How to Make Monsters

by Gary McMahon

  He covered the miles slowly, concentrating so hard on the road ahead that a sharp pain flared up behind his eyes. The town was silent as he passed through, everyone indoors and still enjoying the remnants of the festive period. Decorations that had not yet been taken down hung limply from lampposts and road signs. The ache in his head receded to a dull throb, matching the rhythm of the traffic lights as they phased through their sequence.

  When he reached Lucy’s place he remained inside the car, engine running, fingers clasping the steering wheel. The radio was playing quietly, a gentle country ballad. Chester closed his eyes and willed away the pain. His arms and shoulders ached from gripping the wheel so tightly during his journey, and he felt like he was learning things all over again.

  Finally he got out of the car and shuffled down Lucy’s drive. The snow was melting, turning to grey slush, and withered bedding plants poked their heads through the softening crust.

  He knocked on the door and waited, wishing now that he’d called to prepare her for his visit. Lucy didn’t like surprises; she was an ordered girl, with well defined edges to her world.

  Her face was pale when it peeked chastely around the edge of the door, her eyes big and dark and even a little afraid. “Chester?” The sound of buzzing flies emanated from the house behind her, as if they were clustering about spoiled meat; or perhaps Lucy had simply left a noisy kitchen appliance running in the kitchen.

  He watched her breath mist white in the chilled air, shrouding her features. “Hi, Lucy. I’m sorry I didn’t ring, but I needed to see you.” His feet crunched on leftover snow as he adjusted his position on the doorstep.

  “But I thought we sorted all this out during our last conversation, Chester. That I wasn’t going to come over again.”

  The buzzing sound grew momentarily louder, then stopped.

  Chester did not know what to say. He could recall no such conversation, but to admit the fact might lead him down a road he did not want to travel. “That’s why I came to you.”

  Lucy blinked; her eyes were all pupil, and they sucked in the light. She opened the door further until it pulled on the security chain. Chester could not remember there being a security chain in place on any of the many times he’d been here before. Had she had it fitted because of him? Absently, he rubbed at the scar tissue above his eyes with his fingertips. The raw flesh ached; it felt warm to the touch, despite the rest of his face being cold.

  “What do you want, Chester?” her voice was shaky as she backed away from the door, easing it closed. “Please. Just go away. If you have any more of those relics with you, I don’t want them. What the hell kind of Christmas present was that meant to be, anyway?” Her facial expression looked on the verge of hysteria, but Chester could not be sure whether she was about to laugh or scream.

  He had no idea what she meant, and the pain in his head threatened to return in force. “Lucy…” But he could say nothing more; words failed him; he was bereft of ideas.

  Lucy closed the door. He heard the bolts as she slid them home; and the buzzing sound recommenced, louder this time, almost avid in its intensity.

  Chester stood on the doorstep for a moment or two more, lost in his own confusion, and then he turned and stalked back towards the car. A movement caught his eye, and as he glanced over at the houses opposite, he saw something lithe and dark struggling beneath a neighbour’s porch, its thin hind legs scrabbling in the grubby snow. It might have been a large house pet, but for the fact that it looked spiny and elongated, and as a result of its frantic motion the thing seemed to possess more limbs than were necessary.

  Chester sat behind the wheel and shook his head. His scars were livid in the rearview mirror. He started the engine and crawled back the way he’d come, pointing the car in the right direction and hoping that he did not hit anything. On his side of town, past the old Shell garage and the small construction site that never seemed to progress beyond the demolition stage, he passed the tree he’d hit in the accident. He slowed down without realising, stopped and got out of the car.

  The tree had a huge split in its trunk, near the thick roots where they poked through the earth like fat fingers. The cleft was dark, moist, and looked as if it might be deep enough to lead into the centre of the earth. Chester got down on his knees and stared into the hole, aware that from a distance it might appear that he was praying. He smiled, placed the fingers of one hand inside the hole, brushing its sides. Someone had stuffed snow in there, perhaps a passing child. His fingers burrowed into the soft layer, and he grasped something. When he pulled out the object he saw that it was a child’s doll, a mere plaything. The doll was naked; the smooth plastic of its body was gouged and bitten, possibly during rough play, and its hair had been clumsily removed. Its glass eyeballs remained intact, but they had been damaged with a thin blade or the pointed ends of sharp, needle-like teeth.

