"A fiend out of hell / began to work his evil in the world."
—From Beowulf
When the Foster place burned down, no one knew that I was the last person to leave there alive. Back then, people knew that the place at 1836 Bowers Street was odd, but they attributed it to the reclusive author who lived there, and people left it and its sole resident alone. I went there for help with a college paper. Little did I know what awaited me. Now, as I stare at the ashes and charred remains of the house, standing like blackened teeth against the winter light, I know how close I came to my own end.
In Medieval English Literature 214, we all got assigned a midterm project. Dr. Hoskins assigned me Beowulf. I’d read it—or, well, parts of it—in high school, and I remember thinking that it was a pretty silly thing to call an ‘epic poem’. It didn’t rhyme, for one thing, and despite the rhythm, it felt more like fantasy literature than anything else. I sort of liked all the apparent Viking stuff, but that was before Vikings got really cool because of that TV show. Until the assignment for medieval literature, I hadn’t thought about it at all, really. To help with understanding the Anglo-Saxon or Old English references, Dr. Hoskins said to read a ‘glossed copy’ if I could find one. Then I had to write up a ten-page paper about why the epic was still important today. He offered some popular commentaries and said that the school bookstore might have the glossed copy, as he always told them to keep an edition or two on hand.
I went to the bookstore, but they didn’t have any copies, so I went to the local big book wholesale club. They also didn’t have it, but could order it for me. It would take seven to ten days, which was how long I had to read the poem and write the paper for Hoskins, before we moved on to Chaucer, so I decided to check the public library.
When I was a kid, we went to the library all the time, and I knew the folks who worked there pretty well, especially Mrs. Kaplan, the head children’s librarian. When I walked in for the first time in fifteen years, though, I was surprised to see that the place had changed a lot. The service desk was like a big donut, and the lady behind it was about a thousand years old. She wore a green polyester blazer with a magnetic tag on it that said ‘patron services’, but she looked like she hadn’t bathed in years. Her hair was stringy and greasy. I asked her where I could find a glossed copy of Beowulf, and she stared at me like I was speaking another language. Without speaking, she picked up a phone, dialed a number, and stared at me while she waited for the other end to pick up. She said, “Medieval literature, Beowulf.” She stared at me for a long time, until I understood she was waiting for me to say more. So I said, “Glossed text copy,” and she repeated me, sighed, listened, and then slammed the phone down and said, “Third floor, nonfiction.”
I looked around to see where the steps or an elevator were, and the woman continued to stare at me balefully until I finally saw a sign directing foot traffic to an elevator down a side corridor. I was happy to get away from her. Not only was she incredibly rude, but she smelled a little ripe, too. I wondered whose idea it had been to put her up front.
When I got to the top floor, an older woman was waiting nearby and hustled over to me and asked, “Are you Beowulf?” Then she laughed and said, “Probably not who you are, but what you want?” I laughed and nodded, and she took me to the electronic card catalog and looked up Beowulf, and then I followed her to a spot where it was supposed to be on the stack shelves. Their copy was not there. At least this particular library lady had some idea about personal cleanliness.
“Is it for a paper?” She asked me this with the twinkle of knowledge that only librarians have.
“Yes,” I said. She frowned and asked me a few other questions to see if there was a way to find a workaround. When I told her that I needed that glossed copy and that I didn’t really know what that meant, she nodded knowingly.
“It means that the original language is on the facing page and modern English is on the other. That original language is also English, but called Old English, or, more correctly, Anglo-Saxon English.”
“Thank you!” I was thrilled that someone had explained it to me in terms that I could understand.
“Oh, you’re welcome, my dear,” she said and smiled, and then her face darkened. “Will you wait here? I may know where you can find a copy, if you can wait?”
I agreed and wandered to a group of tables near the stacks and sat down. Before I realized, the librarian lady came back to me with a slip of paper.
“Do you live in town?”
“I do.”
“Well, there’s a collector here in town who may have the book you’re looking for. I’ve left a message, but he’s a bit of a night owl. I let him know that a student was looking for a glossed text copy of Beowulf and that you would be reaching out to him about it.”
“Well,” I said, starting to feel that this had gone too far and that I might be able to find it on Amazon. She shook her head and smiled cheerfully.
“Not a problem. We refer people to him all the time. Have you heard of Michael Foster?”
