Monster
William Young
Published by William Young at Smashwords.
Copyright 2011 WilliamYoung
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapters:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
About
the Author
Also
by William Young
The Signal
The
Divine World
There was blood on Nick Case's tongue. Not much, perhaps just a trace, but there was blood on his tongue. Its sweet taste lingered there for a moment before he swallowed and rolled his head over toward the clock radio. The red numbers blazed in the dark: 3:47. He moved his tongue against the roof of his mouth and pressed the small cut against it, once again tasting a droplet of blood. He blinked hard and stared at the clock before he was conscious of why he had just awoken. The Monster had returned.
He slipped his legs out from beneath the covers and looked over at his girlfriend, Sarah. She was still deep in the nothingness sleep of middle night, her blond hair trailing across her face like moonlight illuminated rivers. He walked into the kitchen and poured a glass of water from the faucet. It was luke warm and seeped into the small puncture on his tongue with a faint sting. He looked out the kitchen window and down the empty street at the closed-up patio of the corner coffee shop: There was no Monster there. Just before Nick awoke the Monster had been standing there, its red eyes burning through the night. Now, there were just white patio chairs stacked in fours and chained to the center posts of each patio table. Of course, the Monster had only been there moments ago in a dream, but the Monster had been absent from his dreams for almost a decade.
The Monster had been a fixture in his dreams throughout his adolescence, fading into less frequent occurrences when he went to college. He had always attributed the Monster to his lifestyle as the son of a military officer and the fact that his family was always moving. In his dreams, the Monster would show up and kill or abduct his friends, but never touch him. It would taunt him from afar or growl at him from the underbrush of his dreams, but never did it threaten him. When he sought it out in his dreams, it always eluded him: It would stand on the horizon and bellow; it would quickly dash across a path just in front of him. Never had it given Nick the chance to close in and confront it.
Nick, when he had gotten older and thought about it, relegated the dreams to the way his subconscious was dealing with the constant upheaval of always moving and leaving friends behind, of never being able to settle down and pursue any one thing for any length of time. The Monster had faded away after he had begun living a more stable lifestyle as a college student, rooted in one place and pursuing one goal. Since graduation, he had never dreamt of it, had chalked that up to finally having taken control of his life. Tonight, though, the Monster had returned, looking for him as it had in so many of the dreams of his youth. When he was young, when his family would move to a new Army post, he would have dreams of the Monster searching for him. Always, the Monster would catch up, track him down and destroy his friends. The Monster was always slow, but it always arrived, and it always destroyed everything around Nick.
Nick took another drink of water and set the glass down, felt his tongue with his fingers, and went back to the bedroom. Sarah hadn't budged. He climbed beneath the covers and looked over at the clock radio: The alarm would go off in an hour.
He awoke with Sarah's hip in his stomach and saw her long arm sticking from beneath her mane of blond hair as she fumbled for the alarm button.
"Jesus, Nick, how long are you going to hit the snooze button?" she said groggily before flopping back onto her side of the bed and closing her eyes.
Nick looked at the clock. It was now just after six. "Shit," he mumbled as he jerked out of bed and walked quickly to the bathroom. Twenty-five minutes later he was hastily fixing a tie around his neck and stuffing his pockets with change, keys and his wallet. He jostled Sarah lightly on the shoulder. Her eyelids slid open and her pale blue eyes stared up at him.
"Hey, I gotta go. I can't believe I overslept. Shit. Bye," he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. "Time for you to get up, now." She grimaced and he walked quickly through the apartment and down onto the street.
As he turned onto the sidewalk near the coffee shop he felt his cell phone vibrating inside his left pants pocket.
"Damn," he said as he pulled it out and looked at the caller ID. It was the city editor. A man who looked like he had just been jogging was sitting at one of the tables with a muffin and a steaming cup of coffee, his hair moist and his shirt wet in a V on his chest.
"John, it's Nick, what's going on?" Nick said after flipping his phone open.
"Nick, where are you? Is there something we should know?"
Nick looked up and down the street, the early morning traffic just beginning to pull from the curbs and make its way down the roads toward the main arteries that would funnel it into downtown parking garages.
"No, nothing so far. My alarm didn't go off, so I'm running a little late."
"Alright, well call us if anything comes up. Steve said it was a slow night, though," John said, and they hung up.
Steve was the evening cops reporter. Nick was the daylight version of the same job and he was supposed to have already cleared two precincts and called in his early report. Nick's portion of the city was usually pretty calm overnight. A few break-ins, a stolen car or two, maybe a stick-up during a busy week. Never anything dramatic.
Nick walked the few blocks to the precinct house, a two story yellow brick building that tripled as police precinct, fire house and paramedic station. The night's police reports, at least those that had been completed before the overnight cops left for home at 7 a.m., were on a clipboard hanging on a nail on the wall next to a bulletin board of notices, wanted posters and instructions for civilians requesting to see an officer. The overnight desk sergeant, Officer Bob Claypool, was sitting behind the counter reading the morning paper. Not Nick's paper, which came out at noon on a good day, but the city's dominant morning daily which dwarfed his own paper's circulation by a factor of four.
Claypool, his body made more stocky by the body armor beneath his uniform, looked up from the desk and smiled broadly when Nick pushed the door open. "Hey, you are working today."
"Stupid alarm didn't go off," Nick lied again, not certain why. "I hope nothing went on last night."
Claypool shook his head and looked back down at his paper. Nick flipped through the reports and jotted down some notes about a burglary in a nearby mansion in which several unidentified paintings were taken. The spot where the victim's name was listed said "victim requests anonymity." There was no value listed for the paintings. He looked up at Claypool.