  “Jesus,” he said, throwing the doll as far away from himself as he could. It landed on the soft snow, face-down, as if trying to burrow back into the earth. Beyond it, in the distance, three or four sleek shapes dropped down from an upright position and began to caper in a brown field patched with white. They ran in circles, chasing or being chased, and as Chester squinted into the low winter sun, the shapes seemed to diminish, bleeding into the background like ink stains.

  Chester forced his hand once more into the cleft in the tree, and when he withdrew it he was holding two small items wrapped in crumpled piece of paper. When he opened the package he realised the wrapping was in fact a child’s crayon drawing of a house. It contained a pair of figures carved crudely from stone.

  Relics.

  Were these the same as the ones Lucy had accused him of offering her, and if so, what were their purpose? They were tiny, their outlines uncertain, and each one had too many arms and legs to be considered wholly human. Although the figures were standing upright, they looked as if they’d be more comfortable scrabbling around closer to the ground.

  That evening he was unable to eat dinner. His appetite had been quashed by the situation with Lucy. He tried to remember what had occurred between them, but all he could summon was the image of her back, retreating along the footpath towards her car. Had they argued again? Had he struck out at her? Now that he thought about it, when she’d peeked at him around the edge of the door earlier that day, it had looked like she was sporting a black eye.

  His sister’s house settled around him, groaning and popping like an old man’s joints. Something that sounded like tiny footsteps scurried across the underside of the floorboards in the hall. Chester gazed out of the lounge window, watching the sun go down across the fields, the light fleeing from him, as if sucked back into that great dying star. The darkness left in its place shivered with potential movement and he closed the curtains to block out the view.

  He stood by the mirror and examined his features. He no longer looked like himself; his face was twisted out of shape. The scars shone, catching the last of the dying light, and when the ceiling lamp flickered, the taut strips of tissue seemed to jump from his head and hover in the air like ectoplasm. Even when he closed his eyes he could see his altered image: mouth pulled into a grimace, eyes set too far apart, cheeks fuzzed with beard growth to compensate for the lack of hair on his head.

  He often thought that, during the accident, when his head had cracked open on the windscreen, something had crawled out: some inner darkness he had freed inadvertently into the external world. Then, on bad days, he thought that maybe it was the other way around and something had crawled inside, taking up residence in his broken skull.

  His brain twitched, but he pushed the image away. There was nothing in there but a complex bundle of nerve endings and highly responsive matter; even his thoughts had abandoned him.

  Leaning into the mirror, he stared at his eyes, and was shocked to see movement behind them. Like looking through a window, he glimpsed a large dark mass as it passed across his gaze, turning to notice him for a second.

  “
No,” he whispered. “No.”

  Running to the front door, he opened it and glared out into the evening, watching the distant shapes as they cavorted like children in the growing gloom. They snapped at each other, massive mandibles compressing only empty air, newly muscled bodies twisting in the twilight as they drew closer to the house, where they had been headed all along. Had he unleashed these things during the accident, or had they simply been lying in wait, preparing for the right moment to escape the cage of his mind?

  He slammed the door, pushed a chair against it, then stood back and wondered how strong they were. He gathered other items of furniture from the lounge and heaved them against the door to prevent them from entering – an antique bureau, a set of drawers, the moth-eaten settee. Then, panting, he sat on the bottom stair and watched the door, sensing their approach, calculating how long it might take them to break down his flimsy barricade.

  His balance failed him as he tried to stand, and he reached out to steady himself on the banister. Upstairs, something moved. An unstable shadow passed the bedroom doorway and Chester bit down hard on a scream. He turned and examined his newly-built barrier, knowing that he did not have the strength to remove it at any great speed. By the time he cleared a way through to the door, whatever was upstairs would be upon him; and the things prowling outside, in the gathering darkness, would be waiting on the threshold to take him down.

