Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

  ‘I’m filming this! You can’t hurt me because the whole fucking world will see it. It’ll be evidence. It’s live, do you understand? It’s streaming. People can see this right now, and they’re phoning the police right now.’ Assuming this is even getting out of the building. He glances at his signal. Yep. 4G. Two bars. Going out live – and he’s alive. So far.

  ‘I didn’t understand. I thought it would be enough. I thought I could do it on my own.’ The man looks down at his calloused palms, the thick fingers. ‘With these hands, with the tools Clayton had, the things he knew. It didn’t work.’

  ‘What the actual fuck are you talking about? You killed people and turned them into freak shows.’ Easy, Jonno thinks, don’t get him riled. Next thing you know, he turns you into a freak show too.

  The Amazing Heartless Man. Did you forget your dead girlfriend? How her tattoo came to life and ripped her to pieces? Hope you got that on camera.

  He can’t think about that now. He can’t even look at her. He can’t, or he will lose his shit, and he is hanging on by a very fine thread as it is. Calm down. Think veteran war reporter. This is Charlie Manson right here, and he has the exclusive, and he just needs to hold it together until the cops come.

  Clayton looks terribly sad. ‘They weren’t supposed to die. Nothing should die. They were supposed to change.’

  ‘So the kid you cut in half was supposed to become a happy little deer and go skipping around the forest?’

  ‘Yes,’ Clayton says with the simple conviction of the believer. Jonno laughs, a high-pitched sound he cuts off in his throat because it’s such a giveaway of how fucking terrified he is. He’s dealing with a madman. An actual madman. Which means he has to keep him talking, because he is totally unpredictable. Jesus. Put that on your CV. Career highlights: playing Scheherazade to a serial killer.

  Jonno takes a breath, clutching his own wrist to stop his hand from shaking. He goes for smooth, gets choked instead. ‘Please explain it to me. I want to understand.’ He can’t stop himself from adding, ‘Just don’t hurt me.’

  ‘I opened them up to let the dreams out, and then I made them into the dreams they wanted. That should have been enough.’

  ‘But it wasn’t.’

  ‘Everything is so physical. I wanted to get at the meaning. You can feel it, can’t you? Underneath.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ He’s hardly going to disagree.

  ‘There are places that are borders. Where something was but isn’t any more, and other things can surface.’

  Jonno keeps his eyes on the screen so that he is not tempted to let his gaze slide away to Jen. It’s easier. The distance through the lens. One step removed.

  ‘It’s all coming through. It’s because of you.’

  ‘What?’ Jonno rubs his chest, suddenly afraid his own ribcage is about to burst open. He doesn’t even have any tattoos, he thinks wildly.

  ‘Art needs an audience,’ the killer says, as if he’s the first guy to ever think of this. ‘It’s like a fire. It needs to catch in the imagination if it wants to live.’ He looks almost happy. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’ Jonno manages, not seeing at all. Trying, in fact, not to see anything outside that glowing square in his hand.

  Oh but you have an inkling, don’t you, boychick? About giving him exactly what he wants.

  Clayton points to the camera phone. ‘They see.’

  Jonno staggers. Who would have thought two little words could have such weight?

  ‘The police hid the bodies,’ Clayton continues. ‘They knew what would happen if they let people see.’

  ‘What would happen?’

  ‘It would spread. The world would break. It would be re-made. But no-one saw.’

  ‘Until I put the videos online.’ He should turn the camera off. Right now. Cut him off cold. But won’t that make him mad, and even more likely to chop him up and turn him into a chandelier? Serial killers like attention. Just keep giving him attention. Even if that makes you an accomplice to his fucked-up fantasies. Isn’t that just what mainstream media does? At least he’s also getting a confession. He’s helping. Plus he’s keeping himself alive.

  ‘I’ve seen other doors around the city. I didn’t draw them,’ Clayton marvels. ‘But they’re there.’

  ‘I did a report on it. It’s become a thing. You’re a global trendsetter. You’re like the Banksy of serial killers!’ Keep it together. ‘So is something going to come through all those doors?’

  ‘You did. And so did she. But they’re just cracks in the surface.’ He smiles at him, with love, Jonno thinks, horrified. ‘I know what you dream.’