"Is there anything to this robbery where they took some paintings?" Nick asked.
Claypool shrugged. "I don't know. What's it say?"
"Not much."
"That's more than I know about it."
Nick wrote down the reporting officer's name, scanned through the car accident reports, and slipped out of the waiting room after fifteen minutes of running through the reports. Claypool was never any help, and Nick had always suspected that he preferred the morning paper's cop reporters to him. Whether the painting heist was anything would depend on if there was anything in the morning paper, but only if its reporter had cobbled something together before midnight when the morning daily went to press. Even if it turned out to be nothing, Nick thought as he walked back toward his apartment to his car, it would be something to track down during the course of the day. Provided, of course, something more interesting didn't turn up at the next precinct.
As he was walking up to his car, Sarah came streaming out of the apartment, her wet hair hanging down against her neck while her skirt billowed out with each of her long strides. He stopped, smiled, and waited.
"No coffee, today, I see," she said, stopping in front of him and pulling her hair back behind her neck. "Didn't you sleep okay?"
Nick shrugged. "I woke up last night around four. I had a nightmare."
Sarah crinkled her eyes together. "About what?"
"The Monster."
Sarah said nothing for a second. "What monster?"
"Remember the Monster dreams I told you I used to have a long time ago?"
Sarah looked away for a second and then nodded. "Sort of."
"Well, I had another one last night."
"Were you up all night?"
Nick shook his head. "Hey, I'll tell you more later. I'm running really late. I can only hope nothing happened last night."
"Nothing ever does," Sarah said, flipped her wrist over to check her watch and pecked Nick on the lips quickly. "See ya later."
"Bye. Have a good day."
Nick watched her cross the street to her car before opening the door to his own. He flipped on the local radio news channel and began listening as he pulled away from the curb and merged into the now steady traffic of bankers, lawyers and businessmen all vying for green lights to usher them into the jam of machines jostling their way downtown.
It was just after nine before he finished his rounds and strode into the newsroom. Normally, he should have been up at five, at the first precinct by six and in the newsroom at a quarter-past eight with forty-five minutes till deadline. Fortunately, there had been nothing for either of the daylight shift cop reporters to write about, so Nick wasn't worried when he passed John's desk, said "Nothing happened," detoured to the coffee pot to fill his mug, and made his way to his own desk.
He turned on his computer and leaned back in his chair, pulled open the copy of the morning daily he had bought at a street kiosk and began quickly scanning it for something he may have missed and might need to work on for the next day's paper. Nothing. No mention of the paintings robbery. He sighed and looked out the window at the sliver of the street he could see. There was just the end of the morning rush hour scurrying for parking or walking briskly towards a building. There was never anything interesting going on just outside his window.
Nick clicked his browser and began scanning the on-line versions of the other daily newspapers in his newspaper’s circulation area, although outside of Pittsburgh and its suburbs, his paper made little dent in the surrounding areas. Then he checked Drudge Report and Instapundit to make sure the world wasn’t ending, clicked quickly through a dozen of his favorite blogs to check if they’d posted yet, and if so, about what, before flipping over to the paper’s subscriber newsfeeds, quickly scanning through the AP’s list of stories and deciding he’d read them later.
He flipped open his notebook, checked his notes from the police report on the robbery, and called the station. The robbery had happened during second shift, which wouldn't report until mid-afternoon, but Nick wanted to leave a message for the investigating officer to call him. He hadn't met the officer before, Detective Rich Tagget, and was unsure if he would get a call back. Cops were like that.
He leaned back into his chair and took a sip of his coffee. The Monster. From out of nowhere it had turned the corner in his dream and begun lumbering toward him. He had been sitting on the street corner next to the bus stop waiting for the 61B to take him somewhere -- where? He couldn't remember: dreams are like that -- when he looked up at the dream night sky and realized the street was deserted and the bus would not be coming. And then the Monster turned the corner and walked down the middle of the street, its massive head looking up, left, right, down. Its long arms hung slackly at its side and its fur was matted down. Nick hid behind the bumper of a nearby car and peeked through the car's windows to watch as the Monster took a dozen steps, stopped, and repeated its search sequence.
It took the Monster forever to move down the street toward Nick and he had been afraid to move away from the car and be seen, to be pursued through an urban dreamscape of his own nightmarish contriving. Again. So he had hidden. When the Monster drew close, he had crawled around the other side of the car into the space between the car and the curb, looking underneath the car at the Monster's hairy feet. It had taken forever before the Monster reached the mid-point of the next block, its broad back clumped with fur as if it had just left its own bed. Nick had slipped away from the car and quickly dashed up the street to his apartment. In his dream he had stood in his apartment looking out the living room window at the coffee shop patio and had frozen as the Monster returned to the corner where the coffee shop was, stared at the curb where moments earlier he had cowered, and turned to look up the street. Then the Monster looked up into his dream apartment, its crimson eyes widening for a moment as it cocked its head to the side. And then Nick had awoke.
"Nick, pick up your phone, man."
Nick started. His phone buzzed again and he looked away from his computer screen at Paul, one of the county government reporters, who was half-standing out of his chair so that he could get Nick's attention.
"Newsroom, Nick Case," Nick said as he placed the handset to his head.
"Yeah, this is Detective Tagget. You called?" The detective's voice was mellow and low pitched.
"Hey, yeah. Thanks for calling me back. I didn't think you'd be getting in until later."
"Surprise, I guess. What do you need?"
"I need some information that wasn't on a police report about a robbery. Some paintings were stolen from somebody's house last night around ten o'clock, but that's all the police report says," Nick said.
