THE MONSTERS WE DESERVE
Marcus Sedgwick
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About The Monsters We Deserve
I am suddenly aware of the space of the house; the air it occupies and which occupies it, of the hanging weight of it, high up here at five thousand feet, and the empty night rising out of the ground as dusk arrives in the mountains. And down in the gorge, ringing chasms throat roaring water into fathomless depths, unseen by humankind and all but the bravest of beasts, while I sit and converse with a woman long dead.
Contents
Welcome Page
About The Monsters We Deserve
Dedication
Epigraph
Frontispiece
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About Marcus Sedgwick
About Zephyr
Copyright
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Frontispiece
And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. Who said that?
Up here there are abysses. Of all kinds.
Up here …
Five thousand feet of altitude. Ringing chasms on every side. Mountain torrents gushing icy waters through throats of rock; a white noise of oblivion. Outrageously uncountable trees, witness to everything, but mute. The air is thin, dry.
*
Wait.
Do you see that comma? No, listen, do you see that comma? It’s there for a reason. I didn’t write: the air is thin and dry. I didn’t write: the air is thin. And dry.
I wrote: The air is thin, dry.
The comma is important – it’s the single snatched breath, a moment of hanging in which you can hear my failing attempts to find the right way to explain all this.
So that’s clear now? Good. One clear thing. And these little things are important. Something as small as a comma could turn out to be significant, perhaps vital. And you know, at this altitude, it often takes your brain a twinkling of time to find the right word. To think … lucidly.
Yes, there are endless abysses up here, and no doubt there is something in their depths. So far I have seen nothing, but maybe that’s because I’ve been looking in the daytime.
*
Night-time, on the other hand, the night … The night is when monsters arrive, when monsters are made. But before we make anything, let me make one other thing understood – this will not be easy. It will not be straightforward. It will move in other ways, sideways and backways: ways we don’t have words for. Something else: it has always struck me as troubling that the words in books are printed in black and white, when life is anything but. The binary colour of words on a page give the sense of simplicity and clarity. But life doesn’t work like that. And neither should a good story. A good story ought to leave a little grey behind, I think.
I can’t help any of this, but I undertake to do my best to set things down as well as I can, and after all, it seems that I am expected to.
You expect me to.
Once more, I have to rummage through the paintboxes and toolkits of my imagination in order to conjure some horror or other, and as you know, I have been unable to find anything of interest to work with.
And yet there is so much to choose from, so many monsters. I might think of Grendel, slain by Beowulf, who likewise dispatched Grendel’s mother, far beneath the surface of the sea. Or the twisted beast, Caliban on his tempestuous island. Be not afeard, he said. Be not afeard? Be very afeard. There were three witches once in a desert place, inciting others to murder and malevolence: Lady Macbeth with blood on her hands. Fair is foul and foul is fair. Mr Hyde, the monster in Dr Jekyll, the ordinary secret sinner, the monster in all of us, the monster we all create ourselves. Count Dracula, the antihero many perhaps crave to be; sexual and immortal. The blood is the life.
So many monsters. Once, they were as plentiful as berries in a pail, or blades of grass in the meadow. Or the trees of an alpine forest. But are there fewer monsters than there used to be? A moment’s thought and I will give you my answer to that.
Monsters lurk in every culture’s life blood – the history of the world is as much the history of its monsters as its angels, and who is the more fascinating: Elizabeth Bathory and her blood-bathing, or Mother Teresa and her poor? Vlad Ţepeş and his impalings, or Saint Francis and his birds? I wish I could give you better answers, I really do, but monsters throng about us; they always have. That being the case, why am I not able to pull something out of the hat? Any one of these beasts has held our ghastly attention across decades, even many hundreds of years.
*
I would like to mention that you sent me here. It was your idea.
Go and immerse yourself. Maybe that will help.
So here I am, and yes, the maps and the lines I drew on them were not your doing, but it is because of you that I’m here, groping around with my rusting creativity, trying to think how to bring a monster back to life. And, like it or not, I settled on one particular monster, after all. Though I really can’t fathom why it’s this monster I have chosen. For that’s what you want, isn’t it? Something you can unleash on the world, in just the way Mary did.
A monster brought to life.
What was it you said?
Something inspired by it, but not.
Something that’s like it, but not.
You publishers never want much, do you? And what do I want? I want to get it done and come home. That’s what I want. And not to suffer any casualties of war in the process.
