Misguided Monsters

Misguided Monsters

It was a foggy, clammy morning as I bumped down the access road on the west side of Ned’s cow pasture. I’d taken the call just after finishing breakfast at the Three B’s, and I knew this one’d be a doozy.

The fog had dimmed the sun enough that I could safely observe its sharply-edged white disk, hanging in the sky like a too-bright full moon.

With the front windows rolled down, I smelled it before I saw it – the scent of burning cloth mingled with the stench of rotting flesh. Fortunately, I had a cast iron stomach, so my Three B’s breakfast special was safe and sound.

I’d never figured out why the history museum couldn’t keep their own artifacts under control. After all, he wasn’t difficult to restrain and confine. But old Ramses had proven to be a wily one since his arrival in Cardiff. He’d had a long enough time, across all those centuries, to figure out how to work free of his jewel-encrusted, gold plated coffin.

Beyond the grumble of the cruiser’s engine, I heard it next – sporadic sizzling sounds, with a loud, deeply disturbing moan of anguish ricocheting off among the forest trees to my left. From out of the fog, Ned suddenly appeared just in front of my right bumper. Slammed the brakes and swerved, narrowly missed him, and came to a stop near the ditch. By the sour, disgruntled expression on his deeply lined face, he didn’t appear apologetic in the least for nearly causing me to run him over.

Ned, skinny as a rail, stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head like that would magically cause Ramses to stop his thrashing. Further along the fence, the old man was tangled in the barbed wire as electrical current sizzled and scorched those thick layers of cloth wrappings that encased his corpse. That moan was chilling. Like the voice of death itself, if death had a voice. Made my teeth hum against each other, the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The bad filling on my upper right molar crackled with pain each time the mummy’s voice rose to peak volume.

Ned went back to the barn and switched off the electric current. Over the next two hours, Ned’s two strongest farm hands and I managed to untangle Ramses from the barbed wire and eventually sequester him into the backseat of my cruiser. Once free of the electrical shocks and the sharp barbed wire, the scorched, rotting mummy had stopped his infernal moaning and became peaceably cooperative. On the drive back to the museum, I glanced back at him now and then.

“I’m really sorry, that you ended up here, Ramses,” I said, as he swayed slightly back and forth on the seat. “I think it was a crime, the way those Brits broke into your tomb, removed you from your culture, shipped you to London.”

I wondered what it was like – to have been a Pharoah over all Egypt, and now be reduced to this.

“If I could, I’d help you get back there, back to Egypt.”

Then, for the first time ever, he spoke to me. His words came out muffled, because of those wrappings I figured, in a mix of accents – part British.

“Thanks, old chap. I love the thought of returning to Egypt. Is it nice these days? I haven’t seen it in thousands of years, you know.”

“It’s changed quite a lot. Been some upheavals there lately, from what I understand. Become quite modern, like much of the rest of the world. You know, there are lot of your countrymen trying to have all the relics of your culture brought back to Egypt.”

Then I realized my faux pas.

“Not that you’re a relic, Ramses. You’re a person, after all.”

“I am a person, and I’m not a person.”

He chuckled dryly, a puff of dust and a musty odor penetrating the wrappings over his mouth.

“Perhaps I will get to see my homeland again someday, then. Don’t suppose I’ll be going anywhere else in the time being.”

As always, after his latest sarcophagus and museum breakout, Ramses had plotted a jerky, staggering path back toward Egypt, his native homeland all those thousands of years ago. Despite the annoyance of dealing with him every few months, I actually felt sorry for the guy. And to think most museum visitors who gawked at him thought he wielded some ancient, deadly curse.

Most folks are terrified of supernatural creatures, but I’ve learned that a little understanding and compassion can go a long way. There are better ways to deal with vampires than driving stakes through their hearts. Though I have to say it was exasperating to disentangle a vampire, in bat form at the time, from a terrified woman’s immense beehive hairdo.

Similarly, there are kinder ways of disarming a werewolf than blasting it with a hail of silver bullets. It was my Superintendent, Sam Rollins, who figured out a better way – when he aimed his laser-sight Glock at one of the fierce beasts and was amazed to see the creature suddenly lose all interest in eviscerating him. Instead, it began to chase and attack the red laser dot with complete abandon. Werewolves are half wolf, after all, aren’t they? And wolves are canines. Like my own dog, Rufus. And everyone knows how dogs love chasing that little red dot.

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The following week, I got another unusual call – Franky had run away from home again. He’s another tragically misunderstood man. Probably the saddest of the bunch. So long as you don’t bring any open flames near him, he does fine. Most folks think he’s some kind of sick pedo, since he’s frequently found sitting in the grass with his straightened legs spread apart while some little boy or girl recites rhymes to him, or plays jacks, or even plays patty-cakes with the huge, oafish man, something that brings him great joy.

