by Jeffrey Ford
“Tonight,” he says, “me and my partner, Shell, and the masseuse, we’re going over the garden wall, so to speak. Heading on, further in, to the Source of Glory.” “What’s that?” you ask. “The next inn down the road,” he says. “I’ve heard you don’t have to be on time to meals, you can sleep as much as you want, cheap beer night, Bingo, you know, better shit.” “Can you get weed there?” you ask. Manfred giggles. He assures you that is not a problem at the Source. Then he leans over and speaks like a distant cry into your ear. “Through the library through the secret door, to the Grotto. Dive in, dive deep, and let the blind fish guide you with their lights. You will come up in a pool on the other side of the inn’s boundaries. The Dog will have no hold on you. And, by the way, your partner, I just saw them before coming in here a moment ago, out on one of the divans in the Mushroom Garden, reading a book.”
You thank Manfred profusely and then you’re off, asking along the way for directions to the spot. You are sent outdoors and off to the east and then south through the ostrich stables, around the Fountain of the Demon Fairy to look for a path through the woods that will lead to where the mushrooms grow. As you are frantically jogging, it strikes you that the sky is darkening. You look at your watch—5:50 p.m. Dinner will be served imminently and you need to be there, but you must see your partner. After all these years, first you will find them and then you can flee to the dining hall holding hands, together again. But now you’ve made a turn around the corner of a wooden corn crib, expecting to see the path to the Mushroom Garden. There are three paths leading into the woods. You stop to think which one you should take, and a few moments later wake from a daze, already walking along a path in the woods.
The sun is setting and the thickets are filling with indigo and stars. An owl calls. The wind blows strong against you on the path. Time sidles by and is gone on ahead. At exactly 6:01 p.m., you look up, drawn by the sound of someone crying in the distance. There on a white divan on the side of the path, is your partner, your friend. You rush to them. Their eyes are dark and glassy, and in their hand, you find the Pistol Witch pipe. They wake suddenly and see it is you, and they cry, and you cry, wrap your arms around each other and hold tight. A comet passes overhead with a golden tail and drops sparks down through the trees. You kiss.
Your partner pulls away and says in distress, “We’re missing dinner.” You comfort them and tell about your plans to escape the Dreaming Dog through the grotto. They tell you, “Yes, I’ll follow you. This place is dark. I fear we won’t last long here. The Dog takes it out of you, one weary bite at a time.” “OK,” you say, “I just have to go back to my room and get my stuff. Come on.” You take your partner’s hand in yours and it makes you strong and together you fly down the path with the wind at your backs toward the looming shadow of the inn. When you reach it, you enter through the laundry, which is empty during the dinner hour. You know they are aware of your absence from the dining hall because you two hide beneath a table with a cloth on it as two of the burly guards with tiny heads, like nipples with eyes and mouths, screech and warble about how not only are you wanted by the inn but Gas has just arrived from the mountain claiming you left him to die and he’s murderously angry.
The weird search party moves on, and you sneak down empty hallways to your room. By the time you reach it, it is almost 7:00 p.m. Another minute and people will be everywhere at the inn. You hurriedly put your pack together and your partner helps you. All is ready. You head for the door and suddenly stop. Your partner isn’t moving. They tell you that in the time they’ve been waiting for you at the Dreaming Dog, they’ve gotten hooked on Pistol Witch. “I’m going to need to take a stash of it with us and work my way off it. But if I try to quit like that,” they say and snap their fingers, “it’ll kill me.” “OK,” you say, because you will promise them anything; meanwhile you hear voices outside returning to the rooms and gardens from dinner.
Together you smash in three doors to three different rooms and easily find the Witch stash in each room. The operation takes mere minutes and you’re dragging your partner out of the last room as they’re reaching back to pocket the pipe and matches, when who should appear at the door to block your escape? That’s right, Gas. Gaspar Maloney, with the two nipple heads backing him up, toting electric cattle prods and pistols. You two retreat up against the wall, and Gas gets closer. “Oh, you’re gonna touch it,” he says and points his leather flesh at you. “After I make them touch it,” he says over his shoulder, “shoot them both dead and bury them out in the Mushroom Garden. I’ll trip on the red caps that grow from the loam of their disintegration.” Gas takes a step toward you, and you ready yourself to resist his efforts.
