A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  “If we ask people to drive out here for this”— Mr. Ransom said, gesturing at the flattened set—“they’re going to feel ripped off.”

  “This won’t do at all,” Mom said.

  “So we have a few weeks to dream up something from scratch,” he said. He ran both hands through his hair.

  “Not necessarily,” Sydney said. She unzipped Eunice’s ever-present backpack and removed a small portfolio, from which she pulled a stack of paper. She passed sheets around to everyone. The page I received featured a picture of a group of teenagers huddled together in a bedroom, shining a flashlight under the bed while something peered at them from its hiding place in the closet. As we traded drawings, I realized that each featured the same group of teenagers in a different scene. In one, the kids moved through a morgue, while behind them a body sat up in an open drawer, still draped in a sheet. In another, the kids walked across a small pond, stepping from stone to stone, while a scaled, webbed hand reached out of the water toward one poor girl’s ankle. In yet another—a rich man’s study, lined with animal heads—this same girl had been snatched by the monster, and it dragged her away while the rest of the kids hugged one another in terror. In each picture, the kids shared a single flashlight.

  “You did these?” Mom asked.

  Sydney nodded.

  “I had no idea you could draw,” she said.

  “How come there’s always one flashlight?” I said.

  “That’s the concept,” Sydney said, looking relieved at the change of subject. “We take some of the simplest, most mundane scare rooms—the easy ones we can throw up in a few weeks—and we add a chase element. So in addition to the regular scares, there’s a monster tracking you, and you’re trying to escape before it finds you. We only let people through in groups of four, and the only lighting in the place is a single flashlight. Maybe we even plant one of our own people in a group every now and then, and the monster could ‘get’ that person. It would be cheap, and we wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel in a few weeks.”

  Everyone else handed Sydney’s drawings back to her, but Mom held on to hers. Her face looked tight, as though the flesh had been yanked taut.

  “How did you come up with this?” she said.

  Sydney fussed with the stack of pages. “Mr. Ransom always says that necessity is the mother of invention, right? I just tried to think up what would be easy.” She held out her hand for the picture.

  “These drawings are good,” Mom said. “More than good.” She sounded miserable about it and handed the drawing back to Sydney with obvious reluctance. “Is this really what you want?”

  A moment of silence followed, broken only by Mr. Ransom’s snort. “Jesus, Sydney,” he said. “I’d hate to be you when I go to sleep at night.” He looked around at us, half a smile on his face. It faded when none of us laughed.

  “Speaking of, should Noah be here for this conversation?” Eunice said.

  “What?” I said. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing,” Eunice said. “But I don’t want you having nightmares.”

  Mom pointed over our shoulders. “Eunice, take your brother to the office while we talk.”

  “I want to help,” I said.

  “Go play with Eunice,” Mom said.

  “I’ll take him up front, but I’m coming back,” Eunice said. “I’m part of this.”

  Mom considered. “Fine,” she said. “Don’t touch anything!” she called as Eunice tugged me away.

  12

  “This isn’t fair,” I said, as Eunice tucked me in that night.

  “Life isn’t fair, buddy,” she said.

  “Mom would have let me help if you hadn’t said anything.”

  “Mom isn’t paying proper attention,” Eunice said. “But I am, and you have to trust me when I say this will be too scary for you.” She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Who do I love most?”

  It was too early for that question. “Wait—aren’t you going to read to me?”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to get started on the script tonight. Mr. Ransom’s making me work with this girl from his playwriting class, so I have to come up with some ideas before I meet with her tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have time in a couple of days?” She hurried across the room and flipped off the light switch. “Good night, little prince.”

  I lay fuming in the dark. Why did my family always exclude me? Why wasn’t I ever a part of things?

  When the scratching at the window started, instead of fear, I felt a hard ball of anger in my stomach. I climbed out of bed and yanked aside one of the curtains. The anger dissipated at once, replaced by wonder.

  My first impression was of dark stone blocking my view of the atrium, tall and monolithic, but roiling dark on dark like flirting clouds of smoke. I leaned forward, trying to gauge the object’s size, and it moved, its top sweeping down. A face drew level with mine, elongated and furry, its snout pressed to the glass and exhaling blasts of fog. Its eyes were bright orange.

  I started to flinch back, but then realized that I was only doing it because I was supposed to. It’s what people on TV and in movies did when they saw a monster. I wasn’t actually afraid. I wanted to see this thing.

  The creature kept still, as though understanding and obeying my desire. I let my gaze linger on its tufts of brown fur, orange eyes, and protruding snout, its talons on the glass, its garment like a living shadow, shrinking and bending from the light, sometimes black, sometimes red.

  I put a hand to the cool glass and spread my fingers. The creature tilted its head to one side, then mimicked my movement, placing its long-taloned paw opposite mine. It looked at our hands, then back at me. I couldn’t shake an impression of a dog, and laughed a little. The creature exhaled hard, fogging the glass. Startled, I stepped back. A dog, maybe, but dogs could still bite.

