Dad stalked forward, belt swinging, fingers flexing.
Jared always closed his eyes when he was getting a whipping. But he wouldn’t close them this time. He’d suffer the beating with his eyes wide open.
If he had closed his eyes, he would’ve missed what happened.
As Dad stomped past the foot of the bed, a thick, purple-black tentacle launched from under the bed and wrapped around Dad’s ankle with a wet, slapping sound.
“What the ... ?” Dad started to say, staring at the rope of flesh around his ankle, and his voice was suddenly drowned out by an inhuman roar that exploded from beneath the bed, as if a lion was under there. Jared’s eyes grew large enough to pop out of his head.
It’s the monster, the monster, the monster ...
The creature yanked Dad’s ankle, and Dad hit the floor on his back, yelling in a high-pitched voice: “Oh, shit! What the hell? Help me, help me!” But Jared’s feet seemed to be nailed to the carpet; he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. He was mesmerized, terrified.
Another dark tentacle shot out and twisted around Dad’s other leg.
“Help me!” Dad was hollering now. He reminded Jared of an old woman.
The monster bellowed, a sound that made the walls tremble and the bed quake.
Jared didn’t move. He imagined the creature beneath his bed as something that looked like an alligator but with lots of tentacles, and even more teeth . . . uh-uh, he wasn’t moving.
The beast began to pull Dad toward the bed. Dad’s arms flailed wildly. His hand snagged the leg of Jared’s desk, slowing his progress toward the darkness underneath the bed.
Jared ran forward, raised his foot, and stomped on Dad’s fingers. His hand fell away from the desk leg, and he slid closer to the bed.
“You bastard, I’m gonna get you... .” Dad groped for Jared’s leg, but Jared moved out of his reach.
The monster thundered louder than before—and the bed itself was flung upward as if it was the lid of a hole. It hovered at almost a ninety-degree angle, suspended by an invisible force.
Beneath, there was the monster.
It resembled an alligator, like Jared had imagined . . . but not really. It had maybe a dozen muscular tentacles, like an octopus ... But it didn’t look like an octopus either, really. Its eyes glowed a gas-jet blue. And it had teeth ... rows and rows of long, sharp teeth.
How did this thing fit under my bed? The question flitted around the back of Jared’s mind. How did I ever sleep with something like that right under me?
A shimmering pool of blackness surrounded the monster, like a dark ocean. Jared thought that the monster was much bigger than he’d figured; most of its body was concealed in the dark, watery aura.
Dad screamed.
The monster reeled Dad in, its enormous, toothy mouth wide open, Dad shrieking the entire way.
Jared wanted to turn away. He didn’t want to watch. He had seen enough. But he could not stop staring.
The monster swallowed Dad whole, like pythons gulp down their prey, except the monster did it so quickly that one instant Jared saw Dad ... and the next instant the only thing left of Dad was his worn leather belt, dangling like a spaghetti noodle from the creature’s lips. Then the creature sucked in the belt, too.
Jared stared at the monster’s glowing blue eyes. He waited for a tentacle to come out and grab him, too.
But the monster did not attack. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but it seemed to wink at him.
The bed, which had been suspended in the air the whole time, banged back to the floor.
Jared exhaled. His chest hurt.
He turned and saw Mom watching from the doorway.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
Mom nodded. Her eyes were wide. “All of it.”
Jared cautiously went to the bed. He didn’t hear the monster breathing. He nudged the bed sideways a few feet.
Underneath, there was only the carpet, a few forgotten socks, and his Louisville Slugger baseball bat. No sign of the monster. No otherworldly pool of darkness.
No sign of Dad.
Mom came forward and put her arm around his shoulders.
“I don’t think it’ll ever come back,” Jared said. “I guess it got what it wanted.”
“That’s right—the monster,” Mom said, and they walked out of the bedroom together.
Death Notice
Ever since her husband’s death eight years ago, Mrs. Mary Pryor could never wait for morning to arrive.
Every evening, she went to bed no later than nine o’clock, and woke up at six
AM
. She was usually just in time to shuffle outside in her house robe and slippers and pick up
The Harbor News
from her driveway even while the delivery van was still in sight, trundling down the street.
Standing at the kitchen table, Mary would carefully unfurl the paper with her spindly copper-brown fingers. She’d flip past the front-page news, sports, business, and lifestyle sections, to peel open the most important part of the paper: the Metro section.
It contained the obituaries.
No matter the day, the obituaries were always there. Someone had always died. And more often than not, Mary knew one of the deceased.
Pencil in hand, bifocals balanced on her hawk nose, she would scan the death notices, making check marks near the names of those she certainly had known, those she thought she or someone of her acquaintance might have known, and those she wanted to learn more about—to confirm whether she had ever known them or not.
