How to Make Monsters (22 page)

Frank was beginning to lose his
grip; fear clawed at his spine. “So, somebody knocked you out and carried you
in here, then hid you under the bed. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying,
Frank. I haven’t a clue what happened. All I know is that I thought I saw a boy
in our car, and when I looked inside he wasn’t there. Then I woke up here on
the bed.”

“A boy?”

“Yes, Frank. A boy. A little boy.”

“Terry said he saw a boy; that the
boy pushed him down that hole into the basement. What did he look like,
Claire?”

She sat up, rubbing her head with a
shaking hand. Then she looked at him, her eyes focusing on his face. “Tall,
skinny. With blonde hair and a weird crooked grin.”

She paused, a sudden animation in
her face. “My God, Frank. He looked exactly like you did when you were a
child.”

VIII

Terry moved fast, keeping
low to the ground where he could and avoiding well-trafficked routes. All he
could remember was that his mother had told him the hotel where they were
staying was near the river, and that they were registered in room number 17.

It wasn’t much, but it was all he
had to go on.

He followed the signs for a
riverside cycle route, hoping that he would stumble upon the correct place. He
was going by instinct, guided by the tenacious bond between mother and son: if
he concentrated hard enough, he could sense her out there in the night. And she
was in deep trouble.

He kept his eyes dead ahead;
whenever he deviated from this, he saw unpleasant sights on either side. The
boy was pacing him, and whenever Terry looked to the side – either side – he
saw the pale willowy figure running level with him, swift as a jungle beast. He
was beginning to change his mind as to whether or not Franz meant him harm. So
far the boy had botched two clear chances: back at the site of the old
orphanage, and then in the hospital.

It was almost as if Franz was trying
to subtly lead him somewhere. Was he herding him away from the hospital? And
back at the ruins of Riven Manor, had he pushed Terry into the basement to hide
him?

It seemed ludicrous, but the more
Terry thought about it the more it made sense. It wasn’t the boy who was
chasing him, it was something else: something terrible.

IX

Frank smoked a cigarette
outside the hotel room, standing on the balcony and looking down at the
sparkling river. A layer of darkness rippled across the surface of the water,
moving like a sheet. There were shapes beneath the sheet, and they were rolling
and writhing, like lovers lost in an embrace. Frank watched them squirm,
wondering if they were real or if he was in the middle of a mental breakdown.

He threw the ciggy over the balcony
and went back into the room.

Claire was taking a shower; he could
hear the hiss of water through the thin wood of door. Sometimes he thought how
easy it would be to hurt her. He didn’t have these thoughts often, but when
they came they were intensely unpleasant. These small fictional deaths felt
like sacrificial offerings to the bad deeds of his past, imagined atrocities
designed to keep the real monsters at bay. Food for the beasts within.

He’d killed her off in his books and
stories, of course, making her the victim in fiction that she refused to be in
real life. Terry, too: he’d murdered the kid so many times that he no longer
felt guilty.

A cold creeping sensation stippled
his back, coming through the open balcony door. Cold fingers caressed his
shoulder blades, easing out the tension. Those lovers he’d viewed from the
balcony had climbed up to pay him a visit. A voice whispered to him, familiar
somehow and bringing with it the uneasy recollection of so much fear, so much
guilt.

It was a voice Frank had not heard
for many years, not since he’d left the orphanage after being fostered by a
nice family named the Links from North London. Finally they had legally adopted
him, helping rid him of the memories that scarred him like a heavy blade. He’d
managed to leave his pain and debasement behind, but now Riven Manor was
calling out to him once more, reaching from the gaping ruins to drag him back.
For years he’d managed to divert the voice into his writing, but lately it had
been too loud, to persistent.

It had begun when he started work on
the new book, the most blatantly autobiographical thing he’d ever written. A
twisted fairytale featuring the Hugger, a creature who loved its victims to
death. Like the staff at Riven Manor all those years ago, it used twisted affection
to render children senseless. Frank had used what few scattered memories of his
time at Riven Manor he could muster to invest the evil with a sense of realism,
of verisimilitude. This was no metaphorical monster: not this time. It was the
real thing.

Smooth arms enveloped him from
behind in an almost liquid motion. And he was unable to shrug off the advances
of the thing that wanted to have him one last time.

X

Terry reached the river
and realised that he was standing on the wrong side. The hotel stood directly
ahead of him, looming on the opposite bank across a black strip of gurgling
water. Franz treaded water in the middle of the river, rapidly shaking his
head. He wanted Terry to turn back.

Now that he’d worked out that the
boy meant him no real harm things had changed. The dynamic had shifted. Instead
of fear, Terry felt a sharp pang of curiosity. Who was this boy Franz, and why
was he here? And, more importantly, what did he think he was protecting Terry
from?

Terry waded into the river, oblivious
to the icy waters that rose up his legs and numbed his genitals. It felt like
cold fingers grabbing him down there.

“You were trying to protect me,
weren’t you?” he said to the boy in the river.

Franz slowly sunk beneath the black surface
of the water, a mournful look on his doughy face. The waters closed over his
head like tar, sucking him down into the hungry depths. The last thing Terry
saw before the boy vanished was the top of his blonde head.

Terry pushed on, swimming in a
doggy-paddle across to the other side. That unpleasant sensation of hands
tugging at his crotch did not disappear; if anything, it grew stronger the
closer he got to the opposite bank. A wet voice whispered in his ear. He could
not make out the words, but they seemed to hold sexual connotations. Some of
the phrases that poured into his ear burned his soul like a hot iron, despite
him never having heard them before and not being able to fully understand their
meaning.

