A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  I’d had enough. I broke from the crowd and walked through the door to the man’s left. It opened out into the cool evening air and slammed shut on the man’s voice, some parting shot I didn’t hear. There was a hayride shuttle waiting to drive people back to satellite parking, but I elected to walk. I kept my hands in my pockets and my shoulders hunched as I crossed the dark field.

  Why would I subject myself to this place to begin with? Because The Wandering Dark was in trouble. Ticket sales had been declining for the last two years, and it was now rare for our parking lot to be even half-full on a Saturday night. Most of our customers were families with young children, and the few teens and adults who showed up seemed dazed and unimpressed, like an audience drugged with Thorazine. Mom wanted to close down, and had even fielded offers to sell the place, but I had asked her to give me a few nights off to scope out the competition. I wanted to see who was stealing our business, and what we might do to win it back.

  I’d been to three haunted attractions in the last week—Blood Bath, a gory slasher-themed place in Dallas; House of Scares, a family-friendly collection of mini-haunts; and now Inferno, a Christian Hell House run out of a megachurch in Mansfield, a perversion of the tropes for religious ends. I should have been able to roll my eyes and laugh it off, but I felt shaken, upset. I couldn’t dismiss the image of Miranda, the date-rape suicide, pleading with me as she was taken to Hell.

  2

  Mom was already in bed when I got home. I went up to my room, and as soon as I was inside, I grabbed the black stone that hung around my neck. I closed my eye and concentrated, and when I opened it again I found myself in the clearing in the black forest. The air was thick and fetid, the trees inky and dense as an Impressionist’s brushstrokes.

  The door opened before I could knock, and there she stood, robe open to reveal a strip of flesh running from the hollow of her throat to the patch of red hair on her mons pubis.

  “Leannon si,” she said.

  Leannon si. Pronounced lihannan shee. A nickname, an inside joke picked up from a book of Celtic fairy tales: a beautiful fairy woman who takes a mortal man as a lover. I’d suggested the name Leannon for want of something to call her, to think of her as something other than “the monster,” “the creature,” or “My Friend,” to reframe our relationship outside the bounds of Danny and the Dinosaur or E.T. Leannon si, to make it less weird as I carried her down the stairs to her bed. Leannon si, as I dropped her on the blankets, lowered myself to my knees, and pushed her legs apart. Leannon si, spelled out with my tongue as she pulled my hair. Leannon si, her thighs clamped around my head, my nose squashed against her as her body locked and she cried out. Leannon si as, gasping, I climbed onto the bed, wrestled my pants off, and slipped into her. Leannon si, her teeth on my ear, her ankles around the small of my back. Leannon si, holding me and whispering, “Good boy,” as the golden kaleidoscope split me into dozens of tiny starbursts. Leannon si.

  We lay entangled and sweating in the humidity. Three years of this. Three years of visiting this little house in this little clearing in another world, of lingering with her in this bed. Did I think it was weird? I wasn’t exactly eager to announce our relationship to anyone, and now, a year and change after high school, I’d started questioning the long-term viability of the arrangement, but only a little. Mostly I’d enjoyed myself, and my passion for Leannon continued to burn hot, lasting in a way no human passion ever seems to.

  Now I laid my head on her pale stomach and studied the canvas on her easel, which depicted two figures on a hillside beneath a sky of blended yellows, maroons, blues, and blacks. A crescent moon and an oblong, misshapen star hung in the sky, and a second star lay on the ground. I couldn’t tell what the two figures were supposed to be. The one on the right looked like an animal, hunched over and draped in yellow, its purple-gray head shaped like an apostrophe. It had an alien eye, lidded only on the bottom and gazing without apparent expression at the sky. The figure on the left looked like a flower with a wide stem and two stalks culminating in mismatched bulbs, one with wings, the other a purple vulva. Behind the vulva, almost hidden in the paint, was the figure of a woman, hips rising to a pair of round breasts. I thought of Miranda at Inferno. She’d been curvy like that.

  “What do you think?” Leannon said, startling me.

  I sat up, pretending to want a better look. “I’m not sure I understand it.”

  She sat up, too, and rested her chin on my shoulder. “It’s not a codex to be decrypted. It’s a painting. It’s okay to say what it makes you think and feel.”

  “What do you think and feel about it?” I said.

  She looked pensive and didn’t answer right away. “I think about you,” she said. It didn’t sound like a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth. It was a balance I’d noticed often. When I’d first heard her speak, I’d assumed the mysteries surrounding her would thin out, but I felt no closer to the heart of things now than in 1999. I still didn’t know her real name, how old she was, or even what she was. I didn’t know where this house was, or how the stone around my neck helped me traverse the distance from my bedroom to Leannon’s front door.

  Sensing the conversation flow in a direction she didn’t like, she got up and crossed to one of her kitchen cupboards.

  “Are you hungry?” she said. “I have food.” She retrieved a bowl of apples and set them in front of me.

  I took a bite of one of the apples and realized that I was hungry—starving, in fact. I demolished two while she watched. When I finished, she took the cores and remaining apples back to the cupboard. I didn’t know what she did with food trash. She always stashed it back in the cupboard, and by the next time I visited, it was gone. Another mystery to add to the list.

