A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  In addition to the work in the yard, Harry started to build a flat platform atop the peaked roof of the house to make space for a beacon.

  “I want the whole neighborhood—the whole city—to see it and show up on Halloween,” he said.

  As Margaret fell asleep at night, she heard his voice muffled above, and footsteps stalking back and forth over her head, an impatient guest waiting to be invited inside.

  9

  Two weeks before Halloween, Harry took a day off and drove the family out to Tyler to visit his mother, Deborah, for her birthday. The drive took most of the morning—a distance Deborah Turner had objected to when Harry and Margaret had first proposed moving her to Weirwood Home.

  “You’ll never come visit,” she’d said. “It’s too far away.”

  She hadn’t been wrong. Margaret and Harry were lucky to make it out every couple of months, but Weirwood was the nicest long-term mental health care community in Texas. It had spacious single-resident quarters; lush, well-manicured grounds; an activity-heavy schedule; and staff to help with things like money management and health and fitness.

  Margaret had also been hesitant to put Deborah in Weirwood. When she and Harry first moved to Texas, Margaret had suggested that Deborah come live with them.

  “Isn’t that the more loving solution?” she’d said.

  Harry had put both hands around his coffee mug and stared at the dregs. It took him a long time to answer. “It’s kind of you to offer, but it wouldn’t be the way you think. I think you—” He broke off and scratched his chin. He tapped the pamphlet for Weirwood on the kitchen table before him. “Trust me, this is for the best.”

  Deborah had taken to the place right away. She made friends, decorated her apartment, got really into knitting. She seemed content when Harry, Margaret, and the girls came to visit, her only complaints being about how much the girls grew in the intervals between.

  “Oh no!” she’d say, as she cupped their faces. “Stop it right this instant!”

  This visit started no differently, with the ritual embraces and exclamations, followed by barbecue and cake at a picnic table on the lawn. After lunch, Harry and the girls ran around with one of the home’s resident dogs, a golden retriever named Daisy. They threw a tennis ball to each other and Daisy ran between them, trying to snatch it out of the air. Margaret and Deborah sat at the table and watched, drinking soda. Margaret cast surreptitious glances at Deborah until the older woman said, “What’s on your mind, sweetheart?”

  “What?” Margaret said, startled.

  “I’m old but not stupid,” Deborah said. “Or blind. Something’s been bothering you since you got here.”

  Margaret had to force herself to say the words. Saying it out loud somehow conjured it into being, made it real.

  “When did you first know,” she said, “that you were—that you weren’t well?”

  Deborah turned to face her. “Is there something wrong with Harry? Or the girls?”

  “The girls are fine, I think,” Margaret said. “But Harry’s been…strange, lately.”

  “I started having bad days in high school,” Deborah said. “Some days the lights were too bright, and sounds were too loud. It was like being hungover, but without the drinking. Sometimes I would stay up for a week, and then sleep for three or four days straight. I couldn’t make or keep friends. I had crazy mood swings. I felt nothing at all on my wedding day, and got the giggles at my husband’s funeral. Sometimes when I spoke to other people, they told me I wasn’t making any sense. When Bill was alive, he helped me manage and hide it. After he was drafted, when it was only me and Harry, it got a lot tougher. I started to feel like people at the supermarket were all staring and talking about me. Reading the ingredients on a can of soup, or looking at the bottom of my coffee mug, I saw hidden messages.” She took a sip of her drink. “I kept a scrapbook—food labels, newspaper clippings, a bunch of memos from the office where I worked. I was so sure someone was trying to tell me something, if I could only figure it out. And then, one night the police picked me up on the shoulder of the highway, ten miles from home, barefoot in my nightgown with no idea how I got there. Harry had woken up alone in the house and made the call. I must have been sleepwalking. Who knows what might have happened otherwise? You probably know the rest. Hospitals, medication, Harry living with his aunt and uncle for a while.”

  “Harry never told me any of that,” Margaret said.

  “I’m not surprised. It was a bad time for both of us,” Deborah said. “No child should have to deal with a mentally ill parent on his own.” She blinked at her lap, and Margaret took her hand. She couldn’t make herself say anything about Harry’s recent behavior now. Whatever came next, Margaret would bear alone.

  Instead, she asked, “You don’t feel like you’re getting secret messages anymore?”

  Deborah gave her a tight, humorless smirk. “No.”

  “What did you think you were supposed to do? Back when you were still getting them.”

  The older woman considered for a moment. “Nothing that made any sense. That’s why they call it crazy.”

  10

  They left for Vandergriff around five. The girls napped in the back while Margaret and Harry listened to the radio up front. Margaret thought about her conversation with Deborah, turning the older woman’s answers over and over in her mind. She was so preoccupied that she took little notice of Harry frowning and rubbing his temples, sucking air through clenched teeth. Then, about ninety minutes from home, he gasped, swerved onto the shoulder of the road, and slammed the car into park so abruptly that Margaret jerked forward against her seat belt.

