by Pat Murphy
Susan shook her head. “Tom was just doing his job. Remember, I didn’t bring you along to play matchmaker.”
“I’m just making an observation, that’s all. Max told us to make careful observations of the world around us. That’s all I’m doing.”
Susan shook her head again, smiling. Pat was irrepressible. Looking out over the sparkling water, Susan admired the houses, painted in beautiful pastel shades of blue and pink and yellow.
“Hey, I found out that we can take a one-day scuba-diving class while we’re here,” Pat said. “I figured I’d go to Max’s workshop and then go diving. Do you want to come?”
Susan shook her head. She wasn’t a strong swimmer and the idea of going underwater with a tank strapped to her back didn’t appeal to her. “I don’t think so. But you go ahead.”
“What are you going to do?”
Susan frowned. She wanted to explore the town, but she was hesitant to do it alone. “I had thought about doing some shopping in Hamilton.” She hesitated. “I guess I could buy a map in the gift shop. But I’ll probably get lost.”
Pat studied her face. “So what if you do get lost,” she said. “You can ask somebody the way. Bermuda used to be a British colony, so everybody speaks English.” Pat shrugged. “If you’re really worried about it, I could skip the dive class.”
“Oh, no, don’t be silly. I’ll be fine on my own.” Susan smiled, determined to give it a try. “Hey, we’d better get to workshop if we’re going,” she said.
“I had a long conversation about monsters last night,” Max was saying. They sat around the library table and the tropical sunshine streamed in the windows. “Everyone has monsters. Some people have monsters that live under the bed; some people have monsters that live in the closet. Most people do their best to keep their monsters in the dark. Most people don’t want to look at their monsters.”
“As a writer, you need your monsters. You need to examine them carefully and use them in your writing,” Max continued. “You can’t go hiding your monsters in the dark. You need to believe in your monsters and bring them to life. You need to make them real.”
Max talked about the unconscious, about finding and using your monsters. Then he gave them a writing exercise.
“Most people have monsters that are vague, incompletely imagined. As a writer, you need to look at things very carefully, describe the impossible in detail to convince your readers that it’s real.”
“Get out your notebooks,” Max said. “I want you to write about a monster.”
“What do you mean, a monster?” Alberta asked.
“Something that scares you—really terrifies you. We all have dark places where frightening things live. I want you to go to one of those places and find something you don’t like to think about. Something that gets under your skin and sends a chill up your spine. I can’t tell you what it would be. That’s something only you know.”
“What if we can’t think of anything?” Alberta asked.
Of course, Susan thought. Alberta would ask that.
“Then start with a childhood monster,” Max said. “Something that scared you when you were little. Chances are that your childhood monsters have grown up along with you. They’ve changed shape, but they’re with you still. Follow your childhood fears and see what you find.
“It’s hard to face your monsters directly, so here’s what I suggest. Write a scene in which the monster is just out of sight. But you know it’s there. Write about how the monster makes you feel.”
“Can it be something real?” Pat asked.
Max nodded. “Of course. All monsters are real.”
He opened his own notebook and began writing. Susan stared at the blank page in front of her.
Childhood monsters, Susan thought, remembering the monsters that snatched bad girls. How had those monsters grown up? What happened to bad girls now?
The answer came suddenly and she shivered, though the room was warm. She thought of Alice, a woman she had known in college.
Susan had attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, a rural campus in the hills above the beachside community. It was a beautiful campus, tucked among redwood groves, isolated from town by miles of rolling hills.
Susan had met Alice in an American Literature seminar. At the second meeting of the class, Alice told the instructor that she thought the reading list didn’t have enough women authors and suggested a few that he could add. It was something that the women in the class had talked about amongst themselves, but no one else had summoned the nerve to mention it to the professor.
Susan lingered after class to thank Alice for speaking up. They had gone out for coffee—just that one time. Susan remembered sitting in the coffee shop and thinking about how much she admired Alice.
Alice didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. She had traveled in Europe the previous summer, working as a camp counselor for two months and then traveling alone through France and England and Ireland. She was thinking of traveling in Nepal next summer; she was trying to line up a job with a travel company to fund the trip.
A year older than Susan, Alice lived in town, rather than in a dormitory on campus. When they left the coffee shop, Susan realized that it would be half an hour until the next bus to town. It was a rainy February night. Susan asked Alice if she wanted company waiting at the bus stop.
Alice shook her head. “I’ll stick out my thumb and catch a ride,” she said. “Lots of people are heading to town this time of night.”
Susan frowned.
Alice laughed at Susan’s expression. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m careful. I only ride with folks with University parking stickers.”
Susan left Alice at the bus stop, her thumb out to catch a ride. Susan never saw Alice again. Alice disappeared. A month later, a serial killer confessed to her murder and led police to her headless, dismembered body. Alice was one of the killer’s eight victims. Six of them were young women, about Alice’s age, picked up hitchhiking. The seventh and eighth victim were the murderer’s mother and her friend.
