Moonlight and broken glass

by Isaiah Badger Pittman

As Marley watched the monster’s hairy, clawed feet move across the long slat of moonlight, he realized it had to die, and that he would have to be the one to kill it.

It would be a demanding task. He was only a boy, barely eight, but the other option—to let tonight repeat itself—was not an option at all. His mother had been mauled so savagely that droplets of blood had even been splattered on the wooden floorboards deep under the bed, where Marley lay flat in hiding. Blood had even found its way into his mouth; he could taste it on his clothes, on the front collar of the shirt he had started chewing on to keep from screaming.

Thick, phlegmy snuffling sounds oozed through the mattress. The creature was sniffing around for him with its long, flat snout. The wind rustled a photo of Marley and his parents, which lay in its shattered frame on the floor beneath the open window. Broken glass glinted with a silver-blue flame like coals of ice. The monster’s long, furry-knuckled crocodilian toes crunched over them, heedless.

Finally, the enormous feet turned and began striding towards the doorway. The wet, raspy snorting sounds grew fainter as it descended the stairs. A long grey flicker of fur, the tip of its patchy bald ratlike tail, swept the floor left and right and then was gone, trailing after it.

Silence and moonlight. A long, long silence.

At last something stirred: a shadow moved, slightly, across the broken glass. Marley could hear his mother sobbing. He began to crawl forward, then thought better of it and began shimmying backwards. He climbed out from under the bed feet-first and stood up.

He jumped. There was someone else next to him in the room. A pale dwarf, all shimmering whites, bone yellows and blood-spattered greys, staring at him with bleary dark eyes set in a gaping skull face…

It was him, he realized: his reflection in the tall bedside mirror. A towheaded boy in off-white cotton pajamas, face transformed by shock into the mask of a grimacing ghoul. A strip of bloody grey flannel hung limply around his neck, wet from his mouth. All him.

He began to move towards the sound of his mother’s crying, tiptoeing to avoid the broken glass. It’ll come back, he thought. And then I’m going to kill it.

* * *

Marley’s mother told the police everything. The police did not believe a word of it.

They took them both to the hospital and separated them. Marley sat overnight in a pediatric ward where the walls were bleached as white as his face had been in that mirror. Hours after the questions had ceased, he sat up in bed, chewing the front collar of his hospital-issued pajamas and watching the shadows for eyes. Every so often the silence was broken by a sob or a long moan from one of the other beds.

A nurse pushed a trolley through the ward several times that night. She was faceless; a gauzy grey veil covered her head and shoulders. The trolley’s three trays were stocked with sweets and juice-boxes, pills and medicines, folded sheets. The second time she passed his bed, she stopped and held out a large cookie, cratered like a little pale moon.

Marley shook his head. The creature had taken away his stomach.

The veil shook slightly, and she passed with a screech of wheels.

“Poor child," He heard her whisper, breathily, not meant for him to hear.

In the always-dying sepia glow of the lamplights, moths pinwheeled and crisscrossed towards the ceiling, like circling vultures attracted by the crisp smell of pressed hospital fatigues. Marley slept eventually.

* * *

They descended the corridor together; the nurse’s hand was small as Marley’s, and a matching shade of pale. She stopped shortly before the hall’s end, where a single door awaited.

“Your mother’s in there," came the breathy voice from behind the veil. She took her hand away from his, leaving something freezing-hard: a silver crucifix on a chain.

Marley burst into the room. Sitting on the bed was a shrunken figure in a sleeveless gown, head wrapped in a dark-stained cloth, a trickle of gummy blood inching down the left temple like a hair-thin scarlet worm. Her eyes were huge, shiny, black marbles. She grinned from chapped lips when she saw him, mouth empty except for two crooked yellow teeth…

Marley backed away, and then his mother was behind him, scooping him up in her arms and carrying him out of the room, away from the woman on the bed, who watched him go.

* * *

By the time they got back to their house, several days had passed. The glass on the floors had all been swept up, but the windows were still broken and yellow police tape was wound around the property, as if the police were spiders trying to trap a large and particularly violent fly.

He still had the tiny silver crucifix. His mother had never noticed it in his hand, even once, the whole trip home, although the silver chain had been dangling out from between his clenched fingers. The silver cross itself had failed to warm up despite the pressure of Marley’s sweaty fist; it was still cold and sharp as a gust of winter wind.

He opened his hand and studied it now. Though the figure on the cross was about the size of Marley’s little finger, every detail was rendered in fine precision, from the nails in Jesus’ feet to the tears in his eyes. The miniature savior’s expression of utter agony and abandonment gave Marley a moment’s pause; someone else’s earthly troubles outweighed his own.

His mother took a glass of wine off the table and went upstairs to bed early.

