A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  “It’s what he said to me, too,” I said. “The night I met him. Maybe he had a psychotic break?”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “But then he started sending me letters. Really detailed letters about this demon that had been tormenting him all his life, making him say and do things he didn’t want to say or do. He insisted that he’d never touched your sister, Noah, but that this demon did make him kill Maria Davis and Brandon Hawthorne. He wrote me that the demon was dead now and he was feeling much better. Sometimes he sent me pictures of the demon, too.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket and handed it to me. I unfolded it and found myself looking at a charcoal sketch of the Gray Beast, the monster that had attacked me and destroyed my left eye. I tried to keep a skeptical (if sympathetic) face.

  “At first, I figured it was a delusional person trying to reconcile the terrible thing they had done, and I didn’t answer any of the letters. But then, one night, while my mom was dying, I got up and started poking around online. That’s when I found the Fellowship. On their message boards, they have pictures that look a lot like this one. And the people in the group are real people. You can look up Sarah, or Josh, and see—they’re not full of shit. They really did go through these things. It’s public record. And yet, despite all the time we’ve spent together, all the talking and theorizing, we don’t have any real proof of these things”—she gestured at the drawing—“or any idea why they do what they do. I’ve wanted to talk to you for years, Noah. Mom kept me away from the trial, and made me promise to leave you in peace. She said you didn’t want to hear my father’s excuses or lies about your sister. But I saved your picture, and when I saw you at Inferno…it seemed like there was some spark, some instant connection, and I thought—” She broke off, and blinked a few times. I would come to know the look well. It was her trying-not-to-cry face, and it got its hooks in my heart the very first time I saw it.

  I took her hand, and she started, but didn’t pull away. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” I said. “The night I met your father? I did see this thing.” I nodded at the drawing. “I saw it, and another exactly like it. They were fighting over—over your father, I think. I ran away in the middle of it all, because I was terrified. I never told anyone because I was worried—”

  “That people would think you’re crazy,” she finished.

  This seemed to ease something in her. Her shoulders sagged a little, and then she did start to cry. I don’t know why I picked that moment to kiss her, but she didn’t recoil. She leaned forward to kiss me back. She tasted a little sweet, like a granola bar, and salty, like tears.

  11

  Fun Mountain was deserted when we returned. I’d half-expected to find the bachelor party outside, arms crossed in parental disapproval, but it was just a couple of cars. Megan leaned over to kiss me before she got out, and then I was alone in the parking lot.

  I didn’t go home right away, but sat in my car with the dome light on, studying the drawing she’d given me. It really was a perfect likeness. Why hadn’t I made any real effort to investigate Leannon and her people? I’d been around her for thirteen years. Why hadn’t I been more curious? I’d asked questions, sure, but Leannon always changed the subject or distracted me with food or sex, and afterward my questions didn’t seem so important anymore. That was certainly part of it. But there was also the fact that I’d suspected her of kidnapping and killing Maria Davis and Brandon Hawthorne in 1999, and I had been proved completely wrong. In a mode of perpetual apology, I had learned to take what she said to me at face value. I’d made myself believe that James O’Neil and the Gray Beast were exceptions, not the rule. But what evidence did I have of that? How did I know that James O’Neil and I weren’t on parallel tracks? Maybe O’Neil and the Beast started as secret playmates, too. Maybe he’d been led by his pleasure centers, manipulated and made to take part in some much darker agenda. But what could that agenda possibly be? Why would the Gray Beast want him to kidnap or kill children? And what if he’d been telling the truth when he insisted that he hadn’t killed Sydney? What then? If he hadn’t killed her, then where had she gone? And was Leannon somehow involved?

  My head had begun to pound again. I set the picture down in the passenger seat to rub my temples. How could I make all of this make sense?

  The sun was peeking over the horizon, turning the sky orange and pink when I arrived back home. Eunice’s car was in the driveway, and when I came through the front door, tucking the drawing into my back pocket, I found her with Mom, Kyle, and Hubert in the living room, all of them facing me like a small intervention.

  “Hi, Noah,” Kyle said, in a small voice.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Eunice said.

  “Out.” I shoved my hands into the back pockets of my jeans. “Something came up.”

  Hubert nodded. “We understand, Noah. We’re glad you’re okay.”

  Eunice clamped one hand on his narrow knee, her fingers white beneath her gaudy engagement ring. “After what you did, the only acceptable excuses are kidnapping or murder. The only place I should see your face is on the side of a milk carton or on the news, where they give people a number to call—”

  I yanked the drawing out of my back pocket and unfolded it for them to see. “Do any of you recognize this?”

  Eunice’s tirade came to an abrupt halt, and a faraway, dreamy look came over her face. Mom leaned back on the couch, mouth slightly open. Kyle and Hubert only looked confused.

  “You do, don’t you?” I said, looking at Mom.

  “Sure,” she said, gathering herself again. “It looks like your monster costume.”

