The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (31 page)

The wipers beat furiously against the glass, and through the nearly impenetrable wall of white, Tim inched along, feeling his way through the storm. He worried about getting to the church a few miles away, and he worried that he would not be able to make it back home to the boys. As usual, Jip balked about going outside, and Tim was in no mood for protracted negotiations, not after he learned how long Holly had been waiting and how his son had completely forgotten to give him the message. Out on Shore Road, he was glad he had decided to leave the boys behind. Even if it meant they would be alone, at least they would be safe.

“Don’t leave the house,” he had told them. He did not want Nick outdoors tracking the invisible man. “Not for anything, Nick. If there’s some problem, call the Quigleys across the road, and they’ll help you, and I wrote down the numbers for the police and for Star of the Sea right by the telephone. In this storm, it’ll take a while to get there and back, but I don’t want you to worry. I’ve driven through worse.”

“Take me with you,” Nick pleaded. “Don’t leave me alone with him.”

Jip locked his fingers around Nick’s wrist.

“Listen boys, you’ll be all right as long as you stick together.” The boy looked heart stricken, and Tim reassured him with a quick hug. “Don’t worry, you’re safe inside.”

“I want to go,” Nick said.

“All right, son, that’s enough. If for some reason we’re not home before dark, make yourselves supper. I’ll call in any case before we head on home, just to check in.”

The last he saw of them, Jip was lost in yet another drawing. Nick escorted Tim to the front door. “Be a good boy, son. And take care of things. Watch after Jip. I’ll be back in a jiff.”

Some jiffy, he thought to himself. The snow poured from the heavens. He wouldn’t be surprised if a foot had fallen already. There were no other cars on the road, and though the county had plowed once earlier that afternoon, he still found himself searching for tire treads to follow. Round the bend at Mercy Point, he saw it again.

The figure crossed right in front of him. Had he been driving at normal speed, Tim would have run over the man. He could barely make out that there was a man at all, only the outline of his limbs, and the dark mane and beard discernible through the scrim. As Tim drew near, he could see that the man was deliberately standing in the road, a mad look of terror on his face as they locked eyes, provoking a confrontation. Stamping on the brakes, Tim felt the Jeep skid sharply to the right, and forgetting all he had been taught, he tried to steer against the slide but wound up fishtailing and lodging the back wheels between the road and an embankment.

“Shit,” he said when the car lurched to a stop. Clutching the steering wheel, he sat in the car for a moment, hoping his heart would quit that awful pounding. He looked through the windshield, but the creature was gone.

Shaken, he stepped out into the storm and hollered at the place the man had been, but there was no reply, and he really hadn’t expected one. In the cold and wet, he walked around to the rear and saw that the bumper on the passenger’s side had plowed deep, and he could not tell if it was jammed against the earth or simply wedged into a snowbank. If he tried to power his way out of the drift, he ran the risk of sinking deeper without any traction. The Jeep was usually a hog in the dirt and mud, but he’d been stuck before when he’d gone off-roading and couldn’t figure the escape angle. Caked in snow, he studied the situation and then got back in, convinced he could rock backward and wiggle his way free. Otherwise he’d have to hope to raise a cell signal in the storm and wait on a plow or the police for help.

“What the hell is that thing?” He sat behind the wheel considering possibilities, some crazed loon escaped from the nuthouse now wandering out to sea. Or worse, a ghost from Holly’s ship. Whatever it was, that thing was as big as a man, that much he knew for sure. “White dog, my ass,” he muttered and popped the car into reverse as he stepped on the gas. For a brief moment, the Jeep responded as he had hoped, swaying backward, and he could sense the treads dig and catch hold, but he shifted too slowly into drive, and the wheels simply fell back in place and spun a deeper rut. He was stuck. He beat on the steering wheel and mashed the horn, but it only made him feel foolish.

*   *   *

The blare of the car horn sliced through the quiet landscape, and even inside the house, the boys could hear it bleat like a lost sheep. The second sound was just as forlorn, the wailing of a man, and Nick wondered how the car sounded so far away, yet the man sounded so near. He imagined Mr. Keenan crashed on the road, his head striking the steering wheel, and he speculated, if that was so, when help might arrive and how long he would be trapped alone in the house with Jack Peter. The monster boy, the boy monster. He had gone mad these past few days, possessed by some spirit that had him drawing, drawing, drawing all the time. Even now, when they had the run of the place, Jack Peter scribbled at the table, oblivious to everything but his work.