  His skull throbbed; things with clawed hands struck at him from within. Outside, in the real world, their corporeal counterparts snickered from the shadows. The lights flickered again, and he cursed the company who supplied his utilities. That quick snapping sound – the same one he’d heard earlier on the phone – began to pursue him down the wide staircase, whatever was making it out of sight for now. He wondered if they’d simply kill him, or if they would use him to supply food, just as they’d used the farmer from the news report. But hadn’t the farmer found a way to stop them? For a while at least, until Chester’s accident had somehow started it all up again, unleashing whatever force they represented…

  Chester hobbled towards the kitchen, looking for a weapon. He grabbed a steak knife from the rack, cutting the palm of his hand on the blade. Blood sprayed the fridge door, so red that it was almost a brand new colour, or at least a shade of an existing colour he had not before encountered. The lights flickered for the last time before going out, and Chester smiled at the inevitability of it all. But it was always dark inside, where the bad things grew and bred, waiting patiently for release. His head felt like it was in the process of swelling, its size increasing to fill the entire room. The sounds inside his skull were also outside, closing in on him.

  The telephone rang in the other room, but Chester knew that there was no way through. He listened to it, tempted by its shrill song, wondering if Lucy had changed her mind and wanted to come over.

  Then, slowly, he moved to the centre of the room, gripping the knife in both hands, to wait for his house guests to formally present themselves.

  NOWHERE PEOPLE

  The night seemed to press against my windscreen like a thick fluid as I drove towards the town centre, one eye on the radio recessed into the dashboard as I attempted to tune it to an all-night Jazz and Blues station. Charlie Parker’s horn pierced the bubble of stale air inside the cab, and I let myself lean back into the driver’s seat, the music washing over me and bringing calm to my mind.

  I was tired: dog-tired. As the Beatles once said, it had been a hard day’s night. I was at the back end of a ten-hour shift, and my lower back was singing like a chorus of crippled choirboys from being locked into the same position for so long. These suicide shifts were killing me, but it was the only way to make any serious cash in the taxi game. And I needed real money more than ever now: after Jude’s birth, Tanya had gone part time to enable her to look after our baby daughter, so I was the only major wage earner in the household.

  Streetlights flashed past, blinking like sodium strobes before my weary eyes, and the night folk prowled the avenues looking for mischief. Low rent prostitutes paraded the footpath outside the Mecca bingo hall; tired, overweight beat coppers watched them from shop doorways and ate chips from greasy bunched newspapers. Clubbers and pubbers staggered like somnambulists towards generic fast food outlets, craving empty calories to help them sleep the sleep of the pissed.

  The two-way radio in the cab belched static, then Claire’s deep growling voice cut in: ‘Karl…Karl, where are you? Number 27? Karl, dammit, come back!’

  I smiled, lifted the plastic mouthpiece from its perch, and told her that I’d be picking up in ten minutes. This seemed to placate her, and she even told me the latest asylum seeker joke that was doing the rounds back at the depot. It was unsurprisingly crude – vulgar, even – and I couldn’t be bothered to force a laugh. Claire called me a humourless bastard, then hopped off the line, leaving more of that empty ululating static to take her place.

  Two girls who looked far too young to be out this late crossed the road without looking on the zebra crossing that suddenly appeared before me, causing me to slam on the car’s brakes. Their thin anaemic faces slowly turned to look at me without really registering my presence, and I glimpsed a profound emptiness in their blank, lustreless eyes. One of them was mechanically pushing pieces of rolled up kebab into her lipstick-smeared mouth; the other was chain-smoking cheap cigarettes. Both of them looked lost, half dead before the age of twenty. I thought of my own newborn daughter, and made a silent promise to myself that she would never end up like that, walking the streets at two a.m., cruising for randy drunks with money in their pockets. In less than an hour these two girls would be bending over in some grimy back alley, or sucking dick in a cheap B&B along the Coast Road. It was just too damned depressing. I felt ice lock around my heart in a sculpted fist.

