A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  6

  Mom had the car towed back home and called Rick, who Eunice told me was an old friend of Dad’s from the highway department. Here was another tenuous link with my own secret origin: a potbellied good old boy in cowboy boots who sometimes came over to help with handyman things but who also wouldn’t talk to me about Dad even when I managed to get his attention.

  I didn’t get a chance to bother him that day. When he arrived in his pickup, Mom met him in the parking lot with a beer in hand. He popped the Torino’s blackened hood while my sisters and I sat on the front porch. Mom stood next to him, arms crossed. He spent only a few moments poking around before he stood and wiped his hands with a rag. He shotgunned the beer and then gave his prognosis. Mom’s head drooped.

  “Looks like bad news,” Eunice said.

  “The car was on fire,” Sydney said.

  “Do cars catch on fire a lot?” I said.

  “Almost never,” Eunice said.

  Mom shook hands with Rick. He waved to us and got back into his truck. Mom watched him drive away, kicked a bit of loose gravel, and then trudged up our front walk.

  “Well?” Sydney said.

  “I have to make some phone calls,” Mom said.

  She carried the phone to her bedroom and stayed there for hours. Eunice made hamburger steaks and macaroni and cheese for dinner while I stood on the step stool next to her, handing her whatever she asked for. Mom still hadn’t come out when the meal was ready, so we fixed her a plate, put it in the microwave, and ate without her.

  She emerged late, not long before my bedtime, and sat at the table while we gathered around her. She ate half her food before she spoke:

  “The engine in the car is obliterated. Rick would have to rebuild it from scratch.”

  “What happened?” Sydney said.

  Mom took a long drink from her water glass. “The fire destroyed any evidence, so we’ll never know for sure.”

  “But he can fix it,” Eunice said.

  “Rebuilding an engine costs a lot of money,” Mom said.

  “How much?” I said.

  “A lot more than we can afford right now.” She clenched her hands into fists. “I just had the oil changed.”

  “What will we do?” Eunice said.

  “Sally can drive you and Noah to school, and she’ll take me to and from work. Sydney, you’ll need to get rides to school and rehearsals with a friend.”

  Sydney already did this most of the time anyway, but still asked, “For how long?”

  “A while,” Mom said. “Money’s tight and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Sydney said.

  “Sydney,” Mom said. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “I’m having a rough day. Can you, this once, stop pressing my buttons and get on my team?”

  “I’m trying,” Sydney said, matching Mom’s frustrated tone with impressive accuracy. “This isn’t about your feelings anymore. We’ve put up with the crappy apartment, the C-grade ground chuck and cruddy pasta, the rattling, flaming car—we’ve done it your way for years, and this is where it’s landed us. Will you please entertain the notion that it might be worth trying something different this one time?”

  Mom put her elbows on the table and clasped her chin. She looked at the half-finished food on her plate, then around the room. Her eyes settled on me and her brow furrowed. I shrank under her gaze—she usually looked at me this long only when I’d done something wrong. As a result, I’ve never really liked being looked at.

  She sighed. “Tell Mr. Ransom I’m willing to have a conversation about a haunted house.”

  Sydney got up and went to the phone.

  “That’s all I’m promising,” Mom said. “A conversation.”

  If Sydney heard, she gave no sign.

  7

  On Saturday night, Sally drove us all to Mr. Ransom’s for dinner. He still lived next door to my family’s former house, and I insisted on sitting by the driver’s side window so I could get a good look when we arrived. Another piece of our family history I’d heard about but never seen. Sometimes, driving around town, I’d look at random houses and try to imagine my sisters playing in the yard, Dad mowing the lawn, Mom reading in a bay window, all of them spread out in an overwhelming abundance of space, where you could go a whole day without seeing another person if you wanted.

  As we pulled into Mr. Ransom’s driveway and Eunice pointed out our old home, I was disappointed by the reality—a brick house with a tree in the overgrown yard and a rusting van in the driveway.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “The lawn looked better when it was ours,” Mom said.

