The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (34 page)

“They’re not here, Tim. What’s happened to them?”

The blood drained from his face as he straightened his back. “What do you mean? Have you tried upstairs? Looked all over?”

Frustrated by his lack of trust, she frowned at him and hurried to the stairway, taking the steps in pairs, hollering for Jack and Nick. All of the rooms had been ransacked. The rugs wet beneath her feet. Quilts on the beds, rumpled and bodiless. Closet doors gaped wide and everywhere papers littered the surface of things. She sifted through scores of drawings, bodies and bones, pictures of monsters, the dead dog now prowling in the neighbor’s yard.
What has he done?
The pictures stopped her, the awful connections turning in her mind. From the middle of his desk, she picked up one of the drawings lying there: two boys wrestling beneath the sea. She curled it into a scroll and carried it back to Tim.

“How could you have left them alone?”

Trembling with pain, he bent over the kitchen table and steadied himself with two hands. “I’ve checked the other rooms down here, and the whole house is a wreck, even the workroom. They’re not here.”

“How could they not be here? Jack is outside?” She hollered and waved the scroll at him. “Where have they gone?”

“I told them if there was any trouble, they should go over to the Quigleys’. Let’s not panic. They might be right across the street.”

“With that beast waiting for them in the front yard?” She leapt for the phone and dialed the neighbors’ number. One of the twins answered with a cheery hello.

“This is Mrs. Keenan,” she said. “Is Jack there by any chance? Did he and Nick come over to your house today in the storm?”

The little girl seemed put off by the anxiety in Holly’s questions that she hesitated before answering. “No. Jack Peter never leaves the house.”

“I know, but are you sure he didn’t come over, and you just missed him?”

“No, we’ve been inside all day. There’s no one here.”

Holly caught her breath. “Is this Janie?”

The girl grunted a yes.

“Do you know anything about that dog that’s out in your yard?”

“Our dog is right here next to me, aren’t you, girl?”

The border collie barked in the background.

“No, the big white dog that’s out there right now?”

“I don’t know what you mean. If there was another dog out there, ours would go crazy. There’s nothing out there, and it’s been as quiet as church all day.”

Holly thanked her and hung up, holding on to the receiver, trying to sort through her fear and anger. “They’re not over there, Tim. Someone’s got them.”

The room looked like a crime scene, signs of struggle and foul play, and it spun in her eyes as if she was drunk. The pounding began in her head, steady as a heartbeat. She hammered on the wall with the paper clenched in her fist till the edges frayed. Papers on the floor, drawings everywhere.
See what I made.

“They’re out there,” she said. “Do you remember the sheep, Tim? That day when Jack was lost and we found him with those sheep that just appeared—”

“I’ll go look for them.”

“Are you listening to me, Tim? I think Jack made them appear somehow.”

“Holly, what does this have to do with where the boys are? Let me go.”

“You? You can barely take care of yourself. I know where they are. But you need to take care of what’s inside. It’s the drawings, Tim.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“The drawings, the drawings he’s been doing. Not the ghosts, not the
yurei
. It’s been Jack all along. He drew the sheep, and they appeared. He drew the dog, and the dog appeared. Lord knows what else he’s made. We need to find all of Jack’s drawings, search the house, and burn them in the fireplace. You get rid of them, and I’ll find the boys.”

He looked at her as if she had lost her mind, but she did not care. She gave him a look as furious as the hammering in her head.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “His drawings are coming to life.”

*   *   *

The boys ran along the far side of the house and at the rear corner took off for a patch of evergreens, carving a new path through the drifts. The skies had burst, and the snow fell in rippling sheets; and in every shadow, they imagined a new terror. They lost sight of the creature and took the chance to rest for a moment under the pines. With his hands on his knees, Nick leaned over catching his breath, and looking with wonder at his friend, outside again. Red shields appeared on Jack Peter’s cheeks, and a rime of frost glistened at the corners of his chapped lips. He rubbed the matt of snow from his hair. Chests heaving, they sucked in deep breaths.

“It’s cold out,” Jack Peter said. “I’m tired of it.”

