Magera was the tiniest of things, a mere dot, a bubble of blood with wings and a head of snakes.
She was nestled in torn-up newspaper like a storyline; water dripping into her mouth from a cracked tank where her parents had been drowned.
"You will be special Magera," they gurgled as they tipped her over the edge.
That was a week ago: when she fell from their grip as men pushed them under before they turned to stone.
As empty as the Hadean depths and despite being lonelier than the loneliest of myths, her newspaper nest was warm and soft: a featherbed of gibberish; a bowl of shredded human hatred she knew nothing of. Her snake-hair hissed her goodnight.
Magera woke and cooed at the lightbulb way above the tank hanging like a petrified star. She wondered if cruel men lived there too and whether she would need to hurt them.
Maggots emerged from her parents' softened backs, dropped from the lip and gathered like gnocci on the floor. Magera peered over the edge of her bed. She purred and smiled as the maggots stared.
Magera crawled onto the soft maggot carpet of cousins and was gently carried to the hole in the door, where the caravan entered the street and halted.
The maggots sniffed the air and Magera gawped at the vast skyscrapers of iron and glass towering above; strange metal canisters flying between them leaving trails of thick acrid smoke; gargantuan chimneys blurted out plumes of green and purple gas, which encircled the towers like sick halos: browbeaten denizens trudged through oil-soaked litter and detritus toward massive factories made of iron; their heads down and hands stuffed in their pockets as the driving rain lashed them into submission.
Magera shivered, stepped off the maggots and nodded her thanks. They all said "you're welcome" in unison.
A rickshaw rode past, pulled by six thin men. The occupant was a vast ogre with an enormous paunch and huge wide mouth: a monster hunter. Around his neck was a necklace of fangs and snakeheads. He stopped burping when the blue light on his head began to flash.
"HALT!" He bellowed and the rickshaw came to a stop.
The vast hunter stood up, although no legs were visible, only feet, and peered round the street with eyes so intent that shadows stopped dead. He swung his dreadful truncheon rhythmically into his flabby open palm.
Magera froze and instinctively sensed that the massive gawping thing meant her harm. She blended into the rubbish in the gutter as best she could, her tiny snakes and wings completely still. She stared intently at his foot above her.
Seeing nothing, his blue light petering out, the quivering man sat down tutting, not yet aware that his big toe had turned to stone.
"ON!" He roared and the six pullers heaved with all their might and away they went, refuse whirling upwards in their wake.
Magera held fast, breathed a sigh of relief and made her way slowly but surely to the small playground across the road, the only sign of childhood life on a street dwarfed by threatening towers.
On a slide sat a boy. He was wearing a black bin bag and a single file of bats circled round and round his head. He looked forlorn, melancholy. He spoke to Magera in a soft whisper.
'Hi, my name is Vinegar. What's yours?'
Having never spoken before Magera pursed her tiny mouth and blew out her name in a bubble of air.
'Magera".
"Well Magera, you're clearly not like them, up there in the superstructures, so you must be like me, something else, something they won't like that's for sure. They call us monsters".
"Oh."
"These humans stuffed in all these skyscrapers can't stand things like us, things they don't understand, things which remind them of magic and they hate magic like the plague! They hate us like the plague!"
"Oh."
"Yep, it's true, sorry. So. Little gorgon, where are you going?"
Magera shrugged and as she moved a maggot fell out from her mop of snakes and landed on the grass.
"Oh!"
The maggot yawned and crawled towards Vinegar.
"Not too close baby fly! My bats are asleep but they're always starving!" Explained the boy.
Maggot shuffled onto Magera's hoof.
"I'm planning on leaving this city, this rotten pile of scrapers. There's nothing here but hate and hunters. I'm going where I can sleep every day to the sound of sweet music, where the night-children hum lullabies in a distant place where the monsters live!" said Vinegar.
"Oh!"
"I'm going to find the Queen Bride's Castle with the swing at the edge of the world, where you can scratch your skin to see the creature within and talk and eat with fiends like us".
