A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  I remembered the flower. “This is for you,” I said, looking at its dim glow instead of at her. “Sort of a congratulatory—whatever.”

  “Are you going to give it to me or just stare at it?” she said. I tore my gaze away from the hypnotic light and handed it to her. She peered down into its folds, her face lit orange. She was pretty. Why did I keep forgetting how pretty she was? Why didn’t her face cling to my mind’s eye?

  “It’s beautiful,” she murmured. “What is it?”

  “An ebon kindness,” I said, delighted with my own spontaneous creativity. “NASA engineered it in a lab—they’re experimenting with plants they can take on spaceships, or plant on asteroids to foster breathable atmospheres.”

  It seemed to cost her some effort to look back at me. “You’re messing with me.”

  “I would never,” I said. “But for real, don’t touch the thorns in the center. They’re poison.”

  “Are you bringing flowers to all the Brads and Katies?”

  “Only you,” I said.

  She grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me forward. My first kiss was quick, firm, and over before I had a chance to react. Donna released her grip on me, and I staggered back a step.

  “See you at work?” she said.

  “Yeah, cool,” I said, running a hand through my windswept hair. “I have to fly home now anyway.”

  She laughed. “You’re so weird.” She shut the window and pulled the curtains together. I watched the orange glow of the ebon kindness recede. A strange memory popped into my head—the nuns, floating down the aisles with candles in their hands during the overture to Mr. Ransom’s production of The Sound of Music in 1989. With that thought, the elation of the previous minute was over, and a heaviness had set in again. I trudged through the overgrown yard until I stood almost beneath My Friend.

  “A little help?” I said.

  With a loud sigh, it drifted to the ground and grabbed my shoulders. A rush of energy passed between us, my stomach tight, heart racing. When it let go, I bent my legs and pushed up into the air. The creature kept its distance on the flight home, and looked away whenever I glanced at it. When we arrived at the house, I flew through my open window, but My Friend remained outside.

  “Are you mad about something?” I said.

  It hesitated, then shook its head.

  “You’re not mad.”

  It shook its head.

  “So are you coming inside?”

  It shook its head again and, turning its back, flew away into the night.

  I shut the window and walked down the hall to Eunice’s room. I wanted to talk to her about Donna, to share the night’s triumph, but when I knocked on her door, Brin answered with a flushed face, her spiky hair out of alignment.

  “Help you?” she said.

  “Are you being funny?” I said. I leaned to one side, and she moved to block my view.

  “Just a second, Noah,” Eunice called, somewhere out of sight. She sounded winded, and I understood what they must have been doing before I knocked. My realization must have shown, because Brin tilted her head and raised her eyebrows.

  “Forget it,” I said. I walked back to my own room, undressed, and went to bed. I replayed Donna’s kiss, trying to pull more details from the memory, but it remained a startling blur. There was pleasure commingled with the surprise, but more an intellectual pleasure at the fact of having kissed a girl than in any physical delight, or desire for the person who gave it to me.

  Muffled laughter sounded from down the hall—Eunice and Brin playing behind a closed door. I guessed their deal—no church, no haunted house—was working out fine. I put my pillow over my head to block the noise, and eventually was able to sleep.

  When I woke the next morning and went downstairs for breakfast, I found Mom and Eunice on the living room couch, wan and almost unblinking before the TV set. They were watching the news.

  “What is it?” I said.

  Eunice looked away from the TV slowly. “It’s happened again.”

  10

  The second abductee in the fall of 1999 was a twelve-year-old boy named Brandon Hawthorne. Brandon had gone to bed at home the night before as usual and his parents had watched late-night TV and fallen asleep without incident. Around three in the morning, Brandon’s father woke up, went to the bathroom, and then decided to check on the boy. He found Brandon’s window open and bed empty. The Hawthorne family had called the police, but so far, the search had turned up no clues. The boy was just gone.

  It would have been impossible to ignore the similarities between this most recent disappearance and that of Sydney ten years before. My sister’s name and picture started to pop up on newscasts again, and reporters called my mother at home and work to request quotes or interviews. She didn’t say anything to me about it, but I heard the messages on our answering machine, and I agreed with the reporters. There was something weird going on.

  Ten days went by without the monster coming to visit. It had been a month since Maria Davis had been taken. No witnesses had come forward, and if there were any new leads, the police weren’t telling the press. I had dreams of flying over Vandergriff, the wind making a rat’s nest of my hair. I had dreams of golden light, of desire rising and being fulfilled. I had dreams where Sydney screamed again and again. I dreamt of open windows, but I never dreamt about Donna.

  At work, the cast began to wear costumes during rehearsals. The Brads and Katies took turns as my victim. I got good at moving in the suit, adapting to their patterns of defense and collapse. Nobody moved like Donna. She wriggled and thrashed against me as I pulled her out of sight. In the dark of the labyrinth, she remained pressed to me even after I put her down.