  Sydney, sitting behind the passenger seat and facing resolutely the other direction, said, “It was a nice place to live. Nicer than where we live now.”

  Mr. Ransom’s house didn’t look great, either. We traversed a walkway bordered with scraggly grass, stepped over waterlogged newspapers, and ducked under a low-hanging tree branch before we reached the door. When Mom rang the bell, Mr. Ransom answered in a button-down shirt, bits of bloody toilet paper stuck to his neck where he’d cut himself shaving. His collar was crooked as he beckoned us in.

  The inside of the house felt nicer—framed prints on the walls, decorative scarves over the lamps, furniture upholstered in pristine white fabric and protected by shiny plastic covers—but smelled stale and dusty, like a place where people hadn’t lived in a while.

  “I ordered in,” Mr. Ransom said, leading us to the kitchen table, which was stacked with pizza boxes, paper plates, and plastic cups and plastic silverware. It looked like the setup for a sad kid’s birthday party, lacking only pointy hats and a decorative tablecloth.

  “This is—quite a spread,” Mom said.

  “It got here a lot sooner than I thought it would,” he said. “So it might be cold.”

  “We can warm it up in no time,” Sally said. She opened one of the boxes, touched the crust, then moved into the kitchen like she owned the place.

  “Do you have a bathroom?” I said.

  “Wouldn’t be much of a house without one, would it?” Mr. Ransom said, then smiled to show he was joking. “At the end of the hall on your left.”

  I crossed the dusty living room and headed down the hall, too shy to admit I didn’t yet know left from right. I found three doors, picked one, and opened it. I knew as soon as I flipped the light switch that I’d entered a boy’s bedroom. Masters of the Universe bedsheets, Superman curtains, and a Batcave play set in the middle of the room, Batman action figure facedown in front of it, as though abandoned midplay.

  Because money had been so tight this year, I hadn’t gotten many new toys. As the flood of Batman merchandise had crashed onto store shelves, I’d had my hands on plenty, but owned none of it, and the Batcave was the holy grail: a hunk of gray molded plastic made to look like stone, with red stairs and blue platforms for Batman to stand upon and brood, a Batcomputer with a huge monitor where he could solve mysteries, and, on the backside, a holding cell for criminals, and a trick platform that could dump a villain (or hero) into a deep pit.

  I bent over the Batcave, mouth dry with longing, and picked up the Batman. I shoved my free hand into my pocket, gauging the available space. Would anyone notice the lump? It wasn’t really stealing—Mr. Ransom’s family had left, and who would miss a single toy?

  “Get lost?”

  I dropped the toy and almost shouted. Mr. Ransom stood inside the room. I clasped my hands behind my back. “I don’t know left from right. And then I saw all the toys.”

  “It’s my son Kyle’s room,” he said.

  “I thought he didn’t live here anymore.”

  “I’m hoping he’ll come back someday, at least to visit. I want his r
oom to be just the way he remembers it.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Mr. Ransom,” I said, shame burning my face.

  “The bathroom’s across the hall,” he said. He ushered me out of the room and shut the door behind us. I opened the bathroom door and he started back down the hall, but before I could enter, he called to me.

  “Your left side is the side with your heart,” he said, putting his hand to the spot. I mimicked him, and we faced each other for a moment like we were saying the pledge of allegiance.

  I’ve thought about this moment a lot in the years since. In the old days, your left side was considered your sinister or bad side. Left-handedness used to indicate a moral failing. Teachers would smack you with a ruler if they caught you writing with your left hand. So it seems appropriate to me that the heart, the symbol of love, the organ supposedly driving the major decisions of our lives, beats on the left side of the body.

  When I got back, everyone had settled down to reheated pizza.

  “Here’s the deal,” Mr. Ransom said, as I hopped into a chair beside Eunice. “The theater department overspent on our summer production of The Sound of Music, and we only have enough money to put on maybe one more show this year. The problem is, we’re supposed to do four more.”

