The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  “We have to get out of here,” Nick said. “Get help. We have to leave the house.”

  “No.” There was no panic in his voice, only certainty.

  He grabbed Jack Peter by the throat and shook him hard. “You’re coming with me. Get your coat and boots. Now.”

  A door slammed upstairs and rattled the windows. The monster was on the move, and it was only a matter of time before it came back down the stairs. Nick dragged Jack Peter to the mudroom and tugged him to the slab floor. A pair of new red boots stood in a corner, and he forced them on Jack Peter’s unbending feet, like dressing a stubborn toddler. He buttoned him into an overcoat and crammed his fists into a pair of mittens. In the background, the wild man took the stairs one by one, its knees clacking and popping with stiffness. With little time to spare, Nick got himself ready and then pushed his friend down the passage to the ruined open door.

  The storm had subsided, but little bursts of snow fell gently in the white world. They stood on the threshold preparing to jump into the abyss. He could feel Jack Peter hesitate at the edge, panic welling up and taking hold. Behind them, the monster had reached the bottom of the stairs, and from the kitchen his ragged breathing sounded like a hunting tiger.

  “You’ll be just fine,” Nick said. “Your father said we should cross the road to the Quigleys if we had any trouble. It’s not far, and I’ll help you, c’mon.”

  He grabbed Jack Peter by the arm and pulled him outside.

  * * *

  Tim winced when Holly mentioned the boys, and the pain in his back shot into his legs. Shifting his weight in the chair, he wanted to scream, he wanted the Japanese woman with the fuzzed eyeball to work her magic again on his panicked nerves. The others observed him clinically, their faces mirroring his discomfort with expressions of empathy.

  “The boys?” He pinched out each word. “They’re fine. Inside. Probably drawing or playing one of their games.”

  Holly shook her head disapprovingly. “I don’t like leaving them alone for so long. If anything happened to Nick while we’re away, Fred and Nell would kill us. Do you remember what those boys did when you went off on your wild goose chase a couple days ago? Nearly ate us out of house and home. Pots and pans and dirty dishes all over the place. Lord knows what kind of trouble they might be getting up to.”

  “Nothing happened,” he said.

  “Wait here,” Father Bolden said. “I’ve just the thing in the library that will fix you up proper.” His boots flapped like clapping seals as he shuffled from the room.

  “Ikiryo,” Miss Tiramaku spat out the word as soon as the priest was out of earshot. “There is one more yurei I meant to tell you about: the living ghost. Ikiryo. When a person has great anger or resentment, his spirit can separate itself from the body and haunt his tormentors. Sometimes the person has no knowledge that his ikiryo even exists, much less is seeking vengeance. I’ve been trying to remember all day.”

  Holding a small noggin of whiskey, the priest returned triumphant. He poured a drop in Tim’s teacup and a larger dram in a glass for himself. Lifting it in a toast, he said, “To warm you to the core.”

  “Any more and my wife will have to do the driving, but thanks just the same, padre.”

  “Seems like I’ve interrupted your conspiracy,” the priest said. “What goes on here?”

  Tim laughed. “No conspiracy here. Miss Tiramaku was regaling us with another one of her stories. The living ghost that leaves the body and seeks revenge.”

  “Ikiryo,” Holly said.

  “To get rid of the ikiryo,” Miss Tiramaku said, “the person must give up his fears and resentments.”

  Father Bolden scolded Miss Tiramaku in stern Japanese, and she looked chastened. Eyes to the floor, she said, “I only want to help their boy. We are so much alike.”

  Conversation halted, as though she had crossed a line without consent and embarrassed them all into silence. Holly fidgeted in her chair and tapped her fingertips against her lips. The priest stared at his empty glass, and Miss Tiramaku looked past Tim to the little window.

  “Snow’s letting up,” she said at last.

  “We’d better get back to the boys,” Holly said. “Miles to go before we sleep.”

  “Ah, Frost. Too bad we don’t have a horse and sleigh back of the church,” Father Bolden said. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and all that.”

  As he tried to get up and out of the chair, Tim moaned. “I might need that horse and sled to get me to the car.”

