Probably Monsters

by Ray Cluley

  The others surrounded him, lowering their hoods so that the cloth gathered around their necks in wrinkled folds from which their heads protruded, red-faced and swollen with rage. They snatched the rope from Luke’s hands and it seemed to unravel from inside him.

  Luke lay back and let them take it all, let them yank it free and tie each of his ankles. When they slung the other ends over the branches of the courtyard’s tree he cried, “See? See? Look at me!”

  Nicky was a mighty figure among the men, high on her horse with a clear view looking down on Luke. She raised her visor to watch as he was hoisted into the air.

  The world turned upside down but still he yelled. “See? This is what I am!”

  Two of the men had a large saw. They lowered it into position between Luke’s legs, against his flesh.

  “This is me!” Luke cried against its biting. “This is me!”

  But the knight, on her horse, tilted her head and saw him differently. Saw him divided in two.

  Bones of Crow

  Maggie tapped her cigarette twice on the pack before putting the filter to her mouth, an affectation she’d picked up years ago when she first started smoking. She’d seen it in a movie; it packed the tobacco tighter or something. Whatever the reason, it was as much a part of her habit now as sneaking up to the roof to enjoy it. Her lighter was a cheap throwaway but it did the job. She cupped the flame, brought it to her cigarette, and sucked in the day’s first glorious breath of nicotine. Pocketing the lighter, she took the cigarette from her lips and exhaled the smoke with a sigh.

  The block of flats she lived in was fifteen floors high with a view of urban sprawl and a sky that was early morning grey. Not that she came up for the view. She did like the air, though, away from the traffic and the fast food smells. Up here, the only pollution was of her own making, clinging to her clothes and making her father tut and grumble. “Your health,” he’d say, meaning his. He’d say it the same way he said, “There’s no need, I’ll do it” and “You should get out and find a husband.” He didn’t mean it.

  The roof had a low wall running around it. It wasn’t the greatest safety precaution, coming up only as far as Maggie’s thighs, but she supposed it stopped someone simply stepping off the edge. If you wanted to do that you at least had to make some effort. In her younger years she’d considered it, but only in the absent way she supposed most teenagers did. Now her suicide of choice came one drag at a time. With every breath she died a little.

  There were two small buildings on the roof. One housed the stairwell. The other was some kind of storage facility, its door chained shut. Maybe there was a generator in there or tools or something. Otherwise the roof was nothing but scattered puddles and low walls.

  Maggie went to the wall and glanced down at the people on their way to work. Or, more likely, on their way to look for work. Once upon a time she’d wanted that too, hoping to make something of herself like her sisters, but with her father’s pension and disability benefit, and the benefits they were claiming for her, there was little need. It used to bother her how rarely she went out but the television showed her all that she was missing and it wasn’t much. And as for marriage, children . . . well, there was still time. In theory. Until then there was always plenty to do around the flat. Cleaning. Cooking. Plus she had her smoking.

  Maggie turned from the street and leant back against the wall in a sort of half sit, half lean, posture. She braced herself with hands either side, smoke curling up from the cigarette between her fingers, and looked out across the roof. The opposite wall blocked her view of the city so all she saw was grey sky but she knew that beyond it was the park, a grand term for what was little more than a pathetic triangle of grass with a solitary climbing frame and a circle of asphalt where the roundabout used to be. It had been taken away because kids were using the wheels of their mopeds to turn it faster than it was designed for. A girl had been flung from it, flying briefly before cracking her head open. Maggie remembered seeing it on the local news. The family petitioned the council to get rid of what they called a “death trap,” though their daughter hadn’t died and it had been her own fault anyway.

  She smoked her cigarette down then checked her watch, knowing the time she’d see. Time to wake father. Time for his breakfast and time for his pills. Time for hers. A final drag and she twisted out what was left on the bricks behind her, dropping the butt into a pile gathered in the corner between roof and wall.

  “Okay.”

  She pushed herself away from the wall and hoped the momentum would help carry her to the door, to the stairs, and back down to the flat.

  S

  Maggie’s father had developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease almost immediately after Maggie’s mother left him. In his more romantic moments he claimed it was because he couldn’t breathe without her, but of course it was because he’d smoked most of his life. Now his puffs came from an oxygen canister. His lungs were weak and his natural defence mechanisms were so reduced that he required various medications to fight infections. Maggie looked after him though. She’d effectively raised her two sisters as well but they’d flown the nest as soon as they were able. She didn’t hate them for that. She tried not to hate them for that. Just as she didn’t hate her father for needing her so much.

  Maggie lit one cigarette from another, stubbing one out and drawing breath from the next. The view from the roof hadn’t changed much since morning. It was still overcast, low cloud giving the late afternoon a premature evening light. Instead of time flying, though, it seemed to barely pass at all.