*
It’s beautiful here. And very, very quiet. You know I like those two qualities, crave them in fact, as you have often pointed out to me – how they are hidden (or not so hidden) in my books, despite what most people see in them. And what most people see in them is blood. For all your protestations, I worry that that’s all you want to see too. I remember that conversation about my very first manuscript. Give me blood, you said. Give me blood. Give me power. The quietness isn’t enough, is it? It never is. Yes, some approaching sense of foreboding will do, but what you really wanted was the blood. But of course, you never really know what a book is until it’s finished, maybe until years after it’s finished. Sometimes it takes that long to know what you were really writing. Do you know what I’m writing now? Do you know what this book will be? How can you, when I don’t know it myself?
*
Beauty and silence. We alpine dwellers have plenty of those, but there’s something else here that pleases me less, something I cannot put my finger on, but which I can sense is coming. It waits between the dark shadows, among the tree trunks of the forest. It tumbles off the mountain in frigid waters. It comes on the blowing of the wind, though that is rare enough here, something I wasn’t expecting in the mountains. I expected grandeur; nature flung over the bones of the world. I got it. I expected solitude; I got that too, solitude without measure, if I want it. And I expected the winds to blow; but instead, the tight valley where I’ve been living provides shelter from all but the most accurately aligned bre
eze.
When I arrived, early October, I could have perhaps been forgiven for mistaking it for summer. The colour of the leaves of some trees was turning, but alongside the occasional beech and birch, larch and oak, most of the trees are the endless armies of firs, looming sentinels on the mountainside, silent, all-seeing.
Firs. Evergreens. Ever greens. That fooled me. The sun fooled me. The blue skies fooled me. The air itself fooled me. It has been really hot. But, once or twice now; a sudden drop in the temperature and the air has changed its smell. Something is coming at least: winter. Winter is coming, and I need to be gone before then.
*
I didn’t tell you how I found the house, did I?
A mountain house, as much a barn as a place to live, at least three hundred years old, high up in the alpine pasture for the shepherds and goatherds and cowherds to mind their flocks during summer. A chalet d’alpage, they used to call them. This is not a place for the winter; it was never intended to be. Even now, it’s someone’s rough weekend place, at best. In the winter, the snow will come to the lip of the roof. Or higher. Even with no snow, the closest I can get the car is a fifteen-minute walk away. After my trips to town I have to lug everything up a narrow track in my rucksack.
Water comes from a source, an old pipe runs down through the forest above; the only heat from logs in the pot-belly stove and the log burner, with its wooden (yes, really) chimney. The only electricity; from the generator, and I don’t run that all the time, because, to be honest, it’s always breaking and I’m fed up with fixing it. The toilet is in a lean-to attached to the side of the house, only reached by going outside.
The house sits at the end of a track, on a slight slope, so that the back is tucked against the hill, and the entrance to the cellar is ground level at the front. There’re patches of forest and pasture below, and nothing but forest above until the tree line, another three hundred metres up. As I said, it’s very, very beautiful.
I couldn’t find anything like this at first. Not where I needed it to be. Then I started hanging out in bars (don’t worry) in St Jean and Le Praz and Mieussy and places like that, (making another little triangle), asking around, until I met a guy called Étienne who said, yes, he had a place I could rent.
He brought me here, and showed me around the house but I knew I was going to rent it before I had even stepped inside. I looked at him and said, ‘Don’t you want to know why an English writer wants to rent a house in the middle of nowhere?’
I’d said it in English, and I wondered if he hadn’t understood the expression. He looked at me, for a long time, but then a sideways smile crept on to his face and he replied in English too, ‘But this isn’t the middle of nowhere. This is the centre of the world.’ Despite the smile on his face, I knew he meant it. And who can disagree; for now at least, this is the centre of my world.
*
The centre of the world. That’s where I am.
And that’s how I’m here; you and Étienne and my damn triangles.
The first I drew was the triangle with Geneva at one corner, and Evian at the second, and the mer de glace at the third. I went to the mer de glace, by the way; the frozen sea that is the glacier crawling down from the slopes of Mont Blanc, a monster moving in ultra slo-mo, so slow only a god could see its motion across time. I felt some connection then, from the old drawings I’ve studied. Its crazy fields of ice look just the same as they did when Mary visited it in 1816. They stand like solidified waves, abstract sculptures, fantastical, like creatures from myth, turned to ice.
You know the importance of these three places: Geneva, Evian, the glacier; I think we spoke about them before I left. I drew the triangle. Then I drew three more lines, from each point of the triangle to the centre of the opposite side, to find the exact middle of the three-sided country that I have created. You might be amused to know, though I know these things please me more than they please you, that the house where I have been living these last weeks lies, as far as I can tell, no more than four or five hundred metres away from the very centre of this triangle; which seems to be an almost inaccessible slope just before the real peak of the mountain thrusts to its summit.
Therefore I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I had more or less accidentally placed myself at some kind of epicentre of Mary’s world. Or the world of her creations, it might be better to say. And then …?
