Alice Moving Under Skies
an excerpt

***NOTICE: Nothing posted under this "excerpt" section is likely to be suitable for the under-aged or faint of stomach. You've been warned.****

The first time Mona Howard discovered that there were real monsters walking the earth, she was ten years old, looking for an old book of fairy tales from when she was smaller. Digging around in her father’s garage, under the workbench piled with stacks of old magazines and a box of empty margarine tubs without lids, she found a likely-looking carton, its cardboard gone soft and fuzzy with dry age and much shuffling. Prying open the flaps, she encountered yet another stack of magazines, but these much older than the ones lying carelessly above, their covers rough pulpy paper, almost newsprint, as opposed to the glossy pages of the volumes left in the open. The magazines themselves didn’t catch her eye or interest, they featured the same glamorously-bound women in peril as the stack of vintage paperbacks in her father’s study, the ones he said he collected for “kitsch value”, whatever that meant, their titles splashed in the same lurid print that sometimes looked like it was dripping, sometimes looked like it was screaming, always advertising the fact that whatever lay behind the covers was supposed to be shocking and not fit for decent folks. Mona had read a few of the paperbacks they resembled, though, and dismissed them as more of the silly kissy-face crap dressed up with blood and knives, nothing she was interested in.

But it was the last box to go through before she had to try and find a stepladder to get to the higher shelves, so she started lifting out the roughly-piled stacks, thinking that perhaps the book she was looking for was stored underneath, hoping that it was so she could go back in the house where there weren’t spiders and the cold musty scent of softly rotting paper and ancient oil stains on concrete.

As she lifted her third stack out of the box, something slicker than the magazines slipped out and fluttered stiffly to the floor. Several somethings, several glossy black-and-white somethings, and she reached across the box to pick them up, turned them over and looked at them.

As a small child Mona had been scared of a formless, faceless monster that lived under her bed and waited for her to dangle a foot, a hand, over the edge so he could grab it and drag her into the dark where the other monsters lived. Her rational mother had no patience for such things, had told her over and over again that there were no such thing as monsters, they aren’t real, it’s all just silly stories and will you just please be quiet and go to sleep already? With enough repetition, and enough shame at irritating her mother when she already had so much to be stressed out about, eventually Mona had come to believe her, and would repeat the same mantra about monsters being *not real* to herself as she tried to go to sleep. Eventually she had reached the conclusion that if things like monsters weren’t real, then neither were unicorns or Santa Claus or fairies, or any of that junk. The loss of those bits of magic seemed a small price to pay for the comfort that came with the eventual absolute belief that there was nothing beneath her bed but dust and lint balls and mate-less socks, the stray Barbie dress or two.

Five years later, holding those glossy 8x10s, and the dam of that logic came crashing down, because here in her hand was proof that oh, yes, there were monsters, they were out there, they were real, and omigod just look, just LOOK at what they could do.

Mona had never heard the names “Elizabeth Short” or “Black Dahlia”. She knew nothing of the sensational Hollywood unsolved murder. All she knew, as she stared in shock at the first picture in her hands, was that this woman was beautiful. Or had been. You could still see it, there in the shape of her eyes, the arch of her brows, the perfect straight short slope of her nose. Her eyelashes were still long and lush, framing half-open eyes that seemed to be awake, still, and miserable, although even at ten Mona knew there was no way this woman could have still been alive when the picture was taken. There were cuts all over that pale face, bulges and depressions that shouldn’t be there on the planes of her forehead, the lines of her jaw. The few teeth still whole and not caked in blood were perfectly shaped, straight and white, peeking out from the horror that had been the mouth, slashed open wide and then stitched back up with rough, careless coroner’s thread.

With a shaking hand, Mona took that photograph and placed it beside her, face-down on the slick cement floor beside her. The next was almost easier to look at, at first glance it could have been a doll, like when the next-door-neighbor’s son stole her favorite Malibu Barbie and cut it in half with his dad’s hacksaw. The top half of the person lay in the lower right-hand corner of the frame, the bottom half in the upper left-hand corner. Except it couldn’t be a doll, because there was a man kneeling beside it, peering intently at the space between her parts, the impossible space where rough grass lay between her halves like a cheap magician’s trick no one would pay to see, not even at the sleaziest traveling carnival. This picture would have been easier to look at, the face not so visible, not so prominent, except for that man, whose presence proved beyond a doubt that this was a real person, lying there in parts, disassembled and discarded, naked and vulnerable.

This is when Mona realized that these were not just more extreme versions of the limply-unconscious blondes wrapped in too much rope on the covers of those magazines and books. The next photo confirmed it, another shot of the thing, the woman, lying on a barren stretch of grass, because one of the men looking on was without a doubt a police officer, which meant this was a crime scene, which meant that this was a real woman, which meant that someone had done this to her . . .

That’s when Mona had to bolt, scattering magazines and photographs, the fiction and gruesome reality alike, for the door leading from the garage to the backyard, where she vomited up her peanut butter sandwich and grape juice and then retched bitter bile until the world around her began to grow gray at its edges, and she crouched there above the puddle of her own sick and tried to put her head back together again.

