The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 Read online

  Hal felt safe for a while. He began to forget about the monkey again, or to believe it had only been a bad dream. But when he came home from school on the afternoon his mother died, it was back on his shelf, cymbals poised, grinning down at him.

  He approached it slowly, as if from outside himself—as if his own body had been turned into a wind-up toy at the sight of the monkey. He saw his hand reach out and take it down. He felt the nappy fur crinkle under his hand, but the feeling was muffled; mere pressure, as if someone had shot him full of Novocaine. He could hear his breathing, quick and dry, like the rattle of wind through straw.

  He turned it over and grasped the key and years later he would think that his drugged fascination was like that of a man who puts a six-shooter with one loaded chamber against a closed and jittering eyelid and pulls the trigger.

  No don’t—let it alone throw it away don’t touch it—

  He turned the key and in the silence he heard a perfect tiny series of winding-up clicks. When he let the key go, the monkey began to clap its cymbals together and he could feel its body jerking, bend-and-jerk, bend-and-jerk, as if it were alive, it was alive, writhing in his hand like some loathsome pygmy, and the vibration he felt through its balding brown fur was not that of turning cogs but the beating of its black and cindered heart.

  With a groan, Hal dropped the monkey and backed away, fingernails digging into the flesh under his eyes, palms pressed to his mouth. He stumbled over something and nearly lost his balance (then he would have been right down on the floor with it, his bulging blue eyes looking into its glassy hazel ones). He scrambled toward the door, backed through it, slammed it, and leaned against it. Suddenly he bolted for the bathroom and vomited.

  It was Mrs. Stukey from the helicopter plant who brought the news and stayed with them those first two endless nights, until Aunt Ida got down from Maine. Their mother had died of a brain embolism in the middle of the afternoon. She had been standing at the water cooler with a cup of water in one hand and had crumpled as if shot, still holding the paper cup in one hand. With the other she had clawed at the water cooler and had pulled the great glass bottle of Poland water down with her. It had shattered . . . but the plant doctor, who came on the run, said later that he believed Mrs. Shelburn was dead before the water had soaked through her dress and her underclothes to wet her skin. The boys were never told any of this, but Hal knew anyway. He dreamed it again and again on the long nights following his mother’s death. You still have trouble gettin to sleep, little brother? Bill had asked him, and Hal supposed Bill thought all the thrashing and bad dreams had to do with their mother dying so suddenly, and that was right . . . but only partly right. There was the guilt: the certain, deadly knowledge that he had killed his mother by winding the monkey up on that sunny after-school afternoon.

  When Hal finally fell asleep, his sleep must have been deep. When he awoke, it was nearly noon. Petey was sitting cross-legged in a chair across the room, methodically eating an orange section by section and watching a game show on TV.

  Hal swung his legs out of bed, feeling as if someone had punched him down into sleep . . . and then punched him back out of it. His head throbbed. “Where’s your mom, Petey?”

  Petey glanced around. “She and Dennis went shopping. I said I’d stay with you. Do you always talk in your sleep, Dad?”

  Hal looked at his son cautiously. “No, I don’t think so. What did I say?”

  “It was all muttering, I couldn’t make it out. It scared me, a little.”

  “Well, here I am in my right mind again,” Hal said, and managed a small grin. Petey grinned back, and Hal felt simple love for the boy again, an emotion that was bright and strong and uncomplicated. He wondered why he had always been able to feel so good about Petey, to feel he understood Petey and could help him, and why Dennis seemed a window too dark to look through, a mystery in his ways and habits, the sort of boy he could not understand because he had never been that sort of boy. It was too easy to say that the move from California had changed Dennis, or that—

  His thoughts froze. The monkey. The monkey was sitting on the windowsill, cymbals poised. Hal felt his heart stop dead in his chest and then suddenly begin to gallop. His vision wavered, and his throbbing head began to ache ferociously.

  It had escaped from the suitcase and now stood on the windowsill, grinning at him. Thought you got rid of me, didn’t you? But you’ve thought that before, haven’t you?

  Yes, he thought sickly. Yes, I have.

