How to Make a Monster

Jenny knew Terry was a monster, the worst kind of man. He had undermined her from the beginning, controlling and isolating her. Eventually, his abuse had manifested physically. People might ask how she could let him away with any of it, but secretly, she knew. She was terrified of him, but she was also ashamed. It was the shame which weakened her most.

She dreamt of her father often. He would be walking with her in Kelvingrove park, but suddenly turn, his face a mask of anger and horror. How can you let him do this to you? You’re not my girl anymore. And he would leave her there alone with nothing but falling leaves gusting around her, and she knew she would be forever in broken solitude.

When she woke from such dreams, real fear would lance at her. Her father had indeed left her, his heart attack sudden and devastating. His loss had ripped a hole in her, a jagged hole, and it was through this wound that Terry had dripped his poison. She barely recognised herself even in her own private thoughts. She was no longer a person, no longer a woman. She had become something else; a thing.

She pulled her jumper back over her shoulder, hiding the awful bruising Terry had left her with after the most recent assault.

Jenny had fled from the house. She had to get away from everything and everyone, to lie to herself, to bury everything. There was one place she could still bask in the memory of her former self: her father’s workshop. It was a broken-down old shed, at the bottom of the garden behind the little house where she had lived so many happy years. Terry hated it; he was such a clean-freak, and couldn’t stand getting his hands covered in grease and murk.

Being in the workshop reminded her of better days. Days after her mother had passed, but days before Terry had infected her life. It was in the little workshop that she thought back fondly to the art classes she had attended with her father after her mother had died. It was something they had decided to do together, to get them out of a house which was full of her things, but empty of her. Doing the classes had helped them both to grieve and find a way forward together.

And then one week, instead of paints and pencil, a new tutor had encouraged them to make objects from old metal parts, springs and coils, which she had collected in a massive bucket from a local scrap dealer. Her father, a mechanic all his days, had loved it, and so had Jenny.

Together, they had made a sort of sculpture, which they both knew would be a vampire. Jenny’s mum had been a real geek for her monsters. She loved nothing better than to drag Jenny and her dad round the TV for a Sunday Sinbad movie, marvelling in the Harryhausen stop-motion. She would tell them all about the old legends even as they watched, or how poor Gwangi in The Valley of Gwangi was not really a monster, just a dinosaur who had been forced into terrible deeds because of the actions of the men who wanted to take advantage of him.

Being a Gorbals girl, her mother had always delighted more than any other of her monster tales or movies with the story of the vampire with the iron teeth, who had been chased from the Southern Necropolis by the children of Glasgow, unwilling to put up with a real vampire in their midst. Unwilling to live with a monster.

They had used a little curl of sheet metal for his cape, and a series of screws for his iron fangs. For a time, before her father died, they worked together in his little garage where he had retired to mend bikes and potter about. The art class had inspired them to build a project, a collection of metal monsters, to honour her mother. Their next creation had been a Creature from the Black Lagoon, with screw nuts for bulbous eyes. There was a sword wielding skeleton, and even a Medusa, with rusted coils for snakes. Over time, they curated a marvellous monster collection, and they all sat on the workshop shelves like trophies.

Her daydream vanished, wisping into the air. She realised that she had been sitting idling in the workshop for some hours, creating something new. Something special to add to the collection.

Standing outside a moment, she realised that her own house was looming at her, a safe haven no more. Now, it was more like a nest, and inside lay a creature with a forked tongue.

Terry was at the front door when she paced in, waiting like a death row guard to escort her inside to her certain demise. It was as if she saw herself walking in, as if no longer in control of her own body. He closed the door, and followed her into the kitchen, skulking in a pressurised silence, cleaning around her to intimidate and harry.

She turned the kettle on and put coffee in a cup without even realising she was doing it, and walked past him to the bathroom. He stalked her, and waited outside, like a brooding golem. When she had finished her business, she crept past him again, trying to steer herself clear of him. As she poured her coffee, he dragged a chair out from under the table. He repositioned it several times before sitting down to face her. It was typical of him, having to control every little thing, even the angle of a chair he would only be sitting on for moments.

“I’m waiting,” he eventually growled.

“Waiting? Waiting for what?” Jenny said, meekly, forcing herself to make the briefest of contact with his grey stare, her voice aching with tiredness.

“For your apology. For what you made me do. How could you do that to me?”

She cringed, shrinking away from him.

“I was never like this before you, Jenny. You’ve made me like this. How can you live with yourself, knowing you’ve done this? Made me like this, made me … lash out?”

