A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  Eunice walks back to the table. Merrin slaps her on the arm and beams. What would it take, Eunice wonders, to feel this way every day?

  Eunice turns to look at Merrin, to say something, but again the room changes. Now she stands in a small, enclosed, stiflingly hot, dark space, next to a table with flashlights on top and bottles of water on the floor beneath. She looks down at herself. She wears a white, hooded robe. She’s in the entryway of The Wandering Dark on opening night, playing the Guide.

  It’s been a fraught couple of days. Sydney quit at the last minute and they had to recast her role, so now Merrin is performing the big jazzy number in the dance hall. Noah still isn’t looking well, and she’s worried—but it’s a distant worry, because, somewhere not too far away, Eunice can hear guests laughing and screaming, and she knows that The Wandering Dark is working. People are having a good time. She imagines herself a playwright, hiding in the lobby of the theater, listening to her show through closed doors. She takes a bow in the dark, facing toward the center of the building. She wishes her father could be alive to see this.

  Look, she thinks. Look what we did for you. She wonders how things are going for Merrin, over in the dance hall.

  Later, as everyone washes the makeup off and changes back into their regular clothes, Eunice finds her typewriter in a corner of the dressing room. She pauses in the act of changing to lay a hand on it. Merrin approaches and hugs Eunice from behind.

  Fondling your typewriter? Merrin says.

  We should have it bronzed, Eunice says, leaning into the hug. Did you hear that audience tonight? Is this what it’s always like? Putting on a play?

  On the good nights, Merrin says, before releasing her. So listen. What are you doing now?

  Nothing, Eunice says, trying to sound casual even as her heart pounds. Why, did you want to do something?

  Merrin licks her lips. Brian Smith and I are going back to his house to hang out for a little while. He’s got a little brother about your age. I thought maybe you two would hit it off?

  Eunice does her best not to look completely crestfallen. Oh, wow. That’s really nice of you, Merrin.

  What’s wrong? Merrin says.

  It takes Eunice a humiliatingly long time to think up an answer. Nothing’s wrong. But I promised Noah I’d tuck him in tonight. It’s been a while, you know?

  What did I do? Merrin says.

  Eunice hasn’t quite scrubbed her face clean of all the makeup, but she heads to the rack where her street clothes hang. Merrin follows.

  Will you please tell me what I did wrong? Merrin says.

  Really. I promised Noah, Eunice says. She takes off her robe, hangs it on the rack, and starts to dress.

  Another time, then, Merrin says.

  Sure. Eunice feels Merrin looking at her, waiting for her to turn around, but she doesn’t. She keeps her back to Merrin until Merrin leaves.

  Eunice suddenly can’t stand up. She walks back to the typewriter and sits down. She doesn’t cry. Not here. She closes her eyes and tries not to see Merrin, tries not to even think of her. Merrin meant no harm. She thought she was doing a good thing. Eunice just wanted a different favor. She wanted to hear Merrin say the forbidden words, to make okay the rotten thing at Eunice’s core that makes her ashamed and afraid of herself.

  When she looks up, she’s in a different room. At first she has trouble understanding what she’s seeing. She gets the impression of a large chamber with vaulted ceilings and a wide, empty marble floor reflecting moonlight. The walls seem to be made of some writhing black material, like tentacles sliding past one another. But then she’s back in the bedroom at the old house, and she’s six years old again, and the typewriter has been replaced by her old Commodore 64. She looks at the words on the screen: A great evil, once safely contained, is now loose. It roams freely, regardless of walls, doors.

  She turns to look at the window, and there’s that shape, the flickering mass outside the glass, looking in with bright orange eyes.

  She looks back at the screen. Her hands remain in her lap as another line of text appears on the screen:

  No matter what you see or hear, try not to make too much noise. Sound will attract the creature.

  From somewhere close by, she hears laughter, and here in the City, where she exists both in and out of time, she recognizes the sound. It’s Noah, her little brother, making way too much noise for this time of night. She looks at the window again to see if the figure there has also heard it, but the figure is gone.

