Its tail switched, making little chinking sounds against the porcelain side of the last urinal.
The tiger looked quite hungry and very vicious.
Charles hurried back the way he had come. The door seemed to take forever to wheeze pneumatically closed behind him, but when it did, he considered himself safe. This door only swung in, and he could not remember ever reading or hearing that tigers are smart enough to open doors.
Charles wiped the back of his hand across his nose. His heart was thumping so hard he could hear it. He still needed to go to the basement, worse than ever.
He squirmed, winced, and pressed a hand against his belly. He really had to go to the basement. If he could only be sure no one would come, he could use the girls’. It was right across the hall. Charles looked at it longingly, knowing he would never dare, not in a million years. What if Cathy Scott should come? Or—black horror!—what if Miss Bird should come?
Perhaps he had imagined the tiger.
He opened the door wide enough for one eye and peeked in.
The tiger was peeking back from around the angle of the L, its eye a sparkling green. Charles fancied he could see a tiny blue fleck in that deep brilliance, as if the tiger’s eye had eaten one of his own. As if—A hand slid around his neck.
Charles gave a stifled cry and felt his heart and stomach cram up into his throat. For one terrible moment he thought he was going to wet himself.
It was Kenny Griffen, smiling complacently. ” Bird sent me after you ’cause you been gone six years.
You’re in trouble.”
“Yeah, but I can’t go to the basement,” Charles said, feeling faint with the fright Kenny had given him.
“Yer constipated!” Kenny chortled gleefully. “Wait’ll I tell Caaathy!”
“You better not!” Charles said urgently. “Besides, I’m not. There’s a tiger in there.”
“What’s he doing?” Kenny asked. “Takin a piss?”
“I don’t know,” Charles said, turning his face to the wall. “I just wish he’d go away.” He began to weep.
“Hey,” Kenny said, bewildered and a little frightened. “Hey.”
“What if I have to go? What if I can’t help it? Bird’ll say—”
“Come on,” Kenny said, grabbing his arm in one hand and pushing the door open with the other. “You’re making it up.” They were inside before Charles, terrified, could break free and cower back against the door.
“Tiger,” Kenny said disgustedly. “Boy, Bird’s gonna kill you.”
“It’s around the other side.” Kenny began to walk past the washbowls. “Kitty-kitty-kitty? Kitty?”
“Don’t!” Charles hissed.
Kenny disappeared around the corner. “Kitty-kitty? Kitty-kitty? Kit—” Charles darted out the door again and pressed himself against the wall, waiting, his hands over his mouth and his eyes squinched shut, waiting, waiting for the scream.
There was no scream.
He had no idea how long he stood there, frozen, his bladder bursting. He looked at the door to the boys’ basement. It told him nothing. It was just a door.
He wouldn’t.
He couldn’t.
But at last he went in.
The washbowls and the mirrors were neat, and the faint smell of chlorine was unchanged. But there seemed to be a smell under it. A faint, unpleasant smell, like freshly sheared copper.
With groaning (but silent) trepidation, he went to the corner of the L and peeped around.
The tiger was sprawled on the floor, licking its large paws with a long pink tongue. It looked incuriously at Charles. There was a torn piece of shirt caught in one set of claws.
But his need was a white agony now, and he couldn’t help it. He had to. Charles tiptoed back to the white porcelain basin closest the door.
Bird slammed in just as he was zipping his pants.
“Why, you dirty, filthy little boy,” she said almost reflectively.
Charles was keeping a weather eye on the comer. “I’m sorry, Bird… the tiger… I’m going to clean the sink… I’ll use soap… I swear I will…”
“Where’s Kenneth?” Bird asked calmly.
“I don’t know.” He didn’t, really.
“Is he back there?”
“No!” Charles cried.
Bird stalked to the place where the room bent. ‘ ‘Come here, Kenneth. Right this moment.”
” Bird—” But Miss Bird was already around the corner. She meant to pounce. Charles thought Bird was about to find out what pouncing was really all about.
He went out the door again. He got a drink at the drinking fountain. He looked at the American flag hanging over the entrance to the gym. He looked at the bulletin board. Woodsy Owl said GIVE A HOOT, DONT 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 Shelburn saw it, when his son Dennis pulled it out of a moldering 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 tike 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 I found that goddammed monkey in that same box.
Terry. had moved away to examine a wooden crate filled with knickknacks, duckwalking because the pitch of the eaves was so sharp.
“I don’t like it,” Petey said, and felt for Hal’s hand. “Dennis can 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 tong 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…