How to Make Monsters (12 page)

I pushed open the door, and waited
for the squeal of those hinges. It didn’t come; the door swung silently open on
a vaporous cloud of dust to reveal a messy galley kitchen that led onto a
cluttered hallway with mildewed cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. To
the right of this hallway was another door, this one a homemade affair constructed
from thick lengths of timber and painted a dull yellow. I rode my luck,
expecting this door to be unlocked too. It was, so I opened it.

A steep concrete staircase led down
into a fathomless darkness; as I stepped down I briefly questioned my actions
then pushed the thought away. I was acting on pure impulse now, shutting off my
mind and going with my gut instinct. If I stopped, I would panic: if I
panicked, I would bolt – probably drawing attention to my presence in the
process. All I needed was one look, a single glimpse into what I knew must be
the control room of this sinister organisation. Then I could go to the police
armed with proof, and bolstered by the knowledge that I wasn’t imagining some
convoluted conspiracy and these people actually existed.

The stairs led into a large
basement, and it was blacker than night down there; there was no natural
illumination, and I doubted that I would find a light switch even if I were
foolish enough to try. So I walked into the gloom, so afraid by now that I
couldn’t halt my momentum, like a man running full-tilt down a very steep
incline. I was simply a series of actions, with little thought behind them.

Soon I was lost in the dark, unable
to even guess at which direction was out. After a while I began to see shapes
form out of the darkness: sketchy figures propped against the seeping black
walls. There was no sound in there but that of my own ragged breathing, so I
knew that the figures were corpses; immediately after this realisation, I
became certain that they were the bodies stolen from the morgue. I slowly
counted the outlines that sat slumped against the bowing brickwork: there were
six of them. Half a dozen.

My feet slipped on the slimy earthen
floor as I advanced further into the room, looking for an object to take away
with me as solid evidence. Something crunched loudly underfoot, and I pitched
sideways in a clumsy fall. As I went down my right hand pushed against, then
slid off some vaguely familiar shape on the floor. My fingers poked into moist
holes, and I felt teeth rattle against my wedding ring. A face. There was a
face on the floor.

I looked down, unable to help
myself. Blind eyes stared back at me, an open mouth yawning emptily into the
chill air of the room. It was only then that I realised I’d been walking on the
dead all along; mutilated bodies lay in a thick carpet of decay on the basement
floor, and as my eyes at last became accustomed to the darkness I realised that
not one of them was Caucasian. I was lying on a crust of murdered immigrants.

And that was when I saw al-hakim. Or
rather what was left of him. The top half of his torso stood upright amid a
heap of severed limbs to my immediate left, his torn face sporting what were
obviously teeth marks. Bleached bone showed through like plastic where hungry
mouths had scooped out hunks of his wrinkled golden brown cheeks.

I looked again at those six immobile
figures that leaned against the wall; at their lurid sports casuals and stained
Burberry baseball caps. Something strained at the centre of my mind, a thought
that couldn’t quite escape its cage. And then they moved. The bodies. All six
of them, twitching and jerking like marionettes as they attempted to get to
their feet. But still not breathing, not any of them. They were dead; but they moved.
Towards me.

It was only then that I managed to
regain control of my senses, and ran blindly across the corpse-layered floor,
looking for an exit. The figures reached for me as I fled, loose white fingers
groping for my living flesh, but I kicked them away, screaming now and not
caring who heard. It was only through blind luck that I stumbled upon the
stairs, my flailing hands bashing against the chipped concrete and three
fingers breaking against the jagged treads. I climbed them in a blind frenzy, wanting
only to get out. To be away from that place and those things…

Nobody accosted me on my way back to
the car; it was as if I didn’t matter, they didn’t care what I’d seen because
nobody would believe me anyway. I sat behind the wheel for an hour, just
waiting and watching the greasy sun struggle up from the eastern rim of the
world. If they wanted to silence me, they had only to come for me. As I sat
there attempting to set my broken fingers I thought about how easy it would be
to steal a few corpses, especially if the authorities were in on it. And I
thought about what it might take to raise the resentful dead. To focus all the
rage and the bitterness, the hostility and xenophobia that exists at street
level to something higher, something darker. Call it urban magic, ghetto
voodoo.

If you could bring back the dead you
could do anything, even use the undead puppets at your command to cleanse your
town, your country, and whip up even more crude bigotry and warped nationalism
along the way. Dress them up in England shirts and tracksuit bottoms, and send
them out to feast on the foreign invaders, to consume before we are consumed.

When I finally started the engine a
watercolour dawn was smearing itself across the steel-grey sky. Curtains were
opening in windows on the estate- early risers getting ready to face the new
day. As I drove back to my family, to my own imperfect little world, I knew
that I wouldn’t ever fully understand what I’d seen. But what exactly had I
seen? Even now, eighteen months later, I cannot be fully sure. But I’m certain
that it’s still out there, in some form or another, perhaps biding its time in
some foetid basement darkness, growing angry and hungry and waiting to be
unleashed.

It was only when I arrived home that
I realised they – whoever they are – had known about me all along. They must
have been monitoring me, waiting to see how much I would learn. Someone must
have tipped them off about my interest in the disappearance of al-hakim.
Perhaps it was Claire, consuming before she herself was consumed by whatever
the fuck stalks in darkness. I just don’t know. I’m not sure of anything
anymore; I don’t even know what is real and what exists only in my mind.

The front door was ajar, and as I
walked into the hallway my heart stopped beating. I felt dead; as dead as those
things that must have come lurching through the twilight towards everything
that I held dear.

