The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  iii.

  He had trouble figuring out how to fit the bones together.

  Skeletons were hard enough to draw, but in his mind, all the bones were jumbled in a pile of pickup sticks. Long legs, shorter arms, the connect-the-dots of the vertebrae. The fingers and toes were puzzle pieces that could be made to fit together only just so. Even the skull had come apart, the lower jaw separated from the face, and some of the tiny teeth gone missing. He took a long time to lay out the skeleton, but Jack Peter wasn’t bothered, he had all day to move the bones from his mind to the picture he had to draw. The pencil fit precisely in his hand, and the sketch paper was clean and white as a bedsheet. He ran his palm against the smooth blank surface, pleased at how it felt against his skin.

  When the package was presented to him off the Christmas mound and he tore the wrapping paper, he was both surprised and dismayed. Surprised by the sheer variety of the Young Artist’s Gift Set, the watercolors and the assorted colored pencils and the sharpener and eraser and the formal elegance of the sketch pad, but dismayed by what to do with it, for he had been drawing forever with pencil stubs on scraps and bits of found paper, and his pictures had always done what he desired.

  “But I can already draw,” he told his parents.

  “Of course you can,” said his mother. “This isn’t going to teach you to draw any better, but having the right tools is essential to any artist. Just imagine what you can do.”

  All through the morning, he waited to try out the new pencils and paper, waited while his parents opened their presents to each other, waited to whittle away the remains from his mountain of gifts. They took their time, since it was just the three of them, and fussed over each new package. He waited through their coffee and the big brunch of bacon and Daddy’s special flapjacks, “stacked as high as an elephant’s eye.” He waited through the obligatory phone call to his grandparents, the long-distance thank-you for the sweater and hope you have a Merry good Christmas. By noon, there were no more festivities planned.

  In his easy chair, Daddy would soon fall asleep. The bandages had come off, but the three slashes across his neck were still pink and vicious. His mother sat across from him, playing with her new tablet, the glow from the screen shining on her face.

  “There’s plenty online,” she said, “but it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Here’s a whole database with shipwrecks off the coast from as far back as 1710.”

  Her husband opened his eyes briefly and nodded.

  “But where’s the Porthleven?” she asked, and the question lingered in the air. From time to time, she mentioned another discovery, lost for a while in the Cornish village for which the ship had been named, but the news drew no response.

  “It’s here,” his mother said to no one in particular. “Records of the Porthleven at the Maine Maritime Museum over in Bath.” She dug deeper into the digital archives, while stealing glances at the Christmas tree and the fire dancing in the fireplace. His father lounged around in his robe and slippers, spending a great deal of energy doing nothing.

  By one o’clock, Jack Peter abandoned the concept of family time. Alone at the kitchen table, he wore his new sweater, the red and blue of the Union Jack, his favorite flag, and he had on a pair of those thick woolen socks that had been balled up in the toe of his Christmas stocking. From the corner of his mouth, a peppermint candy cane hung like a cigarette. He had already tried out the high-powered binoculars he had begged for, and had been searching the rocks and the ocean, though he did not tell his parents what he saw through the lenses, because they wouldn’t believe him. They never believed him.

  The bones had been dancing around in his imagination since the night before Christmas. Where such persistent images came from, he did not know. Sometimes the image appeared quite suddenly, and he was compelled to put it to paper as quickly as he could. Other times he drew things simply because he wanted to make them, and those were the pictures he controlled. But lately, they had come unbidden. The skeleton was one such mystery, and he was dying to get it down. He spent the next hour at the kitchen table carefully drawing all of the bones from memory. Nobody bothered him the whole time.

  Jack Peter drew the bones, starting with the ones closest to the surface. He could render in detail the forearm sticking up from the hole in the sand, but the buried ones were much more difficult to see and harder to render. The candy cane in the corner of his mouth thinned to a sliver. He finished by drawing a few waves in the distance, with one grinning head poked above the foam, a little joke that only he would ever get.

  The paper curled slightly along the edges, the drawing smeared where he had laid an oily fist to steady it, but when he looked down upon his work, he was well pleased. Rolling it into a scroll, he carried the page to his room and spread it out upon the bed so that he could compare what he had created with the scene outside his window. A conspiracy of ravens gathered on the storm fence that ran along the path to the sea. A stray gull, far north for this time of year, had spotted the bones and was laughing on the dune. High tide rolling in had swept clean any footprints on the beach, but the big hole in the sand remained.

  Back and forth he went between his drawing and the landscape, comparing the differences in detail. Lost in the process, he did not hear his mother come in. From the doorway, she watched her son, first his reflection in the mirror, framed by the sea, and then the real boy at the window. Distracted by the optical illusion of two boys, she failed to notice both his drawing and the scene on the shore below. He was surprised to see her and wondered how long she had been there.

  “What have you been up to, Jack? We miss you downstairs. Hardly seems Christmas with you locked away.”

  “I was drawing,” he said. “With my new paper and pencils.”

  “All day? You must really like them, I’m glad.”

  “All day.”

