How to Make Monsters (23 page)

She knew that thing back at the
hotel was not her husband, no matter how much it resembled him physically.
However impossible it seemed, Frank had been taken over. Possessed.

She couldn’t think of anything more
ridiculous. Or more terrifying.

XIV

Terry cautiously climbed
the stairs to room number 17. There had been no one on the front desk when he’d
entered the building, so he’d taken it upon himself to go straight to his
parents. He ran past rooms with closed doors, feeling as if the entire
population of the planet had turned their backs on him. He realised that he had
to do this by himself; no otherwise unmentioned hero was going to appear to
save them all on the next page. This wasn’t like the books he read; it wasn’t
even like the ones his father wrote. They all had happy endings.

He had not seen Franz since the
river crossing, but could sense the boy’s chill presence.

He followed Terry at a distance,
trailing him like smoke.

The door to his parents’ room was
open, and a figure lay on the bed.

Terry entered, peering into the
gloom.

“Mum,” he said, suddenly afraid. “Is
that you?”

“Come in, child,” said a voice he
did not recognise. And when his father sat up on the bed, the door slammed shut
behind him.

XV

The boy was sitting on
the edge of the kerb, playing with dead leaves in the gutter. His face was pale
as flour, and his hair was dark blonde and sticking out at the sides of his
head above the ears. When Claire drew level with him, the boy looked up. He was
the image of Frank at ten years old: she’d seen too many photographs taken at
the orphanage and then later at the home of his adopted family not to recognise
that battered expression, those sad, broken eyes. The perpetually messy hair.

“Hello,” he said, standing. He was
tall – like Frank – and his hands were small in comparison to his burly frame.

Such a pretty, soft mouth; such
smooth, smooth little hands.

“Hi. What’s your name?”

He smiled. It was horrible, like
someone who didn’t know how; someone who only knew how to grimace. “My name is
Franz.”

“Listen, Franz, this is important.
Are you the boy I saw in my car? The boy who pushed my son into the basement at
Riven Manor?”

At the mention of the name, he
visibly folded in on himself, wincing. Claire felt like she’d struck him a
blow.

“Please, Franz. My boy is in
trouble.”

“Go back to the hotel. He went
there, looking for you. I tried to stop him…but he wouldn’t listen. He ran away
from me.”

Claire felt her heart turn to stone;
her womb crumpled as if a vacuum had appeared somewhere deep inside her.

“It’s been waiting for them, the
children. Our children. I saved myself before it got to that, but others, like
Frank, have blocked it all out. They don’t remember what happened to us back
there, but I could never, ever forget.”

The boy held out his hands, palms
down, and twisted them to reveal open wounds at the wrist. They had stopped
bleeding long ago, but some cuts never close; instead they become mouths
through which the mute learn to scream.

“It’s so very patient. It knows that
eventually they’ll all come back, one by one, piece by piece. All it has to do
is wait.”

Claire ran back towards the hotel,
cramp almost crippling her. But no pain, she knew, could equal that caused by
the loss of a child.

XVI

“Dad?”

“Terry, you have to leave. Get out
of here.” Frank suddenly had the upper hand; the sight of his son had given him
the strength he needed to break free of the beasts that held him down.

“What’s wrong, dad? I have something
to tell you. There’s this boy –”

“Just fucking go! Run!”

Terry began to cry. Slowly, and with
little sense of what was happening to his father, he backed up against the
closed door, weeping at his father’s rage.

Frank felt them regain control. He
was finished. He could fight them no longer.

Terry sat on the floor, rendered
helpless by sorrow. He had come here to save his family, and all he’d received in
return was punishment.

They guided Frank’s body off the
bed, clumsily propelling him forward across the room. Frank was powerless to
resist; he was weak as a kitten, weak as a baby. All he felt were the countless
penetrations, the cuts and the beatings, the broom handle rapists taking their
fun. Still he could not remember everything, but this little glimpse into the
darkness of his past was more than enough to numb him to whatever came next.

Frank moved slowly and jerkily, like
the puppet he’d always been, his joints trying so hard not to bend, hands
desperate not to curl into solid fists. He reached out those hands to take what
had been promised in the darkness so long ago: a new plaything for his old, old
friends, something to keep them company in the endless night.

XVII

Terry watched in horror
as his father’s body sprouted multiple arms, hands waving in the air like black
ribbons blown in a stinking wind. Far too many fingers reached for him,
grabbing him by the arms, throat, and face. He went down as the blackness
flooded in, sinking deeper and deeper into its world. It was like quicksand,
pulling him under, dragging him in. When he tried to scream the darkness poured
into his mouth like water.

More claw-like fingers plucked at
his pyjamas, pulling them off his skinny body. Raking his flesh, looking for
ways inside.

“Please,” he whispered, and then he
could whisper no more. All he could do was scream.

XVIII

Frank gave one last push,
concentrating his remaining energy on denying the dark figures their fun. He
managed to take control of his mutating body for a single second; and in that
time he turned to face the door, knowing instinctively what waited on the other
side. He raised his arms and closed his eyes, hanging on as long as he could.

“No!” he yelled, firmly and with no
doubt in his own mind. “No you fucking don’t.”

XIX

Claire burst through the
door like a fury, hurling her entire body weight on top of the surreal
monstrosity that was rearing over her son. All she saw was a mass of arms and
legs, a cluster of twitching erect appendages, scores of lolling wet tongues.
It was the shape of abuse, a hideous pattern of sexual abhorrence.