Tanya was lying face down on the
stairs, her left arm stretched out before her as if she’d been reaching towards
something upstairs. The nursery. The back of her head was red and matted, the
ivory bone of her skull showing through in patches. I didn’t turn her over;
didn’t want to see the expression on her face. I looked up, towards the
upstairs landing. The bathroom door had been kicked in; it hung from its hinges
like a bomb had gone through it. I felt my body move, taking each stair as if
it were a mile high. I knew what I would find when I walked into the nursery,
and I wanted to delay the sight as long as I could; forever, if that was
possible.

Tears streaked my face, but my
throat was too constricted to release any sound. I didn’t want to know, didn’t
want to see, but still I had to ascend and acknowledge what had happened. As I
stepped onto the landing carpet, I imagined Tanya moving behind me, raising her
head and opening her mouth to reveal a gaping darkness at the centre of her. 
Lifting herself to her feet and shambling up after me.

But that didn’t happen; not yet.
Hopefully, it never will.

By the time the police found me cradling
Jude’s cold, cold body in my warm hands, the tears had finally stopped. The
world spun around me like some mad, gaudy carousel, and I could sense things
hiding in the shadows of the world. I looked up at the uniformed officers, and
had a vague recollection of summoning them with the mobile phone that now lay
on the floor under Jude’s crib. I looked at my daughter’s pale face, smiled at
her and wished her pleasant dreams and prayed to God that her sleep would last
forever.

I told the police officers about the
house in Wishwell – of course I did; but it was no use. They didn’t see what I
had. The apocalypse in the cellar was still there; although nothing else
remained but the images in my mind. Their colleagues had probably been there
first, hastily shepherding those unbreathing things into the back of a van and
relocating them to somewhere else in the depths of the estate.

I didn’t do it: I didn’t kill all of
those people. But nobody will believe me, not the police, the psychologists, or
the friends that have deserted me since my arrest. I miss my family, my babies.
They would have believed me.

And somewhere out there – in the
shithole squalor of a broken-down housing estate – it’s still happening. I read
the newspapers with interest, specifically the stories of attacks on
foreigners. Last week, an Asian child went missing. The week before that, it
was a Serbian mother of three. It’s started again.

It’s getting dark outside, and
nights are the worst. That’s when I hear uneven shuffling footsteps in the corridor
outside my cell, and hear my name whispered, as if by the wind.

FAMILY FISHING

When I was twelve years
old my parents went through a rocky patch in their relationship. There were
fights, silences, total communication breakdown. So they decided it best that I
stay with my Grandad one weekend late in the summer, to give them the space to
sort things out between them; to mend the cracks that had suddenly opened up in
the formerly smooth wall of their marriage.

I had no firm evidence, but somehow
felt that I might be the cause of much of this strife. I was self-aware enough
to realise that my behaviour was at the very least erratic – and possibly even
bordering on the antisocial. I was afraid of becoming what used to be called a
“problem child” but these days is merely an average teenager.

Dad dropped me off at Grandad’s
place late that Friday afternoon, his long face stern and pale and twitching
under the skin as if a swarm of butterflies was flapping around inside his
balding head.

“Be good, Dan,” he said to me before
driving away in the big old red Renault. He kissed me lightly on the cheek
before climbing quickly into the car, and didn’t once look back as the dusty
distance swallowed him.

Grandad stood in the doorway of his
big old crumbling detached house; he and dad hadn’t even spoken. Just nodded
silently to each other, as if passing and receiving some mysterious unspoken
message.

“Come on, boy. Let’s get you
settled,” he said in his deep, grating voice that sounded like he washed out
his mouth with a cheese grater. Then he stood to one side and pushed open the
door with a gnarled oak hand.

I glanced back along the unmade road
that led to the distant motorway, and eventually to home, and then reluctantly
went inside.

My grandparents had lived in that
isolated house all their married lives, and even after grandma died of cancer
when I was still in nappies Grandad refused to sell it. Even though the place
was far too big for him, with too many empty rooms, he wanted to remain there
until he died. Until that day came, he haunted the house like a ghost, pacing
through the rooms and hallways and reliving old memories.

The house was located five miles
outside of a small North Yorkshire village called Fell, and the closest
neighbour was about a mile away. The surrounding countryside was beautiful, but
bleak. Grandad had always cherished that desolate aspect: it was in his nature.

I followed the slightly stooping but
still substantial figure of the old fellow along the gloomy hall and into the
cluttered living room. The walls were hung with dark oil paintings – spooky
landscapes and dour, staring portraits – and little piles of ancient paperback
books lined the blistered skirting. Grandad didn’t own a TV; there was a radio
in the kitchen, but that was his only concession to modern communications. The
old man preferred to read.

“I’ve made up a bed for you in the
small room,” he said, glaring at me as if I was an unwelcome guest. “Other than
that, you have the run of the house until suppertime.” Then he left the room,
and short a while later I heard the muted gabbling of the radio and the
clattering of pots and plates.

The small room. The term was
actually something a contradiction: every room in the place was huge, the one
I’d been allocated was simply the least spacious.

I tiptoed back out into the hall,
those unfriendly portraits watching my back intently as I tried hard not to
make a sound to disturb them.

The stairs loomed above me, shadows
dancing across the thin treads like small questing creatures. Directly above,
on the wide landing, stood the upstairs bathroom; a place so damp and mildewed
that even granddad no longer used it. The main bathroom was downstairs,
adjoining the kitchen, where he was singing quietly to himself and preparing
some hand-me-down family recipe too rich for the limited tastes of a developing
pubescent boy.

A thin, bulb-headed hat stand that
stood by the door was a bulky figure bowing towards me as I began to climb the
stairs, and those capering shadows scattered beneath the soles of my descending
feet. Darkness hung heavy, like a vapour, and I attempted to shrug off the
cloying atmosphere of gloom.