at the bulletin board. Woodsy Owl said GIVE A HOOT, DON’T POLLUTE. Officer Friendly said NEVER RIDE WITH STRANGERS. Charles read everything twice.
Then he went back to the classroom, walked down his row to his seat with his eyes on the floor, and slid into his seat. It was a quarter to eleven. He took out Roads to Everywhere and began to read about Bill at the Rodeo.
The Monkey
When Hal Shelbum saw it, when his son Dennis pulled it out of a mouldering Ralston-Purina carton that had been pushed far back under one attic eave, such a feeling of horror and dismay rose in him that for one moment he thought he would scream. He put one fist to his mouth, as if to cram it back... and then merely coughed into his fist. Neither Terry nor Dennis noticed, but Petey looked around, momentarily curious.
“Hey, neat,” Dennis said respectfully. It was a tone Hal rarely got from the boy anymore himself. Dennis was twelve.
“What is it?” Peter asked. He glanced at his father again before his eyes were dragged back to the thing his big brother had found. “What is it, Daddy?”
“It’s a monkey, fartbrains,” Dennis said. “Haven’t you ever seen a monkey before?”
“Don’t call your brother fartbrains,” Terry said automatically, and began to examine a box of curtains. The curtains were slimy with mildew and she dropped them quickly. “Uck.”
“Can I have it, Daddy?” Petey asked. He was nine.
“What do you mean?” Dennis cried. “I found it!”
“Boys, please,” Terry said. “I’m getting a headache.”
Hal barely heard them. The monkey glimmered up at him from his older son’s hands, grinning its old familiar grin. The same grin that had haunted his nightmares as a kid, haunted them until he had—
Outside a cold gust of wind rose, and for a moment lips with no flesh blew a long note through the old, rusty gutter outside. Petey stepped closer to his father, eyes moving uneasily to the rough attic roof through which nailheads poked.
“What was that, Daddy?” he asked as the whistle died to a guttural buzz.
“Just the wind,” Hal said, still looking at the monkey. Its cymbals, crescents of brass rather than full circles in the weak light of the one naked bulb, were moveless, perhaps a foot apart, and he added automatically, “Wind can whistle, but it can’t carry a tune.” Then he realized that was a saying of Uncle Will’s, and a goose ran over his grave.
The note came again, the wind coming off Crystal Lake in a long, droning swoop and then wavering in the gutter. Half a dozen small drafts puffed cold October air into Hal’s face—God, this place was so much like the back closet of the house in Hartford that they might all have been transported thirty years back in time.
I won’t think about that.
But now of course it was all he could think about.
In the back closet where Ifoundthat goddammed monkey in that same box.
Terry had moved away to examine a wooden crate filled with knickknacks, duck-walking because the pitch of the eaves was so sharp.
“I don’t like it,” Petey said, and felt for Hal’s hand. “Dennis c’n have it if he wants. Can we go, Daddy?”
“Worried about ghosts, chickenguts?” Dennis inquired.
“Dennis, you stop it,” Terry said absently. She picked up a waferthin cup with a Chinese pattern. “This is nice. This—”
Hal saw that Dennis had found the wind-up key in the monkey’s back. Terror flew through him on dark wings.
“Don’t do that!”
It came out more sharply than he had intended, and he had snatched the monkey out of Dennis’s hands before he was really aware he had done it. Dennis looked around at him, startled. Terry had also glanced back over her shoulder, and Petey looked up. For a moment they were all silent, and the wind whistled again, very low this time, like an unpleasant invitation.
“I mean, it’s probably broken,” Hal said.
It used to be broken ... except when it wanted not to be.
“Well, you didn’t have to grab,” Dennis said.
“Dennis, shut up.”
Dennis blinked and for a moment looked almost uneasy. Hal hadn’t spoken to him so sharply in a long time. Not since he had lost his job with National Aerodyne in California two years before and they had moved to Texas. Dennis decided not to push it ... for now. He turned back to the Ralston-Purina carton and began to root through it again, but the other stuff was nothing but junk. Broken toys bleeding springs and stuffings.