Monsters We Have Made: A Novel

by Lindsay Starck

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

A poignant and evocative novel that explores the bounds of familial love, the high stakes of parenthood, and the tenuous divide between fiction and reality.

Thirteen years ago, Sylvia Gray's young daughter, Faye, attacked her babysitter in order to impress the Kingman, a monster she and her best friend had encountered on the Internet. When the now twenty-three-year-old Faye goes missing, leaving her toddler behind, Sylvia launches a search that propels her back into the past and back into the Kingman's orbit. With the help of her estranged husband and a sister she hasn't spoken to in years, Sylvia draws dangerously closer not only to Faye, but also to the truth about the monster that once inspired her. Will Sylvia be able to reach her daughter before history repeats itself? Or will it be Sylvia, this time, who loses her grip on reality and succumbs to the dark powers of this monstrous figure?

Both literary and suspenseful, Monsters We Have Made confronts the terrors of parenthood and examines the boundaries of love. Most importantly, it reminds us of the power of stories to shape our lives.

Release date: March 26, 2024

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 336

Sample

PART I

The Girls

 

Transcript: Emergency Dispatcher

April 13, 2008

—Nine one one. What is your emergency?

—Hey, yes, hello, I need—I need—

—Sir, what is the address of your emergency?

—It’s not for me, it’s—it’s for—we found her on the side of the road, but I don’t know who she is, I don’t know her, oh God, her face is covered in—

—Your address, sir? I need the address of your emergency.

—It’s—the woods along the Eno. The state park? I’m calling from the phone—that pay phone near the entrance. Can you—is there someone on the way?

—Yes, an ambulance should be there momentarily. Is this person conscious?

—She is, she says—wait—she says she’s been—

—She’s been what?

—Stabbed.

—[Static.]

—Hello? Hello?

—You’re talking to her now, sir? She’s breathing?

—She’s breathing—but it’s shallow, she’s groaning. I’m worried—I’m worried that she’s going to—I’m not trained, neither is my brother, I don’t know—how to—how to do anything—we wouldn’t know how to—

—Sir. Please stay calm, and stay on the line. How old is she?

—How old? I don’t know! Fifteen? Sixteen? Is it important? How can—I don’t—don’t have any children, so—

—Sir, the paramedics are already on their way. Can you stay with her until they arrive?

—But if they don’t get here in time, oh God, what the hell am I supposed to—

—Is she still conscious?

—[Static.]

—Sir? Are you still there?

—She says—she says she was stabbed and left here. We were out for a hike—we were maybe two miles in—and then I thought I saw someone, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, standing on the side of the trail, but when I turned my head there was nobody there, nothing but branches and leaves—

—Sir—

—But I slowed down, and five seconds later I saw her, I saw—oh God—

—Sir, the ambulance will be arriving any moment. Please stay calm, and listen for the sirens. Do you hear them yet?

—She said something about girls. [Static.] I can’t understand her! Are there other girls out here somewhere? Do they need an ambulance, too? I don’t know what to do, it’s impossible to understand her—

—What about now? Can you hear the sirens?

—No, there’s nothing else, no one else on the path but me and my brother and her, nothing out here but trees—and I’m just—I’m scared of—

—Sir. I need you to stay with me. Now listen again. Can you hear the sirens?

 

Sylvia

Igrew up in a house of disappearing children. I want you to know this. I need you to see how the infants spun through my world like carousel horses, fretful and untamed. For thirteen days they would squall in their cradles and coo in my mother’s arms, and on the fourteenth day the caseworker would click through the front door on her scuffed black pumps, sling the baby across the padded shoulder of her blazer, and crunch back down the crushed-shell driveway to her car. My mother and I would watch from behind the screened windows of the porch, the sea breeze ribboning through our limp hair, our elbows hoisted in a paltry imitation of a wave. The gulls pinwheeled overhead, and I imagined that I heard in their high-pitched, anguished cries an echo of the emotions that I did not yet have the words to express. The next month, a new infant would be swaddled and delivered to our door, and the carousel would careen around again.

I’ve tried to remember how the situation was first explained to me. Was it my sister who described the sterile hallways of a distant hospital, the nurses scuttling around a woman who was writhing on a white bed, straining to bring a baby into that fluorescent-lit room? While I didn’t know what it meant to be in labor, somehow I came to understand that the infants who flitted through our lives possessed not one mother but two. In addition to the woman on the white bed, there was another shadow-figure, lingering somewhere nearby, waiting to spirit that child away.

