A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that’s grotesque, that the world will turn away from. —Ray Bradbury

“Noah, there is no such thing as a happy ending. There are only good stopping places.”

She’d always assumed that religion was something you did in polite company, not in private. Surely nobody actually believed any of the stuff they agreed to on Sundays.

Did anyone think Jesus Christ gave a damn how they used their private parts?

Instead, I ran away like a little boy, and hid from you. I asked God, ‘Why would she do this? She’s a good girl.’ And finally, He answered me: She did it because she loves you.”

a large shape with wide, hunched shoulders, and two eyes that glinted orange through the glass.

“Just practice being in love and wait it out.”

“I guess there’s rich and then there’s rich. From down here it all looks the same.”

“How often do I get a chance to live out a true-life nightmare?”

my favorite, a room that looks ordinary, like maybe you’ve come to the end of the haunted house, but then the lights turn out and disembodied voices begin to whisper ugly truths. Eunice’s notes on this drawing call it “The Bad Secrets Room.”

As Margaret fell asleep at night, she heard his voice muffled above, and footsteps stalking back and forth over her head, an impatient guest waiting to be invited inside.

Human beings are small and insignificant in a big, scary universe, and in a horror story—be it a movie, a book, or a haunted house—we have to face that fact.

But no matter how scary things get, no matter what the audience has to confront or endure, there’s always a happy ending. When the credits roll, or the reader closes the book, or when our guests walk out tonight, their lives will go on. Because they faced the dark, the sun will shine a little brighter tomorrow, and the real-life monsters won’t seem so bad. For a day, or an hour, or even a moment, life will be better.”

No matter how close she gets, though, the shape remains an inky blot on the other side of the glass, a vague suggestion. It seems to flicker, frozen between two positions, like an image on a paused videotape.

Eunice feels fuller than before, like there’s more of her somehow. She wonders briefly if somehow her ascension is linked to her little brother’s descent.

Merrin meant no harm. She thought she was doing a good thing. Eunice just wanted a different favor. She wanted to hear Merrin say the forbidden words, to make okay the rotten thing at Eunice’s core that makes her ashamed and afraid of herself.

She gets the impression of a large chamber with vaulted ceilings and a wide, empty marble floor reflecting moonlight. The walls seem to be made of some writhing black material, like tentacles sliding past one another. But then she’s back in the bedroom at the old house, and she’s six years old again, and the typewriter has been replaced by her old Commodore 64. She looks at the words on the screen: A great evil, once safely contained, is now loose. It roams freely, regardless of walls, doors.

What, Eunice wonders, has she set loose?

Why do the creeps of the world have so much power? I don’t know.

Noah, there’s no such thing as a happy ending. The songs, books, and movies with “happy endings” all stop at the moment of triumph. They don’t tell the whole story. Only the old tragedies tell the truth.

Boastful, loud, and rambunctious, even these fat, aging men remained proud and confident, as though they owned the world. Where did that confidence originate? Also, where did they find their innate sense of brotherhood?

What follows is an orange smear of years during which the wolf is no longer anyone. She is driven by only a few impulses: feed on their pain; capture workers; serve the City.

Some people she only samples (a bad breakup here, death of a family pet there), and others she cultivates like gardens: the deeply depressed, the grief-stricken, the insane, the terminally ill. Some she feeds on for years, and others she takes to toil and dream darkly in the City. A select few—the strongest, most exquisite sufferers—are chosen for ascension and become wolves themselves.

groom

Brin?

I’d only had to nudge them a little to knit them back together.

I was never a guardian, or a hero, but a creator and harvester of fear.

My hope, as I type with unsteady hands, as the black vines begin to move more decisively, excited to begin their work, is that Leannon—my playmate, my best friend, and the love of my life—will be able to bring me back to myself, as I brought her back twice before. My hope is to wander the endless hidden streets, alleys, and offices of the City, to explore its many crevices and parse its dark secrets. My hope is to ride the night winds with Leannon forever.

That I will be stuck as an unthinking animal, thinking only orange thoughts. If that happens…well. I’ve always been comfortable in the dark.

life makes monsters of everyone, but it’s always possible to come back. Pain and death are real, but so are love, and family, and forgiveness.