The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (12 page)

The sleeves of his Santa suit rode up, exposing two inches of pale skin thatched with wiry black hairs. Nick wished he would put on some gloves.

“I thought you liked hanging out with your old pal Jack. Something gone wrong between you two?”

“He’s just weird sometimes.”

“Weird? A bit of an odd duck, but aren’t we all? I’ve come to the firm conclusion that everybody’s got something wrong up there.” He tapped his skull with his middle finger. “Odd ducks, all. But he’s your best friend, Nick, and you’ve got to stick by your friends.”

The door swung open slowly, pushed by a hip, and Nick’s mother came in, a hairbrush in one hand, a coffee in the other. She was wearing nothing but blue underwear and a black bra. “Have either of you seen my red sweater?”

“The one with the tiny Christmas trees on it?” Fred asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Not that one. The nice one.”

“I like the one with the tiny Christmas trees on it. Very festive. Seasonal. Besides, I gave you the one with the tiny Christmas trees on it last Christmas, and you never wear it. You’re naughty, not nice. And you’ll get coal in your stocking this year.”

“Aren’t you going to be late?” she asked.

When Fred looked at his watch, he noticed how the sleeves on his suit rode up on his arms, and he hitched the fabric in vain. “Is it just me, or is everything getting smaller? I must load up the sleigh and hitch the reindeer to it.” As he exited, he recited their names, “On, Comet and Cupid and Vixen and Dixie.…”

“Good grief,” Nell said, pretending to give him a kick in his broad backside. She chased him down the hall, threatening him with the hairbrush, laughing all the way.

After she had gone and he was safely alone, Nick slid his hand beneath the mattress and pulled out the notebook. He had been dreaming about it all night, imagining the pages white as snow, the ink turning to blood red. Hold it close, he decided, bury it under his overcoat, beneath his hoodie sweatshirt, keep it next to the skin.

Nick smuggled in the monsters. While his mother was engaged at the door with Mr. Keenan, he managed to sneak past them both and scurry off with Jack Peter. At the top of the stairs, Jack Peter whispered, “Wait here” and ran into the bathroom. Nick loitered in the hallway, spying through the open door to Mr. and Mrs. Keenan’s room. The unmade bed looked like a crime scene, a red quilt flowing to the floor and tangled sheets the dreadful evidence of their recent presence. He was not sure why, but the disorder unnerved him. He listened for a flush from the toilet, but heard only laughter coming from the kitchen. Jack Peter burst from the bathroom and they crept into his room. Behind the closed door, Nick slipped the notebook from beneath his sweatshirt and handed it to his conspirator.

For the whole week, he had been busy dutifully following the instructions to keep his creations bound in a secret notebook, and on lined paper stood one monster per page. With a mix of nerves and pride, he watched Jack Peter peruse them one by one. The first few creatures imitated their pop culture counterparts: the old movie Frankenstein complete with flat top and neck bolts, and his Bride with the electric beehive hairdo, a cloaked vampire with brilliantined hair and bared fangs, a mummy in peeling wrappers, a skeleton with dancing bones. He had copied the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a winged monstrosity labeled Mothman, a witch and her flying monkeys. There were a stylized werewolf and floating Dementors straight out of
Harry Potter
, an orc from the
Lord of the Rings
, and a fire-breathing dragon patched together from a dozen movie dragons. Jack Peter raced through the images like a critic, vaguely dissatisfied with the work, searching for something that was not there. When he reached the last page, he flipped back to the beginning to scrutinize each drawing, tracing with a fingertip the path of certain lines, muttering beneath his breath. He did not speak directly to Nick but rather seemed lost in the process of seeing.

When at last Nick understood what was taking place, he could no longer bear to sit and watch. He took a turn about the bedroom, inspecting for the hundredth time its attractions. On the other side of the closet door, he imagined, one of their monsters, snarling quietly to itself, peered through the keyhole, waiting. On the bookcase carefully arranged treasures gathered dust. Toy cowboys and Indians and colorful plastic soldiers from many wars tangled in a knot inside a clear jar labeled Sebago Pretzel Co. Next to that contained jumble stood a stack of puzzles and board games—chess and checkers, backgammon and Parcheesi, marathon Monopoly and Risk that could occupy entire afternoons. He touched the box of a German game called
Waldschattenspiel
that they had played all the time last winter, a game requiring candlelight in darkness, where trolls in pointy felt hats hid behind wooden trees, moving away from a relentless seeker, winning by keeping to the shadows.

