Christmas Trees & Monkeys

by Keohane, Dan

  The police sergeant shifted in his chair. “Where do you think we are?”

  Benjamin kept his gaze on the sky. “There’s theory I heard the other day. We never moved. We’re at the center of everything, you see. It’s just that the universe kind of, well, rearranged itself around us. We didn’t change.” He raised his beer can skyward. “All of that up there did.”

  His guest looked at him for a long time, then shrugged. “It’s as good as any other I’ve heard.” He sat back. For a while neither spoke, then the sergeant said, “I guess we’ll have to come up with a whole new set of constellations now.”

  Benjamin nodded. He’d already begun looking for patterns, signs to grab onto which would make sense of the universe hanging above him.

  — — — — —

  About “Y2 Kay”

  Let’s keep things light for one additional story before I whack you all upside the head with something nasty again.

  Look at the title of this next story. I’ll give you one guess what it’s about. Yep, I wrote and sold this baby in 1999. The world was trembling in its boots about the pending Year 2000 crisis which never happened. People were buying food and storing it away (you know who you are...), hucksters were preaching doomsday sermons while selling ten year supplies of dehydrated food to the gullible. And me, I was at my day job, talking with a man named Paul Winslow.

  The subject of the Y2K scare came up, and I vehemently denied things were going to be as bad as people thought. Paul asked me, “Then what do you think is going to happen?” In that moment the right side of my brain kicked in and I rattled off a quick summary of what might happen. I was joking, but Paul looked thoughtful and said, “Is that one of your stories?”

  I said, “No, but it probably should be, huh?” I wrote the story in a couple of weeks. Sent it off to Seth Lindberg, editor of one of the top webzines at the time - Gothic.Net – and waited. Once the new year rolled around this story would be as saleable as green meat. But Seth bought it (God bless him). And the world had plenty of forewarning of what was really going to happen on New Years Day, 2000.

  Y2 Kay

  “...and we’re off!” The producer’s arm swept down with dramatic elaboration.

  The reporter smiled, obviously relieved. “You’re a natural, Mrs. Goodman! Is there something you need right now?”

  Through her exhaustion, Kathleen Goodman tried to return the smile. “I’m fine, Benjamin. Go run along and do whatever television reporters do during commercials.”

  The man nodded. “That would be eat I believe.” Perfect teeth, his Visine eyes never showing fatigue. He walked into the kitchen and pulled a clean coffee mug from the cabinet over the toaster.

  Kathleen was tired, more so than she could remember being in a long time. The crew had mounted an oversized digital clock atop the network’s television monitor, which in turn sat atop the woman’s own large, dark console in the living room. The time glowed a steady red - eleven-thirty-six.

  Eleven-thirty-six, she thought. Lord.

  Any other day Kathleen would be in bed four hours earlier. Wheel of Fortune, a cup of tea then the cold shock of sheets. Tonight was not normal. She sat in her hard-back chair and stared with bemused detachment across the room at the monitor and clock. From the kitchen Benjamin barked orders to the crew and demanded status reports between sips of coffee. The producer, Samantha something, did likewise. Every few moments one of them looked her way, offering a tired but sincere smile. Kathleen wondered if they were secretly afraid the subject of their New Year’s Eve special might kick off to the hereafter any minute. She stared at the camera which loomed like a miniature cannon on its tripod in the middle of the room. Maybe their fears were well-founded. Each time that contraption turned its eye her way, she felt as if the peach pit in her chest the doctors called a heart would dry up once and for all.

  No. She wouldn’t die this night. Too many grandchildren and great grandchildren glued to their sets, waiting for the next installment of “The Woman of Three Centuries.” It might distress the family to see their Grandma leaning lifeless in the chair when ABC cut back from Times Square. She wondered if Agnes was watching. Probably not. Her sister would be having the orderlies checking her machinery every fifteen minutes.