The newspapers had carried graphic stories of the killer’s atrocities. The man had killed the young women in many different ways. He had shot them, strangled them, suffocated them. Some had died quickly; others had fought and suffered. He had raped their dead bodies. He had cut them to pieces. He had kept their heads and hands and disposed of them separately, to thwart any efforts to identify the bodies.
Susan had read the newspaper accounts. She could not help herself. She could not help imagining Alice’s death.
Alice hadn’t died immediately. The killer had shot her several times to kill her. He had taken her lifeless body into his apartment and had sex with her corpse. He had cut off her head. He had cut off her hands.
For months after reading the newspaper account, Susan kept imagining Alice’s hands, separated from her body, lying on the shelf of the refrigerator in the killer’s apartment. She didn’t know that he kept Alice’s head and hands in the refrigerator—the newspapers had only said that he kept them for a few days before disposing of them.
But Susan always imagined them in the refrigerator, their bloody stumps wrapped in plastic. Alice’s hands, one curled into a fist, one limp, with fingers outstretched.
A monster, she thought. She studied her hands—left hand holding the notebook, right hand holding the pen. She remembered the weeks after the murderer had confessed to the killings.
“I am afraid,” she wrote. “I am afraid to go out in a world where there are monsters.
“The newspapers say that this man killed Alice and the other women. But I don’t think he’s a man. Surely a person with a mother and a father, a person with blood pumping through his veins, a person who can feel pain could not have done such terrible things to Alice. No, I think Alice was killed by a monster, some kind of machine maybe, an alien construction that feels no pain and therefore can’t comprehend the pain of others.”
Susan looked at what she had written so fa
r. The monster should be just out of sight, Max had said.
“During the day,” she wrote, “I can go out to the cafeteria for meals; I can go to class. But at night, when darkness comes, I stay in my dorm room with the door closed and locked.
“Sometimes, late at night, I hear things. I hear metal scraping on metal, like the sound of a knife being sharpened. The knife that cut off Alice’s hands must have been very, very sharp. I think of the knife, glinting in the moonlight as the monster sharpens it. I think of the monster, lovingly stroking it on the steel sharpener, admiring the glittering blade. Sometimes, late at night, I catch the scent of rotting meat, and I think of Alice’s hands. Maybe the monster didn’t keep them in the refrigerator. Maybe he left them out in his living room, someplace warm. Maybe they started to decay, breaking down slowly, going bad.
“My mother warned that bad things happened to girls who behaved badly. She didn’t tell me what the bad things were, but now I know what they are. Killers stalk women; monsters threaten them. Madmen cut them apart with chain saws, with hatchets, with knives. Women are raped, tortured, killed. Good girls stay home where they can be safe.
“The monster waits outside the door. I can hear its raspy breathing, smell a whiff of putrefying flesh.”
“It’s always useful to think about what your characters want,” Max said. “Think about what your monster wants.”
“The monster wants my hands,” Susan wrote. “He wants to take my hands and my heart.”
“And think about what the monster fears,” Max said. “What could keep the monster away?”
Susan stared at the words she had written. She had not thought about Alice for years. Now she remembered the first time after Alice’s death that she had gone out at night.
It had been with Harry. He had been in one of her classes. He had asked her if she’d come help him study for the midterm. He knew she took good notes and he would really appreciate her help. She had hesitated, then shaken her head. “I’m not going out at night,” she had told him. She had explained, as calmly as she could, that Alice’s death had left her shaken, that she didn’t feel safe at night.
A puzzled expression had crossed Harry’s broad, all-American face. He had heard of the murders, of course, but it hadn’t occurred to him that there was anything to be afraid of.
“That’s no good,” he said. “You can’t just stay in at night.”
She shrugged. She had stayed in at night since Alice’s death and it seemed to her that she could go on doing so.
“I’ll come get you,” he said. “And I’ll bring you back to your room. You’ll be safe with me.”
He had kept his word. She had been safe with him—that night and on subsequent nights when they went out on dates. For all his faults, Harry had kept her safe, had helped her forget about the monster lurking in the dark. She had worn Harry’s wedding ring and she had been safe.
TEN
“And so she found her heart’s desire,” the woman said. “But she didn’t know it at first.”
from Here Be Dragons
by Mary Maxwell
After workshop, Pat went to her scuba-diving class and Susan set off with a guidebook from the ship’s boutique, determined to explore Hamilton. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and she knew there was nothing to be afraid of.
According to the guidebook, Court Street offered “a fascinating potpourri of smaller stores and services.” The book went on to say that the section north of Church Street was good for “a cultural experience and a ‘different’ shopping excursion.” It sounded intriguing.
On the map, the way to Court Street was quite clear—Susan could follow Front Street, which ran right along the waterfront, to Court Street. Even she couldn’t get lost.
Susan left the ship late in the morning, dressed in a sundress and sandals, with the guidebook and her camera tucked into her purse. Most passengers going on shore excursions had already left. At the top of the gangplank, a security guard ran her cruise card through a card reader. “Have a nice time ashore,” he said.