  The girls reached the other side of the road, and a big Mercedes cruised up to the kerb, the driver leaning out of the side window to whisper sour nothings from behind a cupped hand. The girls smiled dead smiles and climbed into the back seat, too-short skirts riding up over pallid thighs bereft of muscle tone. All that remained on the footpath when the car pulled away was the discarded kebab wrapper and some pale, dry scraps of meat.

  There was a huge advertising hoarding stapled to the wall at the corner of Mylton Road and O’Reilly Street, selling rampant consumers some new brand of alcopop. Graffiti had been daubed across it in thick red dripping lines; I glanced at the slogan as I drove past it.

  Arseylum seekers out! Kill em all!

  The viciously droll message was unequivocal, fuelled by impotent rage and directionless tabloid-driven jingoism. The hatred behind the words was terrifying, bland and unfocused; ready to turn on anyone different from what was considered the norm. The people who had written the words operated under the assumption that all immigrants were money grabbing scam artists, even the honest ones. It was at once sickening and heart-breaking.

  I thought of Jude once more, fearing for her future. I prayed that I was strong enough to educate her to the dangers of such narrow, uninformed thinking. Hoped that I was man enough for the daunting task that lay ahead. It dawned on me yet again that raising a child was the most difficult and risky undertaking of all: if you screwed it up, you were just adding to the dumb herd, producing another mindless follower. The enormity of it all made me want to stop the car and run into the night, screaming until my throat burned. But I drove on, heading towards my last pick-up of this harrowing shift. My final few quid before going home to flop lifelessly into bed alongside my sleeping wife.

  The man was waiting by the kerb outside the Pound Shop when I drew up, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He seemed nervous, but I assumed that he was just riled at me for being late. He lifted a small brown hand and twitched a little half smile as I stopped the car, then jumped into the back seat, slamming the door behind him as if in an attempt to keep out the night.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, pal. Bit of confusion back at base camp.’

/>   ‘S’okay, my friend. No problem.’ His accent was certainly foreign, but I couldn’t place where in the world he could be from. Asia? The Far East? My ignorance of such things truly knows no bounds.

  ‘Where to, boss?’

  ‘Wishwell, please. Palm Tree Way.

  Shit. I could’ve done without a trip to that part of town at this hour. Wishwell was the worst estate in the borough, and the vermin who were housed there would still be up and about, fighting with each other, playing loud music on stolen stereos, smoking weed and drinking illegally imported French booze.

  ‘Good night out?’ I asked, making small-talk.

  ‘No, no. I been working. Cleaning offices. I go home now, tend to family. Sleep.’

  So he worked the graveyard shift cleaning town centre offices: doing the jobs nobody else would do, just like so many other immigrants in this country. Oiling the hidden wheels of commerce. Paid shitty wages under the counter – tax-free, but with no additional benefits – just to enable him to feed and clothe his family. This hard-working man was exactly the type of person the graffiti on the hoarding had been aimed at:: a man just trying to get by, to do right by his family. I had more in common with him than I did the scum who had painted the vitriol. I pitied him for living in Wishwell, but it was probably the only housing the council had offered.

  ‘Tough shift, eh?’ I glanced at him in the rear-view mirror: small face, ever-blinking eyes, creased brown skin.

  ‘Yes, mister. Just like you, I work hard to make something of myself and my family.’

  I took the quick route in an effort to save him a quid on the fare- down by the river, past the dark and abandoned shipyard and the flat-roofed clothing warehouses. The man had lapsed into silence. He sat staring out of the side window with those nervous blinking eyes, his thoughtful features bathed in a wash of sodium light from the lamps that lined the kerb along the riverbank. I wondered again where he had come from, what he had given up to come here and feel safe. But was he really safe? I didn’t think so. Persecution comes in many forms.