The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  Big Fred Weller swayed in the middle of the living room and then steadied himself next to the Christmas tree. “You look both tragic and worried,” he said. “Have you just seen Hamlet’s ghost?”

  “It’s Tim,” Holly said. “He’s disappeared.”

  v.

  Nothing. First, he was there, plain to see, but then he became part of nothing. Through the window, the boys watched Mr. Keenan climb over the rocks chasing shadows that were not there. His coat blowing in the wind like a loose sail, he stopped to scan the landscape, study the ocean, the rocks, and then launch himself, tacking to the northeast and falling off the edge of the visible world. The glass shielded them from the outside, but Nick could see in the noonday light the waves rolling in, crashing silently against the rocks, the clouds banked in the sky, and the bareness of December. He shivered where he stood, but his friend was placid as a statue. In a few moments, Jack Peter stopped staring and walked across the kitchen to his papers scattered on the table. The chill in the room gave way to enveloping warmth as the furnace kicked in, and when the air blew through the vents, the smell of the balsam Christmas greens perfumed the whole house. Shortly after Mr. Keenan had disappeared from view, Nick asked if they should go look for him.

  “He’ll be back, don’t worry.”

  “But we’re all alone,” Nick said.

  Jack Peter looked up from his work. “I said don’t worry. I know what’s going on. He’s just out on a hunt, but he’ll never catch it. He’s not smart enough.”

  They passed an innocent hour talking about monsters. For each of his drawings, Nick had a story—the first time he had seen Frankenstein on the late late show, the mummy from a comic book, Harry Potter facing down the Dementors.

  “Those were scary,” said Jack Peter. “But I know how to make a real monster.”

  Nick laughed at his assertion. “Okay, big shot, how do you make a monster?”

  “I can’t show you,” he said with a laugh. “You can’t do it.”

  The big clock on the kitchen wall scraped away the time, and Nick grew more concerned by Mr. Keenan’s absence each time he stared at its face. He had not realized just how much he depended on having an adult in the house when he was alone with Jack Peter. That boy was unpredictable and possibly dangerous. Wary as a hare, Nick twitched and watched for signs.

  Early in the afternoon, Jack Peter moved without a word to the refrigerator and took out the milk and cocoa syrup. With mechanical precision, he poured the milk into a pot and set it atop the gas burner on the stove, which flamed to life with a few clicks. He watched and waited, his face as expressionless as a stone, and Nick joined him, the lads hovering above the hot pot like a pair of witches at a steaming cauldron. The scalded milk hissed when he poured it into the mugs, and the aroma of chocolate bloomed and made them hungry. They raided the refrigerator and the pantry for their lunch. Jack Peter popped frozen mini pizzas in the toaster oven and Nick cracked open a fresh bucket of pretzels. While they were waiting for the pizzas to cook, they layered saltines with peanut butter into towers as tall as their mouths would stretch, laughing as they ate them, spraying crumbs across the room. For their second lunch, Nick peeled himself an orange and Jack Peter munched on a leg of leftover roast chicken.

  After their meal, the stuffed boys waddled into the living room and nested like a couple of pashas. Jack Peter flung his legs across the arm of his father’s easy chair and stared at the blank ceiling, moving his finger from time to time as though drawing. Perched next to the Christmas tree, Nick watched the glass ornaments catch the slant light and sparkle on their hooks. Silence settled inside the house, broken only by the occasional bark from the border collie across the way in the Quigleys’ backyard. They had fallen into inertia, the heaviness in their small stomachs weighing them to their spots. Nick patted his stomach and burped, and they giggled at how it interrupted the silence. Jack Peter tried to copy his friend but his belch was loud as a grown man’s. He fell into a fit of laughter that was too loud and went on too long.

  “Are you sure your father is coming back?”

  “He’ll return.”

  “And your mother’s just out shopping? When will she come home?”

  “She’ll be back. You worry too much.”

  “What are we going to do? We ought to do something.”

