The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online

see a quick dark slippage from my sight, as if it sat in vigil over my sleep. I sensed its oblique presence grow swollen and dark if I lied on the phone or slammed my door or screamed at my mother, or even picked my nose. It loved hygiene, the ghost, hated sweat and spit and bile, all the bad humors of the body. The only time I ever felt threatened by it was once, during high school, when I snuck a would-be suitor up the back stairwell and into my room because I had grown tired of my virginity, and wanted it to go away. Then, the ghost burst into a tremendous bruise-colored mass at the edges of our sight, and fading in its center to invisibility, it swelled so big it filled the room, pushing both of us up against the wall, sucking out our breath, making the boy freak and escape outside again. By school on Monday, a lock of his hair had turned white and he stopped talking to girls completely, and eventually, in college, he came blazing out of the closet in full Eurotrash regalia.
    For a moment, I felt I was alone, and then, even with my eyes closed, I felt the ghost slipping back in, intangible. "I guess you can tell," I said, opening my eyes. "I'm very, very sad."
    A pause; a pulse. "It's about a boy," I said. "Well. A man." I waited; a darker ring emerged. "I hate him," I said. The ghost came closer, then, a moist, dark air, that smelled of anise and the cool violet smell of shadows. I grew very tired and lay back on the pillow.
    "But it's not just me, you know. The whole world's sad," I said. "It's like a virus. It's going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It's a terrible place to bring a child into," I said. "This world. It is terrible. Just terrible."
    I thought of my best friend, Clarissa, home in San Francisco. Her sick body curled under a sheet, her boyfriend, Sully, stroking her face, putting her to sleep. I thought of calling her, but my limbs were too heavy to move. I thought of the monster, then of the Lump in my gut, dividing and dividing and dividing itself, then of Primus Dwyer. And then I remembered the long sweep of upstate New York through my windshield in the dark of that morning, the hunchbacked barns falling into themselves, the deer darting startled through the dark. How--after those forty straight hours of driving, after the late hallucinations of Primus Dwyer sitting there beside me, grinning, his round glasses glinting--when I rounded the bend at the Farmers' Museum and saw my tiny little town clumped in the dark there, a perfect model town (so sweet, so good), I felt something essential in me dissolve and begin to fade away.
    My eyes closed then, despite myself. "I'm supposed to be in Alaska. I'm supposed to be searching for the first human on this continent." I sighed and said with great effort, "I'm not supposed to be in Templeton." And then I was asleep.
    I HAD HAD a dream about Primus Dwyer and awoke with the hard-bitten landscape of Alaska vibrating in my mind. A softer light was coming through my shades, and I lifted them to find twilight and a red-striped tent poking above the trees down in Lakefront Park. It was there, I thought, to protect the monster from the July sun. My shower with its hot water, with the soap and shampoo, almost made me cry with relief, and when I emerged and saw myself in the fogged mirror, I saw that I looked better. Still skinny, still lost-seeming. But my face had de-puffed and my eyes had emerged above my cheekbones, and, even then, the small imp of vanity chuckled in my ear. I did not look bad, it told me; I was still a pretty girl. And even my navel, where I pressed my hands and felt a pulse through my skin, was still flat.
    I