The Monsters We Deserve

by Marcus Sedgwick

  Approaching it from below, it looms out of the closing trees, weighty and enigmatic, majestic. I can see two faces of the house as I come closer: one looks directly down the sloping forest floor, the other, longer, with some kind of opening at ground level. The windows are shuttered. Hammered shut, I now see, as I get closer.

  All around the house is junk. Piles of old things: some nameable, some unknowably decomposed. A set of moss-covered concrete steps leads up to the higher side of the house, out of sight.

  I take them.

  More junk.

  Piles of old bottles, lumps of corroding metal. Hundreds of empty tins spilling from bursting boxes. A broken table. Mattresses, that reek of wet and decay from yards distant. There’s the main door into the top floor here, but again, it’s shuttered tight, as are two more windows; sheets of thin rusting metal have been nailed across all the openings.

  I turn the next corner, coming down the far side from where I arrived and see more piles of rubbish. Sheets of corrugated iron, leaning against the wall, dying. Old leather and cardboard suitcases, rotting, like everything else here.

  There’s a small level area of ground, overgrown with ivy, ferns, weeds but in the middle of it sits the wet residue of a bonfire. Something draws me closer: I lean over the extinct fire pit and see the remains of a shoe. It’s hard to be sure, but it looks like a woman’s shoe. Then I see another, but it doesn’t belong to the first. I peer closer, and now I’ve started to see them, I easily count the burned remains of at least six different pairs of shoes. Some strips of clothing. A watch strap, old, clearly, but impossible to know how old.

  I stand, feeling that familiar fingernail of fear stroking the back of my neck. Something I have clumsily written into a dozen novels strokes down my spine for real.

  I continue my tour, down and around to the fourth side of the building. There’s a flimsy lean-to tacked on to the back, but nothing else of note, and then I’m at the first side of the house again, where there’s the low opening I saw before. It gapes at me. And though I don’t want to, I know I have to. I approach.

  Inside, to one side, are piles of wood; not nice neat log stacks like everyone makes round here, but a vast mound of splintered crates and spindly branches, heaps of worm-ridden logs and shattered floorboards.

  On the other side is a door. I know it must lead into the cellar; the cave. It’s ancient, and heavy, and into its aging surface things have been scratched, long ago from the look of it. There are clusters of words; in French, and from what I can make out, old French; the writing is cursive and indistinct and I can only decipher the occasional word. There are strange verb forms no longer spoken. There is a date next to one inscription, a date in June, but I cannot see the year. There is a kind of signature at the bottom of one set of lines; ornate: Ab … I cannot read the rest.

  Then there are symbols scratched into the door. Symbols. A simple cross, but which has had a large V-shape etched over it at a later date: I can see that from the different signs of aging. There are other, smaller individual symbols. There’s another; it’s a triangle, of course. An isosceles triangle, standing on its short side. Inside, along the bottom, are ranged three Xs. Above them a line has been drawn and inside the space left above is a double-barred cross. And then the whole triangle has another simple cross placed at the top, like the cross at the top of a church spire.

  I stare at it.

  I hear breathing. No.

  No, I don’t hear breathing, but it’s too easy to imagine, too tempting, up here on the bleak face of a lonely mountain, by a dead house in the woods. It’s easy to imagine, and it’s easy to feel the pressing of thumb and finger across my windpipe.

  I stare at the symbols; the triangular one holds me most. The three Xs in it remind me of something: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung used to put three small crosses in their letters to each other whenever they mentioned something superstitious, or fearful, or merely an irreverent idea. It was a private joke between them, and I remember that they took it from old barns and houses in the Alps, places just like this; the three crosses were to ward off ill-luck and evil.

  I decide to leave.

  *

  Ducking out of the low opening to the space by the cellar door, I take a few steps. I hear a noise behind me; a crack, like someone stepping on dry wood. I spin; but of course there is nothing to be seen. The house glares at me, and now I see something I’d missed before.

  Painted on the side, in large but fading yellowish letters, is a single word.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ I say aloud, though quietly, for I do not want to disturb anyone, or anything, for I can sense that there is something here. I sense that very powerfully indeed.

  Painted on the house is what can only be its name.

  Piège.

  Simultaneously, I remember what it means.

  It means trap.

  My creation will come.

  My creation will come.

  My creation will …

  I tried to walk back to the car so many times I lost count. Walking in circles, maybe, or maybe in triangles.

  The chalet Piège had let me go, sure enough, then, but it seemed only to permit me back as far as my home of these recent weeks, still exerting its weird pull on me.

  There sat my rucksack, as I had left it by the fire. And all my things stacked and ready to go on my desk. And a fire burning in both the pot-belly and the log burner; fires that I had not lit.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh. Holy Christ.’

  *

  All things come in threes. Any writer worth their words will tell you that; in fact, any reader can tell you that, because we like things to come in threes. Especially in stories – three wishes, three trolls, three guesses – but we expect them in real life too. As if stories are not real life! Of course stories are real life – they are made by living beings, not machines, and the day that a machine can tell a decent story is the day we should dig a six foot hole in the ground, gently lay ourselves down inside it and let the falling soil cover our faces and take us away.

