Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

THERE IS A MONSTER UNDER HELEN’S BED by Ekaterina Sedia

Moth flutters against the billowing curtains—white on white—and Helen knows it’s there only because of the sound its wings make, quick little beats, dry and rustling. Helen imagines the moth scream in a silent high pitch.

Helen wants to get up and untangle the little wings carefully, avoiding the powdery scales, but she cannot let her feet touch the floor. She imagines the cool wide boards, polished to a smooth shine, so good to slide across in her white socks she has to change every day now—but that’s for daytime, when monsters are asleep and sated, and retreat under the floorboards and behind the wallpaper covered in deceitfully bright flowers. All monsters sleep behind the flowers, in the narrow interstices between the wallpaper and the drywall, under the nodding shadows of printed daisies and poppies.

But at night they wait for Helen, and she does not dare to set foot on the smooth floor. The moth flutters, and Helen digs herself deeper under the covers.

Helen has to go to the bathroom. The monster senses her restless shifting and breathes heavily, moving closer to the edge, its claws scrabbling on the wood of the floorboards. Helen can hear the wet gurgling of its saliva and phlegm, and shivers. She will wet her bed again tonight.

Helen’s new mom, Janis, listens to the sounds upstairs. The circle of yellow light from the lamp clings to the shaggy rug Janis wants removed but never gets around to.

Her husband Tom follows her gaze with his own and smiles sheepishly.

“How long do you think until she learns English?”

Tom shrugs. “Children pick up languages pretty fast.”

“But she’s… older.” Janis says. There is carefully hidden disappointment in her voice. She tries to love Helen; most of all, she tries not to regret her decision to adopt her. She did not want to wait for a younger child to become available, not in that horrid hotel with frozen pipes and non-flushing toilet, not in Siberia, where snow covered the ground in October. She grabbed Helen and ran back to the semblance of civilization in Moscow and then back to New Jersey—much like one would grab a sweater one did not particularly like, just to not spend another hour in a mall. She now regretted her panic, she regretted—even though she would never admit it to herself—bringing back Helen and not someone else. She is older, and like so many orphanage kids, she has developed an attachment disorder, or so her psychiatrist said.

She is a pretty child though, Janis consoles herself. Thin and blond, with dark blue eyes that have a habit of staring at any adult with thoughtful intensity, as if sizing them up for parental roles. But everyone said how pretty she was. Janis sighs and returns to her reading. It’s a parenting book, something she never thought she would be reading.

There’s rustling upstairs, and both Janis and Tom look up, as if expecting to be able to see through the vaulted ceiling.

“Should we check on her?” Janis says.

Tom shakes his head. “She’s old enough to sleep by herself.”

Janis remembers the orphanage—ten beds to a room. Helen is not used to being by herself.

“She better not wet her bed again,” Tom says.

Janis nods. The book is not helping.

Helen thinks back to the day when the monsters first appeared. She had to go to the bathroom, and she felt (or imagined) a quick touch of hot breath when her feet touched the cold linoleum tiles of the orphanage floor. She listened to the even breathing of eight other girls—one had been recently adopted, the youngest, who went home with her new mom and dad. There were no monsters and no hidden breathing, just a general unfairness of the situation: the longer one waited for the parents to show up, the smaller one’s chances grew.

Helen went to the door, into the long hallway lit by dead fluorescent lights, and all the way to the bathroom where the toilet gurgled habitually.

On her way back, Helen heard voices—husky voices of the older boys, too old to be adopted, too young for the vocational training school where they would be sent once they turned fourteen. The boys everyone knew would grow up to be bad, and already well on their way to fulfilling the expectations. Helen pressed against the wall and listened to their whispers and laughter.

She passed the door of her dormitory and peeked around the corner. They were by the lockers, five or six of them, and there were no adults in sight.

Helen can see it now: there is a girl with them—Tanya, who is older than Helen. She is ten, and she hangs out with the boys; she smokes and drinks with them after the lights-out. But they do not act as her friends. Tanya is crying.

The boys push her against the solid wall of the lockers, and Helen imagines how the cold metal feels against a cheek wet with tears, the faint smell of green paint lingering since last summer.

The boys tell Tanya to shut up, and press harder, her face and chest flat against metal; they lift her dress and pull down her underwear, they force her legs open.

One of the boys, red-headed, cold-eyed, puts his hand between Tanya’s legs; his shoulder is moving as if his hand is searching for something, and his breath is loud in the silence broken only by the occasional sob. He then pulls down his pants and presses against Tanya who cries more as he thrusts with his hips. He steps back and another boy takes his place. Helen thinks she smells the sea, of which she retains a faint memory—she was only two when her real parents took her on vacation.

