How to Make Monsters (4 page)

“I’ll miss you,” said Nicci, holding
her tight on the doorstep. “Come back soon, big sis.”

Emma returned the hug, and wished
that she felt more like staying; it would cost her nothing to extend her trip,
to spend more quality time with her family, but right now the thought of
leaving Prentiss’s ever-widening circle of influence seemed like a very good
idea. “I’ll be back at Christmas,” she said. “In three weeks time. I promise.”

Olly and Jared followed her outside,
trailing her along the street as she headed for the Metro. They were good boys,
full of life and energy, and she brushed away a tear as they ran off towards
the park, waving and calling her name. Even Jared had seemed sad to see her go.

The next train was delayed by ten
minutes, and Emma felt herself drawn to her mobile phone. She took it out of
her pocket, dialled Prentiss’s number, but didn’t press the button to connect
the call. She repeated this procedure three more times before finally giving in
to temptation.

The phone rang out at the other end;
no one was home.

Feeling deeply uneasy, Emma checked
her watch. The London train wasn’t scheduled to leave Newcastle until three
o’clock. It was just after one. If she was quick, she could call in on him,
just to check that he hadn’t done anything foolish.

The train arrived. She got on,
knowing exactly at which station she’d disembark.

She made it to the house in plenty
of time, telling herself that all she was planning to do was check on Prentiss’
wellbeing. If he’d had an accident, or even tried to kill himself, she would
never be able to look at herself in the mirror again. Despising her own
weakness, and his passive strength, she rang the doorbell.

The door opened and a stranger
stepped outside. “Oh, hi,” he said, pulling a woollen hat down over his shaven
head. “You here to visit someone?”

“Yes, Prentiss O’Neil.” She realised
this must be one of the people he shared the house with.

“Ah. I think the queer bugger’s
still in his room. I haven’t seen him for days. If he is in, tell him he owes
me fifty quid for the gas bill, would you.” Then he was gone, jogging along the
street towards the bus stop that was located outside a tiny video rental shop
that seemed only to stock titles from the 1980s.

Emma pushed open the door and went
inside, wiping her feet on the threadbare doormat. The house was silent; a
stale heaviness hung in the air. She climbed the stairs to Prentiss’ first
floor room and knocked on his door, her touch lighter than intended. When no
answer came, she knocked again, louder this time. The door swung open under the
increased pressure from her knuckles.

Emma took a step inside, smelling
that same dry yet moist odour and sensing that something was very wrong. The
room was dark, the blinds pulled over the single window, and looked in even
worse disarray than during her last visit.

“Prent. You here?” She expected no
reply, and none came.

There was a naked figure kneeling on
the bed, turned to face the wall. It was male – she could at least make out
that pertinent detail in the gloom – and his hands were flattened against the
peeling wallpaper. Drawing closer, she noticed that the floor was covered in a
layer of crumbled plaster; the cracks Prentiss had crudely attempted to repair
had opened up, shedding their DIY skin.

“Prent?” She could tell it was him
from the familiar curvature of his spine, and the small tattoo of a Rose on his
left shoulder.

“What the hell –”

She stopped in the centre of the
room, poised to take another step but not quite managing it.

From this angle it looked as if he
had tried to force his head into the long diagonal crack in the wall that ran
in a jagged line from the corner of the window frame. She could see the soles
of his feet on the bed, his legs, taut and skinny, his pallid back, his
neck…but nothing above that.

Then, with growing horror, she
realised her mistake.

Prentiss had not stuck his head into
the crack; the crack had spread across the wall, passing through flesh and bone
to shear off most of his head above the jaw line. Prentiss’ skull had become
part of the fracture, a jagged black rent through which only darkness could be
viewed.

As Emma watched, the wall around the
crack seemed to shiver and the area of damage widened. Its messy Rosarch edges
sent out spidery limbs to breach plasterboard and brickwork and splinter the
dead matter of Prentiss’ rigid torso.

The crack was growing; something was
trying to climb out.

Emma ran from the room, slamming the
door to shut the monstrosity inside. She stumbled to the station and jumped on
the first train to arrive, heading into the heart of the city. Perhaps safety
lay in numbers, surrounded by crowds. But there were cracks everywhere: cracks
in buildings, in road surfaces, even in people.

When she reached the station she sat
in a glassed-walled waiting room under a row of stark fluorescent bulbs. At
least where there was too much light she would see them coming, be alerted to their
presence before they reached her. She pulled up her feet onto the bench,
listening to the groan of plastic, hoping that it would not break. Or crack.

THE UNSEEN

(For Mark Lynch)

(What follows is the slightly edited
version of a hand-written manuscript found in July 2005, wrapped in an old
cellophane sandwich bag and wedged into a hole in the wall of a derelict house
in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne. The sheets were undated, and no author’s
name was legible.)

Our numbers are many, yet
still we remain unseen, unnoticed; the vast majority of you honest, law-abiding
citizens walk past us on the city streets every day, not even realising that we
are there. We are the forgotten. The cast-offs. The outsiders.

We are those who observe you as you
go about your business.

Utilising this questionable
advantage bestowed upon us by our low social standing, we watch. And what we
see is sometimes incredible.

I’ve always kept notebooks, and now
that for some reason I’ve been chosen to chronicle the inexplicable, the stark
and sometimes depressing truth of our busy little peaceable kingdoms, I have
taken care to maintain the habit. Back in my old life, I was a writer of
fictions: I wrote thrillers and detective stories, fooling myself into
believing that they mattered, and eking out a modest existence from the words I
produced. These days the mysteries are real, but my style of recording them has
not changed. I have no publisher, no agent, no means of getting my work “out
there”, but these things are no longer important to me. All that matters is
getting it all down on paper.

