Page 71 of Only a Monster

The door opened onto a short dark corridor with soft lights along the floor; it reminded Joan of walking up the aisle of an airplane. At the end, there was a room just a little wider than the corridor, lit with golden chandeliers the colour of candlelight. A gleaming wooden bar ran the length of the room.

Joan stood there, frozen. There she was. Gran. Sitting alone at the bar, drinking. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, dressed for the nineties in black ankle boots and a black gauzy dress with a Peter Pan collar.

Joan had expected her to be young, but not quite this young. Joan was reminded again that monsters were time travellers. She imagined them, suddenly, living a few months in this year; a few months in that one. Skipping back and forth between decades at whim. She wondered if she’d ever get her head around all this.

Gran was beautiful young—a different beautiful from her older self. Her cheekbones were still sharp. She had Ruth’s hair: lustrous, dark curls. Her eyes were the same luminous green as in Joan’s time.

And she was alive. She was alive and she was here.

‘I fucking hate this song,’ Gran said to the bartender conversationally. It was ‘Wind Beneath my Wings’. Gran and Aunt Ada had argued about it once. They’d all been at a funeral for a distant cousin of Gran’s. You don’t even know this song, Aunt Ada had hissed to Gran. I know bullshit when I hear it, Gran had hissed back.

The bartender lifted his head and saw Joan. ‘Out,’ he said. ‘No kids in here.’

‘I just want to talk,’ Joan said. ‘To her. I just want to talk to Do—Dorothy.’ She stumbled over Gran’s name, unused to saying it.

‘I’m not selling you anything,’ the bartender said.

‘I’m not buying,’ Joan said. ‘Five minutes. Please.’

The bartender looked over at Gran, and Gran nodded slightly.

‘Five minutes,’ the bartender said. ‘I’m setting a timer.’

Joan took a deep breath and sat on the bar stool next to Gran’s. She didn’t know where to start. Gran lifted her glass, and Joan saw that her ring finger was bare. Joan had never seen her without her ruby wedding ring.

‘I don’t know you,’ Gran said, with her usual gruff impatience. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m your granddaughter,’ Joan blurted.

‘Granddaughter?’ Gran said. But her sharp gaze flicked over to Joan and then stayed.

‘I look more like my dad.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Joan. Joan Chang-Hunt.’

‘Chang. That’s not a monster name.’ Gran gulped down her drink. ‘So Maureen’s been messing around with humans. Christ.’

Joan was shocked. Gran had never said anything like that to her before. Gran had always gotten along with Dad.

‘You have something to tell me,’ Gran said. ‘That’s why you’re here. Just say it.’ And that was where Gran’s harshness was coming from, Joan realised. Gran had known the moment that Joan had said ‘granddaughter’ that something bad was coming.

The memory of Gran’s agonised breaths returned to Joan in a rush. The slow, pained rise and fall of her chest under Joan’s hands.

‘Just say it,’ Gran said.

‘You . . . Two days ago. Thirty years from now. You—you died. You were killed.’ Joan’s voice shook. ‘The human hero isn’t just a myth, Gran. He’s real. He came and killed our family. He killed—God, he killed so many people.’

Some of the harshness left Gran’s face as Joan talked. Joan kept expecting the timeline to unravel as she told Gran the place and the time. But, just like with the post office, Joan could feel the timeline resisting. ‘Do you believe me?’ she said to Gran. Please believe me.

‘I believe you,’ Gran said, and Joan felt her chest loosen. She’d been tenser than she’d known. Gran called over the bartender to refill her glass.

Joan waited for him to leave again, and then lowered her voice. ‘Just before you died, you gave me a necklace,’ she said. ‘A key to the Monster Court. I think you wanted me to find a device that the King once used to change the timeline. To stop the massacre and save our family. But I don’t know how to find it, Gran.’

‘The transformatio?’ Gran said. ‘That’s a myth.’

‘A lot of myths seem to be proving true lately,’ Joan said.

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