The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 Read online

  And he had been losing Dennis. He could feel the kid going, achieving a premature escape velocity, so long, Dennis, bye-bye stranger, it was nice sharing this train with you. Terry said she thought the boy was smoking reefer. She smelled it sometimes. You have to talk to him, Hal. And he agreed, but so far he had not.

  The boys were asleep. Terry was asleep. Hal went into the bathroom and locked the door and sat down on the closed lid of the john and looked at the monkey.

  He hated the way it felt, that soft brown nappy fur, worn bald in spots. He hated its grin—that monkey grin just like a nigger, Uncle Will had said once, but it didn’t grin like a nigger, or like anything human. Its grin was all teeth, and if you wound up the key, the lips would move, the teeth would seem to get bigger, to become vampire teeth, the lips would writhe and the cymbals would bang, stupid monkey, stupid clockwork monkey, stupid, stupid—

  He dropped it. His hands were shaking and he dropped it.

  The key clicked on the bathroom tiles as it struck the floor. The sound seemed very loud in the stillness. It grinned at him with its murky amber eyes, doll’s eyes, filled with idiot glee, its brass cymbals poised as if to strike up a march for some black band from hell, and on the bottom the words MADE IN HONG KONG were stamped.

  “You can’t be here,” he whispered. “I threw you down the well when I was nine.”

  The monkey grinned up at him.

  Hal Shelburn shuddered.

  Outside in the night, a black capful of wind shook the motel.

  Hal’s brother Bill and Bill’s wife Collette met them at Uncle Will’s and Aunt Ida’s the next day. “Did it ever cross your mind that a death in the family is a really lousy way to renew the family connection?” Bill asked him with a bit of a grin. He had been named for Uncle Will. Will and Bill, champions of the rodayo, Uncle Will used to say, and ruffle Bill’s hair. It was one of his sayings . . . like the wind can whistle but it can’t carry a tune. Uncle Will had died six years before, and Aunt Ida had lived on here alone, until a stroke had taken her just the previous week. Very sudden, Bill had said when he called long distance to give Hal the news. As if he could know; as if anyone could know. She had died alone.

  “Yeah,” Hal said. “The thought crossed my mind.”

  They looked at the place together, the home place where they had finished growing up. Their father, a merchant mariner, had simply disappeared as if from the very face of the earth when they were young; Bill claimed to remember him vaguely, but Hal had no memories of him at all. Their mother had died when Bill was ten and Hal eight. They had come to Uncle Will’s and Aunt Ida’s from Hartford, and they had been raised here, and gone to college here. Bill had stayed and now had a healthy law practice in Portland.

  Hal saw that Petey had wandered off toward the blackberry tangles that lay on the eastern side of the house in a mad jumble. “Stay away from there, Petey,” he called.

  Petey looked back, questioning. Hal felt simple love for the boy rush him . . . and he suddenly thought of the monkey again.

  “Why, Dad?”

  “The old well’s in there someplace,” Bill said. “But I’ll be damned if I remember just where. Your dad’s right, Petey—those blackberry tangles are a good place to stay away from. Thorns’ll do a job on you. Right, Hal?”

  “Right,” Hal said automatically. Pete moved away, not looking back, and then started down the embankment toward the small shingle of beach where Dennis was skipping stones over the water. Hal felt something in his chest loosen a little.

  Bill might have forgotten where the old well had been, but late that afternoon Hal went to it unerringly, shouldering his way through the brambles that tore at his old flannel jacket and hunted for his eyes. He reached it and stood there, breathing hard, looking at the rotted, warped boards that covered it. After a moment’s debate, he knelt (his knees fired twin pistol shots) and moved two of the boards aside.

  From the bottom of that wet, rock-lined throat a face stared up at him, wide eyes, grimacing mouth, and a moan escaped him. It was not loud, except in his heart. There it had been very loud.

  It was his own face, reflected up from dark water.

  Not the monkey’s. For a moment he had thought it was the monkey’s.

  He was shaking. Shaking all over.

  I threw it down the well. I threw it down the well, please God don’t let me be crazy, I threw it down the well.

