My name is William Johansen and there are some things you should know before you continue.

     First off, I am not, nor do I claim to be, a good person.  I smoke.  I drink.  I do drugs.  A lot of drugs, and I’m not going to bore you with the variety or quantity.

     After all, I don’t know you, do I?

     This all started on a rather mundane Saturday morning.  I rolled out of bed and took a shower at nine thirty before brewing my morning coffee.

     I live in a rundown house in the eastern part of Kansas City, a one-story affair with a leaking roof and a landlord I never see.  Most of my neighbors are black, and most are poor.  As a white artist I’m only poor.

     Sitting in my living room cum studio, I sketched out some sculpture ideas and lit a cigarette.  Coffee and cigarettes:  the blood and breath of the gods of inspiration.

     The secret to creating anything is persistence.  Most of my ideas don’t pan out, but I have dozens every day.  I do well enough that I only have to work three shifts a week at the restaurant to pay my bills.

     As an explanation of my situation, this is good enough.  As an intro to my story, it’s somewhat lacking.  I’ll just jump in.

     So Monday at eleven, I step onto my porch.  It was early May, and when it wasn’t raining you could get first-degree burns from the sidewalk, but it was a typical KC spring.  Never more than three days of the heat.

     Lighting my second cigarette of the day, I watch as children played on my street.  School children just getting up and going outside to play, a rare occurrence in the subdivision where I grew up.  I smiled a bit; it made me glad to live here, despite the gunshots and sirens I heard whenever I was going to bed.

     A bronze-skinned little girl carrying a stuffed bear walked past my house.  I tried to remember who her parents were, before recalling the mixed race couple that lived three houses down.

     I crushed out the cigarette butt, and headed toward my door.  Glancing over, as a semi-homeless gutter-mutt emerged from under my porch and approached the girl.

     The dog wasn’t mean, or anything.  It was actually a very shy animal; the worst thing it ever did was pick at my trash every now and then.

     The girl didn’t know this, though.  She shrank back from it as it sniffed at her.  She hid behind her teddy bear.  I thought she would scream and run away.

     Then the bear moved.

     It twitched, and opened its mouth, letting out a high-pitched growl before swiping at the dog with one paw.  With a yelp, the dog fled back under my porch.

     She looked up at me, and I turned away pretending not to notice her.  Quietly, she turned away, and walked the other direction, further from home.

     Curious, I stepped down onto my lawn, looking under my porch.  The dog looked at me with frightened eyes, and I held out a hand, and coaxed it out.

     It crept out, and I could see that a long, thin thorn sticking into its nose.

     “Shit,” I said, slowly reaching out toward it, and it shied away.

     I seized the thorn, and pulled I out with a quick jerk.  It yelped, and looked at me.

     “Sorry, man,” I said, “but it would’ve been worse to leave it in.”

     Standing up, I went back into my house and locked the door behind me.

     I sketched a picture of a growling teddy bear with thorns for claws, taking great pains to copy the minute pattern on the spine into my sketchbook.  It had to be four inches long, and maybe a quarter the thickness of a pencil.

     Had I actually seen that?

     It looked like it had happened.  The thorn was in my hand.

     Was the bear the monster, or was something inside of the bear?  Why did that little girl hold it?  She was afraid of the dog, but not of Snuggles the Killer Plant.  That was definitely off.

     Setting down the spine, I poured myself another cup of coffee.  I didn’t have work today, but I needed to get some things done--I had a gallery show at the beginning of the next month, three weeks away.

     Should just not pay attention to it.  That’s how the city works, right?

     Everyone sees weird things, they just put them out of mind and forget about them.

     Besides...

     Ah, hell.  I had to know.

     I put on my shoes--a scuffed pair of athletic shoes, the only pair I owned--and stepped outside, locking my door.

     Turning to walk down to the street, I saw that the girl was standing halfway up my walk, looking at me.

Something was wrong.

     Did anyone have eyes that particular shade of green?  It was kind of neon-bright, a hue that wasn’t found anywhere in nature.

     Something weird was happening here.

     “Hey, kid,” I said, by way of greeting, my keys dangling from my right hand.

     “Hey, mister,” she responded.

     There was a moment of silence.  I didn’t really know how to talk to normal children, let alone those who keep monsters as toys.

     I thought of something:

     “Hey, don’t you have a bear or something?”

     “Puck,” she supplied.  I looked at her sharply before noting her inclusion of the “p” sound.

     “Right, where is he?”

     She pointed, and I looked down to see it lying face down by my right foot.

