How to Make Monsters (21 page)

Names and faces had been kept from
him – his silent abusers entered his room in the dead of night, their features
obscured by stocking masks, voices disguised, but dark intentions all-too
clear. Frank had adopted fantasy as the only viable method of escape,
retreating inside himself when the regular attacks took place. During the day
he wrote stories informed by his pain, violent revenge scenarios and fables
about abducted children. He became obsessed with Peter Pan and the “Lost Boys”;
he wished that he could fly, but the type of belief necessary for such a feat
was a luxury he could not afford to risk.

Thankfully, he’d blocked out the
details. Therapy was a no-go area for him in case he started to remember. He
didn’t want that; all he wanted was to forget completely what had been done to
him under the tilted roof of Riven Manor.

“That’s a serious face,” Claire
said, sliding her arm out from under him and straddling his tight abdomen. “You
have that look in your eyes – the one I don’t like.”

“The one I get when I’m writing?”

She nodded, climbed off him and
walked to the bathroom. “I’ll run you a bath,” she said, opening the door and
disappearing inside. The picture – a bad print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream –
hanging on the wall to the left of the door wobbled on its nail, threatening to
fall. It took a long time to settle, and when it finally did so, Frank could
not tear his gaze away from the gaunt figure at its centre.

When his bath was ready Claire
stepped outside to hunt for a shop where they could buy a bottle of wine. She
was determined that her husband should unwind, and her single-mindedness was
nothing short of exhilarating. Frank stripped off his clothes and stood before
the bathroom mirror. Steam had clouded the glass, so he swept a hand across it
to clear the view, creating a thick dark smear.

For a moment he imagined that he saw
the figure of a small boy standing behind him, only the top of a tousled head
visible above his right shoulder, small hands rising to tenderly touch the nape
of his neck.

The image lasted only a second; it
was long enough for him to realise that Claire was right, he was letting
Terry’s accident get to him. The kid was fine, just a few scratches and a big
bruise. They were keeping him in overnight as a cautionary measure because of
his age, that was all.

But they way they’d looked at Frank
in the hospital had felt like a violation, and the probing questions they asked
were like groping fingers inside his head, feeling around the dark places. He
understood that if an injured youngster was brought into the Casualty
Department alarm bells rang – it was only natural, and actually rather
reassuring. But that didn’t negate the sense of intrusion that he and Claire
had to suffer just to confirm that Terry’s injuries weren’t the result of
parental mistreatment.

The episode had triggered fresh
questions in Frank’s own mind. Was abuse hereditary, as the so-called experts
constantly stated? Was he potentially an abuser of his own issue? Did he have
it in him to be the character from his latest book, the despicable and
insidious Hugger?

Perhaps that was what the entire
project was really about.

He sighed, shook his head. Sometimes
Frank found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what he
imagined. His fictions became too much like fact for comfort, and Claire was a
martyr to look after him the way she did. She’d lived through her own traumatic
childhood, and the way she coped was by looking after her husband and child.
Transforming all of her resentment into love and affection. He often envied her
ability to do this, and sometimes wished that instead she would react badly to
his moods, if only to justify the spiteful thoughts he sometimes entertained
about her.

But she didn’t. She knew him too
well to be sucked into the hungry vortex of his despair.

He climbed into the hot bath,
enjoying the scalding sensation up his calves and along the backs of his
thighs. As he lay down the bubbles covered his stomach, hiding the scars there
from view. They still bothered him, those scars; but all he could remember
about their origin was the image of a broken bottle being pressed against his
flesh by someone he was supposed to trust.

Frank closed his eyes and let
himself be taken away. Within minutes, he was dozing.

IV

Claire paid for the wine
and left the shop, feeling like she’d enjoyed a small victory by finding the
establishment in such a rundown area of town. The proprietor, a tiny Asian
woman with a wispy grey beard, had been about to shut up shop to attend some
family function when Claire had pushed open the door to inspect the dusty
aisles of out-of-date canned food, rotting vegetables and magazines left over
from the previous decade.

After buying the best wine she could
find, she climbed into the car and placed the wine on the passenger seat,
fastening her seatbelt and preparing to pull away from the kerb. She was
worried about Frank; he’d been acting odd for the past week. Sure, he’d been
nervous about visiting the site of the orphanage to see the place finally put
to rest, but his moods were darker than ever. And what little she’d read of
this latest book was much more bleak and violent than his usual stuff.

Terry had looked okay – if a little
pale - when they’d left him at the hospital, and the nurse she’d spoken to
while Frank was having a panic attack in the toilet had assured her that all
their son had suffered was a case of mild shock. Still, it had been a nasty
scare, especially when, in the ambulance they’d summoned on Frank’s mobile phone,
Terry had babbled something about another boy pushing him down the hole.

It was nonsense of course: there’d
been no one else on the scene. She and Frank had witnessed the accident at a
distance, and Terry had been standing alone, peering into an exposed foundation
trench. He’d stumbled backwards, losing his footing in the freshly excavated
soil, and simply tumbled onto some boards that had been thrown over a void that
led directly into the basement.

Terry had taken harder falls than
this one during his first ten years of life; and no doubt he’d live through a
lot worse. He was a tough little kid: he took after his mother.

Claire grinned and joined the light
evening traffic, heading back to the hotel. She glanced into her rearview
mirror, watching the CLOSED sign appear in the shop window, and for a moment
had the unsettling feeling that someone had ducked down out of sight on the
back seat.