  ‘Is that so?’ he squeaks.

  This is the part where he cuts off your head and makes it into a lovely hat.

  ‘It’s all exposed, the currents that run through the world.’ Clayton kneels down next to Jen, forcing Jonno to bring her into frame. He can’t look away. Staring into the abyss.

  ‘If you kill me, I can’t film it,’ he says, weakly.

  ‘I’m going to give you what you want.’ Clayton reaches into his pocket, then stretches out a hand to Jonno. There’s something in it. Oh no. No.

  ‘What is that?’ Jonno screams. ‘I don’t want that.’

  ‘It’s what you dream. Clayton dreamed it, too,’ the killer says, offering it to him.

  It’s a baby’s shoe. A little red sneaker, with a Spiderman decal. The size of a lime. ‘A legacy.’

  Shoot to Kill

  Gabriella can hear voices through the newspaper maze, as she twists away from Marcus toward the other side.

  ‘Get it away from me!’ she hears Jonno yell. Close. Very close. ‘Please. I don’t want it.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Clayton says. She recognizes his voice from the brief video clip.

  She pokes her head out, just enough to get a glance at the room. The labyrinth opens onto a pillared space, fractured light leaking around the edges of blackened windows. She takes in three figures. The killer, the blogger, a woman with braids prone on the ground – the pretty DJ who is never going to bring the house down again, by the way her chest is ripped open. Bags of garbage, newspaper stacks, like columns. They’re looking the other way from her, which gives her another second to take it in. Entrances, exits, anyone else in the room. Where the hell is Layla?

  Jonno Haim is hunched over himself, wielding his cell phone at Clayton Broom like it’s a cross against a vampire.

  Gabi steps out, her gun steady in both hands. ‘Detroit Police!’ she says in a voice that brooks no argument. ‘Stay where you are. Where is my daughter?’

  Clayton turns to her and for a moment, just a moment, his whole face distorts. When she was ten years old, her father, the big fisherman, showed her the quickest way to kill an octopus. You reach in and you turn it inside out, just like that. Clayton’s face does that – inverts itself.

  ‘All the dreamers are here,’ he says.

  She shoots him.

  The bullet rips through his shoulder and spins Clayton into one of the pillars of newspaper. He sags against it, blood soaking into the paper.

  ‘I’m going to ask you again. Where the fuck is my daughter?’

  Jonno scrambles to his feet, closing his hand tight on whatever it is he’s holding. He swings the phone in her direction. ‘You’re here. Thank God, you’re here.’

  ‘Are you filming this?’ Gabi yells at him, keeping her gun trained on Clayton, who has his head down, gripping his arm, still facing the other direction. ‘What is wrong with you?’

  ‘I have to,’ he whines. ‘He made me. The eyeballs.’

  ‘Don’t get in my way and stop filming,’ she snaps at the idiot blogger. ‘Clayton! Where is my daughter? I’ll shoot you again. I’ll keep shooting you until I run out of ammo. But not one wound will be fatal. You will be in agony, but you won’t die. I’ll keep you here until you tell me.’

  Something flickers in his eyes. Fear. Finally. ‘I don’t know,’ he say
s, teeth gritted against the pain. ‘I think she might be here. She’s one of the open ones. I can’t control what they’ve brought with them.’

  ‘Not good enough.’ She is not thinking about the words, about opening, about what that might mean.

  Jonno steps back to get both of them in the frame, she realizes. ‘Cut it out!’ she screams at him, and it takes everything in her not to shoot him in the shoulder too, if only to make him stop filming.

  Clayton turns slowly from the pillar, his injured arm dangling. His face is back to normal. If it was ever otherwise. His skin is gray and saggy, his shorn white hair sticking up, but he looks at her with hope. ‘Shoot me. Let it out. I’ve tried to hold it in so long, but it doesn’t belong to me. Nothing belongs to any of us.’

  ‘Mom, watch out!’ Layla yelps and Gabi turns to see her daughter and a big man, shivering and bleeding, emerging from the newspaper maze, clinging to each other. The relief knocks the breath out of her. Alive.