“The author?”
“Well, yes, he’s an author. Or, he was.”
“I have. I have a copy of Death by Starlight.”
“He’s your man. Just give him a call later tonight, and you’ll be invited to see one of the best personal collections of rare books in town. Maybe the only one.” Then she lowered her voice and looked around somewhat conspiratorially, I thought. “Also, just so you’re aware, Mr. Foster is an odd duck. I said he’s a bit of a night owl, but the truth is, he’s never up during the day. This time of year, it shouldn’t be an issue, but it can be a little off-putting for some folks.”
This was late in the fall semester, so I waited until after five that day, when I knew it would be dark, and I called the number on the sheet of paper that she had given me. I fully expected to get voicemail, but when someone picked up on the other line, I felt a distinct sense that this was a mistake. I forced it down and went on to ask the voice if it had a copy of a glossed text of Beowulf.
“I can do you one better than that,” said the voice of Michael Foster. “Can you wander by sometime this week, and I’ll show you what I’ve got?”
“I can, if it wouldn’t be an imposition or anything,” I felt another strange pang at the idea of going to his house.
“I wouldn’t have invited you if it were.” His voice was dry, clipped, and there was a tinge of something, possibly a European or English accent, at the edges of his words. “What are you doing tonight?”
I had to admit that I didn’t have anything planned, and he laughed. “Got to get a head start on this paper, eh?”
I said that I did.
“Who is your instructor? Hoskins?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, yes. I’m familiar with Jim. Well, come on by, and I think we can manage to get you something close to an A. Hoskins is a notoriously hard grader. 1836 Bowers Street. Come up the driveway. I’ll wait for you at the front door. Be here by eight.”
Once again, a pang rose in my chest, and as I hung up, I felt a strong urge to go home, crawl under my bed, and never come out. I fought down the reaction, though, and put the address into my phone.
I followed the directions to the address that Michael Foster had given me. I grew up here and knew the town and how to find my way around well enough, but sometimes habits make us slaves to technology. Bowers Street was on the western perimeter of town, down by what the kids I grew up with used to call Black Wood Acres. These thickly wooded hills were leftover from when the town charter cut the boundaries into the heavily wooded county land. On the western side of Bowers Street, dark pine trees rose high on Bowers Mountain. On the other side, set back off the road in leafy, tree-strewn yards were the ritzy homes of some of the more rich members of our town. The houses were all large and only accessible by long lanes from the street.
1836 was the last house before the woods took over at the city boundary. I turned right into the driveway, which wound through a big front yard and then climbed toward the house. It sat just past a grove of towering magnolia trees. The house wasn’t a mansion or anything. Sitting against the backdrop of pine-covered hills behind it, I felt a stupidly childish unease.
It was obvious to me that Foster kept to himself and didn’t have many visitors. There were no flowers in the beds, no hanging plants on the wide porch, no furniture. The house was dark, except for a dusk-til-dawn light over the attached two-car garage, which shed a sickly, bluish light on the driveway. I got out of my car and stood thinking about which way I ought to approach the house, and decided that it would be smart just to go to the front door.
I’d read several of Foster’s books when I was in high school. I went through a phase when crime fiction really stirred me up, and Game of Knives, Foster’s first book in the Hal Wender detective series, was all the rage. Foster had done a book talk and signing at Graves’ Rare Books downtown, around that time, and I had gone to hear him speak and get my copy of Game of Knives signed, but the book signing part of the event never happened. After his talk and the reading, Foster went into the ‘staff only’ area of the bookshop, and though his local fans waited anxiously for his return, he never came back out.
Tom Graves, son of the owner and a friend of mine from school, told me later that Foster had gotten very sick and that he had ordered his driver to take him home. That made me feel a bit better. I’d seen other authors caught by their sudden fame turn into snobs or treat their adoring fans like they were stupid jerks, but Foster didn’t seem like that to me. Also, it was pretty clear that anyone who could write a character like Hal Wender understood that the people who read his books were real, thinking beings who cared about justice.
Wender, a man stuck in a wheelchair because of a terrible accident that was a failed attempt on his life, was one of the most compassionate and caring investigators in modern fiction. He solved crimes, but he also empathized (where possible) with the bad guys, making them more relatable than most literary detectives. It also made him really good at finding them, with the help of his dashing and fearless female associate, Blair Carson.
