The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  She gasped. “Did that make you angry?”

  “They should send him away. Not me.”

  “You are a special boy,” Miss Tiramaku said. “I understand, because I was a special girl, too, just like you, and other people, they don’t know, do they? They think we are not listening, but we hear everything. They think we are not watching, but we see everything. They think our heads are filled with made-up things, but we know the difference between what is real and what is not.”

  ”I am tired of having to draw all of the time, every day, to take care of everything. Nobody listens, nobody knows.”

  “I know your secret,” she said, and in her eye raged a storm.

  “Snowing,” Nick said at the window, jarring Jack back from his memory of the conversation with the woman who could see the pictures inside his mind. She vanished from his mind as suddenly as she had arrived.

  From downstairs, his father called to tell them, too, that it was snowing. Jack Peter laid down his pencil. He wanted out.

  ii.

  At first the storm mesmerized the three of them, and they watched for a long time as if drugged by the shifting patterns of white. One by one, they peeled away, off to do other things while the snow fell in the background, slowly accumulating without their awareness, an inch sneaking up on another inch. Tim loved the feeling of the first heavy storm of the season, how it covered the ground and blanketed the house. He had switched on a lamp in the living room, but the rest of the house had softened to a muted gray. The snow deadened outside sounds to a whisper, while the old house creaked and groaned like a timbered hull rolling in the waves. The sensation made him sleepy, and he would have settled on the easy chair for a nap if not for the vague anxiety brought on by Holly’s absence. She had taken the car that morning, not his Jeep, and if the conditions worsened, she might have trouble on the roads.

  At one o’clock, he climbed the darkened stairs to find the boys. Pausing outside the door, he heard them bicker.

  “Where did you see him?” Nick asked. “You couldn’t have seen him, because he’s only been outside.”

  “I’ve seen him through the window.”

  “Yes, but only from faraway. You’ve never seen him up close.”

  “I’ve seen him, I’ve heard him.”

  “How could you hear him?”

  “He’s been to the house,” Jip said. “Many times.”

  “That’s not what he looks like anyway. His arms aren’t as long as that.”

  “What do you know? You don’t know what I make—”

  With one knuckle, Tim tapped on the door, and the boys halted their conversation immediately. Like a ghoul in a horror movie, he opened the door as slowly as possible so that its hinges squealed, and he stepped into the room in a stiff-legged gait. They had moved furtively to the bed, papers rustling beneath the blankets. Guilty little buggers. “What’s all this, then?”

  “Nothing,” Jip said. To silence his conspirator, all he had to do was gaze in Nick’s direction.

  “A secret,” Nick said.

  “It’s not nice to keep secrets from your father.” Tim folded his arms across his chest, but when no confession was forthcoming, he relaxed and smiled at them. “Boys will be boys, and every one of them a scoundrel.”

  The quilt twitched up and down like a mouse hopping in the bed, and Jip quickly removed a bare foot from under the covers.

  “You boys trying to scare me? How about some beans and toast for lunch and a couple of fried eggs?”

  Excited by the prospect of their favorite meal, the boys sprang from the bed. In their wake, they left a trail of paper in the folds of the blankets, and Tim was tempted to call them back to clean their mess. Drawings on the floor, pencils on the pillows. Or, he thought, he could straighten the scattered pages for them, but then he let the moment pass.

  They were just toddlers when he had first made them toast and beans, but he was already a dab hand at the Maine way, with a healthy dollop of maple syrup whisked into the pot, sweet as candy. At the meal’s end, their faces had been slick with brown sauce and their fingers were glued together. He wet the corner of a napkin with warm water from the sink and scrubbed them clean. Nick was pliant, giggling, his mouth pressed against the cloth in stern resistance. Washing Jip, by contrast, was like dealing with a stiff doll. Clenched against his father’s touch, he offered no fight, no assistance, no squeals of joy in the simple act. The difference between the two toddlers had saddened him, and he could not smell the sweetness of baked beans in maple syrup without a faint echo in memory.

