The Monster Museum

by J L Bryan

  “I'm sure you're allowed inside,” I joked, after the quiet pause grew uncomfortably long.

  “There's more than what I told you on the phone,” he said. “I've seen things down in the museum—I've been in there trying to get it fixed up, you know, cleaned up and ready for business.”

  “You want to re-open it?”

  “I'm thinking sell it. I don't know anything about running a place like this. But I know how to fix a place up and flip it. That's what I learned from my dad.” He sighed, worry etched deep into his scruffy features and soft blue eyes. He did strike me as a guy who knew how to swing a hammer, his hands calloused, his body lean and muscular under his sweater and jeans. The edge of an arm tattoo peeked out of one sleeve, but not enough for me to see what the picture was. “I can handle it, at least long enough to restore and sell the place. At first I thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me—you know, long hours alone, with all that freaky stuff in the museum. But now it's affecting my kids. They're seeing things. My son's scared to death half the time. I have to keep them safe.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Let's start with the apartment, since that's where your kids are having trouble.”

  “Ghosts.” He shook his head. “This is hard to believe.”

  “There may be other explanations. Especially in a...strange old place like this. Many of my cases turn out to be nothing paranormal at all.”

  “If that's true, then we're all just crazy here.”

  “You don't seem crazy to me.”

  He smiled, for the first time since I'd met him. Well, it was half a smile, but I couldn't help noticing, again, that he was fairly good-looking; he struck me as less like a dad and more like someone who would hang out in a hot nightclub downtown, one where I'd feel too dorky to be comfortable. I wondered about the kids' mother, and why he wasn't wearing a ring.

  “I'm just saying, let's downplay all this for the kids,” Ryan said. “I don't want them even more scared about it. Let's act like it's all no big deal.”

  “No big deal. You got it. But do the kids know why I'm here?”

  “I told them you're an expert in strange things like this.”

  “That's what I am.”

  He gave me a long look, with those blue eyes gazing out from under tousled dark hair, and I realized that I was feeling just a little fluttery in the stomach area. He was pretty cute.

  Stop it, I told myself. Don't be stupid.

  “All right, let's go in,” he finally said, for which I was grateful, because a cold, snow-laced wind had begun to blow.

  He held the door while I stepped into a cramped, squarish stairwell with fat wooden stairs that climbed up in a spiral.

  “These are the express stairs to our apartment,” he said, starting up. “I've redone all these so my kids and me are safe going up and down.”

  “I can tell,” I said. The stairs here were so freshly rebuilt I could still smell the sawdust in the air.

  Dusty black and white photographs hung on the walls, depicting circus acts from long ago, from acrobats on high wires to miserable-looking bears and tigers with their tamers cracking whips. There were other paintings and objects following a circus theme, like a grinning clown mask framed in orange hair and seeming to stare at me with its empty eye holes as I passed.

  “Your stairwell definitely keeps to a theme,” I said, glancing at yellowed sideshow images depicting people with strange deformities.

  “Yeah, sorry, I know it's creepy,” he said. “I figure whoever wants to buy a place like this will want all the antique stuff they can get with it. But I should probably box it all up.”

  “It doesn't scare your kids?”

  “The twins actually like it in here, if you can believe it,” he said. “They're always slowing down to look at the pictures.”

  “And what about the younger one?” I asked.

  “Fortunately the spookier stuff is over his head. Literally. Even the girls have to stand on tiptoes to see them. Which they do. I feel like they're kind of living on their own private planet sometimes. One I'm not invited to visit as often as I used to be.”

  There was a heavy weight behind his words. I wondered what tragedy had hit the family, aside from the uncle's death. With his rumpled look and his air of overworked exhaustion, Ryan gave me the impression of a man who'd recently washed up after some kind of shipwreck, the salt and seaweed still fresh in his hair.

  “And here we are!” He suddenly put on a cheery tone and smiled as he opened the door to the third-story apartment, but the cheerful act wasn't for my benefit. “Ellie, come and meet my three favorite people.”

