Monster
William Young
Copyright 2011 WilliamYoung
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapters:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
About the Author
Also by William Young
The Signal
The Divine World
ONE
There was blood on Nick Case's tongue. Not much, perhaps just a trace, but there was blood on his tongue. Its sweet taste lingered there for a moment before he swallowed and rolled his head over toward the clock radio. The red numbers blazed in the dark: 3:47. He moved his tongue against the roof of his mouth and pressed the small cut against it, once again tasting a droplet of blood. He blinked hard and stared at the clock before he was conscious of why he had just awoken. The Monster had returned.
He slipped his legs out from beneath the covers and looked over at his girlfriend, Sarah. She was still deep in the nothingness sleep of middle night, her blond hair trailing across her face like moonlight illuminated rivers. He walked into the kitchen and poured a glass of water from the faucet. It was luke warm and seeped into the small puncture on his tongue with a faint sting. He looked out the kitchen window and down the empty street at the closed-up patio of the corner coffee shop: There was no Monster there. Just before Nick awoke the Monster had been standing there, its red eyes burning through the night. Now, there were just white patio chairs stacked in fours and chained to the center posts of each patio table. Of course, the Monster had only been there moments ago in a dream, but the Monster had been absent from his dreams for almost a decade.
The Monster had been a fixture in his dreams throughout his adolescence, fading into less frequent occurrences when he went to college. He had always attributed the Monster to his lifestyle as the son of a military officer and the fact that his family was always moving. In his dreams, the Monster would show up and kill or abduct his friends, but never touch him. It would taunt him from afar or growl at him from the underbrush of his dreams, but never did it threaten him. When he sought it out in his dreams, it always eluded him: It would stand on the horizon and bellow; it would quickly dash across a path just in front of him. Never had it given Nick the chance to close in and confront it.
Nick, when he had gotten older and thought about it, relegated the dreams to the way his subconscious was dealing with the constant upheaval of always moving and leaving friends behind, of never being able to settle down and pursue any one thing for any length of time. The Monster had faded away after he had begun living a more stable lifestyle as a college student, rooted in one place and pursuing one goal. Since graduation, he had never dreamt of it, had chalked that up to finally having taken control of his life. Tonight, though, the Monster had returned, looking for him as it had in so many of the dreams of his youth. When he was young, when his family would move to a new Army post, he would have dreams of the Monster searching for him. Always, the Monster would catch up, track him down and destroy his friends. The Monster was always slow, but it always arrived, and it always destroyed everything around Nick.
Nick took another drink of water and set the glass down, felt his tongue with his fingers, and went back to the bedroom. Sarah hadn't budged. He climbed beneath the covers and looked over at the clock radio: The alarm would go off in an hour.
He awoke with Sarah's hip in his stomach and saw her long arm sticking from beneath her mane of blond hair as she fumbled for the alarm button.
"Jesus, Nick, how long are you going to hit the snooze button?" she said groggily before flopping back onto her side of the bed and closing her eyes.
Nick looked at the clock. It was now just after six. "Shit," he mumbled as he jerked out of bed and walked quickly to the bathroom. Twenty-five minutes later he was hastily fixing a tie around his neck and stuffing his pockets with change, keys and his wallet. He jostled Sarah lightly on the shoulder. Her eyelids slid open and her pale blue eyes stared up at him.
"Hey, I gotta go. I can't believe I overslept. Shit. Bye," he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. "Time for you to get up, now." She grimaced and he walked quickly through the apartment and down onto the street.
As he turned onto the sidewalk near the coffee shop he felt his cell phone vibrating inside his left pants pocket.
"Damn," he said as he pulled it out and looked at the caller ID. It was the city editor. A man who looked like he had just been jogging was sitting at one of the tables with a muffin and a steaming cup of coffee, his hair moist and his shirt wet in a V on his chest.
"John, it's Nick, what's going on?" Nick said after flipping his phone open.
"Nick, where are you? Is there something we should know?"
Nick looked up and down the street, the early morning traffic just beginning to pull from the curbs and make its way down the roads toward the main arteries that would funnel it into downtown parking garages.
