Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls

I never got to meet Siobhan Dowd. I only know her the way that most of the rest of you will through her superb books. Four electric young adult novels, two published in her lifetime, two after her too-early death. If you havent read them, remedy that oversight immediately.

This would have been her fifth book. She had the characters, a premise, and a beginning. What she didnt have, unfortunately, was time.

When I was asked if I would consider turning her work into a book, I hesitated. What I wouldnt do what I couldnt do was write a novel mimicking her voice. That would have been a disservice to her, to the reader, and most importantly to the story. I dont think good writing can possibly work that way.

But the thing about good ideas is that they grow other ideas. Almost before I could help it, Siobhans ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.

I felt and feel as if Ive been handed a baton, like a particularly fine writer has given me her story and said, Go. Run with it. Make trouble. So thats what I tried to do. Along the way, I had only a single guideline: to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked. No other criteria could really matter.

And now its time to hand the baton on to you. Stories dont end with the writers, however many started the race. Heres what Siobhan and I came up with. So go. Run with it.

Make trouble.

Patrick Ness

London, February 2011

The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.

Conor was awake when it came.

Hed had a nightmare. Well, not a nightmare. The nightmare. The one hed been having a lot lately. The one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming. The one with the hands slipping from his grasp, no matter how hard he tried to hold on. The one that always ended with

Go away, Conor whispered into the darkness of his bedroom, trying to push the nightmare back, not let it follow him into the world of waking. Go away now.

He glanced over at the clock his mum had put on his bedside table. 12:07. Seven minutes past midnight. Which was late for a school night, late for a Sunday, certainly.

Hed told no one about the nightmare. Not his mum, obviously, but no one else either, not his dad in their fortnightly (or so) phone call, definitely not his grandma, and no one at school. Absolutely not.

What happened in the nightmare was something no one else ever needed to know.

Conor blinked groggily at his room, then he frowned. There was something he was missing. He sat up in his bed, waking a bit more. The nightmare was slipping from him, but there was something he couldnt put his finger on, something different, something

He listened, straining against the silence, but all he could hear was the quiet house around him, the occasional tick from the empty downstairs or a rustle of bedding from his mums room next door.

Nothing.

And then something. Something he realized was the thing that had woken him.

Someone was calling his name.

Conor.

He felt a rush of panic, his guts twisting. Had it followed him? Had it somehow stepped out of the nightmare and?

Dont be stupid, he told himself. Youre too old for monsters.

And he was. Hed turned thirteen just last month. Monsters were for babies. Monsters were for bed-wetters. Monsters were for

Conor.

There it was again. Conor swallowed. It had been an unusually warm October, and his window was still open. Maybe the curtains shushing each other in the small breeze could have sounded like

Conor.

All right, it wasnt the wind. It was definitely a voice, but not one he recognized. It wasnt his mothers, that was for sure. It wasnt a womans voice at all, and he wondered for a crazy moment if his dad had somehow made a surprise trip from America and arrived too late to phone and

Conor.

No. Not his dad. This voice had a quality to it, a monstrous quality, wild and untamed.

Then he heard a heavy creak of wood outside, as if something gigantic was stepping across a timber floor.

He didnt want to go and look. But at the same time, a part of him wanted to look more than anything.

Wide awake now, he pushed back the covers, got out of bed, and went over to the window. In the pale half-light of the moon, he could clearly see the church tower up on the small hill behind his house, the one with the train tracks curving beside it, two hard steel lines glowing dully in the night. The moon shone, too, on the graveyard attached to the church, filled with tombstones you could hardly read anymore.

Conor could also see the great yew tree that rose from the center of the graveyard, a tree so ancient it almost seemed to be made of the same stone as the church. He only knew it was a yew because his mother had told him, first when he was little to make sure he didnt eat the berries, which were poisonous, and again this past year, when shed started staring out of their kitchen window with a funny look on her face and saying, Thats a yew tree, you know.

And then he heard his name again.

Conor.

Like it was being whispered in both his ears.

What? Conor said, his heart thumping, suddenly impatient for whatever was going to happen.

A cloud moved in front of the moon, covering the whole landscape in darkness, and a whoosh of wind rushed down the hill and into his room, billowing the curtains. He heard the creaking and cracking of wood again, groaning like a living thing, like the hungry stomach of the world growling for a meal.

Then the cloud passed, and the moon shone again.

On the yew tree.

Which now stood firmly in the middle of his back garden.

And here was the monster.

As Conor watched, the uppermost branches of the tree gathered themselves into a great and terrible face, shimmering into a mouth and nose and even eyes, peering back at him. Other branches twisted around one another, always creaking, always groaning, until they formed two long arms and a second leg to set down beside the main trunk. The rest of the tree gathered itself into a spine and then a torso, the thin, needle-like leaves weaving together to make a green, furry skin that moved and breathed as if there were muscles and lungs underneath.

Already taller than Conors window, the monster grew wider as it brought itself together, filling out to a powerful shape, one that looked somehow strong, somehow mighty. It stared at Conor the whole time, and he could hear the loud, windy breathing from its mouth. It set its giant hands on either side of his window, lowering its head until its huge eyes filled the frame, holding Conor with its glare. Conors house gave a little moan under its weight.