Christmas Trees & Monkeys

by Keohane, Dan

  The kitchen is large. Dark wood beams soar over contrasting white walls. As Regina walks across the room her eyes scan the counter, toaster, microwave, never resting long on any object. She is distracted and tired. Her briefcase stands on the breakfast table. The coffeemaker hisses and coughs. Half decaf, half regular, the timer set that morning to be ready for them when they arrived. Black steam welcomes senses which are crinkling at the edges, chipping like old paint. Regina inhales deeply, knowing she cannot drink even when it is done.

  Minutes later, husband and wife hold coffee mugs with both hands as if warming fingers on a cold day. John lifts the cup to his face. Steam fills his nostrils. He wants to drink its hot, cleansing pain. Not yet. The birds need to be fed, and he isn’t yet hungry. The coffee mug is lowered. John stares across the kitchen and sees the past week’s faces - crying, screaming, laughing, silent. They parade by, revolving on an invisible spindle.

  Eight Years Old, remembers Doctor John. What had the boy seen? Parents whispering, muffled crying, when Eight Year Old pushed open their door, "but my head was being pulled back, down the hall, like a rope coming out of my neck." The boy was describing his instincts taking over as he opened the door, knowing at a base level what he’d see in his parents’ room. Something monstrous laid out before him. "Wet and splashy," Eight Year Old says. The boy occasionally devises alternative words to describe the contents of that room. When this happens, John usually finds himself wishing for "wet and splashy".

  Each session John takes upon himself these images, holds them close until they no longer threaten the child. Eight Year Old always feels better, while John’s stomach burns with their pain. The heat soon fades, only to flare again on Friday afternoons.

  Husband and wife, now lost in their memories, sit at the table. The kitchen is silent save an occasional sigh of a shoe against tile.

  In memory, feeling her empathy of the week solidify inside her, Regina hears the whispered confessions of Brad Renelle, 10:15 appointment Tuesday. Renelle’s hands droop between thighs, fingers interlocked then loosened, chasing each other across the chasm of his legs. His eyes downcast, staring at his shoe, one foot half-out of its loafer, lips wet. Brad Renelle, large imposing man, whispers an obscene confession of his latest fantasy, occasionally glancing up to see if Regina acknowledges his insanity. Is this simple clarity of thought, she would wonder, something good rather than depraved? Always careful is Regina, never flinching her expression. Never knowing what might set him off. Set any of them off.

  "We need to fill the bird feeders," Regina now whispers to her husband. Her voice is paper. She licks her lips, tries to swallow. "Before it gets dark."

  John lifts his head. Outside the day is still bright with the sideways slant of early summer evening. A dinner appointment tonight with Merrimack Hospital’s director of psychology, written on the refrigerator calendar. An Important Man wanting to pull an Important Couple from the warm shadows of their practices. Imprison them in a menagerie of brick and pensions. Plug them in, harness the talent they possess: Doctor John’s success rate with children deemed lost, his ability to pull them out of the pit - if only a little higher than anyone one else has been able. Doctor Regina for her papers on adult sexual discord, her radical approaches to violent patients. Men and women excessive in their debauchery, serving extended jail sentences, held far from the community’s reaching hands. Her ability to understand the darkness inside them, then extract it. Change them. Sometimes forever. Sometimes for only a week.

  The successful couple trudge outside, slowly, like penitent monks with gazes lowered, heading for the feeders in the front. Husband and wife who take upon themselves the filth and pain of children and violent screamers-who-once-were-human. They help their patients secrete from deep within themselves their nightmares and fantasies, tapped like sap into the dented tin buckets of the doctors’ souls.

  Come unto me all who are weak and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, reads the sign on the wall, in a never-looked at corner of her office. She is beaten, stray dog skittish. But her patients are once again brighter and clearer of mind.

