A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  After the study came a long, rectangular chamber lined on either side with what I took to be filing cabinets. The floor was blue tile, with drains placed at regular intervals. Two metal examination tables stood close together in the center of the room, both empty, and at the far end there was a wooden door with a frosted glass pane and a phrase I didn’t understand: CORONER’S OFFICE. A tall potted plant stood to the right of the door.

  I approached one of the big drawers on the right side of the room. It had a small white label right in the center, and printed on it in small, neat type were the words RANSOM, J. I tugged at the cold metal handle, but it wouldn’t budge. I let go and continued shining my light on all the names on the drawers: Vogler, Goldman, Daniels, Price. I read each aloud, sounding the words as quietly as I could, enjoying the sounds they made when translated into speech: Sangalli, Smith, Stephens, Turner.

  This last one stopped my mindless recitation. Turner, H. As in Harry Turner? I grabbed the handle and tugged. This one opened for me.

  I shone my flashlight into a rectangular box about seven feet deep, containing a narrow cot on rollers. On the cot lay a large lump, roughly human in shape, beneath a white sheet. I reached for it.

  A peal of laughter exploded through the building, boisterous and cheerful. It drove the lump under the sheet right out of my head. I left the drawer open, walked past the potted plant and through the CORONER’S OFFICE door into a large, relatively well-lit space with a hardwood floor and a stage covered with instruments. A single microphone stood in a spotlight, beneath a banner reading WELCOME HOME, BOYS! in red, white, and blue. Balloons were scattered about the floor, and two figures were entwined on a folding chair in the middle. Even from behind I recognized Mr. Ransom’s form, his beefy arms wrapped around the shirtless teenage girl in his lap. She pushed his face into her cleavage, her head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth hanging open. I recognized her, too: Sydney.

  “Say it,” she said.

  Mr. Ransom moaned, making hungry sounds like a pig at a trough. She grabbed his hair and yanked so he had to look at her. In a dirty movie, she’d have been smiling, taunting. Instead, there was something wounded and vulnerable in her face.

  “Say it,” she said again.

  “I love you,” he said, breathless, voice hoarse.

  She tightened her grip on Mr. Ransom’s hair. “Again,” she said. Maybe it was meant as a command, but she sounded like she was near tears.

  “I love you, Sydney,” Mr. Ransom said.

  With her free hand, Sydney reached back and unclasped her bra. The straps slid from her shoulders and down her arms. He made another muffled, hungry sound against her chest, and she cried out, as if in pain. The sound startled me, and I lost my grip on my flashlight. It hit the floor with a clatter, and Sydney’s eyes snapped open, bright with surprised fear.

  She released her grip on Mr. Ransom’s head as her gaze locked on mine. “Noah?”

  Mr. Ransom began to turn around. I bolted. I heard them moving as I scrambled back through the maze of rooms and into the parking lot, but I was small and fully clothed and terrified, and I emerged uncaught, untouched. My Friend remained where I had left it, and I ran into its embrace.

  “Take me home,” I said. Warmth enveloped me as the creature swept its cloak shut and my feet left the ground.

  We landed what felt like seconds later. The creature opened its cloak, and I stepped back into the familiar atrium. I leaned forward, dimly aware of the creature crouched next to me, scratching something on the ground with sidewalk chalk. My head began to clear, and I reached for my window, meaning to open it, but the creature’s paw landed on my shoulder, and things grew immediately fuzzy again. I shook free.

  “What?” I said. “What is it?”

  It pointed at the ground, and I squinted to read what it had written in the dark: INSIDE?

  “No.”

  The creature huffed and scribbled two more words before looking back at me:

  FRIEND

  HELP

  The creature underlined the second word three times, and the chalk broke on the third stroke. I read plaintiveness in My Friend’s slumped posture, the hard curve of its neck.

  “No,” I said again, shaking my head harder.

  It didn’t try to stop me as I pushed my window open and clambered through, and it was gone by the time I turned around to push the window shut again.

  At some point Sydney let herself into the apartment. She came to my bedroom door, the shadows of her feet visible in the crack beneath it, her breath oddly loud and labored. She sounded like she’d just finished a marathon, taking deep, almost wheezing gulps of air, her exhalations jagged and uneven. Eventually she walked away.

  15

  I moved through the next day on autopilot, spaced out during and after school. I spent the afternoon in the back room at Bump in the Night, reading an old Archie Double Digest with bleary eyes until I heard Sally talking to someone up front. The person she was talking to laughed, and I recognized him as Mr. Ransom at once. I looked around the room for a way out but remained rooted in my chair as Sally said, “Sure, go on back.”

  Mr. Ransom lurched into the break room, carrying a large box. “There’s the guy!” he said, voice booming with theatrical cheer. The box looked big enough to stuff a kid into, if you got creative with how you packed the body. He stood in front of me, blocking my view of the doorway. “I’m glad you’re here. There’s something I’ve been meaning to give you.” He set the box on the table and stepped away from it. “Go ahead,” he said.

  I put my comic down and stood on my chair. As I reached for the loose flaps of the box, I hesitated.

