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rian Sullivan stood at on the edge of the crumbling curb, looking down the dark stretch of Eighth Street he would need to walk on the way home. His house waited only four blocks away, and at the corner of each block a high streetlamp built a protective cone of light. Early fallen leaves tumbled in the cool breeze, spreading the faded cinnamon odor of autumn around him, and his scrawny frame shook slightly in the cold. His mother had missed the school music program for work that night, and Brian would walk home in the dark.
He heard his uncle’s voice, a memory from years ago, almost as if it floated on the light breeze. “In the dark or whenever you’re scared, you have to use your imagination. Conjure the craziest—the scariest monster you can imagine. Whatever you imagine—well it can’t possibly exist can it? Not if you created it in your own head. You beat the monsters that way.” Uncle Eli had smiled and patted the seven-year-old Brian’s cropped hair as he spoke.
The brazen illogic of his uncle strained against Brian’s childish, concrete reason. But one night, while his parents’ hot voices rose and fell in the kitchen below, Brian woke in his dark bedroom, and in his mind’s eye he saw a hulking, vague, and unformed creature moving in the hallway. Concentrating, pushing aside his father’s loud, slurring anger, he added fangs, nice sharp ones protruding at odd angles that didn’t quite disappear when the creature shut its immense mouth. A scary monster needed claws, and Brian supplied large jointed fingers with filthy, stained nails—yellow, coarse, and jagged. He then coated the beast in thick, matted fur.
Before long, describing the creatures in the dark became more important than fear. Five years had passed, filled with countless monsters as a buffer against the stale, yeasty smell of his father, the angry, shouted arguments and slammed doors, and the shadows in his house.
A dog barked in the distance as Brian began walking the first of four blocks. That will do thought Brian, a dog. He created a large beast, a hound to shame Cerberus that lurked in the gloom between the streetlights. This monster prowled between two houses, all slobber, ribs, and teeth—hungry and waiting for an unsuspecting boy of twelve. The hound’s eyes burned red, almost glowing from within with little bright fires. Its fangs rivaled those of the hairy beast from five years ago in his bedroom, dripping with bits of offal—torn snatches of skin and meat and blood from its unfortunate victims.
Brian hurried into bright protection of the streetlight when he reached the end of the first block. He felt the steady drumming of his heart, realizing that he had walked at a pretty brisk pace. Maybe my imagination is too good, he thought, trying to reassure himself with a smile. He had almost felt the hot, humid breath of the hound on the breeze. The next block stretched ahead of him, a swath of impenetrable black ink between where he stood and the next streetlight. Maybe it doesn’t make that much sense to try and think about monsters.
But Brian loved his uncle—his mentor and role model, and he valued Uncle Eli’s advice. As Brian stepped from the street onto the worn sidewalk and moved into the shadows, his mind again began to paint something in the gloom. This time, make it some sort of alien, suggested that well-wrought voice from his subconscious. The alien hovered above him: some giant crab/squid combination with a hard shell but long reaching tentacles snatching victims and tossing them into its wide clanking mouth. Brian’s biology class had watched a nature film that day, something about deep seas and the odd, luminous life that exists beyond the farthest reach of the sun—strange beings in bright colors that could live on the heat and acid spewed from underwater volcanoes. This monster needed to eat life to sustain its own since it lived in the cold vacuum of space—just like the strange crabs on the sea floor gathered snow-like fragments of living matter drifting down from the ocean’s surface. All logic of how something alive could exist in the cold, airless void of outer space was lost in the constant churning of Brian’s supple imagination. He shuddered slightly as one of the creature’s long, cold tentacles brushed the back of his neck.
But he had reached the end of the block. Above him, the second streetlight washed away the imagined monster. Brian stood panting, a little out of breath. Halfway there, he thought as he looked behind him and turned slowly to see the remainder of the path. Just two more blocks, two more monsters, he chuckled to himself despite the kernel of fear that didn’t seem to dissolve in the bright light.
Ahead lay the most difficult stretch. Brian always loathed this walk, even after school during bright blue afternoons. In the middle of the block, one large Victorian house thrust its angled roof toward the sky, and a towering hedge encircled the property around the house. The thick hedge only stood four and a half or five feet tall, but to a twelve-year-old boy the height was inconsequential. A wall like that was built to hold back something awful, he told himself.
The sky, truly black now, listened as Brian considered walking in the street, avoiding the sidewalk entirely. Eli’s voice echoed in his head: “When you give in to the fear, the monsters win.” No, Brian would not give in to the fear. He moved forward, his shoes quietly touching the sidewalk as he cautiously walked past the thick hedge. I’m over halfway home, he thought, halfway.
