Monsters

by David Alexander Robertson

  Eva’s voice was a hundred miles away. The emails between Cole’s dad and Vikki—they were screaming at him.

  “Cole!” She was crying. Her voice was shaking, trembling in the autumn wind.

  He stopped. He looked at her. Tears glistening, falling down her cheeks. Tears streaming out of her brown eyes.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Leave me alone. I need to be alone.”

  He could feel her stand there while he walked away, watching him.

  He felt like he was walking in the middle of winter, naked. Numb. The cold seeped into his body, into his soul. It was like his body was protecting him from the trauma. Not letting him feel anything. Not anger. Not sadness. Not confusion.

  And he walked.

  He found himself at the entrance to the cemetery before he realized where he was. He opened the metal gate, oblivious to the shrill squeal as the metal joints ached into movement. He meandered between headstones, framed by granite and marble, wooden crosses, and crumbled stone. He walked away from the well-manicured area that housed his classmates, teachers, and mother, to where the grass grew a bit longer. Where the flowers weren’t as fresh, drying at the base of graves. He found his father’s headstone and sat down on the long grass in front of it, knowing that there was nothing underneath him. He hugged his knees against his chest and rocked back and forth. He read his father’s name, and the inscription, over and over again. Here Lies Donald Harper. Husband. Father.

  “Lies is right,” Cole said to the gravestone, as though not only was his father’s body there, but that he was alive and listening. And maybe he was sitting beside Cole, having come down from the northern lights just for this moment.

  Cole looked around. He saw a stone a few feet away. He reached over and picked it up.

  He hit the stone against the inscription, against the word father as hard as he could. Again and again, harder and harder. Chunks of marble flew all over the place and disappeared into the grass. Within moments, father was almost illegible.

  “You shit!” Cole shouted at the headstone.

  The words started to blur, as tears welled up in his eyes. Cole threw the stone with all his strength. It disappeared into the sky. He collapsed forward, forehead against the marble, arms resting on top of the headstone.

  “Why’d you do it? Answer me! I know you can hear me!”

  “Coley?”

  Cole was breathing hard. Sobbing harder. He could feel Jayne’s heat, but he didn’t turn around to see her. He was trying to breathe deep, in and out, but couldn’t. His breath quivered despite the warmth.

  “Coley, you okay?”

  He felt fire against his back, then the heat was taken away.

  “Sorry!” She’d used her burning hand to touch him. He wanted to ask her to put that same hand back, to feel the fire. To burn his thoughts away.

  To burn everything away.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “What’re you doing anyways?” she asked.

  Cole fell backwards, to the spot where he’d been sitting before, knees to chest. He wiped his tears away with his jeans. “Nothing, Jayney. I’m just seeing…” he stopped at calling his dad, Dad. Didn’t want to call him something so intimate, personal, affectionate.

  “He’s not here though, you know that,” Jayne whispered, like she didn’t want Cole to feel stupid, but everybody knew his dad wasn’t actually buried there.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know that. I know. I just didn’t know where else to go.”

  “Why’re you so sad?” she asked. “I can feel it all over.”

  Cole looked at her. Her flames were low. She looked almost normal.

  “You don’t have to be sad, too,” he said.

  “Yeah I do, you’re my friend,” she said.

  Cole smiled at her, and her flames flared up a bit. He stood up and looked at his dad’s headstone for another minute. He looked at the damage he had inflicted on the word father. “He’s just not what I thought he was.”

  “What, like he was a secret agent or something?”

  “No, not like that.” He thought of how to explain it to a seven-year-old girl, ghost or human. “He did things I didn’t think he’d do, that’s all. And it made me mad.”

  “You were hitting that with a rock.” Jayne pointed at the headstone.

  “Did I scare you?” he asked.

  Jayne nodded. “Yeah, but I was more sad, that’s all.”

  “Me, too.” Cole reached out, and took Jayne’s non-burning hand. Gave it a comforting squeeze. “You don’t have to be sad anymore.”