On the floor between Jack Peter’s old toy box and the desk, a mousetrap had been baited with a chunk of hard cheese, its killing bar poised to snap. Nick squatted on his haunches to inspect, resisting the urge to spring the mechanism with a quick finger. “What’s this for?”

From the bed, Jack Peter did not look up from the picture. “My mother thinks we have a mouse.”

“Have you ever seen it?” Nick sat on the toy box, remembering when it held their childish treasures.

Jack Peter bent closer to the drawing. “I’ve never seen it because it isn’t a mouse.”

As usual, the desk was clean and ordered, schoolbooks piled on the back right corner, paper stacked neatly on the left. The single drawer in the middle sealed in a mystery he dared not release. Atop the bureau, the mirror reflected the falling snow and the ocean through the window on the opposite wall. Nick idled away a few moments, transfixed by the waves caught in the silvered glass. The melody of his mother’s voice rose from below, joined by the nervous reply from Mr. Keenan in the breakfast nook. Theirs was a different rhythm from the muffled sounds his parents made, and he was distracted by its music.

He sneezed and rubbed the tip of his nose with his fingers. His own face in the mirror stared back at him, its knitted brow and puckered frown, and he exaggerated the effect, trying to look angry and disappointed, practicing the scowl until it felt convincing. The sudden appearance of a pale white arm surprised him, but it was only Jack Peter in a state of undress, shucking off his pajamas to reveal a reedy chest and two nipples like staring eyes. Bone-white skin glowed in the thin light, for he was an inside boy who rarely left the house, rarely stood directly in the sun or the rain or the wind. The sunlight might pass right through him, and the very air bruise his skin. Jack Peter pulled on a dark hooded sweatshirt and a pair of jeans and then sat on the floor to wrestle his feet into his socks.

At the window, Jack Peter wrote on the glass with his fingertip. “Do you know this trick?” He breathed hard upon the window, and in the condensation appeared the word “wicked.”

“Epic,” Nick said, hiding an edge of sarcasm.

“Let’s go scare my daddy.” Raising his hood like a cowl around his head, Jack Peter gathered the notebook from the bed and a fistful of pencils from his desk. With a crook of a finger, he bid Nick follow, and they sneaked down and stationed themselves at the kitchen table without a sound.

Nick’s mother had gone off to her party, leaving Mr. Keenan all alone. He was just staring through the bay window, unaware and lost in his thoughts. When he finally noticed them at the table, he seemed mildly distressed at how they had managed to materialize unnoticed.

“You’re like a couple of ghosts. Time for me to hit the shower, boys,” he said at last. “You two be all right without me?”

Soon the plumbing moaned as water gushed in the shower overhead. Taking the notebook in hand, Jack Peter leafed through the pages again, stopping momentarily at pictures that caught his eye. “These are good,” he said. “Some scary. Did you make some of them up?”

Small guilt pulled at Nick’s stomach, as though he had somehow failed him. A string of mucus ran from his nose, and he wiped it away with the back of his sleeve. “No, I copied them from books or movies. Some I remembered in my head.”

Jack Peter grunted and closed the book. “Did you ever see someone who was dead?”

“Besides that time you drowned and everyone thought you were dead for a few minutes?”

A rare laugh escaped Jack Peter’s mouth. “I mean someone who was dead a long time?”

Once when he was cutting through the pine forest on his way home from school, Nick had come across a dead cat, half buried in dry needles. Weatherworn, it was a desiccated bag of matted fur and bones, but when he flipped over the corpse with a stick, a squirm of maggots writhed in its guts, and he retched and ran away. But he had never seen a dead person, much less a body dead a long time. Nick thought of his parents, drowned and hanging in his closet, but he figured they did not count because he could not prove they were real. He shook his head.

Taking a clean sheet of paper, Jack Peter began to draw, concentrating intently on moving the pencil. Nick watched in silence, curious and patient, wondering what strange thoughts danced in his friend’s mind.

