the monster inside

by Tim Hanson

Since kindergarten, Oscar Mendez had been our whipping post.

Whether it was spitting in his lunch or coming up with increasingly cruel names for his nose-picking (Booger King was our favorite), we never found cause to reassign the role. He wasn’t a small boy—far from it, in fact, and his expanding belly had become just another thing to mock—but his inability to stand up for himself without stuttering or breaking into tears was all we needed: we could strike without fearing retaliation.

That is, until fourth grade.

It hadn’t been a major comeback: if it had been anyone else, Jeremy Stark would’ve probably just laughed it off, said something foul in return, and moved on, but because it had been Oscar who’d said it, an example needed to be made. For the last five years, the social hierarchy had remained firmly in place: Jeremy and his sidekick, Louie, at the top, Oscar at the bottom, and the rest of us safely in between, and Jeremy would be damned if that order would be upended now.

No, his favorite whipping post needed to be taught a lesson. In the most severe terms.

*****

Illinois autumns can be terribly erratic, hot one day and freezing the next, and that was the pattern leading up to that fateful afternoon. The day before had been a scorcher, so that morning we’d worn short-sleeved shirts to school instead of the jackets and hats the fickle weather now demanded. As we walked those four blocks from school to Whitman Park, we now paid for our follies, our hands shoved deep into our pockets and our chins tucked firmly against our chests as we pressed on against the howling wind, ready to call this whole thing off in favor of our homes’ warmth. However, once we were at the park, our favorite after-school haunt in those days, such thoughts faded, as sweat now poured down our overheated bodies while we ran from one end of the park to the other. Those afternoons exist as a euphoric blur: all the boys who walked home from St. Bartholomew came here to let loose, to expel the childish energy that place lived to stifle. It was like a release valve, and how blissful it was to let that pressure go. It had become a ritual, following us from first grade to now, and never once during those years had Oscar Mendez made an appearance. Even if he had known about our afterschool gatherings, he knew better than to re-enter the torture chamber, where Jeremy and his minions could operate outside the watchful eye of authority. That is why, just as were getting ready to play a game we crudely called ‘smear the queer,’ we stopped mid-run when that pudgy figure emerged over the hill.

He was the only one wearing a jacket—not the brown, frayed, Goodwill jacket he usually wore, but a new one. At that time in the mid-nineties, Starter jackets were all the rage, and maybe it was the jacket that gave him this newfound confidence: he was wearing the uniform of the herd. I wonder now how many extra hours his mother had worked to buy that jacket. Even then, we understood socioeconomic status and were befuddled how someone as poor as Oscar could afford St. Bartholomew’s bloated tuition, and that, too, became just another thing to ridicule; but now here he was, wearing the outfit usually reserved for the cool. Maybe that’s what enraged Jeremy, or maybe he just didn’t like to see his whipping post looking so happy. Whatever the reason, Jeremy smiled vindictively, raised a welcoming hand, and said, “Hey, Oscar! Wanna play?”

The boy’s plan had worked—or so Oscar thought—and his smile couldn’t have been wider as he came running to join us. Jeremy grabbed the ball from my hand and held it out to Oscar: “Your turn, dude.” None of us then knew why the game was called what it was or what a ‘queer’ was or how it stoked the rage in someone as hateful as Jeremy Stark, this assigned role to the victim only making the ensuing violence all the sweeter for the assailant, but what we did know was what happened to whoever held the ball. There was no escape, though the rules promised such: the herd always descended upon the ball and whoever carried it, punching and kicking and kneeing. There was an unspoken rule of never hitting too hard, though Jeremy and Louie often broke this rule, but we all knew that rule would be null and void as soon as Oscar touched the football.

“Know the rules?”

Still smiling, Oscar shook his head. How could he? He’d never played before.

“Whoever has the ball tries to make it to that hill over there, and we try to tackle them. If you make it to the hill, you win. Since it’s your first time playing, we’ll give you a three-second head start,” Jeremy kindly explained, changing the rules slightly to fit the plan he had for Oscar.

Almost bouncing with excitement, Oscar nodded gleefully and took his position, and likewise, we took ours. Jeremy leaned over and whispered something to Louie. “Ah, hell yeah,” he whispered back, and the rest of us caught on immediately, not knowing the actual rules but knowing the wickedness writing them, knowing we could participate, knowing everything would soon be off the rails for poor Oscar Mendez.

“Ready?” Jeremy asked.

“Ready!” Oscar answered, like a little boy on Christmas about to receive his present.

Jeremy held up a single finger, his middle one. “One—”

“Three!” Louie shouted over him, and before Oscar could register his head start was already over, we were upon him.

