A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  The film’s spell lasted until Harry broke the silence in the parking lot. “If we speed, I can have you home by ten thirty.”

  Margaret let him open her car door and studied his face. He had a long nose over a small mouth and pointed chin, and brown eyes capped with thick, dark eyebrows. She wouldn’t have noticed him across the room at a party, but his face was pleasant, genial. She felt the haze of the movie dissipating.

  “Are you hungry?” she said. “I’m starving.”

  “I could eat,” he said.

  He took her to a McDonald’s a few blocks away, probably the only open place in town. As they climbed from the car, Margaret grabbed the Bartleby’s bag from the seat between them.

  “I want to see what cost me so much study time tonight,” she said.

  “You might want to wait until you’re finished eating before you dive in,” Harry said. “It’s kind of gross.”

  He asked her to go find a seat while he ordered. She took a booth by a window, pulled the book from the bag, and laid it flat on the table: Visions of Cthulhu: Illustrations Inspired by the Work of H. P. Lovecraft. The cover featured a painting of a great, hideous beast, roughly human in shape, with thick, muscular green arms and legs, its hands and feet ending in talons rather than fingers and toes. It had the head of a nightmarish squid, bulbous and many-eyed, ending in a mass of tentacles, which hung down over the creature’s chest and giant, round belly. A pair of sharp but somehow fragile-looking wings sprouted from the creature’s back, and Margaret wondered how such an obese creature could possibly take flight.

  “I hope you’re still hungry for this stuff.” Harry stood next to her with a tray of burgers, fries, and sodas.

  Margaret tapped the cover of the book. “Is this Cthulhu?” She pronounced it kit-hooloo, and knew from his smirk that she’d said it incorrectly.

  “One artist’s rendition, yes,” he said. “And it’s pronounced kuh-thoo-loo.”

  She pulled the book toward herself, making room for him to set down the food. “He doesn’t look scary. Just sort of gross, like the monster version of a fat Buddha from a Chinese restaurant.”

  He laughed and angled his head for a better look. “Yeah, I guess he kind of does.”

  “Is he supposed to be scary?”

  He sat down across from her. “In the story he’s scary. But maybe it’s one of those things you can’t translate without losing some essential piece. Like, it only works in the imagination.”

  She opened the book, flipped to a random page, and found a painting of another monster—this one more indefinite and amorphous, a single mass of flesh with four black eyes; a glowing, vulva-shaped mouth lined with sharp teeth; and a mass of tentacles waving from its back. It floated among the stars, dwarfing a small planet in the foreground.

  “And this fellow?” she said.

  “Azathoth.” He picked up a cheeseburger and unwrapped it.

  Margaret closed the book with some reluctance and laid it on the seat next to her. She plucked a fry from one of the greasy little sacks on the tray. “So, every picture in the book is based on a story by this Lovecraft guy.”

  Harry nodded, chewing his food.

  “It’s a thick book,” she said. “He must have created a lot of monsters.”

  Harry covered his mouth with one hand and spoke around his food. “A bunch. And they’re all connected, too.”

  “What, like they’re related to each other, like family?”

  He swallowed and took a drink of his soda. “Some of them are, yeah. But I meant that they all exist in a shared world. Sort of like those movies where Dracula meets Frankenstein’s monster, you know?”

  She shrugged. “I saw the one where Abbott and Costello met the Wolfman.”

  “Same basic idea. They’re all out there, sharing space, breathing the same air. Like how so many of William Faulkner’s books take place in the same county.”

  “You ever make that comparison in an English classroom?”

  “Not for a while now,” he said. “I learned my lesson.”

  “Professors don’t care for it?” she said.

  He started to say something, then stopped and shoved a fry into his mouth.

  4

  They arrived back at Mrs. Johnson’s a little before midnight and sat in the car trying to figure out what to say to each other.

  “Well,” Harry said, at last. “Thanks for the movie.”

  “Thanks for buying an expensive book,” Margaret said. “We appreciate your business.” She laughed at her own joke, the sound shrill and too loud.

  He stared straight ahead, mouth piled up on the left side of his face. “I guess I’ll see you at the store.”

  “Good night, Harry.” She slid across the seat and kissed his cheek. It was rough with new stubble.

  She got out of the car and walked up the drive, trying to decide if she was relieved or happy he hadn’t tried anything. This train of thought quickly collided with homework stress—her American Lit paper still unstarted, her Chemistry equations in math limbo.

  “Hey!”

  She turned to see Harry running toward her, something clutched in one hand. He stopped about a foot away and extended a small paperback with a cracked spine: The Tomb and Other Tales by H. P. Lovecraft. The cover was black with white type and featured a picture of a man’s forehead split down the middle, red bugs pouring from the place where his brain ought to be.

  “So you can try him out,” Harry said. “My mom gave me this book for my thirteenth birthday.”

  Margaret took the book. “Okay, sounds good—” she started to say, but he cut her sentence short, closing the distance between them, grabbing the sides of her face, and kissing her. It ended before Margaret had a chance to think about what was happening. He jogged back to his car and left her to wander, dazed, up the stairs to the house, fumbling with her keys and wishing she’d asked for a burger without onions.