  I shifted to look through unfogged glass. The creature had also drawn back into its cloak, so only its snout remained visible. It peeked at me from inside, an orange gleam in its eye sockets.

  I leaned forward, held up one finger. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you understand?”

  The creature held up one digit, then nodded slowly, as though trying out the gesture for the first time. I moved my finger to my lips to signal for quiet. Again it mirrored me.

  I let the curtain drop and crossed the room to my toy box. I opened the front panel as quietly as I could and thrust my arm through all the sharp plastic edges to the very bottom, where I’d hidden the Batman action figure. Next, I grabbed my Kermit the Frog flashlight off my nightstand. I unlatched and opened the window wide enough for me to wriggle through.

  I stood on the concrete of the atrium, barefoot. The creature kept its distance. Extended to its full height, it looked at least seven feet tall, most of its considerable length obscured by the amorphous cloak. I turned on the flashlight to get a better look, but the creature held up its claws and looked away.

  “You don’t like that,” I said.

  It shook its head. No.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and switched it off.

  The creature faced me again, its breath heavy and wet. I grew uncomfortable beneath the bright, unwavering gaze. I wasn’t used to being so visible, or noticed. I held up the Batman toy.

  “Did you bring this?” I said.

  It nodded.

  “Why?” I said.

  The creature crouched and picked up a chunk of sidewalk chalk. It made several slow, unsteady scratches on the ground. I shone my light on the space and read a single word written in jagged, barely legible letters: FRIEND.

  “Friend,” I said. “You want to be friends?”

  The creature nodded.

  “Why?” I said.

  It remained crouched before me but made no response.

  I held up
Batman again. “You didn’t steal this, did you?”

  The creature shook its head. No.

  Behind the creature, the living room light came on. Had someone heard us? The creature cringed without turning around, as though even this veiled illumination hurt.

  “I have to go now,” I whispered. “Bye.”

  I turned to my open window and crouched to crawl back inside. One of the creature’s claws landed on my shoulder. I had the sensation of drifting, the way you do in the moments before sleep, everything around me soft, comfortable like a blanket—

  I bumped my head against the window and found myself back in the atrium, squatting outside my window with a monster’s paw on my shoulder. I shrugged it off, embarrassed, as though I’d been caught naked.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  The creature scratched out another message with sidewalk chalk, and I shone my light on the ground to read it: INSIDE?

  If it had made the request before it touched me, I probably would have acquiesced, but now, waking from the sweet fog, I declined.

  “I might get in trouble,” I said. And then, after a second’s internal debate, I added, “You can come back tomorrow if you want.”

  It didn’t try to stop me as I wriggled back into my room, but stared as the glass slid closed between us.

  “Good night,” I whispered, putting my hand to the window. The creature—my monster, My Friend—put its paw opposite mine and scratched the glass, whining just a little.

  13

  With their concept decided upon, my family and the Vandergriff High theater department began work in earnest. I wasn’t allowed back in the warehouse, so I saw none of it. Instead, I spent my afternoons and evenings in the back room of Bump in the Night, doing homework and entertaining myself. Sally picked me up from school and brought me back home at night. She checked my homework, put me to bed, and stayed until Mom, Sydney, and Eunice returned.

  I saw my family only in the mornings, sleepily shuffling past one another as they prepared for the day. I missed Eunice, but My Friend visited every night, arriving sometime between Sally’s kind-but-rote good night and that strange floating place between wakefulness and sleep, its scratch at the window as gentle as a shake on the shoulder. If I’d been older, or a little more careful, or if adults had paid more attention to me when I was small, I might have worried about getting caught out there. But I was used to being invisible, and anyway it was tough to worry about anything once My Friend arrived. At first, we played with action figures, but the creature’s strong, clumsy hands popped off heads and arms. Next we tried board games, but the creature seemed to have trouble remembering the rules, and winning every time grew tiresome, so we started working through my collection of books. First I read to it, and then we copied out sentences and pictures. The creature’s penmanship remained atrocious, but when we tried to copy illustrations from Danny and the Dinosaur, the creature’s facsimiles actually resembled the contents of the book.

  “You’re good at this,” I said, frustrated as I compared our work on the pavement to the book. My own pictures were crude and incomprehensible blobs of color. “I wish I could draw like you.”

  The creature offered me a fat blue cylinder of chalk, which I took. It stepped behind me, put one paw on my right shoulder and the other around my left wrist, and began to guide my hand on the ground. Again I was flooded with that incredible sense of drifting bliss, of warmth and comfort and desire fulfilled. I was vaguely aware of the concrete in front of me, the same way you’re aware of the road through a streaked and filthy windshield.

  When the creature let go, the feeling receded, and I rounded on it, frustrated and disoriented, chalk raised in one hand as though ready to strike. My Friend looked a bit woozy, too, its head bobbing from side to side. It gave me a questioning look.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  The creature pointed over my shoulder. I picked up my flashlight and shone it where I’d made my guided drawing: a vast, sprawling city in miniature, as if seen from a hilltop, stretching out in concentric circles of towering skyscrapers, and, at the center, the nucleus of this strange cell, a tower reaching into the heavens. It looked familiar, someplace I’d been before.