The subsequent Wender novels were all excellent, except that Foster had killed Wender off in the last novel, End of Light, when the detective was diagnosed with a fatal infection and solved his last mystery from a hospital bed. Many of Foster’s fans were angry at this rather sudden end to their favorite detective, but the book’s publication coincided with Foster’s own descent into anonymity. There were rumors that he was writing a masterpiece set before the other books, before Wender was injured, when he and Blair had a brief but torrid love affair, which was the impetus for Wender’s wife to have him killed. It was never released.
Now a famous recluse, Michael Foster stopped doing public appearances, readings, even podcasts or videos shortly before End of Light was published. His fans speculated why this might be, especially with all the rumors about the prequel and books being made into streaming series. His disappearance was upsetting, but it happens to authors sometimes.
That I had been given access to Foster after his very sharp disappearance from public life seemed too good to be true, and also, a bit like a trap as I stood by his front door. It reminded me of the story of the woman—Betty Eppes—who had gotten J.D. Salinger to agree to meet her under the pretense that she wanted to be a better writer, but had secreted a tape recorder under her clothes to capture Salinger’s voice. I’d left my phone in the car, just to be sure that I didn’t trespass on some taboo of weird reclusive writers, as Eppes had done. I did bring my old, ratty messenger bag with my notes from class and my laptop in it. I wondered if Foster would get fed up and angry with me the way Salinger had become angry with Eppes.
Dull light shone through the front door, but otherwise, everything was dark. I pushed the lit doorbell and waited, but nothing happened. Steeling myself, I knocked three times on the door, and before I could let my hand fall to my side, the door opened inward, and the porch light flashed on.
I saw Foster in person once before, so I thought that I knew what to expect. The man before me was Foster, but the change was not good. His skin was bone-white, and his eyes were sunken into dark hollows. They gleamed with almost feverish light, so that it looked like tiny points of fire were reflected in his pupils. He was dressed somewhat formally in charcoal grey trousers and a sports coat, over a heavy turtleneck sweater. His hair, once wheat-brown and worn long, was now close-cropped and iron grey. A thick mustache sat over his mouth, which added a lean-jawed look to his sharp, pallid features.
He asked me my name, and I told him. ‘Please, come in,’ he said. In that moment, I felt panic welling in me again. Some part of my brain screamed for me to get in my car and drive away. I steadied myself with a deep breath and reached out my hand to greet Foster appropriately. I didn’t want him to think I was some overly emotional fan, especially if he could help with my Beowulf research. He took my hand in his, and I hoped he couldn’t feel my suddenly shuddering body. It was ice-cold, as if he’d just that moment been plunging them into ice water. The fingers of his right hand were long, thin, and the nails were cut almost to points. All of this reminded me of something in the moment, but I couldn’t call to mind what exactly that was.
‘Thank you,’ I replied, as he drew me inside and closed the door.
The house had a strangely cold feel that countered what I had been expecting. The foyer, where we stood, stretched back into the house on the left, but on the right, stairs ran up into darkness. There was a room on the right, closed off by tall wooden doors, and to the left, a large sitting room with built-in shelves around all the walls. Everything was pristine; no dust, no musty scent of books, no old house smells. It felt museum-like to me. I even looked to see if red velvet ropes were cordoning off certain areas.
‘Delia at the library tells me you’re looking for a glossed copy of Beowulf.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. And I started to say how much I loved the Wender books, but he seemed to sense it was coming and cut me off.
‘Come right this way,’ he said, and gestured for me to go into the library. ‘You can set your things anywhere,’ he said. I took off my laptop bag, but kept my jacket on.
‘Have a seat. Can I offer you a drink? Tea, or something stronger?’
‘Oh,’ I said, caught off guard. ‘Um, thank you, tea, please if it isn’t too much?’
‘Not at all.’ Foster looked at his watch and then walked to the wall and tapped what looked like a tablet mounted at eye-level. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see what was on the screen, but Foster said, ‘Hot tea for our guest, Otto.’ Then he came back and sat on the settee across from me.
‘So tell me about your project.’