  “Nothing to be done.” Jack Peter pulled a magazine from the rack by the chair and flipped through it, pausing only when a photograph caught his eye.

  “Shouldn’t we go look for your father?”

  He did not glance at Nick but kept thumbing the pages. “I’m not going out there with you.”

  Nick knew why his friend would not leave, but he could not shake the nagging unease about what had happened to Mr. Keenan. Ignoring Jack Peter’s insistent stare, he went to the coatrack and dressed to go outdoors. At the entrance to the mudroom, he looked back at Jack Peter, who had not stirred and now slouched in the chair, watching Nick’s every movement. Without another word, Nick left the house and stepped out into the cold.

  No one else was out on such a gray day, and the only sign of life was the curl of smoke from the Quigleys’ chimney. He made his way from the mudroom to the tilt of sand that separated the yard from the sea. The insistent waves pulsed along the shore, and he walked out slowly, climbing the rocks as if stepping stones, watchful for any telltale movement, but the entire vista was blank and desolate. In the summertime, there might have been gulls overhead or a person or two sunning themselves or casting a fishing line into the dark waters, but here in the dead winter, such memories flitted briefly in his imagination. He marched on, looking back once at the bay window, half hoping that Jack Peter would be watching at least, but there was no one there. Perhaps he didn’t care, perhaps he wasn’t involved. Fingers of damp iciness reached into the gaps of his jacket, and he zipped himself in up to the throat. When he reached the place where Mr. Keenan had last been seen, Nick crouched to inspect the ground. There was no trace of him, not so much as a footprint in the patches of sand between the clumps of rock. To the south, a few sentinel-like houses clung to the edge of the dunes, and to the north rose Mercy Point and the lighthouse, its rooftop globe clear and unseeing as a glass eye. He called once for Mr. Keenan, though there was no answer, and his own voice sounded small and weak.

  If the thing he had been chasing was frightened, it might be running still, like a rabbit escaping a fox, trotting away and hiding and trembling, and then when flushed, dashing off farther, and Mr. Keenan might just have been drawn recklessly into pursuit, and might be miles off now. Or perhaps the creature was some preying beast and had waited in ambush to snatch and carry him to its lair and was only now gnawing on his flesh, and years later, the human bones would turn up when some hiker stumbled upon a cave. Or maybe Mr. Keenan had suffered some accident on the rocks or stumbled into the sea. The body could be any number of places, hidden from view. In the gathering twilight, Nick walked toward the ocean, half expecting to see a corpse bobbing on the water.

  Spindrift blew off the waves and foam gathered in clots that rolled along the shore, full of bubbles like scalded milk. Stretched to the far boundaries, the gray-green sea appeared lifeless, though Nick knew below the waves lived fishes and crabs and lobsters scuttling across the sandy bottom. He remembered the day when he and Jack Peter had last been together on this same spot three years ago, and how they had looked out upon this same ocean, and how he wished he had never met such a strange boy. His parents made him play with him, he didn’t want to, he wanted to be normal. Jack Peter had angered him that day with one careless sentence.

  If I could run away, he thought, I would. If I could swim across the ocean, I would not stop till I reached the other shore. And I would live there in a cottage on the shore of Ireland or England or France. And I would learn to be someone else and speak the way they do and eat their food and give myself a new name. And though my parents would miss me and my friends would know that I am gone, they would forget about me in tim
e, and I could find somebody new. And I would cut that string. I would be rid of him for good.

  There was no body swirling in the waves. Squatting on his haunches, he took off his gloves and put his bare hands on the cold sand, where the ocean would come and cover them in ice water. The sound and motion of the waves matched the rhythm of his breathing until the winter wind and water seeped past his fears. He kept his hands in place until they stung and reddened, but he could not go farther. Shoving them into his pockets, he shivered and stared out at the Atlantic. How long he stood there he did not know. Sometimes when he was alone, Nick felt as if he was the last boy on earth. He moved through the landscape without volition, compelled by an unseen force to be here, a living thing in an artificial world, made to breathe and act and move beyond his own control. The sun at his back slipped down below the tops of the fir trees and cast one brief and final play of light and shadow on the surface of the sea. The shift in temperature awakened him as if from a trance, and he turned and walked back through the lengthening shadows to the darkening house.

