* * * * *
A week had passed since the sentencing of that curse, and Max now sat with a mangled and bandaged hand, his blood still dripping on the desk beneath his microphone. Sweat trickled on his brow. His hand throbbed. The airwaves hummed while Max Jervis wrestled with the shock that curses and monsters could take such real shapes.
A monster stalked him. A monster trapped him in the small studio secluded in the desert. It scratched on his door and waited for Max to stick something more than a hand beyond the threshold, a limb with more flesh around which that monster might grip its teeth.
He first noticed the beast the night following the curse after speaking about the dangerous influence of a recent movie blockbuster, after he had pointed out how the science fiction thriller sugar-coated a message of Big Brother and one-world government. He felt a sting through the toe of his snakeskin boot, and peering at the floor while his radio hummed, Max saw a strange desert insect, a mixed form of scorpion and cockroach he could not name. He tried to crush the thing with a stomp, but the exoskeleton proved too tough. Max did not suffer a weak stomach, and so he trapped the creature in an empty, Styrofoam coffee cup and tossed it out the studio door, careful to place a towel beneath the doorway before returning to the microphone so that it would not slither back into the room to again sting his toe.
Max hosted a round table on the second night following the curse detailing the occult symbolism prevalent in the public school system when the creature’s form further evolved. The creature swooped upon Max as the radio host walked to his car following his show. Leathery wings had sprouted from that exoskeleton. Its mass had expanded to the size of a large bat. Max ripped the thing away from his head before its bite claimed more than a thick tuft of hair, and he gulped as he noticed the numerous rows of teeth that screeched at his neck.
The creature continued to morph and grow over the following nights. Max sprinted into his radio studio, feeling certain that he had glimpsed hundreds of the monster’s wet, glistening eyes sparkling in his headlights. While he hosted shows deriding the nefarious plans of evolutionists and fundamentalists, of Jews and Gentiles, of aliens both foreign and extraterrestrial, the monster’s form grew more terrible. Thumps bounded from the ceiling. A scraping of talons and claws cut at his studio’s door.
And now, the monster trapped Max within his studio. Max had opened that doorway for a second, time enough to be frozen from the shock of the sight of the thing that waited for him, time enough for that monster to chomp away much of his right hand before, miraculously, the door had slammed closed behind the swooning radio host. A shark’s maw shaped the bulk of the monster’s head. The taught and thin legs of an insect stretched across the ground. Sharp horns protruded at every angle from out of the thick, cretonnes exoskeleton. Thousands of eyes had blinked upon Max in that short glimpse out of the studio’s door, and the radio host swooned for the countless antennae that waved in the wind.
The program’s dead silence stretched as Max gazed at the green lights blinking madly on his phone. Max realized he could not afford to allow the silence to linger much longer. Soon, that silence would cut into valuable time reserved for product placement. But fear tightly gripped his tongue. The monster outside of his door loomed over his studio, and Max feared that new words would only fuel that beast’s growth.
Max Jervis feared to say anything, so he thought that perhaps the voices of his listeners would fill the dead silence that hummed through the airwaves and refuse further substance to the monster outside of his door.
“I have a special plea to extend to my audience tonight.”
Max’s voice lifted into the ionosphere. Instantly, the monster threw itself upon the studio’s door, shaking the walls. It scraped upon the roof, and small pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. Max heard the sound of a thousand screeches on the other side of this walls, and he realized that those shrills came from the multiple mouths of a single monster.
“There are things that hover in the midnight air,” Max continued while his knees shook, “things that I dare not give further shape to with my words. I have shared with you in your fears, and excuse me for asking for a reprieve from my role as this show’s director. I am going to ask that my callers direct our conversation. I am going to open my phones to my audience’s voices. Tonight, the army of tongues that is the Max Guardian Radio Program audience will speak what hurt is afflicted upon them, while this radio host remains silent.”
Quiet descended beyond the studio’s walls as Max’s voice again silenced.
The phone line’s green lights sparkled.
Max tapped life into a line with his left fingers and pain shot from his right hand.
“You’re on the Max Guardian Radio Program. Go ahead, caller.”
“Hey, Max, first time caller, long time listener. I’m calling in about the ammunition shortages. The fascists are taking all our ammunition away from us because they’re too scared to try to take our guns.”
“Max, this is Carol calling on the line. Our recent governor election has given ascension to the Anti-Christ. He’s about to force us all to have bar codes tattooed on our foreheads here in my small town.”
“Yeah, Max, I’ve seen the bulldozers being hauled down the highway. They’re getting ready to break ground on that superhighway that’ll disregard our border rights, so they can flood our market and dangerously ignore our safety rules.”
“What’s really going on in this market, Max, is result of manipulation by the secret banking families. All the money’s flooding into the pockets of those elites while the rest of us starve.”
“Would you believe it’s been a cold winter over here, Max? Now, this only goes to show all that global warming talk is all political. Nothing but voodoo science.”
“They’re attacking my culture, Max. They’re going to try to say our basketball team can’t do their halftime dance any more. Now, that really offends my culture.”
“The end is nigh, Max.”
“All of us know, Max, that the monsters are right outside our front door.”
A violent, shrill roar tore through that small radio studio secluded in the desert, and Max cupped his ears with his remaining fingers. The furious roar warbled between rumbling bass and shrieking decibels with such an onslaught of mayhem that Max closed his eyes in a vain attempt to block the pain he heard ravaging in his mind. Blinding stars bloomed against his closed eyelids, and Max swooned in the monster’s oscillating scream. It was the shrill of a legion of mouths, the clacking of uncountable teeth, the utterance of a thousand tongues.
Radio equipment popped and sparked. Dials spun madly around their meters. Hard-drives smoked. Monitors popped and went dark. The scream that filled the studio swept wavelengths both audible and unheard, and its spectrum proved too potent for radio host’s equipment that strove to gauge it.
The roar’s volume escalated. Max swooned in his chair. The crescendo refused to diminish, vibrating the studio’s walls until they rippled like water.
His sensations overcome by the shrill that assaulted him, Max did not hear or see when the studio doorway succumbed to the shockwave of sound that built against it. Max Jervis did not see the final horror of the monster his words had summoned from out of the ether, that beast conceived in a curse and sewn onto fetid bone, that beast that answered an invisible voice’s call to that secluded spot of flat desert. Max did not see how the scaly neck twisted through the broken threshold, failed to feel the hiss of a hundred mouths as they breathed upon the pale radio host who swooned within the noise of its fury.
The monster’s many antennae waved in the air. Several patches of eyes blinked. A claw grasped Max Jervis’s neck. Several rows of teeth clacked.
And then that beast, summoned by the words of a man who was cursed for summoning monsters out of the invisible night, claimed the organ for which it had come before slinking its girth once more out of the studio and back beneath the dark ni
ght.