  Quick as a cat, Miss Tiramaku caught his hand in hers and massaged it, putting pressure on the same points as she had earlier. “Let me help you,” she said, and within moments, the muscles in his back had loosened and he was able to walk from the rectory of his own accord.

  Holly drove, despite his weak protest, and the Jeep plowed through the deep snow with ease. She kept her gaze fixed on the tire ruts in front of her, but he knew she would feel better if they chatted along the way, counterpoint to her concentration.

  “I don’t know about that priest,” he said. “But she’s a miracle worker. I want to know her trick for the future.”

  “Acupressure,” Holly said. “One of the healing arts.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if she is a ghost herself, what with that evil eye.”

  “Tim.” She punched his shoulder.

  “What does she mean she is a lot like Jack?”

  “Same diagnosis. Different name.”

  Out of habit, Tim braked as she rounded a bend. “Well, she doesn’t know him like we do. She hasn’t been around, seen what we have seen. Lot of hocus-pocus, if you ask me. Of course he’s expressing himself, but maybe he just likes a good scare. Maybe he just likes monsters.”

  “Or he is acting like a monster,” she said. “Out of control.”

  The tires slid out of the rut, and the car heaved to the left, and she worked hard to correct the course. She kept her eyes on the road. He stared out the passenger’s window at the landscape blank and white. They rolled homeward in the late afternoon, lost in their private disputations.

  vi.

  Jack Peter stepped through the door from the dream house and into the outside world. Snow landed on his face and melted in the warmth of his bare skin. Flakes stuck to his eyelashes, and he had to blink and nod to shake them off. Spangling confetti fell from everywhere, all around, all at once, as the faint light caught the spinning surfaces. Jack in a box of excelsior, in a glitter dome, in a whirl of blown chalk. The air was cold to breathe and left a wet metallic taste on his tongue. Shirred folds in the white landscape ran from the house to the sea, the blanket of snow thick and soft and heavy. He pulled one foot from its hole and noticed the extra weight in his thighs. In the bulky coat, he imagined himself an Eskimo, a musher in the Klondike. When he took a second step, he slipped and stumbled forward, uncertain of how to maintain his balance when his feet no longer worked. Bracing in a spread stance, he looked up.

  Outside, outside. He had forgotten the way the air felt, the sensation of the wind pushing against him while it held him upright, the clouds forcing down the sky, and behind them, he imagined, the sun blinked like a great eye. He sucked in a gulp of December that filled his lungs with ice and his lips began to tingle and go numb. The impulse to laugh proved irresistible, and he wiped the wetness from his face and forgot about Nick altogether until he heard his voice calling as though from the moon. Ten feet away, Nick implored him to hurry, to catch up, but Jack could not move. He had forgotten how.

  Shuffling through the snow, Nick headed straight toward him, certain as a steam engine. His mouth and cheeks flushed scarlet, and a wet drop hung from the tip of his nose. Snowflakes crossed his face and broke it into a thousand little pieces. From inside the house came the monster’s roar.

  Nick’s hands gripped his arm. “We can’t stop here. We have to get somewhere safe. The house across the street.”

  “I’m outside,” Jack Peter said.

  Nick wiped his nose with the back of h
is sleeve. “Yes, right. That’s terrific, but it is chasing us. You won’t be anywhere for long if we don’t escape.”

  “Outside.” He smiled at Nick.

  Nearby a dog barked, the sound muffled by the storm. Snow slid off an evergreen branch and landed with a wet thud. Inside the front window, the monster spied them and banged its fists against the glass, and then moved out of sight.

  “Yes, let’s go.” Nick said and tugged on his arm to escape.

  In the driveway two parallel indentations marked where the Jeep had pulled away forever ago, and Nick headed for them, thinking it would be quicker to follow the compacted tire tracks rather than wade through the fresh snow. Jack Peter trailed along like a toddler, running stiff legged and trying to pull his arm free. The lights were on at the Quigleys’, and a plume of smoke curled from their chimney. He could visualize himself inside that house, tossing a ball to the collie, playing at last with the twins, their surprised but hospitable mother offering him hot chocolate and peanut butter crackers. It was almost as if they were already there, deep in the dream, safe and warm and happy. He could imagine them as clearly as if he had drawn the whole scene.