He climbed out on the other side,
breathless and terrified. He realised now that there was something here,
something that had emerged from the dank interior passages of Riven Manor when
the bulldozers had done their work, tearing the place apart. Whatever negative
energy had been compressed between the bricks, or had seeped into the wood and
fibres, had been released into the outside world.

XI

“What’s wrong with you,
Frank?” Claire slid across the bed as she buttoned her blouse, suddenly wary of
her husband and needing to place the piece of furniture between them. His face
had altered somehow in the last five minutes, as if the skin had slackened on
the bone beneath.

He walked to the bottom of the bed,
grinning like a fool. His eyes were dead. His lips were thin and compressed,
pulled back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

“Frank?”

“Frank isn’t here. If you’d like to
leave a message, I’m sure he’ll get back to you.” He giggled, his muscular
shoulders twitching.

“Please, honey. What’s happening?”

“Where’s the boy, pretty Claire?
Where’s your son, your little Terry? We want to playyyyy with him.”

In that moment Claire realised that,
as the thing before her had said, Frank was no longer present in his own body.
His personality had been usurped, submerged beneath this…this monster.

“He was promised to us a long time
ago, back when we used to playyyy with your hubby. He was a game boy, little
Frank. Such a pretty, soft mouth; such smooth, smooth little hands. We took
great pleasure from him, back in the day.

“In the deep dark parts of night, we
crept into their little rooms. We took what we wanted, left behind scars that
never heal. We were their own most hated nightmares; we were their bestest
friends. We were the ones charged with their care, and we abused the privilege
to the best of our abilities.”

Their followed a hideous cackling
laugh, a sound that made her skin itch.

“My son is safe. Somewhere you can’t
get to him.” Claire managed to get her feet under her, and thrust herself up
into a standing position on the mattress.

“You can’t hide him from us. We’re
like Rumple-fucking-stiltskin. But even if you name us, we’ll still take him
apart and fill his holes with meat.”

Claire felt nauseous; it sickened
her soul to hear someone – her own husband – talk about Terry like that. Her
poor boy. She wanted to run to him now, to take him in her arms and carry him
away from all the filth of the world.

“Ah,” said the Frank-thing. “A
mother’s love. There’s nothing better to twist, to beat out of shape and
defile. A mother’s love can be such a beautiful thing to ruin.”

“Fuck off,” she said, and aimed a
kick at Frank’s head. Her foot connected; he sat down forcefully on his
backside, a comical look of utter confusion on his face. Those self-defence
lessons had paid off; she had a kick like a mule.

“Bitch!” he screamed, struggling to
his feet.

Claire leapt over him, her knee
catching him in the eye. He squealed, scurrying after her with one hand held
across his face. She saw blood seeping from between his fingers, and the sight
made her heart sing. She was out the door in an instant, slamming it on his
free hand. She didn’t pause to listen to him scream again; she bolted for the
landing, and hurried down the staircase into the waiting night.

XII

Frank fought hard against
the figures that held him down, kicking and biting and gouging. But nothing
seemed to loosen their grip; they could not be harmed in any way. He kicked
out, screaming obscenities, but they pressed down harder on his flailing body.
Their hands felt the same as they always had; their fingers knew his body,
inside and out. Even now that their hiding place had been demolished, they
still wanted to play their dark games.

The irrefutable knowledge that these
entities had been here for a very long time came to him with a vision of men
dressed in animal skins running across rocky ground, the darkness around them
throbbing with intention. The things that now inhabited Frank had been preying
on humanity since the very first men told scary stories around a campfire, eyes
wide and filled with a thirst for knowledge of the dark, hands gripping fiery
torches and making sparking shapes in the air. Riven Manor was the latest in a
long line of nests; its essence was merely their current manifestation.

Wherever human evil dwells, thought Frank
in a moment of painful clarity, they come to feed.

He could see Claire from a great
distance, as if he were watching her through a cracked window that was situated
miles away from where he was being restrained. He watched her as she fought,
and felt a burst of pride when she escaped the clutches of the spirit of Riven
Manor.

“Who are you?” he yelled, still
uncertain as to the exact nature of the creature he fought.

“We are you,” was the reply. “A bit
of your own dark world.”

XIII

Claire had always kept
herself in shape, ever since she’d been attacked at the age of fifteen. Walking
through the park from a friend’s house late one night, a man had grabbed her
from behind. He’d forced his hand up her skirt, clawing between her legs, and
thrown her to the ground. Claire had tried to fight him off, but her attacker
had been too strong, too heavy to shift. As he’d attempted to penetrate her,
she’d been unable to scream: the bastard had forced her own ripped underwear
between her lips to keep her quiet.

She had a dog to thank for her
rescue. A young girl from a nearby block of flats had taken her German Shepherd
into the park to relieve itself, and the inquisitive hound had sensed danger.
It had dragged its owner over to the cluster of trees were Claire was in the
process of being assaulted, scaring off her surprised attacker.

The man was never caught. Claire
bought the dog a brand new collar and a pillow for its bed.

So for the past sixteen years Claire
had attended karate lessons in the local civic centre sports hall; and whenever
possible she’d gone for brisk runs through the neighbourhood. It kept her sane,
and now it had kept her safe. If it were not for the confidence she’d developed
through the years of disciplined training, she would not be here now, running
to the hospital to save her son from something she could barely even
contemplate.