The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  “Please”—her voice cut the darkness—“don’t hold up Nell Weller as your example.”

  Without another word, Tim rolled away from her and into the privacy of his thoughts. She said nothing either, but he could hear her breathing, steadily and in sync with the ticking of the alarm clock. Longtime combatants on this matter, each could not find sleep easily, and an hour passed in wary détente.

  Just past midnight, he heard her calling his name softly from a faraway spot on the opposite shore of his consciousness. She laid her hand upon his shoulder. “Tim, are you awake? Did you hear that?”

  Halfway between sleep and dreaming, he opened his eyes in the darkness of the room and struggled to orient himself. Familiar objects, shades of gray, began to take shape, and he became aware of his wife’s entreaties. “Listen,” she commanded in a hoarse whisper, and he strained to discover what she had heard, but he could find no stray sound.

  “There’s someone in the house.”

  He heard nothing.

  “Something’s walking around.”

  “Are you sure it’s not Jip, going to the bathroom?”

  She cricked her neck toward the bedroom door and looked at the gap where it met the floor. “The hall light’s not on. He’s afraid of the dark and always turns on the light.”

  Fumbling for the table lamp, he nearly knocked it off the nightstand and had to grab the base to stop it from rocking. In the burst of light, he blinked and then hoisted himself against the pillow. She was already up, the quilt pooled across her lap, her feet twitching under the covers.

  “It was on the roof,” she said. “Footsteps crossing from one edge to the other, and then they stopped.”

  “Could be a bird,” he said.

  “Like a man’s.”

  “But they stopped?”

  Her face was flushed, and she frowned at him. “I didn’t wake you up at first. Thought it might be my imagination. But now it seems like it’s in the house. Listen.”

  They held their breath and did not budge. Beyond the door, a board creaked, the sound of a foot upon the stair. He swung his legs over the edge and stood.

  “Shouldn’t you have a baseball bat or something?” she asked.

  “Where would I get a baseball bat?”

  “Some protection,” she said. “In case you have to defend yourself.”

  “There’s a hammer in the workshop, and a shovel out in the mudroom. But I’d have to get by it to get them.”

  “Be careful,” she admonished from the bed. Tim looked back once to see her trembling, her hands clasped at the bunched cloth at her neckline. The bruise on her face pulsed like a siren.

  The idea that he could move without a sound proved false from his very first steps. His weight made the pine boards squeak, but he could not shake the desire to sneak up on whatever was making noises in the bowels of the house. He tiptoed in his bare feet, an impractical cat burglar, and made his way around the bed to the door. The hall was dark and quiet. No light shone from Jip’s room, and nothing scurried out of the way as he walked along the runner that covered the corridor floor. Tim crept down the stairs, alert for any signs, but he met no one as he checked the rooms one by one. The house seemed undisturbed. Only the Christmas tree in the living room suprised him, and he laughed at his foolish reaction to its bulk looming out of the darkness. He checked the knobs and latches, even to the workroom down below, but the doors and windows were locked for the night. He found himself slightly disappointed by the lack of anything out of the ordinary. In the kitchen, he snapped on the lights and drank a glass of water to assert his authority over intruders real or imagined. His only cause for unease was the sensation that his wife was upstairs waiting for him and would continue to insist that she had heard something. But what could he do? He couldn’t conjure a visitor by sheer imagination.

  Tim considered waking Jip to see if he had been the cause of the strange noises, but there would be hell to pay if he disturbed the boy and overturned the night any further than it had already been. He yawned, long and hard, fatigued by the lateness of the hour. Holly would not be placated easily, but he rehearsed his explanation. Birds on the roof, the house settling in the changing weather.

  At the top of the stairs, his left foot landed in dampness, cold as ice. So cold that he yelped and withdrew his bare sole from the rug. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself and bent to feel the dampness with his hand, but it was not wet, just cold, and it seemed to be no larger than the span of his fingers. He blindly ran his palms along the borders of the spot and made it out as a footprint. On his hands and knees, he crawled along the floor and came upon another frozen patch embedded in the runner. A third appeared and a fourth, but he could not tell from the shape of the prints which direction they followed. He crabwalked along the trail to his bedroom door, and then he worked his way back down the hall to his son’s bedroom. A set of icy prints stopped in front of Jip’s room, and Tim squatted there, his eyes even with the doorknob. He grasped the frosted metal, icy as a school yard flagpole, and against his pressure, it turned in his hand, forcing his wrist to twist sharply, and all at once the boy was in the open doorway, backlit, looking down quizzically at his father.

  “Feel this,” Tim said, and he pulled his son’s arm until the boy was on his knees, and he pushed the boy’s hand against the rug. Tim expected him to recoil against the strange temperature, but Jip knelt there implacable.

  “What am I supposed to feel?”

  Pressing his own palms against the corded fabric, Tim could no longer sense the icy prints. He waddled down the hall, testing the runner with his hands and bare feet, but it was warm and dry.

  “It was stone cold just a minute ago,” he told his son. “Someone had been walking on it with frigid feet. Did you hear anything just now? Something on the roof?” He laughed at the absurdity in his own question.

  “No, nothing, nothing at all.”

  “And you’ve been in your room the whole time?”

  The boy nodded and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  “And you didn’t feel the cold? Didn’t see a thing?”

  “Probably in your head. I see things all the time.”

  For a long time, his father stared at him, opening his mouth a few times as though to reply before reconsidering. Like a pale ghost, Holly emerged from the bedroom, anxious to find them both standing there. In her thin nightgown, she shivered as she stood, waiting for some explanation.

  He thought to tell her about the icy footprints in the hall, but he was not sure that she would believe him without any proof, and he was not sure if it was not all some trick of the mind like that thing on Shore Road. Instead he put an arm around her waist and tried to reassure her with a hug. She trembled in his arms.

  “It was nothing,” Tim said. “All in your imagination.”

  “Are you sure? I heard sounds, I felt something moving around.”

  “A bad dream,” her husband whispered, and her breathing slowed. Over her shoulder, he could see his son, small and slight in his little boy’s pajamas. Up and alert when he should have been long asleep in his bed. Jip stood there staring right through them, with his inscrutable eyes, as if they were the intruders in his house, the unexpected visitors in the middle of the night.

  Two

  Holly lied to her husband and son so she could sneak off to see the priest. Early on the Saturday before Christmas, she announced that she had some last-minute shopping to do and that she might return late because of the crowds. Midway through their oatmeal, the boys offered no rebuttal, just a wave of their spoons as she fled the house, winding a scarf around her neck, wrapped in layers of wool.

  A wet wind blew against the car, so she cranked up the heater for the short ride. Fat gray clouds scudded across the sky, heading over the ocean. She turned on the radio in time to catch the last few lines of “The Little Drummer Boy.” Blech, she mimed shoving her finger down her throat. That insipid lyric, that numbing tune. She poked the button on the dashboard
to silence the song.

  She had been on edge for two weeks now, ever since that morning when Jack surprised her with a punch to the face. The bruise had faded, but she could still feel the sting. And then there was the weirdness with her husband, how he was seeing things out in the snow, how he refused to believe her when she heard those strange noises in the night. Her sleep, never truly peaceful, had grown erratic, and she was a mess at the office, chewing out the poor receptionist over one missed call. Ten days of that tension rolled by before she picked up the phone and called Father Bolden, and that first conversation felt like going to confession when she was a little girl. Bless me, Father, these are my sins, and the sheer relief when stepping out of the dark box and saying a few prayers to erase the slate.

  By the time Holly pulled into the church parking lot, she had nearly banished the maddening carol from her mind, but the damn thing had thrown off all that she had rehearsed in the days leading up to her appointment with Father Bolden. They had gotten through the preliminaries over the phone, yet ever since that hesitant exchange, she had been practicing what she wanted to say, feeling a bit guilty that she had omitted to tell the worst of her worries. Now the “rump-a-pum-pum” had drummed it from her mind. For a long time, she sat in the cooling car, wondering where to begin. With the strange events of the past two weeks, the weird noises in her head. Or back to that summer when Jack first refused to come out of the house? Or further still, to when he was a toddler, unresponsive in his high chair? A rap on the window made her jump, and in the glass, a fist pale and spangled with age spots, and beyond that, the smiling face of the priest. He stepped back to let her out and shoved his fingers into the deep pockets of his gray cardigan.

  “I saw you from the house and didn’t know if you’d had a change of heart.”

  “Just collecting my thoughts. It’s good of you to see me on such short notice.”

  “Have you managed to find them all?”

  “My thoughts? No, I suppose if I had, I wouldn’t need to come in.”

  “Well, now, if there are any stray thoughts wandering about, they better come in out of the cold. Shall we?” He laid a hand against the small of her back to guide her to the rectory.

  Inside, the house was less austere than she had imagined. No monks, no Spartan cells, but a plain New England home, the walls a Bristol green, the wainscoting two shades darker. Here and there, evidence of an old man’s miscellany: a rocker and a plaid stadium blanket, bookshelves cluttered with classics, a framed nautical chart of the coastline, a pair of snowshoes hanging by the door. The house smelled faintly of witch hazel and incense.

  He led her to a sparse but elegant dining room. Beside a pot of coffee, a ring cake had been laid out in the middle of a lace doily on an old plate with a braided rim, perfectly centered on a mahogany table. Probably the work of a housekeeper, there were always these devout ladies in the rectory in her day, who served as maid and cook and chaste hausfrau for the priest. The woman herself was absent, although Holly sensed another presence in the house, an organizing spirit. Perhaps she was dusting the priest’s plain room or hovering behind a doorway to eavesdrop. The dining room walls were unadorned, save for the crucifix atop the lintel and one painting that drew the eye by virtue of its solitude. She circled the table to take a closer look.

  As with so many paintings she had encountered in this part of the country, the subject was the roiling sea with a ship barreling toward the viewer, the sky a chaos of yellows and grays. Sails swollen with wind, the cloth tattered at the edges, the ship listed slightly forward with the bow pointed toward the deep. The painter had been clever enough to show a coil of rope uncurling and an unmoored barrel smashing against the rails. A silver plate fixed to the bottom of the frame showed the title in tarnished letters: Wreck of the Porthleven, 1849.

  “I see you’ve discovered the Porthleven,” Father Bolden said. “A tragic tale.”

  “So, you know the story behind this painting?”

  Holding a hand against his belly, Father Bolden chuckled and walked around the table to join Holly as she faced the painting. “I pride myself, if it is not too great a sin, on the history of these parts.”

  “Was there really a shipwreck around here?”

  “Legend has it that the spirits of those who died on board still haunt these waters,” Father Bolden said. “Fact is, she left Cornwall in a calm November, a small crew and passengers bound for America to find a better life. The Porthleven ran into rough seas just as they came within sight of Maine. One December evening, a nor’easter blew in, and the ship floundered in a blizzard. A scrim of white so thick the poor captain could not have known how close they were to land. This whole area was snowed in, not fit for man nor beast, and of course, that lighthouse had not been built. The crew laid anchor but it did not hold. She hit a ledge of rocks and broke apart in twenty feet of water. Six crew and thirteen Englishmen, women, and children, including a vicar from Cornwall, and not a soul survived the freezing sea. People in the village discovered the first bodies next morning, stiff and coated with ice, and story goes that not all the passengers were found, that some still lie at the bottom of the sea, and you can hear them keening on stormy nights, anxious in their watery graves.”

  She shivered and wrapped her arms against her chest.

  “You’ll have some of Miss Tiramaku’s crumb cake.” He pointed at the table, as she turned. “She’s a sensitive soul and will be heartbroken if we don’t finish at least half of it.”

  Taking a chair, Holly allowed the old priest to pour her a cup while she sliced two helpings of cake. The cup rattled in its saucer as he set it before her. The dollop of cream she added left an oily slick on the surface, the color of foam on the back of a wave. She stirred and at once the hue brightened, and in the whirlpool created by her spoon, she imagined the foundering ship and the passengers pell-mell on the decks. The image so disconcerted her that she had to look away from the cup. Through the picture window, scattered flurries danced in the cold air.

  “I’ve been thinking about your situation ever since we spoke on the phone.”

  Holly looked up, flabbergasted by the sudden appearance of the priest already seated in his chair across the table. A sip of hot coffee helped shake off the visions of those people drowning in the sea.

  “Where should we begin?” He bit into a forkful of cake, allowing her time to consider the question.

  “Would it be a sin, Father, to say that I hate him sometimes?”

  Crumbs caught at the back of his throat set him into paroxysms of choking and sputtering. Red-faced, he gulped at his coffee and composed his demeanor. “Surely, Mrs. Keenan, you don’t mean hate.”

  She studied her fingernails and reconsidered her opening gambit. “Perhaps ‘hate’ is a strong word.”

  “A four-letter word. My late mother, God rest her soul, never allowed such a word to be uttered in our house. She would have given you a clap on the ear. Perhaps you meant something else?”

  “Of course, I don’t hate him. He’s my boy. But I do hate the way our lives have changed. The Asperger’s is one thing, but this fear of the outdoors just adds to the struggle. Everything revolves around his needs, his care. Do you know what an ordeal it is just to get him to the doctor’s or the dentist? I have to trick him, offer a bribe, wrap him in blankets so he’s not exposed to the outside.”

  “Why, what happens when he goes outside?”

  “Panic. Terror. First he gasps for breath, can’t get enough air in his lungs. His eyes bulge out like he is afraid of what’s out there. Visible to Jack but invisible to the rest of us. Then come the spasms and convulsions. You would swear some physical presence is sitting on his chest, crushing his ribs. His arms flail out, but he can’t move, can’t get rid of the thing kneeling atop him. Becomes helpless as a newborn, crying and shouting for rescue, but there’s nothing to be done. And I can’t bear to watch it, can’t stand the gulping and retching sounds coming from my own son; and it doesn’t stop, only intensif
ies to the point where all we can do is bring him out of the sun and air and back inside. And suddenly Jack calms himself, but it takes a lot out of him. He acts as if he’s been in a fight or just been chased, panting, slipping into fatigue, and then he falls asleep like a baby after a crying jag. But he’s no baby. He’s growing up, getting bigger, too strong for me to handle, and I’m worried that there’ll come a day…” She stopped herself with a shudder.

  “And these … incidents happen only when you try to take him outside?”

  “Lately he’s been worse. Two weeks ago, he hit me when I woke him up. To be fair, I had startled him, but he’s never done that before. And that same day, he started jabbing his finger against his skull, like he was trying to drill a hole into his brain, completely unprovoked. He seemed possessed.”

  Father Bolden curled his lip over the brim of his cup and took a considered sip of coffee. One eyebrow arched like a snake as he swallowed. Far off in the rectory, a telephone rang.

  “Do you have to get that?” Holly asked.

  “Miss Tiramaku is here,” the priest said. “She’ll answer the call. Why do you say ‘possessed’?”

  She laughed and began smashing the crumbs on her plate with the tines of her fork. “Not possessed in the way you mean. I’m not looking for an exorcist, God forbid.”

  “God forbid, I never thought anything of the kind. Just an interesting choice of words.”

  The fork dropped from her hands, and her voice rose an octave. “I don’t know what to do anymore, Father. I’m afraid of my own son, afraid of what he might do to me, to himself. The punching, the fits, the way he looks at us sometimes, like he’s scheming. Out to get us. He sees things, monsters under his bed, but he’s trapped as well by his thoughts and dreams and his inability to just say what he feels—”

  A loud knock at the front door made her jump. Not two seconds later, the doorbell chimed, then chimed again. Father Bolden pushed back from the table and stood, bowing slightly to his guest. “You’ll forgive me, but I believe my housekeeper may still be on the phone, and whoever’s at the door insists on an immediate answer.”