The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  “I don’t remember any of this,” Tim said. “I had just closed my eyes for a minute, and the next thing I know, you’re waking us all up. From a dream.”

  “To a nightmare,” she said. Far below in the basement, the furnace roared and the blowers breathed to life. Slowly, the heat returned. For the rest of the day, Tim went to check on the thaw. They spent the night camped out in the living room by a roaring fire, huddled in blankets with the television on all night, afraid of their own house.

  Five

  At dawn, Tim woke before the others but found he could not move from beneath the blanket on the couch. An incapacitating fatigue. Daylight arced across the ceiling, and he watched the whitening surface, thinking, thinking of the man he had seen, the wild white man, first on that night when driving Nick, the amazing shape of the creature crouching by the road. And on the beach, again the hunched-over thing spied from a window. Giving chase, he had stumbled and fallen and came to with blood on his throat. He rubbed the sores and winced. Just when he had found a logical explanation—the dead white dog in the trunk of the policeman’s car—Tim had seen it again. The white man running, but what if it was a hallucination? He never had hallucinations. He lived in the real world. Work to be done, problems to solve.

  Through the windows he saw the clouds amassing in the west, and the sky filled with promise. He carried the idea of snow in his mind as he set about his chores. Upstairs, the boys’ bedroom had dried out completely and was warm and snug. The salty residue on the walls had vanished. No ice frosted the windows. He checked for leaks where the winter might come in and furred each window with weather stripping, glancing now and again at the beach below for any signs of the bogeyman. Beside the rocks he found a dark patch of sand that he thought might be the bone spot, but he could have been mistaken. He worked deliberately and quietly, the weight of the past few days lifted by the mundane task. When finished, Tim crept back downstairs and found the bodies at rest where he had left them. Holly and the boys looked like New Year’s revelers on the morning after, crashed in the easy chair and on the floor, sleeping it off. He was grateful for the respite from his anxieties.

  As soon as Holly spoke, he knew that she had been awake for some moments staring at him in the crepuscular light. He went to her side and bent to face her when she opened her lips. “What are you thinking about?”

  “These strange days. Ghosts and the boys.”

  “You think so, too?”

  With an arched eyebrow, he conveyed his skepticism. “Jip’s bedroom is just as it always was. Not a trace of the ice or salt. Weird.”

  She sat up slowly and stretched her arms straight out and rolled her shoulders as fluidly as a cat. “Like it never happened.”

  The boys were sleeping side by side on the floor between the fireplace and the Christmas tree. Chests falling and rising, their breathing synchronized. Twins. In the dimness, they looked alike, their flyaway hair, the way they had wrapped themselves in blankets. Two versions of one boy.

  “It’s good that he has Nick,” said Tim.

  “He won’t always be here,” Holly whispered. “We need help with Jack.”

  “I suppose you are right.” He laid his hands on her shoulders.

  “So you’re okay with this? With finding someone to talk with Jack?”

  He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

  Holly held him off. “I’m serious, Tim. I worry about him all the time, about how strong he’s becoming, and how scared I already am of him. And what happens when we’re no longer around to take care of him?”

  “Whoa, one step at a time,” he said.

  “It doesn’t have to be Miss Tiramaku, but they seem to have already developed a rapport,” she said. “They’re on the same wavelength, the one that never reaches us.”

  With the white of his smile, he surrendered. “Okay, okay. What harm can it be to have him talk with her?”

  She slid from beneath his hands and wriggled out of the chair. Free, she kissed him and headed off to the bathroom. She sang in the shower, moved with élan through her morning ablutions. At breakfast, he caught himself staring at her, marveling at her newfound energy, and in her moments of grace and beauty, she restored his energy.