  Older now, and slightly more hygienic, the boys did not need his help in cleaning up after the meal. Like two lobstermen come in off the North Atlantic, they gulped down their food and wiped their plates with triangles of toast. He sat with them, modeling fastidiousness to no avail, and they ate in silence, content for the company and satisfied without conversation. Every speck gone, they waited for him to finish before asking to be excused, and between bites, he watched them watching him. He noticed for the thousandth time just how much Nick favored his mother’s looks, but the point of view made it seem a fresh observation, like seeing one of Jip’s distorted drawings, the long-familiar suddenly made new.

  The face of the mother in the face of the child. She was on some Caribbean beach, port of call, looking out over the same ocean, basking in sunshine, and he remembered the smell of her summer skin. Outside his window, the snow poured like feathers torn from the gray sky. He pictured Nell in her swimsuit on the beach in the summertime and wondered how different his life would have been with her, with Nick as their son. One moment changes everything. He could have gone back to school, made something different of himself. Had a fine house like the Rothmans’ place. Had a fine wife, a fine son. But the images were as fleeting as the snowfall. He pictured Holly looking through her office window at the storm, wondering if she should come home.

  He stacked the dishes in the sink and made a sea of foam from the soapsuds, and as he scrubbed, he kept an eye on the blizzard outside, half expecting Holly to come through the door at any minute. When he was finished with the bean pot and the cutlery, he went to the phone on the wall and dialed her cell phone, but heard it ring on her desk in the living room. She was so forgetful these days, so preoccupied.

  He shook his head and tried her number at the office. After the fifteenth ring, he decided she must be on her way, so he hung up. She was no good in the snow, not having grown up in New England, and besides she had the car without the front-wheel drive and no chains, and he wished she would just show up already. The boys had gone off on one of their games, and he had no one to talk to and a surplus of nervous energy. He dialed her office again, the receiver smelling of soap, but it just rang and rang.

  The fidgets threatened to overwhelm him, but fortunately, he remembered the seven lobster pots in the workroom. Earlier in the day when he was mending the slats and mesh, he had noticed how odd and out of place was the new material against the old. The whole stack should be taken outside and given a chance to weather and fade in the cold and damp. Now, he brought them up a pair at a time, and on the third go-around, he decided to save time by taking all three remaining traps. At the threshold, he stumbled into the kitchen, dropping them all and sending one clattering across the floor. Nick and Jip rushed to see what had happened.

  “Butterfingers,” Tim said. “When you try to save yourself some trouble, you only get more trouble.”

  “Where are you going with these traps?” Jip asked.

  “I fixed them up and thought I could sell them as antiques to the tourists this summer, Lord knows, they’re old as sin. But you see where the new wood sticks out against the faded bits. Folks can tell. So I need to get them beat up a bit and exposed to the elements. You boys interested in lending a hand?”

  They carried the traps to the mudroom and laid them near the outside door. Tim shoved his hooves into a pair of boots and grabbed a parka from the hook. “Get a coat, Nick, and some boots. You can
help me take these round to the back. A good freeze and a couple months of salt air and they’ll be good as new. Good as old.”

  Tim stepped out into the heavy snow, flying thick and steadily, and the boy trailed behind, faithful as a hound, under the bulk of the lobster pot. They trudged to the top of the hill and set them against the railing that ran along the back of the house. The colored lobster buoys hanging there had little caps of snow. At the end of their third trip, they stood to admire their work and watch the storm, white frosting on their hair and shoulders. A good four inches had fallen, creating a smooth and even layer undisturbed by man or beast, except for their own prints along the edge of the foundation and a very fresh and clearly delineated path between the house and the sea. Footprints had been covered over, but the dents in the snow remained. Tracks of someone who had been walking out there at some point in the past few hours. The trail began at the edge of the shore and meandered across the rocks before disappearing around the far side of the house. Tim put his boot into the nearest print and measured its length. Big as a man’s foot.

