A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

  Her hand doesn’t relax into his, but she doesn’t withdraw, either.

  I swear to you, that was it, he says. I think it was just weird coincidence, or fate, or whatever you call it. Maybe divine intervention. But you know everything there is to tell.

  She does pull her hand away, but squeezes back before she does. She does that little headshake and ashamed smile that means she’s trying not to cry. He knows better than to try to stop the tears, or encourage them. She prefers to fight this battle alone every time. He sits and he waits.

  When she gets control of herself, she says, If it’s okay with you, I don’t think I want to do Fellowship stuff anymore.

  Why not?

  Because I feel like I have all the answers I’m ever going to have, she says. She swallows hard. And that’s going to have to be enough. That’s my closure. I want to move on.

  With me, I hope, Noah says.

  Of course with you, she says. You’re my husband.

  They both pause. It’s the first time she’s said the word out loud since the ceremony, and it still carries its original incantatory power. It strikes him anew that he has gotten married. He has a wife. Regardless of what has come before, he’s made his choice. Megan is his responsibility.

  I am, he says. And as your husband, I have a request.

  What’s that?

  I don’t want to live in Chicago anymore after you graduate, he says.

  Where do you want to live?

  Why not here? I mean, not like right here, at this restaurant—

  God forbid, she says.

  But here. Ashland. A theater town. I could find work in the scene shops, and maybe you could act in a play or two.

  This place seems sort of made for us, doesn’t it? she says.

  She graduates the following May, and they move into a second-floor apartment over a candle store in Ashland. Their new home smells pleasantly dreamy at all hours. Megan doesn’t get any acting work, but she does find a job teaching theater at a local high school, and Noah works in the scene shop at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, building sets. For a while, things are good. The constant confusion, fear, and unreality of his former life fades into a dream of soft colors and inviting scents. The sense of being watched recedes, and his past seems less like something that’s happened to him and more like vivid scenes in a book he once read, a borrowed nightmare. Love and a simple life. This is the real magic.

  But years pass with increasing speed. Leaves drop from the trees only to jump back up overnight, green and renewed, while Noah and Megan march out of youth and toward the gray, murky country of middle age. Somewhere in this montage of years, something slips away from them. By the time Noah is twenty-nine, his esophagus burns whenever he consumes anything with tomato sauce. His back and knees ache all the time for no reason. He carries a roll of Tums and a bottle of Advil everywhere he goes. Every time he turns a corner, he’s exactly where he expects to be. Geography holds no surprises or inconsistencies. He’s tired all the time, exhausted by his job. Sometimes he catches himself looking at the sky, wondering what Ashland would look like from above. Would it be cold up there? Would he need goggles to see his apartment building? He used to ride the night winds. The sky was his, and so was Leannon. Or he was hers. He knows it’s wrong to miss a monster. And so he tells himself he doesn’t.

  It might be easier if things were still good with Megan. It’s not like they’re bad, per se. They don’t fight. They don’t even argue. But they don’t laugh or smile or really talk much anymore. At the end of most days, they spend their time together on opposite sides of the couch, eating burgers or pizza and numbing out to the paltry comforts of laugh-track sitcoms. They don’t ever talk about her father, or the Fellowship, or Noah’s past, and they rarely touch one another on purpose.

  Sometimes he looks at Megan, so far away on her side of the couch, and he wonders why she seems so unhappy. He asks her from time to time, and she always shrugs and turns the question back on him.

  Are you happy? she says.

  He feels numb and unlike himself and doesn’t understand why. He was saved. Why wasn’t his salvation enough? Why is he so disappointed whenever he turns a corner and finds himself exactly where he’s supposed to be? Why has he started doodling city skylines on scraps of paper?

  And then, one night when he’s thirty years old, Noah wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of scratching on glass: skritch-skritch-skritch, at his bedroom window. Some part of him has been waiting for this, had expected it sooner. He rises, heart racing, and crosses the bedroom, but before he can pull the curtains aside, his phone begins to ring. He hesitates before the window, hand on the curtains, momentarily disoriented. Megan stirs, and he reaches for the phone. He picks it up off the bedside table and reads a Texas number he doesn’t recognize.

