Here Be Monsters - By M T Murphy Page 0,20

contraption was quite whole, if slightly disassembled, but the linchpin was missing. There was a hollow space in the glassy entrails, where a key component had been removed. All she could guess about it was its size (not big) and that it was equipped with at least four connection points, where four now sadly gaping rubber tubes linked it to the system. It was the catalyst.

*****

No colour on his craggy cheeks, no feeling to his stony fingers. Dead hair, faded blond, clinging to his cracked scalp. Fingernails turned into glass.

Dead, he would give away too many secrets. This body could not be recovered. He must be allowed to live long years, until every part of him had petrified, and no tests were possible.

In the meantime, he had free reign of the dream world.

He lay on a bed, covered by sheets he couldn’t feel. Tubes went in and out of his shell, keeping his insides alive. Acute scleroderma, it said on his chart.

The bed was reinforced, and double sized. His body had gained weight and density with petrification. The nurses needed a mechanical crane to move him.

They opened the curtains every day. Perhaps sun was not such a good idea.

Brain activity was inexplicable, off the charts, an unpredictable flurry of thought and emotion in a perennial electrical storm inside his skull.

They didn’t know what was going on inside his head, but Lux did. He was living a hundred lives.

She wore skirts and pretty shoes, put on pink lipstick, became the sweetest of volunteers at the hospital where his family had stored him. They had stopped visiting, because life goes on and why spend time caring for an unresponsive rock?

It wasn’t too long before she became his regular companion. Nobody else wanted to. When she fell asleep in the room, the nurses laughed it off.

“You are not the first one,” they said, “he must give off sleepy vibes.”

He did. It was one of his abilities, and now he wanted company. (Come play with me). There were many books in the room, old super hero comics brought from his bedroom at home, from his old life when he was a real boy and not a thing to be found under a bridge.

Lux read them to him, then went out and bought new ones. Superpowers and saving the world. Secret identities. Endless violence. Some made her laugh, probably for the wrong reasons. She wondered where her character would fit in, if she was one of those paper girls in sex-fantasy clothes.

The Dreamer’s file was far from specific. He had been a wild card, developed in unpredictable ways and, when his condition deteriorated, the Doctor lost all contact. He seemed to have been an out-patient, which she didn’t understand, but he was only sixteen then, and in his family’s care. Somehow, all of the Doctor’s subjects had found a way to escape the project before his results were conclusive. Except for the Beast, but he, the first one, had remained stable after a few weeks. He was different. Older than the others. Also, dead before his first treatment.

The dead remain static, the living adapt and grow. Even more so if they are children, like the Dreamer. Like her.

Lux had been reading for a while, a dimpled smile dancing on her lips for the nurses when they came and went, like clockwork, to refill his supplies and check his vitals.

They were reading a new comic today. It was about the king of dreams and his little sister, a young girl who was Death. The ward fell silent, a temple of comatose sleep punctuated by the mechanical bleeps monitoring beating hearts.

Lux walked across a dilapidated manor house, long abandoned, the gold leaf peeling from the rotting wall paper, intricate mouldings on the ceiling slowly turning to dust and beautiful tiled floors covered in dirt.

The white marble chimney was open like a door, gaping in a phantasmagorical green glow, the passageway into the bowels of the house.

She descended iron winding stairs until she began to feel dizzy.

Someone turned on the lights.

She was in the white sterile corridors of the complex. As she walked under the glaring lights there were sounds, voices, cries from the innumerable doors, but she walked straight ahead, never slowing down. She knew how it worked.

The machine was waiting for her, a beautiful beast of polished glass and mirrored steel. It pulsated, it breathed heavily, rubber tubing extended like yellow tendrils to pull her towards the chair. She closed her eyes, willing the dripping tentacles