Fear Nothing (12 page)

Nevertheless, she had succeeded in countering the warmth of the kitchen and the cordial. I no longer considered removing my jacket.

“I can’t stop them,” she said. “But I can stop keeping secrets for them. You deserve to know what happened to your mom and dad, Chris—even if pain comes with the knowledge. Your life’s been hard enough, plenty hard, without this, too.”

Truth is, I don’t believe my life has been especially hard. It has been
different
. If I were to rage against this difference and spend my nights yearning for so-called normalcy, then I would surely make life as hard as granite and break myself on it. By embracing difference, by choosing to thrive on it, I lead a life no harder than most others and easier than some.

I didn’t say a word of this to Angela. If she was motivated by pity to make these pending revelations, then I would compose my features into a mask of suffering and present myself as a figure of purest tragedy. I would be Macbeth. I would be mad Lear. I would be Schwarzenegger in
Terminator 2
, doomed to the vat of molten steel.

“You’ve got so many friends…but there’re enemies you don’t know about,” Angela continued. “Dangerous bastards. And some of them are strange…. They’re becoming.”

That word again.
Becoming.

When I rubbed the back of my neck, I discovered that the spiders I felt were imaginary.

She said, “If you’re going to have a chance…any chance at all…you need to know the truth. I’ve been wondering where to begin, how to tell you. I think I should start with the monkey.”

“The monkey?” I echoed, certain I had not heard her correctly.

“The monkey,” she confirmed.

In this context, the word had an inescapable comic quality, and I wondered again about Angela’s sobriety.

When at last she looked up from her glass, her eyes were desolate pools in which lay drowned some vital part of the Angela Ferryman whom I had known since childhood. Meeting her stare—its bleak gray sheen—I felt the nape of my neck shrink, and I no longer found any comic potential whatsoever in the word
monkey.

12

“It was Christmas Eve four years ago,” she said. “About an hour after sunset. I was here in the kitchen, baking cookies. Using both ovens. Chocolate-chip in one. Walnut-oatmeal in the other. The radio was on. Somebody like Johnny Mathis singing ‘Silver Bells.’”

I closed my eyes to try to picture the kitchen on that Christmas Eve—but also to have an excuse to shut out Angela’s haunted stare.

She said, “Rod was due home any minute, and we both were off work the entire holiday weekend.”

Rod Ferryman had been her husband.

Over three and a half years ago, six months after the Christmas Eve of which Angela was speaking, Rod had committed suicide with a shotgun in the garage of this house. Friends and neighbors had been stunned, and Angela had been devastated. He was an outgoing man with a good sense of humor, easy to like, not depressive, with no apparent problems that could have driven him to take his own life.

“I’d decorated the Christmas tree earlier in the day,” Angela said. “We were going to have a candlelight dinner, open some wine, then watch
It’s a Wonderful Life.
We loved that movie. We had gifts to exchange, lots of little gifts. Christmas was our favorite time of year, and we were like kids about the gifts….”

She fell silent.

When I dared to look, I saw that she had closed her eyes. Judging by her wrenched expression, her quicksilver memory had slipped from that Christmas night to the evening in the following June when she found her husband’s body in the garage.

Candlelight flickered across her eyelids.

In time, she opened her eyes, but for a while they remained fixed on a faraway sight. She sipped her brandy.

“I was happy,” she said. “The cookie smells. The Christmas music. And the florist had delivered a huge poinsettia from my sister, Bonnie. It was there on the end of the counter, so red and cheerful. I felt wonderful, really wonderful. It was the last time I ever felt wonderful—and the last time I ever will. So…I was spooning cookie batter onto a baking sheet when I heard this sound behind me, an odd little chirrup, and then something like a sigh, and when I turned, there was a monkey sitting right on this table.”

“Good heavens.”

“A rhesus monkey with these awful dark-yellow eyes. Not like their normal eyes. Strange.”

“Rhesus? You recognized the species?”

“I paid for nursing school by working as a lab assistant for a scientist at UCLA. The rhesus is one of the most commonly used animals in experiments. I saw a lot of them.”

“And suddenly one of them is sitting right here.”

“There was a bowl of fruit on the table—apples and tangerines. The monkey was peeling and eating one of the tangerines. Neat as you please, this big monkey placing the peelings in a tidy pile.”

“Big?” I asked.

“You’re probably thinking of an organ grinder’s monkey, one of those tiny cute little things. Rhesuses aren’t like that.”

“How big?”

“Probably two feet tall. Maybe twenty-five pounds.”

Such a monkey would seem enormous when encountered, unexpected, in the middle of a kitchen table.

I said, “You must have been pretty surprised.”

“More than surprised. I was a little scared. I know how strong those buggers are for their size. Mostly they’re peaceable, but once in a while you get one with a mean streak, and he’s a real handful.”

“Not the kind of monkey anyone would keep as a pet.”

“God, no. Not anyone normal—at least not in my book. Well, I’ll admit that rhesuses can be cute sometimes, with their pale little faces and that ruff of fur. But this one wasn’t cute.” Clearly, she could see it in her mind’s eye. “No, not this one.”

“So where did it come from?”

Instead of answering, Angela stiffened in her chair and cocked her head, listening intently to the house.

I couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.

Apparently, neither did she. Yet when she spoke again, she did not relax. Her thin hands were locked clawlike on the cordial glass. “I couldn’t figure how the thing got inside, into the house. December wasn’t overly warm that year. No windows or doors were open.”

“You didn’t hear it enter the room?”

“No. I was making noise with the cookie sheets, the mixing bowls. Music on the radio. But the damn thing must’ve been sitting on the table a minute or two, anyway, because by the time I realized it was there, it had eaten half the tangerine.”

Her gaze swept the kitchen, as though from the corner of her eye she had seen purposeful movement in the shadows at the periphery.

After steadying her nerves with brandy once more, she said, “Disgusting—a monkey right on the kitchen table, of all places.”

Grimacing, she brushed one trembling hand across the polished pine, as though a few of the creature’s hairs might still be clinging to the table four years after the incident.

“What did you do?” I pressed.

“I edged around the kitchen to the back door, opened it, hoping the monkey would run out.”

“But it was enjoying the tangerine, feeling pretty comfortable where it was,” I guessed.

“Yeah. It looked at the open door, then at me—and it actually seemed to laugh. This little tittering noise.”

“I swear I’ve seen dogs laugh now and then. Monkeys probably do, too.”

Angela shook her head. “Can’t remember any of them laughing in the lab. Of course, considering what their lives were like…they didn’t have much reason to be in high spirits.”

She looked up uneasily at the ceiling, on which three small overlapping rings of light quivered like the smoldering eyes of an apparition: images of the trio of ruby-red glasses on the table.

Encouraging her to continue, I said, “It wouldn’t go outside.”

Instead of responding, she rose from her chair, stepped to the back door, and tested the dead bolt to be sure it was still engaged.

“Angela?”

Hushing me, she pulled aside the curtain to peer at the patio and the moonlit yard, pulled it aside with trembling caution and only an inch, as if she expected to discover a hideous face pressed to the far side of the pane, gazing in at her.

My cordial glass was empty. I picked up the bottle, hesitated, and then put it down without pouring more.

When Angela turned away from the door, she said, “It wasn’t just a laugh, Chris. It was this frightening sound I could never adequately describe to you. It was an evil…an evil little cackle, a vicious edge to it. Oh, yes, I know what you’re thinking—this was just an animal, just a monkey, so it couldn’t be either good or evil. Maybe mean but not vicious, because animals
can
be bad-tempered, sure, but not consciously malevolent. That’s what you’re thinking. Well, I’m telling you, this one was more than just mean. This laugh was the coldest sound I’ve ever heard, the coldest and the ugliest—and evil.”

“I’m still with you,” I assured her.

Instead of returning to her chair from the door, she moved to the kitchen sink. Every square inch of glass in the windows above the sink was covered by the curtains, but she plucked at those panels of yellow fabric to make doubly sure we were fully screened from spying eyes.

Turning to stare at the table as though the monkey sat there even now, Angela said, “I got the broom, figuring I’d shoo the thing onto the floor and then toward the door. I mean, I didn’t take a whack at it or anything, just brushed at it. You know?”

“Sure.”

“But it wasn’t intimidated,” she said. “It
exploded
with rage. Threw down the half-eaten tangerine and grabbed the broom and tried to pull it away from me. When I wouldn’t let go, it started to climb the broom straight toward my hands.”

“Jesus.”

“Nimble as anything. So
fast.
Teeth bared and screeching, spitting, coming straight at me, so I let go of the broom, and the monkey fell to the floor with it, and I backed up until I bumped into the refrigerator.”

She bumped into the refrigerator again. The muffled clink of bottles came from the shelves within.

“It was on the floor, right in front of me. It knocked the broom aside. Chris, it was so
furious.
Fury out of proportion to anything that had happened. I hadn’t hurt it, hadn’t even touched it with the broom, but it wasn’t going to take any crap from me.”

“You said rhesuses are basically peaceable.”

“Not this one. Lips skinned back from its teeth, screeching, running at me and then back and then at me again, hopping up and down, tearing at the air, glaring at me so hatefully, pounding the floor with its fists…”

Both of her sweater sleeves had partly unrolled, and she drew her hands into them, out of sight. This memory monkey was so vivid that apparently she half expected it to fling itself at her right here, right now, and bite off the tips of her fingers.