  * * *

  “Put down that pencil,” Nick said. Jack Peter did not obey, perhaps was not even listening, but instead leaned further into his work, hunching over his paper, the pencil moving in a series of cross-hatchings to indicate the shadowed eyes, a delicate fury in his speed and gestures. In the flow of his innermost thoughts, he worked without hesitation, the lines appearing by destiny, with no consciousness behind them, the picture having existed there on the blank page from the beginning and needing only the instrument in Jack Peter’s hand in order to appear.

  “Stop,” Nick insisted. “I will wait here until you stop. You have to quit sometime.”

  Jack Peter ignored his friend’s request and began drawing the man’s beard, hair by hair, the full face coming into being, mesmerizing and filled with menace.

  The choice became clear: Nick could either remain there looking over Jack Peter’s shoulder until he finished or he could deliberately interrupt the act. Taking the patchwork paper from beneath the mattress, he smoothed the wrinkles and laid it on the desk, just in front of Jack Peter, evidence of the crime. More tape than paper, the image had taken forever to reconstruct from its torn bits. The jigsaw page was all that remained from the ruined picture of the babies. The artist laid down his pencil.

  “I want to know,” Nick said. “Whether you draw these things before or after you see them.”

  Bristling with anger, Jack Peter tapped the end of the pencil like a jackhammer against the surface of the desk.

  “Where do these creatures come from?” Nick demanded.

  Jack Peter struck his temple with the soft eraser on the pencil’s other end. He seemed to be beating out some telegraphic code only he could comprehend. A pile of his drawings lay stacked to his left, and Nick picked up the sheets and rifled through them, searching for a particular image.

  “You need to tell me. Where’s the one of the ocean coming into the house? I know you made that happen.”

  Nothing could deter Jack Peter from creating the monster at hand.

  “Where’s the dog? The one I heard two nights ago.” Nick tossed the papers back on the desk. “In the trash? Shredded to pieces?”

  Jack Peter refused to answer and could not be further distracted from the drawing in front of him. He bore down, concentrating on the unfinished man, moving his gaze from line to line, imagining how to complete it. No expression, just an intensity to his eyes, a furrow bisecting his forehead. The pencil snapped in his hand. They could play this game all day, Nick decided, and Jack Peter would not budge an inch. He was stronger that way. Stubborn.

  “Did you put the bodies in the closet?”

  “Were you scared?” Jack Peter asked, picking up a fresh pencil. “Did you want to run away? Why don’t you go away, and I can stay here.”

  No course remained except surrender. With a sigh that began deep in his core, Nick withdrew and plopped down on the bed. He stared at the reflection of the gray sea and gray sky in the dresser mirror, slowly realizing that the spots in the glass were not flaws in the silvering, but the movement of falling snow. The weathermen on TV had been calling for a nor’easter all week, and it was finally here. The thought of snowmen and sledding gave Nick a thrill, a chance to be outside, and he roused himself from the bed and went to the window to stare at the real thing.

  “Snowing,” he said in a gleeful tone, but Jack Peter did not so much as turn his head.

  * * *

  For the rest of the morning, Tim puttered downstairs in the little workroom beneath the kitchen, sorting through a jumble of lobster pots that he had long planned on fixing and selling that coming summer to the tourists. Repair on the traps proved a mindless distraction, reworking tangled mesh, cutting slats on the table saw and tacking them to replace the broken
pieces. He figured he would haul them all outside and by June they would be weathered gray. Tucked beneath the house in the small space behind the dune, the workshop was his sanctuary. No windows let in the light, so he toiled shut off from the world. In his workshop he often thought of those city folk who lived year-round in windowless cubicles, yearning for their two weeks, three if they were lucky, on the summer beaches. They would arrive, blinking moles, washed out from their artificial days, just to have a taste of sun and salt and wind on their faces. He, on the other hand, was outdoors every day of the year, and in the peak tourist season, often from dawn to past dusk. An outside man with an inside boy.

  He pounded a nail into the wood, resolving again to fix his son. Once these strange days had passed, he would figure out some new tactics for getting Jip over his phobia. Reintroduce him to the fresh air, give him something to do with his hands. She was wrong about Jip, dead wrong. He could be reached, he could be mended. The son Tim had always wanted. The son that should be his.