I keep a locker in Central Station,
and fill it with my loose pages and messy notebooks (no doubt this document
will end up there too, taking up space with the rest). Some day they will be
important, these seemingly random scribblings penned by a man on the edge;
until then they sit, dusty and neglected, waiting for their time to come.

I’m not quite sure when I first saw
them, but I do know when I first noticed their existence. It was Friday
evening, a boom time for we who live on the streets: drunken celebrants will
put their hand in their pockets to impress their dates; pissed-up workers
letting off steam might buy you a kebab or a burger from one of the countless
fast food outlets down by the Big Market.

I was lounging by Grey’s Monument
with my close pal The Spiker. We were sharing a bottle of rum he’d managed to
lift from an off-license in the Cattle Market, and indulging our usual habit of
people-watching. It’s what we do; all we have. When you’re down on your luck,
you tend to become very observant. You notice a pound coin dropped by a rushing
commuter, a half-eaten packet of crisps thrown into a litter bin at a bus stop,
the way some people will announce that they’re a soft touch purely by the slant
of their mouth or a soft, vague light in their eyes.

The sun was just setting, dragging
crimson-hued acid trails through an unusually low and heavy sky resigned to
dull grey for most of the day. The Spiker went quiet – he’s usually an
incessant talker – and we both just watched for a while, content to pass the
bottle between us in an easy, companionable silence.

And that was when I saw it, out of
the corner of my eye. Later, I began to realise that was the only way to see
them: peripheral. If you look dead-on, you won’t see a thing.

A visibly stressed young mother was
bending down to chastise her baby outside a betting shop, her tired face lurid
and mask-like in the lowering light. The baby was having a tantrum over some
silly incident that matters only to the very young, and the woman was obviously
at the end of her tether.

As she bent to the pushchair,
delivering a rapid open-handed slap to the side of the child’s head and
screaming some indecipherable obscenity, a shadow crossed between her and the
subject of her disapproval. It was like a ripple in the air, a slight
distortion in one of reality’s layers.

And then it was gone. The woman
pushed the baby out into the main flow of foot traffic, becoming lost in the
crowd, and I was left feeling puzzled. Surely I couldn’t have seen what I
thought I had: the vague rumour of a face hovering in the air.

The Spiker and I got roaring drunk
that night, so I gave no further thought to the event. We snagged a couple of
bottles of Thunderbird from a bunch of students on a night out to celebrate
passing their exams, and retreated to a local squat we knew to pass the time.

At 5am I found myself flat on my
back and wrapped up in a stinking sheet next to some woman whose body I couldn’t
recall having lain beside. Her hair was thick with dirt, and I could barely
make out her face through the layer of soot that seemed to have accumulated
there for some reason. I sincerely doubted that anything physical had occurred;
I had been unable to sustain an erection for over a year.

Stiff, tired and hung-over, I got up
and walked outside to swallow some fresh air.

We were up on the first floor of an
old condemned office complex on Pink Lane, were the whores and junkies gather,
and I stood on the fire escape and spied on the sleeping city below. Early
risers – Worm-catchers, as we called them – tramped the slumbering streets
leading from the train station, heading for early shifts, returning from
all-night parties, or just trying to walk the night out of their system.

Through the hazy morning air I
thought that I could see misty shadows hanging from them, like the remnants of
bad dreams. It was an odd sight, lonely and rather frightening, but I put it
down to the cheap booze and began to climb down the folding metal ladder to the
street below.

Finding some loose change in my
pocket, I went into a McDonald’s for a coffee. It was the only place willing to
open that early, and I regretted spending the cash, but I had nowhere else to
go, nobody to see. Time alone was what I needed, if only to clear my throbbing
head.

After the coffee, I walked the
streets, waiting for the people to arrive. Saturday morning shoppers were never
generous, but sometimes patience might be rewarded with a few quid thrown at you
by some witless wag who thought it was the epitome of humour to piss on you
from a great height when you were down on your knees. I didn’t mind: money is
money, no matter the manner in which it is given.

I walked, sat in shop doorways and
avoided company. A few other faces I knew were patrolling their habitual spots,
but all they got from me was a nod of the head, a wink of the eye. I was in no
mood for chat.

Some time around 10 am, I saw my ex
wife. She was alone, climbing out of a taxi on High Bridge Street. There were a
few fancy boutiques in that area, and I guessed that she was shopping for some
new clothes to replace last season’s wardrobe.

I felt nothing when I saw her. The
hate had gone long ago, replaced now by a sort of bitter acceptance. I meant
her no harm, not any more. Attacking her that one time had cleared my system of
the need to hurt, and now all I wanted was to get on with whatever flyblown
tatters of a life I had left.

When my book sales had dried up, she’d
left me to move in with my accountant. The two of them had fleeced me for what
little savings I had, leaving me without a bean to my name. She even took the
house in the divorce, which left me homeless. The drinking soon followed, and
before I knew it the world had skidded out from under me and I was living in a
corrugated steel garden shed out near Four Lane Ends.

We are all just a short step from
the gutter, and if someone chooses to nudge us in the wrong direction, we can
fall in without making as much as a splash.

I don’t hate my wife. I pity her.
She became addicted to the trappings of being married to a local minor
celebrity – the clothes, the parties, the flash cars – and when it all went
away she’d forgotten why we’d fallen in love in the first place.

I ducked behind a wall, ensuring
that she wouldn’t see me, and in my haste I managed to turn my ankle on the
kerb. Sitting down heavily on the pavement, I massaged the area, hoping that I
hadn’t broken a bone. People like me have no doctor we can go and see, and we
are treated like garbage if we go to the hospital casualty ward. Having no
social security number, and no valid ID, we are nothing, ghosts. Such is the
price of dropping out.