I haven’t been back to the forums. Today I open up the browser and let the cursor hover over the bookmark for the forums, but I don’t click it. I still feel that if I do, I’ll only get upset. So I leave it alone.
I want to go somewhere, though. Somewhere that isn’t a search engine, or a reference website. My attention wanders away from the computer monitor, to the books lined up beside it. The books that are the only things on the desk besides the monitor itself. I moved them there when I got tired of the desk being so empty. Children of Hypnos.
There. There is where I’ll go.
My fingers remember the address like I’m thirteen again and I go to the Children of Hypnos fan forums every day. The page comes up right away. It’s still there, after all this time. All the threads, all the posts. The fans may have fled, but the heart is still here, like a little fandom time capsule.
I only have to glance at the welcome thread and all those old emotions rush back into me. For a few years, this was where I belonged. I was a citizen in the city of the Children of Hypnos fandom, and I woke up every morning excited to talk with my fellow fans. I scroll through a few of the old role-playing threads where I once pretended to be a nightmare hunter in the Children of Hypnos world, wielding an oversized battle axe like one of my favorite characters, Marcia. Then I find the discussions where people argued about the meaning behind the symbols of the books and the pieces of the plot. Then conversations about favorite quotes from the four books. Then the endless speculations about that spectral fifth book and what became of Olivia Kane—the speculations that tore the fandom apart and killed this forum for good.
I don’t want the Monstrous Sea fandom to collapse the same way the Children of Hypnos fandom did. I don’t want my fans to float off the way I did. Not all of them will have the boon of their own creations to tether them down; not all of them will be able to create their own spaces where they can be who they want to be and love what they want to love without the fear of someone judging them. I don’t want them to lose this story or this community. I don’t know who they all are, but I know who I was, and I know what it would have meant to me.
I also know this isn’t a good enough reason to force myself to finish the comic. If I don’t have the motivation for it, it won’t turn out well, and no one will be happy with the result.
But motivation doesn’t come from nowhere. Like any good monster, you have to feed it.
I pick up the first Children of Hypnos book and run my hand along the war hammer embossed on the cover. The books never had the titles or Olivia Kane’s name printed on the front cover. Only the weapons. My fingers graze along the spine and bump over the name KANE, and then, larger, DREAMHUNTER.
I crack the book open. Read the synopsis on the inside front flap. “Emery Ashworth’s nightmares routinely try to kill her. . . .” Then flip inside, to the first chapter. As it always does, the first page entices me to read the next, and the next, and the next, until the front door bangs open and my brothers and Wallace tromp inside and I’ve blown through to the final chapter and sit pages away from finishing the book.
Wallace sticks his head through the doorway. “Hey. Thought you might be in here.”
I look up. “What time is it?”
“Like four thirty. Your parents are making dinner.”
“Oh.”
“You rereading Children of Hypnos?”
“I . . . yeah, I guess.” I didn’t mean to, but now I really want to move on to the second book. “I’m almost done.”
Wallace sits on the floor near the foot of my bed and pets Davy while I finish reading.
That night after dinner, I go back upstairs, get the second book, and start reading again. Then the third. I’ve read them so many times I breeze right through, and by five the next morning I’m halfway through the fourth book. When my parents get up, I’m done, and my emotions have been wrung out like a wet washcloth. Like someone cut me open, scrubbed my insides with a stiff brush, and sewed me back up again.
My brain is in high gear. My blood pumps hard through my veins, and my fingers twitch, and I need something. I need it, I need it, I need it. I need it right now, I need it worse than I’ve ever needed anything before.
I need my pencil.
CHAPTER 44
Monstrous Sea is mine.
I made it, not the other way around.
It’s not a parasite, or an obligation, or a destiny.
It’s a monster.
It’s mine.
And I have a battle axe waiting for it.
MONSTROUS SEA FORUMS
USER PROFILE
LadyConstellation **
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AGE: 18
LOCATION: Indiana
INTERESTS: Drawing. Walking my dog. Eggs. (Also, still riding sea monsters.)
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Aug 25 2017
Go here. Read this. Thank me later.
monstroussea.com
EPILOGUE
I show Max and Emmy the pages before I put them up, of course. I’m not a completely terrible friend. Max demands I put them all up right away. Emmy is freaking out too hard about the ending to tell me to do much of anything besides fly out to California with a gallon of ice cream and hold her.
I don’t look at the comments. I don’t go to the forums. I don’t want to see what people are saying about me or my story. I’m not ready for that yet, but I am ready for this to be finished.
Max and Emmy watch the boards, and Wallace reports back to me on the status of the fans.
“They’re going fucking nuts,” he tells me the night the pages go up. I have his webcam feed in one window and Minesweeper open in another. He looks off to the side, clicking through the Monstrous Sea forums. Behind him is a small dorm room, a bed lofted with his roommate’s desk beneath it, and a TV perched precariously atop a dresser strewn with ramen noodles and open cereal boxes. I’d like to blame the mess on his roommate, but if it’s food, it’s probably Wallace’s.
“More people are reading it every day. Way more than were ever in the fandom before. And the people who wrote articles about your identity back in May—they’re talking about this now. That the comic’s coming back, that it’s ending. It’s a thing, Eliza. Reading Monstrous Sea is a thing people do. Not just people who like comics but—but everyone. It’s all over the internet.”
I clear out a corner of the Minesweeper board. “Imagine what they’re going to do when they hear about your transcription.”
Wallace beams.
“My editor says we’re in really good shape to have advance copies of the first book ready before the con.” He starts clicking through something on his screen. “Here she said, ‘Your chapters were already so clean, the line edits will be pretty light.’ And she keeps asking if I think I’m going to have time to do my edits with all my homework.” His smile grows. “Like my professors could even assign me enough homework to keep me away from this.”
“If they do, I know some people who might be willing to help with that.”
“I hope you’re not talking about outsourcing my homework.”
“Didn’t you hear? I’m famous. I can do what I want.”