The monstrous, p.20
The Monstrous, page 20
“Mum!” I shouted and I didn’t care that my mouth was open ’cause I knew that they’d come back and I was scared. They’d come back ’cause of granny M and dad and Sadie-who-tries-to-make-me-call-her-mummy and their new baby and the scary letters and the brown boxes. And I was scared the most ’cause mum had done the thing she’d always told me not to—the thing she’d been too scared to do too.
She put out her hands to stop me running to her and then covered her mouth with her fingers till I remembered I was supposed to do that too. I could hear Wobs trying to cry but he couldn’t ’cause of the taped up dummy.
Mum ran out the door and onto the landing. I saw her eyes fill up black when she turned round to check I was coming and then she stopped and pulled open the cupboard door next to the stairs and ran inside.
When I got there she’d shut the door already but she’d pulled the string that lit the bulb so I could see her through the little slats. Her face was still fat and black and full and her eyes were still wide and her fingers were still over her mouth. She banged at the door till the key fell out onto the floor and I remembered what I was supposed to do and picked it up and put it in the lock and turned it till I heard the click just like we’d practiced.
I saw mum fall a bit when she heard the click too and then she couldn’t hold her breath in anymore. She let a bit of it out and some of the flies came out too. They buzzed black at the slats. I heard her scream a bit and then she waved her hands about trying to make them go back into her mouth. She was crying but I could only tell ’cause her face was all wet when she looked at me through the slats.
“Mummy, make it stop! Make them go away! Make them go away, please!” I wanted her to stop crying and holding her breath too. I wanted that the most.
She stared at me till her eyes went as black as her face and I couldn’t see them anymore. And then she smiled. I think she smiled ’cause I saw the white flash of her teeth before I heard her twist the stick that closed the slats and then I couldn’t see anything anymore.
The light on the landing got dim but it didn’t go out. I heard the buzzy sound get louder and louder and I heard mummy scream and scream and kick and punch and rattle the door and I ran back into Wobs’s room and sat on the floor and cried and cried and held his pudgy hands till it all stopped.
The fluttery feeling in my tummy and chest is starting to hurt now. I don’t like it. I didn’t like it anyway but now I really don’t. The buzzy sound is so loud it’s like it’s inside my ears and I’ve got one hand over my shut mouth but I don’t think they’re here yet. Wobs’s cot isn’t just like the one at home ’cause I can’t fit my arm through the slats to cover his mouth too and when I stand up I’m too short to reach over the top.
They’re coming. They’re coming. My heart is banging really hard and really fast in the wrong place—I don’t like that either. I try not to cry ’cause mum says that doesn’t ever help but I’m scared. And I need to look after Wobs but I can’t ’cause he doesn’t have a dummy and the cot is different and I can’t fit my arm through.
The flappy feeling in my chest is in my throat and it and the buzzy sound nearly makes me scream till I remember to keep my mouth shut. Something fizzes the back of my tongue like sherbet and then I start to gag like when I have a tummy bug and then it all comes up out of me in a big chokey rush.
And then the light comes on again. It buzzes buzzes buzzes and then goes on completely and it makes me blink.
The room is full of black. It’s filled up with it. Black that came from me. I put my hand over my mouth again and I want to scream and cry but then I remember Wobs. He’s still lying on his back with his legs and arms out and his mouth wide open.
“Mummy, make it stop. Make them go away, please!” I whisper into my sweaty and wet hand.
But mum is dead.
After the screaming and punching and rattling and buzzing stopped I went back out onto the landing and stood at the cupboard door and stared at the key. After nothing happened I turned it till it clicked again and pulled it slowly open.
Mum was curled up on the floor like we used to do in the garden when it was too sunny for dancing. There was no buzzy sound and her face wasn’t black anymore but she was covered in blood like a dead gladiator in an amp theatre and most of it was coming from her mouth and nose and ears. Her eyes were staring up at the ceiling and her tears were red too. Her hands were like claws and some of her nails were gone I think.