"Last night? That was yesterday morning. Ten-hundred hours, not 10 PM. We switched back to military time on our reports the other day to keep everything standard. It was getting too confusing to use civilian time on the public reports but military time everywhere else. Mistakes were getting made," Tagget said.
"Oh, well...” Nick said, suddenly chagrined at not having known something so obvious about his beat. “So, what kind of paintings were stolen?"
Tagget was silent for a second on the other end of the line.
"Listen, I really can't give you any more information than
was on the report. Suffice it to say somebody had a couple of paintings taken from their private collection."
"It can't be that big a deal. How can you just put no name, address or anything on a report? I just want to know if it's worth doing a human interest story. You know, a "If you have any information about Joe Blow's favorite paintings, call the police" kind of story. If there is a story," Nick said, sipping his coffee and staring back down at the street through the window. "After all, the incident report is a public document."
Tagget was silent for another moment. Both of them knew that Tagget could make it next to impossible for Nick to get the report, if Tagget wanted to: Public reports and public information were two entirely different things as far as the police were concerned.
"I'll tell you what. Let me give the guy a call, maybe he's changed his mind about it. I'll tell him what you told me about maybe writing a story. If he says okay, I'll get back to you," Tagget said.
"Thanks."
"Yeah, bye."
Nick hung up, grabbed a notebook from the pile on the corner of his desk and stopped to talk to his editor.
"John, I'm going to go skulk around some art galleries, see if anybody knows anything about somebody getting some paintings ripped off yesterday morning."
John looked up from his screen. "Paintings?"
"Yeah. The police don't want to release any information on it, yet, but somebody near Precinct Six got some paintings stolen. They might be valuable, might not, but the victim reported it and requested anonymity and no details about the paintings, so..."
"Have fun," John said and returned to his screen.
The Gallery sat behind a row of picture windows and was framed on the right side by a discount movie theater and on the left by a thrift store masquerading as an antique shop. The gallery dealt mostly with original works by local area artists, but occasionally offered lesser-known works by somewhat famous artists and doodles by famous painters that only name-dropping dilettantes would want. All of the paintings were expensive and none were extraordinary, which caused Nick to quickly conclude where the term "starving artist" was born. The air-conditioned interior was a welcome relief from the early morning humidity hugging the air outside, and Nick stood for a moment in the middle of the gallery slowly assessing the artwork and allowing the coolness to settle on the sweat that had slicked his lower back during the drive from the office. It was only a few more moments before a woman with shoulder-length black hair appeared from around a corner with a much-practiced smile stretched across her lips. Nick guessed her to be in her late thirties or early forties, aerobicized and underfed into the skinny tightness of a fashion model. One look from her at Nick in his loose-fitting blazer and loosened tie weakened her smile perceptibly - no sale here - although she still closed in on him.
"Good morning, how are you today?" the woman asked, stopping a few feet in front of him and letting her arms rest idly at her sides.
"I'm good. You?" Nick said, reaching a hand into his blazer and pulling a business card from the chest pocket. "My name's Nick Case, I'm a reporter with the Evening Times."
Nick stuck his hand with the business card into the gulf between them and let the woman take it. She glanced at it briefly and then cupped it in the palm of her hand, which she returned to her side.
"What can I do for you today, Mr. Case?" the woman asked.
"Well, I was wondering about the local art collecting scene," Nick said, "and I figured the best way to find out who has good collections and who was really into the art scene would be to visit a few galleries and see what they had to say."
The woman furrowed her brow but said nothing.
"Anyway, I was thinking about doing a feature story for one of our upcoming Sunday papers on art collections in the city. You know, who has them, what do they have, what drives them to collect, where do they go to get their artwork, how did they get started? That kind of stuff," Nick said, knowing he was lying and actually hoping she’d bite and offer up the name of a local with a good collection, perhaps even the collection he was searching for. "I don't know what kind of information you'd be willing to give now, but I figured I might as well get out and meet the people who seemed most likely to know."
The woman's smile turned into a straight line and she looked away from Nick at a selection of paintings on the wall to his left.
"Well, that's quite a task," she said, turning back to Nick.
"While I certainly know some people with admirable collections, I don't know that any of them would want me to tell anyone without having first consulted them. And, of course, I'm not sure where you'd want to start. People collect art for an infinite number of reasons, from vanity to love to mere decoration; how you'd want to narrow it down is beyond me. There's no way you could see everything in the area and no reason you'd want to."
"Well, I'm not sure, yet, either. I'm initially thinking people with pretty established collections by artists most people are likely to have heard of. Not the Mona Lisa or anything like that, obviously, but artists who are just as likely to be in a museum somewhere as in somebody's study."
The woman walked over to a pedestal with a vase atop it and pulled off a small business card. She turned where she stood and proffered the card between two long fingers.
"Well, Mr. Case, I'll think about it. Here's my card, should you need anything further."
He took the card and looked at the name, Sophia , and stuffed it into a pocket on his blazer.
"Thanks, have a nice day," he said. She smiled and nodded.
The rest of the week was much the same for Nick. Mornings were spent in the police precincts or the office, afternoons driving to art galleries big and small. For the smallish size of the city, there were dozens of places trying to be art galleries. They were everywhere. He found them on the top floors of antique shops, in small boutiques on the first floors of downtown high-rises, carved out of living rooms in city neighborhood homes, obscured by awnings in strip malls. Everywhere.
As Friday afternoon spun by on the wall clock at work and he fingered his collection of art dealers' business cards, the givers of such being mostly receptive to his pitch, he still hadn't heard from the police about the stolen paintings. He waited out the rest of the afternoon surfing the Web for information on art collections and art collecting.