  She feels a sharp pain in her chest. Merrin’s face leaves her mind’s eye, replaced by an image of Noah. A great evil, once safely contained, is now loose. What, Eunice wonders, has she set loose?

  Noah laughs again. Eunice knows she should get up to check on him, to see what might be at his window, but a low, heavy feeling is upon her—a sickness without symptom, the exhaustion that no rest can quench. She feels her face sinking toward the desk. She lifts her hands to try to hold herself up, and her fingers land on the computer keys. They begin to type without her permission, as her face drifts closer and closer to the screen:

  Loose.

  Loose.

  Loose.

  PART FOUR

  The Whisperer in Darkness

  1

  “Are you sure you know what to do?” I whisper-shouted.

  Mid-August of 1999 and I was sixteen years old, crouched on the roof of my family’s house, drenched in sweat, my hair stuck to my forehead. From my vantage point, I could see into the backyards of our neighbors on three sides—the bright blue of a swimming pool to my left, a yard littered with toys on my right, and a gazebo and fancy deck in the yard opposite ours.

  Floating in the air a few feet from the edge of the roof, My Friend extended its arms.

  “I’m trusting you,” I said.

  My Friend clapped its paws twice, then extended them again, like a dad trying to convince a kid to jump into a swimming pool. I took three steps back, wiped perspiration from my face with my shirt, and took a running leap. Arms spread like a bird, I rose, the earth briefly falling away—and then I jerked to a halt in midair as the creature caught me beneath the armpits.

  We hovered together, face-to-face. The creature’s mouth dropped open in a dopey grin, and I scratched behind its ear. It leaned its head into my hand.

  “Good job,” I said. “But is there a way to do this that doesn’t hurt so much? I’m going to get bruises under my arms.”

  My Friend drifted over to the rooftop and set me down again. It backed up to its previous spot and clapped twice before extending its arms. Come on.

  I shook my arms, trying to ward off the ache around my shoulders. I took two deep breaths and closed my eyes. Even at this pitifully low height, a mere two stories up, I couldn’t prevent visions of shattered bones or a broken neck. I would have to learn fearlessness if I wanted to play this game more often.

  I backed up to the peak of the roof and ran down the slope. This time I bent my legs a little and put more push into my jump. Again I rose, arms spread, and again I began to descend. Panic tried to bloom, but I closed my eyes and pictured myself a figure out of myth: Daedalus, escaping the prison island of Crete on feather-and-wax wings, arms spread, head up, silhouetted against the moon. This time instead of an abrupt stop, I had a quiet sense of weight shifting, like it might in water. The creature caught me gently and spun me in a slow circle. I opened my eyes and meant to speak, but something in the creature’s countenance stopped me. For a moment—probably less than a second—I had the impression of looking at a person’s face rather than an animal’s. This happened occasionally, like catching something out of the corner of your eye, and, like those things that flit at the edge of vision, this impression disappeared as soon as I tried to focus on any specific detail.

  “Good job,” I said now, and gave it another scratch behind the ears.
“Let’s call it a night.”

  We let ourselves back into my bedroom window. The creature flopped onto my bed, and the springs groaned with its weight. I went downstairs, made myself a sandwich in the kitchen, and then brought it upstairs to eat. When I came back, I found an envelope that must have been slipped under my bedroom door. I picked it up and took it to my desk, where I sat to read it while I ate my sandwich:

  Dear Noah,

  Today I was in my geology lab, staring out the window, and I started thinking about all the layers of the earth, and how as we dig/drill/what-have-you, we pull up all these things that are new to us, but are actually ancient. I wonder if human beings aren’t the same? Like every tic of personality, every talent or shortcoming is already in place, waiting to be discovered. My love of writing, for example: Did that already exist, as soon as I was born? Or did it take shape after Dad bought my first computer? I like to think it was already there, and Dad was just smart enough to know where to dig.

