How to Make Monsters (16 page)

It was just after ten o’clock when
the woman approached him. She was tall, too thin for her build, and wore a lot
of make-up on her wide face. Her clothes were tacky and inexpensive catalogue
items, and she wore them a size too small to emphasise curves that were barely
even there. If he’d been sober, Pierce would have run a mile; as he was pissed
and tired and sick of his own company, he welcomed her with a creased smile. It
was all the encouragement she needed, and she sat next to him on a low stool.

Drink?” he said.

“G and T,” she replied curtly, and
attempting a pouting grin. The skin on her face pulled taut, giving her broad
features a skull-like appearance.

Pierce finished his lager, then went
to the bar and ordered. His feet were uncoordinated and his eyes wouldn’t focus
properly, so he held onto the backs of chairs as he stood waiting for the
drinks. He slopped some of his lager down the front of his jacket on his way
back to the table, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She sat and smeared
bright red lipstick onto her thin lips, inspecting her handiwork in a small
compact mirror.

After another two or three drinks,
and some dreary, slurred small talk, the woman invited Pierce back to her
place. They took an unlicensed mini cab to a cramped suburban street and the
woman unlocked the battered front door to a grubby terraced house. Pierce
followed her inside, his mind in a place way beyond paranoia.

“Fifty for straight sex. I do not do
anal or roughhouse,” said the woman as she walked on kitten heels down a long,
bare hallway. He realised for the first time that she had a slight accent:
possibly eastern European. Polish? Czechoslovakian? He couldn’t be sure.

“I…er, yes. That’s fine,” said
Pierce, suddenly grasping the meaning of her words. The house was austere, the
walls painted plaster; this was obviously a temporary abode for a working girl.
He suddenly wished that he could sober up in an instant, like they did in the
movies.

The woman appeared from a doorway,
shadowy kitchen appliances lying in wait in the dark room behind her, and
grabbed his arm as she headed for the stairs. Her cheap shoes made a loud
clip-clopping sound on the bare boards as she led him up onto the first floor
landing. The door that led onto the main bedroom was scarred, and looked like
someone had recently tried to put a fist through it. The room contained a
single bed and nothing more: no pictures on the rough white walls, no carpet on
the dirty wooden floor. There weren’t even any curtains up at the windows.

Pierce fought the nausea that was
rising in his throat, and watched in silence as the woman undressed in a sodium
spotlight at the centre of the hollow room. Her arms were skinny, with track
marks on the pasty flesh of her forearms, and her small breasts sagged like
empty paper bags. When she stepped out of her underwear, he tried to look away,
but his gaze was drawn to the shaven area between her legs. Razor rash shone
there in blotchy red shrieks beneath the paltry light that bled in through the
windows, and her loose belly flopped above like a dead fish.

The woman’s lifeless suit of skin,
he thought, seemed to slither.

The sex was awkward and
dysfunctional. Pierce struggled to maintain an erection, and the woman’s poorly
choreographed attempts at seduction only made things worse. In the end he faked
an orgasm just to get some rest, and threw the empty condom she had provided
far into a dark corner where it lay curled up like a dead snail gouged from its
shell.

When the woman began to snore loudly
and mutter darkly in her sleep he got out of bed, crossed to the grimy window,
and looked down at the street below. Litter struggled in the gutter, and a few
sparse trees waved gnarly limbs from unkempt patches of gardens.  A man with a
handheld video camera darted through the tiny gardens, as if caught in the act
of filming something he shouldn’t.

Pierce felt like throwing up, but he
fought and defeated the urge. Sandra’s face surfaced in his mind, as if
breaking the surface of dark waters, and he strained to push her back down into
the gloomy depths; she didn’t need to see this.

He padded out onto the landing,
looking for the bathroom. When he found it he voided his bladder in the
brown-stained bowl, averting his gaze from whatever floated in it. On the
mirror to his left, scrawled in thick red marker, was another tantalising
question - or was it the same one, simply phrased differently.

What’s in the way?

Pierce knew without even
having to consider anything else that this was another clue. A fresh point on
the compass. Whatever he was searching for was closer than he might think, and
the message seemed to be that he should keep on looking, keep on pushing. But
what was it he was searching for? That was the million-dollar question, the
Golden Fleece, the puzzle wrapped up in an enigma.

The truth was that he really didn’t
know. He was looking, and that was all. And if he was very lucky he just might
find something. Something in the way.

And what of that man with the
camera? Had he, in fact, been filming Pierce? Following him and recording his
movements on tape? Was this some kind of initiation he was required to
experience before deep secrets could be revealed?

He left the prostitute’s shabby den
without even going back into the bedroom to retrieve his coat. Shame and regret
and an inchoate sense of guilt pushed him out of the door and into the dawning
day as she shouted clipped foreign words at his back. As he ran along an
unfamiliar street, then cut up a cobbled alley and headed for a set of traffic
lights on a main road, he wondered what had gone so tragically wrong with his
life that he was chasing graffiti messages through darkened streets.

It had set in long before Sandra had
left, this ennui, and was probably the main reason that she had done so.
Nothing had really interested him for over a year now, and he couldn’t pinpoint
the reasons why. He was just bored, lonely, disinterested; that was why he was
desperately searching for patterns where there were none. It was like trying to
catch rain in the palm of your hand when you are thirsty, pointless and sad yet
somehow necessary.

He let his body fall against a dirty
wall in the alley, his legs buckling beneath him and his body falling heavily
onto the rough cobbles. He sat there for a while, head in his hands, heart in
his mouth, and prayed for answers to questions that he couldn’t even ask. What
was wrong with him? Why wasn’t it enough? His marriage, his house, his job, his
life…

Pierce retrieved his notebook from
the back pocket of his trousers and scribbled frantically. The words he wrote
were meaningless, but the act calmed him enough so that he could gather his
thoughts.