"No, nothing so far. My alarm didn't go off, so I'm running a little late."
"Alright, well call us if anything comes up. Steve said it was a slow night, though," John said, and they hung up.
Steve was the evening cops reporter. Nick was the daylight version of the same job and he was supposed to have already cleared two precincts and called in his early report. Nick's portion of the city was usually pretty calm overnight. A few break-ins, a stolen car or two, maybe a stick-up during a busy week. Never anything dramatic.
Nick walked the few blocks to the precinct house, a two story yellow brick building that tripled as police precinct, fire house and paramedic station. The night's police reports, at least those that had been completed before the overnight cops left for home at 7 a.m., were on a clipboard hanging on a nail on the wall next to a bulletin board of notices, wanted posters and instructions for civilians requesting to see an officer. The overnight desk sergeant, Officer Bob Claypool, was sitting behind the counter reading the morning paper. Not Nick's paper, which came out at noon on a good day, but the city's dominant morning daily which dwarfed his own paper's circulation by a factor of four.
Claypool, his body made more stocky by the body armor beneath his uniform, looked up from the desk and smiled broadly when Nick pushed the door open. "Hey, you are working today."
"Stupid alarm didn't go off," Nick lied again, not certain why. "I hope nothing went on last night."
Claypool shook his head and looked back down at his paper. Nick flipped through the reports and jotted down some notes about a burglary in a nearby mansion in which several unidentified paintings were taken. The spot where the victim's name was listed said "victim requests anonymity." There was no value listed for the paintings. He looked up at Claypool.
"Is there anything to this robbery where they took some paintings?" Nick asked.
Claypool shrugged. "I don't know. What's it say?"
"Not much."
"That's more than I know about it."
Nick wrote down the reporting officer's name, scanned through the car accident reports, and slipped out of the waiting room after fifteen minutes of running through the reports. Claypool was never any help, and Nick had always suspected that he pre
ferred the morning paper's cop reporters to him. Whether the painting heist was anything would depend on if there was anything in the morning paper, but only if its reporter had cobbled something together before midnight when the morning daily went to press. Even if it turned out to be nothing, Nick thought as he walked back toward his apartment to his car, it would be something to track down during the course of the day. Provided, of course, something more interesting didn't turn up at the next precinct.
As he was walking up to his car, Sarah came streaming out of the apartment, her wet hair hanging down against her neck while her skirt billowed out with each of her long strides. He stopped, smiled, and waited.
"No coffee, today, I see," she said, stopping in front of him and pulling her hair back behind her neck. "Didn't you sleep okay?"
Nick shrugged. "I woke up last night around four. I had a nightmare."
Sarah crinkled her eyes together. "About what?"
"The Monster."
Sarah said nothing for a second. "What monster?"
"Remember the Monster dreams I told you I used to have a long time ago?"
Sarah looked away for a second and then nodded. "Sort of."
"Well, I had another one last night."
"Were you up all night?"
Nick shook his head. "Hey, I'll tell you more later. I'm running really late. I can only hope nothing happened last night."
"Nothing ever does," Sarah said, flipped her wrist over to check her watch and pecked Nick on the lips quickly. "See ya later."
"Bye. Have a good day."
Nick watched her cross the street to her car before opening the door to his own. He flipped on the local radio news channel and began listening as he pulled away from the curb and merged into the now steady traffic of bankers, lawyers and businessmen all vying for green lights to usher them into the jam of machines jostling their way downtown.
It was just after nine before he finished his rounds and strode into the newsroom. Normally, he should have been up at five, at the first precinct by six and in the newsroom at a quarter-past eight with forty-five minutes till deadline. Fortunately, there had been nothing for either of the daylight shift cop reporters to write about, so Nick wasn't worried when he passed John's desk, said "Nothing happened," detoured to the coffee pot to fill his mug, and made his way to his own desk.
He turned on his computer and leaned back in his chair, pulled open the copy of the morning daily he had bought at a street kiosk and began quickly scanning it for something he may have missed and might need to work on for the next day's paper. Nothing. No mention of the paintings robbery. He sighed and looked out the window at the sliver of the street he could see. There was just the end of the morning rush hour scurrying for parking or walking briskly towards a building. There was never anything interesting going on just outside his window.
