Christmas Trees & Monkeys

by Keohane, Dan

  Jacob lay back on the couch, hearing the occasional siren. Over the course of the night the sound came more and more infrequently. Obviously deciding that being with their families this final night on earth was the priority, police and fire crews simply gave up.

  He stared at the phone. The chord hung flaccidly over the edge of the table. Claire would call. She had to call. Not that it mattered. He could no more get to the airport to meet her than stop the world from falling apart in a few hours. When the first news hit the air two days ago, neither of them believed. She stayed on in San Francisco. One more day and she’d have the sale wrapped up. This afternoon she phoned. Her flight was still scheduled. At that point both knew it may have been too late.

  Jacob listened to the fight outside, and dozed.

  When the phone rang he snapped awake with the receiver already against his ear. Claire’s voice, fighting for attention with the constant hiss of static.

  “...and, and I wasn’t eligible for the seat, and the people are crazy...”

  “Claire? Is that you? Where are you?” He checked the time. Four forty-two.

  “Jacob,” she said, “there are people and people at the door to this phone. They’re trying to get in. I don’t even know if I can get out of here....” Her voice trailed off. Jacob listened to her breathing, to the shouting in the background.

  “Claire, where exactly are you? I’ll try and pick you up - “

  “Pick me up? How the hell are you going to do that? I’m in Chicago. They made us get off the plane in Chicago and they’re not letting anyone back on. God, Jacob, open your fucking ears!”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Jacob....” The background shouts gained in volume. “Jacob, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. They’re getting the door open.”

  “Claire - “ he wanted to say he loved her, that he always will, some loving phrase that could not reach his lips. She was all he had left. He couldn’t even picture the faces of his parents anymore. Only he and Claire, gripping a single electrical life line.

  “Claire, are you all right? Claire?”

  A series of rapid beeps, then a man’s voice said, “Hello? Hello…!”

  Jacob said, “Who is this?”

  There was a slight pause, then, “Get off the phone, asshole. You’re tying up the line. You had your turn.”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Get off the fu - “ Jacob hung up.

  * * *

  CNN exploded into static fifteen minutes later. Somewhere nearby a window shattered. Jacob gripped the bat tighter in one hand, numbly sipped his last bottle of beer with the other. Liquid flashes of light from the television played across his face. He didn’t want to sleep.

  * * *

  The old man concentrated on a small roll of lint on his sleeve. Outside, three men shifted uneasily against the car.

  They’re only parts of a dream. Jacob wanted to believe that. Their uneasiness implied an awareness, as if these figments of his own bedeviled mind remembered how he’d gotten away the last time.

  “I need you to call the police.”

  The old man looked up, then turned his attention back to the lint. “Why should I do that?” he said. “Nothing happening that I need them for.”

  “You know what’s going to happen. Just call.”

  “Can’t do that. Sorry.”

  Jacob looked around. Through the sputtering neon he saw the men coming towards the door.

  He stumbled past an ancient tower of greeting cards and grabbed the door handle. The guy with the dragon tattoo reached for the knob. Jacob twisted the lock.

  “Come on now, friend,” the man sang through the glass. “Let us in. We just want to purchase some beverages.” His two buddies guffawed.

  Jacob had no time for this. The world was about to get smashed apart and he was having the same damned dream.

  The old man shuffled beside him. “Excuse me, please.” Without looking up he reached for the lock and turned it. “We can’t be locking this door. These gentlemen have a right to come in, just like you.”

  Jacob grabbed his arm, tried unsuccessfully to pull it away. The lock twisted open. The door’s small bell tinkled as the smiling men walked in.

  Jacob wanted to cry. “Why did you do that? Why?”

  The old man didn’t answer. In his slow gait he moved back to the counter. The skinny man put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder.

  “Hey, buddy. Long time no –”

  “Fuck you.” Jacob sent a knee into his crotch. The man doubled over. Immediately the fat guy grabbed Jacob by the shirt.

  “That wasn’t very nice.” He spun him around and shot a fist into his back.

  The air in Jacob’s lungs crystallized. He fell to the floor. A boot in his ribs. Something cracked inside his chest. By now the skinny man had recovered. He grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels and held it like a club.

  The bell over the door tinkled. Claire stumbled in, her face bruised and swollen. Her jaw dropped open like Marley’s ghost. She screamed. For a fleeting moment Jacob felt relief. The police would hear this. The skinny man hurled the bottle at her face.

  * * *

  Jacob opened his eyes to darkness. The television was off. So was the clock. His heart hammered in rhythmic panic. Claire’s screams wouldn’t leave his head. Slowly, gray images from the room came into focus, dull light soaking through the shades. He gripped the bat and stood. The screaming didn’t stop. It was coming from outside. Not Claire. The scream choked off for a moment, fell to a sob. Then the woman started in again. From far off someone shouted at her to shut up.

  Maybe she was being raped, long-tailed demons gripping her flesh, taking one last thrill. Reluctantly, Jacob walked towards the front door. The bat felt weightless, non-existent. Everything was going to shit outside. Between screams, the woman muttered unintelligible pleas.

