Norton, Andre - Anthology (2 page)

 
          
 
"No!" Jason said as she started to
return the monkey to its place on the pillow. "I don't want him in bed
anymore. Put him on the dresser."

 
          
 
Molly couldn't blame him. Her own heart was
thumping faster than was comfortable, although that was mainly because she had
sped upstairs in such a hurry. She sat the monkey down hard on the dresser so
that the blue denim tail pointed up against the wall. Ugly thing, she thought.
There was a faint jingle from the bells around the monkey's neck as if in
answer, and for just the flicker of an eyelid the button eyes seemed to reflect
the light with a yellow gleam. "I don't want to stay up here," Jason
said. "I want to come down and watch television for a while."

 
          
 
Molly considered this. She would be in trouble
if he let it slip tomorrow that she allowed him to stay up late to watch
television. Still, if she made him stay up here and he scared himself sick
because of her stories, she would be in worse trouble. "Okay," she
said.

 
          
 
She left him curled up in their father's
armchair in the living room and went into the kitchen to heat some water for
instant cocoa. Maybe that would soothe him enough to send him back to bed.

 
          
 
When she returned to the living room, a
marshmallow-topped mug in each hand, she stumbled over something in the
doorway. "That's a dumb place to leave anything," she said as hot
cocoa sloshed over her fingers. "Why'd you bring that thing down, anyway?
I thought you didn't like him."

 
          
 
She gave the patchwork monkey a kick into the
middle of the room. It landed sitting up, facing her.

 
          
 
Jason huddled himself deeper into the corner
of the chair. "I didn't bring him."

 
          
 
"Well, I didn't bring him. So how else
did he get here?"

 
          
 
A little more cocoa spilled as Molly set the
dripping mugs added very firmly, "He certainly didn't come by
himself."

 
          
 
Jason stared at her from wide, dark eyes.
"I didn't bring him."

 
          
 
Molly stood quite still. The monkey had
drooped forward so that its front paws touched the floor between sprawled hind
legs. It looked as if it were gathering itself for a clumsy leap. A gust of rain
spattered against the windows. The drizzle that had been falling all day was
growing into a real storm.

 
          
 
"Maybe he did come by himself,"
Jason whispered.

 
          
 
So that was it. Molly suddenly understood.
Jason was trying to get even with her for scaring him. He was out to scare her.

 
          
 
"If you're going to be that silly, I'm
shutting him in the hall closet where he can't get out. I'd shut Mrs.
Welles
in there, too, if she was here."

 
          
 
Molly stalked to the monkey, grabbed it by its
arms, and marched into the hall. A pain jabbed her fingers. She knew it was
from the imitation claws, but it felt like tiny fangs sinking in. It felt, too,
as if the
monkey were
wriggling in her grip, trying to
get free, but that, of course, was only the effect of its heavy body swinging
from its captive arms. The thing must be stuffed with lead. She needed both
hands to thrust it up on the shelf in the closet.

 
          
 
"There." She slammed the door and
heard the latch snap into place.

 
          
 
Then she switched on the hall light and
another light inside the living room door and a third one on the other side of
the room. Not a shadow was left lurking anywhere. Then she twisted the
television dial to a channel that filled the screen with dancers in beautiful
gowns. Happy party music lilted from the speaker.

 
          
 
"Drink your cocoa," she told Jason.
"I don't want it." Jason was eyeing her fingers. There were streaks
of blood on them. "He bit you, too, didn't he?"

           
 
Molly put her hand to her mouth. The punctures
were beginning to smart. "Scratched, not bit. That's a dumb toy to give
anybody. It doesn't have to be alive to kill you."

 
          
 
"But what if it is?" Jason asked.

 
          
 
"Is what?" A flash of lightning
beyond the windows dimmed the lights for an instant.

 
          
 
"Is alive."
Jason gave a strange giggle. He was rubbing the scratch on his neck again.
"What if everything you said is really true?"

 
          
 
"That's crazy. And you're crazy to
believe it." Molly wished she had closed the drapes, but she didn't feel,
somehow, like walking to the end of the room to do it. "The monkey
belonged to Mrs.
Welles's
own children. She wouldn't
give an evil thing to her own children."

 
          
 
"Those weren't
her own
children. She was their stepmother, and they didn't like each other when she
first came to their house," Jason said. "She told me so."