She stepped away from the corner and ran to her room on light feet, barely touching the linoleum. She ran to her bed and then the monster lunged. She felt its fetid breath on her knees, its clawed hands grabbing her ankles.

She cried and wrestled free, and dove under the covers; until morning she dreamt about cold eyes and sharp claws sliding up her legs and forcing them apart.

Janis tries to be a good mother; even as she finds Helen awake and curled up among the bunched and wet sheets, she does not scold. She only sighs and tosses the soiled sheets into the hamper. She then tells Helen to go eat breakfast.

At the table, Helen is still subdued but wrinkles her nose at slices of toast—she does not like Wonderbread, she misses the chewy thick slices with a golden crust. Janis makes a mental note to pick up some loaves of Italian bread, and butters the toast for her impossible girl.

“Eat,” she says, even as Helen stares at her with uncomprehending eyes. “We’re going to see the doctor.”

Helen smiles at that word. “Papa,” she says.

Janis shakes her head. “No. Nyet. Tom is your papa,” she says. “Not the doctor, not any anyone else. You can’t choose your family, you know.”

Helen does not understand, but Janis does, and she mentally admonishes herself to practice what she preaches, to remember this little adage. Like it or not, she is stuck with Helen; she’s not going to return her like an unloved puppy to the pound. If only she were easier to love.

Janis shakes her head and cleans the table. She nudges Helen up the stairs, and she goes, obedient, to brush her teeth and put on her clothes. Helen does everything quickly, the motions precise and fluid, trained by half a decade of synchronized grooming, dressing, and eating. She makes her bed neatly with hospital corners—even though she still seems baffled by the second sheet instead of the white cloth envelope enclosing the blanket that so vexed Janis during her hotel stay in Siberia.

Janis drives to the doctor. In this part of Edison, there are many Russians and other Slavic nationals—she can hear their rough, guttural speech reaching for her through the open car window, trying to drag Janis back to the snow-covered town in Siberia, run down buildings parasitically attached to some industrial monstrosity of secretive purpose.

Helen, on the other hand, perks up and sticks her head out of the window, smiling and waving. Janis purses her lips and pulls her inside, and rolls up the windows. Helen has to learn English, not to cling to a misplaced remnant of the life she had left.

The doctor is Russian too—he laughs with an avuncular roll, and reassures Janis in his heavily accented English. He takes Helen to his office on the third floor of the office building, where the windows offer up a view of the adjacent strip mall. Janis follows even though she cannot understand them. They seem to conspire against her—the doctor at his ostentatious mahogany desk (he sits next to it, not behind it) and Helen, sunken into a plush red chair, a box of tissues thoughtfully placed on the small stand by her elbow. Janis sits awkwardly on an uncomfortable ottoman by the door, feeling like a poor relation, an unwelcome intruder.

The doctor and the girl look at her simultaneously, laugh, and resume their conversation. What an ugly language, Janis thinks. There are no tissues by her ottoman.

Helen likes the doctor, the same way she likes all bearded men with calloused hands and a faint smell of cologne and leather clinging to them. She wishes for a new father like that—not her current flabby, pasty one. Helen knows that despite what the doctor says, the family is not permanent—she remembers children who went home with their new parents, only to be returned and given to different ones. The trouble is, Helen does not want to go back to the orphanage where the monsters are relentless and walk freely at all hours. She prefers the ones that stay under the bed and sleep during the day. Helen devises plans to become a monster herself.

“Why are you unhappy?” the doctor asks. His eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles are kind. He often asks this question.

Helen shrugs.

“Aren’t your parents nice to you?”

“They are,” she says. “They are nice.”

“What’s the problem then? Do you miss your friends?”

“No.” She shakes her head. She does not miss anyone. “I want new parents.”

“Some would say you are lucky to have the parents you do. They give you everything you want.”

She nods. She knows she is being ungrateful—always has been, even back in the orphanage where she was lucky to have a roof over her head and a bed to sleep in, where she did not have to freeze to death in the streets. “I know.”

“Then what?” The kindness in the doctor’s voice cracks, about to let something else through. “What’s the problem?”

“There is a monster under my bed,” she says. “It wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom.”

“Is this why you wet your bed?” the doctor asks.

Helen feels her cheeks grow hot—she cannot believe Janis has told on her. Her eyes flash indignation, but the doctor does not notice.

“What kind of monster is it?” he asks.

Helen hikes up her trouser leg and shows him deep bruises the color of plums, the wide gashes barely healed over, running from her kneecap to the top of her white sock. She hears Janis gasp on her ottoman.