I told him about the assignment, and how Hoskins had suggested a glossed copy of Beowulf, and how the librarian had offered Foster’s help. He listened patiently, saying nothing, but all the time, there was a strange, knowing look in his eyes. About the time I finished my side of things, a man came in with a tray and set it on the coffee table between us. The man was apparently younger than Foster, but broader, almost like a bouncer in his build. He was balding on the back of his head, but wore his hair long despite this. I remember being surprised that Foster had a butler—but what else could this man be? It must have shown on my face.
‘This is Otto. He does a little of everything for me.’ The man stood. Otto nodded at me and then left the room through a swinging door that seemed to lead to the back of the house, maybe a kitchen.
‘I’m not like a lord, or anything, but sometimes being a high-profile writer causes problems. When I was actively writing, we had some problems on the property. Otto sees to my meager wants, but he’s also as fierce as a Doberman when the need arises.’
‘Please,’ he said, gesturing to the tea. Then, crossing one leg over the other, he said, ‘So. Where were we?’
‘Beowulf,’ I said.
‘Beowulf. Right.’
The tea was good. Something fragrant, almost fruity. As I sipped it, some of the tension that had coiled in my neck and shoulders released. I’m not sure how long we spoke, but Foster warmed to the subject, and I found myself truly engaged. The glossed copy he supposedly had remained on the shelf, and he made no move to bring it down.
Beowulf wasn’t just an epic poem, he said. It was a miracle of literary proportions. It was a holdover from a period when stories, usually told orally, were starting to be written down. In the case of the epic poem, the story had probably taken place hundreds of years before it was recorded on paper, and might have even been based on real events that were, to use Foster’s word, embroidered as time went by. Then, Christianity started to take hold in the region, and some monk or friar had the rare prescience to write the tale down when he heard it. ‘Like any outsider,’ Foster said, ‘He did so in the idiom of his own belief, which is why the poem has aspects of both heathen and pagan beliefs, but also the Christian worldview.’
‘It is not about Beowulf, though one reading might convince the reader that he is the hero of the tale, but no! You’ve heard of J.R.R. Tolkien, who is rightly famed for his Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit books. Tolkien was a Beowulf fanatic, and he wrote a title called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.
‘It was a lecture that he had given several times in the 1930s, when Beowulf was being used as a means to collect data about the era in which the story takes place, or when it was written.’ Here Foster jumped up and went to a table near the wall, plucked a skinny book from a pile, and handed it to me. Again, I noticed how sharp his fingernails appeared to be.
‘That book is actually the original. In it, Tolkien argues that Beowulf isn’t about history or sociological data, but that it must be understood, first and foremost, as a work of art. The critics he refers to in the title are the people who wanted to reduce the monsters in the poem to unhappy aspects of folklore, just bad guys that the hero has to deal with that detract from the brave and wonderful Viking-age heroics of Beowulf.
‘Tolkien said that, looking at Beowulf as it was intended, as a piece of art, the monsters function as the most important aspect of the entire tale, because the monsters aren’t just bad guys in the folkloric sense, but they represent the challenges that all of us face. Grendel, his mother, the dragon at the end, represent chaos, death, loss, the unpredictable evils of a world that is still partially shrouded in darkness.’
I sipped my tea as he spoke, and it seemed to me that Foster changed. His eyes glowed. He paced back and forth as he spoke. He gestured and smacked the back of one hand into the other for emphasis. This was a far better lecture than any I had ever sat through in my college courses. I had a fleeting hope that, after tonight, I could convince Dr. Hoskins to let Michael Foster come and speak to the whole class about Beowulf.
As he spoke, Foster started to dwell more and more on Grendel and his mother.
‘The text of the poem says that Grendel and his mother were leftovers of offspring from Cain, who slew his brother out of jealousy and who God cursed,’ he said. ‘It is from Cain that the legacy of all monsters arises. “From Cain all wicked offspring were born: giants and elves, and evil demon‑creatures, and gigantic monsters—those who fought God, time beyond time.”
‘Elves is a funny word,’ Foster said. ‘It doesn’t mean elves like Tolkien had in his stories, or even those little creatures that Santa Claus uses in his workshops. He means creatures of the night. Things that dwell in darkness. Things that feast on humanity.’
Here, he stopped pacing and turned to face me. In the low light of the room, his eyes seemed to be made of fire, and I noted that as he smiled, his teeth grew to distinct points. A look of almost demonic joy danced across his features, and I felt that sense of fear rising in my chest again.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’d better leave, it’s getting very late. Thank you for helping with this.’