  Kathleen Goodman was the oldest woman in America, at least the oldest anybody knew about. On August seventeenth she’d managed to crawl forward to her one hundred and eighth year. Everyone wanted to interview this living monument to history - try and understand what it would be like to live in three different centuries. No one could know, except a few. In the end, her lawyer grandson Andrew, enjoying early retirement in Boston, helped choose which of the fifty-seven news agencies vying for attention would be her guest tonight. She liked the choice, though felt a little cheated ABC didn’t send Dick Clark for the honors.

  Benjamin poked his head into the living room. “Everything all right, Mrs. Goodman?”

  “Fine,” she said. “How long before the next one?”

  He looked at his clipboard. “They cut back to us for the final piece at five after twelve.... after the ball drops in New York and the singing and all that yadda-yadda.”

  Twenty minutes, she thought. Almost a vacation.

  “I’ll just call my sister, then.”

  He nodded and left the room.

  * * *

  Beep. Whoosh. Beep.

  Agnes stared at the darkened television bolted to the opposite wall. As if Death would soon creep out of that gray glass, one second past midnight.

  Whoosh. Beep.

  “It’s going to be OK, Aggie. I promise nothing’s going to shut down.”

  Agnes looked at the nurse. What was her name? It started with a ‘B,’ didn’t it? It wouldn’t come. It never did. Not that this deficiency was related to age. Agnes was one hundred years and two months old and could still remember her first day of school. She just had a miserable memory for names.

  Whoosh.

  The machine continued its cycle unabated, like a mountain river which beyond any reason that comforted her, continued to pour gallons of water year after year. But this wasn’t a river, nor any such act of nature. It was a machine, sucking blood from her like a fictional vampire, digesting and spinning the fluid within its bowels, adding nutrients, insulin, regurgitating it back into Agnes’ other arm. Unfailing. Relentlessly surging to keep her alive.

  Beep. Whoosh.

  Ring.

  But inside this life-giving monstrosity was a computer. Powerful, untiring, infallible. But a computer. She heard the news reports. What they said about this particular change in year. What was that acronym they kept using? Y2K. That’s it. Midnight in the new millennium, when all computers with their hard-wired ‘19’s for centuries will change their years from ‘99’ to ‘00’. The human race will celebrate the year 2000, while the brains embedded in every machine will be thrust back into the Year of our Lord 1900, a time when computers never existed. Not knowing how to handle this new situation, their silicon minds will cease to function. Every elevator will stop between floors. Planes will fall from the sky.

  “Aggie? It’s for you.”

  All life support systems and dialysis machines will stop dead. Dead. Like she’ll be in fifteen minutes.

  “Aggie? Telephone. It’s your sister.”

  Agnes looked at ‘B’ and tried to smile. The nurse raised the back half of the bed with one hand, held out the phone with the other. Agnes took the receiver with IV-stricken hands.

  “Kay? Is that you, Kay?”

  “It’s me, sweetie. How are you?”

  “I’m OK,” Agnes lied. “You sound tired.”

  “You know us television stars,” Kathleen’s voice said. “Always whooping it up ‘til all hours of the night. Did you see any of it?”

  “Of course. You looked wonderful.”

  A pause, then, “You’re such a fibber. You haven’t turned on a television in forty years.”

  Agnes felt a giggle well up, but like so many other
s her big sister managed to create these days, it never evolved past a simple quiver in her stomach. “I suppose not. How come those movie people haven’t come here to interview me? This will be my third, well —” but her voice trailed away.

  “Oh, Aggie, please stop worrying. You told me the hospital gave you the notice on those machines. Everything’s taken care of. The new year’s going to come and go and you won’t miss a single beep of that infernal contraption you’re plugged into!”

  “How can you be sure? Everything’s so advanced these days. Reader’s Digest was talking about micro chips. They said those are the real brains in these things. No one’s really sure what kind of stuff is in there, how they’ll react. Nothing’s like it used to be. No one knows - “

  “Yes, they do. For heaven’s sake computer brains are more advanced than humans’. Heck, if anything is going to react to the new year it’ll probably be —”

  “That’s just my point!” Agnes interrupted. “How can we possibly have thought of everything?”