  “What’s—” she started to say. Harry’s arms flew up off the wheel. One banged against his window and the other struck Margaret on the side of the head. She rocked to her right, more startled than hurt, as the girls woke and began to shout. His legs twitched and his feet stamped the pedals, revving the engine. Little gurgling sounds came from the back of his throat. He sounded like he was drowning. He arched his back, head banging against the headrest.

  Seizure. Her mind grasped the word, held on to it like a life preserver. What should she do? In movies people always put something in the person’s mouth—like a wooden spoon—to keep them from biting through their tongue. Where was she supposed to find a spoon? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The girls were shrieking now, and it made everything so much worse.

  “Shut up!” she shouted at them. “Shut up so I can think.”

  Harry’s body went limp and he slumped forward, chin to chest, eyes closed. The girls fell silent. Tears ran down Sydney’s face, each breath rattling with snot. Eunice was dry-eyed but pale. Harry took shallow breaths through an open mouth. He wiped at his face with the back of one sleeve. Margaret realized she had one hand to her chest and the other hovered over Harry’s shoulder. She let it drop there.

  He opened his eyes, took a shaky breath, and looked at Margaret.

  “Where are we?” he said.

  11

  Margaret drove the rest of the way home. She dropped Eunice and Sydney with the Ransoms, and then took Harry to the emergency room at Vandergriff Memorial. They sat for hours in the crowded waiting room before being led back to an exam room. It was 3:00 a.m. by the time a doctor poked her head in and promised to be with them as soon as possible.

  “Go pick up the girls and get some rest,” Harry said. “I’ll call you when it’s time to come for me.”

  She didn’t want to admit it, but she was happy to leave him there. She needed space. She kissed him on the forehead, her lips dry, his brow salty, and left to retrieve the girls. She brought them home, reassured them with bland promises, put them to bed, and set an early morning alarm so she could call the school and keep the girls home.

  She couldn’t sleep. She hunted for something to watch on TV, but found nothing. Again
st her better judgment, she took an anthology called Great American Horror Stories from Harry’s bookshelf. Glancing through the table of contents, she found a title she recognized too well: “The Hound” by H. P. Lovecraft. She knew she should put the book back on the shelf, but she couldn’t stop herself from reading the story again for the first time since 1968. This time, one passage in particular struck her:

  Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled over the windswept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.

  “You have to help Daddy.”

  She started, jerked out of the story, and dropped the book into her lap. Sydney stood in front of her. Margaret hadn’t even felt her enter the room.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on people,” Margaret said. “And I am helping him. We all are. He’s with the doctors, and the best thing we can do for him right now is rest, so that when he comes home we can take care of him.”

  Sydney gave Margaret a businesslike, unsympathetic look, more annoyed supervisor than child. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Tell me what you mean, then.”

  She scowled, some complicated thing working itself out on her face. “Why don’t you love him anymore?”

  “You’re ten years old, Sydney. You don’t even know what love means.”

  “This is bullshit.” Sydney stormed out of the room. Margaret was too surprised to retaliate. She accepted her daughter’s curse and pondered it. The living room felt tiny, pressed close on all sides. Her stomach cramped and she pressed her hands to it, wincing, before picking up the book and finishing the Lovecraft story. During her first reading, she’d rolled her eyes at the hysterical melodrama, but this time, the final sentences stuck to her mind and wouldn’t shake loose:

  Madness rides the star-wind…claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses…dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial….Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.

  “Where are you?” she hissed into the silence of the house. “What do you want?”

  12

  The hospital kept Harry until nearly dinnertime the next day. When Margaret and the girls retrieved him, he was waiting for them at the dropoff/pickup curb, looking bone tired but otherwise fine. He walked to the car and collapsed into the passenger seat with a sigh of relief. He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes as Margaret started the car.

  “So what’s the story?” she said.

  “No story yet,” Harry said. “They want me to see a specialist. Get more tests.” He produced a business card from his shirt pocket but stowed it again before she got a good look.

  “That’s it? They didn’t even make a guess?”

  Harry shook his head. “They don’t want to make any premature diagnoses. It could be any number of things, so it’s best to wait until we know more.”

  It was like being given permission to pretend there was nothing to be concerned about, and if my mother jumped on it a little too eagerly, I can’t exactly blame her.

  Now several weeks late, she bought a home pregnancy test and took it during the hours she had the house to herself. Here’s where I enter the story, still offstage but evident from the color of a vial of water in the Daisy 2 test kit. My mother sat on the side of the tub and put her face in her hands. A baby. What an awful thing to happen.

