How to Make Monsters (20 page)

Then, at some point just before one
in the morning, something new happened. Something entirely unexpected.

Those inside the shabby flats
suddenly spilled out into the street, stealthy and silent as thieves. They
lined up and stared at my house, as if they knew that I was watching them. I
decided that they probably did.

It was only then that I allowed
myself to admit that the entire street had been taken over, and that the only
house in the district from which they had been turned away was mine. Every
other door stood open; every other heart and hearth laid bare to this strange
invasion.

They stepped forward in unison, a
slow-marching army of broken dolls. When they reached my low garden wall they
swarmed over it, circling the house like crippled scavengers.

I found myself unable to move,
unable to scream. The darkness inside the house was closing in on me, and then
engulfed me in an instant as the lights I’d left on downstairs suddenly went
out.

I did not know what else to do, so I
continued my watch.

A single figure was pushed to the
front of the gathering on my clipped front lawn, limping and shuffling like an
inexpertly animated marionette.

It was an old woman, her shoddily
etched features resembling those of my dead wife. It was as if a rough version
of Vera’s aged face had been stencilled onto the empty head of a department
store mannequin. Her thin mouth, small, deep-set eyes, the dark worry lines in
her pale brow…all evoked as a graven image so that I might be tempted to follow
peacefully wherever they led.

Tears began to stream down my cold,
cold cheeks, and I struggled to understand what I was being shown. Then I heard
the sound of breaking glass and of clumsy bodies flopping through into the
rooms downstairs.

I dearly hoped that whatever was on
its way to convert me would do so only after the darkness had swallowed me
completely, saving me the horror of seeing my own hastily scribbled face
bearing down on me with a dead cartoon smile.

They entered the room one by one,
lining up against the wall, lying across the neatly made bed, leaning against
the wardrobe. I turned to face them, to embrace what I was about to become.
Hand-drawn faces leered from the darkness, thin pencil lips twisting into
uncomfortable smiles.

The facsimile of Vera stood among
them, not even recognising me as I silently pleaded with her to take me in her
arms and soothe away the night terrors, just as she’d done so many times
before.

And just as I reached out my thin
arms to accept the inevitable, they walked away. Leaving the room quicker than
they had entered it, and not even looking back at me as I shuffled pathetically
forward on my aching knees to follow.

They had rejected me. For some
uncertain reason I was not fit to join their ranks, and they had only broken in
to tell me so. A street was chosen, and I had been left behind.

I slid to the floor, as loose and
boneless as a rag doll…or a puppet deprived of its strings. When dawn finally
arrived I was still there: stiff as marble, still and lifeless as the street
outside.

If I wait here long enough they
might return, lumbering along the highways and byways, tumbling over motorway
safety fences and wading through the shallow and stagnant waters of the old
canal.

If I wait here long enough they
might return to save me. Just like they saved everyone else.

A BIT OF THE DARK

I

“Nobody heard him and nobody saw,

His is a picture you never could
draw,

But he’s sure to be present, abroad
or at home,

When children are happy and playing
alone.”

Robert Louis Stephenson,

The Unseen Playmate

Frank Link stood on the
slight rise above the busy motorway bypass, surveying the pathetic remains of
the place he’d called home for three terrible years of his troubled youth.
Tension flared across his shoulders and he was unable to relax his facial
muscles out of the scowl they’d twisted into minutes earlier. The sound of the
traffic below and behind him did nothing to alter his mood; anger was the
dominant emotion and it bounced around inside him like the metal ball in a pinball
machine.

Black sheets billowed at the edges
of his vision like curtains blowing in a strong breeze, but whenever he turned
to look there was nothing there. Just settling dust and the sensation of being
watched from afar. It was a feeling he’d grown accustomed to across the years.

Riven Manor was in ruins; and that
was exactly the way he liked it. The demolition squad had moved out three days
before, and now he could see the place for what it truly was, a flattened pile
of old masonry, rotten timber and dark, dark memories.

“Are you okay, honey?” asked his
wife, moving close and linking her arm into the crook of his elbow.

“It’s dead,” he said, meaning more
than the building; the dark place inside his heart that Riven Manor had
created.

“I know, Frank. The monsters can’t
get you now.”

He turned to her and smiled, tears
welling at his eyes. She looked beautiful standing there against the clear
afternoon sky, her blonde hair done up in a loose ponytail and her sparkling
brown eyes seeing only him and nothing of the crushed but still twitching
horrors spread out below. Claire knew little of the terrors he’d experienced as
a child, but what she did know horrified her. The treatment Frank and the other
boys had received here could not be excused, and Claire was all for suing
someone. Anyone.

Frank smiled at her, his thoughts
flying sky-high. She was a caring, understanding woman, but it was best if she
did not know the full truth of what had happened all those years ago. If he
told her, he feared she might never look at him in the same way again.

He’d spent most of his life
exorcising the demons of Riven Manor. Writing about them in his novels, feeding
them bit by bit into the mincing machine of the film industry by way of
screenplays for low budget horror movies, and finally, now that the place had
been brought tumbling down, he felt on the verge of some kind of closure.

“Where’s the boy?” he said, holding
her hand and gently rubbing his thumb along the side of her palm.

“Exploring.”

A sharp spur of horror raked along
the meat of his mind, drawing old blood. But then he remembered that it was all
over, and nothing could happen to his son. The monsters were dead; only bad
memories remained.

