How to Make Monsters (19 page)

The odd-looking couple had been
waiting for me on the doorstep when I’d arrived home from the supermarket with
my weekly shop, standing still as graveyard statues as I traipsed up the
weed-strewn concrete footpath. The woman had awkwardly stepped aside to allow
me access to my own front door, but the man had simply stood and stared at me,
daring me to verbally challenge their unsolicited presence on my property.

If it were not for the way that they
were dressed – he in a straight-cut black sports coat and charcoal pants, she
in a sensible trouser suit – I would have assumed that they were both of the
same mystery gender. They both sported close-cropped hairstyles, and the female
didn’t seem to be wearing any makeup at all on her greyish cheeks. Both their
faces held a certain blankness, a suggestion of something missing. Or something
unfinished.

I turned and stood in the doorway,
plastic bags waiting at my feet like well-trained dogs, and only then did I
feel confident enough to open my mouth and speak. I was eager to retreat inside
and away from the early December nightfall.

“And what can I do for you?” I’d
asked, not unreasonably I thought.

I was starting to feel a little
nervous, slightly ill at ease. After all, what could an old man with a dodgy ticker
do against two fit and healthy young folk if they decided to turn nasty?

“Listen, I really don’t have time
for this,” I said then. “I have freezer stuff in these bags and need to get
them inside before they start to defrost.”

The woman dredged up a smile, the
dull skin of her face tightening as if somebody was tugging it from somewhere
at the back of her skull. The man just continued to stare.

“So, if you’ll excuse me…”

They didn’t move a muscle, and I
couldn’t help but notice that their eyes were glazed, unfocused. They had the
look of blind zealots, or drug addicts, on faces that seemed inexpertly
rendered in clay rather than flesh.

“If you have any literature –
pamphlets, flyers, that kind of thing – I’d be happy to read them.”

No response. Apart from those
intensely disquieting sketched-on grins.

Too frustrated at this point to be
concerned about seeming rude, I began to close the door. The woman suddenly
stuck a chunky foot between door and frame, moving quicker that I was able to
register. Her face remained unmoved, the creepy smile unaltered.

That was when I felt the first faint
butterfly stirrings of fear in my stomach, like the sensation you get when
driving a car too fast down a steep incline.

“The Lord Our Saviour is the only
one who can close doors on the faithful,” she intoned in a squeaky singsong
voice. Her lips were pressed at head height in the gap her foot had forced, and
they looked moist and squashed against her lower jaw as they curled round the
edge of the door. “Only He can turn us away; but He will receive us again, in
Heaven.”

“Yes, yes. Very nice.” I said. “I’m
sure he will. Now, goodnight.” And I kicked her foot out of the way before
slamming the door on their idiot faces, ensuring that I slid the bolt firmly in
place before picking up my carrier bags and rushing through into the kitchen at
the rear of the building.

The house was cold, the central
heating having once again failed to come on at the hour I’d programmed into the
defective timer switch. Winters seemed to be growing more harsh as the years
advanced; at least when Vera was around we had been able to rely on body heat
to warm us while the radiators warmed up.

But my Vera had been dead for three
long years and the only way I could see her now was to look at the framed photograph
I kept on the mantle above the broken gas fire that I couldn’t afford to have
repaired.

The picture was a snap taken of my
wife on her fiftieth birthday, back when she’d still possessed some of the
vigour of her youth. I remember the moment well: she’d been turning her head,
smiling at the camera, as she cut the cake I’d had specially made for the day.
Two years after the picture was taken, age had caught up with Vera, planting
tumours and blood clots in her veins and turning the marrow in her bones to
chalk dust.

After putting away my meagre
provisions, I washed my hands at the sink. I gazed out of the window and into
the small back garden that I tended so obsessively in Vera’s honour – when
she’d been physically able, she’d loved pruning her roses, weeding the
planters, and turning the rich soil.

My eyes came to rest on the unwashed
windows of the house that backed on to my own. Bodies shimmered like shapeless
masses behind the greyish net curtains, whoever lived there having forgotten to
turn on the lights. Or perhaps they were trying to save on electricity. Maybe
they were even pensioners like me and could barely afford to pay the council
tax never mind criminally high utility bills.

I ghosted back out into the hall,
feeling sad and strangely light on my feet, noticing as I did so that the
unwelcome cold-callers were still standing outside my front door. I could make
out their blurred outlines through the frosted glass; their heads looked
stretched and distorted, arms hung far too long, like those of great apes.

They moved even as I observed them,
turning away and shuffling back along the garden path and onto the pavement. I
entered the living room and watched them as I closed the curtains to keep out
the night; they were heading for the stumpy block of council flats opposite.
Oh, they’d get more than they’d bargained for there! Surly teens in baseball
caps, grubby mothers who swore and chain-smoked and hung around the shopping
precinct dressed exactly like their offspring.

These days it is difficult to
discern who the real adults are.

I remained where I was, peeping like
a nosey housewife through a half-inch gap in the heavy drapes. Three more
people appeared from some hidden alley or side street and joined the couple at
the kerb, and then the entire loosely knit group approached a door that they
seemed to pick at random.

The way the strangers moved was odd,
artless, as if they all had trouble bending their limbs. I thought that they
resembled the puppets I’d enjoyed seeing perform in seaside Punch and Judy
shows as a boy: rudimentary features, slack postures, stiff, arthritic
movements.

Suppressing a shiver not entirely
caused by the drop in temperature, I moved away from the window. The last thing
I saw before closing up the gap was one of the small band of people reaching
out a fisted hand to knock on the door.

