The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 (6 page)

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?

He was jumping for joy because the monkey was gone, gone forever. Gone forever, but not three months later Aunt Ida had sent him up into the attic to get the boxes of Christmas decorations, and as he crawled around looking for them, getting the knees of his pants dusty, he had suddenly come face to face with it again, and his wonder and terror had been so great that he had to bite sharply into the side of his hand to keep from screaming . . . or fainting dead away. There it was, grinning its toothy grin, cymbals poised apart and ready to clap, leaning nonchalantly back against one corner of a Ralston-Purina carton as if waiting for a bus, seeming to say:
Thought you got rid of me, didn’t you? But I’m not that easy to get rid of, Hal. I like you
,
Hal. We were made for each other, just a boy and his pet monkey, a couple of good old buddies. And somewhere south of here there’s a stupid old Italian rag-man lying in a claw-foot tub with his eyeballs bulging and his dentures half-popped out of his mouth, his screaming mouth, a rag-man who smells like a burned-out Exide battery. He was saving me for his grandson, Hal, and he put me on the shelf with his soap and his razor and his Burma-Shave and the Philco radio he listened to the Brooklyn Dodgers on, and I started to clap, and one of my cymbals hit that old radio and into the tub it went, and then I came to you, Hal, I worked my way along country roads at night and the moonlight shone off my teeth at three in the morning and I left death in my wake, Hal, I came to you, I’m your Christmas present, Hal, wind me up, who’s dead? Is it Bill? Is it Uncle Will? Is it you, Hal? Is it
you?

Hal had backed away, grimacing madly, eyes rolling, and nearly fell going downstairs. He told Aunt Ida he hadn’t been able to find the Christmas decorations—it was the first lie he had ever told her, and she had seen the lie on his face but had not asked him why he had told it, thank God—and later when Bill came in she asked him to look and he brought the Christmas decorations down. Later, when they were alone, Bill hissed at him that he was a dummy who couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight. Hal said nothing. Hal was pale and silent, only picking at his supper. And that night he dreamed of the monkey again, one of its cymbals striking the Philco radio as it babbled out Dean Martin singing Whenna da moon hitta you eye like a big pizza pie
ats-a moray
, the radio tumbling into the bathtub as the monkey grinned and beat its cymbals together with a
JANG
and a
JANG
and a
JANG;
only it wasn’t the Italian rag-man who was in the tub when the water turned electric.

It was him.

Hal and his son scrambled down the embankment behind the home place to the boathouse that jutted out over the water on its old pilings. Hal had the flight bag in his right hand. His throat was dry, his ears were attuned to an unnaturally keen pitch. The bag seemed very heavy.

“What’s down here, Daddy?” Petey asked.

Hal didn’t answer. He set down the flight bag. “Don’t touch that,” he said, and Petey backed away from it. Hal felt in his pocket for the ring of keys Bill had given him and found one neatly labeled B’HOUSE on a scrap of adhesive tape.

The day was clear and cold, windy, the sky a brilliant blue. The leaves of the trees that crowded up to the verge of the lake had gone every bright fall shade from blood red to sneering yellow. They rattled and talked in the wind. Leaves swirled around Petey’s sneakers as he stood anxiously by, and Hal could smell November on the wind, with winter crowding close behind it

The key turned in the padlock and he pulled the swing doors open. Memory was strong; he didn’t even have to look to kick down the wooden block that held the door open. The smell in here was all summer: canvas and bright wood, a lingering, musty warmth.

Uncle Will’s rowboat was still here, the oars neatly shipped as if he had last loaded it with his fishing tackle and two six-packs of Black Label on ice yesterday afternoon. Bill and Hal had both gone out fishing with Uncle Will many times, but never together; Uncle Will maintained the boat was too small for three. The red trim, which Uncle Will had touched up each spring, was now faded and peeling, though, and spiders had spun their silk in the boat’s bow.

Hal laid hold of it and pulled it down the ramp to the little shingle of beach. The fishing trips had been one of the best parts of his childhood with Uncle Will and Aunt Ida. He had a feeling that Bill felt much the same. Uncle Will was ordinarily the most taciturn of men, but once he had the boat positioned to his liking, some sixty or seventy yards offshore, lines set and bobbers floating on the water, he would crack a beer for himself and one for Hal (who rarely drank more than half of the one can Uncle Will would allow, always with the ritual admonition from Uncle Will that Aunt Ida must never be told because “she’d shoot me for a stranger if she knew I was givin you boys beer, don’t you know”), and wax expansive. He would tell stories, answer questions, rebait Hal’s hook when it needed rebaiting; and the boat would drift where the wind and the mild current wanted it to be.

“How come you never go right out to the middle, Uncle Will?” Hal had asked once.

“Look over the side there, Hal,” Uncle Will had answered.

