Skeleton Crew (23 page)

Perhaps he had imagined the tiger.

He opened the door wide enough for one eye and peeked in.

The tiger was peeking back from around the angle of the L, its eye a sparkling green. Charles fancied he could see a tiny blue fleck in that deep brilliance, as if the tiger’s eye had eaten one of his own. As if—

A hand slid around his neck.

Charles gave a stifled cry and felt his heart and stomach cram up into his throat. For one terrible moment he thought he was going to wet himself.

It was Kenny Griffen, smiling complacently. “Miss Bird sent me after you ’cause you been gone six years. You’re in trouble. ”

“Yeah, but I can’t go to the basement,” Charles said, feeling faint with the fright Kenny had given him.

“Yer constipated!” Kenny chortled gleefully. “Wait’ll I tell
Caaathy!”

“You better not!” Charles said urgently. “Besides, I’m not. There’s a tiger in there.”

“What’s he doing?” Kenny asked. “Takin a piss?”

“I don’t know,” Charles said, turning his face to the wall. “I just wish he’d go away.” He began to weep.

“Hey,” Kenny said, bewildered and a little frightened. “Hey.”

“What if I have to go? What if I can’t help it? Miss Bird’ll say—”

“Come on,” Kenny said, grabbing his arm in one hand and pushing the door open with the other. “You’re making it up.”

They were inside before Charles, terrified, could break free and cower back against the door.

“Tiger,” Kenny said disgustedly. “Boy, Miss Bird’s gonna kill you.”

“It’s around the other side.”

Kenny began to walk past the washbowls. “Kitty-kitty-kitty? Kitty?”

“Don’t!” Charles hissed.

Kenny disappeared around the comer. “Kitty-kitty? Kitty-kitty? Kit—”

Charles darted out the door again and pressed himself against the wall, waiting, his hands over his mouth and his eyes squinched shut, waiting, waiting for the scream.

There was no scream.

He had no idea how long he stood there, frozen, his bladder bursting. He looked at the door to the boys’ basement. It told him nothing. It was just a door.

He wouldn’t.

He
couldn’t.

But at last he went in.

The washbowls and the mirrors were neat, and the faint smell of chlorine was unchanged. But there seemed to be a smell under it. A faint, unpleasant smell, like freshly sheared copper.

With groaning (but silent) trepidation, he went to the corner of the L and peeped around.

The tiger was sprawled on the floor, licking its large paws with a long pink tongue. It looked incuriously at Charles. There was a torn piece of shirt caught in one set of claws.

But his need was a white agony now, and he couldn’t help it. He
had
to. Charles tiptoed back to the white porcelain basin closest the door.

Miss Bird slammed in just as he was zipping his pants.

“Why, you dirty, filthy little boy,” she said almost reflectively.

Charles was keeping a weather eye on the corner. “I’m sorry, Miss Bird ... the tiger ... I’m going to clean the sink... I’ll use soap ... I swear I will ...”

“Where’s Kenneth?” Miss Bird asked calmly.

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t, really.

“Is he back there?”

“No!”
Charles cried.

Miss Bird stalked to the place where the room bent. “Come here, Kenneth. Right this moment.”

“Miss Bird—”

But Miss Bird was already around the corner. She meant to pounce. Charles thought Miss Bird was about to find out what pouncing was really all about.

He went out the door again. He got a drink at the drinking fountain. He looked at the American flag hanging over the entrance to the gym. He looked at the bulletin board. Woodsy Owl said GIVE A HOOT, DON’T POLLUTE. Officer Friendly said NEVER RIDE WITH STRANGERS. Charles read everything twice.

Then he went back to the classroom, walked down his row to his seat with his eyes on the floor, and slid into his seat. It was a quarter to eleven. He took out Roads to Everywhere and began to read about Bill at the Rodeo.

W
hen Hal Shelbum saw it, when his son Dennis pulled it out of a mouldering Ralston-Purina carton that had been pushed far back under one attic eave, such a feeling of horror and dismay rose in him that for one moment he thought he would scream. He put one fist to his mouth, as if to cram it back... and then merely coughed into his fist. Neither Terry nor Dennis noticed, but Petey looked around, momentarily curious.

“Hey, neat,” Dennis said respectfully. It was a tone Hal rarely got from the boy anymore himself. Dennis was twelve.

“What is it?” Peter asked. He glanced at his father again before his eyes were dragged back to the thing his big brother had found. “What is it, Daddy?”

“It’s a monkey, fartbrains,” Dennis said. “Haven’t you ever seen a monkey before?”