  As she secreted the apple cores, a low rumble sounded somewhere in the distance. Leannon grew rigid. She grabbed her robe off the floor and fastened it around her waist.

  “What—” I started, but she snapped her fingers to shush me. The noise grew louder and deeper. The floor began to vibrate, and then the house began to shake. The easel danced from leg to leg, the painting tilting. The inside of my skull rang. Leannon jumped on the bed and wrapped her arms and legs around me. She felt feverish and hot, her limbs like metal cables. The constant, maddening vibration went on and on until another sound joined it—four slow notes, like sleepy, lazy whale song. The rumbling lessened, then stopped. She moved her hands to my cheeks and let me pull my head free of her throat.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Fine, I think.”

  She turned my face back and forth, peering into my good eye. “You’re sure? Nothing is—changed? Nothing feels broken?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She let me go and we sat up. The house looked like it had been turned upside down and shaken. The cabinets hung open like slack-jawed witnesses, and the floor was buried in an assortment of broken crockery, rags, dried roots, blocks of clay, pads and pencils. The painting lay next to the bed, intact but dinged on one side.

  “Shit,” I said.

  She sighed but waved a dismissive hand. “It’s fine.”

  “At least let me help you clean up.” I started to stand, and she grabbed my arm.

  “I don’t need help, but thank you for offering.” She remained seated, hand clamped almost painfully on my arm. She looked upset. Scared.

  “What just happened?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t read a partial truth in her voice this time. This time I read an outright lie.

  3

  I slept badly in my own bed, chased through nightmares by some unseen leviathan, and woke with the sun already high in the sky. My bedside alarm clock read 11:30 a.m. I swore at myself. I was supposed to meet Eunice for lunch at noon.

  I arrived at the café ten minutes late and found her seated on the patio, reading a Tami Hoag book and d
rinking a mimosa. She glowered as I took a seat.

  “I know, I know,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “I overslept.”

  “God forbid you ever need a real eight-to-five job,” she said. She downed the rest of her mimosa. “Anyway, thanks for showing up.”

  “Sure,” I said. It was the most positive response I could muster. I couldn’t manage Wouldn’t miss it or Happy to be here. Although we were nominally on good terms, things had been strained between us since the night I’d stolen her car and she’d attempted suicide. After two months in a mental health facility on a strong dose of Prozac, she’d dropped out of school, gotten her paralegal certification, and gone to work for a firm in Fort Worth. She moved out of the house and got an apartment close to work, and although she visited every few weeks, our conversation was always cordial, never warm. She complained a lot about her arrogant, know-it-all boss, and kept checking her watch, as though Mom and I were as much a run-out-the-clock situation as any job. She always brought a dessert with her—a pie, cookies, cupcakes—as a gift for Mom, but she usually polished it off herself. I mention this not because I want to judge, but because the constant overeating arrived at the same time the writing stopped. During her visits I usually asked if she was working on anything, and while she made excuses at first, eventually she just said “No,” whenever I mentioned it. She delivered the negation with exaggerated casualness, as if I were asking about the weather.

  “The voices don’t speak to me anymore,” she said. “I’m doing my best to move on.”

  About a year after the hospital, she began to date again. I would have been thrilled, except that Eunice began dating men, and, after a few months, zeroed in on one man in particular: Hubert Sangalli, a long-lost friend from her grade school days. They’d been paired together on a blind date, and after the initial shock of recognition, had embarked on an accelerated courtship, which included a pilgrimage to meet Mom and me after only two weeks. Hubert was tall and thin, with a bad blond comb-over and watery blue eyes. He looked distorted, like someone had pushed him through one of those machines that flattens pennies to stamp on an image, only Hubert’s image hadn’t quite taken.

  The day I met him, he spoke in hushed tones about luck, fate, and destiny. Eunice sat next to him, holding his hand and wearing a thin smirk that looked more like indulgence than agreement. Six months after that, they were engaged, and now the wedding was only a month away. Eunice and I were having lunch to discuss Hubert’s bachelor party, for which I, the de facto, reluctant best man, was responsible.

  “Does Hubert know we’re meeting?” I said. “Normally the groom and best man do this without the bride.”

  “Don’t be a prick,” Eunice said. “You know he’s shy. He likes you, but you’re an intimidating person to be around.” She waved to catch our server’s attention.

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  She didn’t argue the point. Our server arrived, and again I felt a stranger recognize and evaluate me. If Eunice noticed, she didn’t say anything. She ordered another mimosa.

  “What does Hubert have in mind?” I said, meaning, What do you have in mind?

  “He doesn’t drink, so you being underage won’t be a problem,” she said. Inside the restaurant, I saw our server talking to another server. Both turned to look at me, then away again when they realized I was watching them.

  “What about the other bachelor party staple?” I said, refocusing my attention. “Strip club?” I’d never been to one and was curious.

  “He gets nervous when a stranger cuts his hair. I can’t imagine how he’d react to a building full of naked women trying to touch him.”

  “Noble reasoning on your part,” I said.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  “So no drinking and no strippers,” I said. “What does he want?”