Hal did. He saw blue water and his fish line going down into black.

“You’re looking into the deepest part of Crystal Lake,” Uncle Will said, crunching his empty beer can in one hand and selecting a fresh one with the other. “A hundred feet if she’s an inch. Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker is down there somewhere. Damn fool took it out on the lake one early December, before the ice was made. Lucky to get out of it alive, he was. They’ll never get that Studebaker out, nor see it until Judgment Trump blows. Lake’s one deep son of a whore right here, it is. Big ones are right here, Hal. No need to go out no further. Let’s see how your worm looks. Reel that son of a whore right in.”

Hal did, and while Uncle Will put a fresh crawler from the old Crisco tin that served as his bait box on his hook, he stared into the water, fascinated, trying to see Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker, all rust and waterweed drifting out of the open driver’s side window through which Amos had escaped at the absolute last moment, waterweed festooning the steering wheel like a rotting necklace, waterweed dangling from the rearview mirror and drifting back and forth in the currents like some strange rosary. But he could see only blue shading to black, and there was the shape of Uncle Will’s nightcrawler, the hook hidden inside its knots, hung up there in the middle of things, its own sun-shafted version of reality. Hal had a brief, dizzying vision of being suspended over a mighty gulf, and he had closed his eyes for a moment until the vertigo passed. That day, he seemed to recollect, he had drunk his entire can of beer.

. . . the deepest part of Crystal Lake . . . a hundred feet if she’s an inch
.

He paused a moment, panting, and looked up at Petey, still watching anxiously. “You want some help, Daddy?”

“In a minute.”

He had his breath again, and now he pulled the rowboat across the narrow strip of sand to the water, leaving a groove. The paint had peeled, but the boat had been kept under cover and it looked sound.

When he and Uncle Will went out, Uncle Will would pull the boat down the ramp, and when the bow was afloat, he would clamber in, grab an oar to push with, and say: “Push me off, Hal . . . this is where you earn your truss!”

“Hand that bag in, Petey, and then give me a push,” he said. And, smiling a little, he added: “This is where you earn your truss.”

Petey didn’t smile back. “Am I coming, Daddy?”

“Not this time. Another time I’ll take you out fishing, but . . . not this time.”

Petey hesitated. The wind tumbled his brown hair and a few yellow leaves, crisp and dry, wheeled past his shoulders and landed at the edge of the water, bobbing like boats themselves.

“You should have muffled them,” he said, low.

“What?” But he thought he understood what Petey had meant.

“Put cotton over the cymbals. Taped it on. So it couldn’t . . . make that noise.”

Hal suddenly remembered Daisy coming toward him—not walking but lurching—and how, quite suddenly, blood had burst from both of Daisy’s eyes in a flood that soaked her ruff and pattered down on the floor of the barn, how she had collapsed on her forepaws . . . and on the still, rainy spring air of that day he had heard the sound, not muffled but curiously clear, coming from the attic of the house fifty feet away:
Jang-jang-jang-jang
!

He began to scream hysterically, dropping the armload of wood he had been getting for the fire. He ran for the kitchen to get Uncle Will, who was eating scrambled eggs and toast, his suspenders not even up over his shoulders yet.

She was an old dog
,
Hal,
Uncle Will had said, his face haggard and unhappy—he looked old himself.
She was twelve
,
and that’s old for a dog
.
You mustn’t take on, now
—
old Daisy wouldn’t like that
.

Old
, the vet had echoed, but he had looked troubled all the same, because dogs don’t die of explosive brain hemorrhages, even at twelve (“like as if someone had stuck a firecracker in his head,” Hal overheard the vet saying to Uncle Will as Uncle Will dug a hole in the back of the barn not far from the place where he had buried Daisy’s mother in 1950; “I never seen the beat of it, Will”).

And later, terrified almost out of his mind but unable to help himself, Hal had crept up to the attic.

Hello, Hal, how you doing?
the monkey grinned from its shadowy corner. Its cymbals were poised, a foot or so apart. The sofa cushion Hal had stood on end between them was now all the way across the attic. Something—some force—had thrown it hard enough to split its cover, and stuffing foamed out of it.
Don’t worry about Daisy,
the monkey whispered inside his head, its glassy hazel eyes fixed on Hal Shelburn’s wide blue ones.
Don’t worry about Daisy, she was old
,
old
,
Hal, even the vet said so, and by the way, did you see the blood coming out of her eyes, Hal? Wind me up, Hal
.
Wind me up, lets play, and who’s dead, Hal? Is it you?

And when he came back to himself he had been crawling toward the monkey as if hypnotized. One hand had been outstretched to grasp the key. He scrambled backward then, and almost fell down the attic stairs in his haste—probably would have if the stairwell had not been so narrow. A little whining noise had been coming from his throat