A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  “First order of business,” Mom said, “is to figure out your roles.”

  Kyle leaned back. “Oh, man. I’ve been waiting so long to be asked this question.” He closed his eyes. “Professor. I want to be the Professor. And I want tenure.”

  “We’ll see how it goes this year,” Mom said. “Noah?”

  I’d also been waiting for this question. I’d known my answer for a while now, but I felt weird saying it out loud, admitting that I wanted this thing, because I wanted it bad, and was afraid I wouldn’t get it. I was also afraid what my family might think of me for asking.

  “Monster,” I said. “I want to play the monster.”

  Kyle made a sympathetic face. “The poor homely boy. It’s his only option.”

  Nobody laughed. My face burned, and I stared at the floor.

  “Monster it is,” Mom said, her tone neutral.

  6

  Later, on the drive home in Kyle’s Pinto, he returned to his favorite subject: Donna Hart.

  “You lucky, stupid motherfucker,” he said. “She likes you.”

  “No she doesn’t,” I said.

  He gave me some serious side-eye. “Why do you do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “I get that you’re shy, but at some point you’ve gotta go out with somebody. I mean, you’re not gay, are you?”

  “Fuck you,” I said. In Vandergriff in 1999, there were few scarier suggestions. Less than a year ago, Matthew Devries, a gay man in his early twenties, had been tied to the back of a truck and dragged for miles down a stretch of two-lane highway. It had happened in Artemis, about twenty minutes from our town.

  “Look,” I said. “If I promise to flirt with the pretty girl, will you shut up about it?”

  He clapped his hands and held them up over his head like he’d scored a point.

  “Hands at ten and two, Super Dave,” I said.

  I wanted to talk to Eunice about it, but when I got home her bedroom was empty. She was probably out somewhere with Brin. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I wandered past Eunice’s room and into the room at the end of the hall.

  The fourth bedroom in the house was what Mom called the “home office.” It had a filing cabinet, a desk, a computer, and a fake plant in one corner. The room was supposed to be for Mom, but I could count on one hand the number of times I’d found her in here. More often it was me or Eunice using the computer for schoolwork or games. Mostly the room sat empty, as if we all knew its true purpose and were waiting for an excuse to move out the furniture and make space for its real occupant.

  It was also the only room in the house where we kept a photograph of Sydney. It sat atop the filing cabinet, an eight-by-ten school portrait in a gold frame. Sydney in a sundress, hair big with hair spray, her brilliant stage smile turned toward the camera. I’m not sure why Mom picked this photo to display. It had been taken at the start of Sydney’s senior year, a mere two months before she went missing, and it was the photo that inevitably accompanied any stories about her in print or on TV. This photo had become the thumbnail avatar for her disappearance from our lives.

  I picked up the picture, careful not to smudge the glass with my fingers. I wondered if Maria Davis’s parents were going through something similar right now; whether they had a photo of their daughter that would perfectly encapsulate their loss, regrets, pain, and perceived failures as parents.

  I told myself to stop it. That Maria could still be alive and out there somewhere. That Sydney could, too. I didn’t know anything about either case. Not really. I set the photo down, walked back past Eunice’s bedroom, and into my own. My Friend was sitting on the floor, frowning at an open comic book in its lap. It marked its place with one taloned digit when I came in, and pointed at the night sky. Outside?

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I have some work to do.” I got up and got my pencils and some paper from my desk. The creature gave me an inquisitive look. “I have to design a new monster costume for The Wandering Dark. I thought I’d base the design on you.”

  The creature’s gaze grew cloudy and momentarily troubled. It set the comic book down and reached for the paper and pencils, which I handed over. It wrote: YOU WANT TO LOOK LIKE ME?

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “You’re awesome. Why wouldn’t I want to look like you?”

  It pondered the question for a moment but didn’t seem able to come up with a good answer. Still looking slightly troubled, it handed the pencils and paper back. I sat down opposite the creature on the floor, my back against my dresser. It went back to reading, and I started sketching. I sketched for several hours, only vaguely aware of other sounds in the house—Mom moving around downstairs in the kitchen, then settling in front of the TV.

  I’ve never been a great artist, so it took me several tries to draw anything that even approached a resemblance to the creature. I wanted to capture its bulk, its matted fur, the way its eyes glowed with menace and pathos, but everything I drew looked like a dog in a hoodie. I was still huffing over my pad when a knock came at my door, and Eunice entered before I had a chance to invite her.

  “Hey,” she said, then made a face. “You okay?”

  I glanced at the creature’s spot on the floor, which was now empty, then back at Eunice. I swallowed and licked my dry, cracked lips.

  “Fine,” I said. “You startled me, is all.”

  She let herself in and sat on the bed. “Your bed’s really warm.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I moved to the floor,” I said.

  She ran her hand over the blankets, looking concerned. “Do you have a fever? It feels like you left a fired brick in here.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  She glanced at the open window, and for a second seemed ready to say something, but then she frowned and looked slightly pained.