Somewhere beneath us, I heard his muffled screams, his cries of ‘help’ and ‘please stop,’ and I’d like to say it was at this point I felt guilt, that I realized what we were doing was wrong, but in truth, and the truth is a monster we cannot slay no matter how hard we try, I was laughing, screaming ‘get the queer,’ and even when I heard his cries turn unintelligible, and even when I heard fabric tearing and the prolonged ‘nooooo,’ the smile wouldn’t leave my lips. Something deep inside me—in each of us—was being fed, and perhaps I can say it was the elation that I was not the one on the bottom of this pile fueling it, but that was only a small part: the bigger part was feeling the power of making someone beg for mercy. It was the thrill of holding a magnifying glass over an ant scurrying to safety, of tearing the wings off a fly and watching it writhe and attempt to go airborne, to escape, though all of them, Oscar included, knew such attempts were futile.

As we removed ourselves from the pile, Louie got one final lick in, and then there was only one boy lying atop the ball, snot and blood running from his nose, his eyes red and shiny with tears. He was the boy who wore a new jacket and came running down the hill to show that it made him one of us, and now that jacket had been torn apart. Oscar looked down at its ruination, and perhaps more than the bruises and cuts and feelings of betrayal, it was the visual evidence that his plan to fit in had failed, that such plans would always fail, that made him say what he did.

“Welp,” Jeremy laughed. “Looks like we smeared the queer all right.”

Laughter roared, but this time Oscar didn’t flee it; he didn’t beg us to stop; he just stood there, his face inexplicably turning redder, while his hands balled into quivering fists.

“Fuck you, Jeremy.”

The laughter stopped for a moment, but then returned in high-pitched wails at the shock of hearing Oscar Mendez actually swear and the look on Jeremy’s face as his own smile crumbled. As I said, it wasn’t the comeback—we’d all said far worse that day—but it was the brazenness of the prey lashing out at his assailant. Order needed to be reestablished: there were rules, and those rules would not be broken.

Jeremy approached the boy and bumped his chest with his own, pushing him back two steps. “The fuck you say to me, queer?”

And perhaps if it had ended there, Oscar would’ve only ended up with a nut tap; instead, he took two steps forward and said, “You heard me. I said, ‘Fuck you.’”

Our laughter upon hearing this new transgression was cut short, though. Oscar was on the ground, screaming, holding his stomach where Jeremy had thrown his fist, and then Jeremy was dragging Oscar across the grass, staining the boy’s torn jacket with streaks of green and brown. A few of us dared to test the waters and laugh again, but no, this was not the order, the reality of things we were used to, something else was happening here, and good humor died at the site of Jeremy’s eyes, wild and savage, his mouth spraying spit as he spewed every insult he could think of at Oscar before ordering Louie, “The storm drain, take the top off it.” Something that had previously been satiated with small acts of mayhem had been roused, and it was completely in charge now, screaming for the storm drain, dragging the boy to that exposed tunnel leading down into that liquid black, into God knew what.

“No!” Oscar screamed, and Louie laughed and mocked the boy’s cries, but something about his tone betrayed his uncertainty: When would Jeremy stop? How far would he push this? But whatever was controlling Jeremy now had no intention of stopping, of being bargained with, of being mollified: it demanded blood, and its demands would be met in full.

“Um…Jeremy,” one of us dared, but said nothing more. The top of the storm drain was off, and the light reached only a few feet down before the shadows swallowed it.

“I’m gonna dump this fat son of a whore down the drain!”

“No!”

Jeremy kicked the boy in the stomach for refuting his proclamation. “Fuck you! Isn’t that what you told me, Booger King?” Louie stood nearby, grinning unsurely.

With two fists wrapped around the boy’s jacket, Jeremy pushed him over the edge, and something echoed up from the darkness. “You hear that? You know there’s rats down there, don’t you, fatty? You know they eat little queers like you, right?”

Oscar couldn’t control his sobs, but Jeremy paid them no mind; he was more interested in what was happening toward Oscar’s lower half: the front of his pants was growing darker. “Look, boys! Oscar’s pissed his pants, pissed his pants, pissed pants; Oscar’s gone and pissed his pants, so early in the moooorning!” And perhaps it was the relief that Jeremy had resorted back to childish taunts, that maybe this sewer business was just for show to get the boy to piss his pants, or maybe that’s bullshit: maybe the monsters in each of us couldn’t contain their glee after seeing those wet pants. Either way, we began to laugh and sing along, clapping our hands and dancing around the opened storm drain.

Jeremy, no longer laughing himself, leaned an inch from Oscar’s face and said, “Remember this, fatty: don’t you ever, ever, say that to me again. You understand—”

But something shrill cut him off, and then, no one was laughing.

“The fuck was that?” Louie whispered, daring a peek over the edge of the storm drain.

