• Monsters


    There is a car. It smells of leather. It's dark outside the windows, and rain dribbles down in rivulets, endless branching. The window is fogged with condensation. I put out my hand- it is small against the cold glass- and, slowly, rub a circle for me to look through. Outside, all I see is road, water, other cars. Dark trees.
    I hear a soft laugh. I turn my head, wide-eyed. Another face looks back at me. She has high cheekbones and a secretive smile. Her eyes are large, brown, and clear. She is perhaps thirty-five years old.
    “Hello,” she says seriously, and then laughs again. She smiles at me, encouragingly.
    Slowly, nervously, I smile back.

    The house is vast, beautiful, and empty. I stare down at my feet, cold on bare dark wood floors, then up at the walls. Every available wall surface is lined with bookcases, miles of them. The house winds in on itself, like a labyrinth, with one huge library in the center.
    “Don't you like it?” she says from ahead of me.
    I am wet and cold. My hair is in long stringy braids, clinging to my scalp. It has taken us eight hours to get here, over some vast distance I cannot begin to comprehend, and I have some vague understanding that this is where I am to stay for a long time.
    I shiver.

    The days pass with the same routine. In the morning, I awake in a bed too big for me. I open the curtains in a futile attempt to let in some light. It is always dreary and raining. I dress quickly, in the cold, put on my slippers, and carefully step outside my room into an endless corridor of dark-paneled wood, covered in bookshelves. My door is marked, a silk scarf pinned to it securely. If I don't mark it the house tries to fool me by putting another room there. I look around and find my ball of string, yellow yarn, one end tied to my door handle, the other leading off into distance. I pick it up without untying the end and follow it through the house. The way is lit for me by warm and cheery candles in their sconces. Down staircases, up staircases, through parlors and spare rooms and indoor gardens I go, and all have their share of books. I have given up trying to memorize the route- whenever I do, it changes, just to spite me.
    She is cooking breakfast when I come in, absurdly domestic and cheery in her brightly colored apron, never the same one. There is usually some witty saying printed on it. She is making me bacon and eggs. I do not know where the food comes from, but it is always fresh.
    At breakfast she reads to me, usually poetry. She has a mesmerizing reading voice, smooth and sweet.


    The books surround me, always. I suppose it is inevitable that I grow to both worship and fear them. Sometimes I feel as though they're watching me behind their plain cloth-bound covers.
    I do not know how much books cost, but surely the whole house must have cost a great deal to build? I am afraid to wander too far, but I know it is vast in the extreme. Wasn't there a better way to spend her money? I cannot remember much of what is outside the house, but I feel sure there are good things to do with money and bad things. This feels like... not a bad thing, but not a really good thing either.
    All that is outside now is rain and trees. I can see them from my window, but it is too high up for me to climb down. I do not really wish to go out in the cold and wet, but I thought it might be brighter outside. So I went looking for the door. I could not find it. I searched for three hours. I found a dusty museum, an aviary with bright lights and painted walls and little fluttering birds, a room bare except for books and a goldfish pond set in the floor that I had to wade across, but no door. I went to ask her about it. I never have any trouble finding her. It is as though I have this constant sense of where she is at all times, and the house arranges itself so that I do not have to walk very far.
    She was standing in an empty corridor, paused in the act of reaching for a book. I walked up to her hurriedly, the question on my lips, but stopped at her unnatural stillness. She looked up at me, and for an awful moment she did not know me. Her face was frightened and confused, like she did not know where she was.
    “What are you looking for?” I asked.
    She blinked, and looked back at her hand, slender fingers curled around the narrow spine of a book. She pushed it back in and let it go. “I don't know,” she said, her beautiful voice shaking. “I don't know.”
    She walked away quickly; I did not follow.
    And now I am standing in the same corridor, looking for the book she was reading. It had a burgundy color. Oh, here it is.
    It is a book of poems by someone called Robert Frost. It falls open easily at my touch. That great Overdog, that heavenly beast, with a star in one eye, gives leap to the east.
    I look through the poems. They are strange. They make no sense and yet they frighten me. Like this house.
    I am so cold all the time.


    The poem was about a star. I cannot see the stars from inside.


    There are many names in the books. Author's names, character's names, place names. Charles, Elizabeth, Harper, Jane. In the house, I have no need of names. There is me and there is her.
    Lately, I have come to feel there is also an it. It is the books. They are watching- not individually, but as one great being, one consciousness. One monster.
    I have never been to the center of the house, to the main library, because that is where the monster is hiding. It just uses the books to watch us. It is making her sad, making me scared. I don't like it.
    She doesn't notice. She just keeps on reading to me. Poetry at breakfast, plays at lunch, novels at dinner.
    She is also teaching me other things. I am learning about the world through the atlases she shows me. I ask her, “Have you been to these places?”
    She is quiet for a while before answering, “Yes, some of them.”
    “Are they any good? Can I go see them, too?”
    She is angry. “No! You mustn't! They're not good places, they're not good places at all.”
    “Do they have monsters?”
    She calms down. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, they have lots of monsters.”