II

Terry ran along the edge
of the pit, looking down at the exposed foundations. A sturdy wooden fence
surrounded the area, but he’d managed to enter through a section where two
uprights had been pulled apart – possibly by local vandals. The walls inside
the compound had been torn down, the roof lay in tatters on the dusty ground,
and Terry was amazed that such a huge building could be reduced to so much
rubble.

He glanced back up the hill, at his
father and mother standing there like biblical statues. He’d been warned to
stay back, to keep away from the debris, but no ten year-old boy in creation
could ever resist the lure of a building site. Leaping into the shuttered
trench, Terry imagined that he was a W.W.II soldier on a mission deep into
enemy territory. If he were discovered here, in the ruins of this French hotel,
he would be captured and tortured by the dreaded General Heinz Boobyhoff, Nazi
scourge of the allied forces!

It was a bright day; the sun was
just past its peak. Terry took off his sweater and tied it around his middle,
pretending it was an ammo belt. He picked up a stick shaped roughly like a
pistol, and held it before him, ready to take down any enemy troops he
encountered along the way. Rubble crunched underfoot and he almost twisted his
ankle on a fallen door that splintered beneath his weight.

When he saw the boy, Terry was so
caught up in his game that he almost ran up behind the lad and clobbered him
over the head with his makeshift weapon.

He stopped running, breathing
heavily and wondering if the boy had heard his noisy approach. All Terry could
see of him was a narrow back and the nape of a thin neck; the boy was sat
huddled over something, poking at it with a length of oil-stained copper pipe.

Terry approached with caution. The
boy could be a Nazi sympathiser.

“Hello,” said the boy without
turning around.

“Come and see what I’ve found.”

Terry drew level with the stooped
figure, and peered over his shoulder. There was a hole in the ground, about the
size of the bathroom window at home, and the boy was pushing stones over the
rim and into the darkness below. Terry listened: the stones were taking a long
time to drop. The sound they eventually made as they hit bottom sounded faint
and incredibly distant.

“My name’s Franz,” said the boy,
turning his head to look up at Terry. “I used to live here.”

A solitary cloud chose exactly that
moment to cross the sun, darkening the area around he and the boy; Franz’s eyes
were immediately lost in shadow and his mouth twisted into a strange leering
grin. He slowly stood, reaching his full height, and placed a tiny hand on Terry’s
arm.

Terry tensed; he did not like to be
touched - especially not here, in this lonely location, and certainly not by
this odd and slightly intimidating fellow. He opened his mouth to say so, but
the words got stuck in his throat.

“Will you be my friend?” Franz
muttered, blinking like a lizard as the sun came out of hiding.

“Terry!” His mother’s voice,
sounding panic-stricken.

Terry pulled away from Franz,
stumbling on the broken bricks, falling sideways and on top of the loose
timbers that covered the hole like vertical blinds across a small window.

Then he fell, and nothing seemed the
same again.

III

They left the hospital
and booked into a cheap hotel, fraught with worry regarding their only son. The
doctor had said that Terry was merely suffering from shock; he’d banged his
head slightly in the fall, but all he’d have to boast about at school next week
was a small swelling above the left ear. Frank bit his nails, worrying a sliver
of loose skin on his ring finger. Sometimes being a parent was the most
demanding and difficult job in the world.

“He’ll be okay. He is okay” Claire
whispered as they set their things down on the incredibly narrow double bed.
There was little furniture in the room apart from the bed, a spindly
high-backed chair, two frail-looking bedside cabinets and a battered single
wardrobe.

“I know, I know. It’s just that…”

“You can’t handle him being hurt.”

“Yes, that’s it.” Frank sat down on
the rickety wooden chair by the bed, kicking off his muddy shoes. “I hate this
feeling of powerlessness. I know he’s okay this time, but what about next time?
What if he has some kind of major accident or contracts a severe illness?”

“We’ve been through all this before,
Frank. Just because you had an awful childhood doesn’t mean that our son will
too. You’re a fucking great dad; I’m a terrific mother. He’ll survive.” She
smiled, reached out a hand to smooth down his fringe, as if he were the child
in question.

“I love you, you know. Just…just
remember that. Whatever happens.”

“Me too,” Claire responded, pulling him
down into a deep kiss. “And everything is going to be fine.”

They lay on the bed for half an
hour, just holding each other. It always made Frank feel more secure to know
that his wife kept him tethered to the earth. Sometimes he felt that if she
were to release her grip he’d simply float away. Other times he wished she’d
just let him go. Images from the latest book ran through his head: he was
developing the idea of a creature called the Hugger, something dark and bestial
that climbed out of the horror of childhood nightmares to literally embrace
children to death.

Frank’s dark pulp horror stories had
been selling well for years, enough that he enjoyed a reasonable income. Film
options brought in more money (even though none of his books had actually made
it to the screen) and he made a few quid from toiling over other people’s film
scripts, trying to whip them into shape before the cameras rolled and the
budget was spent.

But it wasn’t the money that
mattered. It was the catharsis.

Frank had been abandoned as a baby,
and the authorities had sent him to countless foster homes and hostels before
the staff at Riven Manor, the local state-funded orphanage, had finally taken
him in. It was a sort of last-stop house, the place where mistakes were
routinely sent to be swept under the carpet. Things had been bearable until he
was sent there at the age of seven, and he had suffered three years of the most
horrific abuse imaginable, both sexual and psychological. He still could not
think of those times without coating them in fantasy, easing their passage
through his memory adorned with the costume jewellery of imagination. But in
his dreams he saw it all as it had really happened. Thankfully, when morning
came, he rarely remembered much apart from an unbearable sense of
claustrophobia.