     My eyes dilated, my heart rate quickened, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

     “Jesus fucking Christ!” I yelped, jumping away from it, holding my keys between myself and it, as they were the only vaguely weapon-like object I had with me.

     The bear simply laid there.

     “Can I have him back, mister?” the child asked.

     “Uh...sure...”

     I reached down, not thinking of taking my keys from my hand, picked it up gingerly and passed it to her. I imagined that it would, at any moment, explode into a super-condensed briar patch and take my hand off like a wooden grenade.

     No such thing happened.

     When I handed it to her, she took hold of it, and hugged it, but not before I was able to completely remove my hand.

     Her arm scraped one dangling key.  There was a smell of burnt hair and flesh, and a wisp of smoke.  She gritted her teeth, biting back a shriek, and looked at me with too-wide eyes before running away.

     I had to wonder what I had just seen.

     I looked at the key that had burnt her.  It was a steel door key.  Nothing special about it.

     Sufficiently weirded out, I stepped back into my house.

     I rode my bike to the grocery store, and picked up a bag of fresh vegetables for dinner that evening.  The days were getting longer, but the moon loomed up over the horizon, a sickle-shape as thin as a chisel’s edge.

     Tromping up the steps to my porch, with one hand grabbing on to the bicycle’s heavy chassis, I fumbled for my keys.  I had a milk crate strapped to the bike, and my groceries sat in it, meaning that I didn’t need to hold them, but that I did need to keep it level.

     Unlocking the door, I rolled the bike across the scuffed hardwood floor, and locked the door behind me.

     After a stir-fried dinner, I poured myself a drink, and sat on my porch to smoke a cigarette.  It was oddly cold.

     An unseasonable wall of mist billowed down the street, causing my green lawn to fade into gray.  There were two noises: a steady, wooden click, and the sound of footfalls walking down the street emerged from the mists.  I set down my drink.  Streetlights switched on, casting only the vague suggestion of smoky light in the gloom.

     “You broke the Rules,” a voice said, coming out of the fog.  It sounded creaky, like a broken tree branch or old leather.

     “I had to,” the little girl’s voice, sounding distinctly un-childlike, responded.

     “The Master is displeased.  If you break the Rules again, we might be discovered.”

     “Don’t worry, Caliban.”

     “The Master doesn’t worry, so it falls to me.  It is my job, Miranda...and I’m not friendly when I’m worried.”

     A brief moment of silence followed this weighty statement.

     “Why are you burned?” the creaking voice asked.

     “An iron key.  It was nothing.”

     “Did anyone see?”

     “Just one of the neighbors, and he’s drugged into oblivion most of the time.  Stupid bastard probably doesn’t suspect a thing.”

     “Which one?”

     “That house there.  Twelve-oh-one.”

     “I’ll have to cause an accident, and you’ll have to learn to obey.”

     “What if I’m attacked?” the voice asked, gaining a childish whine.

     “Then die.  That’s all your kind is good for.  Go home.  I’ll handle the bastard.”

     A tall, dark figure emerged from the mist--Caliban, I believe--and stood, watching me.  He was wearing a dark coat, and his skin was pallid.  His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, and he looked like he was wearing a Grecian wreath on his head, laurel leaves, or something.

     But that wasn’t the oddest thing.  He was tall, but his neck was almost as long as his arms, a rigid tower of white flesh that stuck up between his shoulder blades.

     I held my keys out in front of me, and jingled them; it was the only thing that I could think to do.

     “Hello,” he said, resting the tip of his black cane on the ground, “I’m afraid I must have a word with you.”

     “Oh?” I asked.

     “Yes,” he said, stepping forward, making as if to climb the steps.

     “You can stay right there,” I said, “I have an iron key on this ring here, and I’m going to give you a good whack with it if you get any closer.”

     He stopped, considering.

     “There was a time when I would’ve been afforded some degree of respect--” he began.

     “Your voice carries further than you think,” I responded.

     He paused, and fiddled with his cane, bending his neck down to look at his feet.  He wore ratty sneakers, in worse condition than even my own.

     “What’s going on?” I asked, “I’ve seen some weird shit today, and you know what?  I don’t really care.  Mildly interested, but I don’t really care.”

     Caliban smiled, his mouth splitting his face from ear to ear.  His teeth weren’t sharp, but unnaturally squared off.

     “My master gave the couple down the street a gift, but she keeps misbehaving.”

     “Saw what the teddy bear did to the dog,” I prompted.

     “You saw what she made the stuffed animal do; it’s just a toy that was here before she was.”