  John and Regina move by instinct and routine. They smell the fresh coffee aroma drifting from the open windows, pushing them on with promises of future lightness and taste. One or the other repeats that they have to feed the birds. Zombies in elegantly disheveled business suits, stepping up the driveway onto the clipped grass lawn.

  The birds chitter loudly. There are more of them, monochromatic, reds and blues, greens and yellows. Their excitement is audible, watching the couple arrive.

  John thinks about Lisa who turned eleven last week. Freckled and tousle-haired, she fights with her right arm which creeps up on her at night, crawling spider-like to her throat when she dares fall asleep.

  The low sun hits him in the face. John cannot see the birds but hears them. They gossip and worry. He takes one tube-shaped feeder into uncertain hands. Flashes of blue among the leaves. John fumbles to open the top, sees reds bouncing in the corner of his vision. He remembers angry-eyed Michela who kills every pet her parents bring home, and now her mother is pregnant. John’s stomach burns with their fear.

  Regina lifts the second feeder from the pole. Tiny screams fall from the trees as if Autumn is early and the leaves have found a voice. The sound tightens her skin. Intense are the creatures’ wants and needs, like the bleached woman yesterday who sat in silence for twenty minutes only to skulk to the display case by the window and slam her fist through the glass. In a blink she had dragged the underside of one arm sideways, filling the small transparent box with blood. Regina’s stomach cramps with the ice of such blind rage, their rage, all of them. The birdsong loops through her head. Chirping, screaming, laughing among the green tree shade. Her stomach is a bag of frozen slush.

  John doubles over. Fire in his stomach and throat, liquid molten pain. He thinks of the new boy who started sessions Monday, curled up on the couch and slowly gnawing his fingertips off. John feels the boy in him now, struggling to be set free. Doctor John’s mouth closes over the top of the feeder, as does his wife’s over the other. He sees her crying, but she is blurred from his vision. The boy on the couch had pulled chunks of skin free before John realized what he was up to. Now, the boy leaps forward within him, clawing higher, shouting Let me out.

  The ice cracks into jagged spikes in Regina’s stomach. It constricts and conforms to the shape of her esophagus. Like a gush of coagulated oil, black bile curls from her mouth and into the plastic feeder tube. I am heavy laden, she thinks. Regina cannot breathe, like when she was young and had the flu, locked in dry heaves, certain she would never breathe again. It’s like that at this moment, waiting to die, feeling the man on Wednesday who had shoved a steak knife into his lover’s eye now pour out of her in a surreal birth.

  To John it feels like a tongue of magma burning from his throat. Then it’s out. Cooling. He can breath again. The boy curled on the couch in his office fades away. The torment, sin and disease of the week passes with a few remnant pieces spit into the tube.

  Regina does not think any more about the people who should be burned alive, who leave her office feeling freer than before, freer than they should. For Regina, there is only this joyous moment of breathing. So much air inside her, around her for the taking.

  The black tar stretches the limits of the plastic housings - frosting one feeder, steaming to translucence the other. Above them the screams in the trees soar to a deafening crescendo. Greens, blues, yellows dart among the branches. High-pitched whistles drop suddenly to deep-throated impatience. The tiny demons take flight.

  John is caught unprepared and sees them clearly. He wishes he hadn’t, feels close to dying at the consideration of their existence. He pulls his wife away with quick steps and firm grip. She does not resist, taking the summer evening coolness into her lungs. The sky above and around them is fraught with the wings of small bodies, asexual and naked, chittering in hunger and anger. Out of my way, John muses the sounds a
re saying to them. Let us feed on what you have given back to us.

  John and Regina walk unsteadily along the driveway. Before the corner of the house blocks her view Regina gives in to temptation and looks over her husband’s shoulder. The feeders are covered in swarming colors. She focuses on one, a small blue with narrow face. Its wings spread and flutter as it eats. A shorter, yellow demon knocks the blue’s wing aside. Above them, gripping one of the protruding metal bars with curved talons, a green man-shape holds in its fist a wad of steaming mucus. It buries its face into some child’s sin.