  His kids sat on a frayed old couch in a den. The six-year-old boy played a video game on the TV that featured Lego versions of Harry Potter characters. He looked a lot like his father, almost like a miniature version of the man, except for his large, chocolate-brown eyes that cut us a quick glance before returning their full focus to the video game.

  The eleven-year-old twin girls sat at a distance from the boy, leaning over a coloring book that they were doing together. It was one of those adult coloring books with the extremely complex designs, meant to be meditative. Stacey has tried to interest me in them before, but I didn't really pay attention to whatever she was saying about it. The twin girls were doing an impressive job coloring an intricate pattern, their crayons somehow avoiding collision in the tight spaces of the coloring-book page.

  “Ronan, pause it,” Ryan said. “Kids, this is Ellie. She's here to look into some of those problems we've been having at night. Say hi.”

  “Hi,” the twins said, in soft stereo, their lips barely moving. Four fire-blue eyes looked up at me in unison from the coloring book. The girls were milk-pale with red hair, not dark like their father. Their dark, handsome father. I mean, was he a model or what? Why did he have to look like that? Why did I have to get so distracted? I was in town with my boyfriend, anyway. Well, ex-boyfriend. Potential re-boyfriend. Ugh. I hate relationships.

  “The girls are Penelope and Pollyanna,” Ryan said, indicating who was who, not that I'd be able to tell them apart once they moved from their current positions. They didn't dress in matching clothes, like I'd sometimes seen identical-twin kids do. They seemed to have taken care to look different—Penelope in dark clothes, Pollyanna in light pastels. “You can call them Penny and Polly.”

  “Everyone does,” Penny said. Polly nodded.

  “I have cousins who are twins,” I said.

  “Really?” Penny asked, brightening up. “Boys or girls?”

  “Boys,” I said.

  “Oh,” Penny said, apparently losing interest right away.

  “And this is Ronan—hey, Ronan, pause it and say 'hi' to our guest,” Ryan repeated. “Ronan, if I have to ask again, I'm deleting your save and you'll have to start over from the first level—”

  “I'm pausing! I'm pausing!” the six-year-old called out in a near-panic, his ears suddenly working again. He froze the game; on the screen, Harry faced some pretty scary-looking dementors. Even in Lego form, those hooded eyeless guys are creepy. “Is it lunchtime?”

  “We already had lunch,” Ryan said.

  “Can we have it again?”

  “You can have an apple, after we talk to Miss Ellie for a minute.”

  I wasn't sure how I felt about being addressed as Miss Ellie, like I was a preschool teacher or something. I supposed it was a sign he was teaching his kids some old-fashioned manners, which was kind of nice, I guess.

  “Girls, we'll be right back,” Ryan said, while gesturing for the boy and me to follow him.

  “Okay,” the twins chimed together, turning their synchronized gaze back to the coloring book again.

  Ryan led us up the hall. His little boy trailed behind him, glancing back at me frequently.

  “Here we go.” Ryan opened a door. “This is Ronan's room.”

  “It's not my real room,” the boy said. “My real room is back home. At our real house.”

  “Ronan
, I've told you...we're not renting that house anymore. It's not ours anymore. We live here for now.”

  The boy let out an angry grunting sound. He made a show of crossing his arms and stomping into the room, facing away from his father. Comic-book characters adorned the walls, mostly Spider-Man and Iron Man. A small, bright yellow bookcase with three shelves overflowed with picture books. Laundry and action figures were strewn all over the floor.

  “It's not forever,” Ryan said. “We'll move again.”

  “Can it be tomorrow?” Ronan asked, his voice low and pathetically sad.

  “Not tomorrow. Once I get this place fixed up, we can sell it. Then we can move away.”

  “Back to the old house?”

  “We'll see.”

  “Why is everything so bad now?” Ronan asked. He looked back, his eyes shiny.

