Monster (19 page)

Ed turned on the radio, tuning it to a classic rock station. It didn’t seem right to hear someone whistle along with Led Zeppelin, but Ed managed to pull it off.

Judy kept her eyes forward. She kept her whole head forward. Trying to turn it only encouraged Ferdinand to tighten her grip. Judy watched the minutes tick by on the digital clock in the dash. Twenty-two minutes later, the minivan pulled into the driveway of an unassuming two-story house. It was well kept but unremarkable, with little to distinguish it from its neighbors, all of which were identical in nearly every way. Same fence, same yard, same arched roof and stone walkway to the front door. They were different colors at least, though obviously the list of approved colors was limited to shades of green and blue.

This house did have one noticeable difference. Cats. And lots of them. A dozen roamed the front lawn. They all perked up to watch the minivan enter the garage. There was something in their eyes, an eerie sense of expectation, that didn’t register right with Judy.

Ed turned back and flashed a toothy grin at Judy. “Okay, we’re here! Everybody out!”

They exited. “This way, please,” said Ed.

Ferdinand released Judy, who saw her chance. She dashed for the nearly closed garage door. With some luck, she could roll under it and run to one of the nearby houses. This was a suburb. She had a decent shot of finding some help out in the open.

A red cat slinked under the door, into Judy’s path. It meowed, spitting a gout of flame. Judy jumped back to avoid being burned, and the door lowered shut with a metallic finality.

“Thanks, Pendragon.” Ferdinand seized Judy roughly by the wrists and twisted her hands behind her back. Judy struggled, mostly for the sake of her pride.

“That wasn’t very nice, now, was it?” asked Ed.

They followed Pendragon into the house. There were more cats inside. Lots of them. None breathed fire, though. She wondered if that was because they were normal cats or just well trained. Her captors hustled her through the house too quickly to see many of the details, but what little she did see reminded her of her grandmother’s house. Except this place smelled like gingerbread, not cigar smoke. She didn’t spot any velvet Elvis paintings either.

They shoved her into a room that was trying way too hard to be charming. It was all blue and pink with shelves screwed into the walls. All too small to hold anything useful, just knickknacks and commemorative plates. The entire history of the Napoleonic Wars and the Broadway musical career of Ethel Merman were on display. A thriving rubber plant sat in one corner.

“Stay here,” said Ferdinand.

“I’m really sorry,” said Ed, “but we’ll have to lock you in. I don’t really feel right about it, but, well, y’know… after what you just did, I’m afraid you’ve left us no choice.”

They shut the door, leaving Judy in her cell. She flopped down in a padded armchair and propped her feet on an ottoman. She spotted a kettle of tea along with two cups on the table beside it.

The plant’s leaves rustled. A pair of cats, one white, one gray, slinked out from behind the rubber tree and rubbed against Judy’s ankles. The gray one jumped into her lap, and she scratched it between the ears.

“Hello,” said Judy, half expecting the cats to say something back.

The door opened, and an elderly woman with long gray hair entered. She wore a casual flannel top and a pair of slacks. Nothing fancy. She looked eighty, but she glided across the room like a ballet dancer. Poised and graceful was the only way to really describe her. Despite her wrinkled skin, she brimmed with vitality. But she wasn’t very big. Judy figured she could push the woman down and run past her without much problem. She tensed at the edge of her seat.

Pendragon trotted in after the woman. The red cat, licking his chops, gave Judy a look that dared her to make a run for it.

Judy decided she preferred staying to avoid having her eyebrows burned off.

The old woman smiled very slightly. She plucked the white cat off the floor, holding it in her arms. “I trust Rob and Evelyn have been pleasant company. They’ve adjusted quite well. Much faster than I expected, and now they’re so much happier this way. Isn’t that right, Evelyn?”

The white cat half meowed, half purred.

“Can we dispense with the nonsensical small talk and just get down to it?” asked Judy. “What am I doing here?”