  When his work on the pots was finished, he climbed the stairs to the kitchen and saw, as he opened the door, how the light had changed, and at once he knew that snow was falling, and felt just like a kid again, waking on a school day to the spectacular white of a blizzard. He called upstairs to the boys with the news. “It’s snowing!”

  “We know!” Nick shouted from the top of the stairs.

  Tim thought at once that Nick would want to go outside, and later, perhaps after Holly came home and could stay with Jip, he could have a real winter’s day again and take Nick on a sled or build a snowman. Along with that delight came a pang of regret that Jip would not agree to join them. Nick hopped down the stairs and slid across the wooden floor in his stocking feet. Together they hurried to the picture window to watch the first real storm of the season. A thin palimpsest of white covered the ground, and the snow was now falling in waves, flakes hissing into the sea, painting the cold rocks, and still melting against the patches of sand.

  “Maybe we’ll go out later,” Tim said. “Just the two of us, when Mrs. Keenan comes home.”

  The boy beside him nodded with joy.

  “Nothing better,” Tim said, “than a snowy day.”

  * * *

  The first wet fat flakes began to tumble from the clouds just as Holly sneaked away from her office to drive to the Star of the Sea rectory. On her way, she had picked up a cherry strudel at Schroeder’s Bakery, for she wanted to stay in Father Bolden’s good graces since he would have to agree to spare his housekeeper the time to be with her child. Holly was certain she could arrange her help, now that Tim was no longer the main impediment.

  The boys, too, had seemed changed. At the breakfast table, they had been nattering on in their own private language about their plans for the day. She studied Nicholas closely to see if he had gotten enough sleep after his nightmares. Honestly, babies on the walls, a flood that came and went like the tides. He seemed to have recovered somewhat, although when the Wellers returned, his mother would no doubt notice the dark circles under his eyes and his pale complexion from being inside since Christmas. Nick would have tales to tell her, dogs and bones and weeping rooms. They might never let him come back again.

  The snow flew in a frenzy against the windshield and made the storm seem more threatening, enough so that she considered heading straight for home. But when she pulled the old car into the parking lot, sliding slightly to the left, the motion slowed, and stepping into the snow shower, she was surprised by how gentle and harmless and beautiful it was. On such days when Jack was a toddler, she had dressed him in a blue snowsuit, thick overalls with suspenders and a matching down coat, so that he could barely move. Stiff legged and waddling in his rubber boots, he would come outside into the wonder, and within minutes his cheeks would brighten to red and his nose was a cherry button. She’d fling him onto a sled and pull him to the top of a small hill, and there he would consent to sit in her lap for a ride to the bottom. The weight of him was just as real after all these years, his back pressed against her chest as they whooshed along, snow spray in their faces, and his laughter erupting from deep within, so hard that she could feel it in her bones. She would give anything to hear that laugh again.

  Father Bolden answered the door in a worn black shirt and collar, his oversized gray cardigan around his shoulders like an old friend. The sly fox pretended he was surprised to see her and a little put out by her unannounced visit, but his ruse fell apart the moment he spied the white bakery box hanging by the twine curled around her fingers. She held it up to his eye level. “Strudel,” she said. “I hear your favorite is cherry.”

  “How did you know?”

  With her chin, Holly gestured past him toward the kitchen.

  He frowned and nodded over his shoulder. “A man might keep a secret from a wife, but never from the housekeeper. Don’t let the snow in. Come along, come along. I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee.”

  Brushing the snow from her shoulders, Holly entered the rectory and made her way to the dining room. Excusing himself to find Miss Tiramaku, Father Bolden left her alone. She stared at the painting of the drowning ship, trying to convince herself that there were no such things as ghosts.

