Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people - usually lodgers and members of their own families - and who were then murdered in turn: by handing, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf-man. “Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I'd read about in my comics. Inside, they look just like they always have. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Then, 'I'm going to tell you something important. And as for grown-ups.' She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Why do you think she's scared of anything? She's a grown-up, isn't she? Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things.' What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?' I said, 'People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.' Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.' Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago.

'Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Some of them are things people are scared of. I said, 'Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?' People are much more complicated than that. “Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside.

The ocean by the end of the lane