  Ryan winced like he'd been stabbed. He knelt by his son and gave the kid a hug. Ronan stiffened at first, then returned it, burying his face in his father's shoulder.

  Meanwhile, I stood in the doorway like an awkwardly placed mannequin, not sure how to handle this scenario.

  Ryan seemed to have it down pat, though, because the boy recovered after a minute, scrambling over his messy bed to pick up a plastic Spider-Man toy, which climbed along his headboard.

  Then Ryan looked at me expectantly.

  I cleared my throat. “Ronan,” I said, then hesitated. “I see you like Spider-Man.”

  “Yep,” Ronan said, not looking away. “He's a popular franchise.”

  “True.” I smiled at that—genuine this time, not forced. “Look, I know you might not want to talk about it very much, but can you tell me about anything strange you've seen around here? Your dad said both of you saw something strange.”

  Ronan fidgeted nervously, his concentration on his toy broken. He looked at his dad, his eyes wide.

  “It's okay,” Ryan said softly. “She's here to help.”

  Ronan squinted at me. “Are you a superhero?”

  “No,” I said. “Just a regular person.”

  “Then how can you defeat it?”

  “I have a lot of practice investigating weird things for people,” I said. “I'm a private detective. Do you know what that is?”

  He shook his head.

  “Anyway...sometimes what really scares us is the unknown,” I said. “Usually things are less scary once we know what they really are. That's what I've found. So I'm going to investigate and find out what's really happening around here.”

  “It'll get you,” the boy said. “There's no way you can defeat it in battle. It's too big.”

  “There are other ways to win a battle than by being the biggest,” I said.

  “Like having the biggest gun?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But here's one thing that's always true: the more you learn about your enemy, the better you can defeat him.”

  “Is that Sun-Tzu or something?” Ryan asked, looking amused. His blue eyes sparkled when he was amused, apparently, and I looked away from them quickly.

  “I have no idea,” I said. I squatted down on my heels, since I once read kids are less scared if you get down on their level. Or maybe that was animals. I forget. “So...can you tell me what it is? This thing I'm here to battle?”

  He looked at me a long moment. “I don't know what it is.”

  “Well, that's what I'm here to figure out. Can you tell me what you saw? What it did?”

  Ronan looked at his father again, clearly worried.

  “It's okay,” Ryan said. “Go on.”

  “It...” Ryan looked at the window, which was the narrow kind that opens with a crank and slanted outward to ventilate in nice weather. They were sealed tight now. Snow whirled down outside, not particularly heavy or hard-driven, but constant, still falling, still slowly filling in the road back to my hotel.

  “I'm listening,” I said, quietly. Stacey's usually better with kids. I tried to imagine what she would do, and I decided to reach out and touch his hand, just briefly.

  He looked up at me. “Sometimes it crawls on the walls,” he said. “Sometimes the floor. Sometimes it's more like an animal. Sometimes it's more like a person. But not all the way like a person.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It only comes out in the dark,” he said. “It's ugly. It's like an alligator when it crawls on the ground. It has a big long mouth with teeth. But it has big teeth when it stands up, too. Only it's like a man with big alligator teeth.”

  “Are you saying it changes shape?”

  “Yeah. And it becomes invisible. And it smells bad.”

  “What does it smell like?”

  “Garbage. Wet garbage.” He shivered and wrinkled his nose. “With old fish.”

  “I smelled that, too,” Ryan said, nodding. “When I saw it in the hall.”

  I nodded back at him, but I really wanted him to keep quiet for a second, to avoid cross-pollinating his thoughts and memories with his son's.

  “Ronan, did it seem to notice you?” I asked. “Or did it just pass by, like it was minding its own business?”

  “It crawled toward me on the wall,” he said. “It was an alligator. Or crocodile. Do you know the difference?”

  “Not really,” I said, reaching for my phone. “We can look it up.”

  “An alligator will see you later,” Ronan said solemnly, his eyes huge as he stared at me. “And a crocodile sees you after a while!”

