The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (6 page)

He rolled over to face her and laid his hand upon her hip. “I’m truly sorry. You know, Jip could be right, could have been something trying to get in. Fred Weller was telling me that people have been spotting coyotes in the area. First thing tomorrow, I’ll do a thorough check around the premises—”

“You’re forgiven,” she said. Silly man. They both knew he would forget by morning. In the pitch dark, she reached out to find his face, laid her palm against his cheek, and waited to feel his smile. He kissed her and fingered his way to the hem of her nightgown and slid the thin fabric to bare her skin. She raised no objections to his touch, but moments later, when he climbed upon her, she breathed out the softest of sighs.

vi.

From the darkness of his room, Nick listened to the dying of the evening, waiting for them to go to sleep. The plain white sheets and his thick comforter covered him, and he did not move while his parents were still up and about. Their muffled conversation slow and regular as the tides, the sound of a glass against a bottle, weary tread upon the stairs. Not too long, usually, when they were besotted, and then they would pass out, exhausted, and purr like kittens in their dreams. Drunken kittens. The telltale signs began: his father singing in falsetto as he stripped off his shoes, his mother stumbling and cursing the rug. After these weekend binges had become routine, Nick could time almost to the quarter hour when they would end. In the beginning, his parents used to show up plastered and sloppy and throw open his door to watch him sleep, but he stopped all that one evening when he screamed in their faces as they hovered over him. That night he had scared them away once and for all.

When it was safe and quiet, he clicked on the lamp and tiptoed to his dresser, opened the bottom drawer, and reached beneath the sweaters stuffed inside. Curled into a tube, the paper seemed a pirate map entrusted to him for safekeeping, though he knew already that it revealed no treasure. At the Keenans’ house, as they were saying good-bye, Jack Peter had pressed the scroll upon him in the mudroom. “Don’t open it till you are in secret where no one can see,” he had said, but Nick could not resist. He had sneaked a look at it in the Jeep while waiting for Mr. Keenan to drive him home. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Nick unfurled it again and smoothed the edges.

Sketched in pencil was that man from the road, the figure that he and Mr. Keenan had encountered earlier that evening. No mistaking the scarecrow features, the pale skin stretched taut over bones, and the deranged hair twisted like a mop. Jack Peter had captured him in the act of rising from the ground, one hand lifted and begging, the other flat on the ground, supporting his weight. The drawing showed the same incomplete face and the figure’s blank stare, as if Jack Peter, too, had witnessed him on that same deserted road. He knew it was impossible, but Nick could not ignore the similarities. Above the man, penciled in his friend’s familiar block letters, were the instructions: DRAW MORE MONSTERS.

They had been playing this game for years, passing secret messages to each other, hiding notes in coat pockets and underneath pillows where they surely would be discovered later after the friends had parted. For the past month, Jack Peter had been obsessed with war. Through a series of orders and communiqués, their mutual forces had been marshaled. Old soldiers, long forgotten, emerged from their hiding places in shoe boxes on closet floors and dusty cookie tins rescued from underneath the bed. Epic battles featured cowboys versus Nazis, Indians versus the French foreign legion, the blue minutemen versus the red Russians. One battle begat the next in a war without end. Maps to imaginary lands were plotted and then destroyed to prevent the intelligence from falling into enemy hands. Week after week, the carnage continued in the bedroom, behind the Christmas tree, and in one daylong siege in the workshop in the basement among all the dangerous tools. Many men were lost, abandoned beneath sofa cushions or dropped into the abyss below the heating registers.

Before the wars, it had been board games. Hours and hours of Monopoly and Risk. Two weeks to master checkers, and a month of chess. Before the games began, they had gone through a phase of comic books, beginning with
Batman
and
Superman
and ending with
Tintin
, reading side by side with hardly a word between them. They never bothered with the Internet or video games on the computer. The closeness of the big monitor and the brightness of the screen and the quickness of the action gave Jack hammering headaches. Summertime was given over to baseball on the radio, the Red Sox mostly, but on long August nights, they could pick up on AM radio faraway Pittsburgh and Chicago and, for one magic evening, the golden glow of a Dodgers game all the way from southern California. Last spring they had devoted to model ships, whalers and clippers, and over a long Easter break, a scale model of the U.S.S.
Constitution
, complete with cloth sails and string lines and the intoxicating smell of glue and black paint. What mania came before that, Nick could no longer remember, but anything was acceptable, as long as it was safely indoors.