He leaned back in his chair and grimaced at the sharp pain that suddenly formed just above his right hip. He rubbed it for a moment and shifted his position in the chair. It dulled a bit, but persisted. He stood up and twisted his body to both sides to stretch the muscles and then massaged the area with his right hand.
"I think you need a drink, Nick," Paul said from the desk nearby. Paul was staring up from his computer terminal with a quizzical look on his face. "Walking through all those art galleries pulled a muscle on you that only a beer can fix."
Nick smiled. "I wish I could, but I've got dinner tonight with Sarah's parents. It's their substitute 30th anniversary dinner, since they'll be in the Bahamas when the real day comes around."
"How long you been living with her, now?" Paul asked.
"Almost two years. Why?"
Paul shrugged. "I was just wondering about the dinner conversation to come." He smiled up at Nick and turned back to his computer.
Nick and Sarah were waiting on a pair of stools in the bar area of La Mela, he with a martini, three olives, and she with a Manhattan, the cherry stem resting on the cocktail napkin and tied in a loose knot. Her ability to tie cherry stems had been one of the major incentives toward his asking her out three years earlier when he had stood next to her during a happy hour with a ten dollar bill, trying to flag down a bartender. As he had stood there, then, waiting for service he had looked down and seen three cherry stems tied tightly and lined up on a cocktail napkin next to her. She had just finished ignoring a business-suited older man's advances and resumed a conversation with a friend when Nick had said, purposely, "wow."
That was the only conversation fragment he could remember from that night, and only because Sarah had, over the last three years, come up with nearly every conceivable way of saying "wow." For a while, during their initial dating months, she would work "wow" into conversations as an adjective, adverb, noun, and verb. He was glad he had not said something even more insipid and uninspired.
"Don't forget that we're picking up the tab, tonight," Sarah said to him.
"Oh, yeah. That's something I'm not likely to forget. Not for a long time," Nick said. "Do they know it's the beginning of hurricane season down there?"
"Don't tell them. I'm sure they're aware of that, they've been going forever."
Nick stood up from his padded bar stool and rubbed his right side. The pain from earlier in the day had stopped, but in its place was a low-level burning tightness. He couldn't feel any stiff muscles, he hadn't done anything to strain one, but something was definitely out of whack.
"What's the matter?" Sarah asked.
"Beats me. I've been sore here since the afternoon. It's weird."
"Too much sitting incorrectly, maybe?" Sarah offered.
Nick shrugged and then nodded his head to the door. "Look, there's your parents, now."
Sarah smiled and stayed on her stool while Nick took a couple of steps away from the bar and gave her parents a little attention-getting wave. Sarah's father, a fiftyish man with salt-and-pepper hair, a square jaw and blue eyes put his left hand on his wife's bare shoulder and nodded quickly at Nick. While Sarah’s father had allowed what had been a muscular body to soften a bit at the edges, his wife had steadfastly refused to age gracefully. Her hair was dyed a light blonde, a shade or two, Sarah had said, lighter than it had been naturally, and she was thin in the muscular way of a woman who has traded in aerobics classes and Nautilus machines for a treadmill in the basement.
Sarah's father strode up to Nick and shook his hand vigorously with two pumps. "Nick, good to see you again. How are you? Good, I'm sure."
"Everything's good, Scott. How was your flight?"
Sarah and her mother hugged each other hello.
"Eh, flying. You know. It's all just sitting," Scott said.
Nick nodded and turned around.
"Marjorie, nice to see you again," Nick said, accepting the quick hug Sarah's mother gave him. "I hope you saved your appetite and didn't eat the airline food."
Marjorie smiled. "Just a couple of gin and tonics to ease the landing. Which reminds me, dear," she said and turned to her husband, "I could use another about now."
Sarah's father moved toward the bar while Nick stared into his drink. Marjorie and Sarah began the quick chatter of catch-up, a type of conversation possible only by women, with Sarah mostly asking quick questions about the current status of her two brothers and her mother providing short answers. Both of her brothers, the older New York City stock broker brother, Steve, and the younger Baltimore computer consultant brother, Simon, were married. The older one had two kids, an apartment on the Upper West Side, a summer home in the Hamptons and the typical rich New Yorker lifestyle stories that nauseated Nick to hear during the holidays. Simon was easier on the ears, knowing that Nick could care less about the intricacies of computer networks, Web sites, and e-commerce, although Simon’s predilection to talk classical music releases with Sarah's father often drained the life from a room as quickly as an assessment of the stock market's most recent performance.
Dinner had gone by easily enough, with the small talk confined to the banalities of daily life at Nick’s paper, when it was Nick's turn in the conversation, and the ordinariness of Sarah's parent's early-retirement lifestyle of golf, bridge and cocktail parties. That was, until the after dinner drinks arrived.
"So, we didn't tell you and we told Simon not to tell, either, but guess what?" Marjorie asked as she sniffed her sambuca and swirled the coffee beans around the bottom of the glass.
"What?" asked Sarah in a rushed hush of excitement.
Nick groaned inwardly and turned his attention to Sarah's mother.
"Jill is pregnant," Marjorie said, smiling broadly and looking at her husband. "Three months, now."
"No, way, when did you find out?" Sarah asked.
"Last week. Isn't it exciting?"
Nick smiled. The conversation would turn, soon.
"Oh, my God, that's great," Sarah said.
Scott lifted his glass. "Even though they're not here, let's toast some congratulations."
The four of them clinked their glasses over the center of the table and Nick took a sip of his grappa. The vapors burned his nose.
"One day it'll be you, honey," Marjorie said.
Sarah smiled and, though Nick didn't look, he could tell Sarah's father's eyes were looking at him from some undeterminable perspective known only by men who were fathers of daughters.