Foster stopped and stood stock still. He didn’t seem to breathe. ‘Yes, it is getting very late.’
He moved so quickly that I didn’t see it. Before I knew what was happening, he’d grabbed me by the lapels of my jacket and lifted me from a seated position and held me up. As I watched, his face elongated, the brows grew more prominent, the nose sharper, the ears lengthened to points. I could feel the cold pressure of his fists against my chest. He opened his mouth, and I shuddered to see that his teeth were all long and sharp; it hadn’t been a trick of the light. His eyes danced.
As I dangled there, a thing limp with fear, I realized that I had no strength in me at all. Something, maybe the tea was to blame, left me powerless against this sudden attack. Then, like the rushing of memories when someone is about to die, my mind recounted the events that led me to this moment. Hoskins assigned me the stupid paper, the greasy, staring woman at the library, the nice librarian, and the after-hours visit to one of my favorite authors. I felt as though this had all been intended. I’d been selected for this fate, it seemed, but why the conspiracy?
‘Why me?’ I grunted.
Foster smiled a sinister, vicious smile and set me back on the floor and stepped away as I collapsed back onto the settee, trying to catch my breath.
‘A good question, and one I’m happy to answer as a final wish.’
He looked at me, and his face lost the shadows and lines and became more the Foster I remembered from his mug shot in the back of his books.
‘Orphan,’ he said and smiled.
‘Hoskins owes me,’ he said. ‘He’s the reason why I am like this, now. He and his fascination with monsters.’
I noticed that the room was not reeling as it had been before, and that I felt much less disoriented. I tried to slow my breathing, and I focused my gaze on Foster, who was warming to this new story.
‘We were at school together, and in our senior year, Hoskins had a chance to go to Europe and asked me if I would come along. I foolishly said yes. I loved him, then. Hoskins was like the older brother I never had. He was brash, daring, courageous, and generous of spirit. He never flirted with a girl without making sure that there was another girl for me. He was the strong one, but I was always weak. My upbringing, my overbearing father. Nothing was ever good enough, so I thought that if I could just demonstrate that I was even a little like Hoskins, I might prove my father wrong. I was deluded.
‘We took a train east from Germany, just like Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s book, and eventually we wound up on the other side of the Danube. Here, the women were pale, dark-haired, rich,h and luxuriant, and they were far more promiscuous than any women we had ever known. Hoskins was the lover, not me, but he wouldn’t leave me alone in my room. I had to go along with him. The Soviet Union had just fallen, so there was new commerce with the West, and I spent my time in the libraries and bookshops, looking through tomes that had been hidden for generations. Some of my collection here comes from that trip.’ He gestured to the many book-covered shelves in the room.
‘Hoskins was drinking and whoring himself into an early grave. I was hunting for something more substantial. Then one night, there was a major party. Some magyars, made fantastically rich by his association with the Soviets, decided to have a party. Did you know that there are Hungarians in Romania, even now? Of course not. You’ve never traveled. You’re just a poor orphan.’
His words stung, and I felt a keen pain of indignation as he said it, but I knew that this was a signal that his toxic tea was wearing off. My head hurt, I felt sick, but I took all of this to mean that I was regaining my strength.
‘We went to the party. I hoped to find a collection of books in the castle where it was held, but Hoskins, as usual, had other appetites and other plans for me.’
Foster went silent and moved over to the fireplace. He stooped and turned on the gas logs. Bright orange flames danced on his face as he silently remembered his experience.
‘Boys will be boys. You understand,’ he said and looked at me, but not with the hate that had kindled his eyes before, but now something like remorse.
‘A girl, dusky, beautiful, shy, voluptuous,’ he said the last word as if he was savoring its feel in his mouth. ‘She spoke some English, and she promised to take me to the library in the castle. We wandered into the depths of the old place. She had some kind of strong drink, possibly tulca, and she kept putting the bottle to my lips for me to drink. By the time we made it to the collection of books, I was very drunk.
‘The room was small. Not at all the hall of books I had imagined, not even as many books as I have here, and this is just a small part of my whole collection. She drew me into a small alcove and down a winding metal staircase. By now, I was feeling more than amorous; the tulca was doing its work, I guess. I thought maybe she would bring me to some room with a bed, and I wondered secretly if I would find Hoskins there already in some orgiastic defilement of himself in there, too.’
