Christmas Trees & Monkeys (3 page)

“
Oh, shit.”

* * *

“
Burn,” Jacob breathed. “Burn.” He saw the vague outline of the coffin in the flames. “Are you screaming?” He almost laughed the words. He rubbed his hands against the front of his jeans. A sudden, shaking release filled every corner of his body. He sighed in ecstasy. A blinding flash of light forced his hand to his eyes. The doors had been opened. Safety valves kicked in, shutting down the oven.

Jacob leaned into the square of light. He shouted, “No! What are you doing?” The old man pulled the burning husk of coffin through the doors with a grappling hook.

* * *

Laraby thought he heard shouts behind him, but knew they had to be from inside. The top of the coffin was engulfed completely in flame. The layers of polish had melted, leaving the wood along the sides to blacken and pop. Once the majority of the box was free of the doors the old man grabbed the burning lid. The pain in his hands was instant and immense. He let go and grabbed once more for the grappling hook. His palms sizzled against its handle. He allowed himself a short high-pitched scream. Then he noticed the coffin’s latch was open. Why the hell hadn’t he seen that before? Above him, fire and smoke licked at the cement roof. The sprinklers did not react, but the fire alarms screamed in panic.

“
Come on, oh God this is insane.” The coffin just kept burning. Heart smashing in his chest, he maneuvered the hook under the edge of the lid and pulled. The melted hinges fought him every inch. Laraby howled with the effort and the constant pain. The burning lid raised completely.

What he saw in the coffin made him stop. Benchman’s body lay sprawled atop a young boy. It wasn’t Kinsley. The fire spread to the coffin’s lining. Cursing, he flung the dead man away. An arm landed in the fire; the dark jacket’s sleeve glowed with red burning spots then ignited.

The kid was heavy, dead weight. Laraby worked his arms under the shoulders and pulled. The side of the coffin was as hot as coals, searing his knees. The boy’s legs caught on the lower lid. Laraby slipped and fell onto the floor. He clambered back to his feet, reached into the burning coffin and gripped the boy by the shirt. Beside him, the corpse itself was lighting up. Chemicals pumped through veins to replace blood now burned like gasoline. Laraby pulled the boy from the coffin head first. Together they crashed to the floor.

Black smoke filled the room halfway to the floor. Laraby leaned closer to the boy, but heard no breathing. His fingers were too blistered to look for a pulse. He opened Patrick’s mouth and exhaled into it. Once, it seemed, was enough. The boy gasped in the burning air, then coughed with such violence his body twisted on the floor like an epileptic’s.

The old man crawled to the door and opened it, hand disappearing into the smoke when he reached for the knob. He pulled the twisting body of the boy out of the room.

* * *

Smoke drifted under the window; black clouds obscured everything beyond. Jacob wobbled side to side, searching for a break through which to see what was happening. Useless. He found the metal bar; held his breath and propped open the window. Smoke poured into his face. He flattened himself against the ground, coughing once out of reflex. As soon as the cloud beyond the window was spent enough, he raised his head and looked inside.

The wood of the coffin was a blackened, burning log. Within, the crackling bones of Mister Benchman separated from each other as the final licks of flame disintegrated tendons and muscle. Freed of restraint, the skull turned sideways. Jacob stared into two pillars of smoke drifting from the eye sockets. He gripped the tall, neglected grass below the window in an attempt to control his fear. “Where is he?” he whispered. “What did you do with him?” As if to answer, the skeleton’s jaw dropped open in a flaming mockery of laughter.

Jacob scurried backwards without taking his eyes from the window. “Come on, Kenny. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The other boy did not respond. He lay face down, the rock still resting against his head.

“
Kenny?”

A few minutes later, the first fire truck screamed into the yard. In the hellish red glow of the emergency lights, Jacob knelt beside his friend and howled into the night.