"That'll be a great day," Scott said as Nick kept his smile on. Nick looked over at Sarah as she reached across the table and grabbed his hand, pumping softly once and smiling. He put his glass back up to his lips and sucked some of the liquor onto his tongue. It burned.
"You know, if you asked me to marry you, my parents wouldn't put the screws to you like that," Sarah said as she pulled her blouse off and tossed it into the wicker hamper. "Dad only does that because he thinks you should have married me by now."
Nick unfastened his tie as he listened to her.
“He’s said so?”
Sarah gave a small shrug with a half-nod. "After all, we've been living together for almost two years."
There was a zip as she undid her skirt followed by a soft rustle as it slid down her legs to the floor. He looked in the mirror on the chest of drawers and saw her standing on the other side of the bedroom wearing only a bra and underwear, both black. Her blond hair washed over the back of her shoulders.
"Two years? Already?" Nick said, feigning sudden realization.
"And you’re a year older than me," Sarah said, turning around so that Nick could see her frontal reflection in the mirror.
Nick pulled his tie off and dropped it on the floor. "Well, the man should be at least a little older than the woman he’s involved with."
Sarah smiled. "And, you're about to turn thirty," she smiled wider, seeing him watching her in the mirror. "Maybe your biological clock is the one ticking."
Nick turned around and looked at a print of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" that was hanging over the bed's headboard. "I don't hear any ticking. Actually, I think it's stopped."
"You sure about that?" Sarah said, unfastening her bra and walking around the bed. "I know a way I can jump-start it ... if I want."
Nick smiled and took her in his arms.
I'm stumbling down the street in the October darkness with my roommate Darryl, the stars crystallized overhead in the chill air and just barely out of arms reach. We're on the way back from closing a bar, not the first time we've done so, and I'm relying on Darryl's movements as a surrogate gyroscope to tell me which way I need to lean in order to remain upright, the result being that the two of us weave atop the sidewalk like two jet fighters in a dogfight through the Grand Canyon. Just then Darryl stops and points at a bum on the other side of the road near a half-emptied pallet of boxes of grocery store food. The plastic stretch wrap is peeled back from the top like wilting, translucent flower petals.
As we move closer to the bum, Darryl turns and looks at me.
"I think that's the best-dressed homeless transvestite I've ever seen. Just look at the stovepipe hat he's got on: You just don't see that anymore."
I look across the street and shout: "Hey, get away from that, it's not yours. Go on!"
The transvestite-bum gazes across the street at us, laughs and tilts his hat toward us as if we had just given him a standing ovation for his performance. I shout "Hey!" again and the bum leaves, smiling and taking large, magnanimous steps down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.
Just then the door to the restaurant we had stopped near opens and a black couple walks out. They pause on the steps while the man tosses a white silk scarf around his neck and the woman pulls on a pair of leather gloves. Darryl walks up to the man and proffers his right hand.
"How are you doing tonight?" Darryl asks loudly, his voice echoing off the walls and resonating in the thin night air.
"I'm a regular king," the man says as the woman next to him tilts her head a quarter-back and laughs up at the stars.
Darryl turns to me as the couple brush past us. "What's up with your car? Isn't it parked around here, somewhere?"
I shrug and look up and down the street. I had parked it nearby just a few hours earlier.
"That's not the pallet of food we ordered for the apartment, is it?" I ask, motioning across the street with a nod. "I thought we moved it into the apartment."
Darryl just shrugs.
"Hey, is that your green corvette?" the black woman asks, tapping on my shoulder and pointing to a lime green car parked down the road.
"Yeah, I'm a regular corvette guy," I say as I look at my 1968 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight parked alongside the curb. "It was nice meeting you two. Good-bye."
"Bye," the woman says, lacing her right arm through the man's left and walking down the sidewalk.
Darryl and I start walking toward the car when a police helicopter hovers overhead and snaps on its searchlight, first enveloping us in a circle of light before tracing the oval beam across the street and resting it on my car. The helicopter floats above it and the light widens to illuminate it in all its faded lime-green luster. We cross the street and I notice a parking-ticket shaped piece of paper beneath the passenger side windshield wiper. I pull it out and read it as the wind from the helicopter makes October colder than it otherwise should be.
"We protected your car tonight," the note says.
I look at Darryl and then up at the helicopter. "Thanks, I appreciate you protecting my car," I say.
The helicopter turns off its light and flies away.
"What's the note say?" Darryl asks.
I look at my car and notice several dents on the front right quarter panel. "It says they protected my car tonight." Darryl shrugs and begins walking toward our apartment, which is cattycorner to where my car is parked. Then I look back down the street and across the bridge we had crossed just before running into the black couple.
"Holy fuck, it's the Monster."
Standing on the other side of the bridge, barely a hundred yards away, is the Monster. It stands tall in silhouette, perhaps ten feet, and looks menacing from its vantage point just outside the circle of light of a nearby street lamp. Darryl gets a jump-start running while I stare for a moment as it stands menacingly on the other side of the bridge, but then I'm on Darryl’s heels. As we reach the apartment building's front door, though, I become paralyzed and fall onto the grass strip between the sidewalk and the front door. Darryl grabs the front door, fumbles for his keys, and turns to look at me lying in the lawn.
"What are you doing? Get up!" he yells.
I can't move. I see the Monster in the distance starting to cross the bridge. Darryl runs from the door and grabs me under the shoulders and drags me to the landing in front of the security door. He gets his keys out, unlocks the door, and drags me into the foyer where he drops me beneath the mailboxes. I can see him panicking as he flips through the keys on his key ring for the one that will open the door to our apartment. I can only stare through the glass security door as the Monster turns onto my street and begins heading toward my building. Darryl gets the front door open and turns to me.