And in that instant, the entire inn gives a shiver, distant cries fill the air, and a loudspeaker sounds from under the couch of the room you’ve broken into. An announcement is broadcast throughout the room, echoing throughout the inn. “The dog is dreaming. I repeat, the dog is dreaming. Run for your lives.” The inn explodes with the sound of a stampede, everyone heading for the exits. Gas forgets his revenge and he and the guards take off. Your partner tells you to run and that the dream of the dog is an agonizing death. You run, side by side, the opposite direction from the crowd mobbing the hallway. Every foot forward is a battle against the tide. You’re heading for the library and the spiral bone staircase into the grotto. Eventually the crowds thin and you can make your way. Your partner warns you that when the green dog of the inn dreams, he sends out a pack of dream dogs that devour the customers, taking some kind of ethereal sustenance from their captured souls. The inn is merely a trap, a place for the dream dogs to feed when hungry. As you turn the last corner for the library, you see one of the creatures, peeling, with its teeth, the outer film of reality from a screaming Shell Tock.
The wispy blur of the creature peels the poor fellow like an onion, completely devouring every layer with misty fangs sharper than bone. You watch Tock vanish before your eyes; every scream more terrible the less of him there is. “Watch,” your partner whispers in your ear when there is but one more mouthful of prey. The dream dog eats it and lays down to sleep. As it touches the floor, its green miasma disappears. You run past where the horrifying spectacle took place, and it’s as if nothing ever happened there. You enter the library, find the door to the spiral stairs, and the two of you descend. Behind you, at barely a distance, comes the sound of the pack bearing down. The dream dogs are on the stairs, gliding step to step like nimble dancers.
You are at the edge of the pool; the approaching howls and yips resound off the rock walls. You take each other’s hands and leap, and the moment you touch the warm water, the blind fish flee, taking their light and warmth, and you plunge down and down. Frantically you grope for an escape beyond the boundary of the inn. But soon enough you realize the blind fish will not be leading you with their light, there is no escape from the Inn of the Dreaming Dog, there is no Source of Glory. Stop struggling, put your arms around each other tight, and fall into the dark together.
Monkey in the Woods
When I first heard about it, I was like, “Yeah, OK.” Then my brother told me he’d actually seen it swing from branch to branch off into distant trees. I liked the idea of it even if it wasn’t true. But I eventually saw it, a few days after Christmas, staring down at me from high in a maple only a few hundred yards behind the school. It had a white beard and bushy white eyebrows, a little embroidered vest, a red fez with a chin strap. Its canines were curved. The tail was long and ended in a Q, like the beginning of a knot. Its foot hands clung to a branch, and its free hand pointed a finger at me. It screamed, eyes bulging, and I fled.
I’d seen that monkey only five months earlier. It was part of a traveling summer carnival that set up in Brightwaters every year, two towns east. The scene was corn dogs, scumbags and sketchy rides, one of which was called The Round Up. It used centrifugal force by spinning people so fast they stuck to the wall of the contraption and then
the bottom fell out. This kid in my class, Leacock, took a turn at it and puked. The vomit went right down the curving row of spinners and smacked each one in the face. I stayed away from those rides due to a story I’d heard on my transistor radio. It was about a girl who went on a summer carnival attraction called The Twister and got her long hair caught in the machinery. The Twister twisted it right off her head along with her scalp.
There was an organ-grinder making the rounds at the fairground of the carnival in Brightwaters, and he had a monkey on a thin, six-foot chain. It stole people’s food, and if they complained, the thing would climb up their clothing and punch them between the eyes. My brother got punched by it and he said its fist was hard as a nail. The last night before the carnival pulled up stakes and moved on, I was there, and saw a dark-haired woman come stumbling out of the crowd and whirling lights in a red dress. She had her hand to her face and blood was seeping around her fingers. Somebody she knew called to her, “Joan, what happened?” and she said, “That fuckin’ monkey bit my face.”