I went down the stairs really slowly ’cause my knees felt funny and then I picked up the dust sheet and then I climbed back up. At the top I listened again but I couldn’t hear Wobs and I couldn’t hear the buzzy sound so I went back in the cupboard and lay down next to mum and pulled the dust sheet over us both and waited for dad.
He didn’t come but other people did. And they took me and Wobs away and left mum behind.
I’m older than my age. I’m clever. I’m nearly a grownup really. And I have to be brave. Mum always said that I have to be brave. No matter what.
I look down at Wobs. The buzzy sound is making him twitch and breathe faster. I think he’s about to wake up.
The room is still black and buzzy and full of flies. Our bit of room is the only bit left.
I take my hand away from my mouth but it’s very shaky and my mouth is shaky too. I Have To Be Brave. I look down at Wobs again and hope his eyes won’t open. I try to reach him over the top of the cot but I still can’t do it.
“I’m sorry, Wobs,” I whisper. “I’ve got to go away.” I look at his pudgy fingers and red cheeks and silly fuzzy hair. “I’ve got to catch them so you don’t.”
And then I leave our bit of the room and run into the black buzzy noise. I put my hands over my mouth again and hold my breath and close my eyes and pretend I’m not crying. I pretend I’m not scared and my heart isn’t banging really hard and really fast in the wrong place.
And then when I think I’m far enough away and when it feels right—which means when it feels really really wrong—I take my hands away and I open my mouth. Wide. Wider than a tinkly river with ducks and swans. Wider than the throwing net of a fisherman gladiator. Wider than the teeth in the big metal vice on the wooden bench in dad’s tool shed. And then I breathe in.
It hurts. The things I breathe in hurt. Much more than when they came out. Much more than I thought they would and I’d thought they would. I nearly scream as they rattle and buzz in my ears in my nose in my mouth in my throat in my tummy. They scrape and scratch and flap and buzz ’cause now they’re angry. I keep breathing in and in and in till the room stops being black and I’ve got no breath left and then I clap my hands over my mouth and stop breathing anything at all.
I run to the little door in the glass room and when I let one of my hands go to try the handle it opens. I run inside and turn around and shut it again. I can see Wobs’s cot through the fuzzy glass but I don’t think I’m far enough away yet for him to be safe.
It’s hard to hold your breath. It’s even harder when you’re scared and your mum’s dead and you’re trying to be brave but you don’t know what to do. And when angry things are scraping and scratching and buzzing and trying to get out again. I hit my leg against the table with the coffee cup and it topples over spilling everywhere. My spare hand hits the window and bounces back to hit my face. Letting some flies out before I manage to breathe them back in.
I’ll be able to get back out too. When my eyes go black and I start to scream and punch and kick and rattle like mum did I’ll still be able to escape. I’ll be able to run to Wobs’s cot and let all the black out. I’m scared and I’m sore and my heart’s still wrong and I’m full of flies but I’m still Brave like a Gladiator. I still remember what mum said. I’ve got to have a plan. After mister and missus S we always always had A Plan.
I look back at the door and there’s a card sticking out of a slot like a key. I don’t know if it’s the same thing but while I can still hold my breath I pull it out and drop to my knees and push it as far under the door as I can till it’s gone and I can’t see it.
And then I have to breathe out. I can’t hold it anymore. I feel sick and scared and hot and sore and all I can see now are black spots. The flies buzz and buzz and fill the mini room black but I can breathe again and when they push me into the door it doesn’t open.
I think of Wobs’s room when it was full of yellow. I think of mum when she looked like an angel. Her face bright and her hair glowy like my night-light. I cough and choke and breathe.
I look at Wobs through the fuzzy glass. I can see his pudgy arms waving through the bars of the cot as he starts to cry. I can see the fat hairy man and maybe the lady who kept saying, “it’s a crying shame” barging through the door with the window in. But I keep looking at Wobs.