  “It’s not going to bite,” Mr. Ransom said, annoyance creeping into his tone.

  I forced my hands forward and opened the flaps. I gasped at the contents. It was the Batcave play set. The toy I’d lusted after for weeks, right in front of me.

  “Do you like it?” Mr. Ransom said.

  “Isn’t this your son’s?” I said.

  “It was,” Mr. Ransom said, “but he has too many toys anyway, and I saw you take a shine to it when your family came over for dinner.” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to say something in return.

  I pulled my hands out of the box. “This is very nice of you, Mr. Ransom, but I don’t have a Batman figure anyway,” I said. It was a lie, but what probable explanation could I have offered regarding how I’d received the toy? “All I could do is look at it.”

  He sighed. “I meant to bring you Kyle’s Batman, too, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find it. I know Kyle didn’t take it with him, and I haven’t had any guests in my house since your family came over. So do you still want to stand there and tell me you don’t have it?”

  “I didn’t steal Kyle’s Batman,” I said.

  “I can keep a secret if you can. Can you keep a secret, Noah?”

  I looked at the new toy and didn’t answer.

  “What you saw last night,” he said, “with me and Sydney—it was something private, for older people. If you were to tell anyone about it, both your family and I could get into a lot of trouble.” He walked around the table and squeezed my shoulder with one massive, bearlike hand. “You don’t want to make trouble for your family right before your new business opens, right?”

  “Right.” I would have agreed to anything if he would just stop touching me.

  He started to walk out, then stopped and turned around. “Noah,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Ransom?”

  “How did you get to the warehouse?”

  As long as we were keeping each other’s secrets, I saw no reason to lie. “I flew,” I said.

  He gave me a strange, searching look, and then left.

  16

  At home, I hid out in my room, curled up
with the blanket over my head. I told Sally I wasn’t feeling well and she left me alone. Eventually, Eunice came home and let herself into my room. She sat next to me on the bed and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You never used to lie to me.”

  I remained hidden beneath the blanket, pondering the secrets I now kept: Sydney’s; Mr. Ransom’s; my own. I started to cry.

  “Noah,” she murmured, running her hand up and down my back. “Noah, Noah, Noah. It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  Still I didn’t unburden myself. Although we still went through the ritual I love yous at bedtime, an invisible wedge separated us. Her affection felt rote, and I was now a liar.

  As I lay in bed, I wished my family had never decided to make a haunted house. I didn’t care if it meant we were poor forever, if I could have things back the way they were. When the scratching outside my window began, I threw the blankets off the bed and picked up the Batman from the floor. My Friend stood outside, dragging its claws against the glass. I motioned for it to step back, and it obeyed. I unlatched the window and climbed out.

  When I stood, the creature tried to bridge the distance between us. I stopped it by holding up Batman. “Did you steal this from Mr. Ransom’s house?”

  The creature shook its head. No.

  “Are you lying?” I said.

  Its head drooped.

  “Why did you do it?”

  The creature picked up a piece of chalk, and drew a box around the words it had scratched the night before: FRIEND. HELP.

  “Help?” I said. “Help? How does this help anything?” I boiled with the unfairness of it, the way I’d been trapped and burdened. “I could get in a lot of trouble because of you. Go away.”

  The creature stood, chalk still gripped with odd delicacy in its talons. It tilted its head in apparent puzzlement.

  “I know you understand me,” I said. “Go.” I made a shooing motion. The creature stood still. I pitched the Batman, and it struck right above the creature’s left eye. Its head jerked back and it dropped the chalk. Its eyes lit a brighter shade of orange. A low growl started in its throat. Behind it, the sliding glass door went bright as the living room light came on. The creature turned, noticing it as well. I ducked back through my window and pulled it shut right as I heard the latch on the sliding glass door, the pleasant rumble as it moved along its track. I kept still behind the curtains, waiting for startled screams or even violence. Instead I heard the distinctive pad of my mother’s footsteps on the concrete, pausing outside my window, then retreating inside. If she saw the writing out there on the ground, she never said anything to me about it.

  I was still awake when Sydney let herself in around midnight and headed straight for the bathroom. She shut the door and turned on the faucet, but I could hear her harsh, broken voice over the roar of the water. Sydney, hyperventilating, crying by herself in the middle of the night.

  17

  Two days before The Wandering Dark opened for business, Mr. Ransom invited my family to his house for another dinner, promising “honest-to-goodness home-cooked food.” Sally didn’t come with us this time, but she lent Mom her car for the trip. When we arrived at the Ransom house, we found a Ford Fiesta parked next to Mr. Ransom’s pickup in the driveway.

  “Who else is coming to dinner?” Eunice said.

  “He didn’t say anything to me,” Mom said.

  Sydney faced forward, silent in the front seat, and I tried to divine meaning from the back of her head. We’d been avoiding one another with great success since I’d caught her with Mr. Ransom, and this was the first time in over a week we’d been in the same place for more than a few minutes.

  The lawn had been mowed, the newspapers removed, and the errant branch clipped so it no longer blocked the walk. When we rang the doorbell, a small, thin woman, barely taller than Eunice, answered. If not for the laugh lines around her mouth, I might have mistaken Janet Ransom for a girl as she pulled Mom into a hug.