That woman, Joan, had them call the cops on Giacomo (that was the monkey’s name). I stayed as long as I could, but my father was sitting in the Biscayne out under the tall dark trees, reading the horse paper, and I promised him I’d be back in an hour and a half. The cops arrived as I was running to the car. On my way, I stopped for a moment and wormed into a crowd that had formed around Giacomo and his owner. The old man was cowering at the center of the ring. People were red in the face, screaming at him. The monkey intermittently laughed and bent over to pat its ass, long tail wriggling like a snake. The chant “Kill it!” chased me as I raced across the dirt parking lot.
At Christmastime, two nights prior to the big day, snow falling outside the living-room window, by the glow of the tree’s blue light my brother whispered to me so the adults in the dining room drinking wouldn’t hear, “Martin Gompers saw a monkey in the woods today.”
“Where?”
“Pretty far in. Almost to the sugar sand, swinging from branch to branch like Tarzan.”
“Gompers is an idiot,” I said.
You’d think, right then, though, when my brother told me what Gompers said, I would immediately recall the incident at the carnival with Giacomo, but no, I never did. Months had passed and it was Christmas time and snowing and we were free from school and presents were in the offing. Besides, Gompers was a large lumpen nitwit with a bowl haircut and buck teeth. In gym class one day he strangled me until I managed to kick him in the shins and run. I never put it together that the woods the sighting took place in was large and ranged east across two towns and ended right at the field where the Brightwaters carnival was held each summer.
In the days after Christmas, when kids were in the snowy woods trying out new BB guns and hiding from their parents, there came further reports of a monkey. This time from a reputable source. Supposedly the beast threw a handful of acorns down onto Daisy Cooper, girl genius. She thought it meant the monkey was hungry. The next day she brought apples and peanut butter sandwiches to the same spot near the bend in the stream where the sassafras trees grew. She looked up and told the monkey to come down and eat. The monkey screamed at her until she left. After I heard that story, I pictured her at night, in her pajamas, in her bedroom, writing about it in her diary.
Two weeks went by, and at least every other day there was a new sighting either in the woods or around the houses on its perimeter. There was one Wednesday when there were four sightings. My brother kept me apprised of all the monkey gossip. He was two years older and had friends. On New Year’s Eve, all the neighbors came to our house. My mother played the piano, and the drinks were flowing. I stole some whiskey sour from the blender and ate a handful of maraschino cherries. Mr. Makanan from next door was half in the bag, which was halfway to how far he usually was in the bag. He was talking to my father, and I walked over and sat down.
“Did you hear all the hubbub about a monkey in the woods behind the school?” he asked and then burped with his mouth closed. I nodded and my father shook his head. Makanan had blubbery lips and was a tad breathless. Still he pressed on and said, “I was at the carnival this past summer and there was an incident wherein a woman I happen to know, my secretary, was assaulted by the organ-grinder’s monkey. I tell ya, that monkey bit the wrong woman. Joany’s a bitch on wheels. Had the cops there, the whole thing. She was threatening lawsuits. The owner of the carnival made a deal with her. If he killed the monkey and he let her watch it die, would she relent on the legal action? She agreed.”
Makanan pulled himself to his feet, ice cubes clinking in his glass, and said, “Be back with a refill.” I was intrigued by the story, but it was late, past midnight, and I leaned back and into my father. The cigarette smoke and the faint aroma of machining oil that never left him were like a magic sleep perfume to me. We watched the snow outside, fat flakes falling through the light of the streetlamp across the way. I eventually dozed off and was somewhere between sleep and waking when I heard above the low music and conversation of the guests Makanan’s voice. Even as deep in as I was, I could tell he was yet more loaded. I heard and envisioned whatever he spoke.
