Chapter 4: 4: The Monster

“It was an accident!” I said, as the reality of the situation hit me.

We rushed over to Maxwell’s motionless body.

“Is he breathing? I didn’t mean to hurt him, Dee!”

At that point, two kids from our year walked into the classroom.

“He’s breathing,” Dee said. “I think his arm is broken.”

He saw the two kids behind us.

“You two, get a teacher, quick. Maxwell, uh, fell off the table.”

I looked at Dee, startled. He’d come up with the lie smoothly.

“It was an accident,” Dee said as the kids left, “and you were defending me, anyway. How did you do that?”

“It was just a fluke,” I replied.

The ‘just a fluke’ line was one I’d stick to for the next four years whenever The Maxwell Incident came up. The kids went to get a teacher, the teacher called an ambulance. Dee and I quickly spun out a story that Maxwell had been standing on a table for reasons unknown. It was hard to tell if anyone believed us, but with the only other person who’d been present currently unconscious, there was no-one to refute our version of events. The idea that I or Dee might have hurt the much larger Maxwell didn’t seem credible.

Maxwell spent three weeks in a coma before coming back round and making a full recovery. The time Maxwell was out of it though was the longest three weeks of my life. I went to bed every night wondering what would happen if Maxwell never woke up. What if I’d killed someone at the age of twelve? What did that make me? And how had I even done that?

The one thing I was sure of was that I couldn’t let something like that happen again. The phrase ‘he doesn’t know his own strength’ didn’t even begin to cover it.

When Maxwell recovered, I hoped he’d have amnesia and not remember anything, but no such luck. When he heard our falling off a table story, he nodded and said that was exactly what had happened. He played along and said it was his own fault, nothing to do with Dee or myself.

Hearing that was almost worse than if he’d told the truth.

If Maxwell had decided to stick to our version of events, it was only because he was planning revenge of some sort.

On the day he returned to school, he said nothing to me. He just nodded at me with his lizard-like eyes narrowed just enough to tell me he planned to make my life as miserable as possible.

He began a campaign to turn all the other kids against me on his first day back. He didn’t stop until all the friends I had turned away from me. Maxwell told them I was dangerous, violent, that I’d attacked him for no reason.

“Ethan is mental,” he said. “He should be locked up. Just stay away from him. Who knows when he’ll explode again?”

He never told the teachers or his parents what had actually happened. Instead, over the following months, he ostracised me from all the other kids at school. I went from being a relatively popular kid to being a social outcast. Maxwell made me an outcast to be feared and avoided.

I considered all kinds of ways of dealing with it, but by the time I realised what Maxwell was up to, it was too late. His campaign of whispers had done the damage he wanted. Everyone became scared of me, and they steered clear whenever I approached.

Hell, I was scared of me, never mind anyone else. The worst part was, any protests I might have made were muted by the horrible fear: What if he was right?

I didn’t know what had happened, or how. I just knew I couldn’t let it happen again. As the other kids started to steer clear of me, I withdrew as well, fearful of what might happen if I lashed out again for any reason.

In a weird twist of fate, Maxwell’s parents moved to America only a few months later, his father pursuing a job in Silicon Valley. By then, though, the damage had been done. I was ‘mental’ as far as the other kids were concerned.

Over time, since there were no other incidents, I was gradually socially downgraded from ‘mental’ to just ‘weird’ – partly because by then I was mostly keeping to myself out of fear I was going to hurt someone else.

It wasn’t just that I’d discovered this abnormal strength inside me. It was the fact that some twisted part of me had enjoyed it. The sense of power and rage went hand in hand, and there was a darkness attached to it that I knew was all kinds of wrong.

The truth was, I had wanted to hurt Maxwell.

A secret part of me, buried deep inside, had enjoyed it.

I began testing my strength when no-one was around. I stopped doing sports because, afraid of hurting someone else. Dee, however, I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried and we became the best of friends from that day on.

As far as Dee knew, it really had been some weird fluke, and we didn’t talk about it again.

The only other good thing to come out of it was that as I was getting ostracised at school, Jess started hanging out with Dee and me a lot more. She was the other one that refused to listen to Maxwell and wouldn’t let me completely retreat into myself.

At the time, I thought Jess started hanging around more because she felt sorry for me.

It wasn’t until much later I found out the real reason.

*

Remembering all of that, standing in the middle of the Halloween party, I couldn’t bring myself to take a swing at Travis. I wanted to, sure. The dark fire was burning inside me, but I held it back.

I felt stupid, standing in the school hall, surrounded by people having a good time. What had been the point of coming here?

“Fine,” I muttered, “We were just leaving.”

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“Oh, no, kid, you don’t get off that easily,” Travis said with a nasty smile. He was going to drag this out for as long as he could.

“What’s going on here?” a voice queried from behind Travis.

It was Jess, dressed up as Morticia Addams. She looked stunning.

Travis turned to face her. “Nothing. These two aren’t staying, that’s all.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I told them to, babe,” Travis said with a grin.

Jess looked perplexed and then realised what was happening.

“I don’t believe this,” she said, “Travis, we’ve been through this. Ethan and Dee are my friends, so you need to get over your, whatever this is. Plus, I’ve told you not to call me babe. That’s even worse than ‘Legend’.”

Travis was having none of it. He was drunker than I’d realised.

“You need to decide, babe,” he growled. “It’s them or me.”

I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. Judging by the expression on Jess’s face, neither could she.

“Wow,” Dee muttered under his breath.

Travis sober was a moron. Travis drunk was a whole new level of stupid.

“Excuse me just one second,” Jess said as a beeping from her pocket interrupted her. She pulled out her mobile phone, flipped through it, frowned. a message from her dad. She tapped out a reply and hit ‘send’.

Then she thought of something, tapped out a second message and hit send again.

Travis was too drunk to notice his phone had flashed up with a message on it.

“Well?” he demanded.

Before Jess could reply to Travis’s ultimatum, there was a scream from the centre of the dance floor. A real high-pitched terrified scream, not a fake Halloween scream.

More screams swiftly followed the first one.

“What the hell is that?!” someone shouted.

The costumed crowd backed away from the open double doors at the far end of the hall, moving towards us and blocking our view.

“What’s going on?” Dee said.

“Stop it!” someone shouted from the crowd. “Get away from it!”

Some of the kids and adults threw their plastic cups at something that had appeared in the hall. One of the parents picked up a chair and tried to push it back through the double doors from which it had entered. I got my first proper look at the creature when it leapt onto the stage, sending the podium and the laptop crashing down.

The dog-gorilla thing strutted the stage, its rough skin rippled as its claws dug deep into the wood.

Vicious teeth were bared as it drooled and snarled. Red eyes glowed and its thick tail whipped back and forth. Its snout sniffed the air. Hunting.

In the dim light I thought it was a weird dog, or maybe a sixth form prank. It was neither, and you hadn’t seen anything like it on a BBC documentary. Trust me.

“Is that real?” someone asked.

The crowd took a few steps back, moving towards the four of us at the far end of the hall. No-one knew how to react - until the thing let out a throaty roar.

Everything descended into panic and chaos. Some people ran for the exit at the far end of the room, while the rest turned towards the four of us and raced to the double doors behind us. The four of us, still trying to understand what was happening, didn’t move.

The creature strutted along the stage, sniffed, hunting for a scent as people fled and tripped and picked themselves up and fled some more.

It leapt two metres into the air and dug its claws into the wall. It hung above the panicked crowd, sniffing and snarling.

It stopped as it caught the scent it was seeking.

Its claws dug tighter, cracking the concrete walls as it sniffed the air again, to make sure it had the right scent.

Then it looked directly at me.

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