The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 Read Online Free PDF Page A

would get rid of the damned thing for good.
    Somehow.
    “You were pretty rough on Dennis this afternoon,” Terry said in the dark.
    “Dennis has needed somebody to start being rough on him for quite a while now, I think. He’s been drifting. I just don’t want him to start falling.”
    “Psychologically, beating the boy isn’t a very productive — ”
    “I didn’t beat him, Terry—for Christ’s sake!”
    “—way to assert parental authority—”
    “Oh, don’t give me any of that encounter-group shit,” Hal said angrily.
    “I can see you don’t want to discuss this.” Her voice was cold.
    “I told him to get the dope out of the house, too.”
    “You did?” Now she sounded apprehensive. “How did he take it? What did he say?”
    “Come on, Terry! What could he say? ‘You’re fired’?”
    “Hal, what’s the matter with you? You’re not like this—what’s wrong? ”
    “Nothing,” he said, thinking of the monkey locked away in his Samsonite. Would he hear it if it began to clap its cymbals? Yes, he surely would. Muffled, but audible. Clapping doom for someone, as it had for Beulah, Johnny McCabe, Uncle Will’s dog Daisy. Jang-jang-jang, is it you, Hal? “I’ve just been under a strain.”
    “I hope that’s all it is. Because I don’t like you this way.”
    “No?” And the words escaped before he could stop them; he didn’t even want to stop them. “So pop a few Valium and everything will look okay again, right?”
    He heard her draw breath in and let it out shakily. She began to cry then. He could have comforted her (maybe), but there seemed to be no comfort in him. There was too much terror. It would be better when the monkey was gone again, gone for good. Please God, gone for good.
    He lay wakeful until very late, until morning began to gray the air outside. But he thought he knew what to do.

    Bill had found the monkey the second time.
    That was about a year and a half after Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene. It was summer. Hal had just finished kindergarten.
    He came in from playing with Stevie Arlingen and his mother called, “Wash your hands, Hal, you’re filthy like a pig.” She was on the porch, drinking an iced tea and reading a book. It was her vacation; she had two weeks.
    Hal gave his hands a token pass under cold water and printed dirt on the hand towel. “Where’s Bill?”
    “Upstairs. You tell him to clean his side of the room. It’s a mess.”
    Hal, who enjoyed being the messenger of unpleasant news in such matters, rushed up. Bill was sitting on the floor. The small down-the-rabbit-hole door leading to the back closet was ajar. He had the monkey in his hands.
    “That don’t work,” Hal said immediately. “It’s busted.”
    He was apprehensive, although he barely remembered coming back from the bathroom that night, and the monkey suddenly beginning to clap its cymbals. A week or so after that, he had had a bad dream about the monkey and Beulah—he couldn’t remember exactly what—and had awakened screaming, thinking for a moment that the soft weight on his chest was the monkey, that he would open his eyes and see it grinning down at him. But of course the soft weight had only been his pillow, clutched with panicky tightness. His mother came in to soothe him with a drink of water and two chalky-orange baby aspirins, those Valium for childhood’s troubled times. She thought it was the fact of Beulah’s death that had caused the nightmare. So it was, but not in the way she thought.
    He barely remembered any of this now, but the monkey still scared him, particularly its cymbals. And its teeth.
    “I know that,” Bill said, and tossed the monkey aside. “It’s stupid.” It landed on Bill’s bed, staring up at the ceiling, cymbals poised. Hal did not like to see it there. “You want to go down to Teddy’s and get Popsicles?”
    “I spent my allowance already,” Hal said. “Besides, Mom says you got to clean up your side of the