You can imagine their shock then, when the stand groaned and creaked, and part of the wood of the stand split cleanly in two. Beyond all hope, my tampering seemed to have done the job. The Serial Killer would be saved from the noose for another period of time, long enough perhaps, for us to win.
You see, like many things in Salem, the ancient lynching stand was as much a byproduct of its founders as the town itself.
It was Salem’s ultimate instrument of justice, and as such there were runes, layered one after the other, designed to maintain the usability of the stand and, as always, to prevent its poor victims from escaping their fate. There was nothing else quite like it, and a small town like Salem had never bothered to construct another stand.
People lived and died by these runes, so all I had to do was find a way to alter them. Now, I was no member of the Coven nor a Retributionist, as I have stated before I had no spells or deep arcane knowledge to tap into. What I had was my own ingenuity (or insanity) and an old childhood habit of wasting afternoons away on researching runes and witchcraft.
Runes are terribly specific in their capacity, and I had little practical experience with applying them. I merely chipped away some of them that I recognized were for protection, and painted over a few additions of my own.
Well, if there was anything the entire ordeal had taught me, it was that I could not let the Serial Killer die. Having experienced that terrible, inexplicable sensation when watching him being pushed up to the stand, I found I could not allow that to happen again.
I told him as much when the town’s angry shouts had simmered down and we were allowed to return to our homes for the night. “We are never doing that again.”
Slightly pale and shaken but still with that characteristic wolfish grin of his, the Serial Killer readily agreed. “Dinner?”
***
He was a church and priest all packaged in one, confessions and comforting words dripping like blood on his knife, a face and smile promising sin. Sometimes I wanted to carve that smile off of him, press it and frame it so that I could immortalize it in to more than just one searing moment of passion.
That’s not so bad right? People talk about following your passions, and it’s not like I ever did anything worse than draw a little blood.
Guardian Angel. Don’t you like it? What a fitting name for my role. Like the stories of the Bible of the ethereal beings who arrived to save Daniel from the lions’ den, of the men who walked into the fire praising God and were met by salvation at the hands of angels.
Although, I’m quite sure nobody would ever call me that, except in some cruel jest.
I’ve been reliably informed that I’m quite possibly the farthest thing from an angel.