Then the doctor starts asking Janis questions Helen does not understand. She only hears fear in Janis’s voice, and feels guilty. Now she knows about the monster too, and probably worries.

Janis looks at the newspaper clipping the doctor has photocopied for her. Some are printouts of the internet articles, and Janis wonders if he collects this stuff and why. But she knows the answer—there are enough of these adopted children and their anxious parents to pay for his office and the mahogany desk and the red plush chairs. Of course he collects the clippings about child murders.

Janis reads the small, too dark print of a poor photocopy, she looks at the photograph that doesn’t look like a child’s face—just a Rorschach of black and white planes; it’s such a bad copy of the picture. Could be a little boy with black pools where his eyes should have been.

She reads the articles—they all say the same thing. An adopted child beaten to death by his parents in Switzerland. Countries and names change from one article to the next, but the story is the same—beaten, dismembered, thrown out of windows, moving vehicles, off bridges. She flips through the clippings, face after face after face in severe black and white. Janis cries then, not for them but for Helen.

The monster growls so softly it sounds like a purr. Its claws tap on the floorboards like castanets. Helen sits on her bed hugging the bruised knees to her chest.

The doctor did not seem to believe the story of the monster, and instead seemed to think that her mom and dad were the ones who hurt Helen. He even said that if they beat her, she should tell him that now and the police would find her new parents. While the proposal seemed tempting, Helen decided that lying was still wrong. The monster growls louder, reminding her of her mistake.

Helen cannot sleep and she thinks back, to what she can remember of the orphanage—so much of it is fading from her memory already. But the monsters she remembers, their long shadows stretching across the chipping walls. The nannies tell her that these are not shadows, just stains from the age-old plumbing leaks. Just blemishes of an unknown origin. They rumble in the pipes, they spread in the puddles of gray light that move across the floor of the classroom as the day wears on. They hide under desks and chairs in the common room, they follow the children outside to the swings and the monkey bars.

The monsters look out of the eyes of the parents who come to take away children; they all speak unfamiliar languages. They look out of the eyes of the nannies and especially the older boys, all teeth and clawed fingers. Helen avoided them and kept her head down, dreading the day she would be tall enough to push against the lockers.

She dangles her foot off the bed and pulls it back up right away, teasing the monster. She hears it lunge and miss and dig its claws into the floorboards. Its breathing is heavy now, upset. If she weren’t so afraid, she would’ve descended to the floor and let the monster devour her—every bone, every morsel—and lick the floor clean of blood with its red tongue, rough enough to strip the paint and varnish off wood. Her parents would find no trace of her, as if she simply vanished from the world.

It would be a good death, she thinks, not at all like the girl in the orphanage, found hanging off the curtain rod, her red tights wrapped around her neck. Helen remembers her purple tongue teasing between white sharp teeth; she remembers the missing incisor and the swollen tissue squeezing through the gap. Or like the boy who snuck off to go swimming in the lake a few kilometers away. They brought him back, blue and naked and wet like a creature from a horror movie. Like a monster.

She dangles the edge of the blanket and hears the tearing of fabric. She pulls back the long twisting shreds. She hears the footfalls on the staircase, and hides the torn blanket from sight. She pretends to sleep as the door squeals open and Janis stands in the doorway. Helen feels her worried look with the back of her neck.

“This is ridiculous,” Tom says, and turns off the TV to illustrate his seriousness on the matter. “They think that we are hurting her?”

Janis nods and shows him the clippings. They do not say it out loud, but they both are thinking the same thing: these children are impossible, they are messed up and they cannot be fixed. They do not speak English, and yet they demand, they want things, they require tutors and psychiatrists, and their medical bills are piling up. The orphanages have the secret policy of adopting the most damaged children abroad, and Janis cannot decide if it is out of kindness, trying to get them help they cannot get at home, or cynicism, getting rid of the defectives and the unwanted.

She thinks of the people in the adoption agency and the orphanage staff, and she does not know if those people even know their own motives. She only knows that the doctors at the orphanage give all the children a clean bill of health, afraid to spook the potential parents. In any case, they find out soon enough.

Helen came with a heart murmur and bed wetting; the latter does not seem too bad compared to the congenital heart defect that is too late to fix. But even that fades in comparison to her acting out and scratching, to her fears, to her reluctance to let them touch her. Even that fades in comparison to the unexplained bruises and cuts.

“I think she did it to herself,” Tom says. “The doctors checked her out before—there wasn’t a problem then. Maybe she fell or banged against something in the playground?”