  “Come on,” I said. “How long are we going to play this game? How long are we going to keep lying to each other, pretending everything is fine when it’s not? What are the two of you hiding from me? What do you know?”

  Hubert gave Eunice a questioning look, and she stared at me with pure hate etched on her face. Mom remained stony, impassive.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Eunice said. “Stop being dramatic and trying to change the subject. You abandoned your brother-in-law and best friend last night, and—”

  I didn’t stay to listen. I bounded up the stairs to my room, locked the door behind me, closed my eye, and put both hands to the black stone around my neck. When I opened my eye, I stood in the clearing outside Leannon’s house.

  12

  The sky was brightening here, too, although it remained a dark, mossy color. There were no windows in the house, so I had no idea whether Leannon was awake or not. I thought about knocking at the door, but hesitated. Whatever I was going to find out, I needed to find out on my own, before she could interfere or explain it away.

  I turned away from her house and trudged off into the black forest. For want of a better plan, I walked in a straight line. The trees and underbrush were sparse enough to allow my progress, but the forest remained inky black. Every time I tried to get a close look at anything, it danced back into murk, remaining mere suggestion. I walked faster, arms extended before me so I wouldn’t run into anything. I dodged around coal black trees and kicked through tangled brush until I came to a break in the darkness, sickly greenish light through the trees.

  I passed the tree line out of the woods, into open air again. The ground before me ended in a sharp cliff. I walked out to the edge and surveyed the land below. Instead of more forest, I looked upon a vast network of buildings and streets, concrete and glass and glistening black stone spread for miles and miles. Skyscrapers like teeth against the horizon and, at the center, a cyclopean pillar of black stone so tall it stretched up into the pea-soup clouds. It hurt my head to look at it, like staring through someone else’s glasses.

  The buildings looked modern in design but ancient in age, weathered and decayed, eerily quiet and apparently empty. The ground rumbled, gently at first, and the
n with more force. I stepped back and grabbed the closest tree. My fingers closed around gummy bark. The City began to move, entire stretches of street shifting like panels in a children’s picture puzzle—no, that’s not quite right. The City slithered, adjacent streets grinding against one another in opposite directions, a serpent’s head of pavement rising from the ground and rushing at me so fast I didn’t have time to panic or think. It stopped at the edge of the cliff and lay flat there, bridging the distance between me and it with a flourish of four slow, lazy musical tones.

  I waited to see if the street would lash out and strike, but it lay still. This was an invitation, not a threat. I walked down the sloping obsidian pavement and into the City, passing into a canyon of stone and glass. The buildings seemed structurally sound, the windows clean and glossy, the fluorescence behind them yellow-green. Aside from the lack of traffic and the choice of building materials, I might have stepped onto any street of any major financial district in America, except for the feeling that there was something here beyond appearances, lurking just out of sight. What that something was, I couldn’t say, but it felt important. Like a promise being extended, an answer to some unarticulated question, just around the next corner.

  At the end of the street, I turned right, deeper in. As I started down a second block of near-identical buildings, the ground quivered and rumbled. I stopped, arms out for balance as the buildings at the end of the street, outlining the top of the T-intersection, slid away to the right and revealed a new, different street, lined with black iron lamps. Red cobblestones replaced obsidian, and the buildings were smaller, older-looking, restaurants and cafés with outdoor seating. If I’d been in a sketch of a financial district before, I’d stepped into a sketch of the French Quarter now. An unseen jazz combo played somewhere nearby. A sandwich board to my left promised real beignets and THE BEST AU LAIT IN TOWN. Across the street, something moved behind a darkened plate-glass window. I crossed for a closer look, cupping my hands around my eye to cut the glare on the glass.

  The inside looked like an old-fashioned barbershop, with big mirrors, plush red chairs, and a shining tile floor. A man with thick silver hair and a pear-shaped body sat in the middle chair, tilted back like he was going to get a shave.

  I rapped on the glass. He lifted his head slowly, like a man waking from a dream, his eyes bleary and unfocused.

  “Are you okay?” I called.

  Before he could answer, the surfaces of the chair burst and thick black appendages tore out through the fabric. They wavered in the air above him like tentacles with stingers at the ends, and then stabbed down, piercing his forearms and thighs. Blood spurted from the wounds as the tentacles dug in, and he tilted his head back to scream. He struggled against the chair, but it held him fast.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Oh, Christ.” The chair was going to kill him. I ran to the shop door and tugged, but it wouldn’t budge. I looked around for something to break the window, but while I’d had my back turned, the street had removed its wastebaskets and outdoor seating. I could only pound on the glass and watch as the man writhed, screamed—and began to change.

