Harman Beckler’s Monster

By Robert Ryan

The heavens impelled their dissonance on the vale of creation, cracking lightning against the Erebian shore. Clouds beckoned and the thunder cackled like a devil in the sky, so that the earthbound below might wonder what fell God could issue such chastise upon them. A brumal wind rolled down from the hills and clove the land into two.

It had been a fiercely cold winter yore the day, thereon the crops had withered and died and all the livestock soon after. What the people had left for them was to hold up until the chill receded before they could reclaim their livelihoods, or blight away like a dried and forsaken flower.

Not a single soul in the algid wasteland could dare step out their homes. The pitiless cold would indiscriminately reap their mortality and leave their bodies to rot as empty husks. Only the warmth of the tightly-packed cities and small communes could keep the cold out, or for most, at least.

There was a tiny habitation not a mile from the largest city of the land. The building was makeshift and ill-tended, yet it suited its owner tolerably well. Panels hung loose and flapped in the wind, the holes left in the structure boarded up from the inside. No attempt to manage or cultivate the surrounding land had been made, leaving it a simple patch of dried dirt where not even weeds could grow.

While outside the sound of raging winds battered against the thin walls, deep within the flimsy dwelling the incoherent mutterings of its sole inhabitant bounding in the darkness.

In little contrast to the storm toiling outside, another storm incubated within, not the dwelling but the dweller-himself, raging beneath skin and organ like a disease. But it was no virus, but rather a hatred, a boiling fury inside of him that echoed with his livid discourse, a hatred for his fellow man.

Harman Beckler was an outcast. He had been his whole life, to live fugitive from man. He was told to be an emigrant from another land; many suspected exile. Some speculated he practiced witchcraft so far away from civilization. Word of mouth told he was the child of a demented woman and the Devil himself.

But the truth was far more dreadful than witchcraft or the Devil’s work. The truth, he was just a normal man, nothing more.

The tiny, withered old form stood hunched over two long legs, the skin clinging to fleshless bone nourished only by everlasting hate. A one proud, erect spine now sloped forward and warped his body to an unnatural, sickle shape. He had forfeit his hair, teeth and nails long ago due to countless self-experimentation and mutilation; his blinding eyes sunken deep within their sockets beneath a melting brow.

His voice, dry and raspy, spoke abstrusely and incoherently, not that it mattered through that he was all alone. There was no one there beside himself to listen to him speak, he merely spoke for his own comfort. Silence drove him mad, and he invented himself a remedy so he didn’t get any madder.

But his intentions weren’t getting madder or staying just as mad. He was bitter, enraged at those who afore had driven him to such a place. He wanted revenge.

And like the witch people believed him to be, like the monster people saw in him and he saw in himself, he had a terrible, unnatural scheme. He wanted to become the monster, he wanted to crush them himself. He wanted to become a physical manifestation of his own hate.

In years of seclusion his dreaming became speculation, and then his speculation became conviction. He read the works of Gervase and Marie de France, he knew of the tales of men turning themselves into horrible monsters. If them, then why not him?

And there began Beckler’s obsession with finding the thing that would make man a monster. Most of his tests ended horribly, but sometimes, he would wake up and remember being the monster for a brief time afore, he dreamed he had been. And this only made his awful hunger grow.

But now, after countless charms and potions, Beckler had finally found what he had been looking for. He was sure of it; he could feel success beating within his old heart, he could feel the anticipating sweat in the palm of his withered hand.

He had for himself a draft in a flask. The preparations had been made, all he had to do now was take it in his lips… A bony claw reached through the disorienting darkness to grasp it, feeble talons clenching over slick glass.

And with a quick swig using more strength than he should have had in him, the liquid was flung into his mouth. He felt a burning sensation as fluid dribbled down his cheeks. Coughing and sputtering, he dropped to the floor. Deep in his mind and heart, he knew he had finally done it. He could feel the power burning within him, yearning to be released. He knew his long-founded dreams had finally come to… and in contrast to the darkness around him, his eyesight turned white and everything disappeared.

The clouds above had finally parted, the sun peering back down at the earth like a curious child. While the trees had been all but ravaged by wind and had their verdant leaves stripped by fall and cold, they stood hither, many beginning to sprout back new beads of green. The earth had been saturated with rainwater, plump and fertile with life. The long winter was over; spring had come.

Howbeit, while the harsh winter had parted, the people were all not fain to leave the safety of their homes and villages so swiftly. It was thereon the duty of the men of the kingdom to leave their safety to examine the surrounding lands in search of remaining danger, or perhaps even survivors.

The sun had reached midway up the sky by the time a small party of men saw upon the home of Beckler. Not knowing to whom the structure belonged, they shouted out for survivors. With no reply, they broke into the home with naught solicitude and came upon a horrible sight:

Harman Beckler was dead. His shriveled, dried corpse of several weeks lay in a fetal state on the floor, the skeletal hands clutched over his burst stomach. His toxic, exenterated body was so unappealing not even flies could bother with it.

As it turns out, the brew Beckler had created was not a powerful transformative, but instead a volatile compound of nitric acid, which had exploded inside his stomach. All his dreams, all his wicked hopes of revenge against those who had left him to die, had been dashed at last by one experiment too many. He would never get his revenge, and the townspeople, who could never even recognize this desolate form as the legendary madman who had terrorized the countryside, left his body to rot and his bones to turn to dust where they stood.

The monster that the people saw did not exist, nor had the monster Beckler saw in himself, and had killed himself trying to bring out. Harman Beckler himself was no monster, for the real monster had been but in his mind, all along.

END