The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 Read online

  The back closet was a storage space that ran the length of the second floor on the left side, extra space that had never been finished off. One got into the back closet by using a small door—a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of door—on Bill’s side of the boys’ bedroom. They both liked to go in there, even though it was chilly in winter and hot enough in summer to wring a bucketful of sweat out of your pores. Long and narrow and somehow snug, the back closet was full of fascinating junk. No matter how much stuff you looked at, you never seemed to be able to look at it all. He and Bill had spent whole Saturday afternoons up here, barely speaking to each other, taking things out of boxes, examining them, turning them over and over so their hands could absorb each unique reality, putting them back. Now Hal wondered if he and Bill hadn’t been trying, as best they could, to somehow make contact with their vanished father.

  He had been a merchant mariner with a navigator’s certificate, and there were stacks of charts back there, some marked with neat circles (and the dimple of the compass’ swing-point in the center of each). There were twenty volumes of something called Barron’s Guide to Navigation. A set of cockeyed binoculars that made your eyes feel hot and funny if you looked through them too long. There were touristy things from a dozen ports of call—rubber hula-hula dolls, a black cardboard bowler with a torn band that said YOU PICK A GIRL AND I’LL PICKADILLY, a glass globe with a tiny Eiffel Tower inside—and there were also envelopes with foreign stamps tucked carefully away inside, and foreign coins; there were rock samples from the Hawaiian island of Maui, a glassy black—heavy and somehow ominous, and funny records in foreign languages.

  That day, with the sleet ticking hypnotically off the roof just above his head, Hal worked his way all the way down to the far end of the back closet, moved a box aside, and saw another box behind it—a Ralston-Purina box. Looking over the top was a pair of glassy hazel eyes. They gave him a start and he skittered back for a moment, heart thumping, as if he had discovered a deadly pygmy. Then he saw its silence, the glaze in those eyes, and realized it was some sort of toy. He moved forward again and lifted it carefully from the box.

  It grinned its ageless, toothy grin in the yellow light, its cymbals held apart.

  Delighted, Hal had turned it this way and that, feeling the crinkle of its nappy fur. Its funny grin pleased him. Yet hadn’t there been something else? An almost instinctive feeling of disgust that had come and gone almost before he was aware of it? Perhaps it was so, but with an old, old memory like this one, you had to be careful not to believe too much. Old memories could lie. But . . . hadn’t he seen that same expression on Petey’s face, in the attic of the home place?

  He had seen the key set into the small of its back, and turned it. It had turned far too easily; there were no winding-up clicks. Broken, then. Broken, but still neat

  He took it out to play with it

  “Whatchoo got, Hal?” Beulah asked, waking from her nap.

  “Nothing,” Hal said. “I found it.”

  He put it up on the shelf on his side of the bedroom. It stood atop his Lassie coloring books, grinning, staring into space, cymbals poised. It was broken, but it grinned nonetheless. That night Hal awakened from some uneasy dream, bladder full, and got up to use the bathroom in the hall. Bill was a breathing lump of covers across the room.

  Hal came back, almost asleep again . . . and suddenly the monkey began to beat its cymbals together in the darkness.

  Jang-jang-jang-jang—

  He came fully awake, as if snapped in the face with a cold, wet towel. His heart gave a staggering leap of surprise, and a tiny, mouselike squeak escaped his throat. He stared at the monkey, eyes wide, lip trembling.

  Jang-jang-jang-jang—

  Its body rocked and humped on the shelf. Its lips spread and closed, spread and closed, hideously gleeful, revealing huge and carnivorous teeth.

  “Stop,” Hal whispered.

  His brother turned over and uttered a loud, single snore. All else was silent . . . except for the monkey. The cymbals clapped and clashed, and surely it would wake his brother, his mother, the world. It would wake the dead.

  Jang-jang-jang-jang—

  Hal moved toward it, meaning to stop it somehow, perhaps put his hand between its cymbals until it ran down (but it was broken, wasn’t it?), and then it stopped on its own. The cymbals came together one last time—Jang!—and then spread slowly apart to their original position. The brass glimmered in the shadows. The monkey’s dirty yellowish teeth grinned their improbable grin.