Restless, and anxious about the tracks in the snow, Nick pestered Jack Peter for attention. “Let’s do something. Instead of sitting around all day. This is worse than school.”

“Let me finish. Leave me alone.” He looked up from his work, malice in his eyes. “Do you want them to send me away?”

Nick hated him. He felt nothing but anger and resentment for him. Stupid, why did he have to be so stupid? Why couldn’t he be normal, same as everyone else, and just get off his butt and play or fight or talk or throw a ball or break something or go outside? Stuck in the house in a glorious snowstorm with a lunatic. He wanted to smash his face. He wanted to sit on his chest and make him cry. Instead Nick just left him at the kitchen table and went wandering through the house.

He toured the downstairs rooms, picking up knickknacks on the tables and reading the titles of the books in the living room library. Toying with the idea of watching TV, he remembered that only soap operas and cooking shows and programs for little kids were on at this time on a weekday afternoon. He pawed through the mail in the basket by the front door. He thought of his parents out on the ocean in the warm sunshine. Stupid parents. They should come get him from this madhouse. Circling round Jack Peter, still concentrating on the details of his stupid drawing, he made his way up the stairs and headed for Mr. and Mrs. Keenan’s room.

The inner sanctum. He had never been in their room without an adult present, and his solitude made him feel like a spy. Behind the door, their robes hung side by side, and he remembered Mrs. Keenan in the nightgown, the spill of her breasts. The bed was neatly made, so he was careful when he got in it, wondering which side was whose, and then he inhaled deeply on the pillows trying to catch their scent. Nothing, so he eased his way off and straightened the covers. In the dresser drawers, all the clothes were folded and sharply stacked, but he hesitated to open the closets, suddenly afraid of what might be lurking behind the door. The shadowy dimness of the space gave him the creeps, and he was about to leave when he noticed a white corner of a piece of paper peeking out from beneath the rug.

Squatting on his haunches, he peeled back the edge and found one of Jack Peter’s pictures lying on the floor, but he could not make out the details, so he took the page to the window and held it at an angle to catch the available light. Two boys, half-dressed and floating beneath a wavy line, were locked together, wrestling, surrounded by fish and a ragged-clawed lobster on the sand. One boy pushed down on the other’s head while the other boy had his arm round his attacker’s shoulder to drag him to the bottom of the sea. The boys were mirrors to each other, a self-portrait fighting with itself.

He did not know what to make of the picture or why Jack Peter had hidden it there, a clue to a crime committed over three years ago. While Jack Peter clearly remembered the drowning, he had never said a word about it in all this time. Nick set the drawing on the bed and rolled back the rug until it butted against the bedframe. On the floor lay four more sheets of paper, stashed like treasure maps. Four variations on a theme, the underwater wrestlers in different poses, but in each case, twin battled twin. He laid them out upon the bed like pages in a murdered and dismembered book, trying to make sense of the story.

He searched for more. In the linen closet in the hallway, beneath a stack of bedsheets, he discovered two pictures: the naked wild man crouched on a rock overlooking the ocean, and the white dog sprinting after someone who was indicated by part of one leg and a foot, the rest of the person escaping the edge of the page. He left them on the hallway floor by the closet door and then investigated Jack Peter’s room.

Drawings had been hidden everywhere.

Another half dozen under his rug, a sheaf of papers tucked beneath the mattress, a batch in the dark cavern under the bed, and still more tucked in the leaves of books. Nick pried open the desk drawer crammed with page after page. It was madness. Hundreds of drawings, page after page after page. All the monsters on sheets torn from the sketch pad, crowding into notebooks, dashed off on scrap paper. Many showed the creature that prowled outside in the woods, by the sea, a wretched haunting thing. He gathered the drawings in a giant pile and spread them out, covering the entire bedspread, thick as snowfall. The pages spilled to the floor. Babies and bodies and bones from the sea. The sight of the pictures quickened his pulse and strained his breathing. His temples throbbed. Glimpsing himself in the mirror, he was shocked by how pale his skin had become and the dark circles under his eyes. Just like an inside boy. Feeling ill, Nick knelt on the floor by the bed and bowed his head to rest in a mountain of drawings. Jack Peter must be stopped.