  “Pete, did you take that monkey out of my suitcase?” he asked, knowing the answer already. He had locked the suitcase and had put the key in his overcoat pocket

  Petey glanced at the monkey, and something—Hal thought it was unease—passed over his face. “No,” he said. “Mom put it there.”

  “Mom did?”

  “Yeah. She took it from you. She laughed.”

  “Took it from me? What are you talking about?”

  “You had it in bed with you. I was brushing my teeth, but Dennis saw. He laughed, too. He said you looked like a baby with a teddy bear.”

  Hal looked at the monkey. His mouth was too dry to swallow. He’d had it in bed with him? In bed? That loathsome fur against his cheek, maybe against his mouth, those glass eyes staring into his sleeping face, those grinning teeth near his neck? Dear God.

  He turned abruptly and went to the closet. The Samsonite was there, still locked. The key was still in his overcoat pocket.

  Behind him, the TV snapped off. He came out of the closet slowly. Peter was looking at him soberly. “Daddy, I don’t like that monkey,” he said, his voice almost too low to hear.

  “Nor do I,” Hal said.

  Petey looked at him closely, to see if he was joking, and saw that he was not. He came to his father and hugged him tight. Hal could feel him trembling.

  Petey spoke into his ear, then, very rapidly, as if afraid he might not have courage enough to say it again . . . or that the monkey might overhear.

  “It’s like it looks at you. Like it looks at you no matter where you are in the room. And if you go into the other room, it’s like it’s looking through the wall at you. I kept feeling like it . . . like it wanted me for something.”

  Petey shuddered: Hal held him tight.

  “Like it wanted you to wind it up,” Hal said.

  Pete nodded violently. “It isn’t really broken, is it, Dad?”

  “Sometimes it is,” Hal said, looking over his son’s shoulder at the monkey. “But sometimes it still works.”

  “I kept wanting to go over there and wind it up. It was so quiet, and I thought, I can’t, it’ll wake up Daddy, but I still wanted to, and I went over and I . . . I touched it and I hate the way it feels . . . but I liked it, too . . . and it was like it was saying, Wind me up, Petey, we’ll play, your father isn’t going to wake up, he’s never going to wake up at all, wind me up, wind me up . . .”

  The boy suddenly burst into tears.

  “It’s bad, I know it is. There’s something wrong with it. Can’t we throw it out, Daddy? Please?”

  The monkey grinned its endless grin at Hal. He could feel Petey’s tears between them. Late morning sun glinted off the monkey’s brass cymbals—the light reflected upward and put sunstreaks on the motel’s plain white stucco ceiling.

  “What time did your mother think she and Dennis would be back, Petey?”

  “Around one.” He swiped at his red eyes with his shirtsleeve, looking embarrassed at his tears. But he wouldn’t look at the monkey. “I turned on the TV,” he whispered. “And I turned it up loud.”

  “That was all right, Petey.”

  “I had a crazy idea,” Petey said. “I had this idea that if I wound that monkey up, you . . . you would have just died there in bed. In your sleep. Wasn’t that a crazy idea, Daddy?” His voice had dropped again, and it trembled helplessly.

  How would it have happened? Hal wondered. Heart attack? An embolism, like my mother? What? It doesn’t really matter, does it
?

  And on the heels of that, another, colder thought: Get rid of it, he says. Throw it out. But can it be gotten rid of? Ever?

  The monkey grinned mockingly at him, its cymbals held apart. Did it suddenly come to life on the night Aunt Ida died? he wondered suddenly. Was that the last sound she heard, the muffled jang-jang-jang of the monkey beating its cymbals together up in the black attic while the wind whistled along the drainpipe?

  “Maybe not so crazy,” Hal said slowly to his son. “Go get your flight bag, Petey.”

  Petey looked at him uncertainly. “What are we going to do?”

  Maybe it can be got rid of. Maybe permanently, maybe just for a while . . . a long while or a short while. Maybe it’s just going to come back and come back and that’s what all this is about . . . but maybe I—we—can say good-bye to it for a long time. It took twenty years to come back this time. It took twenty years to get out of the well . . .