  The well had gone dry the summer Johnny McCabe died, the year after Bill and Hal came to stay at the home place with Uncle Will and Aunt Ida. Uncle Will had borrowed money from the bank to have an artesian well sunk, and the blackberry tangles had grown up around the old dug well. The dry well.

  Except the water had come back. Like the monkey.

  This time the memory would not be denied. Hal sat there helplessly, letting it come, trying to go with it, to ride it like a surfer riding a monster wave that will crush him if he falls off his board, just trying to get through it so it would be gone again.

  He had crept out here with the monkey late that summer, and the blackberries had been out, the smell of them thick and cloying. No one came in here to pick, although Aunt Ida would sometimes stand at the edge of the tangles and pick a cupful of berries into her apron. In here the blackberries had gone past ripe to overripe, some of them were rotting, sweating a thick white fluid like pus, and the crickets sang maddeningly in the high grass underfoot, their endless cry: Reeeeeee—

  The thorns tore at him, brought dots of blood onto his bare arms. He made no effort to avoid their sting. He had been blind with terror—so blind that he had come within inches of stumbling onto the boards that covered the well, perhaps within inches of crashing thirty feet to the well’s muddy bottom. He had pinwheeled his arms for balance, and more thorns had branded his forearms. It was that memory that had caused him to call Petey back sharply.

  That was the day Johnny McCabe had died—his best friend. Johnny had been climbing the rungs up to his tree-house in his back yard. The two of them had spent many hours up there that summer, playing pirate, seeing make-believe galleons out on the lake, unlimbering the cannons, preparing to board. Johnny had been climbing up to the treehouse as he had done a thousand times before, and the rung just below the trap door in the bottom of the treehouse had snapped off in his hands and Johnny had fallen thirty feet to the ground and had broken his neck and it was the monkey’s fault, the monkey, the goddam hateful monkey. When the phone rang, when Aunt Ida’s mouth dropped open and then formed an O of horror as her friend Milly from down the road told her the news, when Aunt Ida said, “Come out on the porch, Hal, I have to tell you some bad news—,” he had thought with sick horror, The monkey! What’s the monkey done now?

  There had been no reflection of his face trapped at the bottom of the well that day, only the stone cobbles going down into the darkness and the smell of wet mud. He had looked at the monkey lying there on the wiry grass that grew between the blackberry tangles, its cymbals poised, its grinning teeth huge between its splayed lips, its fur, rubbed away in balding, mangy patches here and there, its glazed eyes.

  “I hate you,” he had hissed at it. He wrapped his hand around its loathsome body, feeling the nappy fur crinkle. It grinned at him as he held it up in front of his face. “Go on!” he dared it, beginning to cry for the first time that day. He shook it. The poised cymbals trembled minutely. It spoiled everything good. Everything. “Go on, clap them! Clap them!”

  The monkey only grinned.

  “Go on and clap them!” His voice rose hysterically. “Fraidy-cat, fraidy-cat, go on and clap them! I dare you!”

  Its brownish-yellow eyes. Its huge and gleeful teeth.

  He threw it down the well then, mad with grief and terror. He saw it turn over once on its way down, a simian acrobat doing a trick, and the sun glinted one last time on those cymbals. It struck the bottom with a thud, and that must have jogged its clockwork, for suddenly the cymbals did begin to beat. Their steady, deliberate, and tinny banging ro
se to his ears, echoing and fey in the stone throat of the dead well: jang-jang-jang-jang—

  Hal clapped his hands over his mouth, and for a moment he could see it down there, perhaps only in the eye of imagination . . . lying there in the mud, eyes glaring up at the small circle of his boy’s face peering over the lip of the well (as if marking its shape forever), lips expanding and contracting around those grinning teeth, cymbals clapping, funny wind-up monkey.

  Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead? Jang-jang-jang-jang, is it Johnny McCabe, falling with his eyes wide, doing his own acrobatic somersault as he falls through the bright summer vacation air with the splintered rung still held in his hands to strike the ground with a single bitter snapping sound? Is it Johnny, Hal? Or is it you?