Nick rubbed Jack Peter’s face with the palms of his gloves, trying to help him get warm. “Why did you do this?” he asked.

“They were going to send me away. Too much trouble.”

A loud bellow came from behind. The monster spotted them in their hiding place, and they pushed forward, snow flying in their wake, their flapping coats caught in the draft. They left the cover of the trees and climbed the dune. Stretching before them, the canvas flattened into shades of white and gray. Even the waves seemed frozen in place. The smell of salt and fish and seaweed had been drained by the antiseptic cold. Dead quiet, except for their frantic breathing and the whispering snow. The familiar paths to the sea through the maze of granite were obscured, but they had an advantage over the white man. They picked their way around the familiar rocks while it stumbled after them, gaining ground and then faltering, before slipping and landing on all fours, buried face-first in a snowbank. When he saw it fall, Nick ducked behind a large boulder and pulled Jack Peter next to him. They sat and leaned back against the stone.

“Who is that?” Nick asked.

Jack Peter stared at the sea, refusing to answer.

“Did you do this? Did you make the monster?”

“Yes,” he said. “I made it all.” With the edge of his mitten, he tapped his forehead.

“Well, we’re trapped. Between the ocean and that nightmare thing.”

Nick peeked around the edge of the rock to see what was keeping the monster. With a howl and a string of filthy curses, the creature rose from the ground. Scorched by the cold, its skin was mottled red and blue and snow sloughed off its limbs in thick clumps. Scouring the beach with its gaze, it found Nick before he could duck back behind cover. The fiend stepped forward, relentless.

There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape. Caught in the middle of a great nothing, they had no choice but to move toward the sea. The closer they came to the water, the less snow covered the ground, giving way entirely to sand where the waves lapped the shore, and though they could move faster on this bare surface, so, too, could the monster. They waded into the bubbling wash to the tops of their boots and then turned to face it. The monster lurched toward them and stopped just yards away, tottering on its bare feet and swaying in the storm.

*   *   *

Fire ran along the edges like quicksilver and ignited the drawings in a flash. Tim watched the papers burn and curl upon themselves and the black ash fly up the chimney like a murder of crows. At first he had not understood why Holly had asked him to destroy their son’s artwork, but he had obeyed without question or complaint. She rarely ordered him to do anything, and it was not until he actually looked at the images that he began to understand her logic. These were no ordinary childish portraits. Jip had drawn the wild man many times and in many variations, even though he had never seen him, and how could he, with the monster outside and the boy inside at all times? Only he and Nick had seen him, and never in such fine detail and execution, as if Jip had been face-to-face with it, as if Jip had been intimately wired into Nick’s mind.

Other disturbing visions populated the pages, none of which Jip could have witnessed. The big white dog appeared in several drawings, even though Tim and Nick were the only ones who had seen it firsthand in the back of the policeman’s car. Some drawings were mysteries—an army of monstrous babies, a woman who resembled Nell Weller but vaguely naked and predatory, a pair of bodies with hangers between their bare shoulder blades, bones of a skeleton littering the shore. Tim hobbled from room to room, finding papers scattered everywhere. He searched the entire upstairs floor and brought a bundle down to the fire, pitching them in batches without bothering to inspect the weird subjects, only to stop, stricken, at one drawing that grabbed his attention: the two boys tangled in a violent knot at the bottom of the sea. He guessed at once where Holly had gone, where the boys might be found, and he hurried to the picture window facing the ocean, praying that he was wrong.
Coming to life.

*   *   *

On feet red and blistered with frostbite, the monster walked closer, and the boys could see the sorrows on his face. Deep-set in bruised circles, his eyes conveyed a world of woe and regret. His mouth twisted and gaped slightly, and he seemed on the verge of telling them something. A plum-colored welt ringed his neck. His tangled hair and beard were curled and twisted as strands of kelp, and he was painfully thin, his bones could be counted through his sallow skin, and he had a look of long hunger. He lifted his arms from his sides and stretched his bony hands toward the boys, in a gesture both beseeching and threatening.

“What do you want?” Nick cried.