And now, as with every obsession, this war had its natural limits, a moment when the luster faded suddenly and without reason, and the bored boy would cast around for novelty. His latest passion would be drawing monsters. Not bad, he thought, I could get into monsters. And yet.

Yet he had seen that thing on the road. He pretended to Mr. Keenan that he had witnessed nothing—in part because he could not believe his eyes and in part because he was not completely sure the figure was not simply of his own imagining, an illusion based on Jack Peter’s sketches and the power of suggestion. Whatever it really was. By the time Mr. Keenan had exited the car in pursuit, it was too late for Nick to confess. Anyhow, he had shut his eyes when it looked his way, and then the creature simply vanished into the night, no more presence than if he had never appeared in the first place. Even now, with the drawing spread across his lap, Nick could no more be sure what he had seen or what he may have conjured.

He blamed Jack Peter. That boy had always had a way of pulling him into his inner world, with a strange hold stemmed from their shared affinities and lifelong history. They had been linked from the cradle. Born just two weeks apart, they were raised together. Their mothers seemed like best friends to Nick, and he could not remember a single birthday or Halloween or Christmas that they had not spent together. Separated only by Mercy Point, they were always playing at either the Keenans’ or the Wellers’ house, especially in those long winter months when life at the shore can be so lonesome.

Of course, Nick had other friends, boys from school mostly, but he rarely saw them outside the classroom. They were scattered widely across the peninsula; but most of them, he knew, avoided him on account of his parents. Couple of drunks. By default, his family had remained loyal with their oldest friends, the Keenans, and he to Jack Peter. Once upon a time, they had been equals, or so it seemed to him now, looking back to those years when Jack Peter was unafraid of the outdoors. They would play hide-and-seek in the fir trees that bordered the Keenans’ house, or fly kites in May and June. They were just friends, but all that changed after the accident. Jack Peter emerged out of the ocean an entirely different child, more demanding and in control, and without thinking, Nick began to bend to his wishes. From that time on, he had followed Jack Peter’s lead, always. He, too, had been changed by that day on the beach, though not in the same way.

Daring one more glance at the monster, he rolled up the scroll and tucked it back into the hiding place. The hard wooden floor felt cold beneath his bare feet, and his bed beckoned, soft and warm. He hopped across the room and just as he snapped off the light and settled under the comforter, a crash came from beyond his closed door. A thump of something heavy landing on the floor.

The first thought to flash through his mind was the image of the bogeyman from the drawing come to get him. Hadn’t that thing crossed the headlands moving northerly? Right in this direction. Nick pictured the creature as just beyond, pacing the hallway, readying itself to smash the door and wrest him from the covers. Counting to ten, he steadied himself and waited. A game of hide-and-seek, but when no bony fist turned the knob and no curdling groan was uttered, he realized that his imagination had raced ahead of all reason. He eased his way from under the covers to investigate.

At the far end of the dark hall, his parents’ bedroom door stood ajar, but no light shone from within, so he tiptoed to the entrance and peeked inside. After his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Nick could make out the general contours of the furniture, the pair of mirrored bureaus, and the king bed with one body curled beneath the blankets. His mother snored quietly in her usual spot. On the far side, the white sheets were twisted and wound like wind-wrecked sails. Nick crept over and saw his father passed out in a heap of limbs on the floor. From the angle of repose, his father looked as if he had no head, and for a moment in the stillness, Nick wondered where it might have gone.

“Dad?” he whispered in a soft voice, and when the body did not respond, he laid one hand on his father’s shoulder and shook him gently. “Dad, are you all right?”

His father grumbled something in his sleep but did not respond to his son’s entreaties, so Nick pushed harder with both hands.

