How to Make Monsters Read online

  Nothing. Not even the familiar whispery hiss of static. Just a long, almost baleful silence on the other end of the line. Then she heard a sound like glass or crockery breaking; a loud crunching crackle that made her pull her hand away from the side of her head and screw up her face in an expression of distaste. Was he toying with her, testing what reaction he might receive after all this time?

  “Hello,” she said, loudly, one more time, finger hovering over the green hang-up button.

  “Em? Emma, it’s me. It’s Prentiss.” His voice was faint, as if coming to her across a vast distance. Then there was a surge in volume and she could hear him more clearly. “How are you?”

  “Hi, Prent. I’m good. Long time no hear.” It was typical of him to call her up out of the blue, as if nothing had happened between them. That complete disregard for the social rituals had been part of why they’d split up in the first place. That and about a million other things: half-hidden cracks in his personality that had become all-too apparent during their time together.

  “I’ve been thinking about you.” The statement sent a faint chill of anticipation along her nerve endings, culminating between her legs. No matter how weird Prentiss had become, how strange his behaviour had been, Emma had long ago resigned herself to the fact that she would always be attracted to him.

  “Oh.” The train went under a tunnel; the connection broke for a few seconds so she could not be completely sure of what he said next.

  “-so I’ve been a bit low lately. Things have been strange.” What had she missed? It seemed important, but she didn’t want to ask him to repeat whatever he’d said; her feelings were always so damn messy when it came to dealing with Prentiss that she was unable to act in anything approaching a normal, rational manner.

  “Can I see you?”

  “I live in London now, Prent. I left the north east eighteen months ago.”

  “Really? Well that one took me by surprise.”

  “I’m visiting my sister this weekend.” She regretted telling him this as soon as the words passed her lips. “I guess I could meet you somewhere.”

  “It’s like fate, isn’t it?”

  Emma did not reply.

  “I’m having…difficulty leaving the house. Could you come round? I’m still living in the same place.”

  “Yes. Okay. Tomorrow evening.” She hung up before she could even question her response. The train carried her towards home, and towards yet another ill thought out meeting with her ex. As bright winter sunlight battered her with harsh lightning strokes through the long carriage windows, Emma wondered why, wherever Prentiss was concerned, she could never bring herself to say no.

  She arrived in Central Station just after midday, and dodged the bustling December crowds to catch a Metro to her sister’s place out near the airport. Yet another capsule rocketing through underground caverns; somehow this seemed like a metaphor for a part of her life she’d tried so very hard to leave behind. The stations flew by in a blur. Monument. Haymarket. Jesmond (rendered dark with memories of Prentiss). Ilford Road. Place names rendered meaningless because of her relocation to the Smoke. A group of youths in regulation white tracksuits got on at South Gosforth, the only feature distinguishing one from the next being the colour and brand of their baseball caps. The boys – aged between fourteen and sixteen – lounged with their feet up on the seats and drank cheap cider from dented cans; Emma felt relieved to be getting off the train at the next stop.

  Nicci’s house was a five minute walk from the station, past tired looking shop fronts with dusty window displays consisting of canned and boxed goods Emma hadn’t seen advertised in over ten years. Steel bars and vandal-proof glass marked the way; the sacred landscape of her youth was deteriorating a little more each day she stayed away. Certain parts of the footpaths seemed cracked beyond repair, big gaping fissures opening up in the grubby concrete paving slabs to reveal the dark grasping earth beneath.

  Emma hurried towards Nicci’s house, and when she approached the door it was opened without her having to announce her arrival.

  “Em! Welcome home!” Her sister’s chunky arms went around her, and she was bustled inside and into the warm environment. Food smells accosted her nostrils; the sound of a radio greeted her from another room. This was better. This was more like home.

  They chatted over coffee and biscuits, Emma trying not to comment on Nicci’s recent weight gain. It seemed that her sister’s husband had started a new job, long-distance lorry driving between the UK and Germany. Ed was away for long stints, but according to Nicci this made the time he spent at home with her and the kids all the more worthwhile.