She tore into its flesh with hands
driven by the passion of motherhood, bit and gouged at its faces, pummelled its
seeping organs until they were flayed like skinless sausages. She closed her
eyes and promised herself that she would not open them again until this thing
was done, the creature dead, scattered in chewed-up pieces on the floor.

It didn’t take long to carry out her
wish. She killed the animal who tried to rape her all those years before; and
she destroyed the men who’d twisted her husband so far out of true that he was
open to such a hostile invasion; then she mutilated every other deviant who
roamed the earth, skulking in small towns and cities, living on cosy suburban
streets, preying on the neighbourhood children.

She killed them all. Over and over
again.

When she was finished she picked up
her son and carried him outside. She set him down on the soft grass and sang
him a lullaby, cradling him like she used to do when he was a mere babe in
arms. When he fell asleep she took him to the car and laid him gently across
the back seat. Then she drove out to Riven Manor, watching the boy called Franz
follow close behind, covering the distance in an odd loping run that was more
of a gallop.

Franz was waiting for them when they
arrived, sitting on a small embankment, not even breathing hard. Ghosts can run
forever; they never slacken the pace.

“Frank summoned me,” he said as she
approached. “He gave me his face and a name very much like his own. I was his
invisible friend, the unseen playmate. When they entered his room at night and
locked the door behind them, he would call me and we’d go running in the hills,
swimming in crystal-clear lakes, climbing the tallest trees in the world to
hide from the dark stains below.

“I was his friend. I took him away
from it all.”

Claire went to the boy and embraced
him, her arms passing most of the way through him but halting when he
solidified for just an instant. And in that moment she saw Frank as he was
before a bit of the dark world had invaded, before his innocence had been snatched
away by the very people who were meant to protect it. Nameless. Faceless.
Heartless. They’d killed the child and warped the man.

“Thank you,” she said; and when she
looked into his face it was gone, leaving behind only a slight ripple in the
air, the sense of something passing out of view forever.

She returned to the car and unpacked
the pieces of Frank she’d transported in the boot, laying them carefully and
respectfully on the hardened ground. She buried him there, in the tatters of
Riven Manor, hoping that the act would consecrate the earth, laying to rest
whatever spirits remained. It was daylight by the time she was finished. The
sky was red as blood, and filled with a light that was almost hypnotic in its
beauty. She knew that Frank’s body would be found eventually, probably when the
developers moved in to build new homes over the dismembered carcass of Riven
Manor. But she would answer questions when they were asked, cross bridges when
she came to them. For now, she was content to comfort her son and keep him safe
from further harm.

“Mum?” Terry slipped an arm around
her waist and she thanked the heavens for small mercies: a mother’s love, a
father’s sacrifice, the smile of a little child.

(Dedicated to the memory of Fritz
Leiber, Master of the craft)

STORY NOTES

CHILL

The working title for
this collection was Thatcher’s Bastards, and I wanted each of the stories to
reflect in some way the results of a certain period in modern British history
when new monsters were created, or old ones evolved into something different –
one of the most terrifying of these, in my opinion at least, is capitalism. 
This story was written under the influence of the recent “Global Slowdown” in
the world economy, and examines some of the fears revealed beneath that
particular rock when it was suddenly lifted.

THROUGH THE CRACKS

I saw a picture online
that was meant to be a Mid-Eastern Jinn crawling through a crevice in a
subterranean cave. The picture was a fake, but the ideas behind it were not.
This story examines the fascination we all have with what might lurk between
the cracks in reality; and what monsters we might have summoned with our desire
to see beyond the mundane.

THE UNSEEN

This one was inspired by
reading a story by Mark Lynch, a friend of mine who’s also a damn fine writer.
His tale featured ghostly beings in York; mine has the ghosts of humanity’s
dead and stillborn aspirations in Newcastle.

PUMPKIN NIGHT

Because of its
confrontational nature, and by way of an armoury of outlandish metaphor, horror
stories are well-suited to staring into the mirror of society and reporting
back on what is found there. In 2002, in a place called Soham, Cambridgeshire,
a school caretaker was arrested for the brutal murder of two ten year-old
girls. His live-in girlfriend was accused of covering up evidence of the crime
by repeatedly lying about his movements at the time of the deaths – she was
eventually jailed for three and a half years for conspiring to pervert the
course of justice; he got 40 years for the murders. It seems that the woman’s
loyalty blinded her to the fact that her lover had committed these terrible
acts, and only when she was arrested did she allow herself to confront the
reality of what he had done.

OWED

Unchecked consumerism and
uncontrollable debt are twin horrors which seem to have first lurched into the
limelight during the 1980s; purely modern monsters, these things don’t seem to
want to go away. I have an idea to turn this story into a novella: the characters
keep pestering me, and the Slitten haunt me to the extent that I want to find
out exactly what they are and where they came from.

WHY GHOSTS WAIL: A BRIEF MEMOIR

I wrote this on Christmas
Eve a few years ago. I was feeling a bit low (I hate Christmas) and was
suddenly assaulted by visions of my infant son long after I’m dead and gone. 
These thoughts bothered me so much that I had to write them out of my head, so
I sat at the computer well into the small hours, fighting sleep and feeling
better as the story formed on the screen. Not once did I hear the jingling of
Santa’s sleigh bells outside my window, but I may have heard a single distant
scream.