  The house was silent again. His mother turned over in her bed and echoed Bill’s single snore. Hal got back into his bed and pulled the covers up, his heart still beating fast, and he thought: I’ll put it back in the closet again tomorrow. I don’t want it.

  But the next morning he forgot all about putting the monkey back because his mother didn’t go to work. Beulah was dead. Their mother wouldn’t tell them exactly what happened. “It was an accident, just a terrible accident” was all she would say. But that afternoon Bill bought a newspaper on his way home from school and smuggled page four up to their room under his shirt (TWO KILLED IN APARTMENT SHOOT-OUT, the headline read) and read the article haltingly to Hal, following along with his finger, while their mother cooked supper in the kitchen. Beulah McCaffery, 19, and Sally Tremont, 20, had been shot by Miss McCaffery’s boyfriend, Leonard White, 25, following an argument over who was to go out and pick up an order of Chinese food. Miss Tremont had expired at Hartford Receiving; Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene.

  It was like Beulah just disappeared into one of her own detective magazines, Hal Shelburn thought, and felt a cold chill race up his spine and then circle his heart. And then he realized the shootings had occurred about the same time the monkey—

  “Hal?” It was Terry’s voice, sleepy. “Coming to bed?”

  He spat toothpaste into the sink and rinsed his mouth. “Yes,” he said.

  He had put the monkey in his suitcase earlier, and locked it up. They were flying back to Texas in two or three days. But before they went, he would get rid of the damned thing for good.

  Somehow.

  “You were pretty rough on Dennis this afternoon,” Terry said in the dark.

  “Dennis has needed somebody to start being rough on him for quite a while now, I think. He’s been drifting. I just don’t want him to start falling.”

  “Psychologically, beating the boy isn’t a very productive—”

  “I didn’t beat him, Terry—for Christ’s sake!”

  “—way to assert parental authority—”

  “Oh, don’t give me any of that encounter-group shit,” Hal said angrily.

  “I can see you don’t want to discuss this.” Her voice was cold.

  “I told him to get the dope out of the house, too.”

  “You did?” Now she sounded apprehensive. “How did he take it? What did he say?”

  “Come on, Terry! What could he say? ‘You’re fired’?”

  “Hal, what’s the matter with you? You’re not like this—what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said, thinking of the monkey locked away in his Samsonite. Would he hear it if it began to clap its cymbals? Yes, he surely would. Muffled, but audible. Clapping doom for someone, as it had for Beulah, Johnny McCabe, Uncle Will’s dog Daisy. Jang-jang-jang, is it you, Hal? “I’ve just been under a strain.”

  “I hope that’s all it is. Because I don’t like you this way.”

  “No?” And the words escaped before he could stop them; he didn’t even want to stop them. “So pop a few Valium and everything will look okay again, right?”

  He heard her draw breath in and let it out shakily. She began to cry then. He could have comforted her (maybe), but there seemed to be no comfort in him. There was too much terror. It would be better when the monkey was gone again, gone for good. Please God, gone for good.

  He lay wakeful until very late, until morning began to gray the air outside. But he thought he kne
w what to do.

  Bill had found the monkey the second time.

  That was about a year and a half after Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene. It was summer. Hal had just finished kindergarten.

  He came in from playing with Stevie Arlingen and his mother called, “Wash your hands, Hal, you’re filthy like a pig.” She was on the porch, drinking an iced tea and reading a book. It was her vacation; she had two weeks.

  Hal gave his hands a token pass under cold water and printed dirt on the hand towel. “Where’s Bill?”

  “Upstairs. You tell him to clean his side of the room. It’s a mess.”

  Hal, who enjoyed being the messenger of unpleasant news in such matters, rushed up. Bill was sitting on the floor. The small down-the-rabbit-hole door leading to the back closet was ajar. He had the monkey in his hands.

  “That don’t work,” Hal said immediately. “It’s busted.”

  He was apprehensive, although he barely remembered coming back from the bathroom that night, and the monkey suddenly beginning to clap its cymbals. A week or so after that, he had had a bad dream about the monkey and Beulah—he couldn’t remember exactly what—and had awakened screaming, thinking for a moment that the soft weight on his chest was the monkey, that he would open his eyes and see it grinning down at him. But of course the soft weight had only been his pillow, clutched with panicky tightness. His mother came in to soothe him with a drink of water and two chalky-orange baby aspirins, those Valium for childhood’s troubled times. She thought it was the fact of Beulah’s death that had caused the nightmare. So it was, but not in the way she thought.

