by Keri Knutson
Monsters
Keri Knutson
Copyright 2011 Keri Knutson
Image licensed by DepositPhotos.com/Akuznetov
Cover design by Keri Knutson
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Monsters
Lagniappe - About the Story
Sneak Preview - Running Red
Sneak Preview - Darker By Degree
Follow Me!
MONSTERS
Renee always took the shortcut.
The road that ran down past the old milling company seemed cooler by degrees. The low overhang of trees that canopied the cracking blacktop and the wall of overgrown ferns and pecan trees strung with moss and alive with climbing vines kept out the worst heat of the day and even kept off some of the rain if you misjudged and didn't make it home before the sky opened up.
There were some kids--most kids, Renee thought--that wouldn't walk that way, said there was a bogeyman in the old tin-roofed, tin-walled warehouse buildings, something hiding behind the lacework of ivy that covered the jagged holes in the walls like a fancy green curtain. "That's why they ain't no pigeons in there,” Lamar told her one day when they were walking back from school. "It done ate 'em all up." Renee wanted to ask Lamar how he would know there weren't no pigeons in there, seeing as he was such a big scaredy cat. Besides, Renee had seen pigeons fly out of there a hundred times if she saw them once. But Lamar never listened to her anyway, just ran on up ahead, feet flying over the grass, leaving her behind like he always did.
There were days, especially when it came evening, or when the clouds closed over so that it seemed like the world was covered by a big circus tent, when Renee did catch a shiver walking down the road, when she listened extra careful in case that rustle in the grass really wasn't a rabbit or a squirrel, and then maybe the next day she'd take the main road, past houses and pretty lawns, past shell-paved driveways and shiny mailboxes.
But the road past the old warehouse--had it ever had a name?--took a half-mile off the trip to town and you could walk right down the middle, not having to listen for cars driving over the speed limit and too close to the shoulder. It was quiet and it was cool, and Renee would be eleven on her next birthday, too old to believe in made-up stories about monsters.
The Thompson's was the last house before the green wall of brush swallowed up everything but the road, and Renee walked past with a spring in her step, change jingling in the pocket of her yellow shorts, past the sleeping bulldog dozing on the cool concrete under the carport. I swear, she thought, as she always did, take some kind of racket to wake that dog up. Even though she walked to town two or three times a week to get a snoball or fetch something extra from the store, she'd only ever been barked at twice. "Glad you ain't my watchdog!" Renee called to him, and she was rewarded with the lazy twitch of one ear, but that was all.
She walked on past the line of banana trees that marked the edge of the Thompson's property, familiar marker after familiar marker, the things taken for granted that made up a predictable world, the things that were always there, always certain. She watched a rabbit dart across the roadway, the white tufts of his feet disappearing into the green mass on the other side. Always lots of rabbits, never any people, which was just fine with Renee. This was time she didn't have to share with Lamar or with her brother Charles or even with Suzanne, who was almost always her best friend.
Renee rounded the bend in the road, skirting a puddle of standing water that almost spanned the length of the street, a few inches deep in some spots where the underlying asphalt had been eroded. It was afloat with sheets of green fungus that looked like alligator skin and smelled like fruit gone bad, all moist and sick-sweet. She bent down and picked up a small smooth stone and pitched it at the water, watching the viscous splash as it hit a patch of the fungus. She considered pinging another rock at the side of the building, testing her aim to see if she could hit the rust-red remains of a Purina sign tacked over one of the holes in the metal wall, but then thought better of it. Not that she believed Lamar for a minute, but like her momma said, there's no sense begging for trouble. Monsters'd leave her alone if she left them alone, and besides, it would scare the pigeons.
She was parallel to the railroad tracks now, within site of the highway, and in spite of herself she touched a fingertip to the medal of Mary around her neck. It wasn't that the trains scared her, but it was something like a right of passage, being old enough to cross the tracks by yourself. There was always stories about kids who didn't look, or got their foot caught and then that was it for them, although Renee didn't see how you could possibly get your foot caught unless you were just plain stupid. Or how you wouldn't know that a train was coming. It sounded like thunder up close, deep, rolling thunder that didn't stop. Still, it was something her momma told her every time she left the house. "Now you look both ways at the tracks, you hear,” her momma would say, sure as sunrise. She'd said it not more than an hour before when Renee'd stood on the sun-hot steps of the front porch with the change burning a hole in the pocket of the new yellow shorts.
She stopped to pick up a few more stones, those pretty, smooth ones with little veins running through them, the kind you buy for driveways, and shoved them into one pocket. Renee was building a little rock garden out back--momma had already helped her choose the plants--and she picked up any stone that grabbed her fancy. The ones by the tracks were too rough and sharp, but these were left over from before the line of tin buildings had been abandoned, before they'd put up the "For Sale" sign that was now so faded you only knew what it said from memory.
She touched the medal again, for luck, looked both ways, then skipped across the tracks, down the other side and through the scratchy grass that was rarely cut. Half a country block and she was to the light, then across and in town proper.