  The boy brushed the snow from his head and slicked back his wet hair. Almost immediately a new frosting of snow stuck to him. They did not speak, but by tacit agreement, they set off down to the sea, following the tracks to their source, picking their way around the rocks until the trail petered out at the shoreline. There was no other path to the right or the left. Whatever had made those marks seemed to have come out of the water.

  * * *

  On the tenth ring, Jack Peter answered the telephone. From the vantage of the kitchen window, he could discern the path his father and Nick had made, the heavy flakes covering them like snowmen, white shadows in a world of white. They had nearly disappeared into the page. Because he hated talking on the phone, he almost never picked up a call, but the incessant ringing was worse than his loathing of the instrument. He did not say hello or anything at all, waiting instead for the person on the other end to begin. At first only the sound of breathing filled the void, and then came his mother’s disembodied voice.

  “Is anybody there?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Jack? Hello. Where is your father? It was ringing and ringing.”

  “He’s not here. Nobody’s here.”

  A breath of exasperation escaped her throat. “What do you mean? Where’s Nicholas? Where’s your father?”

  “They are in the water.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They walked to the ocean.”

  “In this storm? Are they crazy? What are they doing down by the ocean?”

  He dropped the receiver, went to the window to check on the two, and then came back to the phone. “Following the footprints.”

  “Jack, where did you go? Stay on the phone, do you hear me? What footprints?”

  “A monster’s.”

  “How many times do we have to tell you?”

  “One hundred times,” he said, but she did not laugh. “They went out to take the lobster pots, so Daddy could weather them.”

  “That man, honestly. Why he felt the need to do it in a blizzard.”

  “To sell to the tourists.”

  She laughed, finally. “Listen, Jack, when your father comes in, I need you to tell him to come pick me up. In the Jeep. My car is stuck, do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you shaking your head? You know I can’t hear that over the phone? Yes, Jack, but listen, I’m not at work. I’m at the church, where Miss Tiramaku lives. Star of the Sea. Can you remember or write that down? Tell him right when he comes back inside.”

  “Wait.” He dropped the receiver again and went to the kitchen where his drawings and pencils had been abandoned. On the back of a picture of the man from the sea, he wrote the name of the church in careful block letters. When he came back to the phone, he could hear her talking to someone else in the room, so he waited until she had finished.

  “Jack, are you there? Where did you go? Don’t let the phone clunk like that. Did your father come back?”

  “You told me to write it, so I had to get a pencil.”

  “Read it back to me, Jack. So you’ll remember.”

  “Star of the Sea,” he said. “Get Mommy in the Jeep.”

  “You’re a good boy,” she said.

  “You’re a good mother,” he said.

  She laughed again and hung up. For a long time, there was only silence, and then the reassuring dial tone hummed in his ear, but when an angry sound, like an alarm, began to chatter, he dropped the receiver to the floor and stepped away.

  Outside, the wind blew the showers across the sky, and the snow had subsumed Nick and his father. Jack Peter pressed his forehead against the windowpane as he peered through the flowing eddies, anxious for sight of them, but they were gone as surely as had they been erased. The trail from the sea to the house was vanishing, too, little more than an impression, and he went from window to window, seeking a sign of where they might have gone. He made a circuit around to the front of the house and there saw a figure approaching, white on white, as though a snowman had come to life and was struggling to find shelter from the storm. As it drew nearer, the figure gained clarity. It was not Jack’s father but the drawing man, ghastly thin and naked, his wild hair blowing in the wind, the snow caked in his beard around the horrid mouth. Come for him at last, come to take him away. Take Nick instead, he thought, and realized in the same moment that Nick was outside with his father, leaving him all alone. On bandy legs, the monster crept closer to the house.