After marking off the obits of interest, she would extract them with a pair of scissors as carefully as a surgeon removing an organ from a living body, and spread them on the kitchen table. She would then brew a weak cup of Folgers.
When the clock struck seven, she would start making phone calls.
She worked the phone like a telemarketer on a deadline, telling family and friends who had died, skillfully probing for connections. It was a small world—six degrees of separation and all that—but in Mary’s experience, in a small town like Spring Harbor, it was more like two degrees of separation.
Sometimes, she had to dig deep to discover the connections. For instance, there was the time last year when she’d told her daughter, Denise, that an elderly gentleman who had died used to be the stepfather of the mother of the boy who’d had a crush on her in high school thirty years ago, before he went to Vietnam and got killed. Her daughter had been amazed at Mary’s research.
Mary took seriously the task of unraveling the obits. Too seriously, her daughter told her. But that was fine. Her daughter was only fifty—a long ways away from Mary’s wizened seventy-six—and the promise of Death wasn’t near enough to her for her to understand how critical Mary’s role was.
People needed to know. It was her duty to tell them.
But Friday morning, things were different.
That morning, Mary shuffled outside at dawn to pick up the newspaper, and when she brought it to the kitchen table and unrolled it, she discovered something that almost made her scream.
The obituaries were missing.
Pages four and five, which always contained the obits, featured only advertisements for cars and furniture. There were no death notices.
Mary flipped through the rest of the section, and could not find them. She searched through the entire newspaper. There were no obits, anywhere.
Had the folks at the paper forgotten to include them? In nearly a decade of her plying her trade, that had never happened. It seemed like a sick joke.
Maybe she’d gotten a defective paper.
She grabbed the phone and punched in the speed dial number for the newspaper, to demand redelivery. She was no good with gadgets; her daughter had programmed the number in for her, since Mary often called the office to complain when the paper arrived more than thirty minutes late.
A prerecorded message greeted her:
“
THANK YOU FOR CALLING
THE HARBOR NEWS
CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT. OUR BUSINESS HOURS ARE MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY, EIGHT AM TO—”
She hung up. In her anger, she’d forgotten that the paper didn’t open its offices until eight o’clock, two hours from now. She couldn’t bear waiting that long to read the obits.
The telephone rang.
She glanced at the wall clock—6:05. Who would be calling her this early?
Maybe someone’s died,
she thought. A strange glee coursed through her.
She snatched up the phone. “Hello?”
Crackling static filled the phone. Underneath the static, she heard, faintly, voices, as if a television was playing in the background. But she couldn’t understand what was being said.
“Who’s this?” she asked.
Static. Low, garbled voices.
She hung up. The phone didn’t ring again. It must’ve been a wrong number.
Back to her problem.
She parted the drapes at the front window. She spotted a paper, bundled in blue plastic, lying at the mouth of Mrs. Johnson’s driveway across the street. Mrs. Johnson, the insufferably proud owner of the lush lawn that resembled the greens on a golf course.
Problem solved.
Gathering her house robe around her, Mary crept across the street. She felt like a thief, and perhaps she was doing something wrong by stealing her neighbor’s paper, but it was in the service of a noble cause, she believed.
She snagged Mrs. Johnson’s paper and hurried back across the road, nearly tripping over the curb in her haste to get back to her yard.
She couldn’t wait until she reached the kitchen to look. Once she reached her walkway, she ripped the paper out of the wrapper and dug through it, sections falling to the pavement and skipping away in the cool morning breeze.
“No,” she said.
The obits were missing from Mrs. Johnson’s paper, too.
Eyes narrowed, Mary looked up and down the block. Many of her other neighbors subscribed to
The Harbor News
, but what if theirs were defective, too? Stealing all of their papers would be foolish and risky.
But her need to know who had died was like a hunger pain.
Her watch read a quarter after six. Her daughter would be up; she had to be at work by seven thirty. If Mary left now, she could catch Denise while she was still home. Denise subscribed to the paper, and she lived on the other side of town, where perhaps this awful mistake had not been perpetrated.
She could have called Denise first, but she knew her daughter would refuse to look up the obits for her. She didn’t understand how important they were.
The Harbor News
was sold at local convenience stores, too, but that meant Mary would have to pay fifty cents, and she’d already paid for her own subscription. She lived on a fixed income and couldn’t afford to waste even a half dollar.
She dressed quickly in gray sweatpants and a shirt—her exercise clothes—and got in her old Cadillac DeVille to drive to her daughter’s house.
“Morning, Mama,” Denise said, opening the door. She wore a house robe, and red rollers were in her hair. “You look upset. Is everything okay?”
“Did you get the paper?” Mary asked, brushing past Denise as she came inside the house, her head swiveling about like a vulture’s seeking a tasty morsel.