  “I did this?” I said.

  The creature pointed at me, then at itself, then interlaced the digits of its paws. We’d done it together. It bent forward and scratched its nightly question on the pavement: INSIDE?

  I gave my nightly reply: “Not tonight.”

  I didn’t tell anyone about the creature, although I wasn’t entirely sure why at the time. Call it instinct. Looking back now, I wasn’t worried about seeming crazy, but I was happy to have something entirely my own, something my family couldn’t hide or take away from me.

  14

  Construction on the haunted house (christened The Wandering Dark) ended in mid-September, but Mr. Ransom and the theater kids stayed later and later past my bedtime for rehearsals. Since Sydney’s arrival at home (signaled by the living room light behind the atrium curtain) was my new bedtime alert, I stayed up later and later with the monster. My performance in first grade, never stellar, began to slip. Sally made sure I finished my homework and turned it in, but I failed tests and slept in class. I didn’t cause any disruptions, so my teacher, Mrs. Column, didn’t expend much energy trying to keep me awake. My days took on a dreamy, distant quality, somehow unreal, as though I was watching a long, boring, poorly projected, and hard to understand movie. When I did see my family, they were preoccupied. All they wanted to talk about was The Wandering Dark, which they would do only in oblique terms in front of me. Even Eunice was distant. I missed her, and was jealous of this new enterprise that had stolen her from me.

  Finally, one night, fed up with being left out of things, I asked the monster, “How do you get here every night?”

  It tilted its head, but didn’t respond.

  “Do you fly?”

  It either didn’t understand or refused to answer.

  I ran a hand through my hair and sighed. “Can you take me someplace else?”

  The creature bent forward, picked up the piece of chalk, and scratched a question on the pavement: WHERE?

  “I want to see the haunted house,” I said. “Take me to The Wandering Dark.”

  My Friend stood and stepped back. It extended the talons of its right paw. It felt more like the hand of an adult human than like that of some unspeakable horror, and, as the creature pulled me into its embrace, I felt warmth and sturdiness. It held me fast to its middle and drew its cloak closed around me. Beneath the cloak, the creature wore a baggy, rough tunic that scratched my face.

  The creature’s leg muscles tightened as it squatted, and then the ground fell away beneath my feet, replaced with empty air. I caught glimpses of the world below, interrupted by rippling fabric: the atrium shrinking, revealing the building of seven units we lived in, and then we tilted forward, the angle changed, and I saw nothing but the purple-black of the light-polluted night sky over Vandergriff. Worry was distant, like a faint radio signal from another state. Pressed flush against the creature, I drifted, a little cold but soothed, comforted and far from the world. The creature had a distinctive smell, something fragrant but also earthy, like the garden department at Walmart, and my mind filled with an image of an immense field of flowers beneath a heavy, dark sky, and, beyond that, a vast skyline, spires and towers and coliseums that seemed to exist only in silhouette.

  I was startled out of my reverie by our landing, as My Friend swept its cloak back and released me. I stumbled away, my legs rubbery, my head dizzy and clouded. I fell forward and scraped my hands on the pavement. The pain cleared my head. We were in the parking lot in front of the warehouse. Mr. Ransom’s pickup truck was parked near one of the garage doors, and a Styrofoam skull now framed the front door. It looked eeril
y convincing beneath the parking lot lamps. The creature approached, and I waved it off.

  “I’m okay,” I said. After a moment of breathing the open air, I felt the dizziness pass. I approached the skull door. My Friend stayed where we’d landed.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I said.

  It shook its head. I tugged at the front door handle, but it didn’t budge. I was about to turn around and tell My Friend to forget it, that we should go home, when the door gave way. There was no click or magic spark. One moment it wouldn’t move, and the next it swung open.

  The lights in the front office were off, and I left them that way. Instead I turned on my flashlight. The room had been cleaned since I’d last been here, the layer of dust scrubbed off everything. The front desk and waiting area chairs had been removed, and the double doors leading into the warehouse were obscured behind a black wall with a white door at its center, the brass knob dull and dented. It turned easily in my hand, and the door opened inward without a sound. I walked down the black hallway, which made a right turn before opening out onto a study—the kind of place where doctors and professors in old movies often conferred. A red and gold rug was spread on the floor, and a cracked leather couch stood across from a huge, ancient-looking desk. Behind the couch sat a fake fireplace, dark and empty. The walls of the room were lined with taxidermied animal heads: deer mostly, occasionally interrupted by a moose or mounted fish.

  Above the fireplace hung an empty mounting board with a hole in its center. I peered into it, trying to see what lay beyond, but the darkness remained remote, impenetrable. I thought about Sydney’s initial pitch for this place: a monster stalking you through a dark labyrinth, and the visitor with a single flashlight to find the way. I knew it was all pretend, for fun, but knowing didn’t help when I was right in the middle of the thing itself, or when there was a real-life monster waiting for me in the parking lot. A monster that had refused to accompany me inside. Who knew the real rules anymore? I moved on, deeper into The Wandering Dark.