Marley closed his fist over the crucifix again and went out into the night.

* * *

The evening was hot and pockets of dew in the grass squelched beneath his feet as Marley ran all over the property. He charged blindly through bushes. He rolled down dark hills. He slid down sheer rocks and climbed trees. He crawled through every moonlit gutter until he could race his shadow and win. Tiny blue snakes darted from his tread. Small blind lunar deer leapt further away into the woods, kicking out their hindlegs like grasshoppers. All the time his clenched fingers scoured the little figure on the silver cross. It stayed cold, no matter what.

He went out every night and kept to the same route.

“Isn’t that cute?" said old Miss Emily Oakamoor at the window, to her sister. “The little fellow is learning to play by himself!" Agnes Oakamoor glanced to where she pointed, then sighed and went back to watching Tomorrow! with Dr. Ugo Stegman. Obviously Emily was being naive, or senile, because that child was clearly in training to run for his very life.

After running himself to exhaustion, Marley would go into his room and read books all night. He was at the library after school every day, reading and studying. The librarians helped him find special books from the back room.

He did not bathe. He knew it could smell him. He knew it tracked him everywhere.

His mother went out one day and tried to buy herself a gun. Her card was declined. Out on the street the sheriff walked by, talking with the monster. They gave her odd nods and she ran to her car.

* * *

Marley’s mother sat at the kitchen table in the blue twilight.

Liquor bottles lined almost every inch of the tabletop, a scale-model city of miniature glass skyscrapers. Most of them had been emptied down to the bitter, slimy dregs. She was still drinking, even though she had to use both hands to lift the glass now. Finally she quit moving and stared at the wall, as the shadows lengthened and the room around her slowly faded into darkness.

She gripped the bottle nearest her and tipped the last of its contents into her glass. A rhythmic thumping on the hardwood boards of the porch, rising on the left and then falling away to the right, announced the passage of her son around the house. For a moment her heart fluttered and her stomach wrenched in anguish for all the things he had been made to witness. He was a brave boy, so smart, and all she had.

The bottle was larger now and had become a tunnel, inviting her in, promising that sticky sort of warmth which full-blooded whiskey in the summer imparts. Gratefully, she planted both her hands on the rim and gently lowered herself inside. Once safely ensconced within, she continued to shrink as she slowly descended to the bottom and crouched into a corner, where she found sleep, and comfort at last.

* * *

After three days, the monster could no longer resist the lure of Marley’s scent. It came back. Marley knew it was coming because he saw a rat on the porch and held out a cookie in offering. The rat came closer. Marley tore off a crumb and dropped it in front of the rat. The rat nudged it back towards him and ran off.

That night Marley heard the monster trying to enter the house. The knife was in his hand. The letter (more of a drawing, really) was safely tucked underneath his mother’s door. Marley understood it was now or never. He opened the window and hoisted himself up onto the roof.

The shingles on the rooftop were blue corn shells. The moonlight dazzled his blue skin. He was at the center of a monstrous carnival of dark shapes. He stopped to take it all in and his feet slipped out from under him.

He caught himself, splitting one of his fingernails, dropping the knife and sending dirt skittering over the edge. He hauled himself up and ran along the angular peak of the house. He looked down and saw the creature’s lower half hanging off the front porch.

Marley jumped.

He landed hard and stumbled running up its back. It tried to buck him. He grabbed a tuft of its mossy, moon-colored pelt and burrowed his face in it, smelling sour fragrance and dirt and whisky and ruined meat.

The creature slammed him against the wall of the house as the moon went behind a cloud. Marley gasped, but his fingers were knotted in the gnarled hair and he did not slip off. When they came away from the wall, he jumped. He tugged and swung on tufts of hair, then got up and ran all the way up to its long face. He pressed the crucifix against the ball of his thumb and drove it as hard as he could into the monster’s eye.

It did not pop instantly, and he fought his way in. Then the socket began to make sucking sounds and swallowed almost the entire length of the chain, pulling it so tight that Marley’s wrist began to lose feeling. His fingers tightened around the chain and he yanked. At first it was stuck fast. He put his entire shoulder into it, and the cross shot out so fast his arm was flung backwards in a violent arc. A spray of eye jelly whipped the branches and clapboards of the house.

The monster’s last scream was choked and died abruptly. It reared, went slack and fell underneath him. When he could move again, Marley climbed off its body and immediately it began to twitch and shudder. Its final exhalation brought a perverse stench, a foul blast of air. Marley breathed it in and tears stung his eyes.

The creature was shrinking on the ground. Its hill of a body slowly became a small boulder. Long stalks of hair began receding into the flesh, becoming ingrown stubble. The moon came out from behind the clouds and Marley stood there for a time, staring down over the lifeless body of what had once been his father.