  Emma’s nephews, Olly and Jared, were over at a friend’s house for some pre-teenaged birthday party, and would return much later, stuffed to idleness with the unhealthy delights of chocolate and cake. Emma was glad of the time alone with her sister; quiet moments like these happened all too rarely these days, and their intimacy helped remind her that she hadn’t just left the bad things behind.

  “Mum and dad send their love,” Nicci said, smiling broadly. “I got an email last night.”

  “I’ve been a bit lazy in contacting them. My computer crashed a few weeks ago, and I seem to have forgotten how to use the phone…”

  Nicci grinned, appreciating that Emma had never been a strong communicator, and that she’d never approved of their parents’ emigration, designed so that they could spend their retirement in the sun. “It’s expensive to call Australia,” she said, reaching out across the table to brush Emma’s hand in a rare show of solidarity. “I’m sure they understand.”

  The rest of the afternoon passed quickly, and all too soon the kids arrived back from the party. Olly was unable to hide his affection for his aunt, and smothered her with rich candy-flavoured kisses; Jared was more insular, and merely pecked at her offered cheek before slouching off to the bathroom to get ready for bed.

  The travelling had tired Emma more than she cared to admit, and when she started to doze in front of the television Nicci ordered her up to bed. “You’re in the spare room, the one next to the boys’ room. I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed, and there’s a stereo set up in there in case you want to listen to some music before turning in.”

  Emma hugged her sister hard, afraid that if she let go this moment might shatter like glass. When Nicci broke free, a look of amused concern on her face, Emma shook her head and trotted silently upstairs.

  Sleep teased her mercilessly, staying just out of reach, jerking away from her mind whenever she got close enough to grab its tenuous, mist-like essence. She thought of Prentiss, and of his obsessions. The way he’d become convinced that reality was shredding like old wallpaper in a derelict house and something nasty was peering through from the other side.

  It was these frightening notions that had finally led to the breakdown of affection between them; Emma had loved him right up until the end, but had eventually been forced to admit that sometimes love isn’t enough. He refused to seek professional help, remaining convinced that he was sane and stable, despite the protestations of the few friends he had left. When Emma had walked away for the last time, Prentiss had been too afraid of his own phantoms to even follow her out the door.

  And now, three years later, did the same madness still drive him? Was he still seeing demons, or had he rid himself of the fantasy life that had driven a wedge between them?

  Finally, she slept, but dark smudges stained her dreams, shapeless fractures that gaped in the corners of her imagination, put there by Prentiss too long ago to trouble her waking mind.

  ****

  “For God’s sake, Em, don’t tell me you’re going to see him?” Nicci’s face was contorted into a snarl; she couldn’t mention Prentiss’ name without it scarring her features. “The bloke’s a psycho. Didn’t he run off chasing monsters, or something?”

  “No,” Emma replied, placing her teacup on a floral-patterned coaster. “He locked himself away so that they couldn’t get him.”

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nbsp; “Oh, well excuse my mistake. That makes a big difference.” Nicci stood and walked to the window, looking out at her boys playing football in the huge back garden. A smile played across her face at the sight, but then she remembered that she was supposed to be angry. Emma loved her unquestionably in that moment, gaining a glimpse into the heart of motherhood; a peek at a state of mind that she someday dearly wished to experience for herself.

  “He sounded rational, Nic. Like he’s got himself together.”

  Her sister turned away from the window, an apple tree framing her, giving the illusion of devil horns sticking out the sides of her head. “You always went back to him,” she said, the anger having fled in the face of genuine concern. “And he always exploited that.”

  “Things are different now. I have my own life, a new start. I’m strong now; I don’t need him to lean on.”

  “No,” said her sister. “You have that all wrong. It was always him who leaned on you.”