It would be a long time before I learned about adoption laws, the transferal of parental rights, and the revocation of consent. Back then, between the ages of six and nine, all I knew was that I adored those strangers’ babies. I spent hundreds of hours combing their bald heads and humming fragments of invented lullabies and, when I ran out of those, rattling off the names of all the seashells I could recall. Coquinas, augers, olives, whelks. I celebrated whenever a new infant arrived and I sobbed each time one of them left us, and I swore that when I was finally old enough to have a baby of my own, I’d never ever let her go.

---

—

Do you see what I mean? To figure out where I went wrong, I must tunnel back to the source. When I turned eighteen, I left the Carolina coast and drove three hours inland, through woods so lush that the emerald arms of branches wrapped around the highway. My second year in college, at a redbrick state university that towered over a town of bungalows and barbecues, I declared myself an English major. I made friends out of novels, and I wrote long-winded essays in a corner booth of the café near my dorm. I analyzed centuries-old poems with the furious patience of a detective assigned to a cold case, scanning line after line while patrons nearby clinked their pint glasses together or dipped their sweet potato fries into bowls of lightly garlicked mayo.

It was during my final year, in a course on the history of the English language, that I became hooked on etymologies. How thrilling to trace a word back to its source, to shovel down through generations until you strike a root! You cannot understand a thing until you’ve memorized its nuances and transformations, until you’ve tracked it back to the beginning. The word origin is from the Latin originem: a commencement, a rise, a lineage, a birth. The stem oriri: to appear above the horizon, to become visible

 In other words, if you can uncover an origin, the world brightens. You see more clearly. Something that was once invisible is revealed to you, and as you drift through the corridor after class, the colored flyers fluttering on their pushpins as you pass, your head feels so heavy with knowledge and significance that your neck strains beneath its weight.

You see now why it is so important to understand about the babies. I want you to ache with my yearning for them; I want you to feel in your open palms, your empty arms, my hunger for a child of my own, and my fear—even then!—that if I loved her too much, she would be taken from me. Years later, when I was pregnant with Faye, I would hear in my dreams the clip of the caseworker’s heels and the slam of her car door and the roar of that ancient engine, the sound ebbing as the distance expanded between us and another infant was carried away. I’d hug my swollen belly and sidle closer to Jack, who could somehow sense my distress even in his sleep. He’d roll onto his side and fling an arm across my bare shoulders and tug me toward his rib cage. “There, there,” he’d murmur drowsily, his breath warm and unexpectedly sweet. “Everything will be all right.”

---

—

When the doorbell rang last September—insistent, dismayed—my book tumbled from my hands to the floor. I jolted up and away from my armchair, but when I reached the front hall, I hesitated. The shadow on the other side of the textured glass door shifted its weight, cleared its throat, rang the bell again and then again. Through the window: the warnings of a red-winged blackbird.

I was remembering the first time the bell rang that way, thirteen years earlier. That morning, too, as I tugged my bathrobe over my shoulders and hurried to the door, I feared what waited on the other side.

Back then, it had been the police on my doorstep. Later, the investigators. After that, the reporters, the lawyers, the psychiatrists, the social workers. Years later, when I believed the furor had died down, I opened the door one afternoon to find a video camera shoved into my face. Three young men in black T-shirts and sunglasses took advantage of my surprise, wedging themselves between the door and its frame, and while I struggled to shut it again, they told me that they were making a documentary about the Kingman, and they needed to ask me a few questions.

That name—the Kingman—fueled my fear and my anger, calling the adrenaline to my arms and legs. I slammed the door against them and jammed the deadbolt back into place.

The Kingman. Even now, I can’t say those words without shivering. My hand trembles

 if I write them. The Kingman. Look! Can you see how the letters blur and wobble on the page?

---

—

On the day that the Kingman entered our lives, Jack and I spent the morning in bed together. The plastic blinds were thumping against the windowsill, blown forward by a damp spring breeze. It’s odd, isn’t it, the things one remembers. It was early April, and the scent of spring was so powerful that I had not been able to resist the urge to throw the windows open. We’d fallen asleep in front of the blue glow of our crime shows the night before, and that morning Faye had gone to the woods with her best friend and her babysitter. It had become increasingly difficult to find time to be together like this—and so here we were in bed, making the most of Faye’s absence, bars of light pinning us against the sheets.

I’ve returned to that moment a thousand times and more over the years that followed. It was the last time Jack and I would touch each other like that. Every other memory from that day, that month, that year, is perilous: toothy and bitter. But those minutes with Jack just before the doorbell rang—the loamy air whispering through open windows, the blankets tangled at our feet, the taste of cinnamon and Earl Grey on his tongue—well, those minutes took on the incredible, ethereal quality of a dream. It is a gift for me to remember them.