Sandra; he thought of her now. Of
her face when she had walked out the door: downcast eyes, blank and
uncomprehending; tears glistening like slivers of ice on her rounded cheeks;
her mouth a slit in the thin pale blur of her face. If he was unable to
understand what was happening to him, then how the hell was she supposed to?
Mid-life crisis, he thought, the onset of middle age fucking with his emotions,
churning him up inside.

On his feet again, he walked to the
end of the alley, refusing to look at the walls in search of more arcane
messages in thick red scrawls. He hailed a passing mini cab and paid a surly
Nigerian fifty pounds to get home, glad of these moments of normality amid the
bizarre landscape that his life had become.

The sun rose unenthusiastically
through a grubby sky outside his window, smearing its glare across the ash-grey
cityscape, and he sat staring at the phone. He had memorised the number, but
didn’t dare dial it. What if it remained unanswered this time, ringing out into
some unknown digital night?  Or, perhaps worse still, what if it was answered,
and the revelation he sought was uttered, whispered like a dirty secret in a
tatty room? What if it wasn’t what he needed? What if it was? The fear was all
consuming, tearing at him like a pack of ravenous hounds, baring his insides
piece by bloody piece. He felt flayed, laid bare beneath a staring sky. But he
also felt a faint glimmer of hope, like a guttering candle flame, flickering
delicately at the centre of everything that he was.

Pierce struggled up off the sofa,
still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, the stale smell of unfinished sex
clinging to them like a string of dried semen. In his trouser pocket he found a
folded sheet of paper. The discovery did not come as a surprise. He unfolded
the sheet and read the words printed on one side:

all questions answered.

On the reverse side of the piece of
paper was a badly photocopied image of an unnumbered page torn from the
Scarbridge A-Z. He slipped it into his notebook, and sat down before making a
decision that could potentially change his life.

V

Pierce walked the drowsy
streets, following the map to the nearby warehouse district. Early morning
joggers and waking street people ignored him as he cut a swathe through their
routines; he was like a windblown scrap of litter, passing them by without
being registered.

Soon he reached the place, an
abandoned factory on the outskirts of a group of residential units with To Let
signs nailed to stakes outside locked doors. Pierce walked towards the building
marked with a large red “X” on the map, and found a corresponding symbol marked
on the corrugated steel wall of a temporary office unit. The marking was
strangely familiar, yet he was certain that he’d never seen it before. A
flattened figure of eight enclosed within a circle, like a deflated
representation of something that he should be aware of.

He crumpled up the paper in his fist
and let it fall to the ground; a slight wind, low to the ground, blew it away.
Pierce reached out a hand and pushed the iron door set into a crooked frame.
The door opened easily. He was expected.

Without giving himself time to
change his mind, Pierce stepped over the threshold and into a darkness so thick
that it felt like cobwebs on his skin. The door closed behind him, swinging
silently on oiled hinges, and he was suddenly more lost than he had ever been
before.

A light went on ahead of him, too
bright; blinding in its intensity. Halogen bulbs set into some sort of mobile
wooden framework all attached to a little wheeled cart. A large black man,
naked to the waist and sweating profusely, pushed the trolley towards Pierce, a
cruel smile on his face. Another man – this one Caucasian, fat, and completely
naked, manned a camera that was bolted below the lights. His small, stubby
penis jiggled due to the erratic motion of the trolley, and he idly scratched
at his balls with the hand that was not fondling the camera’s lens.

“Greetings” said a familiar cultured
voice – the one Pierce had spoken to over the telephone. And then a tall, thin
figure stepped into the light, shadows quivering at his back. “I’m glad that
you could join us. Personally, I had high hopes from the start; you seemed like
ideal material for what we have in mind. You possess great persistence.

“But everyone must first endure our
strict interview and vetting procedure, and also pass certain psychological
tests, before moving on to the final stage.”

The man was carrying the biggest
knife Pierce had ever seen, and its curved blade glistened beneath the
attention of so much artificial illumination. The prostitute from yesterday
stood behind this third, almost elegant, man; she was dressed in a shiny black
bondage suit, with deliberately placed slashes at the breasts and crotch. Her
head had been shaved, even the eyebrows removed; the skin there was raw and
red, like prepared meat. “Dobry den,” she mumbled, smiling through a bright
silver zipper that was crudely stitched to her thin lips.

Pierce began to cry.

“There’s always something in the
way,” said the man with the knife, slipping off his heavy overcoat to reveal a
clean, white butcher’s apron with nothing beneath. “Cutting you off from
personal happiness and fulfilment; or interrupting that perfect view; or
keeping you from your dreams and goals and aspirations.

“And we have that something right
here, where we can use it to our own rather perverse – and very profitable -
advantage.”

Pierce looked again at the camera,
at the startlingly bright lights. “All this…this preparation and skullduggery,
just for the sake of snuff films?”

“Oh, no,” said the calm, neat man.
“That’s not even the half of it. By the time we’ve finished with you, you’ll be
wishing simple snuff was all we had to offer.”

He smiled, and it was cold as steel,
sharp as the knife clutched so delicately in his manicured fingers.

The darkness behind the man
shimmered, and Pierce caught sight of something moving there, something beyond
the blackness that gathered at the edges of his vision: a long, fat, coiled
presence with far too many thick, ropy erections and moist gaping orifices.
Then a shape like a fat snake slithered out of the darkness and wrapped around
the cultured man’s ankles; he kicked it away, smile still lodged firmly in
place on his sharp-angled skull.

Pierce strained to see what was
there, waiting for him behind the facade, but he couldn’t quite focus…there was
something…something in the way. Then he realised that was exactly what he’d
been looking for - whatever was in the way.