  “Okay.” She grew a little brighter still.

  “Come on.” He wasn’t sure where to go, so he just kept dragging Jayne along with him. She thought all the zig-zagging was fun. She kept getting brighter and hotter. Finally, when Cole saw the headstone he was looking for, he stopped abruptly. Jayne let out a groan, sad that their trip all around and through the cemetery was over. Cole stared at the name on the headstone.

  Vikki Folster.

  “Ever see her up there, dancing?” Cole asked.

  Jayne leaned forward, squinted her eyes at the name, sounded it out. “Vi…Vikki…Fos…no…Fol…Folster. I don’t know. Maybe. I never saw that name before so I don’t know who she is. What does she look like, do you know that? Because then I’d know.”

  “I have no idea what she looks like.”

  “We don’t really have names up there, you know. We just kind of dance and we just know our colours and stuff. Why do you wanna know about her?”

  “I just do. I just need to know, Jayney.”

  “Well she’s not down there, you know that? I can tell. She’s not anywhere here at all.” Jayne looked around the cemetery, presumably for spirits that she could see, and he could not.

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “But I know exactly where she is.”

  24

  DONALD

  COLE WALKED INSIDE AND PAST THE KITCHEN, where he dismissed questions from his auntie and his grandmother. He walked down the hallway—ignoring the pictures of his father and his mother affixed to the walls—and into his bedroom. He shut the door and sat on the edge of his bed. He stayed like that, hands interlocked and resting on his lap. No music. Just staring at a piece of flooring that had been chipped off at some point. He couldn’t remember how it had happened.

  Cole didn’t know what time it was when he heard a hesitant knock on the bedroom door.

  “Cole.” The knocking doubled, the sound of knuckle against wood increased.

  Cole didn’t respond. Finally, his grandmother opened the door, and stood in the doorway.

  “What’s going on, grandson?” she asked.

  Cole shrugged.

  “Do you have spares this afternoon?” she asked.

  He leaned back onto his hands, looked away from the floor, to the window, imagining what lay beyond the blackout blinds.

  “What’s wrong? Did something else happen?” she asked.

  Oh, just my life crashed down right on my head, he thought. No big deal. He tried his best not to redirect his anger towards her. But how do you do that when you’re mad at the entire world? What could he say to her? What if she didn’t know about his dad? Of course she didn’t know about his dad. His grandmother had never said a bad word about him. If she knew what he’d done, she might not have said anything bad, but she wouldn’t have said anything good, either. His auntie didn’t know. She didn’t hold back on anything, and she wouldn’t have held back on his dad. She’d always spoken well of him. Cole decided he could not tell his grandmother what he’d found on his dad’s laptop. On Donald’s laptop. That’s what he was going to call him from now on. Did he deserve any better? Did he deserve to die because of what he did?

  “Cole, you’re making your old kókom nervous If it’s just the fire, they’ll figure out it wasn’t you. We know it wasn’t.”

  He heard his grandmother, kind of. He lifted his legs off the floor and sat like he was seven. Crisscross apple sau
ce. His grandmother walked across the room, sat on the edge of his bed, a safe distance away, careful not to intrude.

  “Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

  Cole let out a deep breath. All his breath. He breathed in. “I just am.”

  “You know I won’t make you tell me anything.”

  “Will you make Auntie Joan not make me tell her anything, too?”

  His grandmother chuckled. “Yes, I’ll tell my daughter to let you be. I just worry about you.”

  “I know.” Cole finally turned to her and rested his head on her shoulder. She gave him a pat on the cheek, and a kiss on the top of his head. “You don’t have to. I’m fine.”

  “If it’s one thing that I know, it’s that you’re not fine.”

  “I will be then. I will be fine.”

  “Of course you will be.” She gave him another kiss, got up from the bed, and crossed the bedroom.

  “Grandma?”