  And then she feels someone – Clayton – grab her ankle. Somehow, in that split second, he has crossed the room and caught hold of her. She fires, but the bullet goes wide, skimming one of the pillars and punching through the blacked-out window. It explodes in a spray of glass, which isn’t right, she thinks with odd detachment, a bullet should punch through the glass, leave a perfect splintered hole. But then he yanks her right off her feet. The back of her head hits the concrete with the bright smack of a score at the coconut shy. She gasps with pain, black stars behind her eyes.

  All her bones go limp and she realizes she’s let go of the gun. She twists to grab at it as he drags her across the floor and manages to snag it with a fingertip. She sees her daughter moving. ‘No, Layla! Run. Run as fast as you can. Get out!’ Maybe she only thinks the words because her daughter is not running.

  ‘You can feel it,’ Clayton says, not to her, but to Layla. ‘It’s open in you.’

  Gabi fumbles at her Smith & Wesson, gets a grip on the barrel and turns it round so she’s got the handle. She flips onto her back and braces her elbows against her ribs, and as he hauls her in, like the goddamn catch of the day, she levels the gun and blows his fucking brains out. Which is when everything really goes to hell.

  All Your Fears

  The gunshots hurt. Searing pain. The body is alight with it. The shreds of Clayton that still live are moaning and gibbering. He wants to run. The dream can’t let him, not yet.

  The Police is ruining everything. It needs to complete its design, it needs everyone to see the phoenix, its most perfect piece. It needs to be alive for the door to open.

  The time is now. Dream is wild in the factory, the Wanderer and the Daughter brought it in with them, and the Messenger has unleashed the seeds, spreading it across the Internet, a thousand screens, a hundred thousand, and the dream will grow and it will live on, it’s legacy, even if it dies now.

  But it doesn’t want to die. It’s afraid of the darkness. Which is why it twists its arm out, lashing across the floor, so easy to reshape reality now that people have seen and believed. It grabs the Police and pulls her down. It only wants to make her stop hurting it, to get the gun away. It only wants to live.

  She fires and dreams explode across the room, birds of dark glass and whirling papers, possessed, all their imaginings set free, and it wants to laugh and scream in delight. Finally!

  The next bullet tears into Clayton’s head. Too fast. It should have been able to stop it cold, transmogrify it into a bud exploding open into a flower or a dragonfly or a fish. But it wasn’t paying attention, and now it is too late.

  Clayton’s head jerks back as the hot metal drives through his forehead, shredding its way through the gray pink tissue with its secret folds and the thoughts that spark in the meat, and bursting out the back, pulling the flesh and blood and bits of bone with it – and all of Clayton.

  The man’s thoughts that have haunted it are gone in a flash, like tearing a page from a notebook. It feels Clayton slip away and it whimpers in terror, because it cannot follow him, and everything it feared of death is true. It’s loosed, but still trapped in this world, only now it is alone. It can’t find a form. It seethes and roils above the body that once sheltered it, and the whole room goes mad around it.

  The Police is getting up, staggering toward her Daughter, who is running toward her, the big man moving to help them.

  The Messenger is still filming – and everything his lens sees becomes more alive, more real. A window to the world, when it has been obsessed with doors. And maybe there is still a chance to rise from the ashes.

  It reaches out with everything it has left and pulls the strings, and in the center of the maze, Marcus Jones steps away from his pillar and starts making his way toward them.

  Seeing/Believing

  Layla knows somehow that her mom can’t see it. The man’s limp arm twisting around on itself, becoming a black tentacle that snakes across the room while Gabriella is looking at her with heart-stopping love and relief. She doesn’t see how it snags her round the ankle and yanks her off her feet.

  Her mom fires her gun, and Layla covers her ears. It’s like a fire-cracker going off inside her head. The window shatters, but the glass shards turn into crows, fluttering round the room. Jonno shrieks and swipes at the birds and then slams himself back against the wall, jabbing at his phone.

  But even as the killer is dragging her mom across the floor, he’s looking directly at her, at Layla.

  ‘You can feel it,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she whispers. ‘Fuck off.’ But she can. This is what she does. Imagines other people. Steps into other roles. She can see it – all the tumult inside him. The dreams building up until they’re eating him alive.