  “So we both have money problems,” Mom said.

  Mr. Ransom rubbed his goatee. “Your family has already demonstrated a talent for a particular kind of production design, and I have a little money and a department full of kids dying to get in front of an audience. So we thought”—he gestured at Sydney—“that the department could collaborate with your family on a haunted house this year. We’d go fifty-fifty, and if it works, my department earns enough money for another year of plays, and you can afford to fix your car, or maybe even buy a new one.”

  Mom ran a fingertip along the rim of her wineglass as she considered. “You have the money and the kids. It sounds like you don’t need my help.”

  “We need your family’s vision or else it’s just another crappy haunted house,” Mr. Ransom said.

  “That ‘vision,’ ” Mom said, throwing air quotes around the word, “was my late husband’s. I only made costumes.”

  “Eunice and I did some design work, too,” Sydney said. “It wasn’t all Dad.”

  “You drew funny pictures and your father indulged you,” Mom said.

  “Bullshit,” Sydney said.

  “Sydney,” Sally said.

  “Bite me, Sally,” Sydney said.

  “Sydney,” Mom said.

  “Be that as it may,” Mr. Ransom said, raising his voice, “I understand Harry left behind a lot of unused designs?”

  “Those are off-limits,” Mom said.

  “They’re not yours to keep,” Sydney said.

  “They absolutely are,” Mom said. Sydney looked ready to dive across the table. Mom stared her down. “Test me and I’ll set them on fire tonight.”

  I stuffed pizza into my mouth. I wasn’t hungry—felt kind of sick to my stomach, actually—but I had to do something.

  “Maybe this was a bad idea,” Mr. Ransom said. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble. I’m sure you have another plan for getting back on your feet.”

  Mom took a huge bite of pizza. After she swallowed, she finished her wine in a single gulp. “If I had another plan, I wouldn’t be here. Sally, do we have the money?”

  Sally emptied the remains of the wine bottle into Mom’s glass. “We’ll make it work.”

  “It’ll cost less than you think,” Mr. Ransom said. “We have a scene shop at the school, so we can pitch in with building materials. Students will work for class credit, so you don’t have to pay them, and we can sell tickets at the school to a captive audience. You can keep the sets, props, costumes, and half of any profits.”

  “You really think there will be profits?” Mom said.

  “I really do,” he said.

  8

  That night, I sat on the girls’ bedroom floor, my back against their shared dresser, feet pressed to the foot of Eunice’s bed. Their room, although larger than mine, felt much smaller with two beds crammed into it, the walls decorated with programs from Sydney’s shows and a giant Paula Abdul poster. Eunice’s only decoration was a photo of Ursula K. Le Guin, hanging directly over her bed like a crucifix or dream catcher. The girls passed back and forth over me a flurry of pajamas, makeup removers, moisturizers, face creams, and toothbrushes.

  “Why did Mr. Ransom’s family move away?” I said. Although I’d heard about the split when it happened, I hadn’t started thinking of the Ransoms as people—as a family—until I visited their quiet, empty house, and felt the tug of the missing people on Mr. Ransom, who cut himself shaving and couldn’t even get a warm pizza meal together.

  “None of your business,” Sydney said. She shooed me away from the dresser. “I need in the bottom drawer.”

  I got into Eunice’s bed, and paged through her heavy algebra textbook. The impossibly complex series of letters and numbers printed inside looked like an alien language, dizzying to behold. I shut the book again.

  “Yeah, but why?” I said.

  Eunice swept in from the bathroom and hopped into the bed with me. She took the alarm clock from the nightstand between their beds and pulled it into her lap to set it. “Sometimes people marry the wrong person, and, when that happens, they either stay together and hate each other, or they do the right thing and break up.”

  “Don’t make excuses for her,” Sydney said. She pulled a tank top out of the drawer.