  One is a point. Two is a line. Only with three do we start to feel the strength of physical space.

  Huh, I think then, the triangle.

  I am here because of triangulation, after all. I am here because of triangulation. After all.

  Trapped within this triangle, I wait for my third visitor, Victor’s creation.

  *

  I think about horror. I have contributed enough horror to the world, I know. With my books. With one book, in particular, the one that brought me fame, and money, where all the others I had written had done nothing more than sit in warehouses, unsold, unread, unloved, or in library stacks with a solitary return-date stamped inside the cover, if any.

  I want to put all that behind me, because the world has horrors enough of its own, don’t you think? And yes, I know what I was doing – writing is a way, a very, very good way of understanding the world, both the good and wonderful things and the awful things too, and that’s why I had written horror – not to scare people. It was never about that, never, whatever I found it simpler to say on the stage at book festivals. No, it was something else, something else entirely. It was just to say, Look! I’m scared by this. Should you not be scared too?

  And finally people were scared by that book; the one I wrote, ten years ago or more, which sold as easily as the water voids itself down the reverberating chasm beneath the house.

  It just will not stay on the shelves! they told me, grinning, thinking of the money. And I grinned back, thinking of the glory. And my nasty little secret.

  I did what I did and I cannot undo that now. At least it brought me security, for a good while, if not forever, and as the years have turned over, I started to know it brought me something else – the desire to leave the horror behind. For there is both horror in the world, and beauty, and I wish to turn to that. Yet every writer worth a good-god damn knows this too, for it is graven into each of us: no one cares for beauty. Not in fiction. Not on its
own, not pure, untroubled beauty; not in fiction. It’s what we crave in the real world, of course; beauty, and you know I mean that in its broadest sense: the sense of kindness and wisdom and peace and joy: all the things in the world that are beautiful, and all the things we crave in real life, but which are not sufficient to count, on their own, for anything in the world of stories.

  For here is the only real difference between the life of reality and the life of fiction. Fiction only works when the beauty is tainted by pain. For fiction is not about life; it’s about the troubles in life. That is why we read it. To understand, to grow, to know, to believe, to hope. That all the troubles one faces in life can be overcome, eventually.

  Or not. And that’s when horror writing is its most horrific; when it turns to you, the reader, and with a leer on its face, says, No. There is no happy ending this time.

  *

  I’m sitting in the chair, waiting.

  A while ago, as darkness fell, I took a torch to the door and played it out into the night, daring whatever is coming to come, and be damned. But the pale torchlight showed nothing but the descent of a million, million flakes of snow, falling soft and untroubled.

  They’re still falling, smothering everything without urgency, without anger, without judgement, without ego, as if they know they have all the time in the world in which to complete their task of hiding everything that mankind ever knew.

  My creation will come.

  I hear breathing. Not in the air around me, but in my mind, breathing, slow breathing, breathing, and the pressing of a finger and thumb of gigantic size against my throat, gently, gently pressing.

  And then I must have slept once more, by the fireside once more, because when I wake, a young woman is standing in front of me.

  My creation will come.

  So Victor said, yet that is not what I see before me now, but a young woman, a woman I have already met, in fact; it is Mary, I have no doubt. But she is young, maybe just eighteen or nineteen. At most twenty, I’m sure: the age when she published her book.

  She seems very different from the imposing lady I spoke to before, immediately I can tell that, though I cannot place what it is. One small thing: I notice that the locket is no longer around her neck, and I presume it has not yet been fashioned. Perhaps Percy is not yet dead, for this Mary. Blessed are the eyes that saw him alive.

  She looks down at me, but there is none of the cool hostility I felt from her older self. Then, she was that unspoken power that threatens without need for words or action, but simply states its power through its boldness alone. If I can carry this burden, I have no fear of you. And what burdens she carried, what painful burdens, all those years. Now, Mary seems to be merely waiting for me, for me to be something or do something, perhaps just to wake up.

  I rouse myself, and stand, and not for the first time I tell myself that this isn’t happening, that none of this is happening, because it cannot be. Yet events seem to be ignoring what I have to say about them. And there is nothing to do but play along, taking the role of the pawn.

  I offer her the seat by the fire, but she shakes her head, slowly, and holds her weaker arm out, her wrist slightly hanging, as she indicates the corner of the room where the door to the hidden floor of the house stands ajar.

  ‘Please?’ she says, and it is not a threat but I know it is not really a question either. I nod, and make my way to the stairs, thinking she must have vanished again for her footsteps make no sound, but when I turn she is disconcertingly close, right behind me, so close on my heels that I hurry down the steps into the darkness.

  ‘The first room, if you please.’ She gestures and I turn the corner. A light is coming from the room which held the only piece of furniture across the whole of this floor of the house; the little round table with the key lying inside the drawer. As I enter, I see there are now two chairs next to the table, and a decrepit oil lamp, alight on its surface.

  She indicates the chairs, and I wonder if I am supposed to take one rather than the other; whether it will matter which I sit on.

