How to Make Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

pallid back, his
neck…but nothing above that.
    Then, with growing horror, she
realised her mistake.
    Prentiss had not stuck his head into
the crack; the crack had spread across the wall, passing through flesh and bone
to shear off most of his head above the jaw line. Prentiss’ skull had become
part of the fracture, a jagged black rent through which only darkness could be
viewed.
    As Emma watched, the wall around the
crack seemed to shiver and the area of damage widened. Its messy Rosarch edges
sent out spidery limbs to breach plasterboard and brickwork and splinter the
dead matter of Prentiss’ rigid torso.
    The crack was growing; something was
trying to climb out.
    Emma ran from the room, slamming the
door to shut the monstrosity inside. She stumbled to the station and jumped on
the first train to arrive, heading into the heart of the city. Perhaps safety
lay in numbers, surrounded by crowds. But there were cracks everywhere: cracks
in buildings, in road surfaces, even in people.
    When she reached the station she sat
in a glassed-walled waiting room under a row of stark fluorescent bulbs. At
least where there was too much light she would see them coming, be alerted to their
presence before they reached her. She pulled up her feet onto the bench,
listening to the groan of plastic, hoping that it would not break. Or crack.

THE UNSEEN
    (For Mark Lynch)
     
    (What follows is the slightly edited
version of a hand-written manuscript found in July 2005, wrapped in an old
cellophane sandwich bag and wedged into a hole in the wall of a derelict house
in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne. The sheets were undated, and no author’s
name was legible.)
     
    Our numbers are many, yet
still we remain unseen, unnoticed; the vast majority of you honest, law-abiding
citizens walk past us on the city streets every day, not even realising that we
are there. We are the forgotten. The cast-offs. The outsiders.
    We are those who observe you as you
go about your business.
    Utilising this questionable
advantage bestowed upon us by our low social standing, we watch. And what we
see is sometimes incredible.
    I’ve always kept notebooks, and now
that for some reason I’ve been chosen to chronicle the inexplicable, the stark
and sometimes depressing truth of our busy little peaceable kingdoms, I have
taken care to maintain the habit. Back in my old life, I was a writer of
fictions: I wrote thrillers and detective stories, fooling myself into
believing that they mattered, and eking out a modest existence from the words I
produced. These days the mysteries are real, but my style of recording them has
not changed. I have no publisher, no agent, no means of getting my work “out
there”, but these things are no longer important to me. All that matters is
getting it all down on paper.
    I keep a locker in Central Station,
and fill it with my loose pages and messy notebooks (no doubt this document
will end up there too, taking up space with the rest). Some day they will be
important, these seemingly random scribblings penned by a man on the edge;
until then they sit, dusty and neglected, waiting for their time to come.
    I’m not quite sure when I first saw
them, but I do know when I first noticed their existence. It was Friday
evening, a boom time for we who live on the streets: drunken celebrants will
put their hand in their pockets to impress their dates; pissed-up workers
letting off steam might buy you a kebab or a burger from one of the countless
fast food outlets down by the Big Market.
    I was lounging by Grey’s Monument
with my close pal The Spiker. We were sharing a bottle of rum he’d managed to
lift from an off-license in the Cattle Market, and indulging our usual habit of
people-watching. It’s what we do; all we have. When you’re down on your luck,
you tend to become very observant. You notice a pound coin dropped by a rushing
commuter, a half-eaten packet of crisps thrown into a litter bin at a bus stop,
the way some people will