  He had to do something. He wouldn’t just curl up like a baby. Not this time. They’re outside, he thought. Don’t make the same mistake. This time you don’t have to do anything. Just stay here.

  From outside, “Someone help me, please. Someone...” Then silence.

  Jacob opened the door, stepped onto the small porch. No one waited against his car. A warm steady wind tore over the buildings, the air too thick and humid for early October. A gust knocked him against the railing as he descended the stairs, bat squeezed in both hands. He rounded the corner of the building.

  The naked woman was kneeling on the grass with her back to him. She was alone, staring at the sky. It took Jacob a few seconds, staring first at the woman’s tense buttocks then up to the sky, to come to grips with what floated above them.

  The eastern sky was a bright white ceiling, slowly overtaking the dimming stars. The monstrosity rose from the horizon, its full outline still out of sight. Morning light along the surface gave definition to uncountable craters marring its landscape. In its completeness, the thing was the glowing face of a monster, a nightmare man in the moon.

  The woman tried speaking to the sky, but her voice collapsed into a dry hissing.

  Behind him a man said, “That’s the most incredible -”

  The voice snapped the tentative line holding Jacob together. He didn’t think, didn’t wait to decide who it could be. Spinning on one heel, he swung the bat. He put every bit of strength he could summon into the already unstoppable momentum. When the bat hit the man’s head, Jacob leaned into it. Hit him hard. One chance.

  The impact sent reverberations up his arms and shoulders. The man’s head tilted. His legs collapsed under him and he fell onto the sidewalk, eyes open and bleeding. Jacob had the bat sailing again. It pushed the skull into the concrete. Blood poured over blond hair. A voice deep in the center of Jacob’s mind begged him to stop. It was a weak, ineffective plea. He hammered the bat down again, and again. The victim’s face looked like a rubber mask, empty, incomplete.

  Blood splashed into Jacob’s eyes. He blinked, stopped his assault long enough to wipe it away. His finger
s smeared red.

  The door of unit thirty-one closed. Someone had seen him. Someone watched him kill this man. He blinked away the memory of the face. He’d been one of them. Had to be. Had to be one of them.

  “Kill me, too.”

  The woman’s voice behind him was so damaged it sounded artificial. Jacob turned. On her knees she faced him now, her too-pale skin flecked with dots of blood. “Please kill me. I don’t want to be here when it comes.” She closed her eyes, expecting the maniac in front of her to comply. She mouthed the word “please.”

  A dark, erotic wave boiled inside him. All he wanted to do was smash the bat down, keep playing this new game, hit them, smash them, beg his buddy for more quarters.

  He saw a white Plymouth Fury pass between two buildings. It glided along the drive and disappeared from view.

  In a blink, animalistic mind-numbing rage twisted into terror. He had to get inside. Behind him the woman tried unsuccessfully to scream her objections.

  Jacob slammed the door, let the baseball bat drop. Outside, the car hissed along the pavement. Through the curtains he watched it roll past. The car wasn’t a Fury. A nervous-looking black woman leaned over the steering wheel, obviously in search of a particular townhouse. She gave no notice to the crushed body of Jacob’s next door neighbor. That’s who he was. His name was Tom, or Tim. It didn’t matter, anymore.

  Outside, the world grew brighter. Jacob leaned against the door.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. In his mind he saw a child’s vision of God, flowing white beard falling across his robes. This God looked down at him, the tight angry frown saying all that needed to be said. The image turned away.

  Jacob felt the devil clawing through the ground to reach him. The room shook, sending the remote control skidding across the top of the television. The distant rumbling became a roar. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled along the carpet. The world jerked back and forth. The television tube exploded when it hit the floor. Breaking glass in every room. The townhouse was committing suicide.

  The earthquake stopped. Above him, the ceiling split. Beams groaned as gravity tried to pull the queen-sized bed through the floor. Jacob didn’t move. He lay on his back, staring at the jagged scar above him. Let it fall, he thought. Just let it fall.

  * * *

  Morgan and Sarah Kane ran out of their unit across the street. Above, clouds raced beneath the massive, falling stone. Morgan called his brother’s name. Sarah grabbed his arm, but he’d already seen it. His brother lay on the sidewalk across the way. His head didn’t look right.

  An old woman stumbled, crying, from unit thirty-one. “I’m so sorry for not stopping it,” she shouted. “But what could I do? He would’ve killed me, too.”

  Morgan looked absently between the old woman and the monstrous rock in the sky. He whispered, “Who killed my brother?” Deep below the cracked street the rumbling began again.

  * * *

  The supports split above Jacob’s head. He tried to remember a prayer, maybe the “Our Father.” Too long away from church. Too late for any redemption.

  The quake hit full force as the dead man’s brother came through the front door. Jacob recognized him. Then everything imploded around them. Morgan Kane fell forward. His wife struggled through the shattered entrance in pursuit. She begged him to come back, not to let it end like this. She fell into the room. Jacob let himself pretend she was Claire.

  Claire coming home.

  “You son of a bitch!” The man clambered on top of him. “Wipe that fucking smile off your face.”

