A monster emerges from the shadows. He is followed by another, and another, until the world is inhabited by new beasts of its own creation. This anthology incorporates stories from various genres and timelines, exploring what makes us who we are.
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Did he know what I was?
I expected him to grasp my truth, because the hints were there from the start. Long ago, I had identified the chaos in him. Years before he acted, I plotted my revenge. I doubted how far he'd go in his madness and here was my error but I'd correct it before long. His reckoning approached, yes, swift and keen.
None of the cardiologists I visited understood this odd heart of mine. It beat and beat in spite of fatal pancreatitis, infections, tumors. My sons whined of my quickness to hold a grudge. They vowed my enmity would cause me to decompose, yet they perished of old age while I lived on—until he killed me.
How this murder transpired I now fail to recall. He undoubtedly cut me up afterward, since I woke in pieces beneath the floor.
I wasn't entirely dead.
My heart beat, beat, beat, its thumps vanishing only when I willed them to, and as he listened to their hellish rhythm in his mind, I perceived his thoughts. He assumed my survival was his imagination. Would he drive himself mad rejecting the facts he ought to have known were unavoidable? I'd enlighten him soon.
Dispersed in lumps of gore, I congealed under a mansion I'd hired workers to remodel ten years ago in 1830s Philadelphia. Oh, how wet I now seemed, everywhere and nowhere! Men in long hats dug up the planks that concealed my remains. The authorities thudded down to me in their weighty boots, and they quivered as they noted my every missing limb. A couple of them gawked at my severed head, one of its eyes wide as a vulture's.
Did they know what I was?
I stayed still, so still, an obedient mulch. Corpses experienced little, and if I was to play one, numbness would be my game.
Were those uniformed men aware that I could see them?
"My God!" a deputy blurted, placing his ear against my chest—which was nothing but a wrinkly mound on a headless, limbless torso.
I resisted the urge to smile.
The deputy muttered, "Fellas, I hear it."
Another policeman, whose badge indicated he was a lieutenant, scoffed. "What?"
"His heart." The deputy gulped. "Listen."
Rigid and trembling, his superior brought his own ear to my chest.
"Puh!" The lieutenant frowned at the deputy. "Are you insane?"
When none of the men were looking, my severed head blinked its open eyes.
They didn't know about me, what I was and had always been. I wanted to scold the officers, to make them urinate and defecate on themselves out of fear, but I refrained. Patience was a virtue even in gloom, and I hadn't been impulsive since I was in my eighties. Was I ever young? I was born in this house, and I'd rarely left it, but tonight I would because the authorities slipped on gloves and prepared to take me to the morgue.
