Read How to Make Monsters Online
Authors: Gary McMahon
How to Make Monsters
HOW TO MAKE MONSTERS
Short stories by
Gary McMahon
Published by Morrigan Books
Kindle Edition
Östra Promenaden 43
602 29 Norrköping
Sweden
Copyright 2008 Gary McMahon
Cover art by Simon Strantzas
Design and layout by Mark S. Deniz
Typeset in Garamond and Times New
Roman
Kindle Edition, Licence Notes
This ebook is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only. This ebook my not be re-sold or given away to other
people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please
purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and
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hard work of this author.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks go out to all the
usual suspects – you know who you are; and if you don’t, you’re not one of them
anyway. As always, love and big cuddles to my family.
This one is for Emily, who knows
exactly how my monsters were made
And for Joel Lane, whose support and
enthusiasm has been invaluable
****
“And that the lean abhorred monster
keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and
Juliet,
Act 5 scene 3,
Cancer hag out on a date
Swinging on my garden gate
I’ll kiss you as your face turns
black
A show of love like an attack
Nefandor, Croaker
(Music and lyrics by
Eddie and Eva Woe)
FOREWORD
Monsters. They are
everywhere, all around.
Everywhere you look these days,
there’s one lounging against a car, smoking a cigarette, walking a dog, popping
into the corner shop for a bottle of cheap cider, or voting at the local
polling station on Election Day…
But where did they come from, these
monsters? And why are they here?
The truth is that they’ve always
been here: as long as man has walked the earth, our monsters have trailed in
our wake, picking up our scraps and feeding off the carrion of our failures. In
fact, just in case you haven’t guessed yet, we are the monsters. We are them
and we made them, creating their ragged forms from the meat of our regrets,
filling their hot veins with the juice of our failed plans and dreams, giving
them motion with the unrefined fuel of our memories.
Mary Shelley may have breathed life
into the Modern Prometheus, but she wasn’t the first; she was simply the first
to write about the method employed to make her monster. The rest of us just
carry on, trying to ignore the shambling figures; we attempt to outrun them by
building lives, holding down jobs, having children, buying houses, driving
cars, drinking fine wines and eating healthy food…but it won’t work, not any of
it. We can never be rid of the monsters we made; they are ours to own, and in
turn they own us: it’s a two-way street and there are no U-turns allowed.
We each make our own monster, and
for every individual human being on the face of the earth there exists a
different monster…
The rotten spirit of capitalism, the
thing between the cracks, the ghosts of self, the school employees with
terrible desires, debt, regret, racism, family ties, things that get in the
way, our own faces, tradition, rejection, and the familiar shape of the
darkness that lives deep inside our own hidden hearts.
I know exactly how I made my
monsters, and day by day, bit by bit, I learn to live with them – even to take
strength from them. How about you? Can you identify the component parts of your
own monster, and can you afford the price you must pay for its construction?
Read on, and meet some people who
couldn’t.
Gary McMahon
2008
Leeds
Why Ghosts Wail: A Brief
Memoir
“The crippling of individuals I
consider the worst evil of capitalism.”
Albert Einstein
Joel stood at the side of
the motorway and looked for patterns in the hypnotic movement of the traffic.
The sky above him was black and starless; the moon lurked behind a thick black
sheet, afraid to show itself. The only light came from the car headlights and
the tops of the concrete lamp posts standing like alien trees along the
litter-strewn central reservation.
The somehow malleable sound of hot
wheels on cold tarmac began to unnerve him, so he moved away, dragging his feet
on the stubbly verge. An empty crisp packet, blown by the evening breeze,
snatched at the cuffs of his trousers; he kicked it away, annoyed as if it were
a living thing vying for his attention. Even inanimate objects, it seemed,
would not leave him in peace.
The loud chirping of his mobile
phone interrupted his thoughts. When he failed to answer it immediately, the
impatient tone changed to a song or jingle he had no memory of programming into
the handset.
He took the mobile from his coat
pocket and raised it to his ear, placing it against the side of his head before
pushing the right button – modern life, he knew, was all about pushing the
right buttons.
“Hello.” Traffic noise almost
swallowed the word.
“Hi, Joel. It’s me.”
It took him a moment to place her
voice. “Oh. Hi, Sue.”
“Where are you? I’ve been waiting
for you to come round. The heating’s broken again. It’s bloody cold. I could do
with warming up.”