  Hands around his throat. Jacob grabbed the other’s arms, but never resisted. This was an angel sent to squeeze penance from him. The grip loosened. The angel couldn’t keep his balance. Their figures tumbled across the floor in time with the earth’s breakdown. The ceiling sighed, gave out. The dark lumbering shape of the bed loomed like a miniature version of the annihilation outside. When it fell the floor boards twisted and cracked open. It missed them, landing at Jacob’s feet, kept on going. The tentative grip on his throat fell away.

  For a fleeting moment the shaking stopped. Jacob turned in mid-air, like flying in a dream. He was falling. The floor of the basement seemed to hurl itself up at him.

  Black. Then, slow consciousness. Back into chaos.

  The broken floor of the basement shifted beneath him. He saw the dark, swirling tempest in the sky above through the jagged remains of the floors.

  The earthquake’s howling fell to a background hum. The earth took in its final breath. The light outside dimmed.

  Jacob tried to roll sideways. Hot, wet pain burned down his back. He touched something protruding from his belly, felt the long wooden stake. A vampire run through the heart. But it missed. Everyone missed. After a too-short respite, the world heaved in its final death throes.

  Across the room, the angel bled from a gash running along the middle of his face. He held the woman. Her eyes were open, frightened and unfocused. She stared without blinking at a spot far above. Jacob stumbled forward, feeling the stake pull out of him. He covered only a few feet before rattling plates deep below the floor finally split. His legs dropped into a crevice. Dust and steam. As he slipped into the entrance of hell, Jacob thought he saw the angel rise on a slab of earth, racing skyward as if to meet his destroyer half-way. He carried with him the body of the woman.

  Rapture, Jacob thought.

  His feet had become wedged into the tight confines of the crevice. No more light above. The walls squeezed in. Jacob felt his feet and legs crush out of existence. He wanted to say the “Our Father.” Something large moved up his throat.

  No weight. No maddening violence. The sensation of hitting smooth road after miles of torn and grooved pavement. He rose without pain. In the blackness he sensed, then moved through, the asteroid’s mass.

  Brilliant stars. The earth enormous, looming below as in a proportionally-skewed dream. In its center a dark, scorched growth nuzzled itself below the surface. Dust sailed past the atmosphere into dispassionate space.

  From the carnage, a river of souls like his own flowed, converged toward a single expanding star. Its light stretched forward, celestial arms gathering up its children. Jacob watched the tide move with unnatural speed. He felt no motion of his own. The light expanded, outshone the rest of the universe. Jacob swam in it, barely able to see the river spiraling away.

  The light blinked out. The other stars returned, their illumination tarnished by the display. Jacob had the unwelcome sensation of falling, back toward the crumbling planet.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes. Green tiles. He should have been surprised, should have screamed in defiance.

  He wasn’t surprised. All so logical to him now. Jacob stood, muscles thick as if replaced with layers of fat. The old man moved around the counter. He stopped at the front door and turned, his voice the only clear sound around them.

  “You were so damn close, Jacob.” He opened the door and said, “He’s all yours,” then left the building. The lethargy in Jacob’s muscles crawled into his brain.

  The skinny man and his two buddies walked in.

  “Well, well, Mister Dempsy,” he said. “We meet again.” The fat one was the last to enter. He seemed to be suffering from the same fatigue as everyone else.

  Jacob breathed stale air. “You tricked me.”

  He watched the fat man lean against the door. The world outside was a pale white. Nothing there. Empty. The walls absorbed the whiteness - the nothingness.

  “You had your chance,” the skinny man said. His eyes darted around the room. The walls were gone, replaced by white.

  Jacob fell slowly to his knees, unable to support his own weight. “You thought you could hold me back,” he said. “Play this game in my head forever. Like this is Hell or something.”

  The skinny man forced a smile. “Isn’t it? All the others swam away to Heaven. You saw that. Where else could we be?”

  The fat man was gone. The Irishman drop
ped against the greeting card stand. A moment later nothing washed over that section of the store.

  Jacob whispered. “Somehow you got in my head, kept me running, kept on playing this damned game of yours. You drove me crazy. Made me screw up.”

  The other watched the last of his buddy blink from existence. He took a half step forward. “It worked,” he said, looking everywhere except at Jacob. “You… you were a bad boy, Jacob. Now you get to play with us... with me at least, forever.... Ummm..” He pranced back and forth, not certain what to do next.

  “It worked great,” Jacob breathed. “But we’re not in Hell. There is no Hell. You’re in the same place you’ve always been. My mind. But it’s fading, now. There was only one place to go when I died, and you fucked it all up.”

  The skinny man tried to kick him, but the nothingness caught his arm like a bug on fly paper. Still, as his arm and shoulder blended into the advancing wall, he stretched a leg out, tried unsuccessfully to connect with Jacob’s head or chest. He screamed without sound, his face twisting in revulsion as it drowned in the white. The remaining arm reached up, as if to grab his own hair and pull free the body. Then nothing. Jacob was alone.

  Five feet. Four. Jacob watched the floor shrink like a thin piece of ice. He wondered if this was the end, if he would simply blink away. Maybe something waited on the other side. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. In the end, maybe his only redemption was to finally see this nightmare fade away. Forever.

  — — — — —

  About “Ptolemy”