Janis shakes her head. “I don’t know. But those bruises… they look like fingerprints. Adult fingerprints, and nail scratches.” She draws a deep breath, dreading the question she has to ask. “Tom…. You wouldn’t…”

He looks at her open-mouthed, not indignant, just surprised. “No. Of course not.” Of course not, Janis scolds herself. How could she even think that?

He stares at her, clears his throat. “Janis, we really need to talk.”

She knows what it’s about—the child is a problem, like the children in the clippings. The problem. They never fought before, never suspected one another of anything unsavory. They used to have leisure and spare cash, they never used to argue like that. Janis just cannot bear to think about admitting defeat, to tolerate the smug I-told-you-sos from family and friends. “It’s different when it’s your own,” they will say. “What did you expect? She’s too old, too mixed up. It’s not the same as having your own baby. It’s sad, but you can’t save them, Janis, you can’t save them all.”

She thought she could save just one, but even that is apparently too much for them.

“Yes,” she says out loud. “We need to talk. Let me just check on her.”

Helen squeezes her eyes shut and waits for the woman to close the door, cutting off the thick slab of light reaching in from the hallway. The light makes the monster retreat into its den somewhere between the bed and the floorboards, where its eyes glow with quiet red ferocity in the darkness. She wants to ask the woman—Janis, mom—to leave the door open, to put the lights on, but she cannot, and she cries silently, her salty tears sliding down her cheek and into her hair, soaking into the pillow.

The woman does not leave. Instead she comes in and sits on the bed, the white texture of her cable-knit sweater exaggerated by the light from the hallway and darkness inside the room. It is cold tonight—the cold has finally caught up with Helen. It chased her across the unfathomable chasm of the ocean and nine hours of flying through the air over the stationary clouds. The autumn is here now, and there are no more moths fluttering in the curtains.

Helen peeks between the tear-soaked eyelashes, and the beam of light twinkles and breaks into a myriad of tiny stars. The woman looks back at Helen but does not smile like she usually does when their eyes meet. Instead she sighs and strokes Helen’s hair. She feels the moisture under her fingertips, and she looks like she’s about to cry herself.

Helen considers opening her eyes completely but decides against it and squeezes them shut, feigning sleep. If she looks at her new mom directly, she will start talking, and then Helen would cry in earnest at her inability to understand, to explain about the monsters and shadows and fear.

Helen wants to talk about summers in Siberia—so short and so intense, so full of high-pitched whining of mosquitoes and the smell of pine trees oozing fresh sap, of spongy bogs studded with butter-yellow cloudberries. About the lake where the runaway boy drowned but which becomes transformed by a cloudless blue sky overhead into a swath of precious smooth silk surrounded by soft, succulent-green branches of firs.

But Helen cannot explain these things and she forces her eyelids tighter together, until her eyes burn.

Janis gives up and rises to her feet, the springs of the mattress squeaking in relief. The door closes behind her, cutting off the light.

In the darkness, there is shifting and stirring. Helen watches the sheet of wallpaper peel away, admitting a thin beam of bluish light into the room.

Helen sits up and peers into the widening gap—carefully at first, wary of the monsters. She sees a small man, no bigger than a cat, crouching on the other side of the wallpaper barrier. His withered narrow face looks at Helen over his shoulder, and then he turns away and draws on the inside of the wall—a chain of tiny cranes, dwarfed by the shadows of daisies and poppies. They seem paler on the other side but alive, nodding in the invisible breeze.

Helen pulls the sheets of the wallpaper apart, and she sees a bright blue lake surrounded by yellow-needled larches. The monster crawls from under the bed and stands beside her, panting like a dog, the black fur between its wing-like shoulder blades bristling. Helen is surprised to not be afraid of it anymore.

The monster leaps into the gap and Helen follows, timid at first. She turns to look back and watches the wallpaper fold back with a quiet rustling and grow together, fusing. She sees the ghostly flowers, and behind them—her room, a shadow image from a magic lantern.

The monster growls and bounds ahead, then stops and waits for her by the tiny man and his cranes, which are flying in place, their wings sweeping up and down in a graceful motion. She watches them for a while, never moving and yet flying south among the daisies and poppies which are still blooming despite the autumn and its cold fingers reaching even behind the wallpaper, where the monsters sleep during the day.

The monster barks and laughs and leaps to the right, then to the left; then it gallops toward the lake, looking over its shoulder, inviting Helen to follow. Helen sighs and walks through the fallen leaves, rubbery under her white socks, she walks to the lake where a blue boy with sharp teeth is waiting for her, the monster by his side like a hound.