How to Make Monsters (10 page)

Relics.

Were these the same as the ones Lucy
had accused him of offering her, and if so, what were their purpose? They were
tiny, their outlines uncertain, and each one had too many arms and legs to be
considered wholly human. Although the figures were standing upright, they
looked as if they’d be more comfortable scrabbling around closer to the ground.

That evening he was unable to eat
dinner. His appetite had been quashed by the situation with Lucy. He tried to
remember what had occurred between them, but all he could summon was the image
of her back, retreating along the footpath towards her car. Had they argued
again? Had he struck out at her? Now that he thought about it, when she’d
peeked at him around the edge of the door earlier that day, it had looked like
she was sporting a black eye.

His sister’s house settled around
him, groaning and popping like an old man’s joints. Something that sounded like
tiny footsteps scurried across the underside of the floorboards in the hall.
Chester gazed out of the lounge window, watching the sun go down across the
fields, the light fleeing from him, as if sucked back into that great dying
star. The darkness left in its place shivered with potential movement and he
closed the curtains to block out the view.

He stood by the mirror and examined
his features. He no longer looked like himself; his face was twisted out of
shape. The scars shone, catching the last of the dying light, and when the
ceiling lamp flickered, the taut strips of tissue seemed to jump from his head
and hover in the air like ectoplasm. Even when he closed his eyes he could see
his altered image: mouth pulled into a grimace, eyes set too far apart, cheeks
fuzzed with beard growth to compensate for the lack of hair on his head.

He often thought that, during the
accident, when his head had cracked open on the windscreen, something had
crawled out: some inner darkness he had freed inadvertently into the external
world. Then, on bad days, he thought that maybe it was the other way around and
something had crawled inside, taking up residence in his broken skull.

His brain twitched, but he pushed
the image away. There was nothing in there but a complex bundle of nerve
endings and highly responsive matter; even his thoughts had abandoned him.

Leaning into the mirror, he stared at
his eyes, and was shocked to see movement behind them. Like looking through a
window, he glimpsed a large dark mass as it passed across his gaze, turning to
notice him for a second.

“No,” he whispered. “No.”

Running to the front door, he opened
it and glared out into the evening, watching the distant shapes as they
cavorted like children in the growing gloom. They snapped at each other,
massive mandibles compressing only empty air, newly muscled bodies twisting in
the twilight as they drew closer to the house, where they had been headed all
along. Had he unleashed these things during the accident, or had they simply
been lying in wait, preparing for the right moment to escape the cage of his
mind?

He slammed the door, pushed a chair
against it, then stood back and wondered how strong they were. He gathered
other items of furniture from the lounge and heaved them against the door to
prevent them from entering – an antique bureau, a set of drawers, the
moth-eaten settee. Then, panting, he sat on the bottom stair and watched the
door, sensing their approach, calculating how long it might take them to break
down his flimsy barricade.

His balance failed him as he tried
to stand, and he reached out to steady himself on the banister. Upstairs,
something moved. An unstable shadow passed the bedroom doorway and Chester bit
down hard on a scream. He turned and examined his newly-built barrier, knowing
that he did not have the strength to remove it at any great speed. By the time
he cleared a way through to the door, whatever was upstairs would be upon him;
and the things prowling outside, in the gathering darkness, would be waiting on
the threshold to take him down.

His skull throbbed; things with clawed
hands struck at him from within. Outside, in the real world, their corporeal
counterparts snickered from the shadows. The lights flickered again, and he
cursed the company who supplied his utilities. That quick snapping sound – the
same one he’d heard earlier on the phone – began to pursue him down the wide
staircase, whatever was making it out of sight for now. He wondered if they’d
simply kill him, or if they would use him to supply food, just as they’d used
the farmer from the news report. But hadn’t the farmer found a way to stop
them? For a while at least, until Chester’s accident had somehow started it all
up again, unleashing whatever force they represented…

Chester hobbled towards the kitchen,
looking for a weapon. He grabbed a steak knife from the rack, cutting the palm
of his hand on the blade. Blood sprayed the fridge door, so red that it was
almost a brand new colour, or at least a shade of an existing colour he had not
before encountered. The lights flickered for the last time before going out,
and Chester smiled at the inevitability of it all. But it was always dark
inside, where the bad things grew and bred, waiting patiently for release. His
head felt like it was in the process of swelling, its size increasing to fill
the entire room. The sounds inside his skull were also outside, closing in on
him.

