The Monster Hunters: Weird Stories, #3

By Brendan Detzner

A wealthy man sells his last golden egg and wonders what to do next.

The owner of a sculpture gallery insists that her date close his eyes before she takes her mask off.

The secret masters of Hell debate popular culture.

And eight more.


"What I've always loved about Brendan's writing is the headlong immediacy of it. This is important, it's happening right now, and you are going to pay attention."

BL Sichling, creator of The Beauty of Poppies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brendan Detzner
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393009030

Book preview

The Monster Hunters

1

The Chicago Arts District, where I lived for six years, is a strip of territory on the near south side of Chicago, about a mile south of the UIC Campus and separated from the condos in that more expensive neighborhood by Metra tracks. There’s a tunnel on Halsted going under the tracks, and another smaller tunnel a little further west that’s harder to find. The area isn’t exactly a neighborhood in and of itself; it’s usually referred to as being in Pilsen, but I’ve also heard people say East Pilsen, and those people have a point. If you take the walk from where I live over to Pilsen proper, you can’t help but feel like you’re crossing a boundary.

The District sounds like something official and important, but it isn’t really either of those things. There just didn’t happen to be anywhere else called the Chicago Arts District and the company that owns the area jumped on the opportunity. They justify the name with a lot of weirdly-shaped apartments, window displays up and down the main street with paintings and sculptures and installations (that put a fig leaf over the storefronts that no one is actually using), and an open gallery night once a month, which I have to admit, even as I’m being cynical, is a fun way to spend an evening and what brought me to the neighborhood in the first place.

The apartments, despite their character, cost way too much, definitely too much for the artists the landlords are supposedly courting. I get the impression that the brain trust behind the development spent a decade or so courting gentrification and was just starting to get impatient by the time I showed up. Living around there would not be a smart move for hardly anyone that couldn’t afford to set a few hundred dollars a month on fire. That did describe me, though.

I saw Alexis a few times when I first moved into the neighborhood. Only from a distance, but she’s not a hard person to spot. There’s no clever way to sneak up on this: Alexis wears a hood everywhere she goes. It completely conceals her head and face. From the neck up, everything is covered. Eyes, hair, everything.

The first time I saw her, walking down the sidewalk across the street from me, the hood she was wearing was black. At a glance I thought she was wearing a burkha. The second time, I saw her through a window. That time the hood was a very dark purple, to match the dress she was wearing. I couldn’t tell you now what I thought that time. Memory lies. Living on a street lined with art galleries, you don’t stop and interpret every weird thing that you see. Maybe I thought she was a mannequin. Maybe I thought she was in the middle of some kind of performance piece. But essentially, I did not think.

It was only the third time I saw her, the first time that we were in the same room, that I fully absorbed that the person I was seeing now was in fact the person that I’d seen twice before, and that the hood was an everyday thing. We were in an art gallery during the open gallery night, halfway between where she lived and where I lived.  It was not a very interesting gallery. Paint smeared on canvas in broad amateurish strokes by the same person who rented the space, continually daring anyone who walked in to call their bluff. I pride myself on a good poker face, but either I had a bad day or Alexis was just up to the challenge. She approached me.

These are terrible.

That was her opening line. It was something I saw her do again many times. She’d start with something bold—maybe to draw attention away from how she looked, but who knows—and soften up once she’d established herself. The conversation moved on from the paintings, while I put the pieces together that yes, I had in fact seen her before, and also dealt with the possible reasons why she might be concealing her face. She complemented me on my shoes. It’s possible I might have had the guts to try and get her phone number on that first meeting, but she said she had to get back to her own gallery and left suddenly, and following her felt like the creepy thing to do.

Over the course of the next month, I saw her once, through the window of the flower shop on the corner. I didn’t have time to stop in, I was on my way to work. At the next open gallery night, there was a blizzard. Nobody was coming out that evening who had to walk more than half a block to do so. On the other hand, people still in the neighborhood weren’t going anywhere. There was a single brave food truck braving the weather, serving up fresh made donuts and hot chocolate. I ran into Alexis on the sidewalk, reintroduced myself, and offered to buy her a cup. She told me that she’d love one, but that she couldn’t drink it here and had to get back to her show. I asked if I could join her. She said she’d be delighted.

We went back to her place. Because there were so few people, we had more time to talk than we would have had otherwise. She was good at asking questions, and even better at not getting around to answering them. The night came to an end. I can still remember the way my heart beat, when Alexis locked the door without asking me to leave first. The already thin crowd on the sidewalk didn’t take long to disappear.

What’s funny is that in my memory, I can remember looking deeply into her eyes. Green eyes. I remember her smiling slyly at me because she could tell I was nervous and she enjoyed that. Memory is a liar, of course. She was still wearing the hood.

She took me by the hand—my fingers were shaking—and led me to the open spiral staircase that went up from the gallery to her bedroom. We walked past her sculptures, her rows and rows of perfectly formed nude stone men and some women, cowering in fear or standing in dull surprise. They each cost somewhere between five and ten thousand dollars.

Once we made it to the bedroom, she put her hands on my chest and told me that she had a particular way she liked to do things. The blindfold was a work of craftsmanship. She was good enough with her hands that it was possible she’d made it herself, but it seemed like the kind of thing you’d buy online. It fit around my eyes perfectly, like goggles.