  Day in, day out, her routine was the same. Her father couldn’t perform even the simplest of tasks without suffering a shortness of breath, but really all he needed was her company. Someone to watch television with. It was as much her duty as checking his oxygen and feeding him his pills. He had a plastic organizer for his medication which Maggie sorted for him because he couldn’t get the lids off the bottles. All he had to do was tip the day’s cocktail into his palm and then into his mouth and drink a glass of water, but when the time came he either spilled the pills onto the floor or made such a pathetic attempt to hook them from the container that inevitably Maggie would end up feeding them to him one by one. Pop one in his mouth, raise the water, tip it to swallow, and repeat, wiping away what spilled between repetitions.

  Maggie sighed, glanced at her watch, and took another pull on her cigarette. Today he’d coughed one of the pills back up. It had slipped down his chin on a thin line of saliva. He’d wiped his mouth but the pill fell into the fibres of his dressing gown.

  “I’ve got it, Dad.” She plucked it from his sleeve, pressed it between his lips, and helped him with the water.

  “You’re a good girl. Why haven’t you been snapped up yet?”

  Maggie stared across the roof as if she might find the answer in the grey sky, the bricks and stone. She thought of all she could do to improve her life. It didn’t take long. She took in a lungful of smoke and examined the burning end of her cigarette, tapping away its ash. There was less of it left than she’d thought.

  She flicked the butt away across the roof, a tiny flare for no one to see. It sparked as it bounced and skittered out of sight behind the small storage building. Whatever was in there she didn’t much care, but she did worry there might be litter behind it. Newspapers or magazines, somehow dry, or a puddle of something flammable.

  She pushed herself away from the wall to check, surprised at her own recklessness; she always crushed them out, the wall black-spotted with proof. She must’ve been more frustrated with her father today than she thought. Or with herself. She was due on soon. Maybe that was it.

  The cigarette smouldered where it lay. She squashed it out beneath her shoe and saw she’d been right to check. There was litter, a whole load of it, gathered in the narrow channel between storage building and the outer wall. Except litter seemed too
accidental a term for it.

  “What the hell?”

  A lot of it was newspaper and magazine pages, polystyrene food cartons, plastic carrier bags, but there were other kinds of street debris too. An old traffic cone, a For Sale sign, even a scaffold pole leaning at an angle across it all, resting on the wall. The rubbish had been shaped into something like bedding and Maggie’s first thought was of a homeless person, but then a homeless person who could get into the building would probably tuck up under the stairs somewhere, or in the foyer by the post boxes. There were clothes, though. Mismatched items, some with pegs on them, all of it grubby with bird shit and roof filth. A torn duvet cover was draped over something bulky in the middle of it all. Maggie dragged it aside.

  There were eggs underneath.

  “What the hell?”

  There were four of them, four of the biggest eggs Maggie had ever seen. They had to be fake. Had to be. Each was knee high, about the same size as a barrel for a water cooler. Each was the colour of cement and speckled with dark freckles. She squatted beside them, pressing the back of her hand to her nose and holding her breath against the moist sour odour, the musky wet straw smell of a pet shop. She reached for one of the eggs but withdrew suddenly because she’d read somewhere that touching an unhatched egg meant it would be abandoned. The bird would—

  Bird?

  Maggie laughed and reached out again. Touched it. And again she snatched her hand back.

  It was warm. And something inside had . . . moved. A vibration of life beneath her skin.

  Maggie stood and dug the cigarettes from her pocket, double-tapped one, and popped it in her mouth. She sparked a flame, lit it, puffed a hurried breath, and said for a third time, “What the hell?”

  Darker clouds were gathering, and the small light fixed to the outside of the storage building blinked to life prematurely, tricked into thinking it was night. A storm was coming. Maggie could feel it in the sky.

  She smoked her third cigarette staring at the eggs. They shone like small speckled moons beneath the light. If it hadn’t started raining she probably would have smoked her packet empty watching them, wondering what on earth could have put them there.

  S

  Maggie was awake at first light, despite having stayed up late. She smoked the day’s first cigarette out of her bedroom window, enjoying the cool air, and thought about going to the roof earlier than usual. She’d Googled different types of eggs, and she’d browsed various images, but found nothing useful. The largest eggs nowadays came from the ostrich, but they were only a pathetic six inches high. Not even close. The great elephant bird of Madagascar had laid eggs that were a foot or so high but they were extinct now.

  Maggie smiled. Egg-stinct. Eggs-stinked. She blew smoke into the morning air.

  Anyway, the eggs on the roof were twice the size of the Madagascan ones. Even the largest dinosaur egg she could find online wasn’t much bigger than the elephant bird’s.

  Outside, the city was slowly coming to life. An Asian man was pulling at the metal blind of a newsagents, rattling it up, and a street sweeper was doing his or her best to tidy the city. Someone was walking a dog that kept trying to squat, yanking the lead before it could foul the pavement. A jogger, favouring the empty streets over the tiny nearby park, was running a course that would end in the same place it began.

  In the park, someone was standing on the climbing frame. The climbing frame was two upright ladders with another leaning at an angle, and connecting all three was a horizontal section of bars to swing across. The figure was balancing in the middle of this, standing on the bars rather than hanging below them. Too big to be a child. Maggie was several storeys up, and a good distance away, but she still had the distinct impression that whoever was down there was staring straight at her.

  “Hello,” she said quietly, bringing her cigarette up for another breath, giving a little wave.