  He barely remembered any of this now, but the monkey still scared him, particularly its cymbals. And its teeth.

  “I know that,” Bill said, and tossed the monkey aside. “It’s stupid.” It landed on Bill’s bed, staring up at the ceiling, cymbals poised. Hal did not like to see it there. “You want to go down to Teddy’s and get Popsicles?”

  “I spent my allowance already,” Hal said. “Besides, Mom says you got to clean up your side of the room.”

  “I can do that later,” Bill said. “And I’ll loan you a nickel, if you want.” Bill was not above giving Hal an Indian rope burn sometimes, and would occasionally trip him up or punch him for no particular reason, but mostly he was okay.

  “Sure,” Hal said gratefully. “I’ll just put that busted monkey back in the closet first, okay?”

  “Nah,” Bill said, getting up. “Let’s go-go-go.”

  Hal went. Bill’s moods were changeable, and if he paused to put the monkey away, he might lose his Popsicle. They went down to Teddy’s and got them, then down to the Rec where some kids were getting up a baseball game. Hal was too small to play, but he sat far out in foul territory, sucking his root beer Popsicle and chasing what the big kids called “Chinese home runs.” They didn’t get home until almost dark, and their mother whacked Hal for getting the hand towel dirty and whacked Bill for not cleaning up his side of the room, and after supper there was TV, and by the time all of that had happened, Hal had forgotten all about the monkey. It somehow found its way up onto Bill’s shelf, where it stood right next to Bill’s autographed picture of Bill Boyd. And there it stayed for nearly two years.

  By the time Hal was seven, babysitters had become an extravagance, and Mrs. Shelburn’s last word to the two of them each morning was, “Bill, look after your brother.”

  That day, however, Bill had to stay after school for a Safety Patrol Boy meeting and Hal came home alone, stopping at each corner until he could see absolutely no traffic coming in either direction and then skittering across, shoulders hunched, like a doughboy crossing no man’s land. He let himself into the house with the key under the mat and went immediately to the refrigerator for a glass of milk. He got the bottle, and then it slipped through his fingers and crashed to smithereens on the floor, the pieces of glass flying everywhere, as the monkey suddenly began to beat its cymbals together upstairs.

  Jang-jang-jang-jang, on and on.

  He stood there immobile, looking down at the broken glass and the puddle of milk, full of a terror he could not name or understand. It was simply there, seeming to ooze from his pores.

  He turned and rushed upstairs to their room. The monkey stood on Bill’s shelf, seeming to stare at him. He had knocked the autographed picture of Bill Boyd face-down onto Bill’s bed. The monkey rocked and grinned and beat its cymbals together. Hal approached it slowly, not wanting to, not able to stay away. Its cymbals jerked apart and crashed together and jerked apart again. As he got closer, he could hear the clockwork running in the monkey’s guts.

  Abruptly, uttering a cry of revulsion and terror, he swatted it from the shelf as one might swat a large, loathsome bug. It struck Bill’s pillow and then fell on the floor, cymbals still beating together, jang-jang-jang, lips flexing and closing as it lay there on its back in a patch of late April sunshine.

  Then, suddenly, he remembered Beulah. The monkey had clapped its cymbals that night, too.

  Hal kicked it with one Buster Brown shoe, kicked it as hard as he could, and this time the cry that escaped him was one of fury. The clockwork monkey skittered across the floor, bounced off the wall, and lay still. Hal stood staring at it, fists bunched, heart pounding. It grinned saucily back at him, the sun a burning pinpoint in one glass eye. Kick me all you want, it seemed to tell him. I’m nothing but cogs and clockwork and a worm-gear or two, kick me all you feel like, I’m not real, just a funny clockwork monkey is all I am, and who’s dead? There’s been an explosion at the helicopter plant! What’s that rising up into the sky like a big bloody bowling ball with eyes where the finger-holes should be? Is it your mother’s head, Hal? Down at Brook Street Corner! The car was going too fast! The driver was drunk! There’s one Patrol Boy less! Could you hear the crunching sound when the wheels ran over Bill’s skull and his brains squirted out of his ears? Yes? No? Maybe? Don’t ask me, I don’t know, I can’t know, all I know how to do is beat these cymbals together jang-jang-jang, and who’s dead, Hal? Your mother? Your brother? Or is it you, Hal? Is it you?