  ****

  The taxi arrived at 6:30, and Nicci walked her to the door. “Be careful,” she said, tenderly. “Don’t let him use you again.”

  Emma kissed Nicci’s cheek and climbed into the cab, watching the suburban view unfurl as they neared the outskirts of the city. Prentiss lived in a shared house in Jesmond, a huge Victorian terraced property with rooms so big each one could have contained her entire flat in Bermondsey with enough space left over to squeeze in a single bed.

  All too soon the ride was over, and Emma paid the driver and watched him pull away from the kerb. Trees lined the verges, their branches bare; some of them bore splits in their wide flaking trunks, possibly the result of some kind of elm disease. The footpaths here were in better condition than the ones in Nicci’s neighbourhood, but still the area seemed to be falling slowly into ruin. Gardens were overgrown; the brickwork of some of the houses was badly in need of repair; even the sky looked broken, shattered into giant slivers, like a damaged picture window.

  She could remember the place is if she’d visited it only yesterday. Surely Prentiss’s housemates would have changed a few times by now, but she knew his room would look exactly the same. The last time she’d been inside, there had been newspaper clippings stuck to the walls, stories about environmental disasters, nuclear meltdowns, landmark buildings crumbling into dereliction. Prentiss’s obsession with social decay had been only the start of it; from there, his preoccupations had taken a darker turn. When the books about atrocities had turned up on his shelves, Emma had finally spoken out and begged him to talk to a doctor. It wasn’t natural, she claimed, to read constantly about the Holocaust, Bosnian war crimes, the hell of WW1 trenches.

  Prentiss had explained it all away by saying that modern society needed to embrace the darkness at its core, if only to prevent that darkness from taking hold of us all over again, to stop it reaching through the gaps to pull us down.

  Thinking about all of this, Emma almost walked away. Her hand hovered over the doorbell, and she conducted an interior argument with herself as to whether or not she should return to Nicci’s and order a Chinese takeaway.

  The door opened; a figure stood well back from the threshold, visible only as shadow, and beckoned her inside. “Hurry,” said the shadow. “Come on in.”

  It was Prentiss. He’d been waiting for her.

  “I thought you might not come,” he said as she followed him along a damp, badly decorated hallway. The stairs creaked ominously as they climbed to his room, but Emma was beyond being nervous under such conditions. Prentiss was a shred of the man he’d used to be. His clothes hung on him like rags, his hair was thinning at the scalp, and his skin had taken on a sickly yellow sheen. He looked ill, and Emma knew that if things got out of hand she could easily send him to the floor with a well-placed right-hook.

  “I thought you might be…better,” she said, following him into his room, the interior of which proved her prognosis to be utterly without foundation.

  Prentiss sat on the bed, clearing a space with his hand. Papers scattered to the floor, but he made no move to pick them up. Emma could see they were covered in scrawled notes, unintelligible hand-written theories that still had a grip on his mind.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling nervously. As he was now, Emma had great difficulty understanding exactly what it was about him that had attracted her in the first place. He was a shell, a self-abused puppet flopping on severed strings.

  Suddenly she became aware of the smell: a damp, flat odour that was difficult to place. Then, when she saw the state of what parts of the walls and ceiling remained visible, she realised what it was. Wet plaster. Opened plastic pots of Polyfilla repair paste and crack sealant sat on the windowsill, battered cutlery sticking up out of the white doughy mass within.

  Prentiss had been filling cracks. The stuff hung in abstract stalactites from the ceiling, in frozen drips down the walls. Any crack – however superficial – had been stuffed and inexpertly covered with the malleable material.

  If it were not for his debauched and denuded appearance, Emma would have fled. But even now, in this vastly reduced state, he still retained a magnetic pull on her emotions. She gravitated towards him, even though the stench of urine and halitosis that rose from him in a cloud made her want to back away. He cut a pathetic figure in his stained T Shirt and ripped black jeans; his torso flashed white and spare under the baggy clothing. Emma had never seen him so thin. He looked positively malnourished.