“No reason to be hostile now, dear. I’m merely the guardian of the stone. What I have done is only in the name of preserving the rightful order.”

Lotus removed the Post-it stuck to Judy’s forehead.

“Will you look at this?” Lotus shook her head slowly. “Such sloppy work. Have the arts succumbed to such inferior magic? It’s enough to bring a tear to this old woman’s eye.”

Pendragon turned his back on Judy for a second, and before she could talk herself out of it, she took advantage of the opportunity. She jumped out of her seat and kicked the fire-breathing cat across the room. He yelped, spitting a fireball that blackened the battle of Waterloo.

“How ridiculous,” said Lotus. “Why do they so rarely cooperate?”

Judy punched the old lady right in the throat, who took the hit without flinching. A backlash knocked Judy into her chair and left her dizzy.

“I should have warned you that nothing can hurt me as long as I guard the stone,” said Lotus.

Judy was still shaking off the weird magical repercussion of her poorly-thought-out escape attempt. The haze was coming back. It slammed down over her perceptions of the situation. It was just too much to absorb, too quickly.

Pendragon stalked forward and hissed.

“They always have to learn the hard way, don’t they, Pen-dragon?” Lotus sat in the other chair beside the table and poured herself a cup of tea from the pot. “Care for some?”

“I hate tea.”

“I think you’ll like this. It’s my own special blend. Specially brewed to help you with that memory problem of yours, dear. And, if I do say so myself, it is delicious.”

Lotus poured Judy a cup and set it before her. The entire process was almost mechanical in its precision.

“Go on, drink it. You’ll be glad you did. It will help you remember. For a few hours at least, and with far more vibrant clarity than any shoddy runesmanship can provide.”

“And there are no side effects?”

Lotus said, “You won’t be able to spell anything for a day or two, and you might have trouble riding a bicycle. But even the most perfect magic isn’t a free lunch. As I see it, you have two choices. You can either drink the tea and begin to understand what is happening to you, or you can not drink it and stay as confused as you have been your entire life.”

Judy contemplated the cup.

“It’s your choice, really,” said Lotus.

Judy, once again seizing a moment before she had time to think it through, drank down the tea. There was a twinge in her brain. She knew it was impossible for the brain to feel anything by itself, but that’s how it seemed. Like a spark fired at the base of her skull, activating some unused portion of her mind, clearing out the fog and dust.

She asked for another cup, and Lotus was all too happy to comply.

“Tell me something, Judy: do you ever wonder where it all came from?”

“No, I can’t say that I have,” she admitted.

“The cosmos, I mean,” said Lotus. “The totality of what you and I would label, for lack of a better word, the universe.”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“Not really,” said Judy. Everything seemed sharper now, more in focus. It was like she was seeing things for the first time. She noticed an odd shape to Pendragon’s weak shadow. It was hard to identify, but it didn’t match up. It was long and thin, and two triangles (
Wings?
she wondered) were attached to it.

Lotus picked up her cup, took another sip, and pondered her tea for a few moments.

“Would you like me to tell you?”

“You mean, the meaning of life?”

Lotus chuckled. “Oh, no. I never said that. I can’t really tell you the meaning of life. As far as I can tell, it really doesn’t have one. Not that I know this for certain. Just a feeling. No, what I’m talking about is the origin of the universe, how it came to be.”

“You know that?” asked Judy skeptically. But not too skeptically. She’d seen enough in the past few days to believe nearly anything possible.

“Of course I do,” said Lotus.

Lotus’s kitchen was large and welcoming. It smelled of fresh-baked cookies, and every surface was pristine and sparkling. Roosters and hens decorated the wallpaper, and there were a few knickknack shelves screwed into the wall with ceramic kittens on display. A few cats slept in the corners, under the quaint kitchen table, and on the windowsills. A large, fat gray feline sat on the counter.