The wind shifted outside and gathered speed, throwing the snow fine as grit against the windows. The storm made a constant roar, like the ocean in a seashell, but underneath that sound was a human cry, bitter and constant, as if some poor soul was keening. Nick rose from the floor and surveyed the hurricane of papers in the room. Leave it, he thought. When Mr. and Mrs. Keenan come back they will see the mess and realize how far their child has spun out of control. He wanted them to know and in knowing, do something about the problem. At the very least, they could rescue Nick, put him somewhere safe until his parents returned to claim him and take him away from such raw mayhem. He missed his mother and father and wanted to go home. Nearby, the voice outside roared again, pleading and insistent.

He breathed deeply to marshal the courage to go downstairs and face Jack Peter. Perhaps he had gone off his head completely and had been howling from the kitchen, but when Nick arrived, the room was empty. On the table lay his latest masterpiece, another vision of penciled madness, a close-up of the wild man’s face, but the boy who drew it was missing. The entire house seemed deserted, though he knew this could not be. Perhaps Jack Peter had intuited what Nick had been up to and what he had discovered, and was in hiding.

“Jack Peter,” he said. “I know all about the drawings. I know you are here somewhere. Come out, come out wherever you are.”

Not a peep. He tried the mudroom, but it, too, was vacant. Cold air seeped through the slab floor, and Nick could see the steam from his breath when he called Jack Peter’s name again. Thoughts of escape leapt into his mind, and he considered how to flee the scene, find shelter, and wait out the storm until the Keenans returned. Hanging on the peg, his coat was damp and stiff, but below it his boots were dry. From the open door, he yelled down to Mr. Keenan’s workroom, but it was dark and quiet. He made his way into the living room.

Another log had been added to the fire, for it blazed, popping and crackling behind the hearth. The ornaments on the Christmas tree threw back the light, and the bare furniture absorbed the glow. Had he not thought to look toward the front door, Nick would have missed him. Jack Peter stood with his back to him but ramrod straight, transfixed by a face in the window. The monster was staring back at him, his hands pressed against the glass.

Unable to resist, Nick stepped forward and whispered, “Jack Peter.”

The creature’s mouth was moving and it appeared to be speaking, though no words penetrated the boundary between the outside and inside. His face was gaunt, marked with smallpox scars and wrinkles, deathly pale with deep circles under hollow eyes and teeth as brown and jagged as a broken fence. Snow covered the crown of his head and clotted in his mangled beard. Below his neck his skin was white as paper and laced with blue veins. His attention had been focused on Jack Peter, but when he saw Nick he thumped his palms onto the window and let out another doleful wail.

*   *   *

Their cups had been refilled and on each dessert plate sat another dainty slice of strudel. Father Bolden was busy sawing through the pastry. “So what happened next, after your son was saved from drowning?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not entirely sure. Jack wasn’t the same. He became deathly afraid of going outdoors at all, just cried and screamed and threw fits anytime we tried to get him through the door, and it became nearly impossible for us to take him anywhere. The doctors attributed it to the trauma, and at first we thought he would grow out of it, but the paranoia just grew worse over time, not better. We tried everything, but he will not budge. He’s just withdrawn into the safety of the house.”

With a clatter, Miss Tiramaku dropped her cup onto the saucer. “And he won’t go out at all? So it’s just been the three of you these past few years? Must be a bit claustrophobic.”

“Well, there’s Nicholas,” she said. “Thank God for Nick.”

“I am surprised that you let them play together,” Miss Tiramaku said. “After what Nick tried to do that day.”

Holly gave her a quizzical look.

“Maybe he didn’t mean it,” Miss Tiramaku said. “But Jack told me that Nick tried to drown him that day.”

A sharp pain lanced through Holly’s forehead, followed by ticking, a sound so loud she wondered if the others could hear it, too. The room pulsed along to the beat in her mind, and everything slowed and swayed like the ship in the painting. She felt a swell of seasickness clench at her stomach.