 
          
 
And those children had all died as children.
How they had died no one remembered anymore; it had happened such a long time
ago. Molly had heard Mrs. Stark, the organist at church, telling her mother the
old story just yesterday. One child had died from falling downstairs in a fit,
Mrs. Stark thought. But nobody was still living who really knew, except Mrs.
Welles
, and she seemed to go on from generation to
generation, never growing any older or getting any younger. Were the patches on
the monkey from those stepchildren's clothes? Their clothes and no others?

 
          
 
"Anyway," Molly said a little too
loudly, "the
monkey's
shut away. He can't—"

 
          
 
A roll of thunder stopped her. It started as a
rumble that grew and grew until the house trembled. In the midst of it there
was a click in the hall. Molly's neck muscles went stiff. She couldn't turn her
head to look. But she didn't have to. She knew that the closet door had jarred
open. "It's true," Jason whispered into the silence that followed the
thunder. "True, what you said."

 
          
 
"No!" Molly cried. "Don't
believe it. Don't."

 
          
 
But they both heard the thud of something
falling—or jumping—to the floor from the closet shelf. They both heard the
jingle of brass bells.

 
          
 
Molly shot a glance at the living room door.
It was still empty. "Run," she said, and she hurled herself toward
the opening just as the lights flickered and went out.

 
          
 
Something bumped into her and knocked her
down. "Jason!" she yelled.

 
          
 
"Molly! Molly, help!"

 
          
 
He was behind her somewhere, lost in the dark.
There were scuffling noises and a crash. He kept crying to her, but his voice
seemed to come from first one direction and then another.

 
          
 
Molly was lost, too. A wall met her reaching
hands where the doorway should have been. She turned to the right and stumbled
against the armchair. Jason was no longer in it. The chair arm and the cushion
were warm with a sticky wetness. In the corner of the chair her fingers slid
across a glass ashtray like the ones she had set the cocoa mugs in.

 
          
 
"Jason," she called. "Where are
you?"

 
          
 
This time there was no answer, no sound
anywhere except the lashing of rain against the window.

 
          
 
A flare of lightning showed her the living
room doorway. She ran for it and into the blackness of the hall. The edge of
the closet door struck her head full force as though someone had pushed it. She
went down in a heap on the floor.

 
          
 
When her spinning wits cleared and she could
bear to lift her aching head, all the lights were on again. A woman on
television was talking cheerily about toilet bowl cleaners.

 
          
 
Neither Jason nor the patchwork
monkey were
anywhere to be seen.

           
 
"Jason?" she tried waveringly.

 
          
 
"Up here.
In my
room."
The voice was muffled a bit, but it was Jason's sure enough,
and he wasn't crying.

 
          
 
He came out of his bedroom fully dressed as
Molly gained the top of the stairs. His eyes were round and black in a very
white face, but he was smiling.

 
          
 
"Where are your pajamas?" she asked.
He ducked his head, avoiding her eyes as he tucked his shirt inside his faded
blue denim jeans. "I changed them. They got—messed up."

 
          
 
His rumpled hair stood up like tufts of brown
yarn. The shirt he had on was the patchwork one their grandmother had given him
for his birthday. Molly hadn't ever noticed before that one of the patches was
a triangle of blue gingham on the left shoulder. Or that at the throat there
was a square of yellow the exact same shade as Jason's pajamas.

 
          
 
"What happened to you? How did you get up
here?" She was groping behind her for the stair rail, but she couldn't
find it.

 
          
 
"Don't you know?" Jason stretched
out a hand still half-covered in a pink candy-striped cuff. "Come on. I'll
show you."

 
          
 
"No." Molly raised her arm to ward
him off. "Stay there. Stop it. Stop fooling."

 
          
 
He started toward her, his smile growing wider
and thinner until it was a red line of yarn across his flat face. He laughed in
a silly falsetto that wasn't Jason's laugh at all. "I'm not fooling,"
the monkey said.

 
          
 
Molly shrank away from the blazing yellow of
his eyes.

 
          
 
The bells around his neck jingled as he moved
closer. "No," she cried once more. "I don't believe you. You're
not real."

 
          
 
And she stepped backward off the
stairstep
—into space.
. ..

            
The digital clock on
the nightstand showed exactly
midnight
when Steve
Glimson
sat up in bed, wondering what had wakened him. He couldn't remember hearing a
noise.

            
He didn't have a
stomachache. And nobody had turned on a light. Yet here he was, sitting bolt
upright in a pitch-dark room—waiting.
For what?

            
Though the summer
night air was balmy, he shivered.

            
As though
sleepwalking, he slid from the upper bunk and dropped silently to the floor.
Beyond the open window only blackness met his gaze. Yet he knew something was
out there.

