How to Make Monsters (8 page)

“The Slitten,” said Hayley, her
voice low and cold and even. “They will help. Just ask. Ask.”

After everything she’d seen today,
Lana was ready to believe in anything; any slim hope offered to her looked
appealing, even the private fantasy of a damaged teenager. She let go of Hayley
and fell to her knees at the side of the bed, clasping her hands in prayer. She
lowered her head and gathered whatever energy still inhabited her battered
body.

“Just ask.” Hayley’s voice was a
whisper, an echo.

“Help me. Please help.” Lana’s voice
sounded different, felt strange as it left her throat. The words were like
solid objects regurgitated into the room. They had shape and form and dimensional
properties: they were alive, and went out in search of something incredible.

Hayley was sitting up in bed when
Lana opened her eyes. The expression on her daughter’s face was one of bliss,
like a child on Christmas morning. She held her hands together in front of her
chest, and then slowly, and with great intent, she unbuttoned her nightdress.

Lana leaned back, and then moved
forward. “What are you doing, honey?” The hope was gone; the belief was spent.
There was nothing here but a girl who had lost touch with reality and a mother
who had failed to protect her.

“I’m summoning them.” Hayley’s
breasts were bigger than she expected; they spilled out of the open neck of the
garment, full and firm and lactating. Watery milk striated with pale crimson
streaks leaked from the rigid nipples, drawing wet lines down Hayley’s
bloodless, paper-thin chest.

Rain hammered at the windows, but it
wasn’t raining; hadn’t rained for hours. Shadows streaked the walls and
ceiling; the bricks and floorboards creaked as if in preparation for the
arrival of something glorious. The air turned dusty, grey light seeping from
invisible cracks to baptise the room.

Light webbing drifted down from the
ceiling, like the web of a spider, but longer, firmer, thicker. At the top of
each frosted strand there was a small bundle which began to unfurl. Dusty
petals opening.  Striving for the light.

“What are they?”

“The Slitten.” Hayley bared her
chest to the room, throwing back her head and closing her eyes in an expression
of near ecstasy. The Slitten responded en masse; scores of them dropped like
desiccated spiders from the ceiling, rolling across the floor towards the bed.
They were shadow and half-light, lines and slashes, more thought than
substance. Their features were vague, like stolen shards of daylight trapped in
sealed rooms, and their limbs were many and sharp-clawed.

Lana suddenly realised why Hayley
never wanted to undress in front of her – it was not, as she had thought, a
simple case of teenage modesty, but an attempt to hide her saggy little belly,
engorged breasts and long, red-leaking nipples…to conceal the fact of her
recent motherhood. The baggy clothes, the moodiness, the increasing secrecy –
it all made sense now, at last, in terms of this virgin birth.

The Slitten crawled up onto the bed,
swarming over her daughter and obscuring her lower torso. They reached up and
began to suckle, taking it in turns to slake a thirst born in darkness. Lana
watched in awe; her daughter was a mother to monsters, and for some reason the thought
did not fill her with terror. Instead, she felt a sense of purpose.

Soon the Slitten were satisfied;
they rolled off Hayley and gathered around Lana, their movements slow and
heavy.

“Ask them,” said a voice from the
bed, in the shadows. “Ask them again.”

Lana reached out her hands, and
began to speak.

****

Sometime in the early
hours, not long before the blood-red wash of dawn, Lana once again left the
relative safety of the flat. Hayley was sleeping, worn out by the night’s
demands on her young body. Lana’s wounds ached, but she was tough enough to
ignore the pain.

Beneath Lana’s long winter coat, the
Slitten – her grandchildren – had attached themselves to her body, pumping
resolve into her system while supping the life from her veins. She was a being
of contrasts: guardian and wet nurse, victim and criminal; strength and
fragility, darkness and light.

Crossing the road, she allowed
herself the brief indulgence of imagining Bright’s face when he saw her, his
look of horror when she opened her coat to show him what he and his perversions
had helped sire.