  Moaning, Hal had shoved the boards across the hole, getting splinters in his hands, not caring, not even aware of them until later. And still he could hear it, even through the boards, muffled now and somehow all the worse for that: it was down there in stone-faced dark, clapping its cymbals and jerking its repulsive body, the sounding coming up like the sound of a prematurely buried man scrabbling for a way out.

  Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead this time?

  He fought and battered his way back through the blackberry creepers. Thorns stitched fresh lines of welling blood briskly across his face and burdocks caught in the cuffs of his jeans, and he fell full-length once, his ears still jangling, as if it had followed him. Uncle Will found him later, sitting on an old tire in the garage and sobbing, and he had thought Hal was crying for his dead friend. So he had been; but he had also cried in the aftermath of terror.

  He had thrown the monkey down the well in the afternoon. That evening, as twilight crept in through a shimmering mantle of ground-fog, a car moving too fast for the reduced visibility had run down Aunt Ida’s manx cat in the road and gone right on. There had been guts everywhere, Bill had thrown up, but Hal had only turned his face away, his pale, still face, hearing Aunt Ida’s sobbing (this on top of the news about the McCabe boy had caused a fit of weeping that was almost hysterics, and it was almost two hours before Uncle Will could calm her completely) as if from miles away. In his heart there was a cold and exultant joy. It hadn’t been his turn. It had been Aunt Ida’s manx, not him, not his brother Bill or his Uncle Will (just two champions of the rodayo). And now the monkey was gone, it was down the well, and one scruffy manx cat with ear mites was not too great a price to pay. If the monkey wanted to clap its hellish cymbals now, let it. It could clap and clash them for the crawling bugs and beetles, the dark things that made their home in the well’s stone gullet. It would rot down there in the darkness and its loathsome cogs and wheels and springs would rust in darkness. It would die down there. In the mud and the darkness. Spiders would spin it a shroud.

  But . . . it had come back.

  Slowly, Hal covered the well again, as he had on that day, and in his ears he heard the phantom echo of the monkey’s cymbals: Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead, Hal? Is it Terry? Dennis? Is it Petey, Hal? He’s your favorite, isn’t he? Is it him? Jang-jang-jang—

  “Put that down!”

  Petey flinched and dropped the monkey, and for one nightmare moment Hal thought that would do it, that the jolt would jog its machinery and the cymbals would begin to beat and clash.

  “Daddy, you scared me.”

  “I’m sorry. I just . . . I don’t want you to play with that.”

  The others had gone to see a movie, and he had thought he would beat them back to the motel. But he had stayed at the home place longer than he would have guessed; the old, hateful memories seemed to move in their own eternal time zone.

  Terry was sitting near Dennis, watching “The Beverly Hillbillies.” She watched the old, grainy print with a steady, bemused concentration that spoke of a recent Valium pop. Dennis was reading a rock magazine with the group Styx on the cover. Petey had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet, goofing with the monkey.

  “It doesn’t work anyway,” Petey said. Which explains why Dennis let him have it, Hal thought, and then felt ashamed and angry at himself. He seemed to have no control over the hostility he felt toward Dennis more and more often, but in the aftermath he felt demeaned and tacky . . . helpless.

  “No,” he said. “It’s old. I’m going to throw it away. Give it to me.”

  He held out his hand and Petey, looking troubled, handed it over.

  Dennis said to his mother, “Pop’s turning into a friggin schizophrenic.”

  Hal was across the room even before he knew he was going, the monkey in one hand, grinning as if in approbation. He hauled Dennis out of his chair by the shirt. There was a purring sound as a seam came adrift somewhere. Dennis looked almost comically shocked. His copy of Tiger Beat fell to the floor.

  “Hey!”

  “You come with me,” Hal said grimly, pulling his son toward the door to the connecting room.

  “Hal!” Terry nearly screamed. Petey just goggled.

  Hal pulled Dennis through. He slammed the door and then slammed Dennis against the door. Dennis was starting to look scared. “You’re getting a mouth problem,” Hal said.

  “Let go of me! You tore my shirt, you—”

  Hal slammed the boy against the door again. “Yes,” he said. “A real mouth problem. Did you learn that in school? Or back in the smoking area?”

