Christmas Trees & Monkeys

by Keohane, Dan

  As before, Benedictine lay on his belly, turned the dial without turning, barely a hair change in frequency. The needle strained against the furthermost reaches of its man-made restraint, backed against the wall from so many living voices vying for attention.

  “ssssssstthhhzzzzzzssssss… sszz…”

  There. Something. He leaned forward, hoping the act wouldn’t shatter the thin filament drawn out before him.

  Silence. No, something. A sob? Clearer now. Someone crying. A voice not from any physical source but audible nonetheless, never faded with time. Not a recent bout of tears, either. A cry grown refined over the years, moving in its own rhythm.

  Had she sounded this hoarse in life, he wondered? She uttered a despondent wail for a moment, then slid back into that deeper, heart-splitting sob. Benedictine lay still and listened, staring at the small radio’s face as if waiting for an image of the bereft to appear like a genie, if only he watched long enough. Eventually he closed his eyes, rested his head and slept, lulled by the incessant mournful broadcast.

  He awoke with a jolt. Benedictine felt heavy as if the river of blood in his veins had frozen while he slept, only now beginning to thaw. How long had he slept? He squinted at the glowing face of his watch. Four twenty-one. Just over two hours. Such a long time to lay outside like this. No sign of a growing dawn in the eastern sky, but it was just a matter of time. Here and there among the trees a morning bird repeated it’s lifelong song to the impending light.

  Benedictine leaned towards the radio. She continued sobbing. The signal had faded, however, become atrophied. As if the energy used for this broadcast was being slowly spent, used up like the batteries he’d bought for the radio only yesterday. Or perhaps she’d wandered too far in the metaphysical, barren room which entombed her, away from that impossible microphone which perpetually transmitted her cries to the boy laying above her.

  He listened. Sorrow. Eternal sorrow at some stricken cause which could never be rendered better. Was she mourning herself, he wondered. Those left living? Maybe the sharp blades of hell allowed her this one respite, enough to let her fall into grieving self-pity, never truly appreciating the reprieve.

  Maybe she knew something he didn’t, but could do no more than sob her warning through decayed and withered lips.

  “Stop this,” he whispered.

  The crying stopped.

  No static raced in to fill the void. After a moment a dry sniffle, then a soft moaning and the deep, deep wailing began again.

  Benedictine’s heart seemed to pause as she paused. He thought perhaps to repeat his words, experiment, see if they had the same effect. But he didn’t dare, didn’t want to know.

  Standing, he let the sands of worldly interference pour over the spot where he once lay. Then he walked. Static dipped almost imperceptibly past each tombstone. Not enough for anyone not specifically listening for it to notice. And not all the stones caused the effect, either. Sometimes he wondered if perhaps six feet under these particular spots lay an empty coffin. He imagined a vampire long risen, or an embezzler sitting on a beach far from the box in which he never lay, letting it rot and corrode over the years and decades without him.

  Back. Further than Benedictine ever dared wander in such complete darkness. He’d come to these graves in daylight, wondering whether he’d have the nerve to listen to their voices when he returned. The trees crowded thickly here, more crooked and expansive in this old section of the cemetery. They swept away the stars, and with them the only source of illumination. Benedictine’s flashlight still lay at his previous stop, left to console the weeping young girl with its mechanical objectivity. He stepped carefully, navigating around gray shapes as they emerged like shattered ice flows around him.

  Further back still, where the worn and forgotten dates could barely be discerned even in daylight. In the dark the numbers didn’t exist. But he knew what they read. “b. 1789 - d. 1842.” “b. 1702 - d. 1767.” “b. 1698 - d. 1745.” That was the one.

  The orange flag which he’d placed directly behind the tombstone that morning fluttered in the breeze, sucking any stray light into its colorless florescence. Benedictine pulled the pole from the ground and tossed it away, not wanting its presence to pull his thoughts out of 1745 and into the growing damp light of the present. He lay down with the radio.

