The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 (3 page)

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.

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.

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.