The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

  When they passed the unsecured locker that used to belong to Greg Johnson, Reggie opened it slowly and together they faced a black emptiness that went on forever.

  They reached the milk room, a small chamber near the cafeteria with a warped wooden door that hadn’t shut properly in years. Inside was a large unlocked cooler that contained hundreds of identical pink milk cartons. Reggie removed three cartons of 2 percent, passed them out, then set about quietly arranging and stacking dozens of empty milk crates that the boys could hide behind. Then they sat together on the frigid cement, sipping their milk, ears pricked for the stray rumbling of a janitor’s mop bucket. The cooler hiccupped and purred. Soon their teeth were chattering.

  “It’s freezing,” whispered Willie.

  “Shut up,” said Reggie.

  They held their breath when keys jangled past the milk room. A few minutes after that, they heard metal clangings. Then more of the same, only farther away. After that, there was no sound beyond the cooler and the careful breathing of the three boys.

  “Okay,” said Reggie.

  They tiptoed out into the hallway. The lights were out. Sunset’s glow spread through far-off windows and glared off the tile. They wandered in small circles, blood pounding through their ears.

  “HEY!”

  James leaped. Willie yelped. They both looked at Reggie, who watched their terrified reactions in delight, his rib cage expanding and collapsing.

  James tried it. “HEY, YOU!”

  Willie joined in. “HEY, YOU, BUSTER!”

  And they continued that way for a while, forcing noise, any kind, into the immeasurable silence.

  * * *

  It did not last. Soon the boys moved as if through a church, quiet and reverent, afraid to put their hands to anything.

  They entered the gymnasium, which tripled as the lunchroom and auditorium. The boys craned their necks to peer into the vast open space. It was dark and deep and swimming with dead lamps and dormant basketball hoops. The boys shifted their eyes away and hurried on. The floorboards complained.

  The science lab was locked. They squashed their noses against the glass. Inside, the multiple sinks gleamed in the moonlight. The boys looked toward the case that contained dead beetles, spiders, and butterflies, each stabbed with little colored pins advertising their different parts, but it was too dark to see any bugs. Were they still there? Willie started looking at the ground and instantly the other two boys froze in place.

  What if the bugs escaped at night and crawled beneath the door?

  “I smell meat, I smell meat,” Willie mumbled. The other boys laughed nervously. After a moment, Willie realized what he had said and laughed too.

  A few years ago, Willie had discovered how to memorize schoolwork. All you had to do was make up an unusual sentence that had the same first letters as what you were trying to memorize. For example, in science class—in this very room they were peeking into—Mr. Sharp made them memorize the three different kinds of rocks: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, I-S-M. So Willie invented the phrase “I Smell Meat” to help him remember.

  It didn’t stop there. In Ms. Janney’s social studies class, they had to memorize the first seven presidents. “Where All Jokers Must Make a Jump” stood for Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams (John Quincy), and Jackson. Even Reggie still remembered the presidents, and once recited all seven in proper sequence to evade punishment from the principal. James too had benefited from Willie’s talent, and felt pride when he saw other kids mouthing the bizarre sentences during tests.

  “Kids (Poor Creatures) Often Fight Good Sense” stood for the different levels of the animal world: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. “Everyone Just Leaves” stood for the three branches of government: executive, judicial, and legislative. The system worked. How else was a kid supposed to remember Precambrian-Paleozoic-Mesozoic-Cenozoic or Dopey-Bashful-Grumpy-Doc-Happy-Sneezy-Sleepy or LCDM, the ascending Roman numerals? He might be shy and small and have bad teeth, a long nose, a neck scar, and only one arm, but nobody could get you through a tough exam like Willie Van Allen.

  There was only one problem. His sentences outlasted their usefulness. Willie repeated them so often they became as natural as breathing and as accessible as the alphabet. If you listened, you could hear him murmuring them softly when it was his turn to bat or when Mel Herman wandered too close, smacking gum.