  The ground felt warmer here. The overhanging trees caught the dew before it landed, pulling it away from this dry, arid spot. Benedictine tried not to move the dial.

  “Sssssss.....”

  The static never quite faded. He rested two fingers on the knob, urging it further back. The plastic needle bent in protest. No further, it said. But a millimeter, a fraction of a millimeter. The static faded. An auditory clue. A sound like paper, wind blowing though a shredded wasp nest, its pieces falling like ash. Benedictine saw these images in his mind, drawn by the sound which rose just beyond the static. A breath? No, it couldn’t be. Not a real breath. But something, an exhalation in time.

  So old. 1745. Was that a sigh? Perhaps his unwitting host made these sounds more infrequently than the others, time washing away the soul’s addiction to such mundane earthly habits.

  Benedictine leaned closer to the speaker. The dry grass crackled in his ear.

  The voice he heard, the sound it made, made him think of something he’d read a long time ago. How mummies would make this sound when palms were pressed against their corpses to force stale air from the lungs.

  “Aaaaahhhh…,” the voice said. Then nothing. Silence. Benedictine waited. “…aahhhhh,” breathed the wasp nest voice again. Then in a whisper that was more breath than words, “Leave us alone.”

  He involuntarily shuffled away from the radio. The words had been directed at him. They had to be. They weren’t. He was being paranoid again. Slowly, he moved back into his earlier position. But the thought wouldn’t go completely away. Had these been the first words uttered from this spot in a hundred years? Two hundred?

  “Go home.... leave aaaahhss alone.” The man buried two and a half centuries ago took in a slow, paper breath.

  “Killing usssss...”

  The words drifted around the living boy, no more a part of their originator than the air the dead man continued to exhume. Yet directed. At him. Talking to the trespasser laying atop the grave so long undisturbed.

  Benedictine stared at the gray monument in front of him, perfectly smooth in the night, darkened and chipped along the edges in daylight. It marked the spot where a man’s body was interred under centuries-old tears. Now the speaker breathed its contempt at what he was doing. Hating him for his wet, beating life. Loathing him for his vision.

  “Killing me....” the wind itself seemed to say. It was too much.

  Benedictine stumbled to his feet and ran, leaving the radio to lay against the granite marker. An unheard cry from the speaker, an ethereal transmission no longer attended to by the retreating teenager. “…stop…,” said the dry, ancient soul, as it slowly leeched from the radio to lift and dissipate like fog in the cool morning air.

  — — — — —

  About “The Monkey on the Towers”

  Yep, we come to the “Monkey” story as alluded to in the title of this collection.

  The origins of this story go back well before I started seriously writing fiction. Sixteen years earlier, to be exact. I’m stuck in the tailgate of a friend’s old station wagon as a group of us head to New Hampshire for a skiing trip. There I was, wedged between sleeping bags and pillows and effectively barred from any conversation. All I could do for the two-and-a-half hour drive was stare out the window. Stare, stare, and let my mind and imagination wander, wander, up Route 3, looking out the window, watching the mile markers swish past, swish past, buildings illuminated against the evening reds and purples.

  Further north we ventured, steady rhythm of the road, entering Manchester, New Hampshire, and me still staring out the window. Three large radio towers beside the highway - tall, red lights blinking, blinking. I ima
gined a giant Kong-like ape swinging back and forth (no idea why, the image just came to me), back and forth. Our car passed the towers and continued on its trek, but the ape continued swinging from tower to tower in my mind. The latter part of the eventual story, involving the woman Kimberly, is the very scene which played out in my head. Bizarre, but it passed the time.

  It passed the time.

  Snap! You are awake again, and it’s sixteen years later. I had always wanted to write this story, its characters and general atmosphere haunted me at unexpected moments. I thought, however, it would be too weird to attempt. Then one day I discovered that horror isn’t only about the expected fears and terrors, the well-trodden images and tropes. Beautiful and terrifying things can happen when a writer bends the rules, twists reality in a way that’s never been done before. I found stories in surreal magazines like The Silver Web and The Urbanite, and realized - My God! I can write “The Monkey on the Towers” after all!