The telephone rang in the other
room, but Chester knew that there was no way through. He listened to it,
tempted by its shrill song, wondering if Lucy had changed her mind and wanted
to come over.

Then, slowly, he moved to the centre
of the room, gripping the knife in both hands, to wait for his house guests to
formally present themselves.

NOWHERE PEOPLE

The night seemed to press
against my windscreen like a thick fluid as I drove towards the town centre,
one eye on the radio recessed into the dashboard as I attempted to tune it to
an all-night Jazz and Blues station. Charlie Parker’s horn pierced the bubble
of stale air inside the cab, and I let myself lean back into the driver’s seat,
the music washing over me and bringing calm to my mind.

I was tired: dog-tired. As the
Beatles once said, it had been a hard day’s night. I was at the back end of a
ten-hour shift, and my lower back was singing like a chorus of crippled
choirboys from being locked into the same position for so long. These suicide shifts
were killing me, but it was the only way to make any serious cash in the taxi
game. And I needed real money more than ever now: after Jude’s birth, Tanya had
gone part time to enable her to look after our baby daughter, so I was the only
major wage earner in the household.

Streetlights flashed past, blinking
like sodium strobes before my weary eyes, and the night folk prowled the
avenues looking for mischief. Low rent prostitutes paraded the footpath outside
the Mecca bingo hall; tired, overweight beat coppers watched them from shop
doorways and ate chips from greasy bunched newspapers. Clubbers and pubbers
staggered like somnambulists towards generic fast food outlets, craving empty
calories to help them sleep the sleep of the pissed.

The two-way radio in the cab belched
static, then Claire’s deep growling voice cut in: ‘Karl…Karl, where are you?
Number 27? Karl, dammit, come back!’

I smiled, lifted the plastic
mouthpiece from its perch, and told her that I’d be picking up in ten minutes.
This seemed to placate her, and she even told me the latest asylum seeker joke
that was doing the rounds back at the depot. It was unsurprisingly crude –
vulgar, even – and I couldn’t be bothered to force a laugh. Claire called me a
humourless bastard, then hopped off the line, leaving more of that empty
ululating static to take her place.

Two girls who looked far too young
to be out this late crossed the road without looking on the zebra crossing that
suddenly appeared before me, causing me to slam on the car’s brakes. Their thin
anaemic faces slowly turned to look at me without really registering my
presence, and I glimpsed a profound emptiness in their blank, lustreless eyes.
One of them was mechanically pushing pieces of rolled up kebab into her
lipstick-smeared mouth; the other was chain-smoking cheap cigarettes. Both of
them looked lost, half dead before the age of twenty. I thought of my own
newborn daughter, and made a silent promise to myself that she would never end
up like that, walking the streets at two a.m., cruising for randy drunks with
money in their pockets. In less than an hour these two girls would be bending
over in some grimy back alley, or sucking dick in a cheap B&B along the
Coast Road. It was just too damned depressing. I felt ice lock around my heart
in a sculpted fist.

The girls reached the other side of
the road, and a big Mercedes cruised up to the kerb, the driver leaning out of
the side window to whisper sour nothings from behind a cupped hand. The girls
smiled dead smiles and climbed into the back seat, too-short skirts riding up
over pallid thighs bereft of muscle tone. All that remained on the footpath
when the car pulled away was the discarded kebab wrapper and some pale, dry
scraps of meat.