  5

  Margaret stayed up all night to finish The Tomb, as though the book’s cast of geniuses, madmen, and near-indescribable horrors held the key to deciphering the strange young loiterer with whom she’d shared a brief, oniony kiss.

  The book didn’t help. Harry didn’t seem like a madman, a monster, or, no offense, a genius. All she learned about him was that he had a taste for the macabre, and an extraordinary patience for dry, overwrought prose. She found Lovecraft almost unreadable. The stories had characters inasmuch as there were named people who existed on the page, but they never grew or changed or engaged in any meaningful human interactions. Whenever they spoke, they sounded like anthropomorphized textbooks from alternate dimensions. Most of the stories seemed to be about a single survivor relating the tale of an exploration of some ancient ruin and going mad as he realized that the ruin had been built (and was sometimes still inhabited) by some primordial horror. It was all florid, adjectival language, with nothing approaching the awesome horror and dread of the paintings in Visions of Cthulhu.

  On the other hand, many of the tales had a compelling sense of dark revelation, the gradual realization by the narrator that the comforting “real world” humans inhabited was in fact nothing but weak gauze ready to be pulled aside to reveal an abyss of terrors underneath. It was sort of the opposite of Moses and the burning bush, or Paul on the road to Damascus. The same basic concept as religion—the world is not the world—but twisted.

  She was still wrestling with this idea when she staggered into Western Civ the next morning, and didn’t notice Pierce approach until he sat down beside her.

  “You’re talking to me again?” she said.

  He sighed, and his nostrils flared. “I admit maybe I overreacted. But what you did—”

  She leaned back in her chair, eyebrows raised. This ought to be good.

  He put a hand to his brow. �
��I’m trying to apologize.” His forehead creased, and it looked familiar somehow.

  “You’re amazing at it. Spectacular.”

  “Can I take you out tonight? And have a real, adult conversation? Please?”

  For the first time in almost a week, Margaret felt the uncomfortable tug of her mother’s voice at the base of her skull. The letters M-R-S burned in her mind’s eye like a brand. She was too tired to say no.

  He took her to Searcy’s most expensive restaurant, a surf and turf place named Captain Bill’s with old fishing nets and harpoons hung from the walls and ceilings. He encouraged her to get whatever she wanted and ordered the lobster to prove his point. Margaret ordered a salad. She’d never eaten lobster. When she watched her parents do so, she found the whole messy business—the bibs, the excess of fluid, the cracked shells with paltry meat inside—revolting. Her mother and father might as well have eaten giant red bugs. The thought put her in mind of the cover of The Tomb and made her glad for her salad all over again.

  She finished her food before Pierce finished cracking and digging and dipping and chomping. His forehead shone even in the low restaurant light, and she tried to decide if he was already going bald. Also, had he worked up a sweat over lobster? That couldn’t be good, right?

  When the waiter brought the check, Pierce set it down in the middle of the table as he pulled his wallet from his jacket. She looked from the bill to Pierce and caught him watching her, making sure she’d seen the total. He pretended not to have seen, threw down several bills, and told the waiter to keep the change.

  He’s trying, she scolded herself.

  After dinner (and a handful of complimentary mints), they drove out to the parking lot by the city park. It was a clear night with lots of stars. The constellations put Margaret in mind of Azathoth from Visions of Cthulhu, the vagina monster propelled through the heavens by tentacles. She sleepily wondered what Harry was doing right now, and wished she could have napped before the date.

  She’d almost drifted off when Pierce said, “You don’t have to sit so far away.” She started as he patted the space next to him.

  She scooted closer. He put an arm around her, and she made herself lean into his body. It wasn’t so unpleasant. There was something comforting about it. Human.

  “Are you still angry at me?” he said.

  “No.”

  “I understand if you are. I acted like a real dingbat.”

  “It’s fine.” She patted his chest. Honestly, she realized, she didn’t care.

  He took a deep breath. “The truth is, it scared me when you—did what you did. We haven’t been seeing each other for very long, and it happened so soon. I didn’t handle myself like a man. Instead, I ran away like a little boy, and hid from you. I asked God, ‘Why would she do this? She’s a good girl.’ And finally, He answered me: She did it because she loves you.”

  Margaret’s body went rigid. “You talk to God a lot?” She never prayed outside of church or meals with other Christians, and even then she only bowed her head, closed her eyes, and said Amen when appropriate. Her mind wandered during prayer. She assumed everyone’s did, although you weren’t supposed to say so.

  “All day, every day,” he said. “Anyway, my point is, God told me that you love me, and furthermore, that the reason I ran away was that I love you, too, and I wasn’t ready to admit it.” He shifted in his seat and peered down at her, his forehead nearly blinding in the moonlight. A vein stood out near his scalp. Was it pulsing? Was he okay? “I love you, Margaret. I know it’s fast, but my parents say that when you know, you know. If you’re ready to get serious, then so am I. I want you to come home with me during the Thanksgiving holiday. I want you to meet my family.”