This time she would not succumb to
his distasteful demands.

This time, as requested, a debt
would be paid in full.

WHY GHOSTS WAIL: A BRIEF MEMOIR

It was a dry, overcast
Tuesday evening in the cold mid winter when I came back from the dead. Night
was falling in slow shades from a sky that looked flat and grey as old slate.

I hauled myself from the river in
which I’d drowned over a year ago – losing control of my car on an invisible
sheet of black ice and plummeting to a watery demise – and stood on the muddy
bank. Dripping.

The moon was heavy and bloated,
drooping through the thin clouds like a pregnant woman’s belly and birthing a
cold, hard light that did little to illuminate the way. I stared at the
surrounding countryside, noting how much it had changed in my absence. Trees
were bent and crippled, sporting layers of powdery mould from some ferocious blight;
grass was brown and spiky, starved of moisture and sunlight; even the water
from which I’d risen ran thick and black as crude oil.

Everything seemed tainted, polluted.

I walked in the direction of my old
house, planning to look in on Molly and the kids. I didn’t plan to haunt them;
that would only cause them alarm. No, I just wanted to check that they were
surviving their grief, and that their lives were back on track since my small,
ill-attended funeral. I wanted to see that they were okay.

I passed O’Malley’s place and saw
old Tom crawling around in the mud outside the empty ruins of his family farm.
He was down on all fours, like one of the animals he’d bred back when he was
still among the living, and stuffing great handfuls of mud into his mouth.
Tom’s face was drawn and elongated, his mouth stretched open like a grain sack.
It made him look like that old painting, The Scream.

The clumped dirt just poured through
him, returning to the ground where it had originated, leaving no trace on his
transparent form. Tom had been dead for five years.

Tom’s wife and son had left the area
not long after they’d buried him, relocating to New Zealand. Their absence must
have driven Tom’s wraith insane, and all he could do to be near them was ram
fistfuls of the earth they’d loved into his maw.

The dead have boundaries, lines and
borders that cannot be crossed. We are tied to places, not people; and
sometimes those we leave behind move on to destinations where we are unable to
follow.

I averted my eyes and moved on. I
had no desire to attract Tom’s attention, or to disturb what must be his
nightly ordeal. Unstable spectral images of livestock that had been culled
during the last B.S.E scare flickered in and out of focus around him, like a
weird strobe effect. Tom reached out for them with mud-spattered hands, but the
cows vanished before he could make any kind of contact, only to reappear
elsewhere in the field, as if teasing him, or playing some kind of ghostly game
of tag.

My clothes refused to dry as I
walked, and my skin remained grey-white and sodden, the colour and texture of
damp tripe. A consequence of my return, I thought. I didn’t even pause to
wonder why I’d been allowed back into the land of the living, just accepted
that I was there. To paraphrase a classic, there are far stranger things in
heaven and earth than my limited philosophy can comprehend.

I passed not a single car as I trod
the narrow and winding road to the cottage; nor did I see any other pedestrians
braving the chill night air. Whether anyone would have been able to see me is a
question that I cannot answer. Perhaps, I thought then, only those dear to me
might perceive my presence. Or perhaps were I to enter a building, I’d register
only as a faint wind in the room despite closed doors and windows, a sudden
chill in the air, a partially glimpsed movement in an otherwise empty chamber…

The little rose garden I’d tended in
life was overgrown and stricken with weeds, the plants and flowers all gone
brown and rotten. Things had been left to die, just like I’d done. I guessed
that Molly must still be deep in mourning to allow things to slide in this way.

The lights were on in the cottage,
and I could see dim figures bobbing behind the dirty windows. The front door
was chipped, the paint peeling like scabs from damaged flesh; even the bricks
were flaking away, shedding in great patches like dry, reddened epidermis.