He stayed with Joan and her two sons until after the carnival had closed down and the rides were locked up. In the pitch dark, they were ushered by the carnival clown, fake nose and makeup still on him, into a clearing in the woods beyond the field. Someone handed him a flashlight that hardly cut the night. Giacomo’s owner was there and three of the carnival workers who ran the rides; each had a shotgun. The carnival owner had a pistol in a holster on his belt. Giacomo’s hands were tied with cord behind his back. He stood against the trunk of a giant oak lit by the headlamps of a tractor. Joan’s kids were crying at the fact that their mom was going to have a monkey killed. She told them, “Shut it.” They grew quiet, but the tears still rolled. “Gentlemen?” she said.
“Ready,” said the head of the carnival.
The organ-grinder dropped to his knees as the three shotguns rose to aim dead center on Giacomo’s heart. The monkey somehow knew it was in a bad spot and its teeth were chattering. The owner took out his pistol and aimed as well, but before he could give the order to fire, the organ-grinder said something, one word, a command in whatever language was his, and in an instant, Giacomo was free. Before the cord that had bound him hit the ground, he was streaking toward his firing squad.
One stupendous leap and he was on the face of the middle shooter. With his back foot he kicked the double barrel of the shotgun and it went off and sprayed the first shooter’s knee, ripping his pants to bloody shreds. With a wild scream from both the monkey and his victim, the middle shooter’s left eye came out of its socket on the sharp fingers of Giacomo. The head of the carnival stared in astonishment, his mouth wide and dark as a cavern’s. The monkey used the one-eyed man’s shoulders as a platform from which to leap up and grab a low-hanging branch. While the poor middle shooter fell to the ground to join the first shooter, the third shooter took aim. Before he could pull the trigger, a prodigious rain of monkey shit fell on Joan, her sons, the three shooters, the organ-grinder, the head of the carnival, and Mr. Makanan.
As the snow subsided, so did sightings of the monkey. He may have been hiding among the thick branches of a pine. That was my brother’s theory. I didn’t want to picture Giacomo dead, that snarling face finally slack with peace at the blue heart of a snow drift he’d fallen into from the branches high above. I don’t think Gompers ever gave up on seeing Giacomo. I bet if I were to run into him today, he’d lean close to me, suck on those big fucking horse chompers, and whisper with a misty chaser of spit, “There’s a monkey in the woods.” A touching report came from Dean Fuscia, who lived next to the school. He said he was walking home one night in January, and in the light of the upstairs window in the house across the street from his, where the old woman who sometimes went door to door through the neighborhood and asked for a glass of gin, lived, he saw the monkey
plain as day and it was done up in a blue dress with puffy shoulders and a high collar.
The other person who wasn’t willing to let Giacomo become a memory was Mrs. Cooper. She, of course, stole into Daisy’s room while her daughter was in school and read every word of the girl’s diary. Daisy was a good writer, I remember from being in class with her, and I’m guessing she rendered her affection for Giacomo in terms she never would for her mother. In any event. Mrs. Cooper brought it to the PTA and demanded someone do something about it.
“What do you want me to do?” asked Mr Torrey, the principal.
“Hire a hunter.”
Torrey laughed, but Mrs. Cooper stoked monkey fear throughout the neighborhood at every Tupperware party and after church, and eventually Torrey was forced to make a compromise. His plan was to get a few of the men whose kids went to the school together and go out in the woods with guns and hunt the monkey down. Daisy’s mother agreed to his proposal. Somehow my father got roped into the hunting party. It was not his kind of thing by a long shot, but my mother forced him to it out of a sense of civic duty. “Shit,” was what he said to her to confirm he’d participate. At the end of February, on a 55-degree Saturday, sunny, with a slight breeze, the hunt was on. Kids were not allowed in the woods. It had been announced at school over the loudspeaker before the pledge on Friday morning. Any kid caught in the woods on Saturday would have detention for the summer during summer-school hours. The thought of spending July and August locked up every morning in a hot room with nothing to do but stare at the concrete walls was enough to keep us away.