Suburban Monsters by Christopher Hawkins

Author:Christopher Hawkins [Hawkins, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Coronis Publishing
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

They watched all the new episodes together now, Sophie’s feet in Carol’s lap, the two of them huddled on the couch under a blanket. Sophie adjusted to the loss of her tablet after a few days, and no longer asked for her mother to help find it. Even so, Carol sometimes heard her searching the drawers in the kitchen in the late afternoons when she was trying to sleep. Sophie probably suspected that her mother had hidden it away, but she hadn’t said so.

“Mommy,” Sophie said in her sweetest, most hopeful voice, “can we please get more kays?”

She had waited until the commercial in order to have her mother’s full attention. Carol set her pen and her spiral notebook aside to brush the curls away from Sophie’s hopeful brown eyes. “No. I’m sorry, sweetie, but we can’t.”

Sophie’s lip trembled, but she bit down on it and turned back to the TV. By now she knew better than to argue the point. She also knew that she would find a way to ask it again when the moment seemed right, just as she had at least a dozen times before. Carol had learned quickly what “more kays” meant. There was no way to avoid knowing about it, because the message was the same in every episode.

“Tell your parents to let you watch us in 4K on a UHD TV!” Listabell would translate for Mister Mudgett while the fuzzy tyrant leaned in close over her shoulder. “The Toyman’s coming soon, and you’ll need to see all the colors to find the Numblycrumbs before he gets here!”

Carol had assumed at first that it was just a commercial, even though they never mentioned any brand names. Of course, her regular sources on the internet insisted that the show was different when you watched it on a high-resolution monitor like a 4K television. A cadre of convincing die-hards pointed out intricate patterns in the show’s striped set pieces, and how, if the light hit them just right, those same patterns, like strange hieroglyphs, could be seen in the costumes themselves. They posted clips and screenshots that seemed to show odd outlines in the shapes of people, lurking at the edge of the frame. Carol had gone so far as to buy a new high-resolution laptop, plundering the emergency fund almost all the way down to nothing, just so she could see for herself.

And they were right. There were patterns in the backgrounds, on the costumes, everywhere. Straight lines arranged in starburst sigils, angles and whorls like some lost and ancient alphabet. The longer she stared at them, the more she began to think that she could start to understand what they meant. She found clips of Gib’s conversion and watched them over and over. When she looked hard enough, she was sure she could see something standing behind him, its hands closing around his throat.

Sophie giggled as Mister Mudgett kicked Narly and sent him sprawling to the studio floor. At least, it had the appearance of a kick, as she could see no feet beneath the hat-to-floor tangle of yarn.

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