They played me records, Neil Diamond crooning out love songs, songs about loss.
They took me to the movies, to a secret clubhouse in the woods.
They taught me about monsters.
About how to spot one.
How to be one.
How to act human even when you are sure you’re a monster.
I turned the pages, revisiting all the old monsters. It felt a little like a forgotten family album; the figures were that familiar. There was the vampire, teeth dripping blood. And the werewolf, the full moon behind him almost as menacing as the monster himself.
The images and words pulled me back to the clubhouse with the cracked window and the wide pine boards on the floor, Eric and Violet at my side. I could smell the old wood, the musty scent of the building.
“Write down your favorite monster,” Vi told me that first day, handing me a paper and marker. The day they’d invited me to be part of the club. I still remembered what I’d drawn. I flipped through and found it now: my drawing of the door in B West, of Gran’s eyes looking through. MNSTR.
“Are you at the end yet?” Skink asked, and for half a second, I was unsure where I was, when I was.
It could have been Eric standing next to me, hurrying me along because we were late, late for a monster hunt.
I blinked and looked around to remind myself that I was still in the Chickering Island Campground office, sitting at the desk. Skink was bringing me a cup of coffee, and together we were trying to work out what to do next. Whatever it was, I wished like hell I could leave this boy out of it, but he was already in it. And he’d made it clear that there was no way I was going anywhere without him.
“Not yet,” I said, turning to the next page—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—soaking it all in.
I read the last lines:
By taking the potion, Dr. Jekyll awakened the beast, his dark side, and in the end, the dark side is stronger. The dark side wins.
And because the monster takes over, they both must die.
Skink perched himself on the edge of the desk, leaning down to read over my shoulder.
“So this girl,” Skink said. “This girl you wrote the book with, she’s your sister?”
“Yes,” I said.
He flipped the binder closed and pointed at the cover. “Are you Violet Hildreth or Iris?”
“I was Iris.”
“What was she like? Back then, I mean? I mean, did you know that she had this… this evil inside her?”
I shook my head. “No. I was supposed to be the broken one. I was the monster.”
* * *
I REMEMBERED THAT final night, together in the basement room at the Inn, how Vi closed her eyes, slipped down to the floor on her knees.
I dropped down, shook her shoulders, called her name, “Vi! Violet! Wake up, Violet!”
But when she did wake up, did open her eyes, she was not the same person.
She never would be again.
Violet Hildreth was gone.
The monster looked back at me from icy-cold eyes.
* * *
NOW I TURNED back to the book, flipped to the final entries, the new pages—so much whiter and crisper. The pages the monster herself had added in.
There are so many kinds of monsters, are there not?
Like Eric’s chimera, I am many-faced.
I contain multitudes.
For years now I have roamed the country, much like you, dear sister. Haven’t we always been each other’s shadows? Bound inexplicably.
But are we really so inexplicable, when you look at where we both came from?
We may not be sisters by birth, but the way in which we were reborn in that basement binds us more strongly than shared blood, don’t you agree?
Like you, I’m always moving, always on the run, always SEEKING.
Seeking the girls.
You know about the girls.
I seek the girls while you seek the monsters.
But do you know—have you guessed—why I do what I do?
Because we know every monster has a motivation, a driving force. Every monster has a HUNGER, a need it must satisfy. Do you remember our lessons?
What do I do to the girls?
I SAVE them.
I save them because… because… because…
Because I could not save you.
Each time I transform a girl, it’s YOU I’m saving.
You, my sister.
My brave hunter of monsters.
My other half.
My missing piece.
Come find me.
Come home.
I’ll be waiting.
“Do you know what she means?” Skink asked, pointing at the page. “Where home is?”
I blinked down at the page, the world around me flickering and wavering, the past and the present entwined. The past I’d been running so hard from, yet chasing after, for all these years.
“The Inn,” I told him. “She’s gone back to the Hillside Inn.”
“Wait,” he said, eyes wide. “The Hillside Inn? From The Helping Hand of God?”
I nodded.
“Holy shit! That’s why the name Hildreth sounded so familiar. You two are from there? You were like… that crazy doctor’s experiments? No way!”
I stood, my legs shaky.
And just like that, the die was cast.
I was going back to the place where both the monster and I were created.
I was going home.
The Helping Hand of God: The True Story of the Hillside Inn By Julia Tetreault, Dark Passages Press, 1980
From the files of Dr. Helen Hildreth
Patient S files
The process I have outlined and perfected in the Mayflower Project is a unique combination of medications, ECT, hypnosis, cold water therapy, and sensory deprivation.
When done correctly, as with Patient S, the subject is wiped clean of memories, of any sense of his or her past self.
But the final and most crucial step, the key to making it all work, is to stop the patient’s heart with either an electric shock or a high dose of seizure-inducing medication.
Then the heart must be started again by the practitioner, either by electrical or manual means.
This process of dying and being brought back to life is ancient. There are stories in every culture of the travelers who have made this journey. It is the most profound physical and symbolic act of transformation a human body can endure.
While the subject may be brought back by a defibrillator or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, my own preferred method is open-chest cardiac massage. I place the heart on my left palm, which is held open and flat. With my right hand on the anterior surface of the organ, I squeeze at 100 beats per minute. The heart must remain horizontal.
When the heart begins to beat on its own in my hands, I replace it in the cavity of the chest.
It is a moment of, dare I say, transcendence, for both the subject and myself.
I have given this person a new life. A new beginning.
Dr. Hutchins says it is a bit like playing God.
But I don’t entirely agree with that assessment.
I tell him, “It is like being the helping hand of God.”
The Monster
August 21, 2019
I COME FROM THE belly of the snake. The dark side of the moon. From my grandmother’s gin still: juniper berries, coriander, orrisroot. I leave a bitter taste on your tongue.
I am poison.
I am, I said.
I come from the electricity in the air, captured lightning in a bottle.
From a rabbit shot and brought back to life again.
I come from the loneliness of rain dripping down a windowpane, a little girl looking out from it, wishing for a friend, a sister she could share everything with.
I come from the Templeton family: a long line of drunks, imbeciles, and inferior specimens of humanity.
I come from the voices of the old gods and the new ones. The voice of Neil Diamond, full of the crackles and skips from Gran’s old albums. I am Brother Love. I am every monster in the old black-and-white movies. I am the mice in the killing jars and the one who puts them inside those jars; I am the cotton ball soaked in chloroform. I am the squeak of metal wheels the mice run on, going round and round, round and round.
Wheel of life. Wheel of creation.
Wheel of going nowhere fast, stuck in a cage.
And me, I know about cages and locks.
And I know how to be freed.
I come from the Hillside Inn.