Page 104 of Misfit Monsters
“What’s he got stuck all over the walls?” Raze mutters.
I can’t make out the details from here, but shadows dapple the wall behind the ladder below our perch and the floor beneath the furnishings on the side away from the cages. I nudge my companions. “Let’s go down and take a closer look.”
I flit through the narrow bands of darkness and into the larger splotches offered by the table and desk. Tucking myself in a shadow next to a pencil holder, I study the corkboards up close.
The photographs and articles seem to be clustered into groups, each around a specific person. Some have jaggedwords scrawled on them in marker, likeBRAINWASHING MENACEandRIGHTS GOUGER, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
I sense my companions’ presences gathering around me in the shadows. “Those must be the people he’s targeting,” I say. “He’s fixating on a whole crowd. There’d always be people he decided were making his life difficult on purpose, that he wanted the beings he was controlling to get rid of. He didn’t use to say—or write—stuff like that, though.”
Hail’s tone is disdainful. “It looks like conspiracy theory craziness. Humans make up all kinds of insanity even though they can’t handle the actual strangeness in the world.”
My former captor was a little unhinged to begin with. Has he spiraled even farther into vengeful delusion?
Please let Gracie have gotten away from him all right.
I shift my attention to the next board. The drawings tacked to it remind me of some of the warped creatures we’ve stumbled on—mismatched features, arrows that maybe show them shifting from one awkward form to another. The erratic notes are difficult to read even from here, but the bits I can decipher record the writer’s observations of the creatures’ characteristics and behavior. It looks like he was trying to figure them out too.
So he could make better use of them rather than so he could protect people from them, of course.
Some of them are dated. Raze grunts. “He’s been keeping track of them for almost a year now.”
“And keeping track of the rift too, I think,” Mirage pipes up, adjusting his position to peer toward the map.
As I study it alongside him, I decide he’s right. The map looks a lot like the image I’ve seen on Jonah’s phone when he stops to navigate, showing the area we’ve been driving around in. It’s marked with at least fifteen red push-pins—different locations the rift has galivanted to, maybe?
I frown. “I don’t see any pattern. Maybe Rollick would be able to find one.”
Hail’s presence twitches. “If we can get it to him.”
He’s barely finished speaking when the stout, pasty man climbs out of the lower cellar into the room.
Even though I knew my former captor was down here, my essence clenches up at the sight of him so nearby. Closer up, it’s clear his skin has gone blotchy, his graying hair patchy, as if he isn’t eating all that well.
He’s obviously not preparing haute cuisine in this remote place. Is he even getting enough sunlight? I think he might be wilting like a plucked flower.
Possibly his mind as much as his body, because as he walks over to the corkboards with a stiff gait, he starts muttering. “It all stinks, Sam. Every one of them. We have to pelt them all with justice.”
It’s only when he pats the sewing dummy on its armless shoulder that I realize who he’s talking to. Or rather, what.
How does he think it’s listening to him when it doesn’t even have a head to put ears on?
There’s unhinged and then there’s whatever this is. All hinges have departed the area.
The sorcerer stares at the pictures I assume are his current targets, tapping his lips. Disgust and anger roll off him in a noxiously bitter sludge I can’t in good conscience call soup.
“What do you think, Sam?” he asks the dummy. “Stomp on him first? Or her, who’s always flinging her eyes around?”
Who’s doing what now?
I can’t help stating the obvious—at a murmur, as if there’s any chance of the sorcerer overhearing me. “He definitely doesn’t like those people.”
Hail snorts, similarly subdued. “No fucking kidding. Somehow I don’t think they’d like him either.”
While David Blaver glowers at his photographs andcarries on his one-sided debate with the fabric torso who’s apparently his only friend, I slink away to the opening to the deeper cellar. At a peek into the dim space below, a flinch ripples through my essence. “Oh, no.”
The men shoot over to join me. Mirage’s voice roughens. “That’s not fair play.”
A vaguely human figure slumps against the wall beyond the opening. Vaguely because there’s little left but bones stuck with shreds of fabric and scraps of flesh. Intestines loop around the knobby spine in a gruesome belt.
