How to Make Monsters

by Gary McMahon

  “I love you, you know. Just…just remember that. Whatever happens.”

  “Me too,” Claire responded, pulling him down into a deep kiss. “And everything is going to be fine.”

  They lay on the bed for half an hour, just holding each other. It always made Frank feel more secure to know that his wife kept him tethered to the earth. Sometimes he felt that if she were to release her grip he’d simply float away. Other times he wished she’d just let him go. Images from the latest book ran through his head: he was developing the idea of a creature called the Hugger, something dark and bestial that climbed out of the horror of childhood nightmares to literally embrace children to death.

  Frank’s dark pulp horror stories had been selling well for years, enough that he enjoyed a reasonable income. Film options brought in more money (even though none of his books had actually made it to the screen) and he made a few quid from toiling over other people’s film scripts, trying to whip them into shape before the cameras rolled and the budget was spent.

  But it wasn’t the money that mattered. It was the catharsis.

  Frank had been abandoned as a baby, and the authorities had sent him to countless foster homes and hostels before the staff at Riven Manor, the local state-funded orphanage, had finally taken him in. It was a sort of last-stop house, the place where mistakes were routinely sent to be swept under the carpet. Things had been bearable until he was sent there at the age of seven, and he had suffered three years of the most horrific abuse imaginable, both sexual and psychological. He still could not think of those times without coating them in fantasy, easing their passage through his memory adorned with the costume jewellery of imagination. But in his dreams he saw it all as it had really happened. Thankfully, when morning came, he rarely remembered much apart from an unbearable sense of claustrophobia.

  Names and faces had been kept from him – his silent abusers entered his room in the dead of night, their features obscured by stocking masks, voices disguised, but dark intentions all-too clear. Frank had adopted fantasy as the only viable method of escape, retreating inside himself when the regular attacks took place. During the day he wrote stories informed by his pain, violent revenge scenarios and fables about abducted children. He became obsessed with Peter Pan and the “Lost Boys”; he wished that he could fly, but the type of belief necessary for such a feat was a luxury he could not afford to risk.

  Thankfully, he’d blocked out the details. Therapy was a no-go area for him in case he started to remember. He didn’t want that; all he wanted was to forget completely what had been done to him under the tilted roof of Riven Manor.

  “That’s a serious face,” Claire said, sliding her arm out from under him and straddling his tight abdomen. “You have that look in your eyes – the one I don’t like.”

  “The one I get when I’m writing?”

  She nodded, climbed off him and walked to the bathroom. “I’ll run you a bath,” she said, opening the door and disappearing inside. The picture – a bad print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream – hanging on the wall to the left of the door wobbled on its nail, threatening to fall. It took a long time to settle, and when it finally did so, Frank could not tear his gaze away from the gaunt figure at its centre.

  When his bath was ready Claire stepped outside to hunt for a shop where they could buy a bottle of wine. She was determined that her husband should unwind, and her single-mindedness was nothing short of exhilarating. Frank stripped off his clothes and stood before the bathroom mirror. Steam had clouded the glass, so he swept a hand across it to clear the view, creating a thick dark smear.

  For a moment he imagined that he saw the figure of a small boy standing behind him, only the top of a tousled head visible above his right shoulder, small hands rising to tenderly touch the nape of his neck.

  The image lasted only a second; it was long enough for him to realise that Claire was right, he was letting Terry’s accident get to him. The kid was fine, just a few scratches and a big bruise. They were keeping him in overnight as a cautionary measure because of his age, that was all.

  But they way they’d looked at Frank in the hospital had felt like a violation, and the probing questions they asked were like groping fingers inside his head, feeling around the dark places. He understood that if an injured youngster was brought into the Casualty Department alarm bells rang – it was only natural, and actually rather reassuring. But that didn’t negate the sense of intrusion that he and Claire had to suffer just to confirm that Terry’s injuries weren’t the result of parental mistreatment.

  The episode had triggered fresh questions in Frank’s own mind. Was abuse hereditary, as the so-called experts constantly stated? Was he potentially an abuser of his own issue? Did he have it in him to be the character from his latest book, the despicable and insidious Hugger?

  Perhaps that was what the entire project was really about.

  He sighed, shook his head. Sometimes Frank found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what he imagined. His fictions became too much like fact for comfort, and Claire was a martyr to look after him the way she did. She’d lived through her own traumatic childhood, and the way she coped was by looking after her husband and child. Transforming all of her resentment into love and affection. He often envied her ability to do this, and sometimes wished that instead she would react badly to his moods, if only to justify the spiteful thoughts he sometimes entertained about her.

  But she didn’t. She knew him too well to be sucked into the hungry vortex of his despair.

  He climbed into the hot bath, enjoying the scalding sensation up his calves and along the backs of his thighs. As he lay down the bubbles covered his stomach, hiding the scars there from view. They still bothered him, those scars; but all he could remember about their origin was the image of a broken bottle being pressed against his flesh by someone he was supposed to trust.

  Frank closed his eyes and let himself be taken away. Within minutes, he was dozing.