  “So good to see you, Margaret!”

  Mom returned the hug a second too late, her surprise and discomfort apparent in her posture. Mrs. Ransom let her go, then pulled Eunice and me into a wiry, painful embrace.

  “Eunice, you’ve become a young woman,” she said. “And, Noah, you look just like a miniature version of your father. It’s uncanny.”

  No one had ever told me this before, and I was still processing it as Mrs. Ransom pulled Sydney into the deepest, longest hug yet.

  “Oh, Sydney,” she said, clutching the back of my sister’s head like a baby’s.

  Sydney was also late to return the embrace. “Oh, me,” she agreed.

  Mr. Ransom appeared inside the doorway, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Surprise,” he said, voice weak.

  “Don’t blame him, it was my idea,” Mrs. Ransom said. “Come in, come in!”

  The air inside the house had been renewed, turned fresh and fragrant. The lights were bright, and the layer of dust had been swept from the furniture. A boy sat on the living room floor, playing a Nintendo that had not been there before.

  “Kyle,” Mr. Ransom said to the boy. “Manners!”

  The boy sighed and stood. He shook hands with everyone.

  “You’re Noah,” he said when he got to me, boredom turning to open hostility. “You have my Batman and Batcave.”

  “Noah, did you steal Kyle’s toys?” Mom said. Over a week the Batcave had been sitting in a box in my bedroom and she hadn’t noticed.

  “Mr. Ransom gave them to me,” I said.

  “Did he?” Mom said. She looked into the kitchen, where Mr. Ransom moved back and forth, checking the oven, stirring the contents of a large pot.

  “Daniel’s grown very fond of Noah,” Mrs. Ransom said, “and I guess he was feeling generous one day.” Her smile seemed too wide, as though, despite the words coming out of her mouth, she absolutely thought me guilty of stealing from her child.

  Mom’s stare at Mr. Ransom turned into a frown. “Still, if Kyle wants his toys back, I’m sure Noah would be happy to return them.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Ransom said. “We’re not about to take back a gift, are we, Kyle?”

  “No,” Kyle said glumly.

  “Why don’t you show Noah your room?” she said.

  “Come on,” he said, and I followed him down the hall.

  His room looked much the way it had the last time I’d been here, only less dusty and missing its Batcave. A lot of Ghostbusters toys were scattered across the carpet.

  “You like Ghostbusters?” I said.

  “I like Batman better,” he said.

  “I’ll give it back.”

  He looked as though nothing would please him more, but knew better than to agree. “I’d get in trouble. It’s so dumb. Mom got so mad at Dad when she found out about the Batcave, but she won’t let me have it back, either. Dad bought me a Nintendo to say sorry. Mom got mad about that, too.”

  “Does she get mad a lot?”

  He smiled a little. “All the time.”

  At that point Mr. Ransom summoned us to the dinner table. Kyle and I sat next to one another, the air between us now open rather than hostile. We ate together in companionable silence while the adults talked.

  “So,” Mom said, after we’d all settled in and made the usual comments about how good everything looked and smelled. She gestured at Mr. and Mrs. Ransom, sitting at the head and foot of the table. “This is a surprise.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Sydney demanded.

  “Sydney, manners,” Mom said.

  “About a month, I think,” Mrs. Ransom said.

  “A month?” Sydney glared at Mr. Ransom. He glanced at her, and then caught my ey
e. Kyle looked around the table, confused by the sudden tension. I stuffed food into my face, pretending obliviousness.

  “Sydney, what is the matter?” Mom said.

  Sydney squeezed a balled-up napkin in one fist. With her thumb and forefinger, she tore tiny shreds of paper from one end and dropped them on the table. Her breathing also seemed a little labored, but I don’t think any of the adults noticed this tiny alteration in the movement of her shoulders, chest, and back. Sydney was good at performing. It was the sort of subtle change that only a sibling could sniff out.

  “I see you every day, Mr. Ransom,” Sydney said. “You never said anything to me.”

  “It’s not Mr. Ransom’s job to tell you about his personal life,” Mom said. “He’s your teacher, not your friend.”

  Mr. Ransom took a sip from his wineglass. “It didn’t seem appropriate, Sydney,” he said.

  “Daniel tells me great things about the choreography you’ve put together for the dance hall in the haunted house,” Mrs. Ransom said. She reached across the table to hold Sydney’s hand. “I’d love to come take a look and maybe give you some pointers.”

  Sydney swallowed hard, and I saw her bring her breathing under control. “Of course,” she said. “I’d love some advice.” Something about the glassiness at the edges of her eyes, briefly visible before she hardened her gaze again, fractured me deep inside.

  18

  When we got home, Sydney remained in the doorway while the rest of us went to the living room to remove our jackets and shoes. She stood silhouetted against the open door, arms pulled tight around her middle.

  “Sydney?” Mom said, hands poised over her sneaker laces.

  “This is all wrong,” Sydney said.

  “What do you mean?” Mom said.