"C'mon, get the fuck up!" he yells.
"I can't. I can't move," I yell back as I watch the Monster walk toward the front door of our apartment building. "I need the scroll. Get me the scroll."
We have scrolls in our apartment that, when read, alleviate fear-paralysis. Darryl, though, is equally panicked as his head jerks between the safety of the apartment and my limp body at the bottom of the landing.
"We only have one left. I can't give it to you because it might get me next, so get up," he shouts as he looks into the apartment.
"Get it, I need it, the Monster will see me here any second," I shout. "If he sees me, we're both done for. Get it!"
Darryl refuses to look at me and I look back through the security door. The Monster is on the sidewalk and lumbering toward the door, its arms barely moving as it strides toward me.
"We only have one left. I need it for myself," Darryl says as he runs into the room and picks up the scroll, unrolls it and reads it aloud.
I look through the door and the Monster staring down at me, its red eyes glowing. It's nearly expressionless mouth almost resembles a grin of
Nick woke up in a cold sweat. He was sitting upright in bed. He looked over at the clock radio: it was 3:17 in the morning. Sarah was sound asleep, turned on her side, her hair fanned out across her face and washing over the pillow. His tongue hurt fiercely. He rubbed his eyes and slipped out from under the covers and went into the living room, picked up the pack of cigarettes from the coffee table and lit one. He blew a geyser of white ghosts into the darkness and watched as they fractured in the moonbeams coming through the slats in the blinds.
Twice in two weeks? The Monster? He sucked deeply on the cigarette and watched its tip glow furiously in the dark, red like the Monster's eyes. He shivered as the perspiration on his body evaporated and he looked into the shadows of the living room for the lurking hulk of the Monster. He looked down at the tip of the cigarette again and tried to concentrate on something else, hoping that the effort would clear his mind of the dream. He thought about the stolen paintings, trying to imagine what they might look like and conjuring images of Rembrandts into his mind. He wondered about the owner and whether he stood and stared at blank spaces on the wall. He looked at the tip of the cigarette and saw the eyes of the Monster.
"What are you doing up smoking a cigarette?"
Nick jerked on the couch and looked over to where Sarah was standing, her hair tangled about her shoulders and her nightgown clinging to her curves.
"Did I wake you?"
"I smelled smoke."
"Sorry."
Sarah walked into the room and sat down on the couch next to him. "What's the matter?"
Nick took another long drag on the cigarette and crushed it out. "I had another dream about the Monster."
"The Monster?"
Nick nodded.
"Are you okay?"
Nick shrugged. "I don't know. I guess. My tongue is sore. I guess I bit it to wake myself up."
"Didn't you have the same dream last week?"
Nick shook his head. "No. I dreamed about the Monster last week, but it wasn't the same dream. They're never the same dream; they're always different. It's always the same Monster, though."
"The Bigfoot thing?"
Nick nodded.
"Anything you want to talk about?"
Nick shook his head. "No. It's just weird that I'm dreaming about it, again. It's been so long. It's weird that I'm biting my tongue to wake up; I used to do that in high school. Sometimes I would wake up sure that I had been screaming -- my throat would feel hoarse like I had been screaming -- but no one else ever heard me."
Sarah yawned and looked over at Nick in the darkness. "Is there something wrong?"
Nick shook his head. "I don't know."
"Are you stressed out about anything?"
"Maybe, I don't know. Nothing I can think of," Nick said, staring up at the grayness of the ceiling. "This Monster used to follow me everywhere I went when I was a little kid, always popping up in my dreams. Seven or eight or nine feet tall with red eyes, sharp teeth, long fingernails and all covered in hair. Sometimes, it was really fast: it would come out of nowhere and take one of my friends off into the woods to his death. Other times, it was extremely slow, sluggishly coming after me as if it were mocking my ability to escape.”
Nick shook his head and looked at the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, crumpled like a broken spine worn white by the elements. "And tonight, it was moving slow, coming after me methodically. And Darryl, shit, I haven't seen him since I don't know when. He's probably still in grad school working on a new masters in something. None of it makes any sense to me."
Sarah put her arm around him and pulled him close. "C'mon, let's go back to bed. Tomorrow's Friday and you can forget about everything tomorrow night."
Nick let her pull him from the couch and down the hall. He watched her from behind as the nightgown smoothed itself across her hips and emphasized the curves of her rear with each step. He turned her around when they crossed the threshold to the bedroom and pulled her in close, pressing his lips tightly against hers. She pulled away from him and smiled wickedly.
"A monster, huh?" she said as she moved her hand downward below his stomach. "Wow, scary."
Nick picked up the phone half-way through the first ring and clipped out his name into the receiver. “Nick Case.”
"This is Tagget. You still interested in the stolen paintings?"
Nick blinked and looked at the keypad on the phone. Tagget? Paintings?
"Hello?" Tagget asked.
"Yeah, yeah, I am. What do you have?" Nick asked, turning to look over his shoulder at the wall clock. It was a minute past eight.
"The owner is Bill Maxell. He lives over on Strathmore Street: 411 Strathmore. He said you can come by anytime today before noon. He thinks the publicity may do a little good at spreading the word," Tagget said.
Nick copied down the phone number Tagget gave, scribbled the address and name below it, and thanked the detective. Nick pulled his sport coat off the back of his chair and slipped his arms into it as he walked over to his editor's desk.
"John, I'm heading out to check out those stolen paintings. I should be back sometime later."
"What paintings?" John asked. He looked up from his computer and stared at Nick.
"The ones that were stolen the other week on that police report with no information on it."
John scratched his chin. "Did the Morning News have anything on it?"
Nick shook his head. "Nope."
