A Cosmology of Monsters Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Shaun Hamill

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Hamill, Shaun, writer.

  Title: A cosmology of monsters : a novel / Shaun Hamill.

  Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2019

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018050831. | ISBN 9781524747671 (hardcover : alk. paper). | ISBN 9781524747688 (ebook).

  Subjects: GSAFD: Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A654 C67 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2018050831

  Ebook ISBN 9781524747688

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover illustration by Na Kim

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Picture in the House

  Part Two: The Tomb

  Part Three: The Thing on the Doorstep

  Part Four: The Whisperer in Darkness

  Part Five: The Nameless City

  Part Six: The Shunned House

  Part Seven: The Haunter of the Dark

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  This book is for my mother, Patrice Hamill; my mentor, Laura Kopchick; and my wife, Rebekah H. Hamill.

  He was someone who acted out our psyches. He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them onscreen. The history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because 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

  Upon retiring, he had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn.”

  —H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

  PART ONE

  The Picture in the House

  1

  I started collecting my older sister Eunice’s suicide notes when I was seven years old. I still keep them all in my bottom desk drawer, held together with a black binder clip. They were among the only things I was allowed to bring with me, and I’ve read through them often the last few months, searching for comfort, wisdom, or even just a hint that I’ve made the right choices for all of us.

  Eunice eventually discovered that I was saving her missives and began addressing them to me. In one of my favorites, she writes, “Noah, there is no such thing as a happy ending. There are only good stopping places.”

  My family is spectacularly bad at endings. We never handle them with grace. But we’re not great with beginnings, either. For example, I didn’t know the first quarter of this story until recently, and spent the better part of my youth and young adulthood lingering like Jervas Dudley around the sealed tombs of our family’s history. It’s exactly that sort of heartache I want to prevent for you, whoever you are. For that to happen, I have to start at the outermost edges of the shadow over my family, with my mother, tall, fair-skinned, and redheaded Margaret Byrne, in the fall of 1968.

  2

  Like me, my mother was born somewhat late into her parents’ marriage. Unlike me, however, she reaped the benefits of being born to financially successful parents. Her father, Christopher Byrne, was a women’s clothing buyer for Dillard’s department stores, and had a close personal relationship with William T. Dillard himself.

  Margaret didn’t know her father well; she thought of him as a handsome stranger who smelled of cigarettes and who always brought home gifts from trips to New York—mostly original cast recordings of the Broadway musicals he saw while away—but she never wanted for anything. She grew up in a big house in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee, and always had a generous allowance, nice clothes, cars, and, when the time came, tuition at her parents’ alma mater: Tilden University, a small conservative Christian school in Searcy, Arkansas.

  You’ll never have to worry about money, Margaret’s mother told her, and in 1965 that seemed true. My grandfather had been so successful at Dillard’s that in 1966, as my mother matriculated for her freshman year of college, he left the company to open his own store. However, by the winter of 1967, the store was off to a slow start, and in the summer of 1968, while Margaret was home for summer break, her mother broke the news: the store was failing. The Byrnes would pay Margaret’s tuition for another year, but would have to take away her car, her monthly allowance, and the dorms.

  When Margaret reminded her parents that she would need at least two more years to finish her bachelor’s in English, never mind her master’s in library science, her mother said, “I’d suggest you speed up work on your M-R-S before you worry about your B.A.”

  Only somewhat daunted, Margaret did her best with a near-impossible situation. When she returned to Searcy in the fall, she’d secured a job at Bartleby’s, the town’s only bookstore, and rented a room from the owner, Rita Johnson, a widow whose only religion was the written word, and whose politics were more Betty Friedan than Richard Nixon. Mrs. Johnson lived in a cozy two-story house near campus, charged a pittance for rent, and laid down almost no rules. She didn’t care what hours Margaret kept as long as she didn’t bring boys to the second floor of the house, and Margaret could use the TV and the record player as much as she wanted as long as she kept the volume low.

  All of this new freedom was an abrupt, almost startling change from the stringent rules of the old residence hall. Margaret had never wanted to come to Tilden, with its mandatory signed morality pledges and heavily enforced attendance at Sunday morning worship services. She’d enrolled because it was the only school her father would pay for. She’d suffered through all the religious ritual in the hopes of a college degree, a career, and a life of her own. And now, living with Mrs. Johnson, she got her first taste of what that life might look like.