  Margaret sat up. Pierce smiled at her with a sort of benevolence—an expression she associated with her father’s face on Christmas morning, the look of a man bestowing a great gift.

  “That’s—that’s a big step,” she said.

  “I love you, Margaret,” he said. He leaned down and kissed her. She let him push her down on the seat and crawl atop her. She accepted his kisses and clumsy hands. As he bit her ears and neck, she caught something out of the corner of her eye—something at Pierce’s window. When she moved for a better look, though, it was gone. She tried to settle back into the rhythm of necking, put her hands on his face, kissed him, let him push his tongue into her mouth like a fat, slimy worm. She opened her eyes, and this time the vein on his forehead really was pulsing as he worked himself into a passion on her mostly passive body. She looked up, away from him, and saw something else outside, this time on her side of the car—a large shape with wide, hunched shoulders, and two eyes that glinted orange through the glass.

  She made a muffled sound of panic, put her hands on Pierce’s shoulders to try to push him off, to get his tongue out of her mouth so she could warn him, but he only moaned and fumbled at her harder. The vein on his forehead had stretched across his brow, dividing it into two separate planes of sweaty, pale skin. She wriggled, trying to get free. Something moved beneath the skin of his forehead. The vein pulsed twice and then burst.

  Pierce’s head cracked open, and hundreds of tiny red insects came spilling out onto her face, into her hair, down the cracks between her dress and her flesh, thousands of tiny legs wriggling in a bid for freedom. She kicked Pierce off of her, screamed, and scrambled backward, swiping at herself. She had to get them off, she had to get out of the car, she was going to die in here if she didn’t get out—

  She grabbed the door handle behind her and pulled. The door popped open and dumped her on the ground outside. Pierce came crawling across the seat toward her, and she tried to get up and move, to get away before she had to see his face, to see spiders digging into his eyes, flooding his nostrils, and pouring into his mouth to eat him from the inside out—but she was too tired from her all-night reading marathon, too winded from screaming, and moved too slowly. When his face emerged into the moonlight, she couldn’t help but look.

  He was a little sweaty and flustered, his face flush with interrupted arousal (and possibly alarm), but otherwise okay. The vein had vanished, leaving his waxy forehead plain and flat.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. He got out and knelt in front of her.

  She blinked a few times, breathing hard. “I’m fine,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “I’m okay.”

  6

  She explained that she hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, and might have had some sort of waking nightmare. He played the part of the concerned boyfriend and didn’t ask too many questions. She did find herself hungry again, however, and, eager to avoid any further necking, asked Pierce if they could get drive-through.

  And so she found herself at a McDonald’s for the second night in a row, staring out the window of Pierce’s car while he ordered fries and a milk shake for her at the drive-through. Her face felt raw, as though she’d been nuzzling sandpaper. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to think. She only wanted to stare out the window and drift. Let Pierce deal with the disembodied voice at the drive-through speaker. Still, even this innocuous conversation, an exchange of less than fifty words, made her uneasy. What was it? Why the vague panic in her chest? She turned in her seat and surveyed the car, trying to discern the source of her discomfort. It wasn’t until they pulled up to the window that she understood. Harry opened the folding glass to take their money.

  His eyes met Margaret’s across the car, and his mouth opened in apparent surprise.

  “You sure you want this?” he said, smiling a little as he offered the shake. “It might have tannis root in it.”

  “I’m sorry?” Pierce said.

  Margaret shook her head a little. Harry looked from her back to Pierce.

  “Nothing, sorry,” Harry said.

  “How much was it, again?” Pierce said.
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br />   Harry told him, and they made the exchange. Harry counted the money and shut the window, and Pierce drove away. On the ride to Mrs. Johnson’s, Margaret held the milk shake with two hands, but she couldn’t bring herself to take a sip. When she got back to the house, she took it to the kitchen and dumped it into the sink before heading upstairs. Tannis root indeed.

  She fell asleep almost at once. She dreamt about baying sounds, as if some wolf or hound was in great pain nearby.

  7

  Margaret’s mother cheered when Margaret called to tell her the news about Thanksgiving. She was so loud Margaret had to hold the phone away from her ear.

  “That’s my good girl,” Mrs. Byrne said.

  “My grades are in bad shape,” Margaret said. “I’m behind in all my classes.”

  “You only have to hang on long enough to seal the deal,” Mrs. Byrne said. “You can do this, princess.”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t feel.”

  “It doesn’t feel what?” Mrs. Byrne said.

  It doesn’t feel right, Margaret thought. What she said instead was “It doesn’t feel real yet.”

  “It will,” Mrs. Byrne said, as though reading the subtext in her daughter’s voice. “Just practice being in love and wait it out.”

  As she got ready for school in the mornings, Margaret repeated the mantra again and again. We are in love. We are in love. As she brushed her teeth, she tried to picture Pierce next to her, the two of them taking turns spitting into the sink. As she fixed her hair and got dressed, she tried to miss Pierce, to wonder where he was, what he was doing. She tried to pine, to look forward to Western Civ. She ran along with the kite of their relationship held over her head, trying to get it aloft on its own. It always seemed to need a little extra help.