            
"Phew!" he
gasped, clapping his hand over his nose and mouth as he caught a whiff of a
musty odor—like rotten garbage.

            
At the sound of his
low exclamation, two lights flickered in the darkness just outside his window.
He felt his skin crawl as he stared, convinced somehow that these

two
glowing lights were eyes staring at him.
Yet how could they be? He had seen many wild animals in the woods surrounding
the farm, but always their eyes reflected light, they never generated the light
themselves. But on this moonless night there was no light to be reflected, and
the house was in total darkness.

 
          
 
"What's up, Steve?" came a sleepy
voice from the lower bunk.

 
          
 
"Nothing," he managed to say without
a quiver. When he slammed shut the window, the two points of light disappeared.
Only then did he turn to face his younger brother, Irwin.
"Just
closing the window because of the stink."

 
          
 
"What stink?" Irwin mumbled. "I
don't smell anything."

 
          
 
"You couldn't smell cow dung if you fell
in it."

 
          
 
"Sorry," Irwin said into his pillow,
and immediately Steve regretted snapping at his brother. It wasn't fun having
stopped-up sinuses like Irwin did, and the kid was sensitive about his allergy.

 
          
 
Steve climbed back into bed, but sleep was a
long time coming. He kept seeing those two glowing lights. Finally he fell into
restless sleep.

 
          
 
The sound of Irwin opening the window woke
him, and he struggled off the bunk bed, feeling strangely tired. He looked at
the eight-year-old boy, five years younger than himself. Maybe it was because
Irwin was small for his age, or because he was a slow learner—not really
mentally retarded, Steve insisted to
himself
, but slow
in grasping new ideas. Anyway, it always made Steve feel protective about his
brother—a protectiveness he didn't feel for his eight-year-old cousin, Emmy,
who was spending the summer with them, or for Adele, his fifteen-year-old
sister. He only felt that way about Irwin. But then, everyone in the family had
a special feeling for Irwin. The two boys raced to see who would be the first
one dressed, and Steve deliberately put his shirt on inside out, so he had to
take it off and put it on again. Irwin's gleeful "I won!" made Steve
feel better after the way he had spoken last night.

 
          
 
Steve went with Irwin out to the chicken house
to gather the eggs, Irwin's before-breakfast job. On their way back to the
house, Steve stopped in mid-stride, staring at several huge footprints in the
dirt outside his window. His dark hair felt stiff at the roots, and his body
was suddenly clammy. Automatically he wiped his hands on his jeans. Through his
mind flashed thoughts of the terrible creature the local Indians called the
Yamadan
, the monster that lived in the forest. He glanced around,
expecting to see the burning eyes, but all he saw were Adele's two horses
rounding the house at full gallop. Adele was on one, Emmy was on the other.

 
          
 
Dodging, he leaped up on the back porch step
and yanked Irwin up with him, yelling at his sister for being so reckless.
Irwin found the momentary excitement amusing, but Steve's thoughts were still
on the footprints. They had been obliterated.

 
          
 
"Are you okay?" Mom asked when Steve
came into the kitchen. "You look pale." She touched her hand to his forehead,
but felt no fever.

 
          
 
"You'd be pale if you had two dumb girls
galloping their
horses
right at you," he snapped.
"They could've run over Irwin."

 
          
 
Mom clucked, as she usually did when her
children bickered, but she didn't seem concerned.

 
          
 
When they were all gathered around the
breakfast table, Steve looked at his square-faced father. "Dad," he
began, feeling a little uncertain. His father wasn't one to put up with ghost
stories and such. "Have there been any bears around here lately?" Those
footprints probably had a very logical explanation.

           
 
"Bears?"
Dad said, looking up while he nibbled a strip of bacon.
"No—not
in the last few years."

 
          
 
"You sure?"

 
          
 
"Sure as I am that hens lay eggs. Not a
farm around here has seen a bear—or even a bear print for that matter, since .
. ." He paused to think, ". . . since the rangers moved the last of
them to the national parks. That's been seven or eight years at least."

 
          
 
Steve's heart seemed to stop for a moment. No
bears. His logical explanation dissolved.

 
          
 
"W-what about a
Yamadan
?
They—" Dad slammed a fist on the table
so hard that the dishes clattered, and Irwin timidly shrank in his chair.
Automatically, without being fully aware that he was doing it, Steve put a hand
over Irwin's. His younger brother smiled and resumed his silent eating.

 
          
 
"
Yamadan
!
Yamadan
!"
Dad growled.
"A lot of Indian gobbledygook.
Horned beasts that walk like man, mysterious disappearances, moss-draped
forest—utter nonsense!" He glared at Steve. "Look for yourself. Do
you see moss hanging from the trees in our woods?"

