How to Make Monsters Read Online Free

stairs
creaked ominously as they climbed to his room, but Emma was beyond being
nervous under such conditions. Prentiss was a shred of the man he’d used to be.
His clothes hung on him like rags, his hair was thinning at the scalp, and his
skin had taken on a sickly yellow sheen. He looked ill, and Emma knew that if
things got out of hand she could easily send him to the floor with a
well-placed right-hook.
    “I thought you might be…better,” she
said, following him into his room, the interior of which proved her prognosis
to be utterly without foundation.
    Prentiss sat on the bed, clearing a
space with his hand. Papers scattered to the floor, but he made no move to pick
them up. Emma could see they were covered in scrawled notes, unintelligible
hand-written theories that still had a grip on his mind.
    “Thank you for coming,” he said,
smiling nervously. As he was now, Emma had great difficulty understanding
exactly what it was about him that had attracted her in the first place. He was
a shell, a self-abused puppet flopping on severed strings.
    Suddenly she became aware of the
smell: a damp, flat odour that was difficult to place. Then, when she saw the
state of what parts of the walls and ceiling remained visible, she realised
what it was. Wet plaster. Opened plastic pots of Polyfilla repair paste and
crack sealant sat on the windowsill, battered cutlery sticking up out of the
white doughy mass within.
    Prentiss had been filling cracks.
The stuff hung in abstract stalactites from the ceiling, in frozen drips down
the walls. Any crack – however superficial – had been stuffed and inexpertly
covered with the malleable material.
    If it were not for his debauched and
denuded appearance, Emma would have fled. But even now, in this vastly reduced
state, he still retained a magnetic pull on her emotions. She gravitated
towards him, even though the stench of urine and halitosis that rose from him
in a cloud made her want to back away. He cut a pathetic figure in his stained
T Shirt and ripped black jeans; his torso flashed white and spare under the
baggy clothing. Emma had never seen him so thin. He looked positively malnourished.
    “Why did you ask me here?” She
thought a direct approach might at least yield one or two vaguely coherent
answers.
    Prentiss stood up from the mattress,
a hand going up under his shirt to scratch a dry sore on his concave belly.
Emma drew in a breath; as he turned, she could clearly define his ribs and the
vicious ripple of spine through the scant covering of skin and atrophied
muscle. Prentiss, she realised, was visibly wasting away.
    “One of my housemates knows your
sister – he drinks in the pub where she sometimes does shifts behind the bar. I
knew you were coming, Emma…I’m sorry. I needed to talk to someone, and you were
the only one who ever believed me. The only one who listened.”
    “I never believed you.” The truth
was her only recourse now; Prentiss had been fooling himself for too long and
she no longer wanted to be complicit in the deception. “All I ever did was
humour you. And when you didn’t get the message, I left.”
    His smile was grim, like a widening
crack that slowly crawled over the lower part of his waxy face. Emma had the
insane urge to plug it with sealant from the tubs lined up on the floor by the
end of the bed.
    “I see,” he said, sitting back down
and rubbing the side of his head with an open palm, wincing as something – some
undefined pain – bothered him. “I understand.”
    “You need help, Prent. You’ve needed
it for a long time.”
    “Nobody can help me.” His face
softened, becoming both more and less than the sharp angles of his bone
structure. It was as if a form more solid than his features could hint at was
trying to push through from inside his skull. “I’ve spent all these years
looking for them, examining the gaps, and now that they’re finally here no one
believes me.
    “They’re coming, Emma. Coming
through the