  Sometimes she tried to talk to me. “So this is the monster’s lair. I have to be honest, I’m a little disappointed. I thought it would look like something from Buffy or Aliens.” Another time: “You know that flower you gave me? I forgot to put it in water for like two days and it still hasn’t died.”

  I never took the conversational bait. If Donna thought my behavior strange, she didn’t say anything. We ate lunch together at school and held hands in the hall between classes. She rode with me and Kyle to rehearsals in the afternoons. From the outside, we probably looked like a normal high school couple, but everything she said sounded like it was coming from far away, down a distant hall.

  I wanted to talk to Eunice about it, but every time I stopped by her room, I could hear her in there with Brin, and I knew better than to try to interrupt again. Instead, I waited for Eunice to come to me—which, on the last Friday night before The Wandering Dark opened, she finally did.

  I was supposed to go to Donna’s for movie night, but I called her and pretended to feel sick to get out of it. Eunice and I took her station wagon to the high school, where Eunice let me get some practice in with my new driver’s license. Afterward we went to an all-night diner for soda (for me) and coffee (for her).

  “So,” she said, dumping creamer into her mug and stirring the black liquid to a light brown. “I hear you’ve started a romance with a Katie named Donna.”

  I smiled a little and bit my straw. I’d missed how funny she could be when she was feeling playful.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to be embarrassed. I’m glad you’re finally out in the world, meeting people. I was starting to worry that my antisocial tendencies were rubbing off on you.”

  “It’s not that I’m embarrassed,” I said. “I mean, Donna’s nice, but…I’ve been having trouble thinking about anything besides Maria Davis and Brandon Hawthorne.”

  Eunice stopped futzing with her coffee to regard me. She seemed to really take in my face for the first time all night.

  “Because of Sydney?”

  I shrugged
. “I guess so. Do you think it’s the same person taking the kids now?”

  She took a sip of coffee. “I don’t know. I haven’t put much thought into it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I know it’s selfish,” she said. “And I hope they find those kids, and that they’re okay. Hell, I hope we get closure with Sydney. But none of those are problems I can solve. I’ve got my own stuff going on now.”

  “What—” I hesitated, because I worried what it might mean to acknowledge it in the open. “You mean Brin?”

  Her cheeks turned pink and she stared into her coffee, but she did nod.

  “Where is she tonight anyway?” I said.

  “Church retreat,” Eunice said.

  “I thought she was taking a break from that place,” I said.

  “This is sort of her ‘last hurrah,’ ” Eunice said. “She’s been going to church with some of these people for years, and they pretty much begged her to come to this weekend. It’s a chance to say goodbye.” And then, either not noticing or choosing to ignore my skeptical expression, she pushed on. “You know, I didn’t realize how lonely I was until I wasn’t anymore. It’s funny. She gets me. I guess I get her, too.”

  I swallowed my dislike for Brin. “I’m glad you have a friend,” I said.

  She looked radiant with embarrassed happiness, hands clasped around her mug. I gently pushed my soda glass across the table until it clinked against her mug.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  11

  The Wandering Dark opened and drew strong crowds despite the curfews and real-life nightmare taking place in our town. I stalked strangers, banged on walls, rattled doors, and harvested ripe, full-bodied screams. Sometimes I let a Brad or Katie through untouched, and sometimes I captured them, terrifying the audience. It kept the plants jumpy and heightened the guests’ terror, making the catharsis of emerging into the parking lot, in full view of our security guards, that much sweeter. I was a good monster. I loved the work. When I wore the costume, separated from the world by a barrier of fur and fabric and plastic, nothing else mattered.

  It was only at the end of the night, when I peeled off my second skin and became Noah Turner, that I felt confused and anxious. Donna and I continued to hold hands and traded the occasional kiss at work, but I didn’t feel anything about any of it. I thought a lot about Eunice’s suicide note, about people excavating one another in search of things they wanted and needed. I felt like a hollow shell being operated remotely. Mostly I felt a vague, nebulous dread. Like something awful was about to happen, which I was powerless to stop.

  It turned out to be not any one thing, but a series.

  The Monday after we opened, I got home from school to find Eunice’s bedroom door shut. I paused outside, listening for muffled laughter or rustling sheets, but heard only silence. I went back downstairs to fix myself a snack. As I passed through the dining room with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I noticed a white envelope on the kitchen table. A new note from Eunice? I sat down to read while I ate. The envelope contained several sheets of paper, but the page on top was a note in a hand I didn’t recognize:

  “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper.”—Romans 1:26–28

  I have repented my sins. If you care about the world after this one, you will, too. Please don’t call again.

