Christmas Trees & Monkeys (13 page)

She tried to stand. Every muscle in her body fought the action. She fell back, wheezing.

Oh, God, please. Don’t let me be sick
.

She thought of that newspaper story her father read, about the epidemic in England. People were dying from influenza faster than the plague of the dark ages. And it was starting to spread here, to America.

No
, she thought.
I felt fine when I went to bed
.

Kathleen tried to stand again, and succeeded. Stiff, cold pain spread into her legs and hips.

“
Mom? Is anyone here?” Dreaming. Every step, the sound of her voice, all of it felt and sounded like an elaborate nightmare. Her father would be gone until Thursday, selling his brushes. But her mother
must
be here somewhere. It was then she thought of the baby. Something’s happened to the baby and they brought Kathleen here while she slept.

Oh, no. Oh, no oh no oh no.

She shuffled towards the kitchen. Why was everything so bright? Then she realized. These weren’t candles. The house had electricity! Her fear momentarily fell to the sudden excitement of standing in a house with honest-to-God electric lights. She stumbled over a man’s body.

She instinctively threw out her hands to brace the fall. In the instant before she impacted with the floor tiles, Kathleen got the first good look at her skin. Dry, wrinkled, spotted with dark brown blotches. These weren’t her hands. They belonged to someone else, an old woman. If they were hers, she was sicker than she feared. When she landed something in her right wrist came loose. Any discomfort prior to this moment faded under the blinding fire in her arm. She closed her eyes and howled against the pain. The grinding in her wrist reverberated even through her teeth.

When Kathleen opened her eyes, a man stared back at her. His gaze was cold, unblinking. Lifeless. In her peripheral vision she sensed other bodies scattered on the floor with her.

This man needed her help. They all did. What in God’s name could
she
do? She was only eight years old. Without any reasonable answer, she began to cry. She called for her mother, for anyone, knowing something bad was happening. The disease from England. Everyone was dying. Kathleen closed her eyes and cried through the pain in her wrist, through the image of her shrunken and sickly skin, through the lifeless eyes of the man on the floor beside her.

* * *

The hospital corridor was silent, but for the steady beeping of the machinery. Slumped in chairs, draped across the half-walls of every workstation, nurses and interns lay as if in drunken slumber. The odor of decomposition overpowered the automatic air fresheners. In one room at the end of one hall, the screaming began again.

The old woman thrashed side to side, oblivious to the panicked beeping of the machine as it compensated for changes in the patient’s vital signs. Agnes was hungry. She screamed, her body reverberating with the effort. The two-month-old infant raised its hundred-year-old arms into the air, begging for the breast or bottle which would never come.

— — — — —

About “Ritual”

I came up with the idea for this story a full year before I actually wrote it. I was lying in bed, trying to get my then-very-young daughter Audrey to go to sleep. I was staring at the swirling patterns of shadow on the ceiling and, like any normal person, saw a goat’s head. And, like seeing demon faces in trees, once I saw the shape I couldn’t see anything else. I imagined the head emerging out from the ceiling, attached to a human body.

Hmm, thought I. Why would it do that? Perhaps a demon (hence the goat’s head), or a ghost, or something like that. I had to stop thinking about it because Audrey had (and still has) a tendency to pick up on people’s thoughts and gets upset if what I’m thinking involves demons coming out of her ceiling.

Around that time, Steve and Melanie Tem came out with an award-winning novella called
The Man in the Ceiling
, so that kind of squashed my plans for the story. Later, however, I returned to it, deciding that the coming-from-the-ceiling bit wasn’t the point of the story, but the visitation itself. And, well, that’s why we have dark closets, isn’t it?

I honestly don’t know why I made the characters Irish. I guess I just liked their names and language, and at the time
Ballykissangel
was a popular television show in the Keohane household.

“
Ritual”

“
Would you like to stay up late tonight, Liam?”

“
No, Da. It’s my bed time.”

“
Ah, I know. But I just thought, well, seeing — as you’re always asking.”

The eight year old crawled under the sheets without replying. His father waited for the ritual to begin. Liam squirmed, kicked the sheets, pulled out his arms from the blankets. Slowly settled.

When it came time for Donel’s part he paused, not wanting to follow the routine. Not tonight. He wanted his son with him, wanted to ask again, demand,
Liam, stay up late with me
.

Nobody spoke, though the boy normally would be spouting off details about school or a book he was reading. Waiting for the moment his Da was ready to close the door before offering a detailed answer to “what did you do at school today”, even if the question had been asked two hours earlier. Tonight Liam remained quiet. He did smile, keeping only to the essence of the routine, quietly, reverently.

Perhaps, Donel thought, the boy didn’t understand the significance of tonight. If that was so, wouldn’t he have wanted to stay up late?
Liam’s coping better than you
, he thought.
He wants to be alone, to sleep away the memory instead of languishing in self-pity like his father
. For one his age the ritual of “bed” overpowered all else, this night more than any.

Donel knelt beside the mattress and tucked the sheet under Liam’s chin. Kiss on the forehead. Press of sheets.

Liam turned in the bed’s cocoon until he lay on his belly.

Touch of hair. Time for Donel to leave.

“
Last chance,” he whispered, rising.

“
Good night, Da.”

Donel began to close the door.

“
Da?”

Hope. Donel paused. “Yes?”

“
I’m OK. You know?”

The statement was so adult, so certain in tone, his father was mute for a moment. Finally Donel half-smiled and said, “I know.” He closed the bedroom door.