  Student artwork lined the hallway leading to the art room. The boys ran their flashlights over each work, exclaiming when they found one of their own. It was fun enough. Eventually one of them noticed that there were several pictures missing. According to alphabetical placement, these spaces had once been claimed by Greg Johnson. Someone had taken his artwork, just like they had taken the contents of his locker, and it was as if he never existed.

  “Guys, look at this,” said Reggie.

  They all gathered around a watercolor painting. It was a swirl of garish color: red, purple, orange, and green, with razor slices of yellow. James and Willie stared for a minute but there was nothing substantial to find within the mess, just haunted outlines and unsettling shapes.

  Reggie’s flashlight found the signature in the corner, scraped in reluctant pencil: MEL HERMAN.

  “Figures,” he said.

  Mel Herman was a mean kid. He was bigger than his classmates, and it was speculated that he had once been held back a grade, maybe even two or three. He sat in the back of class, slumped deep down in his desk. Teachers were always telling him to stop looking out the window and pay attention.

  Here was the strange thing. All the teachers seemed to like Mel Herman. Maybe this was because he always did well on tests even though he never studied. He could do an entire page of math problems before most kids could finish one or two. You could always tell when Mel finished, because he would snap his pencil in two, sigh loudly, cross his arms, and stare out the window like he’d do almost anything to be set free.

  Mel’s grimy hair tangled around his ears. He wore thick glasses that were always taped in the corners. He wore the same too-big black shirt day after day. One kid swore Mel used to have a paper route but was fired when he attacked an adult who refused to pay. Another kid said that Mel didn’t have any parents and survived at home all alone. Still another claimed Mel had once had an older brother, but that he’d died in a shoot-out—either that or was in the slammer serving fifty-to-life. Maybe that was why the teachers liked Mel Herman so much, maybe they just felt sorry for him.

  But James and Reggie didn’t feel sorry for him. They hated him. Mel didn’t have any friends and didn’t deserve any. He always showed up to junkball at the same time they did, like he’d been circling the abandoned vehicles all morning. He was the best hitter around—he hit a home run almost every single time he swung—but still nobody wanted Mel Herman on their team, because if you screwed up, he’d go crazy. He’d yell and scream until his face grew red and his nose dripped snot. Sometimes he’d push you over and rage above you with his hands in fists. Fortunately, instead of trouncing you, he’d usually just invent some bad words and pace around the outfield. In the meantime the game halted, and all the players stood around swatting mosquitoes and wishing they were somewhere else.

  It wasn’t just the diamond. Without notice, Mel Herman showed up everywhere, all the time, a big black mark that marred any scene he entered. Playgrounds: there he was, shuffling past the jungle gym. The library: he’s there, moving among the cold, still stacks. The streets: at the end of every single block, around each corner. Despite the fear and unease he struck in smaller boys everywhere, he moved about the town virtually un noticed by grown-ups, possibly because he was neither small enough (a lost toddler) nor big enough (a delinquent high schooler) to raise alarm. Grown-ups, of course, were mistaken. This skulking black-clad figure, this mysterious Mel Herman, was a menace, always in motion, always a danger, and always unwelcome.

  Mel was also the best artist in school by a mile, although he
seemed to hate art class as much as any other. Usually he would paint pictures so overwhelming that they were impossible to appraise beyond their scope and size. There were no rainbows in his artwork, no cats or dogs, no figures holding hands, nothing painted in brushstrokes applied with anything less than murderous force. Mel worked in great, wet, purposeful patterns constructed with a brutal confidence; these formations often paired themselves with details so fine they hurt the eye-even with his artwork, Mel Herman terrorized. Now and then an art teacher would risk offering praise for one of these fanatical images, to which Mel would only stare back, his thick face ripening with disgust.

  Other times, mostly in earlier grades, Mel would dash off something awesome—a salivating dinosaur, or a disintegrating vampire, or a guitar flying through the air on Pegasus wings—but then, before showing it to the teacher, he’d tear it to pieces. When the teacher asked him why he hadn’t done the assignment, he’d just shrug and say, “The assignment was stupid.” Then his eyes would spark behind his dirty glasses and he’d wipe his nose with the back of his sleeve, and all the other kids would busy themselves with their drawings so he didn’t catch them watching.