  Dennis flushed, his face momentarily ugly with guilt. “I wouldn’t be in that shitty school if you didn’t get canned!” he burst out.

  Hal slammed Dennis against the door again. “I didn’t get canned, I got laid off, you know it, and I don’t need any of your shit about it. You have problems? Welcome to the world, Dennis. Just don’t you lay off all your problems on me. You’re eating. Your ass is covered. At eleven, I don’t . . . need any . . . shit from you.” He punctuated each phrase by pulling the boy forward until their noses were almost touching and then slamming him back into the door. It was not hard enough to hurt, but Dennis was scared—his father had not laid a hand on him since they moved to Texas—and now he began to cry with a young boy’s loud, braying, healthy sobs.

  “Go ahead, beat me up!” he yelled at Hal, his face twisted and blotchy. “Beat me up if you want, I know how much you fucking hate me!”

  “I don’t hate you. I love you a lot, Dennis. But I’m your dad and you’re going to show me respect or I’m going to bust you for it.”

  Dennis tried to pull away. Hal pulled the boy to him and hugged him. Dennis fought for a moment and then put his face against Hal’s chest and wept as if exhausted. It was the sort of cry Hal hadn’t heard from either of his children in years. He closed his eyes, realizing that he felt exhausted himself.

  Terry began to hammer on the other side of the door. “Stop it, Hal! Whatever you’re doing to him, stop it!”

  “I’m not killing him,” Hal said. “Go away, Terry.”

  “Don’t you—”

  “It’s all right, Mom,” Dennis said, muffled against Hal’s chest

  He could feel her perplexed silence for a moment, and then she went. Hal looked at his son again.

  “I’m sorry I badmouthed you, Dad,” Dennis said reluctantly.

  “When we get home next week, I’m going to wait two or three days and then I’m going to go through all your drawers, Dennis. If there’s something in them you don’t want me to see, you better get rid of it.”

  That flash of guilt again. Dennis lowered his eyes and wiped away snot with the back of his hand.

  “Can I go now?” He sounded sullen once more.

  “Sure,” Hal said, and let him go. Got to take him camping in the spring, just the two of us. Do some fishing, like Uncle Will used to do with Bill and me. Got to get close to him. Got to try.

  He sat down on the bed in the empty room and looked at the monkey. You’ll never be close to him again, Hal, its grin seemed to say. Never again. Never again.

  Just looking at the monkey made him feel tired. He laid it aside and put a hand over his eyes.
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br />   That night Hal stood in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, and thought: It was in the same box. How could it be in the same box?

  The toothbrush jabbed upward, hurting his gums. He winced.

  He had been four, Bill, six, the first time he saw the monkey. Their missing father had bought a house in Hartford, and it had been theirs, free and clear, before he died or disappeared or whatever it had been. Their mother worked as a secretary at Holmes Aircraft, the helicopter plant out in Westville, and a series of sitters came in to stay with the boys, except by then it was just Hal that the sitters had to mind through the day—Bill was in first grade, big school. None of the babysitters stayed for long. They got pregnant and married their boyfriends or got work at Holmes, or Mrs. Shelburn would discover they had been at the cooking sherry or her bottle of brandy which was kept in the sideboard for special occasions. Most of them were stupid girls who seemed only to want to eat or sleep. None of them wanted to read to Hal as his mother would do.

  The sitter that long winter was a huge, sleek black girl named Beulah. She fawned over Hal when Hal’s mother was around and sometimes pinched him when she wasn’t. Still, Hal had some liking for Beulah, who once in awhile would read him a lurid tale from one of her confession or true-detective magazines (“Death Came for the Voluptuous Redhead,” Beulah would intone ominously in the dozey daytime silence of the living room, and pop another Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup into her mouth while Hal solemnly studied the grainy tabloid pictures and drank his milk from his Wish-Cup). And the liking made what happened worse.

  He found the monkey on a cold, cloudy day in March. Sleet ticked sporadically off the windows, and Beulah was asleep on the couch, a copy of My Story tented open on her admirable bosom.

  So Hal went into the back closet to look at his father’s things.