The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Nick’s face with one fingertip. “Okay, you can go now.”
    In the old days when he went about outdoors, Jip often walked the path along Shore Road and up and over the granite rocks at Mercy Point to Nick Weller’s house on the other side. They would gambol like billy goats on the rocks and while away many empty summer days. It was not more than a mile by foot, though the boys were only allowed to make the trip during daylight and in fair weather. By car, one had to dogleg inland to drive around the headlands and the cliffs, and the roundabout way turned it into a three-mile drive. Not that Tim minded the ten or fifteen minutes spent bringing Nick home. He was grateful that the boy still came over after all these years, putting up with Jip’s strangeness, providing a connection to the outside world, a semblance of normalcy.
    As if things were ever normal. Maybe, once upon a time, when he was a brand-new baby and would return a smile. That was the first sign, surely, that something was wrong when his reaction to every cootchy-coo was listless. He wasn’t as closed off as some of the other boys Holly and Tim had met in those damned support groups. He talked where others were lost in silence or trapped in a handful of words or sounds. He could bear, with warning, to be touched, although this morning’s incident gave Tim some doubts. It’s a spectrum, the shrinks had said, and Jip was on the high-functioning end, but even so, it was far from normal to refuse to set foot outdoors, far from normal to live so deeply inside the mind. But Nick didn’t seem to care, or perhaps his sense of loyalty trumped his aversions. Tim clamped a hand on his shoulder and led him into the cold.
    The boy climbed into the Jeep and buckled his seat belt. A wave of longing flowed through Tim as he watched the boy ready for travel. Polite, obedient, a bit on the shy side, but mostly just an ordinary boy. Tim checked his emotions and shifted into reverse. “On the road again,” he sang as the Jeep rolled down the driveway to Shore Road. The winter sky was filled with stars and a half-moon pulling the tides. They glided as quiet and alone as a ship on the sea.
    “Sorry about that scene with the picture,” Tim said. “You know Jip. Sometimes he can’t find the words.”
    “Don’t worry, Mr. Keenan.”
    “Do they still teach art in school? Do they still teach you kids how to draw?”
    “We have art two days a week,” said the boy. “And music on Fridays.”
    Music, he had forgotten about music for Jip. Music might do. Something to add to the home-school curriculum, and they could begin in the new year. The practice, the discipline would be good for his son. A wind instrument, perhaps the clarinet would be cool. He turned inland and began the horseshoe curve around Mercy Point. For a few hundred yards, the beam from the lighthouse crossed the road, and its brilliance never failed to surprise him. Backlit, Nick’s reflection appeared in the windshield, animated as he talked. “We did drawing at the beginning of the year. And cutting shapes out of paper, a mosaic. And watercol—”
    Tim mashed the brakes and stopped the Jeep, wheels crunching the gravelly shells along the edge of the road. Beyond the boy’s transparent reflection in the glass, something stirred not twenty feet ahead. Uncoiling, the white mass transformed itself into a living figure rising from a crouch, its pale skin glowed sepulchral blue in the moonlight, and it turned with a hunch of the shoulders and began to shuffle away. In the beam from the lighthouse, it looked back once, illuminated for an instant. In long, urgent strides, it sped over the rocks toward the sea and then disappeared into the darkness so quickly that Tim was not sure if it had happened at all or exactly what had been spooked by the car.
    “Did you see that?” he asked the boy.
    Nick was rubbing his neck where the seat belt had caught him as the Jeep suddenly stopped. He did not appear to have