Nick clicked his browser and began scanning the on-line versions of the other daily newspapers in his newspaper’s circulation area, although outside of Pittsburgh and its suburbs, his paper made little dent in the surrounding areas. Then he checked Drudge Report and Instapundit to make sure the world wasn’t ending, clicked quickly through a dozen of his favorite blogs to check if they’d posted yet, and if so, about what, before flipping over to the paper’s subscriber newsfeeds, quickly scanning through the AP’s list of stories and deciding he’d read them later.
He flipped open his notebook, checked his notes from the police report on the robbery, and called the station. The robbery had happened during second shift, which wouldn't report until mid-afternoon, but Nick wanted to leave a message for the investigating officer to call him. He hadn't met the officer before, Detective Rich Tagget, and was unsure if he would get a call back. Cops were like that.
He leaned back into his chair and took a sip of his coffee. The Monster. From out of nowhere it had turned the corner in his dream and begun lumbering toward him. He had been sitting on the street corner next to the bus stop waiting for the 61B to take him somewhere -- where? He couldn't remember: dreams are like that -- when he looked up at the dream night sky and realized the street was deserted and the bus would not be coming. And then the Monster turned the corner and walked down the middle of the street, its massive head looking up, left, right, down. Its long arms hung slackly at its side and its fur was matted down. Nick hid behind the bumper of a nearby car and peeked through the car's windows to watch as the Monster took a dozen steps, stopped, and repeated its search sequence.
It took the Monster forever to move down the street toward Nick and he had been afraid to move away from the car and be seen, to be pursued through an urban dreamscape of his own nightmarish contriving. Again. So he had hidden. When the Monster drew close, he had crawled around the other side of the car into the space between the car and the curb, looking underneath the car at the Monster's hairy feet. It had taken forever before the Monster reached the mid-point of the next block, its broad back clumped with fur as if it had just left its own bed. Nick had slipped away from the car and quickly dashed up the street to his apartment. In his dream he had stood in his apartment looking out the living room window at the coffee shop patio and had frozen as the Monster returned to the corner where the coffee shop was, stared at the curb where moments earlier he had cowered, and turned to look up the street. Then the Monster looked up into his dream apartment, its crimson eyes widening for a moment as it cocked its head to the side. And then Nick had awoke.
"Nick, pick up your phone, man."
Nick started. His phone buzzed again and he looked away from his computer screen at Paul, one of the county government reporters, who was half-standing out of his chair so that he could get Nick's attention.
"Newsroom, Nick Case," Nick said as he placed the handset to his head.
"Yeah, this is Detective Tagget. You called?" The detective's voice was mellow and low pitched.
"Hey, yeah. Thanks for calling me back. I didn't think you'd be getting in until later."
"Surprise, I guess. What do you need?"
"I need some information that wasn't on a police report about a robbery. Some paintings were stolen from somebody's house last night around ten o'clock, but that's all the police report says," Nick said.
"Last night? That was yesterday morning. Ten-hundred hours, not 10 PM. We switched back to military time on our reports the other day to keep everything standard. It was getting too confusing to use civilian time on the public reports but military time everywhere else. Mistakes were getting made," Tagget said.
"Oh, well...” Nick said, suddenly chagrined at not having known something so obvious about his beat. “So, what kind of paintings were stolen?"
Tagget was silent for a second on the other end of the line.
"Listen, I really can't give you any more information than
was on the report. Suffice it to say somebody had a couple of paintings taken from their private collection."
"It can't be that big a deal. How can you just put no name, address or anything on a report? I just want to know if it's worth doing a human interest story. You know, a "If you have any information about Joe Blow's favorite paintings, call the police" kind of story. If there is a story," Nick said, sipping his coffee and staring back down at the street through the window. "After all, the incident report is a public document."
Tagget was silent for another moment. Both of them knew that Tagget could make it next to impossible for Nick to get the report, if Tagget wanted to: Public reports and public information were two entirely different things as far as the police were concerned.