  They heard the dog before they saw it. Barking furiously, it emerged from behind the Quigleys’ house, but it was not the little border collie protecting its territory. Churning the snow in great strides, the big white dog from Jack Peter’s drawings raced toward them, ears back and teeth bared. “Oh shit,” Nick said and grabbed Jack Peter’s arm, but the beast braked in a cloud of snow, stopping short at the edge of the property as though an invisible barrier prevented it from stepping onto the road.

  “I thought it was dead,” Nick said. “I saw it in the back of the car.”

  With one finger, Jack Peter sketched a fence between them and the dog. “I don’t think it can get us,” he said. “I don’t think it will cross.”

  Snarling and snapping its teeth, the dog paced on the edge, worrying a path and holding them at bay. They didn’t dare move.

  Behind them came the monster, picking up their trail from the mudroom. Even from forty feet, they could hear its frantic breathing. The only escape route would be to circle round the other side of the house. If they backtracked, there was a chance they could make it inside again and lock the doors and hope for the best. Failing that, they could simply head for the sea and wait for Jack Peter’s parents to return home.

  “Run,” Jack Peter said.

  * * *

  As she drove the last stretch home, Holly remembered the first time Jack had run away from her. Before the accident, in June of his seventh year, they had driven to a pick-your-own farm and orchard as a Sunday outing. It was the edge of high season, so Tim stayed home to take care of the tourists and summer people, and it was just the two of them. Mother and son gone for strawberries. One moment they were together in the fields, bent low and hunting for red to fill their waxed cartons, and the next moment Jack had vanished. She had been daydreaming, thinking perhaps of strawberry-rhubarb pie or shortcakes for dessert, and when she looked up from the riot of leaves, she could not see any sign of him. He had been scooped up from the earth, plucked from her side. It took a minute to register that he had slipped away without a word. She wound her way through the rows asking the other pickers if they had seen her son, a little boy, a quiet boy, a broken boy who had wandered off. The strawberries had been sown on the bottom flat land next to a small rise, and one party of searchers joined her, while another party struggled up the incline. A blond-haired girl in pigtails and gingham shorts spotted him first. She called out to Holly from the crest of the hill, pointing to a spot far off in the distance. Holly jogged to her and saw the figure in a field, small as a toy. He did not move the whole time she ran toward him, calling out his name, for he had found a quartet of sheep huddled together on the farm, staring back at him and bleating their protests. “See what I made, Mom,” he said, and she chalked it up to some random thought buzzing around his brain. When she threw her arms around him, it was like hugging a wooden soldier. The other searchers were bewildered by the sudden appearance of the sheep in the meadow, but she thought nothing of it at the time, just glad to find the little lost boy.

  See what I made. Holly recalled his words as she and Tim drove through the virgin snowscape, the yards of the beach houses and summer homes covered white, the pines shagged with ice, everything blank as paper and deathly silent. Was he saying that he made those sheep? The dream house appeared suddenly through the trees, and she saw at once the picture was askew. Zigzag tracks crossed the yard, madcap trails churned through the snow. She lurched the Jeep into the driveway.

  From across the street came a series of loud barks. A big white dog paced along a trench it had made in the snow, threatening them from the Quigleys’ yard.

  “Good God,” Tim said. “That’s the white shepherd I saw in the back of Pollock’s car.”

  She nearly jumped back in the driver’s seat. “I thought you said it was dead.”

  The dog seemed unable or unwilling to give chase, as though bound by an invisible chain. Keeping the Jeep’s hood between it and herself, she sidled around to help Tim manage the snowy driveway. Because of his sore back, he needed to lean on her in order to shuffle through the snow.

  “What in the hell is going on here?” Tim asked, pointing to the mudroom’s door, open and swinging on its hinges. They stopped to inspect the jamb and the splintered wood at the lock.