  He rushed at it again, meaning to stomp on it, smash its loathsome body, jump on it until cogs and gears flew and its horrible glass eyes rolled across the floor. But just as he reached it, its cymbals came together once more, very softly . . . (jang) . . . as a spring somewhere inside expanded one final, minute notch . . . and a sliver of ice seemed to whisper its way through the walls of his heart, impaling it, stilling its fury and leaving him sick with terror again. The monkey almost seemed to know—how gleeful its grin seemed!

  He picked it up, tweezing one of its arms between the thumb and first finger of his right hand, mouth drawn down in a bow of loathing, as if it were a corpse he held. Its mangy fake fur seemed hot and fevered against his skin. He fumbled open the tiny door that led to the back closet and turned on the bulb. The monkey grinned at him as he crawled down the length of the storage area between boxes piled on top of boxes, past the set of navigation books and the photograph albums with their fume of old chemicals and the souvenirs and the old clothes, and Hal thought: If it begins to clap its cymbals together now and move in my hand, I’ll scream, and if I scream, it’ll do more than grin, it’ll start to laugh, to laugh at me, and then I’ll go crazy and they’ll find me in here, drooling and laughing, crazy, I’ll be crazy, oh please dear God, please dear Jesus, don’t let me go crazy—

  He reached the far end and clawed two boxes aside, spilling one of them, and jammed the monkey back into the Ralston-Purina box in the farthest corner. And it leaned in there, comfortably, as if home at last, cymbals poised, grinning its simian grin, as if the joke were still on Hal. Hal crawled backward, sweating, hot and cold, all fire and ice, waiting for the cymbals to begin, and when they began, the monkey would leap from its box and scurry beetlelike toward him, clockwork whirring, cymbals clashing madly, and—

  —and none of that happened. He turned off the light and slammed the small down-the-rab
bit-hole door and leaned on it, panting. At last he began to feel a little better. He went downstairs on rubbery legs, got an empty bag, and began carefully to pick up the jagged shards and splinters of the broken milk bottle, wondering if he was going to cut himself and bleed to death, if that was what the clapping cymbals had meant. But that didn’t happen, either. He got a towel and wiped up the milk and then sat down to see if his mother and brother would come home.

  His mother came first, asking, “Where’s Bill?”

  In a low, colorless voice, now sure that Bill must be dead, Hal started to explain about the Patrol Boy meeting, knowing that, even given a very long meeting, Bill should have been home half an hour ago.

  His mother looked at him curiously, started to ask what was wrong, and then the door opened and Bill came in—only it was not Bill at all, not really. This was a ghost-Bill, pale and silent

  “What’s wrong?” Mrs. Shelburn exclaimed. “Bill, what’s wrong?”

  Bill began to cry and they got the story through his tears. There had been a car, he said. He and his friend Charlie Silverman were walking home together after the meeting and the car came around Brook Street corner too fast and Charlie had frozen, Bill had tugged Charlie’s hand once but had lost his grip and the car—

  Bill began to bray out loud, hysterical sobs, and his mother hugged him to her, rocking him, and Hal looked out on the porch and saw two policemen standing there. The squad car in which they had conveyed Bill home was at the curb. Then he began to cry himself . . . but his tears were tears of relief.

  It was Bill’s turn to have nightmares now—dreams in which Charlie Silverman died over and over again, knocked out of his Red Ryder cowboy boots, and flipped onto the hood of the old Hudson Hornet the drunk had been driving. Charlie Silverman’s head and the Hudson’s windshield had met with an explosive noise, and both had shattered. The drunk driver, who owned a candy store in Milford, suffered a heart attack shortly after being taken into custody (perhaps it was the sight of Charlie Silverman’s brains drying on his pants), and his lawyer was quite successful at the trial with his “this man has been punished enough” theme. The drunk was given sixty days (suspended) and lost his privilege to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Connecticut for five years . . . which was about as long as Bill Shelburn’s nightmares lasted. The monkey was hidden away again in the back closet. Bill never noticed it was gone from his shelf . . . or if he did, he never said.