Nothing. Nothing.
I hate nothing. All writers do. You always say at these times that it will come back, but how do you know that, when I don’t? What makes you so sure? There are enough people who just stopped writing, for whom the source dried up and was never refilled. Why should I think I’m any different?
*
Nothing is the precise opposite of what we’re trying to do. Like the tragic king said, Nothing will come of nothing. You can’t make something out of nothing, you make it out of something else, something that pushes its way into you, whether you want it to or not. Like love. Or a virus. (Take your pick, but that’s what writing a book is like, I’ve told you that often enough too. You cannot write a book without infection. You become infected, and not until you are infected will anything worth writing be committed to paper.)
*
But then, I thought I had given myself something, with my triangle, with Étienne’s house on the mountain, I thought I had given myself enough. Yet it seems I have not. Winter is coming and then I will have to be gone. Already there’s been a brief icing of snow on the peak. I didn’t see it fall; it came secretly in the night, like a lover. By noon it was gone, as quickly as it came, but I know this is the warning. I have to hurry.
And yet, I still have nothing for you, nothing at all.
I dreamed of breathing.
*
Of the sound of breathing, all around me, up close to me, in the dark of the place where I sleep.
*
When I woke, it was gone, and, in that moment, I knew it was only a dream.
Here’s something you might like: a short while ago I came out into the tongue of forest below the house and found a dead stump to sit on, shivering as soon as I was away from the sun. Everything was still; that utter stillness that is somehow unnerving, as if Time has stopped. It’s not just the stillness; it’s the stillness and the trees. I have always loved nature, and forests, but these trees … After a while they start to get to you. I suppose that sounds stupid, but there’s just something uncomfortable about the way they stand in their tens of thousands, saying nothing, seeing everything, like I said. I’m sure they add to the sense of being unnerved, so as I sat there, I tried to remind myself that I like trees. That they are not something ominous. And yet, there’s a vast difference between the gentle oaks and ash trees, and the legion of firs of the Alps. If the light at the foot of an oak is dappled, the light at the floor of a fir forest is practically non-existent.
*
Nothing seems to live there, nothing moves. A bed of a billion dead pine needles muffles all sound. The ferns do not move. There is the smell of decay, of the spores of fungus. Little else.
As I sat on my stump, the moment became a spell. And it took a living thing; a bird, to flit from the low branch of a pine, to break it. I realised that, along with Time, I had been holding my breath, and then I laughed out loud and shook my head.
It’s funny when you spend a long time by yourself. Once or twice I have caught myself speaking my thoughts without realising it; I think I simply needed to hear a voice, even if it was mine. The longest I’ve been without speaking to anyone, without going to town, is eight days. Eight days without speaking. Doesn’t sound very long, does it? Try it. So when I laughed I sort of startled myself, wondering whose laughter it was for a second, before recognising it as mine.
*
That thin air I mentioned before tricks you in more ways than one: not just the nosebleeds and the dryness of your skin; it makes the sun slice harder, making it feel warmer than it really is. Until you’re in the shade and then you know re
ality. It’s … cold.
I sat, thumbing through my notebook, looking for something, anything, that could be the key to this whole idea, getting more and more frustrated, colder and colder, till finally I couldn’t stand it. I got up and stomped off into a patch of sunlight to warm up again. I stood, fuming for a bit till I realised you cannot be angry in a forest. Did you know? But until then, I was silently cursing you.
That’s a lie. I actually told the forest that you were an evil creature for getting me into this, and then I turned and remembered I was in a forest, and, did you know, you can’t be angry in a forest, and then I turned again and I thought about soup. And wine, but mostly soup, which drew me back to the house, via the stump to collect my notebook, and it had been totally still all this time, all this time, but as I approached a rare stab of a breeze blew up the valley.
Then this happened: the wind turned the pages of my notebook.
Not all at once. First, one. Flick. Then two more. Flick, flick. And then another, as if an invisible hand was finding the right place, and just as I leaned over to pick it up, my own hand hesitated as I saw the page on which a solitary line was written – a note to myself:
You despise that book. Destroy it.
That’s all, but it’s all I need. I know it. It’ll be enough. I’ve started with less. So I hereby declare that I am infected! I’m writing to let you know you’ll get your story after all (and then I can leave here before the snows come) but it won’t have been me that will have brought it to you – it will have been the wind.
*
I’ll start tomorrow; now I have to have my soup. If the work goes as I hope, I’ll have a first draft in a couple of weeks, three at most; you know I work fast once I get going. The really funny thing is I don’t even recall writing that line in my notebook. But then, I’m having trouble remembering what I did yesterday, so let’s take what we’re given, shall we?
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