“Huh?” Denise frowned. “Yeah, I—”
“Where is it?”
“In the kitchen, I was reading it like I always do before I go to work. What’s this all about, Mama?”
But Mary had already set off down the hallway. She hurried into the kitchen.
Terrell, her twelve-year-old grandson, sat at the table. He was eating Froot Loops and reading the comics page. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw her.
“Hey, Grandma. Why you here so early?”
“I need that.” She snatched the newspaper away from him. Hands trembling, she searched through it.
But her search was in vain. The obits weren’t in there.
She gnashed her teeth. This was just crazy.
Denise came into the room. “Mama, what’s this all about?”
“I’m looking for my obits, but they ain’t in there.” She tossed the paper onto the floor. “They ain’t in none of the papers. It don’t make any damn sense!”
“Ah, those obituaries.” Denise nodded, comprehension coming into her eyes. She smiled. “Well, if they aren’t in there, maybe no one’s died lately. Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Someone’s always died. I need to know who.” Mary wrung her hands.
“I’ve never understood it, Mama. Why are these obituaries such a big deal to you?”
“People need to know who’s passed on,” Mary said. “Not everyone gets the paper like I do. I got to tell folks.”
Although Mary tried to explain herself as clearly as possible to her daughter, she could see from Denise’s puzzled expression that her daughter didn’t understand. Her daughter thought she was some loony old woman. That was one of the things Mary hated about growing older; younger folk thought you were losing your mind whenever you did something they didn’t understand.
But Denise would learn better once she reached Mary’s age, when Death loomed like a rising sun on the horizon of your life. She’d learn the importance of informing the living who had passed on. Because we all had to go someday. It seemed like common sense to Mary that the deceased would want everyone who’d ever known them to be told that they were no longer dwelling in this world and had moved on to a better place.
Terrell watched her, too, with the same look of puzzlement. But of course, he was only a child. Mary didn’t expect him to know any better. He’d never even been to a funeral, poor baby.
“If you say so,” Denise said. “But it seems kinda morbid to me.”
“It’s part of life. I hope that when I pass on someone makes sure my obit runs.”
“Please don’t talk like that, Mama.” Denise frowned.
Mary laughed harshly. “You learn to get comfortable with dying when you reach my age, girl. Anyway, can you look up the obits on the computer?”
“I’ve got to get ready for work,” Denise said. “Terrell can go on the Web and look for you.”
“Mom!” Terrell said, and groaned. “I gotta go to school.”
Mary hooked her long fingers around Terrell’s wrist, like talons. “Come on, boy. It ain’t gonna take that long. Let’s go to that computer.”
Terrell had a computer in his bedroom. It amazed Mary how younger people were so comfortable with these machines. Using her microwave and a remote control for her TV was about as technologically inclined as she got.
While her grandson sat at the desk and tapped confidently on the keyboard, Mary waited behind him and watched the screen.
“Found ’em, Grandma,” Terrell said. He pulled up a screen filled with black text.
Mary pushed up her bifocals on her nose and leaned forward. She studied the obituaries.
“Those ain’t it,” she said. “Those is yesterday’s obits. I done seen them already.”
“But that’s all they have on here.”
“Look again.”
“Grandma, I gotta get ready for school!”
“Then go get ready. Lemme look myself.”
“But you don’t know how to use a computer.”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t know how to do, boy! Get up out that chair and go get dressed.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Terrell shrugged, slid out of the chair. “It’s all yours.”
“Hmmph.” Mary settled in front of the computer. Squinting, she studied the keyboard and the screen. She’d used a typewriter before, when she’d worked as an admin at the VA; this was just like that, sort of. Except for that little gadget on the side they called a rat, or whatever. Terrell had been using that rat-thing to move the arrow across the screen, and he’d click it when he wanted to do something.
She placed her hand on the rat and moved it around the foam pad. She clicked the little button on there.
The screen flickered—and then went black.
“Uh-oh,” she said, looking around. “I done broke this thing.”
She clicked the button again. Nothing happened. She plucked some keys on the keyboard. Still, the blackness remained on the screen.
What could she have done wrong?
As she was about to call her grandson back in to check it out, she heard static sputter from the computer’s small speakers, both of which were mounted like ears on either side of the monitor.
Lord, she had
really
broken this thing.
Then, she heard something mingled with the static. Strangled voices, difficult to understand. It was as if the computer was broadcasting a weak radio signal.
She leaned closer.
The static-obscured voices grew louder. It was like a crowd of people talking all at once. What were they saying? Had someone just said her name?
“Mary ... want to talk to you ... tell you ...”
They had said her name. Clearly.
What in the name of Jesus was this?
“Mary ... Mary ... need you ...”