— — — — —

About “AM”

There are generally two types of stories I tend to write.
Slam! Bang! Aaaaaahhh!
Meat and Potatoes kind of horror, like the previous story. Then there are the ones I sometimes write at night before dropping off to sleep. I do this rather than reading when I feel the muse tugging at me. I’ll boot up the laptop and sit in bed, type away, then eventually fall asleep mid-sentence. I wake up in the wee hours of the morning, save the file, and turn off the PC. The next night, it usually takes a little while to figure out what the last couple of sentences say. You see, I usually fall asleep first,
then
stop typing a few minutes later (sleep-writing, if you will). So the last couple of lines might read:

The cat bowed its head in an angry fghen sjt . Bentille laughed attt the little shit wha ths she ejejejeje,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Many a brilliant writing was lost in the inability of my brain to unscramble lose last lines.

The other off-shoot of these stories is that their atmosphere tends to be more moody and introspective. I become bolder in my approach, experimenting with stuff that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. In the case of Benedictine in the next story, even his name was a bizarre step. What the hell kind of name is
Benedictine
? It’s not a name, but it’s perfect for this story... I think. My tired brain probably picked it because of the monk-connection (i.e. Benedictine Monks). Reverence. Quiet. The story itself came to being on the ride home one night after working late. I was bored of the FM stations, didn’t have my usual book-on-tape, so I tried some talk shows on AM. Driving along a deserted Interstate 190, I noticed how so many faraway stations served as background noise, hissing in and out depending on where your car happened to be passing at the moment.

Hmm
, thought I,
maybe these aren’t other radio stations, maybe they’re
... well, read on....

Oh, I should point out, the bits in the story where I portray radio static was
not
me falling asleep while writing, honest.

— — — — —

AM

Benedictine barely breathed. Just enough to keep himself alive. Otherwise the tenuous line, the milky thread connecting him to the old couple might forever blow away, a breath severing a spider’s thread. His fingers did not touch the dial. They merely offered the suggestion of touch, of turning barely a whisper to the left. It shouldn’t be able to go this far. There was nothing here to get.

Or so everyone thought. Benedictine knew better. Not to breathe. Just enough. Not to touch.

“
...spell it ou… zzzzhssss… me.” Static washed over the words, an undertow perpetually pulling the voices back into its depths. “Maybe I’m too sen… zzzzsssshhh… sten properly.”

Listen. Savor the clarity for as long as it remains.

Her: “You just never cease to dig your cla… ssskkksszzzindss… my skull. Are you ever happy?”

Him: “Must be th…sssss. Senile me. Fine. Tell me. What the hell did I do this time?”

Oh, God. So clear now. Benedictine looked up, but only with his eyes. A turn of the head might sever the signal. A.M. radio could be a hypersensitive harpy when she chose to. More so this far back on the dial, and such an eternal distance between Benedictine and the bickering couple.

The night sky was clear, crystallized into a billion stars. Odd, since A.M. broadcasts usually traveled better with clouds to reflect from. His eyes returned to the portable radio. He supposed weather didn’t really play a factor in this case.

The old woman finally replied. “It’s what you didn’t do. It’s ALWAYS what you didn’t s… sssszzzzthh....”

Not so soon! Static. Passing under some celestial overpass? So inconsistent, the signal. He waited.

Benedictine was seventeen years old. He liked this old couple. They argued. Never seemed to give it a rest. This was the third time he’d tuned them in with any semblance of clarity. The first two transmissions were no different than tonight’s. Argue. Bicker. Unrelenting, spiteful words, and something else. Did true love mean fighting over eternity? It couldn’t be that. Subtle inconsistencies in their voices. Overtones of genuine humor in their rhetoric. Maybe they took some macabre pleasure in each other’s biting exchange.

“
...zzthlssss… “ Silence.

The hissing faded, returned, fell in submission to the signal once again. He hadn’t moved the dial. There hadn’t even been a breeze. Good fortune.

But silence.