“I love you,” I think inside my head ’cause I think that’s what mum was thinking inside hers when she looked at me before her eyes went black and she twisted the stick that closed the slats in the cupboard door. And I hope it won’t ever be the same for him. The same as for granny M and mum and me. I don’t think it will be.
I try to smile again before I forget how to. Wobs will call Sadie mummy. But I don’t mind. And I don’t think mum will either.
The fat hairy man and the crying shame lady run out into the corridor with a screaming Wobs between them. The flies turn back from the fuzzy glass and the locked door. They fill me with black and angry. They choke till I can’t remember being scared or sore or me.
And the flies. Filled with fury and stymied grief. Anomalies. The divine and diabolical; the magical and humoural. The obtuse, the diseased, the misunderstood. Never any of it more than flies.
And now, an opportunity too many lost. Finally, an end. We know it’s over. And so we stop flying.
THEY'RE THE PHONE calls we hate most. That unnerving 2 a.m. jangle that drills your gut the way a dentist drills a tooth. If you’ve been out of college for much longer than a year, nobody has anything to tell you after midnight that you want to hear.
And could you bring a shovel? I can’t find ours.
Things like that least of all.
Yes, I went to college. Took a year or two longer than it should have. I had a habit of arguing with professors. Except for the extended trip back to the auld ancestral homeland—a given, in our family, a rite of passage that somewhere along the way seems to have lost most of its original significance—college was the farthest away from home I’d ever gotten for any length of time.
Otherwise, thirty-eight miles—that’s it. I rolled down the mountains, bounced across the foothills of the Rockies, and had just enough momentum to make it as far as Boulder. Not a bad place to land, really. It put a little distance between me and where I grew up, but not so much that I didn’t have a ready sanctuary close by in case I ever needed it. In case I had another of those phases in which I couldn’t quite trust my eyes and ears.
The drive back up, I’ve never minded it in the day. At night, that’s something else. Get past a town called Lyons and the spine of the North American continent starts to wrap around you. The road winds. A lot. Cliffs tower on one side while gorges yawn on the other. Narrow, as gorges go, and not terribly deep, but enough to swallow your car and leave you broken on a rocky streambed below.
When the settlers of the New World left their homes in the Old, it was only natural that they look for things that would be a reminder of what they would never see again. The Dutch who founded New Amsterdam, later to become New York, were drawn to Manhattan because the encircling river there reminded them of the lowland waters back home. Germans who made it past the Mississippi found, another hundred or so miles west, a region around the Missouri River that seemed very much like the Rhineland.
And the Scots from whom my sister and I descended? They had to go farther before they were satisfied. Occasionally I’ve wondered whether it was blind chance or ordained fate that drew them up into the Rocky Mountains until, at the site of what would one day become Estes Park, they looked around at the peaks and crags, and knew that here was as passable a substitute for the Highlands as they were ever likely to find.
While staking their claims in a world that could be as hostile as it was unfamiliar, these immigrants couldn’t have helped but take comfort in whatever semblances of home they could find. I’ve always understood that.
What I never really thought about was what they might have brought with them.
She was waiting for me outside the front door, Noelle sitting on the ground with a candle. I didn’t know if the candle was for her benefit, to keep her occupied, or for mine, so I wouldn’t trip over her in the dark. This house sits on the edge of town, up against the old scar where pines were cleared to make room for cattle, so you can’t see much here at night. There are no streetlights here. There never have been. There probably never will be.
Not much of a street, either. More like a neglected road and a pervading sense that what happens around these old pines and aspens stays within them.
Noelle’s candle was a big, fat pillar brimming over with melted wax. My sister took hold of it and tipped it, poured the molten wax over her hand, over the crust already there. Turning her hand as it ran, cooled, hardened. She must have done that when we were kids, although now wasn’t the moment to ask. There were times when we were growing up that I wondered how her hand got so chapped looking, but only ever the left one, and just as often in the middle of summer as the dead of winter.