“It was like a troll,” she said, “a gremlin, some wicked thing out of a storybook. Those dark-yellow eyes.”

I could almost see them myself. Smoldering.

“And then suddenly, it leaps up the cabinets, onto the counter near me, all in a wink. It’s right
there
”—she pointed—“beside the refrigerator, inches from me, at eye level when I turn my head. It hisses at me, a mean hiss, and its breath smells like tangerines. That’s how close we are. I knew—”

She interrupted herself to listen to the house again. She turned her head to the left to look toward the open door to the unlighted dining room.

Her paranoia was contagious. And because of what had happened to me since sundown, I was vulnerable to the infection.

Tensing in my chair, I cocked my head to allow any sinister sound to fall into the upturned cup of my ear.

The three rings of reflected light shimmered soundlessly on the ceiling. The curtains hung silently at the windows.

After a while Angela said, “Its breath smelled like tangerines. It hissed and hissed. I knew it could kill me if it wanted, kill me somehow, even though it was only a monkey and hardly a fourth my weight. When it had been on the floor, maybe I could have drop-kicked the little son of a bitch, but now it was right in my face.”

I had no difficulty imagining how frightened she had been. A seagull, protecting its nest on a seaside bluff, diving repeatedly out of the night sky with angry shrieks and a hard
burrrr
of wings, pecking at your head and snaring strands of hair, is a fraction the weight of the monkey that she’d described but nonetheless terrifying.

“I considered running for the open door,” she said, “but I was afraid I would make it angrier. So I froze here. My back against the refrigerator. Eye to eye with the hateful thing. After a while, when it was sure I was intimidated, it jumped off the counter, shot across the kitchen, pushed the back door shut, climbed quick onto the table again, and picked up the unfinished tangerine.”

I poured another shot of apricot brandy for myself after all.

“So I reached for the handle of this drawer here beside the fridge,” she continued. “There’s a tray of knives in it.”

Keeping her attention on the table, as she had that Christmas Eve, Angela skinned back the cardigan sleeve and reached blindly for the drawer again, to show me which one contained the knives. Without taking a step to the side, she had to lean and stretch.

“I wasn’t going to attack it, just get something I could defend myself with. But before I could put my hand on anything, the monkey leaped to its feet on the table, screaming at me again.”

She groped for the drawer handle.

“It snatches an apple out of the bowl and throws it at me,” she said, “really whales it at me. Hits me on the mouth. Splits my lip.” She crossed her arms over her face as if she were even now under assault. “I try to protect myself. The monkey throws another apple, then a third, and it’s shrieking hard enough to crack crystal if there were any around.”

“Are you saying it knew what was in that drawer?”

Lowering her arms from the defensive posture, she said, “It had some intuitive sense what was in there, yeah.”

“And you didn’t try for the knife again?”

She shook her head. “The monkey moved like lightning. Seemed like it could be off that table and all over me even as I was pulling the drawer open, biting my hand before I could get a good grip on the handle of a knife. I didn’t want to be bitten.”

“Even if it wasn’t foaming at the mouth, it might have been rabid,” I agreed.

“Worse,” she said cryptically, rolling up the cuffs of the cardigan sleeves again.

“Worse than rabies?” I asked.

“So I’m standing at the refrigerator, bleeding from the lip, scared, trying to figure what to do next, and Rod comes home from work, comes through the back door there, whistling, and walks right into the middle of this weirdness. But he doesn’t do anything you might expect. He’s surprised—but not surprised. He’s surprised to see the monkey here, yeah, but not surprised by the monkey itself. Seeing it
here,
that’s what rattles him. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“Rod—damn him—he knows this monkey. He doesn’t say,
A monkey?
He doesn’t say,
Where the hell did a monkey come from?
He says,
Oh, Jesus.
Just,
Oh, Jesus.
It’s cool that night, there’s a threat of rain, he’s wearing a trench coat, and he takes a pistol out of one of his coat pockets—as if he was expecting something like this. I mean, yeah, he’s coming home from work, and he’s in uniform, but he doesn’t wear a sidearm at the office. This is peacetime. He’s not in a war zone, for God’s sake. He’s stationed right outside Moonlight Bay, at a desk job, pushing papers and claiming he’s bored, just putting on weight and waiting for retirement, but suddenly he’s got this pistol on him that I don’t even know he’s been carrying until I see it now.”

Colonel Roderick Ferryman, an officer in the United States Army, had been stationed at Fort Wyvern, which had long been one of the big economic engines that powered the entire county. The base had been closed eighteen months ago and now stood abandoned, one of the many military facilities that, deemed superfluous, had been decommissioned following the end of the Cold War.

Although I had known Angela—and to a far lesser extent, her husband—since childhood, I had never known what, exactly, Colonel Ferryman did in the Army.