little spooked after a couple of weeks of this; she told Vic one morning in a kind of laughing, nervous way that things in Tad’s closet sometimes appeared moved around. Well, Tad did it, Vic had responded. You don’t understand, Donna said. He doesn’t go back there any more, Vic . . . never. He’s scared to. And she had added that sometimes it seemed to her that the closet actually smelled bad after Tad’s bouts of nightmare, followed by waking fear. Like an animal had been caged up in there. Disturbed, Vic had gone into the closet and sniffed. In his mind was a half-formed idea that perhaps Tad was sleepwalking ; perhaps going into his closet and urinating in there as a part of some odd dream cycle. He had smelled nothing but mothballs. The closet, finished wall on one side and bare lathing on the other, stretched back some eight feet. It was as narrow as a Pullman car. There was no boogeyman back in there, and Vic most certainly did not come out in Narnia. He got a few cobwebs in his hair. That was all.
Donna had suggested first what she called “good-dream thoughts” to combat Tad’s night fears, then prayer. Tad responded to the former by saying that the thing in his closet stole his good-dream thoughts; he responded to the latter by saying that since God didn’t believe in monsters, prayers were useless. Her temper had snapped—perhaps partly because she had been spooked by Tad’s closet herself. Once, while hanging some of Tad’s shirts in there, the door had swung quietly shut behind her and she’d had a bad forty seconds fumbling her way back to the door and getting out. She had smelled something in there that time—something hot and close and violent. A matted smell. It reminded her a little of Steve Kemp’s sweat after they finished making love. The upshot was her curt suggestion that since there were no such things as monsters, Tad should put the whole thing out of his mind, hug his Teddy, and go to sleep.
Vic either saw more deeply or remembered more clearly about the closet door that turned into an unhinged idiot mouth in the dark of night, a place where strange things sometimes rustled, a place where hanging clothes sometimes turned into hanging men. He remembered vaguely about the shadows the streetlight could throw on the wall in the endless four hours that follow the turn of the day, and the creaking sounds that might have been the house settling or that might—just might—be something creeping up.
His solution had been the Monster Catechism, or just the Monster Words if you were four and not much into semantics. Either way, it was nothing more (nor less) than a primitive incantation to keep evil at bay. Vic had invented it one day on his lunch hour, and to Donna’s mixed relief and chagrin, it worked when her own efforts to use psychology, Parent Effectiveness Training, and, finally, blunt discipline had failed. Vic spoke it over Tad’s bed every night like a benediction as Tad lay there naked under a single sheet in the sweltering dark.
“Do you think that’s going to do him any good in the long run?” Donna asked. Her voice held both amusement and irritation. This had been in mid-May, when the tensions between them had been running high.
“Admen don’t care about the long run,” Vic had answered. “They care about fast, fast, fast relief. And I’m good at my job.”
“Yeah, nobody to say the Monster Words, that’s the matter, that’s a lot the matter,” Tad answered now, wiping the tears off his cheeks in disgust and embarrassment.
“Well, listen,” Vic said. “They’re written down. That’s how I can say them the same every night. I’ll print them on a piece of paper and tack them to your wall. And Mommy can read them to you every night I’m gone.”
“Yeah? Will you?”
“Sure. Said I would.”
“You won’t forget?”
“No way, man. I’ll do it tonight.”
Tad put his arms around his father, and Vic hugged him tight.
That night, after Tad slept, Vic went quietly into the boy’s room and tacked a sheet of paper to the wall with a pushpin. He put it right next to Tad’s Mighty Marvel Calendar, where the kid couldn’t miss it. Printed in large, clear letters on this sheet of paper was: THE MONSTER WORDS