How to Make Monsters (3 page)

Sleep teased her mercilessly,
staying just out of reach, jerking away from her mind whenever she got close
enough to grab its tenuous, mist-like essence. She thought of Prentiss, and of
his obsessions. The way he’d become convinced that reality was shredding like
old wallpaper in a derelict house and something nasty was peering through from
the other side.

It was these frightening notions
that had finally led to the breakdown of affection between them; Emma had loved
him right up until the end, but had eventually been forced to admit that
sometimes love isn’t enough. He refused to seek professional help, remaining
convinced that he was sane and stable, despite the protestations of the few
friends he had left. When Emma had walked away for the last time, Prentiss had
been too afraid of his own phantoms to even follow her out the door.

And now, three years later, did the
same madness still drive him? Was he still seeing demons, or had he rid himself
of the fantasy life that had driven a wedge between them?

Finally, she slept, but dark smudges
stained her dreams, shapeless fractures that gaped in the corners of her
imagination, put there by Prentiss too long ago to trouble her waking mind.

****

“For God’s sake, Em, don’t
tell me you’re going to see him?” Nicci’s face was contorted into a snarl; she
couldn’t mention Prentiss’ name without it scarring her features.  “The bloke’s
a psycho. Didn’t he run off chasing monsters, or something?”

“No,” Emma replied, placing her
teacup on a floral-patterned coaster. “He locked himself away so that they
couldn’t get him.”

“Oh, well excuse my mistake. That makes
a big difference.” Nicci stood and walked to the window, looking out at her
boys playing football in the huge back garden. A smile played across her face
at the sight, but then she remembered that she was supposed to be angry. Emma
loved her unquestionably in that moment, gaining a glimpse into the heart of
motherhood; a peek at a state of mind that she someday dearly wished to
experience for herself.

“He sounded rational, Nic. Like he’s
got himself together.”

Her sister turned away from the
window, an apple tree framing her, giving the illusion of devil horns sticking
out the sides of her head. “You always went back to him,” she said, the anger
having fled in the face of genuine concern. “And he always exploited that.”

“Things are different now. I have my
own life, a new start. I’m strong now; I don’t need him to lean on.”

“No,” said her sister. “You have
that all wrong. It was always him who leaned on you.”

****

The taxi arrived at 6:30,
and Nicci walked her to the door. “Be careful,” she said, tenderly. “Don’t let
him use you again.”

Emma kissed Nicci’s cheek and
climbed into the cab, watching the suburban view unfurl as they neared the
outskirts of the city. Prentiss lived in a shared house in Jesmond, a huge
Victorian terraced property with rooms so big each one could have contained her
entire flat in Bermondsey with enough space left over to squeeze in a single
bed.

All too soon the ride was over, and
Emma paid the driver and watched him pull away from the kerb. Trees lined the
verges, their branches bare; some of them bore splits in their wide flaking
trunks, possibly the result of some kind of elm disease. The footpaths here
were in better condition than the ones in Nicci’s neighbourhood, but still the
area seemed to be falling slowly into ruin. Gardens were overgrown; the
brickwork of some of the houses was badly in need of repair; even the sky
looked broken, shattered into giant slivers, like a damaged picture window.

She could remember the place is if
she’d visited it only yesterday. Surely Prentiss’s housemates would have
changed a few times by now, but she knew his room would look exactly the same.
The last time she’d been inside, there had been newspaper clippings stuck to
the walls, stories about environmental disasters, nuclear meltdowns, landmark
buildings crumbling into dereliction. Prentiss’s obsession with social decay
had been only the start of it; from there, his preoccupations had taken a
darker turn. When the books about atrocities had turned up on his shelves, Emma
had finally spoken out and begged him to talk to a doctor. It wasn’t natural,
she claimed, to read constantly about the Holocaust, Bosnian war crimes, the
hell of WW1 trenches.

Prentiss had explained it all away
by saying that modern society needed to embrace the darkness at its core, if
only to prevent that darkness from taking hold of us all over again, to stop it
reaching through the gaps to pull us down.

Thinking about all of this, Emma
almost walked away. Her hand hovered over the doorbell, and she conducted an
interior argument with herself as to whether or not she should return to Nicci’s
and order a Chinese takeaway.

The door opened; a figure stood well
back from the threshold, visible only as shadow, and beckoned her inside. “Hurry,”
said the shadow. “Come on in.”

It was Prentiss. He’d been waiting
for her.

“I thought you might not come,” he
said as she followed him along a damp, badly decorated hallway. The stairs
creaked ominously as they climbed to his room, but Emma was beyond being
nervous under such conditions. Prentiss was a shred of the man he’d used to be.
His clothes hung on him like rags, his hair was thinning at the scalp, and his
skin had taken on a sickly yellow sheen. He looked ill, and Emma knew that if
things got out of hand she could easily send him to the floor with a
well-placed right-hook.

“I thought you might be…better,” she
said, following him into his room, the interior of which proved her prognosis
to be utterly without foundation.

Prentiss sat on the bed, clearing a
space with his hand. Papers scattered to the floor, but he made no move to pick
them up. Emma could see they were covered in scrawled notes, unintelligible
hand-written theories that still had a grip on his mind.

“Thank you for coming,” he said,
smiling nervously. As he was now, Emma had great difficulty understanding
exactly what it was about him that had attracted her in the first place. He was
a shell, a self-abused puppet flopping on severed strings.

Suddenly she became aware of the
smell: a damp, flat odour that was difficult to place. Then, when she saw the
state of what parts of the walls and ceiling remained visible, she realised
what it was. Wet plaster. Opened plastic pots of Polyfilla repair paste and
crack sealant sat on the windowsill, battered cutlery sticking up out of the
white doughy mass within.