  The figure shuffled sideways a few steps. Maggie supposed they had to go sideways because of the climbing frame, but wouldn’t they want to see where they were stepping? Once it had shuffled to its new position, the figure opened up a long coat, black with black beneath, and Maggie wondered if she was looking at a flasher down there, or some other kind of pervert.

  “Goodbye.”

  She scraped her cigarette out on the bricks of her window sill and brought the stub inside, pulling the window closed. She levered it shut and went to make a coffee. Maybe the person down there knew about the eggs. Maybe they’d put them there, and was waiting to see how Maggie would react. Maybe it was some sort of elaborate joke.

  She readied a cup for her father, though he wouldn’t be up for some time yet, and she put his morning pills on a saucer. She spooned coffee granules into her own cup and took her own pills waiting for the kettle to boil. Tiny ovoids in her mouth, sitting on her tongue. She thought about the eggs on the roof. She thought about keeping one, bringing it down to the flat stuffed under her jacket, “Oh, I’m pregnant, Dad, didn’t you know?” Like he’d ever believe her. Like she could ever compete with Julie or Jess. Like she would ever have kids. She spat the pills into the sink and washed them away. It didn’t matter. Looking after Dad was more than enough.

  She took her coffee up to the roof.

  In the early hours of the morning, the air on the roof smelled different. There was a coolness to it, a fresh promise that today was new and anything could happen. She liked the quiet, too. Few cars, no TVs in the flats below, workmen yet to arrive at the site opposite, filling the world with their radio and banter. She didn’t pause to enjoy the air or the peace, though. She went straight to the space behind the storage building, half expecting to find only a clutter of litter, but the nest was still there. The eggs were still there. She raised her cup to them, “Good morning,” and took a sip. It was very hot but good and the smell of it did something to dispel the rotten odour of the nest. “Sleep well?”

  She wondered how long they’d been there before she’d found them. Some eggs, she knew from her research, were actually fossils never to hatch. What were these? One had been warm yesterday, hadn’t it? She crouched to touch it, the same one as before, and yes, there it was. An internal heat. Or maybe a residual warmth. She gave it an experimental tap and though it didn’t yield beneath her knuckles she could tell that it might, with enough pressure.

  There were no feathers in the nest. That was unusual, wasn’t it?

  Because four giant eggs was completely normal.

  She took another sip of coffee and put the cup on the wall before pressing both hands to the egg. She caressed it, marvelled at how smooth it was, just like a real egg. With one hand either side she attempted to lift it. It was heavy, and something inside fidgeted, a confined squirm that made Maggie snatch her hands back. She wiped them on her jeans as she stood then took up her cup again, glancing out to the park.

  That same figure was still on the climbing frame. It hunched suddenly as she watched, and with the action came a shrill scream that broke into a sequence of aborted noises. Then it dropped from its perch and its coat opened, opened, opened far too wide either side and flapped, flapped, because it wasn’t a coat at all; with two hard beats of its wings the thing was aloft.

  Maggie fumbled the cup she’d hardly taken hold of and it spilled, dropped, smashed, “Shit!” She glanced down as she stepped away from it and when she looked up again the sky was clear. She peered over the wall and saw nothing coming. Still, she left the broken pieces of her cup where they lay. She headed for the stairs, not running but certainly hurrying. Dad would be wanting his morning cuppa and she had to take her pills.

  She didn’t look up and she didn’t look back.

  S

  She was supposed to be watching an old movie with her father but her mind wasn’t on the plot. At least she didn’t have to follow any conversation though; he was wearing the full breathing mask today
rather than the nostril tubes. It fitted around his nose and mouth and it prevented him from talking. He had to look his question at her when she got up during the adverts.

  “Toilet,” Maggie said. She checked his oxygen, adjusting it on her way out. “Cuppa tea, Dad?”

  He nodded, returning to the black and white world of the TV.

  Maggie had a packet of cigarettes hidden in a box of tampons in the bathroom. She grabbed them and flicked the kettle on in the kitchen before letting herself out into the corridor. She closed the door quietly and lit the cigarette early; she needed the nicotine before getting to the roof this time. She was confident there wouldn’t be enough smoke to set off the alarms. Confident, too, that they probably didn’t work anyway.

  It had been a few days since her last visit to the roof. Since then she’d enjoyed her cigarettes in the bathroom, extractor fan on, her hand and face at the tiny open window because she was too worried about what she might see from her own. The one in the bathroom had glass that was opaque even though they were so high up, and more importantly it didn’t face the park. She’d had nightmares about the park, dreams in which the thing she’d seen there had flown right at her, crashing into her bedroom in an explosion of glass and brick only to drag her out screaming, both of them screaming, and then she was falling until she was suddenly awake. One night she’d woken from this to find her father shuffling in the hallway. He’d opened his dressing gown and released a flock of dark birds at her and she’d woken a second time, smothered beneath her blankets. She was ready to check the roof again now if only because it might put an end to the dreams.

  At the door to outside, cigarette somehow half gone already, Maggie paused. She listened. Nothing. She opened the door.