  The best Reggie and James could figure, Mel just liked trouble. Saturated in light, isolated from the primitive sixth-grade doodles surrounding it, his painting was as breathtaking as his unannounced arrival at the junkball field. As scary as it was, the painting was truer than anything that anyone at school had ever said, because it came directly from Mel’s brain, completely un-contaminated by fears of bad grades, detention, or ridicule. It was as honest as someone spitting in your face.

  “Guys.”

  Reggie’s voice was severe. James’s and Willie’s lights twirled madly across the walls. It was another Mel Herman masterpiece, and this one was huge: four strips of brown paper had been hastily stapled to create a massive, disorderly canvas, and even at this size the activity spilled off all four edges. It looked like a road map drafted by a lunatic. The entire surface was etched with minuscule people, animals, landscapes, and loosely geometric patterns. It was pencil, crayon, paint, and marker, and all mixed together in every possible color. There was even a splotch that just had to be dried ketchup. All the same, James didn’t know why Reggie’s face was so grim.

  “Look,” Reggie hissed, jabbing a finger at the picture’s bottom left corner. The boys pressed forward. Willie’s long nose nearly touched the paint.

  James saw a squiggle of lines. Willie’s eyes traced the same squiggle. Then Reggie breathed the word “truck” and the suggestion instantly aligned their vision, snared their breath, beat together their hearts, because secretly they were all dying to find exactly what they had found.

  It was a tiny drawing of tiny vehicle running over a tiny person. It was a detail so small probably no one had ever noticed it before. Yet there it was.

  The boys pointed flashlights into each other’s faces. Their skin burned pallid and their eyes became reflecting pennies, their mouths gaping black holes. Willie closed his eyes to block the light and for a second looked like Greg Johnson in his casket, tranquil and colorless.

  James tapped Willie’s good shoulder with his flashlight until Willie cracked open an eye.

  “Do you think … ?” James whispered.

  “Get that flashlight outta my eyes,” Willie said.

  “But why would he do it?” said James.

  “Why are you trying to blind me?” said Willie.

  “Wait a minute, no,” James said, shaking his head. “Mel Herman can’t drive.”

  “Why not?” shouted Reggie. His face was grave but his eyes glinted. “He’s big enough to drive a truck. Smart enough, too, I bet.”

  “Maybe his dad drives it,” suggested Willie.

  The bottom of James’s stomach fell away. This was too plausible.

  “I thought he didn’t have a dad,” James said hopefully.

  “That’s the thing, nobody knows,” said Reggie. James could tell he was thrilled to unearth a new reason to hate Mel Herman, and instantly James felt Reggie pushing this reason on him and Willie, pressuring them to accept it. “Nobody knows squat about him. He wears the same clothes every day. He walks to school from who knows where. Hell, he walks everywhere and watches everyone and knows exactly what everyone is up to. And he shows up for junkball out of nowhere?”

  The implication was haunting. If Mel Herman followed kids to the junkyard, might he follow kids away from the junkyard as well? Might he do it in a truck?

  Reggie leapt and in a single motion ripped the large painting from the wall. When he folded it into quarters and stuffed it inside his backpack, he moved with the curt motions of one handling something dead.

  They did not stay the night. Around midnight, the boys wiggled out a classroom window, and when they walked away from the school they did it swiftly and did not look back.

  Parents, Prepare My Cage

  They couldn’t return home at one in the morning, especially since they were all supposed to be staying at one another’s houses. So Reggie, James, and Willie crept through the town toward the park, where they could sleep beneath branches, out of view of any police cruising the streets on the lookout for suspicious curfew breakers or trucks. As they walked, James thought he had never seen the town so static.

  They woke up at dawn and stretched, laughing at the strange tattoos the grass left on their faces and forearms. They tried to remember what had happened inside the school, but the memory was as murky as a dream. Only the crackle of Mel Herman’s painting inside Reggie’s backpack hinted otherwise.