She strolled down the gangplank. “Taxi,” called a man in baggy Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt. She shook her head and continued down the waterfront past booths offering snorkeling trips and other excursions, past vendors selling cheap jewelry and tourist trinkets, past a stand where a gray horse stood by a carriage for hire. “No, thank you,” Susan said to the vendors who hailed her. “Maybe later.” The waterfront had a holiday atmosphere. Flowers bloomed in planter boxes along the waterfront. A dark-skinned woman with a basket of coconuts smiled at Susan. A man in Bermuda shorts was selling ice cream bars to a group of children.
Susan noticed a number of tourists from the cruise ship: half a dozen older women were inspecting the jewelry; a young couple was discussing the merits of a carriage ride; two other couples were talking to a man in a booth about a snorkeling trip.
She walked along the waterfront, leaving the tourists behind, and found her way to Court Street without incident. On Court Street, she headed north, past government buildings. She passed a group of men dressed in the business attire she had read was standard here during the warm months—button-down shirts, jackets, ties, and baggy Bermuda shorts that ended just above the knee.
Seeing the men gave her a dreamy sense of dislocation. The setting looked so normal—stone government buildings, wide green lawns. From the waist up, the men would have looked fine on the streets of downtown San Francisco. And from the waist down, they just looked silly, giving the scene a strangely surreal quality. When she crossed Church Street, the official buildings gave way to shops selling fabric, ready-made clothing, umbrellas, toys. The shops had a crowded, jumbled feel to them. The sidewalks were filled with shoppers—men in shorts, housewives in colorful dresses—all local people, she was sure.
She wandered down the street, strolling through the shops. There didn’t seem to be anyone else from the cruise ship shopping here. She made her way through the crowd, happy to have left the other tourists behind. She bought a keychain flashlight in one store—the kind that lit up when squeezed. It said “Souvenir of Bermuda” on the side, but she bought it just in case there was another blackout.
She took a few pictures: a shop with brightly colored clothing hanging in the window, the crowded street. She could imagine sharing this with her friends back home. “This street was a little off the beaten track,” she would say. “Just locals, no tourists.”
She was getting tired and starting to think about lunch. The sun was overhead and the day was getting a little too hot, when she saw a side street that looked intriguing. She’d go just a little farther, she decided as she turned onto it.
Trucks filled with produce were parked along both sides of the narrow street, leaving just enough space for a vehicle to pass between them. In the trucks and on the crowded sidewalks beside the stores, mangos, bananas, coconuts, papayas, and tropical fruits she could not name spilled from boxes and bins. The smell of ripe fruit was almost overpowering.
Men pushed carts filled with produce through the crowd; women carrying shopping baskets negotiated with shopkeepers. The men selling the produce watched her as she passed; the shopping house wives glanced at her. She was out of place here. She knew that. The people around her spoke English, but she couldn’t understand half of it, so thick were the accents; so abundant, the slang terms.
As she passed a shop doorway, she noticed a group of teenaged boys watching her a little too closely. One of them said something she didn’t understand, and the others laughed. She hurried past them, glad of the crowd of housewives around her.
She felt dizzy with the heat. She needed something cool to drink, a place to sit down. Maybe she should turn back. She glanced back in the direction from which she had come, but two of the teenagers were walking after her. Looking forward, she could see bright sunlight where the street ended at another street or a square. She continued down the narrow street.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Pardon me.” She was squeezing th
rough a crowd of chattering housewives—big black women in colorful clothing who had gathered around a produce stall. Susan had to make her way past them to reach the light. She clutched her purse under her arm, remembering now that the guidebook had warned against pickpockets and purse snatchers. It was too hot, too crowded, too loud with unintelligible chatter. “Excuse me. Pardon me.”
She had almost reached the end of the alley when she heard a rumble of drums and a shrieking of whistles. “It’s the gombey,” she heard a woman say—or at least that’s what it sounded like.
People jostled against her. The crowd moved and she was carried along with them, like a swimmer caught in a current. She tried to resist, struggling toward the light at the end of the alley. “Please,” she said. “Excuse me. I need to go this way.”
“Gombey,” someone else was saying. “It’s the gombey.”
“Please let me through,” Susan said. She just wanted to get to an open space where she could get a breath of air. “Please.”
Some of the people around her tried to help. “look sharp there—let the tourist lady through,” said a woman.
More chatter around her—she didn’t catch much of it, something about the tourist lady, something about a good view—and she found herself pushed to the front of the crowd, facing the bright mouth of the alley. The drums were thundering around her, echoing from the walls; the whistles were shrieking like lost souls. She could see strange figures coming toward her, silhouetted against the light. They were impossibly tall, and the light reflected from them, sparkling on their faces and bodies. She squinted, trying to make out details, and she saw leering faces with bright, staring eyes. One figure brandished a hatchet in her direction. The monstrous creatures around him wielded whips, raising them high. They stalked toward her, waving their weapons.
She clutched her purse and her camera, confused by the pounding of the drums, frightened and dizzy. She couldn’t run—the alley behind her was packed with people; in front of her, the creatures blocked the way. She didn’t know what to do.