Her first stop was at the snoball stand, where you could still get a small for fifty cents, and she chose spearmint, partly because Lamar hated spearmint, and partly because it tasted the way that grass smells when it's just cut. She sat on the steps and ate it slowly, in no hurry. The clouds were in a straight grey line to the east and she'd bet a dollar it wouldn't rain today. After the snoball was gone she pulled out the other two quarters and contemplated, sliding them against each other between her green-tinted fingertips. She could save them for tomorrow, but tomorrow it might rain, and was it really a trip to town if you only went one place? Grown-ups always had several places to go, to the market and to the hair-dressers, to the library and to the hardware store.
She slipped the quarters back into her pocket and walked two more blocks to the store and slipped inside, greeted by cold air and the greasy smell of chicken frying. There was a cooler up next to the counter with cans of soda floating in chipped ice. She dipped her fingers in and pulled out a Coke, then pushed it and her two quarters across the counter. With the can in a little plastic bag with script across the side thanking her for being a valued customer, Renee made her way back to the light, wondering what was for dinner, and even more importantly, what was for dessert. She glanced at a battered blue pick-up and waited for it to turn, relegating it to the background of her life, the countless things that are seen and then un-seen. She was across the highway and up over the tracks in less than a minute.
This was the easy part, Renee thought, going home. It always seemed shorter than the trip in and so what if the shadows were creeping up through the snarled bushes and falling long across the road? Ten more minutes and she'd be at the Thompson's and then five more minutes beyond that to her own house, where her mother would be looking out the kitchen window for her, snapping beans in the sink or rolling a pie crust.
There was a rustle in the underbrush, and Renee walked faster, not running yet, because it was only a rabbit after all, or at the very worst a
snake, which would be bad, but not as bad as (a monster) some things. She told herself she wouldn't run, but she wouldn't look back either, because that wouldn't help (begging for trouble, her mother said) and if she did look back and there was something emerging from the torn metal of the wall, well maybe she wouldn't be able to run, so it would be best to just keep walking fast, the cool metal of the soda can frosting her leg through the plastic sack as she picked up speed.
She was still fighting the impulse to look back when it came out of the bushes, an arm whipcracking around her thin neck, but it wasn't a monster covered with slime and vines, it was a man in a blue shirt with the sleeves torn off, and Renee flashed back to the policewoman who'd come to their school, how pretty and sharp she’d looked in her blue uniform with her hair pulled back, how she told them what to do, what to do (Stranger Danger) if someone grabbed you, you were supposed to scream, and surely if Renee could scream someone would hear her, the Thompson's would hear her, but she couldn't scream, couldn't suck in any air at all and it was getting darker, and what else had the pretty policewoman said? Renee swung the sack up and over her head as hard as she could, the can of soda like a rock in a slingshot, hitting the side of the man's head and exploding with a whoosh, cold sticky fluid raining down and then suddenly Renee could breathe again, but it wasn't enough. There was a bright pain inside her head and she saw the road coming up to meet her.
Renee opened her eyes, sticky with tears and spilled soda and saw the sky moving above her, and trees moving with it. It took her a moment to realize that the man was half-dragging, half-carrying her through the thicket behind the old building, and she only had time to register the pain where her knee had hit the ground before she lost the sky, and that was the worst thing, so far, seeing the sky cut away as they entered the open doorway at the back of the building, because she knew no one would find her now, no one would see.
She thought about screaming again, but the man's hand was around her neck, squeezing, and she was afraid he wouldn't let her breath again, so she let him push her down on the dirty floor where leaves crackled beneath her, where it smelled like crawfish gone rotten, fishy and dead. She could still see light, coming in through the holes, filtering green through the ivy like she was inside the aquarium in New Orleans, and the man was on top of her, crushing her ribs, and the smell getting worse until she thought she might throw up, until her mind went back to the time Lamar had found the dead cat in a culvert, how awful it had smelled, a smell you could never forget. The man muttered as he pawed at her clothes but all she could see inside her head was the empty sockets where the cat's eyes had been. Would that be what she looked like when they found her?
Either it was the blow to the head or the beginning of shock, but she didn't see what happened next, all she was aware of was the weight that was crushing her and the rotten leaf/dead cat smell that engulfed her. And then the weight was gone.
It might have been a minute, it might have been ten, and then Renee felt a twig poking into her back, like a finger urging her to move along. She sat up in the filtered green light, surrounded by the hulking shapes of rusted machinery, sitting on a floor strewn with fungus and dead leaves. The man was gone as far as she could tell, unless he was teasing her, lurking in a shadow-filled corner until she tried to run again. She scooted back on her butt, toward the square of late sunlight that was the door. She was almost there when she heard a wet, sucking sound, the kind your shoe might make when you pulled it out of mud, and a sound like sticks breaking, big sticks. She did run then, up on her feet and out the door, as fast as the rabbit that had crossed the road earlier, away from the strangled scream that followed her and then cut off, the scream that caused the pigeons to fly from the top of the warehouse. Renee ran down the road and past the Thompson's sleeping dog, ignoring the pain in her scraped knee, the blood that mixed with sweat and ran down to stain her sock pink, all the way home.
She told her momma that she'd tripped and fell down into the ditch, which explained almost everything, everything but the blue pick-up they found a week later abandoned on an overgrown square that abutted the old loading dock of the mill company. But Renee didn't change her story, even when she told Lamar, even when she told Suzanne. She was going to be eleven next birthday, and she was too old to believe in monsters.