She led me into the room, and put her finger to my lips when I tried to make a joke. She let go of me and came back again, pushing gently on my hips so that I fell backwards and landed on a mattress. She climbed on top of me. I reached for her and her hands found mine. She stage managed. When I reached up, she steered me back down again, not unpleasantly.

She bit my shoulder and it felt sharper than it should have, like a needle. She nibbled on me again under my nipple and it wasn’t as sharp.

I told her I wanted to touch her hair.

You don’t want to touch my hair, she said. Her accent came all of the way out. I realized I’d never actually heard her speak Greek, and that I wanted to.

She kissed me and I heard something hiss. Try not to judge me too harshly for not figuring things out sooner. In my defense, it’s kind of a big leap to make. Especially when you’re not thinking clearly.

2

I’m an accountant. I was lucky enough to get turned on to my career by my uncle when I was very young; I graduated high school ahead of schedule and finished up college early too, along with my CPA, so I was able to get my first real job when I was only twenty-one. Good job, too. I still have it. I moved to Chicago for the position. I’d grown up in Peoria and gone to school there to save money, and by the time I had my degree I’d been very practical and very focused for a very long time. I liked the idea of being young and making good money in the big city. I wanted to have adventures.

I like my job, and I like the people I work with, but I’ve never found my work itself to be especially challenging. My first time making the big push through April I was wondering if I’d made a mistake with my life. I’m not an artistic or creative person. I’m not cool. I’m fine with that, then and now, and I’ve read enough books to know that being interesting isn’t always such a great thing in practice. But at the same time I’d always had a modest hope that I could at least get a taste of that other world, that other way of living.

My colleagues weren’t much help. They were bar people. I tried to go spend time with them, but happy hour was not to my taste. The only thing I took from the attempt was a taste for spirits. Not beer. Whiskey, wine, and tequila, my holy trinity. But only the good stuff, and I like to drink it in private, so that didn’t get me anywhere. I also didn’t like sports, or marathons or races. You get the most benefit from twenty minutes a day, and you can do that on a treadmill before you brush your teeth each morning. People around me weren’t religious, but even if they had been I didn’t much care for that either.

I gave up trying for a little while. It took completely losing a three-day weekend to Civilization 3 to bring me back to the drawing board.

One thing I did like was museums. So I started going to museums, and when I ran out of museums I started going to art galleries, and it turned out that I liked those even better. The quality of the art was a mixed bag, but the people-watching was excellent. I was always the kind of person that enjoyed reading the biography of someone who did a painting I liked, or a sculpture or whatever else. I’m always interested in knowing if they had a day job, or how the bills got paid if they didn’t. Those kinds of questions make people upset when you ask them in person, and of course it makes things worse when people find out what I do for a living. Once you ask about money and they find out you’re a money person, they think that’s all you are.

If I’m being honest, it does hurt my feelings a little bit. But only a little. I care about money, and I keep track of it, and I have a lucrative job. There’s a connection between those three things. Being broke doesn’t make you a saint and it doesn’t make you interesting.

At the same time, that kind of thinking causes people like me to only spend time with other people like me, and that’s not what I wanted either, so I learned to keep my mouth shut. I let my wallet do the talking. You could just walk into a room full of strangers the opening night of a gallery show looking like someone who could afford to buy a painting, and the creator would ease up to you and their life story would come spilling out. And sometimes I’d even buy the painting. I made someone’s night more than once.

I had no problems getting invited to the high-end galleries, but they weren’t much fun. The places I liked were lofts where people served Oreo cookies with cheap red wine. That was why I moved to Pilsen, or whatever you want to call the neighborhood I lived in. It brought me closer to my hobby. It was efficient.

3

I’m reasonably sure that the first few times Alexis and I spent time together, she didn’t intend for it to go anywhere. She was attracted to skinny soft-spoken guys in glasses, and once I made it through her first evaluation and didn’t seem to have a problem with how she looked, her entertainment for the evening was set.

I don’t think it’s as uncommon a thing as you might think, to not care about the hood or the blindfold. I already told you about her voice. And at the risk of sounding crude, Alexis had great legs. My reasons for noticing her from across the street that first time were less than elevated.

In any case, it was not a foregone conclusion that anything long term was in the works when I left Alexis’ apartment that first morning. That could have been it. As it happened, we ran into each other at a cafe the following Saturday. She was walking in, and I’d been about to leave, but I didn’t have anything pressing to do that day, so we grabbed a table and talked for a while. I sent her flowers the day after that. I went to the same shop where I’d spotted her before, and spared no expense. I included a phone number with the bouquet. She called me and we went out to dinner.

Again, I didn’t screw around picking a restaurant. The waiter was an older gentleman who didn’t blink when he saw Alexis. Total professional. My guess is that he thought there was a medical situation, that she had burns on her face or had just had plastic surgery or something like that. That was one of my earlier guesses too, until I actually had the chance to touch her face.

We ate and talked. We stretched things out: dessert was followed by drinks. We talked, a lot. We liked talking to each other, and we both knew it. At the same time, getting any specific information about where Alexis came from or what her life was like before she started renting her studio was difficult. She managed to stand perfectly still and dodge around at the same time.

She got me talking about politics. I try not to start on that. Once I get going it can be hard for me to get the worms back into the can.

"Everything is always a goddamn emergency. Over the course of the last century, life expectancy