Monster - A. Lee Martinez [89]
The cap fell off the bottle.
“Take that, collective unconscious.”
Monster took an experimental sip of the beverage. It wasn’t as cold as he liked, and it was a little flat. But he wasn’t expecting miracles. He finished the beer and approached one of the doors at random. There were no markings on it, so he had no clue what lurked behind it. Secrets. His secrets.
He touched the handle. A clap of thunder rattled the house. It was his fear. He got that now. Fear of knowing and fear of not knowing.
“You don’t want to go in there,” said Lotus. “You won’t be able to handle it.”
He glanced back at her, and he glimpsed the fear in her eyes. She was afraid too. Afraid of what was behind the door. Afraid of what he’d learn.
She stood. “You won’t be able to handle it.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Monster chugged the last of his beer and tossed the bottle aside. “But maybe not.”
A crackle of electricity ran through him as he opened the door leading to his innermost mysteries and entered the darkness within.
Monster lacked imagination. So the anthropomorphic personification of the universe appeared as a miniature sun orbited by a tiny earth. The sun wore sunglasses, even though that made absolutely no sense to Monster.
He shielded his eyes. “Hello?”
The sun glanced down at him. A giant smile spread across its bright yellow face. Monster braced himself for the divine wisdom.
“Judy.”
“What about her?”
“Judy,” repeated the sun in its slow, neutral cadence.
“Yeah?”
The sun frowned.
“Judy.”
“I got that, but what—”
The sun darkened in frustration.
“I know you’re trying to tell me something,” said Monster, “but I don’t get it. I don’t understand.”
The sun snarled as it struggled to express itself. Monster decided the universe was an idiot. It would certainly explain a lot of things.
“Help. Judy.”
“Okay.”
The universe sneered at him.
“What? You want me to help Judy. I figured that out. Am I allowed to ask why?”
The sun beamed a bright light down on Monster, and a series of images flooded into him as the universe tried to answer his question in relatable terms. He didn’t get most of it, but he gleaned enough, filtered through his subconscious and offered up in the form of spontaneous knowledge.
There was a plan, all right. A cosmic struggle reaching the endgame. Judy was a central part of it, the most important piece in the game.
“Really?” he asked incredulously, thinking the universe was playing a joke on him.
The sun nodded.
Monster would’ve been okay with that except for his own part in this. He was part of the cosmic plan too. A random pawn, an unknown variable thrown in at the very last minute. One chance encounter in a supermarket with some yetis and another with some trolls in an apartment had put him on this path. Dumb luck had made him Judy’s guardian. The universe hadn’t given a damn about him before that, and it didn’t even bother lying to him about it. Just as it didn’t bother lying to him about his chances of survival.
“Really?” he asked. “That’s it? That’s what this is all about?”
The universe laughed in a lighthearted, childish way. With a hand of cosmic flame it reached down and patted Monster on the head.
It changed him.
“Help. Judy.”
Then the world fell out beneath him.
22
Chester tried to wake Monster. First by shouting at him. Then by shaking him. But physical contact disrupted Chester’s paper body. The sink effect had become part of Monster himself, and that could’ve meant any number of things, all of them bad. A human body was too fragile to exist like that outside of a few seconds, but the only effect seemed to be that Monster changed color every few seconds.
Chester tossed a throw pillow at Monster. Then a magazine. Then the twenty-five-pound rune dictionary. It bounced