  “We’re going to go for a ride,” Hal said. He felt fairly calm, but somehow too heavy inside his skin. Even his eyeballs seemed to have gained weight “But first I want you to take your flight bag out there by the edge of the parking lot and find three or four good-sized rocks. Put them inside the bag and bring it back to me. Got it?”

  Understanding flickered in Petey’s eyes. “All right, Daddy.”

  Hal glanced at his watch. It was nearly 12:15. “Hurry. I want to be gone before your mother gets back.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Uncle Will’s and Aunt Ida’s,” Hal said. “To the home place.”

  Hal went into the bathroom, looked behind the toilet, and got the bowl brush leaning there. He took it back to the window and stood there with it in his hand like a cut-rate magic wand. He looked out at Petey in his melton shirt-jacket, crossing the parking lot with his flight bag, DELTA showing clearly in white letters against a blue field. A fly bumbled in an upper corner of the window, slow and stupid with the end of the warm season. Hal knew how it felt.

  He watched Petey hunt up three good-sized rocks and then start back across the parking lot. A car came around the corner of the motel, a car that was moving too fast, much too fast, and without thinking, reaching with the kind of reflex a good short-stop shows going to his right, his hand flashed down, as if in a karate chop . . . and stopped.

  The cymbals closed soundlessly on his intervening hand, and he felt something in the air. Something like rage.

  The car’s brakes screamed. Petey flinched back. The driver motioned to him impatiently, as if what had almost happened was Petey’s fault, and Petey ran across the parking lot with his collar flapping and into the motel’s rear entrance.

  Sweat was running down Hal’s chest; he felt it on his forehead like a drizzle of oily rain. The cymbals pressed coldly against his hand, numbing it

  Go on, he thought grimly. Go on, I can wait all day. Until hell freezes over, if that’s what it takes.

  The cymbals drew apart and came to rest. Hal heard one faint click! from inside the monkey. He withdrew his hand and looked at it. On both the back and the palm there were grayish semicircles printed into the skin, as if he had been frostbitten.

  The fly bumbled and buzzed, trying to find the cold October sunshine that seemed so close.

  Pete came bursting in, breathing quickly, cheeks rosy. “I got three good ones, Dad, I—” He broke off. “Are you all right, Daddy?”

  “Fine,” Hal said. “Bring the bag over.”

  Hal hooked the table by the sofa over to the window with his foot, so it stood below the sill, and put the flight bag on it. He spread its mouth open like lips. He could see the stones Petey had collected glimmering inside. He used the toilet-bowl brush to hook the monkey forward. It teetered for a moment and then fell into the bag. There was a faint jing! as one of its cymbals struck one of the rocks.

  “Dad? Daddy?” Petey sounded frightened. Hal looked around at him. Something was different; something had changed. What was it?

  Then he saw the direction of Petey’s gaze and he knew. The buzzing of the fly had stopped. It lay dead on the windowsill.

  “Did the monkey do that?” Petey whispered.

  “Come on,” Hal said, zipping the bag shut. “I’ll tell you while we ride out to the home place.”

  “How can we go? Mom and Dennis took the car.”

  “I’ll get us there,” Hal said, and ruffled Petey’s hair.

  He showed the desk clerk his driver’s license and a twenty-dollar bill. After taking Hal’s Texas Instruments digital watch as further collateral, the clerk handed Hal the keys to his own car—a battered AMC Gremlin. As they drove east on Route 302 toward Casco, Hal began to talk, haltingly at first, then a little faster. He began by telling Petey that his father had probably brought the monkey home with him from overseas, as a gift for his sons. It wasn’t a particularly unique toy; there was nothing strange or valuable about it. There must have been hundreds of thousands of wind-up monkeys in the world, some made in Hong Kong, some in Taiwan, some in Korea. But somewhere along the line—perhaps even in the dark back closet of the house in Connecticut where the two boys had begun their growing up—something had happened to the monkey. Something bad, evil. It might be, Hal told Petey as he tried to coax the clerk’s Gremlin up past forty (he was very aware of the zipped-up flight bag on the back seat, and Petey kept glancing around at it), that some evil—maybe even most evil—isn’t even sentient and aware of what it is. It might be that most evil is very much like a monkey full of clockwork that you wind up; the clockwork turns, the cymbals begin to beat, the teeth grin, the stupid glass eyes laugh . . . or appear to laugh . . .