  She stepped into the room and struck a casual pose by leaning against the edge of his desk. Careful not to look at him directly, she stared instead at the toys on the bookcase. He tracked her movements warily, wondering why she had come. These days she seemed frightened to enter his room or wake him in the mornings, and she only came in when he wasn’t there, to tidy up or put away his clean clothes in the dresser.

  “Can I ask you a question, Jack? I don’t want to scare you, but do you know anything about the strange things that have been happening around here?”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  “I’m glad about that.” She laughed. “But, seriously, have you seen anything unusual?”

  Twisting his arms over his head, he tried to escape her question.

  She took a few steps closer to him and bent down to see his face. “Or voices in the night. Do you ever hear voices out there, in the ocean, like someone calling for help?”

  He looked at her as if she had gone crazy.

  “What about the other day when your father left you and Nick alone in the house?”

  “We were good. We didn’t mean to make a mess.”

  His mother sat on the window seat, her face halved in the afternoon light. She had approached him cautiously, and he felt bad again for having hit her, but it was an accident. One minute she was across the room, and the next, she could have held him in her lap. “Have you ever seen that thing your father was chasing?”

  “The monster.” He held up his fingers curled into giant claws.

  She laughed again. “Mr. Weller thinks it might be a coyote or a dog run wild.”

  “A dog with a bone.”

  “There’s something out there,” she said. “I just don’t know what.”

  Out there. Jack looked through the glass. The sun shone in a cloudless sky, and he could see the dry grass and bare beach rosebushes move in the breeze. His father had followed the thing across the rocks and then disappeared. You could be so easily lost, over the horizon, into the sea. One minute here, one minute gone. Nothing certain.

  “Sometimes I see things,” he told his mother. “And then they go away.
But I have never seen anything in here. Not even a mouse.”

  “‘Not a creature was stirring,’” she said. “‘Not even a mouse.’”

  He remembered how she used to read “The Night Before Christmas” to him each year. Sitting in her lap, he had learned to memorize it and then read it himself. His mother taught him to read, taught him how to write. She wrapped her hand around his, around the pencil, and together they made the lines, the circle O and the combed E and the wavy W. Spelling was hard to remember, and even now he was not the best of writers, but he could draw.

  He smiled at her. “Safer in here.”

  She did not answer him but went far away in her thoughts. Her silence unnerved him, and he drummed his fingers on the windowsill until the noise reached her. Waking from her reverie, she smiled at him and laid her hand over his beating fingers. “So, what have you been drawing? Show me your latest masterpiece.”

  With a grand flourish, he gave her the binoculars and told her to look toward the rocks on the left. She soon found the hole on the beach and a strange white sticklike object raised in the sand next to it.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  He unrolled his drawing and spread the paper along the width of the windowsill. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth. Her eyes darted from the bones on the paper to the rocks and sea.

  “Like an arm,” she whispered, and then she was at the door, calling loudly for Tim to please come upstairs right away.

  iv.

  The red and blue lights from the police car beat against the windows and the side of the house, the reflection pulsating into the sky. Tim wondered whether the young policeman behind the wheel had left on the lights for show, some excitement in a sleepy tourist town on a peaceful Christmas Day. The few neighbors would no doubt speculate about the presence of the cruiser in the driveway, but he did not know the protocol for the flashing lights. Perhaps he could just ask him to shut them off, but he wasn’t even sure that calling the police was the right move in such a situation. Holly had insisted that he do something about the bone in the hole on the beach. She had freaked out when she saw it from Jip’s bedroom window, waking him from a nap in the easy chair to come upstairs and see.

  Just a pup, the county trooper appeared barely older than their son. He stepped from the car stiffly and put on his hat as though this was some traffic citation. Tim and Holly had been awaiting his arrival, and they nearly leapt from the house to greet him.

  “You the folks with the bones?” He had the singsong rhythm of a native.

  “The Keenans,” Tim said. “It’s just one bone.”

  “What happened to you?” He lifted his chin. “That’s quite a gash there on your neck. Cut yourself shaving?”

  Tim laughed and gently touched the raw skin on his throat. “As a matter of fact, I did, but this happened later. I was out the other day on the rocks and must have slipped and hit my head. Some kind of animal must have gotten at me while I was unconscious.”

  The policeman leaned in and inspected Tim’s neck. He held up three fingers and made a slashing motion. “Looks like they were made by fingernails. Human. And mad.”

  “The crime scene is around back,” Tim said.

  “Let’s have a look-see.” He stepped aside so that Tim and Holly could lead the way on the path between the dunes. The ravens perched on the snow fence took off, cawing madly over the disturbance.

  As she looked back to the policeman, Holly noticed his name tag pinned to the breast of his jacket. “Is that your name? Officer Pollock? Bet you get joshed about that all the time, around here. What with all the fish.”

  “No, ma’am. First time.”