  Before the house obscures her view Regina wonders what human blemish it is devouring.

  * * *

  They are inside now. Stillness becomes calm.

  The kitchen is darkened from the drawn window shade, the feeding outside dancing shadows upon it. John succumbs to the thick coffee smell and lifts the cup to his lips. Though he is shaken, he feels a welcome lightness and tries to recall the details of the past week. All of it remembered, but when he searches for empathy, the pain built with every confession and diverted stare, there is nothing.

  Standing in the dim-lighted kitchen sipping from his mug, John knows he is free.

  Eventually the shadows outside flutter away. Regina is empty, free as well to be only herself. For the weekend. Until Monday, when it will start all over again. Doctor Regina and her beloved husband will open their souls and become vessels into which their patients shall pour their pain and sins. The world expects nothing less of its caretakers. Nor do the demons, which will always return. They will alight upon the trees even when the leaves have gone and the snow contrasts their skin, dimmed in the cold to subtle pastels and gray. They will come, expecting to be fed.

  — — — — —

  About “The Doll Wagon”

  In the summer of 2000, while playing softball during an my very first Necon writer’s conference, I struck up a conversation with two other writers: Suzanne Donahue and Stefano Donati. Come to find out each of us had stories slated to appear in the same issue of a horror magazine which never materialized — it went out of business beforehand. Suzanne and Stefano also happened to be editing an upcoming anthology entitled, Poddities: A Creative Tribute to Jack Finney’s Body Snatchers. They asked if I could write something for them to consider. When I got home and was cutting the lawn (I get most of my story ideas in one of two places: the first is behind the lawnmower, the second I’ll save for the introduction of “Ptolemy”), a quiet simple story came to mind.

  I wrote “The Doll Wagon” in just over a week - a new personal record. Now, evil dolls aren’t exactly new to the horror biz, but this seemed like an interesting take on the idea, and I think it came out as one of my best stories. It garnered some nice recognition in the field, including an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. That’s always a nice thing to see.

  The Doll Wagon

  The Doll Wagon came on a warm night in July, rattling down Claisdale Avenue at nine o’clock. The sky glowed with a prolonged sunset, shimmering ultramarine between the rustling leaves of Maples and Oak. Claisdale Avenue was quiet, most of the children having run home at the call of their mothers or the switching-on of outside lights. Cars in driveways ticked away the days’ heat and living room windows cast the neighborhood in a soft, yellow glow.

  “Dolls!” shouted the woman in robes.

  She pulled the cart behind her. Wind chimes tinkled. Pale white dolls swung from hooks and loops of string, in time with the turning of the large irregular wheels.

  “Dolls!” she called again. Her robes fell behind her, lost in the cart’s shadow. Black tousled hair fell across her shoulders, over the robe’s unused cowl. She seemed out of time, a peddler from another century lost in this quiet, modern suburb.

  Faces peered nervously behind screen doors and over the backs of couches. They watched the pale woman walk slowly down the center of their street.

  “Dolls,” she called, loudly but with patience. On both sides of her cart, dolls of ages past mingled with those found in the local Toys R Us. They bounced and swung as if in dance, tiny blue eyes reflecting the window lights as they passed, searching out the faces behind the screens. Looking for a home.

  * * *

  “I see one! I see one!” Megan was out the door before her mother could react.

  Joanne hesitated, screen door held open, and watched her daughter run across the lawn towards the wagon. “Meg, come back here,” she shouted, but her call was without heart.

  The wagon stopped. Its burden swung like living tassels. Joanne walked quickly down the two front steps and across the grass, following her daughter’s path. The woman in the robes knelt before Megan and smiled, reached up to where the little girl pointed, and handed her a chubby baby doll. Its skin matched that of the woman, shiny in the dim light.

  As Joanne approached, she saw her neighbors at the edge of her vision. They moved cautiously over lawns, led by their children.