  She stopped just at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “What if you thought you knew somebody, and then, I don’t know, you found out something about them, and they were…different? Like you never knew them, ever.”

  She put her hand on the doorknob. “You need to figure out what version you can trust.”

  “How do you do that? How do you know what to trust?” Cole thought about the emails. He could recite them, word for word. They were there in black and white. They said what they said. Could he trust that? Why couldn’t he? But then he thought about Donald making him breakfast in the morning. Donald holding his hand and taking him away from the exploding Coke bottle they’d just put Mentos in. Donald sitting with him at the picnic table outside the research facility, sharing sandwiches with him, telling him that he worked so hard to buy them good food. Veggies and fruit. Ruffling his hair. Tucking him in at night with a kiss.

  Sorry, kiddo.

  His grandmother started to back out of the room, closing the door on her way out. “Trust comes from truth. You need to find that truth, grandson.”

  She closed the door and left Cole sitting in the dark. The blinds let in little slits of light that fell across his body, cutting him into pieces.

  25

  VIKKI

  A TRAY OF COLD FOOD HAD BEEN LEFT INSIDE COLE’S bedroom door over an hour ago, and had remained untouched. After his grandmother left, Cole moved from sitting at the edge of his bed to lying flat on his back. He’d stuck earbuds into his ears and had been listening to Sleep Well Beast by The National on repeat. He’d taken more medication, which had helped calm his mind.

  After he’d read the emails a fire started to rage inside. Now, underneath his skin he felt charred bones, ashes, and embers. This sensation was new. He hadn’t yet encountered it over the years that he’d been living with anxiety, but it was just as unpleasant. The meds had only done so much to soften the feeling.

  His legs were spread out, pointing at the edge of either side of the bed, one arm was resting at his side, and he had one hand spread across his chest to monitor his heartbeat, and as though he could push down the burning feeling. He stared at the ceiling. Back in Winnipeg, his therapist had told him to visualize in order to address his anxiety. He now pictured the ceiling as snow, cold and white and falling over him and through him and inside of him.

  It did little good.

  His favourite song on the album cut out. “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness.” In its place, the Knight Rider theme blasted into his ears. Cole ignored it. He didn’t even look at his phone, just waited for the ring—one he never downloaded onto his phone—to cut out, and for his song to cut back in. But it didn’t. The theme song kept repeating—for how long, Cole didn’t know, but its stubbornness won out. He lifted the phone and found a selfie of Choch, from the shoulders up, staring back at him. The spirit being was wearing a purple blazer, orange dress shirt, purple tie, and a vicious little smirk. Cole pressed his thumb against the decline button, but the phone kept ringing and the Knight Rider theme song kept playing. Cole answered the phone.

  “Yes.” Cole let the phone fall against the mattress along with his arm, and returned to staring at the ceiling.

  “I’m just checking before I actually do this, because I understand you’ve had a hard day, but may I please make a pop culture reference?”

  “No, you may not.”

  Cole heard Choch groan through the receiver. “Okay,” the spirit being said through gritted teeth. “But don’t say you’re not my special little guy.”

  “What did you want, Choch?”

  “I have a proposition,” Choch said.

  “I think we’ve talked about how I’m not doing any more deals with you. That includes propositions.”

  “You sound soooo much like Ferris trying to sound sick on the phone in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Choch blurted out lightning-fast.

  “And then you made the reference anyway.” Cole tried to hang up, but his phone—or Choch—would not allow it. Cole took the earbuds out of his ears so that he could no longer hear Choch.

  “If you throw the phone out the window next,” Choch’s voice blared through the phone’s speakers, “I will just appear in your room, CB. I’m sure you’d rather speak on the phone than have me talk to you in person, then, afterwards, visit with your auntie and grandmother, then—”

  Cole stuck the earbuds back in his ears. “Okay, okay. I’m here.”

  “Better. Now, with all that out of the way, I have to ask what you’ve been doing all day.”