---

—

By the time I was ten, the steady flow of infants through the house had stopped. My mother, pulling double shifts at the hospital, returned home with her face haggard and her gaze unfocused. An early stroke had bound my father to his chair; my sister, nine years older than I was, had already left for school. Alone along the shoreline, I lobbed clamshells back into the waves and stalked among flocks of royal terns and pelicans.

When I found a great blue heron chick chirruping in the ditch that ran behind our mailbox, I built a nest from a box of T-shirt scraps and chopped up chunks of fish that my mother didn’t see me sneaking from the freezer. For weeks, the yellow-eyed fledgling followed me through the tall grass of our backyard, cocking his head to the left when I read aloud to him from fairy tales and chapter books. By the time the heron had reached his full four-foot height, my father had grown sicker, and my mother was brittle and pale. When the bird finally tilted his tufted head toward the impassive sky, leaned into his pewter-blue wings, and relinquished me, the pain in my chest was so searing that for a moment I believed that

my heart would tear through my torso in pursuit of him.

I remained earthbound. Still: whenever a feathered shadow crossed the sun, whenever I caught a glimpse of a familiar silhouette skimming over the reeds, I wondered if he was mine. Even now, hundreds of miles from the coast and decades away from that bird, I find my steps slowing and my pulse singing every time I approach a flock of birds on my walks around this snowcapped city.

I know that it’s foolish. But this is what I’m trying to tell you. No matter how old we grow or how far we travel, we can never escape our childhood.

---

—

You can see the way a story proliferates, can’t you, like a set of monstrous limbs? One scene lurches toward and seizes another, then another, and another, until the past is knotted with the present and it’s difficult for even the storyteller to distinguish between what was real and what was imagined.

What I’m trying to say is that when the doorbell rang last September, it contained within it the sound of the bell ringing thirteen years earlier. Maybe that’s why I dragged my feet down the hallway. Maybe that’s why I took so long to open the door to the police officer waiting there with a gray-eyed child on her hip. Maybe it’s because I was transported to the handful of minutes, sweet and aching, before I found myself alone again. Before Jack folded into himself like a paper plane. Before our friends and family fell away from us. Before the silence filled up that empty house like sunlight.

 

Interview with Lillian Pine, Former Durham Police Officer

Recorded on June 28, 2018

As soon as we got the call about the stabbing, the chief directed me to find those other girls. The victim had told paramedics that two kids were out there. She was breathing heavily. She’d lost some blood. She seemed confused. But we didn’t want to take any chances. What I mean is, whoever stabbed her was still at large. We wanted to get to him before he caught up with her friends and stabbed them, too. Some of us scoured the state park: the woods, the river, the restrooms, everything. The rest of us went out to the roads. We’d been patrolling the highways for about an hour when we got a call from a driver who’d been listening to the news. He said he’d seen two little white girls walking up I-85. He pulled over, and they looked terrified. When he tried to tell them that he wasn’t going to do anything but take them home, they bolted. They ran like fawns, the guy said.

I pictured it: the two of them taking off with the kind of grace that girls lose when they get older. In my fifth-grade health class I’d learned that when my hips got wider, I wouldn’t be able to beat the boys in the mile anymore. I remember thinking it wasn’t fair, the way my body was about to turn against me. When we headed back up the highway to find those girls, I was remembering that age. You’re not a teenager yet, but you’re close enough to know that in another couple years something will be coming for you. When we finally caught sight of them trekking through tall grass on the far side of the highway, ratty backpacks slung across their bony shoulders, all I could think was: Thank God they’re safe. Ten years later, I still feel the heat of that relief. Jesus Christ, I said. Thank God.

Of course back then we had no idea that this was only the beginning. We couldn’t know that when we got them in the squad car and secured them in the precinct, they’d brought their monster with them, too.

 

Sylvia

Iwaited for the ghostly shape of the squad car to dissolve into the sycamore trees at the end of the road. Then I called Jack. As the phone rang and rang and rang, I imagined the cabin that I’d never seen: a pinewood porch with a single rocking chair behind the screen; a hand-carved stool beneath the kitchen counter; a plaid comforter pulled square across the bed; shelves and nightstand spare and dusted, devoid of knickknacks, picture frames. Through the window: the haze of blue-gray mountains hanging over the horizon.

“Yes?” Jack grunted when he finally lifted the receiver.

I tried to sound as though picking up the phone and dialing his number a few seconds earlier had not made my fingers tremble. “It’s me,” I said.

From his end of the line: the creak and slam of a porch door and the four-note trill of a Carolina chickadee. I pictured him leaning against a porch railing, the muscles of his shoulders hard beneath his flannel. Perhaps his gaze was fixed on the ridges in the distance, crowned with spruces and firs. When he took a shaky breath, I could almost taste the woodsmoke and pine on my tongue.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

The words skidded out of me. “The police were just here,” I said. “With Amelia.”