* * *

Tonight was the second anniversary of that bloody moment in his family’s life. This seemed now to be an annual ritual. Remembrance. Spending one evening every year before the telly, images flashing by, words buzzing from the speaker, seeing and hearing nothing but the silence of the house.

Donel closed his eyes, head against the back of the couch, and thought about the past. He tried to recapture a moment of happiness, one when Cloida was smiling, crossing the kitchen to embrace him as he arrived home. It never happened, not really. Even before their son was born, his wife existed in a cloud of self-imposed darkness. She emerged often, but then only for a short time. Cloida would inevitably drift back into the tempest of her mind.

Perhaps she saw the road ending from a distance away. Donel sometimes thought so, sitting in this chair, not watching the television. Staring at the wall as if waiting for his wife to step out of the paper’s fading pattern, born anew, emerging from the chrysalis where she’d hidden herself.

Every time his train of thought wandered this path, he thought of Father O’Nan.
Where has she gone?
Donel asked once after the funeral. O’Nan’s answer of silence sliced a hole in Donel’s world, never to be repaired.

She was somewhere lost in her cloud, drifting in the darkness she’d cultivated during her life. That was
not
the priest’s unspoken answer, but Donel clung to it. He knew what O’Nan was not saying. Where is Cloida?
Burning for eternity
.

With shaking hand he lifted the glass to his lips and wished Liam had stayed up. Comfort to another brings comfort to oneself, someone had said in the blur of those first few weeks after Cloida’s death.

Liam was so small two years ago. His loss was not the same, an absence felt but never understood. Not like Donel’s. It’s never the same with children. Donel wondered if he might not be slowly brewing his own dark cloud. If so, where would that leave Liam?

* * *

Liam lay on his side within the sheets. He stared ahead, willed himself still. The bedroom shadows leaned away from the nightlight, casting the room in an angled sleep-time world.

Tonight she would come back, as she had the year before. Da would not understand. His world was work, fixing the car, missing Mum in his own way. Liam wanted to go downstairs and lay on his father’s lap, sit beside him on the couch, watch an old movie.

But then he might miss her when she came. Might start to forget. If he was not here, waiting, would she ever come again?

The closet was not in his line of sight, so he did not see something shift in the dark, sheltered from the nightlight across the room by the partially-closed door. The figure moved forward, molding itself from the blackness. Long legged, naked. The figure stepped across the carpet, almost floating. The head of a snake topped the otherwise flawless female body. Its eyes were dark, unmoving. Softly in the light the figure emerged from the closet, drifted toward Liam’s bed, keeping out of sight before it stopped, hesitant. It stood like a surreal statue and waited.

Liam stared ahead, forcing his eyes to remain open. Nothing before him. Dark corners bled into the light. His eyes eventually closed in sleep.

* * *

Downstairs, Donel snapped awake. He’d fallen asleep on the couch again, the ritual broken early this year. Perhaps he was already bored with the repetition. He straightened, lifted his glass and drained the last stale swallow. He checked his watch.

Eleven-fifteen. He still had work tomorrow, get Liam off to school. Donel stood up and went into the downstairs bathroom. He’d check on Liam after, try not to wake him. Let tonight be like any other for his son. Maybe next year it would be so for Liam’s father. Cloida went away of her own accord, time to forget and live what life God had in store for the rest of her family.

* * *

The growing odor, the sense of a presence in the room made Liam’s eyes open. Murky vision gritty with interrupted sleep. For a moment he did not remember and gasped when he saw the figure standing before him. Memory returned. He made sure not to look at the face, not to respond.

See me
, the figure seemed to say, unmoving, beautiful but soundless.
Acknowledge me. Please...
.

Liam stared at the legs, smooth, almost reflecting in the glow of the nightlight. He wanted to look at the figure in its entirety, see it completely. But to do so would be to acknowledge it, and to see the head, which in the periphery of his vision seemed to collapse and expand, shifting first from a snake’s then suddenly sprout horns and fur, gray like a goat’s, melting again into a muddy lump. He stared at the legs, but knew what was demanded of him - see it for what it was,
who
it was, let the face come into focus, sharply beautiful like he remembered.

He sensed the struggle of the visitor, wanting to reach out to him but unable, a statue of flesh cold to the touch.

Come to me
, it didn’t say.

Liam slipped from the cocoon of his bed sheet, keeping his eyes downcast, wanting to embrace the perfect legs, let the thing lift him into its trembling arms, hold him and rock him to sleep, sing, coo, shoosh, love.

Remember.

He stared at its feet. The skin around the ankles had dried, lacking its initial luster. It was as if Time itself was blowing like a dry wind about the woman - no, the
thing
.

He risked a look further up until the head was a blur above him. He looked down quickly. Had he seen a dog, angry, snarling, a wolf? Not a goat this time.

I am real
....

The corporeal voice was jagged with desperation, tingling through him, trying to pull him forward. Liam struggled to be still. He watched its skin crack, fade to an ashen gray in the glow of the nightlight.

Look at me... I am real.. I am....

It did not say his name, nor had it the year before, or the year before that when Liam awoke loudly from a nightmare. That first night Liam had seen his mother standing by his bed, her head bloody and misshapen. That long ago night the image disappeared quickly, leaving him alone in the room and hearing his father’s voice down the hall,
Oh, my God, Cloida, Oh, My God
. Over and over. Not coming into the boy’s room for a long time after.