  “Did you need something?” I said.

  She blinked a few times and stood up. “You’re right. It’s late.”

  “You don’t have to leave,” I said. “Where’d you go tonight?”

  She stood still in the middle of the room with that strange, pained look of concentration on her face for another moment. A small, unsure half smile emerged from it, and she glanced to the side as if she might find an answer in the corner of my room.

  “I went with Brin to her church,” she said, and sat back down on my bed.

  “On a Friday night?”

  “They do some kind of service or event almost every day or night of the week,” she said. “Brin says that they want to appeal to people with nontraditional schedules, who maybe can’t get off every Sunday morning or Wednesday night.”

  I leaned back against the desk. “What was it like?”

  Again that shifting gaze, the refusal to look at me. “It was…weird. First, the church is in a storefront in a lousy strip mall, between a nail salon and a tax prep place. The front windows are painted black, so no one can see in or out, and the inside looks like a punk rock show venue—just a bunch of folding chairs in front of a small stage with colored lights and a black back wall.

  “Everybody who showed up for the service looked like Brin—tattooed, spiky hair, patches on their jackets—but they were all carrying Bibles. It was like something from The Twilight Zone. They all wanted to shake my hand and welcome me ‘to the flock.’ There was a praise band that played a bunch of really loud, fast punk rock music, and I didn’t understand any of the words, and everybody ran to the front of the room and started moshing around…”

  “Did you mosh?” I said. As bony and fragile as Eunice looked, I imagined she’d shatter like glass in a mosh pit.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I sat in my chair, but Brin moshed. And then, after everybody got worked into a frenzy, the pastor came up and the room got quiet. He has this really calm, soothing voice, like some
one talking you down off a ledge. He starts off about how happy he is to see everyone, and how blessed we are to have this space to be together and worship the Lord. But then it got sort of weird. He got on this riff about how he noticed that not all of us were moved to dance by the Holy Spirit, and I swear he was staring right at me.

  “ ‘I hope you’ll find the strength to let go and let the Spirit move you in the future,’ he says. I just tried to laugh it off. Like maybe it was his way of being friendly, you know? Encouraging me to participate.

  “But then he starts talking about people who have left the church and started attending elsewhere, and he rants about disloyalty. He starts naming people one at a time, and revoking any blessings they’d ever received through the church. Like ‘Jane Dunlop, who met her husband at this church, and who had her baby baptized here—I revoke your marriage and your child’s salvation. You are damned.’ He did this for like twenty different people. And, Noah, everybody there seemed fine with it. They were shouting ‘Amen!’ and ‘Praise Jesus.’ ”

  “Even Brin?” I said.

  “Not Brin,” Eunice said. “She just sort of sat there. Afterward, I told her that the sermon seemed weird and wrong to me, and she was like ‘Now you know how I feel about what your family does for a living.’ So we made a deal. I’m going to take some time off from The Wandering Dark this year, and she’s going to try and find a different church. One that’s not so…hostile. And in the meantime, she and I can hang out without feeling weird about it.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What do you mean ‘take some time off’?”

  “It’s not like I’ve been superinvolved so far this year anyway,” she said. “It’s been a tough semester, and I think I deserve a year off.”

  “Yeah, but letting some Jesus freak bully you into quitting? Eunice, that’s wrong.”

  She still wouldn’t meet my eye. “It’s not quitting. It’s just…taking some time.” She stood again. “Anyway, it’s late. Good night, kiddo. Don’t stay up all night.” She kissed me on the cheek and left.

  I waited up, but My Friend didn’t come back.

  7

  I gave Mom the new sketch the next day at the breakfast table, expecting her to sign off on it without much reaction. Instead, her expression went from preoccupied to something like outright alarm.

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

  I pretended to study the picture. “I don’t know. I made it up. Why?”

  She seemed on the verge of saying something. “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Mom, it’s obviously not nothing.” Why was she freaking out?

  She ran her fingers over my sketch and then glanced at me. “You’re not—you’ve never seen this thing before?”

  Now my own curiosity was piqued. “Have you?” I said.

  The tight line of her mouth assumed a few different shapes before she shook her head. “No. No, of course not. This Maria Davis business has me on edge is all.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. What did a monster costume have to do with Maria Davis?

  “Sorry,” Mom said. “This thing gives me the creeps.”

  I could tell she was going to give in and let me have my way, so I didn’t pursue the topic further.

  “That’s the idea,” I said.

  8

  I refused to join rehearsals until I had my costume. I would’ve felt silly trying to drag people away in my street clothes, and once my coworkers had seen that ridiculous image, how would they ever take me seriously in a costume? No matter how good the finished product, my victims would always remember regular, sweaty Noah. When they saw the monster for the first time, it needed to be the monster.