As if to answer, the monster opened its mouth, but no words came out, only a sound that began with an infant’s urgency and slowly loudened to a long drawn-out wail that resounded and echoed off the rocks and the dream house and sang out to the wide expanse of the sea. A human cry, born out of ancient suffering, turned inside out and full of unspeakable grief and longing.

The boys backed away from the creature, and when the waves struck his legs Nick recoiled from the shock of the frigid water. He heard Jack Peter cry out like a bird. Torn between surrender to the monster to end that tormenting pain and the desire to escape, Nick went deeper. A wave broke over his legs and crashed against his back, soaking him through his heavy coat and pulling him away from shore. As he sank, Nick felt the hands wrap around his waist and force him under.

The water stung like the prick of a thousand needles. The monster cried out in pain, the skin on its shoulders blackening and its hair turning to ash. Flames burst on its limbs, yet it kept marching toward them. Without warning they were going under. Nick had no chance for even a mouthful of air, and he found himself plunged in darkness, trying not to swallow water. The weight of his clothes made him sink quickly, with Jack Peter at his side, dragging and pushing him to the bottom. He fought the pressure on his chest, grappled and pulled at Jack Peter’s hands, fighting to be free. The waves, too, gripped and buffeted them, churning the silt and shells, and in the muck he felt as though he was being erased from the page, torn from the outside world.

*   *   *

Holly nearly crumpled to the ground in pain from the cold pressure boring into her skull. The boys had made footprints in the snow, and she followed a pair to the top of the hill. Slipping through the heavy wet snow, she climbed to the crest, the whole ocean spread out before her. Below, one of the boys cried out loudly from the shore. She searched desperately for any sight of them among the rocks or along the sandy shore. Her shouts thinned to a whisper in the blinding whiteness. When she saw a flash of red boots in the water and the navy blue of a child’s coat, she ran toward it, the beating in her head finally stilled, her heart exploding with what was in front of her.

They might be dead, she thought, by the time she reached them, but Holly flew to the tideline. She plunged into the water, anesthetized by its iciness, thrashing to the spot where she had last seen her son and diving underwater again and again in desperation. Breathless, she rose from the waves and saw at once Jack in a dead man’s float. She cried out his name and seized him by the coat, turned him over on his back, and towed him to the beach. On the edge of the sand, she rested, catching her breath. Black with soot, Tim had arrived and fished out Nick’s heavy wet body from the sea, but Holly was barely aware of anything else. They were alone in the quiet of the day, and she cradled her son in her arms,
my boy, my boy
, until the water streamed from his mouth, and his heart stirred.

vii.

The little girl with no hair smiled at him across the room, and Jack Peter returned her beatific grin with a smile of his own. When he noticed that his mother was watching, he bowed his head, blushing. Other people wandered in and out of the visitors’ lounge—a tired man rubbing the small of his back as he paced; two nurses on a coffee break; an older couple, the husband pushing his wife in her wheelchair and bending to offer some quiet comfort. The Keenans waited for some word, any word at all, now back at the hospital for another long day. Both boys had gone in to the emergency room after they had been pulled from the icy Atlantic. Jack Peter had been treated for mild hypothermia and shock, but Nicholas had not regained consciousness since the drowning. They had seen him once in the ICU, hooked up to a respirator and lying still on his back, a birdlike thing impossible to bear. Father Bolden and Miss Tiramaku had come for a visit and to say a few prayers, but his parents did not pray. They could only stare at the floor as the words were spoken.

Getting Nick’s parents off the cruise ship in the Caribbean had proved difficult, and then their flight from Miami to Portland had been postponed because of the blizzard. Texts and phone calls never suffice, and Holly and Tim agreed to keep vigil until the Wellers arrived. A small plastic Christmas tree sat on a table in the corner of the room, and on the walls were cutout decorations: Santa and his sleigh, sprigs of balsam, a blue and white menorah. Holly was grateful that the piped-in music had been changed from Christmas songs to some indecipherable pop mush playing softly in the background. Tim was giving the day’s newspaper a third read, and Jack passed the time, thankfully, without drawing. His fingers danced across the screen of her smart phone as he played another mindless game with fanatical desire.