  At the crest of the hill, they could see the hole in the sand above the high-tide mark, and they hurried down to take a closer look. Five feet long and four feet deep at its lowest point, it was empty save for a shallow pool of water resting at the very bottom. A slab of rock on the northern side cast a shadow into the crater. On the seaward side, most of the sand had been piled, and signs of disturbance ringed its perimeter. Although there were no footprints, indentations in several spots showed that whatever had been digging had shifted positions to get a better angle and go deeper. The wind had blown some of the piled sand toward the ocean, exposing a single bone, weatherworn as driftwood. Midway along its length, the bone twisted slightly and ended in a notch designed to fit the head of another bone. Tim had seen this type of bone before on an X-ray. In high school, he had broken his right arm playing football, a compound fracture of the radius. They all bent down and looked at the surface as bleached as a cloud.

  “It’s an arm,” Tim said. “A human arm.”

  “Could be,” Pollock said. He pulled it from the pile and the sand spilled into the space where the bone had been. “Smallish, but human most likely. A child, perhaps a small adult.”

  “Where did it come from?” Holly asked. “How did it get here?”

  “Can’t say. Could’ve washed up ashore. You would never believe what the ocean coughs up. Found a foot once, still inside a boot. Could’ve been here a long time. Looks old. And got dug up by whatever was here last night.”

  Holly shuddered and wrapped her coat more tightly around her shoulders. “What was here last night?”

  With a grunt, the policeman stood and tapped the arm bone against his thigh like a riding crop. “Probably smelt it or could tell there was a buried bone. There’s been a big white dog running loose around these parts. Dogs can smell bones a mile away. Even ancient ones. Seen any other holes? Any other bones lying around?”

  Tim frowned at him. “Shouldn’t you be treating this more like a crime scene? Isn’t that kind of evidence of foul play?”

  They could read the reflection in his sunglasses as Pollock held up the bone to the sunlight and inspected it closely. “This arm has been detached from a living thing for a long, long time.”

  “How long?” Holly asked. “Can you tell how old a bone is?”

  Brightening to her question, he turned to her and away from Tim. “Look at these striations here, the way the knob is worn as an old croquet ball. Course I can’t tell simply by eyeballing it, but I’d say that bone has been here for years, decades even. What I can do is send it off to the crime lab in Augusta—they might be able to say for certainty.”

  “That’s it?” Tim asked. “You don’t want to investigate? Call in the CSI?”

  Pollock jammed the bone back into the sand pile. “I could, if you insist. We could run some tape around this hole and call the state police, but they might want to bring in a backhoe, chew up this whole waterfront. This being Christmas Day, I’d be loath to disturb those boys. Ruin the rest of your holiday, all for an old bone. But if you insist, Mr. Keenan, I could radio in. Or I could write up my report, send this upstate, and, turns out I’m wrong, we can always come back. Bring a big crew. If there’s more bones, likely they’re not moving out on their own.”

  Slipping her hand under Tim’s arm, Holly pulled herself closer. “It is Christmas.”

  “Could you at least see if there are any other bones in the hole?”

  His leather holster rubbed and squeaked as Pollock hopped down into the hole. He looked like a gravedigger halfway done with the job, chest deep in the earth. When he bent to investigate the bottom, he was swallowed whole. “The sand’s packed solid here. You can see the marks from whatever made this. Sure no shovel.”

  “Any signs of other bones?” Tim shouted from the edge as though speaking to a man in a deep well.

  Pollock popped up and brushed the sand from his jacket. Laying the bone on the edge, he waited for Tim to offer a hand and then climbed back to the top. “There’s no one else down there.”

  “What’ll we do about the hole?” Tim asked.

  “Get yourself a couple of shovels, and you could fill it in no time. You wouldn’t want someone to stumble into it and hurt himself. Maybe you and the boy could do the job.” With his thumb, he pointed to the second-story window. Jip had been watching the
ir every move.

  “Not going to happen,” Holly said. “He doesn’t ever leave the house.”

  “Never?”

  Tim answered quickly. “Agoraphobia. He’s afraid of the outside.”

  “It’s not a phobia,” Holly said. “It’s not like he’s just afraid of the dark or scared of heights. It’s all part of his illness, a condition of the mind. He’s much worse than that.”

  Her words hung in the air like an executioner’s verdict. Pollock reached for the bone at his feet, and in the distance one of the ravens on the beach screeched at a thief. Wrapping his coat more tightly, Tim shivered and pondered their life together. He wished she would not be so free with her opinions in public and be so adamant in her analysis. Jip was getting better day by day. Once upon a time, he would have no more stayed in the light of the window than venture onto the beach. But he was up there now, watching them from on high.

  “Would you like to meet him?” Holly asked. “Our son, Jack. He doesn’t get many visitors, as you might imagine, and I’m not sure he’s ever met a real live policeman. He would be thrilled.”

  Tim put his hand on the trooper’s shoulder. “Come inside and warm up a little before you go on your way. There’s a pot of coffee on, and nobody can resist my wife’s Christmas cookies.”

  “I’ll make you a hot chocolate,” Holly said. “You seem more of a cocoa kind of guy. Oh, it will be all right. You’re worried about missing a crime. Nothing ever happens on Christmas, especially around here, and you won’t be missed. We’ll never tell.” She hooked her arm in the crook of his and had him lead her to the house.