The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (26 page)

“What do you want, Jack Peter?”

Up on one elbow, he was eager to talk. “I wasn’t scared of the lady with one eye.”

“She had two eyes. A cataract on one. My nana in Florida has ’em all the time. She had a surgery to cut one out.”

“They cut her eyeball?”

“With a knife. A scalpel.”

“I would not want a knife in my eye.”

“Me neither. I’m glad you weren’t scared of her.”

“She was nice.” There was an air around Jack Peter’s sentence, a kind of wistfulness that Nick associated with school when one of the boys or girls had a crush on a teacher. A teacher’s pet.

“You should talk to her,” Nick said. “Tell her everything, all your secrets.”

No reply. All was still for a while, quiet enough for Nick to hope their conversation was over and he could sleep. He had nearly dropped off when another question disturbed him.

“What about that dog?”

“It was a big white dog, big as a wolf. Kinda scary to look at since it was dead.”

“I wonder what it is like being dead.”

Nick did not answer. The question hung over the bed palpable as a thick and heavy cloud. There was no answer to it, and in time, the boys fell asleep.

Hours later, when the house was quiet for the night, a scratching at the door awakened Nick. He had heard that sound before. At his grandparents’ house, their little Yorkie would paw at the door whenever it wanted to be let out or let back into the house. Nails scraped the wood, more desperately now, as if something was trying to dig its way into the room, and a canine whine came through the space between the floor and the door. Nick could hear it snuffle and breathe and then the low-pitched growl rumble from its chest. In the trunk of the police car, the dead dog’s mouth was pulled back exposing two rows of sharp teeth. He could see them clearly now, the long fangs snapping at him. He could feel the canines ripping at his pajamas, hear the vicious mad barking. With a whimper, he turned away and shook Jack Peter by the shoulder. Nick knew he had been drawing again. “Make it go away,” he whispered, repeating and repeating until the boy rose from his dreams and whatever was beyond the closed door padded down the hall and went back to that special hell where nightmares are born.

v.

The dream house now sat at the bottom of the sea. Waves broke six feet above the roof, and bubbles escaped from the chimney and streamed one by one to the surface. In between the fronds of the kelp forest swam the windup fish, shining brightly as it passed through columns of sunlight. An octopus hid in the mailbox, two arms slithering through the slot. Starfish clung to the balustrade along the front porch. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. With great care he drew dorsal fins, walleyes, scales, and the little beard beneath the mouth open for one underwater breath. The cod took a long time to draw, but Jack Peter didn’t mind, he had all morning, he lost track entirely. The pencil weighed just right in his hand, the lines certain and crisp, and the sketch paper was smooth and willing.

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. He remembered the sound of the Dr. Seuss book, its music in the background of his mind as he drew, and he could picture the illustrations and how the book was about counting things and observing details. Say, what a lot of fish there are. Windup fish swimming in the sea all the way from Japan, and the lady with the cloudy eye knows how he works. Inside his head. All these fishes need deep water, and if the ocean came and rose above the roof, Daddy would be dead, and Mommy, too, and Nick, bodies floating in the deep. Their friends could come and gather the dead and drowned and hang them up to dry. The end. No more pictures to draw, no more secrets. His hand cramped, and then the pencil grew as heavy as a spade.

He studied the house, vaguely dissatisfied with how he had drawn it, the difference between the perfect construct in his brain and the finished images on the page. He felt a bit sick to his stomach and slid the paper to the bottom of the stack on his desk. He turned off the light and sat in the gathering dawn. The others slept, slumbering in dreamland. Nick sprawled across the mattress, twisted sheets wrapped around his body like a fishing net. Late in the night, he had been crying again. Always crying. Always wanting something else. Nick could be such a chore; there was a limit to Jack Peter’s patience. Down the hall, his parents drifted, two on a raft. They would be up soon enough, his mother off to work, his father wandering restlessly from room to room. If they were drowned and dead, who would take care of him? “Be careful,” he whispered, and then all at once, the whole house sprang to life.

“Wake up,” he said to Nick, and the boy obeyed at once, sitting up in the bed, wiping the sleep from his eyes. A glimmer of leftover resentment lingered, but Nick said nothing, just dutifully rose and hurried off to the bathroom. Jack Peter heard the others make way, the quiet
good mornings
exchanged in the ebb and bustle of another daybreak. His father stuck his head into the room, and from the chair at the desk, Jack Peter nodded at him.