  Your sister in Christ,

  Brin

  Eunice’s note came on the following page:

  Dear Noah,

  Love is ridiculous, right? A chemical imbalance, an illness. We catch it, we go mad for a little while, and what do we do when it passes? If we’re “lucky,” we’re saddled with an imperfect marriage, a mortgage, and obnoxious, needy, resentful kids. Our ambitions and dreams and potential greatness are extinguished for want of a little human contact and some orgasms (passing bodily contractions that can easily be achieved on one’s own). And yet, 99% of all music, literature, film, and art is devoted to love. The world carries on like this is the best, most natural thing. We sing endless songs about getting sick, and the complex of scars left when the illness fades.

  But you know what’s worse than catching love? Having the object of your illness not return the feeling. Hearing them say, “No thank you,” when you declare yourself. Worst of all is knowing, deep down, that she doesn’t really feel that way, but let some creep scare her into saying it anyway. Why do the creeps of the world have so much power? I don’t know.

  There was no jokey verdict at the end, no reassuring farewell. The letter just stopped. I went to Eunice’s room and knocked on the door. She answered disheveled and puffy-faced.

  “What is it, Noah?”

  I glanced behind her into the darkened room, and had the impression of a deeper, wide space—a huge fairy-tale ballroom with floor-to-ceiling windows full of moonlight. I glanced at Eunice’s tired, impatient face, and then at the room again. This time it looked like Eunice’s room—tidy, stuffed with books, and a small TV on the dresser pouring out pale blue light.

  I held up her note. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You seem like maybe you’re not.”

  “I am okay,” she said, emphasizing each word. “I thought you liked reading about what’s on my mind, but if you’re not mature enough to handle it—” She reached for the note.

  “No, no,” I said and stepped away. “I guess I overreacted. Sorry to bother you. And I’m…sorry about…you know.”

  She made a face. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  12

  The following night, I begged off a late dinner with Kyle and Donna after the last guests left and hung back to help Mom close up shop. I found her at her desk, counting cash.

  “I’m worried about Eunice,” I said.

  “Is that so?” she said, without looking up.

  I told her my reasons (minus Eunice’s sexuality), and when I finished, she leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. I noticed the streaks of gray in her hair for the first time, the permanent laugh lines around her mouth. She had turned fifty-one this year, but I hadn’t realized until now that she was actually getting older.

  “Eunice has always been like this,” she said. “A fight with her friend might intensify things, but as long as she’s on her medication, all you can do is wait it out. She’ll get better when she’s ready.”

  “This time feels different,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Different how?”

  Was she really so blind? Had she not noticed the change in Eunice when Brin had come into our lives? Had she never suspected?

  “Do you really not know?” I said.

  She gave me a cold stare, as if daring me to say more, to break the border between us, cross the no-man’s-land of Sydney’s disappearance, and start admitting things. When I didn’t, she resumed her count. “I understand you’re worried about your sister, but trust me, it will be fine.”

  But when we got home, I found a note in Eunice’s scribble on the upstairs bathroom counter:

  The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper—H. P. Lovecraft, “Celephaïs”

  I don’t know if she meant for me to see it or not.

  13

  The week passed without much incident. My Friend
still hadn’t reappeared, so I spent my downtime reading and watching TV with the volume low, so I could pay attention to Eunice’s movements. She didn’t move much—mostly from the bedroom to the bathroom or kitchen. Her hair was greasy and tousled, and her eyes puffy with either too much or not enough sleep. I did what Mom said. I gave her space.

  Kyle was home sick from school the following Monday, so Donna and I ate lunch together in the cafeteria without our usual buffer, both of us quiet as we worked through our cold, rubbery school-issue pizza. Even through the fog of worry about Eunice and My Friend, I could feel Donna working up to something.

  “The other night, when Kyle drove me home after closing?” she said. “That night you stayed behind to help your mom? Something happened and I’m afraid how you’ll take it.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “We kind of kissed.”

  “Kind of?” As though these were the two words worth arguing about.

  “It wasn’t anything we planned.” She finally looked over at me. “I invited him inside to see the ebon kindness—which still hasn’t died, by the way—and then…” She trailed off and shrugged. “I spaced out, and when I came to, we were kissing. I know it sounds like bullshit, but it’s like I forgot that I even had a boyfriend for a minute. I’ve actually been forgetting a lot of stuff lately.”

  I didn’t know what to say—or even how to feel. I felt myself reaching for the tools I’d been handed by every cheating/breakup scene from every TV show or movie I’d ever watched, but I paused when I realized that it would be an empty motion. Donna’s admission only created a sense of relief. It could be over and it wouldn’t be my fault.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s okay.” I poked at my pizza. I really didn’t feel hungry.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s okay. We’re cool.” I left my lunch on the table as I exited the cafeteria, already thinking of something else.