The flames flashed and flickered, and the room grew warm.
‘What I found instead was the monsters that Hoskins had been searching for. Some offspring of ancient evil; call it Cain’s child. Call it Grendel. The girl, naked and smirking, eyes glowing in the darkness, vanished into the darkness and left me with him—with it.’
Again, Foster was silent, staring at the flames. I slowly slid my butt toward the edge of the settee. I was feeling much better now,w and I felt that, while he was busy reminiscing, I could try to make a break for the front door before he could reach me, or call Otto.
‘You haven’t known real horror,’ Foster said, his voice thick, as though he was sobbing. ‘Until tonight, you didn’t think monsters were real. But they are. The thing in that basement was real, and it was old and malevolent, because until only recently before we arrived, it had starved in silent agony in that place. When it fed on me, I learned of its ageless menace, saw it hiding, wandering in the catacombs and hidden places, feeding on rats and snakes and other crawling things until it felt a turn of tide in the world coming and it saved its strength and when the castle was opened by the magyar for parties, the thing set its teeth into the partygoers and found itself slaked with humanity as it had rarely been before. It made slaves of the young women there, and they brought many victims to its dark lair in the bowels of the castle. It fed and fed, and no one seemed to notice that those it devoured were not missed or sought. Their folktales had long told of a creature that supped on the living in those parts, and knew not to go looking for it or the people that became its food. There I was, an American college student, thousands of miles from home and safety and the recipient of the thing’s infernal disease.’
Foster turned to look at me, and I saw that tears of blood streamed down his cheeks into his iron-grey mustache.
‘It was Hoskins who found me and rescued me, though I was nearly dead. He wrestled me away from the thing and set fire to the castle and brought me to a hospital, where I was treated for malnutrition and other diseases of the blood.
‘I died. But in the darkness, I awoke and I was no longer Michael Foster. I was now part of that ancient horror in the smoking castle. Hoskins came to mourn over me, but the night after my quiet burial, I showed him the truth of it.
‘I leapt from the street to the window of the hostel that we stayed in and opened it easily. I woke him and then fed on one of the coeds that stayed there to show him what I had become. It was at that moment that his guilt overwhelmed him. After some persuading, he vowed to take care of me, to get me home, to help me, because he knew that he was to blame.’
I listened intently, now, not just hoping for a moment to escape, but for some reason, hearing the tale, filled me with desperation, dread, and sadness. It wasn’t a story of fear, so much as true pity. Foster hadn’t chosen this, whatever it was.
‘Through infinite cleverness, Hoskins got me home. I came back here and slowly settled into my new life. He was the one who finally understood what I was, what I needed to survive. He was also the one who encouraged me to write and even helped me with the novelizations. If it hadn't been for him, my books would never have been published. When the money started coming in, he got me a body double to cover signings and readings.’
‘And he fed you,’ I said, snapping Foster from his reverie.
‘Yes,’ he said and took a dark handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at the streaks of blood on his face, then turned back to the fire. ‘Yes. At first, a homeless person or some other poor soul, but the police were taking note of the missing people. That was when we enlisted the help of Vanessa Jones and Della Kingman.’
Vanessa Jones was the woman at the desk, I thought. The one with greasy hair and a sour stench. I said as much to Foster, who barked a laugh.
‘Yes. That awful Jones woman has a cousin who works at the crematorium. She moonlights there. Every month, all the unclaimed bodies in town go there. She fudges the numbers. Ms. Kingman does the research, finding people who have no family, no one to miss them. Otto deals with the apartments and the vehicles. And Hoskins assigns them Beowulf, and then sends them here to me.’
It was a conspiracy, then. I understood too late that I ought to have trusted my instincts a little more.
He sobbed again, but I felt nothing, now. This complex conspiracy made me the next meal for this animal in human shape. Whether his story was true or not, he could have allowed himself to starve or burned his house down rather than be responsible for so many murders. At that moment, I felt like a rat caught in a trap and my only feeling was the urge to run, to get free, to kill Foster if needed.