  Margaret loved her new quarters, her new freedom, and, best of all, she loved the dim lighting and narrow aisles of Bartleby’s. She loved stocking the new arrivals, setting up themed displays, and helping her customers, kindred spirits on the hunt for stories. The only burr in her work life was a young man named Harry, who came in maybe twice a week and asked her questions to which she suspected he already knew the answers: Who wrote Great Expectations? Where do you keep your biographies? He always thanked Margaret for the information, but regardless of what he claimed to be interested in, he would inevitably camp out on the floor in the science fiction section, where he read books without ever buying anything.

  He looked young, abou
t Margaret’s age, and she assumed he must go to Tilden as well. She wondered how he found time to read so much and go to school. Also, if he went to Tilden, he could probably afford books. Why loiter? It got on her nerves, but whenever she confronted him about it, he replaced the unpurchased merchandise on the shelf, apologized, and left.

  For a while, she worked thirty-two hours a week at the store, attended class, and studied in the downtime, but this routine proved more difficult than she’d anticipated. Work—even relatively easy work, in the tranquility of Bartleby’s—was draining. After a full shift, her feet ached and her brain felt like a wrung-out sponge. All she wanted to do was lie down on Mrs. Johnson’s couch and watch TV. On the nights she did force herself to study, she found it a slow, repetitive, laborious process. She had trouble focusing, and had to read paragraphs (or single sentences) over and over again to glean any approximation of meaning. She felt tired all the time, overslept, missed classes, and turned in assignments late or not at all. By late September her grades were worse than ever.

  Her safety net, sewn by her mother’s phantom, taunting voice, came in the form of Pierce Lombard, a boy from her Western Civ class. Tall and skinny with close-cropped hair ten years out of fashion and heavy-lidded eyes underscored by dark bags, he looked perpetually sleepy and about a decade older than his actual age (twenty), but he asked Margaret on at least one date a week and he came from a wealthy family of chicken tycoons. If you did your shopping at grocery stores in the southern United States in the mid–twentieth century, chances were you’d purchased at least one Lombard chicken. Pierce sometimes tried to explain the business to Margaret, but every time he did, her attention wandered.

  They didn’t go to the movies often, because Pierce disapproved of most films (he was conservative and devout even by Tilden standards), but when they did go, he sat at attention, and never smiled or laughed. Sometimes, in the dark, Margaret watched him instead of the film. He looked thirty now. What would he look like in another ten years, or twenty, when the pressures of chicken entrepreneurship began to wear on him?

  He was polite, always opened doors for her and said “Please” and “Thank you.” When they took his Mercedes someplace to neck, his kisses seemed mathematically calculated to ride the line between passion and good manners, his hands on her waist, stomach, or face. Margaret, a “good girl” and still a virgin, imagined that real love ought to be a full-contact sport, intense and dangerous, the kind of thing that happened on railroad tracks or forest floors, two bodies struggling to express purity of spirit. She wondered if Pierce, a “good boy” himself, was waiting for her to show a spiritual kinship before demonstrating that kind of passion, so one night in early October, she reached into his lap and squeezed his groin. He startled, pushed her away, and retreated to the far corner of the driver’s seat.

  “Why did you do that?” he said.

  “Because I wanted to,” she said.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “We shouldn’t.”

  He took her home after that and didn’t kiss her good night.

  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. Pierce was a boy. Shouldn’t he push for more, trying to see what he could get away with? Did anyone think Jesus Christ gave a damn how they used their private parts? Pierce should be overjoyed that she’d shown some interest in his penis, shouldn’t he?

  Pierce stopped calling after Margaret groped him, and sat far away from her in class and worship services. Her newfound free time didn’t help her grades; she failed three tests in a row. When her Algebra professor handed back her midterm with a big F− on the front page, he murmured, “Get it together, Miss Byrne.”

  She felt a growing directionless fury at the unfairness of it all. Why was it her problem her father was a bad businessman? Why was it her responsibility to convince some sleepy-faced pinhead to enjoy her body? How was anyone supposed to succeed in these circumstances?

  The day she got the Algebra exam back, she carried her anger to her shift at Bartleby’s. Mrs. Johnson read the emotional weather and left her alone to restock the science fiction section, which would have been fine, but Harry was blocking the aisle with his back to the shelves, a hardcover book open in his lap, a Please Don’t Read the Books sign hanging directly over his head.

  She crossed her arms and glared at him. The sun came through the window behind her, and her shadow stretched forward down the aisle, shading him.

  “Hi, Margaret,” he said. He smiled at her. “I’ve been meaning to ask—do you have anything by Philip Roth?” When she didn’t return the smile, he said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Can you read?” she said. “Do you understand the words on the pages you’re turning? Or do you sit here because you want to look smart for passersby?”