It was getting dark, so she turned
on her lights; bands of illumination flooded the road ahead, revealing potholes
and discarded litter. Again she experienced the sensation that there was
someone behind her – this time, whoever it was had sat up. She looked in the
mirror. There was no one there. The bright afterimage of a small boy with dark
blonde hair was burned into her retina, like a subliminal image glimpsed
between frames in a film.

When she reached the hotel Claire
got out of the car and opened the rear door. The back seat was empty; she
smiled at her foolish compulsion. Slamming the door, she marched towards the squat,
ugly two-storey building, glancing back over her shoulder and through the
gathering darkness. A small boy sat behind the wheel of the car, smiling
lasciviously.

V

Frank opened his eyes and
gasped; water poured into his open mouth, making him cough and choke. God knew
how long he’d been asleep, but the bath water was barely lukewarm. It felt like
he’d been out for hours. He sat up and stretched from a sitting position,
hearing the bones in his back pop like distant gunfire. The pain that flared
there was the result of more dimly recalled childhood beatings: yet another
grim souvenir of Riven Manor.

He got out of the bath and dried
himself down with a surprisingly fluffy hotel towel, enjoying the soft feel of
it on his aching body. If Claire had returned with the wine, she must have
decided to let him soak for a while longer. He pushed open the flimsy plywood
door and stepped into darkness.

Claire must still be out, gamely
hunting down an off licence. Persistence was another facet of her personality
that he both envied and occasionally despised. He crossed to the bed and turned
on the bedside lamp, dropping the towel and fishing around on the floor for his
jeans. Unable to locate them, he got down on his hands and knees and thrust a
hand under the bed.

His fingers made contact with what
could only be flesh. Cold flesh.

Breathing heavily, Frank felt the
cool skin of an arm, the creased material of a shirt or blouse.

He pulled away his hand.

Slowly, carefully, he bent down near
the floor and raised the sheets that hung down the side of the bed, their tip
touching the stained carpet. Peering under the bed, he stared into Claire’s
open eyes. Only then did he allow himself to scream.

VI

Terry sat up in bed, his
skin crawling with the sensation of a million ants moving in a wave over his
body. He’d heard a scream; he was sure of it. That was what had woken him.
Terry listened hard, trying to make out sounds other than the quiet snoring of
other patients, the swoosh-swoosh of running-shoes on the tiled floor, the hum
of the ventilation system.

The scream did not come again.
Perhaps he’d dreamt it, dredged it up from some nightmare he’d been having?

He couldn’t be sure, but he felt
that it had sounded like his mother.

Terry got out of bed and walked out
of the ward, passing sleeping children and a nurse engrossed in some late-night
quiz show he was watching on a tiny portable television. He moved along the
corridor in silence, determined not to wake anyone, or to draw attention to his
progress. He didn’t know where he was going, but he did know that his family
needed him.

After walking the halls for what
seemed like a long time Terry stopped, listening to the eerie near-silence. His
parents had denied the existence of the boy, Franz, saying that Terry had
imagined the other. But he was certain that the boy had been there, and that he
meant Terry harm. More than that, he felt that Franz meant to hurt his parents,
specifically his dad. The fact that they almost shared a Christian name was not
lost on him. It seemed important somehow, as if part of some grand scheme or
plan.

Terry continued on his way, seeking
an exit. He saw the lifts up ahead, their doors firmly shut. He hurried,
knowing that to summon them he’d have to wait around in full view, risking
exposure.

He pressed the button to call the
lift. The little “up” arrow glowed green; Terry waited, feeling tense and
anxious. He heard the sound of the lift mechanism hauling the metal box up its
grimy shaft: the hum of motors, the clank of machinery. Come on! he thought,
his leg twitching with impatience.

The lift doors opened a fraction,
then stuck with a thin band of black between them. Terry lurched forward and
pushed his fingers into the gap, attempting to tug the doors apart. He
strained, focusing all of his strength on that thin vertical aperture. Finally,
the doors reluctantly began to open.

Franz stood on the other side,
dressed in dirty jeans and a torn white T-shirt. His face was smeared with
dirt, his eyes like stones pressed into river clay and his mouth was curved
into a slow grin. “Going down?” he said, and his voice was like sticks being
clashed together: dry, empty. Dead.

Terry ran for the stairs, aware that
his feet were bare. He was dressed in hospital-issue pyjamas that had a flap at
the rear: his arse was waving in the cold air.

He slammed through the doors and
hurled himself into the stairwell, smashing a shoulder into the wall on the way
down. The pain didn’t bother him; he was more concerned with outrunning Franz.
Footsteps padded behind him, possibly a level up from his current position but
still too close for comfort.

When he reached the ground floor
Terry fully expected to be accosted and led back to the ward, but there was no
one around. The hospital was unnaturally empty. Surely there should be night
staff wandering the wards, checking up on things? And where were the late-night
admissions? This only added to the sense of dreamy inevitability that he was
experiencing, and when he stumbled out of the main doors into the parking area,
Terry realised that he was all alone.

VII

Frank lay his wife on the
bed, holding back tears. She was breathing; her airways were open. He picked up
the telephone to call yet another ambulance, but was halted by the sound of her
voice: “No. I’m fine.”

Frank replaced the receiver in its
cradle and returned his attention to the bed. To Claire. “What happened? What
the hell is going on?”

“Hang on a second, just until I can
get myself focused.”

“What the fuck were you doing lying
under the bed? I thought you were dead!”

Shadows moved on either side of him,
rippling like black fabric. Frank felt like the walls were closing in.

“Under the bed?” her face was blank,
the expression one of utter confusion. “I…I thought I saw someone in the car
when I got back here with the wine. When I opened the door, there was nobody in
there, but then I sort of blacked out. The last thing I remember is being
carried into the room.”