  They moved fast, trying to beat the sun across the sky. They passed a woman walking the opposite way down the sidewalk. Two little girls, twins, held on to the woman’s hands. When they passed, the girls saw Willie’s missing arm and at the exact same time started bawling.

  The boys ran.

  The Van Allen house was the first stop. The tree house looked small and flimsy in the morning light. Without a word, James and Reggie nodded farewell to Willie and watched as he started up the driveway, his shoes making light patters on the pavement. So delicate, these sounds—but suddenly the front door flew open and Mrs. Van Allen was there, and she shrieked, and then she and Mr. Van Allen came sprinting, she in a fancy nightgown that rippled back to reveal stripes of underwear, he in pajamas that snapped at the air.

  They descended upon Willie like they wanted to eat him. Willie took a knee to protect himself from being tackled. Arms wrapped around his back and lips pressed up against his head. “Oh, baby, my little baby!” squealed his mother, while his father gritted his teeth and encircled both of them in his arms, his hands flitting like spiders across their backs. Willie squeezed shut his eyes like it hurt, and James and Reggie believed it—after a moment, they couldn’t even see Willie anymore, he had gone missing somewhere inside the clutching arms of his parents. When another minute passed and no reprimands were doled out, not to anyone, the two boys stole away. The Van Allens never acknowledged them.

  Willie was whisked inside, stripped, and nudged into the bath by his mother. His parents obviously knew he had not been at James’s house last night, but for some reason they did not discuss it. Willie heard his father dial the phone and sigh, “Call off the dogs, the little son of a gun is back.” Then he appeared at the bathroom door, but seemed unnerved by his son’s nudity and turned his attention to the newspaper and red pen that were clutched in his shaking hands. “All is well,” he said, maybe to them, maybe to himself. “Back to work, then, back to work.” Mrs. Van Allen smiled but did not respond, and continued washing the grass from her son’s hair—bathing in private was something Willie had been forced to relinquish after losing his arm. As she scrubbed, she jabbered mindlessly about things that were of no interest to Willie: heat, humidity, groceries, the upturn of the job market. Willie was tired and had to keep reminding himself to sit up tall so his arm bandages wouldn’t get soapy, but upon hearing this last topic he forced himself to contribute. “Did Dad find a job,
then?” he asked, feeling very grown-up despite being naked in a tub. His mother laughed through clenched teeth, scrubbing at his neck, soap bubbles swaying from loose strands of her hair like bulbs on a string of Christmas lights. “No, no, no, he hasn’t,” she whispered. “But jobs aren’t everything, are they?”

  As Willie’s mother re-dressed his stump, Willie tried to block out her voice so he could hear his father moving elsewhere in the house. The only thing he heard was the electric fan. As was often the case these days, Willie started to worry, and that telltale cleft scored the soft skin between his eyebrows. Willie did not know why his dad had lost his job, but suspected it had something to do with the hit-and-run. It seemed like the same day Willie had been struck on the road, his father had been infected with a terminal disease that he was slowly dying of, right here inside this house.

  Willie barely remembered getting hit—just that silver truck and how it had floated away. The doctor who sewed up his stump said it was a blessing he didn’t remember more. Mostly, Willie remembered looking up from a hospital gurney, seeing the white ceiling rush by, and then his father’s worried, upside-down face. It was then that Willie uttered his first words since the truck hit him: “Dad, how come you forgot me?”

  He didn’t mean to make his father feel bad. But after he said it, the life had drained from his father’s face and it had yet to return. Before his father lost his job, he had sold things—insurance, mostly—and he would sometimes invite Willie into the TV room where he was downing a beer and spinning an old autographed football between two hands, and he would point at the athletes on the screen and make Willie guess how big an insurance policy he would sell that man if he met him.

  “A hundred dollars?” Willie would venture.

  “A hundred dollars! This is a sportsman we’re talking about here! He makes a living getting his butt knocked around the field!”

  “A thousand dollars?” At this point, Willie would start to smile. His father’s exaggerated distress was comic.