  So while my fellow cast members learned lines and blocking, I memorized the monster’s warren, a series of passages alongside the attraction that allowed the monster to track visitors unseen and emerge at random to terrify and/or drag away our audience “plants”—characters always named Brad or Katie. I ran laps, my feet echoing on the concrete floor and wooden stairs, rattling the walls of the flimsier sets. I needed to be able to move through this space in a heavy costume and a mask that obscured my vision—and to do it in the dark. So I ran and ran. By the end of the first week I could travel it with my eyes closed.

  On breaks, I sat at an open dock door, guzzling water and soaking up whatever breeze the day had on offer. Sometimes Donna (who’d joined the cast as a Katie) and Kyle sat with me. Kyle played the part of the “wacky friend” in these little scenes, making jokes and talking me up in front of Donna. I did my best to play the part of “interested, normal dude.”

  The new costume was ready by the end of the second week, and we introduced it to rehearsals that Friday. Without showing it to anyone ahead of time, or letting them know what we were doing, Mom announced that the cast would start rehearsing with the lights off. The Brads and Katies, clumped together and playing “the audience” would be given a single flashlight to navigate the warehouse.

  For this first lights-off rehearsal, Mom gave me free rein to show up wherever and whenever I wanted. As the Brads and Katies moved through the attraction, I silently kept abreast. With the lights on, they had moved with bored arrogance and surety. Now, in the quiet and shadows, their laughter turned anxious.

  “Jesus,” one of the Brads said, as I peered into the Professor’s study. “I know it’s fake, but Jesus.”

  Donna swung the group’s flashlight back and forth, but still I held back. I followed them into the morgue, and then into the dance hall, where the band started their big brassy number and other bit players waltzed around the room, blocking the Brads’ and Katies’ way, forcing them to navigate a sea of dancers. The room, with its dim lighting and wide floor, should have been a relief from the unbearable tension of the small, dark rooms preceding it, but it left my prey feeling edgy and exposed. They shuffled through the room, flashlight turned off for the moment, a knot of nervous energy, and reached the double doors marked EXIT on the far side. Passing through, they found themselves pitched into darkness again.

  “Donna,” one of the Katies hissed. “Flashlight.”

  Donna turned the light on and found her nose inches from my snout.

  “Boo,” I said.

  Her scream made me glad for the muffling barrier of the mask. The whole group shouted in terror. I ducked through one of my secret exits and back into my labyrinth.

  “Noah, you asshole!” someone called.

  9

  That scream, that moment of terror I had created, made me so giddy that, in a fit of manic glee, I decided it was time to make a move on Donna. When My Friend arrived after sundown that night, I said, “I need the best flower you know of. Something hard to get.”

  The creature picked up the pen and pad on my desk. WHY? it wrote.

  “Never mind why,” I said. “Will you do it?”

  It sighed. FRIEND HELP, it wrote. BACK SOON. It trudged to the open window and flew out into the night.

  I paced the room and waited. My Friend returned about half an hour later, carrying a long-stemmed black flower. The heart of the plant glowed faintly, like a tea light about to flicker out. The illumination was ringed with thorns.

  DON’T POKE THE MIDDLE, the creature wrote. DON’T STARE AT IT EITHER. YOU MIGHT FALL IN. It pointed to the flower. WHAT FOR?

  I found myself reluctant to say, “A girl.” My face felt hot, but I pressed on anyway. “I need another favor, too. I need you to make me fly again.”

  The creature stared at me.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  NOTHING WRONG, it wrote. FRIEND HELP.

  A moment later, after getting a fresh charge of energy from the creature, I soared through the sky, the black flower clenched to my chest. The monster trailed me at a distance to
make sure I didn’t plummet to my death. I’d looked up Donna’s address on her application for The Wandering Dark, but since I’d just gotten my driver’s license, I still had only a hazy idea of the town’s layout and kept having to fly low and check street names. I eventually found myself over a one-story house on a street full of near-identical homes. As I hovered above it, the creature stopped beside me.

  “I’m trying to guess which window is hers,” I said.

  The creature drifted around the left side of the house and pointed at a window right behind the fence.

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  It nodded.

  I followed it and drifted down to the ground. “Hang around but out of sight, okay?”

  The creature hung in the air over my head, glowering, then floated into the yard behind the house. I rapped on the glass, stepped back, and held up the flower. The curtains rippled and parted a fraction of an inch. I felt like I might puke. Why had I thought this was a good idea? What girl would find this romantic? This was what a crazy person would do.

  Donna’s face appeared between the curtains, eyes cloudy with sleep, hair pulled into a golden bun atop her head. She wore a T-shirt and pajama pants. She mouthed my name as a question: Noah?

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll go.”

  She held up a finger to say One minute, then disappeared. When she came back, her jaw was working. She was chewing gum. She unlatched the window and slowly pushed it open. When she got it halfway up, she bent down and stuck her head out.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

  “I came because—” I stopped and cleared my throat. I could have used some water. “You’re doing a great job at work and I wanted to say thanks.”

  She smiled. She was happy to see me at least. “In the middle of the night?”

  “We are a haunted house,” I said.

  She pointed at my chest. “What’s that?”