  “Fun Mountain,” she said. “Mini golf, rides, go-carts, then a nice dinner. Maybe a movie, if anything good is showing.”

  “He wants a ten-year-old’s birthday party?” I said.

  “This man will be your brother in a month,” she said. “Please just make him happy? And try not to make fun of him to his face while you’re doing it. It would mean a lot to me.”

  “All right,” I said, although I couldn’t bring myself to apologize. “I’ll get it done.”

  “Great,” she said. She gave me a list of other men Hubert knew—not necessarily friends—who I might be able to corral into attending the party. Our main business concluded, she asked about me, and The Wandering Dark. I told her about how I was spying on our competition for ideas.

  “Have you found anything worth stealing?” she said.

  “Not yet,” I admitted. “What they’re doing, we already do better. The only thing these places have going for them is that they’re not us. If we’re going to innovate, we’ll have to do it on our own.”

  “Any ideas?” she said.

  “I’d like to create a more immersive experience,” I said. “Beyond a walking tour of cheap scares. A place where people could spend the night, like a haunted bed-and-breakfast, or a motel where weird shit is always happening. And depending on what level of scare you sign up for, you get an experience ranging from ‘creepy’ or ‘vaguely unsettling’ to ‘genuinely afraid for your life.’ ”

  Eunice tilted her head, inscrutable behind her sunglasses.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing.” She pursed her lips. “Dad had a similar idea, right before he died.”

  It had been years since anyone had mentioned Dad to me.

  “I don’t know how far they got with it,” Eunice said. “It was something he and Mom worked on to pass the time, but he was far gone by then. Mom said it was all just nonsense she wrote down to humor him. Crazy person stuff.”

  4

  I met with Mom later that afternoon in the costume shop at The Wandering Dark. She worked while we talked, repairing the latest iteration of my monster costume, fat threads of black and red holding together strips of fur in various shades, from near black to a faded brown bordering on yellow. Mom’s hair had wide streaks of gray now, and she carried permanent bags beneath her green eyes. Crow’s-feet and laugh lines had etched themselves into her face. She was fifty-four this year, but the bifocals perched on her nose made her look even older.

  I paced as I made my report, telling her what I had told Eunice, and my theory about familiarity being our biggest problem.

  “It makes sense,” she said. “Imagine running a movie theater that only played one movie every day for thirteen years.” She glared at the costume. “The place is falling apart anyway. I swear, the costumes never used to wear out this fast.”

  “Maybe we could do something all-new then,” I said. She set down the costume and leaned back on her stool. “I had an idea for a haunted hotel, and Eunice said you and Dad had a similar idea back around the time I was born, so I thought maybe, if you’d let me look at his old notes—”

  She started shaking her head before I finished the sentence. I’d braced myself for an argument, but not what Mom actually said:

  “I threw all that stuff out years ago.”

  I stopped pacing. “Why would you do that?”

  She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Try to imagine a box in your house that exists only to remind you of the worst, most painful time of your whole life. Would you want to keep it?”

  “You could have hidden it in the attic and given it to Eunice when she moved out. You could have given it to me.”

  She put her glasses back on. “I did what I did. I can’t undo it.”

  “I’ve never even seen a picture of Dad,” I said. I would see one eventually, but not for another eleven years.

  “Look in the mirror and you’ll get the general idea. And even if I still had the box, it wouldn’t make a differ
ence. You promised ideas to save this place, but come back to me suggesting we build an all-new and completely different place—one that would cost a fortune and might not be legal. But setting aside money and the law, you assume I’m interested in building something new. I got into this business in 1989 to save our family from financial ruin. It turned into a good moneymaker for a while. It meant a lot to you and Eunice, and it’s been a nice tribute to Sydney. But now it’s stopped making money and it sounds like you don’t have any strong ideas for fixing that. My advice to you would be to enjoy your last few weeks here. Soak it in and say goodbye.”

  5

  I stopped my industrial espionage and went back to being the monster. It was still a joy, but tempered now by sadness because it was ending. As with Leannon, I tried to avoid long-term thinking, but it was hard in this case, since I had so little time left to harvest screams and terrify strangers.

  One night, about a week after going back on the job, I popped my head through a “porthole” and saw “Miranda” from Inferno amid a clump of visitors in the Professor’s study. The strangers jumped and shrieked at my appearance. Miranda did not. She leaned back a little and squinted, as though trying to get a better look. Her lack of surprise startled me, and I backed away, disappearing into my labyrinth. Later, when I emerged in the dance hall, meaning to snatch a Brad, I paused next to her. I sniffed at her elbow and slid my snout up along her arm, past her shoulder and neck, and hung my face right before hers. Her breathing remained calm and steady. She wasn’t at all scared of me.

  “Hey!” the Brad sputtered, sounding confused but trying to stay in character. “Leave her alone!”

  His real name was Jimmy, a skinny, chinless kid who’d been miscast. He put a hand on my shoulder like he meant to shove me, and we shifted into our choreographed tussle. He tried to punch me, and I choked him unconscious before fleeing with him back into my labyrinth.