The bickering old man and his nagging wife, both suddenly mute. But the signal was clear, the hissing most definitely fallen under its strength. The two were no longer talking. Benedictine stared at the dial. The grass chilled him, as if every dark blade had begun to grow, digging through the jacket and into his belly, injecting early morning dew like ice.

Silence.

Did they know he was listening? That was stupid. Paranoid. They couldn’t hear him, or know he was here. Benedictine looked around the dark landscape. Trees loomed like monstrous pedestrians hovering around an accident, seeming to lean in for a closer look at the man sprawled on his belly in the dark. The man who stared in turn at the portable radio leaning against the granite slab.

Benedictine was alone. Above him, stars ignited more brightly than he could remember. Nothing for miles to compete with their brilliance. No one knew he was here. No one knew he was listening.

But if he could hear them, then why couldn’t —

“
Well,” said the old man, as if tiring of the stalemate. “Like I was saying, maybe you think I should get my head examined.” His voice was clear, but somehow devoid of its earlier passion. Speaking as if bored of this play acting. But so clearly, as if uttered from only a few feet away. Benedictine stared at the ground where he lay. “But do you remember when we were in our thirties... I think it was —”

“
You were forty-two and I was thirty-nine.”

Benedictine jumped at the old woman’s voice. Still coming from the tiny speaker, but never before this clear, this loud. As if drifting closer to the surface, bordering their world and his. He didn’t like this image invading his thoughts. He rose to his knees, eyes scanning the ground below him. The man rebuked his wife’s interruption. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say, yet.”

“
Yes I do… ssszzthh...” The signal fell below the watery white surface of static, a million living souls pushing those lost back under the waves. Benedictine stood holding the radio in one hand. It hissed as if angry, too far from the ground, from the couple. He stared at the twin granite monuments.

They died together, recently, probably arguing all the way to the end. It was a car accident. He’d looked it up at the library. Only eleven months ago. Maybe that was why their signal was so strong. The thought seemed ludicrous.

He walked further back, the shadows of the spectator trees closing in behind him, waiting for his next intrusion. The flashlight’s beam bounced across various epitaphs. Some more interesting than others’, but still too recent. Here. Twenty years ago. She died three years before he’d been born. Young. Mid-twenties.

As before, Benedictine lay on his belly, turned the dial without turning, barely a hair change in frequency. The needle strained against the furthermost reaches of its man-made restraint, backed against the wall from so many living voices vying for attention.

“
ssssssstthhhzzzzzzssssss… sszz…”

There. Something. He leaned forward, hoping the act wouldn’t shatter the thin filament drawn out before him.

Silence. No, something. A sob? Clearer now. Someone crying. A voice not from any physical source but audible nonetheless, never faded with time. Not a recent bout of tears, either. A cry grown refined over the years, moving in its own rhythm.

Had she sounded this hoarse in life, he wondered? She uttered a despondent wail for a moment, then slid back into that deeper, heart-splitting sob. Benedictine lay still and listened, staring at the small radio’s face as if waiting for an image of the bereft to appear like a genie, if only he watched long enough. Eventually he closed his eyes, rested his head and slept, lulled by the incessant mournful broadcast.

He awoke with a jolt. Benedictine felt heavy as if the river of blood in his veins had frozen while he slept, only now beginning to thaw. How long had he slept? He squinted at the glowing face of his watch. Four twenty-one. Just over two hours. Such a long time to lay outside like this. No sign of a growing dawn in the eastern sky, but it was just a matter of time. Here and there among the trees a morning bird repeated it’s lifelong song to the impending light.

Benedictine leaned towards the radio. She continued sobbing. The signal had faded, however, become atrophied. As if the energy used for this broadcast was being slowly spent, used up like the batteries he’d bought for the radio only yesterday. Or perhaps she’d wandered too far in the metaphysical, barren room which entombed her, away from that impossible microphone which perpetually transmitted her cries to the boy laying above her.