This was the house we’d bought
together three months after the wedding, the place where Molly had given birth
to our children, and where we’d begun to raise them. And here it was falling
apart at the seams, sinking deeper and deeper into a mess of disrepair and
neglect.

The state of the house seemed to
reflect the condition of my wasted mortal remains when they were put in the
ground, and of the three broken hearts that it held within its crumbling walls.

I glided right through the battered
wooden door, passing into the house on a current of stale air that rushed to
aid my transition from one place to the next.

My young son, Gary, was in the
process of climbing the stairs, a moth-eaten old teddy bear in one hand, and a
glass of water gripped tightly in the other. As if sensing his daddy’s spirit,
the boy stopped, turned. Gazed down into the dark hallway.

I screamed but no sound came. Only
dark water leaking from the sides of my mouth.

Gary’s face was prematurely aged,
his eyes sunken into a haggard midget’s skull. His pretty blonde hair was thin
and wispy, falling out in dry clumps. He’d become an old, old man looking out
from the body of a four-year-old boy.

I went through into the lounge when
my son resumed his steady ascent to the first floor, and saw my three-year-old
daughter sitting before a flickering television screen. There was a framed
photograph of me on the low table beside her – a portrait taken long ago, when
she was just a babe-in-arms.

One of Katie’s arms was dangling
slack at the shoulder, the joint having jumped, or been pulled, from its
socket. The right-hand side of her face was crumpled inwards, as if from a
heavy impact, and her remaining eye was staring blankly, milky-white as marble,
from all that ruin.

I tried to cry, but only more
stagnant river water poured from my useless tear ducts: it seems that the dead
don’t cry for the living. I felt only an echo of a greater despair; an
ironically phantom feeling that haunted the inner sanctum of my being.

Molly entered the room, looking
groomed and beautiful in a pair of dark blue jeans and a white woollen sweater.
She was the only point of brightness in a dim landscape, the only thing that
looked as I remembered. My wife. My lovely living wife.

“Molly,” I tried to say, but only
succeeded in sending a violent draught of air across the room, slamming the
door behind her. She couldn’t hear me, or sense me; even the closing of the
door had gone unnoticed. In that brief moment I felt far less than even the
ghost that I am.

Then Molly turned partially away
from me, and bent down to offer Katie a cookie from the open pack that she held
in her delicate veiny hands. Her distant gaze fluttered like an insubstantial
airborne insect and came to rest upon my picture. I could see the pulse beating
rapidly in her neck, as if an invisible finger was repeatedly pressing her
there. As she turned back towards me her eyes were moist, and she quickly wiped
them dry on the sleeve of her sweater.

A large fist-sized tumour was
suspended on rubbery strings of matter, dangling from a gaping rent in Molly’s
back, located in the area near the kidney. The roughly circular cluster of
angry cells twitched; evil, malignant, expanding in diameter as I stood there
and watched.

I raised my hands to my river-wet
face, and they passed straight through my head to meet empty air on the other
side. Nothing could erase the awful sight.

Is it any wonder that ghosts are
always seen moaning and wailing and mournful, their faces twisted and fixed
into expressions of perpetual terror? When glimpsed by the living, spectres are
never smiling, waving blithely, or radiating an aura of happiness.

And I’ll tell you why.

Because this is what they see: the
whole wide world winding down like a big old clock, everything turning to ruin,
and their loved ones gradually assuming the aspect of how they will eventually
pass away…little Gary from merciful old age, Katie beaten to death in her early
twenties by some late-night assailant or would-be rapist, Molly quite soon from
a cancer that hangs like a monkey on her back and will never, ever stop until
it has devoured her.

And I could see it all too: what
little future they had mapped out across the pale white parchment of their
living, breathing bodies. I could see far too much, and they didn’t even know I
was there. But I had faith that they would see me eventually, catching sight of
my tired spectral form whenever the pain and the rage allowed me to momentarily
pass through the veil that divides us.