The nature of Jack’s silence changed. I knew his face so well that even in that moment, a lifetime away from him, I could see the worry crinkling in the corners of his eyes, could feel the dread stiffening his limbs. I knew that within seconds, he would be shoving his hand through his untamed hair. It felt like a betrayal, an invasion, that I could still sense his thoughts and fears so piercingly. Is it always this way with people who once loved each other?

---

—

I had been engaged to someone else when I met Jack. It had been my fiancé who insisted that I make an appointment with an eye doctor. For months, peculiar shapes had been slinking through my peripheral vision. On one of our Saturday morning hikes, I’d outstripped him on the trail, plunging deeper into the woods, fighting knotted roots and stumbling over rotting trunks, following a flickering silhouette that hovered just beyond my line of sight. When I paused for breath, I realized I was lost. By the time I’d made my way back to the parking lot, several hours had passed, and my fiancé was placing panicked calls to park rangers. Once we were home, he made me promise that I’d see a doctor.

The doctor turned out to be Jack, his white coat crisp and his beard cropped close. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but Jack does. He’d walked into the room and seen me leaning back in the chair with a mystery novel flipped open on my lap, my hair long and my gaze steady. He’d noticed and dismissed as irrelevant the glint of my engagement ring. He told me later that although he knew we’d never met before, he’d recognized me as if from a vision or a dream.

Once, he told me that the same feeling, that warm tide of recognition, had crashed over him years later in the delivery room when the nurses had placed Faye in his trembling arms. The labor had lasted for thirty hours, and by the time she emerged, her skin glistening faintly blue beneath the hospital lights, Jack was so numbed with terror and exhaustion that he feared he wouldn’t have the strength to hold her. But then: I know you, he had thought, gaping at her wrinkled face in the seconds before she began to wail. I’ve seen

you before.

Recognize. From the Old French reconoistre: to identify from a previous experience or former encounter; to acknowledge as true. In thirteenth-century British sources: to investigate by jury; to find guilty.

---

—

The eye appointment was supposed to last for fifteen minutes, but Jack kept me in that examination room for over an hour. By the time I stepped out, my fiancé was pacing between the rows of plastic and wire frames, twisting his fingers together, his body coiled with tension. He sprang forward at the sight of me. Jack watched us from a few yards away, reclining against the doorframe as if melded to it, his gaze hooded and his posture deliberately lazy. I glanced back at him on my way out, trying not to imagine what it would be like to press him up against that door, to feel his skillful fingers sliding underneath my skirt. He caught my gaze and held it until I was forced to turn away.

On the way home, my fiancé asked what Jack had said about the ghost shapes in my line of sight. “He said not to worry,” I replied absently. “With time and rest, they’ll disappear.”

I didn’t tell my fiancé that Jack had spent most of the hour tilting toward me with his fist on his chin, his gaze keen and searching, the light twinkling along the burnished frames of his glasses. He’d asked about my hobbies, my family, my job. When I told him about my bookstore, he showered me with questions about it. He made so thorough a list of my favorite titles that I almost believed he needed the information for my file. When the hour was nearing its end and his assistant was sighing loudly outside his door, he jolted to his feet and announced that he’d definitely need to see me again.

“There’s one more test I’d like to run,” he said. When I asked him what it was, I could see him thinking quickly. “Color blindness,” he replied, and grinned. The sudden illumination of his face was as blinding as a camera flash. I blinked into the light and smiled back.

A few weeks later, he called to say he had a batch of eye drops that he wanted me to try. He persuaded me to order a new pair of glasses and then informed me, unapologetically, that the shipment was delayed. I made three trips before they were in my hands. Right there in the optical shop, in full view of his staff and his other patients, he adjusted the glasses around the curve of my face and slid his fingers gently into my hair.

“I’ve run out of reasons to get you here,” he murmured, his face inches from mine. By then, I’d memorized it. I knew the angle of his arched eyebrow,

the white scar that trailed like a comet along his jaw. The throaty hum of his voice spun through the whorls of my ear for hours after I’d left him. I assumed I’d eventually shake off the crush. Instead, something inside me shifted when I gazed at him through those new glasses. The shop crystallized, and I saw in his bearing, in his eyes and his chin and the pale twist of his lips, a vision of my future child.

From behind us came the sound of my fiancé clearing his throat. I rose to my feet and went home with him. But not too long after, I came back for Jack.

---

—

After everything happened, after our love curdled and our family turned sour, I found myself obsessing over that afternoon in the optical shop. I worried over the memory like a tongue over a rotting tooth. ...