  “Agnes, please don’t get any sicker worrying over something as silly as this. Is someone there with you?”

  Agnes looked at ‘B’ and smiled. “Yes. She’s very nice. She promised to stay with me until the end.”

  Kathleen audibly sighed over the line. “It’s not going to end. I promise. I’ll call back right after they say goodbye over here. Then I’m going to sleep until Monday.”

  “Goodbye, Kay.”

  “I’ll talk to you later.” Kathleen hung up. Agnes held the phone to her ear a minute longer. When the dial tone kicked in she let it fall to the bed. The nurse hung it up then gently took her hand.

  “How’s her interview going?”

  Agnes didn’t answer. The clock on the side table read eleven-fifty-four.

  * * *

  Times Square was fuzzy. Kathleen blinked. Her exhaustion was beginning to win the battle. Only three minutes until midnight. On the monitor, the New York crowd bounced like popcorn behind Mr. Clark. In a smaller inset picture, the glowing yellow ball waited with electric impatience for it’s descent into history. Benjamin stepped into the room.

  “Six minutes until we say goodbye, Mrs. Goodman.”

  “Fine.” Her voice was a whisper. So tired. She closed her eyes and dozed off.

  * * *

  “Ten!” The shouts began from the nurses’ station down the hall. ‘B’ never took her eyes, or smile, from Agnes.

  “Nine!” Beep.

  “Eight!” Whoosh.

  “Seven!” Beep.

  Agnes felt her heart beating in its thin cavity. She tried to pray, to make some final reconciliation before it ended.

  “Six!” Whoosh.

  “Five!” Beep.

  But she couldn’t concentrate. The roller coaster was cresting its apex and would never come down again.

  “Four!” Whoosh.

  “Three!” Beep.

  “Two!” It would stay at the top. Whoosh.

  Forever.

  “One!” The nurse never wavered in her smile, but gently squeezed Agnes’ hand. Such a wonderful young girl.

  “Happy New -”

  Beep. Whoosh. A genetically-encoded process, like an internal clock unerringly mapping her lifetime and buried deep within the nurse’s mind, rolled over the new year as it had done thirty-six other times since her birth. The nurse’s grip loosened. Her eyes rolled up into their sockets. As if in slow motion, she fell back in the chair. Dead weight carried her body to the floor.

  Beep.

  Whoosh.

  Agnes was hungry. She screamed and screamed.

  * * *

  Kathleen stared transfixed at the painting across the room. It glowed with the color and brilliance of St. Malachy’s stained-glass windows. But the painting was too detailed. Maybe it was a photograph. She’d seen a number of them before. But all that color....

  She must still be asleep. The scene before her depicted hundreds of people sleeping on a bright street corner. She concentrated on the image. Maybe they weren’t sleeping, after all. Body after body lay atop one another, oddly contorted, an arm now and again twisted the wrong way. Macabre. A piece of dust drifted across the scene. Kathleen squinted her eyes to follow its path. It disappeared at the picture’s edge. Another appeared. Then another.

  Her heart began beating oddly, too fast. Those weren’t pieces of dust. Like locusts, swarms of stray confetti and papers drifted across the bizarre landscape of bodies. These things were in the painting, or picture, whatever it was. They moved. The painting was alive!

  Kathleen said, “Mom?” Her voice sounded dry, sickly. “Mom?”

  At last she pulled her gaze from the image and scanned the room. This wasn’t her bedroom. It wasn’t even her house. Candles glowed brilliantly from every corner. But the light was wrong, too white, too bright. She gripped the arms of the chair. Chair? She’d gone to sleep in her own bed. What was she doing in a strange house sitting in a chair? A mental image of Goldilocks popped into her mind, try as she might to suppress it.

