Page 43 of Only a Monster

Joan shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re wrong.’

‘You can’t stop your family from dying,’ Aaron said. ‘You just can’t.’

‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong!’ Joan barely knew what she was saying. She felt as though she were choking. ‘You didn’t even talk to that man downstairs! You could have convinced him!’

‘Can’t you feel I’m telling the truth?’ Aaron said. ‘You must be able to feel it—the resistance of the timeline. It’s all around us.’

Joan couldn’t feel anything. ‘We came here to help them!’ she said. ‘That’s the whole reason we came back!’

‘That’s the reason you came back!’

‘What are you talking about?’ Joan demanded. ‘What are you . . .’ But their conversations were coming back to her. Aaron had never said that he’d help her undo the massacre, she realised slowly. It was Joan who’d talked about saving their families. She stared at him. ‘No.’

‘We had to run,’ Aaron said. ‘If we’d stayed there, we’d have died. Would you have left just to flee?’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she whispered. She couldn’t. ‘We have to undo it. We—we stole so much time.’ More than sixty years of human life between them. ‘We have to undo it together.’

‘Well, we can’t,’ Aaron said, ‘because it doesn’t work like that.’ And the words were cold, but he sounded as upset as Joan felt. He turned and stalked to the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Joan stared out the window onto the monster street below. Rain was still pouring down. The cobblestones were shiny and black. Aaron had to be wrong. He had to be. This couldn’t be how it was—Joan’s family dead, those people in the Pit . . . Joan couldn’t really have shortened their lives.

Through the window, movement caught her eye. Across the street, the post office door was opening. A man stepped out into the rain, carrying a sack of mail. Joan’s breath stopped.

The man hefted the bag, clearly struggling with it in the wet. Then he took a step and vanished, bag and all.

Now, Joan thought. She knelt on the window seat, trying to get a better look. Now. Aaron had been wrong. Those letters would be delivered. And it would be all over now.

Five seconds passed. Ten seconds. Joan was still kneeling on the window seat in her wet clothes. Twenty seconds.

There was something on the ground where the man had been standing. Joan pressed closer to the window, trying to see through the streaming rain. There were two things. Two white envelopes.

You must be able to feel it, Aaron had said. The resistance of the timeline. It’s all around us. Now, in the back of Joan’s mind, the word resistance snagged. With the same sense with which she’d felt the yearning of time travel, she could feel something in the world. Aaron had made it sound like a natural force. A resistance. But Joan’s sense of it was more of a great beast stirring. Something that when pushed would push back.

As rain continued to fall, Joan watched the two envelopes slowly take on water. She watched them discolour and distort with the weight of it. Then she watched them fall apart until they were no more than pulp in the gutter.

On the street, monsters continued to appear and disappear. They ran from the rain in their top hats and hooped skirts, in their nineties grunge and eighties hair.

As Joan watched, Aaron’s expression came back to her. She remembered how he’d looked at her as they’d stood in the rain—with that awful, old, weary expression.

‘Joan!’ Aaron whispered in her ear.

Joan startled awake. It took her a second to get her bearings. She hadn’t even realised she was falling asleep. She was curled up on the window seat. There was a blanket over her now. It was night outside. The only light in the room was the jumping colours of a television.

‘What’s that noise?’ Aaron whispered.

Joan tried to gather her thoughts. She was disoriented and confused. Something was playing on the TV. Music. ‘Totoro?’

‘No. I mean, yes, but—’ Aaron stalked away and pressed a button on the remote. The music continued. Aaron mashed at the remote. ‘Urgh—’ He bent down and wrenched the plug from the back of the television.

The room was suddenly silent and dark.

And then Joan heard it too—a click-click-click of someone picking a lock. In the moonlight, the doorknob bobbled. And then Joan was awake. She was very awake.

She scrambled up, pointing at the wobbling doorknob. Aaron’s eyes widened in understanding.

There was a heavy vase by the door. Joan lifted it, tensed and ready. Aaron picked up a cushion from the sofa and positioned himself on the other side of the door.

What the—? Joan mouthed at him. What was he going to do with a cushion? Smother the intruder?

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