Vinegar looked at his audience of two.
"Do you want to come with me?"
Magera and maggot nodded. All the snakes as well.
"Super!"
"We'll need some food to keep us going," said Vinegar.
Each got a little drop of sugary spit from Magera's snakes and off they went.
It took two days to free themselves from the gyres of humanity and break out of the vast structures packed together like implanted teeth. A small posse of factory workers with pitchforks, lead by the fat hunter in the rickshaw, had even seen them off the boundary.
"Good riddance!" Bellowed the mob, "You're the last of the monsters so don't come back!"
Vinegar turned to them bearing his fangs and raised two fingers, his bats wriggling their rear ends in their direction and defecating.
"Clowns!" Growled the vampire.
After another night of endless traipsing past pylons draped in witches knickers, shambling through the gluminous wastes of landfill, oil, grime and rubbish, at last there was nothing human left, save for one forgotten shed, where the city's trashman had sat and pointlessly scratched at his ledger.
As they quietly passed the filthy building, they heard the sound of whining and yelping and howling and certainly not sounds a trashman would make.
They followed the noise inside. There, in a deep pit, lay a trapped wolf. A young wolf. A young werewolf to be exact and like the rest of the troop - except maggot of course - the last of its kind.
"Hullo!" Shouted Vinegar peering over the pit.
"Hello, oh, hello, howl, howl, hello!" Came the frantic reply.
"We'll get you out!"
With an old rope thrown down and tied to a hook, the werewolf climbed out with the help of Vinegar's bats rotating like a propeller beneath his furry feet.
"Thank you!"
"You're welcome!"
"What's your name?"
"Orrible. That's what the old man called me."
"Well, Orrible, why not join us and tell us your story on the way," offered Vinegar.
Magera and Maggot nodded too.
And so the four monsters left the world of humans behind and set off for the fabled castle where dark days lasted forever.
Over windswept moors and forlorn crags they wandered. Like gargoyles perched on the buttresses, ravens grunted their displeasure at being disturbed in their nests but the monsters just laughed and waved goodbye, their spirits soaring like phantoms.
Eventually, after hiking many days and nights, they stood in front of a cave, above which was carved the symbol of a crossed-out pitchfork.
"Queen Bride's Castle!" Gasped Vinegar. "It's through here! No humans allowed, just us monsters!"
"Yay!" said Magera and Maggot.
Orrible howled. The snakes hissed.
They scrambled through the pitch-black cave and popped out like corks from a nebuchadnezzer.
Before them was a fret-shrouded vale full of shrieks and screams and roars and the group immediately felt at home.
Banshees whizzed by them; bogarts ran up trees; greenteeths wriggled in the pools and kelpies in the distant fields were growling.
It was Hell on Earth and the refugees loved it, each one skipping and dancing with joy. Even maggot crowdsurfed the snakeheads, it's little mouth cooing as they flicked their tongues with glee.
When they reached Queen Bride's Castle; a tremendously high palace of singed barn timber stretching up into the clouds; each was given a hearty welcome, on behalf of the Queen, by the royal Igors and offered a meal of anything they so desired: black pudding for Vinegar, some pus for maggot, spare ribs for Orrible and a gorgonzola for Magera.
The Castle was lit by electrodes, which were constantly fed by lightning flinting off the sleeping Kraken to the North. On every table were devices with dials and sparking arcs and the windows were brimming with flasks of blue and purple liquids, through which the lightning flashed and conjured rainbows like bruises in the air.
As the companions wandered round the ramparts, they realised that all their dreams would indeed come true and at last they felt accepted. They were really home in the land of monsters.
In the centre of the Castle was an enormous library of monster literature, the Wrathenaeum. It stood on the back of a giant stegosaur called Tomes. It's back plates had become the bookcases and Tomes explained to the new members that everyone got a book written about them and put in the Wrathenaeum, which they could update with fresh adventures whenever they wanted and even before they happened if they lent the Crystal Ball!