“Don’t call your brother fartbrains,” Terry said automatically, and began to examine a box of curtains. The curtains were slimy with mildew and she dropped them quickly. “Uck.”

“Can I have it, Daddy?” Petey asked. He was nine.

“What do you mean?” Dennis cried. “
I
found it!”

“Boys, please,” Terry said. “I’m getting a headache.”

Hal barely heard them. The monkey glimmered up at him from his older son’s hands, grinning its old familiar grin. The same grin that had haunted his nightmares as a kid, haunted them until he had—

Outside a cold gust of wind rose, and for a moment lips with no flesh blew a long note through the old, rusty gutter outside. Petey stepped closer to his father, eyes moving uneasily to the rough attic roof through which nailheads poked.

“What was that, Daddy?” he asked as the whistle died to a guttural buzz.

“Just the wind,” Hal said, still looking at the monkey. Its cymbals, crescents of brass rather than full circles in the weak light of the one naked bulb, were moveless, perhaps a foot apart, and he added automatically, “Wind can whistle, but it can’t carry a tune.” Then he realized that was a saying of Uncle Will’s, and a goose ran over his grave.

The note came again, the wind coming off Crystal Lake in a long, droning swoop and then wavering in the gutter. Half a dozen small drafts puffed cold October air into Hal’s face—God, this place was so much like the back closet of the house in Hartford that they might all have been transported thirty years back in time.

But now of course it was all he could think about.

Terry had moved away to examine a wooden crate filled with knickknacks, duck-walking because the pitch of the eaves was so sharp.

“I don’t like it,” Petey said, and felt for Hal’s hand. “Dennis c’n have it if he wants. Can we go, Daddy?”

“Worried about ghosts, chickenguts?” Dennis inquired.

“Dennis, you stop it,” Terry said absently. She picked up a waferthin cup with a Chinese pattern. “This is nice. This—”

Hal saw that Dennis had found the wind-up key in the monkey’s back. Terror flew through him on dark wings.

“Don’t do that!”

It came out more sharply than he had intended, and he had snatched the monkey out of Dennis’s hands before he was really aware he had done it. Dennis looked around at him, startled. Terry had also glanced back over her shoulder, and Petey looked up. For a moment they were all silent, and the wind whistled again, very low this time, like an unpleasant invitation.

“I mean, it’s probably broken,” Hal said.

“Well, you didn’t have to
grab,”
Dennis said.

“Dennis, shut up.”

Dennis blinked and for a moment looked almost uneasy. Hal hadn’t spoken to him so sharply in a long time. Not since he had lost his job with National Aerodyne in California two years before and they had moved to Texas. Dennis decided not to push it ... for now. He turned back to the Ralston-Purina carton and began to root through it again, but the other stuff was nothing but junk. Broken toys bleeding springs and stuffings.

The wind was louder now, hooting instead of whistling. The attic began to creak softly, making a noise like footsteps.

“Please, Daddy?” Petey asked, only loud enough for his father to hear.

“Yeah,” he said. “Terry, let’s go.”

“I’m not through with this—”

“I said let’s
go.”

It was her turn to look startled.

They had taken two adjoining rooms in a motel. By ten that night the boys were asleep in their room and Terry was asleep in the adults’ room. She had taken two Valiums on the ride back from the home place in Casco. To keep her nerves from giving her a migraine. Just lately she took a lot of Valium. It had started around the time National Aerodyne had laid Hal off. For the last two years he had been working for Texas Instruments—it was $4,000 less a year, but it was work. He told Terry they were lucky. She agreed. There were plenty of software architects drawing unemployment, he said. She agreed. The company housing in Arnette was every bit as good as the place in Fresno, he said. She agreed, but he thought her agreement to all of it was a lie.

And he was 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 grins 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 tile 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 band from hell. 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.

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. Aunt Ida had brought them here on a Greyhound bus which left from Hartford, and they had been raised here, and gone to college from here. This had been the place they were homesick for. Bill had stayed in Maine 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 back there someplace,” Bill said. “But I’ll be damned if I remember just where. Your dad’s right, Petey—it’s a good place to stay away from. Thorns’ll do a job on you. Right, Hal?”

“Right,” Hal said automatically. Petey 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 was, 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 drowning face stared up at him, wide eyes, grimacing mouth. A moan escaped him. It was not loud, except in his heart. There it had been very loud.

It was his own face in the dark water.

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

He was shaking. Shaking all over.

The well had gone dry the summer Johnny McCabe died, the year after Bill and Hal came to stay 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.