Broken Monsters. Lauren Beukes
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Название: Broken Monsters
Автор: Lauren Beukes
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Триллеры
isbn: 9780007464623
isbn:
The currents are crude and subtle in the billboards shouting slogans that say one thing, but mean another, tugging at desires and anxiety, but also alive in the graffiti, the squiggled tags that writhe with look-at-me, acknowledge-me, I’m-here.
And art, most of all.
The dream and Clayton sit on a cool marble bench in the central courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Art, which Clayton never visited because he didn’t like the formality of it, when he thought art should be rough and ready, and they stare at Diego Rivera’s giant frescoes of men and machinery and feel the churning beneath. All the galleries are like that, dreams seething beneath the surface of the paint, under the skin of the bronze statues. Clayton was so close. But he didn’t know how to cut through.
The dream thinks it does. You need life to make life. ‘The birds and the bees’, to steal a thought from the man it is inhabiting.
Eventually it has to leave the art museum. The needs of the body are a nagging constant. So they are behind the wheel of the truck when it sees the boy, half-collapsed against the side of the bus stop, his head resting against the scuffed-up Plexiglas. It stops the car and watches the boy sleep. There is no-one else around. The boy stirs and his leg kicks out, once, reflexively, like a rabbit or a dog. Or another kind of animal.
It climbs out and goes to get something out of the toolbox the man keeps in the back.
It remembers this from a dream Clayton once had.
‘Get up!’ Shaking the limp boy by his bare shoulders, his skin still clammy from overnighting in the freezer in the basement. The boy’s head lolls back on his neck, and the dream weeps with frustration, its tears shattering like glass on the cement, among the detritus in the tunnel, the trash and condoms, the old tires, bits of chalk left over from a mural of a girl’s face, smiling down on them with serene encouragement in the quiet and the dark.
It brought him here to unveil him, close to the physical border between Canada and the United States, in the hopes that borders overlap.
It can’t understand what’s wrong, why he won’t get up, maybe wobbly at first on his new legs, like a faun, before he begins to bound and leap and fly, and then his very being, the fact of him, will rip through the skin between the worlds, let them slip away, back home. Or bring all of the dream crashing in on them.
It has been so very careful, so patient. Flesh is messier, and has its own challenges, but it is not so very different to working in metal or clay or wood. It followed the instructions on the package of chemicals very carefully. A day to prepare, a day to bind. Maybe that was its mistake. The choice of materials, the freezer, keeping the deer in the refrigerator, the plastic wrap mummifying the boy, suffocating him. Perhaps he opened his eyes in the ice chest, battered his hands against the lid, perhaps he has already come and gone, and it missed its moment.
It strokes the bristly hair of the legs that run to the smooth skin of the boy’s belly, the scoop of his navel. It cups one of the small, sharp hooves, takes one of the child’s hands and laces his slim fingers between Clayton’s clumsy ones. It squeezes, gently. An admonishment. Get up now. Stop playing. It’s not funny. Words it knows from Clayton’s head.
But the boy is a dead, empty thing. It has done it all wrong. This stupid head, these stupid hands. It tries to remember how it came through, the man in the woods and the lure of uninhabited spaces – a vacancy that dream can rush in to fill, a door to step through.
‘I’m sorry,’ the dream says with Clayton’s mouth. And it is, for both of them.
About to climb back into the truck, it hesitates and picks up a piece of pink chalk from the ground. It draws the rough outline of a door, the chalk snapping in Clayton’s thick fingers. But it is persistent. Because maybe, next time, the door will open, and the boy will climb unsteadily to his hooves and take lilting steps through.
The dream will try again.
There’s no such thing as by the book, Gabi knows. Every case defines itself. But you start with what you know. Work backwards. Fill in the gaps. Daveyton did not arrive home between four and five p.m., when he usually does on a Friday. He left school around three, according to the science teacher who was supervising the hang-out that day, which is what Humboldt Middle School calls their aftercare, confirmed by the footage they’ve retrieved from the security cameras. The school can’t afford to maintain their library, but they have surveillance cameras and metal detectors. Priorities.
Usually, he would walk to the bus stop (public transit: the school does not have its own bus service) with a friend in his class, Carla Fuentes, but she had a dermatologist appointment, and her dad picked her up early. Which means he went missing somewhere in between school and home. It’s the worst place of all, that anywhereland.
The parents have been interrogated separately and together, with a lawyer and without, and referred for counseling. They were both at work at the time of their son’s disappearance. Lucky to have a double income. Juliet Lafonte works as an administrator at a doctor’s office, although her arthritis makes her a slow typist. She has witnesses to her whereabouts all Friday.
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