  His every thought was falling away and let loose into the world. The figure in the window got bigger and bigger, and just as Jack stepped back, the white man reached out both long arms as if to grab at him and pull him through the glass. His long bony fingers stretched and slapped at the windowpane with a report as sharp as gunfire. His face came fully into view, a wretched expression in his black eyes, threatening and imploring, a grimace full of teeth as ruined as tombstones. Jack had seen that face many times before, and now he realized his mistake in drawing it. He screamed, and the creature heard him through the glass. Turning its head as if mounted on a spit, the man glanced over its right shoulder, aware of another presence nearby. The creature quickly retreated, running away from its pursuers. Jack withdrew to the heart of the house, waiting in the kitchen for what was next to come. He was frightened by the uncertainty.

  * * *

  Tim and the boy had stood at the tideline, puzzling over what might have made the footprints that had risen from the sea. These weren’t the marks of a coyote or even the paw prints as big as that dead white dog’s. They were clearly evidence of a two-legged gait, a man. Tim’s mind jumped to the white man. He felt sure that Nick knew it, too, though he dared not ask for fear that he would worry him, for the boy was already anxious in his movements, casting his gaze up and down the shore, anticipating something emerging from the storm.

  They slowly climbed the incline toward the house, guiding their steps through the trail they had carved. Curiously, Jip was not spying on them from the window as usual, and Tim wondered what might be occupying his attention. A trough in the snow skirted along the foundation, and below every window was a tramped-down area, as if their quarry had paused beneath each entry point to the house. The windows were all smudged and wet with dirt and melting snow. On the far side, the tracks veered sharply into the pines along the southern border of the property, and Tim and Nick followed them into the trees. Where the evergreen needles had fallen, the snow cover had thinned to a bare coating, and they nearly lost the scent, but the prints picked up again and the length between strides widened, as though the thing was running now and had crossed the road.

  Panting, Tim stopped and considered the child at his side, cold and wet and tired. It could be anywhere, miles away, over the rocks or into the woods. As much as he wanted to put an end to the mystery plaguing them, he decided to abandon the chase. “This is no place for a child,” he hollered into the wind. “Time to
get you safe inside.” They retraced the path their own boots had made and circled back to the door by the mudroom. A couple of old towels hanging on pegs allowed them to dry their wet hair into tangled manes. They wrestled free from their coats and boots and their soaking socks, turned up the cuffs on their wet jeans, and marched barefoot into the kitchen. Jip was at the kitchen table, drawing.

  “Where were you so long?”

  Nick looked like a wild thing, his cheeks bright red and his hair a shock. “We saw footprints out there. It’s a blizzard, and we tried to follow them.”

  “What was it?” Jip asked.

  “I don’t know. Can’t tell,” his father said. “Did you see anything from inside?”

  Bending down to his paper, Jip resumed his drawing. “Nothing. Just waiting.”

  They left him at the table and went to change into dry clothes. Tim lit a fire in the fireplace, warm heart to the quiet house, worrying about Holly out in the storm. Nick kept watch at the window, imagining a monster in every shadow. An hour passed before Jip stopped his drawing long enough to report about his mother’s phone call and how she said to take the Jeep and find her at the Star of the Sea.

  iii.

  “I’ll not have another word about ghosts,” Father Bolden said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, filling Holly’s head with such tales. A ghost is little more than a trick of the mind at war with itself. A temporary manifestation of psychological conflict.” He rubbed his stomach and licked the last of the cherries from the tines of his fork. “No more of your folktales, Miss Tiramaku.” He turned to Holly. “Why don’t you tell us about what brought you here in the first place? Why don’t you tell us about your son?”

  At one end of the mahogany table, Father Bolden and Miss Tiramaku sat together as familiar as a long-lost uncle and aunt welcoming her back to the family. The snowy day brought memories of the slant light of other such afternoons, holiday times with her parents and sister, catching up after extended absences, of cups and saucers, dessert plates dotted with crumbs, and feeling that they might never again have the chance to talk this way. She wanted to confess what she had done and what she had failed to do, what she had said and what she had failed to say. She had yearned to tell someone about her dreams and her boy for a long, long time.