  Then he cracked up laughing, like he hadn't just been talking about a toothy, smelly reptile-monster crawling all over his walls.

  The kid was smiling, proud of himself—his delivery had been pretty spot on, honestly, and his dad was laughing, though maybe it was just a little forced, like he'd actually heard that one before. Perhaps many, many times before.

  It was the first time I'd seen the boy smile, and I just didn't have the heart to steer his thoughts back to the monster right away. I could get more information from his father later.

  “Thanks a lot for talking to me, Ronan,” I said. “Can I ask you more questions later, if I need to?”

  “Yeah. I hope you can kill it,” he said. “You need a really big gun.”

  “I'll keep that in mind, thanks.”

  The kid opted to stay in his room, looking at his comic books. Ryan closed the door gently as the two of us returned to the hall.

  “He seems nice,” I said.

  “Don't let the smile fool you. He'll whoopie-cushion your chair the second you look away.”

  “You really know how to calm him down,” I said. “He was nervous and scared at first. I could tell.”

  “That's just years of practice,” Ryan said. “Like you with the ghost-catching. Right?”

  “Right.” I opened my mouth, but none of my questions seemed appropriate. I wanted to know what had happened to the kids' mother. I wanted to know how old he was, because he seriously looked like he could have gone to high school with me. And it was weird to think of being my age with three kids, especially twin middle-schoolers. And how long had he been caring for them by himself? Or was there someone else in the picture? The dusty, worn wood-panel apartment, odd circus decorations, and frayed mismatched furniture certainly looked like it had passed from unmarried eccentric uncle to widowed father without a woman even glancing into the place along the way.

  “So,” I said. “Does anyone else live here? Or work here?”

  “Just me and the three kids,” he said. “My wife died four years ago. She had oat-cell carcinoma, which is a kind that kills you fast. She probably developed it young from growing up in a house full of cigarette smoke. And she started smoking herself in middle school. We both did, we thought we were cool...” He shook his head. “Ryan just barely remembers her. Sometimes he asks a lot of questions about her. Other times he acts like he doesn't remember at all.”

  “It can be hard to cope with a loss like that. Even years after it happens.”

  “I've noticed. I took him to counseling for a
while—the girls, too—but there's nobody to take him to around here. And our health insurance came from Paula's job, so...” He shook his head. “Sometimes things fall apart all at once. And everything that you thought was there for you, like backing you up—your family, your job, whatever—it can turn out none of it's very solid at all.” He looked out one of the long, narrow rectangular windows his deceased uncle seemed to have favored, to the snow falling outside. The afternoon was darkening under heavy cloud cover. “I did not see myself ending up here. You're a kid, you're a teenager, and you blink...boom, people are dying and responsibilities are crushing in on every side. People are depending on you, and you can't depend on anyone. If you screw up, hey, it's just a helpless kid's life you're ruining. I miss the days when I only had to worry about ruining my own.”

  “It does seem like a lot to handle at your...how old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine,” he said. He really could have gone to high school with me. He was only three years older, maybe closer to two. I had a birthday coming up soon. “You're doing the math, aren't you? Yeah, we were in high school when Paula got pregnant. Senior year. It's like living in an alternate timeline ever since then. I had plans for after school...instead we had a quick cheapo ceremony at the Wedding Palace in Gatlinburg, which is definitely not as big as the name might imply. I went to work for my dad fixing up houses instead of...well, it doesn't matter now.”

  I momentarily imagined an alternate timeline, one where I'd gone the route of kids and family instead of taking the haunted trail deep into the land of darkness and death. Maybe if my parents hadn't died. Maybe I would have hooked up with Antonio Torres, my high school boyfriend. My last-ever conversation with my parents had been an argument about going on a date with him. My parents had been against it, just because he was an obvious delinquent and all-around bad influence waiting to happen. He was really cute, though. This had not mattered to my parents.

  What if I'd snuck out that night, gone with him anyway? Maybe somehow my parents would have lived; maybe Clay would have remained dormant, as he had for years before that.