What she wanted most in the world, right then, was to simply stand up, walk along the shabby cracked sidewalk to the creaky screen door leading into the kitchen, then through the house, up the stairs to her small bedroom, turn on her television to another Full House rerun, and let the amazing forgetfulness of youth replace the images seared into her mind with sassy blonde toddlers and inept comedian uncles. But then her father would see the mess the next time he went into the garage, would know what she’d found, what she’d seen, and make her talk about it, and the last thing in the world she wanted was to talk about those pictures, ever, with anyone. That would be worse than seeing them again, so she stood up on shaky legs and forced them, one foot in front of the other, back the way she’d came, and begun picking up the dropped photographs, stacking them neatly and putting them back into the box, burying them once more beneath their tame and naive imitations.

That night as she lay in bed, Mona stroked her own smooth cheeks, imagining them sliced open and gaping. She wondered if that had been done while the pretty woman was still alive, and if her screams had been louder with a larger hole to come out of. The thought made her sick again, but it was a worse kind of sickness, the kind that can’t be relieved by something so simple and clean as vomiting. This feeling of sickness, of utter wrongness, was a cold stone that sat somewhere between her stomach and her heart, seeping its chill outward until she shivered beneath her pile of blankets, convinced she’d never be warm again.

You were wrong, Mom, she thought as she lay there, fingers obsessively moving over her cheeks, curling into the corners of her mouth and stretching them out into a grimacing rictus of pain, as tears she didn’t notice slid into her temples, pooled in the curves of her ears. You were wrong, there are monsters, but they’re not under my bed, and they won’t just grab my feet and drag me under, they’ll cut and hack and leave me naked and bloody for strange men in old hats to stare at, to take pictures of. There are monsters out there and they are so much worse than I ever dreamed they could be.

Mona didn’t know how she’d ever sleep again, but then, she was only ten, and therefore incapable of understanding exactly how resilient her own mind could be, had to be, was designed to be in order to survive the million mundane horrors of childhood.

Hours after she’d gone to bed, hours after her father had finished his night’s drinking and television and slumped heavily onto his own creaking bed, hours after the house had settled its creaky old bones into something like silence, the chilly impatient logic she’d been taught by her mother, before her mother had decided, quite reasonably, that the whole “family” thing just wasn’t working out in the concrete, could be much better supported in the abstract with her gone and untethered and sending cool green checks from a distant city, began to work its saving magic. A monster had done this, yes, but that monster had been a man, a being who walked around in daylight and ate and drank coffee and went to work and spattered the toilet seat when he pissed, just like any other. Her father’s pulp novels had taught her that much, at least, along with more euphemisms for breasts and penises than she’d ever have use for.

And not knowing whose mutilated corpse she’d seen, not knowing the infamity of the unsolved case, she deduced, quite logically, that since there had been policemen there, then that man/monster must have been caught, must have been put away and maybe even sent to the electric chair for what he’d done to that poor, beautiful, dark-haired woman. She was old enough to realize that the monster was a man, but still young enough to believe that any man who acted monstrously would eventually be caught, and punished for his actions, by the other men, in their fedoras and sports coats and badges. It never worked out any other way, on television or the news or even the crappy novels she was growing increasingly angry with her father for owning and reading. One man kills a woman, other men find her and hunt him down and make him pay.

That is when Mona’s worldview truly solidified, with all people everywhere lumped into three groups—monsters, victims, and the people who brought justice to the monsters on behalf of the victims.

And because her mother had made her strong, if cold, and because her father had carelessly left so much lurid tripe around for her to stumble over, Mona couldn’t identify with the most obvious role a ten-year-old girl could be cast as, namely the victim. Instead, she clung to the comfort of those stone-faced men, strong and iron talismans against the horror that was that woman’s mutilated face, the message her glazed eyes telegraphed about pain and terror and what one person could do to another. She fixated, there in her bed that night, on those supposed heroes of justice and monster-hunting.

She wrapped their rightness around herself tighter than any quilt, huddled into their strength and their logic and their relentless pursuit of all the wrong that lies in people.

But she couldn’t draw comfort in the idea that they would protect her. As she’d lain there through the cold hours spanning midnight, a part of her mind that she couldn’t hear over the clamor of black-and-white gore and terror had realized that her daddy was a man, just like them, and instead of protecting her from knowledge like this, he’d inadvertently exposed her to it, and no protection or comfort could be found in imagining that another man like him could ever keep her from witnessing, much less experiencing, horror like that.

Instead, in the end, the thought that lulled her into a fitful, nightmare-filled sleep, was the thought that she could be like the men with hats and badges, that she could be the one to hunt down and wreak vengeance on the monsters with men faces who held within them the capacity to cut apart something so beautiful and fragile.

That was the night Mona decided that she would be not be a victim, nor would she be someone who would, or could, be protected, be saved from the fate of that broken woman, but instead be the detective who protected others from that end.

That was the night Mona’s monster was born.