  He told Petey about finding the monkey, but he found himself skipping over large chunks of the story, not wanting to terrify his already scared boy any more than he was already. The story thus became disjointed, not really clear, but Petey asked no questions; perhaps he was filling in the blanks for himself, Hal thought, in much the same way that he had dreamed his mother’s death over and over, although he had not been there.

  Uncle Will and Aunt Ida had both been there for the funeral. Afterward, Uncle Will had gone back to Maine—it was harvest-time—and Aunt Ida had stayed on for two weeks with the boys to neaten up her sister’s affairs. But more than that, she spent the time making herself known to the boys, who were so stunned by their mother’s sudden death that they were nearly sleepwalking. When they couldn’t sleep, she was there with warm milk; when Hal woke at three in the morning with nightmares (nightmares in which his mother approached the water cooler without seeing the monkey that floated and bobbed in its cool sapphire depths, grinning and clapping its cymbals, each converging pair of sweeps leaving trails of bubbles behind); she was there when Bill came down with first a fever and then a rash of painful mouth sores and then hives three days after the funeral; she was there. She made herself known to the boys, and before they rode the New England Flyer from Hartford to Portland with her, both Bill and Hal had come to her separately and wept on her lap while she held them and rocked them, and the bonding began.

  The day before they left Connecticut for good to go “down Maine” (as it was called in those days), the rag-man came in his great old rattly truck and picked up the huge pile of useless stuff that Bill and Hal had carried out to the sidewalk from the back closet. When all the junk had been set out by the curb for pick-up, Aunt Ida had asked them to go through the back closet again and pick out any souvenirs or remembrances they wanted specially to keep. We just don’t have room for it all, boys, she told them, and Hal supposed Bill had taken her at her word and had gone through all those fascinating boxes their father had left behind one final time. Hal did not join his older brother. Hal had lost his taste for the back closet. A terrible idea had come to him during those first two weeks of mourning: perhaps his father hadn’t just disappeared, or run away because he had an itchy foot and had discovered marriage wasn’t for him.

  Maybe the monkey had gotten him.

  When he heard the rag-man�
��s truck roaring and farting and backfiring its way down the block, Hal nerved himself, snatched the scruffy wind-up monkey from his shelf where it had been since the day his mother died (he had not dared to touch it until then, not even to throw it back into the closet), and ran downstairs with it. Neither Bill nor Aunt Ida saw him. Sitting on top of a barrel filled with broken souvenirs and mouldy books was the Ralston-Purina carton, filled with similar junk. Hal had slammed the monkey back into the box it had originally come out of, hysterically daring it to begin clapping its cymbals (go on, go on, I dare you, dare you, DARE YOU), but the monkey only waited there, leaning back nonchalantly, as if expecting a bus, grinning its awful, knowing grin.

  Hal stood by, a small boy in old corduroy pants and scuffed Buster Browns, as the rag-man, an Italian gent who wore a crucifix and whistled through the space in his teeth, began loading boxes and barrels into his ancient truck with the high wooden sides. Hal watched as he lifted both the barrel and the Ralston-Purina box balanced atop it; he watched the monkey disappear into the maw of the truck; he watched as the rag-man climbed back into the cab, blew his nose mightily into the palm of his hand, wiped his hand with a huge red handkerchief, and started the truck’s engine with a mighty roar and a stinking blast of oily blue smoke; he watched the truck draw away. And a great weight had dropped away from his heart—he actually felt it go. He had jumped up and down twice, as high as he could jump, his arms spread, palms held out, and if any of the neighbors had seen him, they would have thought it odd almost to the point of blasphemy, perhaps—why is that boy jumping for joy (for that was surely what it was; a jump for joy can hardly be disguised) with his mother not even a month in her grave?