Bad Monkeys (5 page)

So I dreamed about this stuff for a few weeks, and then the dreams started to taper off. The janitor hadn’t come calling on me, nobody at school or in town had seen him, no more kids had gone missing, and while I still knew the guy was guilty, more and more it seemed like that was somebody else’s problem.

Then one evening my aunt and uncle drove down to Fresno to visit some friends of theirs. Originally I was supposed to go with them and catch a movie while they played bridge or whatever, but the day before, I’d gotten busted for cheating on a test, and after the school superintendent called home to narc on me, my aunt went from talking about “when we go out tomorrow night” to “when your uncle and I go out tomorrow night.”

They left around six. Storm clouds were blowing in from the west, and I was pissy enough to hope they’d get caught in a downpour. By seven the sky was overcast and lightning was flickering on the horizon, but there was still no rain.

I read a few chapters of Nancy Drew—I’d worked my way through most of the series by now, so I’d had to start rationing the books that were left—then ate the cold meatloaf my aunt had left me in the fridge. After I cleared my plate I sat back down at the kitchen table to work a crossword puzzle from the Fresno
Bee.
This was another Phil-type activity that you couldn’t have paid me to do back in S.F. But with no TV, a looming Nancy Drew shortage, and Señor Diaz hanging up the phone every time I tried to call Carlotta, my entertainment standards just kept getting lower and lower.

It was a hidden-message crossword, which they did sometimes: certain of the clues were highlighted, and if you solved them and strung the answers together,
they’d form a saying or a quotation, like RED SKY AT MORNING, SAILOR TAKE WARNING, or THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL US MAKES US STRONGER. Usually the special clues were hard enough that you had to finish the whole crossword to get them, but sometimes, like tonight, you could solve them directly.

The first highlighted clue, 1 across, four letters, was “Defunct
Life
magazine rival,” and I knew that was LOOK. The second clue, 9 across, five letters, was “Opposite of over,” or UNDER. The third clue—and this one was
so
easy I almost laughed—was a fill-in-the-blank, 13 across, three letters, “Winnie ____ Pooh.”

There was a rumble of thunder and the rain finally started. It was the downpour I’d wished for and then some, but instead of making me happy it set me on edge. I went down the hall to the front door, flicked on the front-porch lights, and spent a long time looking out, making sure that the hiss of the rain was just rain, and not tires creeping up the drive.

The next clue was the only one I didn’t get right off the bat: 20 across, four letters, “Where the NC gun is hidden.”

NC gun?

Capital N, capital C. I thought it might be a typo, so I moved on to the next clue, 24 across, four letters, “Tarzan’s girlfriend.” My scalp prickled a little when I saw that, but what really made my hair stand up was the last clue, 31 across, nine letters, “The loneliest Brontë.”

Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t have gotten that one either, but it just so happened that we’d been reading
Jane Eyre
in class that week, and the teacher had given us the rundown on the whole sorry Brontë family, so I knew that the loneliest Brontë was CHARLOTTE. After Branwell and Emily and Anne all died, Charlotte was the one left over, the one left alone in the house, kind of
like I was right now. And so if you added it all together, tonight’s hidden message was—

LOOK UNDER THE blank, JANE CHARLOTTE.

Yeah. And maybe it was because it shared a couple of letters with “blank,” or maybe it was because I was sitting with my back to it, but all at once I knew that the missing word was SINK.

My aunt and uncle’s kitchen had this huge sink—“Big enough to slaughter a pig in,” my uncle said one time, and he made it sound like that was more than a figure of speech. It had a big cabinet space underneath it too, and once when we were visiting a few years earlier, Phil crawled under there during a game of hide-and-seek and split his head open on the drainpipe. So between thoughts of pig slaughter and the memory of Phil with blood streaming down his face, I wasn’t exactly eager to stick my nose down there.

Of course I had to look. I told myself that it was just a coincidence anyway, there was no way that message in the crossword could really be intended for me personally. Maybe “Look under the sink, Jane Charlotte” was a line from Shakespeare.

So I opened up the cabinet, and there was nothing there but the usual assortment of under-the-sink junk, and I’m like, see, just a coincidence. But then I’m like, not so fast, if there
is
a gun, it’s not just going to be lying out next to the silver polish. So I felt up in the space between the wall and the back of the sink basin. And at first I was just touching air, but then I moved my hand a little and my fingers brushed something rough. A package.