  * * *

  “I’m going to call her Megan,” Megan said joyfully. William pulled the covers tight under her chin and that of her new doll.

  “But that’s your name,” he said.

  Megan pulled the doll out from the covers and held it aloft. The toy face peered down, back into her own. “That’s why it’s a good name,” she said. Her voice had already taken on its pre-sleep sigh. William smiled and kissed his daughter on the cheek. He moved as Joanne came to the bedside.

  “Good night, Megan,” she said after her own kiss. Her daughter whispered her good night, never taking her eyes from the other Megan. Joanne stood back and watched the girl slowly lower her arms until the doll rested on her chest and nuzzled under her chin.

  * * *

  “You’re sure you checked it out?” Joanne lifted the pot of decaf from the coffee maker. A late drop fizzled on the heating unit. “Nothing inside? And you washed the skin?”

  William leaned on the edge of the sink and lightly played with his wife’s hair.

  “Yes,” he said. “I promise. I didn’t rip the dolls’ head off but I squeezed the body and its little legs and arms,” he moved his hands in a pantomime of his earlier search. “Nothing.”

  “Still, all of this is too weird.”

  William returned his hand to Joanne’s hair. “I have to agree with you there. By the looks of the crowd, though, it’s a great idea. I mean, hell, when you came back inside I saw more people walking out across the street.” He looked past the kitchen towards the living room and added, “Kind of reminds me of when the ice cream truck comes by.”

  Joanne didn’t reply at first, merely took a tentative sip of coffee and wandered towards the front door. William followed her and together they gazed into the street. The wagon, and its driver, had long moved on.

  * * *

  The Doll Wagon returned the following night. The air was humid and thick with mosquitoes, more oppressive than the previous evening. She rolled the cart down Claisdale at nine o’clock, calling, “Dolls,” in her loud but undemanding tone.

  * * *

  “But I want to get one for you!” Megan bunched her fists and stood defiantly in front of her mother. Joanne kept her hand on the door handle and tried to look stern.

  “Megan, I understand this is an exciting thing, but you’re not taking care of the doll we bought you last night. It wasn’t even in your bed this morning.”

  “I take care of it. It just fell behind something. PLEASE. There were some really nice ones out there, and it’s almost your birthday, and there were so many pretty things in there, and oh Mommy, please just one more...”

  “Dolls!” called the woman in the robes. The tinkling, swinging cart passed gradually by their house. Joanne turned from her daughter and looked outside. As many people hurried towards the cart tonight as before. Mothers or fathers, pulled along by excited children. Some of them, if Joanne could tell through the cross-hatched screen and dim street lights, looked as worried as she. No one had seen this woman before, and no
w here was the wagon two days in a row.

  Joanne looked down at her daughter and knew any further argument would be fruitless. “One more,” she whispered. Instead of whooping with joy as Joanne half-expected, Megan only smiled and led her mother by the hand, out across the grass, like so many children were doing on similar lawns along the street.

  * * *

  Megan heard the thing talking to her mother, convincing her to buy another doll. She screamed from under the bed, “Mommy! Don’t buy one! She’s not me! Don’t buy one!” Her words never sounded, never made it past Megan’s own plastic doll mind. As she had been doing all day, the girl tried moving her arms, turn herself over, but the arms were fixed, immovable. She could think, could feel her skin on the dusty floor. But none of it felt right.

  Her head was turned to one side. A chubby, plastic doll arm stretched away, one finger pointing across the room. A tiny mote of dust stretched web-like between Megan’s new hand and the floor.

  “This isn’t my hand,” she sobbed. She heard the thing and her mother go outside. Megan wanted to scream again, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. No one could hear her. When she cried, no tears fell from her glassy blue eyes.

  * * *

  “Coming to bed?” Joanne leaned on the door frame.

  William looked up, startled. “What? Oh.... no. Not yet. I want to stay up and watch the news.”