How to Make Monsters (9 page)

I tucked my legs up under my body,
and slowly lowered myself down onto the floor, being very careful not to pass
through the dusty carpet and creaky timber joists into the dank basement below.

And now I sit and watch the slow
dissolution of those that I cherish, waiting for them to cross over. Wishing
that time and space would just grind to a halt and freeze them there, in living
poses, so that they no longer have to die. The other side, you see, is worse
than where they are. Far, far worse than where you are.

One of these days I know my wife
will join me, slipping her tiny ice-cold hand into mine as I stand watching our
children weep. And we’ll wait together, Molly and me, wailing into the
emptiness, trying our hardest to warn the rest of the family; and attempting to
tell them to get on and live their lives before it’s too damn late to make any
difference, any difference at all.

ACCIDENTAL DAMAGE

After the road accident,
things began to change for Chester. It was not just a question of his
perceptions – how he viewed the world – it was other things, tangible things.
Like the way Lucy had stopped coming around, and his friends no longer
telephoned to see how he was. Always a solitary man, Chester did not crave the
attention of sick-bed revellers; he simply wanted his friends and lover to show
some concern.

Maybe it was the scars. The doctors
had shaved his head for the surgery, which made him look dim and thuggish, and
the shiny white scar tissue traced a thick band across the top of his scalp,
down over his forehead, to terminate at a point between his eyes at the bridge
of his nose. It was an ugly injury, and he’d been told that the damage would
never fully fade. He was scarred for life, tattooed with a physical memory of
the accident in which he’d almost perished.

His actual memories of what had
happened were vague, nebulous. All he could recall was driving back from Lucy’s
place at the other end of town two weeks before Christmas. It was late; they’d
argued over something he could not remember and which she had not mentioned
since he’d regained consciousness. It was dark, cold. The roads were icy. The
police thought he must have hit a patch of black ice; the back roads were known
to be treacherous with it every winter. All Chester knew was that he’d suddenly
lost control of the car, and had then been swallowed by blackness.

He climbed out of bed, pushing aside
the books and magazines that littered the area around him, and went to the
window. The day was grey; the sky shimmered like sheet metal. The fields around
the house seemed to close in, narrowing his world to the immediate area outside
his door, but he was all too aware that this effect was merely a reflection of
his psychological state.

The winter-stunted trees shook like
skinny figures, their branches twitching in a slight breeze, and he glimpsed a
dark shape gliding across the flattened horizon. Was it very small, like a gnat
stuck on the glass, or simply far away? He could not be sure: nothing seemed
stable since the accident, even his sense of self. The shape grew in size, as
if either bloating or drawing near, and then it vanished, perhaps an animal
ducking into a burrow or nest at the edge of a field.

It took a few minutes for Chester to
realise the ringing in his head was the sound of the telephone downstairs, its
shrill voice nagging to be answered.

“Who’s this?” he said, hoping it was
Lucy, perhaps calling to ask if she could come to the house. He left the room,
catching sight of himself in the wall-mounted mirror on the landing – long,
thin face, scratchy patches of partially re-grown hair on his head, wide
stripes of scar tissue – and inched down the stairs, all too aware that any
sudden movement might bring on one of his headaches. The stairs creaked, the
banister shifted beneath his hand, his legs wobbled as he attempted to reach
the phone before it rang off.

Slamming into the doorframe, he
entered the lounge, and just as he lunged for the phone it stopped ringing. The
silence it left behind vibrated like a tuning fork; Chester’s ears stung. He
picked up the receiver. “Hello. Lucy?”

Nothing but static greeted him. It
sounded like the shifting of ice floes, the cracking of glaciers. Chester
gripped the cold plastic, his hands weak and unable to apply much pressure. The
static cleared and he heard a series of distant clicking sounds, like the swift
closing of a bird’s beak or the snapping of teeth. Then the line went dead.

Later that day, after a light lunch,
he watched some television. The local news station was broadcasting a piece
about a nearby farm where human remains had been discovered, half-frozen and
buried in shallow graves. The farmer had been arrested before Christmas, when
the bodies were first uncovered, but the news station replayed old footage of
open graves and gave empty updates every day. They seemed obsessed with the
events at the farmhouse, despite there being very little fresh news to impart.
The farmer was awaiting trial but was reported to be so frail that he might not
last that long. A relatively young man of forty-seven, he was said to look
closer to eighty years old.

Chester watched as a tall,
grey-haired anchorman walked from room to room in the old farmhouse, pointing
out the strange graffiti daubed on the walls, annotated entomological sketches
of insects torn from text books and hung with pins, piles of books and dirty
clothing stacked against the doors and windows. The kitchen sink was thick with
filth; the plates stacked there teemed with cockroaches. Strange stone carvings
sat on every available surface: on shelves, benches, even on the floor,
standing against the skirting boards.

“Mr. Winchester lived alone, and
still denies all knowledge of the remains. The victims were killed a long time
ago, and if he is indeed guilty of the murders of these people, he either
stopped killing or found somewhere else to store the bodies long before his
secret was uncovered.”

Chester turned off the television
and stared at the wall above the screen. It was as if good news was no longer
worth reporting. All he ever saw or heard or read about was murder, violence
and bloodshed.

He took some pain killers for his
head and stood at the back door smoking a menthol cigarette. He remembered
giving up smoking this time last year, but after his surgery had started up again,
seeking solace in the smoke that even now filled his lungs with thin, coiling
fingers. The sun was a washed-out smear in the sky, and clouds shunted each
other like dodgem cars at a funfair. A single bird flew in ever-decreasing
circles above the roof of the house, and he watched it as the cigarette burned
down to ash in his hand.