  It started with his limbs, where the chair had anchored him. His arms and legs lengthened and thinned out like Play-Doh rolled between two palms, until both hands and feet lay loose and boneless on the floor. Then the tentacles began to pulse, as if something were pumping through them, and the man’s limbs thickened and inflated. The sleeves of his shirt and the legs of his slacks tore. His shoes exploded as his feet swelled. Fingernails and toenails thickened and curled, and hair burst in tufts from the pale, doughy flesh, covering him in fur. The man banged his head back against the chair, his screams less human and more animal. His nose and chin stretched away from his face into a snout. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they had turned orange. He’d become one of them. One of Leannon’s people.

  The chair released him, and he rolled onto the floor in a furry heap. I stepped back and bumped into something hard. I saw them reflected in the barbershop mirrors: a whole line of monsters in robes, standing right behind me. I turned and faced the one I’d bumped into. It bared its teeth and snarled. I took another step backward, this time bumping up against the glass window. The wolf-thing raised one of its talons as though to strike.

  A sharp bark from nearby cut the moment short. The creature threatening me dropped its arm, and the line parted to show me Leannon across the street, wearing her monstrous face for the first time in years. She squared her shoulders and spread her claws, a growl deep in her throat. The gang of monsters opposite her exchanged looks and apparently decided not to fight. They parted, and Leannon extended one paw to me. I walked to her. She yanked me against her body and took off.

  It took only a few seconds to get back to her clearing, and she dumped me in the grass before we landed. I rolled to a stop, and she set down in front of me, back in human form. I tried to stand, but she shoved me back to the ground, face white.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” she said.

  On my feet again, I fought the urge to shove her back. “What the hell did I just see?”

  “That’s a private, sacred ceremony,” she said. “You had no right to go snooping.”

  “The City invited me in,” I said. “It wanted me to see.”

  She studied me a moment, her fury burning out. She put a palm to her forehead. “It’s seen you. It has your scent.”

  “Is that how you—your people—are made? Is that how you got to be the way you are?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Is that what you do? Kidnap people, bring them here, and turn them into monsters? Is that what was supposed to happen to James O’Neil? Was that what he meant to do with Maria Davis?”

  And then I remembered Josh at the Fellowship meeting, asking me about Sydney. Sydney, who had gone missing around this time of year thirteen years ago.

  “What really happened to Sydney?” I said. “Is she dead? Is she here?” I gestured back at the City, where I had just seen a man transformed. “Is that what happened to her? Did you do this to her?”

  Leannon approached, reached out to me. “I know you have questions, but you have to trust me now, Noah.” The way she dodged the question told me all I needed to know. She’d taken Sydney back in 1989 and was trying to distract me, the way she always distracted me.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said, taking a horrified step back. “Leave me alone.” I clenched the stone, closed my eye. Leannon was still protesting as I returned to my own room.

  The house was silent now, free of my family’s scolding. I lay down on my bed and tried to get my shaking under control.

  13

  I called Megan and asked her to meet me at Fun Mountain again that night. When she arrived, smiling, she found me sitting cross-legged on the hood of my car. She must not have liked what she saw, because her cheer turned to concern at once.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  The Turner Sequence IV: Noah

  The City has seen Noah. It has his scent. So although his visits are intermittent, and usually brief, it watches him while he is abroad. His torture isn’t anything he can wake from in a cold sweat, something to be swept away by a lover’s reassuring touch or a bit of late-night TV. It’s the course of his life.

  It begins in 2002, as he waits for Megan in the parking lot at Fun Mountain. He feels uneasy, alone with the concrete and the sodium vapor lights shining a yellow-green that’s a touch too familiar. Part of him wishes he’d gone into the dim purple cavern of the arcade. But for once, he’s sick of the dark.

  So he waits, cross-legged on the hood of his car, fingers tucked into the crevice where his calves touch. He hopes he looks impish and cute, a twenty-first-century Peter Pan with a pirate’s eye patch, come to lead his Wendy to merry mischief. He keeps reach
ing for the stone around his neck, the way he sometimes does when he’s nervous, and he is repeatedly startled to find it absent. He left it in a desk drawer in his bedroom, where it can rot for all he cares. He just wishes its absence didn’t make him feel so naked and exposed.

  Here comes Megan now, climbing from her car, wired from an invigorating night of saving souls, her hair up in a ponytail. She looks to Noah like a picture of normality and open wholesomeness. After the day he’s had, he aches for her.

  What’s up? she says, her smile disappearing as she sees his expression.

  He’s debated what to say for hours, but settles on the simple, true thing. I need your help.

  He explains that there’s more to his story than he’s told so far. She joins him in his car and he tells her about the night Sydney vanished—the scream and the power outage that knelled together. He tells her about the strange sounds at his bedroom window in the weeks before Sydney’s disappearance, and about his mother’s and his sister’s strange reactions to James O’Neil’s drawing of the wolflike creature.

  He doesn’t tell Megan everything, though. Not about his friendship with the creature, or the name he gave her, or that, until today, they were lovers. He wants Megan’s feelings about him clear and uncomplicated. She needs to see him as a lovable victim finding the strength to speak up for the first time, not the kid who grew up to fuck the monster.