MonsterVille
Six

Melanie left to run her errands. It took River about five minutes to replace the phone, the broken phone which looked someone had hit it with a hammer. It wasn’t the most economical way to prevent him from using her phone but it was certainly effective. Finding the internet connection took a little longer since he had to replace a tablet or a computer to access it and that required snooping through the house. In his defence Melanie hadn’t told him he couldn’t look around, just that she wanted him to prepare some steaks which he would get to just as soon as he’d found the computer…

What he discovered was that while the house looked huge from the outside it was positively immense on the inside. He found five bed rooms with two ensuites, two other bathrooms, a second lounge room aside from the room with the art gallery and fireplace; the second lounge room housed a sixty inch high definition television with an extensive collection of blu rays, mostly supernaturally themed tv shows with a few scifi shows thrown in. There was a porch that came off the second story and over looked the edge of the woods, a garage attached to the back of the house and a little drive way that swung around to meet it. There was also a vast basement that he was a little intimidated to explore, it was dark, the stairs creaked and he couldn’t see a light switch. Maybe Melanie didn’t meed lights? Maybe she could see in the dark… he had no idea what kind of monster she was, or even what kind of monsters existed out there. For an instant his hand trembled as he thought about that but he pushed past the thought and stilled his shaking hands.

In the entire house River found just one locked door which surprisingly wasn’t Melanie’s room. He found her room during the search and discovered she was either a genius or just pretentious. Her room was filled to bursting with academic books, text books on subjects ranging from medical sciences to psychology to mathematics and history. She was obviously an avid reader on every subject she could get her hands on which he supposed made sense if she couldn’t leave the town and she didn’t appear to be in great health.

On a mahogany desk on one side of the room River found her computer, an alienware laptop with a glowing red figure head. He flipped it open and the first thing he saw was a prompt for a password. He sighed. Even if it had been unlocked he guessed she would have password protected the wifi anyway. Couldn’t let the human try and call for help after all. He closed the computer and left the room as undisturbed as possible. Which brought him back to the locked door.

Her art room maybe? She was apparently a prolific painter judging by all the art around the house but he hadn’t seen any kind of a studio or supplies anywhere else… a mystery to be solved another day. He needed to get to work on her dinner, keeping the monster well fed and happy would be his immediate course of action to keep himself alive.

Melanie returned a few hours later and River was proud to say he had cooked an edible meal, if not perfect it at least looked pretty. The soup was a little salty and the meat, while flavourful, was a little chewy, he felt like maybe he had overcooked it. Just to be safe he had a second slice of steak marinading and ready to go. Melanie came through the door with a rustle of bags that she promptly dropped at the sight of the table laid out in her honour.

“Dinner is served,” River announced happily, “I mean, well I did what I could?”

Melanie prodded the still warm meat and turned up her nose at it. It was subtle as if she didn’t want to hurt his feelings but still River frowned, maybe it wasn’t brilliant but it wasn’t that bad was it?

“Have you eaten?” she asked.

“Ah, no? I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to… I’ve never been a slave before, not entirely sure what I can and can’t do.”

It was her turn to frown, “You can eat if you’re hungry.” She pushed the steak across the table until it slid to a stop in front of him, “There you go. Eat that.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll have some of the soup,” she said with a sigh, “I should probably have said it before when I asked you to marinade the steak, I don’t really eat cooked meat, it’s a digestive thing.” A monster digestive thing.

“Oh… Oh! Ok. Cool.”

“Cool?” she queried, as if her lack of dinner was something interesting to him.

“Not like that,” he assured her, “it’s just that I kind of suck at cooking so I made a spare.”

“A spare?”

River went to the fridge and pulled out the second steak he had been marinading. Melanie’s eyes lit up at the sight of it and he felt a momentary burst of pride as he placed it down in front of her. It was still soaking in its juices with a thick slather of sauce and herbs over the top.

“Now this is a meal,” Melanie announced happily as she took a bite. She was happily chewing when she noticed River jotting down a note, “What are you doing?”