John smiled almost imperceptibly. "See you later."
Strathmore Street had once been in one of the more affluent of the inner city suburbs strung out between downtown and the city limits. The street was a river of smooth asphalt unmarred by center lines and bordered by perfect sidewalks and deep lawns that reached back to brick and stone mansions. In the days when steel had ruled the city, these had been the homes of the upper-most crust of management, the wealthiest bankers and the most prominent doctors. Now, though, they were occupied by corporate middle-managers, college professors and lawyers. It still smelled of money as much as the elms that lined the grass strips separating sidewalk from road, but was less storied and retained none of the aroma of power.
Maxell's house was a wide, three-story brown-brick affair with a turret on the left side and a slate roof. The front of the house was awash in red, yellow and blue tulips that blazed brightly against the building’s facade and dared the neighbors to compete. Many did, matching Maxell's flower moat with equally dazzling arrays of cineraria, forsythia and agapanthus. Nick pulled his car to the curb and popped out of the door. He popped a mint into his mouth to drown the smell of tobacco from his breath and walked up the driveway and along the cement path to the entrance.
He assumed that on the other side of the door a chime was singing some few notes of a Mozart piano piece while he waited on the stoop for the door to open. Mansions didn't have buzzers or bells, they had chimes, and a man with stolen paintings certainly had a specialized chime to announce the fact there was someone waiting on the other side of the door. The door opened to show a man in a blue blazer, tan slacks and a white shirt, his tie loose around his neck. He was in his mid-fifties, his head topped with thick gray hair, two dark commas above his hazel eyes.
"Yes?" the man asked.
"I'm Nick Case. I'm a reporter with--"
"Oh, yes, come in. Detective Tagget said you'd be out," the man said as he pulled the door open and stepped aside. "I'm Bill Maxell."
Nick stepped into the house and looked around. Vases with fresh cut flowers stood on wooden stands and the hardwood floors were covered with Persian carpets. Nick stopped a few steps in and turned around to watch as Bill Maxell pushed the door shut and turned the deadbolt. The older man stuck his hand out to Nick and Nick shook it.
"Here's my card," Nick said as he reached into a blazer pocket and pulled one out. Bill Maxell took it and set it on a vase stand
"Come, I'll show the study that was robbed," Maxell said as he brushed past Nick and mounted a staircase to the left of the foyer in which they had been standing. The stairs creaked as they walked up. Nick scanned the walls for paintings, but none were anything not readily available from a mall art store and most likely gracing the walls of millions of American and Canadian homes. They arrived on the second floor landing and walked to a door at the end of the hallway and Nick stood silently as Mr. Maxell pulled a key from his pocket and turned the lock open.
"It's just up here on the third floor," Maxell said over his shoulder before clambering up a narrower, steeper staircase.
The study was the entire third floor of the house and had been, in its heyday sixty or seventy years earlier, an in-house ballroom. The ceiling was high and the hardwood floor was polished to a basketball court sheen. A marble bar stood in one corner of the room, the shelves behind it crammed with crystal decanters filled with clear and brown liquids and a full load of glassware. Elsewhere through the room were scattered love seats and groupings of easy chairs surrounding low, glass-topped circular tables. Several of the wall spaces were occupied by framed paintings of people, flowers, and cities by artists not recognizable to Nick. Near several of the copses of chairs stood easels with charcoal drawings or pen-and-ink renditions of naked women.
Bill Maxell walked across the center of the floor, the heels of his tasseled loafers slipping perceptibly from the heels of his feet and slapping the floor a split-second before each step, and leaned against the bar. Nick pulled a notebook from his pocket and clicked his pen to life, scribbled a few quick impressions of the room onto the paper, and walked across the room to where Mr. Maxell leaned against the bar. On his way across the room, Nick noticed four spaces on the walls that had seemed, at one point, to have been home to paintings but which were now bare spots of unblemished umber-colored paint. Mr. Maxell barely moved as Nick crossed the floor, his eyes were fixed to one spot on the wall that was merely paint, and Nick made a mental note to write that fact down after finishing the interview.
"Mr. Maxell--"
"Bill, please."
Nick nodded. "Bill, so what happened here, so far as you know?"
Bill Maxell shrugged and sighed, rubbing his right palm across his brow as if the thought of it all were something too unimaginable to readily discuss.
"They took my Wyeth. My `Dr. Syn.'"
Nick scribbled that down and looked up at Mr. Maxell. "Your `Wyeth?'" Nick asked.
Bill Maxell nodded solemnly. "It wasn't the most expensive of the four, but it was my favorite. I've had it for years. It was the first real painting I ever spent any money on and it was one of those paintings that you know you have to have the minute you lay eyes on it," Mr. Maxell said as he walked to the rear of the bar. He put a glass on the bar, the room echoing for a moment with the clink of glass on stone, and he took a crystal decanter from one of the shelves.
"Do you want a Scotch or something?" Bill Maxell asked, motioning to Nick with the bottle. Nick shook his head. "Yeah, it's a bit early, but," Bill Maxell shrugged and poured his glass a third full, "when you lose something like that, sometimes you need a drink to talk about it. Even this early in the morning."
Nick nodded.
"Anyway, that Wyeth was a beauty. It was different. Just a skeleton sitting in an admiral's coat and staring out the window of some old warship -- the kind that used canons and were sail powered, when naval warfare was personal -- and it just felt so right to look at it," Bill Maxell said, putting the bottle back onto the shelf and looking across the room at the blank space of wall. "I don't know what it symbolized to anybody else, but to me," he said, pausing for a second to take a small sip of the Scotch, "…to me, it sort of said we are all fighting losing battles, all destined to end up dead on the battlefield, all of us wondering what the fight was ever for.