  “I can read,” he said.

  “Then why don’t you—” She tore the Please Don’t Read the Books sign from the shelf over his head and tried to pitch it at him. The flimsy paper fluttered through the air between them like a fallen leaf, making its lackadaisical way to the floor. Harry watched it land before looking up at her.

  “Why don’t I what?” he said.

  “Why don’t you—you—you read it, you bought it!” She grabbed him by the shoulder. “Get up.”

  Perhaps surprised by the force of her anger, Harry did as commanded, and allowed Margaret to march him to Mrs. Johnson at the front counter, book still open in his hands.

  “Harry’s ready to check out now,” Margaret said. She pushed him toward the register.

  He gave her a plaintive look but put the book on the counter. It was a big glossy hardcover, something you might find on someone’s coffee table.

  Mrs. Johnson took the book and checked the price on the front flap. “Are you sure, Harry?”

  He grunted an affirmative. Mrs. Johnson rang up the total. He grimaced when she read it off, but pulled out his faded, cracked wallet and paid. Mrs. Johnson put the book in a bag for him. He mumbled his thanks and left.

  She watched him go before speaking to Margaret. “What was that about?”

  “Nothing,” Margaret said.

  “Actually nothing, or you-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it nothing?”

  “Take your pick, Mrs. Johnson.”

  “Watch your tongue, young lady.”

  Margaret returned to work stocking the shelves. As her shift wore on, her anger ebbed away until it disappeared altogether and left her mystified by the strength and force of her outburst. Certain details kept presenting themselves to her, things she’d never noticed about Harry before: the ragged sleeve on his button-down shirt, the fabric rough from too many washings; the faded knees of his jeans; some vague, greasy smell she couldn’t place, inescapable when in his proximity.

  By the time her shift ended that evening, she felt a dull shame, which only intensified when she found Harry waiting in the parking lot. He sat cross-legged on the hood of an old, beat-up Chevy, hands in his lap. She almost never saw cars that old on campus. Maybe he was a scholarship kid? Or, like her, trying to work his way through school? Face hot, she forced herself to approach.

  “That was an expensive book,” he said.

  “You can return it. If you have the receipt you can get cash.”

  He made a face. “I couldn’t do that to Mrs. Johnson. She’s always nice to me.”

  “Can I pay you back?” she said. She dug for her wallet in her purse.

  He moved his head from side to side as though arguing with himself. “I was going to go to the movies tonight. I guess if you really want to set things right, you could buy the tickets.”

  “You want me to go to the movies with you?”

  “I’ll drive,” he said. “You pony up for admission.”

  “W
hat do you want to go see?”

  “Rosemary’s Baby just opened in Little Rock,” he said.

  Margaret had heard of the film. The preacher had denounced it in chapel last week, with broad, exciting terms: blasphemous, profane, hideous. Any student caught attending the film (or reading the Ira Levin novel on which it was based) would be expelled. But nowhere in Dr. Landon’s warning (or the memo posted all over campus) was the film described in any detail. What made it profane? What made it blasphemous?

  If Margaret had still lived in the dorms, she wouldn’t have even considered the idea. But Mrs. Johnson wouldn’t rat her out; the proprietor of Bartleby’s thought all stories ought to be accessible to everyone, regardless of inherent morality. She’d be proud of Margaret for making up her own mind.

  However, Little Rock was a fifty-mile drive from Searcy, and Margaret still had unfinished Chemistry homework, which she told Harry.

  “I’ll drive fast all the way there and back,” he said.

  She looked down at her plain sweater and the skirt she’d worn to class that morning. Not exactly a prime first date ensemble, but this was about reparations, not romance. The clothes would help set his expectations accordingly.

  “Let’s go then,” she said.

  3

  It was a horror picture starring that girl from Peyton Place, about a young married couple that moves into a new apartment and ends up ensnared by the elderly, doting Satanists next door. Margaret bought the tickets, and Harry paid for the popcorn and soda. Their fingers touched in the popcorn bucket a few times during the movie, but Harry didn’t try to hold her hand or put an arm around her. He stared at the screen, engrossed.

  The movie wasn’t jump-out-and-scare-you terrifying, but unsettling on a deeper, more primal level. Margaret found herself identifying with the title character as Rosemary was bullied and isolated by her husband and neighbors, raped by the devil, and helpless to do anything in the end but be a mother to the spawn of that unholy union. As Rosemary rocked her baby in its black bassinet and the credits began to roll, Margaret sat back in her seat, stunned. Were movies allowed to end this way? With the devil triumphant, and the heroine defeated?