Oh, you know. When I was a kid I met a strange man at the crossroads and we made a deal. That was the joke my brother Paul would always use when anyone asked him how in hell he got so lucky all the time. I think I was the first person he tried it out on, back when I was already a sophomore at Penn State and Paul was graduating high school early with acceptances to Yale and Stanford and Princeton. How the hell’d you do it, I’d asked and he said That family vacay we took to Massachusetts a long time ago, I was out walking alone and I met a man at a crossroads and we made a deal, you know? And then he let out that smug, chirping laugh that made me love him and want to punch him in the stomach at the same time.
I grew up to teach literature and English courses at Greeley, a pretty good boarding school where I teach some pretty smart kids and get decent benefits. In my free time I’ve been working on a novel about two brothers whose lives take different courses.
But Paul? Paul founded an early payment-processing company and sold it for a fortune a few years later and used the fortune to found a logistics company with some pretty cutting edge tech and some sweet contracts. He married a guy named Barry and they live in a mansion up in Druid Hills.
On a Friday night in late October, I had agreed to watch their three year old, Lucas, so that they could have a rare night out together. Paul disliked the idea of a nanny, so they were doing the child-rearing as a team which meant if both members of the team wanted to go out together they needed to find trustworthy childcare. And not many things are more trustworthy or more dependable than a tweedy big brother who would be just as happy grading papers and maybe watching some Scorsese movies or something while also keeping an eye on a beautiful, well-behaved child.
At 8 o’clock, when I guessed Paul and Barry would just be sitting down to their dinner at Black, Black Meat (trendy haute cuisine, a difficult reservation to get), I helped Lucas brush his teeth and made sure he scrubbed his face and read him a bedtime story. It was some very twee story about a fox and a less patient fox and the misadventures they had trying to steal some chickens. Then Lucas, who was wearing Spiderman pajamas and still slept with a Bluey night light, crawled into bed.
I set up my laptop on the brushed nickel coffee table with a glass top and sat at the couch in the living room–some unbearably expensive mid-century Swedish piece whose smooth, rounded contours made me think of a UFO. All in all, it was a pretty comfortable couch and I was looking forward to a pretty chill night.
From where I was sitting I could hear if Lucas needed anything, and even see him if he got up to pee or something. None of us have privacy anymore, I guess, least of all 3 year olds with tech savvy parents, so I also had a baby monitor that let me see him as he lay in his bed. “Honestly, isn’t that a little much?” I’d asked. Paul had rolled his eyes but Barry said “When he’s five we can start giving him more privacy. The last thing a four year old needs is long periods where he can just disappear.” Paul had shrugged. I knew Barry had had sort of a rough childhood.
Slightly creepy or not, I did check the monitor from time to time, usually when I paused between making comments on a paper (my 10th graders had written papers on Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown) and deciding on a numerical and letter grade. At Greeley, it took a lot to get below a B, and most of the papers I graded that night were legitimate A-s or A’s anyway. Lucas was always in bed, sleeping soundly.
It was a little before 11 when I looked up and was surprised to see Lucas wandering into the cavernous living room. I’d been watching Infernal Affairs 2, the Hong Kong noir movie Scorsese based The Departed on, and must have been even more transfixed by the violence and the ambiance than I’d realized because I had not heard a single peep when Lucas must have gotten up, opened his door, and walked down the hallway.
He was still wearing his Spiderman pajamas and, other than his hair being a mess, he looked fine. Still. Hey champ, you okay?
Lucas stared at me a little blankly with a sly smile on his face. I was sure everything was fine, but this wasn’t the most reassuring response he could have given me. Barry and Lucas were a little concerned he might be on the spectrum and so detached or aloof behavior was something we all paid attention to.
You miss your dads? They’ll be home soon but you should get back to bed don’t you think?
The kid grinned then, a big, happy grin like he’d just gotten a puppy for Christmas. (Actually animals tended to hate Paul, dogs in particular, the only chink I could think of in his charm.)
He spread his arms out as if to ask for a hug and ran, stumbling and mincing and giggling, right at me. Swell kid, I thought and I sat in the couch and put my arms out too to give him a hug.
He giggled and buried his face in my chest for a moment and I blew a raspberry on his forehead and he giggled more. Then he said in voice that sounded a little too high and a little too soft Uncle Roy, look. He took the baby monitor off the coffee table and held it up for me.
Lucas continued to sleep soundly in his bed.
What the…how did you do that? Wouldn’t really have surprised me if Paul’s kid were somehow ridiculously precocious, especially about tech stuff.
No answer. Heavy, oppressive silence.
I looked up from the monitor to see a little boy shape wearing Spiderman pajamas. His eyes were hanging down at weird, loose angles and just kind of swinging slightly, as though they were boneless. His hair wasn’t just messy, I saw that it was straw, jutting out in clumps and at weird angles as if hastily glued into place. And his face was very, very wrong. Rough as burlap and much darker than Lucas’ skin tone. I couldn’t help thinking of some of the 50 year old housewives who tanned themselves into looking like crones despite their Ralph Lauren sweaters, their Cartier necklaces.
Then I realized that his eyes, one much darker and much smaller than the other, were buttons. His mouth was stitched in a nearly straight line a little too low–how had I believed this thing had been smiling at me? He had the face of a sockmonkey.
I screamed. For a moment his face was different–still hideous but human now–and he smiled a broad grin at me that made me cover my eyes. When I uncovered them he had a sock monkey face again, incapable of expression.
He pointed at the baby monitor again. Lucas still slept but now it looked more fitful, like he was having a bad dream. I could see his little fists were balled up and he was sobbing in his sleep.
A voice I had never heard before came out of the motionless, stitched-on mouth somehow. Please be so kind as to remind Paul of our deal and please tell him that if he cannot hold up his end then we will have to take something that is precious to him.
I stared at the strange stuffed boy with the sock monkey face and wild straw hair and couldn’t make myself move. Then I forced a nod, Oh-kay I spit out weakly, mouth dry and lips sticking together and tongue feeling clumsy and slimy.
The thing nodded to me and then there was a ripping sound, seams bursting, and sawdust and dead leaves started spilling out of tears in the thing’s face and body slowly but ineluctably until there was just a pile of mulch and late October leaves on the floor alongside a bunch of burlap. A locust crawled out of the pile of leaves and I choked back a sob.
And then Lucas was sitting bolt upright in bed and yelling “Uncle Roy! I had a bad dream Uncle Roy!”