     “Before?” I asked.

     “Yes, Master gave the gift to them just last week.”

     “Bullshit,” I said, putting a cigarette in my mouth and lighting it.  He watched, bemused, as I took a puff, “that kid’s six if she’s a day, and I’ve seen her before last week.”

     “You saw the previous one.  Master gave his gift, and took the child off the parents’ hands.”

     I sneered, holding the cigarette between my teeth.

     “You kidnapped her?”

     “We left a replacement.”

     I bit through the filter, the still-burning cigarette falling to the ground.

     “What the hell are you?” I growled.

     “I’m Caliban,” he said, simply, “Master is a great fan of Shakespeare; it’s why he took little Miranda.  He loved her name and had to have her.”

     I spat the filter onto the ground.

     “That’s fucked up, Cal.”

     The monster placed its foot on the bottom step, and continued grinning.

     “The Master has his desires, it is not my place to question, just to make sure that they are fulfilled.”

     “Even if he’s an evil bastard?” I said, jingling my keys again.

     “Master is beyond good and evil, human.”

     Caliban took another step, and I swung my keys.  He raised his left hand, and our forearms intersected.  My arm went numb, and he struck me with his right, bony knuckles knocking the wind out of me.

     I crumpled against my front door, and fought simultaneously to regain my feet and my breath.  The keys fell from my hand.

     The door was unlocked.  I fumbled with the knob.  The door swung wide open.

     Caliban was a monster, wasn’t he?  The Tempest?

     He was behind me.

     I ran into my house.  It was behind me, a violation.

     Had to get far away.  The kitchen.  Back door.

     The sound of a wooden cane being dragged along the ground.  Wood, not metal.

     I ran, through the living room and into the kitchen, past aborted sculptures that I would never get a chance to complete.

     The door couldn’t be unlocked without my keys--a security measure.

     Glancing around for a weapon, I spotted a cast iron skillet.

     Good a weapon as any, I imagine.

     I picked it up just as Caliban was passing into my kitchen, raising his cane for an overhand strike.

     I swung.

     The cane was serpent-quick.  Snakelike, like his neck.

     The cane landed between my left shoulder and neck.  The skillet hit him on the chest with bone-jarring force.  With a grunt, I fell to the floor.  My head thudded against the hardwood floor.

     My stomach heaved from the pain.  I thought something might’ve been broken, or at least sprained.  I had a bruise for the next month.

     Caliban didn’t have a bruise.  Instead, he had a smoldering ruin where his chest should’ve been.  His head thrashed around on his too-long neck.

     I pushed myself upright, and stood over him as he drummed his heels on the ground.  He was discovering the hundreds of steel nails that held my floor together.

     “Don’t like metal, do you?” I asked.

     He gargled something.

     “Before you die, tell me where your master is.”

     “Warehouses...” he vomited.

     “What are you?”

     “Fair Ones...changeling...”

     I hauled him to his feet, and a thought struck me:  these creatures couldn’t go to the police.  I could do anything I wanted with this creature, and he’d be the only one that knew.

     “Nice coat you’ve got there,” I said, smiling at him.

     I had work the next evening, but I wore my new coat and took the bus to the public library.

     Changelings...Fair Ones.  Fairies, they’re called, but Disney really made them a lot friendlier.  They’re supposed to be bastards, or rather are bastards, if the snake-necked hit man I threw out of my house could be believed.

     According to all of the materials I gathered and read, they’re allergic to iron.  Steel, being mostly iron, was good enough, apparently.  They’d steal children and whisk them off to Faerie--a place, it seems, not a creature--to replace their children who had been taken in the Teind, a tithe paid to hell.

     Sounded a little too neat, that last part.  I could accept fairies; I’d hit one with a skillet and stolen his coat.  The rest was a little too...well...fantastic, I guess.

     Silly, right?

     Yeah.  Right.

     Fairy-tale rejects that probably wanted to fuck us all with switchblades.  Who would’ve thought?

     “Warehouses,” snake-neck had said.  I figured that meant the west bottoms.  That’s what I thought of when I thought of warehouses, at least.

     I put the books on a table, and headed to a hardware store.  I needed to buy something made out of metal.

     Work that night seemed to go at a glacial pace, and I dealt poorly with customers.

     “Waiter, where’s my beer?”

     “Oh, I’m sorry, sir.  I’ll go back and get that for you, sir.”

     There’s a trick to being a waiter:  You have to turn terms of respect into invectives without the customer knowing.  If you can do that, then you won’t get nearly so stressed out when some tourist decides to make his stand against all the factors that are ruining his vacation on your shift.  If they aren’t particularly quick on the uptake, you can even get a fat tip out of it.