  “Why did you ask me here?” She thought a direct approach might at least yield one or two vaguely coherent answers.

  Prentiss stood up from the mattress, a hand going up under his shirt to scratch a dry sore on his concave belly. Emma drew in a breath; as he turned, she could clearly define his ribs and the vicious ripple of spine through the scant covering of skin and atrophied muscle. Prentiss, she realised, was visibly wasting away.

  “One of my housemates knows your sister – he drinks in the pub where she sometimes does shifts behind the bar. I knew you were coming, Emma…I’m sorry. I needed to talk to someone, and you were the only one who ever believed me. The only one who listened.”

  “I never believed you.” The truth was her only recourse now; Prentiss had been fooling himself for too long and she no longer wanted to be complicit in the deception. “All I ever did was humour you. And when you didn’t get the message, I left.”

  His smile was grim, like a widening crack that slowly crawled over the lower part of his waxy face. Emma had the insane urge to plug it with sealant from the tubs lined up on the floor by the end of the bed.

  “I see,” he said, sitting back down and rubbing the side of his head with an open palm, wincing as something – some undefined pain – bothered him. “I understand.”

  “You need help, Prent. You’ve needed it for a long time.”

  “Nobody can help me.” His face softened, becoming both more and less than the sharp angles of his bone structure. It was as if a form more solid than his features could hint at was trying to push through from inside his skull. “I’ve spent all these years looking for them, examining the gaps, and now that they’re finally here no one believes me.

  “They’re coming, Emma. Coming through the cracks.”

  Emma suddenly felt very afraid, not only for her own physical wellbeing, but also for her old boyfriend’s sanity. This was real madness, close to the bone and way out over the edge. Prentiss had completely lost his mind.

  “I’m going now,” she mumbled, slipping her hands into her pockets and trying to act like this situation was the most normal thing in the world. “I have to get back – Nicci will be wondering where I am.”

  Prentiss said nothing; just stared at a spot on the floor, eyes wide and seeing beyond the worn weave of the carpet.

  Emma opened the door and glanced back over her shoulder. Prentiss was now on his feet, moving slowly towards her, a large scrapbook held out like an offering. “Take it,” he said. “Please. Just take it and read what’s inside.”
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  She turned to face him and took the book, smiling coldly as she stepped backwards through the door and out onto the landing. The door closed in her face; Prentiss did not pursue her out of the strange world that was his grubby double room. She took the stairs two at a time, forgetting about the book in her hand. Once out on the street, she ran towards the nearest Metro station, jumping the cracks in the pavement and praying that she would not have to wait long for a train.

  At some point during the journey, she remembered that she was holding the scrapbook. Carefully, as if she were handling some extremely fragile artefact, she opened the book. The pages were stained and dog-eared from overuse, and the narrow spine was torn. Inside were pasted articles from obscure periodicals, smudged prints of digital images downloaded from amateur fortean websites, and yet more hand-written notes.

  Emma scanned a few of the articles, her blood seeming to thicken in her arteries.

  A report of a Djinn terrorising a cave network somewhere in the desert outside Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; the caves were fed by underground streams which were part of some immense subterranean network of gulfs and chasms: cracks in the belly of the earth.

  An earthquake in Argentina, and the subsequent sightings of a strange spider-limbed demon prowling in the foothills of some local mountains.

  Cave divers reported missing in the Yorkshire Dales.

  Babies stolen from a hospital in Mexico, whose basement was recently damaged in a terrorist bomb blast, the foundations splitting open to reveal a deep underground crevasse.

  They were coming. Coming through the cracks.

  Emma shook her head, trying to dislodge Prentiss’s crazy statement. This was not evidence; it was merely random information used to support his own delusion, a framework upon which he could hang his fantasies. You could prove anything to yourself if you were desperate enough, even this utter nonsense.