  Inside, no lamps had been turned on against the dying of the light, and Jack Peter had not moved. He was where Nick had left him, splayed across the easy chair, studying the ceiling as though some picture had been sketched upon the surface. He greeted Nick with a grunt. “What did you find outside?”

  “Nothing.”

  The news didn’t seem to faze him one way or another. He swung his legs around and sat up straight. “I’m bored. What should we do?”

  “Aren’t you worried about what happened to your father? Where’s your mother?”

  “We just have to wait. We should do something to make the waiting go faster. Do you want to draw more monsters?”

  “I’m tired of drawing.”

  As if a switch had been thrown, Jack Peter stood suddenly and clapped his hands together. “Let’s have another war. You always like a good war. You can be the greens.” Without waiting for an answer, he took off for his bedroom and the bucket of plastic army men. Nick looked once at the door, willing it to open, for an adult to push through, but it remained closed fast against the outside world. He gathered his resolve and took the stairs two by two to join the battle.

  The bodies were piling up when he heard a voice calling from below. They dropped their toys, and Nick ran to greet Mrs. Keenan at the top of the stairs. She was full of questions about her husband, questions for which he had no good answer. So instead, she sat quietly on the sofa murmuring Tim’s name when the Wellers arrived, full of drink and curiosity.

  The five of them kept vigil in the living room. Nick’s mother put on a pot of coffee, and his father turned on the Christmas tree lights and built a fire in the fireplace. In a corner, Jack Peter examined the monster notebook again, scrutinizing each page. Mrs. Keenan waited by the telephone, and his parents took up the sofa, collecting their wits and sobriety. A current of anxiety flowed from person to person, and now and again, the notion of a search party was proposed and rejected. Night had fallen completely, and it would be dangerous out on those wet rocks with just a flashlight.

  Minutes after six o’clock, Nick heard a scratching outside the mudroom, like a mouse gnawing at the wood, and just as he rose to investigate, the door creaked open. They raced to find Mr. Keenan standing there in the threshold, his face and hands beet red and raw, wildness in his eyes. A slash of dried blood arced across his throat and more blood was spattered on the front of his overcoat in a dark constellation.

  vi.

  The blood, Jack Peter was mostly interested in the blood. The pattern that it made on his face and clothes, the way the color changed from bright fresh crimson to deep magenta, nearly black. He positioned himself in the middle of the room, and as usual, they were oblivious to his presence, as he studied their every movement and noted every word. The grown-ups wanted the whole story from his father, and they fussed over him when he came in. His mother peeled off his stiff coat and tugged the wet gummy boots from his feet. Mrs. Weller went to the kitchen sink and doused a dish towel in hot water to dab at the crusted blood at his throat. Mr. Weller poured a mug of hot black coffee and stripped the throw from the back of the sofa to wrap around Daddy’s shoulders. Nick sat on a chair at the edge of the room, frightened by the blood and chaos, biting his fingernails. But Jack Peter watched with greedy curiosity as the man slowly emerged from the wind-chapped and dirty skin.

  The ragged gashes on his throat resembled the nail marks of an animal, and the wounds would not stop bleeding. When one towel turned red, it was discarded for a fresh one. Running back between the chair and the sink and the cupboards, Jack Peter replaced four towels before the color faded to pink and subsided. His father took a sip of the coffee and winced when it hit the roof of his mouth. His mother’s hands were shaking, and she clasped her fingers together as though in prayer to still the tremors. Mrs. Weller asked for a first-aid kit, and Mommy left the room to hunt for it.