The Castle's scarred lumber corridors were adorned with brimstone plaques graced with witticisms, slogans and rally-cries. Some even spoke them out loud as you passed, like 'Halloween Forever!', 'Every Day is a Ghoul Day!', 'No Mobs Here!' and "Dark Days are Here Again!'.
Besides the Igors, a crew of busy skeletons kept the old palace ticking over and catered for all the monsters living within and without the Castle walls. The skeletons were rewarded with endless milk from the Minotaurs.
An ambulance was on call staffed by Sirens and a hospital for sick beasties was overseen by a caring Harpie called Abhorrence Nightingale. She'd been way over-unctuous with her generous ointments so a seconded demon was due to audit the cauldrons. The shredders were going like a Salem seance.
After two nights Queen Bride eventually appeared in the main hall. She was lowered from the tower above, where she'd been recharging her neck-trodes. Smoking from lightning strikes, she sat and joined the new arrivals for a supper of burnt toast, fresh bandages and her daily must, stale wedding cake.
Tall tales were told round the table and the guests and the Bride got on like a house on fire.
It was over a nightcap of ectoplasm that she tells her new friends about her lost love, the Monster, missing for decades and stuck somewhere in the castle's thousand rooms.
Vinegar, Orrible, Magera and maggot promised to help the Queen find her lost Monster and would begin straight away. All of her Igors joined them too.
They searched high and low, in graveyards, labs, dungeons, wine cellars, tunnels, crypts, vaults, breakfast rooms, back rooms, front rooms, parlours, boudoirs, master bedroom, guest rooms, state rooms, broom cupboard, barns, chests, coffins, the Ghost Train and the Black Lagoon.
Nothing. Not a sniff of the Monster.
"There is nowhere left to look Igors", screamed the Queen at her servants.
"Beg your pardon Ma'am, but there is one place left"
They all stared at that one brave Igor shivering at the back.
"The cinema in the spire!"
"But that's been locked and sealed since we built the castle. It's forbidden to go near it!" Argued the Queen.
However, she accepted her servant's logic and the Queen lead the group up a spiral staircase of one hundred wooden steps, which creaked like vertebrae as they trod.
Thick cobwebs festooned the walls and banisters. Old hungry spiders ran forward chomping at the bit, only to stop dead and curtsey for their Queen.
As they approached the final flight they could hear strange sounds. Voices, several voices and even music. It was a film being played in the cinema in the spire.
The Queen entered and saw for the first time in decades her beloved husband, the Monster. He was sat on the timber floor transfixed by the huge screen on the wall, a patient stretched ghost on which an old projector was beaming a black and white film.
It was Frankenstein.
The Queen's heart melted as she watched her sweet mesmerized creature reach out to the old blind man in the film and mouth the word 'Friend' just as he did on the screen.
With tears running down her face-paint and sizzling on her neck, she walked slowly towards her beloved, the rest of the group caught up in her bridal trails.
"My darling Monster!," the Queen whispered and hugged him tightly. The Monster stared at her, as if waking from a long dream.
"I've been watching our old films dear. You know, the old ones when people still loved us. When we were famous." He explained, his stitched-on eyes welling up with formaldehyde.
"Don't worry about that now my dearest. I am just so pleased to have you back. Let's get you to the rooftop and fully recharged".
The small group of new guests followed the Monster and his Bride to the circuitry in the clouds, where the lightning zapped night and day.
In time the Monster was himself again, helping the Queen run the castle and look after all the creatures in her care across the baddest of lands.
The new arrivals settled into their new home and had dreadfully monstrous lives.
Maggot grew up, had a few tantrums, then became a nice shiny Bluebottle living on a Yeti. 'Orrible made some wolfish pals and running in packs, terrorized the castle forest fairies.
As for Vinegar and Magera, they were given top jobs: Vinegar was tasked with tending to the castle's growing bat colony and Magera assisted the regal stonemason with petrifying skill.
They also became the Royal couple's closest friends, got their own haunted house complete with Igors and lived shabbily ever after.
The (fi)end.
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