  So I did.

  The Monkey on the Towers

  The monkey appeared on a gray September evening, before the final licks of sunlight fell to the halogen glow of street lamps. No one knew where it came from, nor where it went when it suddenly faded from sight.

  On September 16th, just after seven in the evening, an extremely large ape took up residence in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire. It swung back and forth between three radio towers standing alongside Interstate 93. For most of the first few minutes it simply propelled itself around the first tower, using its momentum as a centrifugal impetus away from the framework. It should have spiraled towards the ground, but did not. It moved around and around until, perhaps bored of this, it reached with the other arm towards the center spire. Thus began the repetitive act of swinging between the towers in a silent figure-eight. It took no notice of the increasing spectators along the edge of the highway, their automobiles abandoned and forgotten. On the ground below, people kept their distance, feeling more secure behind the white maintenance building a hundred yards away.

  Within an hour the interstate was a mass of dented and steaming cars, crushed by the chain reaction from those too far back to notice the spectacle, blanketed by the klaxon of a hundred car horns screaming for attention. Some of the spectators, still reeling from the impact from drivers behind them or to those in front, eventually forgot their wounds and stared at the scene alongside the road.

  The ape was large. Too large, according to zoologists interviewed in the months which followed. If the animal were to stand upright, it would have risen half as tall as the towers themselves. It couldn’t be classified as any species of primate previously encountered. It was just too big, too surreal in its silent orbit above the ever-growing masses.

  By eight o’clock the world around the radio towers was ablaze in light. Police barricaded the area with yellow ribbon. Evening news reporters shoved each other for the best vantage, beaming the creature’s image into every household. The monkey paid no heed to the carnival of lights and sounds. It just swept its half-circles around the towers, one massive arm after another.

  Two deaths were directly caused by the visitor. The rest resulted from injuries sustained on the highway and from a man who arrived later sporting an AK-47 rifle and what some described as a “joyously psychotic” expression. Of the two deaths caused by the ape, the first happened twenty minutes past eight o’clock.

  * * *

  David Pratchett was still in his office when the call rang in from the state police barracks. Within minutes the helicopter, already en route when the veterinarian answered his phone, landed in the grazing fields of the zoo’s neglected backland. He watched it land from his office window, the phone still held to his ear.

  Now, standing just inside the yellow tape, Pratchett stared up at the animal. He followed its liquid movement back and forth among the towers’ few remaining beacon lights. As it did with everyone else, the ape ignored him. Almost. When Pratchett took his first tentative steps away from the barricade, the large expressionless head turned in his direction.

  Pratchett stopped. The ape ignored him once more.

  “You need to keep these people as far back as possible,” he said.

  The reply that came into Brian Sullivan’s head was quickly suppressed. Instead, the police sergeant said, “We’re trying, Mister Pratchett. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Everyone’s just about hypnotized by this thing.”

  “This thing...” Pratchett said, considering the words carefully. When Sullivan turned to look for breaches in the fluttering yellow ribbon, Pratchett walked to his death.

  “You know we’re here,” the veterinarian whispered, taking short but deliberate steps towards the center tower. “Are you waiting for something?” The ape crossed over the gaps, curled around and settled into its earlier rotation around a single purchase, the center tower. Around and around, keeping its black eyes fixed on Pratchett each time its orbit brought the man in sight.

  With well-practiced calm, Pratchett continued speaking. “It’s OK. I’m a friend. Where do you come from?” Lower and lower the creature swung, the free arm curled against its chest. Because of this, Pratchett misjudged its reach.

  Sullivan’s stomach wrenched when he turned and saw Pratchett’s slow advance. “What the hell are you doing?”