There was a huge advertising
hoarding stapled to the wall at the corner of Mylton Road and O’Reilly Street,
selling rampant consumers some new brand of alcopop. Graffiti had been daubed
across it in thick red dripping lines; I glanced at the slogan as I drove past
it.

Arseylum seekers out! Kill em all!

The viciously droll message was
unequivocal, fuelled by impotent rage and directionless tabloid-driven
jingoism. The hatred behind the words was terrifying, bland and unfocused;
ready to turn on anyone different from what was considered the norm. The people
who had written the words operated under the assumption that all immigrants
were money grabbing scam artists, even the honest ones. It was at once
sickening and heart-breaking.

I thought of Jude once more, fearing
for her future. I prayed that I was strong enough to educate her to the dangers
of such narrow, uninformed thinking. Hoped that I was man enough for the
daunting task that lay ahead. It dawned on me yet again that raising a child
was the most difficult and risky undertaking of all: if you screwed it up, you
were just adding to the dumb herd, producing another mindless follower. The
enormity of it all made me want to stop the car and run into the night,
screaming until my throat burned. But I drove on, heading towards my last
pick-up of this harrowing shift. My final few quid before going home to flop
lifelessly into bed alongside my sleeping wife.

The man was waiting by the kerb
outside the Pound Shop when I drew up, shifting his weight from one foot to the
other. He seemed nervous, but I assumed that he was just riled at me for being
late. He lifted a small brown hand and twitched a little half smile as I
stopped the car, then jumped into the back seat, slamming the door behind him
as if in an attempt to keep out the night.

‘Sorry I’m late, pal. Bit of
confusion back at base camp.’

‘S’okay, my friend. No problem.’ His
accent was certainly foreign, but I couldn’t place where in the world he could
be from. Asia? The Far East? My ignorance of such things truly knows no bounds.

‘Where to, boss?’

‘Wishwell, please. Palm Tree Way.

Shit. I could’ve done without a trip
to that part of town at this hour. Wishwell was the worst estate in the
borough, and the vermin who were housed there would still be up and about,
fighting with each other, playing loud music on stolen stereos, smoking weed
and drinking illegally imported French booze.

‘Good night out?’ I asked, making
small-talk.

‘No, no. I been working. Cleaning
offices. I go home now, tend to family. Sleep.’

So he worked the graveyard shift
cleaning town centre offices: doing the jobs nobody else would do, just like so
many other immigrants in this country. Oiling the hidden wheels of commerce.
Paid shitty wages under the counter – tax-free, but with no additional benefits
– just to enable him to feed and clothe his family. This hard-working man was
exactly the type of person the graffiti on the hoarding had been aimed at:: a
man just trying to get by, to do right by his family. I had more in common with
him than I did the scum who had painted the vitriol. I pitied him for living in
Wishwell, but it was probably the only housing the council had offered.

‘Tough shift, eh?’ I glanced at him
in the rear-view mirror: small face, ever-blinking eyes, creased brown skin.

‘Yes, mister. Just like you, I work
hard to make something of myself and my family.’

I took the quick route in an effort
to save him a quid on the fare- down by the river, past the dark and abandoned
shipyard and the flat-roofed clothing warehouses. The man had lapsed into
silence. He sat staring out of the side window with those nervous blinking
eyes, his thoughtful features bathed in a wash of sodium light from the lamps
that lined the kerb along the riverbank. I wondered again where he had come
from, what he had given up to come here and feel safe. But was he really safe?
I didn’t think so. Persecution comes in many forms.

I dropped him at the outskirts of
Wishwell, refusing his offer of a tip and bidding him goodnight. He smiled at
me, shook my hand and wished my family well. I watched him as he darted across
the road, ducking into a narrow alley lined with battered green wheelybins
behind a low block of flats. Tom Waits croaked near-tunelessly from the radio,
and I reached down to let off the handbrake.