It was rolled up in a piece of potato sack and tied up with twine. I brought it out into the light and unwrapped it. And there it was.

It looked like a toy zap gun. It was bright orange, with a puffy barrel, and it seemed to be made of plastic. It was heavy, though, and from the weight and the fact
that it was slightly cold, I thought it might be a water pistol. But when I checked the base of the handle there was no rubber plug, just a flat plate embossed with the letters
NC
.

There were more markings on the side of the gun. Near the back of the barrel, right above the trigger, was a dial with four settings. One setting was labeled
SAFE
in small green letters; the next setting was labeled
NS
, in blue; the last two settings, both labeled in dark red, were
CI
and
MI
. The dial was currently set to
MI
.

I did the thing that you traditionally do when you’re a teenager and you find a gun, which was point it at my own face. The dark hole of the NC gun’s muzzle seemed more real than the rest of it, though, so I decided not to pull the trigger. Instead I looked around to see if one of my aunt’s cats was in the room. But the cats had made themselves scarce, and before I could choose something else for target practice, all the lights in the house went out.

For the first few seconds I was amazingly calm. Then lightning flashed outside and I turned towards the window above the sink, drawn by an afterimage of something that didn’t belong. When the next flash came I saw it clearly: out beyond the backyard, in the orange groves that ran behind the house, a van was parked with its headlights off.

Something big walked across the back porch, passing right in front of the window—I say
something,
but of course I knew who it was, and what he was here for. He went straight for the porch door, which was locked but flimsy, and banged on it hard, real hammer blows. I could feel it shaking in its frame. There was a pause, and then he started attacking the doorknob, rattling it like he meant to pull it off.

By this point I was practically shitting myself with fear. I still had the gun, but I’d gone back to thinking of it as a toy, and in another moment I would have
dropped it in the sink and started running blind through the house.

Then the phone rang, a beautiful sound. The janitor immediately stopped rattling the doorknob. The phone rang again, and again, and I moved towards it, terrified that if the ringing stopped before I reached it the attack on the door would begin again. I racked my knee on a chair, and banged my side against the corner of the kitchen table, but I held on to the gun.

I answered the phone on the seventh ring:
“Hello…?”

“Jane Charlotte.”

“I don’t know who this is,” I whispered, “but I need help. Your bad monkey is right outside my back door.”

“No,” the voice on the phone said. “He’s in the house.”

Down the hall in my uncle’s study, a board creaked.

“Now don’t panic,” the voice advised. “He won’t expect you to be armed. Just hold the gun steady in both hands…”

I hung up. From the phone to the porch door was about a dozen steps, but my feet didn’t touch the floor more than twice.

The door wouldn’t open, even after I remembered to unlock it. Something—one of the porch chairs, probably—had been jammed under the knob on the other side.

Behind me, another board creaked: he was coming down the hall. I whirled around and raised the gun, even as his silhouette filled the kitchen doorway.

The NC gun doesn’t make any noise when you fire it. I didn’t realize that at the time, though, because just as I pulled the trigger, the lightning came again, striking so close behind the house that there was no pause before the thunder. The kitchen filled up with sound and light, so bright that the janitor himself seemed to glow like a real angel, an angel with a flaming dagger in one hand and a sparkling wire halo in the other. I screamed, and
he screamed too, and by the time the brightness failed he was already falling.

In the dark I heard his body hit the floor. I lowered my aim and pulled the trigger again, but this time there was nothing, not even a click.

The rain stopped. The thunder and lightning moved off, and after a while the power came back on. I could see him, then, sprawled on his back in the kitchen doorway, not moving. He was just a man now; his eyes were glassy, and he had a new expression on his face.

He looked surprised.

Now, this next part may be a little hard to believe.

Really.

You know normally, if you shoot an intruder in your house, especially a serial killer, the first thing you do afterwards is call the police.

Right.

Or just run like hell to the neighbors’.

Right.

Right. But I didn’t do either of those things.

What did you do?