“Whozat? Ah, Nicky. I seemed to have missed the bed.” Whiskey breath, but his clothes smelled like sour milk. Still dressed in his bulky sweater and trousers, he had at least remembered to take off his shoes and socks, for his bare feet shone white in the darkened room. As he tried to stand, he struck a pose that mirrored the man in Jack Peter’s picture, a kind of fishlike crawl from out of the primordial ooze. Nick bent to offer support, and his father used him as a crutch to stand, wobbling and uncertain. “You’re a good boy.”

Nick helped him back into bed, untangling the sheets as best he could and tucking him in. His mother sighed in her sleep but did not stir. For a long while, he watched them to make sure that in their unconscious states they would not be tossed about by their boozy dreams. On other nights like this, they could be trusted to lie as still as a pair of corpses, but he wanted to be sure his father would not fall out of bed again. He swore to himself, as he had a dozen or more times these past few years, that he would never touch a drop of liquor. They had been better able to handle it when he was younger, but over the past few years their drinking had grown worse. Sometimes they seemed to willingly remove themselves so far from reality as to lose their place in it.

Gently shutting the door behind him, Nick returned to his own room and eased into bed. Outside the cold wind blew, and the sheets and pillowcases were ice against his bare skin. With a wriggle he wrapped the comforter around his feet to warm them. He knew that he would be awake as long as he was frozen, that he would not be able to get to sleep anytime soon, and a mild panic set in over the lateness of the hour and the prospect of school in the morning.

“Sleep,” he told himself. “Just go to sleep.”

But he could not sleep. The man on the road filled his thoughts. Mr. Keenan had stopped short and the car jerked them forward against the restraints of their seat belts. Nick had pretended not to see, but he had seen all. Uncurling like a fern, the man had risen from the ground and stood half hunched in anticipation. In the pale moonlight, his bare skin shone white, and he moved with a wild animal’s hesitancy and sudden alarm. A deer caught by surprise, here and then gone, disappearing into the night. He wondered where the man had run off, for to the east lay bare rock tumbling down to the endless sea. Summer days Nick and Jack Peter had hopped about over that same rough slate, dodging crevasses and tidal pools, but he could not imagine how a barefoot man could make his escape or where he might hide or how he might avoid the dark and freezing waters.

The room had grown stifling and close with the constant blast of forced air. He flipped over his pillow and laid his head against the cool fabric, reaching back with his free hand to throw off all the covers except for the thin sheet. Blood rushed to his cheeks, and he felt a slick of perspiration pool along the ridge of his spine. Hot as August. The faint aroma of salt water, sunshine on the beach wafted into the room. He could smell fish and the broken bits of crab and lobster shells too long in the heat. The odor of rot made his eyes water, and he sat up in the dark room, wondering where the smell originated. The rank and humid foulness hit him full blast in the face. The bed seemed to totter momentarily, a boat rocking on a wave, before it settled again, and then the wave reached the wall and slid into the closed closet. Something heavy inside bumped against the surface of the door, hard the first time and then softly again. The hangers rattled like metal chains.

He did not want to get out of bed. The thought of opening the closet frightened him, but the clatter would not stop and the odor intensified with his every breath. Sweat beaded along his brow, and his pajamas clung to his skin like wet napkins. In their bedroom, his parents were out cold. He could call till hoarse, but they would not waken till morning. He knew he would have to face the thing itself. The closet would not let him go.

Curious and afraid, he put one foot on the floor as though to test whether it was safe. Tender as a wing, a flutter beat in rhythm on the inside of the closed door. The stench was now awful, fetid and briny. He wished he had just left the door open, so he could see inside without taking a further step, even if that meant, as it sometimes did, that he would have to deal with the amorphous shapes of his clothes tricking him with their ghostly transformations. The scraping from inside the door continued, insistent as a whisper. The heat pressed upon him, palpable as fog. Nick gingerly put his other foot down and crept across the floor, anxious that he might awaken the man inside, or that thing from the road that he was now sure lingered there, ready to pounce as soon as he turned the doorknob. Muttering a prayer, he steadied his nerves and, deciding at the last moment to get it over with quickly, he flung open the door.