Jeremy, too, was looking over the trembling boy’s head. “Probably the pipes or—”

It happened so quickly that none of us registered what had actually happened until much later, when the fragments of horror could be aligned with a more rational mind—but no, that’s bullshit, too. The rational mind could never align the seconds thereafter, see the details as they actually were, for what happened shatters rationality as we know it, undoes every rule or certainty we’re foolish enough to believe. For one moment, the bully was sitting atop his prey, and the next, something green was gripping his face—a hand, a claw, something with fingers, one of which was sliding effortlessly into the pulpy white mush of the bully’s right eye.

Each of us froze: first, because Jeremy was now sobbing, a sound we’d never heard before; second, because something had been down there in the black water, something we’d been promised by our parents could not exist, monsters weren’t real, just the stuff of fantasies, kids, so go back to bed and sleep soundly in the warm glow of the rational world; and third, because we didn’t know what the fuck was attached to that claw digging into Jeremy’s face, but it sounded crazed, it sounded jubilant, it sounded hungry.

“Help me!”

That wasn’t Jeremy—he wouldn’t have been capable of anything so coherent now—but Oscar, who was pulling on Jeremy’s waist, fighting to get him away from that hole, to save him. But why, why risk your life for a boy threatening to dump you into the drain where something like this dwelled? Why not run like the rest of us would have had fear not paralyzed our legs and scrambled our thoughts? Perhaps it was something deeper inside him, the central core of Oscar Mendez, a morality beyond anyone who hadn’t suffered daily torments at the hands of boys he just wanted to call friends. Or perhaps it wasn’t so mature, just a naïve and quite foolish hope that Jeremy would have done the same had the positions been reversed.

“Help me!” Oscar heaved backward, and Jeremy screamed as the claw with its hook in the boy’s eye yanked him back, pulling him further into Hell. “Louie! Louie! Grab his feet!” But the boy’s allegiance was broken, insignificant in the face of this unfathomable terror. “Louie!” Oscar screamed again, yanking, and then there was a crack and a wail that sounded inhuman, as the claw began ripping the top of the boy’s head off.

“Mama!”

Then he was gone, Jeremy’s screams receding down into bottomless fathoms.

And then: silence.

Oscar’s arms, which had just been holding the boy, now hugged himself. His mouth opened, closed, and then opened again, but not a sound escaped. The rest of us just stood there, staring at the black circle. Oscar turned toward us, his eyes wide but without tears. “We have to get help,” he whispered. “We have to—” But the claw was back, and then so was another, two green arms shooting out of the shadows, dripping with black sludge and God knew what else, and they grabbed hold of Oscar’s back and shoved the boy face-first onto the ground. Was it vengeance it was after or merely a meal to stock away for after it was done with Jeremy? Who knew, and more importantly, who cared? We’d spent long enough in this nightmare for one rational thought to find its way through the velvet fog—Run!—and we did.

“Help me!” Oscar cried, but now it wasn’t the call of a hero without the strength to do a heroic deed; it was the cry of a boy being dragged into Hell, the final call to the tormentors who’d always stood by whenever Jeremy Stark had made his life a living nightmare—only now that nightmare seemed inconsequential to whatever awaited him below.

I was one of the last to find his legs, to make a decision—run or help—so it was my eyes Oscar’s sought out, it was to me he made his final plea: “Help me, Dave. Please.”

It wasn’t my inability to answer or even move that sealed the boy’s fate: it was my full-on retreat, for I was the last one to leave him behind, to run up the hill from where he had recently dreamt that maybe he could finally call us his friends. In his dying breath, Oscar had dared implore one of the herd, who had not only laughed at his misfortunate but had joined in. In his final moment in the light, before those arms attached to whatever dwelt below yanked him down and delivered a slow, excruciating death, the boy had dared to hope that humanity would find me, and that such humanity may push a tormentor to save his prey, just as heroism had found him and pushed a victim to save his assailant. I can only hope now—and it is a pathetic hope, one that will follow me to the end of my meaningless life—that in his final seconds, it was not this thought of betrayal and cruelty that went through his mind but the certainty he was a far better person than any of us, better than this cruel world deserved.

At the top of the hill, I looked back over my shoulder, and the hole was covered again. Beyond this, past the park’s eastern border, cars were driving down Oak Street, obeying the speed limit. And aside from a few birds chirping overhead, the world was silent again. It had resumed its natural order.

But somewhere beneath this, buried deep inside this façade of order, two boys screamed, and no one heard them. Two boys cried for their mothers as they were eaten alive.

Before I got home, the streetlights came to life. It was getting darker earlier now, and even before I could reach my front door, my mother ran outside, jacket in hand, asking me why I hadn’t thought to wear one when I stepped out this morning.

Photo of Tim Hanson

BIO: For the last seventeen years, Tim Hanson has taught high school English, a passion rivaled only by his love for writing. His short stories and essays have appeared in nearly two dozen journals and anthologies, and he recently won Flash Fiction Magazine's flash fiction contest. You can read more about Tim at TSHanson.com.