Prentiss had been filling cracks.
The stuff hung in abstract stalactites from the ceiling, in frozen drips down
the walls. Any crack – however superficial – had been stuffed and inexpertly
covered with the malleable material.

If it were not for his debauched and
denuded appearance, Emma would have fled. But even now, in this vastly reduced
state, he still retained a magnetic pull on her emotions. She gravitated
towards him, even though the stench of urine and halitosis that rose from him
in a cloud made her want to back away. He cut a pathetic figure in his stained
T Shirt and ripped black jeans; his torso flashed white and spare under the
baggy clothing. Emma had never seen him so thin. He looked positively malnourished.

“Why did you ask me here?” She
thought a direct approach might at least yield one or two vaguely coherent
answers.

Prentiss stood up from the mattress,
a hand going up under his shirt to scratch a dry sore on his concave belly.
Emma drew in a breath; as he turned, she could clearly define his ribs and the
vicious ripple of spine through the scant covering of skin and atrophied
muscle. Prentiss, she realised, was visibly wasting away.

“One of my housemates knows your
sister – he drinks in the pub where she sometimes does shifts behind the bar. I
knew you were coming, Emma…I’m sorry. I needed to talk to someone, and you were
the only one who ever believed me. The only one who listened.”

“I never believed you.” The truth
was her only recourse now; Prentiss had been fooling himself for too long and
she no longer wanted to be complicit in the deception. “All I ever did was
humour you. And when you didn’t get the message, I left.”

His smile was grim, like a widening
crack that slowly crawled over the lower part of his waxy face. Emma had the
insane urge to plug it with sealant from the tubs lined up on the floor by the
end of the bed.

“I see,” he said, sitting back down
and rubbing the side of his head with an open palm, wincing as something – some
undefined pain – bothered him. “I understand.”

“You need help, Prent. You’ve needed
it for a long time.”

“Nobody can help me.” His face
softened, becoming both more and less than the sharp angles of his bone
structure. It was as if a form more solid than his features could hint at was
trying to push through from inside his skull. “I’ve spent all these years
looking for them, examining the gaps, and now that they’re finally here no one
believes me.

“They’re coming, Emma. Coming
through the cracks.”

Emma suddenly felt very afraid, not
only for her own physical wellbeing, but also for her old boyfriend’s sanity.
This was real madness, close to the bone and way out over the edge. Prentiss
had completely lost his mind.

“I’m going now,” she mumbled,
slipping her hands into her pockets and trying to act like this situation was
the most normal thing in the world. “I have to get back – Nicci will be
wondering where I am.”

Prentiss said nothing; just stared
at a spot on the floor, eyes wide and seeing beyond the worn weave of the
carpet.

Emma opened the door and glanced
back over her shoulder. Prentiss was now on his feet, moving slowly towards
her, a large scrapbook held out like an offering. “Take it,” he said. “Please.
Just take it and read what’s inside.”

She turned to face him and took the
book, smiling coldly as she stepped backwards through the door and out onto the
landing. The door closed in her face; Prentiss did not pursue her out of the
strange world that was his grubby double room. She took the stairs two at a
time, forgetting about the book in her hand. Once out on the street, she ran
towards the nearest Metro station, jumping the cracks in the pavement and
praying that she would not have to wait long for a train.

At some point during the journey,
she remembered that she was holding the scrapbook. Carefully, as if she were
handling some extremely fragile artefact, she opened the book. The pages were
stained and dog-eared from overuse, and the narrow spine was torn. Inside were
pasted articles from obscure periodicals, smudged prints of digital images
downloaded from amateur fortean websites, and yet more hand-written notes.

Emma scanned a few of the articles,
her blood seeming to thicken in her arteries.

A report of a Djinn terrorising a
cave network somewhere in the desert outside Dubai in the United Arab Emirates;
the caves were fed by underground streams which were part of some immense
subterranean network of gulfs and chasms: cracks in the belly of the earth.

An earthquake in Argentina, and the
subsequent sightings of a strange spider-limbed demon prowling in the foothills
of some local mountains.

Cave divers reported missing in the
Yorkshire Dales.

Babies stolen from a hospital in
Mexico, whose basement was recently damaged in a terrorist bomb blast, the
foundations splitting open to reveal a deep underground crevasse.

They were coming. Coming through the
cracks.

Emma shook her head, trying to
dislodge Prentiss’s crazy statement. This was not evidence; it was merely
random information used to support his own delusion, a framework upon which he
could hang his fantasies. You could prove anything to yourself if you were
desperate enough, even this utter nonsense.

When she eventually made it back to
Nicci’s place, Emma remained withdrawn and pensive until it was time for her
nephews to go to bed. Then she read them a bedtime story before soaking in a
hot bath. She lay in the steaming tub with her eyes open, staring at the
ceiling. There was a crack above the toilet she’d not noticed the day before.

Her aimless dozing was interrupted
by a knock on the door; Nicci’s voice drifted in to break her reverie: “Em, you
okay? Can I come in?”

“No, I’m fine. Really. Just a bit
down after seeing Prentiss. But you can rest easy. It’s over. I won’t be seeing
him again.”

“Okay, hon. I’m here to talk if you
need me.”

Emma glanced over at the scrapbook
she’d balanced on the rim of the sink. She almost called Nicci back, asked her
to look at what was inside the tatty covers. But no, to do so would have felt
too much like willingly entering Prentiss’s nightmares. The only cracks she
knew of where the ones in his sanity.

Bath time over, she dried herself
off and went to bed, looking forward to the end of her stay. She was due to
return to London the next day and any enjoyment she’d taken from the trip had
been tarnished by her communication with Prentiss. Even now, he was able to
ruin small parts of her life, and she resented the power he had over her.