I got sleepy. I mean, the guy was dead—I kicked him a couple times to make sure—so it’s not like notifying the cops was
urgent
anymore. And now that I knew I was safe, I just really felt like lying down for a while. I thought, my aunt and uncle will be home in a few hours, and we can deal with the aftermath then.

So I went upstairs to my room. I barricaded the door with my dresser—just in case—and lay down. I slipped the NC gun under my pillow. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, it was morning. My bedroom door was wide open, and I could hear my aunt making breakfast in the kitchen. I got up and went downstairs, and stood in the empty doorway where the janitor’s body had been.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” my aunt said. “Would you like bacon with your eggs?”

The porch door was open too, and I could see my uncle out back, walking around the remains of a lightning-blasted tree.

“Hold off on the bacon,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I ran upstairs and looked under my pillow.

The gun was gone too, wasn’t it?

Yeah. But there was something else in its place. A coin. A gift from the pistol fairy, maybe.

It was the size of a quarter, but thicker and heavier. It looked like gold. It had the same image on both sides, a hollow pyramid with a glowing eye inside of it, you know, kind of like the capstone from the pyramid on the dollar bill. Running around the rim of the coin was a three-word slogan:
OMNES MUNDUM FACIMUS
.

My Latin is rusty.
Mundum
means “world”?

Yeah. I got a Latin dictionary from the school library and worked it out.
Omnes
is “all of us,” and
facimus
, that’s “create” or “make,” so
omnes mundum facimus
is like, “We all make the world.” That’s how it translates; as for what it
meant,
though, that was trickier. It was a puzzle, see? A sort of aptitude test, like the hidden message in the crossword, only much harder, so it took me a lot longer to get it.

How much longer?

Twenty-two years.

THE NEXT TIME THE DOCTOR ENTERS
the room, he’s carrying a second file folder, thick with evidence.

“Checking up on my story?” she guesses, as he deals the folder’s contents into three neat piles on the table.

He nods. “I don’t like to confront patients, but in prison psychiatry I find that taking an aggressive tack early on can be very useful.”

“For separating the con artists from the genuine head cases?” She looks amused. “So what’s the verdict on me?”

He offers her the first of his evidence piles. “This is a report filed by the Madera County sheriff’s office in October 1979. A man named Martin Whitmer was found dead in his van in a roadside ditch outside Fresno. Whitmer had worked as a janitor at a rural high school, but quit his job after an unidentified student accused him of being the Route 99 Killer.”

“Well there you go. It’s just like I said.”

“Not quite.” He flips to a page near the bottom of the pile. “There’s no mention of a bullet wound in the autopsy. Mr. Whitmer died of a coronary.”

“Yeah, I know. I told you, I shot him with an NC gun.”

The doctor thinks a moment. “NC stands for Natural Causes?”

“Right. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.”

“The gun shoots heart attacks.”

“Myocardial infarctions,” she says, tapping a finger on the cause-of-death line in the autopsy report. “MIs. And the CI setting, that’s for
cerebral
infarctions. Heart attack and stroke, the two leading killers of bad monkeys…” She smiles. “So what else have you got?”

He pushes forward the second pile, which consists of just two sheets, printouts from a newspaper microfilm reader. It’s a story from the San Francisco
Examiner
, with the questioning headline ANGEL OF DEATH HANGS UP WINGS?

“‘Sixteen months after the Route 99 serial killer claimed his last victim,’” she reads aloud, “‘state police are beginning to hope that the so-called Angel of Death—whose identity remains a mystery—may have gone into retirement…’ Yeah, see, I told you the cops didn’t believe me about the janitor. So even after he turned up dead, they thought the Angel was still out there.”

The doctor points to a circled paragraph farther down the page. “Keep reading.”

“‘Thirteen-year-old David Konovic, the boy believed to have been the Angel of Death’s eighth and final victim, disappeared from a Bakersfield gas station on December 12th, 1979…’”

“December,” the doctor says. “Two months after Whitmer was found dead.”

“Are you sure the newspaper didn’t screw up the date?”

He slides the last evidence pile across the table. “The sheriff’s report on David Konovic’s abduction. The date matches. And when the boy’s body was recovered, he was found to have been tortured and strangled in the
same manner as all the other Angel of Death victims. So what does that tell us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Jane.”