  Hello? he says.

  Who is it? Megan says, voice thick with sleep.

  The voice at the other end is small and full of static like a fading radio signal, and he doesn’t catch anything but the last two words, uttered in breathy panic: little prince.

  Eunice? he says. Eunice, hello?

  Noah? It’s a man’s voice now, much clearer, and sounding confused.

  Who is this? Noah says.

  He walks to the window to part the curtains, but whatever was out there is gone now. It’s just him, Megan, and the voice on the phone saying, Noah, this is Hubert. Something terrible has happened.

  PART SIX

  The Shunned House

  1

  I returned to Vandergriff on a Sunday in March 2013, riding coach near the wing of an American Airlines flight as it dipped below the clouds into the gray, wet, miserable reality of DFW airport. Weather-related complications kept us on the tarmac for nearly an hour, and I had to squeeze my Kindle to keep from screaming with frustration. It was only rain, for Christ’s sake. Cars drove in rain all the time. What the fuck slowed down a landed plane?

  Beside me in the window seat, Megan put a hand on my arm. “Bring it down a notch. You’re about to white-knuckle that gizmo in half.”

  I set the Kindle back on my lap and gave Megan an apologetic look. She squeezed my arm. There was sympathy in her glance, but something else behind it. I looked away, through the window.

  When we finally disembarked, Kyle met us at the baggage claim. We’d kept in touch via social media, but I hadn’t seen him in person since my wedding, so his beer gut and salt-and-pepper hair took me by surprise. He pulled me into a bear hug and pounded me twice on the back.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said. “Although the circumstances suck.”

  I reintroduced him to Megan, and she smiled as they shook hands. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen her smile at something other than a sitcom and failed. A muddled potpourri of jealousy and longing pinged in my chest.

  Kyle insisted on carrying her bag to his Prius and loaded it into the back for her. He wanted her to sit up front, too, but she proved immovable on this point. She stretched out in the backseat and I rode shotgun. We crept out of the parking garage and into gridlocked traffic amid a heavy, view-obscuring thunderstorm.

  I gestured at the endless lines of cars around us. “Sorry about this. You probably had better things to do today.”

  “Are you kidding?” Kyle said. “If I weren’t here I’d be at home wrangling the kids while Donna’s at her book club. Instead they’re with my mom today. This is like a spa day for me.”

  Megan snorted in the backseat.

  “How are your folks?” I said.

  Kyle cleared his throat. “Mom tossed Dad out. For good this time.”

  “What for?” I said, trying to sound like I had no theories of my own. I had no proof Mr. Ransom had continued philandering after Sydney vanished, but a man who could fall in love with one teenage girl seemed likely to have fall
en in love with others.

  “No one thing in particular,” he said. “At least, not that I know of. Mom seems a lot happier. Redid the whole house. It doesn’t even feel like the place where I grew up anymore.”

  “And your dad?” I said.

  “Living in a trailer park,” Kyle said.

  He went on for a bit, prompted by questions from me and Megan, talking about his marriage, his three kids, and, eventually, The Wandering Dark. He and Donna had bought the place from Mom in 2003 and rebuilt on the old bones, turning the attraction from a nightmare maze into a safari through the country of the undead. They rechristened it Zombie Mansion and it opened in unintentional tandem with the zombie craze kicked off by 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead. They’d done well for a while, but, as my family had learned, in the haunting business, familiarity eventually breeds indifference, and Zombie Mansion had finally closed last year. Kyle had taken a job at a company that sold boxes and packing supplies, and Donna answered phones in an office.

  “We still have the warehouse and everything in it,” he said. “I’m brainstorming ways to bring it back.” The words sounded hollow, as though even he didn’t quite believe them. It would be hard to leave behind the stability of his current job. Adulthood gets us all in the end.

  Things got quiet after that. Kyle turned the windshield wipers up to full speed. They made whiny sounds against the glass, and I could feel all of us trying to think of something—anything—to talk about that didn’t involve the reason for our return to Vandergriff.

  Megan finally made a gambit. “So, Kyle—I hear my husband used to date your wife?”

  “For less than a month,” I said, playing along. “And then Kyle—my best friend—stole her away.”

  “Stole is a strong way to put it,” Kyle said.

  “So is best friend,” I said. We all laughed, and for a moment, I was happy to be home, in a car with my wife and my best friend, seeing the two of them get along, teaming up to make me the butt of a joke. It was a glimpse into the life I’d thought I would have when Megan and I had first gotten together, the one that had never quite materialized.

  The feeling evaporated as we pulled into Eunice and Hubert’s neighborhood. Well—to call it a neighborhood was an overstatement. The street on which Eunice’s house stood was the first and only row of completed homes in the development. Skeletal, unfinished structures and empty, weed-filled lots lined the streets beyond. A faded sign on the street corner promised HOUSES AND LOTS STARTING AT $30,000.

  “Sign looks old,” I said as we drove in.

  “It’s been there for years,” Kyle said. “The people bankrolling the project went out of business and nobody’s come in to finish it. There used to be forklifts and cranes out there, but I guess someone bought those and took them. Now the rest of it sits and ages.”

  He parked in Eunice’s driveway behind a family-friendly SUV that must have been Hubert’s. Eunice’s car, listed in the newspaper articles as a black 2009 Toyota Camry, was absent, probably still in police custody. The house was a two-story brick structure with wide front windows, a sloping lawn, and a view of an industrial park across from the development.

  Kyle and I got out of the car to retrieve the suitcases and ran up the driveway ahead of Megan.

  “Call me if you need anything,” he said. “We can get a beer.”

  He ran back to the car, waving at Megan as she walked up the drive with a magazine open over her hair as a pitiful umbrella. I rang the bell, and Hubert threw open the door. He’d remained skinny and pale, but looked more haggard, his hair unkempt, dark bags beneath his eyes.

  “Noah,” he said, and pulled me into a tight hug despite my sopping clothes. “Thank God you’re here.”

  2

  Like the outside of the house, everything inside seemed calculated to communicate a message of suburban normality: the dining room with the glossy wooden table and straight-backed chairs; the matching china hutch; the pleasant, forgettable paintings of boats and landscapes alongside Sears family portraits; the pristine cream-colored carpet and white furniture in the living room. Everything is fine here, the house seemed to say through gritted teeth. We are normal and happy, goddammit.

  Two children sat on the living room floor, playing with Lego bricks: Caroline, age ten, and her brother, Dennis, eight. Both glanced up as I entered. Dennis looked like a smaller, rounder version of his father, and Caroline looked achingly like her mother, with the same red hair and pale complexion, the same gangly limbs and weak chin. When Hubert introduced us, Dennis gave me a dazed nod, but Caroline glared, as though already suspecting me of some wrongdoing. Hubert offered us coffee, and we sat in the breakfast nook to drink it.

  “What do you know?” he said.

  “Sorry?” I said, an icy flush running through me as though I’d just been accused. I felt Megan’s gaze fall upon me again. I didn’t meet it, but instead stared into my coffee cup. The silence stretched out.

  “Oh,” I said, lamely, as if I’d misunderstood his original question. “Only what we’ve read online.”

  Taking turns, Megan and I repeated the public version of the story: the previous Monday, Eunice had gone to work, spent a full morning at her desk, and, according to her coworkers, “seemed fine.” At noon, she left for lunch and never returned. Her car was found parked in the unfinished housing development a block from where we sat right now. Her purse was sitting in the middle of one of the unfinished houses. Everything—even the cash—was still inside. When police tried to get in touch with my mom, to see if she had heard from Eunice, they couldn’t reach her by phone. They couldn’t get an answer knocking at her front door, either. When they entered the house, they found the television on and a pot of coffee burning in the kitchen, but no one inside. Neither Mom nor Eunice had been heard from since.

  When we finished, Hubert said, “Eunice works late a lot and sometimes forgets to check her phone. I didn’t worry until the next morning, when I woke up and she wasn’t home. I lost a whole day before it occurred to me that something might be wrong.”

  “Hubert, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, and hit the table. My coffee splashed over the side of the mug and puddled on the wood. “I made vows when I married your sister. I was supposed to take care of her.” I patted his shoulder and he pulled me into a second, tighter hug. I let him crush me like a stuffed animal.

  When he let go, he wiped his face with the back of his hand. “There were things I should have noticed.”

  “Like what?” Megan said.

  “She stopped taking her medication. I found at least three months’ worth in a shoe box in her closet.”

  “And you didn’t notice any change in her?” I said.

  “She seemed…peppier,” he said. “More energetic. Sometimes she stayed up all night. But, Noah, I swear to God, I thought it meant she was happy. That maybe she would start writing again.”

  Caroline and Dennis came into the kitchen then and cut the conversation short. The rest of the evening was subdued. Megan and I played the parts of the clueless, worried family while we sat in the living room and watched animated movies. The kids sat on the floor and built a Lego house.

  “That’s pretty good,” Megan said, as they finished the main walls and started on the roof.

  “It’s only a dumb house,” Caroline said.

  “When I was a kid, I could never make anything with Legos,” I said.

  “Were you dumb?” Dennis said.

  “Dennis!” Hubert said, but I laughed.

  “Yeah, I guess I kind of was.”

  Around nine, Hubert sent the kids to bed. They were bunking together in Caroline’s room so that Megan and I could have Dennis’s bed. It became apparent as soon as we entered the room that the kid was apeshit for Lego. A Bionicle poster hung over his bed, and shelves had been bu
ilt into the walls to display all his completed kits.

  As soon as we shut the door behind us, Megan said, “I still think we should get in touch with the Fellowship.” She’d been voicing this same desire several times a day ever since we’d heard about Eunice and Mom.

  “We already agreed we were done with Fellowship business,” I said. “Years ago.”

  “That was in 2003. This is now. Maybe they can help.”

  I stood up and paced the room. I made a show of looking at Dennis’s shelves of race cars, spaceships, supervillain lairs, airports, and houses, a gallery of instructions followed with painstaking care. This fastidiousness must have been something he’d inherited from his father. Eunice and I were both slobs.

  “I’m not saying it isn’t Fellowship business,” I said, “but my family are missing and I don’t want a bunch of people poking around in Hubert’s and the kids’ lives. And, anyway, suppose you’re right. Suppose my family were abducted by monsters. There’s nothing we can do. That’s how it’s been for everyone else in the Fellowship, and how it went with Sydney.”

  I turned away from Dennis’s toys to face her. She sat on the bed, knees to her chest.

  “Why didn’t you want me to come home with you?” she said, voice small.

  “I did want you to come,” I said, struggling to maintain eye contact.

  She sighed and held out a hand to me. “Come to bed.”

  Instead, I got my toiletries from my suitcase and went to shower. Megan was asleep when I came back, but she’d left the nightstand lamp on for me. I got in the bed next to her and turned out the light.

  It was true that I hadn’t wanted her to come to Texas with me. Things had been strange between us for a long time now. She seemed unhappy, and when she looked at me, there was always a searching quality in her eyes. It reminded me of the way people in Vandergriff used to look at me in the years after 1999—like there was something untrustworthy about me. And in this case, she was right. Part of my desire to come alone was wanting time and space to myself to make sense of my family’s disappearance, without feeling like I was under a microscope. But the other part of it had to do with the circumstances around the disappearances. The scratching at my bedroom window, the faded voice on the phone. Back when Megan and I lived in Chicago, the City usually called to me when I was alone. It would be much harder to be alone with Megan around and analyzing my every move.