“Brandt,” she said. The name of her ex-husband came out of her as if it had been lodged deep, had to be yanked out skewered on the barbs of a fishhook. “He killed her. He’s killed my baby.”
It cut the legs right out from under me. Down on the ground, hugging my sister, feeling that if I didn’t have her to hold onto, I’d just keep falling, up to my clawing fingertips in clotted earth.
Should I lie, to pound home the sense of tragedy? Prattle on about what a little beauty queen my niece was, radiant and full of poise and charm beyond her years? That’s what sells the grief: the image of a potential that people can recognize at once, without having to look deeper or think; someone they want to wrap their arms around and protect from every bad thing until she’s old enough to fuck.
Except she wasn’t a cute child. Not on the outside. It was like she’d taken the least appealing attributes from both parents, then made the worst of them. Maybe she would have grown out of it, duckling into swan, but probably not. So this is what she would’ve grown into: a homely young woman ignored by the world, except for the parts that she touched directly because she loved the world anyway. Six years old and already, on some level, she knew what lay ahead, so she’d begun to prepare. Bugs and plants and mammals, Joy just couldn’t get enough of them…especially the herds of elk that ambled through Estes Park every autumn rutting season. I adored her all the more for it—that hopeful, melancholy spark of awareness.
So did her father. That’s what I want to think: that he loved her more than he simply hated losing. Loved her enough to break into his one-time home and try to take her away into his new world. Except he didn’t love her enough to do it competently. In the middle of the night, the haste with which he was trying to get the job done…maybe she didn’t realize who it was, just that she was draped over some man’s shoulder and that was how you made the news, as long as you were cute enough. No wonder she fought. Six years old and groggy and still she sent a grown man down a flight of 125-year-old stairs.
In a just world, Joy would’ve landed on her father, not the other way around. He would have broken her fall instead of her neck.
Noelle’s hand was starting to look truly deformed. I should’ve blown out the candle, except that would’ve left us in the dark, and just hearing her cry would’ve been worse somehow than seeing her.
“A shovel—did you bring one? I looked and looked for ours, but....”
No one could blame her for not thinking straight. What jury would fault her for finishing the job on her ex-husband that the stairs had started? What cop wouldn’t have coached her, however subtly, to spin her story to eliminate her culpability? Okay, she took the big iron fireplace tongs to the back of his skull—so?
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I told her. “There’s nothing to bury here.”
I’m more familiar than I would like to be with how, even in the most crushing moments of her life, a woman can look at you as though you’re the biggest fool she’s ever seen.
Noelle peeled the wax from her hand and snuffed the candle, then stood, and like a wraith, turned and walked toward the front door.
This house. We’ve always lived in this house.
It was built by ancestors who died when my grandparents were young, by that first generation of immigrants who came and saw and set down roots, sinking them deep in the cool, mist-dampened earth.
This house. Sprawling and dark, its timbers hug the land as if it had come to a respectful truce with the hills and trees rather than trying to defy them. When it was new, could anyone have looked at this house and not seen that it was built by people who were determined to dig in, hunker down, and stay? Could anyone have failed to recognize that these were people who would love the land and bring down a terrible wrath on neighbors who might oppose or try to cheat them?
It’s their blood that flows through my veins, even if these people couldn’t be much more remote if they were characters from myth. Their names were spoken with reverence even in my own lifetime, during my first few years, with my grandparents living in their own wing of the house.
We’ve always lived in this house. But there was never the remotest chance that it could one day be mine. It’s always been passed down to the daughters.
Tradition like that, you change it at your peril.
As for the boys, I suppose we learned to never ask why.
Inside the house, Brandt lay where he’d died. He had managed to get up and stagger away from where he’d landed at the foot of the stairs, but appeared not to have made it far before Noelle brained him.