  She rubbed her stomach at the spot where she imagined I floated, subdividing, gaining mass and shape. “I’m sorry, baby,” she murmured. I wish I could have responded, could have put my hand on the wall of her womb and reassured her. But I went on happily ignorant in my perfect little world, there but not there with her in her despair.

  Nor was I the only problematic new development. Five days before Halloween, Margaret received a phone call from a Wilma Cabot at the UTV admissions office, who informed her that the check for her application fee had bounced.

  A cold stone settled in Margaret’s middle. “I’m sure there must be a mistake.”

  “I’m sure,” Wilma said, and her kindness layered more ice over Margaret’s insides. “But the fact remains that your application fee has not been paid.”

  “Is my application dead then?” How could the check not have cleared? The balance in her checkbook sat close to a thousand dollars. The fee was only ten dollars.

  “No, ma’am,” Wilma said. “If you can get us a valid check or money order before the end of November, we can still process it.”

  Margaret promised to be by in person with the money in the next couple of days, thanked Wilma, and hung up. She went to the desk where she kept all their financial records and reviewed the last few months. As far as she could tell, nothing was out of place.

  Harry was late coming home, and when he arrived around six thirty, he was riding shotgun in Rick’s truck as Rick backed into the driveway. When Margaret opened the garage door, she found the two of them unloading a polished silver coffin from the bed.

  “What the hell is this?” she said.

  “Hi, Margaret,” Rick said. He looked sheepish, as though he’d been caught doing something wrong.

  “Not now, Rick,” she said, and turned her glare back on Harry. “I thought you were going to build a coffin?”

  “We’re almost out of time,” Harry said. “This makes more sense.”

  “How much did it cost?” Margaret said.

  “Nothing,” Harry said, but Rick looked at the ground, uncomfortable, and he added, “I got it from the community theater downtown.”

  “And they just let you take it?”

  “For Chrissakes, yes,” Harry said. He scratched his neck. Rick went out to the driveway and leaned against the hood of his truck, his back to them. “Okay, it cost a little bit.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred dollars.”

  “Harry!”

  “What?” he said. “I’m giving it to the high school drama department when we’re done. Daniel Ransom’s going to help with line control. If he sticks around, he’s probably going to be a big part of Sydney’s life in a few years. She’s going to want to be in plays.” He studied her reaction, didn’t seem to like what he saw. “What’s the big deal?”

  “I got a call from UTV today,” she said. “My application fee bounced.”

  “It did?” She couldn’t tell if his surprise was feigned or genuine.

  “We had a deal,” she said. “But now our checks aren’t clearing and you’re spending a small fortune on a single prop to convince our neighbor to spend two or three hours as a ticket taker?”

  “Will you calm down? I get paid on Friday. Call the office and ask if you can bring in the check next Monday.”

  “That’s not the point,” Margaret said. “I shouldn’t have to worry what you’re spending behind my back. We’re not supposed to be that couple.”

  Harry ran both hands through his hair. “The money is spent, Margaret. I’m sorry that for all the years I supported you and encouraged you to go back to school, you sat on your ass, stayed home, and did nothing. I’m sorry that after over a decade of waiting on you, I decided to do one fucking thing for myself, and I’m sorry that it happened to coincide with your sudden interest in your education. I’ve already offered a fix for the problem, so tell me, please, what else you could possibly want from me.”

  She wanted life the way it had been even six months ago. She wanted to be able to worry about her husband, wanted to feel uncomplicated, unamb
iguous love, so that no part of her hoped he really was sick, or crazy. She wanted not to worry about the question of whether to bring a baby into this disintegrating family or set it free back into the ether. She wanted all of these things, but couldn’t find a way to say any of them.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t want a single thing from you.”

  13

  As a baby, Eunice ran my mother to the edge of sanity with her insomnia, and Mom couldn’t get her down for a whole night until she was two years old. Even then, I don’t think Eunice slept. She got good at quietly entertaining herself, looking at her books, teaching herself to read by flashlight, and sometimes sneaking into the living room to watch TV after everyone was asleep.

  After Dad bought her the Commodore 64, though, she never risked the TV again. For a few weeks she played the games Dad had gotten her, but she quickly tired of the simple, repetitive tasks—matching words to images, solving easy math problems, fighting dragons and spaceships—and started teaching herself to type in the word-processor program. She wrote at night, careful to keep her keystrokes quiet.

  Being only six (if an advanced, exceptionally bright six), she hadn’t mastered all the niceties of formatting and grammar, so her electronic diary from 1982 has no paragraph indentations or breaks, which makes the whole project difficult to read, but this juvenilia makes an interesting prelude to her later work, an important glimpse into a time I can only ever reach through photographs, journal entries, newspaper articles, and the broken, incomplete memories of the surviving members of our family. I mention all this now to draw your attention to a note Eunice wrote during the week before Halloween: