by Shaun Hamill
11
Leannon and I have just returned from the wedding and come upstairs to the room where I found Eunice last year. The desk where she wrote still sits here, the black vines swaying from its surface as though in a gentle wind. They’ve hung over me for the last several months as I’ve written this record, my overlong and inelegant version of Eunice’s suicide notes. Tonight, their moment comes at last.
I’d like to tell you I sat back down tonight full of determination, ready to hold up my end of the bargain, but the truth is that my legs failed on the way up the stairs and Leannon had to carry me up and put me in the chair.
“Be brave now, Leannon si,” she whispered, and kissed my neck. “I’ll be here.”
The whole City feels silent but for the clack of my keys and my harsh, ragged breath. This is the second part of the deal I made, the final condition I must fulfill. In exchange for my family’s safety and success, I will become a servant of the City. I now sit at the desk originally meant for Eunice, waiting to be transfigured into something wild and feral. I wait to join the work of feeding the City and populating it with dreamers.
My hope, as I type with unsteady hands, as the black vines begin to move more decisively, excited to begin their work, is that Leannon—my playmate, my best friend, and the love of my life—will be able to bring me back to myself, as I brought her back twice before. My hope is to wander the endless hidden streets, alleys, and offices of the City, to explore its many crevices and parse its dark secrets. My hope is to ride the night winds with Leannon forever.
There’s always the chance that I won’t be able to come back to myself like Leannon did. That I will be stuck as an unthinking animal, thinking only orange thoughts. If that happens…well. I’ve always been comfortable in the dark.
The desk is starting its work.
Oh god.
It hurts.
The Turner Sequence V: Harry
Although Harry sees the City, he never goes there. He goes someplace else.
It starts on his deathbed at Vandergriff Memorial Hospital. Nobody calls it that, of course. Deathbed is one of those clichés everyone utilizes in daily conversation—about what they’ll remember, what they’ll regret, what they’ll recant—but when an actual deathbed appears, the term vanishes from the lexicon. No one speaks its name, because to speak its name speeds it along in its terrible work.
Harry’s in so much pain now that he wouldn’t mind if things sped along. This illness has been endless. At first, to pass the time, he drew designs for a haunted house he knows he won’t be alive to build. It was fun to dream big, to give voice to the images that have nagged at his waking and sleeping thoughts since he was ten years old. A vast, sprawling City, eerily empty and darkly compelling for reasons he’s never been able to articulate. He’s always been afraid to talk about it, but now, under the guise of a game, he’s been able to show it to Margaret, sharing it with someone at last.
His strength has waned, though, and he’s too weak to draw anymore. Tonight, he lies alone in the dark after his family has gone home for the night, awake in bright, constant agony, and he whispers the term to give it power: deathbed, deathbed, deathbed.
For all the good it does. The end feels impossibly far away. The only upside of death’s distance is that his family goes home at night and leaves him in peace. Family. A wife, two daughters, and now a son. The people he is supposed to love, but whose faces now trigger apathy, annoyance, or (when he feels sufficiently provoked) apoplexy. He wishes they would just stay home. He’s sick of their wan, needy faces.
He used to be a warm, thoughtful person. He can point to specific moments of overwhelming happiness with these people in his past: his first kiss with his wife, Margaret, on a warm night in Searcy in 1968; Sydney’s squeal of laughter as he pushed her on a swing at the park, her dark hair flying around her head; Eunice across the glass from a manatee at the Dallas World Aquarium, communing with the fat white beast while he held her aloft. He remembers all of it, but he doesn’t feel any of it anymore. The doctors tell him that this is the tumor’s work, distorting his personality, turning him into a fun-house-mirror version of himself, but he feels like this is the real Harry, the one from the shadows, emerging at last.
Now he lies in his bed, looking out the window, weak and hurting and repeating his mantra: deathbed, deathbed, deathbed. Deathbed, deathbed, deathbed. Deathbed, deathbed, death—
The sky outside the window lights up, a bright flash of blue that interrupts his thoughts. At first, he thinks it’s lightning, but there’s no rain, no thunder. He blinks, the afterimage bright against his eyelids. Maybe it’s a hallucination. But it happens again, a bright blue pulse that bathes the whole world. He lifts the remote on his bed and presses the call button. No one answers.
He closes his eyes and listens for the telltale sounds of humanity out in the hall—rustle of papers, squeak of shoes on linoleum, hushed conversations—and hears none of it. He opens his mouth to call again, but the blue light floods the room, brighter than before, and for some reason this confirms what he already suspects. There’s no one out there.
He disconnects himself from the various tubes and wires keeping him “comfortable.” The effort winds him, but not as much as he suspected it might. He pushes the lever that lowers the bed’s safety railing, and slides down into a heap on the floor. It hurts, but again, less than you might think.
He stands and shuffles into the hall, but instead emerges in the master bathroom of his house across town. His reflection gives him pause: he looks meatier, and still has a full head of hair. He wears jeans and a sweatshirt instead of his hospital gown. He doesn’t feel great, but he certainly feels better than he did a few seconds ago. A garment bag hangs from the shower rod behind him. He unzips it and finds a white suit inside. The formal ghoul costume Margaret sewed for the Tomb.
There’s a knock at the door, and Margaret opens it. She’s dressed as the gravedigger, with a fake mustache pressed to her face.
“Why aren’t you dressed yet?” she says.
“I lost track of—” He closes his eyes to clear his head.
“You okay?”
He nods. “Fine.”
“Get a move on, space cadet. We’re running late.”
She closes the door. He disrobes and puts on the suit. After checking his reflection again, he leaves the bathroom, but instead of emerging into his bedroom, he finds himself in the tiny apartment he shared with Margaret during college—a one-bedroom unit with ratty carpet and fake-wood-paneled walls. Boxes full of his old paperbacks and comic books and pulp magazines line the room. His things are everywhere. The kitchen table is buried beneath his typewriter and stacks of school papers.
Thump.
The sound seems to come from the bedroom, and he leaves the overfull living room to investigate. He sees himself and Margaret in bed, both in their early twenties, as good-looking and healthy as they’ll ever be. It’s late, and the Harry in bed is asleep, wearing Margaret’s sleep mask so she can leave the light on to read. Beside him, Margaret looks up from her copy of The Haunting of Hill House and leans over to kiss the sleeping Harry on the cheek. The Harry in bed continues to snore, unaware. The Harry watching touches his cheek and a pang of longing sounds against his heart.
The blue-white pulse blazes through the bedroom window. When he can see again, he’s in a different bedroom, on a different night. At first his surroundings—the bed, the nightstand, the dresser—appear freakishly large. Then he looks down at his body and realizes that it’s not the room that has grown. He’s gotten smaller.
He’s ten years old, and he’s wandered into his mother’s room in the middle of the night because he thought he heard her cry out. All he’s found are rumpled covers in her bed. In the story he’ll tell countless times over the course of his life, this is the moment when he turns and runs to the
living room, to the telephone where he’ll call for help. He’ll admit that what he thought he heard must have been a nightmare, because when the police find his mother, barefoot, bruised, and dazed, she’s nearly twenty miles from home. She would have been gone for hours if she walked that far. It’s impossible that he heard her call for him.
But here’s what actually happens: Harry walks to his mother’s bed and finds it warm. As he runs his hand across the sheets, he brushes against something cool and hard. He lifts the object. It’s a perfectly smooth black stone, and it gleams even in the dark. When Harry closes his fist around it, a hole opens in the world before him, smooth and round as the stone itself. Through it, he sees something he’ll never forget: a vast, cyclopean mishmash of architectures, medieval castles bumping up against business buildings and sports stadiums beneath a green-black sky. Creatures fly through the heavens, little bat-like shapes against the miasma.
Again he hears it—his mother calling his name, shrieking it from far away: Harry! Harry, please!
He steps away from the hole in the world, tangles his feet, and falls over. The stone flies out of his hand as he catches himself with his palms, and the portal closes. He scrambles out of the room, heading for the telephone and adults who can solve the problem for him.
But as he runs out of the room, the blue light pulses before his eyes, and when he can see again, he sees himself, bald and bony in his hospital bed (deathbed), sleeping. A pregnant Margaret sits in the chair next to him, watching him with a hard-to-read expression on her face. She looks away from the sleeping Harry and at the binder in his lap, full of designs for a haunted house the size of a city. An expression of fascination crosses her face, and he knows, in that way you just know things in dreams, that somehow his vision of the City, the image he’s been cursed by and fascinated with all his life, has somehow infected his family. The haunting won’t end when he dies.
For the first time in months, he can feel around the corners of the tumor, and finds his true self, the one who cried at his daughters’ births and longed for the pretty redheaded girl at the bookstore. His true self is ashamed. Ashamed that he opened his family up to this City and all its awful possibilities. Ashamed that he didn’t listen to Eunice when she said she saw something at her bedroom window, didn’t listen to Margaret when she showed him the claw marks in the brick outside the house. Ashamed that he didn’t listen when the women in his life tried to tell him something was wrong. Ashamed he pretended that things were fine and normal when they were anything but.
He starts across the room toward Margaret, but as he reaches her, the blue pulse flashes outside the window and the scene changes again. He’s still in the hospital room, but now he’s the Harry in the bed. The pain is worse than ever, and his breath is ragged in his own ears. He’s vaguely aware of Sydney beside him, holding his hand. He turns to her, because he has to tell someone, has to warn them somehow. She looks so frightened, so eager to please. He gathers his thoughts, but it’s difficult, like raking leaves in a high wind.
Eunice was right, he manages.
Daddy? she says.
Margaret, he says.
Sydney. It’s Sydney, Daddy.
The drawings. The designs. It’s all there. You have to, he says.
Have to what? Sydney says.
It’s seen us. It has our scent.
And then the scene changes again. He’s still in the hospital bed, but Sydney stands across the room, looking sullen as Margaret hands him a newborn baby.
Noah. The baby’s name is Noah. Harry’s body is racked with pain, but his mind is clear, and he’s been given a second chance to meet his son. Free of the tumor’s distortion, he has so much he wants to tell the boy, but most important, maybe, is this: life makes monsters of everyone, but it’s always possible to come back. Pain and death are real, but so are love, and family, and forgiveness. But the words won’t come. Instead he leans forward and kisses Noah’s forehead and hopes this tiny pink blob of a person will grow up to understand.
The pulse flashes again outside the window, much faster now, and when his vision clears, he appears to be in the backyard of Spooky House, lying atop Margaret on a mat. It’s October 1968, and she’s looking up at him with those green eyes, trying to decide something, and he knows it’s something important, something big, but before she can speak, the mat falls away beneath them. No—it doesn’t fall. It stays where it is. He and Margaret are the ones moving, drifting up through space. They’re not the only ones, either. As he looks about, he sees dozens of other people floating up, up, up, amid cars, bags of garbage, dumpsters, dead leaves, sports equipment, newspapers, cars, cats and dogs—anything not bolted down rises through space. The sky strobes, blue-white-blue-white-blue-white.
Margaret wraps her arms and legs around him, holding on tight. They spin slowly up, like Superman and Lois Lane dancing in the heavens. He wishes he could see Sydney and Eunice again. He wishes he could see how things turned out for them, whether they and their little brother shrugged off the yoke he laid on their shoulders. But this will have to do. This last moment with Margaret.
He kisses her, his funny, hot-tempered, and heartbroken wife, and when he stops, he finds her crying.
Oh, Harry, she says. He understands. He feels it, too. The weight of the years, of the pain, of all the things they’ve both lost, things that even the death of gravity can’t carry away.
It’s okay, he says. He kisses her again and again, her cheeks, her temples, her chin, her flaming red hair. It’s all okay. I love you, Margaret. Until the end of time and whatever comes—
Acknowledgments
Stephen King once said, “No one writes a long novel alone.” I would like to second that, but amend it to say, “No one becomes a novelist alone.” I’ve been helped along by a long list of teachers, professionals, relatives, and friends, and I’d like to extend thanks to a few of them now:
To my editors, Tim O’Connell and Anna Kaufman, for their endless enthusiasm, their incredible ideas, and their relentless determination to get this thorny labyrinth of a story just right. To the whole team at Pantheon Books for working their blue fairy magic on this manuscript to turn it into a real book: copy editor Susan Brown, production editor Kathleen Fridella, publicist Abigail Endler, marketer Julianne Clancy, interior designer Michael Collica, jacket designer Kelly Blair, and, of course, publisher Dan Frank.
To my incredible literary agent Kent Wolf, who saw something in this weird literary genre hybrid, and found it a perfect home. Thanks also to my film and TV coagents Lucy Carson and Kim Yau, who continue to take such good care of me over on the media side of things.
To my in-laws, Jim and Melany Harrelson, who gave me a quiet, beautiful place to finish work on this book and who are always delighted to hear any and all news from the literary world.
To my gifted and resilient wife, Rebekah, for encouraging and supporting this project, even as she endured a pulmonary embolism and the grueling process of diagnosing an autoimmune disorder. Her paintings sat next to my desk during the composition of this novel and were an endless source of inspiration.
To the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, both the people who keep it running—Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek—and my instructors: Ethan Canin, who reminded me that good fiction is about people; Lan Samantha Chang, who read my early pages and said she wanted to feel scared; Ben Hale, who gave no shortage of good technical advice; and Paul Harding, who always encouraged me to look for what was human and honest and true, even in a book full of haunted houses and monsters.
To my friends and colleagues at Iowa, who read early passages of this novel and provided useful criticism and encouragement: Jake Andrews, Kris Bartkus, Noel Carver, Patrick Connelly, Susannah Davies, Mgbechi Erondu, Sarah Frye, Jason Hinojosa, J. M. Holmes, Erin Kelleher, Maria Kuznetsova, Jennie Lin, Alex Madison, Magogodi Makhene, Kevin Smith, Lindsay Stern, Nyoul Luet
h Tong, Monica West, and most especially, Joe Cassara and Sorrel Westbrook-Wilson, my novelist partners-in-crime.
To my writing teachers in Texas: Kristin vanNamen and Matthew Limpede of Carve magazine, as well as Tim Richardson, Tim Martin, and Joanna Johnson at the University of Texas at Arlington. Also teaching at UTA but deserving of a separate shout-out: Laura Kopchick, who put me on this path and continues to offer me opportunities whenever she can.
To the Barnes & Noble in Arlington, Texas, where I worked for eight years. I went to war on Harry Potter release nights, surreptitiously wrote my first real short story while cashiering, discovered innumerable new authors, and met my wife. I don’t have a big family, but the staff at that store made me feel like I did.
And, to my parents, Rick and Patrice Hamill. Dad made up personalized bedtime stories for me every night, and Mom taught me how to pay attention to character and narrative structure. They started my love of storytelling, have always encouraged my writing, and I’ll never be able to thank them enough.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of Arlington, Texas, Shaun Hamill grew up on a steady diet of horror fiction and monster movies. He holds a BA from the University of Texas at Arlington and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Carve and Spilt Infinitive. If you really want to embarrass him, go check out the short films on his IMDb page. A Cosmology of Monsters is his first novel.
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