  IV

  Claire paid for the wine and left the shop, feeling like she’d enjoyed a small victory by finding the establishment in such a rundown area of town. The proprietor, a tiny Asian woman with a wispy grey beard, had been about to shut up shop to attend some family function when Claire had pushed open the door to inspect the dusty aisles of out-of-date canned food, rotting vegetables and magazines left over from the previous decade.

  After buying the best wine she could find, she climbed into the car and placed the wine on the passenger seat, fastening her seatbelt and preparing to pull away from the kerb. She was worried about Frank; he’d been acting odd for the past week. Sure, he’d been nervous about visiting the site of the orphanage to see the place finally put to rest, but his moods were darker than ever. And what little she’d read of this latest book was much more bleak and violent than his usual stuff.

  Terry had looked okay – if a little pale - when they’d left him at the hospital, and the nurse she’d spoken to while Frank was having a panic attack in the toilet had assured her that all their son had suffered was a case of mild shock. Still, it had been a nasty scare, especially when, in the ambulance they’d summoned on Frank’s mobile phone, Terry had babbled something about another boy pushing him down the hole.

  It was nonsense of course: there’d been no one else on the scene. She and Frank had witnessed the accident at a distance, and Terry had been standing alone, peering into an exposed foundation trench. He’d stumbled backwards, losing his footing in the freshly excavated soil, and simply tumbled onto some boards that had been thrown over a void that led directly into the basement.

  Terry had taken harder falls than this one during his first ten years of life; and no doubt he’d live through a lot worse. He was a tough little kid: he took after his mother.

  Claire grinned and joined the light evening traffic, heading back to the hotel. She glanced into her rearview mirror, watching the CLOSED sign appear in the shop window, and for a moment had the unsettling feeling that
someone had ducked down out of sight on the back seat.

  It was getting dark, so she turned on her lights; bands of illumination flooded the road ahead, revealing potholes and discarded litter. Again she experienced the sensation that there was someone behind her – this time, whoever it was had sat up. She looked in the mirror. There was no one there. The bright afterimage of a small boy with dark blonde hair was burned into her retina, like a subliminal image glimpsed between frames in a film.

  When she reached the hotel Claire got out of the car and opened the rear door. The back seat was empty; she smiled at her foolish compulsion. Slamming the door, she marched towards the squat, ugly two-storey building, glancing back over her shoulder and through the gathering darkness. A small boy sat behind the wheel of the car, smiling lasciviously.

  V

  Frank opened his eyes and gasped; water poured into his open mouth, making him cough and choke. God knew how long he’d been asleep, but the bath water was barely lukewarm. It felt like he’d been out for hours. He sat up and stretched from a sitting position, hearing the bones in his back pop like distant gunfire. The pain that flared there was the result of more dimly recalled childhood beatings: yet another grim souvenir of Riven Manor.

  He got out of the bath and dried himself down with a surprisingly fluffy hotel towel, enjoying the soft feel of it on his aching body. If Claire had returned with the wine, she must have decided to let him soak for a while longer. He pushed open the flimsy plywood door and stepped into darkness.

  Claire must still be out, gamely hunting down an off licence. Persistence was another facet of her personality that he both envied and occasionally despised. He crossed to the bed and turned on the bedside lamp, dropping the towel and fishing around on the floor for his jeans. Unable to locate them, he got down on his hands and knees and thrust a hand under the bed.

  His fingers made contact with what could only be flesh. Cold flesh.

  Breathing heavily, Frank felt the cool skin of an arm, the creased material of a shirt or blouse.

  He pulled away his hand.

  Slowly, carefully, he bent down near the floor and raised the sheets that hung down the side of the bed, their tip touching the stained carpet. Peering under the bed, he stared into Claire’s open eyes. Only then did he allow himself to scream.

  VI

  Terry sat up in bed, his skin crawling with the sensation of a million ants moving in a wave over his body. He’d heard a scream; he was sure of it. That was what had woken him. Terry listened hard, trying to make out sounds other than the quiet snoring of other patients, the swoosh-swoosh of running-shoes on the tiled floor, the hum of the ventilation system.

  The scream did not come again. Perhaps he’d dreamt it, dredged it up from some nightmare he’d been having?

  He couldn’t be sure, but he felt that it had sounded like his mother.

  Terry got out of bed and walked out of the ward, passing sleeping children and a nurse engrossed in some late-night quiz show he was watching on a tiny portable television. He moved along the corridor in silence, determined not to wake anyone, or to draw attention to his progress. He didn’t know where he was going, but he did know that his family needed him.

  After walking the halls for what seemed like a long time Terry stopped, listening to the eerie near-silence. His parents had denied the existence of the boy, Franz, saying that Terry had imagined the other. But he was certain that the boy had been there, and that he meant Terry harm. More than that, he felt that Franz meant to hurt his parents, specifically his dad. The fact that they almost shared a Christian name was not lost on him. It seemed important somehow, as if part of some grand scheme or plan.

  Terry continued on his way, seeking an exit. He saw the lifts up ahead, their doors firmly shut. He hurried, knowing that to summon them he’d have to wait around in full view, risking exposure.