I made myself a bowl of soup and sat
eating it in front of the television. Vera had never allowed me to do that when
she’d been around to object, but now I did it just for the company. A televised
voice in the house was better than none at all, even if it did belong to some
mincing Liverpudlian transvestite on what passed for a quiz show.

The soup was unbearably bland, so I
left most of it, setting the bowl down on the low coffee table at the side of
my comfy armchair. The table lamp that provided the only illumination in the
room flickered a couple of times, then finally settled. There had been a few
blackouts over the past months, and I hoped to God that this didn’t signal the
approach of another.

The older I got the more fearful of
the dark I became. It was like regressing to the point in my childhood where
I’d been most afraid. Back when I was ten-years-old I’d been scared of
everything, but darkness (and the threat of what it concealed) had been the
worst, the ultimate terror.

Now I tended to see faces looming in
the darkened rooms of my house, and the smeared outlines of heavy bodies
swimming like whales through the gloom. Vera had kept me safe from such
imaginings, but now her protection was gone.

I got to my feet and turned on the
main light, blinking at the sudden transition from dim to too bright. Then I
took my dinner dishes through into the kitchen and placed them by the sink,
ready for washing in the morning.

There came a sound from the front of
the house: a sharp clattering thud, as if something substantial had collided
with a front wall of one of the neighbouring buildings.

Stepping slowly and quietly through
to the front door, I peered out through the tiny glass spy hole I’d had the son-in-law
of the man up the road install immediately after Vera’s funeral.

There was a large mob of people
gathered outside the entrance to one of the flats across the way. Some sort of
commotion seemed to be taking place - a row or disagreement. I could clearly
hear raised voices, snatches of angry conversation.

Someone was telling the door-to-door
God Squad who’d bothered me earlier to go away – and in no uncertain terms. A
burly gentleman with tattooed arms who stood outside gesticulating in a vest
and shorts despite the seasonal chill.

I pressed my eye to the glass,
straining to make sense of the images given false distance by the distorting
fish-eye lens.

Seven or eight figures stood smiling
around the shouting man, and in response to his insults and obscenities they
all reached slowly towards him with unnaturally long hands that looked to have
too many fingers.

A car flashed by on the road between
my house and the block of flats, obstructing the view for perhaps a couple of
seconds. Certainly no more than that. By the time the vehicle had passed all
was calm; the previously enraged resident now stood in silence, mouth hanging
open in such a way that it seemed to be dangling on a faulty hinge.

Then the suddenly taciturn man led
the group inside his home, and the door slammed shut on the back of the last
one in.

I prised my eyeball away from the
peephole and forced myself up to bed, where I slept uneasily, thinking of Vera
and how much I missed her company.

The next morning was a Saturday and
I slept uncharacteristically late, due mostly to my troubled night’s slumber.
Rising just after 10am, I washed, dressed, and then cooked an early lunch. My
head felt heavy, stuffed with cotton balls; my mouth was dry as old bones and
my eyes itched maddeningly.

I locked up the house and decided to
take a stroll down by the canal, where bleary-eyed weekend fathers dragged
sleepy toddlers into the frosted park and hyperactive dogs took listless owners
for brisk jogs along the gritty litter-lined towpath.

Paranoia hung over me like a cloak:
glazed eyes watched me from all quarters. The skinny branches of deformed
winter-bare trees hid stunted stick figures, and a thin man in a knee-length
Macintosh inspected my progress intently from the other side of the canal
through a large pair of binoculars.

The cold was nipping like claws, so
I truncated my constitutional. Taking a shortcut through the car park behind
the bus depot, I made my way back to my safe little suburban haven.

The rest of the day was spent
reading Dickens and I just about managed to lose myself in the London of a
bygone era, where men wore tops hats and women paraded in huge conical skirts
that hid more than a multitude of sins.

By sunset I was feeling edgy, and as
the sky turned a deep shade of crimson I checked that all the doors and windows
where secured against more than just the cold.

I watched some television with the
sound turned down low for a little while, and then unable to resist the
temptation for any longer, I twitched aside the living room curtain and looked
for signs of what I can only term oddness outside.

Most of the house lights in the
street were turned off – except for the ones inside the very flat that the
annoying word-spreaders had entered the previous night. I glimpsed movement
behind the glass, and occasionally a face would turn to stare in my direction.
Although certain that I could not be seen, I turned out the lights and
retreated upstairs in hated darkness.

Over the next few hours people left
the burly man’s dwelling in small groups of two or three, visiting several of
the other flats in the same block. Then they progressed along the quiet street,
knocking on doors and rapping on darkened windows. Each time a door was opened
to them a discussion ensued – sometimes animated, most times not. Each of these
exchanges ended in the same way: the visitor would reach out a hand, casually
touch the forehead of the other person, and be wordlessly invited inside.

I watched from a first floor window,
unsure of what I should do. If I called the police, or any of the other
emergency services, what was I supposed to report? A feeling that all was not
well? A hunch that the neighbours I barely even spoke to – despite having lived
among them for twenty-five years – were being coerced into joining some kind of
religious cult?

No. That simply would not do. I was
being paranoid again, scared of my own cowering shadow. I hated being old,
lacking in any kind of physical strength. Old age meant nothing more to me than
fear and regret, and I was being mercilessly eaten alive by demons of my own
creation.

So I sat in the dark and spied on
them, deathly afraid of what nestled in the dense and silent shadows that
gathered inside the room, but far more fearful of what was going on out there,
up and down the night-time street.

Yet more figures drifted to the
impromptu block party, arriving from points unknown. From other houses, other
streets. A few cars and a battered mini-bus even pulled up at the kerb,
disgorging even more of the shambling stiff-limbed gatecrashers.