  And then her mom blows Clayton’s head off. Brain matter and blood and bits of skull splatter the pillar, but something else comes spilling out of the ruin of his head as Clayton slumps to the ground – a great cloud, like gray cotton candy condensing in the air.

  Everything is going nuts. There are newspapers and crows fluttering around the room.

  ‘Holy shit, holy shit!’ Jonno yells, still filming. She sees how his phone makes the cloud bigger and darker and it makes her think about how the old gods needed people’s faith to make them powerful.

  Gabi is climbing to her feet, uncertainly, holding her head, looking for her daughter.

  ‘Mom, I’m here.’ She runs to her, TK following, and tucks herself up under her arm. TK does the same, although he has to stoop.

  Her mother can’t stop touching her face. ‘Layla, I thought he was going to kill you. I thought you were dead already.’

  ‘Come on, Mom, keep moving. You’re goddamn Detroit PD, and you shot the bad guy. He’s dead. Everything is fine now.’

  Only it’s not, not really, because she can see the storm building above their heads and feel the wild thoughts that dance through it like lightning.

  ‘It’s looking for somewhere to go!’ she shouts to TK, because Gabi doesn’t understand, she sags between them, shock or concussion, closing her eyes against the shit that is happening around them, paint flaking off the floor and lifting into the air, whirring into tornados of color. The garbage bags are dragging across the floor and something is lumping its slow way through the newspaper tunnels behind them.

  Jonno turns in a half-circle, his mouth open, filming everything he can. Crows made of black glass circle over a dead woman with her chest torn open, and Layla doesn’t want to look too closely at her, because she thinks she is definitely real and definitely dead.

  She just wants to get out of here alive.

  But the birds land on the woman’s chest and peck at her skin.

  ‘No,’ Jonno shouts and runs at them waving his arms. ‘No, get away from her!’ Layla looks back and sees how the birds become misshapen feathery smears as they near the ceiling. The moment they’re out of the camera’s depth of field, they go out of focus.

  ‘It’s the phone,’ Layla says. ‘He’s streaming it.’

/>   ‘I told him not to,’ Gabi says. ‘I’m going to kill that knucklehead punk,’ but it’s all bluster, because she can barely stand.

  ‘The old gods,’ Layla says.

  ‘What?’ TK snaps. He can see it too. The wildness around them.

  ‘You have to see to believe. The phone is making it worse, stronger, whatever. I have to stop him.’

  She shifts her mom’s weight onto TK, slips out from under her arm, and sprints toward Jonno, scooping up a half-brick from the ground. Which means she does not see the broken thing stagger out of the maze behind her, plywood angel wings hanging lopsided from its shoulders and a door lodged in its face.

  All You Ever Dreamed

  Jonno doesn’t know what to focus on. There’s so much happening. The dead man with the gunk pouring out of his head, like a mushroom cloud. That’s not normal, right? He’s pretty damn sure that’s not normal. His phone keeps beeping with new messages. Nineteen missed calls. They’ll have to wait. And he should try to figure out how to turn off incoming calls, because it’s got to be draining his battery.

  Stop fiddling. Film this shit. Even his troll is on his side for once. He wonders if he should be adding commentary.

  ‘I’m Jonno Haim,’ he says, ‘and shit. Look, this is real. This is happening. All of this is real.’ He pans across the room and sees the birds on Jen. ‘No! No, get away from her!’ He runs at them, waving his arms, still filming, always filming. They take off from her body, losing substance as they flutter into the air above him. ‘Bastards!’

  Concentrate. The detective. The dead guy. The volcano coming from his head.

  ‘I’m trying!’ Jonno shouts in frustration and then the kid, out of nowhere, smashes a piece of brick down on his wrist.

  ‘Ow, fuck! What the hell did you—?’ He’s dropped the phone. ‘No, I need that. Cut it out. It’s not a game.’

  ‘I know,’ she says and stomps down on it with all her weight. The screen splinters. But it’s still working. She’s what, all of a hundred and ten pounds? It’s almost funny. He almost laughs, but he’s too busy fighting her for it.