"I'll tell you what. Let me give the guy a call, maybe he's changed his mind about it. I'll tell him what you told me about maybe writing a story. If he says okay, I'll get back to you," Tagget said.
"Thanks."
"Yeah, bye."
Nick hung up, grabbed a notebook from the pile on the corner of his desk and stopped to talk to his editor.
"John, I'm going to go skulk around some art galleries, see if anybody k
nows anything about somebody getting some paintings ripped off yesterday morning."
John looked up from his screen. "Paintings?"
"Yeah. The police don't want to release any information on it, yet, but somebody near Precinct Six got some paintings stolen. They might be valuable, might not, but the victim reported it and requested anonymity and no details about the paintings, so..."
"Have fun," John said and returned to his screen.
The Gallery sat behind a row of picture windows and was framed on the right side by a discount movie theater and on the left by a thrift store masquerading as an antique shop. The gallery dealt mostly with original works by local area artists, but occasionally offered lesser-known works by somewhat famous artists and doodles by famous painters that only name-dropping dilettantes would want. All of the paintings were expensive and none were extraordinary, which caused Nick to quickly conclude where the term "starving artist" was born. The air-conditioned interior was a welcome relief from the early morning humidity hugging the air outside, and Nick stood for a moment in the middle of the gallery slowly assessing the artwork and allowing the coolness to settle on the sweat that had slicked his lower back during the drive from the office. It was only a few more moments before a woman with shoulder-length black hair appeared from around a corner with a much-practiced smile stretched across her lips. Nick guessed her to be in her late thirties or early forties, aerobicized and underfed into the skinny tightness of a fashion model. One look from her at Nick in his loose-fitting blazer and loosened tie weakened her smile perceptibly - no sale here - although she still closed in on him.
"Good morning, how are you today?" the woman asked, stopping a few feet in front of him and letting her arms rest idly at her sides.
"I'm good. You?" Nick said, reaching a hand into his blazer and pulling a business card from the chest pocket. "My name's Nick Case, I'm a reporter with the Evening Times."
Nick stuck his hand with the business card into the gulf between them and let the woman take it. She glanced at it briefly and then cupped it in the palm of her hand, which she returned to her side.
"What can I do for you today, Mr. Case?" the woman asked.
"Well, I was wondering about the local art collecting scene," Nick said, "and I figured the best way to find out who has good collections and who was really into the art scene would be to visit a few galleries and see what they had to say."
The woman furrowed her brow but said nothing.
"Anyway, I was thinking about doing a feature story for one of our upcoming Sunday papers on art collections in the city. You know, who has them, what do they have, what drives them to collect, where do they go to get their artwork, how did they get started? That kind of stuff," Nick said, knowing he was lying and actually hoping she’d bite and offer up the name of a local with a good collection, perhaps even the collection he was searching for. "I don't know what kind of information you'd be willing to give now, but I figured I might as well get out and meet the people who seemed most likely to know."
The woman's smile turned into a straight line and she looked away from Nick at a selection of paintings on the wall to his left.
"Well, that's quite a task," she said, turning back to Nick.
"While I certainly know some people with admirable collections, I don't know that any of them would want me to tell anyone without having first consulted them. And, of course, I'm not sure where you'd want to start. People collect art for an infinite number of reasons, from vanity to love to mere decoration; how you'd want to narrow it down is beyond me. There's no way you could see everything in the area and no reason you'd want to."
"Well, I'm not sure, yet, either. I'm initially thinking people with pretty established collections by artists most people are likely to have heard of. Not the Mona Lisa or anything like that, obviously, but artists who are just as likely to be in a museum somewhere as in somebody's study."
The woman walked over to a pedestal with a vase atop it and pulled off a small business card. She turned where she stood and proffered the card between two long fingers.
"Well, Mr. Case, I'll think about it. Here's my card, should you need anything further."
He took the card and looked at the name, Sophia , and stuffed it into a pocket on his blazer.
"Thanks, have a nice day," he said. She smiled and nodded.
TWO