The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

It was horrible, what they had heard—and just one day after the curfew had been dropped? It was too much to be mere coincidence. James had heard it first, through his bedroom floor, as his mother gasped into the telephone. His father was absent, working late yet again, but his mother provided James plenty to chew on. After she hung up, she told Louise the whole thing, then dialed one friend, then another, and in this fashion the news, as well as the speculation on who would do such a ghastly thing, vibrated out through telephone wires to grown-ups all over town as well as to their eavesdropping children. James remained crouched on his floor, hardly breathing. Of course he knew that Reggie and Willie would want to know—they’d need to know—only he was afraid to tell them. Because if he told, Reggie would want to see it.

  Then there were footsteps on the roof and Reggie was there, his ghost face at the windowpane, just like old times. Out of habit, James let him in. Reggie’s expression made it clear that the news had already reached him. There passed a moment when one of them could have laughed or smiled or done something to stamp out the dread. But that moment left them and their silent faces made it worse. It was Reggie Fielder and James Wahl—once the best of friends—and neither could utter a word.

  They were out the window and down the side of the house, away. Together they threw stones at Willie’s window and hid shoulder to shoulder beneath the tree house. They waited. Five minutes, ten minutes. The night deepened. The hot wind ruffled their hair warmly, as if they stood abreast a bonfire.

  As they waited, James stole glances at Reggie. As far as James was concerned, the fight on the junkball field was not finished. He could not forgive himself for failing to come to Willie’s aid, for being so afraid, and so still he waited to take the next blow. But even this, James knew, would be overlooked tonight.

  Then Willie ran out the door—ran!—and it was instantly clear that the Van Allens had heard, too, because they could hear from inside the snatches of rage and bafflement: “—never should’ve lifted the curfew, I told them;” “Barry, why are they doing this to us?” Willie’s braces glimmered from his open mouth and his eyes were shining. The boys stood looking at one another for a moment—again, if only one of them had said something the spell might’ve been broken and then maybe one of them would’ve been brave enough to say, “No, this is crazy, we don’t need to see it,” and the other two might’ve agreed—but then, from inside, they heard more wailing and the chain rattle of car keys, and that was all it took. They were running again, their skin erupting in goose bumps even though the evening was sticky.

  Naturally every boy in town would want to see this, but Reggie alone claimed knowledge of a secret back route that avoided all lit roads. So they dove into the timber. Now, hurtling through the trees, the time for worrying was past. They would be there shortly, and then the truth would separate itself from rumor.

  James kept his legs turning and did not know how he continued to find footholds on the black, uneven terrain. It felt as though he was fleeing something fearsome and gaining—maybe it was a silver truck, maybe it was Willie’s parents, or maybe he was simply trying to outrun the summer, which had finally come home, fattened and vengeful. School began soon, he knew that, and all things, even summers, eventually died. But perhaps if you ran fast enough, you’d never have to witness the actual moment of passage.

  It hit all three boys at once, the terrible possibility that they were lost. They had never played in these woods before. They certainly hadn’t expected to cross that creek. Were they wildly off course, heading now into the deeper, darker jaws of something waiting to swallow them? There was no telling what creatures prowled in such woods: bobcats, bears, wolves, spiders, snakes, maybe even other boys who had lost themselves in the forest years before.

  James knew it was hopeless—they should’ve come out the other end of these trees long ago. Willie glanced back at him and James recognized the same fear, but Willie’s expression warned James to keep quiet. James weighed the moment. If he spoke his dissension aloud, his voice might become his own missing arm.

  Then Reggie slowed. The other two pressed up behind. There, before them, was a fence. It was wrought iron and tall. They had arrived. They looked beyond the fence and their shoulders shuddered and their guts hardened.

  Gravestones spread across the cemetery at regular intervals like the protruding vertebrae of a buried monster a thousand times larger than Tom’s. It was a calculated risk: if the boys dared trespass, might not the Monster rise and reveal the rest of its hideous skeleton?

  The boys had cleared bigger fences in their day.

  They helped Willie vault over the top—the maneuver was the same used to hoist him up to Mel Herman’s garage. Once alone on the other side, Willie looked back through the bars. James shivered. It was like seeing Willie on the other side of the Van Allens’ screen door, only this time his home was a cemetery—this was where he lived. Perhaps he was supposed to have died when the truck hit him, and the cemetery just wanted him back.

  Seconds later Reggie was over the fence. Burying his dread, James followed suit and then they stood together at the far perimeter of the graveyard, three boys versus a legion of the dead, and they advanced without weapons because of the one desire that conquered even terror: the desire to see.

  They moved silently through the stones. They kept expecting to see it, to see something—a gathering of grownups, other curious children, maybe even newspaper reporters. When they finally saw it in the distance, they realized they had been looking at it for some time. There were no crowds. There were no lights. There was only the glisten of police tape tied from tree to tree.

  The boys slowed but kept walking. Soon they could read the yellow tape: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Then they were at the tape, then they ducked beneath it, and then they held their breath as they looked upon it. The rumor was true.

  Greg Johnson’s grave was a tilled mash of dirt and grass. The headstone had been knocked back and now jutted at an angle. They could see the words GREGORY JOH but a great chunk of stone had gone missing and with it the rest of the name. The boys stepped closer and allowed their feet, through their thin sneaker soles, to feel the soft mounds of dirt vomited up from Greg’s grave.

  A truck had done this. Someone had driven his truck harmlessly through the entire cemetery and then ripped his tires into Greg’s burial plot, yanking his vehicle violently back and forth, breaking Greg’s headstone and accelerating so that the truck wheels spun in place and sliced deep furrows into the ground.

  Although there was no blood, it looked to the boys like carnage. Both Reggie and James remembered how the area had looked at Greg’s funeral, the lines of the plot drawn so neatly within the cemetery’s geometric grid. Was the culprit a high school hooligan out for a sick giggle? Was it the work of a surly grown-up hoping for the resumption of the curfew? Or was it, as everyone had been whispering all evening, a taunting reminder that the hit-and-run killer was still among them?

  Willie ventured the closest, climbing right on top of the soft mound of earth. He kneeled down, dirtying his knees, and grabbed a handful. Suddenly all the things they had done that summer—good things, bad things, awful things—ran off the edges of their minds like dirt spilling through five little fingers.

  A grinding noise. A low growl.

  Wheels.

  Engine.

  A truck.

  They heard it together and they collectively heaved, each boy in a different direction, and they each darted a few feet before realizing they were alone, and then they ran at each other and collided like fools, legs tangling, fingers poking eyes. Reggie ended up on the ground; James pressed a palm to his scratched cheek; Willie was several feet away, blinking his eyes, dazed.

  Silence. Nothing. They were okay. Everything was fine-Then: Whoonnnk! A horn, and the splattery growl of an engine. And suddenly the boys ran, diving through the arms of seizing shadows, lacing in and out of headstones. They were not heading to the fence and the forest, no, this time they were sprinting to
ward the cemetery’s front gate, the quickest way out.

  From somewhere, everywhere, the truck, louder.

  They didn’t have time to locate it. Was it on a nearby road? Was it coming from deeper inside the cemetery, where the driver had idled in darkness, awaiting the perfect moment to strike? The boys kept running.

  There was the front gate! Of course the grown-ups had locked it, double-chained it, but the boys paid it no mind. They ran harder, the engine noise now filling their heads and sinuses, until it seemed that the truck was directly on top of them and any second now they would feel the bone crack of the grill punching into their backs.

  The fence: they executed formation, feet into palms, hands grasping wrists, legs flung—and they were over it. Six feet banged down on the other side, then kept running, down the driveway to the street and up the center of the street toward home.

  It was a ghost town—or maybe the boys were just running too fast to see anyone. All they knew were the paved roads beneath them, jarred and vibrating with each brutal landing of shoes. Somewhere above, a sky and a moon. And somewhere behind them …

  The truck?

  A moment’s hesitation—maybe it was just the roll of summer thunder, not an engine, and maybe those bobbing headlights behind them were just porch lamps flickering with moths. No, it had to be a truck, somehow escaped from the cemetery confines and now gunning its engine in another crazed attempt to catch them.

  In their panic, single words expelled within jets of gasped air.

  “… Willie’s house …”

  “… go to Willie’s …”

  Willie’s house was the closest, and the only possible haven. They knew that grown-ups could not help and would not believe. A grown-up would say there was no truck, and maybe they would be right. This possibility was the worst of all—that the grown-ups were right and had been right all along, and that there was nothing following them, nothing to fear, and no reason at all to run. So they kept running.

  And there at the dead end of the street was the Van Allen house. They felt their faces stretch with thankful grins, and they began to slow. But then it was right there around the bend, the metallic cry of a truck—a different one, the same? Who knew, and who had time to find out? The boys made fists and faces and tossed their chests into the wind and ran. Willie, somehow, kept up and did not lose balance.

  They veered off the road, across the Van Allen lawn, past the doorway. They knew where they were heading without pausing to gasp it aloud. All three boys ran face-first into the tree, scuffing their foreheads and chins and fingertips, tasting bark and blood.

  For a moment, they scurried against each other like mice, and visible somewhere in the upheaval were Willie’s stunned eyes, filled with the awareness that he could not join them because of his missing arm, their failure with the pulley, maybe more reasons. Willie would be left behind to be eaten by the truck, or by the man who drove the truck, or by his parents, or by the other people in the world who sooner or later always consumed boys like Willie. He could not fight it.

  But then they surged upward, Reggie and James, and somehow, unbelievably, Willie found himself rising. He felt his toes find the almost-forgotten footholds of those plank steps, felt his one hand take hold and help to lift his body heavenward. His friends were all around him, multitudes of them, pushing with arms and legs and shoulders and knees, creating unlikely human slings, fantastic stepping stones, miraculous braces, and somehow Willie continued to rise, up, up, higher and higher. It was something that made no sense, something nearly impossible. Reggie and James scrambled up the tree in a motion like the flex of a single complicated muscle, and through some strange magic, brought Willie up with them.

  They collapsed over the edge of the tree house floor. They winced and grunted and pushed Willie inside. Willie rolled over and then came to a halt in a sitting position, his eyes wild, his face flushed, thrilled and mystified by his sudden and unexpected ascent. He was grinning and his eyes were wet.

  Immediately the three huddled together. For the first time in hours they could see each other clearly, and even though it was dark they were energized by the strength they saw. Eyes were bright. Chests beat up and down. Sweat glistened from faces and necks. They were scared but alive.

  Their breathing slowed. They remembered to blink. Reality began to seep back into their minds. There was no truck. There had never been a truck. It had only been their minds playing. Playing. The word was an insult, and they looked away from one other, suddenly uncomfortable.

  And then with a squeal, something smashed into the tree.

  The boys screamed and their hands went out and they gripped whatever they could. Splinters entered palms. Shoulders jammed painfully into hard corners. What was happening? What was this? They had heard no engine approach.

  Yet now, from directly below, came a high-pitched shredding against the base of the tree. Every board of the tree house vibrated and moaned; nails inside each board sang in protest. A smell like smoke and rubber filled the air. The large Mel Herman painting still tacked to the wall—forgotten evidence of Reggie and James’s private tree house meetings—wrinkled and nearly tore before once again pulling taut. Willie started mumbling things beneath the engine’s throaty groan; strange, complicated sentences with improbable words: “meat,” “jokers,” “pawn,” “devil.”

  Reggie fell flat to his stomach. He had to see what was down there, he had to know. Willie and James held themselves tight in opposite corners, watching in disbelief as Reggie squirmed forward inch by inch and peeked his head over the far edge of the tree house.