     “Something wrong, Will?” the bartender, Sinclair, asked.

     “Just can’t wait to get out of here,” I said, “I need a Boulevard?”

     “What kind?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

     “Doesn’t matter, he won’t know the difference.”

     Sinclair barked a laugh.

     “Probably right.”

     That evening, I left my bike at home.  I put the lock and chain around my kneck, and the hammer I’d bought at the hardware store earlier went in my bag.  My living room was strewn with chisels and mallets, but I was didn’t want to use the tools of my art as weapons.  Not at this point, anyway.

     Why am I doing this? I wondered, It’s not really my problem.

     Maybe I wanted to rescue that little girl.

     Maybe I wanted to prevent it from happening again.

     Maybe I wanted to hurt someone or something for a reason.

     I know one thing, though:  in the end, I didn’t care why I was doing this, I only really cared that I was doing it.  Something inside of me derived pleasure from the thought of going out and destroying these monsters and bringing the child home to her parents.

     How to explain the changeling was something I didn’t really think about, though.

     I took the bus downtown, and headed toward the river, down into the West Bottoms, which were cloaked in mist.  Bingo.

     Squat brick warehouses rose up around me, and I lit a cigarette out of nervousness.  Having something natural to do with your hands is a great asset when you’re anxious.

     The mist hid everything more than fifty feet away from me.  I reached into the sack that hung from my shoulder, and I removed the hammer.  The cigarette was in my left hand, and the hammer in my right.

     Silence, save for the sound of a train passing by north of the river.  No...there was another sound; a flapping noise.  I could easily believe that bats lived down here in abandoned warehouses, but it still made me nervous.

     Taking a long draw on the cigarette, I glanced around, and felt uncertainty grip my insides.

     I didn’t like this.  Not one bit.

     I spend a good twenty minutes trolling the warehouse district, when I glanced up at the sky.  The white grin of the moon loomed overhead, large as my thumbnail.

     A translucent blue shadow passed between it and me; if it were some strange species of bat, then it would have to be close enough to touch with my fully extended arm.  I knew that it wasn’t.

     The lock on my bicycle chain slapped rhythmically against my solar plexus as I walked, and the hammer was heavy in my right hand.

     Glancing up as I heard a flapping, I saw the blue figure alight on the side of a brick building, holding onto it like a bat.

     A woman’s face turned to regard me; giant, liquid eyes and a pouting mouth.

     “Let me guess, Ariel,” I said, recalling what I knew of Shakespeare.

     She shrugged.  She lacked hands--her arms turned to blue-feathered wings with a structure like those of a bat.

     “Why don’t you come down and talk to me?” I said, hefting the hammer, “I promise not to kill you if you tell me where your ‘Prospero’ is.”

     “I...I can’t,” she said, weakly.

     “Why not?  Afraid of a little iron?”

     She nodded, an odd motion for someone hanging on a wall.

     “Then why’re you here?” I snarled.  Though I didn’t get it, at the time, it’s clear now that I frightened them more than they frightened me.  All monsters are afraid of brave people, I suppose.

     “To watch,” she said.

     I cocked my hand back, as if to throw the hammer.

     “You’re telling me where that fairy fuck is, or I’m going to bean you with this lump of metal,” I said.

     She launched herself into the air; as soon as her muscles tensed, I threw it.

     The hammer spun through the air.  She scooped her wings pushing the air beneath her downward.  Newtonian laws of motion dictated that her body--so much heavier than air--was pushed up.  There was a sizzling noise. 

She corkscrewed through the air, the hammer falling to the ground as she fell.  Struggling, she landed on her feet, skidding.  I heard a bone crack.

Retrieving the hammer, I walked over to the whimpering figure.  Now on the ground, her wings were a burden.  One leg was bent at an angle, and she rested her bent wings on the ground.

“I’m going to return that little girl to her parents,” I said, hoping I was right, “and you’re going to tell me where to find her.”

“The...the master...” Ariel said, hopping on her heavy wings.

“Where?” I said, an icy edge in my voice.

Something liquid hit the ground--she must’ve been in tremendous pain.  A burnt and battered shoulder, and a snapped leg; she was crying.

     “It’s only going to get worse if you don’t tell me.”

     She looked up at me.

     “Why wasn’t someone like you there when he took me?  Why do you care?”

     I looked at her, dispassionately, and shrugged.

     Who was the monster, again?

