Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff Read Free Book Online Page A

all together, tonight’s hidden message was—
    LOOK UNDER THE blank, JANE CHARLOTTE.
    Yeah. And maybe it was because it shared a couple of letters with “blank,” or maybe it was because I was sitting with my back to it, but all at once I knew that the missing word was SINK.
    My aunt and uncle’s kitchen had this huge sink—“Big enough to slaughter a pig in,” my uncle said one time, and he made it sound like that was more than a figure of speech. It had a big cabinet space underneath it too, and once when we were visiting a few years earlier, Phil crawled under there during a game of hide-and-seek and split his head open on the drainpipe. So between thoughts of pig slaughter and the memory of Phil with blood streaming down his face, I wasn’t exactly eager to stick my nose down there.
    Of course I had to look. I told myself that it was just a coincidence anyway, there was no way that message in the crossword could really be intended for me personally. Maybe “Look under the sink, Jane Charlotte” was a line from Shakespeare.
    So I opened up the cabinet, and there was nothing there but the usual assortment of under-the-sink junk, and I’m like, see, just a coincidence. But then I’m like, not so fast, if there is a gun, it’s not just going to be lying out next to the silver polish. So I felt up in the space between the wall and the back of the sink basin. And at first I was just touching air, but then I moved my hand a little and my fingers brushed something rough. A package.
    It was rolled up in a piece of potato sack and tied up with twine. I brought it out into the light and unwrapped it. And there it was.
    It looked like a toy zap gun. It was bright orange, with a puffy barrel, and it seemed to be made of plastic. It was heavy, though, and from the weight and the factthat it was slightly cold, I thought it might be a water pistol. But when I checked the base of the handle there was no rubber plug, just a flat plate embossed with the letters NC .
    There were more markings on the side of the gun. Near the back of the barrel, right above the trigger, was a dial with four settings. One setting was labeled SAFE in small green letters; the next setting was labeled NS , in blue; the last two settings, both labeled in dark red, were CI and MI . The dial was currently set to MI .
    I did the thing that you traditionally do when you’re a teenager and you find a gun, which was point it at my own face. The dark hole of the NC gun’s muzzle seemed more real than the rest of it, though, so I decided not to pull the trigger. Instead I looked around to see if one of my aunt’s cats was in the room. But the cats had made themselves scarce, and before I could choose something else for target practice, all the lights in the house went out.
    For the first few seconds I was amazingly calm. Then lightning flashed outside and I turned towards the window above the sink, drawn by an afterimage of something that didn’t belong. When the next flash came I saw it clearly: out beyond the backyard, in the orange groves that ran behind the house, a van was parked with its headlights off.
    Something big walked across the back porch, passing right in front of the window—I say something, but of course I knew who it was, and what he was here for. He went straight for the porch door, which was locked but flimsy, and banged on it hard, real hammer blows. I could feel it shaking in its frame. There was a pause, and then he started attacking the doorknob, rattling it like he meant to pull it off.
    By this point I was practically shitting myself with fear. I still had the gun, but I’d gone back to thinking of it as a toy, and in another moment I would havedropped it in the sink and started running blind through the house.
    Then the phone rang, a beautiful sound. The janitor immediately stopped rattling the doorknob. The phone rang again, and again, and I moved towards it, terrified that if the ringing stopped before I reached it the