He’s no pervert, and actually has a very kind heart. Young kids are the only people who don’t stab him with pitchforks, or burn him with torches, or cage him, or shackle him to a metal post as part of a freak show, where folks laugh and hoot and holler and throw things at him. Younger folks accept Franky for who he is, not fear him.

The drive back to the dark, gloomy Rickelstein estate – where his creator, Doctor Rickelstein the First once lived – was a long one. He’d moved here, with all his lab equipment, after the folks in Germany deported him and Franky. Somehow, they’d ended up in England, where Rickelstein had commissioned the building of a mansion that looked shockingly similar to his family’s castle in the old country.

I watched Franky carefully in the rear view mirror. I didn’t want him to stop that infernal picking again at the sutures on his wrists.

“Franky, how are you doing back there? It’s really good to see you again. Is old Doc Rickelstein treating you well?”

He looked so sad – all seven feet, seven inches of him. His flat-topped head, the yellowish green tinge to his skin, his deeply sunken eyes, their rims dark, one iris a vivid ice blue, the other bright green. What a strange, living paradox he was.

“Okay, I guess,” was all he said. He sounded downtrodden, sad. Lonely. There still remained some German in his accent.

“Hey, whadda ya say we do a drive-through at McDonalds?”

His eyes grew wider, and I thought I saw the glisten of tears pooling in his blue eye. Rickelstein mustn’t have restored the other eye’s tear duct, I supposed. Still, I hadn’t wanted to evoke such an emotional reaction.

“I see Mc…DON… alds… on TV, but I never go to one!”

“Do you like hamburgers? Oh wait, of course you would. Hamburger sounds kind of German, so I think you will!” I grinned in the rear view mirror, and for the first time, I saw one side of his mouth lift in his best attempt at a smile.

I certainly had to use the drive-thru lane. There was no way I could terrify the eat-in customers by having Franky clomp in with metal bolts sticking from either side of his neck, in those tall, heavy platform boots of his.

I ordered each of us a Big Mac and fries. The woman at the window never saw Franky sitting in back, which was for the best, really. When I handed the fries back to him, he touched several of them and recoiled. His contented expression morphed into a grimace of fear.

“Hot!” he shouted. “Hot! Fire!”

“No Franky! Calm down! Listen. It’s not fire. Just let them cool down a bit, and they’ll be fine. Trust me! It’s NOT FIRE, okay?”

Thank God that did the trick. He grew placid, and within a couple minutes, he was voraciously munching down fries. A few of them escaped his grasp due his limited motor abilities. But when I handed him the burger, that was a revelation!

Just one bite, and his face lit up with wonder and amazement. And a child-like joy that formed a lump in my own throat, I’ll admit.

“Good!” he kept grunting, as he chomped and swallowed as bits of shredded lettuce fell free. “Good! Thank! Danke!”

There were smudges of grease and special sauce around his mouth when he was finished, but he sat back with contentment on his face. I rolled down all the windows, and he enjoyed the rush of air over his face and through his hair.

Try as I might, however, he got bored enough on the hour-long drive to start picking at the sutures on his wrists.

“Franky, please leave your wrists alone. You know what always happens when you mess with them.”

Each time I chided him, he paused and looked out the window for a while. But Franky was easily bored, it appeared, because he resumed only a few minutes later. And as we ascended into the Misty Mountains, it only got worse. At times, he brought his left or right wrist up before his face and grinned when a stitch pulled loose.

We were rounding the last turn, bringing the massive, turreted, medieval-style Rickelstein mansion into view, when Franked grunted from the backseat. Something thumped on the backseat. Then a frustrated sigh.

“Aw, Franky. I told you not to do that.”

He gave me a guilty look.

“But it’s okay. It’s fine. Doc will fix you up, right as rain.”

After we met the Doc at the mansion’s rear entrance, there it was – Franky’s detached right hand lying palm-up on the backseat.

I can’t really fault him – not for anything. After all, I can’t realize the horror of waking up while being cooked alive by lightning bolts, then realizing your entire body is a stitched together hodgepodge of pieces torn from other people’s dead bodies. For Franky, that horrifying rebirth occurred many years ago, but scars that deep will probably never heal.

When I eventually drove off, leaving the mansion looming darkly in the mist, Franky stood there watching me. Just before I rounded a turn, he raised the stump of his right forearm, as if to wave at me. I wondered, somewhat wistfully, whether his detached hand, now resting on Doc’s metal “parts tray”, was splaying its fingers and wobbling strangely back and forth…