     “I care because I do.  I can’t really tell you anymore, because I don’t know any more...just be satisfied that I do.”

     She fell to the ground.  If it weren’t for the wings and the fuzz of blue down, she could’ve been a pretty woman in her late teens or early twenties.

     “Now...” I said, kneeling next to her, “where is your master?”

     I beat the door of the one-story warehouse down, splintering the locked door with a series of blows from my hammer.

     The inside was dark and smelled of dust and rot.

     There was a faint, blue light suffusing the air, and no walls inside the structure; there was a large carpet unrolled across the floor, which was hardwood, studded with nails.

     A small figure sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet.  It wasn’t much larger than a child, but its skin had the same texture as wood.  It looked male, but I didn’t really know how to judge, with these creatures.

     He wore homespun clothing, and stood up as I entered; smiling, he displayed squared-off teeth.

     “Ah, William, so good to see you.  Would you like a drink?”

     He gestured, and a porcelain teacup appeared on the edge of the carpet.

     “Who are you?”

     “You called me Prospero.  I like that, but it’s not my name.”

     “Then what is?”

     He smiled, giggling.

     “I messed up your cohorts pretty bad.  Maybe I should beat your name out of you?” I asked, stepping forward in what I hoped to be a threatening fashion.

     “Oh?  And who’s the monster, now?” he asked, mirroring my step.

     “I didn’t steal an innocent child out of her home,” I said, slouching forward and sneering.

     “Miranda wouldn’t be innocent much longer,” he said, shrugging, “the human world is a terrible place, where children are forced to grow up, and where people grow old and die.  Why not take her to Faerie with me?  There, she could be happy forever.”

     My skin crawled, as he spoke.

     “Like your servants?  I don’t think her parents would like that, very much.”

     “I don’t care.”

     Stepping to the edge of his carpet, I spread my feet and squared my shoulders.

     “You should,” I growled.

     There was a flash, and the carpet dissolved into a living mat of centipedes and cockroaches, writhing around my feet.

     “I’ve got iron on me, you stupid bastard,” I said, taking a step forward.  The living carpet retreated away from my feet.

     The fairy shrank back.

     I drew back the hammer, and struck him in the gut, causing him to double over.  He fell to the ground, and I kicked him in the stomach twice, for good measure.

     The illusion vanished.

     Taking off my bike chain, I draped it around his neck, and he screamed.

     “Where’s the girl?”

     “Monster!” he shrieked, tears rolling from his eyes.

     “I didn’t think it would be easy,” I sighed.

     Grabbing him by his homespun shirt, I dragged him across the floor, each nail-head burning a dot into the soles of his feet.

     I pulled him a block away, and threw him down between two rails on the train tracks.  He curled up into a fetal position, sobbing.

     “Where’s the girl?”

     “Fuck you!  I’m rescuing her!”

     His world probably exploded in a supernova of agony when I hit his collarbone with the hammer.  I pinned his elbows to the ground with my knees, as I straddled his tiny chest.

     I saw motion in the corner of my eye, and glanced over.  A bandaged Caliban supported the wounded Ariel, and they watched me silently.

     “Tell me where Miranda is,” I said, tiredly.

     “Or what?  You’ll kill me?”

     Sighing, I leaned in over his face, and grinned.

     “No, no, no...you misunderstand,” I said, “I’m not going to kill you.  I’ll never kill you.  Your life will be nasty and brutish, but not short at all.”

     He slumped back on the ground, and turned to his servants.

     “Bring her to him.”

     I led Prospero by the chain, pulling him toward my house.  Caliban carried a sleeping Miranda.

     “What do you want me to do with the girl?” he asked me.

     “Take her back to her parents, and then get lost.  Take the changeling with you when you leave.”

     “What are you going to do with my Master?” Caliban asked.

     “I’m still thinking,” I said, looking at the childlike figure.

     “I...um...I’m sorry,” Caliban said, “we didn’t have a choice; we had to do what he ordered us to.”

     “Yeah, and he would’ve done the same thing to that little girl,” I said, “freaks like him can’t be allowed to exist.”

     “I wish someone like you had been there when I was taken,” he said.

     “Well, no one like me was there,” I said, “do your own thing, snake-neck.”

     At the start of June, I had a gallery opening.  I made a boatload of cash, selling a dozen sculptures.

     The most popular piece was a newer one:

A four-foot tall wooden figure, its childlike face twisted into a screaming mask.  Through every joint I had nailed a three-inch iron nail. 

It went for ten thousand dollars.  I lived for almost a year on that sale.