“This?” River asked holding up the notebook. It was just a small black flip book he had found while snooping around the house, he found a half dozen of them in a drawer and hadn’t thought Melanie would notice one missing. “I’m um, taking notes?”

“Notes?”

“Things you like and don’t like,” he said sheepishly, “things I can and can’t do. Just so I can keep it all straight and not make the same mistake twice. My life literally hinges on keeping you happy after all.” She frowned at that as well but she didn’t correct him and didn’t chastise him for taking the notebook either.

It turned out one of the errands Melanie had run was replaceing River a change of clothes, not that he wasn’t rocking the cheerleader uniform but for some reason she had thought he might prefer something a little more manly. He now had a couple pairs of jeans and a few shirts in various colours, of which he was currently wearing a red one. She had also procured him a pair of sneakers, but given his feet were still a touch messed up he was going without them for the time being.

“This is your room now,” Melanie said.

He was a touch disappointed that it wasn’t the constellation room but he didn’t say anything, he didn’t want to make waves. It was one of the rooms with a bathroom attached and a walk in wardrobe where Melanie had stowed his new clothes. There was a window that looked out onto the woods and a large king size bed, larger than any bed he had ever owned actually.

For a monster’s slave/potential snack it was quite ostentatious, a great deal more than he had expected. Although it was hard to tailor one’s expectations to being a monster’s slave, for one he hadn’t known monsters existed until recently and for two a guy in a first world country in the twenty first century didn’t really think about being a slave. Sure there was still slavery in the world in some places he just hadn’t expected to ever be in one of those places. It was hard for him to reconcile his world view with his new reality.

Melanie was sitting on the bed as River emerged from the bathroom.

“I’ve just realised I don’t know your name,” she stated.

“Ah, it’s River,” he said, “River Johnson.”

“River.” She repeated, definitely amused.

“My parents never really got out of the whole flower child hippie thing,” he said with a touch of embarrassment.

“Well if ever there was a time for a new name now would be it,” she pointed out, “you could pick anything you like, or,” she added mischievously, “I could always name you. Like a pet.”

“If it’s all the same to you I’ll stick with River, kind of the last tangible link I have to my family.”

Her expression went from amused to sombre in the blink of an eye, “Fair enough.”

“And what should I call you? Mistress, Master, Melanie?” she smiled at the use of her actual name, apparently she hadn’t realised he knew it.

“Only my mother calls me Melanie, you can call me Mellie.”

“Mellie,” he said, “seems a touch informal for my master.” Once again her mood soured.

“Stop that.” She chided him, “I don’t like this anymore than you do so stop being a brat about it.”

“A brat?”

“Do you think I want you here? In my house, snooping through my things?” So the notebook hadn’t been forgotten, “Tempting me…” she trailed off and stood up, turning away from him. River swallowed hard, that had been hunger in her eyes, a craving for him, for his flesh.

“I don’t,” she answered her own question, “I don’t want that at all.”

“Then you could always let me go?” he suggested.

“Oh please leave, any time you like,” she said sarcastically, stalking towards him. She was angry now, and with her anger came something else, a different air surrounded her, a predatory energy as she drew to a halt just in front of him.

She poked him in the chest as she spoke, “If you go through the town you’ll probably last an hour before someone rips your head off, if you go through the woods it’ll be more like thirty minutes before you’re eviscerated. There is no leaving,” she poked him again, “No escape,” another hard jab into his chest to punctuate her point.

“But if you’d prefer to try then go for it. I don’t want you here anymore than you want to be here because right now your life is in my hands and I don’t like that. You’re kind of snide and sarcastic one minute and a quivering wreck the next and I don’t have the energy to deal with that kind of dependence, but I also don’t want your blood on my hands, I don’t want to kill you or give you to someone else who will kill you because I’d feel guilty about it for the rest of my life so why don’t we just try to make the best of this situation? You’re mine so you can cook, clean, chop fire wood, whatever, I don’t care. Just stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours until we can figure out a better solution. Other than that all I can promise is that if you stay in the house no one should bother you. If you leave you’re toast. Do we understand each other?”

“Yeah, I think we do.”