“You’re up. Just us boys today,” Tim said. “Your mother’s back to work. Come have some breakfast with us and say good-bye.”

Good-bye, he thought after his father departed. Good-bye, mother; good-bye, father. Good-bye, Mr. and Mrs. Weller. Good-bye, Nick at the bottom of the sea.

At the breakfast table, Jack Peter watched his parents get ready for the day. They moved like bees from flower to flower. Coffee on, muffins in the toaster. Cereal bowls and spoons, a bottle of milk, cornflakes, a ripe banana cut into coins. The newspaper rescued from the front stoop, shedding its plastic skin. She was trying to tell his father a story, but had trouble keeping his attention. A manila folder on the counter contained her evidence, and she kept returning to it and brandishing different sheets of paper.

“There’s a painting in the rectory at Star of the Sea,” she said. “That’s where I first heard of it. All these years and I never knew, a shipwreck right in our backyard.”

Shuffling across the floor in his bare feet, Nick entered the kitchen. His hair stood on end like a cartoon character just frightened out of his wits. I suppose he had been, Jack Peter thought. I mustn’t forget about the dog.

His father tousled Nick’s hair. “Orange juice?”

Nick and Jack Peter nodded, and he fetched two glasses from the cupboard.

“So I went to the Maritime Museum yesterday,” she said. “Did you know they have an archives there with a record of every ship that hit the rocks from here to Machias?”

His father poured the juice. “Say when.”

She buttered a muffin and chomped a half-moon from the edge. “And here’s a list of all the passengers. No survivors, can you imagine? And some of the drowned came ashore. Listen: ‘bodies taken by friends.’ And the others were never found. Do you understand what I mean? Tim, are you listening?”

“Bodies taken,” he said.

“Not that. Some bodies were never found. And I looked on the Internet to find out what happens to bodies left at sea.”

Gingerly, he stroked the red marks on his neck. “Honestly, Holly. In front of the boys.”

She chewed another bite. “You boys can take it, can’t you? It’s not as if it happened just yesterday. Bodies disappear quickly, but in the right conditions, the bones can last for years, for centuries. The bone, Tim, the arm bone.”

In the next chair, Nick shoved a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth and crunched.

“I’ll bet you anything,” she said, “when the tests come back, they’ll say just how old it is, just how long it has been in the water: 1849.”

His father pulled out the sports page from the newspaper. “And the dog just found it on the beach?”

“Don’t you get it? The bone, the shipwreck, the weird voices in the night. Miss Tiramaku says there might be ghosts.
Funa-yurei
, she says.”

Clearing his throat, Tim leaned back against the counter, regarding her with wonder. “Tiramaku,” he said at last, making the name sound like an insult.

His parents stared at each other from their respective corners, a truce passing between them before any shots could be fired. His mother was the first to break, glancing at her watch. “I’m late. You boys be good.”

They mumbled their promises through their cornflakes.

*   *   *

The boys vanished after breakfast, off to their secret games. Tim let them go with a smile. They were close as brothers sometimes. On the counter lay the jumble of Holly’s papers, and he stacked them neatly in their folder, sighing at his wife’s latest obsession. Old bones, ghost ships. That ridiculous Japanese woman with her crazy ideas. He washed the dishes and gathered the plastic garbage bag to take outside to the trash cans. He shivered as he looked out to the snow clouds collecting off to the west. He had just lifted the lid from the metal can when a blur of white in the yard frightened him.

Flushed from his hiding place, the white man bristled alert and then darted between the fir trees and crossed the road. All angled arms and legs, he galloped along the edge of the Quigleys’ house and disappeared from view. It all happened so quickly that Tim could not believe what he was seeing. He shoved the trash bag into the can and considered following, but knew from hard experience that it would be as futile as chasing a rabbit. The cold handle cut into his palm, so he screwed the lid back in place.

White as a ghost, white as paper. Tim had thought it was dead, if such a thing could ever be called alive. Or shown to be a great white dog. Or a figment of his mind, but there was the white man again, running not twenty feet from the house. Where the man had brushed against the evergreen branches, needles still swept the air. For the longest time, Tim stared at the path the thing had taken like a deer caught in the open and gone to cover. He thought if he waited long enough he might make him reappear.