  “What?” demanded James.

  “Truck,” said Reggie, as if only mildly surprised.

  Below, cloaked by the steam that poured from its front hood, was a truck, its front end wrapped around the base of the tree. Its wheels were spinning. It was stuck. Then suddenly it dislodged and jumped several yards back. The engine spit violently and then the truck roared and leapt once more.

  The world shook. Reggie howled and ducked back into the tree house, covering his face with his hands. Willie and James shouted as the tree branches shook and the tree house itself spun, as if it were screwing loose from the tree. There was a snapping, splintering noise and the boys watched in terror as three floorboards buckled and crumbled into wreckage.

  Willie’s mumbling continued, his lips moving faster and faster, his sentences flipping inside out until they could not possibly contain meaning, not even to Willie. James thought he heard the word “vacancy” in there, again and again, the piercing stab of the “V” sound cutting through the truck’s oceanic thrum, but James did not know if Willie was describing that old motel, this tree house, or himself.

  Outside, the screech of a pig being slaughtered—the truck—and then a sound like a thousand lightbulbs stamped beneath a thousand boots. The tree limbs flailed and the tree house twisted. Half of a wall fell away and the boys heard it pound against the ground several seconds later. No longer was the tree house as straight and sharp as an unspoiled grave; now it was as warped as Greg Johnson’s resting spot—the roof, the floor, the walls, everything bending and peeling off into a spray of wood chips. Mel Herman’s torn and flapping artwork shone through the chaos, the hard slashes of color finally transporting to the real world: here was the violence the paint predicted, right here. There was a deafening blast as the long-forgotten metal pulley crashed through the weakened ceiling, the flimsy floor, then vanished.

  Through the rattling darkness, Reggie and James found the white flash of each other’s eyes. They were both lying flat on the disintegrating floor of the tree house, their mouths stretched wide. They might have been screaming, the both of them, it was impossible to tell. Yet they both realized the same thing at the same time.

  Willie was no longer talking.

  They twisted their heads to the corner where Willie should have been, his head between knees, his single arm folded across the top of his head. Willie was not there and the entire corner was go
ne.

  Another screaming metal crunch filled their ears and the tree moaned in misery. The tree house soared outward as if it planned to launch itself like a baseball. At the last second the tree snatched it back, and that’s when the roof exploded into a shower of wooden daggers that rained upon the boys, scarred their legs, nicked the backs of their necks. Rusty nails landed in their hair; they felt other nails, cold and laden with tetanus beneath the palms of their hysterical hands. Before they shut their eyes they glimpsed the night sky totally exposed above them.

  Wait—there was Willie! He had escaped from the collapsed corner and now hobbled like a three-legged dog through the hailstorm of wood. Reggie and James were frozen—without realizing it, they had accepted their fates—yet Willie was moving. His knees shoveled through inches of loose white wood and the colored confetti of Mel Herman’s painting as the floor bucked and writhed below him like the back of a giant beast. Willie’s face remained focused as he headed toward the widening mouth of the tree house door.

  Alone, neither Reggie nor James had the courage to move. They were too scared, too shocked, too small, too powerless. But when they looked past Willie and at each other, there was something between them just strong enough.

  James took to his knees and lunged. Reggie rolled his body over the sharp shreds of wood. They were faster than Willie, and in a flash they crossed the undulating floor. They sank their hard fists into Willie’s clothes and when Willie felt it he exclaimed—loudly, angrily—and clambered for the doorway with an authority neither of the boys expected. Reggie and James cried and pounced. James swiped for Willie’s left arm, the one that wasn’t there, and James felt certain that for the rest of his life he would feel the tickle of that ghost arm fluttering through his empty fingers. Willie toppled half way out the door and dove down at the truck. But Reggie had found a grip and now James found one, too; but then they both felt Willie’s shirt ripping, yawning away. So they fell upon Willie’s legs and wrapped their arms around them. Willie’s torso dangled above the truck.