  For such an easy answer, it took Cole a while to respond. He’d been in bed all day, doing nothing. He hadn’t eaten, hadn’t talked to anybody, hadn’t so much as put a toe on the floor.

  “But there’s a whole lot of something in that nothing, isn’t there?” Choch asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Cole said.

  “So what were you thinking about, while doing nothing?”

  “Just images flashing in my head,” Cole said. “Of Donald. All the memories I have of him, and how they all feel different now, like they were lies.”

  “Fake news!”

  “And then of her…Vikki…but she has no face, because I’ve never met her, I don’t know her. This girl, too. Vikki’s daughter. They look like mannequins, you know?”

  “That’s super creepy, CB, just saying. This is not that kind of story.”

  “It’s not a story, this is my life.” It was something Cole felt he’d told Choch repeatedly.

  “But I digress. It sounds to me like you could kill two birds with one stone.”

  “How?” It was partly a question, and partly Cole playing along, in all his frustration, to get Choch off the phone.

  “We have this deal you may have heard of, correct?” Choch continued without waiting for an answer, “and you’re also very curious about the identity of this woman and her child. What if finding these things out may or may not assist you to some degree in working towards fulfilling some of the requirements our deal entails?”

  “That was, like, the most non-committal sentence ever spoken in the history of the world. You know that, right?”

  “You have two lovely ladies sitting in the kitchen, worrying about you over cups of black coffee, whom you could simply ask.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Is this where I draw it out of you by saying, ‘Yeah, but what?’ or something to that effect?”

  “I don’t want them to know about Donald. Some part of me doesn’t want to ruin memories of him for other people.”

  “How sweet of you,” Choch said. “While I don’t necessarily think any memories will be ruined, I wonder if you can’t simply just ask them about Vikki without mentioning your father. Donald, sorry. I’d forgotten that you aren’t referring to him as daddy any longer. I mean, after all, not asking people right outside your door might be something one would call a plot hole, if this were a story and not your life.”

  Cole sat up and felt a little dizzy from doing so quickly. “Fine, okay, I’ll g
o ask them. Happy?”

  “Delighted. You’re the man, CB. Ta-ta.”

  Cole ended the call, and it really ended. He took out his earbuds, left his phone on the bed, stepped over the plate of food, and exited his bedroom.

  Auntie Joan and his grandmother were in the kitchen, hunched over cups of black coffee, just as Choch had said. When Cole entered, and sat down at the table in front of them, they stopped talking. Choch was right about that, too. He’d been the subject of their conversation.

  “Did you eat?” his auntie asked.

  “How are you, nósisim?” his grandmother asked.

  “Who is Vikki Folster?” Cole asked.

  Auntie Joan and his grandmother looked at each other, confusion written all over their faces.

  “Vikki?” Auntie Joan asked. “Why would you ask that? Where did that come from?”

  “It doesn’t matter where it came from, I just want to know,” Cole said.

  “She worked with your father,” his grandmother said.

  Cole tried to assess his auntie and his grandmother, to suss out any weirdness, any evasiveness, any sense at all that they were once again protecting him from something.

  “For, what, two years?” Auntie Joan said to his grandmother, who nodded.

  “And that’s it? They just worked together,” Cole said.

  “They and a bunch of other people, from the community and from outside the community,” his grandmother said. “What’s this all about, nósisim?”

  Cole may not have been as astute as Eva and Brady were at telling whether somebody was lying or not, but they seemed to be truthful. Donald and Vikki had worked together, so what? Whatever they were up to, they kept it a secret.

  “Who was she with?” Cole asked.

  “With? Like, who was she dating back then?” Auntie Joan said.

  “Yeah.”

  Auntie Joan and his grandmother exchanged looks again, like they could telepathically communicate, but it seemed like neither of them were sure. And it wasn’t important to them, either. Why would it be? They had no idea that the person Vikki was with very likely murdered her and Donald.

  “I think it was…” Auntie Joan kept looking at his grandmother for help.