Across the street, in the parlor window of the Quigleys’ house, the curtains parted and suddenly closed. How strange to have someone home in the middle of the day, but of course, the children were on Christmas break. Perhaps they had witnessed the white man, too. Tim turned his collar against the wind and walked over to the neighbors’. Behind the front door, their dog barked madly. He listened for the approach of someone coming to calm him. Staring him in the face was a brass door knocker in the shape of a humpback’s fluke, covered in a pale green patina and pitted with salt. Three knocks until one of the twins answered through a crack no wider than her face. She kept the dog at bay with one firm leg against its chest.

“Howdy,” he said to the child.

“Nobody’s home,” she said. “My mother went out.”

“That’s okay.” He could not remember which one of the identicals she was. They were two halves of the same peach. Without expression, she simply waited for him to continue. “Did you see anything strange go by just now? Something as big as a man?”

She shook her head and started to close the door. Slick as a salesman, he stuck his foot in the opening. “Wait, let me at least have my guess this time. I’d say Edie, is that right?”

“No,” the girl said. “It’s Janie.”

“Ah, you’re right. I should have known by your obvious charm and intelligence. Tell me, Janie, were you just peeking through the curtains?”

A guilty smile spread from ear to ear. “No.”

“In that case, you better fetch me Miss Edie.”

The head disappeared, and the collie stepped into the void, sniffing him in the crotch. Tim pushed away the sharp muzzle, and then both twins appeared side by side on the threshold. “Hello, Edie. I’ve just come over to ask you girls a question.”

They stared at him, through him, waiting.

“Have either of you seen a man running around the neighborhood? A tall man, with white bare skin, with long hair and a tangled beard? I thought maybe one of you was spying from behind the curtains.”

The girls stiffened slightly and inched closer to each other.

“I didn’t mean to scare you. I could be all wrong, just my imagination.”

The twins shook their heads in matching rhythm.

“Nothing strange at all?”

Edie wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “We saw the police come to your house on Christmas.”

“That? It was about something we found on our beach, is all.”

Janie wiped her nose as well. “Did they arrest him and take him away?”

Tim bent down so his face was on their level. “Arrest who?”

“Jack Peter,” they said, and the certainty in their voices took him aback.

“Whatever gave you the idea that the police would come for my son?”

Each girl chewed on the inside of her cheek, one left one right, mirroring her twin. They stared past him to the house, where the two boys were playing.

“Our mother isn’t home,” Edie said. “And we aren’t supposed to open the door for anybody no matter what.” Janie closed it in his face.

One hard kick and the lock would break. Or at the very least, he could hammer with his fists until they opened up and answered his questions. Instead, he retreated without complaint, wondering the whole time what they must think about Jip. “Weird kids,” he muttered, exhaling each word in a cloud of condensation. In the few minutes he had been outside, the temperature had dropped by several degrees. Cold air from Canada rushed in, and if the weather folk were right, conditions were ripe for a nor’easter. Batten down the hatches, and, Lord, it was freezing. He walked out into the yard, wondering if he should try to track the white man. The wound at his throat throbbed, and he remembered the last time he had given chase. Besides, the thing was long gone, no doubt racing over the headlands or in some rocky hiding place. What kind of creature had come crouching from his dreams? Bone cruncher, throat slasher, nightmare vision.

Back inside his own house, Tim called upstairs to the boys, and Jip answered as if nothing had happened. Safe, in any case. He flipped through the pages in Holly’s ghost files.
Bodies not found. Sailor (stranger
). Perhaps she was right after all. Had some phantoms risen from the bones of a ship? Impossible.

The central heat cycled off and the blowers stopped, and within minutes, it was chilly enough inside for him to need an afghan to wrap round his shoulders. With a cup of coffee in hand, he nested in an armchair, staring through the window for signs of the white man prowling around outside. He brooded over the Quigley twins and their dark suspicions. Children had always found Jip strange, and they could be such emotional thugs. Even when Jip was just a little boy, the others chastised or shunned him, and Tim still remembered picking him up from his first day of nursery school to find him scowling and alone in a corner. As he grew older, kids called him retarded or stupid or crazy. No wonder he withdrew, no wonder he angered so easily.