“You want me to say that Whitmer couldn’t have been the Angel of Death, is that it?”

“Doesn’t that seem like a reasonable conclusion?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he
was
the Angel of Death.”

“Well if that’s the case, how do you explain this last victim?”

“I don’t.”

“You mean you can’t.”

“It’s a Nod problem,” she says.

“An odd problem?”

“A
Nod
problem. You know, the land of Nod, east of Eden? In the Bible?”

“I know the reference, but…”

“Cain kills his brother Abel,” she says, “and God sets him wandering in the wilderness as a punishment. Cain ends up in Nod, where he settles and gets married. Which is a problem, logically, because Adam and Eve are supposed to be the first people on earth, and as far as we know, Cain and Abel are their only children. So where did this wife come from?

“Now, people who don’t believe in the Bible tend to think the Nod problem is a big deal. Like for example, there was this guy my mother dated one time for a couple months, Roger, who was this totally rabid atheist, and he used to pick on Phil—”

“Your brother was religious?” the doctor asks.

“In a little-boy kind of way. My mother was raised Lutheran, and even though she didn’t really believe, she took us to church because she thought it would be good for us. I stopped going as soon as I was old enough to
say no, but Phil really got into it. Said his prayers every day, the whole bit. So along comes Roger, and he’s constantly razzing Phil about inconsistencies in Scripture. ‘Hey Phil, it says here in the Gospels that Judas hanged himself because he was sorry for betraying Christ. But it says in Acts that Judas wasn’t sorry, and he died when his stomach exploded. How come there are two different versions of the story?’ Or, ‘Hey Phil, if all the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, how did Matthew know what Jesus said in his prayer?’ The Nod problem, though, that was his favorite: ‘Hey Phil, it says that God put a mark on Cain to warn other people not to harm him. What other people, Phil? His parents? The same ones who didn’t listen when God told them not to eat the fruit?’”

“And how did Phil respond?”

“Well like I said before, Phil was a big-time nitpicker himself, so at first he kind of got into it. He tried to play along, only Roger wasn’t playing. Roger would shoot down every explanation Phil came up with, until finally Phil had to admit he didn’t have an answer, and then Roger would say, ‘So does that mean you’re going to give up this Bible nonsense?’ and Phil would say, ‘No,’ and Roger would say, ‘That’s because religion makes people stupid.’”

“What did you think of that?”

“Oh, I definitely think religion makes people stupid,” she says. “But Roger was still a hypocrite.”

“Why a hypocrite?”

“Because the Nod problem didn’t have anything to do with him being an atheist. If the Bible had been perfectly consistent, he still wouldn’t have believed a word of it. His mind was made up, and pointing out contradictions was just a way of being smug—and meanwhile, he completely missed where Phil was coming from.

“Phil
did
believe in the Bible. Part of believing that the Bible is true is believing that any problems in the
text have solutions. Actually knowing what those solutions are isn’t important. It’s like, just because I can’t tell you what killed the dinosaurs doesn’t mean they aren’t extinct. And so to Phil, looking at it from that perspective, it was Roger who was being unreasonable. So Phil didn’t know where Cain’s wife came from. So what?

“And it’s the same with this.” She waves a hand at the papers in front of her. “Don’t pretend this is some kind of objective inquiry for you. You’ve already decided what you believe. All you’re doing now is looking for a club to beat me with until I agree to see things your way.”

“Jane…”

“But that’s not going to happen. I know my story is true. If something about it doesn’t add up for you, we can discuss it, but don’t try to blow a little discrepancy out of proportion. It’s just a Nod problem.”

“Well, you’re putting me in a difficult position,” the doctor says. “If I can’t question inconsistencies in your account—”

“You can question them. I just said we can discuss it.”

“But you’re unwilling to entertain any real doubt.”

“Which makes us even,” she says. “Just like Phil and Roger.”

The doctor frowns.

“Sorry to spoil your game plan. Does this mean you don’t want to hear any more?”

“No, I still want to hear the whole story.”

“Good. Because it would make you a liar if you didn’t. I mean, you’re already a liar for saying you’d keep an open mind, but if you bailed on me now you’d be a double liar.”

“Well I wouldn’t want to be that,” says the doctor. “So after you killed the Angel of Death, what happened next?”