He turned around and went inside,
making a decision. If Lucy would not come to him, he would go to her. He put on
his heavy coat and left the house, climbing into the four-wheel drive. It
wasn’t the first time he’d driven since the accident, but he had deliberately
kept away from the vehicle, and whenever he was forced behind the wheel he kept
to the side roads, his speed considerably lower than the legal limit.

Chester started the engine and sat
at the kerb, wondering where it had all gone wrong. Before the accident, his
life had been on course.  The house was an inheritance from his elder sister, a
spinster – left to him, along with substantial funds, when she finally lost her
battle with cancer three years ago. His job was going well; Lucy was all over
him, almost clamouring for his touch. Then, in a cosmic finger-snap, everything
had changed. Darkness had flooded in.

He covered the miles slowly,
concentrating so hard on the road ahead that a sharp pain flared up behind his
eyes. The town was silent as he passed through, everyone indoors and still
enjoying the remnants of the festive period. Decorations that had not yet been
taken down hung limply from lampposts and road signs. The ache in his head
receded to a dull throb, matching the rhythm of the traffic lights as they
phased through their sequence.

When he reached Lucy’s place he
remained inside the car, engine running, fingers clasping the steering wheel.
The radio was playing quietly, a gentle country ballad. Chester closed his eyes
and willed away the pain. His arms and shoulders ached from gripping the wheel
so tightly during his journey, and he felt like he was learning things all over
again.

Finally he got out of the car and
shuffled down Lucy’s drive. The snow was melting, turning to grey slush, and
withered bedding plants poked their heads through the softening crust.

He knocked on the door and waited,
wishing now that he’d called to prepare her for his visit. Lucy didn’t like
surprises; she was an ordered girl, with well defined edges to her world.

Her face was pale when it peeked
chastely around the edge of the door, her eyes big and dark and even a little
afraid. “Chester?” The sound of buzzing flies emanated from the house behind
her, as if they were clustering about spoiled meat; or perhaps Lucy had simply
left a noisy kitchen appliance running in the kitchen.

He watched her breath mist white in
the chilled air, shrouding her features. “Hi, Lucy. I’m sorry I didn’t ring,
but I needed to see you.” His feet crunched on leftover snow as he adjusted his
position on the doorstep.

“But I thought we sorted all this
out during our last conversation, Chester. That I wasn’t going to come over
again.”

The buzzing sound grew momentarily
louder, then stopped.

Chester did not know what to say. He
could recall no such conversation, but to admit the fact might lead him down a
road he did not want to travel. “That’s why I came to you.”

Lucy blinked; her eyes were all
pupil, and they sucked in the light. She opened the door further until it
pulled on the security chain. Chester could not remember there being a security
chain in place on any of the many times he’d been here before.  Had she had it
fitted because of him? Absently, he rubbed at the scar tissue above his eyes
with his fingertips. The raw flesh ached; it felt warm to the touch, despite
the rest of his face being cold.

“What do you want, Chester?” her
voice was shaky as she backed away from the door, easing it closed. “Please.
Just go away. If you have any more of those relics with you, I don’t want them.
What the hell kind of Christmas present was that meant to be, anyway?” Her
facial expression looked on the verge of hysteria, but Chester could not be
sure whether she was about to laugh or scream.

He had no idea what she meant, and
the pain in his head threatened to return in force. “Lucy…” But he could say
nothing more; words failed him; he was bereft of ideas.

Lucy closed the door. He heard the
bolts as she slid them home; and the buzzing sound recommenced, louder this
time, almost avid in its intensity.

Chester stood on the doorstep for a
moment or two more, lost in his own confusion, and then he turned and stalked
back towards the car. A movement caught his eye, and as he glanced over at the
houses opposite, he saw something lithe and dark struggling beneath a
neighbour’s porch, its thin hind legs scrabbling in the grubby snow. It might
have been a large house pet, but for the fact that it looked spiny and
elongated, and as a result of its frantic motion the thing seemed to possess
more limbs than were necessary.

Chester sat behind the wheel and
shook his head. His scars were livid in the rearview mirror. He started the
engine and crawled back the way he’d come, pointing the car in the right
direction and hoping that he did not hit anything. On his side of town, past
the old Shell garage and the small construction site that never seemed to
progress beyond the demolition stage, he passed the tree he’d hit in the
accident. He slowed down without realising, stopped and got out of the car.

The tree had a huge split in its
trunk, near the thick roots where they poked through the earth like fat
fingers. The cleft was dark, moist, and looked as if it might be deep enough to
lead into the centre of the earth. Chester got down on his knees and stared
into the hole, aware that from a distance it might appear that he was praying.
He smiled, placed the fingers of one hand inside the hole, brushing its sides. 
Someone had stuffed snow in there, perhaps a passing child. His fingers
burrowed into the soft layer, and he grasped something. When he pulled out the
object he saw that it was a child’s doll, a mere plaything. The doll was naked;
the smooth plastic of its body was gouged and bitten, possibly during rough
play, and its hair had been clumsily removed. Its glass eyeballs remained
intact, but they had been damaged with a thin blade or the pointed ends of
sharp, needle-like teeth.

“Jesus,” he said, throwing the doll
as far away from himself as he could. It landed on the soft snow, face-down, as
if trying to burrow back into the earth. Beyond it, in the distance, three or
four sleek shapes dropped down from an upright position and began to caper in a
brown field patched with white. They ran in circles, chasing or being chased,
and as Chester squinted into the low winter sun, the shapes seemed to diminish,
bleeding into the background like ink stains.

Chester forced his hand once more
into the cleft in the tree, and when he withdrew it he was holding two small
items wrapped in crumpled piece of paper. When he opened the package he
realised the wrapping was in fact a child’s crayon drawing of a house. It
contained a pair of figures carved crudely from stone.