  Of course, not all prospectors are so kind. Most people in your life are digging at you for things they want—sex, attention, a smile, permission to change lanes on the highway. They’re hunting for things to take, not give.

  When this occurred to me, I started feeling low. How long until the world hollows me out?

  I know I haven’t been at my best for the past few years. I’ve gone to my doctors and taken my Paxil like a good girl, and for the most part I’m able to get out of bed and function every day. But I feel less me, Noah. I don’t get as sad as I used to, but I never feel really happy, either. Maybe I’m already hollowed out?

  Yours (albeit numbly),

  Eunice

  We all dealt with what had happened to Sydney in our own ways. In 1989 Mom had reported Sydney’s disappearance to the police, and even faithfully related my story of screams, dimming lights, and a ransacked bedroom. Soon after, news vans were camped outside our apartment. We stopped watching TV because our faces were all over the local (and, briefly, national) news. But as weeks turned into months without new leads or clues to my sister’s whereabouts, public interest waned. The news vans moved on. The police still called it an active investigation, but I discerned no further activity on their part.

  Eunice experienced her first major depressive episode at about this time. Mom had her briefly hospitalized and then medicated. The doctors helped some, but no matter how they adjusted Eunice’s medication and dosages, she still had trouble functioning in the world. She couldn’t keep a job for more than a few weeks, and while she continued to test extraordinarily well, she couldn’t completely focus on anything. She graduated from high school a year later than planned and bombed out of a full scholarship at the University of Texas in Austin after one semester. Since then, Eunice had been living in her old bedroom again and chipping away at an associate’s degree at Vandergriff Community College, taking one or two classes a semester and working sporadically at Bump in the Night and The Wandering Dark when she wanted spending money.

  It was during this span of years that the “suicide notes” began to appear. I don’t know why I kept them. I guess I was hungry for Eunice’s company, even if only on the page. Every now and then she floated the idea of suicide, like something she kept in her back pocket, but I couldn’t imagine my kind, funny sister hurting anyone, least of all herself.

  I read this latest note twice and then stuffed it back in its envelope. I put it in a shoebox beneath my bed with the others. I let my hand linger against the envelopes, felt the dry, springy comfort of my stash, and then closed the box. My Friend grumbled as I climbed into the bed beside it, but scooted over and made space for me.

  “Thanks ever so much,” I said. In response, it wiggled toward me until its back was pressed into my front. Its warmth through the cloak and my clothes didn’t help with my general sweatiness, but there was still a sweetness, a comfort to the touch, a sense of coming home. It pulled me swiftly down to sleep, even as I tried to make a mental note to check on Eunice in the morning.

  2

  As a cruel booby prize in exchange for our loss, my family’s financial situation underwent a vast improvement after Sydney vanished. The Wandering Dark drew heavy crowds in its first couple of years, and Bump in the Night, buoyed by the comic book boom of the early 1990s, turned profitable for the first time. We were able to move out of the apartment and into a four-bedroom house. Sally White let her share of the store’s success carry her even further: although she tried to keep her hybrid friendship-partnership with my mom going after Sydney’s disappearance, she eventually grew tired of Mom blowing her off and shutting her out. She sold off her half of Bump in the Night and moved to Indiana with a boyfriend in 1993. Although we received an invitation to the wedding, my family didn’t attend.

  We weren’t happy, but we were financially solvent, which, after my early childhood in poverty, nearly amounted to the same thing. And, in 1999, Mom finally agreed to hire Kyle Ransom and me as paid employees at The Wandering Dark. As our first on-the-payroll assignment, we had to go see Kyle’s father’s production of The Crucible at Vandergriff High, a ripe spot to pick up new talent. Mom handed us a stack of audition flyers and practically shoved us out the door on opening night.