Joel gritted his teeth. The simple
declarative sentences she often used when she wanted something, her light
manner, the sexual undertones in her soft voice: it all made him want to end
the call, terminate the discussion before it had even begun. “I’m on my way,”
he said, glancing at the road, at the endless ribbon of traffic that promised
an escape but never quite delivered. Where were they all going, these people?
Everyone but him had a destination in mind, a route to follow.
“Joel?”
Sometimes he hated Sue. She could
not understand his motivation for giving up a steady job with a reputable firm.
His decision to leave the rat race had terrified her and she badgered him
constantly to go back to work, to earn some decent money so he could buy the
things everyone else did and fit into the narrow slot society had kept for him
since birth.
Her limited view of the world
sickened him, but not enough that he could give up the warmth of her body on a
cold night, or the way she would happily fellate him almost on demand, even in
a public place – especially in a public place.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,”
he said, before tugging the phone away from his ear, drawing back his arm, and
tossing the phone into the traffic. It clattered onto the hard road, spinning
on some unknown axis until either a car or a small van rolled over it, smashing
it to pieces and sending them skittering like insects.
“I don’t want you!” he yelled, not
knowing whether he meant the phone or the woman whose voice was barely
contained within it. It didn’t matter anyway, not now the thing was dead.
Joel walked away from the scene of
his crime, following the line of the road as if it were a river that might lead
to the open sea, feeling a sudden intense chill on his skin. The air had grown
cold, and when he looked at the cars paused at the roundabout up ahead, he saw
cobwebs of frost creeping across the rear windows.
If he cut across the wasteland to
his left, then through the park, he could make it to Sue’s house in less time
than he’d promised. Climbing the low fence, he peered through the darkness; he
could see the lights of her street from here, but they felt less than
welcoming.
The traffic noise dimmed as he moved
away from the road, walking carefully across the rocky ground towards the
opposite fence, which ringed the council-owned play park. As he drew near, he
began to pick out familiar shapes in the darkness: the immobile swings; the
roundabout, moving gently in the wind; the monkey bars a seven year-old boy had
been hanged from by a gang of teenagers only last summer. The boy had died
slowly; his killers were still in youth custody and probably would be for years
before they could be tried, sentenced, and finally – after serving shortened
terms in a cushy jail – discreetly relocated abroad with new identities.
He climbed the other fence and
entered the park. There was no one around: even the local kids were inside on a
night as cold as this, or perhaps they kept away because of what had happened
last summer, creating new myths and legends from the senseless murder of a
small boy.
Stuffing his hands into his coat
pockets, Joel stalked past the swings, not giving them as much as a glance.
Something creaked – a dull, metallic sound – but he refused to acknowledge it
and hurried his pace.
There was something on the slide: a
long, humped shape perched at the bottom of the dimpled stainless steel ramp.
Joel stopped, took his hands out of his pockets, and stared at the shape. It
looked like a body, and for an instant he expected it to sit upright, its school
clothes falling away to reveal a thin white neck with a knotted football scarf
biting into the soft flesh.
The shape did not move. Was it a
bundle of clothes dumped there by passing fly-tippers?
Joel took a step closer to the
slide, his eyes watering, his throat dry. He looked behind him, at the distant
lights of the motorway, and then back at the sight he knew he had to deal with.
The truth was obvious and
inescapable. There was a body on the end of the slide.
He stared at it, not knowing what to
do; unsure even if it was alive or dead. Reflexively, his hand went for his
mobile phone, and he cursed himself for throwing it away. Why did he always
have to act out of pique?
“Are you okay?” he took another step
towards the body, hoping it was just a tramp sleeping off his nightly meths or
cider intake. “Excuse me.”
The body did not move. The ground
beside was not littered with empty bottles, burned spoons, or used hypodermic
syringes.
Joel put out a hand, left it there,
hovering only inches away from the body. It looked like a man, but it was
difficult to be sure. He was wrapped up in rags, and there were what looked
like used bank notes stuck to his frost-coated clothing. Bills and receipts
clung to his dark scalp and the flaky remains of his face. Joel tried not to
stare at the decayed features, but was unable to look away from a mouth that
yawned far too wide beneath a flattened nose, and eye sockets so deformed that
they were beginning to meet in the middle of the misshapen head.
Vomit rose in his throat and he was
at last able to avert his gaze. He ran across the park, heading in the
direction of Sue’s street, where the lights still burned brightly. Once there,
he could use her land line to call the police. His feet caught on tufts of
frosted grass; his breath misted before his eyes, making it difficult to see.
The night seemed darker than before.