"You know, you could fight with your wife a million times -- who doesn't -- and at the end you'd wonder what all the fighting was for. Did anyone win, or will there just be more fighting between other couples?" Maxell said, taking another sip of whisky. "But, at the same time, and this is what intrigued me about the painting, it also showed that we will always fight, no matter what. That everything is a struggle until the end, and that you should never stop."
Nick was writing furiously and barely paid attention as Bill Maxell walked into the middle of the study and stood there with stooped shoulders.
"Imagine walking into your house to find that the very thing you identify with had been stolen," Maxell said, turning and staring at Nick. "Sure, it's only a painting. It's insured. All that stuff. But, what if you walked home and the thing that you liked to look at for a few moments just to come to terms with everything, what if that were gone?"
Maxell shrugged and turned slowly in place, surveying the room Nick felt sure hundreds of parties had been thrown in just for the sake of Bill Maxell's peace at being with people who could see his art collection. The Maxell identity, as depicted by a dozen dead painters who had never once dreamed a thought that he, Maxell, would own their work and cherish it the way he had.
"But how did the thieves get into your house?" Nick asked, trying to bring the conversation into some sort of question-and-answer format that would give him the information he needed for a story.
Maxell shrugged and motioned to one of the windows in the room. Nick walked over to it. There were no signs of it being damaged or of the sill being pried open, and he noticed evidence of police fingerprint dust. He looked through the window and noticed a large oak tree with a branch that overhung the garage, which was attached to the lower portion of the roof that sloped upwards to the room he now stood in. Nick turned around and faced Mr. Maxell.
"They climbed in off a tree?" Nick asked. Maxell made two barely perceptible nods. "You don't have a security system?"
Maxell shrugged. "No. I’d thought about it. Never in my life have I ever been robbed. I mean, never. No break-ins to any of the apartments I ever lived in; never mugged; never had a car broken into. I guess I just figured it would never happen," he said, bringing his glass to his lips and taking in a small sip. "I'm fifty-three and never been robbed. I guess that's weird."
Nick shrugged and began the nuts-and-bolts part of the interview, pulling information on the different paintings from Maxell and transferring them to his notebook. There was a lot of money in those four paintings, all of which were insured, although Maxell's tale of woe stretched more along sentimental than monetary lines. Nick had spent almost an hour in the study listening to Maxell before he managed to get a tour of the house and an explanation of the other various sculptures, vases, wood carvings and assorted items that Nick wrote off as bric-a-brac, albeit expensive bric-a-brac. Bill Maxell and his wife, she was some sort of computer systems consultant currently in Argentina doing something concerning several polysyllabic computer terms strung together, had spent the better part of their thirty-one years of marriage accumulating what would most likely be auctioned off by their two children in about thirty more years, causing Nick to wonder how much money they had invested in decorations.
The den, as Bill Maxell termed it, was long room with dark oak walls, an expansive fireplace of natural stone, several high-back overstuffed leather armchairs draped with dark cotton throw blankets, and a Steinway grand piano covered with a scattering of music sheets. Nick easily imagined Maxell on a snowy Sunday afternoon seated in one of the chairs, his legs resting on one of the ottoman's and covered by a blanket, listening to his wife noodle around on the piano.
"So, what can you do at this point to track down your paintings?" Nick asked as he stared absently at the esoterica on the walls.
"Not too much. I've contacted all of the art dealers that would likely know anybody interested in the works. The FBI was out here the other day for information on them, too. I guess I just have to wait and see if they turn up. Maybe visit a lot of galleries, too," Maxell said. He pulled up the left sleeve of his jacket, looked at his watch and pursed his lips. "Well, Mr. Case, I've got only a few more minutes before I have to leave, so if you will excuse me, I need to finish getting ready."
Maxell walked across the room and turned into the hallway, motioning for Nick to follow him. They strode down the hall toward the front door and Maxell snapped the deadbolt open. Nick stopped on the threshold, turned around and looked back at Mr. Maxell.
"Oh, by the way, are you going to get a security system now?" Nick asked.
Maxell shrugged and tilted his head. "It's almost pointless now, since the good stuff is gone," Maxell said, "but I don't want the bastards coming back thinking there's more good stuff to be found, so tomorrow I'm having installed the best security system money can buy."
"Don't forget to tell your wife before she comes back and tries to get in," Nick said, smiling and turning to leave.
He wasn't sure, but he could have sworn Bill Maxell scowled.
By the end of the day, Nick had transcribed his notes into the computer and logged a dozen calls to art dealers, law enforcement agencies, and New York City galleries. None of the paintings merited much of a ruffle in the art world, although a couple of people were sad at the loss of the Wyeth painting and doubted that it would appear for sale. The majority of art thefts were done when a buyer was already known. Nobody, Nick was told, was stupid enough to steal someone's collection and put it up for open sale. Someone would notice and that would be that.
The phone trilled on his desk and Nick snapped it off the hook and pressed it to his head.
"Nick Case," he said as he looked over his shoulder at the clock. The end was near.
"Nick, it's Dave, what's shakin'?" the voice on the other end, Dave Kryzcapowicz, asked.
"Not much, Cap, just trying to get out of here. You?"
"Same. You up for happy hour at that place around the corner from your apartment?" Cap asked.
"The Grove?"
"Yeah."
Nick looked at the clock again, it was almost three. "Sure, when can you get there?"
"I'm thinking about four-thirtyish."
"Good, uhhh-yee," Nick said, reaching his hand down to his side.
"What the heck does `uhhyee' mean?" Cap asked, laughing once on his end of the line. "Or was I supposed to say, `domo arygato'?"
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