  Father Bolden touched her shoulder and she leapt from her skin. He had slipped into the room with the pastry, plates, and a wicked-looking knife, while out in the kitchen, Miss Tiramaku was taking cups and saucers from the cupboards. Holly had heard none of this. She pressed her fingertips over her heart to slow its beating.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Father Bolden said. “You were in a bit of a trance.”

  “Just this painting,” Holly said. “I’m not sure why, but it seems so vivid to me, so real. I’ve found out more about it.”

  “Miss Tiramaku said you were off to the archives to research.”

  “Damn,” she said. “I left all the papers at the house.”

  Carrying a tray with three cups and a pot of coffee, Miss Tiramaku appeared to be struggling, and when Holly offered, she allowed her to remove the weight of the carafe in order to set down the service on the table. When her hands were free, Miss Tiramaku greeted her in a quick embrace, stiff as a hug from Jack. She looked much older again, as if being in the rectory or the company of the priest had given her more gravitas, but even so, she was a welcome sight.

  The priest began to pour. “Mrs. Keenan here was—”

  “Holly,” she said. “Please call me Holly.”

  He smiled and moved to the next cup. “Holly found herself lost in the Wreck, and I may have given her a bit of a fright.”

  “No, it’s just that after the last time I saw it, I started having dreams about the shipwreck and hearing things, imagining things. Knocking on the walls of the house. Tapping inside my head.” She turned her face away, eyes downward. “Tell me, Father, where does the church stand on the matter of ghosts?”

  “Ghosts?” He looked at her over the top of the frames of his eyeglasses. “You seem to be preoccupied with ghosts. That’s the second time you’ve brought them up.”

  “On Christmas eve, after midnight, I was driving home in the fog and I stopped when it was getting too thick. There were voices coming out from the sea. I thought it was a party or a husband and wife having an argument, but now I could swear they were the crew and passengers on that ship. I had to find out. I went to the museum and dug up records from the Porthleven. A handwritten list of the passengers. Did you know that people around here came and claimed the bodies found in the wreck? And some bodies were never found, just left there at the bottom of the sea? And then this bone turned up, a human bone, the arm bone of a child, right on our property. Don’t you see, it all adds up. Ghosts.”

  Setting a cup and saucer before her, he picked up the knife to attack the strudel. “In general, no to ghosts or wandering spirits. Tell me, Holly, have you been talking with my housekeeper here? About the yurei? Have you no shame, Miss Tiramaku?”

  Miss Tiramaku poured a shot of cream in her cup
, and it swirled round like a cloud.

  * * *

  The snow reminded him of that woman who had come to the house yesterday. In one eye, snow had swirled like a shaken globe. Jack Peter knew he should not stare, but he could not resist the strangeness of the white flakes in the black of her eyes. She was speaking to him, telling a story, but he was not listening, for he was watching the snow fall in her eye. His parents and Nick were in the other room, listening to Frank Sinatra. She had been talking for some time, and he had no idea what she was saying, and he looked for some way out so he would not be lost.

  “Your mother tells me you like to draw.”

  “I got an artist’s kit for Christmas. And paper.”

  She pretended to look away, the way adults sometimes do, to show they are not that interested in the conversation and try to throw off suspicion. “What do you draw? Things you see or things you imagine?”

  He turned his head in the opposite direction and drummed his fingertips on the table.

  “Maybe sometime I can see your drawings?” she asked. “Even your secret ones.”

  He nodded. That would be okay.

  “I know you like monsters. Do you draw monsters, too?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And Nick.”

  She looked puzzled. “You like to draw pictures of Nick, or do you like to draw with Nick?”

  He did not understand her question and did not reply.

  “Nick seems to be a nice boy,” she said. “Is he a good friend?”

  He nodded. “He comes over here to play. He stays inside with me.”

  She leaned in closer, so close they nearly touched, and she asked, “Does that make you happy?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “And sometimes I am mad. They said they might send me away.”

  “Your mother and father?”

  Jack Peter nodded. “And Nick,” he said. “He held me underwater. He wanted to get rid of me.”