  I’ve always hated The Crucible. It’s an interminable, joyless affair, and the most interesting idea in the play—that witchcraft may be afoot in Salem—is reduced to a metaphor for McCarthyism. Also, call me crazy, but I hate “poor innocent man falsely accused by sexy young girl” narratives.

  Mr. Ransom erected an interesting set—a giant tree that dominated the stage, with all the judges sitting in the branches—but the actors looked lost as they milled about and shouted blank-faced accusations at one another. The girl playing Abigail, who was so blond her hair looked almost silver in the stage lights, did an okay impression of Sue Lyon in Lolita, but by the time the acne-ridden John Proctor elected to hang rather than sign a false confession, Kyle and I sat with our chins propped on our fists, praying for curtain call.

  After the play, we found Mr. Ransom at the base of the stage, shaking hands with well-wishers. He’d suffered a heart attack not long after Sydney’s disappearance, and after surgery and some severe diet changes, he’d lost a lot of weight, but the change made him look even less healthy. His skin hung around his face and puddled at his waistline like a half-melted candle, and his ruddy complexion had been replaced with a pallor that made him look more fungal than human. He was the only participant in the opening season at The Wandering Dark who hadn’t been asked back after 1989.

  As we approached him now, flyers in hand, I didn’t see Mrs. Ransom anywhere. When I mentioned it to Kyle, he looked uncomfortable.

  “She teaches a class on Thursdays,” he said. “She’ll come to the Saturday show.”

  “It’s an important story,” Mr. Ransom said, shaking hands with what appeared to be someone’s grandfather.

  “Absolutely,” the old man said, “but I wonder if teenagers will agree?” He glanced up at a mostly empty auditorium behind him.

  Mr. Ransom smiled tightly. “Thanks so much for coming out,” he said. He turned to us and forced the sour look from his face. “Boys. What did you think?”

  “It was intense,” I said.

  “Very dark,” Kyle said.

  “Very faithful to the text,” I said.

  “This is one of the great American plays,” Mr. Ransom said. “Who am I to chop it up?”

  The girl who had played Abigail emerged from the backstage area, out of costume but still caked in makeup. Up close she was very pretty, with glowing hair and bright blue eyes. She stopped when she saw Kyle and me.

  “Hi, Kyle,” she said. She nodded to me. “Hi, Noah.”

  “Do we know each other?” I said, taken aback.

  She punched me on the arm. “Come on, quit it.”

  “Quit what?”

 
She widened her eyes a little in disbelief. “We sat two rows apart in Mrs. Thurston’s English class. For like all of eighth grade.” She put her hands to her chest. “Donna Hart?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, but it sounded like a lie. “Sorry, I’m kind of a space cadet.”

  We stood in awkward silence until Kyle piped up: “The play was intense.”

  “Very dark,” I agreed.

  “Superfaithful to the text,” Kyle said. “And you were great!”

  “The best part,” I said, because I wanted to make up for hurting her feelings.

  She punched me on the arm again. “Quit it,” she said, obviously pleased.

  “Hey, while we’ve got your attention,” Kyle said, handing her a flyer. “You should come audition for The Wandering Dark in a couple of weeks.”

  “It’s this haunted house my family runs,” I said.

  “I know what it is,” she said. “I’m no rube.” She studied the flyer.

  “We always need actors,” I said.

  Kyle tugged on my arm. “We have to get going.”

  I took the hint. “See you around, Donna Hart.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Who knows, maybe you’ll even remember me next time.”

  We started up the steps to the stage. When we were out of earshot, Kyle stopped me.

  “How have you never noticed that girl?” he said.

  “I noticed,” I lied. “I just didn’t remember her name.”

  “How do you forget anything about a girl like that?”

  It was a good question. She was charming and easy to look at, but even now she was sort of fading from my mind.

  “I’ve got a lot on my plate,” I said.

  “Like what?” I didn’t answer right away, and he scoffed. “I don’t understand you, not one bit. If I were in a class with that girl, that’s all I would think about. In fact, I will think about nothing else henceforth.” He closed his eyes.