  The Wellers threw their questions at Tim, but he could not find the words to answer. His face reddened in the warmth of the house, and the frost in his matted hair melted. From behind the scrim of adults, Jack Peter caught his father’s eye, and he looked as if he was conjuring a plausible explanation. “You had us worried absolutely sick,” Mrs. Weller said.

  “There was someone out there. The same thing I saw on the road that night I brought Nick back to you.”

  “Coyote,” Mr. Weller said. “You’re not the only one who’s seen it. The Hill brothers found one had been at their trash cans just last week, and it nearly ate the Rivards’ little dog. Some of the fellas were playing poker in the basement there, and they heard all this yapping, and out in the yard, a mangy old coyote snapping its teeth, ready to carry the poor pooch away.”

  “It wasn’t a coyote but taller than a man. The boys saw it, too. Tell them.”

  Jack Peter waved the bloodied towel in his hand. “It was a monster. Trying to get in our house.”

  All of the adults stared at him as if he were crazy. He hid his face behind the wing of his crooked arm and retreated from their scrutiny.

  Mr. Weller laid his hand on Nick’s shoulder. “How ’bout it, son. Man, or something else? Maybe a werewolf out in the middle of the day. Did you get a good look at the beast?”

  The boy’s lips quivered and his eyes blinked rapidly as he fought the urge to cry. “I don’t know. It was far and we turned away and when we looked back, it was gone.”

  Tim rose from his chair, as if emerging from a cocoon of ice, crackling and stiff in his joints. Anger contorted his features, and he stepped between Nick and his father to confront the boy. “But you saw him, clear as I did. You saw him today and you saw him that night.”

  Nick chewed his lip and stared at the floor.

  “Tell the truth, boy. A man, wild and naked.”

  Everyone now watched Nick for some affirmation or denial, but the boy was in a panic that threatened to drown him.

  From his crouch, Jack Peter listened as they questioned his friend, saw how scared he looked, and jumped up to save him. “He didn’t have a pecker.”

  In unison, their heads swiveled to face him. Mrs. Weller laughed at the comment.

  “That’s what Nick said.”

  His father croaked a warning. “Jip—”

  “I never said that.”

  “You did,” Jack Peter said. “You saw the drawing and you said he had no penis.”

  The adults, even his father, laughed again. Jack Peter hated it when people laughed at him, and he wrung the bloody towel in his hands and waved it to make them quit. When he saw the shock on their faces, he stopped and clasped his hands behind his head to keep still, to show them they should not be afraid.

  His mother entered the room, bearing the first-aid kit, and she came at once to his side. “I’m just going to help you,” she said and laid her hand upon his knotted fingers, prying gently to get him to relax his grip, but he didn’t want to, not yet, he wasn’t finished telling them about the monster, but s
he kept tugging at his hands and speaking slowly, words full of music, till he finally gave in to her and let go of the towel. She held his left hand in her right, rubbing his thumb with her thumb, and he was okay.

  “What’s going on? What happened here?”

  Nobody wanted to tell her. Each person avoided her gaze.

  “Who set off Jack?”

  “It was nothing,” his father said. “Just a misunderstanding about what’s appropriate in mixed company.”

  “Heavens, Tim,” Mrs. Weller said. “I’ve heard ‘pecker’ plenty of times.”

  “Mixed, children,” he said.

  Rising for the defense, Mr. Weller tottered to the middle of the room. “Jack here was trying to tell us what he saw—or didn’t see—in regards to that creature your husband chased all the way to Canada.”

  His mother took out some gauze and a bandage and went back to patch up his father. She pressed the nail marks with her fingertips. “So much blood. Do you think you might need stitches?”

  He dismissed her anxiety with a wave of his hand. “I saw something out on the rocks, white as a ghost, and I chased it. I must have passed out, and when I came to, it was early dark and I was so cold. My neck was bleeding. I could feel something had been at my throat. All the way home, I kept hearing noises out in the blackness, following me, footsteps behind me, all around, that would stop when I stopped and start up again whenever I moved.”