  The ape’s free arm, now fully extended, swung around. In the last second of his life Pratchett saw the giant fist, and thought of Hans Brinker. Remembered reading about the heavy wrecking ball hurtling towards the boy’s father. The impact sent Pratchett’s shattered body sailing over the white maintenance building.

  Seconds of numb silence. The ape resumed its circumnavigation of the towers, around the last, back towards center, moving higher as it did so. Like passengers on a roller coaster, the crowd exploded in a chorus of screams.

  “Don’t shoot it. Don’t shoot it, God damn you.” Sullivan pushed Bennie Powers’ arms down. The sergeant looked around. “OK!” He tried to keep the screaming out of his own voice and prayed that the trooper wouldn’t shoot him in the foot. “Anyone else attempting to cross this line will be arrested. Is that clear?” Then to Powers in a softer voice, “Tell everyone to keep their pieces holstered. Shoot that thing and God knows what’ll happen.”

  * * *

  Kimberly Hobson pulled at the collar of her sweater. The act stretched the fabric beyond returning. Muscles under her shoulder blade tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed, in time with the rhythmic movements of the animal on the television. Prime time had been preempted by local news, but only temporarily. The set was now tuned to the New England cable news station, covering the events “as they happened.” For Kimberly, the world around the set faded to a blur. She stared at the monkey, watched its oversized muscular frame moving between the towers. When the camera panned across the crowd, or cut away to various shaky interviews with experts, Kimberly felt a panic, like running out of air too far below the water’s surface. These subtle changes in his wife were lost on Tom. He continued clicking away at the computer, mumbling occasionally the facts garnered from the jumbled encyclopedia of the Internet.

  “Shit,” he said. “Nothing. It could be a silverback, but it’s way too big, and there isn’t any white on it. Is there?” No answer. He didn’t turn around. “There’s not a whole lot of stuff out here. The rest of the world either hasn’t noticed or no one’s made any updates. If it wasn’t such a madhouse over there I’d go and check it out for myself.”

  Kimberly heard these last words, and they affected her. She ran fingers across her throat, wondering how far away the towers were. A mile? Two at the most. At that moment the camera image shook. The ape no longer swung but gripped the leftmost tower with both arms and legs. It stared directly into the camera. In the background, spectators squealed nervously.

  “Now what?” Tom stood behind her. His voice startled Kimberly from her reverie. He didn’t notice. “Oh, man. It’s going to attack.”

  It didn’t attack. Staring into the camera which broadcast its i
mage into Kimberly’s mind, the animal stretched out one arm, as if pleading an unseen keeper for food, or company.

  Tom took an unconscious step backwards. “Looks like it’s trying to say something. Maybe it’s scared.”

  Kimberly suddenly found herself standing before the towers. Silence all around. The ape reached down, inviting. Arousal filled her, warm, breathless. She stepped into the open hand. It closed gently, entombing her. The rough palm pressed against her face. No panic. She tried to breathe through the ever-tightening grip.

  “What the hell are you doing?” The living room returned with its light and flickering television. Kimberly gasped, laying on her back on the floor. Tom hesitated a moment, then lifted her into the chair. “Are you all right? It looked like you fainted. The hell with this.” He reached over and clicked off the set.

  “No! Please, don’t.” She reached for the button. Tom stopped her.

  “Kim, what’s wrong?”

  She closed her eyes, tried to resurrect the feel of the giant hand around her. “Nothing,” she whispered. “The news. Everything. I need to lie down.”

  * * *

  The bed was cold and inviting. Maybe she was too sensitive. Sleep. Better.

  Tom turned off the light and closed the door without speaking. Kimberly remained on the bed, eyes open. The earlier fatigue lifted in the solitude. She had to go. Now.

  Naked. Her sweater and jeans in a pile by the door. The white dress fell from its hanger and slid over her. She wore nothing else. Cool cotton against skin. Subtly, softly erotic. She put on a thin pair of slippers and left the bedroom. Tom’s back was silhouetted against the ever-changing images on the computer. He never turned around, never understood she was gone until it was too late to do anything about it.