  “Did Mom marry the wrong person when she married Dad?” I said. “Is that why she won’t talk about him?”

  “Don’t ever let me hear you talk about Dad that way again,” Sydney said. She stalked out of the room and slammed the bathroom door.

  9

  Later, after spacing out for ten pages of Kadath before bed, I asked Eunice, “What’s a haunted house like?”

  “I’ve never been to one myself,” she said. “Only the one we made with Mom and Dad when I was your age.”

  “Was it scary?”

  “Not for me, but since I helped make it, I already knew everything that was going to happen. I think it was scary for the people who came to visit, though.”

  “What about Mom and Dad?” I said.

  “They both seemed angry and worried most of the time,” she said. “They fought a lot.”

  “Then why would Mom want to do it again?”

  She made a face. “She doesn’t want to, Noah. She has to. Sydney’s the one who wants to.”

  “Why does Sydney want it so much? And why doesn’t Mom want to use Dad’s old designs?”

  “I don’t know,” Eunice said. For the first time in my life, I didn’t believe her.

  10

  There was no scratching at the window that night, just a loud crack that startled me awake. I opened my eyes and sat up. The apartment was dark and quiet around me, which meant everyone was in bed. Either I’d dreamt the sound, or it had come from the atrium.

  I got out of bed, opened the curtains, and pressed my face to the glass. A few toys lay scattered where I’d left them, and something small and black lay in a rusty lawn chair, almost invisible in the dark. Still half-asleep, I unlocked the window and slid the glass panel open as quietly as I could.

  The concrete felt cool and rough against my bare feet, the air humid and reeking of automobile exhaust. I walked over to the chair and picked up the object: a Batman action figure, as shiny and pristine as if fresh from its package. The toy I’d almost stolen from Mr. Ransom’s house. I turned a slow circle, but found no figures lurking in the shadows.

  11

  Mom and Sydney set up shop at an old warehouse on the far side of town. Mom sold a rare run of The Amazing Spider-Man to pay for the lease, and the we
ekend after signing, my family made a trip in Sally’s car to our old storage unit. Mr. Ransom and a couple of theater kids met us there, and together we unpacked all the props, costumes, and sets from the Tomb. I watched with simultaneous wonder and disappointment as it shambled piece by piece back into the light—wonder, at finally seeing this obscure bit of family history, and disappointment at how cheesy it all looked under the unforgiving fluorescents: flimsy sheets of wood painted to look like limestone brick in a mummy’s tomb; flaking papier-mâché monster masks; intentionally raggedy costumes with stitching that might drive a Lovecraftian hero into hysterics. I’d erected vast nightmare chambers in my imagination, and the actuality was, like my family’s former house, a letdown. Mom, Sydney, and Eunice, on the other hand, looked uneasy and troubled.

  Once everything was loaded and strapped down—the whole unit fit into two pickup truck beds—we drove out to the new warehouse, which sat on the town limits at the end of a long, narrow, tree-lined drive. Sydney got out of the car to unlock the gate, and we pulled into a massive parking lot before a rectangular box of a building, dull and gray as cinder block. Mom led us through the glass front door and into a reception area with a large desk and a few dusty chairs pushed against the wall, then through a set of double doors into the warehouse proper, a big open space with a concrete floor and exposed rafters, a pair of restrooms in one corner, and, along the wall facing the parking lot, a series of rolling garage doors. Dust billowed under our feet, and the hot, stuffy air stung my nose.

  They opened two of the dock doors and moved everything inside, spreading it across the empty floor. While the theater kids drank soda in the parking lot, Mom, Eunice, Sydney, and Mr. Ransom surveyed everything, assessing what could be reused and what ought to be thrown away. They realized quickly that Mom’s initial idea—reconstruct the Tomb, freshen the paint, and add a couple of chambers—wouldn’t work. For one thing, much of the wood Dad had salvaged during construction had either rotted or cracked, rendering it unusable. For another, it all looked small and cheap arrayed in such a large, well-lit space.