“Do you mean dead like zombies?”

The boy across the table paused and lifted his eyes. “Not zombies.”

“They’re called the living dead.”

“Not zombies.” He continued his line, the tip of his tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth. “Zombies eat brains. And they are slow. Not zombies.”

“But dead, anyhow.”

“Definitely,” Jack Peter said. “Or at least I think so.”

Above them the shower stopped, and Nick thought he heard Mr. Keenan call out, but Jack Peter made no move to answer. He finished and rotated the paper so Nick could take a look. The creature faced him from a head-on perspective, a man of sorts, his arms longer than his legs and bent at the elbows, the legs bent at the knees, so that he appeared crablike, scrabbling toward the viewer. His hands and feet were splayed outward, and his face, full front, was wild and ruined. Bug-eyed, he stared beneath a tangle of hair thick as seaweed. He wore no clothes, which only emphasized his preternatural physique, as though made of skin stretched over wire. Nick recognized him at once. The creature he had encountered on the road that night with Mr. Keenan.

“That’s him. I’ve seen his face before.” He stared at the page and laughed to himself. “You missed one thing though. He’s got no pecker.”

“What’s a pecker?”

“You know, your thing between your legs. If this dude is naked, you’d see his pecker.”

Jack Peter giggled and tilted his head at the image. “You mean his penis.”

“Whatever you want to call it. His is missing.”

Across the room, a window flew open, snapping as though spring-loaded, and the curtains unfurled like two flags. A gust of cold wind blew and scattered the loose pages onto the floor.

“What the heck was that?” Nick rose to close the window.

Jack Peter stopped him. “Wait, get those papers first. I’m not finished yet.” He was already busy drawing again.

Mr. Keenan strode into the room, his face red with anger. Hollering at the boys, he raced to shut the window, and he turned on Jack Peter, demanding to know why he was opening all the windows in the house and didn’t he realize the heat was on. But Jack Peter simply withdrew, tapping the pencil against the table. Nick had seen that gesture many times and knew that his friend was retreating deep into himself and would not be reached. Mr. Keenan kept hollering at them to tell the truth. When Jack Peter finally confessed that there was someone on the beach, his father did not believe him at first. He had to go to the window to see for himself, to press his hands and face against the glass, searching the shoreline for what had spooked his son. “What the hell is that?”

In a blur, he dressed in boots and an old winter coat and was out the door searching for what they thought they had seen. The boys watched as he stumbled across the sand and rocks, looking back once as if to ask them for directions or whether to go on, but it was too late, he was too far gone, and he disappeared into the midday nothing, and they were all alone in the empty house.

iv.

Trying to stem the pain, Holly pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. Behind her a line of customers shifted impatiently in place, and the teenaged clerk at the counter waited for a credit card with indifference. Perhaps it was the fluorescent light or the incessant piped-in music or the hustle and bustle of the determined shoppers, each on their merry mission, unaware of the other people in the world, thank you, at least one of whom had a thwacking headache. She hated the mall, and at the moment she was not too fond of Christmas either.

The Rose Art Gift Set, with its sixty-four-piece assortment of premium-quality drawing components, included twenty-four colored pencils, eight watercolor pencils, oils, pastels, duo-tip markers, sharpener, eraser, and illustrated instructions, along with the sixty-sheet Deluxe Sketchbook, may have been overkill, for her son’s interests were often fleeting. There were scads of toys abandoned in his room, gathering dust on the shelves, archived in his old toy box. He’ll like it, she reassured herself, although she never knew with Jack from day to day what he liked, much less what he loved. If he loved.

Shopping bag in hand, she exited the store and threaded her way through the groups of gawkers wandering the faux boulevards. Knots of bored teenagers aimlessly passing another afternoon. Boys in football jackets, girls with wires twisting from their ears, everyone tapping messages to one another on their smart phones. Young husbands, helpless and clueless, searching for that perfect gift for their wives. Young mothers pushing strollers, their babies ordinary as could be. Children queuing for photographs with an ersatz Santa Claus. Holly lingered awhile before a shop window displaying ridiculously expensive women’s boots and wished she were twenty years old again. What different decisions she would make. Better shoes, not the least of them.