  “Something’s been at it,” Holly said. “I’ve got to check on the boys.” Leaving Tim to fend on his own, she rushed into the house. A lick of water ran down the center of the slab floor, and a pair of cross-country skis lay in an X she had to step over. Coats and hats and boots were jumbled in a heap next to the kitchen step, and the inner door was broken, too. She called to them and entered the room, shocked by the mess. Muddy footprints dotted the linoleum and one of the chairs lay on its back, two legs off the ground. An overturned glass on the counter dripped milk down the face of a cupboard. Papers were strewn everywhere, some torn in half and others ruined with sandy water marks. Moving quickly through the empty space, Holly called for the boys again, glancing at the windows smudged by dirty hands. When no answer came, she stuck her head in the opening to the mudroom and saw her husband straining to pick up a mangled scarf and hang it on a peg. He moved as though he was old and riddled with arthritis.

  “They’re not here, Tim. What’s happened to them?”

  The blood drained from his face as he straightened his back. “What do you mean? Have you tried upstairs? Looked all over?”

  Frustrated by his lack of trust, she frowned at him and hurried to the stairway, taking the steps in pairs, hollering for Jack and Nick. All of the rooms had been ransacked. The rugs wet beneath her feet. Quilts on the beds, rumpled and bodiless. Closet doors gaped wide and everywhere papers littered the surface of things. She sifted through scores of drawings, bodies and bones, pictures of monsters, the dead dog now prowling in the neighbor’s yard. What has he done? The pictures stopped her, the awful connections turning in her mind. From the middle of his desk, she picked up one of the drawings lying there: two boys wrestling beneath the sea. She curled it into a scroll and carried it back to Tim.

  “How could you have left them alone?”

  Trembling with pain, he bent over the kitchen table and steadied himself with two hands. “I’ve checked the other rooms down here, and the whole house is a wreck, even the workroom. They’re not here.”

  “How could they not be here? Jack is outside?” She hollered and waved the scroll at him. “Where have they gone?”

  “I told them if there was any trouble, they should go over to the Quigleys’. Let’s not panic. They might be right across the street.”

  “With that beast waiting for them in the front yard?” She leapt for the phone and dialed the neighbors’ number. One of the twins answered with a cheery hello.

  “This is Mrs. Keenan,” she said. “Is Jack there by any chance? Did he and Nick come ov
er to your house today in the storm?”

  The little girl seemed put off by the anxiety in Holly’s questions that she hesitated before answering. “No. Jack Peter never leaves the house.”

  “I know, but are you sure he didn’t come over, and you just missed him?”

  “No, we’ve been inside all day. There’s no one here.”

  Holly caught her breath. “Is this Janie?”

  The girl grunted a yes.

  “Do you know anything about that dog that’s out in your yard?”

  “Our dog is right here next to me, aren’t you, girl?”

  The border collie barked in the background.

  “No, the big white dog that’s out there right now?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. If there was another dog out there, ours would go crazy. There’s nothing out there, and it’s been as quiet as church all day.”

  Holly thanked her and hung up, holding on to the receiver, trying to sort through her fear and anger. “They’re not over there, Tim. Someone’s got them.”

  The room looked like a crime scene, signs of struggle and foul play, and it spun in her eyes as if she was drunk. The pounding began in her head, steady as a heartbeat. She hammered on the wall with the paper clenched in her fist till the edges frayed. Papers on the floor, drawings everywhere. See what I made.

  “They’re out there,” she said. “Do you remember the sheep, Tim? That day when Jack was lost and we found him with those sheep that just appeared—”

  “I’ll go look for them.”

  “Are you listening to me, Tim? I think Jack made them appear somehow.”

  “Holly, what does this have to do with where the boys are? Let me go.”

  “You? You can barely take care of yourself. I know where they are. But you need to take care of what’s inside. It’s the drawings, Tim.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “The drawings, the drawings he’s been doing. Not the ghosts, not the yurei. It’s been Jack all along. He drew the sheep, and they appeared. He drew the dog, and the dog appeared. Lord knows what else he’s made. We need to find all of Jack’s drawings, search the house, and burn them in the fireplace. You get rid of them, and I’ll find the boys.”