 
          
 
Steve shook his head. All of the surrounding
woodland was filled with oaks, birches, and other more delicate trees. Yet
Indian legends said that these very woods, the home of the
Yamadan
,
were dark, dank, and draped in ghostly moss.

 
          
 
"What brought this subject up?"
Adele asked in the imperious tone she had been using lately.

 
          
 
"Steve's trying to scare us because we
scared him," Emmy suggested, and she grinned tauntingly, showing a
mouthful of braces. Steve ignored her.

 
          
 
"I'll have no more talk about the
Yamadans
," Dad said sternly, nodding toward Irwin who
was busy eating his oatmeal. Then in a gentle voice he added, "I won't and
concentrated on his breakfast.

 
          
 
When the meal was over, Steve went out to do his
chores. Theirs was known as a truck farm, growing mostly corn, melons, and
squashes. And back toward the woods was open pasture land for their cows.

 
          
 
"When you finish your chores around the
house," Dad said, "I could sure use some help. How about harvesting
the ripe corn?"

 
          
 
Steve nodded as an idea formed in his mind.
When he finally got to the cornfield, he hurriedly filled his big bags with the
ripened ears, and then left
them,
darting off beyond
the pumpkin patch to the clump of trees where old
Nobara
lived in his log cabin.
Nobara
claimed he was an
Indian chief, but there wasn't much left to be chief over. Only six Indians,
the remnants of what was once a proud tribe, still lived in this grove, and Dad
didn't like Steve to hang around them. He said they made up stories that
frightened the neighboring children, and that it was only at the sheriff's
insistence, that they kept quiet. But today Steve needed information.

 
          
 
The old chief sat on the stoop of his cabin by
the front door. Though
Nobara
wore the conventional
jeans and plaid shirt of his neighbors, he still preferred moccasins to shoes,
and he tied a red silk band around his gray hair. His dark face was all lines
as he smiled a welcome, but his eyes held the usual deep sadness. Steve had often
wondered what tragic event in the old man's life had brought such grief to him.
As far as he knew,
Nobara
had never fought in any
wars, nor had any of his immediate family been massacred. Yet he must have
known some great sorrow.

 
          
 
Today, as usual, the old man seemed pleased to
see Steve, and he talked of the little squirrels he was trying to lure closer
to eat the acorns he had gathered for them.

 
          
 
"
Nobara
,"
Steve said when there was a moment of like a bear?" He tried to steady his
voice.

 
          
 
"Big tracks,"
Nobara
said, nodding, "but two—not four like the bear."

 
          
 
"What kind of . . ." Steve
hesitated, shivering despite the heat. He wanted to know, yet he was afraid to
find out. "What are its eyes like?"

 
          
 
For a moment
Nobara
looked startled.
"Eyes?
Why do you ask about its
eyes?"

 
          
 
Steve shrugged. "Oh, I don't know,"
he said carelessly. "I just wondered, I guess. I've heard that the
Yamadan
is big and hairy, and that it has horns, and claws
for hands. But I never heard about its eyes, and eyes are important. You can
tell a lot by eyes."

 
          
 
"Like fire,"
Nobara
said in a low voice. "Eyes like fire." "Have you ever seen a
Yamadan
?" Steve asked, remembering the red glowing
lights of last night.

 
          
 
The old Indian shook his head. "If I had,
I would not be here to talk with you now. To see it is to die. In all time,
only one man ever saw it and lived. That is why I know how it looks."

 
          
 
"Who saw it?" Steve's voice cracked.
Nobara
, looking uneasy, shuffled his
moccasined
feet.
"My father's
brother."

 
          
 
Steve's eyes widened in
surprise.
"Tell me about it," he pleaded.

 
          
 
For a long time
Nobara
said nothing. When he finally spoke, his voice shook with dread. "The
Yamadans
—there are two, both males—they are necessary to
each other. When one dies, the other must get a new companion."

            
"How?"
Steve murmured, feeling goose bumps. "It steals a man ... or a boy. It
changes him into a
Yamadan
."

 
          
 
"It stole your uncle?" Steve asked
in awe.
Nobara
nodded.
"When I
was only a boy, my uncle so disappeared.
He came back a few days later
and told about the
Yamadan
—said it lives in a wet,
gloomy forest with much moss. He said he began to change—to grow horns and hair
on his body—and he begged the
Yamadan
to let him go
home. Uncle talked to animals. The
Yamadan
understood
and let him go."