“Ernst, you know better than that,” scolded Lotus. She lifted the rotund cat off the counter and set it down. He meowed in protest. Except it wasn’t a meow but an elephant-like trumpet.

“Don’t be like that. You know it’s not feeding time yet. Go on, now. Scoot, scoot.” She gently prodded the cat with her foot. All the other prime sleeping spaces were taken, so Ernst trundled his way out of the kitchen. There was no other word for it. He trundled. He swayed back and forth and his little gray tail swished lazily. It was hard to find a shadow, but Judy was certain the dim reflection in the shiny linoleum belonged to a miniature elephant.

“You must really like cats,” said Judy.

“I think I prefer parrots, to be perfectly honest, but it’s too late to start over at this stage. I’m sure I’ll grow very fond of them in a few hundred thousand years. I didn’t particularly care for primates at first, and that worked out all right. For a while, at least.”

Lotus removed an apple from the refrigerator, set it on a cutting board, and with a few deft cuts sliced it into six pieces. She offered one to Judy.

“No. Thanks. I’ll take a beer if you have one.”

“Sorry, but I don’t drink alcohol.” Lotus frowned very slightly. “Rather nasty habit. I can offer you some juice.”

“Pass,” replied Judy. “So what’s going on here? Where’s this stone thing that everyone keeps talking about?”

“It’s more than just a thing,” said Lotus. “It is the life force of the very universe itself. The stone is responsible not only for the birth of everything you would call reality, but for the continued existence of that reality. It is the beginning and end of creation, the great wheel of life, the endless serpent eating its own tail.”

“Sounds keen.” Judy never had much tolerance for that New Age bullshit. The tea hadn’t changed that.

“Yes,” agreed Lotus. “Keen, indeed.”

“So where is it?” asked Judy.

Lotus brushed aside the apples and held up the cutting board. She whispered a few words that Judy didn’t understand. The wood darkened and became a shiny black slate with swirls of blue and red.

“That’s it?” said Judy.

“You sound disappointed.”

“I expected it to be, I don’t know, bigger or something. So this is the most important thing in the universe?”

“Considering that there would be no universe without it,” said Lotus, “I have to say that’s correct.”

“And you use it as a cutting board?”

“It’s indestructible. My countertops aren’t. It also makes an excellent nutcracker.”

“A hundred and one uses, huh?” said Judy.

“No. Really only four.” Lotus counted them off on her fingers. “Cutting board, nutcracker, universe creator, and paperweight.”

“Probably could steady a wobbly table with it too,” suggested Judy.

“Probably,” agreed Lotus, “but that hasn’t come up yet.”

“Can I hold it?”

“Be my guest, dear.”

Judy took the stone. It was a little warm, though not exceptionally so. It vibrated too, but not in a truly perceptible way. It was more a vague sense of vibrant energy. Strange shapes carved themselves into the slate. They reminded her of Monster’s runes.

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Oh, just the stone reacting to you. It not only sustains the universe but records what happens within it. You hold in your hands the source of all knowledge. Everything that has ever occurred is written somewhere within the stone.”

“It knows the future?”

Lotus chuckled. “Nobody knows the future. It hasn’t happened yet. But anything that has happened or is happening now is observed and recorded within the stone. Of course, for that very reason, it’s also largely incomprehensible. Imagine everything within the universe placed within a single, disorganized volume.”

Judy scanned the incomprehensible writing. It shifted and stirred, and the more she concentrated on it, the more it seemed to react. She thought she could almost read it. Almost…

“This is God?” asked Judy. “I thought He’d be taller.”

Lotus offered an insincere smile. “Yes, very amusing. I’ve never cared for flippancy, you know.”

“Sorry if I offended you,” said Judy. “I’m usually more polite to my kidnappers, but so far my week’s been really shitty.”

“Oh, is that what you think? Kidnapped? Really, how absurd.” Lotus laughed. “You aren’t a prisoner. In fact, you’re free to go whenever you please.”