  She tried to stand. Every muscle in her body fought the action. She fell back, wheezing.

  Oh, God, please. Don’t let me be sick.

  She thought of that newspaper story her father read, about the epidemic in England. People were dying from influenza faster than the plague of the dark ages. And it was starting to spread here, to America.

  No, she thought. I felt fine when I went to bed.

  Kathleen tried to stand again, and succeeded. Stiff, cold pain spread into her legs and hips.

  “Mom? Is anyone here?” Dreaming. Every step, the sound of her voice, all of it felt and sounded like an elaborate nightmare. Her father would be gone until Thursday, selling his brushes. But her mother must be here somewhere. It was then she thought of the baby. Something’s happened to the baby and they brought Kathleen here while she slept.

  Oh, no. Oh, no oh no oh no.

  She shuffled towards the kitchen. Why was everything so bright? Then she realized. These weren’t candles. The house had electricity! Her fear momentarily fell to the sudden excitement of standing in a house with honest-to-God electric lights. She stumbled over a man’s body.

  She instinctively threw out her hands to brace the fall. In the instant before she impacted with the floor tiles, Kathleen got the first good look at her skin. Dry, wrinkled, spotted with dark brown blotches. These weren’t her hands. They belonged to someone else, an old woman. If they were hers, she was sicker than she feared. When she landed something in her right wrist came loose. Any discomfort prior to this moment faded under the blinding fire in her arm. She closed her eyes and howled against the pain. The grinding in her wrist reverberated even through her teeth.

  When Kathleen opened her eyes, a man stared back at her. His gaze was cold, unblinking. Lifeless. In her peripheral vision she sensed other bodies scattered on the floor with her.

  This man needed her help. They all did. What in God’s name could she do? She was only eight years old. Without any reasonable answer, she began to cry. She called for her mother, for anyone, knowing something bad was happening. The disease from England. Everyone was dying. Kathleen closed her eyes and cried through the pain in her wrist, through the image of her shrunken and sickly skin, through the lifeless eyes of the man on the floor beside her.

  * * *

  The hospital corridor was silent, but for the steady beeping of the machinery. Slumped in chairs, draped across the half-walls of every workstation, nurses and interns lay as if in drunken slumber. The odor of decomposition overpowered the automatic air fresheners. In one room at the end of one hall, the screaming began again.

  The old woman thrashed side to side, oblivious to the panicked beeping of the machine as it compensated for changes in the patient’s vital signs. Agnes was hungry. She screamed, her body reverberating with the effort. The two-month-old infant raised its hundred-year-old arms into the air, begging for the breast or bottle which would never come.

  — — — — �
�

  About “Ritual”

  I came up with the idea for this story a full year before I actually wrote it. I was lying in bed, trying to get my then-very-young daughter Audrey to go to sleep. I was staring at the swirling patterns of shadow on the ceiling and, like any normal person, saw a goat’s head. And, like seeing demon faces in trees, once I saw the shape I couldn’t see anything else. I imagined the head emerging out from the ceiling, attached to a human body.

  Hmm, thought I. Why would it do that? Perhaps a demon (hence the goat’s head), or a ghost, or something like that. I had to stop thinking about it because Audrey had (and still has) a tendency to pick up on people’s thoughts and gets upset if what I’m thinking involves demons coming out of her ceiling.

  Around that time, Steve and Melanie Tem came out with an award-winning novella called The Man in the Ceiling, so that kind of squashed my plans for the story. Later, however, I returned to it, deciding that the coming-from-the-ceiling bit wasn’t the point of the story, but the visitation itself. And, well, that’s why we have dark closets, isn’t it?

  I honestly don’t know why I made the characters Irish. I guess I just liked their names and language, and at the time Ballykissangel was a popular television show in the Keohane household.

  “Ritual”

  “Would you like to stay up late tonight, Liam?”

  “No, Da. It’s my bed time.”

  “Ah, I know. But I just thought, well, seeing — as you’re always asking.”