Jenny thought of her father’s workshop, and thought of her new creation. “I’m going to bed now, Terry. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.”

“Aye, aye, you just never understand how this hurts me so much, Jenny. Why would I want to come near you anyway. You look terrible.”

Jenny lay for some hours, forcing herself to see a world where she might be free of him. She was trapped. The only way out was to become what she had to become. He was sheepish when he came to bed. She ignored the incessant shuffling of his pillows. His petty controls, his foibles, whatever made him the way he was; none of it mattered anymore. Laying there, quietly in the night, Jenny realised she had moved past all of it. The man next to her was not a man. He was a monster. And she knew what she had to do. What she had to become.

Deep into the night, he was finally asleep. Jenny stepped from bed gracefully, and left the house. She stepped into her father’s workshop and turned on the little torch which hung behind the door. They were all there, all the little monsters she had built and created with her father. As she flashed the torch, the light made it seem as if a snake coiled more closely around the head of Medusa, that there was a flurry of the vampire’s steel cape.

As she shone the torch along the shelves, the shadows made it appear like the skeleton warrior was flexing its bones, and that the gills of the Creature from the Black Lagoon pulsed. Though she knew they were all inert, she flashed the torch again and revelled in their shapes and shadows. They become alive when they need to, she thought. When they must.

She collected the piece she had been working on, and quietly re-entered the house.

In the bedroom, she stood for some moments watching Terry as he slept. Then she opened her mouth, and fixed her creation inside it, her tongue feeling its way around the metal. The taste of it brought the realisation that now she had become something other, just as she needed to.

She kneeled up on the bed, and having removed the duvet, she straddled him. He roused, his head bobbing to make sense of it all. “Jenny? What the hell are you doing?”

She writhed against his body gently, and ran her hands up and down his shoulders, gripping his arms to his sides. Terry opened his eyes, and a sickening smile appeared on his lips. It was a smile which said I knew you would come back to me. You always do, you weak little bitch. It was only a matter of time. He yawned confidently.

“You want it now, don’t you. You want this, now, in the middle of the night” he said, somewhat drowsily. Then he opened his eyes fully.

“You silly little bitch. You’ll take it when I want to give it,” he said, raising his head from the pillow.

He could see her face more clearly now, wild and unkempt, her raven hair straggly and loose around her face, dropping towards him. She lowered her head to face him, and opened her mouth. And now it was Terry’s turn to feel terror, and his eyes grew wide in incomprehensible fear.

Her iron fangs, two whole rows of serrated, barbed monstrous metal teeth, glinted in the moonlight which crept in through the open shutters in their bedroom.

“Jenny …” he whimpered in confusion.

She threw her face down upon him, tearing at the flesh of his nose and cheeks. He screamed, the uncontrollable, wheezing scream of a child, and she ripped his nose away from his face. In an instant, her fangs were upon him again, biting, razing, tearing. Blood and flesh flew around them, spattering on the headboard, the walls and sheets. Terry struck out, his limbs flailing against her in horrified agony, and pushed her backwards.

But Jenny punched him on his gory, gaping mouth, punched so hard his front teeth buckled inward and lodged in his throat. And then, she lashed her face down upon him a final time, this time below what was left of his mouth, and tore at his throat like a ravenous beast.

His eyes darted insensibly here and there, looking around her, past her, seeking some way to escape, seeking anything other than to face the horror, the monster atop him.

She lay back, releasing him at last. His trembling hands went to his throat, fingers dancing in his own soft tissues, and he knew then that he was dead, that the bitch had killed him. He knew then that there was no help for him, no escape, and no way to scream or cry, as his throat was simply no longer there. The sheets saturated around him, blossoming crimson with his draining lifeblood.

He whined and gurgled, as the last moments of his life were terrified misery.

A moment later, Jenny stood up from the bed. She was grateful that his petulant little noises had ceased. She took the iron fangs and placed them on the dresser next to her mother’s jewellery. She took a shower, to free her of his filth. She took the fangs downstairs, and left the house, the front door lying open.

In her father’s workshop, she cleaned and polished the fangs.

Then she set them on a stirrup, next to the all the other monsters. She breathed deeply of the metal polish on her hands, and thought of her father. Content, she sat outside in the still gloom of the night, and waited.

BIO: J.S. Apsley is an author based in Glasgow, Scotland who won the Ringwood Publishing short story prize 2024 for his debut fiction submission, "Immersion" and has since placed over fifty short stories in journals and magazines around the world, such as the Brussels Review, Creation, the Colored Lens, Fiction on the Web, Mobius BLVD, Necessary Fiction, Tales of the Unreal and others.

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