  He pressed the button to call the lift. The little “up” arrow glowed green; Terry waited, feeling tense and anxious. He heard the sound of the lift mechanism hauling the metal box up its grimy shaft: the hum of motors, the clank of machinery. Come on! he thought, his leg twitching with impatience.

  The lift doors opened a fraction, then stuck with a thin band of black between them. Terry lurched forward and pushed his fingers into the gap, attempting to tug the doors apart. He strained, focusing all of his strength on that thin vertical aperture. Finally, the doors reluctantly began to open.

  Franz stood on the other side, dressed in dirty jeans and a torn white T-shirt. His face was smeared with dirt, his eyes like stones pressed into river clay and his mouth was curved into a slow grin. “Going down?” he said, and his voice was like sticks being clashed together: dry, empty. Dead.

  Terry ran for the stairs, aware that his feet were bare. He was dressed in hospital-issue pyjamas that had a flap at the rear: his arse was waving in the cold air.

  He slammed through the doors and hurled himself into the stairwell, smashing a shoulder into the wall on the way down. The pain didn’t bother him; he was more concerned with outrunning Franz. Footsteps padded behind him, possibly a level up from his current position but still too close for comfort.

  When he reached the ground floor Terry fully expected to be accosted and led back to the ward, but there was no one around. The hospital was unnaturally empty. Surely there should be night staff wandering the wards, checking up on things? And where were the late-night admissions? This only added to the sense of dreamy inevitability that he was experiencing, and when he stumbled out of the main doors into the parking area, Terry realised that he was all alone.

  VII

  Frank lay his wife on the bed, holding back tears. She was breathing; her airways were open. He picked up the telephone to call yet another ambulance, but was halted by the sound of her voice: “No. I’m fine.”

  Frank replaced the receiver in its cradle and returned his attention to the bed. To Claire. “What happened? What the hell is going on?”

  “Hang on a second, just until I can get myself focused.”

  “What the fuck were you doing lying under the bed? I thought you were dead!”

  Shadows moved on either side of him, rippling like black fabric. Frank felt like the walls were closing in.

  “Under the bed?” her face was blank, the expression one of utter confusion. “I…I thought I saw someone in the car when I got back here with the wine. When I opened the door, there was nobody in there, but then I sort of blacked out. The last thing I remember is being carried into the room.”

  Frank was beginning to lose his grip; fear clawed at his spine. “So, somebody knocked you out and carried you in here, then hid you under the bed. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying, Frank. I haven’t a clue what happened. All I know is that I thought I saw a boy in our car, and when I looked inside he wasn’t there. Then I woke up here on the bed.”

  “A boy?”

  “Yes, Frank. A boy. A little boy.”

  “Terry said he saw a boy; that the boy pushed him down that hole into the basement. What did he look like, Claire?”

  She sat up, rubbing her head with a shaking hand. Then she looked at him, her eyes focusing on his face. “Tall, skinny. With blonde hair and a weird crooked grin.”

  She paused, a sudden animation in her face. “My God, Frank. He looked exactly like you did when you were a child.”

  VIII

  Terry moved fast, keeping low to the ground where he could and avoiding well-trafficked routes. All he could remember was that his mother had told him the hotel where they were staying was near the river, and that they were registered in room number 17.

  It wasn’t much, but it was all he had to go on.

  He followed the signs for a riverside cycle route, hoping that he would stumble upon the correct place. He was going by instinct, guided by the tenacious bond between mother and son: if he concentrated hard enough, he could sense her out there in the night. And she was in deep trouble.

/>   He kept his eyes dead ahead; whenever he deviated from this, he saw unpleasant sights on either side. The boy was pacing him, and whenever Terry looked to the side – either side – he saw the pale willowy figure running level with him, swift as a jungle beast. He was beginning to change his mind as to whether or not Franz meant him harm. So far the boy had botched two clear chances: back at the site of the old orphanage, and then in the hospital.

  It was almost as if Franz was trying to subtly lead him somewhere. Was he herding him away from the hospital? And back at the ruins of Riven Manor, had he pushed Terry into the basement to hide him?

  It seemed ludicrous, but the more Terry thought about it the more it made sense. It wasn’t the boy who was chasing him, it was something else: something terrible.

  IX

  Frank smoked a cigarette outside the hotel room, standing on the balcony and looking down at the sparkling river. A layer of darkness rippled across the surface of the water, moving like a sheet. There were shapes beneath the sheet, and they were rolling and writhing, like lovers lost in an embrace. Frank watched them squirm, wondering if they were real or if he was in the middle of a mental breakdown.

  He threw the ciggy over the balcony and went back into the room.

  Claire was taking a shower; he could hear the hiss of water through the thin wood of door. Sometimes he thought how easy it would be to hurt her. He didn’t have these thoughts often, but when they came they were intensely unpleasant. These small fictional deaths felt like sacrificial offerings to the bad deeds of his past, imagined atrocities designed to keep the real monsters at bay. Food for the beasts within.

  He’d killed her off in his books and stories, of course, making her the victim in fiction that she refused to be in real life. Terry, too: he’d murdered the kid so many times that he no longer felt guilty.