The hedge provided the best hiding place for his next creation. He settled on a more terrestrial monster, abandoning the flailing tentacles of the thing in the sky. Sometimes, the best monster lies in something that is real—or something that could be real. This one, he thought, is a person. He pictured a man from an article about a murder trial he had skimmed a week ago in the town newspaper. Some anonymous photographer had taken the mug shot of the accused at a slightly odd angle; the man’s face tilted slightly downward causing dark pools of shadow to rest over his eyes. My killer, Brian said to himself, will only have one eye. In his mind, Brian saw the killer’s history: a fellow inmate had gouged out this man’s eye with a spoon during a prison brawl, leaving a purple indentation under his heavy brow. All of the other inmates hated the man, the killer, because he murdered children. Brian remembered a similar story, maybe from a movie that his father watched late at night.
Next to Brian, the leaves from the hedge wall rustled, and his image faltered. For a moment, the heavy stench of cigarettes and beer—his father’s smell—hung in the air. He stopped momentarily, waiting for the sound again while standing in silence next to the high bushes. Nothing. Just my imagination, Brian thought, and he resumed walking.
The hedge rattled again immediately as though someone brushed against the other side, shadowing Brian’s steps. Brian’s pace quickened, and the sound amplified. With the end of the block in reach only ten yards ahead, Brian broke into a full sprint. He skidded to a halt under the streetlight and looked back at the hedge—the edge of which was just visible in the outer limits of the streetlight’s glare. His lungs burning, breathless, and sweating, Brian shook his head. No more monsters tonight.
Once Brian caught his breath he looked ahead at the last streetlight, the one that stood just yards from his front door. He considered running the length of the block, simply focusing on that light, his door, the key hidden under the rock beside the planters on the porch. No, he thought, I’m not letting the monsters win.
Brian started that final stretch fully intending that his mind would build no more monsters that night. While he walked the first half of that block he tried hard to focus on math problems from school that day and the songs they sang at the concert—songs about Paul Revere, Thanksgiving, and the planets.
The breeze stopped, and the darkness listened to Brian’s thoughts. Something in the darkness wanted another monster. Something needed his imagination.
Brian heard his name and paused. The voice sounded like a whisper, but with a tone that was almost pleading, asking for something. I could sprint from here. Brian shook his head. He took another step and heard the voice say his name again, definitely pleading this time, strained and urgent. He stopped again and listened, but no further voice came from the thick night—only the faint crackle of leaves as the autumn breeze picked up again.
Brian walked faster now, his feet crunching noisily on the worn concrete walk, and he almost didn’t hear the voice the third time. The sound remained faint, still only a whisper, but it sounded demanding—almost angry like a whispered growl. Brian turned on the spot, looking behind him, to the right across the street, and then to the left into the dark shadows of the neighbor’s yard. The sound stopped, and Brian looked up toward the end of the block and his house. His front door stood maybe fifty yards away—just beyond the last streetlight. He fingered the key in his pocket and thought about Paul Revere.
His eyes lifted again toward his house, and saw the spindly figure of his father standing there, pounding against the door with one balled fist while the other held a brown bag. Brian’s heart jumped, and something in the bushes shuffled behind him. He cocked his head over one shoulder and glanced into the shadows, only to find nothing but the slick blackness of night. A cold hand wrapped around his left arm, and he spun to look at the stained face of his father.
“C’mere, boy. I know yer mother gave ya a key.” The man’s humid breath reeked of beer, smoke, and decay. “Where’s the god-damned key?” He shook Brian by the arms, but suddenly dropped his grip.
Brian stumbled to the curb and dropped to the ground. He spun in time to see a dark mass, a near-shapeless form drag his father to the ground with black tentacles. His hands caught behind him, and he staggered to his feet. He turned to run, but tripped on his father’s discarded liquor bottle, wrapped in a paper sack. Brian caught himself again, scraping a knee and jarring the meaty palms of both hands.
The streetlight sat only a few yards away, and Brian began to crawl. It was the noise, a slick, slurping sound that pulled his gaze back over one shoulder. The dark form hunched over his father’s body and lifted its head. Except for one eye that had been gouged out, leaving a rough hole like one that could be left by a dull spoon, the thing bore his father’s face.
“C’mere, boy,” it snarled in his father’s voice, opening its mouth to reveal sharp fangs—stained and blotted with blood—fangs that would rival those of Cerberus. |
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