  She solves the problem by taking the chair on the right of the table, I join her on the left.

  She says nothing, and a long silence empties itself into the shadows, so long that I know she is waiting for me to begin.

  ‘I … I was expecting something, someone, else,’ I say.

  She smiles, but it’s a weak smile, that says more about desperation than happiness.

  I wonder if she knows we met before, when she was her older self. Or is this young Mary innocent of that? Through my mind I run what snippets of her life I can recall. At this point, what had she lost? One child? Two? Is her husband dead yet? No, not quite, but it will not be long. And her husband’s estranged wife … she will soon throw herself into the Serpentine, drowned, like Percy himself. And Mary’s half-sister, there is not long to live before she will swallow those pills. I try to read any of this real-life horror on Mary’s face; but I can’t see anything.

  ‘You mean the creature,’ she says in reply.

  I nod.

  ‘Victor said his creation would follow him …’

  ‘And Victor was right. Our creations follow us, whether we like it or not. I know you are aware of that yourself. Are you not?’

  This again. She means the book. My book. My successful book.

  She continues.

  ‘And just as our creations follow us, so they also start to say something about us, in return. They begin to define us. I sense that you are also aware of this?’

  And, My god, I think, that’s true. I wrote that book, and I thought I was in control. Hah! How absurd is that? And how vain! Because as soon as it was done, and in the world, and began to be read and talked about and read, it was no longer in my control. And even more than that, it started to define me, in return. As a writer, even as a person, perhaps, because people know me as the writer of that book, and nothing more. Nothing more. How much worse it must have been for Mary! She whose first novel became one of the world’s most famous works of literature, almost overnight. From the moment of its birth, her novel must have created her, as much as she had created it. It will have taken its toll, no doubt. Maybe its revenge.

  ‘I see you understand me,’ she says. ‘It’s true. I am as much made by the book I wrote and the characters I created, as by who I was myself. Since Victor is part of the book, I am now as much his creation, as he was originally mine.’

  This conversation is starting to unsettle me. I try for the last time to talk myself out of it; but give it up. From here on I know I can only watch myself. No more than that.

  He was born just a few years before Mary died, so perhaps she doesn’t know that Nietzsche put his finger on it: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not himself become a monster. If what we make comes back to haunt us, to define us and alter us, well, then, hadn’t we better be very careful what we create? Snatches of the things I have created in my books irrupt into my mind, and I suddenly fear their presence in my life, eating at me from the inside. If you gaze into an abyss for long enough, the abyss will gaze back into you. What if these things were to come back to haunt me? And then, with a cold sickness, I realise that they already have. Like the virus of inspiration, they are in me already; changing me, colouring my view of the world, perhaps preventing me from ever finding peace, or joy; because what I wrote was horror.

  Fast on that thought comes another.

  ‘We are responsible for our creations,’ I say, and with that she lifts a finger rapidly into the light of the lamp, and only now do I notice the subtle smell that I take to be the oil, mineral and dead. Mineral and dead, something quite like gas, and I am aware that I am being pulled in closer to Mary, to Mary’s world.

  ‘Yes!’ she declares. ‘Now you have it. Now you approach the truth.’

  She seems to have more in her, so I stay silent, until she finds a way to begin.

  ‘I believe I told you,’ she says (and I see that she does
know that she’s spoken to me before), ‘that from the start, my book has been misunderstood. From the moment of its issue into the world, it has been cast as something it is not. Are you aware of this?’

  I am, and I tell her so.

  Ask most people what the message of Frankenstein is, and they will tell you one of two things. They may perhaps say that it’s a book about the dangers of playing God. Victor meddles with occult science that he should leave well alone, and the result is evil, horror. Death. Or perhaps, in a more modern take, you might have someone tell you it’s about the dangers of science itself; how we like to think that science is always benign, whereas the truth is that science leads to as much destruction and damnation as it does advancement.

  ‘But,’ I say, ‘with respect, you may have yourself to blame for this.’

  She bristles slightly but inclines her head to direct me to explain.

  ‘Your subtitle. The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus stole the secrets of fire and learning from the gods, and was punished by them as a result. It’s no wonder people felt that way about your book since you called Victor Frankenstein “Prometheus” in your subtitle.’

  She closes her eyes. Nods slowly, once.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says. She waits with her eyes still closed for a long time, as if remembering painful things, until finally she rouses herself.

  ‘But, you know, there are even blunter falsifications that have been foisted upon it – those laughable interpretations of my book on the stage, for example.’

  And on the cinema screen, I add, but I wonder if she even knows about such things. The moving pictures – in film versions of Mary’s novel, Victor unwittingly puts the brain of a murderer in his creature, and so it’s born evil.

  The first was James Whale, Hollywood, 1931. No, wait. It returns to me that there was a short film before that, an even earlier one.

  1910! Yes, 1910. A twelve-minute long adaptation of Mary’s story, depicting the creation of the monster. And yes, even there, he was born a monster. He does not become one later as happens in the novel; he is born evil. And why? The audience is told that ‘the evil in Frankenstein’s mind creates a monster’. A liberal adaptation, it was called. So very liberal.