When I was a boy, I read up a lot on monsters, especially vampires. I knew all the mythology and especially how to kill them, or, should I say, how the heroes always managed to kill them. I didn't know if Foster was a vampire for real, but my circumstances left me with little time to debate with myself. I looked around for something that I could stab him through the heart with, or, if nothing like that presented itself, I might try to kick him into the fire. In Foster’s story, Jim Hoskins had set the castle on fire and that had killed the thing that lived in there.
I stood, clutching my laptop bag and started to back toward the door. Foster didn’t turn to face me, but said, ‘There’s no way out. Many have tried to escape, but your car is gone and the gates are closed. You could prolong your end with a diverting game of hide and seek with Otto on the grounds, but he’s quite adept at such things. You might manage to add a few moments to your life, but you won’t escape.’
‘Where’s my car, you asshole,’ I asked, now far more angry than afraid.
‘Otto will drive it out onto the curvy part of Bowers Road and put your body in it in a creative way that will make it look like you left here and fell asleep at the wheel. We’ll have all the proof needed to verify what happened, I’m afraid,’ he said and gestured at the tablet mounted to the wall. ‘We’ve been doing this for years now and we’re very good at it.’
‘Fuck you,’ I shouted and hurled my laptop at him after whirling it over my head.
What happened next I have gone over again and again in the intervening months.
My laptop bag struck Foster and fell into the fire. Something in the bag caught fire and then exploded. I can only guess that it was the lithium battery. The blast hurled Foster like a rag doll across the room and against the wall with the control panel on it. His suit was burning and he brushed at it as the flames licked up. Otto came bounding into the room and looked around in horror. Books were catching and falling onto the floor. An end table caught and sparked against the curtains which also lit. The room was filling with smoke. Otto ran toward Foster, who scrambled as his clothes caught fire.
Despite this, he stood, turned toward me, arms outstretched like some flaming mockery of classic monster movies, and started to move toward me. The room was so full of smoke that I was momentarily disoriented. When Foster reached me, I thought I was done. He reached out and grabbed me and picked me up. I had a fleeting moment when all the memories of my life sped past my mind’s eye, but then I was flying.
Foster hurled me through the front window and onto the porch. My clothes were smoking, now, and in desperation to get away, to run, to get clear, I leapt over the railing and into the grass, where I rolled to stop from catching and burning. I had to pull off my jacket, which smoldered in the grass.
It was then that I looked back up at the house. Flames were now licking out the broken front window against the porch roof. I could hear glass breaking. A huge column of black smoke rose against the star-filled night. I looked at the window that Foster had flung me through, and saw a shape there. Then I heard a pain-filled wail and wondered if that was Otto, or if he had abandoned his master and escaped.
The thought woke me from my daze, and I turned to see if my car was there. Thankfully, it was. Otto hadn’t gotten to work on that part of the plan yet. I reached into my pocket, hoping that my keys were not in my now incinerated laptop bag. I coughed, then tried to take a deep breath when I felt them in my hip pocket and ran to the car, started it, swung it around, and departed. As I turned left out of the driveway toward town, I could hear fire sirens howling over the town.
News must have reached the other members of the conspiracy. Two days later, I showed up to Hoskins’ class, only to find a note on the door that said that it was cancelled and to see student services. I went to the school library, logged onto the student computers, and found an article about the Foster place burning. There were whispers among my classmates that Hoskins had been found dead in his apartment, but I never verified it. The fire, meanwhile, had caused quite a stir in the literary fan community across the nation.
Whatever happened to the smelly library lady, I never knew, but I steered clear of the public library, too. In fact, I started to feel unsafe everywhere in town. I had no idea if Otto was alive or if one of the others would realize that I had killed their master and seek revenge on me.
I waited and waited for the fire investigators to call me about why burned remains of my laptop were found at the Foster house, and I toyed with many practice excuses and alibis, but no one ever came to see me. After the fall semester ended, I broke my lease, packed up my belongings, and drove to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where a distant cousin of mine still lived and worked. Twenty-five hundred miles was a good start at being well away from Foster’s memory.
The only things that remain to me of the night I met a real monster are my dreams of Foster’s thin and ravenous face coming toward me through pillars of roiling, choking black smoke and the unshakable memory that always follows the nightmares. I wake with the vision of the burned timbers of his house, standing like sharp, blackened teeth against the dark hills beyond.
Thinking of Bram Stoker and J.R.R. Tolkien
